Der Markt für LTE Angebote dürfte sich kaum anders verhalten als andere Märkte. Das bedeutet: Nur Konkurrenz belebt wirklich das Geschäft. Da der Ausbau der LTE Netze aber bedingt durch Auflagen des Bundes in ländlichen Regionen Deutschlands beginnt, dürfte die Konkurrenz hier nicht allzu groß sein. Der Preisdruck auf die LTE Angebote ist also eher gering. Anders dürfte die Sache in Städten aussehen, in denen LTE Angebote etwa mit VDSL und mit Kabel Internet konkurrieren. Hier werden potenzielle Kunden es eventuell als Manko begreifen, dass etwa die bisherigen Vodafone LTE Angebote keine Doppelflat-Angebote mit Telefon- und Internetanschluss und Flatrates für beide Anschlüsse sind, aber praktisch ähnlich viel kosten.

Ob und wie stark sich Preise für LTE Angebote in Zukunft nach unten entwickeln, dürfte auch vom Zeitpunkt abhängen, ab dem Wiederverkäufer den Markt betreten. Bei UMTS/HSDPA Angeboten ist das ja längst Realität geworden. Neben den Netzbetreibern buhlen hier beispielsweise auch 1&1, Unternehmen wie MoobiAir, Medien wie Bild und n24 oder Discounter wie Aldi und Lidl um Kunden. LTE Angebote werden vielleicht mancherorts (auf dem Land) erst einmal fast so etwas wie eine Monopolstellung des einen oder anderen Unternehmens erzeugen, das aufgrund mangelnder Konkurrenz kaum Veranlassung sehen wird, die Preise für seine LTE Angebote zu senken. Aber es gibt Hoffnung: Bisher gab es für die Preise bei Breitbandtechnologien im Lauf der Zeit eigentlich nur eine Tendenz: sinkend! Es gibt berechtigte Hoffnung, dass LTE Angebote hier nicht zur Ausnahme werden.

“How can I use my point and shoot camera to make good photos?”

This article makes a few assumptions since it is not possible for a ‘one size fits all’ answer. There are numerous great articles focusing on squeezing every bit and byte out of digital point and shoots, they include many technical and sometimes difficult to remember techniques. Moreover, everyone is not totally serious about getting the ‘perfect’ photo… getting good photos is what matters.

Let’s assume that You:

• have a compact digital camera.

• like to photograph everyday events.

• are not concerned about details of technology.

• are not interested in hi-fi stuff – just decent photos.

• are willing to spend the next few minutes reading about it.

Here are the points, with a short explanation…

1. Point – Shoot – Wait
Whenever shooting, don’t click and immediately move the camera away… wait for a second before you move your hands. It will reduce the number of blurred photos drastically.

Explanation: Most cheap digital cameras have a problem called ’shutter lag’. It is the time between you clicking the button and the actual photo being taken. Film cameras do not have this problem, neither do the more costly SLRs.

2. Pay Attention to the Light
Look for soft, reflected light for portraits. Slightly overcast day is perfect! Keeping the sun behind your back ensures good overall lighting. Pointing the camera in the direction of the sun will make anything in between appear solid black or extremely dark. Also, do not include very dark and very bright objects in the same frame as long as possible.

3. Get Closer
Cameras with digital zoom are nothing more than a marketing gimmick. If your optical zoom does not get close enough, move yourself closer to the subject if possible. Getting too close and using wide-angle will result in distorted images… so choose the location carefully!

4. Use flash sparingly
A flash usually ruins a perfectly fine photograph. Unless totally required, keep the flash off. Let the camera decide for alternative ways to expose the photo. Use the flash when the sun is right overhead – to fill in the shadows under the eyebrows.

5. Steady The Camera
Many point and shoot cameras also have very low sensitivity to light, hence they have to keep their shutter open for a long time to gather enough light. Next time you are photographing in low light, use a steady object to take support while you shoot. If you don’t have anything around to take support of, make sure you hold the camera with both hands. Before you are going to click, hold you breath for a moment – since breathing almost always causes blur in hand-held night photos. Hope these tips help you to increase the quality of your day to day photographs! Remember, these are the most basic techniques to get good photos… we will discuss more and better ways to improve photos in the coming weeks.

