Amilo L7320 Revival

Background info:

To begin with I'm not a laptop fan. I did not own a laptop for a reason! I've got a good desktop at home, another one at work, and yet another one at my parents place. So wherever I was I had a full fledged very capable and productive desktop environment. And whenever I was on the road I just used my smartphone to get online. I considered laptops to be a logistics and productivity hog. Dragging them around, charging them, working on their cumbered touchpad is a pain compared to a mouse experience on the desktop. Now I happened to receive a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo L7320 to do whatever with it at my will.

There are 3 things I did to it to make it a lot more capable:

1. I bought (for $10) another 512MB DDR2 RAM.
2. I installed ALPS driver. It adds scrollwheel functionality to the Amilo L7320 touchpad.
3. I installed touchfeeze. It turns off your touchpad while you're typing.

Actually I found 3 really annoying things about the FUSI Amilo L7320.

1. It came with 512MB of RAM. This is not even enough to load a modern browser. So if I wanted performance, lots of tabs, and applications running parallel I had to remotely log into my home desktop. Doubling the RAM to (1GB) helped a whole lot. Now Chrome fits into the RAM just fine, and the Amilo is not swapping anymore the minute I try to actually use it.
2. The PS/2 touchpad of the Amilo L7320 is quite a bulky one. Neither has it support for multitouch (by hardware) nor does it support middle button or scrollwheel emulation out of the box. I tried installing a plethora of Synaptics touchpad drivers at least 3 versions of the official releases and 2 patched versions with all features unlocked. - None of that helped to my greatest anger. And while scroll wheel emulation and touchpad partitioning did work under Knoppix, I could not get the same thing working for XP. The Fujitsu Amilo L7320 support site useless. They did not have the link for a more capable touchpad driver. My only lead was the device string "ACPI\PNP0F13\4&10C7922&0" in the device manager. Googling that also led back to the Synaptics sites and further miseries. Finally I figured I should look at touchpad drivers of similar FuSi models on the Fujitsu support site. And that's what brought me to the solution eventually. I found someting called the ALPS Pointing-device driver on the L7300 drivers site. So browse to the L7300 drivers, instead of the L7320! The name of the file is FTS_TouchpadAlpsPointingdevice_5514012_1001816.
3. Third thing that was really annoying that I would accidentally hit the touchpad, dislocate my cursor, and find that I am typing garbled stuff. I realized that I ended up typing less and less on my Amilo because of this, that really set my productivity back. The solution came in the form of a cool utility called Touchfreeze. Touchfreeze turns off your touchpad, while you are typing, so accidentally hitting the touchpad with your thumb no longer places your cursor to a new location while you are typing.

Video playback on my Casio Exilim Z10 digital camera

Watch movies on your Casio Camera's LCD screen, that is!

I have been thinking about watching movies (maybe TV series) on the screen of my Casio Exilim Z10 digital camera for half a year now. Just recently I have decided to do something about it. My first approach was to download a camera-made MJPEG video from the SD card of my camera, analyse the format and then use mencoder from the mplayer pack to generate something very similar format-wise but with my own movie content.

Mencoder failures

My first approach was to use mencoder. I love mencoder. It's my primary choice for transcoding stuff. But this time mencoder has miserably failed on me. The reason for that was that mencoder had a very poor multiplexer code built-in allowing literally zero control whatsoever how the audio and video streams you wish to mux together. The Casio Exilim Z10 digital camera requires that one video frame is followed by one audio frame (a short chunk of audio stream for the previous video fame). Densely muxed - in other words. The most obvious reason for that is, that this way playback requires less read-ahead, less caching on forward and backward seeks and thus less operational memory. What's more such muxing of A/V makes seeks a lot snappier since there is no need to read large areas of the slow flash storage (SD card) when a seek happens and land itself at some random position within the muxed stream.

Commercial Software

There is a commercial software called Digital Camera Media Studio by Makayama Interactive. It has a price tag. The freely downloadable demo versio has a 3 minute limitation for transcoding video. The only upside of this software was that it actually worked. It's campaign is quite misleading though: It advertises itself to be the de-facto transcoder for the "proprietary MJPEG format of Casio cameras". Now that's a sheer lie. Read on why!

