I am RIPPING my folk's music collection and putting it on a Linux box to serve a Slimdevices Squeezebox.
I will also be adding a lot of free live blues and jazz shows to their collection from sites like archive.org and easytree.org.
I have been using a Slimp3 to play my collection for about 3 years and it has changed my life. I have probably listened to more music in the last year than in my entire life pre-Slimp3. Funny thing is, it isn't the studio stuff I bought over the years (and am completely tired of).. It is the live music.
Extracting resins from the filter media?
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 1
A friend and I were discussing this article a week ago and had some concerns that the resins used for ion exchange may be soluble in the alcohol.
So we asked a chemist. Here is his reply. Also, the Brita uses a small amount of a silver compound to inhibit biological acvitiy. We forgot to ask him about that.
I read the link and I can't decide. The chemical species that do the ion exchange are bonded to a polymer support. It would depend on whether or not anything could be extracted from the polymer support by the ethanol. Often compounds added to the plastics (plastisizers) to give it specific characteristics are extracted. These would be selectively adsorbed by the carbon but??? Also any o-rings or seals (I've never seen a Brita filter pitcher) may be a problem with chemicals extracted by the ethanol. Ethanol is not particularly aggressive as a solvent (2-propanol, rubbing alcohol, is tremendously more of a problem for extracting things from plastics) so I doubt the people were poisoned at any level even measureable. Repeating the experiment I would just use activated carbon from the brewing website suggested in one of the comments. The possibility that the ion exchange resin is removing anything from a distilled product seems small. Unless someone has watered the vodka with hard, nasty tasting water the ion-exchange is pointless.
My friend points out that the water used to dilute barrel strength spirits is critical to flavor, so the IERs may have an effect.
The benchmark referenced in this article gives Intel a big break by not comparing the Athlon 64 in native 64 bit mode. The few articles that do typically don't come right out and show the graphs side by side with Intel. 64 bit support makes a big difference in an increasing number of applications.
Another important fact - a socket 939 based motherboard purchased today should accept a dual core Athlon 64 in about a year. The dual channel memory controller in the 939 version means there will be plenty of memory bandwidth for that upgrade.
Encoding and transcoding video and audio are two great examples of CPU intensive work that aren't "games".
I run natively compiled Gentoo on my Athlon 64 system.
Using gmail.. Don't like it
on
The Webmail Wars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I remain disappointed with gmail.
It still won't open messages in a new window. Is it so unnatural to want to view the message index in one window and open the messages in new windows while retaining my view of the index? I mean, some of us can chew gum and walk at the same time.
On Yahoo, I can do this simply by middle clicking links. Not on gmail. Javascript and frames hell prevent it. As if that makes it "okay".
I still can't find an option to get a traditional chronological view of my inbox. Gmail only seems to provide their threaded view. Many times, that view is not optimal.
No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
No option to show full headers by default.
5% of the time, gmail says it is unavail when I try and login. A retry gets me in.
It is great as an inbox for registering accounts, etc. But aside for the benefit of the 1GB causing everyone else to raise their quotas, it ain't that great.
I've had packet8 for 6 mos or so. Its good except for the massive latency
That has not been my experience at all.
My first p8 call was to a friend to do a latency test. One person counts "1..2..3" and the other repeats the number as soon as they hear it. That gives the lead surprisingly good feedback on latency.
My sister uses Vonage and doesn't have this bandwidth problem, but she's in NY and I'm guessing there's a Vonage interface in NJ.
I should have mentioned that I am in southern Michigan. A friend who lives 40 miles away had both Vonage and VP. He dumped Vonage with extreme prejudice due to quality. He keeps VP over P8 only because VP offers a local number in his town.
For a couple of years, I used VoipBlasters and the open source Fobbit software to do my own voip between Seattle and Virginia. The quality and reliability were far better than any provider I have used to date. That codec rocked and used very little bandwidth.
