Flogs - english

Sony DSC HX-5V - The OSM Mappers Camera? #2

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:15:34 +0200

Its definitly not the mappers Camera. After using it for a week i'll say - save the money for a decent GPS Receiver like the GPSMap 60Csx or similar. The Sony has the problem of non deterministic GPS Reception. Although it tells you it has good Satellite reception doesnt mean it'll write the current position to your images. Under real life conditions the accuracy of the GPS signal is bad and barely usable for OSM purposes. I am used to see which side of the road i was standing at (on my GPSMap 60Csx tracks). With the Sony you'll be happy to be able to identify the correct street. But this is only a random factor. Sometimes you'll get best accuracy - middle of the street, and sometimes you'll have something 100-200m off. Comparing with the GPSMap running under the same circumstances there is no real reason.
The Compass has other problems. It is very sensitive to acceleration and other technical gear. It takes some seconds to get a good bearing so there is no way to use it in the car, while cycling or something. You need to stand still, point at the direction you'd like to photograph and wait for 1-2 seconds.

The only good thing about the camera is the low shutter-delay and the Clocks accuracy. As the clock seems to be synchronized with GPS there is no need to take a photo of the GPS Receiver before. They'll have the same time. Photo v. GPS time offset is always 0. For that little "feature" i wont spent 350€.

JOSM Patch done - GPS Image Direction shown

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:18:42 +0200

So after nobody stepped up to write a little JOSM Patch to show the direction of the image taken by the Sony DSC HX5V i tried my luck fixing it myself. I have never touched Java before and i still dont like it, but it was quite easy to add a little arrow nose to the camera icons. I already sent it to the JOSM-dev mailinglist and hopefully it will be accepted.

Sony DSC HX-5V - The OSM Mappers Camera?

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Sat, 15 May 2010 16:51:39 +0200

Cameras with GPS are rare and typically expensive. Now Sony produces a compact camera for ~350€ with GPS and even a compass to show bearing.

The Camera is easy to use - just put it into Easy mode and start shooting. Shutter-Lag is astonishing low. One thing which is a bit annoying is that as soon as you have a little rain and you have a little drop on your Windscreen the camera trys to make a "Macro" shot of the drop. The Macro automatic seems to be a little too agressive.

The GPS has assitance functionality (aGPS) which means that you may preload the GPS Almanach for the next days. GPS acquisition time is good when you put the assistme.dat
onto your SD Card. This is possible without special software or
knowledge. One simply needs to download the file and put it into the Private/SONY/GPS folder on your SD Card. When done you'll get a fix within 5-10 seconds after turning on the camera.

The first impressions are that the GPS works quite good compared to a GPSMap 60Csx when in good conditions. When entering the car it depends on where you put the Camera. On the passengers seat it already looses fix quickly. The annoying fact is that in case the camera looses fix it writes the last known good position into the image, which is okay when you only want to know which part of the city you are in, but we are OpenStreetMap mappers, we'd like to know which side of the street we are at. So the camera is missing a "shutter block without gps fix switch" or even better a choice what to do with images when there is no fix - "Last known good position", "No position" or "Shutter block".

So when you were planning to eliminate your GPS Logger with using a GPS enabled camera you are out of luck. The GPS is just a workaround when there is no GPS available and it needs training to produce usable results.

Here is another review with some Windows software capable of showing bearing and focal length as a horizontal angle - very nice. Someone working on a JOSM agPifoJ extension?

debian mipsel buildd problems

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:06:33 +0200

Now the mystery has been solved. The crashed on the mipsel buildd rem were caused by a broken fan. Replaced and working through the package backlog.

CFE Fail

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:20:01 +0200

One of the Debian/Mipsel buildds had some problems with rebooting so i thought upgrading CFE,the onboard firmware, would be a good idea. It wasn't:

CFE 1.0.40

CFE> boot ide0.0:
Loader:raw Filesys:raw Dev:ide0.0 File: Options:(null)
Loading: ........... 130048 bytes read
Entry at 0x0000000020000000
Starting program at 0x0000000020000000
SiByte Loader, version 2.4.2

CFE 1.4.2 Current

CFE> boot ide0.0:
Loader:raw Filesys:raw Dev:ide0.0 File: Options:(null)
Loading: Drive status: 51 error 04
Identify Success
Could not load ide0.0:: Boot program checksum is invalid

So Broadcom decided it would be a good idea to change someting with the bootloader checksum and be strict about it - not just warn - Big #FAIL i'd say ...

New Year, New Key, New e-mail address

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 10:17:25 +0100

I was thinking of switching key and email adress for a while and probably 1st of January is not the worst time to actually do it:

gpg --fingerprint CB09F22F
pub 4096R/CB09F22F 2010-01-01
Key fingerprint = 75BF 68EE 879B 5F6A 5AA5 0FCA 90DD 4120 CB09 F22F
uid Florian Lohoff <f@zz.de>
sub 4096R/761E0A69 2010-01-01

Its already signed with my DSA and RSA key and uploaded to the keyservers.