Combining Commercial Software with mencoder

The no-brainer dumb idea to get a free lunch here is to slice up your source video into 3 minute chunks, transcode them using the commercial demo tool, and join them back together with mencoder. Let it be enough to say here: It works. I am not going to detail the mencoder command lines for that herein, because there is a superior method. Read on!

VirtualDub and Reps's article on steves-digitcams.com

Works! Hurray! Reps's blog on Casio Cameras is quite accurate. let me quote it for history's stake:

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Hi all,

as I see all this mess around in all Casio forums about putting images and video back to cameras I promised to make a small tutorial. It is not perfect and will be edited constantly but I hope that You will get the idea. All software used for this process is kept freeware up to reasonable extent.

1. Still images to camera: freeware from Casio (all oldies are best when rediscovered :-) ) : http://www.exilim.com/intl/avenue/function/photo_t.html

Same can be done via Bestman editor (but shareware)

2. M4S2 video playback/editing:
a) I suggest to download ffdshow ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow/ ) and install it (I personally did not associate it with any types of files)

b) open Video decoder configuration and select libavcodec for generic MPEG4:



c) this enables to open them in VirtualDub ( http://www.virtualdub.org) for editing and play back in WMP without sound synchronization problems.

d) for quick processing of M4S2 files for viewing on DiVX capable DVD player or other device I can recommend MP4Cam2avi :http://sourceforge.net/projects/mp4cam2avi/
This enables the DiVX compatibility and sound in eg MP3 format- and it is lighting fast!

3. To play back any video on Casio (MJPEG): to my great surprise my Z750 (which uses enhanced M4S2 video was capable of MJPEG coded AVI playback- so I believe that they all do- check it out please...)
a) open Your video in VD (version 1.7.0 supports AVI, MPEG and VOB at least...)
NB! careful with VBR MP3 soundtracks- You have to find modded VD for them or process the audio separately. NB! Make sure You are in full processing mode for video.
b) basic actions in VD will not be covered here - enough to visit eg http://www.doom9.org and read the tutorials (RTFM first as always :-)
c) if Your video is not 320x240 or 640x480 open Video->Filters->Add->resize , here You can adjust for letterbox and resize (use the preview...):


d) Open Video->Compression->ffdshow codec->Configuration (not tried various speeds but around 1000 seems OK- testing later :-) ):



e) Open Audio tab and set it to full processing mode also. Then open Conversion and make the desired changes (may depend on camera model):


f) Open Audio->Compression and select IMA ADPCM (less wasty than uncompressed PCM) and select desired quality:



g) Then You can do Preview filtered under File tab- and if no error messages You can go to File->Save as AVI... and save it like something VIDSxxxx.avi (even directly to Your camera if too lazy to load it later :-) )
h) as a small result I can offer this (WARNING, file is 3.5MB - common to MJPEG videos :-( ):http://casio.diagnostika.ee/VIDS3256.AVI

That is briefly sufficent for now, in some days I will continue with M4S2 playback in Casios (P505, Z7/850, S600, S770 as far I can recall now...)

Best and hope this helps You all a bit, JR

PS All questions and critique and additions and corrections are welcome...

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Ferrari

Nem lehet tudni... hogy ezt miert irom most ide. A Hungaroringen fotoztam le ezt a Ferrarit, es jol nezett ki, de voltakeppen semmi jelentosege nincs, hacsak nem annyi, hogy feldobja az oldat. :)

Vodafone 541 - tetszett - visszavittem

Megvettem. [...] Visszavittem.

15K volt asszem, majd a 3 napos "nem tetszesi" garanciat kihasznalva, visszavittem. Nagy nehezen, de visszakaptam a 13.6K-t, mert ugye levontak belole a SIM kartya arat. Ez nem zavart egyaltalan, mert az alatt a harom nap alatt, mig nalam volt a telefon mindent kiprobaltam benne. A SIM kartyan meg kaptam 10MB ingyen adatforgalmat, amit jocskan ki is hasznaltam.