What really seems to be lacking is quantitative info on the VOIP performance of various retail providers. The reviews I have read are extremely lame rah-rahs. I have done a lot of searches and there just isn't much good data on the web. I'd love to put together a website offering the info (since I love doing performance work), but I haven't figured out how to even cover the hosting costs. voipreports.com links to dslreports.com, but they don't even have a voip link on their homepage.
I just dumped Voice Pulse. I have had their unlimited plan since April. The quality was good for a few months but has been awful since August. This would happen with or without p2p network activity going on in the background. I even tried their lower bandwidth codecs.
VP also raised prices from $35 to $38 when Vonage dropped to $25! What price war?
I have had packet8 for a month. The unlimited service is $20. So far, quality is much better. More impressive is the good quality even with 12 KB/sec of p2p upstream on my cable modem.
I had to do it now. The PCIe wasn't that important to me and support of the current hardware is only now getting halfway decent. I figured I couldn't wait for the new hardware to become mature (no rev 1 for me, thanks!) and for the Linux support.
It took a long time to research the system due to lack of Linux compatibility info. I discovered a lot of info on how well the Athlon 64 CPU overclocks. I mean Really overclocks. There is way more info about OC'ing these chips than running them under Linux.
I haven't overclocked since cranking my Celeron 300 to 366 Mhz in 1999. But I had to give this a shot.. I am typing this from my 1800 Mhz Athlon 3000 90nm cranked to 2430 Mhz with some fast ram. I had it up to 2700 in testing. It screams on Gentoo. I also broke down and splurged on an absurd graphics card, a BFG GeForce 6800 GT. The CPU idles at 36C and the system seems to run much cooler than my nforce2/XP2200. The socket 939 systems feature a dual channel memory controller and the very likely ability to run dual-core CPUs in about a year.
I ended up going with the nforce3 based MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and an XP-90 cooler. Finding good Linux compatibility info was tough. As for issues, things are pretty good right now. No major gotchas. I would buy that MB again.
My main outstanding issue at the moment is an issue with time ("many lost ticks") and an inability to set the hwclock from Linux. Still need to track that one down.
Obligatory performance numbers.. This system replaced that old Celeron 366. It ran 425 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS while the new system does 4914.
Stream performance is quite insane: Function Rate (MB/s) Copy: 4213.8589 Scale: 4148.7969 Add: 4570.0995 Triad: 4564.9183
If you have never used BT and watched how it consumes bandwidth, you really ought to check it out. Pretty neat.
Tools like Etherape will draw funky realtime network connectivity maps. Watching your computer talk to that many other peers makes you feel pretty exposed.
Azureus is my preferred graphical client under Linux. Any other favorites?
The fear is ridiculous because nuclear plants have an excellent track records, because modern designs are inherently safe, because nuclear waste is compact and relatively easy to store.
It isn't ridiculous. As this recent near catastrophy illustrates.
A buddy of mine has a masters in nuclear engineering. He tells me of testing steel alloys for various reactor applications and finding siginficant issues. But because the goal of the study was elsewhere, he was told to ignore it by the professor.
You should hear him talk about how F'd up the Yucca mountain waste storage project is. The government and US industry consider the project solved to the point where they won't even fund further research. He says Europe is much further along in how they encapsulate and handle the waste problem.
Thank you for mentioning that you have both seen this under Windows. That is very helpful..
Funny thing is, I think I see the same problem on my nforce2 under Linux.
I generally encounter it when doing lots of p2p. I find my root disk has been switched to "read only" after various errors. In fairness to nvidia, I should point out that I have not had the problem since swapping out that drive. So my case could be a drive problem. Other than that, I have not seen this problem. Of course I am fed up with nvidia's drivers and run only OSS drivers (which has a huge impact on X11 performance, even just opening new browsers or xterms).
