Just few days ago Miro, billed as ‘Groundbreaking Internet TV software“, the open and free video player, has gone 1.0, and launched in a polished, slick package for Linux, Mac and Windows. Miro (formerly Democracy Player) is the open and free alternative to Joost, Windows Media Player and iTunes for getting, watching and organizing your video. In place of DRM and proprietary formats, Miro uses the VLC video-engine to play practically every video format under the sun. It has over 2,700 channels of free content, and it uses BitTorrent to download, which means that the creators you love won’t get clobbered by bandwidth bills when their videos get popular.

Miro allows you to search, subscribe to, and view any number of video podcasts. A handy guide is built right into the client so you’ll never be without content, but if you can’t find something that strikes your fancy there the ability to search across a number of video sharing sites is also baked right into the app.

Miro 1.0 also takes a bold stand against main competitor Joost. The revamped front door of the site has a huge banner reading “Better Than Joost.” (Miro vs Joost comparison) [I personally haven’t tried Joost, but liked Democracy Player]

Here’s run down of some new features:

• Video Format Support — Miro claims it can play just about anything, MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and more. I’ve yet to encounter a file that didn’t play in Miro.

• 

  Video Playlists and Watched Folders — if you aren’t grabbing all your video content through Miro, just tell the app where you’re storing it and it’ll show up in your playlists regardless of where you got it.

• BitTorrent and RSS support — Miro can download individual BitTorrent files and torrents that are in feeds and you can subscribe to any video RSS feed you like. There’s even a setting to auto-download new videos whenever they show up in a subscribed feed.
• Saved Search Channels — like smart folders essentially. If you search for a something specific across sites and you like the results, you can add it as a channel and new videos will appear that meet the saved search criteria.
• Social site integration — Got a video you like and want to tell the world? Every video in Miro has quick links to post to Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and Video Bomb.

Miro is created by a charitable foundation called the Participatory Culture Foundation, an organization that also makes complimentary, free packages like Broadcast Machine (for publishing your own video channels) and VideoBomb (like Digg, but for video). The foundation pays programmers to improve the technology, and it’s entirely free to use and improve.

“I love Miro because it just works, no other video on the web is like that,” said John Lilly, COO of Mozilla and a PCF board member. “Miro represents a great blend between a web application and a desktop application.”

Miro allows you to organize your subscriptions in channels, create playlists, and much more. Miro is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Link

Spend few hours of your this weekend trying out this great new and finalized killer application.

Miro’s launch comes at a crucial time in the fight for open media. Net neutrality, media consolidation, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) are all causing controversy online. Miro comes down firmly on the side of openness.

UPDATE to my Previous Post: After tweaking a little with the position of the camera and playing around with the light source, and then later returning back webcam to it’s original position, the view is much better, I mean the brightness/contrast, compared to what I got from my initial experience. I am not sure whether this has something to do with UVC driver, Skype or them together. Still, I’d like Skype to include webcam controls in it’s next release.

There is another problem though. When seeing/watching other persons webcam, in status window I see only around 1/4th of the whole picture (upper-left corner), and to view the picture completely the only option is to make the video full screen. Switching to double size mode, it only zooms that 1/4th of the screen while leaving the rest intact/out of view. Here is a rough idea of what I mean:

Looking forward to a better release with bugs resolved and few more features added. I can surely say that Skype is now perhaps my number one Video IM for now, as Kopete still has a lot to add, and Pidgin got no video option as of today.

Another Update:  The problem definitely seems to be in UVC driver in conjunction with Skype. I tried quiting Skype and loging off from KDE and then again relaunching Skype,and the picture again was very dark. Launched Kopete and then manipulated with webcam settings there, and bam, all good, the picture is now good back again in Skype. So as I said before, add tweaking/manipulation in Skype under webcam settings tab.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Quality Assurance leader, announced a preview of the Spread Firefox 2 site that will be the future home to all Firefox enthusiasts out there.

