Remanent Domain

Best mouse ever!

2011-01-30T20:51:00.001-05:00

I'm not usually one to sing the praises of particular electronics products, but I will make an exception for the Logitech V550 mouse.

At work, I'm constantly taking my laptop in and out of its docking station and traveling around the building to various conference rooms and other offices. It's a pain to use the touchpad when away from my desk, and it's also a pain to carry a wired mouse and have it dangling all over the place and accidentally activating buttons when I'm carrying it around. One of my coworkers showed me this model and I immediately decided to get one myself.

The killer feature (for me) of the Logitech V550 is that it comes with three little adhesive clips. You attach one to the lid of your laptop, and then you can snap the mouse onto and off of the laptop in a flash. The buttons cannot be accidentally activated when it's clipped in. The mouse itself is fairly small but feels solid and comfortable in my large-ish hands. It also has Logitech's "Hyper-Fast Scrolling" wheel which I thought was kind of a gimmick, but turns out to be quite nice: you can use the scrolling wheel click-by-click as with most other mice, or press it to switch to a smooth-scrolling mode which is good for scrolling down long pages. You can also wiggle the scroll wheel side-to-side, and I have configured this to go forward and backward on web pages.

I haven't had it long enough to find out how good the battery life is, but it's supposed to be many, many months, which is far better than other optical mice I have used.

So, if you need a mouse to use with a laptop that you're carrying around all the time, I highly recommend this one. I paid about $30 and I think it's well worth it.

Humbling is...

2010-07-19T18:48:00.000-04:00

humbling /ˈhəm-b(ə-)liŋ/

adjective

The realization that my $20 MP3 player can beat me at Chess.

If, for some reason, you want to install Windows 7... here's how to make an installation USB drive, from Linux

2010-07-03T08:15:00.005-04:00

Hey, do you remember CD-ROMs or DVDs? They were these round things that you put in your computer... made a lot of noise. Stored files, but not very many. Not very fast. A pain to deal with. Nobody uses them anymore, now that we just download music and movies off the Internet and exchange files online or via flash drives. Nobody, that is, except for my mom, who was upset when her DVD drive broke a few months ago...

Anyway, I digress: my mom is evidently not the only one who still uses DVDs. Microsoft still distributes DVDs for installing and upgrading Windows 7.

My Acer 1410 notebook is awesome, but one of the least-awesome things about it is that it came with Windows Vista. Not just Vista, but Vista loaded up with a whole lot of crapware courtesy of Acer, including about 500 flash games that have to be uninstalled individually. Basically the first thing I did with the computer was to install Ubuntu instead of Vista.

But then Acer sent me free DVDs to upgrade to Windows 7... which I heard sucked less than Vista. So I decided to give it a shot. But here's the thing: the Acer 1410 doesn't have a DVD drive, since no one except my mom and Microsoft uses them anymore. So how to install Windows 7?

Windows 7 can be installed from USB drives

Although Windows 7 is still distributed on DVD, it's smarter than Windows XP or Vista (but still only as smart as, say, Linux circa 2000). Windows 7 can install itself from a USB drive, or pretty much anything... I actually used a 4 GB SD card since I have a bunch of those lying around.

There are a bunch of guides on the Internet that explain how to copy your Windows 7 DVD onto a USB drive and make it bootable. There's even an official tool from Microsoft to do it. Unfortunately, these tools and procedures require that

You have a computer with Windows running on it and a DVD drive
You actually have to use Windows to prepare the USB drive... and, frankly, the idea of actually using Windows to prepare bootable media sounds excruciating to me

Are you getting the feeling that I don't really know why I wanted to install Windows 7 in the first place? Basically, I just wanted to find out if it sucks less than I imagined it would...

Anyway, if you are okay with the above requirements, you can use Windows to transfer your Windows 7 installation DVDs to USB, and be on your merry way. But, for me...

Making a Windows 7 USB stick from within Linux

You need a flash drive or memory card with at least 4 GB capacity to hold the entire contents of the Windows 7 installation DVD. Be aware that everything on the USB drive will be erased!!! Oh, and you need a DVD drive on your Linux computer too.

Plug in the USB drive on your Linux computer, and figure out the device node assigned to it (perhaps /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc). If you don't know how to do this... ask. If the flash drive is automatically mounted, then unmount it after you've checked to make sure that you've copied any important data off of it.

Now we need to blank the USB drive and format it with NTFS. This detail is extremely important! If you format the USB drive with FAT32, then the Windows 7 installation will start to work, but fail cryptically with messages about unavailable CD-ROM drivers... the Internets are littered with confused forum postings by others who have stumbled on this weird bug.

So, let's use GNU Parted (which should be installed on most modern Linux systems). First, blank the partition table (replace /dev/sdX with the appropriate device node for your USB drive):

$ sudo parted /dev/sdX
(parted) mklabel msdos
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdb will be destroyed and all data on
this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? yes

Next, create a new partition filling the USB drive, make it bootable, and then check that it worked by displaying the partition table:

(parted) mkpart primary ntfs 1c 100%
(parted) set 1 boot on

(parted) print
Model: Multiple Card Reader (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdX: 4094MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  4094MB  4093MB  primary  ntfs

(parted) quit

Sweet. Now you have to format the newly-created NTFS partition:

$ sudo mkntfs --fast /dev/sdX1 
Cluster size has been automatically set to 4096 bytes.
Creating NTFS volume structures.
mkntfs completed successfully. Have a nice day.

Here's a slightly tricky part: you have to give the USB drive an appropriate Windows 7 boot sector. There's a great program called ms-sys for this sort of thing, and I have made pre-built ms-sys packages for Ubuntu. So install it. Use ms-sys to make an appropriate boot sector for the USB drive:

$ sudo ms-sys --mbr7 /dev/sdX
Windows 7 master boot record successfully written to /dev/sdX

Finally you have to copy the installation files onto the USB drive. Mount the newly-created NTFS partition, however you usually mount removable media. Also, take the Windows 7 installation DVD and mount it. You may wish to pause for a moment to think about how quaint the DVD is, and to remind yourself which way is "up" on the DVD drive.

Copy allllll the files and directories from the DVD to the USB drive. You can use a graphical file manager like Nautilus, or do it from the command line with rsync, using something like this:

$ rsync -av /mnt/dvd /mnt/usbdrive

Slow...
Progress...
While...
We...
Copy...
A...
Bajillion...
Files
done!

And finally, you're done! Unmount the USB drive and boot off of it on the computer you're trying to install Windows 7 onto. Windows 7 actually installs fairly quickly, but I must warn you that it will overwrite other operating systems' bootloaders without asking. So if you plan to dual-boot Windows and Linux/*BSD/etc., be sure that you have something like SystemRescueCD or a bootable Linux flash drive so that you can recover the bootloader.

Epilogue: Windows is still lame

So after all this rigamarole, I have Windows 7 installed on my Acer 1410 notebook alongside Ubuntu. Whoopty-do. Windows 7 seems to run a little faster than Vista, and without the crazy screen flickering problems when you suspend and restart.

If you like Ubuntu and are sick of XP and Vista, you still won't like Windows 7. It's the same old same-old as far as I can tell.

Back to Ubuntu for me. :-)

Wow, Pandora on the Motorola Q

2010-06-30T15:58:00.002-04:00

The Motorola Q smartphone is getting pretty old and crufty these days, and can't do a lot of the cool stuff that newer Android and iPhones can do but... apparently it still has a few tricks up its sleeve, including the ability to play streaming Internet radio using the free Pandora service.

The Pandora website claims that only the newer Motorola Q9C is supported. Indeed, if you visit the Pandora website from your Q's browser, you'll get a message saying that it's not supported.

However... if you download the pandora.cab installation file by spoofing the Q9C's User Agent string, then it will install perfectly on the Motorola Q. You can also find copies of pandora.cab on a few sites around the web.

I've been listening to Pandora on the Q while writing, and it works great. This is gonna be excellent for listening to music on long car trips. Just make sure you have a power cable, because, even with a good cell signal, Pandora seems to drain the Q's battery in under 2 hours...

High-capacity hard drives

2010-06-18T11:30:00.001-04:00

I've been shopping for a big, reliable, fast, cheap hard drive and have been frustrated by the lack of useful reviews and comparisons between different 2TB models. Finally I found this useful 2TB HD Roundup from HotHardware which compares Seagate, WD, and Samsung models.