It is very frustrating. I have been trying to choose a socket 939 Athlon 64 MB for the past week. There are technical reasons for my choice and OSS community reasons.. Do I reward nvidia for their support of Linux? Do I deny them based on closed source? How many hours can I spend selecting a freakin' $125 MB? Arggh...
One thing is absolutely certain. There is a huge need for more Linux centric hardware info on the web. Aside from compatibility there is benchmarking. Seen any perl benchmarks comparing Athlon XP to Athlon 64? Why the hell not?
What specifically are you talking about when you say "browser installations under Linux are generally very insecure"? There's nothing in this exploit, for example, related to the security of the browser itself.
Again, we are not talking about any specific vulnerability. We're talking about what will eventually happen because the browser runs as the ID of the user. Javascript and other plug-ins (Flash) compound the threat.
Just yesterday we read on Slashdot that 'All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse.'
If that isn't yet another big red flag, I don't know what is.
Because the complexity and importance of our web browsers continues to increase, security of those applications will never be "solved" or "fixed".
Other steps must be taken to deal with these issues. What we can do is treat the symptoms.
For those using Linux or UNIX, privilege separation (running the browser process as a user ID that has limited rights) and a chroot jail would be major steps forward.
I believe the browser projects need to work with the community to support that type of runtime configuration.. Before a big nasty vulnerability does damage.
Here we are not talking about the MB manufacturer but rather the chipset at the heart of the MB.
For example, the MSI K8N Neo MB exists in a version with the NVIDIA nForce3 chipset and in a version with the Via K8TPro chipset. Just as ASUS uses both chipsets. Etc.
The gotcha in all of this is buying for Linux. All of these new boards and chipsets coming out is Just Great. Reviews that focus on Linux are a huge step forward. But if your primary focus is Linux, being in the early group of folks to give a new product the go can be a Real Bear..
Right now, we're about to see a whole new generation of faster MBs come out. At the moment, I still haven't figured out which MB/Athlon 64 combo is ideal and I've been wanting to place the order for a few days. As much as I want to wait for XXX to release YYY, I have to keep telling myself that my Linux requirement means it is the support date and not the release date that matters most.
Because the complexity and importance of our web browsers continues to increase, security of those applications will never be "solved" or "fixed".
Other steps must be taken to deal with these issues. What we can do is treat the symptoms.
For those using Linux or UNIX, privilege separation (running the browser process as a user ID that has limited rights) and a chroot jail would be major steps forward.
I believe the browser projects need to work with the community to support that type of runtime configuration.. Before a big nasty vulnerability does damage.
I have had an Archos for about a year and have been very happy. The open source Rockbox software is great..
I don't see much point in the Karma. It is expensive.. somewhat unstable.. and like most proprietary products, will be End of Life'd soon enough.
What I would really like to have is WAV recording capability. Though the MP3 recording on the Archos has worked well and I have sourced at least one concert using it with the line-in and good mics.
Good recording capability is lacking in most products.
Slashdot Mirror
I am RIPPING my folk's music collection and putting it on a Linux box to serve a Slimdevices Squeezebox.
I will also be adding a lot of free live blues and jazz shows to their collection from sites like archive.org and easytree.org.
I have been using a Slimp3 to play my collection for about 3 years and it has changed my life. I have probably listened to more music in the last year than in my entire life pre-Slimp3. Funny thing is, it isn't the studio stuff I bought over the years (and am completely tired of).. It is the live music.
A friend and I were discussing this article a week ago and had some concerns that the resins used for ion exchange may be soluble in the alcohol.
So we asked a chemist. Here is his reply. Also, the Brita uses a small amount of a silver compound to inhibit biological acvitiy. We forgot to ask him about that.