On October 28^th, Intel released the reviews on the new “Penryn” Core 2 processor, specifically the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX9650. The QX9650 has a lot of new features and welcomes a new generation to the Core 2 processor family. So what are these features and how will they equate into benefits to the consumer and, more specifically, Linux users? That’s what Linux Hardware is here to unravel. In this review I’ll cover all the high points of the new “Penryn” core and talk to a couple Linux projects about the impact on end-user performance.

Intel Core 2 “Penryn” and Linux

Reviews of Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Processor – The 45nm Era Begins:

• HardOCP
• Techgage (A couple of Linux benchmarks)
• Madshrimps (Almost 5GHz overclock!)
• The Tech Report

P.S. I am still waiting for AMD’s Phenom X4 processors, hoping that they can overclock well and can compete with latest Intel offerings (price/performance), though am quite sure that it won’t be able to beat them.

Mozilla ruffled some penguin feathers last month when the organization revealed that Firefox 3 would get an extensive visual refresh to maximize integration with Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. After the decision was widely criticized by Linux enthusiasts, Mozilla reversed its position and decided to revisit Linux theming. Work on the new Linux theme has progressed rapidly in the past month, and the earliest pieces are now included in the latest Firefox 3 nightly build. We took a good long look at the new theme—called Gnomestripe—and we like what we see.

Complete Article @arstechnica

Related: Where’s The First Firefox 3 Beta?

This tutorial shows how to install x11vnc on your N800 which in return makes it possible to connect remotely to your N800 device using VNC.

I. Setting Up Nokia N800 for VNC Access Using `x11vnc`

1. Install x11vnc application on the Nokia N800. Either download the x11vnc deb package on the PC, transfer it to N800 and install it; or download and install it directly from N800.

2. You need to run x11vnc server in your Nokia N800 now. From the applications menu, go to Extras and select the x11vnc application. You can also run it from the terminal if you want to see its output messages.

3. Next note down the IP address of your Nokia N800 device. Go to [Applications Menu] -> Tools -> Connection Manager.

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If you remember all the recent ballyhoo about Google entering the wireless handset market with a possible gPhone, and their announcement last week that they weren’t going to release the product but instead they’ve created the Open Handset Alliance that ties numerous mobile device vendors to a common API (Applications Programming Interface). As expected Google released their Android Software Development Kit (SDK) yesterday. It provides all of the tools needed to start creating applications that run on the next generation mobile operating system.Android revolves around the Browser and Java, it even uses the same dev tools (in this case Eclipse is the out of the box supported IDE).

Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK, that it will be open source in the future, and demo applications on the Android platform.

Also check out 3 part overview series on the Android platform – Androidology:

“Android is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. It is being developed by the Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies. Android was built from the ground-up to enable developers to create compelling mobile applications that take full advantage of all a handset has to offer. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK.”

The main repository for the Android API is located here :
http://code.google.com/android

The Android SDK can be downloaded here :
http://code.google.com/android/download.html

As you all probably know by now, Gmail now supports IMAP access for all e-mail accounts for free. IMAP is great because it allows you to sync your emails between multiple computers, devices or e-mail clients.

There are two ways you can configure your KMail e-mail client for accessing Gmail account through IMAP – the IMAP as it is and Disconnected IMAP (dIMAP). The difference between the two mentioned IMAPs is that first one requires you to always have internet connection (be online), and a fast one when you have tonnes of e-mails, whenever you want to read/manage your account, as it fetches/syncs e-mails directly from the server (GMail server in this case). The second option, dIMAP, is used to achieve the same result that Thunderbird does, known as “cache IMAP” – having all your e-mails stored locally on your computer, allowing you access to offline reading and management, which on your next check mail command will sync it with your GMail account.

You can create both type of accounts and use them simultaneously for a time being and later decide which better suits your need. I personally prefer dIMAP.