Unfortunately, Hitachi's surprisingly cheap 7200 rpm drive was not reviewed there, but here's a review of it from Tom's Hardware.

Based on this, I think I'm gonna spring for the cheap, low-power, and pretty well-performing Seagate LP 2tb drive.

The Best of DC's 2010 48 Hour Film Project

2010-05-28T01:54:00.006-04:00

As I did last year, I attended both sessions of the DC 48 Hour Film Project's Best Of screenings. All together, 24 short films were shown (out of 104 total submissions) including 4 from our screening group. This year, my group Jungle Rules had our movie Koma in the Best Of bunch... very exciting for us!

The winner this year was Shovel Ready. No runners-up were announced, but Under My Skin, My Friends in Sudan, and Saving Face won numerous awards.

Again, I've gone around trying to find high-quality online versions of these top movies, and here's what I've come up with. This year I was pretty careful and took notes during the screenings:

Staple Remover Melodrama

High as a Kite

Ordinarily Extraordinary

(Can anyone find it online?)

Shadow Tale

Koma

film de femme

Dash

Speed

Rent in Peace

Paradigm Smash

FDA

Jackalope

The Continuing Saga of Bud Chestrock

Quelques Instants

tHERAPY

Kill The Monsters

Lost

Army of Darkness

100 Million BC

Mainframe

(Can anyone find it online?)

The Puppy Wrangler

(Can anyone find it online?)

Chloe

Breathe, Focus, Octopus

My Own Worst Enemy

(Can anyone find it online?)

Hörn: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet

anaglyphic red-green 3D

Under My Skin

Tiebreaker

My Friends in Sudan

The Imperial

(Can anyone find it online?)

Shovel Ready

Saving Face

Rakirovka

just

Rakirovka

48 Hour Film Project 2010

2010-05-07T01:55:00.002-04:00

Once again, I participated in the 48 Hour Film Project's DC competition this past weekend. I've been super busy and stressin' about finishing my PhD, and it was awesome to just spend an entire weekend doing something compleeeetely different... even if it involved severe sleep deprivation.

This year, the required elements were...

Character: Marco or Muffin Gabbowitz, someone who works with animals
Line of dialogue: Do you think you can do that again?
Prop: a horn

Our assigned genre was film de femme, a movie featuring strong female characters. In addition to Rob, Jon, Decker, and I (who've participated in all 3 of our 48 Hour Film projects under the illustrious banner of Jungle Rules Productions) we expanded our core team to include several of Rob's law school friends.

Things turned out awesome. Decker, as always, was amazing as our director and video editor, staying up all night Saturday once again while Rob, Jon, and I got a few hours sleep. Decker and Rob did a bunch of projects in the fall with the GWU Law Revue, and produced a few hilarious videos, including the YouTube sensation Shit In My Pants. Decker got a Panasonic AG-DVX100B semipro camera out of it. It's just incredible how much better its battery life, manual zoom and focus, exposure controls, ergonomics, and resultant video quality are, compared to the small MiniDV camcorders we were using previously.

We had a fairly wild brainstorming session on Friday night, with a lot of amusing stories bandied about, but settled on a fun and feasible one by about midnight. Rob's friends turned out have a lot of theater and acting experience among them, and did an amazing job as actors and writers. I did a lot of filming and most of the audio cleanup, as usual, and also helped write some of the scenes.

Our movie was shown in screening Session D on Wednesday May 5 at the AFI Silver theater in Spring Spring. Again, it was a ton of fun to see our film and those of 11 other teams on the big screen. We've really improved since last year... especially in our technical prowess and cinematography, where we were very much at the bottom of the heap last spring.

The Betamacks, who made last year's brilliant stop-motion silent movie, Janice and Jonas, shot a hilarious "historical fiction" movie in red-green 3D this year, entitled Hörn: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet. Citra Productions was another highlight of the night... their Tiebreaker was hilarious and beautifully shot in HD with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR. There was another great, funny mockumentary about a haunted house, sort of Paranormal Activity meets Best in Show; I wish I could remember the team's name or the movie title. (Can anyone find it online?) Also, a very weird and dark funny movie involving a talking squirrel and lesbian park rangers, Shadow Tale.

UPDATE: Our short film, Koma, is now online for your viewing pleasure!

How to encode video for the Sansa Connect using FFmpeg

2010-05-06T23:06:00.002-04:00

Tarq (my BFF, yo) sent me some goodies in the mail... a bottle of fine Michigan maple syrup from Camp Daggett (his home away from home) and...

A Sansa Connect MP3 player!

I already have a Sansa e250 MP3 player onto which I have installed the awesome, awesome, awesome Rockbox firmware. The Sansa e200 series models are among the best-supported by Rockbox and there are so many improved features: MPEG-2 video playback, FM radio presets and recording, games, better battery life, faster startup time, album art, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC playback, MicroSDHC memory card support, etc. The e250 only cost me about $30, and yet its hardware is comparable to the iPod Nano, and its features are way better.

On paper, the Sansa Connect looks like a nice upgrade... its specs include a larger 2.2" 320×240 screen (1.8" 220x176 for the e200 series), 4 GiB flash and a MicroSDHC slot, decent-sounding speakers so that you can listen without headphones, and a faster 125 MHz ARM processor that should help it play higher-resolution videos. Most excitingly, it features 802.11b/g WiFi support! No FM radio, though that feature never worked very well on the e200 except outdoors, due to the poor antenna.

Unfortunately, what the nifty hardware giveth, the poor software taketh away. Like a lot of embedded devices, the Sansa Connect is based on embedded Linux, which is really cool but a lot of companies really suck at implementing it. The firmware is really buggy and I have already managed to freeze it in several different ways. The WiFi is only used for one thing: Internet Radio. Cool, so I can listen to ShoutCast MP3 streams, right? Not so fast... the device is tightly coupled to Yahoo! Music, which is now defunct, so you can't listen to any Internet radio at all :-p

Getting video onto this thing is also a PITA. Sansa provides the crummy Sansa Media Converter software for Windows only. It's a pain to install and a pain to use. Fortunately, some clever folks on various forums have figured out how to use FFmpeg to convert video files to the various weird video formats that Sandisk's Sansa firmware always requires. (You would think a Linux-based device would have awesome video format support based on the extensive libraries of open-source codecs available, but no...)

This thing is just crying out to be hacked to run a real Linux distro, or Rockbox. Just think of the possibilities... you could use it as a WiFi network finder, a portable WiFi remote, a USB WiFi adapter, a streaming media player... there are all kinds of nifty apps that could run on this thing. Unfortunately, it's also been discontinued, probably because the crummy firmware didn't win it many fans.

Video conversion

It took me a couple of hours to figure this out, so I thought I would post information on how to convert video for the Sansa Connect under Linux. You'll need FFmpeg, with the "unstripped" codec libraries which include the not-quite-GPLed FAAC encoder (easily install prepackaged versions from Medibuntu if you're running Ubuntu). Here's the command line to use under Ubuntu 9.10/Karmic:

ffmpeg -i INPUTFILE -r 29.97 -vcodec libxvid -b 640k -acodec libfaac \
  -ab 128k -ar 48000 -g 300 -s 320x240 -ac 2 -f mp4 -aspect 4:3 \
  OUTPUTFILE

This says... take the input file and convert it to MPEG-4 video (Xvid) at 30 fps in 320×240 resolution, with AAC stereo audio, and a combined bitrate of about 768 kB/s.

Several forums actually suggested fine-tuning the video encoding settings with additional options:

ffmpeg -i INPUTFILE -r 29.97 -vcodec libxvid -b 640k \
  -bufsize 4M -qmax 51 -mbd 2 -flags +4mv+aic -trellis 1 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -g 300 \
  -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ar 48000 -g 300 -s 320x240 -ac 2 -f mp4 -aspect 4:3 \
   OUTPUTFILE

I'm not enough of a video codec expert to understand all of these, but they do improve quality and file size slightly, although they make FFmpeg run a good deal slower (~45 fps with these options, vs. ~110-120 without, on my dual-core AMD64 system).

