ricardocabellov5.5

If you ever need to take screenshots of your desktop every 10second (or whatever). Here it's a quick script:

while true ; 
do
scrot '%s.png' -e 'mv $f ~/Desktop/temp/scrot/'
sleep 10
done

Just paste the script on an empty file and change the properties to "Allow executing file as program". Double click and Run in Terminal. Control^C to stop it. That's it.

The terms lossy and lossless are something I learnt recently when I discovered the format FLAC. As example MP3 is a lossy format; distorts the data on the pocess, and the end result is not exactly like the original. FLAC, on the other hand compresses the data but keeps it 1:1 with the original, just like a ZIP does.

Lagarith is the same but for video. There are some other lossless video codecs but from my experience Lagarith, using the YV12 color space when compressing, is, by far, the best. Not only in terms of file size compression, but also in terms of playback.

As an example, I've compressed r08028 at the resolution of 640x480 60fps, which is the resolution it was designed for, and it ends up as 2gb file (uncompressed is 14gb). 2gb is still quite big for a 3 minutes video but with nowadays 1TB+ HDs maybe we can start archiving our demos in this way so we can recompress them to new video formats as soon as they appear without having to mess with emulators and rendering again.

Best thing of the codec is that the playback. On a multi-core machine can play 1920x1080 60fps videos with no problems.

Unfortunately, this codec hasn't reached mainstream and it doesn't have much support yet (ie VLC doesn't play it). But if you happen to be a Windows user, give it a try!

If you want to know more about the codec, here you have some extra info, and here the sources.

Now, if only FLAC could also be used for compressing the audio that gets encapsulated in a .AVI...

EDIT: Forgot to mention. You can use this codec from kkapture itself. And if that wasn't good enough, the whole kkapture process gets way faster (compared to capture to uncompressed frames). Capturing r08028 is faster than the demo itself.

I seriously envy this kid. Love the sounds he gets.

If you had 2 weeks of holidays in September you would probably get a nice apartment in a Sunny island at 5 min of the beach. I would too. But not this time.

Instead I will be going to a Reykjavik hotel for 15 days. Why Reykjavik? Because 15 days in a hotel in UK it's about £1,000 and in Iceland it's £300 (breakfast included)... and the flight from London to Reykjavik costs £200, so that's why.

The idea is to stay inside the hotel room with my laptop all the time (Carmack's style). Hopefully with no distractions. Although I won't lie, I'll probably do a break at some point and visit the blue lagoon... Still, I think I've never been 15 days isolated. I'm much more productive when I'm alone (like everyone else I guess). So I'm very much looking forward to it.

You may think that this is wrong. But you need to understand this... The list of ideas I note down every day keep growing and the fact that the daily life doesn't give me enough time to materialise 99% of them really frustrates me.

Right now I don't know what I'll be working on, need to go through the list of ideas and do a selection... maybe xplsv.tv v2, maybe an android game, maybe a javascript demo... I really don't know.

Any suggestions/requests you may have?

If you were wondering what was Shock / Collapse up to these days, the truth is that hasn't changed much. However, seems like he has moved to the dark side (the good one): open source. The good old chap, not only keeps doing amazing illustrations, but he has been working on a set of brushes and modifications for Gimp to make things easier when doing paintings in Gimp.

http://ramonmirandavisualart.blogspot.com/

I could watch this site for hours.

Composed for the escena.org renoise 2 competition #2

Download the renoise file

Composed for the escena.org renoise 2 competition #1

Download the renoise file

Click to see bigger.

Somehow, the film Choke made me buy four Chuck Palahniuk books last Christmas. I'm usually really bad on this, I buy books but I don't read them, mostly because I read very slowly. But thanks to Chuck I'm gave it another try. After fully reading Choke and Fight Club (2 books in a year it's a record already) I was now reading Masters of Doom which Andreas recommended and lent (thx!).

If you played Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom back in the days, you'll want to read this as it explains how they were done. Pure nerd-gossip.