Philips has two nicely specified webcams on the market at the moment, the SPC-1000NC and the SPC-1300NC, both 1.3 megapixel (1280×1024 native resolution) devices.

Now, as many amateur astrophotographers will tell you, the earlier Philips Toucam models had lenses which unscrewed from a M12.5×0.5 thread allowing the easy fitment of a telescope adapter. Alternatively, ‘Micro Video’ lenses of different focal lengths could be fitted to the webcam.

The SPC-1000NC/SPC-1300NC may be a different issue as I’ve read an old post from the QCIUAG via a german astrophotography forum indicating the lens on these camera’s VGA sibling is captive (no M12.5×0.5 thread )

I’d be really grateful if anyone passing this way who knows with certainty whether the lenses can be removed or not post in the comments section below and let me know.

It would also be handy to know if the webcams are permanently attached to their bases or wether they have a normal tripod thread.

I just picked up this story over at Arstechnica.

Apparently, web metrics firm Xiti has found that 28% of the web browser market in Europe is now running Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is an alternative to Microsoft’s operating system tied Internet Explorer product. Firefox offers improved security, performance and extendability over IE and the fact that it is free, open-source software has undoubtedly helped in it’s adoption. IE, fairly or not, has gained a bit of a reputation for having vulnerabilities and exploits. Firefox also has these but enthusiastic developers tend to produce patches with all haste.

It probably also helps Firefox’s position that, unlike IE which is only available for Windows (it is discontinued for Mac), Firefox will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and soon a range of handhelds.

It will be interesting to see if the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.0 increases the Mozilla market share still further.

For the record, I believe delusionofgrandeur.co.uk looks considerably smarter in Gecko (Firefox’s render engine) than in IE. You can download Firefox for free HERE.

The BBC has finally pulled it’s finger out and made their iPlayer view-on-demand system work on Linux and Mac platforms. The iPlayer streaming service is now available via web-browser using the Adobe Flash plugin. The download service is not available as it has apparently still not been possible to port Verisign’s proprietary, DRM encumbered Kontiki software to other platforms.

Apparently, releasing a flash-based version will not be enough to appease the BBC Trust on cross-platform availability either.

The streaming iPlayer requires the latest flash version which is a minor version of Flash 9.x (9.0.115.0). The iPlayer will run with earlier flash 9.x versions but the full-screen mode is disabled. Apparently, users were formerly required to register before using iPlayer but when I went to try it, I was given direct access. The experience was somewhat underwhelming. The bitrate was obviously lower than required to maintain the quality and the frame rate felt like 15fps. That said, this is probably the best the BBC can do at the moment as services such as iPlayer require a huge amount of processing power and bandwidth due to the potential userbase.

The personal gripe that I had is probably more of a problem with the BBC in general rather than iPlayer itself. Despite the large iPlayer catalogue, there seems to be very little worth watching. I’m sure it appeals to the lowest common denominator (whoever he may be) but I’m left puzzled by what the modern BBC regard as ‘entertainment’.

Earlier on, I was checking the delusionofgrandeur server logs and I nearly feel out of my chair when I discovered…..

….wait for it….

…what do you mean you guessed by the picture? ….oh.

That’s right, we were visited by a user of the hallowed Playstation 3. I feel privileged that perhaps as much as one fifth of the world’s Playstation 3 userbase chooses to read delusionofgrandeur (They may have even paid Five Hundred and Ninety Nine US Dollars for the experience!). It appears that the PS3 has an integrated web-browser that simply identifies itself as PLAYSTATION 3 Suggestion to Sony; check caps lock

To PS3 User; If you happen to come back, please let us know if you’re using or intend to use Linux on your Playstation 3

Tux 500 are a previously little-known Indianapolis 500 racing team.

Their express aim is the marketing and promotion of Linux in mainstream media and they have just qualified 31st for the 2007 Indianapolis 500 race on the back of just $12,500 worth of donations (presumably they have permanent backers to enable them to afford the car and run the team)

Good luck to the Tux 500 team on May 27th!

…and then it doesn’t.

I think I mentioned before that I was fairly sick.of SuSE (hence my wholesale move to Ubuntu) but I was recently presented with a broken machine from a friend that needed fixing.

This box was a SuSE 10.0 install running the rather superb Zoneminder CCTV security monitoring software. Unfortunately, this box had died completely.

Initial inspection found the fault easily; a set of expanded / blown capacitors next to the CPU.

So, without further ado, I aquired a replacement socket A nforce2 motherboard. Of course, the new nforce chipset differed from the VIA chipset on the original board and when the HHD was transferred over, this was to cause problems.

Waiting for device /dev/hda1 to appear

Of course, it never appears as the required module for the new nforce2 controller is not available to the bootloader.

The Fix:

I downloaded and burned to CD the first disk in the SuSE 10.0 install set. (not the mini boot iso!)

I then booted from this CD and selected install.

At the point I was asked if I wanted to do a ‘new installation’ I selected ‘other’ and ‘repair’. I then selected expert repair (my delusions showing again).

From the expert repair menu, I told it to rewrite the bootloader (with the default options).

Then reboot and hey-presto, it’s working again.

Full disclosure: it took me about 4 hours to work this out as the correct fix!

Note: The nforce NIC also had to be confgured in my case using YAST.