Last weekend marked the return of the ‘HCC days’ here in The Netherlands. Ever since the dawn of the home computer, enthusiasts would gather in Utrecht once a year to admire the latest models and buy stuff a discount prices. In the age of the internet, with prices being even lower in web shops and blogs detailing every new gadget long before it hits the shops, this formula lost most of its appeal. What I found most interesting about the event however was to browse through old an refurbished stuff and find stuff worth gambling a few euros on to see if it still works. Luckily, the new formula still allowed for this kind of stand. Because this year, I wanted to replace my ‘TVPC’.

For a few years now, I’ve had an old Hewlett-Packard e-PC (that’s right, with only one ‘e’) hooked up to my TV. I used it to play movies, watch YouTube and surf the web. Its aging 1GHz Pentium III processor wasn’t quite able to keep up with higher bitrate videos, and YouTube’s fullscreen mode was simply too much to ask (under Linux at least). That’s why I was happy to find a Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic C620 PC that looked like the perfect replacement.

This little machine packs a 3GHz Pentium 4 processor, along with DDR memory and a SATA hard drive. The integrated Intel graphics card is fast enough to play movies at full screen, and there’s a PCI expansion slot. All for 39 euros. And it works. Really well in fact. Ubuntu really flies, and all the components were detected upon install. Getting one of these purpose-built office machines is a perfect way of getting hold of a cheap PC with HTPC dimensions.

Sure, this isn’t a true HTPC in the sense that it will record my favorite shows, but it will download them :). I use my DVD recorder for recording, so I call this my TVPC. Using the PCI slot to add a video capture card and adding more storage would transform it into a real HTPC, although the lack of an HDMI port might be an issue. But I have no need for one of those right now. I might spraypaint the beige parts black or silver to make it look more like a regular AV component, but other than that it’s a perfect addition to my home cinema setup.

I’m a movie fan. I go to the cinema as often as I can, but I also watch a lot of movies in the comfort of my own home. I’ve got a neat little setup that is not at all high-end and hasn’t cost me an excessive amount of money. I did hand-pick every component. But because I bought all the components one by one and didn’t quite go through all the specs beforehand, some things didn’t work out as well as they could have. Here are some things to be aware of when buying AV equipment.

1. Get a TV with more than one HDMI interface

Mine has only one. I didn’t even use it at first, but now my cable decoder is connected to it. So I’m out of HD connections. No fancy set-top boxes or blu-ray players for me, unless I go for a switch box of some kind too. Most of those come with yet another remote control, and add to the already pretty embarassing power consumption of my setup.

Having a digital reciever built into yout TV set also saves you an HDMI position, but here in The Netherlands, where DVB-C is the most popular option, TVs with the right tuner are scarce.

2. Make sure your TV and PVR talk to each other

Mine don’t. My LG television doesn’t support Follow-TV or any of its more advanced successors (CEC/AVlink) and as a result does not allow me to pause live TV with a single button. If both devices would have talked the same language, the TV would have told the recorder what channel to start recording That would have been pretty nifty. So don’t be blinded by high contrast and brightness numbers alone. These things are usually mentioned in very small print, but can make a significant difference in the way you (need to) control your setup.

3. Don’t go for ‘ready’ when there’s ‘full’

My TV is HD-ready, as opposed to ‘Full HD’. And while I know that with the relatively small screen size and my current viewing distance I won’t be able to tell the difference, it does make my friends shake their heads in disbelief. And if I ever decide to sell this TV I’m pretty sure potential buyers will too.

Generally speaking I think it’s recommendable to go with standards that will last. 1080p will probably remain the norm when it comes to video for the foreseeable future, so anything less is probably not a good investment.

4. Invest in good universal remote

It’s no fun having to change channels with a different remote than you need to turn up the volume. I got one of the cheaper Logitech Harmony models and it rocks. Your main investment will be in time though, as these things need you to configure them carefully and tweak settings until everything works the way you want.

