Open Source

Just in case you haven't heard, Ubuntu 9.10 was released today! I'm really excited to be upgrading sometime next week (I would have done it today, but duty calls) as I've been hearing nothing but positive reviews about this latest version of my favorite operating system.

If you've never heard of Ubuntu before, definitely give it a look. It is an entirely free (as in no $$!), open-source operating system built on Linux. I've been using it exclusively on all of my computers for about 6 years now.

You can download the CD from here. Just download the file and then use a CD-burning program to burn the disk image onto a CD. (NOTE: Don't just burn the file onto the CD. The file is an image of the entire CD. If you're not quite sure what to do, just leave a comment, and I'll be happy to help you out.)

The Cowon D2+. It's hard to know where to begin in describing this little player. This is partly because it is difficult to know what to compare it to. It has a touchscreen and movie capability, so one might compare it to an iPod Touch. But this would not really be a fair comparison for either player. The Cowon D2+ is much smaller, lacks any sort of internet connectivity, and certainly does not boast the sleek elegance and applications of the iPod. However, the Cowon D2+ is nearly $100 cheaper. And anyone who has any experience with Cowon will tell you that one doesn't by a Cowon audio device for internet or applications. One buys a Cowon for sound quality. And the Cowon D2+ blows any Apple device out of the water on these grounds. Even on cheap headphones, the difference is noticeable. (In the interest of full disclosure, I do not own an iPod Touch. These comparisons were made using a friend's iPod.)

So what should we compare the D2+ to? Really, it's an amazingly affordable audio player with video playing tacked on. It is better to think of it along the lines of one of the previous generation iPod Videos. It bridges the gap between the cheap mp3 players that can do video (like the Samsung S3) and those mp3 players that really do do video, like Cowon's own S9, or an iRiver Clix.

Design-wise, the D2+ suffers, as many of Cowon's products do. It doesn't look all that great. It's chunky. Brick-like. However, what it lacks in style, it makes up for in build quality. The D2+ has some heft to it. It feels substantial in your hand. Though made of plastic, it doesn't feel plasticy, if that makes any sense. And even given it's squarish frame, it still fits quite comfortably in a front pocket.

But design is more than just externals. The thing that really sets the D2+ apart, in my mind, are all the conveniences that it brings with it. This is where it really starts to look nice compared to the iPods of the world. First of all, it is charged and docked using a standard USB mini-jack. You know, the kind that you use for just about everything else that you attach to your computer. I cannot stress how convenient this is. I have a single USB cord plugged into my computer that I use to connect my video camera, my two digital photo cameras, my phone...and I can just use that same plug for my D2+. Even more importantly, if I ever lose my cord, I don't have to send off to the manufacturer, or buy a specialized chord. I can just use one of my million extra USB cables I have lying around. Even better than that: I can charge my D2+ in my car thanks to the USB cable to cigarette-lighter plug that came with my GPS. I really don't understand yet why every mp3 player (or every peripheral device, for that matter) doesn't just use this wonderful standard plug.

Another great feature of convenience of the D2+ is the SD Card port. That's right...this is one of the few players you can find nowadays that is actually expandable. I bought the 8gb version, but with the purchase of an inexpensive sd card, I can double, or even triple the D2+'s storage. (Yes, indeed...it is SDHC compatible.) And I love the convenience of popping in/out the sd card to load up new podcasts rather than plugging the player in. What can I say, I'm lazy. I like the convenience, and the knowledge that if I ever get around to filling up the 8gb of space I have (which I will), I'm a 16gb SD card away from plenty of extra breathing room.

To round out the external ports and buttons, you'll also find a proprietary I/O plug (for Video-Out or an external microphone), a standard headphone jack, a power/hold slider, a built-in microphone, volume buttons, and a menu key. It's actually roughly the same configuration you get with the iAudio 7 (with the exception that the iAudio 7 used a standard connection for the Line-In).

Now, let's talk about the user experience. The D2+ is touchscreen. This worried me at first. I'm not a huge fan of touch screens. I like real, physical buttons. Furthermore, my experience with the iAudio 7 did not give me much confidence in Cowon's ability to design an intuitive menu-system. And with a touchscreen, and intuitive menu-system really is a must. Now, to be honest, the UI of the D2+ is...okay. It's actually much, much better than I feared. But it is still a little convoluted, and it takes some getting used to. Some things are brilliant. Others...not so much.