Wine support in FreeBSD isn’t exactly as fine as it is in Linux… or so I hear. Maybe they are right – because I wasn’t able to run Picasa2, neither was I able to run the latest version of Winamp (even without themodern skin). The fun part was that the installations go super smooth… but the applications don’t run at all.

Then I decided to try a small application, one that I was using everyday when I was on Windows – IrfanView 3.99. The shock came when the installer refused to work! Apparently one dll file, the mfc42.dll was not found on the (wine) system. Getting the file wasn’t painful. Search But the program kept getting creative with the error messages.

Finally I decided to try installing version 3.95 of the program and it worked!

Now I had a working IrfanView, but it was still not the default application for image files. So I tried setting it in Control Centre/ Open With in KDE. Nothing seemed to work.

Finally I came across a discussion where it became apparent that IrfanView cannot handle UNIX style forwad slashes in the filename. The solution was to write a script that changes the slashes to windows-style backslashes and then calls IrfanView.

So I wrote a small script that should make life easy for me. It converts the slashes and calls appropriate program via wine for a given file extension.

Now all I have to do is install the Windows programs into wine, update my script to associate the programs with extensions and point KDE to the script which automatically calls the right application.

Somewhat redundant, but I think it serves the purpose for now. I’m looking for a way to find out the proper associations from wine itself and not have to maintain a list of file handlers.

The free calls are supported by 10-second at the beginning of each call. Calls can be placed via a computer, a mobile phone, or even an SMS! Talkster even supports conference calls.

Click here to know more‎

Open Source software gives us the freedom to choose. And like every other case, with freedom, comes the responsibility of making decisions for yourself. Some find it easy, some find it a hassle – but it is a necessity.

Selecting the software that will suit my needs best is an ongoing process. In the Open Source world, programs are updated every day – unlike the proprietary world where the company releases updates once in a while. So, one has to keep up with the new features and pick the ones that are most useful. That also means, this list may change over time…

Here’s my list of software, each given with the purpose I use it for. Now, there’s a catch – there are a few programs that are installed as dependencies (other programs need them as supporting programs) which I might not mention, but will be installed automatically.

Operating System:

FreeBSD/ PCBSD: These are not two different operating systems, FreeBSD is the original lean mean serving machine aimed at large servers and geeks amongst us. PCBSD is a sugar-coated avatar of FreeBSD, aimed mostly at the casual user. I love FreeBSD (and PCBSD too) for its speed, efficiency and most importantly the documentation and software installation/updating methods. Also, using FreeBSD also makes me feel happier!

Desktop Environment

KDE looks and feels the best. Though it is not lightweight as compared to other software, it just “Feels right”. Also, I like the Qt Toolkit which forms the base of KDE. I have Gnome installed, but only as a dependency for some of the software that I use.

Photo Management

Photo management is not (yet) fun on FreeBSD. DigiKam is by far the best software that I have come across. However,in my humble opinion, it has some serious user interface issues. I’m hoping they fix it soon. I would like to try blueMarine but it depends on Java and I’m allergic to Java. I tried installing it but somehow it doesn’t want to work… anyway, both softwares lack one very important feature that I need as a photographer – non-destructive editing. So I’m more or less undecided about what software to use. Picasa for linux doesn’t work on my system even with Linux compatibility layer on. Picasa for windows doesn’t work with Wine. I’m yet to try Adobe Lightroom with Wine.

Photo Editing

I prefer a simple editor for basic retouching needs inside the photo management software, however, anything complex calls for a complex software – GIMPShop (this is a fansite – the official site does not seem to be very useful…). It is a variation of the original software GIMP – made more sensible and easier to use, and looks a bit like Adobe’s PhotoShop.

