Posts by Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face 473 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Every now and again seemingly ordinary events conspire to create the "perfect storm" of a true to life movie script. You've got Belgium. The European Commission. Telecommunications Regulation. Postal Services.
This is going to make one kick-ass political thriller.
I really hope they cast Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson in the starring roles.
I've used Linux as home / remote servers for years. Recently built a new home server in a nice DVD player style case as a media PC attached to the living room TV. Works well now, but problems with drivers for third party hardware and hassles with screen tearing and audio dogged the box for a while. Fortunately the webcam I attached has a decent inbuilt microphone, because I could route sound via HDMI, or onboard sound card, but not both - which kinda scuppered using it as a standalone CD player.
Setting up the remote control and wireless air keyboard thingy also required a lot of patience. Ditched CUPS as a print server when I got a new colour laser printer with built in network and tbh was glad to see the back of it. Still a little dissapointed about the lack of official support by movie streaming sites for Linux, but YouTube and most of the iPlayer type services are OK.
All in all, it enables me to do most things I want (including running the security cameras and acting as a web dev and music server). Frustrating at times, but configurable, free, and fun to learn. I've always found the forums to be helpful places, but a lot of that is down to not weighing in with your own frustrations, arrogance and sense of entitlement.
... that would assume that the object of the exercise is something other than keeping the Bureaucratic Classes in useless but lucrative employment at our expense for years to come. Actually getting the work done - not a priority.
My suggestion would be that Amazon set up a counter investigation into why the EU can never get its own accounts signed off by auditors. Having worked briefly in a technical role on a completely pointless and entirely wasteful EU project in the past I'd be happy to testify.
If I'm going to synchronise all four Squeezeboxes and get the house shaking to Slash's new album at high volume I might as well do it properly. I get the argument for MP3s, but it's only really relevant on the move, where storage is an issue. Hence the a nightly script to keep an MP3 mirror of the FLAC files. Best of both worlds.
I regularly have to reboot my Lumia 1020 to get the bluetooth to work with my Ford Audio. The text message reading works OK once it's connected, but for some reason it can't hear my replies. Phone works well. Music works OK, but since the 8.1 update I have to kick it off from the actual phone - which kinda defeats the point. Also after about an hour it turns down the volume to a stupidly low level on the basis that my non-existent bluetooth headphones might be damaging my hearing. Never mind that farting around with your phone's unlock screen and volume control at motorway speeds can be pretty terminal in itself.
I've plumbed for a mixture of streaming and static (offsite) images. I spent £90 on three cheap IP outdoor wifi cameras, positioning them over the exterior doors and front garden. Once configured, I didn't use the built in web server at all, instead using a program called Motion on my media PC/home server to plug into the feed generated by the cameras and detect any changes in the image.
Each of these snapshots are then saved to an images directory and uploaded via SSH to a remote web server where a simple web page with a minishowcase JavaScript gallery picks up everything automatically and displays the historic stills in order. A cron job deletes everything older than 5 days old to preserve disk space.
There's also a live feed that runs from Apache on the home server, which picks up the snapshot.cgi of each camera and refreshes the images using JavaScript within the page. That way the actual web server of the camera is not exposed to the outside world.
Took a bit of fiddling about configuring the internal network, subdomains and url forwarding in Apache but it works pretty well. The idea is that you can see on the live feed if there is a problem, then trawl through the stills for the evidence. Unfortunately, the cheap cameras let the whole thing down a bit, my grass looks more purple than usual and I'm sure my bald spot looks bigger...
Not a downloader, but my sympathies are with Google. They invent a simple product that pretty much revolutionises how we use the web and can be run with a handful of people and a shed full of servers. Suddenly, every Tom, Dick and Lapdog Politician starts feeling all entitled and Google end up spending more on lawyers and administrators than they do on tech, research and development.
I doubt it. This is a narcotics case, probably domestic, probably FBI. So 1) The NSA would not deign to get involved in such pedestrian affairs and 2) The FBI would need their evidence to be obtained through the proper legal channels in order to present before a court. Probably more cock up than conspiracy, this one.
"...A new commissioner would therefore have to get up to speed on the case, which probably wouldn't help matters."
It's true that it wouldn't help Google - they have better things to be getting on with. But the primary objective of the Commission is to perpetuate and expand their own bureaucracy. They live for this kind of stuff.
Hehe, that reminds me of a response that a tour operator penned to one of its more belligerent complainers. It went something along the lines of,
"...You should be aware that over the past few years we have made great strides in improving all aspects of our holidays. We have also taken the decision to improve the quality of our customers, and as such we would appreciate it if you did not book with us again next year...."
I'm still on 8.0. If you can live with (amongst other things) the mandatory synching of your data to the MS cloud, random battery drainage, a mail client which can't handle Postfix "plain" SMTP authentication, the inability to switch off the phone while charging, a Skype client that doesn't allow old style Skype logins, a screen which locks while you're driving, delving through interminable menus to perform the simplest tasks, a search button that's hardwired to Bing and a satnav that has apparently never heard of the M62 it's really not too bad.
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