The Prestidigitator

After months of staring wistfully from outside camera stores, I finally went ahead and bought the Canon Vixia HF10 (uhuh, High Def).  Shooting has been a somewhat humbling experience but I’ll get there. Sooner or later.

Moving files around has been a tad tricky so I thought I’d document (sort of) what I did.

Linux:

If the device doesn’t mount, try ‘dmesg‘

# mkdir /camera
#mount /dev/sdb1 /camera
#cd /camera

MPlayer supports AVCHD (.mts) files, but you’ll need to compile MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html) from source.

Windows:

Couldn’t  install the proprietary software that comes with the camera because my netbook doesn’t support the minimumm resolution. So I had to convert the .mts files to .avi.

First, install the AVISynth base and then this (mts_2_xvid.rar) . Unpack the .rar file and copy the .mts files from the camera into the folder and run the batch file _multi_demux_mts_Xvid.bat. That nifty little piece of code compresses the video to .avi and saves it in the same folder.

Trust me, it’s way simpler than it sounds.

Configuring Hardy Heron has been a bitch; finally got around to fixing two nagging issues.

1. Sound: Ubuntu 8.04 has been infamous for having serious issues with sound. The fairly easy thing to do would be to build the ALSA modules all over again using the module-assistant package.

sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i alsa

Reboot.

This seemed to have resolved most of my sound problems.

2. Login Screen resolution: I’ve had this problem with all distributions thus far; the text size on the login screen is so large that it’s, well, invisible. Go figure. The fix:

sudo gedit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf

(Find)

[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/bin/X -br -audit 0

(Change to)

[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/bin/X -br -audit 0 -dpi 96

Reboot.

In related news, beating Nina Williams on the Sergie Dragunov story arc is turning out to be much harder than anticipated.

(It’s 3 am. Obvious?)

Despite being mathematically challenged, I’ve always been quite the (amateur) astronomy/astrophysics enthusiast. So imagine my curiosity with all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s upcoming initiative, the WorldWide Telescope. But having recently moved to Linux, I had to find open source alternatives.

And, I’ve found (ok, so finding in this day and age is a tad bit overrated) a couple of really good open source sky mapping programs:

1. Stellarium: This is a planetarium software which means you’ll have a pretty much earth bound perspective of the night sky. Excluding additional plugins or data files, there’s a massive catalogue of over 600,000 stars and a pretty huge number of nebulae as well. The visualization is extremely cool with near realistic depictions of atmospheric conditions and light. For a given point on earth, you can choose how fast time passes, thereby being able to view the night sky in time lapse. I spent close to 4 hours last night trying to figure out the stuff I could do with this brilliant piece of software.

2. Celestia: While Stellarium is the equivalent of gazing at the night sky, Celestia is akin to travelling through space; delivering images of what stars, planets and galaxies would look like up close. The basic program consists of a catalogue of 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. Using key board or mouse controls you can basically travel through the universe (limited by available data) at speeds ranging from 0.001m/s to light years/s. Celestia is a very power and bandwidth hungry software, so I would suggest Stellarium to get a hang of things initially.

Frankly, there’s nothing that puts things into perspective like marveling at the sheer magnitude of the universe and nothing…nothing comes close to the realization that we’re a generation lucky enough to be alive during a time like this; a time when everything seems possible.

Links:

• Stellarium User Guide
• What Made Me Cry: Microsoft’s WWT [From Scoble's Blog]
• Stellarium screenshot from here

It took me over 2 years to work up the courage to completely (no dual boot!) switch to a Linux distribution; and I’ve finally done it. Linux Mint 4.0 (Daryna). It took most of my day (and Swen’s) yesterday to complete the move and I have to say, I can’t help but me amazed by the possibilities.

Installation was a breeze, took all of fifteen minutes and configuring the system was easier. Most of the stuff worked straight out of the box, including the video, sound and graphics drivers. Installed Compiz Effects (a compositing window manager) which makes Vista look like a cheap knock off.

What I did have was a little trouble with getting the net set up but that was because my new ISP uses the PPPoE protocol. A bit of googling fixed that ($ sudo pppoeconf at the terminal window solves everything) and I was online to get live support that got me through the rest of the process.

I remember complaining about how Linux was a major pain to use back in college but boy has it come a long way in the last 2 years!

Natalie has a better personality now. Way better.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDJWi9yrTw]