Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

  "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...

How's this for an amusing trip down memory lane? Ten years ago, on the eve of the millennium, the big " Y2K ," I was reporting for work in the basement of Gilchrist Hall at the University of Northern Iowa . I was to staff the university's "Y2K Command Center," the strategic hub of UNI's efforts to thwart any disasters due to Y2K. As we now know, very little happened due to Y2K. The fear was that any digital device that recorded dates with only two digits wouldn't know how to properly handle a year "00" and would behave unpredictably. This was a valid concern, but not a surprise so almost all such problems were fixed months ahead of time. Midnight came and went, and things were pretty quiet around UNI. One of our maintenance staff discovered a ventilation fan not working properly (for non-Y2K reasons) and that was it. All the professional staff went home a couple hours after midnight, but Robert Shontz (great student, individual, and c...

At its very core, linking websites together is what makes the web the web. I've had my own website since 1996, and like many people, we all had a page dedicated to our favorite links. In 2001, my friend Brian Gongol (and he certainly wasn't alone) went a step further and provided not just a list of links, but rather a stream of updates, whether they be sites of interest or news of the day, each complete with Gongol's thoughtful commentary. I liked the idea, and with my adoption of Delicious in 2002, I had an easy way to tag, catalog, and comment on links. Almost 900 links later, I'm still using Delicious, but I'm not sure if anybody has noticed. My RSS feed is picked up by FriendFeed , but not many more people pay attention to it. So what are people paying attention to? Twitter and Facebook , that's what. They each provide audiences I'd like to share with, but neither are good enough to make me leave Delicious behind. Throw Google Reader (my favorite R...

While digging through some old papers, I came across a copy of PC World magazine from January 1998. The headline on the cover reads, "YOUR NEXT PC: What's New for 1998 - and Beyond ." Predictions are fun to make, and more fun to make fun of looking back. Let's see where PC World hit, and where they missed. In one section called "The Desktop Computer in Ten Years," PC World asked Mark Weiser, chief technologist at Xerox PARC what to expect by 2008. Here's his list: The PC will move into a closet, and we can expect gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage. Displays will be flexible and you can fold them up in your pocket. Voice recognition will not replace the keyboard and mouse for privacy reasons. Wires will become built into walls and the furniture and we will have wireless mice, keyboards, and phones. E-paper will be standard for everything from books to business cards. We will have "pocket net computers" that allow us to log on to the i...

About a week ago I replaced my well-worn installation of Kubntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" with the sleeker, newer, Kubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope." I hadn't made the jump to Kubuntu 8.10, the first to include KDE 4, because there were plenty of reports about bugs and incomplete features. After waiting through another release cycle, I figured it was time to stop falling behind the tech curve and upgrade. Surely I had been missing something. Instead of finding a bunch of new indispensable features and conveniences, I'm afraid KDE 4.2 is still not ready for my desktop. My biggest gripe? File management. It's not so much a debate between Konqueror and Dolphin, but frankly neither are doing what I want them to do. In KDE 3, I could hover over the icon of a picture, and a pop-up would give me all sorts of good information: date, owner, filesize, image dimensions, and a little bit of EXIF data. Neither Konqueror or Dolphin do that now, although I've read t...

When I moved to Fairplay a year and a half ago, one of my major concerns about living here was the lack of broadband. The only options at the time were two I weren't willing to accept: satellite service from WildBlue and HughesNet. It's not that the service they offer is all that horrible, but the service agreements and contracts (you know, all that fine-print stuff most people don't want to read) were just plain ugly to me. So ugly, in fact, that I went with dialup, something I never thought I'd ever have to do again. Fortunately, another Fairplay resident named Jerry Wilson with the same distaste for satellite, similar broadband needs, and greater entrepreneurial spirit decided to take matters into his own hands. He bought a T1, put up a big antenna, and resold wireless broadband to people around town. The service is called Parkspeed, and as you can see from the website , it's pretty low-key and still a way for Jerry to satisfy his gaming habits. Despite som...