ub[3]rgeek.net

The last week or so has been pretty crazy. I booked my travel for my England/Scotland trip on Sunday, so I will be flying from ROC to EDI on 27 Oct, and then back from LHR to ROC on 3 Nov — just in time to vote in this year’s presidential election. I also converted one of my laptops to use dm-crypt for /home. Clearly this is not perfect and if someone wants to come and snatch the laptop while it’s on and snarf a copy of the RAM to find the key they’ll get the data, but that is a smaller subset of people than who would be able to get data off the machine without encryption. If you use Ubuntu of a recent version, I found the community docs here helpful. The system prompts me for a passphrase at boot now, all automagically. A real testament to the Ubuntu guys and all the work they do.

I have also been playing around with the new release of mediatomb and have been futzing with the new fourcc features to try to get the largest subset of avi’s working on my PS3 that I can — it doesn’t detect the audio type so there are still some that don’t work, and there is still that freaky glitch where Dattebayo encoded fansubs either don’t play at all or freeze after a few seconds. My PS3 transcoding profile now looks something like this:

<profile name="ffmpeg-avi" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<avi -fourcc-list mode="ignore">
<fourcc>XVID</fourcc>
<fourcc>DIVX</fourcc>
<fourcc>DX50</fourcc>
<fourcc>WVC1</fourcc>
</avi>
<accept -url>no</accept>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</profile>


So basically I transcode any AVI files other than DiVX 4, 5 XViD and VC1 video streams. I will have to adjust this a bit but until I find a command line app that can read the fourcc code without needing X11, that’s going to be somewhat tricky I think, it would be nice if they offered the ability to filter by filename / pathname regexes as well, maybe I’ll open a feature request.

In other news (related to the PS3 and mediatomb because that’s what I use to watch this stuff since I’m too cheap to pay for cable/sat) the Formula 1 season started last weekend. I can’t wait to see how this season turns out. The three-way grudge match between Alonso, Räikkönen, and Hamilton will be killer to watch, not to mention the up and coming challanges from the Red Bull & Toro Rosso teams as well as Honda and Super Aguri. Another exciting year begins!

I’ve been a Sprint PCS customer for 7 years, ever since I heard Emmanuel Goldstein on Off The Hook talk about this new “digital” cellphone tech. Their service has always been outstanding, clear and reliable. Their customer service has always been good to me, but I admit I have heard some horror stories from friends about botched bills, messed up service, lost replacement phones, etc. Of course, their service is based on the CDMA technology, which is an all-digital cellular telephone system that unfortunately is used… in the United States… and not really anywhere else. There are a few carriers in Canada, but service is spotty at best, and roaming charges are just scary. Japan uses a CDMA standard, but it is not compatible with the US standard.

Today I finally cancelled my account with Sprint, as I have switched over to T-Mobile. The only real reason is because T-Mobile uses GSM. GSM is the Global Standard for Mobile communications, most countries these days use GSM, according to the GSMA, the association that promotes GSM, over 212 countries and 2 billion people use GSM phones. It is probably most famous in the US for coming up with SMS, the Short Message Service that most people these days know as ‘txting’. But the big draw for me is that I can take my GSM Blackberry nearly anywhere in the world and at the very least be able to make voice calls and send and receive SMS messages. This is literally as easy as switching out the little SIM card from the back of my phone. I already have a O2 SIM, which is good for service in the UK and most amusingly a UK phone number.

I guess I’m most excited about finally getting to travel. I really really hope I can make this a regular thing. This is such a wide wonderful world, it would be such a shame to die without seeing any of it. If I can manage to visit the UK in 2008, I’d like to see Ireland in 2009. It would be rocking to get to see Japan, but that is a level of culture shock that might just drive me insane!