Bluetooth on a Toshiba Tecra A9-127

I got a Toshiba Tecra A9-127, listening to the model number of PTS52E-06002LEN as written on the back, from work to replace my dying old HP Compaq nx9030. As my laptop OS of choice is Ubuntu, currently in it's Hardy release, it's not completely coincidence that the hardware is almost all Intel based since that's what Matthew Garrett recommends. And indeed, it all works effortlessly! Apart from bluetooth.

For bluetooth you need a tool called toshset. Once you have that you can enable the internal bluetooth device:

flub@signy:~$ sudo toshset -bluetooth on
bluetooth: attached
flub@signy:~$

And all of a sudden you'll have an hci device, probably hci0, check it with hciconfig -a if you fancy. Magic! It's just like plugging in a USB dongle...

Only toshset is not available for the amd64 flavour of hardy, only in the i386 version. No panic though, Debian has an up to date package (Ubuntu intrepid also has the right 1.73 version but doesn't build it for amd64 yet - bug filled).

$ dget http://the.earth.li/debian/pool/main/t/toshset/toshset_1.73-2.dsc
$ dpkg-source -x toshset_1.73-2.dsc

Don't quite rejoice yet, Debian seems to have changed from the pciutils-dev package to libpci-dev. So go and edit debian/control to build depend on pciutils-dev again. Then just build the package, install and enjoy.

Hopefully someone will now spend less time then me figuring this out...

Ripping videos from DVD

Physical discs are a nuisance, I really just want to play what I want to watch in the room I want to watch it just streaming it over the wireless. This actually works wonderfully well. Unfortunately just copying the file structure of a DVD works and gives you DVD-quality video, but the size is huge and streaming this over the wireless tends to create some trouble (not to mention that every byte must also be encrypted/decrypted for ssh so this is getting CPU intensive too, ssh offloading onto hardware would be so cool). Hence the need to "rip" the DVD and encode it to some smaller format arises.

After spending a while looking at various options I finally found the great thoggen.

Only problem left is how much to compress. After some very un-scientific tests (Google failed to find me any nice studies/graphs!) I decided on a quality of 35 and no resizing. But if anyone knows of a better study on what settings to prefer it would be greatly appreciated! It would be great to see quality vs file size vs frame size for different types of video. Ideally with a subjective "human quality" level too so you'd know what still looks good.