Open Source - Linux and Video on a Laptop

Project Log

14 November 208: Facilitated remote presentation to Green ICT Symposium using Skype on an EeePC

October 2008: Installed and used Skype
Once prerequisite libraries were downloaded and installed using Synaptic Package Manager, the downloaded debian etch version installed fine using KPackage Manager. The audio and text function works fine. However, I am still working on getting the firewire camcorder to be recognised by skype and to be available for video.

August 2008: Squeezing out the Inkpad of a C40UX printer.
The lights on the printer flashed alternately. Googling the symptom lead to the diagnosis that the ink pad was saturated. There were lots of useful sites and one provided a copy of the Service Manual, unfortunately the ones provided on the epson site are just the end user ones - but I eventually found the right manual.

It's a messy job. I chose to squeeze, rinse, dryout and reuse the little felt pad rather than try and find a replacement. Getting to the ink pad and then putting the printer back together was difficult but possible with the manual and a star screwdriver.

Then came the bad news - the lights were still flashing. The counter has to be reset using the Service Utility. For this you need a mate with Windows as the only program I could find to reset the counter ran on windows. I guess you could have tried running it under Wine.

After the reset the printer worked perfectly. Though I have never got the Epson Printer Maintenance utility to work. There seems to be a communication problem between the printer and the utility.

May-June 2008 - eeePC on an Aegean Odyssey

February 2008 - Language Problems with KDE (Knoppix 5.1).
Somehow the language settings in KDE got confused. As a result I ended up with the KDE menus in German. After much stuffing around I located the problem in /home/knoppix/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals" After I changed "Language=de" to "Language=en_US:en", see below, I could read my options again.

[Locale] Charset=iso8859-1
Country=au
Language=en_US:en
TimeFormat=%H:%M:%S

Review of Draft HTML5 Specification

August 2007: Video Editing on Linux with Kino

Slides from Talk to SLUG Monthly Meeting

May 2007: Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG) Bootcamp Lightning TalksTalks

March 2007: Cleaning the Targa Laptop, after an Ink Spill
It finally happened! While refilling a printer cartridge, ink spilt onto the keyboard of the Targa Laptop. After a day of erratic behaviour by the computer and investigation of new computers, there was nothing to loose in trying to clean the laptop. So, I disconnected all the cables and removed the CDROM drive, the hard disk, battery and PCMCIA disk. Then held the keyboard under cold running water, which rinsed out the ink.

After ensuring the laptop WAS COMPLETELY DRY INSIDE and OUT, using an electric fan, dryer and the fresh air. I reassembled the laptop and was pleasantly suprised, that it was as though the ink spill had never happened.

December 2006: Greeting CDROM

August 2006: Entry to the Creative Commons and Fedora Project Open Video Contest

2006: Video Production using Linux, Open Source and Open Standards
A long term project is the production of a multi-media family history, which requires the development of a multimedia framework through which to communicate it. The issues are accessibility for a disparate group of people, encoding video in a suitable format. At this stage, while the video includes recordings in a range of languages, I haven't embarked on using other indian scripts - in particular Kanada and Devanagri used for Konkani, Marathi and Hindi.

July 2006: Open Source Video Editing and Publication

January 2006: Linux Log - Digital Video on Ubuntu

January 2006: Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger

August 2005: Linux Log2 - AV

August 2005: Support for Camcorder
The Canon MVx250i records video to mini-tape and stores photographs as jpg and avi to a card. It also has an Advanced Accessory Shoe, audio out, a microphone socket, USB and power sockets (grouped together to the right of the lens) s-video and firewire (below the lens). The USB cable was included with the camera and is required to download data (jpg and avi files) from the card. You need a firewire cable to download the video from the tape. The camera came with editing software (but not for linux), which I did install and use, and it worked fine - including providing a range of video compression options.

October 2003: Switch to Linux
The time had come to upgrade from a 1997 NEC Versa Laptop running MS Windows 95. The computer worked fine but did not burn CDs, had no USB ports and the clock battery had perished (requiring the time and date had to be set each time the system was powered up). More critical than the hardware problems, was the early version of Netscape Browser, did not provide the necessary encryption support required to access an increasing number of websites.

Coupled with the time and energy dealing with threats from viruses lead me to explore Linux and eventually to make the switch.