Recent content on Notes
I was looking into how to link a remote point in my mansion to the network and checked how it could work with a fiber-optic connection, since the router had a SFP+ socket. 
 TL/DR: I’ll go with a SFP+ bidi single-mode connection. 
 First of all, stay safe. Don’t look directly into a fiber with your eye. The light/laser is not powerful, but why do it? You won’t see…
Apple is a marketing company. Once the device is not supported anymore, it’s
called “vintage”. You should go buy a new one otherwise the experience heavily
degrades. But these old laptops are still quite powerful―this MacBook Air 2011
model, for example, has an i7 CPU and an SSD, FFS. Luckily they can be given a
new life with Linux. 
 TL/DR: Installing Fedora…
The Kinesis Advantage series of keyboards has a row of tiny function keys at the top. These cheap rubber keys are the shame of the expensive Kinesis keyboards. The latest version in this series, model KB600, has the tiny function keys made out of plastic, no more rubber―feels better. 
 The Esc key in my ancient KB133 Kinesis was registering key presses only when I was pressing very hard. The…
I’ve been using a Kinesis Classic keyboard since 2007 when I got one at Google. I did notice some minor issues every few months, but it started to be somewhat annoying only after reading Michael’s list of the issues Kinesis keyboards have. Thanks Michael! 
 I probably flirted with the idea of replacing the keyboard’s controller following Michael’s instructions for two…
Earlier this month I got to FOSDEM in Brussels
for the first time. Below is how I remember it. Overall it has been
great. 
 I quickly learned to look for a different room when there was a queue at
the door. But this once I decided to wait in queue, hoping somebody
would get out so I can enter. I and the person in front of me got close
to the door, but unfortunately we did…
In the Pitivi video editor, the viewer is
quite important, as it shows the video. Our viewer also shows a discreet
frame around a clip selected in the timeline, making it easy to resize
and position the video of the clip by
dragging .
Below is the story of the viewer updates in the past year. 
 Easy resizing 
 It was a bit cumbersome to have to drag both the left and…
In Pitivi, the ruler is displayed above the timeline to show the times
corresponding with the current view. A series of H:MM:SS.XXX timestamps
on a ruler might leave the impression that only trained professionals
are supposed to use it. I had trouble reading the timestamps and looked
for ways to make the ruler more useful. Read below for the story. 
 
 Pitivi ruler, Dec…
x264 has a few generic
encoding presets you can use when rendering. You can see the list of
presets and exactly what encoding options they specify by running
 x264 --fullhelp .
You’ll most probably notice the following presets: ultrafast , superfast ,
 veryfast , faster , fast , medium , slow , slower , veryslow .
Ideally you’d always use veryslow 
when…
Using Bugzilla to manage Pitivi was a bit
painful and we were looking for a replacement. Many projects seemed to
switch to Phabricator lately, which looked like a very good platform for
managing projects. We experimented migrating Bugzilla bugs to
Phabricator, and we are pretty content with the result. The UI is nicer,
we have a better search function, and the Git integration…
Read the first part on Jeff’s blog: The
War Against Deadlocks, part 1: The story of our new thread-safe mixing
elements
implementation 
 GNonLin 
has served our cause well for a number of years, but was left with
indelible marks from the Old World. We grew increasingly worried with
GNonLin’s common affiliation with Deadlocks, to the point where it…
Supybot is an IRC bot, an application which can
connect to a specific IRC channel and do stuff there. For example, with
the Bugzilla plugin ,
Supybot can report on the channel whenever a new bug is filed, or if
somebody mentions “bug 1234” in the conversation, it will print
details about bug 1234. 
 Install supybot 
 First, you have to install Supybot. If…