Search for the Perfect Linux

What next

Now I have a list of Linux distros that will work with my laptops wifi what am I after?

I want something which can access the BBC iplayer, my SMB network storage and play a DVD.

Bonus points for playing any other catch up services.

Search for a Linux wot works

Distrowatch is both a website and podcast about whats new and sexy in the world of Linux

Well after the surprise of Pardus I thought lets slowly go thru each distro on its top 100 list

The idea is to come up with something that can cope with iplayer, hopefully legitimately on my previously used Dell inspiron 1520

Here is a spreadsheet to show how far I got...(blue ones are where the wifi works)

Pardus on Dell Inspiron 1520 with celeron 540

Got a 32" LCD TV and wanted a laptop to watch iplayer on it
So £100 secured a Dell Inspiron 1520, celeron 1Gb RAM 80gb HDD Intel IG (yuck), broadcom wifi chip and Vista Home Basic
What a festering pile of shit!
Video playback jaggy user response non-existent

Well then I found Pardus, a Turkish Linux distro with that gorgeous KDE 4 (which now almost works...)

The WiFi worked out-of-the box, yes I kid you not just gave it my WPA password and bingo, broadcom! Ah!

Anyway this thing flies BETTER THAN a dual core 4GB windows 7 m/c !

AND all the multimedia keys on the side (mute, vol+/- play/pause...) all WORK

The only problem? I keep having to run setxkbmap -layout gb or else it thinks I have a US keyboard

One day I will figure out which start up script to put that in

Or just maybe I will try Mandriva... but loving this Pardus

Hitler for breakfast

Google Lab, home of some grey if not black swans, a great place!

Anyhow my snippets are ngrams and fusion tables

In reverse order, fusion tables shows a link between income and smoking, really poor people don't.

Ngrams shows us what we find important, I tried music(Beatles v Elvis), Hitler, breakfast and to make it all come together tobacco .(Hitler V Breakfast here)

In a nutshell music is right at the bottom of that list, even at the very height of the pop music 60's scene, Hitler just about as important as food but despite the fact everyone is a non-smoker tobacco beats the lot!

Is this the story of the 20^th century? See how eggs overtake smoking during wars, also how by the end of WWII tobacco starts a steady decline, in fact it seems to peek when the worst of the 30's depression is upon us!

Could it be that the reason the worlds economy went into free fall was the smoking habit? Could it be a combination of spending money only on the one product and its health effects snuffed out the rest of society?

This graph would seem to support another idea: that we should talk about Hitler to stimulate the economy!

I look smug as I put away my slide show , put on my coat and leave a table of the powerful reeling from this science based observation

Snow Joke

Ah don't it look all crissmassy and stuff

3600 Frames

An old school super 8 film has 3600 frames, which at standard speed is played at 18 frames per second

That 3 and a third minutes (3mins 20 sec.)

Now 640x480 is a VGA frame in pixels, at 24 bit colour (8 bits / 256 shades for each red green blue) is about 900k per a frame, uncompressed

That’s under 4GB for 3 minutes 20 seconds for 3600 frames, uncompressed

So one 4GB SD card in almost any digital camera will when set to its lowest resolution equal at least one roll of super 8 film

Add in the fact you will be saving jpg and not bmp and you can divide that by 15

So a 256MB SD card recording VGA resolution images to jpeg is about the same as one roll of 50ft super 8 film

Android Audio

Idea for Microphone Array
Ever wanted to record multitrack sound? You know like 5.1?
How, there is usually only one mic jack on a PC?
Well why not hook a bunch of microphones to a bunch of 802.11g WiFi cards and stream it over, a 44100 Hz sample rate @ 16 bits is 705600 bits/sec at full tilt 802.11g could cope with 80 such streams (well in theory), so 6 even 10 should be no problem
HOW
Now the microphone wireless module would be a soundcard style ADC a TCP/IP stack and a WiFi circuit, which would be Google's Android running on some mobile phone style contraption with an XLR socket to attach said microphone.
WHY
An array of microphones recording at the same time can be used like a virtual boon mic, moved by software rather than on the end of a pole. It would enable clearer sound, as you can cancel out the background fuzz look at wikipedia's entry on the subject