I read the link and I can't decide. The chemical species that do the ion exchange are bonded to a polymer support. It would depend on whether or not anything could be extracted from the polymer support by the ethanol. Often compounds added to the plastics (plastisizers) to give it specific characteristics are extracted. These would be selectively adsorbed by the carbon but??? Also any o-rings or seals (I've never seen a Brita filter pitcher) may be a problem with chemicals extracted by the ethanol. Ethanol is not particularly aggressive as a solvent (2-propanol, rubbing alcohol, is tremendously more of a problem for extracting things from plastics) so I doubt the people were poisoned at any level even measureable. Repeating the experiment I would just use activated carbon from the brewing website suggested in one of the comments. The possibility that the ion exchange resin is removing anything from a distilled product seems small. Unless someone has watered the vodka with hard, nasty tasting water the ion-exchange is pointless.
My friend points out that the water used to dilute barrel strength spirits is critical to flavor, so the IERs may have an effect.
The benchmark referenced in this article gives Intel a big break by not comparing the Athlon 64 in native 64 bit mode. The few articles that do typically don't come right out and show the graphs side by side with Intel. 64 bit support makes a big difference in an increasing number of applications.
Another important fact - a socket 939 based motherboard purchased today should accept a dual core Athlon 64 in about a year. The dual channel memory controller in the 939 version means there will be plenty of memory bandwidth for that upgrade.
Encoding and transcoding video and audio are two great examples of CPU intensive work that aren't "games".
I run natively compiled Gentoo on my Athlon 64 system.
I remain disappointed with gmail.
It still won't open messages in a new window. Is it so unnatural to want to view the message index in one window and open the messages in new windows while retaining my view of the index? I mean, some of us can chew gum and walk at the same time.
On Yahoo, I can do this simply by middle clicking links. Not on gmail. Javascript and frames hell prevent it. As if that makes it "okay".
I still can't find an option to get a traditional chronological view of my inbox. Gmail only seems to provide their threaded view. Many times, that view is not optimal.
No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
No option to show full headers by default.
5% of the time, gmail says it is unavail when I try and login. A retry gets me in.
It is great as an inbox for registering accounts, etc. But aside for the benefit of the 1GB causing everyone else to raise their quotas, it ain't that great.
So how exposed is a Firefox user with javacsript enabled, running zonealarm, with a hardware stateful firewall/nat device?
I only use Windows for a particular printer driver, visio and a couple of games.
Just wondering how exposed I am when popping out to the web for a quick Doom hint..
Doom 3 has some cool rendered holograms.
A Princess Leia hologram would have made a nice easter egg.
I've had packet8 for 6 mos or so. Its good except for the massive latency
That has not been my experience at all.
My first p8 call was to a friend to do a latency test. One person counts "1..2..3" and the other repeats the number as soon as they hear it. That gives the lead surprisingly good feedback on latency.
My sister uses Vonage and doesn't have this bandwidth problem, but she's in NY and I'm guessing there's a Vonage interface in NJ.
I should have mentioned that I am in southern Michigan. A friend who lives 40 miles away had both Vonage and VP. He dumped Vonage with extreme prejudice due to quality. He keeps VP over P8 only because VP offers a local number in his town.
For a couple of years, I used VoipBlasters and the open source Fobbit software to do my own voip between Seattle and Virginia. The quality and reliability were far better than any provider I have used to date. That codec rocked and used very little bandwidth.
What really seems to be lacking is quantitative info on the VOIP performance of various retail providers. The reviews I have read are extremely lame rah-rahs. I have done a lot of searches and there just isn't much good data on the web. I'd love to put together a website offering the info (since I love doing performance work), but I haven't figured out how to even cover the hosting costs. voipreports.com links to dslreports.com, but they don't even have a voip link on their homepage.
I just dumped Voice Pulse. I have had their unlimited plan since April. The quality was good for a few months but has been awful since August. This would happen with or without p2p network activity going on in the background. I even tried their lower bandwidth codecs.
VP also raised prices from $35 to $38 when Vonage dropped to $25! What price war?