Let's talk about the brilliant things first:
1) The play/pause rew/ff buttons are great. Basically, whenever you're on the playing music screen, simply pushing your finger anywhere on the screen will bring up the play/pause button in the middle, and the rew/ff buttons on either side. They are big enough that it's easy to hit them. It works so well, I can even control the player on the touchscreen without even looking. It really is that good. Just push the screen once to bring up the menu, and then push the middle of the screen to play/pause, or either side of the screen to skip forward or backwards. Brilliant.

2) The menus are context-sensitive. I really like how when you bring up a menu while you're playing an audio file, the menu options are designed to be the ones you would most tend to use while playing an audio file. It makes a lot of sense, but I have rarely seen it done this well. The only thing that would make this better would be to have the menus user-editable.

Not so brilliant things:
1) There are a million options (which is certainly not a bad thing), but they're hard to discover and difficult to get to. This is problem I have run into with just about anyone except Apple. Apple solved this problem by not letting you change anything. But this is no solution. I love how tweakable the D2+ is. But some major work needs done on consolodating menu items and categorizing things properly. I'm sure I'll figure it out in time. But really...why should I have "Display", "General", and "System" settings all in very different places, controlling very similar things? Put it all in one place.

2) There is no way to delete files without syncing the device to the computer. I really don't get this one. On the iAudio 7, I could delete a file even while I was playing it. My sansa clip (which I will review next week) can delete files without any problem. I realized that it may seem strange to want to delete files--but when I'm finished with a podcast, I don't want it hanging around on the system. I get confused which one's I've already listened to. I want to just delete it and be done with it. As it is, though, I have to plug the D2+ into a computer before I can do anything about it. This could easily be fixed in a firmware update, which I really hope happens...but I won't be holding my breath.

Aside from these major things, there are many small pluses and minuses we could go into. But that would get boring really quickly. Let me just summarize by saying that the UI is not as nice as an iPod, but quite usable, and a big improvement from the other Cowon devices I have used in the past.

Now, before this review gets too long, I just want to point out a few other pluses and minuses to the D2+ as a system. The only real minus that I think deserves mentioning is that this really should not be considered a video player. Yes, the screen is fantastic, and the fact that you could just load your videos onto an SD card is really convenient. Except that Cowon has messed up again and severely hamstrung the D2+'s video playing ability. You are limited to playing videos that are encoded in MPEG-4 (XVid works fine), which is not so bad, until you realize that the resolution must be 320x240. It's a huge pain to have to re-encode all of my videos to play. Perhaps the system just isn't beefy enough to downscale a 640x480 file, but it's still annoying. And at this point, a little h.264 love would be nice.

To end on the good points, let's begin with the absolutely unbelievable battery life. I experienced this with the iAudio7 as well, but I'm even more impressed with the D2+. The thing just lasts forever. I'm upwards of 40 hours right now, and I'm still showing about a 1/3 charge. Can you believe that? 40 hours! And this is not just listening to music. I've watched a little over two hours of video on it as well. I suspect that part of the reason that the D2+ seems a bit hefty and chunky is due to the battery. It must be some battery to last this long! But this is really something that I think other mp3 player manufacturers should realize--I'm willing to have a slightly stubbier body if it means I'm not having to plug the player in every day to charge!

Second, (and this is the main reason I buy Cowon products to begin with) the D2+ will play just about every file format under the sun. Sure it will do your standard MP3, WMA, and WAV. (If you use the old firmware, you can even play AACs.) But more importantly, it will play your OGG Vorbis, FLAC, and even APE files. I'm a huge fan of FLAC, myself, so this really is a major plus in my book.

Well, that's about it for the Cowon D2+. I really recommend this little guy, especially if you're a linux-lover who likes using open formats like Vorbis and FLAC. Even if you're not a linux geek, though...the D2+ is really hard to beat for the price.

I know I promised to write more regularly. And I shall. July is almost over, and with it Kids Camp will be finished up. That means a little breathing room in terms of free time. Nonetheless, I know that I need to devote more time to writing. Not just here on this blog, but in general. Even my sermon writing has suffered recently.

A while back, I asked what people would like to see appearing on the blog, and one of the suggestions was linux stuff. Now, honestly, as much as I like playing around on linux, that hobby has also suffered recently. Nonetheless, I still use Ubuntu as my only operating system. And so, I thought that I might share a few things about my experience as an everyday linux user. Interestingly, my first foray into this series won't have a lot to do with linux. Instead, we're going to talk about MP3 players.

