Computing

Things To Do Immediately After Getting Your TMNet UNIFI (HSBB)

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Little Introduction:

On March 2010, Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) launched its High Speed Broadband (HSBB) service, called ‘UniFi‘. TM’s UniFi high speed broadband packages comprises services of high speed Internet, video (IPTV), and phone, with speeds of 5 Mbps, 10Mbps and 20Mbps.

Upon sign up, the customer will receive 4 pieces of equipment:

  • Fiber Broadband Termination Unit (BTU), ie. where you connect the fiber optic cable into.
  • WiFi router (D-Link, D-615 with custom firmware), which is plugged into the fiber BTU.
  • Set-Top box for IPTV and VoD, which will plug into the WiFi router.
  • DECT phone plugged into the Fiber BTU.

I’m not going to rant about the UniFi or TMNet’s services, nor speed, nor the much debated bandwith cap that TM said they’re going to impose.

I’m going to talk about the security (or the lack thereof) of the default WiFi router setup.

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Playing 1080p Video in Ubuntu Without Lag

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I have not-so-bad specs for my laptop:
– Dell XPS M1530
– Intel Code 2 Duo CPU 2.40GHz
– 4GB RAM
– Running Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10

I have no problem running 720p .mkv HD video files. No lagging, no dropped frames whatsover. However, when running 1080p .mkv files, especially those big sizes full-HD Blue Ray medias, I have:
– Lagging,
– Dropped frames,
– 100% CPU utilizations.

It doesn’t matter if I’m using VLC, or Totem Movie Player, it will always have those problem above. From what I’ve read, this is probably due to FFMpeg codecs for H.264 decoding.

However, I have a solution, found from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1037625

Below are the steps:
1. Install mplayer:
sudo apt-get install mplayer-nogui

2. Run your 1080p .mkv files with it:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau /path/to/the/mkv/file

Now the HD movies playing in my Ubuntu laptop are smooth as it can be.
Try it out. Cheers.

How to Enhance Your Linux Desktop with Conky

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I have been using Conky as my desktop monitoring widgets for quite some time now. Before this, I’ve been using few applications like screenlets and gdesklets, but there’s a lot of drawbacks on these applications. Among them were limited customizations, it’s difficult to develop your own widgets, unable to find widgets you’re looking for, and if you do find them, they are too buggy to be used in the first place.

Then, I’ve found Conky. I’ll never turn back.

This is the best system monitor I have ever experienced. It is highly customizable, all you have to do is modify the Conky config file. There’s a lot of widgets/variables to use, such as system monitoring tools (CPU, RAM, SWAP, Hard Drive, etc), batteries capacity, networking, and more. And best of all, it is very, very easy to create your own widgets. If you know any programming language such as Python, Perl, or even a simple Shell Scripts, then you’re off to create your own.

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Google Wave – What Email Would Look Like If It Were Invented Today

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What is a Wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

More info on:
Google Wave
Google Wave “Is What Email Would Look Like If It Were Invented Today”
Google Wave Video Demo Makes a Little More Sense of Wave

Extend Transmission Torrent with Scripts

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Transmission is one of my favourite bittorrent client. However, it’s lack the feature of running command(s) before or after you have finished downloading. Luckily we can improvise this with the help of transmission-remote, a command based client for transmission, and along with some Linux bash scripting.

Below I have created a simple bash script. What it does is, converting all of the finished avi’s to wmv. The conversion is via ffmpeg. The script below is easily modified to suit your needs, such as:
i – Copying the finished torrent to another location.
ii – Doing any conversion to your media.
iii – Send you mail notifying the torrent have finished downloading.
iv – etc, etc.

So, let’s get started.
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