My Technophilic Musings

I’m going to be bespectacled and have been advised to reduce and limit my computer usage considerably. A bit of nostalgia set in on hearing this and I thought about my short journey so far in this wonderland of solid-state and otherwise.

First time I touched a computer.
> 1989, at school in 2nd standard

First command I typed on a computer.
> “dir”, 1990, 3rd standard

First game I played on a computer.
> “bricks”, 1991, 4th standard

First Colored game I played on a computer.
> “Dangerous Dave”, 1991, 4th standard

First program I wrote on a computer.
> “Hello, Ankit!” in basic, 1992, 5th standard(The pre-teenage rebel in me substituted the “world” by “Ankit”. Why “Ankit”? That’s a mystery )

First time I held a mouse.
>1992, 5th standard, Windows 3.0

First Windows Program I used
>PaintBrush (MSPaint today), 1992, 5th standard

First “3d” game I played
> Wolfenstein 3D (or Wolf), 1993, 6th standard Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: commands, Computers, corporate, games, history, linux, nostalgia, Programming

Just a small tip. If you want to view a pdf and you don’t have adobe acrobat (or any other pdf reader) installed, e.g., you are sitting in a cyber cage or at a friend’s place, you can still view it.
Only thing you have to do is, just prefix the url to the online pdf with “http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=” and you’ll see a nice web interface rendering your pdf without having to install anything on your PC.

e.g.: url to pdf: http://abc.com/readme.pdf

So final url: “http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://abc.com/readme.pdf“

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Adobe Acrobat, online PDF reader, PDF, scribd, tips

Worried about someone breaking into your house in your absence? Or just need to keep a tab on who enters your room while you are away? Well, all you need is a webcam, a linux PC/laptop and a twitter account. And you are set for real time updates through twitter about all that goes on at your abode behind your back (can even receive a text message/sms on your phone). Keep reading for the very simple setup you need.

1.) Download and install "motion" on your computer. For ubuntu users, this is as simple as running

2.) Setup your motion configuration file. (Usually at /etc/motion/motion.conf). There are quite a lot of options available. You might want to tweak it a lot according to ur needs later on but the most important ones that you can begin with are (leave the rest untouched for now):

2a.) Add/edit the option "target_dir" to point to the directory where you want to save the images of the event when motion is detected.

2b.) Add/edit the option "locate" and set it to "on" so that you get a nice square box around the detected moving object/person.

2c.) Add/edit the option "webcam_port" and set it to, say, "8000". Motion includes a mini http server so now, you can use it to view the actual images of the happening when you get the update and check for false alarms.

3.) Now, comes the most important part, about getting the update. Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: fun, linux, motion, motion detection, real time updates, sms, thieves, Twitter, ubuntu, webcam

Did you know that instead of installing special software to view your webcam video, you can simply use mplayer for the same purpose, and with a lot of fine control. e.g. try running the following command with your webcam attached to your computer.

And you can use mencoder to capture and encode video from your webcam:

Have fun playing with the huge number of options available. You could even cat the test.avi file into a folder of your web server and have instant streaming video .

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: fun, linux, mencoder, mplayer, stream, video, webcam

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop's usb port. dmesg gave the following output:

[21328.211333] usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
[21328.319698] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[21328.439705] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[21328.458509] zc0301: V4L2 driver for ZC0301[P] Image Processor and Control Chip v1:1.05
[21328.459113] usb 1-1: ZC0301[P] Image Processor and Control Chip detected (vid/pid 0x0AC8/0x301B)
[21328.520576] usb 1-1: PB-0330 image sensor detected
[21328.870287] usb 1-1: Initialization succeeded
[21328.870919] usb 1-1: V4L2 device registered as /dev/video0
[21328.871001] usbcore: registered new interface driver zc0301
[21328.913737] usbcore: registered new interface driver gspca
[21328.913811] ubuntu/media/gspcav1/gspca_core.c: gspca driver 01.00.12 registered

Great! Everything set up, I thought. But running various programs, camorama, camE, kopete, everything gave weird errors like "Connection could not be made", "device not ready" or just showed a blank screen. But soon, after  few trial and errors, I found the solution. Basically the "zc0301" module is the culprit and all you have to do to get your camera working is prevent it from loading. So, this is what I did:

And voila! the webcam started working like magic. Of course, this tip is only for webcams that use this particular chip. And if you want to make this change permanent so that you don't have to run these commands everytime you want to use your webcam, all you have to do is add the following line to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file

blacklist zc0301

This would prevent the module from loading whenever you connect your webcam to your computer. Let me know if this worked for you or if you have some of your own tips/tricks/hacks to get this or other webcams working on linux.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: blacklist, camera, dmesg, gspca, linux, modprobe, ubuntu, webcam, zc0301

Disclaimer Notes:

1. I wrote this because these things just came into my mind today while I was reading about the impending “Hardy Heron” release related things and saw that there is a lot of FUD being spread still. So, thought of jotting down my likes/dislikes and not making it a linux v/s windows campaign. Though at a few places, it might be necessary to compare the two just to put things into perspective.
2. These are reasons why “I” like/dislike Linux and not why others might like/dislike it although you might find common patterns.
3. Most of my recent experience is with Ubuntu these days, so most examples would be from it as well.
4. These reasons are purely from an end-user’s perspective and not from a linux developer’s perspective. So, I’m not taking into factor that I can change the kernel (or most other things’) source code because “generally” I don’t.
5. This post is quite long. And if you have a flame to send out my way (which you are most welcome to do), please read it in its entirety before doing so, because many things I say at some point have some caveats covered at another point.

