Month: July 2010

TV for the new age – YouTube Leanback

Today I found about yet another attempt of YouTube to shift more of the traditional TV audience online. The experiment is called YouTube Leanback and it is currently in beta. Once you go to that address, it’s like switching on the TV set – immediate full screen video display. By default, the videos are chosen from your own feed – subscriptions, friends, social connections, etc. But you can switch to categories and search as fast as you can switch channels on your normal TV. The interface is completely keyboard navigated, which is a new thing for me on YouTube, but it is so fast and intuitive that it takes about 3 seconds to get used to.

I’ve mentioned some time ago that Miro is the easiest way to watch online videos that I ever came across. It still is, if we are talking for the whole web (different sites, different formats, different feeds, etc). But YouTube Leanback is by far the easiest way to watch YouTube videos. In fact, after about 5 minutes of using it, I have subscribed to all those channels that I am used to seeing in Miro that broadcast on YouTube. This way I will have much faster and easier access to my videos and will only need to download with Miro those that don’t use YouTube. For some reason. Which is beyond me.

Moves like this are exciting. I am much interested in seeing how the Web will transform TV, which parts will move online and how fast, and which parts will stay with traditional broadcasting. YouTube is right on the spot here – there are billions of videos online, but there is still no easy way to access them all, search, sort and select. YouTube Leanback is a large step in the right direction.

Drowning doesn’t look like drowning

While being common knowledge between people who work on water (life guards, maritime professionals, etc), this still might be quite a shock for all the rest – drowning doesn’t look like drowning. Most drownings you saw in movies and on TV are nothing like what a real thing is. Here is a quote from the article that you should definitely read:

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening.

Via kottke.org.

Biometric passports coming to Cyprus

Cyprus Mail reports that biometric passports will be implemented in Cyprus later this year:

Parliament also gave the green light to the introduction and implementation of biometric passports as of this autumn.

The new passport will bear the owner’s fingerprints, installed by microchip, eliminating the risk of theft and identity fraud. All passports must be replaced once the system starts operating in October.

The new law contains a clause ensuring that fingerprints will not be used for any other purpose and that this data shall be stored for a period of just 48 hours and then deleted.

Diplomats will be the first to obtain their biometric passports, in early September, followed by the rest of the population in mid-October.

The new passports will cost €70.

Finally! Per account signatures in Gmail

I’ve been waiting for this feature for years and finally it arrived! For those of us who have multiple accounts configured in Gmail, custom per-account signatures are supported. No more copy-pasting from templates, Greasemonkey scripts, and Canned responses trickery. Go to your Settings and configure a separate signature for each account. And it gets better than that – you can even do rich-text signatures if you use HTML emails a lot.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you to the whole Gmail team and those guys who made this handy feature happen. I wanted this for a while!

flac2mp3

I was going through Fedora Planet stream when I noticed this blog post about converting Flac files to mp3 on Linux. That reminded me of a couple of folders with files that I can’t listen to in my car. So I thought I’d convert them now, especially that I have the guide handy it only consists of a couple of steps. I tried and it worked, except that default options used resulted in the mp3 file of 128 kbps, which is a rather low quality. So I played a bit with it and ended up with the following shell flac2mp3.sh script:

#!/bin/bash

# Convert flac file to mp3 with best quality VBR

for file in *.flac
do
    base=`basename "$file" .flac`
    # Convert flat to wav
    flac -d "$file"
    # Convert wav to mp3 with variable bit rate, best quality
    lame -V 0 "$base".wav "$base".mp3
done

As mentioned in the comments, it creates variable bit rate (VBR) mp3 files with maximum quality.

Update: The moment I finished this blog post I felt weird. It was almost like I did it before. And indeed. I should have searched my own blog before posting. Here is the post I did five years ago which has pretty much the same script in it.