Scott Dowdle's blog

I really enjoyed this video so I'm sharing it.

A few quick bits of news from the OLPC world.

X0-1.5 - If you didn't know already, the XO-1.5 models are out. In fact I currently have one in my possession but I'm only borrowing it and will be giving it back soon. What's new? Well from the outside you can't tell anything is different because the outside has not changed at all. The insides are completely different with a new motherboard, new CPU, new video chipset, everything. With the new motherboard comes greatly expanded storage for both the firmware and permanent storage. One big change in the software is that now it includes the GNOME desktop and an easy mechanism in the settings to switch back and forth between SUGAR and GNOME.

X0-HS -The X0-HS is the X0-1.5 with a different keyboard for bigger hands. The new keyboard is hard plastic rather than a rubbery membrane. I haven't seen any pictures of the X0-HS yet but as I understand it existing X0-1.5 units can easily be retro-fitted with the HS keyboard. I believe it is also supposed to include a different set of default installed activities... ones that would appeal to an older crowd.

Watching TV? - This video speaks for itself but you can find the activity site here. I assume the content is delivered over the network:

Upcoming X0-3 - Just in case you were wonder what future hardware the OLPC folks were working on, check out this youtube video.

I found this video fascinating (although the editing is a bit erratic) so I decided to share it. I personally do not see the personal desktop (hardware nor software) dying any time soon.

There is a lot of passion in the discussion and as a result some passionate words are used that some might find offensive... so be prepared.

What do you think?

David Eder brought this video to my attention last night at the BozemanLUG meeting. I believe I saw some blurb on Slashdot some time ago about this but I never made it to the video. I'm posting it here as to expose a few more to it. Enjoy:

I haven't seen it hit the mainstream IT media yet but give it a few minutes... Google has released On2's VP8 video codec... both the source code and the specification. They have created a project named WebM that includes VP8, the Vorbis audio codec, and a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container. To get it going, they have released patches to mplayer and ffmpeg that adds VP8 support. Gstreamer is listed as coming soon.

Haven't heard of VP8? Well I'm pretty sure you have heard of the Ogg Theora video codec, right? Theora is based on On2's VP3 codec. On2 continued to work on video codecs and came out with VP6, then VP7 and then VP8... each adding an additional layer of functionality to the previous codec. VP8 is said to be a high quality video codec that is highly compressed and streams well... comparable at a technology level with the proprietary H.264 codec.

The complaint had been that Theora, being based on VP3, was good BUT that it was not on par with H.264. Now that VP8 is open, we supposedly now have a free codec on par with H.264. The question that remains is... Now what?

From attending Jesse Keating's talk about the upcoming features in Fedora 13 I learned that the rawhide repository has been split in an effort to provide a more stable build environment for Fedora releases. I also learned that it is a good idea to disable the updates-testing repo to help avoid potential breakage. Jesse also said that at some point during the upgrade cycle that the Beta will turn into the release version. With the new information, I decided that it wasn't too early build my MontanaLinux Fedora remix.

I had installed the Beta on a couple of physical and virtual machines and was fairly impressed with it so I decided to go ahead with the remix effort. First I would have to find all of the repository URLs to pull the packages from. That wasn't too difficult... just look at the files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ on a Fedora 13 Beta system.

To save on bandwidth over many builds I decided to rsync the entire development tree down so I would have a local copy. The i386 devel tree is about 19GB with 16,787 packages. The x86_64 devel tree is 21GB with 20,811 packages. I also have to rsync every day or two to keep up with package updates.

The RPM Fusion folks already have packages for Fedora 13 and the existing Adobe packages work fine on the Fedora 13 Beta as well so the this remix will be pretty close my previous remixes.

I am building from within a Fedora 13 Beta KVM virtual machine. I composed the first build yesterday and installed it on my netbook last night. I have noticed a few glitches in my initial package selection. For example I installed sugar* and that brought all of the sugar packages including sugar-logos which is a boot-time Plymouth animation. As a result, booting my netbook for the first time after install showed the Sugar animation which I wasn't expecting at all. Also the number of packages I had was right on the edge of 2GB and I wanted to insure that it would continue to fit on a 2GB USB thumbdrive... so I decided to update the package set. I decided to remove sugar completely because that would free up some room and get rid of unwanted boot animation.

I'm doing a second compose right now. We'll see how that turns out.

I just wanted to post a little background about the videos I recorded from LFNW 2010.

I recorded them with a Samsung SC-MX20 which is a very inexpensive / budget rig. The sound quality is fair to good considering the camera does not have the ability to use an external mic. The video quality is fair to good considering that most of the rooms had the lights turned off for viewing projected presentation slides. The videos are unedited and I did not bother to even add title slides mainly because I wanted to stick with Linux apps for production and I have yet to find a reasonable video editor. Yes, I've tried them all and they either have issues with audio export or want to transcode the video resolution to something other than the original size.

The videos were recorded at 720x480 resolution and where transcoded with a combination of Handbrake and ffmpeg2theora... with the final results being in Ogg Theora (.ogv) format.

The videos were uploaded to archive.org and are streaming (and downloadable) from there.

In the HTML 5 video tag I used to embed the videos I used a resolution of 512x288 to avoid forcing horizontal scrolling. Starting with the 3.6 series of Firefox you can play videos full-screen but it is recommended that you simply right-click on the videos and "Save Video As..." to download a local copy and user your preferred video player for best performance and quality.

For those with browsers that don't support the HTML 5 video tag nor Ogg Theora video, you are out of luck. Feel free to download the individual files and play them back with VLC.

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