Sergei Mutovkin’s Rumbling Mumbling

It is just a small statement to support Earth Hour. It is my statement to let governments and people governed by them know that we need to start “thinking Green”. We need to stop waisting our natural resources and use best available technologies to generate our energy. But on a personal level we can also help by recycling, using power efficient products, encourage producers of currently more expensive “green” products by buying only “green”.

Blogs like mine don’t help to solve the problem, they actually make it more acute. Unfortunately, it is a pleasure to have some services available at all times and it is difficult to part from them. But at least we can switch off devices that are not used. For example, even if power supply is just plugged to a power outlet, most probably in this idle mode it sucks a watt or two while the device is completely shut. Even a power supply of your computer can be made more efficient, you just have to ask your supplier of choice be it Dell or Apple. You can use efficient CPUs, like the 45W AMD Athlon 64 X2 or upcoming Intel Atom. You can recycle your old CRT screen and get a small power efficient LCD, or even better buy a lightweight portable laptop and use it as your only computer.

Show them we want to be “Green”.

Great news, according to this overview OpenOfffice.org 2.4 will be contain some nice evolutionary improvements. In fact, OpenOffice.org 2.4 is already available on all major mirrors. My favorite Canadian mirror at University of Sherbrooke already hosts it for almost instant download. Unfortunately it does not look like Ubuntu 8.04 will have it bundled, the last Alpha 6 I’ve tried had 2.3.1…

Waiting for OpenOffice.org 3.0 for OSX (Native)… Give it to me, give it to me….

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find out that Sanyo has announced a new camcorder - VPC-CG9.

The cool thing about this device is that it should cost only $279.99 MSRP, meaning places like Amazon will probably get it in low $200. Will be desperately waiting for reviews with samples to check that they are playable on my Playstation 3. If they are - the device is definitely on my “Wish List” Even though HD camcorders are already all around they are still quite costly and adequate storage is too expensive, though the best two HD camcorders, in my own opinion, Canon Vixia HF10 and Panasonic HDC-SD9 are getting down in street price monthly.

P.S. The link to the camcorder though still unpublished by Sanyo was easy to figure out since just had to find out what was the latest product and add one more to the index.

It has been almost three weeks as AMD has announced the new chipset - 780G and a new power efficient CPU - X2 4850e. Motherboards are available for a couple of weeks already and are quite cheap. I’ve put my eye on this combo as my new server rig (with ASUS M3A78-EMH motherboard that features 6 SATA2 ports - feature that should be standard these days, but it is not). 4850e should be approximately as fast as 4800+ but only at 45W. Great? Isn’t it? But the CPU is nowhere to be found. Is this a paper launch again? Too frustrating…

All I want is a power efficient rig to run Ubuntu 8.04 Server LTS.

April 6, 2008 Update: What a disaster. I want to get AMD CPU first time in a VERY VERY long time and I can’t do it ANYWHERE on the internet one month after it has been announced. I totally miss the point of announcing it at all… It seems Dell is using it already in its business line, but nowhere else. If only there was any Intel based 6 SATA port motherboard I would have dumped AMD idea altogether. Then AMD complains that it can’t occupy its fabs enough… Now I know: it is because CPUs are not available at all, nobody can buy them to require any manufacturing at all. If only there was a cheap G33 based 6 SATA port motherboard except the expensive Supermicro board…..

My home phone number starting today it has changed. I don’t want to publish it right here on publicly accessible blog, but if you e-mail me, I will immediately let you know.

So what did happen? Since 2004 I was a happy customer of FCI Broadband (Futureway Communications) a GTA’s local communications company. Last June I’ve got a happy letter from Rogers telling me that FCI Broadband is no more, they have bought it. But they claimed that I shall not worry - nothing is changing. Though I knew that “nothing is changing” is not for long, Rogers, like any other monopoly closes competing businesses fast, so that they do not compete with their main offerings. Fast forward to January 15th, 2008 and I got a letter from Rogers this time telling me that I have to switch to their “uber-cool” Rogers Home Phone (basically VoIP phone over cable) and I have to do it within next month or my phone is no more. I knew that this was the time to say “Good Bye” to Rogers. Now I have a VoIP phone from Netfone.ca. All features, free unlimited local calling, etc all for 9.95 + GST (no PST as they are in BC) (and you can transfer your existing phone number if it is in the area of their land-line switch - mine was not).

