Tuxradar did a open ballot to gather peoples thoughts on the subject. They discussed it on episode 1 of season 2 of their podcast and they even mentioned me at 35:23. I was making the point that the default search engine of Firefox is moot because many people are switching to Google’s Chrome browser.

• The jQuery theme song by Jonathan Neal – http://jquery.thewikies.com/jquery.mp3 – It’s catchy.
• The free software song:
  • By Phoenix Imago – http://www.gnu.org/music/freesoft.ogg
  • By Fenster – http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/Fenster-Free-Software-Song.ogg
  • By RMS (the orginal) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw
• Coder girl by dalechase – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-m6JDYRFvk
• Search Engine Rap Battle: GOOGLE vs YAHOO and MSN vs GOOGLE
• Kill dash 9 Rap – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4

I’ll try to add more as I come across them… know any good ones?

Google is trying to teach me to suck eggs. They obviously know what Operating system I’m using so I thought they would be clever enough to detect what browser I’m using and serve me something more targeted? What scares me more is that I suspect they are actually paying someone for me to see that advert.

A friend of mine is planning to write 52 songs in a year.

It sounds extremely challenging but I love the first three. He’s releasing them under a copyleft license.

Go for it Rob!

Yes – I went outside bare foot in the snow. I saw the cat catch a Robin in the garden and rushed to the rescue. The nice thing about working from home is that you don’t need to wear any shoes.

Karmic Goods:

• It includes a new piece of software called “Ubuntu One”:
  • Ubuntu One currently gives you 2GB of free cloud storage via a folder called “Ubuntu One” in your home directory or via a URL (https://one.ubuntu.com/).
  • Ubuntu One allows you to sync your Tomboy notes between PCs – see this setup tutorial: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/Tutorials/Notes
  • Ubuntu One allows you to sync your Evolution contacts between PCs – seet his setup tutorial: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/Tutorials/Contacts
• The Desktop icons have been improved and now use a vector format (i.e. svg instead of png). I was able to use my own icons, created in inkscape, very easily.
• Updated software. Firefox was updated from version 3.0.11 to 3.5 which is faster, supports the video and audio tags and has a private browsing mode. Geany was updated from version 0.17 to 0.18 which handles long filenames better in the Documents pane. Meld has been updated from version 1.2 to 1.3.0 which has better search functionality and no longer seems to lose it’s scroll synchronisation when the window loses focus. The kernel was updated from 2.6.28 to 2.6.31.
• The headphone and microphone sockets now work. So does the DVD eject button on the laptop chassis. Only the 2 user programmable buttons and AV-mode keys still do nothing.

Karmic Bads:

• Startup and shutdown seems slower! This is odd seeing as it uses newer startup software called Upstart that is supposed to be faster! I even installed Grub 2 via https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2 but it didn’t help.
• The webcam (MotionEye – Ricoh USB r5u870) didn’t work after the upgrade: /dev/video0 no longer existed!

Fixing the webcam:

The Sony VGN-AR51E laptop comes with a integrated Ricoh webcam. The webcam model number is 05ca:1839 as seen via:

> lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]

Current kernel info:

> uname -a
Linux psyduck 2.6.31-16-generic #53-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 8 04:02:15 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Useful commands and logs that give info about the problem:

> dmesg | less  (or less /var/log/kern.log)
[   19.367070] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (05ca:1839)
[   19.367573] uvcvideo: UVC non compliance - GET_DEF(PROBE) not supported. Enabling workaround.
[   19.367786] uvcvideo: Failed to query (129) UVC probe control : -32 (exp. 26).
[   19.367789] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
[   19.367824] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[   19.367828] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)

The problem seems to be that the webcam drivers were not packaged for Ubuntu 9.10. In the previous version (Ubuntu 9.04) the webcam used the r5u870 V4L2 driver but it was deprecated and replaced in Karmic by a kernel module called R5U87x. R5U87x should be better because it is a set of userland tools that loads the firmware for all UVC compliant devices and makes them work with a more standard uvcvideo driver. Unfortunately, the R5U87x tools were not packaged in time for Karmic because the firmware images contained in the package didn’t have a suitable license to allow redistribution. i.e. the original working r5u870 driver was not packaged but nor was the newer R5U87x driver! This is all documented in Bug 120434.

