One pain point I have with more recent notebooks is that manufacturers have decided to no longer have dedicated function keys for important things such as changing the sound volume or muting the microphone. Instead, these features are now part of the standard ‘F’ function keys which I guess the typical user does not use anyway. But I am not the ‘standard user’ so when I was really fed up with this state recently, I starting looking for a fix.
Back in summer I spent some time working on a Nautilus file manager plugin to automate image rotation, shrinking, removing exif information and PDF’ing the resulting images into a single file. I have been using it quite a lot ever since and especially when treating a high number of files, say 1000 images at a time, the process can take 15-20 minutes easily. At the same time, I have noticed that my 4 thread CPU is not fully utilized as all processing is done sequentially. So I had a look how to run several things simultaneously to speed things up.
Continue reading Multiprocessing for My Nautilus ExtensionIn a previous post I wrote a bit about UMTS being switched-off in Germany by two network operators in mid-2021, less than a year from now. While other network operators have similar plans I found it quite interesting that Swisscom has decided to do the opposite. Instead of switching-off UMTS soon, they have decided to phase out GSM by the end of 2020.
Continue reading Swisscom Goes the Other Way – GSM on the Way Out
After the (virtual) Vintage Computing Festival Berlin is before the (virtual) festival and I’m in the process of cutting, upscaling, loudness normalizing and re-encoding the video stream dump into presentations for media.ccc.de. Ffmpeg is a great tool for this and with the right GPU hardware that the process probably flies. But I’m not a gamer and also don’t regularly modify and cut video streams so I don’t have that. As a result, going through all the steps to produce a final video of a presentation takes a Lenovo X250 2-core / 4 thread notebook around one hour for each hour of video material provided. Due to a lack of proper GPUs I thought I’d do the next best thing and just throw more and powerful CPUs at the problem that one can rent in the cloud. A 16 dedicated vCPU virtualized setup for 166 euros a month that can be rented on a per minute basis should do the trick. Or so I thought…
Continue reading ffmpeg and Those 16 CPU Cores for Video Encoding
Last weekend, I spent most of my waking hours at the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin. And as has become the new normal in our pandemic new world, it has taken place online. As I was running the BigBlueButton video conference server for the event I have learned a lot over the past weekend. To my relief but also somewhat to my frustration, I still don’t know where the capacity limit actually is.
Continue reading Running the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin Online – Some Reflections
Recently, two German network operators publicly stated that they will switch-off their UMTS networks in Germany in mid-2021. I’ve heard about such intentions before from other network operators in Europe a few years ago but their switch-off date at the time was ‘far’ in the future. But mid-next year is pretty much around the corner and it feels much more real now. That’s the first time in my career that a wireless technology that had a tremendous impact on my life is actually switched-off and I feel a bit sentimental about it.
Continue reading The End Of UMTS Is Near… Those Where the Days
Back in August, we finally relented to the pandemic reality and started to organize the 2020 edition of the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin in the virtual domain. Things have progressed nicely since then and we are ready to open the doors this this weekend!
Continue reading Vintage Computing Festival Berlin – This Weekend! – Virtual Edition
I use the XMPP messenger “Conversations” quite a lot these days for end-to-end encrypted voice calls over my own infrastructure and I am quite amazed at how background noise is handled in WebRTC based voice channels on Android devices. When I’m in a ‘normal’ voice call, noise cancellation usually works pretty well until I switch to my Bose headset. Once the headset it plugged in, noise cancellation in the phone is disabled and people find it difficult to understand me due to the background noise in busy places or in the car. Not so with WebRTC!
Over the years, setting up a Linux notebook to access Eduroam Wifi networks around the world has become quite easy. While there is a generic installer script that institutions can customize to help their users to set up their Linux notebook, it has become easy enough in the meantime to just set it up with the standard network manager dialog when connecting to ‘Eduroam’ for the first time. As I recently migrated from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04, I had a look if anything had changed in the setup.
I am one of the few people who have the luxury, the time and the knowledge to run most of his cloud based services for family and friends at home. While this is the most private setup for personal data and communication, not everyone who wants his private data not to be in the hands of globally dominating surveillance capitalism companies does have this luxury. But there are many options for privacy focused people even if they can’t run cloud services on their own. As I keep being asked what I’d recommend, I thought I’d put together a post on how to have as much control over your privacy and your data as possible while not hosting the required servers (‘the cloud’) at home.
Continue reading Digital Sovereignty – Without Running Your Own Services At Home