By now, we know of a few requirements for viewing video on iOS (iPhone/iPad et al.). The video codec should be H.264 or another “standard” MPEG codec, and the audio should be AAC. AC3, as far as I know, is not supported. That’s all fine and dandy, but subtitles have been one of the trickiest […]

I originally wrote this in 2009 as a cheatsheet for processing black and white scanned sheet music. It’s a collection of tips for converting and processing scanned images to ultimately get a nice, high-quality PDF that you could archive. The programs convert and mogrify are part of the ImageMagick suite and the program pdfimages is […]

I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 minimal on a server and it’s great. $ less -bash: less: command not found $ man bash -bash: man: command not found $ tree ./ -bash: tree: command not found $ whois google.com -bash: whois: command not found $ curl –help -bash: curl: command not found

Scheme’s power to simplicity ratio makes it a fun target for implementation. Today, I introduce a couple new ways of running Scheme powered by Javascript. The first is an online Scheme interface that I’ve been working on sporadically for the last few months. Inspired by TryHaskell, it began as a series of patches to jquery-console, […]

I recently moved an old website to a new server. For performance reasons, the new server is running nginx instead of Apache, and didn’t have nginx set up to use PHP. (The optimal way, apparently, is to use PHP-FGM, which currently requires you to patch and build PHP yourself, at least until PHP 5.4). That […]

If you are using the Android SDK on a shared computer, you might run into the awesome “NAND: could not create temp file for system NAND” error. This is because “/tmp/android” is hardcoded into the emulator as the directory to start temporary files during emulation, and somebody else has likely claimed it first. The easiest […]

Scope is one of those things that is absolutely essential to understand as a programmer. If you don’t understand how a language handles scope, you are doomed to continue making difficult-to-understand mistakes and poor code design. Scheme is a good platform for exploring how scope works for beginners, and the language features that it has […]

I’ve just finished writing the big parts of usbscale, a command-line program written in C that reads and interprets data from USB scales. It was meant as a little hack for the Stamps.com scale, so currently it’s only set up to recognize the Stamps.com 10-lb scale (manufactured by Elane). It should be trivial to add […]

I didn’t see any Scheme code to read Minecraft NBT data files, so I made one. And in doing so, I see why there weren’t any NBT readers in Scheme. (Haskell programmers can use Adam Foltzer’s much cleaner Haskell version.) When I found out that there was a gzip egg called z3, I thought my […]

I was cleaning out some miscellaneous files from my computer today when I found a folder called “eyeos”. EyeOS. My friend and I thought we were uber-cool when we set up eyeOS on our shared hosting accounts and looking back, yeah, well, we were. EyeOS was an ambitious open-source project to give you a desktop […]