René Rebe

Microsoft Says Free Software Violates 235 Patents, probably as famous ones as the “FAT” - file-system - patent.

The free software world remains unimpressed, and elsewhere the NY Stock Exchange Moves To Linux, while Linus Torvalds estimates:

It’s certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does.

Not only that the Novell Microsoft patent exchange and cooperation deal was bizzare enough, now Dell event joined this wanna-be Linux alliance after their customers most often asked for Linux in the Dell Idea Storm.
AND IT IS NOT EVEN April the 1st! :-(

I started with 1.9GB of plublic photo images, and the collection grew to 4.6 GB online in this blog, now. The Wordpress pixgallery plugin was rewritten by about 50% in the meantime, including many bug fixes, new features and utilizing our in-house ExactImage software library for the image DSP (digital signal processing) - mostly for improved speed and less server load :-)

One of the recently added photo collection, also known as streams, is the State of Play, Performance - Event, Berlin held by Susan’s sister: Sabine Klaus as well as Ridade Al Daghestani, Arnar Lindal Halldorsson and Alexandra Ross.

As the photos can not yet be commented (I guess I finally have to rewrite the other half of the PixGallery code, …), please feel free to leave comments about the event here in this post.

My first contact with the Sony MiniDisc format was in the mid 90th. At that time I have been a bit more active palying guitar and bass and the Mini-Disc was a perfect medium to not only record some jam sessions or concerts but also carry the tiny player with other pre-recorded music around when others either had big, skipping CD-players or grinding and noisy analog tape walkmans. Despite a Yamaha MD HIFI deck I have the portable Sharp MD recorder. The later, now nearly 10 years old, is still in perfectly function after it was in use for 3 years when I was an trainee, for music yam sessions, I even borrowed it to a friend who studied composing and it made it to Ireland on a three week bicycle tour.

I never brought one of those MP3 player, whether iPod or other low-quality incarnations, because the ability to record is too handy and those mp3 player can not form the base for a music collection. At some time the hard-disc, or even sooner the flash, is filled up. MDs can be collected nicely among the CDs - and hundreds of them.

Now that Sony released a High density, Hi-MD format, including the possibly to store arbitrary data as well as inject MP3 tracks caught my attention. With the announcement of the MZ-RH 1 MD-Walkman it was the time to give that promising product a try:

The MZ-RH1 comes with quite a lot of paper work, the left side bunch are manuals in several languages, the cable remote, usb cable, and since the device has only a USB connector - not a dedicated power-supply plug, a power supply with a usb connector to charge the battery independent of a computer.

Overall the device looks very stylish and professional, especially the jog-wheel with play and record button and the OLED display. Compared with my former Sharp recorder it is much thiner and way lighter.

Usability wise it is as intuitive as usual, the jog wheel is used for navigation and fast forward / rewind in tracks, and as usual for MD recorders you can move, split, combine tracks on the fly, edit titles and so on.

The cable remote is a bit disappointing, it looks a bit cheap, plastic-wise, and lacks viewing angle. Also just because of this limitation I had to notice the device display does not allow to show the track names - maybe because the device has two separate displays and some Sony engineer decided the gab inbetween would be too big for scrolling text …

With a Hi-MD formatted disc the recorder appears as normal USB storage device and thus is accessible from any OS: Linux, Mac OS, Windows to name a few. However the old, classic MDs are only accessable from within the Sony SonicStage software - not even from the Mac software shipped with the package. Also SonicStage is not able to play the old MD tracks in real-time, instead the recorder will play the track out of the headphone / line-out if requested to play in the software, however it is still possible to copy those tracks back to the PC.

To upload audio tracks, be that MP3 or ATRAC files, the device should be able to play, meta data updates in special files of the Hi-MD medium are required, just drag’n dropping the files is not enough. SonicStage is required to register the files properly - not even the Hi-MD Transfer for Mac allows this, however it is just a matter of time until some open source developer will figure out how to update the meta data accordingly - as it was case for the Apple iPod as well …

All in all it is a awesome portable recorder that should be quite a pleasure to use for the next years, the music can be collected on a shelf while the 1GB media is still large enough to allow a current “personal best of” to be carried around as one would do with other MP3 players.

The quality of the headphone / line-out is exceptional perfect, and a menu option allows raising the level to the standard line level. I still wonder why in contrast the Sony walkman “cell phones” produce clicks and clacks between some mp3 files that make your ear wanna die with a far from linear output frequency spectrum.

The use as ordinary data storage is a much welcomed extra that might, or should suspend my 250MB Zip - random access CD / DVD media is still not widespread either. However the Sony DRM is really a drawback, especially with not even Mac software to transfer music onto the player. (I need to figure out the meta-data to up and download the tracks under Linux, however a first glimpse indicate that will not be that easy …)

Update:
The self discharge is quite high. When it is on stand-by for about a week the Li-Ion battery is about empty.

Update 2016:
Unfortunately the OLED display apparently die after some time. Since the “o” in OLED actually stands for organic, I personally call this “rotting away” displays. Sigh.

It is however possible to find those spare parts sometimes, and replace it with a lot of time and patience: Replacing the OLED EL-display on a Sony MZ-RH1

As far as I have found out the same part: 1-802-022-11, Indicator Module, Organic EL, is also used in at least the Sony NW-S202, S203, S205 and NW-E305, E307.

Update 2017
Now that I can upload mp3 from Linux I accidentally realize the MZ-RH1 refuses to play 48kHz files :-/ Apparently the decoder or DAC is limited to 44.1kHz.

Update 2018
Now with OLED swap video series!

Today I sorted the photos that stacked up over the last years. Just deleting the unworthy ones and rotating the portrait images took 4 hours and left 1.9 GB of images in 1600 files which will show up in the photo gallery within the next days

Thanks to a quickly done kde servicemenu entries executing jpegtran for lossless JPEG rotation in the image context menu of Konqueror it was quite a pleasure. It is as simple as creating a ~/kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/rotateL.desktop with the content:


[Desktop Entry]
ServiceTypes=image/jpeg
Actions=rotateL

[Desktop Action rotateL]
Name=Rotate to the left (counter clockwise)
Icon=rotate_ccw
Exec=jpegtran -rotate 270 -outfile "%u" "%u"


Maybe something like this (including the variant for 90 degree) should be shipped with KDE by default ,-) Anyway it reminds me I should add support for lessless rotation to ExactImage.

So I dive into the shiny new world of blogging as well. Not because I want to be so wicked damn cool, but because my static HTML files and shell script generated photo galleries I maintain since about 1997 started to not feel right anymore. Publishing new photos was not just drag’n droping files for example in KDE’s Konqueror from a camera:// to a fish:// remote machine, but additionally running aging shell script in the right order - guess how that felt like in the 21st century …

Let’s see how comfortable I’ll feel with WordPress after some days of use ,-) …