Month: August 2011

Innsbruck with #TBUIBK

Last week we headed off to the 2nd Travel Bloggers Unite conference (the first was this Spring in Manchester). Hashtag: #TBUIBK Delegates arrived from all over and some found it more convenient to fly into Munich, and so the organizer kicked in for some free shuttle transfers for us from Munich airport down to our hotel. Even if we were arriving at MUC via DB Regio, the shuttle drivers didn’t mind at all.

We got to Innsbruck just about two hours after departing Munich on Wednesday night, checked in, and crashed out (it had been a long day). We got started the next morning early exploring the town while killing a little time waiting for our city tour and photo walk to start. One of the first things we noticed: Innsbruck likes two things: puns, and visitors from Italy.

We got ourselves some Tiroler Bauern Gröstl and Schupfnudeln and climbed the stairs to the top of the Stadtturm. The sun was strong, and it gave me a chance to play around with the Diorama art filter on my camera. Austria seems like a good place for that.

We finished up lunch and then started two tours, almost back-to-back. Our first tour guide was a very nice woman named Ute. She knows everything about Innsbruck, but insisted we didn’t have time to do all the best stuff, as we hurried our way through the multimedia museum exhibit on your favorite HRE and mine, Maximilian I; toured the Hofburg palace, admiring the royal portraits; visited the Dom for some impressive sculpture and plenty of Rokoko, and got the skinny on the Goldenes Dachl.

Just about directly after that, Ken Kaminesky took us on a photo walk around town. Armed with our DSLRs, point-and-shoots, and smartphones, we learned a little about lighting, accessories, perspectives, and that it’s not so much the gear that really makes the shot as it is the patience and perspective of the photographer.

We met a lot of great new people over those 3 days, and it was awfully nice to reconnect with pals from Manchester as well.

Here’re the rest of the best of the photos from that trip:

WEBMU 2011 Cologne — Agenda

The Whiny Expat Bloggers MeetUp in Cologne this year now has its own agenda.

If you live in Germany, and blog about that (or other stuff) in English, then come visit Cologne with us in October. We’ll whine collectively while touring and eating and laughing. Sign up on our discussion board to get the full load of details — and they’re looking really good, thanks to your hosts.

On our discussion board, you’ll find ideas about where to stay, how to get there and — the best part — who-all will be attending. I can’t wait to see old pals and meet new ones!

Inheriting a router from someone else

The Accidental Expats were in a mad rush to part with some of their European acquisitions. I got a sweet deal on an N-spec. router out of their chaos. That’s an upgrade for me — I’m still using the G-spec. router that came with the contract with our ISP. But TAEs’ N-spec. device branded and optimized for T-Com (a.k.a. Telekom, again, I think) and I use another DSL provider (at least until my current contract is up in a few months…let’s see who makes the best offer then).

But after two days of messing around with it, I think I’m going to switch back to the original one. For whatever reason, and I don’t know enough about EMC and Napoleonic-War era construction and mixed OS environment to make a guess about why, my Linux machine beyond those thick walls in the back room connects better with the older router. Skype is usable with the old one. Running a small webserver as a test environment through a NAT firewall and DynDNS hostname works with that one. I just can’t seem to get those things to work reliably with the N-spec. router, even though the functionality is ostensibly there on the new router (and just to make sure, I updated its firmware to the latest version, though not without a little headscratching — it took me a while to realize that the router was rejecting the firmware file upload because I was using Google Chrome instead of MSIE <v7 or Firexfox ≤v3).

I thought N-spec. routers were supposed to have both speed AND range advantages over G-spec. Any thoughts as to how I could reap those benefits? I only have one device still stuck with a G-spec. WLAN adapter; once that gets replaced at some point in the far future, our household will be pure N-spec. compatible.

Otherwise, I may as well stick with the slower but apparently more reliably G-spec. router.

Will you join us at WEBMU 2011?

There’s a poll up at the ExpatBloggersInGermany.com board seeking your input. Just a real basic question — “Are you coming to the Whiny Expat Blogger MeetUp 2011?” — and Yes/No/Maybe options for your response. You can change your vote as often as you like while the hosts are planning the agenda.

If you’re an expatriate living in Germany blogging in English, come on out to Cologne in October for a weekend of laughter and comiserating. If you’re new to our discussion board, you can register right there too — just don’t forget to mention your blog’s internet address and your (rough) location in Germany.

Skype on Kubuntu Natty (11.04) with video on from a crappy old web camera

I’ve been tinkering around with this all morning. I’ve been googling for terms like

  • skype
  • linux
  • kubuntu
  • gspca
  • sonix
  • gspca_sonixj
  • 0c45:613c Microdia PC Camera (SN9C120)
  • video
  • modprobe
  • lsmod
  • lsusb
  • speedlink

to mostly no avail. I kept finding hits and solution suggestions for older operating systems, or newer cameras. But I pressed on, because I knew this camera was working with applications like the aptly named Cheese (whence the image in this post came), Kopete, and even Google+ Hangouts seemed to work just fine with this cheapo camera (well, aside from its cheapo image quality, that is).

Sooner or later along the way, I hit upon this post by Hitesh Sarda which gave me a hint about starting Skype by setting some environment variables. I tried what he suggested, and that didn’t work for me. But I noticed that in the same folder as the shared object he mentioned, there was another one available.

myuser@linux:/usr/lib/libv4l$ ls
ov511-decomp ov518-decomp v4l1compat.so v4l2convert.so
myuser@linux:/usr/lib/libv4l$

And that v4l2convert.so shared object file does something to make my camera work with Skype. So with a simple shell script, I can start Skype and get the video working:

#!/bin/sh
env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so skype

I suppose most people would have simply upgraded to a newer/better webcam…but not me. Skype needs to catch up with other software companies supporting more varied hardware via open-source platforms out of the box, otherwise they’re going to end up just like Microsoft Internet Explo — oh…uh, never mind.