5. Watch out for lip sync issues

I thought it was pretty smart to buy a DVD mini system, so I could get decent sound when watching DVDs. And it works. The thing is that my TV delays the video a little because it processes the image digitally. Just enough for me to notice that audio and video are out of sync. And the audio system doesn’t have a lipsync adjustment option like some others do. Another thing to look out for in the fine print near the bottom of the specs list.

Things I did do right

Besides that whole CEC thing, I love my TV. It’s got a good screen with wide viewing angles and good colour rendition. It’s probably better to have a good screen with a few bells and whistles missing than the other way around. I also think I made the right choice in going for a stereo audio system. Every surround sound setup I’ve ever listened to (outside movie theatres and not including anything more expensive than my car) hasn’t sounded quite as good as my little Yamaha. Especially not with regular music CDs. I also don’t like sounds coming from everywhere when the image is in from of me, but that’s a matter of personal preference. Once surround television becomes the standard I’ll hook up more speakers…

This week, Gmail introduced a set of skins (”themes”) for their web email application. Luckily, there are a few that are quite functional, but there’s also a large number with obtrusive graphics and terrible color schemes. I was quite relieved to find there was a ‘classic’ theme that looks almost exactly like the old familiar gmail interface. Am I the only one not ‘getting’ this skinning thing?

I’ve often wondered why so many people find ’skinnability’ such an important feature in software. Not being able to change its appearance is a much-heard complaint about Miranda IM, a lightweight multi-protocol messenger for Windows that focuses on low resource usage instead of eye candy. And for that I love it.

WinAMP

When I fist started using WinAMP (which I guess was just about every windows user’s first mp3 player), I remember spending hours looking for a skin that would make it look ‘windows’. There was no way to truly make it blend in with the OS and have it adhere to the same interface conventions. And even though playing mp3 files was a heavy task for computers in those days, WinAMP had a resources consuming skinning engine. In fact, there were thousands of skins available, most of them made by users.

With later versions of WinAMP, the skinning API became more complex and allowed designers to change every aspect of the player’s interface. You could now transform your audio player into an animating egg-shaped metal blob with cryptic alien markings on it, one of which you needed to push to skip to the next track. I remember not being able to control the program on colleagues’ computers because of the interface madness that was their skin.

(Small) Windows only?

The phenomenon appears to be limited mostly to small applications that most users will let live in a corner of their desktop, such as audio players and IM clients. There are programs that change the entire appearance of Windows itself, but those haven’t really caught on. So most users apparently want to choose skins for some of their windows when the rest will look ‘default’.

It also seems that this is mostly a Windows thing. OSX applications usually look clear and elegant and the same goes for most Linux programs. It could be that those operating systems make it far harder to implement application skinning, but I’ve never heard a Mac user complain about not being able to turn their apps into alien artifacts.

Beauty is only skin deep?

It is my guess that applications like WinAMP benefited immensely from the skinning cult that came to surround them. The thousands of skins that were available let user express their personality through an otherwise pretty basic audio player. Competing products offered superior features and even a better sound quality, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to have the coolest looking WinAMP in your office, home or school.

Also, the average 3rd party theme for WinAMP is testament to how you can never overestimate the design sense of your audience. 99% of them is truly terrible. Some of the worst occupy the ‘most popular’ list on the program’s website. I guess that simply to have made a skin elevated your coolness-status to above mere skin users, no matter how poor the result was.

So, Am i missing out on something? Should I witch back to Trillian and skin the hell out of it? Ditch Foobar2000 in favor of WinAMP?

Stephane Grenier sent me a copy of his newly published book Blog Blazers, 40 top bloggers share their secrets this week. Having a new book mailed to me reminded of my adventures into book publishing when I contributed to a book about Flash optimization back in 2002. Since then I’ve become an avid blogger, and although I read very little paper nowadays I was curious about this project. Stephane interviewed 40 successful bloggers about how they became just that, and the results are hard to put down.