Batch Image Editing

For adding watermarks to images before uploading to the big bad Internet, I use ImageMagick, a collection of command line tools that make batch editing a bunch of photos pretty easy.

PIM

KDE comes with a good assortment of Personal Information Management software… and since they integrate well into the desktop environment, I prefer them over other software.

Music

Music is a geek’s basic need. Sitting at the computer for hours makes you grumpy and irritable – and having a software that hassles you just to listen to some good music is the last thing you want! Just get AmaroK, and stop worrying about music. It will assist you in whipping your library into shape with inbuilt support for MusicBrainz for automatically tagging popular tracks. It can also rearrange your files in a neat filesystem hierarchy if you wish. Has support for Magnatune, a fantastic music store that lets you listen to and download full preview tracks for free. The list goes on and on – AmaroK can be called “THE” software for all your music library needs.

Video

I’m not a big fan of video, since it makes me wait and look at screen while people take their own time to ramble on about stuff… passive entertainment, which makes you wait. OK, movies once in a while are perfect – I love good movies, so there must be a way of watching them too. KMPlayer does a great job of playing almost any format that I can find. It is a front-end to MPlayer – which works behind the scene.

Office

There are two packages that I switch back and forth between – KOffice and OpenOffice.org. Both of them are excellent, but I find one useful for a particular task and other more convenient for some other work. Until one of them becomes more suitable to all the stuff that I deal with, I have to carry the extra baggage!

Programming

When the above programs fail to deliver or where the task it trivial, and using any of the above software is going to be more hassle than needed, I prefer writing quick scripts in Python. Along with Python, I use Qt Toolkit via PyQ. Editing is mostly done in Kate for all trivial scripts. Larger projects use Eric3 as the IDE.

New Stuff:

DVDisaster is my new favorite! It does some neat tricks to protect my DVDs and CDs and it also reads as much as possible from the already b0rked media! Way to Go!

This change can be called as a Birthday Gift for my subdomain “pbx.homeunix.org”. It celebrated its first year on 27 Feb 2007. The website though, has evolved through 9 years (since 1998) and has found itself on many different domain names, using various technologies for delivering content. It is rightly said “The only thing constant, is change.”. So today we move on to another technology…

This post is being made through the fantastic content management system called WordPress. You can check it out on http://www.wordpress.com/. I have tested it for more than 6 months, and I seem to like its simplicity and its power, rather the power hidden behind its simplicity! In the last 9 years of the existence of my website, on various domains under various titles using various content management systems… I have found that if a website can be edited “at whim”, there’s a better chance that it is updated regularly! What else gives itself to such purpose than a blog? Yet WordPress is not just a blog… is has facility to make static, hierarchical pages – just like a regular website. Hence m choice.

Another reason for selecting WordPress – though I like to have a fancy CMS, but I don’t like the cluttered look and feel of most of the content management systems we have around. This is a website devoted primarily to photography, it should be simple and straightforward because its audience includes mostly people who are not concerned with stuff like “CMS”, “Subversion“, “PyQt4” and “FreeBSD“. They usually don’t really care how many guests and registered users are online. They probably don’t want to know what version of software I am using. Infact, they don’t want to be bothered by this post either!

WordPress lets me keep other pages in the front, and hide the blog away – for the really enthusiastic people. Also, an important feature – I can embed Gallery2 into WordPress, making the experience of browsing this website as seamless and painless as possible. This post is actually “behind the scenes” – the website is still showing the “Website Under Maintenance” page… once I finish setting up the plugins and skin for the site, I’ll lift the curtain. Hope this change is a pleasant one. Apart from the broken links, there should not be much trouble – though I’ll try my best to make proper redirects ASAP. And friends, thank you for your patience, support and encouragement! Keep rocking.

I tested Transcode 360 and had great success with my HP extender, but unfortunately the original XBox is not liking the video stream that it’s getting which results in a jerky playback.  But as you can guess from the name of the app, it works great on the XBox 360 including 5.1 digital audio playback.

