I currently have about three or four different flavours of Linux running on different bits of kit so I am fairly familiar with the pros and cons of the different ‘distributions’. For ease of use and widespread support, Ubuntu is near the top of the list – so for at least one of my systems, that’s what I have installed.

I have been hearing about how the latest version of Ubuntu (9.01) should have some decent improvements (faster boot sounds promising for example), so earlier today I initiated a system upgrade using the built-in system updating tool. This worked well last time I upgraded, however today, it went horribly wrong… read on dear friend for details of this minor pothole on my otherwise smooth motorway of Linux system maintenance…

I should first say that the system I was updating is accessed via a KVM switch – a switcher that allows me to flip from one PC to another at the press of a button, retaining just one screen, keyboard and mouse. This usually works pretty well, and the odd glitch is resolved by disconnecting and reconnecting the USB plugs.

So, after running the upgrade process for about 90 minutes, flipping between my usual work screen and the installer on the Linux box, I was a little perturbed to see that the keyboard and mouse inputs on the Linux machine were no longer being recognised. I thought I would wait for he upgrade process to complete, thinking it would probably be happy left to its own devices – however towards the end of the upgrade, there appeared a dialog asking whether I would like to save or reconfigure an item – I had no way of responding (plugging in a second mouse directly into the Linux box did not work) so (as the upgrade had now stalled, waiting for this dialogue to be dismissed), the only option was to crash re-boot (5 seconds on the off button).

On re-booting, it was clear that the whole lot was a mess – it would certainly not boot into Linux. So what to do?

The beauty of modern Linux distributions is that they can be installed using a variety of painless techniques – via a USB key for example. In this case, I decided to grab a copy of the latest iso disk (useful to have in any case as it is in itself a complete operating system bootable from CD). Downloading via Bit Torrent (using my installed trusty utorrent app) was blindingly fast – and in minutes I had a new install CD.

The rest is predictable – the Ubuntu installer is completely painless – and I now have a squeeky clean Linux box again.

If you haven’t tried Linux, I seriously recommend giving it a go – you might be surprised. The Wubi installation method makes it a breeze for anyone to install it from within Windows (when booting you have a few seconds to choose whether to boot Ubuntu or Windows – until you uninstall it like any Windows application). At the very least, you will get to see how far the Linux desktop has come since the early days – the learning curve is now far less steep, and if your needs for a PC are modest (email, web, word processing, spreadsheet) I suspect you will be satisfied immediately.

Right, that’s it – I’m off to install some of my favourite bits and bobs on my new Ubuntu installation.

Then along came Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Webmail interfaces to their existing email accounts, and then along came Googlemail. To many people, these mail services are not the sort of thing they think of as being suitable for running their business, but as I said, the world is definitely changing and here I spell out the reasons why one of these services has created a real alternative to the old way of doing things.

Googlemail give you flexibility

Here are the reasons why you should seriously consider moving to Googlemail for your business email service:

1. It can be ubiquitous – available everywhere – from your mobile phone, laptop at home or while travelling, business PC, Holiday Hotel PC etc.
2. It can be configured to collect email from your other email accounts – it can act as a universal aggregator of email services. It can also send email from any of your “aliases” – you choose whether you wish to send as a personal email or from one of your other accounts
3. It has a great spam filter
4. It is better at organising your email. Traditionalists (I know a few like this) may have developed a complex system for keeping their email organised – copying mail on different subjects or from different people into different folders. Googlemail allows you to sort mail in a similar manner, but is actually much more powerful. Instead of folders, Googlemail uses “labels” or think of them as Tags. These give you quick access to the mail you once kept in folders – but here is the killer feature – an email can appear in more than one place – just give it two labels (e.g. “Urgent” and “Personal”).
5. Just like Outlook or Outlook Express, Googlemail has automatic features – it can automatically label incoming emails in different ways (or delete all emails from your worst enemy if that is your wish).
6. Googlemail automatically keeps tabs of “conversations” based on subject, replies and forwards.
7. For people who are (like me I admit it) somewhat paranoid and like to keep backups and archives of really old stuff, It is easy to backup and if wished, archive Googlemail emails using IMAP.
8. The Google contacts utility is slowly getting better and better – and many mobile devices (iPhones Android and optionally Windows Mobile)  are now able to use this as a single source address book (no more address books in different formats in different places hoorah). It is easy to import and export to and from the Google Addressbook.

I hope these features persuade you to have a look at Googlemail – I suspect many who try it will find it a liberating and time saving move and will never want to go back.

