Category Archives: General

Proposal: book club for freetarians

Posted on 2012/07/19 by Ben

There are lot of people who, for various reasons, prefer to consume food whose creation did not harm animals. (This is not always clear, but for the most part there is consensus on which foods are harmful.) Much (maybe most) … Continue reading →

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It’s Google

Posted on 2012/06/29 by Ben

I’m normally reticent to talk about the future; most of my posts are in the past tense. But now the plane tickets are purchased, apartment booked, and my room is gradually emptying itself of my furniture and belongings. The point … Continue reading →

Posted in Xiph, sugar | 1 Comment

Ethics in an unethical world: Ethics Offsets

Posted on 2012/03/14 by Ben

The recent hubbub regarding the (admirably public) debate within Mozilla about codec support has set me thinking about how to deal with untenable situations. After rightly railing against H.264 on the web for several years, and pushing free codecs with … Continue reading →

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Route9.js

Posted on 2011/11/30 by Ben

I was really impressed by Michael Bebenita’s Broadway.js, the recent port of an H.264 decoder to pure Javascript using Emscripten, a LLVM-based C-to-JS converter … but of course this is the opposite of what we want! Who needs H.264? We … Continue reading →

Posted in Xiph | 7 Comments

Evolution

Posted on 2011/08/05 by Ben

So I wrote this song, sort of. Maybe you’ll like it. YouTube version Sheet Music Reference files at Archive.org After about 6 years of covering pop songs in my a cappella groups, I really wanted to sing some original music. … Continue reading →

Posted in Xiph | 3 Comments

An Auto-Aligner for PiTiVi

Posted on 2011/07/26 by Ben

It’s rare to get exactly one recording of an a capella concert. Usually someone’s parents have a fancy but outdated camcorder, someone in the front row has a cell phone video with a great angle but terrible quality, and there’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Xiph | 2 Comments

Transparent Video with GStreamer

Posted on 2010/11/15 by Ben

So you wrote a script to generate an animation with ImageMagick or something. You have a folder full of transparent PNGs, one for each frame. Now you want to do some alpha-channel compositing in gstreamer (e.g. with PiTiVi). Instead of … Continue reading →

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Stream Switching at FOMS

Posted on 2010/10/06 by Ben

I spent Sunday and Monday at The Free and Open Media Summit Foundations of Open Media Software in NYC. The first day was held in a smallish meeting room at the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch school of NYU. … Continue reading →

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Education, Geek to Geek

Posted on 2010/09/23 by Ben

Monty of Xiph.Org just put out a new video on the fundamentals of digital multimedia, hopefully the first of many. It’s a fun intro for anyone who’d like to know more about the foundations of modern audio/video technology, especially students. … Continue reading →

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Foreign Languages

Posted on 2010/06/06 by Ben

While I was in Sweden there was an active advertising campaign whose tagline was some variant of “Would you sell your mother?” and a link to sellyourmother.se. This seemed to be a sort of “mystery campaign”, where the company doing … Continue reading →

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