Until recently, good long-focus lenses (those huge telescope tubes) were the property of professional photographers and few consumer-oriented models available at the market suffered from average-to-poor image quality. Fortunately, the progress in technologies in last few years changed this situation. Now, it’s not a problem for even an amateur photographer to get an affordable, relatively compact telephoto zoom providing pretty decent performance in a focal range up to 300mm at a reasonable price.

70-300mm

Rambling across Andorra la Vella, I stumbled upon a small but amazingly rich photo store where I picked up a Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 DG OS lens. The lens offers a good telephoto range (equivalent to 110-470mm on APS-C DSLR) and features the Sigma’s Optical Stabiliser (OS) technology which, of course, is a must-have at those levels of magnification.

Max magnification of Canon EF-S 18-55mm IS (88mm APS-C)

Max magnification of Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 DG OS (470mm APS-C)

The lens initially was meant to be an auxiliary add-on to complement my basic Canon kit for distant shooting. However, Sigma 70-300mm demonstrated some interesting features beyond its long-zoom capabilities and I had a lot of fun playing around with it as with my main lens. Though not being a true macro, it delivers attractive close-ups with impressive bokeh and amusing effects of shallow depth of field:

Also I found that at the wide angle end (70mm), it performs well like a portrait lens.

18-250mm

I realized very soon that what I really wanted is one universal lens to cover as much as possible. I understand that this is a disputable point that would likely cause criticism from serious photographers, but an advantage of ability to capture everything without having to swap lenses on the run matters a lot for me. Again, the technology progress in recent years has improved the mega-zoom area significantly and almost all major lens makers now can offer the quite well-made 10-15x zooming constructions featuring a wide focal length range with minimum of compromises in speed and image quality.

After reading some reviews and test reports, I ended up with another product of Sigma: a 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM model. The main advantage is, of course, its 13.9x zoom range that makes it a great general purpose and travel lens.

18mm (29mm APS-C)	50mm (80mm APS-C)
150mm (240mm APS-C)	250mm (400mm APS-C)

Like 70-300mm DG model, this Sigma lens features the image stabilizer which is very helpful for shooting in low light without a tripod (though the tests show that it’s effectiveness is somewhat overrated in specifications). The lens is also equipped with an ultrasonic (HSM) autofocus motor (that the 70-300mm model lacks) which makes focusing amazingly quiet, fast and accurate.

By the specs, the minimum focus distance is 45cm, but it seems like a limit for AF only. In manual focus mode, I can shoot as close as at 10cm for decent close-ups:

For a mid-level superzoom lens, Sigma 18-250mm exhibits outstanding image quality in terms of distortion and chromatic aberrations. Sharpness is another story, though: all tests I saw exposed inconsistency with sharpness across the frame area and focal length range; notably, soft corners and general softness at the telephoto end. But the same reviews suggest that if to stick to aperture size from f8 to f11 at those focal lengths, the image stays pretty sharp. So, this is something I can live with.

Conclusion

Well, if I would start right now, I were forget about the kit lens and get the camera body and a modern superzoom like Sigma 18-250mm (Canon 18-200mm, Tamron 18-270mm, name it…). The lesson I learnt about the modern consumer optics market is that in the low- to mid-level range there is absolutely no point to have a set of lenses only to extend your focal length possibilities. The advantages of having a single all-in-one lens are obvious and the difference of quality given the same price segment is negligible. And it saves money which is better to be spent for specialized tools – something like a super-wide angle or a good fixed portrait lens.

Now, the Sigma 18-250mm completely replaced the Canon’s kit EF-S 18-55mm IS as my main general-purpose lens. Together with EOS 600D, it is compact and light enough, making a handy combo (near 1kg total) I can carry everywhere and shoot without a feel of any limit.

The story would end here if we didn’t want to access the media collections also from TV. This brought me to learn about DLNA technology and to get a DLNA-compliant media player, as well as to install and configure special media server software.