If you try to alter the video resolution, aspect ratio, container format, or video/audio codecs... you will either cause the Sansa Connect to refuse to play it, to horribly mangle the video display, or to crash the player altogether. If you encode the video with MP3 audio instead of AAC... instant crash on transfer. It'll also break if you make the bitrate too high (I'm not sure where "too high" is, but the above settings look great for the videos I've transcoded). Clearly they only tested this thing with the exact format produced by their own crummy software. >:-(

But, if you do follow one of the command lines above... you'll get MP4 files that you can transfer to the Sansa Connect's Video folder, and play successfully. Woohoo!

You're not going to believe what happened to my car this time

2010-03-26T16:10:00.014-04:00

I think it's fair to say that my car, a 2000 Toyota Corolla, has not led a particularly lucky existence. The day after I moved to Maryland for grad school... the window was smashed and my brand new CD player stolen. Then some vandal smashed the tail light for no reason, a few months later. Then all was well for a few years, until I got rear-ended on a highway off-ramp, smashing the bumper and severely damaging my touring bike which--as luck would have it--was being carried on the back of my car. (On the plus side, the guy who hit me was totally a nice responsible guy, and his insurance took care of everything.) Then, in the last year, I've had two more windows smashed by random vandals.

So, when my roommate walked in yesterday evening and asked, "Dan, have you seen your car lately?" ... I got pretty worried.

It had been a lovely warm day. I went for a run from about 6:30-7:30pm, just before dark. There were some moderate gusts of wind, but nothing too crazy. I ate dinner and got ready to go out and watch the Cornell Big Red (my alma mater!!) play Kentucky, Cornell's first NCAA Sweet 16 appearance in a loooong time.

I'm not sure what went through my head right when Nathan beckoned me to come outside and take a look... had my car been stolen? Spray-painted? Set on fire? Had all the windows been smashed in the past hour for no apparent reason?

The truth was far, far stranger. A very large tree had decided to practice its piledriver moves directly on the hood of my car...

Let's take a closer look...

No, no, no, that doesn't do it justice. To really appreciate this bizarre situation, we need to take a broader look...

Normally, we have a tree on the left of the driveway, and another one on the right. Now, we had one in the middle too.

The tall and apparently healthy tree on the left side had snapped in half, and the top half of the trunk managed to get tangled in the power lines and land, perfectly vertical, on my hapless car.

The fire department came and... put caution tape around everything. Uhm. Excellent. Thanks? I guess that keeps everyone safe or something?

I retrieved a few important things from the trunk of the car. I went in the front and got the insurance and registration. The tree wiggled and creaked precariously on the hood. I wondered how much engine damage there was. I tried to start the car: it started, but it definitely didn't sound right. The tree wiggled and creaked some more. I got out of there.

I talked to the fire department, the power company, and got some insurance info. The Cornell-Kentucky game was about to start. Rather than sit around and commiserate with my poor, poor car, I decided to go out to Penn Quarter Tavern in DC and cheer on Cornell. The game had already stated, and Cornell was up 14-10 against the #1 team in the tournament!!!! Nathan was kind enough to give me a ride. LET'S GO RED!!!

But... we lost, 62-45, mostly due to a pretty disastrous spell in the last 10 minutes of the first half :-( It was a crazy long shot, and a pretty good game nonetheless. (USA Today had a highly amusing article about the David-and-Goliath matchup between Cornell and Kentucky, by the way.)

Well, I got home, and the tree hadn't fallen over or anything...

Soon, at about 1am, the amusingly named Asplundh Tree Experts showed up with a large, impressive bucket truck. (But seriously, is "Asplundh" not the funniest name you've ever heard??!!) They're contractors for PepCo, our utility company, and were assigned to remove the tree from the power lines. They told me it was dangerous to have touched the car with the tree lying across it and the power lines (which were not damaged). In my years of physics learning, I have not once encountered a tree that was capable of conducting electricity, so I just brushed this off, and refrained from going all physics on them...

They also told me that they weren't responsible for any damage incurred by the car while they cut down the tree. However, they actually did a really good and careful job removing the tree. It took quite a while, but they didn't further damage the car other than some scratches due to falling branches. In retrospect, I probably should've encouraged them to drop logs on the windshield and otherwise smash up the car pretty good... this would be a lot easier to deal with if the car had been totaled. I'm just not a big fan of insurance fraud or senseless destruction, however. :-/

Not such a pretty sight. Smashed hood, cracked or scratched windshield, busted wipers, scratched quarter-panel, a door that doesn't quite open right, and some very disquieting noises from the engine. It's kind of hard to convey how deep the dent in the hood is. If I could've opened the hood, I might've been able to get some idea of the engine damage.

Got it towed to a local body shop approved by the insurance company. (Both the tow truck driver and the tree guys swore they'd never seen anything like this before!!!) Not looking forward to getting an estimate back on this, especially since we have an extreeeeeemely high deductible. I've asked my landlady about whether her homeowners' insurance may cover it, but I'm not too optimistic about that either :-(

Anyway, I hope this freak accident has been a source of amusement, at least!!! My irascible brother-in-law Sam has made a couple of, uh, lolcars out of it:

Grudging props to Mac OS

2010-03-21T02:33:00.000-04:00

So, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple are basically the only tech companies that I really loathe. Microsoft and Sony are pretty much irredeemably awful. Apple does some cool stuff (hint: not iPod) but they're surrounded by such an insufferably smug attitude and I hate the frickin' Steve Jobs personality cult.

Anyway... I'm at my grandparents' house for the weekend, and they have an iMac connected to a DSL modem. No router. So how the heck am I supposed to get my notebook online?

Well, it turns out that Mac OS 10.2+ has a really nice Internet Sharing feature... turns the computer into a Wireless Access Point and NAT router with DHCP. Slick! It "just works" too. Windows XP has an equivalent feature, which is just awful and barely usable with a wired connection. In Linux, you can turn your computer into a full-fledged router, of course, but I don't know of any easy GUI for it.

By far the best part about the Mac OS sharing is that it actually puts the wireless adapter into Master Mode, so that it can present itself as a genuine AP-based network. Works waaaaay better than an ad-hoc computer-to-computer network like Windows sets up... those are always very slow and flaky, if they work at all.

I'm posting from the iMac's shared wireless connection right now, and I get good signal strength and bandwidth that's about 80% of what they get upstream.

So, nice work Apple. Good feature!

Make your own electronic book

2010-03-03T01:05:00.012-05:00

Ever wanted to make your own electronic book? No? Me neither! But then I found an out-of-print book at the library, which I really wanted a copy of. Here's how I scanned it and cleaned it up into a nice usable document, using my desktop computer running Ubuntu.

Scanning

I took the book and scanned it with the Sharp MX-M350N copier at work: it's a big copy machine that can also make black-and-white scans, and mail you the images. With a little bit of tinkering, I got it to scan at 600 dpi, in the correct size for this small paperback book, and to save everything in one big multi-page TIFF file. Within 20 minutes or so I had scanned all 270 pages, and gotten my hand sore from pressing down on the spine of the book.

The scanner's output ain't pretty:

adjacent odd and even pages are combined
there are ugly dark creases between pages and around the edges
pages are slightly rotated and off-center
there are lots speckles of noise/dust throughout

Extracting page images

First thing I did was to extract images of the individual pages from the PDF file. (If your scanner produces separate image files for each page, then you don't need to do this.) The fastest way to split the TIFF up under Linux is with the tiffsplit command:

$ tiffsplit scan.tiff page-

This ran amazingly fast, and produced a whole bunch of files, page-aaa.tif through page-afg.tif.

So now I had a whole bunch of TIFF page images. What next?

ScanTailor is awesome

As I mentioned above, there are lots of ugly features of the scanned book. It turns out that there's an amazing open-source program to automate all of the tedious cleanup tasks: ScanTailor. It's only at version 0.9.5 so far, but it's really stable and can do a lot of things:

With a few clicks, ScanTailor will automatically split pairs of pages, automatically deskew page images (rotate them correctly), automatically figure out where the margins are (not perfect, but worked for about 98% of the pages in my book), lay out the extracted images into nice uniform pages with margins, and even remove some of the noisy dust flecks from the images (although this tends to eat punctuation marks sometimes)!

This involves a lot of heavy-duty image processing, so it took a while to run even on a fairly fast desktop computer. Basically, I set up ScanTailor to clean up the scanned images, and left it alone for half an hour or so...

At the end of it all, ScanTailor produces a whole bunch of new, cleaned-up TIFF images, 0000_page-aaa.tiff through 0274_page-afg.tiff.