Before we start, here is what you need to have for IMAP/dIMAP to work:

I. Enaabling IMAP in Gmail:

1. Login to your G-Mail account. In the upper right hand corner, click Settings.

2. Navigate to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.

3. Mark the circle for Enable IMAP in the last section and then Save Changes.

II. Configuring KMail IMAP:

1. Head to Settings -> Configure KMail -> Accounts -> Add:

2. Mark IMAP in dialog that appears.

3. Now here are the fields that you must change under the General Tab:

• Login: Type in your full e-mail address, including gmail.com
• Host: Type in imap.gmail.com
• Port: 993

4. Under the Security tab of the same window, mark Use SSL for secure mail download under Encryption and Clear Text as method:

Now, next time you retrieve mail, you should find your new GMail IMAP account under the mail tree. Keep in mind that it may be a bit slow to get everything downloaded if you have a lot of mail.

III. Configuring KMail with dIMAP:

1. Head to Settings -> Configure KMail -> Accounts -> Add:

2. Mark Disconnected IMAP in dialog that appears.

3. Now here are the fields that you must change under the General Tab:

• Login: Type in your full e-mail address, including gmail.com
• Host: Type in imap.gmail.com
• Port: 993

4. Under the Security tab of the same window, mark Use SSL for secure mail download under Encryption and Clear Text as method:

Now, next time you retrieve mail, you should find your new GMail dIMAP account under the mail tree. Keep in mind that it may be a bit slow to get everything downloaded if you have a lot of mail, but as with the first option, where you are using only IMAP feature of KMail, once all downloaded, later it will be faster, as all your mail is cached on yor local hard drive (make sure to check Tips section at the bottom).

IV. Setting up Outgoing Mail (SMTP):

This remains the same:

There you go …. all set up and ready to go.

Tip to Notice with dIMAP: You can’t unsubscribe from the folders on the server. This implies that you have to subscribe to the ‘all mail’ folder. This really slows everything down if you use disconnected imap (which means that all messages are stored also locally). As in the web interface ‘all mail’ contains all your ever send or received mails (as long as you don’t delete them or report them as spam). This means that you have to download everything twice! Fortunately there is an option for some e-mail clients to differentiate between imap-folders subscripted server-side and imap-folders subscripted local. This makes it possible simply to ignore the ‘all mail’ folder in your e-mail client while it still exists on the server.

Here are settings that can be used with KMail 1.9.x (don’t use earlier versions if you want to unsubscribe ‘all mail’ locally!):

1. Go to the settings for incoming accounts and check the option “show only locally subscribed folders”.
2. Click with your right mouse button at your [GMail] or [Google Mail] folder and choose “local subscriptions…”. Uncheck here every folder you don’t want to see. Additionally to the ‘All Mail’ folder I have also unchecked the trash folder, since I use the local trash folder anyway. This makes sense as long as you don’t need your deleted mails on several locations.

Tips: If you really want to nuke the IMAP cache of all IMAP accounts then delete everything in ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/imap/.

Tips: It is a good idea to use KWallet to store all your e-mail account(s) password(s) … and for the rest of the KDE apps as well.

If you’re like most people, you probably named VMware or Xen first. Many of you probably know of one or more of the following: Parallels, QEMU, KVM, Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. However, few of you probably know about VirtualBox. And chances are if you know about VirtualBox 1.502, you’re already running it because it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source.

Sort of? Here’s how it works. InnoTek, a software company in Stuttgart, Germany, has released both a proprietary and a GPLv2 open-source version of the program. The VirtualBox OSE (open-source edition) has a subset of the features of the proprietary version.

VirtualBox OSE is not crippleware. It’s as full-powered a virtualization program as you’ll find today. What it’s missing are additional features, not basic functionality. You can also use the proprietary version, without charge for personal and educational use and to evaluate it for possible business purchase.

The free, but proprietary, edition gives you a built-in RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) server and USB port support. It also offers, to the best of my knowledge, the unique ability to use RDP to access remote USB devices from a local VM (virtual machine) and use local USB devices on a remote VM. It also supports the use of iSCSI network drives for use as virtual hard drives.

Complete Article