The media player

The device is Samsung BD-C5500 Blu-ray player that serves a home theatre setup in the living room (40″ LCD TV and 5+1 Dolby system). The player is compliant with UPnP/DLNA standards and it means that being connected to a network it looks for DLNA-compliant Media Server instances and automatically connects to them.

In the time when I purchased it (summer 2010), my knowledge about this kind of hardware was close to nothing and I had no any specific requirements in my mind. All what I needed was something that should play as many formats as possible, have a digital output and an Ethernet port.

Though my choice was somewhat random, Samsung turned out to be ok: it’s true Full-HD with a nice crisp picture through HDMI, friendly to seemingly all common A/V formats and can browse and play media from DLNA servers, external USB and, um, the disks, of course.

As a bonus, the player connects to internet to show online content like YouTube videos, Google maps, Picasa albums, Twitter and Facebook pages and so on. Sadly enough, the Twitter widget still isn’t aware of OAuth authentication (and therefore, is broken) and the available set of apps lacks such essential thing as a simple web-browser, so there is no way to view the random webs on TV with it.

Another sad thing about the player was WLAN support I’ve rashly bought into. On the rear panel, you can find a USB slot for an external wireless adapter, but don’t expect that any WiFi dongle in the world would work — this is for special Samsung adapter of which I know nothing but that it’s an exotic beast. Out of curiousity, I tried one of DLink dongles and it was (predictably) ignored by the device. There is however, a newer model of the player with a built-in WiFi adapter on board and all in all,  it was not a big problem to lay another Ethernet wire and plug it into the player.

The media server

I considered two DLNA media servers: Serviio and MediaTomb and finally have chosen the latter because it looked simpler, lighter, configurable and has a web-interface to manage media collections.

A gothic look of the user interface makes me sick but the way it works is simple and intuitive. You only need to select a directory in the server filesystem and MediaTomb will crawl it to find all supported media files and add them to the database. After a directory is added, it is monitored for updates to be synchronized with the MediaTomb DB. As soon as you upload new file to a monitored directory on the server, it appears in the MediaTomb collection and hence, in the player.

A good thing about MediaTomb is that it is scriptable — there is straightforward server-side JavaScript one can edit to implement custom collection structures based on metadata extracted from media files. Note that MediaTomb from Ubuntu repositories recklessly lacks scripting capabilities: if you want to enable this feature, download the sourcecode and build it yourself with JavaScript support.

Video

The video collection has a loose ad-hoc structure in the server filesystem, created manually: movies/series/animations/whatsoever, occasionally subcategorized by genre or by a director, etc. I liked to preserve that structure in the MediaTomb database and the import script modified like in this example does that.

Audio

MediaTomb does a good job on categorizing music using common ID3 tags by default: author, album, year and genre. I am happy with that taxonomy (this is what I’m used to see in AmaroK) and have not changed anything there.

Photos

The photo collection is organized in MediaTomb with date-based subalbums. It can read EXIF tags from photos but it’s not too useful: maybe someone wants to see his shots sorted by camera model or by aperture value, but not me. I would better want MediaTomb to be able to read the keywords from XMP/IPTC metadata written by digiKam but I have no idea if it’s possible.

Links

Some manuals and articles that helped me a lot in MediaTomb configuration and customization:

• http://mediatomb.cc/dokuwiki/scripting:scripting
• http://my.opera.com/maurice118/blog/how-to-use-the-import-js-with-mediatomb-upnp-server
• http://wiki.flexion.org/InstallingMediaTomb012.html
• http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/MediaTomb

The last year, an opportunity to bring myself to do it right is appeared, thanks to two things: First, I got new Core-i7 box as my  developer workstation, so my old good Pentium-4 came out of work. Second, a large roll door closet has been built in the hallway where I reserved a room for the server stuff.

The server room is 70×50×45 cm space in the top section of the closet, accessible with a ladder: good against kids, pets and unscheduled accidents of all sorts. The room contains the server machine, LAN/WiFi router and the power supply, as well as some empty space for accessories, backup disks, instruments and other stuff.