Rather than putting together several of my own screenshots, take a look a look at this blog posting.  Note that in the last couple of beta releases the author has switched away from windows media encoder (I’ve never had much luck with WME, ever) over to mencoder which means that this seems to be more performant that WME based apps.

If you have ripped DVDs or Divx files that you want to play back on an extender, give Transcode 360 a look.  There are even rumors of some integration talks between Transcode360 and My Movies.

My summary:

There were a few new and cool things I saw tonight:

• DirecTV allowing HDTV content into MCE
• Some interesting new PMC devices and obviously a refreshed PMC platform
• Comedy Central will be providing content via Online Spotlight
• Live.com includes some very cool TV services including remote recording, remote access to MCE information, and long overdue – recommendations.
• I’m concerned about how many times they alluded to using the PC and 360 as the new advertising platforms.

Below you’ll find the transcript I typed up on the fly – it’s unedited and probably pretty sloppy but here you go…

Bill starts by saying he’s proud to be named Time’s person of the year, glad that he beat out mother nature; had there been one more hurricane he might have lost. 

He recaps last year and focuses on 2006 – Office 12 will be launched and Media Center in the mainstream.

He moves to a flatscreen that might be mounted in the home with all of the information that might be useful to a family.  It includes a map showing the location of all of the family members (GPS), bubbled up news video items that are related to you with the ability to track that topic.  That video is now available on the cel phone to watch on the way to work.

Bill arrives at work with 3 huge monitors and authenticates via fingerprint, that news story he was tracking is on his desktop.  He then logs in to a video conference about the article with various execs.  He then picks up a tablet which is an extension of the main desktop system and drags content from the tablet onto the desktop and into the video conference.  He drags one of the telecon participants into an IM application to have a side chat.  A notification pops up to let him know that due to traffic trouble he’ll need to leave early for the airport – alternate routes are sent to his PDA.

In the airport, he places his celphone on a “smart table” where he authenticates via fingerprint and the table turns into a full display for the cellphone.  Drops a business card on the table and it brings up the info.  Drag the business card onto the cel-phone’s display (on the table) and it adds it to his contacts.  A contract is sent to his phone and requests a digital signature.  Pick up the phone and the table shuts off.

Sets the stage saying that broadband access is taking off, and that software will now enable

Anywhere in the house having the movies you own coming up, sharing pictures with friends and family and screens around the house, annotations.  If these things can all be driven through a central interface, they will take off.  Likewise this software needs to work on any device – it’s software for the user not for the device.  Presence, preferences, information all follows you to your devices.  Watching TV and chatting with your friends about it should be a straightforward thing.

Alot of your information will be stored out on the internet, and once you authenticate that information will be available to you.  Very reliable and very secure cloud storage.  Easy connections between people and devices.

A huge component to this will be the investments that have been made in the Windows platform, both 2’ and 10’ interface. 

Vista Demo – Aaron Woodman

Fresh UI with all applications surrounded in glass.  Taskbar shows live previews of the applications including motion video, as does ALT-TAB.  Flip3D allows you to scrolll through all of your applications in a tilted 3D mode.

Sidebar on the right contains gadgets with information or functionality at a glace – egg timer, weather, pictures, fox sports gadget for up to date sports info.  Can be dragged to desktop for more info.  Sideshow is a small LCD on the side of a laptop to allow quick access to information like calendar without turning on the PC.

Start menu allows you to search for the app, or access the library and search for content anywhere on the PC.

IE Tab Browsing with a twist – all tabs shown in a “slide sorter” type view (my description not his) for quick access.

Windows has built-in parental controls including web restrcitions, time limits, game ratings.

Experiences:  Gaming, memories and music.  He plays Flight simulator with his XBox 360 controller plugged directly into the PC. 

He then opens up the windows photo gallery, including tiny thumbs with larger hover-over images and more useful metadata searching.  Also includes a built-in editor as part of the photo browser, and always saves an original version along with the edited image.  Finally he opens a slideshow with some cool effects, white border around photos and motion, with video mixed into the same slideshow interface.