Putting everything together

Now we want to put these cleaned-up pages all together into a single document. I decided to use the DjVu format since it offers really good compression for text, better than PDF.

First I need to convert all these TIFF images to DjVu's format. I decided to write a little Makefile to do this, in ScanTailor's output directory:

TIFF = $(wildcard *.tiff)
INDIVDJVU = $(patsubst %.tiff,%.djvu,$(TIFF))
OUTPUTDJVU = complete.djvu

all: $(INDIVDJVU) $(OUTPUTDJVU)

$(OUTPUTDJVU): $(INDIVDJVU)
        djvm -c $@ $^

%.djvu: %.tiff
        cjb2 $< $@

This Makefile uses DjVu's cjb2 utility to convert monochrome TIFF images in DjVu's format, and then it uses djvm to combine them all together into one DjVu file.

I ran make all, and after a bit of processing, I had the complete book in the file complete.djvu. It's about 6.5 MB in size... very good for a 270-page book at 600 dpi!

To do...

It'd be nice if I could select and search for text in this book. Right now it's just a series of images! The next thing I'll do is try to figure out how to do optical character recognition (OCR) on the images. There are some interesting projects like Ocropus and Tesseract that are making open-source OCR software.

Large file hosting: try ADrive

2010-03-02T00:29:00.004-05:00

Often, when I'm skiing or on some other excursion, I take large numbers of photos and want to distribute them to other people. So I need a web host that offers a lot of storage space and high download capacity.

There are a large number of free-ish or ad-supported file hosting services; Wikipedia offers a handy comparison guide.

The ones that everyone seems to use are MegaUpload and RapidShare. The problems with RapidShare are that it only allows you to share files up to 200 MB, and downloads from free accounts are very slow; MegaUpload allows files up to 1 GB, and downloads are speedier, but their flash-based upload interface never works successfully for me under Linux. Also, both sites are very gaudy and ugly and they make downloaders wait and solve CAPTCHAs in order to download files.

Recently I tried ADrive, and this one I like a lot. Advantages:

File size limit is 2 GB
Free accounts get 50 GB of space
Uploader is Java-based and very reliable
You can organize your uploaded files into folders easily
Pretty good download speeds... > 200 kB/s
No waiting or CAPTCHAs to download files

So, ADrive gets my seal of approval. Worth checking out if you need to share large files reliaby, and don't want to pay for it :)

Pidgin, Google Talk, and XMPP

2010-02-25T18:42:00.002-05:00

The Pidgin IM client supports just about every instant messaging protocol ever conceived, including many poorly-designed and undocumented proprietary protocols, such as those used by AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN. It also supports XMPP (aka Jabber), the open-standard protocol on which Google Talk is based.

There are some interesting technical and political issues surrounding the implementation of Google Talk's XMPP extensions...

XMPP presence and the Shared Status extension

The XMPP protocol core supports users' signing in from multiple locations simultaneously: each client normally picks a different resource name, which is appended to the user's Jabber ID to distinguish them. For example, I might be logged in as dlenski@gmail.com/Gmail via the GMail chat interface, and as dlenski@gmail.com/Pidgin via Pidgin. Each of these resources can maintain independent presence, which encompasses status (e.g. Available/Away) and message ("Dude check out my latest YouTube video").

Google Talk/Gmail Chat (is there an official name encompassing both of these?) offers a few non-standard client- and server-side extensions to XMPP. The most notable of these is the Shared Status extension (for which Google provides some very helpful documentation). With the extension, clients automatically synchronize their presence with each other. Try it out: open GMail in two separate windows, and adjust your chat status in one window... it will be immediately reflected in the other.

Invisible Mode

In addition to presence sharing, Google Talk also offers users "Invisible Mode." When this mode is enabled by the client, the Google Talk servers don't report presence information to the user's contacts. So the user can send and receive messages, and see their own contact list, but they will not show up in anyone else's list of online contacts (often called a roster for XMPP).

Invisible Mode, though a seemingly separate feature, is inextricably linked to Shared Status: a Google Talk client can't go Invisible except via the mechanism of Shared Status.

Why did Google make this design choice? It's not very clear to me... the XMPP standards body has drafted a proposed mechanism for invisibility (XEP-0186), but it's quite complex in the demands that makes of compliant servers, which must carefully manage presence information in order to maintain the illusion of invisibility for specific resources, while still allowing invisible clients to communicate. My guess is that Google's engineers decided this was just too complicated, and tacked on a simple shared-invisibility mechanism as a quick hack.

Enter Pidgin...

As mentioned above, Pidgin supports XMPP, so users can connect to Google Talk's servers and chat with their friends seemlessly.

Officially, however, Pidgin does not support Google's Shared Status and Invisibility extension. A lot of reasons have been given for this:

It's not part of the standard XMPP protocol.
Some users find it annoying... if you change your presence in one location (e.g. home computer), you might not want it changed in another location (e.g. work computer).
There's already a proposed standard invisibility mechanism for XMPP (the aforementioned XEP-0186).

This causes a lot of confusion, however. New Pidgin users sign on to their Google Talk accounts and find that Invisibility doesn't work and their status messages aren't propagated when logged in from multiple locations. There have been lots and lots of bug reports about this problem, and someone always asks, "Why not support it?" and inevitably some of the above reasons are mentioned.

A large number of badly-conceived hacks and correct but laborious workarounds and partially functional Pidgin plugins have been devised to enable Invisible mode for Google Talk accounts in Pidgin.

Put it all together

A few months ago, Ayan Chakrabarti wrote a patch for Purple (the library on which Pidgin is based) that actually provides a complete implementation of Google's Shared Status and Invisibility extension.
With this patch, Pidgin works very much like GMail chat! You update your status in one place, and it's reflected on other computers where you're logged in. You can go Invisible, and come back. Awesome!

I updated AyanC's patch to work with the latest version of Pidgin, 2.6.6. I also built packages of this patched version for Ubuntu, found here, so Ubuntu users can easily upgrade to this version.

There's still some ongoing debate about whether Pidgin should officially support Google Shared status, but it appears that momentum is now moving in that direction. A few of the good arguments for inclusion (not originally mine):

The developers may not like Google's non-standard Invisibility mechanism, but Pidgin supports a lot of worse-designed and worse-documented protocols.
Google Talk's implementation may be non-standard, but Google Talk is by far the most widely-adopted implementation of Jabber, so it deserves some consideration.
Some users don't want Shared Status, but it can be a configurable option.
Pidgin confuses new users by not supporting the same status semantics as Google Talk's official clients.

Acer AS1410: first impressions

2009-10-06T21:01:00.013-04:00

I recently bought an Acer AS1410 netbook/small notebook. Here's a bit more about my thought process while buying, and my initial review.

Deciding what to buy

I've wanted to get a netbook/small notebook computer for a while now. My Dell Inspiron 1501 was nice and fast with a dual-core AMD Turion 64 processor, but it was a very bulky 8 pounds and not fun to schlep to and from campus or on trips.

The main things that made me hesitate about a netbook were:

Small keyboards. I have large but not huge hands, and I have tried several 9" and 10" netbooks, even the ones that were well-reviewed, and found their keyboards to be intolerably small.
Small screens. The 1024x600 resolution of the typical 9" or 10" netbook screen seemed too small for me. Running the GNOME desktop under Linux, I like to have both top and bottom panels on the screen, and room for a couple non-overlapping terminal windows.
Slow processors and 1gb RAM limits. Pretty much all the netbooks use Intel Atom N270/N280 processors. Apparently the 1gb RAM limit is Microsoft's fault, since they refuse to sell Windows XP anymore to OEMs offering better-spec'ed systems. I want to be able to do some number-crunching and software development on my portable computer without tearing my hair out as the computer swaps to disk and bogs down...

I noticed the recent crop of 11"-12" netbooks with interest. The first one that caught my eye was an Acer 751h, back in June 2009 or so. Costco was selling 'em for the astonishingly low price of $300. I tried it and found the keyboard somewhere between tolerable and pleasant, appreciated the higher 1366x768 screen resolution, and enjoyed the aesthetics overall. However, the flaw of the 751h is that it still has only 1gb of RAM and actually uses an even slower Atom Z520 processor, which has been panned by all the reviews I've read.

