PocketDivXEncoder

PocketDivXEncoder

This is very very cool. OK it’s possible to do this yourself with the same library, ffmpeg, on the command line. However, this allows you to choose the device and quality you want, and produce the file – easily. I most defintely will pay 6 dollars for that ease!!

I’ve tried to reencode a film for my phone before (p910i). After producing a few command lines that spanned the screen multiple times, and produced jack shite, I gave up! This looks the buisiness.

Mind you it is Windows only….. Grrrrrrr…..!
🙂

Bausch & Lomb Renu solution makes you go blind!!!

FDA says Bausch & Lomb plant inspection to continue – MarketWatch

Well I suppose I should stop complaining that my optician recently switched me to hydrogen peroxide rather than continue using ReNu. I quite liked that solution to, but I think I would prefer slight eye discomfort and longer cleaning techniques to going blind…….!!!

Bausch & Lomb themselves have now told opticians to remove this from there shelves. I wonder when UK opticians will do the same. I was previously on Dollond and Aitchson’s contact lenses by post service. Up to 3 months ago I was using Renu with Moisture loc. It seemed a fairly good product. The moistureloc addition made it a lot more comfortable.

I wonder if this will turn out to be a plant contamination. I guess so. But if the solution itself proves to be a sustainable environment for the fungus, I guess its anti-fungal properties are not too good. If the contaminant are spores, they are fairly hard to kill. Nonetheless a fairly unforgivable product failure!

Software vs Hardware Raid in Linux

Software vs Hardware Raid in Linux

An interesting real case experiment of various raid levels, and file system options.

Using RAID 5 with chunk of 128k, and Ext3 with a stride of 16 and block of 4k seems to be the best!
..and something that suprises me is that raid 50 was slower and less cost effective in terms of available storage than Raid 5.

I spent last night reformatting my raid array into RAID 10, then kernel RAID 10 level (rather than a RAID 0 array of RAID 1 arrays), then RAID 50, before going back to RAID 5. There was no real difference in output, and since RAID 5 maximises the storage space, it was an easy decision.

Which indicates that I need a much faster external SCSI box. All the discs are 10k u160 or better. The box is only a SUN UW Box. e.g. u40. I guess the bus is completely saturated!

For anybody who wants to experminent with software RAID in linux, MDADM is really the way to go. It’s just so easy….!

mdadm -v --create /dev/md0 --raid-devices=6 --level=raid5 /dev/sd[abcdef]1

mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0

mount /dev/mdo /mnt/raid

will create, build a filesystem and mount a 6 drive RAID 5 array. I should mention that between steps 1 and 2, you really should wait until the array has finished synchronising and reconstructing itself. Although this point is not essential, it will slow things down. Also MDADM is quite clever, and leaves a drive out as a spare. It constructs the array in degraded mode. That is the array is missing a drive. This speeds things up as there are less drives to saturate the bus.

MightyPhone – 2

So MightyPhone is actually quite cool, so after the 5 day trial I went ahead and subscribed. 30 dollars plus UK VAT a year. So far is works perfectly with my Desktop, although not with Notes 7 so far!!! It works better than expected with my Phone, and what is quite cool is that the web interface is actually a decent contacts manager and calendar!

When I synch the phone from it’s cradle it uses the tcpip connection of the desktop. Otherwise it uses my GPRS connection. The GPRS connection is not quite perfect, as it keeps choosing my Vodafone WAP connection instead, which fails. So I have to manually open a connection using Opera, then reuse the connection. However, at £2.25 per MB, I will not be using this option too much!!
I have two tasks now….

  1. somehow export all my birthdays from Notes (orEvolution at home) into it.
  2. Try and make Evolution synchronise with the server using the SyncML plugin.

I have no idea if this is possible or not, but if it is, my PIM needs will be satisfied for at least the forseable future… 🙂