Category: tech

Podcasts and Mailing Lists

Posted by Kristian Golding on September 10, 2023

Mailing Lists

Pointer
A reading club For software developers. A newsletter about what current and future CTOs are reading and thinking about.

Podcasts

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Weekly science podcast produced by the SGU Productions llc. Also provides blogs, forums, videos and resources.
Coder Radio
A weekly talk show
Oxide Computer Company
Recordings of our weekly live show where we discuss a wide range of topics.
The Changelog podcast
Software's best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews & talk show.
Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris | Stream Episodes Now
Join Sam Harris for the Making Sense podcast as he debates questions of atheism, politics, self, religion, free will, philosophy, economics, science & more – listen now!
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens explores money, energy, economy, and the environment with world experts and leaders to understand how everything fits together, and where we go from here.
About SE-Radio : Software Engineering Radio
Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Now a weekly show, we talk to experts from throughout the software engineering world about the full range of topics that matter to professional d…
Programming Throwdown
Episode 163 – Recursion

Compressing video with ffmpeg

Posted by Kristian Golding on November 29, 2020

I was looking into what was taking up space in my Dropbox account and found some older videos, each a few gigabytes in size, where I didn’t really care if there was a small loss of quality to make them much smaller. I found some options with ffmpeg that worked pretty well

ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx265 -crf 34 output_file

This will re-encode the file using x265. The “-crf” option specifies the amount of compression, with a range from 0-51: “0” being lossless and “23” the default. With the default I was able to halve the storage space required with negligible video loss. I upped it to “34”, as above, and while there was a bit of loss in video clarity, it didn’t matter for the video content. The result? A file originally ~ 2.4 GB in size was reduced to ~ 300 MB.

I had a folder of such videos, so used this Bash one-liner to process each file and output a new processed file.

for file in ./*.mp4; do ffmpeg -i ${file} -vcodec libx265 -crf 34 ${file%.*}_processed.mp4; done

${file%.*}_processed.mp4 means from the original file, keep the filename (removing the extension) and replaced it with “_processed.mp4”.

Errors while running Rust on Virtualbox

Posted by Kristian Golding on August 16, 2020

I got the following error when running “cargo run” on my “Roguelike” follo-along project (https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook)

Err` value: CreationErrors([NoAvailablePixelFormat, NoAvailablePixelFormat])'

I found the error was due to 3D acceleration being enabled on my Linux Mint 19-based development environment, running on Virtualbox 6.1.10. That is, make sure you have this in your vboxmanage line in your Vagrantfile:

vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--accelerate3d", "off"] # Disable 3d acceleration until Virtualbox team fixes it

Remembering back as to why I had that line set to “on”, I think I was playing around with getting the Android emulator to work in Virtualbox, which as of 6.1 supports nested virtualization. I came close to getting that working, ultimately I don’t think it’s possible right now.

Configuring OSMC for high quality audio

Posted by Kristian Golding on June 8, 2020

And what I mean by that is, “default all audio output to a USB device, not unlike an O2+ODAC kit from JDS labs”.

Step 1: Install OSMC, which is a Kodi-based media entertainment distribution that can run on Raspberry Pi (https://osmc.tv/download/)

Step 2: Configure ALSA audio to use the USB audio device as the default (this way, I don’t always have to keep the USB device powered).

dmesg output when connecting the USB soundcard

Check which cards are identified by asound

“cat /proc/asound/cards” output

I have to make the USB audio device the default, in slot 0. Edit the file /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf and change the default device to be “1”, thus, USB audio will become “0”

defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.card 1

Reboot the device, run “cat /proc/asound/cards” again and check the order has changed. Regardless of whether the USB audio amp is actually plugged in on power up, whenever you do plug it in, it will come up as the default device and audio will be routed to it.