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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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My Podcast Predilection

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I think my main modus operandi is to interact with as much information as possible. I read for school, keep track of a couple hundred news feeds in Google Reader, watch documenaries, and follow really smart people on social networks who share good things. It's a full-time job, and I love it. Now that the semester is over, I can try to stay more up-to-date with a growing number of podcasts I follow. Being a PhD student is a very immersive experience, but podcasts are one way I keep myself stretched in more than just one direction. Here's a list of what I watch or listen to on a regular basis: TWiT.tv : I keep up with a ton of technology news and debate by following Leo Laporte and others on his podcasting network. Here are the podcasts I prefer to watch: This Week in Tech  (This is roughly the tech equivalent of "Meet the Press," but far, far less formal) Tech News Today  (Today's their 500th show, and I'm sure I've never missed one) Security Now  (St...
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Think before you shoot

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Here's an interesting story from the Denver Post . Apparently a couple of young males thought it would be fun to go out into the street and shoot their paintball guns at people passing by. Unfortunately, one of the people they shot at was a kid (probably 15 or 16 years old) who was carrying a real handgun. He fired back, hit one of the paintballers in the head, and now their little prank has put somebody into intensive care. Just sad. You can easily find enough blame to spread it around to everybody. I'm left to wonder where the kid with the handgun developed that kind of aim...maybe he just got lucky...or unlucky...
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