Author Archives: Marco Barnig

Talking Tom Cat and friends

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Talking Tom Cat

Talking Tom Cat app

Talking Tom Cat is a free app for phones and tablets that shows a cartoon cat onscreen that repeats whatever you say into the device in a funny voice. Talking Tom Cat also responds to pokes and strokes of the screen. You can pet the cat and hear him purr. You can pour him a glass of milk and watch him drink it. Talking Tom Cat has incredible attraction for kids.

Talking Tom Cat  was created by Outfit7, a startup founded in October 2009 in Slovenia by Samo Login. The company moved its headquarters to Limassol, Cyprus in 2011. Outfit7 is known for its creation of the popular Talking Friends collection of about 20 mobile apps which have been downloaded more than 400 million times. Tom Cat is the most popular Talking Friend which has been downloaded more than 40 million times. Other characters are Gina the Giraffe, Pierre Parrot, Ben the Dog, Rex the Dinosaur, Larry the Bird, Baby Hippo, the cats Ginger and Angela and others.

In 2012 Tom Cat and his friends appeared in TV shows and music videos.

The company generates revenue through a combination of paid app downloads, in-app payments for virtual items and advertising. Tom Cat and the Talking Friends are also available as plush toys. The Talking Friend Superstars bring the apps to life and can even talk with the apps.

Second Life and OpenSim mobile clients

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Two mobile grid clients are available for Second Life or OpenSim virtual worlds :

Pocket Metaverse (for iOS ; version 1.8.0 ; $4.99)
The following features are provided :

  • Instant Messaging & Chat
  • Friends List with Who’s Online
  • World Map and Teleporting
  • MiniMap with Who’s Nearby
  • Profiles, Groups, Search
  • Giving, Receiving, and Managing Inventory
  • Read Notecards and view Snapshots and Textures
  • Upload and Download from the Photo Album and Camera (iPhone only)
  • Payments
  • and more

The app does not show a 3D world view.

Mobile Grid Client (for Android ; version 1.19 ; monthly fee L$250)

The following features are provided :

  • messaging client/viewer with local chat
  • IM
  • group chat
  • people search
  • mini map
  • the ability to teleport
  • inventory support
  • and more

The app does not show a 3D world view.

Linden Lab, the company that created Second Life and grew that online community into one of the most colorful, varied online social networks in the world, recently launched some new products. One is Creatorverse, an app for Apple and Android phones and tablets that is designed around a very different type of collaborative, creative play from Second Life.

Aurora-Sim Metaverse

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Aurora-Sim is the next generation of the OpenSimulator Project.

Aurora-Sim is a community based project consisting of individuals with a variety of technical and non-technical talents and has been developed with emphasis on security, speed and performance.

The architecture is designed to be as flexible as possible, so that third parties can create modules by pluging into Aurora-Sim’s modular design. By using the .NET framework and Mono, Aurora-Sim can be run on many platforms.

The Aurora-Sim software is still in alpha. There are 3 components :

  • Aurora Simulator (virtual world server ; version 5.0.1)
  • Aurora Web UI
  • Aurora Joomla interface

The source code is available at Github.

Hypergrid Business and Grid Press

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Hypergrid Business is the magazine for enterprise users of virtual worlds.

Hypergrid Business is published by Trombly International, a Massachusetts-based communications firm with key staff in Boston, Belgium, Shanghai and Mumbai. Subsidiaries include the China Speakers Bureau. Hypergrid Business offers in-depth and up-to-date coverage of the OpenSim technology and community, which is currently the leading contender to be the hyperlinked 3D Web, with news, case studies, opinion, and feature stories. They cover also alternative open source platforms like Open Wonderland, and proprietary enterprise platforms like ProtoSphere.

The Editor in Chief and publisher of the Hypergrid Business Magazine is Maria Korolov. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld.

Another source for news and views from around the OpenSim is Grid Press, covering also the new Aurora-Sim metaverse. Grid Press says to be dedicated to bringing you factual news, reliable information and honest opinions. It promotes the free and open exchange of ideas and opinions in a fashion that is respectful of all persons. Grid Press operates on a not-for-profit basis, though it is not a registered non-profit. Grid Press is supported and hosted by Zetamax, an OpenSim hosting company, claiming to offer a truely managed OpenSim solution.