A couple of weeks ago, two very new entrants to the netbook/mini-notebook market caught my eye (reviews linked):

the MSI Wind U210: 2gb RAM, 250gb hard drive, HDMI output, 6-cell battery, and an AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor at 1.6ghz. Free upgrade to Windows 7. Selling for about $430 online.
the Acer Aspire AS1410: 2gb RAM, 250gb hard drive, HDMI output, 6-cell battery, and an Intel Core Solo SU3500 processor at 1.4ghz. Free upgrade to Windows 7. Selling for $400-430 online.

Being a longtime AMD fanboy, the MSI U210 appealed to me most. However, it turns out that it's slightly less power-efficient than the Intel SU3500 processor, and that coupled with a lucky price break pushed me towards the Acer AS1410.

Last week, 1saleaday.com (pretty self-explanatory...) offered the Acer AS1410 for $405 shipped. Best of all, they were selling a slightly improved model with 3gb RAM rather than the usual 2gb. You could get any color you want, as long as it's red :-P. So, I sold my Dell laptop on Craigslist and sprung for the AS1410.

And today, it showed up on my doorstep...

My review

It turns out that I got the "Canadian version" of the system, with French and English keycaps and "Toronto" as the default timezone. Okay by me... I speak French and having the accent mark keycaps might come in handy at some point.

The first thing I noticed, after removing all the protective plastic, is that it's a pretty nice-looking little computer. The battery doesn't stick out despite its fairly high capacity. The screen is very bright and about as sharp as my old Dell, with a similar resolution despite its smaller size. I'd guess the 11.6" screen could be a touch larger (say, 12.1" like the MSI U210) and still fit the case, but that's not a huge deal.

I plugged it in, turned it on, and went through the motion of completing the setup for Windows Vista Home Premium. This took a looong time, probably an hour, and constantly thrashed the hard drive light. Also, the fan came on, although the computer never got too hot, and its sound was louder and "crunchier" than I'd expected. I think I'm going to blame this part on Vista, rather than on the computer.

Once I got the system up and running, I realized there was a rather large quantity of junk software on it: a dozen or so crummy games, some crummy IM client, some crummy file encryption software, a trial version of MacAffee antivirus, etc. I plan to mainly run Ubuntu Linux on this machine, but it's still really annoying to have Windows preloaded with all this crap. I uninstalled all that as fast as I could, and then installed both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to replace the default Internet Explorer browser, which I loathe.

While puttering around with Control Panel, I heard some system sounds and realized that the speakers on this thing are not too bad for being so small.

I connected to my home network with no trouble, getting a good signal with the Intel a/b/g/n wireless adapter. And I've been playing around on the web since. What I'm really noticing about this computer are the ergonomics of the keyboard and the touchpad.

The keyboard is pretty good. I mean, I'm getting used to it already, which is a good sign. There are a couple of annoying features, though:

The left shift key is foreshortened, excessively, to accomodate... an extra "|\" key?!?!? WTF?! Why are there two of them??
The L-shaped enter key is nice and big, but unfortunately it "hooks" up-and-left rather than down-and-left. You'll never guess what's in the lower-left corner of the Enter key. Why yes, it's the other "|\" key! Someone at Acer has a strange sense of humor...
The left Control key is too small. I wish they'd made it twice as wide and shortened the space bar somewhat.
The arrow keys are half-height, so they can cram in the Home/PgUp and End/PgDn keys as well. This might be the most annoying, since I typically move my hands when I need the arrow keys, so a bigger "landing zone" is most helpful here.

I don't know why Acer didn't stick with the sensible looking keyboard layout of the Acer 751h, which is otherwise an identical form factor:

Frankly, although the AS1410 keyboard's quirks are annoying, I've only been using it for an hour or so and they're already a lot less annoying. My pinkies have gotten used to the placement of the Shift and Enter keys, and I'm working on the Control and arrow keys...

The touchpad on this thing is pretty nice. It's small, but frankly I don't see any way around it. It blends in with the surrounding case visually, but from a tactile standpoint its surface is easily distinguishable. The separate left and right buttons are a nice feature, although they are very "short" vertically. I think I'll soon get used to that as well. I don't really care about multi-touch, but the scrolling feature seems to work fine.

I've been on battery for the last 2.5 hours, with the default "Balanced Power" setting under Vista, and I still have 66% remaining. It looks like the battery should deliver on the promised 6-7 hour life in normal usage.

I tried listening to some music via Last.fm, and the speakers are, again, decent. The bass is fairly loud but gravelly, and vocals are perfectly pleasant to listen to. With headphones, everything sounds great as expected.

Conclusions

The good:

A good, modern Core 2 processor
3gb of RAM
A high-resolution, pleasing 1366x768 screen
HDMI output (if I ever get a TV...)
A reasonably-sized keyboard that feels nice to the touch
Free upgrade to Windows 7, which presumably sucks less than Vista
Battery sits flush and runs for 6-7 hours
Runs very cool
a/b/g/n wireless is flexible and future-proof

The bad:

Loaded with a whole lot of junk software
Fan is loud when it turns on, and the noise is slightly grating on the ears
A few questionable keyboard layout choices, annoying at first but probably not dealbreakers for anyone
No built-in Bluetooth, although there's an LED for it?! I can buy a mini USB Bluetooth adapter for $2.50 these days. Not having one built-in to every netbook/notebook wireless card seems inexcusable...
No eSATA. Hard to blame Acer for this one, because very few notebooks have eSATA yet. But there's already a SATA controller for the hard drive, and it'd be really nice to be able to connect an external hard drive or CD drive with better-than-USB performance. Notebook makers would simply have to find room for one more small external port: seemingly a smart and reasonable thing to do.

To do:

Install Ubuntu. Since Intel provides excellent Linux support for their graphics and wireless adapters, I foresee no problems!
Test the VGA and HDMI external monitor outputs.
Test the webcam and internal microphone. I've heard they hold up well in low-light and high-noise conditions, but I'd like to find out for myself.

Supreme Court shadow boxing

2009-07-19T00:18:00.007-04:00

Recently, Charles Blow of the New York Times noted that, if Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, there will be 6 Catholics, 2 Jews, and only 1 Protestant on the Supreme Court. This is a sharp reversal from the situation 30 years ago where there were 8 Protestants and one (very liberal) Catholic on the Court. Blow asks, "Does/should this matter? Why?"

Here's what I think: the outsize Catholic (and Jewish) presence on the Supreme Court doesn't really "matter" in terms of the court's legal thought and direction.

I think, rather, that the confessional makeup of the court is a symptom of the bizarre, uninformative process for selecting and confirming Supreme Court justices.

As we've seen in the recent confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, it's now considered improper to ask a nominee to make a public statement about his or her beliefs or ideas on any matter of controversy that may come before the court, and a nominee may refuse such a question without any political risk.

Thus, the process of "selling" a nominee to the Senate and to the voting public is "coded" through the personal identity of the nominee. For example, Republicans have placed a very high priority on opposition to legalized abortion in the last 30 years. Since the Catholic Church has been unbending in its opposition to abortion, nominating a conservative Catholic to the Supreme Court has been a way to tacitly inform the Senate and the public of a nominee's pro-life views. Likewise, Jews have often been active in civil rights movements in the USA, so nominating a Jew is a way to signal a nominee's civil-liberties views, and perhaps carries less socio-political baggage than a black nominee.

Although Sonia Sotomayor is a Catholic, I regard this as incidental to her nomination, since her religious beliefs aren't used as a coded reference to her political views. Instead, her ethnic/linguistic identity as a Latina serves the same function: we are meant to presume that she will take a compassionate approach to immigration, that she will be supportive of cultural diversity in general, and that she will uphold affirmative action.

I'd prefer a situation where Presidents could openly nominate Supreme Court justices because of their shared legal and political beliefs, and the Senate could in turn openly question the nominees about those beliefs. Instead, we have a weird Kabuki theater in which nominees' political beliefs are only indicated via an ever-changing set of social identity markers.

The Best of the Best

2009-05-22T00:02:00.018-04:00

Tonight I went to both sessions of the Best of the 48 Hour Film Project DC 2009. 24 short films were shown in all, out of 94 (?) total on-time submissions. There was some great work shown tonight, with the second session in particular just blowing me away.
The winners were:

Gwendolyn Dangerous
Rakirovka
Ivan Pagoda: A Feel Good Story

I've gone around trying to find high-quality online versions of everything I really liked, and here's what I've come up with. Here they are, listed in the order of my favorite movies:

Rakirovka

Janice and Jonas

Ivan Pagoda: A Feel Good Story

slightly

Gwendolyn Dangerous

Please Forward

Stonking

American Institution

He Drove

Nowhere Man

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

cool

'Za

Life Is Super

Paradigm Smash

(Can anyone find it online?)