The Server

The server machine is Pentium-IV/3.00GHz CPU with 2GB of RAM, built upon ASUS P4S motherboard. The machine is rebuilt from a common 2005-year desktop PC by repackaging it into a smaller case and removing the videocard and DVD-ROM. Two brand new 1.5TB SATA drives were installed to provide enough disk space.

The box runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server with 2.6.32-21 kernel.

Power and ventilation

The server closet is powered by 600VA Ippon UPS unit monitored via NUT.

The hardware in the closet produces a considerable amount of heat, so ventilation system was necessary. Hot air is pulled out of the closet space through a vent grille with a fan fitted into the drop ceiling and connected to the house ventilation grid. Inward fresh air is delivered through the clearances above and below the roller door and through the perforation at the back of the shelf. Initially, it was planned to mount another fan for forced air supply from outside of the closet but the idea had been postponed for the sake of noiselessness. For better air circulation, the internal shelves were made shorter to provide an empty space along the back wall.

The air vent carries a common 12V computer case cooler fan that is powered  directly from the motherboard and is controlled by BIOS, therefore. The more warm is registered by the motherboard thermistors, the faster is  the speed of the ceiling fan, that provides a good balance between cooling and noise.

The sensors display constant temperature of 35°C for the server motherboard and 50°C for the CPU (with the roll door closed), that’s ok, I think.

Networking

There is D-Link DIR-300 router that serves both as an Ethernet cable switch for stationary devices and as a WiFi hotspot for mobile stuff across the house, like the laptops and the phones. A special hole was drilled in the closet wall to put the WiFi antenna outside for better coverage.

Twisted pair Ethernet cables were laid inside the walls during house repairs last summer. The cables are ended with the wall outlets in convenient places (with some spare endpoints).

The server connects to Internet via an EV-DO broadband modem with external antenna on the house roof. The client devices use the server machine as an Internet gateway. To provide the gateway functions, the iptables firewall with NAT, caching DNS proxy (pdnsd) and transparent Squid web-proxy are configured on the server.

File server / NAS

The most part of the server disk space is shared over the network.  As there are Linux and Windows clients, the server provides both Samba protocol and NFS to access the shares. Also, there is rsyncd daemon running to provide incremental remote backup service for the client systems.

Media server

The server runs MediaTomb UPnP MediaServer software to host our movie and music collections. It primarily serves a home theatre setup in the living room, centered around  a UPnP-compliant Blue-ray player.

Developer’s stuff

I am a full-time software developer, working from home most of the time. Almost all my projects are hosted on remote repositories, but there are some internal and experimental things living on local Subversion server. Also I found that running a local Trac does a great help for scheduling and task management.

And, there is Tomcat I need for  testing of the web-apps.

Control and monitoring

To access the server  from the local network, plain old Telnet works great. To monitor the server status, there is Munin software that displays nice real-time diagrams of server load, temperature, memory and disk usage, network traffic and other useful information via the web-interface.

Problems

• It’s a real pain if the headless machine goes unbootable due to misconfiguration or by another reason. I got this recently when attempted connection of an external HDD brought to major maintenance: I had to get the box from the closet, open the case and mount a videocard and a CDROM just to comment a single line in fstab.
• Free disk space is vanishing with menacing speed (mostly because of Full-HD movie rips) and the old motherboard has only two SATA slots. Perhaps, I would need to think about a SATA hub and RAID at the nearest future.
• I’m worrying how my cooling solution would work at summer season.

As I skipped 7.10 “Gutsy” release, I preferred to do a fresh install from Hardy Heron LiveCD instead of two-step “Feisty » Gutsy » Hardy” network upgrade. I installed Hardy right into the existing Feisty partition replacing the old installation. Separate home partition was left untouched to keep all my personal preferences and data in new system.

It took ~25 minutes from booting the installation CD to logging into a working system.

