Tag: Video

Convert any file VLC can play to mp3

I just felt the need for a script that could extract the audio track of a video, transcode it and save it as an mp3 file … 2 hours later I was finished (get the Gist). 😀 It uses VLC to do hard work. 😉

Thanks to Kris Hom for the inspiration. 🙂

Update 2014-03-01:

  • Check whether VLC is installed
  • Should also work on Linux now
  • Increase default bit rate to 192kbit/s
  • Fixed bug where the file/playlist would repeat endlessly

Update 2014-11-05:

  • Also look for VLC in “~/Application/”

Update 2016-03-05

Interview with Bruce Schneier on Privacy, Security & the Future

Bruce Schneier talks about how the mechanics of privacy changed since the advent of social media, who holds control and power in the new arena, what are real issues and what are just generational differences in dealing with them. He has a lot of good analogies to make his points. 🙂

Authors@Google: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is discussing his book “The Pluto Files” … basically recounting a few thousand years of finding things in the night sky, naming them and building an understanding of what they are … case in point: (now dwarf planet 😉 ) Pluto … including his hypothesis on why Americans in particular get so worked up about Pluto not being a planet any more. 😀

The Y Combinator

I take my head off to Jim, that’s a great way to approach a weird intersection of mathematics and programming. 😉 For those who are curious … he uses a very simple mathematical algorithm to explore how you can express recursions in Lambda calculus and thus “derives” the Y combinator.

Totally useless, but worth every minute. 😉

 

Secrets of Search

Douglas Merrill from Google talks about what it takes to build a search engine for the web.

Besides that what strikes me as interesting is their choice of languages “focusing” (he didn’t exactly say that, but it’s what you understand, when he says they won a prize for it) their efforts in machine translation on: Arabic and Chinese … o.O

Joomla! Wold Conference 2012 Keynote: Changing the world with Open Source

Pascal Finette gave a great keynote at Joomla! World Conference 2012 talking about how Mozilla came to be and what they learned along the way. He shares insights on how to build a competitive product, a healthy community and maybe even a business around it, but developing and governing it the open source way.