First impressions

I have to admit that my initial impressions weren’t great. The cover isn’t my favourite piece of artwork, and the page layout isn’t terribly appealing either. Once I’d read a few of the interviews however I thought I’d detected a far more fatal flaw. Every single interviewee answers the same set of questions. Most of the interviews were probably done by email, but I really felt some of the answers warranted further investigation, for which this rigid format does not allow. The conversation just doesn’t take off in all sorts of directions like a most natural conversations would. But even though I was almost ready to put the book down then and there, I didn’t. And a few chapters after that I couldn’t.

The ’same questions approach’ means you get different views from different people and requires you to make up your own mind. The more of these perspectives you read about the more a consensus begins to form and the more you start to relate it to your own blog. The somewhat monotonous format will probably keep you from reading the book front to back in one go but it does have its merits. Don’t be put off by this either.

Get rich quickly

In my opinion, the focus of the book is a little too much on revenue. Most of the questions are about success in terms of traffic and monetization of weblogs, and even though some bloggers stress that other success factors can be more important I felt the book didn’t quite disspell the myth that blogs are an easy way to get rich. It would have been great to have had a few more questions about the blogger’s motivations and passions.

If you’re serious about blogging and haven’t finished your holiday wish list yet, this might be a good gift idea. It’s not a very expensive book and there is some great expert advice in there. If it leaves you, like it did me, craving for more details, I guess we’ll have to urge Stephane to dive into this a bit deeper and do a follow-up book.

I came across this article on Ars Technica a while ago while looking for ways to improve Flash performance on my two Ubuntu machines. I wanted to see if there was a way to get YouTube clips to play properly. Both my 1 GHz Pentium III and the 1.6 GHz Atom have trouble with Flash videos and especially it seems with Flash’s full screen mode.

Ars tested how much CPU load YouTube caused on some pretty interesting machines.

I knew Flash was slow under MacOS 9, but I never would have guessed it to be more than 6 times slower under OSX. A small web video that pushes a monster of a dual Xeon machine to 40% cpu load is ridiculous.

Linux

It’s very unfortunate that Ars opted not to publish numbers for their YouTube test under Linux. They do however mention worse numbers for a different test. Worse compared to Mac that is. This explains why my netbook is struggling with large Flash movies under Ubuntu when I had no trouble with this under XP.

So what’s up with Flash on non-windows operating systems? Are fundamental architectural differences keeping Flash from performing decently or is Adobe simply way behind in optimizing their player for other platforms?

Improving YouTube playback on Linux

Flash Player 10 offers a significant perfomance boost over version 9, so I recommend upgrading to it if you haven’t already. I also noticed that, on slower machines, turning off hardware acceleration (right-click a flash movie, uncheck the box on the display tab) can help boost performance.

For YouTube and Firefox there’s a greasemonkey script that circomvents Flash altogether and uses VLC to play the videos. This makes them play completely smoothly in full screen mode, but the controls (stop, play, skip, etc) don’t seem to work.

I have to say that I was slightly disappointed by the 8.04.1 version of Ubuntu-eee. I know I blogged about how the Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu would probably be ideal for netbooks, but now that I’ve actually played around with it I feel differently. The 901’s 9″ screen is big enough to use the regular UI, and having even the smallest little popup window be maximized bugged the hell out of me.

That’s why I decided to go ‘back’ to my old setup with regular Ubuntu made ‘eee-friendly’ using the array.org kernel. I put the word ‘back’ between quotes in that last sentence because this also allowed me to go with the newer 8.10 version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex). It may not be as easy as installing Ubuntu eee, but I found it to be well worth the extra effort.

Installing Intrepid Ibex

This really couldn’t be any simpler. Ubuntu’s installer is even easier than the one that comes with Windows. I chose to pay a little extra attention to the disk partition setup (like with 8.04), but other than that there’s nothing to it.