He then opens up the next version of WMP, which is a clean interface including primarily album art.  Under genre, there is a digital stack of covers to show you how much is in each stack.  Performance has been improved, a 10,000 song library is scrolled through quickly with album art and metadata flying by.  Search is integrated as well.

Van Tofler from MTV comes on stage to announce the new partnership “Urge”.  MTV has a history of bringing music to a new format – TV.  This is a unique approach to digital music – big labels and indies, history behind the music, mood-based personal soundtracks.  The development of Urge will be driven by users feedback and customization.  Urge will change, as thankfully did MTV (Flock of Seagulls reference). 

Demo of urge [looks like a big flash webpage] embedded in WMP.  You can search Urge using the standard WMP navigation, including the entire 2 million song library.  Content includes songs and text.  Channel hubs will be built for the television brands like VH1. 

He searches for Justin Timberlake, and gets music plus some additional content.  A playlist is presented with Justin Timberlake music and other music that is similar.  Justin Timberlake saunters out onto stage to talk up Urge [unconvincingly].

Bill Gates returns to talk about portable technology and begins with Tablet PCs.  New technologies will reduce the cost premium for tablets, including cheaper passive digitizers.  Research has been working quite a bit on handwriting to learn as you work with it.  Driving tablet to mainstream is a major commitment.

Windows Mobile is another major area of investment, with 100 smartphones and 93 operators worldwide.  Bill shows a Palm Treo with photo-based dialing and says how easy it is to use with one hand [note that he uses 2 hands for the demo though].

He shows a Philips phone that is integrated into messenger for VOIP calling, allows you to browse your Messenger buddy list on the phone LCD.

Next Bill moves over to the video.  [Oy, he talked about targeted advertising]  He talks about getting video that is more personalized to you including shows you want, and condensed newscasts down to what is interesting to you.  One experience will get your mainstream video, tail content (niche programming), and will blow open the channel-based culture.  IPTV trials are expanding this year into many different areas, and content will be made available anywhere you want it.  This is where Media Center comes in.

There are now 6.5 million copies of Media Center out in the market, and that will grow into many different areas including portable devices.  There will be alot of enhancements to MCE in the vista version.  The intel partnership is very important with the VIIV platform (pronounced like five).  There are other partner content providers as well desigining new capabilities via Online Spotlight.  They are also partnering with DirecTV to get the Directv video onto the MCE PC, and will also connect up to portable devices and Xbox 360 in HDTV.  Also Sky in the UK will be setting up a video on demand option for media center customers in the 2’ and 10’ experience for existing customers (?).

Joe Belfiore takes the stage to demo MCE.  Announces Comedy Central Motherload with streamed content from Comedy Central and some additional content in a webpage-like interface.  There are 5 new partners today including comedy central.

Joe shows a tiny PC from Averitek (sp?) which looks about the size of an external CD burner, available for $499 with not tuner, $1000 with a tuner. 

He also shows the Toshiba Gigabeat, with a 30GB hard drive with about 4 hours of battery time.  Also shows the familiar MCE interface.  Device flips 90 degrees to watch horizontally and navigate vertically.  Watches Hitch which was downloaded via Vongo from Starz. 

He then shows an LG PMC device which looks alot like a creative Zen but with a widescreen display.

Joe shows live.com, and focuses on a TV service for live that includes content that is recording, guide, and a recommendations service based on your MCE habits and can be tweaked manually to let it know what you like. 

Next he moves to Windows Live Messenger, and one of the contacts is a TV service bot.  Demo initially fails but then comes back with a conversation about TV activities.  “These are the shows your friends like” which is a list based on the preferences of your buddies.  He then asks “What’s on tonight” which brings up a guide.  Then “How about showing SciFi” which filters the list down to SciFi and offers up a trailer for Battlestar Galactica.  “Would you like to record this show?”.

