Cricalix.Net

Well, it’s not that I love Sarah McLachlan in the romantic sense - more that I love the song I Love You. Reading a thread on Ars, I was reminded that I hadn’t listed to my Surfacing CD in ages. Rather than wander downstairs, I decided to see if my PC speakers were any good (and really, they’re not). Dug up my rip of the CD and chose the track. Not a peep from the speakers of anything remotely close to a good, deep bass line.

So, downstairs I go, CD in hand and popped it into my fairly cheap stereo with ‘wOOx‘ bass boost. Chose track 2, and settled back with my HD497s snug on my ears. The track kicked in, and I’d swear that my head vibrated from the sheer amount of low bass emmanating from my headphones. Hit the bass boost button on the remote control, thinking I’d left wOOx enabled. Very bad move, it was off :>

Sitting there listening, and singing along, I was reminded about how much I love this song, despite it being such a melancholy track. I really wish I had a sound system that could play it back properly, but I think I’ll need several grand worth of kit to do that, and a house in the middle of nowhere with no neighbours to upset.

I’ve been avoiding buying DVDs for a while, to let my budget settle down under the new mortgage load. The other day, while reading a thread on the ArsTechnica forums, I was reminded that I was interested in watching the GitS: SAC (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) series. So I popped around to play.com and went browsing. 7.50 quid per DVD isn’t the cheapest price ever, but it is fairly good. Also picked up the beginning of the Cowboy Bebop series - I’ve already seen them from when I lived in the USA, but figured I’d like to watch them again.

The DVDs arrived yesterday, and the first candidate for the screen was SAC. Unfortunately, xine couldn’t read the DVD, muttering about CSS decoding not possible because of libdvdread. I guess the Debian/Ubuntu folks decided to avoid any legal issues that CSS presents. Fortunately, there’s also an easy workaround provided, courtesy of the Ubuntu Wiki. 5 minutes later my machine had compiled the CSS library, and xine was happily reading the DVD.

Shirow Masamune writes a pretty good story - but that’s what pretty much every other review says :) I thoroughly enjoyed the first 4 episodes, and loved the Tachikomas - they had me laughing the moment they showed up. Their chirpy voices were absolutely brilliant, and lent the right amount of quirkiness to them. The second DVD was a bit of a letdown, containing the same 4 episodes in DTS format, but that’s what I get for skimming the page. I’ll have to install a 5.1 capable DVD system one of these days, just to see what I’m missing in the positional audio.

About 3 months ago, I upgraded from 512 Kbit ADSL to 1 Mbit ADSL. This necessitated a price jump from 21.99 a month to 29.99. Not bad really, considering that Force9 give me things like 250 MB of web storage on their main network, spam and virus scanning (which I don’t -really- need) and other odds and ends.

Browsing adslguide.org.uk, I noticed that F9 had changed their pricing plan for Premier accounts (which I have) so that 21.99 gets you up to 2 MBit if your line can handle it. I opened a support ticket on Friday enquiring about any regrade fees (as they’re actually intending to regrade everyone by July), and had 2 MBit ADSL by Monday morning. Very very nice indeed. Cost me 14.99 to regrade - I could have waited, but heck, I’m worth it :)

The big question is, “Is it noticeable?” The answer is “Yes!”

I have a Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Pro - decent camera, and it works under Linux thanks to the work of Nemosoft and now Luc Saillard via the pwc driver. Toss in the webcam application in xawtv, and I can take a snapshot of my garden, fishtank or whatever interests me every few seconds to every few minutes. It has the ability to upload a copy via ftp (using the ftp command line client), but it seems to have issues once in a while when trying to do this - resulting in a webcam page that doesn’t update.

The driver presents a v4l or v4l2 interface via the kernel, so it should be possible to write a small KDE application that takes advantage of the kio_slave features in KDE (transparent network access via many different protocols) to read a graphic from the v4l interface and use a kio_slave to push the resulting image file somewhere else. Heck, if the refresh rate isn’t too heavy, you might even be able to push the image to multiple locations at once.

The only drawback to this idea? I don’t know how to talk v4l(2) or how to write KDE apps. Perhaps someone browsing the net will see this posting and decide to write one!