Mono

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Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. Sponsored by Xamarin, Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. A growing family of solutions and an active and enthusiastic contributing community is helping position Mono to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

The latest stable version of Mono is 2.10.x.

Blackberry Z10 features

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Last update : August 4, 2017

The Blackberry Z10 was first presented at the BlackBerry 10 event on January 30, 2013. The Z10 has a beautiful, crisp 4.2-inch LCD display with a 1280 x 768 resolution at 356 DPI. The Z10 comes with a built-in 16GB Flash storage, but it also supports microSD media cards up to 64GB, for a total possible capacity of 80GB. The Z10 has 2GB of RAM and a dual-core, 1.5GHz processor and it’s ready for 4G LTE. It has a mobile hotspot functionality, which supports up to 8 devices, sharing its internet connection.

The Z10 software is composed of three main UI components:

  • Application home screens
  • Active Frames screen, which shows open apps in dynamic windows that change and update with new information
  • BlackBerry Hub, a central inbox where you find all of your various messages and notifications.
Blackberry Z10

Blackberry Z10

BlackBerry calls the process of navigating through these components BlackBerry Flow. You can easily access the BlackBerry Hub when you’re using a specific application or while you’re navigating home screens by sliding your thumb up from the bottom of the display and then to the right, to pull the active page to the side and peek at your Hub.

The application home screens are similar to what you find in iOS or Android. Each panel fits 16 apps or folders, with four icons in four rows. To create a folder, you just hold your finger on an app for a few seconds and then drag it on top of another app icon.

The Z10 virtual keypad provides an advanced typing experience and takes predictive text a step further. The on-screen keys are large, and the keyboard’s rows are separated by virtual frets, which add some space and provide more touchable area per key. The touchscreen keyboard learns the user’s writing style and suggests words to help the user type faster, more accurately and with the least amount of effort.

A new camera feature in the Z10 is the TimeShift camera setting, which helps you capture better pictures of groups of people. TimeShift takes a rapid series of images and lets you isolate the faces of the subjects in your photos. You can then tap the faces in the picture and fast forward or rewind them to find the best facial expressions.

Another new multimedia feature in the Z10 is Story Maker which lets you create multimedia video montages using images, video and music stored on your device.

The Z10 browser is particularly adept at handling HTML 5 websites and supports Adobe Flash.

The BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) can be used for video calls, in addition to voice and text chats. BBM in also lets you share your device’s screen with video-chat participants.

In the BlackBerry World app store you can buy apps, games, music, TV shows and movies, using a number of payment options including PayPal.

The Z10 can easily connect to Microsoft Exchange using ActiveSync, with no BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) required. Using the new BES 10 gives organizations many unique security and management features, including access to BlackBerry Balance, which creates a secure workspace on BlackBerry 10 devices that can be managed by IT without affecting personal data.

The Z10 comes with an Office document editor called DocsToGo that can both view and create Word and Excel documents and edit PowerPoint presentations. The Adobe Reader on board allows to view PDF files. An app called PrintToGo aims to replace printing on paper. It shows up as a printer on your computer and sends the docs wirelessly to PrintToGo so that you can view them on your phone.

The Z10 has an eight MP rear camera with autofocus and LED flash, capable of shooting 1080p video, and a two MP front-facing camera. The device has three shooting modes (normal, stabilization and burst) and four scene modes (action, whiteboard, night, beach and snow). To save geolocalisation GPS data in photos, this feature must be enabled in the correspondent parameter list.

One of the biggest additions to the OS in update 10.1 was its new HDR camera mode. This feature allows users to shoot two photos at once, one in HDR mode and a separate in standard shooting mode.

The Z10 has Voice Control, that allows the user to operate the phone by spoken commands. Voice Control recognizes natural speech patterns, so that the user can talk naturally and always be understood. It can be used to send messages, compose emails, dictate documents, and search the phone just by speaking to the app.

Another new feature of the Z10 is the ability to play your music, videos and pictures on your DLNA devices over WiFi (DLNA server).

By supporting developers to bring their Android app creations to the Z10, BlackBerry took strategic advantage of the existing app ecosystem on Android.

More informations about the new Blackberry Z10 are available at the following links :

My Blackberry Z10 didn’t recover from a reboot two weeks ago and has now been replaced by an Android phone.