Cry Guy

Happy Hour

The Imperial

amazing

A whopping five of these top movies were from the screening group that Paradigm Smash was in. Here's a great blog entry on the top DC entries from a more experienced reviewer! There's also a blog with entries from some of the project's other participants in DC.

Update: Here's another blog post from Tohubohu, the group that made Please Forward, with a list of all the finalists in the DC competition.

Update: Here's the 48 Hour Film Project's official DC 2009 page, showing the award winners. Ivan Pagoda: A Feel Good Story won the award for Best Acting... very well-deserved, in my opinion!

The latest Pentax DSLR, wow!!

2009-05-21T11:40:00.003-04:00

Forget netbooks or camcorders, I have a new gadget to lust after... the new Pentax K-7 DSLR camera.

It has a new HD movie mode that looks to beat the Nikon D90's and the Canon EOS 500D's.

It'd be a pretty substantial upgrade from my current Pentax K10D. It's also up to 14.6 megapixels (10 for the K10D), 6400 max sensitivity (1600 for the K10D), and 5.2 fps (3 fps for the K10D), live view, high-speed sync, and PC flash socket.

A few small things I'm (slightly) skeptical about:

So there's an external microphone input for video recording... but no headphone jack to play back and check sound quality???
The body is slightly smaller than the K10D or K20D, which most consider quite big. I actually like the large size of the K10D cause I have pretty big hands. Wondering if the K-7 will be as comfortable to hold.
And then there's the price: $1,300 for the body at launch (compared to under $600 that I paid for my K10D with kit lens). Yow! I hope that'll come down fast.

Handy feed of latest deals on Netbooks

2009-04-02T15:33:00.000-04:00

Here's a nice site that keeps track of all the latest deals and special offers on Netbooks: dealnetbooks.com. There's an RSS feed too. Very handy, easier than sifting through Slickdeals or Edealinfo, and updated several times a day.

They also have some good reviews of netbooks at the companion blog, netbooked.net. Technically-minded and fluff-free information.

I for one am now leaning towards the Asus Eee PC 1000HE. It gets great reviews in terms of keyboard, battery life, build quality, and overall performance, and it's got built-in bluetooth. And deals to get it for $360 with a 2gb memory upgrade keep popping up and then selling out quickly. So I'm pretty tempted spring for it.

How to tether your Moto Q as a modem in Windows

2009-04-01T16:47:00.003-04:00

Previously, I figured out how to use a Motorola Q smartphone as a modem under Linux. I use Linux all the time, but for the benefit of others I got around to figuring out how to do it under Windows XP as well.

But first, a brief rant from our sponsors:

People are always insinuating/complaining that hardware doesn't work right under Linux because it doesn't have drivers for what they use. Gimme a break. Linux supports more hardware than any other OS, and it supports it better than other operating systems. Nearly all the drivers for Linux are open-source and extremely well-tested, and they're designed to work with as much different variants as possible. So if you have a Netgear wireless card and a Linksys wireless card that use the same chipset, they'll work with the same driver in Linux. Not so under Windows where you have to track down the proprietary drivers specific to each manufacturer's products. Just the other day... I dug an old crappy webcam out of my drawer o'parts. Guess what? It worked under Linux but not at all in Windows, and after an hour of searching I still couldn't find a driver because apparently the manufacturer no logner supported it. So if you want hardware support that works on all architectures and versions of your OS, switch to Linux!!!! </end rant>

Back to the matter at hand: how to set use your Moto Q for Internet access in Windows XP. You need:

A Motorola Q phone with data plan. (I can only test with Sprint.)
A USB cable for the Q. I can't be bothered to figure out Bluetooth tethering for Windows.
The Motorola USB modem drivers for Windows XP. (This is the part that took so long to figure out, as I ranted above. I eventually found out that Verizon distributes the Motorola drivers. Under Linux, you just use the generic USB modem driver which works with all different brands.)

Okay, let's do this:

Install the drivers before you plug in the phone. (They'll end up in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Motorola.)
On the Moto Q, go to Start → Accessories → Modem Link.
Hit the right soft-button to Activate the modem link and then press OK on the warning screen that comes up.
Now you can plug the phone into your computer. Windows XP will hopefully locate the correct drivers and announce that it's found a USB Modem Smartphone or something like that. (Double-check that it found the drivers in Control Panel → System → Hardware → Device Manager, if you have issues.)
On the computer, go to Control Panel → Network Connections and choose Create a new connections. Follow the on-screen instructions, and put in the following settings:
- Dial-up connection
- No username or password for Sprint.(for Verizon, see here)
- The number to dial is #777.
- Choose 460 kbps as the connection speed (it's the highest possible for me at least).
- If you have a "normal" modem, make sure that this connection is set to use the Moto Q as the modem device, and not the other modem.

To test the connection:

Disable your other network connections (wifi, ethernet, etc.)
Double-click on the new Dial-Up Connection to enable it.
Try to surf the web, check your email, etc. Does it work? If so, great success!!!
Feel free to bask in the smug sense of satisfaction that comes from outsmarting the phone company.

There you have it. Your wireless plan's contract probably forbids tethering, however I've not had any repercussions for using it for occasional Internet access in airports and other places when there's no WiFi network. No guarantees though. I'm not responsible if you break your phone, if Sprint sends goons to your house to beat you up, if your cat catches on fire, or even if your grandma forgets your birthday. Thank you.

What netbook should I get?

2009-03-27T14:35:00.006-04:00

I've decided I want a netbook, one of those diminutive, cheap laptops that are all the rage these days.

I currently have a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop, about 2 years old. It's still plenty powerful with a dual-core processor, but it is bulky and heavy at about 8 pounds. It has a DVD/RW drive that I never use, and a 15" screen... bigger than you really need for a laptop, but not big enough to watch movies on comfortably from more than a few feet away. As a result, it hardly ever leaves the house unless I'm going for more than a few days, and it's a real pain to take on the plane.

So I want to sell it and get a netbook. I have a few concerns, though.

I have pretty big hands and do a lot of coding, so I want a keyboard that's not too ridiculous. With that in mind, I think I would prefer a 10" netbook over a 9" one, but not 100% sure.
I'd prefer one that can take a regular 2.5" hard drive. Many of the netbooks have flash memory in a non-standard form factor. It's (a) small and slow, (b) expensive to upgrade, and (c) doesn't reduce the weight, size, or power consumption enough to offset these disadvantages.
I don't care whether it comes with Windows or Linux. I'm going to run Linux either way.
Built-in Bluetooth would be nice so I can use my phone for free Internet access without even taking it out of my pocket.

The Dell and HP and Lenovo models seem a bit overpriced for getting basically the exact same thing as the smaller brands. Here are the models that have intrigued me the most in terms of price and features:

MSI Wind: it's 10", has 1gb of RAM, takes 2.5" hard drives, has built-in Bluetooth, and is about $300 with a 160gb hard drive. Weighs 2.3 lbs. But how's the keyboard?
ASUS Eee PC 1000: very similar specs to the MSI Wind, supposed to have a very nice keyboard, and a bigger 6-cell battery. Weighs about 3 lbs. Worth the extra $40 and weight?
ASUS Eee PC 1000: very similar specs to the MSI Wind, supposed to have a very nice keyboard, and a bigger 6-cell battery. Weighs about 3 lbs. Worth the extra $40 and weight?
ASUS Eee PC 900 or Acer Aspire One: even tinier 9" models, and cheap. About $250 with similar specs to the 10" models. Too small??

So does anybody have any experience with these, preferably more than one of them? Which of them have nice keyboards? Any hidden features or bugs I should be aware of?

How to use your Moto Q as a modem

2009-01-22T02:31:00.009-05:00

So, I have the awesome (and now-discontinued) Spring SERO phone plan, which basically gives me unlimited text/data/everything for less than I paid for Verizon's cheapest plan. The only problem I've had until now:

How to tether my Motorola Q phone to my computer, so that I can use it as a modem when I'm not in range of a wireless network?

I read a whole lot of stupid forum posts on this topic, mostly by seriously confused people, and I was under the mistaken impression that (a) it's really hard to do, (b) it requires special software, and (c) Sprint has removed the features enabling tethering from the phone.