Current (Dec/09) fix:

• David Jarenkas has created r5u87x-loader (which doesn’t contain any non-free pieces) to load the webcam drivers. Add the following Personal Package Archives (PPA) to your sources list:

  sudo emacs -nw /etc/apt/sources.list
  add:
  deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/r5u87x-loader/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
  deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/r5u87x-loader/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
  

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 9711AB5F
gpg --export --armor 9711AB5F | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install r5u87x

sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

Test with a application such as Cheese (or gstreamer-properties or xawtv or skype).

In Skype, audio works but video still doesn’t until you add yourself to the “video” group (the file permissions of /dev/video* is group read and writtable for the “video” group):

sudo usermod -a -G video tom

Other tweaks:

The Ubuntu splash screen is nice but I prefer to see what the computer is doing. To turn off the splash screen do:

• sudo emacs -nw /etc/default/grub

  and change

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
  to
  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
  

• Update grub:

  sudo update-grub2

]]> http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/ubuntu-9-10-on-a-sony-vaio-vgn-ar51e/feed/ 2 http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/ubuntu-9-10-on-a-sony-vaio-vgn-ar51e/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TomFotherbysBlog/~3/5QrxYgmsp1w/ http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/house-of-the-dead-overkill/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:00:53 +0000 Tom http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/?p=1377 Wii, Duck hunt (Light gun), 6/10

When you buy this game you know what you’re going to get. And you get it. And yes, they went overkill on everything, especially the gore and the clichés and the bad language. The story is entertaining if you like Shaun of the Dead.

I like the gun shop – it makes the game have a bit of variety when you can choose a different gun for the level.

My main bone to pick is that it is extremely difficult to calibrate the light gun. I was trying to calibrate the official AMS Hand Cannon through the in-game calibration settings. Why is it so hard? It was way off on the first million attempts. However after 30 mins of trying, I managed to get it spot-on. It was just a random success. So I suggest you patiently re-try and re-try until it just works (for reference, the TV was a Samsung UE40B7020W).

]]> http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/house-of-the-dead-overkill/feed/ 0 http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/house-of-the-dead-overkill/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TomFotherbysBlog/~3/fbKsDZ8mYL0/ http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/new-tv-samsung-ue40b7020w/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:00:49 +0000 Tom http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/?p=1364

I get annoyed at the branding of these new “LED” TV’s – they are not fundamentally new technology, they are simply LCD screens lit up via LEDs.

However it’s branded, it is brilliant!

What’s Good?

• It is so extremely vibrant and bright that it makes our Panasonic LCD look very dull.
• It only uses <0.1 Watt while on stand-by. So efficient that there's not even a proper "off" button.
• It “Powers up” really fast. There is a picture on the screen about 8 seconds after pressing the Power button on the remote.
• It’s got a good resolution (1080p).
• It’s thin (but, who cares unless you wall mount it?)

What’s bad?

• There’s no HDMI button on the remote – to select HDMI 1 for example you need to press 5 buttons (Source, Down, Down, Down, Select). This is really annoying because I need to do it every time I turn the telly on.
• Don’t bother connecting it to the Internet – it’s boringly slow and it can’t download firmware updates.
• It’s not Wii friendly. It’s too thin for the Wii sensor bar to sit on top of the TV but it also can’t sit at the bottom of the TV because the black base is so shiny that it disperses the IR and makes it inaccurate.
• The sound volume doesn’t have enough different levels towards the quiet level.

Our TV came with a free Blu-ray player (Samsung BDP1600XEU). I don’t recommend this player. Blu-ray movies often freeze and it takes ages to connect and disconnect with the TV. If you pause the movie and switch to watching TV for even a few seconds, when you come back, you’ll find the movie stopped and your position lost.

]]> http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/new-tv-samsung-ue40b7020w/feed/ 0 http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/new-tv-samsung-ue40b7020w/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TomFotherbysBlog/~3/0-aCCxXliVg/ http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/good-things-come-to-those-who-wait/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:00:32 +0000 Tom http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/?p=1366 I used to have a neighbour who did photography as a hobby. It was really interesting seeing him set up little things to entice animals so he could get some photographs and I always found it amazing the creatures he could find in and around our houses.

There was one particular shot he had been trying to get for the last 2 years – and he finally did it:

Good one, Doug!

]]> http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/good-things-come-to-those-who-wait/feed/ 1 http://www.tomfotherby.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/good-things-come-to-those-who-wait/