Unsurprisingly good

No doubts, Kubuntu developers and packagers spent this year not for nothing. In general, Hardy is a better system than previous Kubuntu versions. It loads essentially faster and many little annoyances was fixed. Good job!

Hardware compatibility

Ubuntu systems are known to have great hardware support. As far back as 7.04 version, it recognized my hardware configuration including such exotic devices like DVB-card and CDMA modem without any problem. The only trouble was my HP LaserJet 1020 printer for which I had to install and configure foo2zjs package manually. So, it was nice to see it’s fixed in Hardy; now my printer is supported via native HP open source drivers and working out the box.

A bad surprise was that Hardy could not detect my monitor automatically and set failsafe 640×480 resolution as a result. It was strange as it was no problem with it in Feisty. Even when I’ve clicked “Detect monitor” button manually, it detected it as default “plug-n-play” monitor. I had to remember a model of my monitor and select it from the list. Not a big deal, but a pity though.

KDE 4

Looking great and nice but apparently, a lot of work is still needed there. Crashes are not unusual everywhere and the single Plasma panel looks more like a prototype than a part of a desktop for the real world. It’s half-baked, almost not configurable and I cannot setup a desktop I need for my tasks (IMHO, an essential fault for any Linux software).

So, I’m use the “solid rock” KDE 3.5.9 as a primary desktop environment for work and sometimes switch to KDE 4 just to get a feeling of  bleeding edge desktop technologies.

Grumbles

• Dolphin – I already grumbled at it and I still have no idea what are the reasons to have yet another desktop file manager. Konqueror was a default KDE file manager for years and a whole generation of Linux users grew up with an idea of this software inspired by Konq. Dolphin’s user experience is different in many ways and totally unusual for me (and I think, I’m not alone). No matter if Dolphin is good or bad, I need Konqueror, thanks!
• Samba didn’t see my home network after installation. And I was unsuccesfull to fix it using configuration GUI in KDE Control Center (though I’m not a sysadmin guru and might miss some options). Finally I managed to configure the network by manual editing ‘smb.conf’ taken file from a backup of previous installation. Maybe it sounds trivial for experienced network administrators, however I remember that I didn’t edit any configs to get Samba working in Kubuntu 7.04.

I should say I hate disks. They are taking a lot of space, cluttering all around, getting scratched and getting lost sometimes. I am too lazy to stand up and find a CD/DVD on a shelf just to get a movie or a song. I already got all my music collection in the computer as MP3 files and used to grab every new audio CD immediately. I’d like to do the same with DVD movies – rip them from the disks, convert them to something like MPEG4 and provide shared access to the media collection in our home network.

Our home LAN is small and simple – there are only two workstations connected by an Ethernet cable. There are my main work machine running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the children room computer owned by my daughters. The last box runs XP Home Edition, it is weaker and got a smaller harddrive than the Linux box – so server/client roles in the media network were obvious.

As the Linux box already runs Samba, the solution for sharing the media files over the network was ready. I only created a Windows network drive on the client machine and linked it to the Samba share on a server filesystem. I’d like to have more sophisticated solution for media organizing – something like a specialized media server with advanced metadata/annotation/categorization features but found no one so far. All in all, simply movie titles and preview thumbnails are good enough, and my children have no problems to navigate over the movie collection.

Well, my only task was to rip the movies from DVD’s. My first try of ripping DVD using the familiar tools was unsuccessful. Strangely, K3b – a swissknife for all CD/DVD tasks in KDE – could not rip video DVD’s in Feisty. As it was turned out, it is Kubuntu-only limitation and I have no idea is it a result of that copyrights paranoia (though grabbing the audio CD’s works fine), or just a miss of packagers in Canonical. The people said it is still unworkable in 7.10 Gutsy. Of course, I might recompile K3b from sources but I decided to look for another ripping tool first.

