GilesBathgate

For anyone interested in using linux on this laptop, the following should be of help. The camera is labeled as Motion Eye but lsusb reports the device as:

05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]

After alot of messing around and installing defunct kernel modules, that seem to work, but actually include the wrong firmware versions. I found that the work being done by Alex Hixon on a generic R5U87x driver to be the most up to date. Previously the project rolled its own kernel module to support the camera, However the current version works by providing userspace tools to upload firmware to the device so that the standard uvcvideo driver in the kernel can communicate with the camera.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much around in the way of a howto to explain how to use the code. So I had to figure out the following for myself.

First of all install mercurial and some other project dependencies

sudo apt-get install mercurial libglib2.0-dev libusb-dev

Now you can download the source

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/ahixon/r5u87x/

Change into the source directory and issue the following three commands.

cd r5u87x
make
make rules
sudo make install

If your user isn’t part of the video group you will probably have to modify /etc/group and make yourself a member of that group otherwise you might experience Permission Denied errors.

After you have rebooted you can test using mplayer

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2

Also make sure you can record because uploading the wrong firmware will in some cases allow you to see output but not record it.

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0 -nosound -ovc lavc -o test.avi

If you want to clean things up afterwards you can run the following commands
sudo apt-get --purge remove mercurial libglib2.0-dev libusb-dev
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove
rm -r r5u87x

You may find the above steps also work for the following devices:

05ca:1830 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 [R5U870]
05ca:1832 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC3 [R5U870]
05ca:1833 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 [R5U870]
05ca:1834 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 [R5U870]
05ca:1835 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC5 [R5U870]
05ca:1836 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC4 [R5U870]
05ca:1837 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC4 [R5U870]
05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]
05ca:183a Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC7 [R5U870]
05ca:183b Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC8 [R5U870]
05ca:183e Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC9 [R5U870]

Head over to recordyou.com and you will be able to download and authorize Record RC4 until September 9 when they hit the official release day.

I recently compiled a small executable program writtern in C with the Visual Studio C++ Express. The output was a 56K executable, which ok is pretty small, but actually in terms of programs its really large.

So I looked into compiling my program with the TinyCC compiler.

First I downloaded the compiler, however it quickly came apparent that the libraries and includes that come with the compiler were just a minimal set. What I needed was the includes from MinGW. Its only necceccery to download the Windows 32 API package.

My program needed to be linked with winsock2 so first i needed to run

tiny_impdef c:\windows\system32\ws2_32.dll


This will generate a ws2_32.def file. I was then able to simply compile the program with.


tcc program.c ws2_32.def


The output of which is an executable of 1K. I asume because the compiler itself is small, and the compiler compiles itself that it would produce rather small executables. I have yet to test compiling the same program using mingw and GCC -Os.

I went to Amsterdam last weekend with Joey, Trish and Chris. The flight over from Bradford-Leeds Airport was fairly quick and painless, however we did have trouble finding our Hotel which apparently had moved (it was a Boat Hotel)

The first night we were there we met these two English girls from Weston-Super Mare, they were quite drunk and really funny. We were supposed to all meet up in the Facebook Friends of the Amstel Botel Group, but haven’t heard from them since. The next morning we were all feeling a little hung over, Trish was feeling a bit “sea sick”, so Chris, Joey and I all went into Amsterdam city centre, to have a few early morning beers. When Trish met up with us later we all had a snack of Manneken Pis before going to a famous museum close by. We spend the rest of the day shopping, drinking and treating ourself to a really nice meal.

The second day we went to the Amestedam Taussauds waxworks museum, it was really busy but really fun to see such lifelike models. We spent the rest of the day shopping exploring and drinking.

We got another cat! We decided to call this one Mikey.

We got a new cat, we have named her Katie

Dad: “How do I turn off your Internet.”
Giles: “Its a router, you just leave it connected.” (He has an ADSL modem)
Dad: “But how do I close the website down so that its not connected to that website, I don’t want to hog that website.”
Giles: “HTTP is stateless meaning that the website is no longer connected as soon as you have finished loading the page.”
Dad: “Well with some websites you have to log off, like Banks, and they have a lot of problems when too many people are logged in.”
Giles: “The problems that Banks have are very specific to their applications, which is why for example you can’t press the back button on Barclays, because banks try to have stateful sessions built on top of HTTP which is stateless, but the rest of the web works the way I just said.”
Dad: “oh”

Later on my “Technophobic” Dad beat us all at Wii Bowling.

Yet again I am searching the net for aspnet_regiis. I tried various combinations including asp_iisreg and aspiis_reg, both of which return results in google. so it seems that I am not the only one who keeps forgetting how it is called. I decided to put it here for my own personal reference. This tool usually has to be run using the -i parameter if you install IIS after you installed Visual Studio and you want to do web service type things.

Sidechain compression is not the only effect you can create in Reason using the MClass compressor. Those smart people at propellerheads were insigtful enough to give the MClass compressor a Gain Reduction CV out. Which you can use to control any parameter you like.

Here I am using the compressor to pump an RV7000 Reverb Start by creating a Combinator to host the RV7000 this allows you control parameters that would not otherwise be controllable using CV’s. I’ve put the compressor in the combinator too just to keep things tidy. The Gain Reduction CV output is connected to the Rotarty 1 input on the Combinator. This allows Rotary 1 to be routed to the Dry/Wet parameter of the RV7000.

The overall effect of this setup isn’t that great, but the point is that you can use sidechaining to control any parameter in Reason.

Here is how I do sidechain compression in Reason. In this example I am going to use a kick for the sidechain source, which can give the output of the compressor a bouncy catchy effect.

First of all you want to setup a default rack with a 14:1 Mixer, an MClass Compressor and a Redrum, make sure when you add the compressor its auto routed as an effect send to the mixer.

Now flip the rack and connect the Redrum’s Send 1 to the Left(mono) channel of the sidechain input on the compressor. Note that the sends from Redrum are mono outputs.

Program a basic 4/4 kick drum pattern into the Redrum device. You can add claps snares or anything else you like they will not be being sent to the compressor at this time until you turn the send knob for a particular Redrum channel.

Once the Redrum is setup how you like you can now send the kick drum to the sidechain by turning the send knob for the kick channel all the way to the right. Note that this doesn’t stop the kick from being sent to the mixer.

You can lower the compressors Threshold and raise its Ratio until you see the kick drum really pump the VU meter. Now that the compressor is pumping we need to give it something to compress. Add a synth to the rack and make sure its auto routed to the mixer. Turn up the aux send of the channel to which the synth was added.

When you play notes on the synth you will hear it go quieter when the kick drum is playing. This can be a useful way to make synth baselines fit better in the mix.

The advantage of using sends rather than using the single channel output of the Redrum are two fold. Firstly the kick drum is not muted and does not need further splitting using a Spider Audio Merger & Splitter. Secondly other elements of the beat can be sent to the sidechain in varying amounts. The advantage of using the compressor as a effect send is that many instruments can have the same compression added to them by altering the aux send of each channel.