Posts

Dec 12, 2004
my thresholding is getting pretty good

My thresholding algorithm for semacode is getting pretty good I think. Check out these results on the classic “Barbara” computer graphics test image.
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Dec 9, 2004
more flickr

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Dec 2, 2004
Cassini!

The pictures from the Cassini spacecraft have been awesome. Here’s an example. From Astronomy Picture of the Day .
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Dec 1, 2004
tru.mp is mine

So I’m hanging out on the #mobitopia channel and aeden was on there talking about his new site for .mp : Get.MP where you can register on this new TLD. Well, what do you know, there’s still plenty of 3-letter domains left, so I went with the del.icio.us trent and got myself tru.mp . I don’t really have any plan to use it but I figure I can sell it off at a profit someday.
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Nov 29, 2004
Apple will not make a phone

So I just woke up and noticed that Russell Beattie says that Apple’s going to make a smartphone. They’re not going to make a smartphone.<ul><li>The smartphone business is already full of excellent products. Nokia is almost exactly like apple and has the same corporate character and sensibilities. apple can’t compete against nokia. Nor can they compete against Sony-Ericsson, who make very pretty phones as well. </li><li>apple has no experience with making cell phone radios, and it’s not trivial </li><li>cell phones are going to eat MP3 players anyway, but it’s going to take some time, maybe a few years. </li></ul>
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Nov 28, 2004
apple

I was dreaming about Apple again last night (which I often do, since I worked there in my capacity as a busybody). If I were in charge of apple, here’s what I would do.<ul><li>their core business is selling computers. the main competition to computers is smartphones but apple is safe because smartphones have small screens. until roll-up large screens are made, apple is safe. </li><li>they pick small markets with low-hanging fruit. Easy pickings. what’s next? a video camera is next. the video cameras on the market suck. apple already has experience with optics from the iSight. they’ll make a video camera </li><li>they lose tons of money on Mac OS X. they spend upwards of $100 mil a year on it, but make almost none of it back. instead they make money from the computers. OS X is a loss leader. </li><li>they aren’t doing squat with weblogs. that needs to change. </li><li>they will not make a cell phone. cell phones are fine, there’s lots of good cellphones already on the market </li></ul>
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Nov 17, 2004
iMovie to ffmpegX to DivX encoding

How to properly use the kick-ass ffmpegX (for OS X, a wrapper for all kinds of open source tools) to encode your iMovie movies.<blockquote>It is very important, that you do NOT choose the “Full Quality DV” Setting when exporting from iMovie. This just makes iMovie glueing the 2GB chunks together in which it records movies. Mencoder can’t handle that. Here’s what to do: Choose “Expert settings”. Click “Export”. Choose “Movie to Quicktime Movie”. Click “Options”. In “Video Settings” choose “DV PAL” (or NTSC, if you are on that TV System). In the Audio settings, choose uncompressed 48khz Stereo. Uncheck “Prepare for Internet streaming”. Make sure the output file has .mov as extender. Now the recording is reencoded as a single movie which Mencoder will encode completely as AVI. </blockquote>
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Nov 13, 2004
Dance of the Suger Plum Fairy

I always liked this song. Now I can play it (I mean the full orchestra version ;-) The first 4 bars (repeated 5 times). Performed by yours truly, on my powerbook keyboard, with Garageband, MidiKeys, the Steel Xylophone SoundFont from HammerSound (free), the Pizzato Strings sound from the QT library, which is lame but I can’t find a SoundFont for it yet. I didn’t use any quantization in order to get that live performance feel to it. I mixed the stereo so that it’s like a real orchestra - Violins on the left, Cellos on the right. The Celesta is in the middle though, since it’s solo. The sheet music is from mfiles (also free), that’s what I worked from. The Orchestra Layout image file. The piece, is by Tchaikovsky.
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Nov 12, 2004
I bought Myst and downloaded it too

I bought Myst IV, Revelation from amazon.ca but you know, they’re a bit slow here and it’s not going to arrive until next week. So, having paid I felt no problems about logging into SuprNova and snagging the bittorrent for the game. Sure, it’s taken 2 days so far and I still won’t get it until tomorrow, but at least I’ll be able to start playing this weekend :)
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Nov 10, 2004
Myst IV sound hacking

I just downloaded the Myst IV Revelation demo (it’s free there) and it’s very cool. It brings back memories of Myst and maybe (I can hope) it will be as good as Riven was. Anyway, I guess I’m going to buy it as soon as I’m done writing this, but first, some obligatory info on hacking the sound files out of the demo.
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