Proprietary infighting opens Ogg's way?

The chips haven’t stopped falling yet, but a squabble (instgated by Microsoft) between Microsoft and some MP3 patent-holders could have opened a door of opportunity for Ogg to see major commercial success.

Which is odd — when you think about it — for a totally free codec, but when market penetration is needed to make your format acceptable to manufacturer’s lawyers, it’s a bit of a Godsend, one to be grabbed with both hands.

Myself, I use Ogg because it produced better sound quality & only uses about ²/₃ to ³/₄ of the space to do it in.

Nobody’s going to sue non-commercial little me for using MP3 format for personal give-away sounds, but if they did, they’d be sad since a pair of one-line commands is all that’d be needed to revert to Ogg-only format, and they’d be hearing about their indiscretion for several years to come.

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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