Mr. Potato Rats?

-
Quiznos owes us some sort of explanation, and I guess this is it. This is at least 10 times more disturbing than the Goldfish "until we bite their heads off" jingle...

Popular posts from this blog

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

-
Image
  "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...
Read more

So long, Blogger

-
Image
  I saw the aurora this year! Twenty-four years of using a single blogging platform feels like enough. Nowadays, I feel like most platforms get pulled out from under us long before that, and we don't get to choose when we want to stop using some piece of online tech. Not so with Blogger, which Google has managed to maintain from the time they acquired Pyra Labs until now. It may not have been the most cutting-edge platform, but it's endured. I, however, am ready to jump to a more self-hosted solution under more of my direct control. I've been moving content over to a new site, raymondjohnson.me . There you'll find the blog posts I've written here along with new content. See you there and Happy 2025!
Read more

2012 Year in Review

-
Image
My 2012 looked similar to my 2011 - a lot of reading, writing, studying, and teaching. Throw in a bunch of running and a pretty miserable Cubs season and the year came and went pretty quickly. I traveled back to Iowa for the first time in four years, giving me a chance to visit old friends and help my parents a bit. However, if my 2012 is highlighted by anything, I think it comes down to three things: experiencing some great speakers here at CU-Boulder, passing my comprehensive exams, and not only setting, but reaching, a running goal. Great Speakers You know what else is great about all these tickets? I think I spent a total of $2 on them. I'll remember 2012 for the outstanding speakers I got to see in person. First was Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaking at Macky Auditorium  in February. In a talk called "The Delusions of Space Enthusiasts," Tyson, in a most entertaining way, talked about how we doubt our power to innovate, how we look too much at the past of the sp...
Read more