There is a nifty command line utility: transcode. It can convert video from one format to another using lots of import and export codecs – and directly from a DVD too. In fact, you need to install it if you want to rip DVD’s with K3b, though it had no help in my case. Using transcode has only problem – you should be a video engineering guru to understand its manpage with lots of all transcoding options. I didn’t want to learn all that stuff – I only needed to convert videos from DVD into AVI/MPEG4 files with the same frame size and without visible loss of quality.

I finally chose dvd::rip – a GUI frontend to transcode written in Perl and GTK+. In Kubuntu, you can found it in multiverse/graphics repository section. If you want to get compressed MPEG-4 files, you will also need XVid codec (multiverse/libs/libxvidcore4) or another DivX/XVid library for transcode.

Ripping DVD with dvd:rip is an easy two-step process: at first stage it copies the selected titles from DVD to the harddisk and lets you clip and scale the resulting movie. The program allows to choose from few presets of movie format and quality with previewing the results. Video gurus can also get into all codec’s fine-tuning options, while others can just go to the next stage by clicking on “Transcode” button letting the program to do its job with defaults. The second stage is quite long and finishes with a MPEG4 file in a container of a selected type (AVI, OGG or MPEG).

After spending some time on googling and reading the comments and opinions of those who have answered “yes”, I finally decided not to upgrade. Well, not now.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not devoid of neophilia attacks and not afraid of experimenting with my environment and tools. I even love it. But I want to be sure that the results would improve my life’s quality or, at least, the things are exciting new and interesting to try.

The sum of innovations in Kubuntu 7.10 doesn’t worth a time, a bandwith, and (as it turns out) a degree of a risk to break working Feisty installation. I am pretty happy with it – perhaps it is the best Linux I ever had – and I am definitely unwilling to change the things without essential reasons.

The reasons they tell why do I need an upgrade look strange. Dolphin as a default file manager? Sorry, but I don’t need a file manager – I need also a local documentation browser and a client for SSH and for FTP and for Samba and WebDAV and SVN and for other stuff and it should have the tabs and a console at the bottom and… In short, I need Konqueror. Replacing it with a file manager (even if it is a really good one) – it’s nothing but downgrade.

Strigi search? Everyone says it is still an alpha so putting it into production release looks weird. KDE old file search worked fine and it is stable and well tested. And (excuse me for this product-placement) I use SCAN which does a lot more except basic full-text search.

OpenOffice 2.3? But to install it I don’t need to upgrade a whole system.

No, thanks. What might drive me to upgrade is KDE 4 Final, for instance. Or Beryl/Compiz, gettin’ fuckin’ stable, integrated seamlessly and not conflicting with basic KDE stuff. Or maybe, NEPOMUK or similar bleeding edge technologies released into production.

I am far from blaming Kubuntu maintainers and pretty well understand them. This is what happens sometimes when you have to provide a fixed release cycle but fully depend on other’s work. The fact is that the Linux world had no visible technology breakthrough in the last six months. Alas.

So let’s wait for the April, 2008.

So far, it was GPRS. Very slow, very expensive and unstable. It’s not a secret that GPRS internet traffic has lowest priority in GSM networks. So, sometimes it shuts down because of voice traffic overload. I was annoyed and was looking for an alternative.

So, it was a really good news about CDMA/EV-DO coverage. I’ve brought CDMA modem to test and it works well. There is drastic difference from GPRS. An average time of ping latency in the satellite tunnel is reduced in 4-5 times (from 600-800 to 150-200 ms), so web surfing is smoother and faster now. The speed test shows about 600 Kbps for download (satellite channel was turned off, so it’s CDMA real speed) and 80 Kbps for upload. It saves money also – the megabyte is 4 times cheaper there than on GPRS.

The modem

It is Anydata ADU-E100 USB-modem on Qualcomm chipset:

There is a special software for Windows, so I worried a bit how it would work in Linux. As it turned out, it needs nothing in my Feisty. I just plugged the modem in and immediately found it as ‘/dev/ttyUSB0′. After some PPP configuration (dial number and account data) i got it working in minutes.

