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Sideload iOS and tvOS Apps
Signulous is the most reliable app signing and installation service. Upload and sign your own IPA files, or choose from our extensive library of popular apps.
Monday, March 20, 2023
Signulous – Sideload iOS and tvOS Apps
African Developer Creates New Software So Africans Can Use Bitcoin Without Internet Access
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Groet,
Jan
Sent from my mobile device on the go, apologies for brevity and typos.
Sunday, March 19, 2023
Navigating the unpredictability of everything
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SLACK, the Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.
UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is/was using Mac
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Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson was one of the developers of MULTICS, the ancestor of and inspiration for UNIX. He also developed Space Travel in 1969, arguably one of the first video games, and then ported it from MULTICS to GECOS… and then to a spare PDP-7 that was knocking around the lab, in the process creating a set of development tools that he and the late Dennis Ritchie subsequently turned into an operating system they called UNIX.
He also co-designed and co-wrote Plan 9 from Bell Labs, the better-architected successor to Unix. Plan 9 failed to displace its much more primitive forebear, but it's still being developed today. He then went on to design Plan 9's CPU-independent successor, Inferno. Although Thompson is now 80 years old, he most recently worked at Google, where he co-developed Go… although his hiring caused problems: he refused to take the company's mandatory C proficiency test, on the feeble pretext that he designed the C language.
Proton referral link
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Saturday, March 18, 2023
A Vision for Nostr. Coracle blog.
If I had to sum up what the core principle of Nostr is, I would say "individual sovereignty". Nostr is a social experiment that asks people to take responsibility for what they say (and sell, host, publish, promote). This topic has been explored ad nauseum by better writers than I using Bitcoin as a vehicle, so I'll avoid re-treading the same ground if I can, except to point out that the two key design decisions of the Nostr protocol, self-custody of keys and hosting spread across multiple relays, simultaneously entrust control to users and revoke certain entitlements users are accustomed to.…Many users including myself have experienced a 10x or more increase in engagement, despite a much smaller number of people on the platform. This is of course likely due not only to the lack of an algorithm, but also to the lack of celebrities, which tend to absorb attention, leaving little for the rest of us. But for now, Nostr is for the plebs.…Most people I know don't have Twitter accounts, or use them. For them, Twitter is about as relevant to their lives as CNN. Instead, they use private Facebook groups to arrange babysitters for their kids, or Cragislist to buy and sell local goods. They use Google maps to find reviews for nearby businesses, and the church email list to keep up with prayer requests. They subscribe to newsletters their friends publish, and spend their days at work sending memes over Slack. The common theme here is that all these platforms connect "us" with "mine", not with "them". And yes, journalism and topical interest ala Reddit is a part of this, but for normal people, a vanishingly small part. But let's stop squawking about "echo chambers".
Friday, March 17, 2023
How to make a video look much smoother, without (greatly) increasing the file size?
I’m often annoyed when looking at a film or short video that looks jittery or stuttering, as if the makers haven’t given it the love it should have received when recording or editing.
I’ve also noticed that my eyes are a little bit better than most peoples’ that I’m a minority for noticing or being troubled by this at all.
Stuttering or Jittery video?
To illustrate what I even mean by “jittery or stuttering” I’ve made a screenshot from a video that is part of my favourite study bible at Jo 4:20,21. You can find this video at this link.
In this video, we see the ancient Samaritan area with mount Gerizim. Then, the camera pans left and we see the low plains with the current-day-city Nablus. While the camera pans left, the video is stuttering. Let me try to show you this with a short video that I will shoot with my phone camera. Here it is:
Now, having established that there really is a problem, I would like to show you a simple solution.
You see, we’ve walked on the moon more than 50 years ago. My watch has more computing power than all the computers at NASA in the ’60 combined. There is no reason on earth why we still need to create video files with only 24 frames per second.
The solution: “upscaling” the frame rate with FFmpeg.
Through the arcane art of using FFmpeg with it’s ML-supported frame rate upscaling, it is perfectly possible to turn a so-so source file into a much more enjoyable output.
Of course, the information that isn't in the video file has to come from somewhere. The filters in the FFmpeg software don't run on the clever Machine Learning models that, say, an iPhone's Image Processing know how to fabricate. The FFmpeg software simply looks at a frame and the next frame, and calculates what should go in between. This simple trick, however, is good enough to fool our human eyes.
So, the exact command is:
- ffmpeg -i [input.mp4] -vf minterpolate=fps=60 [output_60fps.mp4]
Where the filename of the input and output are between [brackets].
The source file has a frame rate of 24 frames per second at a resolution of 1280x720:
After entering the command, my M1 chip powered laptop spent a whole 5 minutes and 45 seconds on this conversion. I would be truly interested to find out how long short it takes on an M1Pro or a M2-powered beast machine?
The result?
The resulting file has more than double the frame rate and is somehow about 3 MiB smaller 🤔
But more importantly, the so troubling stuttering or jittering has now melted away like snow in the sun:
Why not do this?
If I had to be generous, I could imagine that, to save underpowered feature phones that most of LATAM and Africa use, the makers of these videos deliberately choose not to add a higher frame rate. After all, much more annoying than a stuttering video is a video that is not playing at all because of device constraints that you, the user, do not understand.
This argument can, however, easily be muted by the simple fact that this website (jw.org) as well as the JW Library app, serve you options: You can go as small as a 240p file.
So, why not make the largest file at a higher frame rate and keep all the more budget friendly options on the current regime?
I really don’t know. It seems to me a no-brainer with lots of upside and virtually no downside. But maybe I’m missing something?
I would love to hear your thoughts? 😊
Edit: You can post your input on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35195095
Sunday, March 12, 2023
Monday, March 06, 2023
Follow Twitter users on Nostr #MarchOffTwitter
In the spirit of #MarchOffTwitter, did you know you can "follow" Twitter users or any RSS feed on Nostr?
For Twitter, you can use privacy centric website Nitter to get a RSS feed for Twitter users. This is anonymous; no sign up required. Once you found their address on Nitter simply add /rss at the end. For example: https://nitter.net/EFF/ >> https://nitter.net/EFF/rss
One you have a RSS feed URL you can then use https://rsslay.nostr.net. Simply input the RSS feed URL and it will automatically generate a public key you can follow using your Nostr client.
Make sure you add wss://rsslay.nostr.net as a relay for the new users to be visible.
PS: The website appears to have intermittent issues. If you get an error 502 try again and it usually works after a few tries.
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