5 Reasons why I like Linux:

These reasons aren’t listed in any particular order. All of them are quite important for me.

1. Light on Resources: I must say that Linux is what still keeps my more than 3 years old laptop running in a prim condition with the latest and greatest of everything from technology stand-point as well as eye-candy stuff. An example: With almost every effect of Compiz Fusion turned on, hordes of screenlets and AWN enabled, an Apache/MySQL/PHP based server running, and a dozen of other applications (firefox, nautilus, terminal, GIMP, RhythmBox, Open Office Word Processor, VLC player, etc) open, my setup consumes around 500 MB of RAM. While on the other hand, if I was using Vista, It’d have demanded atleast 1 GB of RAM just to run Aero, forget about the rest of the things.

2. Cost: This is a big factor for me. Almost everything is free or atleast has a free alternative available. Most of the times I’ve found these free software to be much better than commercial software in terms of feature sets as well as stability. But even otherwise, when there are cases where the free alternative a bit lagging as compared to the commercial one (e.g. GIMP v/s Photoshop), I haven’t felt that my needs have ever outgrown the free software.

3. Ease of Use: Doing “stuff” on linux is just so easy. By “stuff”, I mean everything from doing some normal day chores, downloading files, customizing things, automating routine tasks, etc. The backbone for this is “the terminal” (not the movie :P). I can do almost anything I want from the console. It not only saves me time and frustration in executing a program, waiting for the GUI to load and then go through a series of clicks but also allows me to batch up everything into one pretty little command. Moreover, every thing has so many options that I can configure to my liking. (More on the “options” later below)

4. Getting Software: Getting software couldn’t be more easy.

• It generally involves typing in “sudo apt-get install <software>”, pressing enter, and that’s it. The latest version is ready to roll on your machine.
• Reboots are minimal. Even after thinking for quite long, it’s very hard to recall any time when I had to “log-off” my system (let alone reboot) after installing a software (or even a driver)
• Updates are automatic, and not just for the OS or a few core components, but for all the software that I installed through repositories (but not for the ones which I installed from my local deb’s or compilations, which is understandable of course)
• The latest fixes/patches are available very quickly. Moreover, the revision cycle for most distros lies between 6–12 months and hence, even a complete desktop upgrade is quickly available as well (as compared to the 7 year period after which Vista came out). You can even “upgrade” to the latest distro revision without having to wipe everything, though I generally prefer a clean install.

5. Security:Now, I agree with everyone that the reason why we don’t see many viruses for linux is because the user base is very less as compared to other OS’s but I also believe that this is not the “only” reason.

• The thing is that since most of the software is open source, so exploits are found quite quickly and patched and released rapidly. While in a closed source environments, even if a white hat reports it, the exploits go on un-noticed, un-worked upon by the developers (A good example is the recent falling of Vista during the “Pwn to Own” contest because of a known but unpatched vulnerability by Adobe, not a fault of Vista in this case though but you get my drift).
• The security model otherwise is also quite tight and its very hard for someone to exploit it till the time you use common sense along with it. (A linux virus can easily wipe ur “/home” without acqurining root permissions).

5 Reasons why I dislike Linux

These reasons irk me the most but aren’t enough for to make me move away from Linux. I mention them because getting them right would make my Linux expereince that much more joyful and probably others feels the same too. Moreover, this is not a gripe and is not a command/order to “the Linux guys” out there to fix it, because linux is of, by and for the community. And being a part of this community, I share the burden of this equally and would like to help out in making it better in whatever ways possible, developing, testing, suggesting things.

1. Getting Software: I had mentioned about how easy it is to get software from most distros’ repositories with a single command. However, getting and installing software is also a challenge that many people face in linux. After sometime your particular version of the distro stops updating the software and will include only security fixes and such. Now, there are many good people who would backport software for your version but not all the time. You can download pacakges off the internet (debs’ for ubuntu) but they might not work because of too many inter-mingled dependencies. Compiling is another option but many times, it can spiral out of hand. I hope we can better softwares like GDebi that could make this much more easier.

2. Options: Earlier I listed having so many options as one of my reasons to like Linux. But, sometimes, too many options tend to get to my head. This gets even more difficult when you have too many choices but no clue about what means what and which one is the best. However, the community is continously trying to make this right. A lot of documentation projects are going on, and the mailing lists, IRC networks and other forums also give out a lot of information. Especially for Ubuntu, I find a huge community based support system which always helps me out. (PS – The Ubuntu Forums are the nicest forums you’ll ever come across. I am yet to come across a post that contains words like “RTFM” or “n00b”)

3. Ease Of Use: Some times, just some times, the lack of a GUI for common things irks me and I wish in respect of a few things (read wi-fi) that things could “just work”. But I guess this is a trade-off that I can live with, and moreover this situation is also improving especilly due to the efforts taken by Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, GNOME and KDE. (Special thanks to nm-applet ). Moreover, Hardy Heron, b43 and the latest linux kernels promise to solve the wi-fi setup issues.

