Zit er op JW.org verschil in de audio kwaliteit van de drama video's tussen hoge en lage resolutie bestanden?

Korte antwoord: Ja.

Lang antwoord: Om dit te ontdekken heb ik de congresvideo gedownload in alle verschillende beschikbare formaten.

Vervolgens met dit script gecontroleerd wat de bitrate en sample rate van de audio is:

echo -e "Bestand\tGrootte (bytes)\tBitrate\tSample rate"

for file in *.m4a; do

  size=$(stat -c%s "$file")

  bitrate=$(ffprobe -v error -select_streams a:0 -show_entries stream=bit_rate -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$file")

  sample_rate=$(ffprobe -v error -select_streams a:0 -show_entries stream=sample_rate -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$file")

  echo -e "$file\t$size\t$bitrate\t$sample_rate"

done | column -t

Dit zijn de resultaten:

• gnj_E_02_r1080P.mp4  125375  48000
• gnj_E_02_r720P.mp4    125375  48000
• gnj_E_02_r480P.mp4    125375  48000
• gnj_E_02_r360P.mp4    93375    48000
• gnj_E_02_r240P.mp4    61375    48000
• gnj_E_02_r144P.3gp     48374    44100

Conclusie: Alles vanaf 480P is de hoogste audio kwaliteit. 

Waarom zou je dit willen weten? Op een van de komende congressen worden aflevering 2 en 3 van "Het goede nieuws volgens Jezus" weergegeven. Helaas in Nederland nagesynchroniseerd naar Nederlands. Als je toch het origineel Engels wil horen kun je deze zelf downloaden en gelijktijdig met het congres (via oortjes natuurlijk) afspelen. Om niet te veel te hoeven downloaden weet je nu wat je moet hebben: de 480P variant 👍 

Starlink may be lying about speed.

Today I did a quick speed test. 

• The first was with the official Starlink App. 
• The second one was via my favorite speed test website from Cloudflare. 

Download speed: 224 vs. 45 mbps. Starlink reports 5X as high a speed. 

Upload speed: 15 VS. 12. Seems pretty honest reporting. 

Latency: 40 vs. 50,5 ms. Latency is very hard to compare moment to moment, so let's say they both report honestly in that moment. 

So how is it possible that Starlink reports soo much higher download speeds? 

My guess would be that the satellite(s) detect the download speed test and simply generate or send from on-device memory some data. This would explain why the speed is higher: it doesn't mimic real internet traffic. 

Cloudflare on the other hand needs to get data from a data center, into a nearby ground station and then have it bounce around the globe between Starlink satellites till it finds one that's above(ish) our location. 

Again, that is simply my guess for the big discrepancy. My advise: don't be bamboozled by Starlink's own speed claims but use your own tests. 

Update van mijn Meshtastic experiment

Ik heb mijn Meshtastic Seeed T-1000e nu een week of 6 en ik heb tot nu toe 246 andere actieve nodes ontdekt tussen Amsterdam en Luik.  

Dat klinkt misschien als veel, maar als je bedenkt dat in bebouwde gebieden (lees: Noord-west Europa) de 868mhz band met laag wattage maar 2-3km bereik bied, dan snap je wel dat we er veel meer nodig hebben. 

Het valt me verder op dat veel mensen deze alleen even aanzetten om te experimenteren en dan weer uit zetten. Dit betekend dat je dus voordat er een ramp gebeurd niet goed kunt oefenen om te zien of je over grotere afstanden berichten kunt uitwisselen. Jammer dit.

Een aantal oplossingen zouden zijn om deze T-1000e of vergelijkbare goedkope LoRa apparaten in een houder met zonnepaneel te steken en deze op hoge gebouwen te plaatsen. Wat vrienden die op de bovenste verdieping van een flat wonen overtuigen er een aan te zetten en aan te laten zou ook al veel doen voor stedelijke dekking. 

Heb je zin om mee te denken en mee te praten over Meshtastic gebruik in Zeeland, Brabant en Limburg? Meld je dan aan voor de zojuist door mij in het leven geroepen Signal praatgroep via deze link. 

Open for work, starting now.

I'm about to get married this autumn 🍂 😃 🥳 

So naturally most of my time was spend helping my girlfriend fiancé move her stuff to my house.  And basically make it our house. So, most of my furniture is gone. The walls have different colors. My books move an entire floor and the floors have all changed from carpet to PVC. 😅

Anyways. It's been about one year ago that decided to take a sabbatical. 

I'm open to work again. So if you know an opening in 

• general administration
•  (technical) writing
• writing (technical) quotes
• or oracle PL-SQL development 
• Or something that's I have never done yet but would love to learn like Microsoft Dynamics

… then, let me know 😊. 

I'm looking for roughly 2/3 days per week work. Remote or on-site close to Breda, NL. 

Your help is greatly appreciated 💕 

Adobe Project Indigo

This new app from Adobe is another take on the older photography apps that help your iPhone make better high dynamic range (HDR) photos. 

The point of this app is to make the photo look like it was made on a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. 

The thing that I feel is still missing on iPhone photos is the deep saturation and very wide color gamut that you get by using such a (much more expensive) SLR camera. If that gap can be partially filled by using this app on my trusted iPhone 15 Pro, good. 

I'll give it a swirl and report back to you my dear readers. 👍

Has Signal usage collapsed? It seems so.

For daily communications I use either iMessage or WhatsApp. I have other options installed in my phone, like the p2p Keet app and the totally off-grid Meshtastic app, but those are barely used. 

Now that WhatsApp is going to show adverts I guess I might see some friends hate it and switch to Signal like they did last time WhatsApp was in the news in a negative way. 

The problem I guess is that too many people use WA daily and don't care about meta data leaking (loss of privacy) and don't care about seeing adverts either. 

They will keep on using WhatsApp anyways. 😥 

To test if anyone who installed Signal is ever opening it, I posted a "status" (yes, Signal has those too).

This is a screenshot from my "add story" screen in Signal. The point is to show "216 kijkers (viewers)"

As you can see here, I have 216 'viewers' on Signal. That's only 10% of the total amount of contacts I have on WA. 

So, after almost 24 hours and potentially 214 viewers, I got exactly one viewer. 

My current analysis is that Signal is almost dead. 

Hopefully this will change permanently after ads are shown too often in WA. We will see. 

TIL Perplexity can also find cars based on license plates

I strolled past an interesting looking van today. Me and my buddy Peter wondered if we could find what brand, model and year the car would be from. 

My guess would be a Hanemag or Unimog car from the '80. Kentekencheck.nl came up blank. 

But Lo And Behold. Perplexity was able to identity the car as a recent Russian car made by Uaz. 

That is one more use case were I won't be needing special websites or Kagi or another search engine for.