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Intel Alder Lake processors now compatible with Linux 5.18, offering improved performance and efficiency with hybrid architecture

January 26, 2023

Intel has recently released their 12th generation Alder Lake processors, which feature a unique hybrid architecture. The processors combine two types of cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficient-cores (E-cores). P-cores are the traditional cores that we're used to, with high clock speeds and Hyper-Threading. E-cores, on the other hand, are smaller, consume less power, but are slower and do not offer Hyper-Threading.

The Alder Lake processors are now fully compatible with the latest version of Linux Kernel 5.18+. This new architecture brings a significant improvement in performance compared to traditional single-core processors. It allows for better multi-threaded application performance and more efficient power consumption. Additionally, Intel has optimized the Alder Lake processors to provide improved system responsiveness across a wide range of workloads. By combining the power of both E-cores and P-cores, Intel has achieved the perfect balance between power and efficiency.

To activate E-cores in Linux, users must run the command “lscpu —all —extended”. This will display the CPU column and CORE column, which can be used to identify which cores are P-cores and which are E-cores. Once identified, users can then configure their system to use the appropriate cores for different tasks.

One of the most interesting features of the Alder Lake processors is that the performance of P-cores scales reliably with the number of cores, while the E-cores provide a massive 40% improvement in single-core efficiency over Skylake chips. This allows for improved battery life in laptops. Intel has configured their 12th generation CPUs with 8 blocks dedicated to P-cores and two blocks dedicated to E-cores. This configuration is faster for rendering than if Intel had used all 10 blocks for P-cores.

In summary, the Intel Alder Lake processors are now compatible with Linux 5.18, and offer improved performance and efficiency thanks to their hybrid architecture. Users can take advantage of this by running the “lscpu —all —extended” command in Linux to identify and configure their system to use the appropriate cores for different tasks.

Citations :

EDID – Extended Display Identification Data

January 25, 2023

EDID stands for Extended Display Identification Data, which is a data format that contains information about a display device, such as its resolution, refresh rate, and supported color depths. It is typically stored in the display device itself, and is used by the operating system to automatically configure the display settings.

The command sudo get-edid | parse-edid uses two utilities, get-edid and parse-edid, that are not included by default in Ubuntu 22.04.

You can check if the utilities are installed by running the command which get-edid and which parse-edid in the terminal. If the output is “command not found”, it means that the utilities are not installed and you need to install them.

You can install the utilities by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install read-edid

This will install the package “read-edid” which contains both get-edid and parse-edid utilities.

Once the package is installed, you can then use the command sudo get-edid | parse-edid to display the EDID information for all connected displays.

In Ubuntu 22.04, you can troubleshoot EDID issues by checking the output of the following command in the terminal:

sudo get-edid | parse-edid

This command will display the EDID information for all connected displays, and can help you identify any issues with the data.

If the output shows that no EDID data is available, it may indicate a problem with the connection between the display and the computer, or a problem with the display itself. You can try unplugging and then plugging in the display, or connecting it to a different port on the computer, to see if that resolves the issue.

If the output shows that the EDID data is invalid or corrupt, it may indicate a problem with the firmware of the display. In this case, you may need to contact the manufacturer for assistance.

You can also check the logs for any error message related to EDID, by running the following command:

grep -i edid /var/log/Xorg.0.log

h264ify Addon by erkserkserks

January 24, 2023

https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

“Try h264ify if YouTube videos stutter, take up too much CPU, eat battery life, or make your laptop hot.

By default, YouTube streams VP8/VP9 encoded video. However, this can cause problems with less powerful machines because VP8/VP9 is not typically hardware accelerated.

In contrast, H.264 is commonly hardware accelerated by GPUs, which usually means smoother video playback and reduced CPU usage. h264ify makes YouTube stream H.264 videos instead of VP8/VP9 videos[…]”

H264ify is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that aims to improve the performance of YouTube video playback by redirecting YouTube to use the H.264 video codec instead of the VP9 codec. H.264 is a widely used video compression standard that is known for its high efficiency and good quality. VP9, on the other hand, is a newer codec developed by Google that is designed to be more efficient than H.264, but it is not as widely supported.

The problem with VP9 is that it can cause high CPU usage and lead to poor performance on some systems, especially on older computers or those with weaker processors, resulting in choppy playback, dropped frames, and other issues. H264ify addresses this problem by redirecting YouTube to use H.264 instead of VP9, leading to a significant improvement in video playback performance, especially on systems that have difficulty decoding VP9. In addition to improving performance, H264ify also has the added benefit of reducing data usage and battery consumption, as H.264 is a more efficient codec than VP9.

