hertenberger.co.za

And no, this has nothing to do with today’s Halloween. Pumpkins are made for eating, not carving up.

8 more days of waiting for Fedora 8 Werewolf, which will include the new PulseAudio subsystem, which will update the way audio is handled on Linux – controlling the volume of individual applications and hot-plugging of USB audio device are two features PulseAudio will bring to the new release. Look for it soon on other distributions.

Digital cameras have revolutionized photography. The biggest pain is still the download of photos for further processing, mailing or storing. Either connect the camera to the computer and download with a dedicated application, or remove the storage card and transfer the photos using a suitable reader. Certain camera models incorporate wireless networking, but what if one could retrofit an existing camera with wireless networking capabilities? Eye-Fi has just such a solution: the Eye-FI SD card. Your camera needs to utilize SD cards for storage, so I’m out of luck with my EOS 350D.

The card has 2GB of storage and built-in wireless networking capabilities. It is able to connect to a home network and move files to a storage location or any one of the popular photo sharing sites available on the Interweb.

When uploading to a photo sharing site, Eye-Fi is able to resize images to optimize bandwidth usage prior to sending the images on their merry way. This is quite innovative technology – maybe Eye-Fi are able to integrate a GPS into their next model? Amazon lists the 2GB Eye-Fi for USD 99. Not a bad price, and certainly worth the cost for the convenience.

If I had the time to play golf, I’d choose a putter with a difference. Ok, there’s the small twist of requiring the ability to drive a straight, long ball and recover from the rough. Let’s assume we have the ball on the green, for now. What better tool to have in your arsenal than a putter shaped like the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 starship?

Can’t argue with the shape. It looks like the NCC-1701, alright. Will it improve your game? I have no clue. But it’s a golf gadget for a true geek. That’s all that matters! Available from the STARTREK.COM for about USD 130..

Bring down that Romulan Bird-of-Prey before it cloaks, or sink that ball in two putts or less. It’s your choice.

Last night, I finally gave in. Gave in to the audio book craze. I don’t remember the number of times I’ve entered the audible.com portal, then balked at the thought of becoming a statistic, a monthly payee to a service. I enjoy podcasts. I enjoy reading. I spend many hours in traffic, doodling and twiddling my thumbs. At least listening to something is a means of shifting my focus and preventing me from engaging in a one-on-one war with a Gauteng taxi. Come to think of it, that’s almost like being a Linux devotee and subscribing to audible. Let me explain from the beginning…

A subscription to audible runs you a couple of Yankee greens a month. For that, you have the pleasure of downloading one audio book of your choice. Considering the fact that these digital tomes weigh in at five hours plus, a book a month should be sufficient. The sign-up process is the usual web 2.0 cut and paste your credit card details. Then you’re done. Select a book and download. audible uses a mega compression method that is able to fit those five or more hours into a file smaller than 80MB, on average. Depending on the format you choose, of course.

Snag one for open source aficionados: choice is Windows or Apple only. Snag two: choice of Format 1, Format 2, Format 3 or Format 4. Forget OGG or even MP3.

These files are encrypted. DRM‘ed. No chance of getting them to play without some outside assistance. You can’t even download them in a conventional way. For that, you need the Audible Manager, and it wants to know your preferred device.

Then, it connects to the portal and checks out your order

I frequently upload images to (hopefully) enhance the content of these very pages. It’s a pain regardless of the method used: log on to CPanel on the administrative part of the website to launch a decent AJAX file manager or run some form of ftp client. Whatever I use, the sequence of actions is rather boring and tedious. Now that I’ve discovered RightLoad, that’s out of the window! With RightLoad, uploads are possible with a single click.

Select the files to upload…

Hit the upload button, and things happen. The application is even so courteous to inquire whether or not thumbnails should be created. How nice!

Of course, you do need to set the file locations, user names and passwords. That’s once-off, then you’re good to go. Highly recommended.

Now, if only they’d release a Linux version.

In anticipation of the upcoming release of Fedora 8 (the Werewolf release), it may be a good idea to make sure your hardware is up to the task. So, unlike other operating systems, you should be fairly confident that Fedora will run. Just print this out and place it strategically on your chosen platform

If you are so inclined, you may want to run Ubuntu instead. You’ll need this.