This could get a little geeky – so apologies in advance. For people with modern consumer AVC type video cameras however, this little guide could be rather useful.

I recently bought a lovely little video camera – a Sanyo Xacti HD700 see my review on GDGT. This little gem will take nice still photos (7.1 mega pixies with a 5X zoom) and rather good video (720P is fine for my TV). The camera does have a few issues (low light performance being the main one) but for the money (£109 on eBay right now) it is amazing.

Video and stills are saved to SD or SDHC cards which is fine and convenient. The video saved by the device is in ISO standard H.264 and AAC audio which is nice – and the bundled software (Premiere Elements) does a good job of whipping together DVDs and so on – but if like me you want to retain video quality and keep edited video in a decent compression format (H.264 or the open source equivalent X264), what are the options? The answer to this question seems to be impossible to find (try Googling for “mp4 cut edit” or “H.264 editor”  and see what I mean.

As my main use for this camera is to take relatively short clips over the course of a holiday, outing or special event, all of which need joining with nice dissolves and occasional trims, I need to find a way to do this as painlessly as possible. Here is my brief guide on how this can be done using open source or free software.

Tools needed

MeGui – this is a Swiss Army knife for performing all kinds of conversion and muxing magic on various video formats – it acts as as a gui or front end to many other tools

AVISynth – this is another powerful tool – acting as a frameserver for other applications

AvsP – this is a useful editing tool for AVISynth scripts

Outline of the procedure

The steps are:

1. create an avs script to load up and dissolve the clips (optionally tweaking their colour/contrast and start/end points – AvsP is useful here but this could be done with a text editor if you are familiar with the syntax etc.)
2. load the avs script into MeGui and use the auto feature to whack out the finished mp4 file (having selected x264 at the standard constant quality value of 25 or 26 and AAC audio at 128kbps) .

The results are brilliant and give me completed video files for my holidays etc – which I can then save to my media and backup hard drives. These have good quality despite excellent compression and are ideal as my archive format for family video files. Being ISO standard H.264 (using the x264 codec) and AAC audeo, they should remain valid as file formats for years to come and be playable on every future media device worth its salt. For more info on video files, video codecs and audio codecs, I recommend MeWki – see the notes on Containers, video codecs and audio codecs

In Detail

Install AVISynth and MeGui. AvsP does not need to be installed – it will run anywhere.

Run AvsP and start creating your script – here is an example which loads three clips and dissolves between each one in turn with an overlap of 40 frames:

A=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0008.MP4",audio=true)
B=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0009.MP4",audio=true)
C=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0013.MP4",audio=true)
Dissolve(A,B,C,40)

You can also tweak colour and contrast if you like – here is an example that does this:

A=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0008.MP4",audio=true)
B=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0009.MP4",audio=true)
C=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0013.MP4",audio=true)
out=Dissolve(A,B,C,40)
Tweak(out,hue=0.0, sat=1.3, bright=0, cont=1.1)

It is easy to perform all kinds of other actions on the clips – such as trimming and adding titles – e.g.:

A1=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0008.MP4",audio=true)
A2=Subtitle(A1,"Holidays June/July 2009",x=640, y=300, first_frame=0, last_frame=90, + \
 font="Arial", size=38, text_color=$DDDDFF, halo_color=$000000, align=8, spc=0, lsp=0)
B=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0009.MP4",audio=true).Trim(0,4500)
# previous line trims the clip to 5 minutes (4500 frames at 25fps)
C=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\SANY0013.MP4",audio=true)

and so on – best to have a look at the AVISynth site for more details

So now we have a script that will load the clips ready for processing by MeGui – so open up MeGui and in the Video and Audio sections browse to the script you have just created.

A little configuration is required:

Encoder settings
For video I start with x264 scratchpad profile and change the quality setting to constant quality at 25. Select the mp4 file format (remember with videos you have containers such as avi, mp4 and so on, and the video inside these containers will be compressed using a codec such as DivX, Xvid, H.264 alongside audio which will be in wav, mp3, AAC, AC3 – read it up on Wikipedia if this needs clarifying).

On the audio – select FAAC scratchpad and set the bitrate to 128 ABR . On the audio extension, choose MP4-AAC

Now all that is necessary is to hit autoencode – it will whir for a while, then offer to add the jobs to the queue. Once queued, go to the queue tab and Start.

If everything has gone right, you should end up with a nicely edited single file in standard ISO MP4 format with all your clips nicely dissolving into each other.

It would be nice to find something that would do this out of the box, but until then, the above is not too onerous.