Well, it ain't true. In the course of a few hours, I figured out not how to tether my Moto Q in two different ways: first, using a USB cable, and second, via Bluetooth. So I'm going to explain how to do it both ways under Ubuntu Linux 8.10. It should be pretty much the same under other Linux variants.

Using a USB cable

You need to have pppd, chat, and pon/poff commands installed. Under Debian or Ubuntu, just do apt-get install ppp to install them.

First, on the phone go to: Start Menu | Accessories | Modem Link. Check that the Connection type is set to USB. Then press Activate.
A screen will pop up telling you to press OK before plugging in the USB cable. Do it, then plug in the cable. (Linux is apparently smart enough to not get confused if you keep the cable plugged in the whole time, so you can basically ignore this part.)
Okay, now go to your computer. You should now have a new device node, /dev/ttyACM0. The Linux kernel makes the phone look just like a good ol' fashioned serial modem using this driver.
Now let's make a configuration file for pppd. Some of you may remember this from the dark ages of dial-up-modems. From the command line, start up an editor as root:

$ sudo nano /etc/ppp/peers/motoq_usb

/dev/ttyACM0        # connect to the serial port /dev/ttyACM0
460800              # ... at 460800 bps (as fast as possible)

usepeerdns          # get DNS servers from the phone
defaultroute        # and use this as the default internet connection

crtscts             # use hardware flow control
lcp-echo-failure 0  # if you forget this, ppp will drop the connection
# (ask me if you want the gory details)

# This explains to pppd how to talk to the "modem"
# to set things up.  Really simple!  Just dial a
# made-up number and then you're done.
#
connect "chat '' ATZ OK 'ATDT#777' CONNECT ''"

Under recent versions of Linux, you should now disable NetworkManager because it may get confused when you monkey with the Internet connection manually. So right-click on the Network applet in GNOME and un-check Enable Networking before you continue.

Now we're ready to fire it up! To start the connection for the first time, use:

$ pon motoq_usb nodetach

If all goes well, you'll see something like this:

Serial connection established.
Using interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyACM0
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP
local  IP address 68.246.162.72
remote IP address 68.28.113.69
primary   DNS address 68.28.114.91
secondary DNS address 68.28.122.93

Fire up your web browser, email program, or whatever... check that you're online, and everything's working.
To close the connection, press Ctrl-C in the window where pon is running.

Now you can easily start and stop the connection to the phone:

$ pon motoq_usb # to connect
$ poff motoq_usb # to disconnect

And... there you have it! Your phone works as a modem.... just don't forget to re-activate Modem Link before you use it in this way. I get speeds of about 8 kB/s, which is just great for email and web browsing. Disclaimer: I am not responsible for high usage bills, exploding phones, or any airborne eel attacks that may result from following this procedure.

Using Bluetooth

In my next installment, I'll explain how to use the Moto Q as a Bluetooth modem. Obviously, you need a Bluetooth adapter on your computer to do this. I got a tiny one for $3 and it works great. With the phone as a Bluetooth modem, things are really überl33t. You can keep the phone in your pocket and use it as a modem without ever messing with any cables :-)

Coming soon...

My digital camera advice

2008-12-03T20:32:00.002-05:00

A bunch of people are asking me what digital camera to get. So here are my suggestions (reliable reviews linked in bold, good prices in parentheses).

If you want something that's cheap and good, get the Panasonic LZ8 ($100 with free shipping). Usually I recommend the Canon Powershot models, such as the Canon A590 IS ($110, fs), but this year the Panasonic is definitely the one to beat: it has an impressive wide zoom range and manual shooting controls without sacrificing user-friendliness.
If you want something that is eye candy but also a decent camera, then I'm really not the guy to ask, but... if I were I would recommend that you sell your soul and buy the Sony Cybershot W120 ($140). I grudgingly admit that it is well-built, functional, and attractive... although I FREAKIN' HATE SONY and their stupid Memory Stick cards!!!
If you want something fancier, get a DSLR. Seriously. Yeah, they're bulkier but it's just pointless to pay $400 for a high-end compact when you can get a vastly superior SLR for $550. Basically the only downside of an SLR is that you can't do video on any of the entry-level models yet.

I am partial to Pentax. The Pentax K200D ($565 with kit lens) is a great deal, with built-in stabilization, and a water-resistant body that you can't get except on high-end models from other companies. Also, it comes with a non-crappy lens, unlike most other entry-level models.

Canon and Nikon are not doing anything exciting in entry-level DSLRs these days.

The Olympus E520 ($500 with kit lens) is enticingly cheap, and I liked its predecessor the E-510 a lot.

The Olympus E-520 offers slightly faster burst mode, but the Pentax K200D is water-resistant, is better in low-light, and has a much wider lens selection (= every Pentax lens ever made).

There you have it...

UPDATE:

A side-by-side comparison of the Canon 450D/XSi, Nikon D60, Pentax K200D, Sony A200, and Olympus E-520 from dpreview.com with links to reviews. And here's a pretty good comparison by a guy trying to choose between the K200D, 450D/XSi, and D60.

Alaska... is that for real??

2008-11-05T14:09:00.004-05:00

Well, the Democrats won pretty big last night, with a few astonishing exceptions.

Did convicted felon Ted Stevens really keep his Senate seat, and equally sketchy Don Young his at-large congressional seat???

Apparently they both won... un-effing-believable, especially given that the polling seemed to strongly indicate that both corrupt politicians would lose to their Democratic challengers.

Looks like Oregon Republican Gordon Smith has also managed to keep his Senate seat, despite the long odds in a Democratic wave. He, of course, is a moderate Republican and hasn't been tainted by any scandals, so it's less shocking, but no less surprising given the polls going against him.

Palin gets pranked

2008-11-01T18:46:00.000-04:00

From The Huffington Post, with the audio!!!

The AP reports that a Quebec comedy duo, posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, have successfully prank called Sarah Palin.

Okay, this is certainly not the highest form of political discourse we have, but it is so freakin' funny. My favorite parts are the incredibly, brazenly ridiculous pop culture references in French. So here's my annotated transcript with translations of the hilarious French bits.

Palin: This is Sarah.
Palin: Ah, yeah, Governor Palin.
Palin: Hello.
"Assistant": Just hold on for President Sarkozy, one moment.
Palin: Oh, it's not him yet, they're saying. I always do that.
"Sarkozy": Yes, hello, Governor Palin.
P: Hello, this is Sarah, how are you?
S: Fine, and you? This is Nicolas Sarkozy speaking, how are you?
P: Oh, it's so good to hear you. Thank you for calling us.
S: Oh, it's a pleasure.
P: Thank you sir, we have such great respect for you, John McCain and I. We love you and thank you for taking a few minutes to talk to me.
S: I follow your campaigns closely with my special American adviser Johnny Hallyday, you know?

(Johnny Hallyday is a fairly ridiculous olllddd French pop star who looks kind of like Bono.)

P: Yes, good.
S: Excellent. Are you confident?
P: Very confident and we're thankful that polls are showing that the race is tightening and...
S: Well I know very well that the campaign can be exhausting. How do you feel right now, my dear?
P: I feel so good. I feel like we're in a marathon and at the very end of the marathon you get your second wind and you plow to the finish.
S: You see, I got elected in France because I'm real and you seem to be someone who's real, as well.
P: Yes, yeah. Nico, we so appreciate this opportunity.
S: You know I see you as a president one day, too.
P: <Nervous laughter> Maybe in eight years.
S: Well, I hope for you. You know, we have a lot in common because personally one of my favourite activities is to hunt, too.
P: Oh, very good. We should go hunting together.
S: Exactly, we could go try hunting by helicopter like you did. I never did that. Like we say in French, on pourrait tuer des bébés phoques, aussi.

(on pourrait tuer des bébés phoque, aussi = Let's kill some baby seals, too)

P: Well, I think we could have a lot of fun together as we're getting work done. We can kill two birds with one stone that way.
S: I just love killing those animals. Mmm hmm, take away life, that is so fun.
P: <Laughter>
S: I'd really love to go, so long as we don't bring along Vice-President Cheney.
P: No, I'll be a careful shot, yes.
S: Yes, you know we have a lot in common also, because except that from my house I can see Belgium. That's kind of less interesting than you.
P: Well, see, we're right next door to different countries that we all need to be working with, yes.
S: Some people said that the last days and I thought that was mean that you weren't experienced enough in foreign relations and you know that's completely false. That's the thing that I said to my great friend, the prime minister of Canada Steph Carse.