The modem can be powered from few supplies – USB, external 5V supply or from the battery in its cradle (if I would buy a laptop someday). It’s small, light and thin, especially without the battery:

The external antenna socket is a great thing. With the antenna outdoors I found it working much more stable and fast.

They told also it can work as a CDMA phone with an external headset (a Motorola one is compatible) and send/receive SMS. But it seems those features are available with AnyData proprietary software (Win32-only). All in all, they are not my most wanted features.

A lot of people know about Beryl due to its show-stopper feature – a 3D-dimensional “Desktop cube” where each edge of it is a separate desktop. You can place the windows on separate edges and rotate the cube to change the current desktop. For those who are not on Linux, I should say that multiple desktops is a common practice in Linux desktop environments, and Beryl’s cube is just a metaphor for to visualise that old concept.

What’s good

• Switching between windows using their scaled live previews (like in OS X) is great.

• It is an eye-candy. True transparency and realistic shadows effects make the windows looking awesome.

• It is very customizable. You can spend hours to explore all options and adjust Beryl settings by your taste.
• A rich set of customizable window decoration themes.
• Zooming the screen is amusing and pays for accessibility.

What’s bad

• Beryl didn’t work out of the box with ATI Radeon graphic card. This howto helped to fix the problem.
• Java applications do not display correctly. See the solution.
• I could not find an option to display taskbar icons only for a current desktop, as I used to do in default KDE mode.
• There is a sort of conflict of Beryl and default KDE desktop switcher (“Pager”). It is better to turn it off when using Beryl.

[Upd: Unfortunately, the bad things list is growing]

• Beryl makes SuperKaramba widgets invisible if SuperKaramba is started first. See a trick with autostarting order.
• Beryl prevents the system to awake from Hibernate or Suspend mode. The solution is to kill Beryl before hibernating and to start it automatically on awakening.

[/Upd]
Resume: Install it if you care about the desktop aesthetics or want to amaze your Windows friends.

The difference between good and not-so-good Linux distribution is how often you have to keep a hammer and file in your hands while making the system good for living. In this sense, Ubuntu is a good system.

The last week I’ve almost upgraded my fresh Kubuntu 7.04 installation to an environment where I could grow roots, work and live in peace. There are the things that I needed to install absolutely:

• Sun Java 5. I kindly appreciate efforts of the GNU Java projects (default in Ubuntu) but sorry, they cannot replace Sun’s implementation so far.
• Eclipse. I cannot program without it.
• Firefox. Konqueror is good, but many modern ajaxian web interfaces have problems with it. So, Fox rocks.
• Extra multimedia codecs. How could I live without my old huge MP3 collection?
• Apache, PHP and MySQL. I am a web-developer, huh.
• GIMP and Inkscape for graphics.
• And lots of other thingies.

First problems

Bug #91368. I was unable to fetch ‘universe’ packages list when ‘apt-get update’, because the downloaded gzip file was broken and stuck in the ‘/var/lib/apt/lists/partial’ dir. I removed it and tried to update again but it had no help – I got the same broken file. And it was happening only with the ‘universe’ list (maybe, ‘coz it was a largest one). Finally, I downloaded it with wget, gunzipped, renamed an moved into ‘list’ manually and it worked! Later I found on Ubuntu Forums that replacing ‘http:’ protocol to ‘ftp:’ everywhere in ‘sources.list’ fixes the problem. Sort of apt and proxy issue, I think.

Bug #102742. Not so critical but sad also – KNemo network monitor (a very useful thing that shows nice connection icons in the system tray, connection speed graphs and keeps network usage statistics) strangely eats up to 100% CPU time and makes the rest of the system crowling slowly. I didn’t see this behavior in my previous installations. I have no idea how to fix it, so, I simply turned it off waiting for update.

So far, it’s all.

Contents of the Desktop CD is not too rich but enough as a basic kit for the most of home/office tasks. Now I am in the process of installing all extra stuff I need and moving all my environment from old (Fedora) installation. So, my system is dual-booted until this process is done.