This is the first "blog" of any kind I've ever had, so it's probably not the greatest...
Just a little snippet about me:
I'd like to consider myself relatively tech-savvy; obviously I use Linux (Arch to be precise; K.I.S.S. FTW), and I enjoy learning new things about computers in general (both software and hardware-related).
This blog is mostly just for whenever I feel like telling the world about my experiences with computers/Linux (or just life in general), or just posting for the hell of it.
Just a little snippet about me:
I'd like to consider myself relatively tech-savvy; obviously I use Linux (Arch to be precise; K.I.S.S. FTW), and I enjoy learning new things about computers in general (both software and hardware-related).
This blog is mostly just for whenever I feel like telling the world about my experiences with computers/Linux (or just life in general), or just posting for the hell of it.
Something a little less "deep", and more "practical" (well, to me at least)
Sometimes when I see someone watching an HD video with the embedded (*shudder*) Flash player on a website, I just want to say someting like, "Do you have any idea how many CPU cycles are being burned up just to play that video??".
If I want to watch a video on YouTube (or some other video-hosting website) that offers a higher vertical resolution than 480p, I use my fancy little DownloadHelper FF plugin and just download it. Then I can play it with GNOME MPlayer, which has the huge advantage of providing VDPAU acceleration, which not only reduces the CPU load by a lot, but also reduces the chances of the damn machine roasting my legs whenever I sit with it! A GPU is a lot more efficient than a general-purpose CPU for video decoding/playback, and Flash is just plain bloated anyway...no wonder it turns a laptop into a griddle when you try to use it for HD video!
I've heard that Flash 10.1 supposedly provides GPU acceleration (for NVIDIA cards at least), but a) Adobe has discontinued 64-bit Flash for Linux (I'm on 64-bit Arch), b) the GPU acceleration is allegedly Windows-only (I don't even think Mac OS X has it
), and c) I don't do a whole lot of Flash-related web browsing anyway. Oh yeah, I've tried it on my WinXP box, but I didn't really see that much difference in CPU load (maybe 10% less than before).
...anyways, that was a bit of a rant, but at this point, anything to get me off the whole "are we free?" shtick is worth it.
If I want to watch a video on YouTube (or some other video-hosting website) that offers a higher vertical resolution than 480p, I use my fancy little DownloadHelper FF plugin and just download it. Then I can play it with GNOME MPlayer, which has the huge advantage of providing VDPAU acceleration, which not only reduces the CPU load by a lot, but also reduces the chances of the damn machine roasting my legs whenever I sit with it! A GPU is a lot more efficient than a general-purpose CPU for video decoding/playback, and Flash is just plain bloated anyway...no wonder it turns a laptop into a griddle when you try to use it for HD video!
I've heard that Flash 10.1 supposedly provides GPU acceleration (for NVIDIA cards at least), but a) Adobe has discontinued 64-bit Flash for Linux (I'm on 64-bit Arch), b) the GPU acceleration is allegedly Windows-only (I don't even think Mac OS X has it
), and c) I don't do a whole lot of Flash-related web browsing anyway. Oh yeah, I've tried it on my WinXP box, but I didn't really see that much difference in CPU load (maybe 10% less than before)....anyways, that was a bit of a rant, but at this point, anything to get me off the whole "are we free?" shtick is worth it.
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