Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Using PulseAudio for OSS Applications

In my previous post, I discussed how to use PulseAudio to enable sound for coLinux. This works fine for programs like MPlayer, but has issues with some programs e.g. Solfege.

The solution is simple: if the problematic applications have support for OSS, then emerge them with OSS USE flag on. In addition, PulseAudio should also be emerged with OSS USE flag (to enable the building of padsp, a PulseAudio OSS wrapper, which will be discussed below). Under Gentoo Linux, one way is to simply add OSS USE flag to /etc/make.conf. Alternative way is to enable the USE flag application by application. For example, to enable OSS USE flag for Solfege, type the following:

# echo "media-sound/solfege oss" >> /etc/portage/package.use

When running these applications, prefix the command line with padsp like the following:

$ padsp solfege

Note that you may need additional configurations in the application to use OSS for audio output.

Monday, May 5, 2008

HV30: Camcorder and Accessories

I just bought Canon HV30 (Amazon, Review) recently for my baby. Before buying HV30, I was agonizing over the selection between HV30 and Canon HF10 (Amazon, Review) (although I know that HF100 is better than HF10 from money point of view since the internal 16GB flash drive of HF10 does not justify the price difference, I do like the black paint job of HF10 and HV30).

Comparison of HV30 vs. HF10

So why I chose HV30 over HF10? The following is my comparison.

FeaturesHV30HF10Comments
Price MSRP price is $999 in US and ¥10580.00 (about $1514) in China MSRP price is $1099 in US and ¥14080.00 (about $2014) in China The price difference in China is quite significant, which is true even for street price.
Performance 1/2.7 in. sensor 1/3.2 in. sensor According to the review, HV30 has slightly better performance over HF10 thanks to larger sensor, however the gain seems to be marginal for most cases.
Functionalities Viewfinder, Zebra, Peaking
Accessories Standard accessory shoe Canon proprietary accessory shoe
Backup Tapes are cheap for backup Additional backup is needed since SDHC cards are expensive and will be reused.
Community A mature community (looking at hv20.com for example) Situation will improve
Form Factor 88x82x138 mm (3.5x3.2x5.4 in.), 535 g (1.2 lb.) 73x64x129 mm (2.9x2.5x5.1 in.), 380 g (13.4 oz) HF10 is small and light, which is ideal for traveling. Normally the camcorder which you takes out often is the most useful one.
Media Tape SDHC card + internal Flash Flash card is really convenient: just like small DCs. No hassles for rewinding and no worry for overriding.
Zoom 10x optical zoom 12x optical zoom
Noise Tape noise can be heard in silent environment No such noise since flash card is used.

Accessories

What I have:

  • Battery and charger: compatible ones
  • Camera bag: Lowepro Edit 120+
  • CPL filter: Kenko 43mm
  • HDMI cable
  • IEEE 1394 cable: Belkin 4-pin to 4-pin
  • Lens cap
  • miniSD: Transcend 2G. Not sure whether 4G could be used (the manual only states that up to 2G has been tested).
  • Tape: Panasonic AY-DVM63PQ
  • UV filter: Kenko MC-UV 43mm

For future purchase:

  • 35mm adapter
  • Close-up lens: +1/+2/+4
  • Mic: Canon DM-50, or combination of Rode Videomic and stereo mic. Maybe XLR adapters with XLR Mics?
  • Neutral density filters: ND2/4/8
  • Shoulder strap
  • Steadicam Merlin
  • Telephoto lens: Canon TL-H43 (any black version?)
  • Tripod and fluid head: Manfrotto 190XPROB (tripod) + 701RC2 (fluid head) + MBAG70 (bag)
  • Video light: Canon VL-3
  • Wide angle lens: Canon WD-H43 (any black version?)
  • Wrist strap

Final Words

After over 1 month's usage of HV30, I'm pretty satisfied with it. There is a lot of things for me to learn: how to shoot, how to edit, just to name a few. But all the efforts are worthy when you view the video clips produced from it.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Automatic Backup

We need to backup our stuff in case that some disasters might happen. One way is to backup to some external medias like tape, USB drives, or CD/DVDs. However working with them is somehow tedious and manual intervention is needed. People tend to be lazy therefore we are reluctant to backup if the process is inconvenient. If we have one additional machine with link in between (throughout this article, we assume the remote machine is named as remotebox), we can setup an automatic backup mechanism.

Overview

We use crontab to schedule rsync jobs to backup our files to another machine. Since rsync is secured with SSH, to suppress the password prompt, we have to setup SSH keychain.

Setup SSH Keychain

Generate Keys

This section mainly follows this nice guide.

We use the DSA approach.

$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
$ scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@remotebox

Then log in to remotebox and append the public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file like so:

cat id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
rm id_dsa.pub

Install Keychain

Keychain is a nice package which prompt you for your passphrase once you log into the system, and automatically provides passwords for later SSH session. Note this incurs security risks (there are always tradeoffs between security and convenience) therefore attention is needed.

This part mainly follows this guide.

First install keychain by typing emerge keychain.

Then add following lines to your ~/.bash_profile.

/keychain id_dsa
. ~/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh

Setup Crontab Job

We can then setup our automatic backup system now. Since there are almost infinite number of combinations of crontab and rsync patterns, I just shown one example below (many interesting examples of rsync usage can be found by typing man rsync).

0 9,16 * * 1-5 rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~/work/ remotebox:~/backup/

The above example synchronizes local directory ~/work to remote directory ~/backup on host remotebox, on 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. of every working day. Note that I have used option --delete, which will try to delete extraneous files from destination directory. This can ensure that the destination directory is an exact copy of source directory but it would be dangerous if the destination directory contains some files already. So test this option before you actually use it.

Switching Browsers in Emacs

Recently, I have met one dilemma in Emacs. Since I'm using Emacs for my blog writing, Firefox is used for previewing. Also as an Common Lisp user, I use emacs-w3m to read HyperSpec. Here comes the problem: I can only set one browser for browse-url-browser-function. How can I suit my requirements simultaneously?

Fortunately, Emacs is highly extensible. I just write one simple interactive function toggle-browser, which can toggle between Firefox and emacs-w3m when pressing M-x toggle-browser. Following is the code:

(defun toggle-browser ()
  "Toggle browser between Firefox and emacs-w3m."
  (interactive)
  (setq browse-url-browser-function 
        (if (eql browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-firefox)
            'w3m-browse-url
          'browse-url-firefox))
  (message "%s" browse-url-browser-function))

Update: please look at the 1st comment from pedro for a better solution.