To determine if you might need the H264ify addon on an Ubuntu 22.04 system, you can check the processor architecture of your computer. If your processor is a 64-bit architecture, then you are less likely to experience the poor video playback performance that the addon aims to fix. To check the processor architecture of your system, you can use the command uname -m in the terminal, which will output either “x86_64” for a 64-bit processor or “i686” for a 32-bit processor. Additionally, you can also check the codec used by your browser to decode the video by using the browser's developer tools, or by using a website such as YouTube HTML5 Video Player Detection.

It is worth noting that even if you have a 64-bit processor, you may still want to use the H264ify addon to reduce data usage and battery consumption. To install H264ify, users can download it from the Chrome Web Store or the Firefox Add-ons page. They may also need to enable GPU acceleration, which can be done by following instructions from WebUpd8.org. Once installed, users can check which format YouTube is using to stream videos by right-clicking on the video and selecting the “stats for nerds” option. If H264ify is working correctly, the mime type should read video/mp4.

H264ify is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that helps improve video streaming performance on YouTube. It does this by switching the YouTube video stream from using VP8/VP9 to H.264 instead. This change is instant and not visible or noticeable to the user's eye.

The main benefit of using H264ify is that it reduces the load on the CPU, as H.264 is commonly hardware accelerated by GPUs. This usually results in smoother video playback and reduced CPU usage. Additionally, it may help users who try to play high resolution video on YouTube, such as 1080p video, and notice dropped frames or jerky playback.

To install H264ify, users can download it from the Chrome Web Store or the Firefox Add-ons page. They may also need to enable GPU acceleration, which can be done by following instructions from WebUpd8.org.

Once installed, users can check which format YouTube is using to stream videos by right-clicking on the video and selecting the “stats for nerds” option. If H264ify is working correctly, the mime type should read video/mp4.

In summary, H264ify is a browser extension that aims to improve YouTube video playback performance by forcing the use of the H.264 codec instead of VP9. This can lead to a significant improvement in video playback performance, especially on systems that have difficulty decoding VP9. Additionally, it also has the added benefit of reducing data usage and battery consumption. It's worth noting that even if you have a 64-bit processor, you may still want to use the H264ify addon to reduce data usage and battery consumption, as H.264 is a more efficient codec than VP9.

To check if your Firefox or Chrome browser is using the VP9 codec, you can use the browser's developer tools.

In Firefox:

Open Firefox and navigate to a YouTube video. Press F12 to open the developer tools. Select the Network tab. Refresh the page and look for a request to a video with “vp9” in the name.

In Chrome:

Open Chrome and navigate to a YouTube video. Press F12 to open the developer tools. Select the Network tab. Refresh the page and look for a request to a video with “vp9” in the name. If you see requests for videos with “vp9” in the name, then your browser is likely using the VP9 codec to decode the video. If you don't see any requests with “vp9” in the name, then your browser is likely using a different codec, such as H.264.

Alternatively, you can use a website such as YouTube HTML5 Video Player Detection to check which codec your browser uses to play YouTube videos.

It's worth noting that, even if your browser is using VP9 codec, it does not mean you will experience poor video playback performance, it may depend on the type and quality of your computer hardware and network connection.

It is possible to determine which codec your browser is using to decode video from the terminal, but it would require additional tools and commands.

One way to do this is by using the youtube-dl command-line tool, which can be installed by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Once installed, you can use the youtube-dl command to download a YouTube video, and the tool will display information about the codecs used in the video.

For example, to download a YouTube video and display information about the codecs used:

youtube-dl --verbose [video_url]

This command will download the video and output a lot of information about the video, including the codecs used. You can look for the “vp9” in the output to see if the video is using VP9 codec.

Another way is using ffmpeg tool that can be installed by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Then you can use the ffmpeg command to analyze the video file and get information about the codecs used.

ffmpeg -i [video_file]

This command will output information about the video, including the codecs used, you can look for the “vp9” in the output to see if the video is using VP9 codec.

It's worth noting that these methods just give you an idea of the codec used in the video file, but they don't indicate the codec used by the browser to decode the video, because browsers have their own codecs and sometimes use different codecs than the ones used in the video file.

Citations :

There are several forks too, like this for example

“A Firefox/Chrome extension that blocks video codecs you have chosen on YouTube […]

“enhanced-h264ify is a fork of well-known h264ify extension for Firefox/Chrome which blocks VP8/VP9 codecs on YouTube, so that you can use H264 only. This may be useful because there are lots of devices on the market which support H264 hardware decoding and do not support VP8/VP9.