Last year, while I was out working on the farm, I finally decided that I was tired with putting up with the closed nature of my iPod. I hated how difficult it was to get music onto the thing if you didn't want to use iTunes. And I hated how limited it was in terms of file format. And, though I doubt this would be an issue for many people reading this blog, the iPod is just not very well designed when you're primarily going to be using it while out on a tractor, or while tossing hay bales from a pickup truck. I don't think Steve Jobs really had that demographic in mind when he designed his player.

So, after looking around for a while, I finally settled on a Cowon iAudio 7 to replace my iPod Video 30Gb. And I was super happy with it when it first arrived. It fit all the criteria I was looking for. First of all, it was fully linux compatible. It looks like just a normal usb drive when you plug it in, and you can drag and drop your music onto it without having to resort to any proprietary programs. Also, it played just about every file format under the sun--most importantly for me, ogg vorbis and flac. It had physical buttons (albeit a little finicky) so that I could use the player in my pocket. And (as an added bonus) the battery life was ridiculous. It could easily go for 50-60 hours before it would quit on me.

Unfortunately, I broke the wonderful little player a few weeks ago. I broke the screen. It will still play music, but it is impossible to navigate, now. So, basically, I have a slightly obese iPod Shuffle.

So, about a week ago, I began researching linux-friendly MP3 players once again. I thought about just buying another iAudio 7, but after using it for about a year, I had enough niggles that I thought I could do better. Mainly, I wanted a player that truly had physical, tactile buttons. The iAudio 7 had a touch surface that was just annoying to use, and then 3 programmable buttons on the top edge. I basically used the top buttons for everything. This time around, I wanted to find a player that was designed for those of us that like the feeling of clicking in a button rather than swishing our fingers over a surface. What can I say? I'm old fashioned that way.

In addition to the Real Button requirement, I still wanted a player that could play my ogg vorbis and flac files (which was, by far, the most difficult requirement).

I ended up with the following players on my short list:
Cowon S9
Cowon D2 or D2+
Cowon iAudio U3
Samsung YP-U4
Samsung YP-P2
iRiver T7 Volcano

Now, these players all vary in price considerably. And not all of them met all of my criteria. What I ended up doing, though, was rather strange. I decided I would try out two players. One from my short list. And another one that was completely out of left field. These are the two players I bought:

Cowon D2+

SanDisk Sansa Clip

Thursday, I'll go into more detail about my experience with the Cowon D2+.

Here's a quick entry that will bore all of you who tend to skip my open source/nerdy computer posts. All the same, I hope it will be of use to some out there on the interweb.

A while ago, I gave a brief review of my new ASUS Eee PC 901 and Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1. Overall, it was a very favorable review, but one of my big niggles with Ubuntu-eee was that it did not support the VGA-out on my Eee PC. Now, I use my Eee to project slides for church, so this was a major set-back, and I was always having to reboot into the native Xandros OS just for this functionality. Until last week, that is.

As it turns out, I was wrong about Ubuntu-eee not supporting the VGA-out on my Eee PC 901. Actually, it does. It just doesn't display that functionality up-front, in a nice, easy to access GUI. This is one thing the Xandros OS did a fantastic job with. You could actually just press two buttons on the Eee to (1) change the resolution and (2) enable the VGA-out.

But, as I've already alluded to, it turns out it is quite possible (and actually quite simple) to get the VGA-out going with Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1. And here's how:

We're going to use a fantastic program that comes with Ubuntu-eee called "xrandr". This program will let us set the resolutions of the internal monitor, the external monitor, and turn the external monitor (VGA-out) on all with one, easy command. The command that I use when I hook my Eee up to our church's projector is:

xrandr --output LVDS --mode 800x600 --output VGA --mode 800x600 --same-as LVDS

Basically, this command first sets the internal monitor (LVDS) to a resolution of 800x600, and then it turns on the VGA-out port (VGA) and sets it to the same resolution of 800x600, and then it sets it so that the VGA-out will mirror the internal display.

I use a resolution of 800x600 because I want the screens to mirror each other, and this is the largest "standard" resolution that will fit on the internal Eee screen (because it's max resolution is 1024x600). Now, you can use xrandr to create one large virtual screen such that the external screen is a different resolution from the internal one. But, unfortunately, Ubuntu's netbook remix interface doesn't play nice with that type of setup. So, for now, I'm happy with mirroring the two displays.

