Sabih Mir's Barbarian Blog

Crappy quality and 4:3 videos no more?

Sabih Mir — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:59:30 -0500

For too long Youtube has been a bastion for crappy quality and 4:3 screen ratio videos; I’m glad they’re finally giving us a better experience (though tricking your browser to trick Youtube to display the widescreen, “HD” video is somewhat klunky).

But man, watching stuff in widescreen AND higher quality is just so nice. Glad to see the other video sites are forcing Youtube’s hand.

EDIT!
So it looks like Youtube implemented this across the board, so everyone know has access to widescreen vids and you no longer need to do the hack I described above. But apparently you can force a higher res version of the video you’re watching (if available) by adding “&fmt=22” (sans quotes) at the end of your movie url.

Music listening habits and visualization

Sabih Mir — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:31:27 -0500

One thing I realized quickly when I got to TBG is that most people here are really into their music (I’d venture to say that over 60% are “active” musicians in some capacity). I think one of the first things I did when setting up my computer was to add the iScrobbler plugin for iTunes so that all my tracks would update my last.fm account. We even have a Barbarian Group last.fm group!

My musical tastes aren’t extremely erratic, but I really like the notion of having a glimpse into what I’ve been listening to since I started tracking my music. Last.fm gives you some cool ways to see what you’ve played, but nothing as visually striking as LastGraph does.

LastGraph lets you explore your last.fm listening history.

And you can generate gorgeous PDF graphs like so:

You can snoop/visualize any Last.fm user’s listening habits by plugging in their username and giving LastGraph a few moments to gather the data. Look’s like Rick listened to a lot more music in September then I did!

Render any fonts in any browser...no flash?

Sabih Mir — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:34:46 -0400

A friend just IM’d me a link to a new type of cross-browser text replacement technique called typeface.js which allows for any HTML text element to be rendered in the font of your choice. Now the most common of these live-text to rendered replacement techniques is the awesome sIFR, but typeface.js is notable cause it’s only javascript.

At first I was about to write it off since the examples section of the project site shows images, but when I took some time (oh what has the internet done to our patience) to read through the background (and view source), I realized this is a pretty great and new approach to achieving this effect.

The javascript reads from the glyph information of any font you specify, which you need to add to your server after being converted using their conversion process(conversion), and then renders out the font using your browser’s vector drawing capabilities! Pretty rad indeed. Definitely something to keep your front-end eyes on.

On this day, BW3 began.

Sabih Mir — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:46:26 -0400

Shit just got real(er).

Google has just announced their entry into the web browser arena (and has created a handy comic about what went into making it): Google Chrome.

While my first inclination was to moan and fret about the start of BW3 (not the chicken wing joint, but the third browser war), reading through some of the features and reasoning behind the endeavor changed my mind…and I’m curious how these innovations (a new Javascript engine? a Javascript Virtual Machine? Tabs on the OUTSIDE?) are gonna change things.

Here are some (blurry) screenshots.

Take that, snarky consumer!

Sabih Mir — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:34:35 -0400

So I guess an owner of Tiger Woods Golf by Electronic Arts wanted to show a bug that was in the released version of the game by uploading to YouTube….EA got wind of this and posted a response to it, getting Mr. Woods himself to participate.

Pretty great that EA took the time to do this kind of thing.