Once you’ve successfully installed the OS and rebooted your Eee-PC you’ll find that the wireless network adapter doesn’t work. Luckily the wired one does, so I grabbed an old UTP cable I had lying around and used that to install the array.org kernel.

Installing the Array.org kernel

The installation instructions will guide you through this. It will require you to type in a bunch of cryptic terminal commands, but it won’t take more than five minutes or so. After that, all the hardware on your Eee-PC wil work.

I went with the ‘lean’ kernel. Why would you want support for all sorts of hardware that the Eee-PC does not have? A high end video card won’t fit into your tiny little laptop, so there’s no need for nVidia drivers. It’s currently marked as ‘experimental’, but I’ve had no trouble with it so far and it does make your 901 boot faster (mine now takes around 40 seconds to boot from power on to login prompt).

Eee-control

This step is of course optional, but if you want control over the Eee-PC’s performance modes and the ability to toggle wifi and bluetooth on or off you’ll need Eee-control. It’s a simple .deb installer download, so nothing tricky here either.

Ubuntu 8.10 has Firefox 3, A newer version of Transmision (the older one worked OK but lacked essentials like a ‘time remaining’ estimate) and lots of of other updates. Unlike with Ubuntu eee you’ll need to manually add Skype by downloading the client from Skype’s website. Ibex was set to medium eye-candy by default on my 901 and you can easily bump it to ‘high’, making it a very sleek OS to work with.

Version 1.17 fixes this issue, and adds a highlight color setting.

Oh, and Ryan Tomlinson has ported WP-Cumulus to BlogEngine.NET. More about his project here.

I’ve been using the Google Talk application for years. It’s a lightweight Instant Messaging client that was built upon open standards and doubles as a pretty good Gmail notifier. My reason for not using another Yabber client like Miranda was that that wouldn’t allow voice chat, which I often use professionally.

Things turned a little ugly when Google decided to add a web-based gtalk ‘gadget’ to Gmail. All of a sudden I found myself being logged into the same account twice, with messages popping up in either the web or the desktop client without any sort of logic. I was quick to disable the Gmail gadget, but yesterday’s announcement of ‘Google Talk voice and video chat‘ had a big surprise in store for me. It’s a web-client-only feature.

In my opinion, Gmail is the best email client, bar none. I use it not just for the convenience of being able to log into your email anywhere, but mainly for it’s superior features and usability. The gtalk gadget is an altogether different beast. It too can be accessed anywhere, but it’s nowhere near as convenient as the desktop client. New chats don’t pop up automatically, there’s no way to have the contact list pop out and you need to keep a browser window open all the time to avoid being logged out.

Up until yesterday it also lacked features when compared to the Windows app, but now the one killer feature that both lacked is available only in the web client. And it works very well. I had a little trouble getting it to use the right microphone, but once that was sorted I was able to video chat with a friend in a noticeably better image quality than for instance Skype has to offer. Audio also seemed a bit better, and the interface is as clean as we’ve come to expect from Google.

So, will video chat eventually be added to the desktop application as well, or is Google forcing us to use the chat gadget? Has the desktop client been abandoned? It hasn’t gotten any new features in ages and there are no Mac or Linux versions. On top of that, the new video feature was been built using Flash, which probably makes it harder to incorporate into an application since Flash is very much a web technology. And will they add file transfer to the gadget?

** UPDATE **

As it turns out, there are even more options when it comes to Google Talk. There is an iGoogle ‘gadget’ that pops out, but that does not have the video chat option. Here’s a little overview:

Am I the only one to find this a bit confusing?

I’ve been getting questions about a possible Chinese version of WP-Cumulus almost on a daily basis ever since I posted the first version on wordpress.org. I’ve tried to reply to all of them with basically the same answer. That I’d tried to create one but failed. And secondly that although perhaps possible, a Chinese version might not be usable due to file size issues. I looked into this again today to see if I could confirm that second claim, and here’s what I found.

