Heise hat manchmal einen ungewollt zynischen Humor. Oder ist das eher das Talent unserer Regierung?
Auf der einen Seite schlotterts in der Hose, da man ja jetzt abgehört werden könnte, andererseits beschließt man nun die BKA Gesetzesnovelle, die genau diese Mittel auch legitimiert.
Update 08-28-2008: This post has moved to it’s own subpage. There you’ll find an updated version that should fix the wake issue.
This is absolutely epic, I love the idea. Seems to be viral marketing, though (and at least it seems to work on me). Reminds me, I still want to watch the new Indy flick, even though people say it’s crap…
[via Boing Boing]
I know it’s not a feasable way to do it but sometimes you can’t get around to copy a user profile while it’s still locked (think: Windows locks it even after the user logs out).
To copy such a pesky profile I use Hobocopy:
hobocopy /full /y /r “%HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%” “C:\UserProfileBackup”
The program makes use of shadow copies to perform the process so the resulting file will still be locked but at least it was copied. This becomes quite useful when used in conjunction with, for instance, the portable version of CCleaner and it’s /AUTO switch.
Woot woot. Good things do happen 🙂
Now it’s time to do some regression tests. Without implying bad things here, but people should be very strict with applications before giving out platinum status.
Things like “does work perfectly fine as long as you don’t click button X” or “works perfectly fine but has some visual glitches” usually mean the application does not work perfectly fine and therefore doesn’t really deserve platinum status. Feels a bit like cheating on yourself if you give out platinum too easily. Just my two cents, though.
It took me about a week to sort out some issues with my setup but now CoreAVC 1.7 is running fine in my SVN version of Mplayer thanks to the revamped patches from the CoreAVC-for-Linux project (yay, no more old builds!).
Some notes:
It’s a real shame: A while ago I blogged about a very nice set of patches to make CoreAVC work on Mplayer. Now it seems that a DMCA note was filed and Google has kicked the project from it’s Code page.
Don’t fret, though! CoreCodec is a little torn apart on this issue but is apparently helping Alan, creator of this great patchset, to make the patches ready for CoreAVC 1.7 (the most recent one, you had to use 1.5.* before):
Regardless of the cause, CoreCodec and I have resolved the conflict, and CoreAVC-for-Linux should be back online soon. In addition, the patches for 1.7.0 are ready to go, and Linux users should see a nice performance improvement on Dual-core machines (compared to 1.5.0) once it is available.
Geez people, don’t scare us like that!
Can’t really tell how I’ve managed to overlook this great program 🙂 .
Nemo is a file manager without… well… it’s more like a calendar actually… but with files. Hard to explain but very fitting to keep track of my incredible heap of data. I’ll keep an eye on this project as it is not only written in C# (Mono) but also utilizes the capabilities of Xesam. That makes 2 great reasons to love it already 🙂 .
It’s a good thing that people actually listen to you when asking for advice on what kind of TV they should buy. Too bad they stop listening when you start talking about upgrades to the rest of the television set stuff (like set top boxes, for instance).
So, there’s this shiny new Full HD television with 3 HDMI ports and all kinds of kinky fizzle and the picture still looks like crap. Can you guess why? Let me give you a small hint: It has something to do with the receiver just doing 1080i instead of 1080p. [Note: I’m talking about the picture on HD channels, of course!]
Just to prove that coughing up 2000 Euro for a new TV wasn’t a phenomenal waste of money (although on review, it was considering Germany’s TV shows) you just have to hook up some fairly powerful multimedia overlord computer to that thing and play .hack//G.U. Trilogy, it’ll get you a nice “Wow” moment 🙂 .
Of course you could also spend additional 600 bucks and get a PS3 and GTA IV to celebrate your unending stream of funds. That way you can also assure that I’ll always be Johnny on the spot to fix stuff at your place. Ah, but make sure you’ve got enough potato chips and soda 😉 .