I have had packet8 for a month. The unlimited service is $20. So far, quality is much better. More impressive is the good quality even with 12 KB/sec of p2p upstream on my cable modem.
I had to do it now. The PCIe wasn't that important to me and support of the current hardware is only now getting halfway decent. I figured I couldn't wait for the new hardware to become mature (no rev 1 for me, thanks!) and for the Linux support.
It took a long time to research the system due to lack of Linux compatibility info. I discovered a lot of info on how well the Athlon 64 CPU overclocks. I mean Really overclocks. There is way more info about OC'ing these chips than running them under Linux.
I haven't overclocked since cranking my Celeron 300 to 366 Mhz in 1999. But I had to give this a shot.. I am typing this from my 1800 Mhz Athlon 3000 90nm cranked to 2430 Mhz with some fast ram. I had it up to 2700 in testing. It screams on Gentoo. I also broke down and splurged on an absurd graphics card, a BFG GeForce 6800 GT. The CPU idles at 36C and the system seems to run much cooler than my nforce2/XP2200. The socket 939 systems feature a dual channel memory controller and the very likely ability to run dual-core CPUs in about a year.
I ended up going with the nforce3 based MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and an XP-90 cooler. Finding good Linux compatibility info was tough. As for issues, things are pretty good right now. No major gotchas. I would buy that MB again.
My main outstanding issue at the moment is an issue with time ("many lost ticks") and an inability to set the hwclock from Linux. Still need to track that one down.
Obligatory performance numbers.. This system replaced that old Celeron 366. It ran 425 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS while the new system does 4914.
Stream performance is quite insane:
Function Rate (MB/s)
Copy: 4213.8589
Scale: 4148.7969
Add: 4570.0995
Triad: 4564.9183
Hmm, archive.org has .torrents?
Whoops- you're right. Archive.org is a great legal content site that actually has *bandwidth* and so does not require p2p.
My mistake, but still a great site.
How about some torrent sites with great legal content?
This site is excellent.
If you have never used BT and watched how it consumes bandwidth, you really ought to check it out. Pretty neat.
Tools like Etherape will draw funky realtime network connectivity maps. Watching your computer talk to that many other peers makes you feel pretty exposed.
Azureus is my preferred graphical client under Linux. Any other favorites?
Doh.
These drives do 85 MB/sec best case. What sort of throughput are folks seeing from fast SCSI drives in Linux RAID configs?
So how many MB/sec are you getting from your
The fear is ridiculous because nuclear plants have an excellent track records, because modern designs are inherently safe, because nuclear waste is compact and relatively easy to store.
It isn't ridiculous. As this recent near catastrophy illustrates.
A buddy of mine has a masters in nuclear engineering. He tells me of testing steel alloys for various reactor applications and finding siginficant issues. But because the goal of the study was elsewhere, he was told to ignore it by the professor.
You should hear him talk about how F'd up the Yucca mountain waste storage project is. The government and US industry consider the project solved to the point where they won't even fund further research. He says Europe is much further along in how they encapsulate and handle the waste problem.
Check it out in this video.
Cray's phase change uses Fluorinert, while the average PC uses Freon.
I went with an XP-90 to air cool my new Athlon 64. The heatpipes arguably make it passive phase change cooling.
Thank you for mentioning that you have both seen this under Windows. That is very helpful. .
Funny thing is, I think I see the same problem on my nforce2 under Linux.
I generally encounter it when doing lots of p2p. I find my root disk has been switched to "read only" after various errors. In fairness to nvidia, I should point out that I have not had the problem since swapping out that drive. So my case could be a drive problem. Other than that, I have not seen this problem. Of course I am fed up with nvidia's drivers and run only OSS drivers (which has a huge impact on X11 performance, even just opening new browsers or xterms).
It is very frustrating. I have been trying to choose a socket 939 Athlon 64 MB for the past week. There are technical reasons for my choice and OSS community reasons.. Do I reward nvidia for their support of Linux? Do I deny them based on closed source? How many hours can I spend selecting a freakin' $125 MB? Arggh...
