Bart De Waele » Bram.us

Siri vs. Scotland

Posted: February 4th, 2012, 12:57pm CET by Bramus!

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Many in Scotland find that their voice-activated virtual assistant can’t understand them …

The iPhone’s Siri doesn’t seem so smart in Scotland →

Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film

Posted: February 3rd, 2012, 1:33pm CET by Bramus!

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A short film about letterpress and one of the few remaining movable-type printing workshops in the UK, situated at Plymouth University, featuring Paul Collier.

Black

Posted: February 2nd, 2012, 12:15pm CET by Bramus!

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Dutch ISP XS4ALL was ordered to block several IP addresses and domain names (presumably) linked to The Pirate Bay (full list here). In response, they blacked out their homepage.

Roughly translated from Dutch:

For the first time in history a Dutch ISP was forced to revoke access to a foreign site. The Den Haag court ordered XS4ALL to block several IP addresses and domain names.

The judge ruled that the freedom of information — a European civil right — is less important than the interests of the entertainment industry. A wrong decision. So XS4ALL will appeal.

XS4ALL has three issues with the ruling:

An IP block is way out of line (one of the blocked IPs only shows the word “yeah” when surfing to it).

“BREIN” (to keep things simple: the Dutch RIAA) can update the blacklist any time they want

A block won’t solve anything

psd.js

Posted: January 31st, 2012, 10:03pm CET by Bramus!

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Impressive new addition to the list of javascript codec/file format implementations:

psd.js is a general purpose file parser for PSD files created in Photoshop. Given a PSD file, it can parse out information such as image size and color modes, image resources, layer info, image contents, etc.

Written in Coffeescript. Works in modern browsers and NodeJS.

psd.js →
psd.js source (github) →

Permalink for 'Bram.us/2012/01/31/Everything_you_need_to_know_about_Facebook%e2%80%99s_IPO'

Everything you need to know about Facebook’s IPO

Posted: January 31st, 2012, 9:26am CET by Bramus!

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(click to enlarge)

Rumor has it that the IPO filing will be tomorrow.

Facebook Timeline Movie Maker

Posted: January 30th, 2012, 11:58pm CET by Bramus!

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Here’s my resulting movie →

Cool concept, needs some technical/ux work though. Some quick quirks I noticed:

Can’t change the loading background image. It now shows a photo of a friend of mine, instead of a photo of me
Videos can’t be saved/embedded
Loading of “saved” video is slow (most likely because they’re built on the fly?)
Editing photos is not really fast: one. by. one.
One can only edit after having watched the entire video
No fast forwarding
No way to adjust an already adjusted video by going to the link (if it’s your video)

Timeline Movie Maker →

Moonrise Kingdom

Posted: January 30th, 2012, 11:29pm CET by Bramus!

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Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, MOONRISE KINGDOM tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore — and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle. Bruce Willis plays the local sheriff. Edward Norton is a Khaki Scout troop leader. Bill Murray and Frances McDormand portray the young girl’s parents. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as the boy and girl.

Next to an impressive line-up: Directed by Wes Anderson. Due late May 2012.

CSS calc() in Chromium/Chrome

Posted: January 30th, 2012, 11:17pm CET by Bramus!

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Three days ago this was committed:

This is the parsing stage of calc. The expressions are evaluated and expression trees are generated. CSS values are not created yet – that will happen in a subsequent commit.

Looking forward to the next commits, as this feature will make things — such as flexible columns with a little border in a responsive layout — easier.

Note: calc() already works in IE9+ and Firefox4+ (with -moz vendor prefix).

Chromium Changeset 106166 →