4. Browsing: The browsing experience on linux isn’t too great. But this is not a fault of Linux as such. This is due to companies providing adequate linux support (e.g. java plugins for 64 bit) and too many sites optimizing their code for IE. But again, there is hope for this as we can already run IE on linux (IEs4Linux) plus SUN has promised a 64 bit java firefox plugin with the next JRE.

5. Drivers: This is again due to companies not giving proper linux support for their hardware and not even releasing their hardware details for the OSS community to develop their own drivers. However, I can understand that giving out hardware details might not be an option for these companies considering the competition, and also proper software support might be a bit unfeasible due to a smaller consumer base. But again, more and more companies are seeing the light now and releasing proper drivers for linux, with Nvidia and ATi taking the lead (When will Creative listen?). And a special thanks to the OSS community for making working drivers despite all this.

So, this is it. After reading back through what I just wrote, I am dead sure that I will stick to Linux as the trade-offs are too meagre for me. Will you?

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: aero, apt-get, compiz fusion, dislikes, drivers, ease of use, firefox, gui, IE, installation, java, latest, likes, linux, linux v/s windows, reasons, reboot, resources, security, Software, terminal, ubuntu, Vista, windows

Have been in the hunt for a good basic paint program for linux for so long. I’m running a Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (amd64) box (yeah, yeah I didn’t upgrade to Gutsy because it sneaked up too quickly onto me and the impending loom of LTS goodness of Hardy was also there). Have been suggested various things so far like GPaint, Kolourpaint, tuxpaint etc but none of them cuts it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love GIMP but its an overkill when I have to go through 2 menus, a dialogue box and several clicks, just to make a silly rectangle, but I don’t hold anything against it cuz afterall its an “Image Manipulation” program, not a painting one.

So, what do you use/recommend when you have to draw a few basic shapes, connect them through lines and arrows, put in a mashup of few silly pics and colorize it a bit with basic effects? And are there any gnome native ones or do I ultimately have to give in to install KDE dependencies?

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: draw, feisty, GIMP, gnome, gpaint, Gutsy, Hardy, KDE, kolourpaint, linux, paint, tuxpaint, ubuntu

If you thought that a webcam is just for getting in visual touch with your distant friends, then you could not be more wrong. There are many other uses e.g., making videos, rudimentary security systems, etc. But I didn’t know that it’d be as simple as a a few keystrokes and a couple of clicks, until I stumbled across this article on Linux.com – Five fun ways to use a Linux webcam. It lists out the following five things that can be achieved ever so easily with a webcam and your linux box:

• Record Yourself
• Make a Video Streaming webserver
• Monitor your house
• ASCIIfy your image
• More fun with your videos and stills

Do check it out at the aforementioned link.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: convert image to ascii, five fun ways to use a linux webcam, fun, fun with videdos, house monitor, linux, record, security, video streaming, webcam, webcam fun, webserver

If you have multiple soundcards in your system and have to switch between them regularly (e.g. laptop owners like me, who use an external soundcard while being docked to groove to the highest and the lowest of frequencies through those 7.1 channels and use the in-built sound card while on the move) you would definitely be under-whelmed by the less-than-stellar performance of ubuntu in switching between the sound cards. For me at least, ubuntu (fiesty 7.04 amd64) never seems to recognize that I’ve connected the speakers to my Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PCMCIA card, and merrily continues to huff-puff through the tinny laptop speakers until I manually go into the sound preferences, switch over to multichannel playback and vice versa. Well, I still haven’t found an automated solution for the switching, but here is a little cli-magic to do this in a click.

Continue reading »

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: asoundconf, audigy2, bash, cli, external soundcard, internal soundcard, linux, sound card, soundcard, switch sound card, ubuntu

Ask any laptop user about how much he liked to kick some butt in Gears of War and he would cringe and cry with agony even before you are able to say the “C” of Crysis. But not anymore. For its notebook consumers, Dell has finally come up with the perfect answer to the questions posed by these ridiculously-difficult-to-get-more-than-10–fps games. Available now is some motherly love for your laps in the form of 8800M GTX with its M1730. But that’s not all, it slaps onto the lappy not one, but two GFX cards in one. Yes, men, you heard that right “SLI” .

And those who are just beginning to get those puddles forming around the corners of their eyes because they bought their M1730’s with the slightly retro 8700’s, Dell loves you as well, because you, my dear friends, get an option to upgrade to the latest and greatest as well (US only as of now, but would soon be offered to Europe, AP customers as well).

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: 880m gtx, dell, Gaming, Gfx, graphics card, laptop, notebook, nvidia, SLI