This extension has new features such as manual blocking of H264, VP8, VP9, AV1 codecs and 60fps video. By default it blocks everything but H264 and 60fps video. It works only on YouTube[…]”

https://github.com/alextrv/enhanced-h264ify

Ugly sweaters to confuse AI :D

January 24, 2023

“These ugly sweaters make you invisible to AI” #uglysweaters #ai

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/23/23567341/these-ugly-sweaters-make-you-invisible-to-ai

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15271874/ai-adversarial-images-fooling-attacks-artificial-intelligence

datadetoxkit.org

January 23, 2023

Take control of your digital privacy, security, and wellbeing, learn about tackling misinformation, control your health data, find resources for youth and families, and browse our Alternative App Centre and workshop materials. Meet our partners to get a glimpse into the global movement of the Data Detox Kit[…]

https://datadetoxkit.org/en/home/

FOSS Warn

January 23, 2023

Get emergency alerts from warnung.bund.de or alert.swiss

https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nucleus.foss_warn/

How to convert multiple .odt files to a PDF file plus merging them

January 23, 2023

To create a single PDF from multiple LibreOffice Writer documents in Ubuntu 22.04, you can use the command line tool “libreoffice” to convert the documents.

Open the terminal in Ubuntu(Ctrl+alt+t) . Navigate to the directory where the documents are located using the “cd” command.

Use the following command to convert all .odt files in the directory to .pdf:

libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf *.odt

This will convert all .odt files in the directory to .pdf and save them in the same directory. Alternatively, you can also use the command-line tool “unoconv” to convert the documents.

unoconv -f pdf *.odt

In order to merge all PDFs into one, you can use the command “gs” (Ghostscript)

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf ...

Please note that this command will overwrite the file merged.pdf if it already exists, so make sure to use a different file name if necessary.

To merge the multiple PDFs created by the command “libreoffice —headless —convert-to pdf *.odt” into a single PDF, you can use the command line tool “pdfunite” which is part of the “poppler-utils” package.

Open the terminal in Ubuntu.

Navigate to the directory where the PDFs are located using the “cd” command.

Use the following command to merge all PDFs in the directory into a single file:

pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf ... merged.pdf

This command will take all the pdf files in the directory and merge them into a single pdf file named “merged.pdf” Alternatively, you can also use the command-line tool “gs” (Ghostscript)

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf ...

Please note that this command will overwrite the file merged.pdf if it already exists, so make sure to use a different file name if necessary.

Additionally, you can also use other tools like pdftk, qpdf, pdfjam to merge multiple pdfs into one.

How to create a text file from a given PDF File on Ubuntu via terminal

January 23, 2023

Sometimes one needs the plain text of a given PDF file. For this you can use pdftotext this program is part of the poppler utils.

Open your terminal ctrl+alt+t

Navigate to your files location

then 1st install the poppler-utils

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y poppler-utils

After the installation, you can run this command

pdftotext example.pdf example.txt

You can also use “-layout” option to retain the layout of the text in the output file as it is in the input PDF file.

pdftotext -layout example.pdf example.txt

That's it :D

TTS i.e. Text To Speech in Linux e.g. Ubuntu

January 23, 2023

Tbh epseak is very, very unsettling always when I encounter this diabolical speech. A slight shiver runs down my spine. But fear no more :D

Let's use pico2wav

This tool is more acceptable, still no match for the likes of gTTS or something similar nonetheless far better than speak.

As always, open up your terminal ctrl+alt+t

sudo apt-get install libttspico-utils

Afterward navigate to your text file then type these for an acceptable German vocalization i.e. TTS

pico2wave -w output.wav -l "de-DE" input.txt

MakeMKV

January 17, 2023

MakeMKV beta ist ein kommerzieller Konverter-Software, mit der man DVDs und Blu-ray-Disks abspielen oder auf der Festplatte speichern kann. Es ermölicht auch die Konversion von bereits vorhandenen .iso-Dateien und anderem Videomaterial.

Das Programm nutzt das Matroska-Format, da es eine Vielzahl von Audio- und Videocodecs unterstützt und Untertitel sowie Kapitelmarken übernehmen kann. Um die Dateien weiter zu bearbeiten, kann man z.B. HandBrake verwenden.

Während der Beta-Phase ist das Programm kostenlos und der Testzeitraum von 30 Tagen kann beliebig oft verlängert werden. Nach Beendigung der Beta-Phase muss das Programm für die weitere Nutzung der Blu-ray Funktionalität erworben werden.

Weiterführende Literatur:

https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/MakeMKV/

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/08/watch-bluray-discs-in-vlc-on-ubuntu-with-makemkv

https://www.veuhoff.net/auf-linux-dvds-und-blu-rays-abspielen-anleitung/