FFmpeg scripts

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Last update : September 13, 2013

I use the following FFmpeg scripts to create or convert videos with FFmpeg to host them on the Synology DiskStation :

1. one image to video (15sec, 25 fps, AVC, mp4 container)

ffmpeg ^
-loop 1 ^
-f image2 ^
-i folder/imagename.png ^
-r pal ^
-vcodec libx264 ^
-t 15 ^
output_myvideo.mp4
pause

2.  image sequence to video with good quality (15sec, 25 fps, AVC, profile Baseline@L3.1, 1 Ref Frame, Chroma subsampling 4:2:0, mp4 container, start at image xxx, animation, preset very good quality, constant rate factor = 20)

ffmpeg ^
-f image2 ^
-start_number 1113 ^
-i folder/imagename_%%05d.png ^
-r pal ^
-vcodec libx264 ^
-crf 20 ^
-preset veryslow ^
-profile:v baseline ^
-level 3.1 ^
-refs 1 ^
-pix_fmt yuv420p ^
-tune animation ^
-t 15 ^
output_myvideo.mp4
pause

3. add audio stream to a mute video (15sec, AAC-LC, 48Kbps bitrate, 44.1 Kz sampling, one channel)

ffmpeg ^
-i folder/mymutevideo.mp4 ^
-i folder/mysound.flac ^
-vcodec copy ^
-acodec libvo_aacenc ^
-ar 44100 ^
-ab 48k ^
-ac 1 ^
-t 15 ^
output_mysoundvideo.mp4
pause

4. change video container

ffmpeg ^
-i folder/myvideo.mp4 ^
-vcodec copy ^
-acodec copy ^
output_mynewvideo.flv
pause

5. change framerate (stretch super8 film, digitized with 25 fps, to original framerate 18 fps)

ffmpeg ^
-i input01.avi ^
-target pal-dv ^
-vf "setpts=25/18*PTS" ^
output01.avi
pause

Managing thumbnails on the Synology Photostation

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Last update : September 16, 2013

To upload photos or videos to the Synology Photostation, you can use five different tools. In all cases, thumbnails for photos and videos are created in several resolutions at the upload process.

1. Synology Assistant

Snap_synassis

Synology Assistant

The Uploader feature has been removed in version 4.3-4206, released on 27.8.2013.

2. Synology Photostation Uploader

Synology Upload Tool

Synology Upload Tool

Version 1.0-038, released on 27.8.2013, only supports bulk uploads (source is a folder).

3. Photostation Album Charger

Synology Album Upload Tool

Synology Album Upload Tool

4. Synology Filestation Charger

Synology Filestation Charger

Synology Filestation Charger

5. Windows Explorer in local network

Windows File System

Windows File System

The two first tools (Synology Assistant and Photostation Uploader) are more efficient because the CPU of the computer is used to do the conversion and the thumbnail creation, whereas the CPU of the Synology Diskstation is used in the three other ways.

The free software ImageMagick is used by the Synology Diskstation to handle images and thumbnails.The Synology DMS 4.2 system (and later) create several thumbnails for each photo or video uploaded in the Photostation (shared system folder photo). These thumbnails are saved in a hidden folder named @eaDir, created in each album folder. Subfolders with the name of the photo or video, including the extension, are created inside the @eaDir folder. Such a subfolder contains the following thumbnails :

DMS 4.2 – Photo Station 5

Photos :

Filename Max width or height (pixels)
 SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_B.jpg  640
 SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_L.jpg  800
 SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_M.jpg  320
 SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_S.jpg  120
 SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_XL.jpg  1.280

Videos :

Filename Max width or height (pixels)
SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_B.jpg 640
SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_L.jpg 800
SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_M.jpg 320
SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_S.jpg 120
SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_XL.jpg 1.280
SYNOPHOTO:VIDEO_SCREENSHOT.jpg video original

DMS 4.3 – Photo Station 6

Photos :

Filename Max width or height (pixels)
SYNOPHOTO_THUMB_B.jpg 640
SYNOPHOTO_THUMB_M.jpg 320
SYNOPHOTO_THUMB_PREVIEW.jpg 160
SYNOPHOTO_THUMB_S.jpg 120
SYNOPHOTO_THUMB_XL.jpg 1.280

Videos :

Filename Max width or height (pixels)
SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_M.jpg 320
SYNOPHOTO:THUMB_XL.jpg video original
SYNOPHOTO:VIDEO_SCREENSHOT.jpg video original

Display of thumbnails

The short dimension of the thumbnail is calculated with the aspect ratio of the original photo or video. If the video is rotated (metadata Rotation=xx), for instance by using an iPhone, the thumbnails are also rotated and displayed as expected. Metadata are not saved to the thumbnails.

