I just posted a consolidated watch list for Star Trek Voyager. I am a deep AI skeptic, but since everything these days is AI, and I wondered if this is something AI could help with. Spoiler it really is not. I asked ChatGPT and Claude to each come up with a Star Trek Voyager Continue reading How does AI do in making a Voyager watch list?
Some years ago I made a consolidated watch list for Star Trek Voyager, and put it on Medium (originally here). I have updated and added it to this site. There is more detail below the table. As with many episodic shows, the 1980s and 1990s Star Trek shows contain less good episodes. As my wife Continue reading Voyager watch list
The latest episode of ATP included a discussion about MacOS 27 dropping support for Intel Macs and MacOS 28 (partially?) dropping support for running intel binaries. I have been curious about this, so did some Wikipedia diving and put this post together. 68K to PPC The first 68K Mac was the original Macintosh 128K in Continue reading Mac processor transitions
Every year on 12 December, Geneva holds a festival called l Escalade, celebrating the defeat of an attempted invasion in 1602. A celebrated part of the victory was when a cook dumped a pot of boiling soup on the invaders. This act has become part of the annual tradition of l Escalade with the sale of chocolate Continue reading Making a marmite de l Escalade with a 3d printer
The touch-sensitive buttons on the front of our Samsung dryer stopped working a few months ago. We rarely if ever use them, so it would not be a problem, except the dryer convinced itself that the child lock was also on. The child lock can only be removed by holding down two of the touch-sensitive Continue reading Fixing touch sensitive buttons on Samsung Optimal Dry Heat pump Dryer
Part of my day-job involves reviewing and searching through PDFs of old documents, most commonly WA government gazettes. The supplied PDFs were OCRed back in 2013. But I have never been sure how accurate the original OCR was, or if modern technology could do a better job. I went through a brief project to see Continue reading OCR comparison
The SVT AV1 team just keep making their codec better. Version 2.0 was released in March 2024. It promised further increased speed and quality. As it seems this website is now just endless codec comparisons, I did a few hundred encodes of the same old video file to see how this new version compares to Continue reading SVTAV1 2.0
A reddit post after my last post suggested that despite the source being in 8 bit colour, SVTAV1 should always be encoded in 10 bit colour, as it produces significantly better results. ffmpeg can be asked to encode in a different colourspace by specifying the pixel format. For example, to encode a video in 10 Continue reading SVTAV1 10 bit
My previous post was made with the RAV1E and SVTAV1 codecs as they were in mid 2023. Both codecs received significant updates later in 2023. This post looks at the RAV1E 0.7, and SVTAV1 1.8. As with the previous post, I encoded the same 1000 frame video clip at various presets and quality settings of Continue reading AV1 codec update
I have been a video encoder enthusiast since the early 2000s, but I have not been following it closely for several years. I was curious about the current state of video encoders. As a long time enthusiast I have long been curious to see how modern codecs compare to historic codecs. I picked a high Continue reading Video encoder comparison