Now a little problem

The above technique will only work for a limited number of files needing to be joined. Your mileage may vary – but on my PC equipped with 4Gb of memory, it crashes after around 15 or more video clips. Why? – the answer seems to be that AVISynth needs to load the codec dlls once for each clip – so the more clips, the more memory this eats up and this causes out of memory errors. So how do we get around this problem? My simple answer is to join (with dissolves, trims, titles, colour tweaks etc.) the source videos in batches of 10 at a time, using a very high bitrate to preserve quality as much as possible (e.g. CQ setting of 15 and audio bitrate 192kbps), and then run a final join of the resulting files using the desired final quality and bitrate. The results are, to my eyes, indistinguishable from videos created in a single join process.

Here are some example AVISynth scripts which illustrate all of the above:

Example 1 – join up in batches of 10 clips at a time

Aa=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE01.MP4",audio=true)
A=Subtitle(Aa,"Lefkada June/July 2009",x=640, y=300, first_frame=0, last_frame=90, + \
font="Arial", size=38, text_color=$DDDDFF, halo_color=$000000, align=8, spc=0, lsp=0)
B=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE02.MP4",audio=true)
C=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE03.MP4",audio=true)
D=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE05.MP4",audio=true)
E=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE06.MP4",audio=true)
F=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE07.MP4",audio=true)
G=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE08.MP4",audio=true)
H=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE09.MP4",audio=true)
I=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE10.MP4",audio=true)
J=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\FILE11.MP4",audio=true)
out = Dissolve(A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,40)
Tweak(out,hue=0.0, sat=1.3, bright=0, cont=1.1

Once you have the resulting files, join them up using the final desired quality and bitrate:

A=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\Full1-muxed.MP4",audio=true)
B=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\Full2-muxed.MP4",audio=true)
C=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\Full3-muxed.MP4",audio=true)
D=DirectShowSource("C:\Users\Julian\Desktop\VidSource\Full4-muxed.MP4",audio=true)
Dissolve(A,B,C,D,40)

And that gives you the finished long video all nicely edited with cross dissolving transitions between each clip.

Of course I am joking, but it is of course true, email in it’s most basic form is and has always been an insecure method of communication.

First, a bit of background…

There are various techniques used to access email, each with pros and cons…

1. the standard way
2. the big business way
3. the web way
4. the mixed up and mobile way

1. The Standard Way
this is my way of saying – POP3 for getting your email and SMTP for sending your email. This is the way most ‘normal’ people did it until webmail came along and especially the younger generation started using Hotmail, Yahoo etc. The POP and SMTP servers would be located at your ISP, incoming (POP) mail would be held on their server until you connected and sucked it all down as a lump. Outgoing (SMTP) mail would be ‘relayed’ by your ISP’s SMTP server out onto the Internet where it magically found it’s way to the destination.

The security issue here is that the mail data is easy to snatch our of the Internet data stream – governments do it all the time in an automated manner to check for hot words relating to terrorism and crime.

Now this might not seem especially important to you (“who cares if people read my mail – I know it is insecure so I never put sensitive information in it”) – but whoaaa! You have forgotten something – if you are collecting email from an email account outside your ISP – the logon data (username and password, is also being sent in the clear. The only way to secure this is to enforce the use of SSL (or TLS) data connections to your email hosting service – in this way as a minimum the logon data is kept totally secure – even if once mail is passed out onto the Internet on it’s way to it’s destination, this verneer of security is removed and it is sent in the clear once again.

2. The Big Business Way
this is my way of indicating that many (most?) large companies employ their own email servers (e.g. Exchange Server) and therefore the internal emails may never leave the company network, and log-on data is never passed out onto the Internet.

Of course, once emails are flying around the Internet, once again they are going to be in the clear and available for anyone to snoop.

Once area of regular debate is the extent to which companies may snoop on their employees’ emails – ho ho – that is always good for a laugh. Many a high flyer has been brought down to earth as a result of inappropriate emailing activities. I believe the law states that emails created using company property in company time are the property of that company – so it has every right to snoop.

3. The Web Way
Hotmail was probably the first big webmail only service -but now there are many others. My own favourite is Googlemail – more of that in another blog post!

Webmail brings with it many security questions:

- many people in Internet Cafes have found to their horror that their email account has been hijacked (moral: LOG OFF when you have finished!)
- the fact that you CAN log on anywhere opens up the opportunity for username and password snooping.
- as people need to be able to remember their logon details, they tend to use short and easy to attack passwords.

The best webmail services (e.g. Googlemail) allow you to use secure (SSL) connections to both log on and to read and send emails – now this is approaching a gold standard.