A little background

Flash offers two basic modes for text fields.

1. Using an embedded font. Because the font is embedded into the movie, every user will see the correct font, and you will be able to rotate, animate and use transparency on the text field.
2. Using a client system font. This will save a lot of file size because no characters are embedded, but as a trade-off you can not rotate, smoothly animate or dim this kind of text field.

Because animating and dimming are essential ingredients in WP-Cumulus, I find myself forced to use option 1. I’ve written a short tutorial about adding your language’s to WP-Cumulus. For most languages, this is very easy to do.

According to Flash’s font embedding dialog, Chinese ‘Simplified’ consists of 13,746 characters. Basic Latin only has 484, and still adds 27 kilobytes to the Flash movie’s file size. Theoretically, embedding Simplified Chinese would create an SWF file of over 766 kilobytes. This is why I dismissed the idea. 700 Kb is far too heavy for what is essentially a toy.

In comes Microsoft YaHei

Vista comes with a font called ‘Microsoft YaHei’, and as I found out today, that particular font actually contains all the Chinese characters. This enabled me to have another go at trying to create a Chinese version. Here’s what I did.

1. I opended up the flash and set the textfield’s font to ‘Microsoft YaHei’.
2. I clicked the ‘embed’ button and added ‘Simplified Chinese - Level 1′ to the selection.
3. In the Tag.as file, I changed the font name from ‘Arial’ to ‘Microsoft YaHei’.
4. I then published the movie.

I had copied some Chinese text (see the screenshot above, I have no idea what it means) into my test tag cloud beforehand and it was now being displayed wonderfully. Unfortunately, the resulting SWF file was 3.7 MB (that’s right, megabytes…). Putting something like that online would make your blog come to a grinding halt for the vast majority of users.

All is not lost…

I came across this post today, from which I gather that Flash 10 has introduced a new type of text element that finally allows non-embedded text to be properly animated. If this is true, a true unicode version of WP-Cumulus might become a possibility. I will definitely look into this asap.

When visiting family last week, the conversation turned to Sudoku puzzles and how to solve them through software (I know, it’s sad ). My initial impression was that it shouldn’t be too hard to write a program that fills in the missing numbers but, as so often, I now stand corrected.

My first attempt was to write a program that does the following:

1. Pick a 3×3 box of numbers
2. See which numbers are missing
3. For each of these, check the number of possible positions
4. If it fits in only one position, fill it in

While this worked for some Sudokus I soon realized I needed to also pick columns and rows in step 1. That helped. It then worked great on easy to medium puzzles but failed for Sudokus that require some thinking ahead. Determined I wasn’t going to write a chess-like program, I was just about give up when I realized that instead of checking for a single possible position, I could do educated guesses with numbers that fit in two spots. So this is what the current version does.

1. Pick a 3×3 box, column of row
2. See which numbers are missing in those 9 positions
3. For each of these, check the number of possible positions
4. If it fits in only one position, fill it in
5. If that does not happen for a reasonable period of time, go into guessing mode and guess a number with two possible position
6. If the process stalls again, delete all uncertain numbers and go back to step 5

This is how a third incarnation of my little Flash movie came to be, and it now solves pretty much all of the Sudokus I found online, labelled as ‘hard’ or ‘very hard’. As an application it’s still a little rough around the edges. You should see this as more of a proof of concept kind of thing. It is also built so you can see the progress and for low CPU utilization, it’s not at all optimized for speed. Therefore, it can take quite some time to solve difficult puzzles. Nevertheless, if you feel like playing with it, please feel free:

Black numbers are given, blue ones are deduced through logic, red ones are guessed and gray ones are results based on those guesses. Please do not try to edit the puzzle whilst solving, that will almost certainly result in weird behavior.

I realize there are tons of Sudoku solvers out there, almost all of which are better than mine. Please keep in mind that I made this because I wanted to see not if it could be done but whether or not I could do it…