One thing is absolutely certain. There is a huge need for more Linux centric hardware info on the web. Aside from compatibility there is benchmarking. Seen any perl benchmarks comparing Athlon XP to Athlon 64? Why the hell not?
What specifically are you talking about when you say "browser installations under Linux are generally very insecure"? There's nothing in this exploit, for example, related to the security of the browser itself.
Again, we are not talking about any specific vulnerability. We're talking about what will eventually happen because the browser runs as the ID of the user. Javascript and other plug-ins (Flash) compound the threat.
Just yesterday we read on Slashdot that 'All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse.'
If that isn't yet another big red flag, I don't know what is.
How would this help against URL spoofing?
The point is that current browser installations under Linux are generally very insecure.
It shouldn't take a major security disaster to fix the obvious problems that arise from running the browser under your own ID, etc.
Unofortunately, the recent focus of resources (at Mozilla) seems to be shifting to acquiring Windows users and making browsers more "windows like".
Because the complexity and importance of our web browsers continues to increase, security of those applications will never be "solved" or "fixed".
Other steps must be taken to deal with these issues. What we can do is treat the symptoms.
For those using Linux or UNIX, privilege separation (running the browser process as a user ID that has limited rights) and a chroot jail would be major steps forward.
I believe the browser projects need to work with the community to support that type of runtime configuration.. Before a big nasty vulnerability does damage.
Chroot, in particular, is very tricky.
I have been beating the bushes hard looking for the best Athlon 64/socket 939 MB combo for Linux.
The nforce3 apparently suffers from some IDE problems and a bug report has been filed.
I am currently leaning towards the MSI K8T Neo2 FIR.
I would like to hear about Linux on nforce4...
Also, this site seems to be giving hardware reviews under Linux a go. Any other good Linux-centric hardare sites?
VIA has more problems than I can count.
Here we are not talking about the MB manufacturer but rather the chipset at the heart of the MB.
For example, the MSI K8N Neo MB exists in a version with the NVIDIA nForce3 chipset and in a version with the Via K8TPro chipset. Just as ASUS uses both chipsets. Etc.
The gotcha in all of this is buying for Linux. All of these new boards and chipsets coming out is Just Great. Reviews that focus on Linux are a huge step forward. But if your primary focus is Linux, being in the early group of folks to give a new product the go can be a Real Bear..
Right now, we're about to see a whole new generation of faster MBs come out. At the moment, I still haven't figured out which MB/Athlon 64 combo is ideal and I've been wanting to place the order for a few days. As much as I want to wait for XXX to release YYY, I have to keep telling myself that my Linux requirement means it is the support date and not the release date that matters most.
Because the complexity and importance of our web browsers continues to increase, security of those applications will never be "solved" or "fixed".
Other steps must be taken to deal with these issues. What we can do is treat the symptoms.
For those using Linux or UNIX, privilege separation (running the browser process as a user ID that has limited rights) and a chroot jail would be major steps forward.
I believe the browser projects need to work with the community to support that type of runtime configuration.. Before a big nasty vulnerability does damage.
Chroot, in particular, is very tricky.
For text pattern matching, we don't need floating point ops IMO. For decryption, we don't need it either. So?
So you actually thought you were going to get accurate info?
I created some a couple of years ago and they worked quite well in writer. Efforts to import those bindings in recent versions have failed.
How about some official support?
Big complaint, eh? Openoffice rocks.
I have had an Archos for about a year and have been very happy. The open source Rockbox software is great..
I don't see much point in the Karma. It is expensive.. somewhat unstable.. and like most proprietary products, will be End of Life'd soon enough.
What I would really like to have is WAV recording capability. Though the MP3 recording on the Archos has worked well and I have sourced at least one concert using it with the line-in and good mics.
Good recording capability is lacking in most products.