2008

Thu, Sep 25

<00:00 EEST> Synchronicity is moving to Viitatorni on Alvar's name day.

Fri, Sep 19

<23:38 EEST> Last Saturday a friend of mine was on the TV, and I struggled for a while to get the episode from Yle Areena. Our national broadcasting company has decided on a streaming Windows format, and while some people have been able to play them with MPlayer, it doesn't work at the moment. I tried Totem as it was the recommended choice for Ubuntu users, and after installing the requisite plugins it sort of worked. I watched the entire episode with frequent glitches and a complete loss of A-V sync.

Today I found out that Kaffeine, with the Xine backend, works pretty much perfectly. Plain Xine doesn't work at all though. The problem with it and MPlayer seems to be with the stream handling, not with the Windows-based codecs themselves. Perhaps this is a deliberate setup to make saving the stream harder; Kaffeine/Xine only saves the playlist file instead of the actual contents :-/

Together with this considerable proportion of YLE's programming available online, goes a recent announcement of government-sponsored 100 Mbps Internet access for every Finnish household by 2015. Some sources mention this as the possible upgrade path from the current standard-definition digital TV. So why actually did they build the intermediate DVB stage? This is the very question lots of geeks, myself including, argued back in the days before the DVB investments. Now somebody is finally getting a clue, having wasted an assload of taxpayer money. Duuuuh.

Another example of the public officials' stupidity is the 'Stop Töhryille' campaign against graffiti. Their fascist interpretation of zero tolerance has been all over the news lately. I could probably discuss for ages on this topic, but after today's adventures I'll just ask: Where were these infallible art critics with their zero tolerance when somebody made this mess on Saraakallio a few millennia ago?