Four generations of iPod nanos compared
Over the last few years, I bought one specimen of all four generations of Apple’s iPod nano media player, mainly to make rePear compatible with each new model. (In fact, rePear’s main development...
View ArticleH.264 Decoder Benchmark, Part 2
After the H.264 decoder benchmark I did when DivX 7 came out, I got some comments that I misrepresented CoreAVC by using an outdated version. Recently, I repeated the benchmarks using the newest...
View ArticleBreakpoint 2009 Party Report
The is no such thing as easter. There’s only Breakpoint. Happy Breakpoint! This 1984-inspired text is from one of the bigscreen slides from this year’s issue of world’s largest Demoscene-only party:...
View ArticleNanoJPEG: a compact JPEG decoder
If you followed my works, you know that I like compact, single-file implementations of decoders for various media formats, and where such a thing doesn’t exist, I tend to write or at least port one...
View ArticleProposal: A file system for Live CDs
CDs or DVDs containing a full Linux system for installation, testing, repair or other special purposes are quite common these days. Chances are high that people make their first steps with the Linux,...
View ArticleTechnical details about »Applied Mediocrity«
As you may or may not have noticed, my latest intro won the PC 64k competition at Evoke 2009. Unlike my previous demos and intros, it actually featured a few effects that go beyond fixed-function...
View Articlepdfgen, an image-to-PDF converter tool
Converting images of scanned documents into proper PDF files is quite a hard task. What I usually want is put the images on a page of a well-defined size (e.g. A4 or Letter) don’t resample the image...
View ArticleVideo encoder comparison
There has been some buzz about HTML5 web video lately. I won’t retell the story here, because it’s almost completely political and not technical, while I’m only interested in the technical side of...
View ArticleBreakpoint 2010 Party Report
It was the end of an era: On April 2-5, 2010, the last Breakpoint demo party took place in Bingen. After 8 years of partying (6 of which I personally participated in), the main organizers decided that...
View ArticleVideo on the Canon EOS 550D
A few weeks ago, my father bought a shiny new Canon EOS 550D DSLR camera, not only for capturing photos, but for videos too. Why not – after all, the video functions are finally taken seriously by the...
View ArticleChoosing the right video format
There’s a wide variety of devices out there which are capable of video playback – computers, music players, mobile phones, game consoles, you name it. However, all of them support a different set of...
View ArticleReal Steganography with TrueCrypt
You probably know TrueCrypt, the perhaps most popular tool for encrypting filesystems. As an alternative to full filesystem or even full disk encryption, TrueCrypt can also work with filesystems inside...
View ArticleServer move and update
As you may or may not have noticed, I moved servers today. I have my own small (virtual) server at emphy.de for a few weeks now and I finally came around to moving the blog from s2000.ws/s2000.at to...
View ArticleFake screen resolutions in kkapture
(Disclaimer: This posting is likely of no interest to people outside of the demoscene :) The small tool kkapture by ryg of Farbrausch is the only sane way to get a video dump of demos, intros and...
View ArticleThe most evil feature ever conceived: the Exif Orientation Tag
There are some advances in technology that are actually steps backwards: features that look nice on paper, but always get in the way when implemented in reality. One of my pet peeves in this category...
View ArticlePhotoJoin, a photo synchronization tool
In this post, I’ll present a solution to a common problem that occurs quite often nowadays: Merging photos from multiple people into one continuous, consistent stream. It is definitely not the first...
View ArticleLinux Graphics Demystified
It’s already been a few weeks since I held a presentation at Chemnitzer Linuxtage (»Chemnitz Linux Days« – a small Linux congress held at the university I used to attend). As it’s about a topic that...
View ArticleWriting ultra-small Windows executables
How small can a valid and useful Win32 executable be? There already are a few tutorials about this topic, but these are either not working on modern Windows versions any longer or only cover the most...
View ArticleColor Generation in IBM CGA, EGA and VGA
It started quite innocently with a few Twitter threads about retro DOS gaming. The question was why no games (or any other software, for that matter) that were designed for EGA graphics cards made use...
View ArticleBlack Mesa review
For years (actually more than a decade!), the world eagerly waited for a new game in the »Half-Life« franchise, well knowing that there may never be such a thing. So imagine everyone’s surprise when...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....