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I just made a little update to downclimb.com. I've been working on stuff and hopefully I'll have a working site in place soon.

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Effects of Handbrake presets and RF quality settings across AV1, H.265, and H.264

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  "Fantastic!"   Every once in a great while, I dive deep down the rabbit hole of media formats and the codecs 1 that encode and decode them. Sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's audio, and this time it's video. I'm no expert in these things, but rather an enthusiast who (a) likes to create and organize digital media and (b) likes knowing that the formats I'm choosing are going to meet my present and future needs. In the past few months I've been adding Blu-ray movies to my media server. I've relied on H.264/AVC as my video format for a long time (more than a decade, maybe?), but with H.265/HEVC now pretty mainstream and AV1 emerging, I figured it was time to refresh my knowledge and get to know how these different tools might serve me. This is going to be a long post, so I'm going to take a moment here to establish the four considerations I make whenever I'm encoding media, whether it's video, audio, or photos. The four consider...
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2021 Ride the Rockies

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In January of 2020, I set my sights on riding Ride the Rockies. After finishing my 5th RAGBRAI in 2019 and riding both the Buffalo Bicycle Challenge and Pedal the Plains that fall, riding the premiere bicycle tour in Colorado was something I wanted to do. As spring approached, I trained, kept my weight down, and then saw my plans change as the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the cancellation of all the summer bicycle tours. Given the choice of a refund or moving my registration to 2021, I moved my registration. Riding the Rockies would have to wait another year. As it turned out, even if the organizers hadn’t postponed RTR in 2020, I wouldn’t have done it. In April, I had shock wave lithotripsy to break up a kidney stone, and in May, I got a deep vein thrombosis in my left calf. (These were unrelated. I’d had bouts with kidney stones for a few years, and, the best I can tell, the DVT was triggered by the abrupt transition from a super-hard Zwift ride in the late evening to sleeping wit...
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Much Nothing About Ado

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  Rounding the bend on Ride the Rockies As I look back at 2023, I get the sense that I'm basically finishing this year where I started the last one. Sure, lots of stuff happened, but ultimately, I don't feel significantly ahead or behind where I was a year ago. Is that good? Bad? Neither? I'm finishing up my 8th year with the Colorado Department of Education. It's still good work, but there's so much of it! It's difficult to not finish each day just dwelling on all the things that might help people but there's just not enough hours to do it all. This has also been a year for many new colleagues, which brings new opportunities and challenges. By some measures, you might say this was my biggest cycling year yet. I rode Ride the Rockies for a second time, and that week was dominated by cold, wet weather. The highlight of the week should have been riding over Rocky Mountain National Park on Trail Ridge Road, but snow had closed the road and even if by some good ...
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