Pozele de pe Transfagarasan (cu ocazia finalei turului ciclist al Romaniei) au fost incarcate pe site: http://www.staicu.com/20090613.
…nu prea ajuta :p
… spatiului si timpului personal… 
In the last month the blog was inactive. This was due to personal and work related issues (not much time left for extra playing). I’ll try to change this. In the next weeks this space will become a small playground for testing various web technologies (if my available time will allow for it, as always). This could render the blog unusable or…weird… As there is no much useful content and readers this should not be a problem. The first item to be integrated is a small webcam feed. Should it be a sidebar item or a sticky article?… it remain to be seen. Next will be the twitter feed… (or first, it isn’t decided yet). A design update is on the list followed by a new content management for the main site (gallery mainly).
Reading about this old issue followed by something related on the ThinkPad I was curious to check the value on my R61… and the value retrieved was way too high: 450585. After just a few minute it increased to 450620 with a rate of about 3 cycles /minute! All these with the laptop on AC power and maximal performance settings. The S.M.A.R.T. reports 2718 power on hours and 347 power cycles. The laptop was bought end of March (more or less 200 days ago). If the drive is rated for 600k load cycles then (with the current settings) it will fail in at most 100 days. WOW! Less than a year lifetime! (the laptop has a 3 years warranty but this is just stupid).
For moment I applied the dirty workaround (running hdparm -B 254 at each startup should be enough as I’m not using suspend/hibernate - the KDE session resume features are enough for what I’m doing) and the count(down) has stopped. I’m not sure if this is related to Linux or to BIOS settings (had to reboot to check) but the settings are just normal for a computer used more as a desktop than a laptop (more performance vs. battery life). Is this a Lenovo default setting? I don’t know for moment but I’ll have to check the SMART on two other identical laptops bought at the same time but which run Windows not Linux. For more details please check also:
http://spicifer.blogspot.com/2007/12/about-loadcyclecount-issue.html
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug-is-worse-than-i-thought/
UPDATE: On a second R61 running Windows XP the counter is 40747 for an uptime of 1683 hours. That gives around 1 cycle / 3 minutes (vs. 3 cycles / minute for Linux!). The BIOS does not have any setting to change the HDD power management (the only power management adjustable from there is the CPU and PCI). Next step is to check if the Linux just use the default BIOS settings or it sets a very specific (and bad) value.
Does anybody knows a good NLE video editor for Linux? The basic features I’m looking for are:
- multi track support (video and audio)
- clip cutting from the main recording without creating new files (virtual clips)
- a few transitions between the clips and effects on them (just basic processing)
- support for 16:9 processing
- slideshows from pictures with basic processing (panning, zooming, rotations)
- stable for real projects so it does not crash each 3-4 minutes while trying to handle a 10 minute DV clip (full resolution)
Each and every tool I’ve tried (kino, cinelerra, lives, kdenlive) miss at least two of the features. One of them is the stability: none have resisted more than 5 minutes on real work so they cannot be used for my work. I just wish for a real NLE video editor for Linux please… (open source or free)
As you might have observed the blog was a little “unstable” the last 2 months (long downtimes, slow responses). Currently it is migrated on a new host provider. The migration is finish, now it will upgrade to the latest wordpress/k2 releases in the next hours…
Update: The update to latest WordPress and K2 theme is finish. The new K2 version has disabled the “old” look and feel (sidebar), I’ll fix it in the next days. For moment that’s all, lets hope I’ll write more often now… next, there will be some photos…
In the winter holidays I’ve got a brand new Sony PSP. It has a big screen for a portable device and it’s designed for playing games but I’m using it mainly for book reading. The primary reader is Bookr for pdf files (and, in the future, lit files after I’ll finish a plugin for it but this will take other 3-4 months at least). The main disadvantage reading on the screen is that you’ll have to do a lot of scrolling as the normal page height is two or three times the height of the visible screen. But there is a very simple solution if you can generate your own files.
If you set the pdf’s page size to a specific value then it will fit on the PSP’s screen. By seeing one full page at a time all you have to do is to flip through them (much simpler than using the stick to scroll while reading). This specific page size can be computed by taking into account that the PSP screen has 130 dpi and that OpenOffice (yes, I’m using it for office work and pdf saving) is using 72 dpi to render to PDF. As the psp screen is 3.69” width and 2.09” height the page size has to be set to 6.67” width and 3.78” height. Optionally you can adjust the font size to obtain a nice looking book for your device… Just check the document, export as PDF and upload on PSP.
Happy reading!
I’m alive… but I don’t feel like writing anything, on any subject, anywhere, anytime soon