I’ve been in love with the SATA cradle from the moment I saw it. Too bad that darn thing costs half a fortune when importing it from Japan. Sharkoon obviously saw the potential of the device as well and made a similar device available in Europe — USB only.
What a bummer. But finally the QuickPort Pro comes to the rescue and brings eSATA goodness to us poor, poor European pigs. Amazon Germany sells the QuickPort Pro for 36 Euro per unit. Quite a pricetag but worth the money if you work with many harddisks. Mine’s ariving tomorrow, together with a new pair of disks 🙂 .
I’m a big fan of new technologies and interesting software. I’m also a fan of filesystems and the concepts behind filesharing programs.
So I’m really glad to be able to give Wuala a try. The program can best be described as a decentralized, p2p based filesystem with credit system built in that’ll integrate into your filesystem (on Linux via NFS) and allows you to store files encrypted on the net.
Yeah, sounds a little bit fishy. But it works flawlessly and quite fast to this point so I can’t really moan 🙂 . The idea is quite simple: For starters you get 1GB of space, if you are online on a regular basis (more than 17%) you can trade space on your harddisk for more online space.
What to make of Wuala? Time will tell, there are only a few users right now and the formula for online time calculation could need a little makeover. Apart from that: Cool!
One of the major annoyances with theme upgrades is that all your precious changes will be lost, or you’ll have to diff and patch it from one version to another. That’s quite a lot of useless work.
The K2 theme I’m using as the base for this WordPress installation supports two cool features now:
Personally I think that’s totally awesome. But there are some points I’m still missing, though. For starters, the hooks are currently quite rudimentary, I can’t really control every element at this point. Second, I want to add options to the admin panel through my style’s functions.php — which I am unable to do atm (if I’m wrong on this point, please enlighten me :)).
Nevertheless, K2 is absolutely awesome. Ah, and in case you wonder… yes, the theme is getting a makeover. I’m migrating from the old, broken (too much playing ;)) Unsleepable 2 to a new something I’m currently building.
Geez, what a unlucky day! Had to format the laptop, reinstall Vista (two times, to be precise!) and I’m finally getting all my data back from the fileserver (over WiFi, that is… I guess I’ll get cancer because of that someday).
At least FLStudio and the KeyRig work again, so I have some toys to play with 🙂 .
As a note to everyone who encounters a bluescreen after installing Vista updates on the file crcdisk: Do not install the update KB *899! Yes, it is required for SP1, but if you have to install it, postpone the process to the very end of your update process. Or even better: Get a Vista SP1 DVD. I’ll try to do so for future reinstallations.
Windows, despite all it’s flaws, is nice for a few things. First of all, there’s a buttload of cool, gory games. And second there’s a really nice multimedia support; many companies/individuals write highly optimized software for video splitting, decoding, muxing, output etc.
Now, three cool programs are Haali’s Media Splitter (comes with Haali’s Media Renderer), CoreCodec’s CoreAVC and nVidia’s PureVideo. Combining these leads to a boost in performance, allowing my 2GHz notebook to play 1080p content steadily without hard framedrops.
Linux on the other hand is a little cornered. Yes, we do have XvMC for hardware MPEG-2 decoding but this doesn’t really help with HD content at this point. So until there’s a counterpart to PureVideo Linux will always be slower.
As you may know I only recommend Mplayer and Xine on Linux. They’re the greatest, the best and if you think otherwise you must be stupid 😉 .
Mplayer can be patched to use CoreAVC for a little performance boost (we all need a little boost, do we?). This is great stuff. The patch will fail a chunk against loader/Makefile, but it’s no problem to add the missing lines by hand. Also, please note that you’ve to run ./configure –disable-mencoder before applying the patch.
So, how much does it give us in terms of raw performance? Not too much, unfortunately, but for my system 5-12% already make a big difference.
Most of the performance loss is still being caused by the lack of hardware MPEG-4 decoding and the use of the old Overlay mixer.
Nevertheless, if you have bought CoreAVC you owe it to yourself to give it a try.