Comb Free TV

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Ever since purchasing a full-featured DVB card, I always wanted to test the popular VDR package. As I don’t have a TV connected to the card, I had to analyze other options to visualize the VDR output somehow. After a disappointing session with streamdev, I started using xineliboutput and it works like a charm.

VDR seems much more robust than the other options I have been looking at so far. One thing I have been missing with xineliboutput is the Xine‘s bob deinterlacer for the xvmc and xxmc drivers. I prefer this deinterlacer as it does not reduce the framerate (unlike many others) and it utilizes the GPU, so watching TV with decent quality does not reduce my machine’s performance notably.

So I modified xineliboutput in order to use that deinterlacer – my little patch is available right here. To use it, you will have to install the xineliboutput plugin with my patch applied, and then activate the bob filter in ~/.xine/config_xineliboutput:

video.device.xvmc_bob_deinterlacing:1

Now, run 'vdr-sxfe --video xxmc' to watch comb free TV (on nvidia cards). To use xvmc instead replace ‘xxmc’ with ‘xvmc’ in the patch, note that I tested this with the xxmc driver only.

Bug Me Not

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I’m not a big fan of registering my email address all over the place, but the latest flood of comment spam finally made me get a WordPress API key in order to be able to activate the Akismet plugin. I’m not a 100% sure how this thing is supposed to work, but it successfully identified spam on a re-scan already.

So, spam bot, if you are reading this – don’t you even try…

Beyond bzip2

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Yesterday I wanted to help pushing large chunks of log data (30G) through a ridiculously low-bandwidth channel. I remembered reading about Con Kolivas’ lrzip and wondered whether it would provide better compression than bzip2 in this case. So I ran a little benchmark on a 1G chunk of data and compressed it with bzip2, lrzip and p7zip.

ratio time compr. cost
bzip2 7.14 05:45 100.00% 100%
lrzip 7.26 24:33 101.76% 427%
p7zip 8.42 28:13 118.01% 490%

OK, so I’ll stick with bzip2 for now. At least for that kind of data lrzip is not really an option – ~330% extra effort to get less than 2% improvement just doesn’t seem worth it. I have to say I am impressed what kind of compression p7zip (or better 7-Zip) can achieve but it is very expensive nevertheless. I like the fact that it seems to utilize all available CPUs automatically, though (in realtime it ran only ~19 minutes on a hyperthreading machine).

Even Closer

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Finally I remembered to pack my real camera before jumping into my car yesterday morning. So here are the results of my latest experiment in tunnel photography. The first two are using the traditional technique, the third features a slight deviation to reveal more of the original image.

B295 Tunnel Tunnel Pragsattel B295 Tunnel
Creative Commons License

Additionally I took some non-tunnel images and ran them through the ‘convergence’ process. The last image is an original photo (no convergence here) – I merely applied some Selective Gaussian Blur to reduce the noise.

B295 B10 Lights, Camera, Photo
Creative Commons License

I assume these wallpapers should keep me going for a while. Maybe I’ll make some dual/wide screen edits sometime. As ‘usual’ Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 applies.

Spam

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Receiving the first spam comment after 7 days of operation I wondered about the global cost of spam once again. While google will provide a range of high random numbers (with a maximum of $200 billion per year) there’s also this little form that will allow you to compute your individual costs per spam. And by wasting the time to fill out the form you can increase your costs even further!
Unfortunately the form doesn’t cover spam filter tuning nor comment spam so it was not that much of a help after all.

Switched to WordPress

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Being fed up with my last-century under construction homepage I decided to switch to something that will:

  • hopefully look good,
  • be W3C standards compliant and open source,
  • require less maintenance,
  • and still provide some useful functionality.

So I chose to give WordPress a try and I really enjoy it so far.