06 Aug 2022
Hey, I made a book! The Illustrated Guide to Video Formats is widely available through most booksellers. And I made a website too! Archives of Tomorrow has everything the book has and a bit more. I have a lot of process-y things to say but haven’t found the time to put them to paper, and this announcement post is already 3 weeks late! Here are a few of the things I hope to write about...
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20 Jun 2022
This is a quick blog post about how I’ve been making my book, how I was able to use open source software throughout the process, and a few lessons that I learned. I’ve been exclusively using Linux as an operating system for the past 4 years. Linux distros, however, are not especially known for their attention to visual design. (If you are looking for that, though, I recommend ElementaryOS! I ended up having some hardware...
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31 May 2022
Post co-authored by me, Ashley, and Jessica Farrell, Community Facilitator for the BitCurator Consortium and Software Preservation Network. Check out those sites to learn more about her and her great work! Archive81 debuted as a Netflix original at the beginning of 2022. Here is the plot summary from Netflix: “An archivist takes a job restoring damaged videotapes and gets pulled into the vortex of a mystery involving the missing director and a demonic cult.” A...
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29 May 2022
This is an older draft that I’m publishing a bit late (Aug 6, 2022) – this covers my thinking around how to decide what the path forward is, and I have a lot more thoughts now that I’ve been through the process, keep an eye on this space for those posts coming soon! Thinking about where to print Making a book can go a few different ways. Obviously, there’s pitching to a big (or not-that-big)...
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09 May 2022
(Why I said making instead of writing will become obvious quickly) In late December, as things start to slow down and wrap up for the year, I was feeling pretty burned out. I’ve been feeling burned out for a while (and I’m certainly not alone in this sentiment, there are so many reasons to feel burned out even in the best of personal circumstances, which are my circumstances). I also had a lot of pain...
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16 Jul 2021
This blog post is very short, but I just had to get these out of my head! 21 January 1973 PARRY Encounters the DOCTOR 22 June 1973 ARPAwocky December 1985 ‘Twas the Night Before Start-up’ September 1989 “Act One - The Poems” February 1992 Remembrances of Things Past December 1995 The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas Not poems but close: September 1989 The hitchhiker’s guide to the internet 1 April 1994 A VIEW FROM THE...
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03 Jun 2021
A big problem with getting into video in general is all of the esoteric lingo that you have to learn, and WebRTC introduces a slew of new acronyms and words into the mix. Since WebRTC is basically a protocol composed of or built using many other protocols, it can turn into an acronym soup pretty quickly. It can make it difficult to even have a high-level conversation about live video streaming on the web without...
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03 Apr 2021
Overview / project vision I’ve spent the last few weekends working on this thing, tentatively titled Media Collection Viewer (and it seems like that name might just stick!). The way it works is that you provide it with a valid JSON file derived from the audiovisual file analysis tool MediaInfo and it produces charts based on that data, so that you can get a broad understanding of the files you are having to handle. (Note:...
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16 Nov 2020
The below writing was included in Screen Slate’s “The Year the Internet Broke”, a publication corresponding with a film series held at Anthology Film Archives earlier this year, right before the big shutdown of 2020 and the last time I used the subway, walked in Manhattan, saw people casually, hugged a person I don’t live with, and ate at a restaurant. Copies still available through the link above, and it goes towards supporting this excellent...
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14 May 2020
Update: Project page is now up, here! Go there if you want demos and a high-level overview of this project. In anticipation of Recurse Center’s Never Graduate Week (essentially an alumni week time of celebration), a week I had planned to take off from work, I started to think of projects that might fit well into the scope of just one week, both at the angle of R&D work but also technical work. Stumbling through...
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13 May 2020
For the past little while, I’ve been working on this network-based performance project that I have named Throttled. It’s a performance by 233 gifs and a very slow network connection. This blog post is a bit about what I learned while making it. I’m writing this somewhat in haste, so the notes are a bit sloppy. This project had me asking some questions that are the opposite of what people usually want to learn about...
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21 Feb 2020
This is the eight and (perhaps) penultimate in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo”. (And the last until this project is able to be wrapped up after code review, which hasn’t started yet so it could be a while.) Anyway, I suppose this means that this is the last of the weekly post series. This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. MediaInfoInfo: Initialize...
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14 Feb 2020
This is the seventh in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo” (with weekly associated blog posts). This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. Other posts: MediaInfoInfo: Initialize project MediaInfoInfo: Parameters / making a plan MediaInfoInfo: General streams MediaInfoInfo: Video streams MediaInfoInfo: Audio streams MediaInfoInfo: Image, Menu, Text and Other streams MediaInfoInfo: MediaInfo-specific words MediaInfoInfo: Metadata Tags MediaInfo-specific words Going through parameters and their...
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07 Feb 2020
This is the sixth in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo”. This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. Other posts: MediaInfoInfo: Initialize project MediaInfoInfo: Parameters / making a plan MediaInfoInfo: General streams MediaInfoInfo: Video streams MediaInfoInfo: Audio streams MediaInfoInfo: Image, Menu, Text and Other streams MediaInfoInfo: MediaInfo-specific words MediaInfoInfo: Metadata Tags I’ve tackled the largest sections – General, Video, and Audio. I was...
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31 Jan 2020
This is the fifth!! in a series of blog posts on a project I call “MediaInfoInfo” (with weekly associated blog posts). This project is focused on improving documentation for the ubiquitous media analysis tool MediaInfo. Other posts: MediaInfoInfo: Initialize project MediaInfoInfo: Parameters / making a plan MediaInfoInfo: General streams MediaInfoInfo: Video streams MediaInfoInfo: Audio streams MediaInfoInfo: Image, Menu, Text and Other streams MediaInfoInfo: MediaInfo-specific words MediaInfoInfo: Metadata Tags Audio! Like the Video streams section, the...
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