(apparently, Steph Carse is a Canadian singer. The real PM is Stephen Harper.)

P: Well, he's doing fine, too, and yeah, when you come into a position underestimated it gives you an opportunity to prove the pundints (sic) and the critics wrong. You work that much harder.
S: I was wondering because you are so next to him, one of my good friends, the prime minister of Quebec, Mr. Richard Z. Sirois, have you met him recently? Did he come to one of your rallies?

(apparently, Richard Sirois is a Canadian actor.)

P: I haven't seen him at one of the rallies but it's been great working with the Canadian officials in my role as governor. We have a great co-operative effort there as we work on all of our resource-development projects. You know, I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife. Oh my goodness, you've added a lot of energy to your country but, uhm, with that beautiful family of yours.
S: Thank you very much. You know my wife Carla would love to meet you, you know even though you know she was a bit jealous that I was supposed to speak to you today. <Laughter>
P: <Laughter> Well, give her a big hug for me.
S: You know my wife is a popular singer and a former top model and she's so hot in bed. She even wrote a song for you.
P: Oh my goodness, I didn't know that.
S: Yes, in French it's called du rouge a lèvres sur une cochonne, or if you prefer in English, Joe the Plumber... <singing>it's his life, Joe the Plumber.</singing>

(du rouge a lèvres sur une cochonne = lipstick on a female pig)

P: Maybe she understands some of the unfair criticism but I bet you she is such a hard worker, too, and she realizes you just plow through that criticism.
S: I just want to be sure. I don't quite understand the phenomenon Joe the Plumber. That's not your husband, right?
P: That's not my husband but he's a normal American, just works hard and doesn't want government to take his money.
S: Yes, yes, I understand we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France. It's called Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit. We--
P: Right, that's what it's all about, the middle class and government needing to work for them. You're a very good example for us here.
S: I seen a bit about NBC, even Fox News wasn't an ally as much as usual.
P: Yeah, that's what we're up against.
S: Governor Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life. You know... uh, Hustler's Nailin' Paylin?

(I don't know how he got this line in. Presumably she misheard "Hustler" due to his accent!!! Insane!!!)

P: Ohh, good, thank you, yes.
S: That was really edgy.
P: Well, good.
S: I really loved you and I must say something also, governor, you've been pranked... by the Masked Avengers. We are two comedians from Montreal.
P: Ohhh, have we been pranked? And what radio station is this?
S: This is for CKOI in Montreal.
P: In Montreal? Tell me the radio station call letters.
S: CK... Hello?

I just donated money to a couple of political campaigns...

2008-10-30T20:47:00.000-04:00

... for the first time in my life. Thanks to this nasty, nasty innuendo-filled ad by Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, against her rival Kay Hagan. The ad even has a voice actor impersonating Hagan's voice and saying, "There is no god." This might be the worst thing I've ever seen:

Also, why is considered acceptable for a politician to completely smear atheists?? Don't they deserve the same dignity and respect as other religious/un-religious groups?

So, nice work Dole... I gave money to Hagan and a few other candidates.

Who uglified iGoogle?

2008-10-16T17:28:00.002-04:00

Awww, crud... who decided to change the iGoogle home page? It's now totally ugly and hard-to-read, with all kinds of tiny text coming from my RSS feeds.

Can anyone at Google make an option to re-enable the old format??

Surveying scientists' use of computers

2008-10-15T11:35:00.006-04:00

Here is an interesting survey for all the scientists out there.

And here is an explanation of it:

Computers are as important to modern scientists as test tubes, but we know surprisingly little about how scientists develop and use software in their research. To find out, the University of Toronto, Simula Research Laboratory, and the National Research Council of Canada have launched an online survey in conjunction with American Scientist magazine. If you have 20 minutes to take part, please go to:

http://softwareresearch.ca/seg/SCS/scientific-computing-survey.html

We’d also be grateful if you’d spread the word through any mailing lists, blogs, or bulletin boards you have access to. Thanks for your help!

Programming languages I know

2008-10-14T20:39:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting post making the rounds on planet.python.org about what programming languages people know and in what order they learned them.

My list (bold for the ones I still use and know well):

GW-BASIC (1989-1990) I'll never forget buying an actual programming book. 8-year-old me just devoured it!
Turbo Pascal (1992-ish)
x86 assembly
C
Visual Basic
HTML (1997?)
Perl (2000)
LaTeX
SQL
JavaScript
PIC and AVR 8-bit assembly (2004)
Verilog (2006)
Python (2006)
MIPS assembly (2007)

I would say that C, Perl, SQL, Verilog, and MIPS assembly have been the real big "eye-openers" along the way that taught me to think about computers in new ways. But Python is the one I use most and love best these days :-)

If I had more time and persistence, I'd like to learn something Lisp-ish. Every time I've tried, I've given it up quickly. Something about the lack of syntactic differentiation confuses me and turns me off to it. Maybe I should try Haskell...

Opening a MasterLock

2008-09-12T19:13:00.000-04:00

Don't you hate it when you lose a lock combination? I always feel wasteful throwing 'em out and getting a new one.

There's a website that shows you how to crack a MasterLock.

Use the info on that page to get the third digit, then there's an algorithm to figure out the 80 possible combinations... or you can use this spreadsheet to figure them out. Then just try them till it works... there are only 80 possibilities, so on average it will take only 40 tries.

I was able to open my lock that I hadn't used all summer, woohoo!! I <3 my internets.

Fixing cell phones and where to get the parts

2008-09-03T00:28:00.001-04:00

So, I went camping at Lake Erie a couple weeks ago, and cracked the glass protective cover over my phone's screen:

My phone with the broken protective glass screen cover

It didn't really affect the phone functionally, but it was pretty ugly and I figured it would eventually fall apart with so many cracks in it. I called Sprint, and they wanted $125 to fix it!!! And I'd have to mail in the phone and be without it for several days.

So I did a little Googling... and apparently this glass screen cover is literally just a sticker. It has an adhesive backing and just sticks down on top of the LCD. Making it extra-ridiculous to pay someone $125 to fix it.

I've always thought it was annoying how you can't buy small parts for cell phones. But it turns out you can!!! There's a great online store at CNN.cn where you can buy small parts for zillions of different phones and the prices are very cheap. I got a new glass screen cover for $5 + $5 shipping from Hong Kong. It arrived in about a week very well-packed. I basically just pried the old screen cover off with a thin blade, and put the new one on. Now my phone's back to its original state:

My phone with the protective cover replaced

So... if you need any parts to fix your cell phone, and don't want to pay the ridiculous prices of the cell phone companies, definitely check out CNN.cn. I'm not affiliated with them or anything, just a pretty happy customer.

Remanent Domain

Best mouse ever!

Humbling is...

If, for some reason, you want to install Windows 7... here's how to make an installation USB drive, from Linux

Windows 7 can be installed from USB drives

Making a Windows 7 USB stick from within Linux

Epilogue: Windows is still lame

Wow, Pandora on the Motorola Q

High-capacity hard drives

The Best of DC's 2010 48 Hour Film Project

48 Hour Film Project 2010

How to encode video for the Sansa Connect using FFmpeg

Video conversion

You're not going to believe what happened to my car this time

Grudging props to Mac OS

Make your own electronic book

Scanning

Extracting page images

ScanTailor is awesome

Putting everything together

To do...

Large file hosting: try ADrive

Pidgin, Google Talk, and XMPP

XMPP presence and the Shared Status extension

Invisible Mode

Enter Pidgin...

Put it all together

Acer AS1410: first impressions

Deciding what to buy

My review

Conclusions

Supreme Court shadow boxing

The Best of the Best

The latest Pentax DSLR, wow!!

Handy feed of latest deals on Netbooks

How to tether your Moto Q as a modem *in Windows*

What netbook should I get?

How to use your Moto Q as a modem

Using a USB cable

Using Bluetooth

My digital camera advice

Alaska... is that for real??

Palin gets pranked

I just donated money to a couple of political campaigns...

Who uglified iGoogle?

Surveying scientists' use of computers

Programming languages I know

Opening a MasterLock

Fixing cell phones and where to get the parts

How to tether your Moto Q as a modem in Windows