main April 2012

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22 participants
23 discussions

Processing power and bandwidth needed for streaming internet radio
by Chris Green 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

I'm confused! (so what's new?) My Acer Aspire laptop runs the little dedicated internet radio application I found quite recently with no problems at all when I run it at home. There it has an ADSL connection with something between 3Mb/s and 4Mb/s. However when I try it here (in France) using the WiFi service here it's completely useless, i.e. it produces about one second in five of actual sound. The bandwidth here is quite good though, the BBC iPlayer bandwidth check (which should be vaguely relevant as I'm trying to listen to the BBC) tells me:- Download speed: 1778 kbps Streaming speed 1: 1512 kbps Streaming speed 2: 1958 kbps Streaming speed 3: 1122 kbps Which the BBC says isn't quite enough for HD TV (!) but should manage anything else - all I want is a single radio channel! Does a lower connection speed require a faster processor to keep up or should I be looking somewhere else for what's causing the totally broken up internet radio here? -- Chris Green

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Really odd USB error/failure with Genius mouse
by Chris Green 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

I'm not really expecting a solution to this, just ranting/reporting an oddity. It confirms my general distrust/hatred of USB in general! :-) I have a little Acer Aspire netbook that I use (as I am now) when away from home, it runs xubuntu 11.10 (though I'm fairly certain I saw the same problem with previous versions of xubuntu). I use a Genius/Kye Traveller 350 mouse with it rather than the horrible touchpad. This works beautifully as it's actually a trackball rather than a mouse and has a scrollwheel and a fourth button that I have programmed as a double click of button one - bliss! :-) However after a random amount of time the Genius mouse stops working, since this is quite a long time (like hours rather than minutes) it doesn't often worry me too much as I don't spend hours on my laptop. Tonight though I decided to have a play and see if I could work out why it stops working (as the netbook had been left turned on and the mouse had, as usual, stopped working). I have the mouse plugged into the left hand side of the netbook where there are two USB ports as I usually use it left handed (even though I'm actually right handed). Since it had died just now I unplugged it and plugged it back in a couple of times, nothing, dmesg/syslog shows nothing, it's as if the mouse doesn't exist. If I reboot though it will work with no problem. Then I tried plugging it into the USB port on the RHS of the netbbok, and it works! It's still working. I can plug/unplug it repeatedly and it works every time. If I plug it in to the LHS ports there's still nothing happening though. Other devices (e.g. memory sticks) plugged into the LHS USB ports work perfectly though. It's just the mouse that won't work in the LHS ports (until I reboot!). Wierd! I think USB is a creation of arcane beings. -- Chris Green

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Directories to exclude on a backup
by Chris Walker 01 Apr '12

01 Apr '12

I'm about to backup my system as I want to resize the sda1 partition and I didn't think it was possible to do that with an existing system. So I looked online and found a Ubuntu guide to it which suggests excluding the following directories :- /proc /lost+found /mnt /sys/ I intend to backup /home separately so I will also exclude that but is the list reasonable or are there others I should also exclude? TIA

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