Of course, this certificate alone is no guarantee. But then again, that’s certainly not limited to Linux distributions.

This week, Google rolled out IMAP support in addition to the already-present POP support for GMail.

That’s quite significant if you are intent on accessing your mail from a variety of devices. With POP, you basically have one chance at downloading the mail. If you’re unlucky enough to connect with a different device, the mail messages are downloaded to that client, and won’t be available for download to your primary mail client. With IMAP, you’re always browsing your mail’s source, like viewing a file server. Multiple mail clients can be updated, without anything happening to the messages on the server. For those who like to organize their mail folders, there’s the additional benefit of being able to have such organizational niceties update the server.

This is a great feature, especially since I’ve long been trying to find a solution to being able to download messages to the E90 and my home workstation. You’ll find the IMAP mail settings and instructions on how to configure your mail client in the Settings page of your GMail account.

Networking kit generally doesn’t get me too excited. I have a 54G Netgear wireless router running off my iBurst modem. It provides reasonable coverage of the house, though there are dead spots on the extreme west and east rooms. Once you known that, you modify your use of the wireless signal to accommodate such an inconvenience. My Linksys WRT54G will soon be flashed with a different firmware, potentially to run an Asterisk server. But it too has a similar issue with providing a decent signal all over the house. Don’t mention any part of the garden: that’s a deadzone, and a pretty big one at that. Regardless, I want an Internet connection. So the delivery method is not something that bothers me. Until I got a chance to configure and test one of the newer MIMO-capable Netgear wireless routers, that is. It’s the WPN824 Rangemax, and it’s my next upgrade to the networking infrastructure at home.

The WPN824 is a rather unremarkable piece of plastic, familiar to anyone who has ever seen one of their more modern wireless routers. A white shell, with indicator lights for ports, WAN and wireless activity/connection status. The box contains two plastic supports with which the router may be stood on its side. There are no externally visible antennas, with the wireless router relying on seven built-in antennas that modify their power output based on feedback received from the environment. I guess that makes the WPN824 something of a bat, except that it is unable to fly…

The cool, disco-featured blue strobe LEDs are revealed in their full glory once the unit is connected and powered up. Netgear thoughtfully provides a switch to disable the rather disconcerting circle of flashing blue lights. I’m not sure whether the lights actually indicate the internal antenna signals, or whether this is purely for visual effect.

One thing is for sure: RangeMax is absolutely incredible. I connected a server by LAN cable next to the existing Netgear and connected by WLAN from nx8220 and the E90. Then, I started walking, kit in hand, monitoring the signal strength and occasionally connecting to the SAP system. The signal strength hardly moved below 90% anywhere in the house. Then, I walked out into the garden and to the neighbour’s fence. At roughly 100m from the WPN824, I still had a signal, though weakened and occasionally fading. Walking to the south-easternmost point, diagonally away from the router, the signal was present for a distance of almost 120m!

With such an increased range comes an increased necessity for security. Other than that, this opens up a slew of possibilities: Lego Mindstorms lawnmowers, wireless IP cameras in the garden and the wireless homing implant for the dog…

Until Blu-Ray becomes so ubiquitous that we all feel the need to replace every movie we now own on DVD, there still no faulting the picture quality of that format. Oh, but let’s not forget that there’s HDVD too. We’ll make that choice when we get to it. For now, there’s no reason no to enjoy Heroes Season 1 on DVD. The pack I got from kalahari.net is part one of season one.

That means three DVD’s taking us all the way to episode 8. I’ve seen them before, but having them available in decent quality is nice. Even better is the addition of some special features.

The never-before-aired 73 minute premiere episode alone is worth the price of admission…no?

Here’s a picture of the new Nokia N810 with slide-out keyboard extended.

Very much like the keyboard on the E90, with the cursor control pad on the left rather than on the right. That may take some getting used to!

It runs maemo’s OS 2008, a Debian-based operating system. With an SDK already available, and full support for GTK+/GNOME, it’ll be interesting to see what applications other than the standard ones become available. It’s even possible that a number of standard desktop Linux applications based on GTK+ and GNOME will be ported across to this platform. There’s already a healthy selection of applications available from maemo’s download site.