Voice quality seems to be fine, but now I have flexibility to call from anywhere, where there is a free WiFi using my Nokia N800 and its build-in SIP phone (I’ve tried and it works like charm).

Abandon monopolistic Bell and Rogers, switch to VoIP, there are a few choices in Canada.
http://www.netfone.ca/ (they are my current VoIP provider)
http://www.unlimitel.ca/ (they have an ugly website, but I’ve read they are quite good)
http://www.vbuzzer.com/ (very cheap and very popular in GTA)
http://www.gizmoproject.com/ (international, biggest Skype competitor, but Skype does not offer SkypeIn in Canada, otherwise they would have been my choice)
http://www.primustel.ca/ (a friend of mine is there, like it a lot, but it costs twice as Netfone.ca)

You can also order VoIP from Bell or Rogers, but then you will have to pay same old $40+ CDN + Taxes)

Btw, netfone.ca for GTA is routed through https://www.voipportal.ca/ so it might be the same quality as other providers that use this network.

One more thing.

Right now you can get a FREE 416 VoIP number for Life from http://www.freephoneline.ca only about 300 out of 5000 numbers are left. I’ve got mine, they have a Java based Soft Phone and you need to use computer to call, but hey it is FREE!

Great news came just as I was thinking going home (from work).

The news is that Warner has joined Blu-Ray exclusive club. All of sudden my grief about not being able to buy HD-DVD player during the boxing day is gone. HD-DVD is dead, long live Blu-Ray. Now 70% of all movies will be released in Blu-Ray format exclusively. This will eventually lead to the HD-DVD camp studios to abandon that exclusive camp and join Blu-Ray group since nobody will have players for their HD-DVD stuff, except a few hundred thousand early adopters.Too bad so many folks spent their hard earned $$ on HD-DVD equipment…

Get PS3 for $369 from Dell while you still can! What a great device it is…

It seems GO 720 was a good investment indeed. Just a day after my review of the device TomTom has announced partnership with Google to allow adding Points of Interest from Google Maps right into TomTom GPS device. Unfortunately, I’ve left my GPS in my car tonight so I can’t try this new feature, but I will definitely try it tomorrow…

Energy Costs a lot these days. Running server at home is has advantages like access to some of my data from anywhere in the world and disadvantages like constant use of a lot of electricity. These server is currently powered by a very hungry setup:
CPU: Celeron D345 (3.06Ghz 256K 533FSB Socket 478)
Motherboard: Intel D865GVHZL
RAM: 1Gb DDR333
HDD: 2×320Gb Seagate 7200.10

Now progress moves ahead not only in terms of pure performance of the system but also energy consumption. So I’m thinking of the ways to cut at least some of my electricity bill by upgrading my server. There are many choices and the slower CPU you choose the better it gets. But I still want something fast (don’t ask me why). Today I have looked around and found a few “interesting” options. One of them is:

Motherboard: MSI K9AGM2-FIH - 75$
CPU: AMD 64 X2 4800+ 65nm (Brisbane) - 105$
RAM: OCZ Platinum Revision-2 2Gb PC6400 DDR2 800MHz - 65$
Case: Antec NSK4480 - 73$.
Total: 318$

Now the question is is it worth upgrading and spending SO much money but benefit from it only three years down the road in terms of monetary savings? Unfortunately environment looses for now, as the cost of the system is more than I can get back. Now if only I can sell my current server to someone…

Currently downloading several images from Canadian mirrors. 7.10 is still not officially released… so if you are interested in a CD of the greatest and latest Kubuntu or Ubuntu for i386 or x86_64, please ask me kindly and I will burn one for you.

I’m a big fan of Digital SLR photography. One of the advantages over compact P&S is that all SLR let you shoot in RAW. Raw allows you get get better results not only today but in also in the future. This is the case with my photo shooting session of Queen + Paul Rodgers concert back in March 16, 2006. Originally all photos were processed with Canon Digital Photos Professional. DPP converts RAWs into Jpeg but preserves all CMOS noise for high ISOs and can’t recover highlights without manually tweaking the curve. Yesterday I had finally found time to process all the photos again but now with Bibble Pro, which did help to automate quite a few things. The results are much better.

Thanks to Noise Ninja built into Bibble all images are almost noise free even though they are all ISO1600. In the future with advent of better image processing techniques it will be possible to batch re-process all the images again and get even better results. Again all photos are on Flickr and in my Gallery.