DMS 4.2 – Photo Station 5

The photo-thumbnails are displayed as follows :

Application Qualité Mode simple Mode détaillé Info Agrandissement Vignette Diaporama
PC – M M M L S XL
DSphoto+ Normal S S S L S L
DSphoto+ High M M M XL M XL

The video-thumbnails are displayed as follows :

Application Qualité Mode simple Mode détaillé Info Videocover Vignette
PC – M M M XL S
DSphoto+ Normal S S S L S
DSphoto+ High M M M XL M

DMS 4.3 – Photo Station 6

The photo-thumbnails are displayed in M-size in all list-, time-line-, mosaic- and info-views, independent of the quality setting (normal/high) in DSphoto+. The photos are displayed in XL-size in the enlarged- or slide-show-views. The sizes B and S are used in other Synology multimedia apps like the multimedia server. The video-thumbnails are also displayed in M-size for overviews and in the original size (XL) for viewing.

Replacement of thumbnails

Sometimes it’s necessary to replace the automatic generated thumbnails, for example if the thumbnail for a video is not representative. The replacement can be done with the Synology web console. One problem is the character : in PhotoStation 5 which is not supported in filenames in Windows systems. Thumbnails created before an update to Photo Station version 6 contain such characters. A temporary name for the uploaded file can be changed in the webconsole with the command

> mv old_name new_name

in the correspondent folder (mouse support in the web console). The change can also be done in the command line interface (CLI) with the Putty client. It’s necessary in this case to change the directory with the command

> cd ../volume1/photo/album_folder/@eaDir/image_folder
> dir
> mv old_name new_name

It’s important to check if the read-write properties of the changed files are set to 755, otherwise they should be modified with CHMOD.

The cover pictures for an album are located in the @eaDir folder at the same level as the album folder. Inside this folder are subfolders with the same album names, containing a file SYNOPHOTO:ALBUM.cover. It’s a text file with the filename of the cover photo, nothing else. If no cover photo is defined, the first image in the album is used as default cover. If a movie is selected as a cover image, the filename of the video is listed in the SYNOPHOTO:ALBUM.cover text file.

A second file SYNOPHOTO:ALBUM.sort is in the same @eaDir folder. A content example is shown below :

{"type":"3","order":"0","list":["IMG0001.jpg","IMG0002.jpg","IMG0003.jpg"]}

The following list provides some links to webpages with additional informations about this topic :

JPEG Chroma Subsampling

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The JPEG compressed file format can produce significant reductions in file size through lossy compression. The compression techniques take advantage of the limitations of the human eye by discarding additional image details that may not be as noticeable to the human observer.

Humans are much more sensitive to changes in luminance (brightness) than  to chrominance (color) differences. JPEG can discard a lot more color information than luminance in the compression process. Chroma subsampling is the process whereby the color information in the image is sampled at a lower resolution than the original. JPEG translates 8-bit RGB data (Red, Green, Blue) into 8-bit YCbCr data (Luminance, Chroma Blue, Chroma Red).

The different levels of YCbCr subsampling are :

  • 4:4:4 – The resolution of chrominance information is preserved at the same rate as the luminance information. (1×1, subsampling disabled)
  • 4:2:2 – Half of the horizontal resolution in the chrominance is dropped, while the full resolution is retained in the vertical direction, with respect to the luminance. (2×1 chroma subsampling)
  • 4:1:1 – Only a quarter of the chrominance information is preserved in the horizontal direction with respect to the luminance information
  • 4:2:0 – With respect to the information in the luminance channel, the chrominance resolution in both the horizontal and vertical directions is cut in half (2×2 chroma subsampling)

JPEG chroma subsampling is not a particularly good mechanism for compressing images used in the medical field where the chrominance may be equally as important as the luminance.

Photoshop uses different chroma subsampling levels depending on the Quality settings:

  • 2×2 Chroma Subsampling – Save Quality 0-6 or Save For Web Quality 0-50
  • No Chroma Subsampling – Save As Quality 7-12  or Save For Web Quality 51-100

Additional informations about JPEG Chroma subsampling are available at the following links :