init 7

Un brevetto per dominarli tutti

Nella lotta a colpi di brevetti tra Apple e HTC, in cui Cupertino accusa la società taiwanese di infrangere ben 20 brevetti, non passa inosservata la notizia che Marty Cooper ha lasciato l’iPhone per comprarsi un Motorola Droid, che non sarà un HTC, ma che con molti terminali di quest’ultima condivide il sistema operativo Android voluto da Google, vero bersaglio delle accuse scagliate da Apple.

Perché mai questa notizia è interessante? Perché Marty Cooper è il detentore del brevetto numero 3. 906.166. O, detta più facile, Marty Cooper è l’inventore del cellulare. Di seguito il video nell’intervista in cui avviene la rivelazione.

È interessante sapere che Cooper usa in realtà due telefoni. Oltre al Droid il buon Marty usa il Jitterbug, essenziale, semplice, con i tasti grandi e che si sente forte. Questi ottantenni non si accontentano mai!

Palm Pre (Plus) batte iPhone 50 a 1

Se mettiamo da parte un attimo il confronto con se stesso (uno dei due non è altro che una versione aggiornata dello stesso telefono, con più RAM e più storage), il Palm Pre è decisamente un oggetto interessante. Forse anche più del Nexus One di Google.

Se torniamo a parlare delle prestazioni, allora riuscire a far girare 50 applicazioni contemporaneamente è uno schiaffo all’iPhone che al momento fa girare un’applicazione alla volta.

Nexus One – NINJA’S UNBOXING

La vera storia dell’intro Pixar

Tech5, un web e 2 cantonate e mezzo

Puntando più sulla gnocca che sul contenuto (e come dargli torto!) Tech5 ha preso qualche abbaglio (due e mezzo per la precisione) nella puntata dedicata a «I 5 marchi che hanno fatto la storia del web».

La prima cantonata riguarda Netscape Navigator, che pur essendo stato il browser più importante della storia, non è stato il primo browser, ma addirittura il terzo. Prima di lui Nexus, il browser sviluppato da Tim Berners-Lee (l’inventore del web) e quindi Mosaic di cui alcuni pezzi furono poi alla base sia di Netscape Navigator e soprattutto di Internet Explorer. Inoltre Microsoft non ha sviluppato Internet Explorer, ma lo ha comprato da un’altra ditta, un vizio che Redmond ha avuto fin dai tempi del DOS. Avrebbero potuto dire che Firefox è un discendente diretto di Netscape Navigator, ma questo è il male minore.

La seconda cantonata è su Napster che essendo stato il primo (almeno mi pare) sistema di scambio file basato sul peer-to-peer non ha mai fatto parte del web. Tra quanto tempo capiremo che Internet e Web non sono la stessa cosa?

La mezza cantonata arriva alla fine: il Web 2.0. Tutto corretto tranne quando l’annunciatrice dice che non è un vero e proprio marchio. Sbagliato! «Web 2.0» è un marchio registrato dal gruppo editoriale ÒReilly. Il fenomeno non l’hanno inventato loro, ma sono stati loro i primi a dargli un nome e quel nome lo hanno registrato. Ora è un trademark, ma non lo dite troppo in giro.

Eyespot is closing down

Eyespot, the website dedicated to mixing video clips, is closing down. I just received a mail from them suggesting me to migrate to some of their competitor. Here is the mail they sent.

We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you.

For our users at eyespot.com, we’re no longer allowing you to upload new videos. You can retrieve your uploaded video and mixes by going to your mymedia gallery and clicking the download link below the video thumbnail.

For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing (e.g. http://corp.kaltura.com/) and video publishing space (e.g. http://www.fliqz.com/) immediately. We’ll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard].

We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company.

After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we’re now moving on.

Thank you all for being apart of our community over the past three years.

Jim Kaskade
President & CEO

I used Eyespot in the past, I mixed a few video (just some titles on my own videos, so nothing special) and I’m not supposed to be a great fan of this service. Just, it’s always quite sad when a site or a company closes down.

Good bye Eyespot!

Hibernate eventually working on my Linux Box

I have to confess: I had surrendered a lot of time ago. I was not able to get my computer hibernate, or better, it could hibernate, but it would not wake up correctly and I needed to restart. Just like Walt Disney.

Luckily Ubuntu is updating twice a year and so I tried again yesterday. And it failed. So I had a look on the logs and I found out the problem was the X server, whose process was eating 99% of the CPU after waking up. Even the computer seemed hanged it wasn’t: I could login through SSH. So after a visit to Ubuntu Forums, I guessed it was because of NVidia proprietary drivers and I eventually reached this page, from which I got some good hints.

