So watching a movie in Totem & the audio is too quiet – how should one resolve this. Not as quickly or easily as one might hope…
- The volume control inline to the cable on my headphones?
- The volume control buttons on the Thinkpad laptop, aparantly separate from the main soundcard mixer?
- The software volume control in Totem itself, presumably scaling in the GStreamer pipeline?
- The volume control applet on the GNOME panel, with its master volume control?
- The PCM output level in the soundcard mixer application?
- One of the other 10 or so soundcard mixer controls which can be enabled from the mixer preferences, half of which appear to be no-ops?
So, to simply increase the output level of the audio on the DVD I’m watching there’s a choice of 6 possible volume controls to tweak. If any one of these is set too low, it constricts the range afforded by the remaining controls. Why does each application need its own private volume control ? No one seriously listens to mp3s in Rhythmbox, and watches a DVD at the same time, so the master soundcard volume control will cope just fine. Likewise, the plethora of soundcard mixer controls is a complete waste of time – I don’t need to control the headphone volume jack independant of the builtin speakers. What the purpose is the PCM mixer control serving, besides providing another way to make stuff inaudible?
Constrast the situation with a Television. There’s just one volume control, whether I’m using headphones or the builtin speakers, whether its switched to the Cable box, games console, broadcast TV, or DVD player. Not 6, just one. Use a computer as my home media center ? No thanks, I like to spend time watching and listening, not playing hunt-the-volume-control.
The BBC is reporting on the Institute for Public Policy Research’s latest report which suggests that voting be made compulsory in the UK. While some may try to dissmiss such a suggestion on the grounds that it infringes civil liberties, but consider the maths for a minute. With elections once every 5 years, life expectancy of 75 years and a minimum voting age of 18, one can realistically expect to have 11 occassions on which to cast one’s vote in a general election. It is pretty hard to argue that casting 11 votes in a lifetime would result in a measurable impact on person’s civil liberties. Democracy is not something that one can take for granted – those living in the UK are very fortunate in comparison to millions elsewhere in the world living under military rule, dictatorship, and other forms of oppressive government. Democracy as a succcessful form of governance has the idea of accountability as one of its core foundations – if they value democracy, the population has a duty to keep a check on its government; casting one’s vote at time of election is one of the few ways in which change may actually be effected. One vote may not appear to make a difference, but when that’s multiplied by the 40% (or more) of the population who typically fails to vote, it should be clear that really anything is possible. While compulsory voting may not solve voter apathy overnight, it ought to reinforce the message that democracy is something one must work to protect – that it is one’s duty to protect it – both for ourselves & future generations.
WikiPedia has a page on the subject of compulsory voting considering the pros & cons, and listing the places with compulsory voting today. There is an interesting fact at the end – the Massachussetts constitution of 1918 has an article giving the general court the power to enforce compulsory voting during elections, although its never chosen to exercise it yet.
BTW, for those who’ve asked – while I’d like to allow comments to be posted without needing a blogger.com account, every time I’ve enabled anonymous posting in the past the spam-bots have gone wild :-( So they’ll have to remain registered users only I’m afraid. If you don’t want to register you can always email me, or reply via your own blog on Fedora Planet.
In my previous apartment in London I didn’t have the space to unbox & use my Hi-Fi, so for 2 years I’ve been listening to music pretty much exclusively through my laptop. While I unquestionably missed the audio quality of my Roksan CD player & Amp, I’ve gotten accustomed to the convenience of not having to physically switch CDs every 60 minutes. A quick move across the pond later, I once again have the space to use my Hi-Fi (yay for cheap Cambridge rents – well compared to London at least!), but it has reminded me just how tedious CD changing is.
And then I remembered the fine folk at Slim Devices who make a nifty little device to connect the music library on your computer, to your Hi-Fi. The latest generation 3 SqueezeBox looks even smarter than their previous models, and with their explicit support for Linux was just the thing I needed. I ordered one of the wifi-enabled versions, which arrived just in time for the weekend, and even after only 2 days of use I can highly recommend this to anyone looking for a similar device.