Now, what happens when you want to unplug the VGA-out and set the internal monitor back to the native resolution? Well, you just use another simple xrandr command:

xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output VGA --off

As you can probably guess, this command first sets the internal monitor to the "auto" resolution (which is the native resolution of the internal screen), and then turns off the VGA-out display.

Now, to make it even easier to set up my Eee with a projector, I simply wrote these two commands into their own files, and created icons on the top panel--one that points to the command that turns the external monitor on, and one that points to the command to turn it off. Easy peazy!

Well, mid-term reading week is here at PTS. And, naturally, that means that all good procrastinators will once again turn their eyes to their neglected blogs as a way to escape from the mounting pressures of papers that need to be written and books that need to be read.

I count myself as one with those brave procrastinators. And you, gentle readers, will be the benefactors of our stressed disobedience.

So, what have we in store for today? Well, nothing all that exciting, probably. A review of something that has been reviewed many times over. But, I felt it my duty (er...procrastinatorial duty?) to offer my own thoughts on the ASUS Eee PC 901 and the Ubuntu-eee operating system. That's right! You're actually getting two reviews in one...so we'd better get started! Read more »

Now that I'm back to working semi-full-time again (as a youth pastor), I'm realizing just how useful all these new communication tools that we now have can be. A large part of my work involves communicating with the other pastors, as well as the kids and parents.

For example, this past weekend we had our Fall BBQ. Pastor KC was in charge of most of the planning, but he got help from Pastor John (for sports), the parents (for food), and me (for small group time). We all really needed to be on the same page, so we sent a lot of "Reply to All" emails back and forth.

Here's the thing, though. At least on the Linux side of things, we have some great tools that could have made this whole process even easier. We have Pidgin (with Jabber) that we can use for instant messenging, and it even supports chat rooms and file transfers. This would have made several meetings, where we all had to drive the 45 minutes up to church, completely unnecessary. Also, there is the fantastic Abicollab, which is a word processor (think MS Word) that allows for multiple people to edit online, at the same time. So, when I was working on the small group curriculum, instead of sending out email attachments to everyone to get checked and revised, we could have just held a couple of Abicollab sessions to take care of it in one place.

Now, these are just a couple of simple examples from the Linux side of things. I should note that in a cross-platform situation (like the one I have at church), Google offers most of these services with their "Google for your domain." They have GTalk (which actually runs on Jabber), which also supports voice calls; Google Docs, which allows for easy sharing of documents (though not concurrent editing like Abicollab); and, of course, Google Calendar (which allows you to share certain events to the public, or to particular contacts).

The problem is, at least at church, not everyone uses (or knows how to use) these tools. And so, we end up with mammoth email discussions, physical church meetings that take time and gas, and a lot of extra paper flowing around. I'm not really sure what the solution is. Part of the problem is that there are too many standards floating around. Not everyone uses GTalk (or Jabber) for IM. AIM, MS IM, and Yahoo are all still very popular. Not everyone even uses gmail (which would make switching to using the Google services much easier). What I would really like to see is the person in charge of the church website take the time to set up these services specifically for our church. In other words, run our own Jabber server, so that we can have church-only IM. Run our own mail server, so we can have church-only email. Run our own Abicollab server (which is actually really, really easy), so that we could have a centralized place to store church-planning and finalized documents. Hey, why not run our own CalDAV server so that we can have a centralized, easy to edit calendar?

The tools are all here. We just need someone to make them available. Using them is not even that much of a problem anymore. I don't know any of the current pastors who don't know how to use an instant messenger.

So, what do you think? Do you use these types of tools at your work. And if you do, does your employer serve their own, or do they use the large, centralized servers of Google/Yahoo/&c?

Well, I promised an update about Google Chrome today. Unfortunately, that will have to wait. Of course, this means that by the time I get around to actually writing about it, Google's new browser will be old news and will most likely have already taken over Firefox's number 2 spot in the browser wars.

So why am I having to delay the article? Well, quite simply because I'm having trouble getting it installed. You see, I run Windows via a Virtual Box VM, and it seems that Microsoft is having trouble validating my copy of Windows. (The hardware is virtualized, so they keep thinking that I'm using my copy of Windows on a bunch of different computers.) Of course, the whole validation thing Microsoft makes you go through means that I'm going to have to call MS, explain what's going on, and beg that they will validate my legally purchased piece of software. I've had to do this about 3 times before...and it's just annoying at this point.