Basically what I did was to add the

Option "NvAGP" "1"

under the device section in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and change the following

ACPI_SLEEP=true
ACPI_HIBERNATE=true
SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=false
SAVE_VIDEO_PCI_STATE=true

in the /etc/default/acpi-support file. Remember that both files must be edited as superuser: have you ever heard about sudo?

I did not blacklisted the agpgart and the intel_agp (altough I have via_agp) and it worked anyway.

Next step: convince screenlets to do what I want insted of what they want.

H264 YouTube video in Totem

This is just a two minutes hack to the original YouTube plugin for Totem 2.22, the Gnome Multimedia Player. It’s nothing more than a proof of concept: I hope in a very near future the original plugin could have a setting to allow users to choose the favourite video quality.

You can install it without damaging the original plugin. You also can have both enabled.

You can download it as a gzipped package:

youtubeh264.tar.gz

You only need to extract it and copy it in your totem plugins directory (usually it’s /usr/lib/totem/plugins).

[Fixed] For Ubuntu Hardy users I also prepared a deb file, easier to install and uninstall, architecture indipendent:

totem-youtubeh264_0.0.1-2.deb

Some Screenshots following (click to enlarge).

Gtkpod 0.99.12 backport for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

I backported the Gtkpod 0.99.12 for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

These packages have support for aac (Advanced Audio Codec). I also compiled it with the video support, which was not originally included in the binary version in Ubuntu. That’s why you also must install the libmp4v2 and the Mpeg4ip packages.You can download the needed files from the following list:

• faad_2.6-1_i386.deb
• gtkpod-aac_0.99.12-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
• libfaad0_2.6-1_i386.deb
• libfaad2-0_2.6-1_all.deb
• libmp4v2-0_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
• libmpeg4ip-0_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
• libmpeg4ip-dev_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
• libmpeg4ip-doc_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_all.deb
• mpeg4ip-server_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
• mpeg4ip-utils_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_i386.deb

Update: you will also need the libgpod3 package, which is not available in Gutsy. You can download it packaged by Mario Limonciello in his PPA repository. Thanks Brian for signalling this missing.

Here you have also the dev files (you’ll need them only if you are going to build any software which has dependencies on Gtkpod, Faad or Mpeg4ip):

• libfaad-dev_2.6-1_i386.deb
• libmp4v2-dev_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
• libmpeg4ip-dev_1.6dfsg-0.2ubuntu1_i386.deb

Attention! Gtkpod 0.99.12 has still some issues:

• it will not automatically extract thumbnails from videos, but you can set them by hand;
• on the iPod Touch and the iPhone photo uploading is not working: photo are actually uploaded and listed but the iPod Touch/iPhone will not be able to show them.

To install the files just download them and install using dpkg. Assuming you downloaded to your desktop, type the following inside a terminal:


cd ~/Desktop
sudo dpkg -i *deb


Podencoder script with Single Pass option

I recently bought an iPod Touch, very nice gadget, but with a very bad video section: only a few formats accepted, forcing me to recode almost all my video files.
I found the best way to do it on Linux is to use the Podencoder script by Mark Pilgrim. It mainly needs mencoder and mp4box, both easily installable on Ubuntu and Debian. The only problem is that my computer is really slow, and encoding an H.264 video seems to be never ending, also because the Podencoder script automatically use a Two Passes encoding, which gives the best quality, but also almost double the encoding time.
So I added an option to Podencoder to choose the Single Pass (the Two Passes is still the default action). If you want to encode using Single Pass just use the -1 option, like in this example:


podencoder -1 input_video.avi


You can download the modified script from here: podencoder.

Remember to make it executable. It’s also good to place is in the local bin path. To do all those actions just copy and paste the following lines into your terminal (you need to be root):


wget http://www.soccio.it/code/ipod/podencoder -O /usr/local/bin/podencoder
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/podencoder


If you are using Ubuntu or other sudo enabled distros, you can use these lines instead, without the need of being root:


sudo wget http://www.soccio.it/code/ipod/podencoder -O /usr/local/bin/podencoder
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/podencoder


I also prepared a few lines script to encode your videos from the Nautilus file manager. The result videos will be placed into your Desktop. Just place the Nautilus Scripts Encode for iPod – Single Pass and Encode for iPod – Two Passes into ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts. Again: remember to make them executable. Again, to download and place the two Nautilus scripts in the right place just copy and paste the following lines into your terminal.


cd ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
wget "http://www.soccio.it/code/ipod/Encode for iPod - Two Passes"
wget "http://www.soccio.it/code/ipod/Encode for iPod - Single Pass"
chmod +x *
cd