Ami tetszett:

* 2.4" 320*200 touch screen

* usb csatlakozo / tolto

* web kamera uzemmod (!!!) allat

* usb drive uzemmod

* micro sd

Amit kiprobaltam:

* factory reset :)

* service menus :)

* PC software suite a vodafone uk oldalarol

* az OT708 firmware frissito utility az alcatel oldalarol. ez azt monta, hogy nem erheto el frissites a telohoz.

Ami nem tetszett:

* durvan gyenge java teljesitmeny es buggos implementacio

* gagyi interface

* sms iras fajdalmas

Amiert visszavittem:

A JAVA oritoen hulla lassu. Kivarhatatlan! Az opera mini 4.2 / 5.0 borzalmasan lassan toltodott be es bonyolultabb oldalakon pl gmail login page, ahol input text boxok miatt a telefon visszakapta a vezerlest rendszeresen kifagyott. Igazabon keptelen voltam egyszer is az opera minibol a gmailembe belepni, mert miutan beirtam a jelszavam a telo csontra fagyott mielot visszaadta volna a vezerlest a java alkalmazasnak. En pont azert vettem ezt a telot, hogy mobil internet terminalnak hasznaljam, es az opera mini 5 touch-os feluletevel szuper kis internetezo kutyure tegyek szert. De ebben a teloban a java implementacio olyan szenny lassu volt, hogy hosszu perceket kellett varni pusztan a java alkalmazas betoltesere, es akkor meg nem nyitottam meg semmit. :(

Kapcsolodo forumok:

* telefonguru

* mobilarena

Vodafone 541 a Vodanal:

* vodafone

Fuck grub2

I decided not to upgrade to grub2 from grub1. I am usually in favor of upgrades and I have always been the "prefer to use the cutting edge" type of guy but grub2 just got it worse on all grounds. The important features that could have tackled new fields are not being implemented, however we have a nice new cumbersome syntax and tool-chain that is only good enough to tackle the same issues we already had a working solution for with grub1. Some points to support that grub2 is no progress:

Grub2 has ugly syntax

• Curly brackets to separate blocks of code are so last decade! It makes me feel like moving back to C from Python. The grub.cfg config file of grub2 contains more junk and is far less readable than the menu.lst of grub1.
• Why do we need the set keyword for God's sake? Is it not just easier to treat root, timeout, default, (...) as methods as we did with grub1? Moving from methods to variables? So last century approach again! In addition, doing so would also save us room and do good for clarity. Keep simple things simple please!

Messy /etc/grub.d automagics

• It is cumbersome to keep track of and debug so many files under various locations of the file system. Grub2 has its automagics stored in a series of files under the /etc/grub.d directory.
• At least designers of grub2 could have put it under /boot/grub2/grub.d directory instead of /etc to keep related things less apart.
• I do realize that it may seem to be a progressive thought to adapt a apache2-like config approach for grub2. But its so wrong. It just makes things more chaotic. Let's say you edit grub.cfg from an other OS (on the same hardware) to add more menu items and options to it. The next time the primer OS updates its kernels it will flush the things you just edited in your grub.cfg.

Still no _real_ ISO chainloading

• ISO file chainloading is fake.
• Grub2 will not boot any OS ISO such as a Windows bootable ISO.
• It will only "save you the small hassle" that is the extraction of the kernel, squashfs and initrd files from the ISO.
• However it will leave you with the hassle to figure out what are the names and paths of these files inside the ISO.

No ntldr loading still

• Ntldr still cannot be loaded from grub2. ( Grub4dos does load it, but grub2 implemetation is still in far far future plans only.
• Only chainloading of a Windows partition's boot sector works. But that was already implemented in grub1. So no progress here.

No dynamic booting of hotplug devices

• There is no dynamic booting of hotplug devices like USB pendrives. It would have been nice to let grub load a hotplug device as: chainload usb(0)+1 or something like that, so that you could differentiate it from all the hd(0), hd(1), ..., hd(6) bunch.