Now, I have to get my Windows validated because I need to download the SP2 updates because Google won't allow Chrome to be installed on an unpatched Windows system. Now, I'm not knocking Google on this. Truthfully, I think this is a really good call on their part. Unfortunately, it just means that I can't install their browser to try it out and give my real opinion on it. Hopefully I'll get the Windows weirdness worked out in the next few days.

So, in lieu of a proper write up, here are a few thoughts/concerns/praises I have for Chrome with the strong caveat that I haven't used it:

• It's based on Webkit. This is a good thing. Webkit is most known now for powering Apple's Safari browser. But, it actually started life as KHTML, the rendering engine for KDE's Konqueror browser. Yes, once again, all the good stuff is coming from the Linux side. :) The other reason why I'm glad that Google went with Webkit (instead of Mozilla's Gecko, for instance) is because I have been worried recently about Apple totally taking over and driving the direction of Webkit. They've been pretty slow, for example, in adopting things like the Aria framework (a Mozilla development, but an excellent one) and the audio/video tags I wrote about before. With Google in the bunch, I think we'll see Webkit pulled into a more democratic, standardized stance, especially since Google has already acknowledged a forthcoming Linux version.
• Chrome is Open Source. Bravo, Google! As much as I have liked many Google products in the past, I have simply refused to use them on the basis that they were not truly Open Source. Am I just a FOSS fanatic? Well, yes...but my reasons with avoiding proprietary Google apps are a bit more paranoid, and when you're talking about something like a web browser, my paranoia quadruples. Google is already amassing terrabytes upon terrabytes of my private data through my google searches, gmail, and gtalk use. With Chrome being open sourced, experienced coders can look at the source and actually see what information is being sent to and stored in Google's servers. This makes me feel better about using Chrome--it makes me feel like Google is being upfront about any data gathering they might be doing.
• All the same, I'm probably not going to use Chrome. I'm truthfully really happy with the direction Firefox has been taking. And, if I need a zippy webkit browser...well...that's what Epiphany is for. :)
• One of my concerns about Chrome is what this will do to Mozilla. Firefox has gained a ton of ground these past few years, and I would hate to lose all that to the Google juggernaut.
• However, I do like competition. We saw during the browser wars how competition raised the quality of all the browsers. I'm hoping Chrome will contribute to Firefox also improving.

Well, I guess that's about it. From all the reading I've done on Chrome, the general consensus has been that it's a good browser (though still a little young). I would go ahead and give it a try and see what you think. One area that Google shines is in UI design, and the browser has been in desperate need of a UI facelift for a while now, so I'll be excited to see where Google takes us.

But, if you haven't tried Firefox 3 yet, give it a try, too. These are both great Open Source products, so show some support!

Well, my final sermon out at Boise City is up in the "Sermons" section of BDWHITE.com. I have it posted in just about every format possible (plain HTML, PDF, ogg vorbis, mp3, streaming mp3). If you do happen to try the streaming mp3, let me know if it works, especially if you're using IE. It seems to work fine on Firefox for me, but this one sermon doesn't seem to want to stream in IE, and I can't figure out why. Hopefully it just happens to be my particular IE test case.

I'm really hoping that all the major browsers will get their acts together and start supporting the <audio> and <video> tags from HTML5. Mozilla has already said they are going to be supporting ogg vorbis audio and ogg theora video via the tags in the upcoming Firefox 3.1. (And I think the new Opera is supposed to support the tags as well.) This will make embedding audio and video much, much easier. In fact, the tags work basically the same as the image tag for putting a picture on your page.

The only problem is that the HTML committee didn't specify which codecs that tag should support. This is a big bummer, because it could fragment the tags into something unusable, and be basically the same as before flash video became the defacto standard because of youtube. I mean, what use is an embedded video tag, if the video is a wmv file and you're running Linux or OSX? Same problem as all the streaming video news sites from 3 or 4 years ago. The whole reason flash video works for everyone is because it requires a specified codec. And it's really a shame, too, because ogg vorbis and theora really would have fit the bill for this perfectly. Theora is not the best video codec around, but it is at least as good as mpeg4, and when Dirac comes around, it will be able to compete with things like H264 (which the new flash video is based on). And ogg vorbis as been consistently shown to best mp3, and the auto-normalization you can do with it is just awesome.

Anywho...check out the sermon...and maybe in a year or two I'll switch over to the fancy audio tags. :-)