dreaMING of Fusion

Recently my mum wanted to replace her stack of VCDs to DVD. The VCDs are bilingual which is one language on each of the stereo channel. Since DVD supports VCD's MPEG 1 PAL (352x288) format as described in the mencoder manual , I thought I could just easily copy the video stream and transcode the audio stream to AC3 with the following mencoder recipe: mencoder -ovc copy -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf AVSEQ01.DAT -o AVSEQ01.mpg However, after burning the first disc with DVDStyler, I found that my Phillips DVD player does not allow switching between left and right channel for DVDs although language switching works fine with the original VCD. Thus, I have to split the single track stereo channel into two separate mono audio channel. After some experimenting with mencoder's audio filter, here's the recipe: mencoder -nosound -ovc copy -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf AVSEQ01.DAT -o video.mpg men...

My wife is going to take a rather long journey bus this weekend. So, I decided to transcode some videos for her to watch on her phone. Here's the recipe: ffmpeg -y -i inputFile.avi -f mp4 -vcodec libx264 -level 30 -s 240x128 -b 200k -bt 768k -bufsize 10000k -maxrate 10000k -g 300 -coder 0 -threads 4 -acodec libfaac -ac 2 -ab 96k outputFile.mp4 This is mostly based on the instructions from the videohelp.com forum . I have tried 320x240 resolutions, but I decided to scale it down a little to save space since it does not look any worse at 240x128.

Sometime ago, a colleague told me that she bought a Roomba 405 but the battery seems dead, unable to charge. Being the curious me and how I like to fix things, I made a deal that if I could fix it, I can use it to clean my house for 1 month :-) So, this post is a sharing and also a kind of documentation for myself on how I got the Roomba working again. Initial diagnosis.... So, the next day she brought the Roomba to me in office and I took it home. First step, I tried to charge it by connecting the AC-DC adapter to the robot. According to the user manual, it seems charging. The amber LED is blinking slowly. A few hours later, I detached the power and try to see if it moves by pressing the "Clean" button. Nope, it is dead as a log. So, next step, I took my multimeter, removed the battery and measured the battery terminal voltage. Huh, it reads approx 0.6V? Now, I gotta monitor the voltages while charging to figure out what's wrong. I attached 2 thin wires to the terminals,...

Just some long over due update.... I have upgraded to Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 This time, they have finally got it rt73usb wireless drivers right. I have disabled my own complied driver before upgrade. Now I am using default driver. I have been using it for a few weeks and so far no connection dropping and download speed is good. One little surprise after upgrade was that my display was corrupted when it enters KDM, I can't even go to console mode with Ctrl-Alt-F1. I had to SSH into my machine from another computer and type: aticonfig --initial This configures a default set of display settings into my xorg.conf. After this, everything is working great. The only slight disappointment is that lm-sensors module for my phenom processor is still not available. I can only monitor using mobo sensors. Perhaps I'll try to compile my own module when I have some time later. Now I am just too busy at work and also all the wedding preparation.. sigh..

Recently, my wireless connection seems unreliable. It keeps dropping from time to time unpredictably. I cannot just reconnect it with network-manager. I had to unplug my Linksys WUSB54GC usb stick and plug it again to work. After getting frustrated with this, I finally did a quick google search and found out that this is somewhat a know issue with as describe in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/283759 The suggested solution is to install linux-backports-modules-generic package. I am trying it out now and I'll update this later if it works out well. UPDATE: Nope, not working for my current intrepid kernel: $ uname -rv 2.6.27-9-generic #1 SMP Thu Nov 20 22:15:32 UTC 2008 The kernel module won't even load due to some "unknown symbols" error in the syslog Next, I have also tried compiling the compat-wireless from http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download but also could not work. This time, the kernel modules could load, but could not connect at all due due to time...

Recently I have upgrade my machine to a Phenom 9650 with 4GB RAM. So I decided to use install Kubuntu 64-bit. However, I had to install the 32-bit libraries and nspluginwrapper for Adobe Flash Player to work as it previously only 32-bit binaries was release. Now, Adobe has released an Alpha "refresh" version of native 64-bit Flash Player to enable pure 64-bit web surfing experience! To install, first uninstall currently installed flashplayer with the following commands: sudo apt-get purge flashplayer-nonfree nswrapperplugin Then download Flash Player 10 for Linux 64-bit from here . and extract libflashplayer.so to the following directories: ~/.mozilla/plugins/ /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ Restart firefox and go to your favourite flash site. For me, youtube.com and various flash site works well! The only problem is that konqueror doesn't seems to like it and does not display properly and it has been reported as bug 169626 .

Recently discovered that I could enable nested paging for Virtualbox 2.1. Nested paging is a new hardware virtualization extension on AMD K10 Barcelona/Phenom and Intel Core i7 Nehalem processors that allows processor to offload memory paging required by the guest OS that is traditionally done by the VM with shadow paging. Since it is a new feature, it is not available in the configuration UI yet. First, you will have to enable hardware virtualization (VT-x/AMD-V) in Settings -> Advanced. Then, nested paging can be enabled as described in the VirtualBox User Manual with the following command: VBoxManage modifyvm -nestedpaging on The performance boost is quite noticeable. The boot up time for my virtual Windows XP has drop from about 25 seconds to 18 seconds. Super PI Mod has dropped from 39.159s to 36.016s Various benchmarks on the net show performance boost up to 30%. I'll run more benchmarks next time.