The Contour ROAM Action Cam

While my blog hasn't been getting any action, I've gotten myself an action cam to record my MTB rides.

Two years ago my brother bought a Drift x170 and we have since recorded all of our bikes rides. The Drift x170 is a non HD camera, but even so we recorded several hours of video which we still enjoy to watch back today.

Fast forward to our days. To record video in non HD format is the equivalent of taping music in a magnetic tape in the age of CD's. It was therefore about time to upgrade our videos to HD. And since my brother has recently moved to France, it was up to me to shell out on a new Action Cam to bring along in our MTB rides.

Today's choice are mostly between two brands: Contour and GoPro. Each brand has several offers, but ruling out the most expensive ones, it was either the Contour ROAM or the GoPro HD Hero. Both offers are quite similar technically wise, both record HD with a very decent framerate, and batteries last about the same time. What I found different was the form factor, the Contour can easily be fitted to an helmet without disturbing too much the center of mass (which as my brother learned from the Drift x170, is something that should not be forgotten). Price wise, they are sold in the same price range, but since I found an Amazon sale of the ContourROAM it instantly became the best :)

The image quality is great. The week I got the camera I immediately took it for a ride on a short route in Bio Ria. You can see the quality of the pictures on the vimeo movie in this post. Furthermore the camera is quite sturdy and has already gotten some rain on. Overall it has been a great purchase so far, and I'm looking forward to record some cool HD videos in the months to come.

Canal nº 140777 – Rolando na Ria no MEO Kanall

Meanwhile, you can check old videos and some new ones online on Vimeo, or if your lucky enough to have FTTH MEO service on channel 140777.

Linux kernel 2.6.38.4 for the Iomega iConnect

After a long hiatus, I'm back with the latest version of the linux kernel (2.6.38.4) for the iomega iconnect.

This new kernel brings several improvements to the previous ones, since it improves support for Marvell's Kirkwood platform (on which iConnect is built upon) and finally includes in the main kernel the wireless driver for the RaLink RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe which is built in the iConnect.

Without further due, here are the files:

New Blog Engine

Guess what, I wasn't happy with "just" changing themes... and decided to switch theme again along side with a new blogging engine. Wordpress is great and all, but required me to keep constant attention (keeping up with security updates), and overall performance was lacking (even though I used the great Super Cache plugin).

Since moving to a low cost VPS provider (found them through lowendbox ) which is capped to 256MB, I've been struggling to keep my resource usage controlled. This has led me to survey alternative blog engines that are less resource savvy than Wordpress running on LAMP, one of such alternatives grab my attention.

Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby that generates your blog from plain text files (no DB needed). Since I hadn't messed with Ruby before, I got my excuse to finally jump on the bandwagon.

Truth be told, the last weeks have been more about CSS3 (and some HTML5) then Ruby and Jekyll. In the process I've forked bibjekyll in order to generate my CV from my .bib files instead of copy&pasting my papers into the CV page.

With the new platform up, I hope to dedicate more time (of my non existing one) to other projects that have been left hanging for the last months.

New Theme

This blog is now more then 4 years old, and was in dear need of some shake ups...

It's true that I don't post here that often, with a new semester that started just last week, with a brand new class on Information Systems Infra-Structures that I'm now preparing, with new research projects just kicking in, and of-course with my ~20month year old daughter that requires full attention from everyone in the house, it's been hard to publish new posts that have been lining in the pipeline.

Simplefy ScreenshotNonetheless, I've started in December (yes that long ago!) working in a new wordpress theme to update this blog. The theme is based on Automattic Toolbox which is a semantic, HTML5, canvas in which I could fit a very simple theme I found at coolwebtemplates.net.

The theme name is very obvious: Simplefy. It's a trick word with "Simple" and 5 (of HTML5).

In addition to the new theme, I've updated the RSS feed url. So please, if you are reading this blog through an RSS please make sure to update the url to http://www.diogogomes.com/feed/.

Binary Kernel and Modules for the Iomega iConnect running Linux Debian

In the last months after I've published an howto on how to customize the Linux kernel for the Iomega iConnect, I've been getting lots of comments from people who would like to have a go at installing it, but which are not proficient Linux users.

In order to assist those situations, I'm hereby making it available binary versions of Linux 2.6.37 configured for the Iomega iConnect, as well as the source code used to compile those binaries.

Now for the "extras":

How to compile the wireless card driver (RaLink RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe)

The driver is available at Ralink's website (RT3090PCIe) and can be compile with:

make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=../arm-2010q1/bin/arm-none-eabi- LINUX_SRC=/usr/src/linux

As of the current version of the driver, you will run into some compilation errors. You should activate:

"cfg80211"
"EEPROM 93CX6"

in kernel config but must disable

cfg80211 in os/linux/config.ml (HAS_CFG80211_SUPPORT=n)

Hopefully newer versions will fix this issue and AFAIK Linux 2.6.38 will include this driver

A binary version of the driver (compatible with the previous kernel) is available here

You also need to place file RT2860STA.dat (found in the driver tar.gz) into /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat

What I'm listenning to ...