Dreambox 8000 / mediaplayer

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:58:40 +0100

I like my Dreambox 8000 a lot - But regarding the price its unacceptable that it wont play any DIVX/Xvid beyond PAL e.g. 720x576. So whenever you have half way acceptable resolution for your FullHD Display the Dreambox wont play it.

You can guess what my little 2 1/2 Year old thinks about the new TV / Receiver when there is no way to watch his Shaun the Sheep episodes ...

Nevertheless - i am now recoding to mpeg2 16:9 - The DM8000 will play at least that:

mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -vf harddup -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:keyint=15:vstrict=0:acodec=mp2:abitrate=256:aspect=16/9 -ofps 25 -o $outfile $infile

temp files named "l" are harmful

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:20:10 +0100

flo@t1:~$ crontab l
flo@t1:~$ crontab -l

Where is my crontab?

Philips and OpenSource

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:52:39 +0100

Thinking about a new TV i was looking at the new Philips Ambilight Series - In the Manual of the new 46PFL9704 you'll find a page like this:

Rumours say Philips is using a Linux with all the stuff neded to play AVI/H.264 etc ... So - where is at least the GPL and a dozend other licenses - And where is the source (which has lately been removed from the website i was told).

roaming and printing

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:04:23 +0100

I always wanted my laptop to automatically detect my network location and set some configs for the location. One of the problematic areas was printing. I have a print server everywhere and probably a default printer - but i dont want to select the right print server everytime i move subnet etc ... So i cam up with this solution which is based on network-manager (yeah i know - bad software) and cups (client only - no server e.g. cupsys)

/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/02printer



#!/bin/sh



IFACE="$1"

ADDRESS=$DHCP4_IP_ADDRESS



remove_printerconf() {

        rm -f /etc/cups/client.conf

}



detect_location() {

        place=""



        case "$ADDRESS" in

                195.71.4.*|195.71.5.*)

                        place="work"

                        ;;

                193.189.251.*)

                        place="home"

                        ;;

        esac



        /usr/bin/logger -p daemon.info -t location Found location to be ${place} for ip adress ${ADDRESS}



        rm -f /etc/cups/client.conf



        if [ -f /etc/cups/client.conf.${place} ]; then

                /usr/bin/logger -p daemon.info -t location Setting new printer config

                ln -s /etc/cups/client.conf.${place} /etc/cups/client.conf

        fi

}



case "$2" in

        up)

                detect_location

                ;;

        down)

                remove_printerconf

                ;;

esac

So basically - whenever a new interface comes up i check for its ip address and have it set a symlink for /etc/cups/client.conf - The only problem left is with network-managers bad habit of connecting the wireless additionally to the wired network - so i have both networks connected and they'll come up one
after the other ...

Spamstats update

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:11:16 +0200

I am collecting all my spam mails since 2003 - thats a lot in total but allows some interesting stats on the spam i get:

Thats spam per day so begin of 2009 i got around 2300 spammails per day and we are down to a much more acceptable level.

I also have mails predating 2003 but i would need to sort them from the legitimate mail which would be a pain .... Probably i could use bogofilter to do that automatically ....

Palm Pre and Privacy

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:58:00 +0200

I guess this is unaccetable from a security/privacy standpoint - Palm - i'd say you'd better explain this:

Joey Hess dissecting his WebOS

Father - the 2nd

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:57:48 +0200

It was a little silent the last days and weeks. I got father the 2nd time on 28th of June - A little Girl named Rhea ... So Henri now has a sister.

sane and scanner buttons

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:42:00 +0200

After starting to make my home a paperless by introducing a Document Management System i wondered how to use the buttons on my document scanner (fujitsu fi-4120C). After looking around people seemed to have written some software using the libsane backend to poll the buttons. One to name is kscannerbuttons. They all did not fit my needs as i wanted a command line version. Also the fujisto does "only" have 2 buttons (scan and send to) but it has the notation of a function with a 7 segment display which does not trigger a function itself, but may be used to address the function to issue on pressing one of the other 2 buttons. So i started to write my own little scanbtn which regularly polls the buttons, debounces the changes, only notifies a secondary script which contains the policy on change etc. To get the source try:

git clone git://hydra.gt.owl.de/scanbtn.git

getstream has its mailinglist

nospam@example.com (Florian Lohoff) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:35:46 +0100

After repeated requests for a mailinglist i made one for getstream. See here http://gt.owl.de/mailman/listinfo/getstream for subscribing.

Another news is that there is now an official git tree for getstream with all the latest and greatest changes.

git clone git://hydra.gt.owl.de/getstream.git