Installation was a breeze. The server side software comes in an RPM which installs & starts with the only configuration option being to tell it the directory containing your music. Configuration of the device itself amounted to no more than selecting the correct wifi network, entering the WEP key (WPA is supported too), and telling it IP address of the host running the server software. So from unpacking to playing music was no more than 5 minutes of work (well, plus another 5 minutes trying to convince NetworkManager to connect to my wireless network after I had enabled WEP). Along with the defacto standard MP3 support, it also supports OGG, WAV, FLAC and Apple LossLess – with the latter formats, audio quality is supreme. The best thing about it though in comparison to similar devices, is the UI provided by the LCD display and remote control. As well as the initial network configuration, this lets one browse & search your local music archive by artist, album, etc, select from countless Internet radio stations, and interact with other non-music items such as RSS news feeds, weather reports, and other plugins… Oh yeah, plugins – the server software is completely open source, well documented and easily extendable – 3rd party plugins for the device are actively encouraged, and there are some seriously useful add-ons available.
The only downside of all this is that its highlighted the shortcomings in the audio quality of my mp3 collection. Even with a high quality, VBR encoding there is still noticable loss of definition at both ends of the spectrum. So I’ve decided to re-rip all my CD’s into the lossless FLAC format – averaging out at about 400 MB / CD a 200 GB hard drive will comfortably store 500 CDs and if I ever need to switch formats again I can encode straight from the FLACs, skipping over the ripping part.
DV has been doing some great (and much needed) work to provide a stable API for managing Xen, by building the libvirt library. There are already APIs in C, and Python, but when it comes to system administration I’m really a Perl guy so I knocked up a set of XS bindings (in the Sys::Virt namespace) to allow libvirt to be called from Perl scripts. With DV’s recent 0.1.0 release of libvirt I thought it timely to upload the Perl bindings to CPAN, thus there is now a module Sys-Virt 0.1.0 available. There’s basic API docs, along with a couple of practical examples
On an unrelated note, its been great to be able to buy DVDs in Boston/the US at a fraction the price I’d have paid in London. So I was rather surprised to come across a DVD that actually costs more here – Abbas Kiarostami‘s film 10 comes in at 26.99 USD, vs 8.97 GBP (equiv ~15 USD). Never thought I’d be shipping DVD’s from the UK to the US! Now just got to get around to ordering one of the nice MultiSystem (PAL+NTSC) & MultiRegion Pioneer DVD players so I can watch DVDs on a real TV instead of my laptop…
I’m really rather puzzled by why people consider having non-English blogs on Fedora Planet so troublesome. I’m monitoring perhaps 20 big news / blog aggregator sites through the LiFeRea RSS reader, which makes managing large volumes of news output frankly trivial. Out of easily 100’s of articles that get published every day, I can quickly dismiss 90% just based on the title alone, for 10% I might read the short summary content, and 1% I’ll read in full. Dimissing a story I’m not interested in takes one key press to move to the next new article. So really, the inclusion of a handful of foreign language blogs is line-noise & with unmeasurable impact on the amount of time it takes to process my daily news feeds.
So for someone not interested in reading them, the inclusion of a handful of foreign language blogs is line-noise & with unmeasurable impact on the amount of time it takes to process a daily news feeds. Conversely for people who do want to read them there is a clear benefit from having all Fedora blogs on one aggregator.
If there is anything at all highlighted by the introduction of these new feeds its just how far technology regressed when the world ditched NNTP in favour of the web. The capabilities for organizing, filtering & generally managing news feeds over RSS pale in comparison to the old NNTP news readers – no I’m not talking about the lame Netscape news reader – I’m refering to tools like trn or tin – the mutt of news readers! The focus should be on producing better RSS readers…
I for one welcome our French Fedora bloggers, even though I (shamefully) can’t understand what they’re saying :-)