Next up is HD-DVD showing a Toshiba player coming out this spring for about $400.  HD-DVD then fires up on MCE to show not only video quality but interactivity as well.  Scenes and menus are overlays on top of the video instead of swapping out to another screen.  It can also allow you to bring up scene-based information such as actor bios for those who are in that scene.  Player can be internet-aware to keep the content up to date.  Producer commentary is shown via a floating talking head as a layer on top of the video.

Joe goes to “Managed copy” to copy down the high-def version of the movie to the hard drive.

Next we move to the Dell digital cable receiver.  You plug in the cable in the back, and on the front is a slot for your cablecard.  This gives you access to HDTV over digital cable on your Vista Media Center [hard for me to get excited about this since it’s only available in the US].

The new media center UI takes advantage of widescreen high-definition displays.  Joe demos the horizontally-aligned album art, and shows the stacks of album covers by artist or by year.  The movie library shows movies that are available either via DVD changer or that were legally downloaded from HD-DVD. 

Peter Moore comes on stage to talk about the XBox 360. 4.5 to 5.5 million XBox 360s will ship by June.  Celestica will join as a third manufacturing partner to meet additional manufacturing demand.  Xbox Live marketplace allows users to get to new content via the 360, including music and movies.  More partners are coming, including the first sponsored game – Texas Holdem poker.

MS will be releasing an external HD-DVD drive for the 360 this summer.  Xbox 360 is driving the sales of new HDTV monitors, with 50 HD games by this summer.  Al Bernstein comes out to demo Fight Night Round 3 with Bill Gates vs Steve Ballmer (Bill wins).  A playable demo will be available on XBox Live tonight [now that’s a cool addition to the console wars].

Bill Gates returns to summarize:

• High definition is a key theme in XBox, MCE, DVD
• Partners are enabled (including advertisers) by the new platforms
• This all has to work across all these devices and be user-centric

So, I decided to get another card to put in the system and run the pair through a good beating to determine if this combo is something I can now fully recommend.  I ran these cards in my Gateway 901x system during the beta, and more recently for the last month I’ve been running them in my new Athlon64 system (custom build).  The cards were stacked beside each other to try to force any heat issues that might arise, knowing that the Elite has been accused in the past of running hot.  I then challenged them with the new fall season of TV, which means that they were both running at full steam for hours at a time, every day for about a month sucking in all the new TV shows that I could get my hands on.

The result?

Well, this is going to be a short article because I have absolutely nothing but good things to say about the cards.  Picture quality continues to be the best in the class (especially noticeable when using the XBox Extender), the combination of MCE Rollup 2 and the new ATI drivers were rock-solid stable, and my Cool & Quiet Asus motherboard remained both cool and quiet.

Would I recommend dual ATI TV Wonder Elite cards to the Media Center community?  You bet I would.  Simply stated it’s the best card you can currently purchase for Media Center 2005 Update Rollup 2, and I am now convinced that ATI is going to do what it takes to support the card going forward.  At $140 each the cards are still not too cheap, but there’s always the Sapphire version of the same card for $80 which is just a few dollars more expensive than the Hauppauge PVR-150.  For an extra $10 the ATI tuner chipset is definitely worth it if you’re looking to build a new system.

The next challenger to the TV Wonder Elite will be the nVidia Pure Video dual tuner card, which I hope to be able to review at some point in the future to compare to the TV Wonder Elite.

Away mode and Intel’s Instant-On technology are very similar and supported in very much the same way with Media Center PCs.  If you have hardware that supports it, Away Mode allows you to do some interesting new things with the power button that weren’t possible before.  For example, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to press the power button while you’re listening to a CD and it instantly shuts off?  And wouldn’t it be even cooler if when you pressed the power button again it turned back on and resumed playing that CD?  It’s the interaction with application(s) as well as unique power management states that makes Always On a cool addition to Media Center.

Away mode allows you to put the PC into a standby mode where the audio and video are turned off, the fans turn down, but the PC otherwise stays awake to service the recordings, your USB peripherals, and extenders.  It’s an ideal power state for Media Center PCs that was previously not available.  Seems simple, but if it were I guess someone would have done it by now.