Asides

Asides are brief thoughts, links to interesting content, and quick updates that don't warrant a full blog post. Think of them as my digital margin notes or the blogging equivalent of tweets.

You know it’s a good day when you get to watch “The Last of Us” S01E03.

Rather shocked to see that a large fancy drink from Starbucks is now £6.20‽

I must have spent about 10 hours over the past week on blot.blog. How much have I spent writing? I’ve added a sidebar and implemented a few features.

Some are important and useful. I’ve added search. And there’s now an ‘asides’ section for short thoughts (I’ve imported all my old tweets too). But most of my time has been spent fiddling with CSS.

I really need to dedicate more time to writing my blog, not building it.

Netflix has introduced HDR10+.

Also:

“AV1-SDR is already the second most streamed codec at Netflix, behind H.264/AVC.”

In my mind AV1 is still not widely supported or used. I guess not.

I know Netflix has done its best to avoid H.265/HEVC due to its prohibitive licensing costs. And it has financially and technically backed AV1. But I’m surprised there’s that many AV1-friendly devices out there.

One of my hobbies is video transcoding. I use HEVC. But perhaps I should take a look at AV1. I won’t adopt it yet. Encode times I’m sure are still too slow and I have very few devices that support it. But I’m curious how it competes with HEVC on quality.

This is a test. Seeing as this blog is essentially my own little Twitter, it seems fitting that I’ve imported all of my tweets into it.

3122 tweets imported – dating back to 2008. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum.

I’m trying to implement a new rule: I’m not allowed to save any articles to read-later on a Saturday/Sunday morning.

If I’m not willing to read it on a weekend morning – when I’ve got a hot coffee and bucketloads of time – then I’m never going to read it.

I saw ‘turkey teeth’ in person for the first time today. It was quite a shock. They look awful.

Those things will not age well. You shouldn’t get teeth based on a fashion.

“I know I’m talking to myself, but I would like some response from you.” - my girlfriend

“Silvio Berlusconi invented the modern oligarchy. Musk is expanding it.”

I haven’t thought about Silvio Berlusconi for a while. Francis Fukuyama:

When historians 50 or 100 years from now investigate how and why Western civilization collapsed, they would point to Silvio Berlusconi as the chief villain. The former Italian Prime Minister was the inventor of the modern form of oligarchy, in which a rich individual uses his money to buy his way into political office through the purchase of media properties, and then uses his political office to protect his business interests.

Well, guess what, we now have our own home-grown American oligarch in the Berlusconi mold: Elon Musk.

“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave [behind].” - Henry David Thoreau, 1846

“I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.” - Henry David Thoreau

“O wretched men, who hold their joys as crimes!” - Maximianus

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds & it was necessary only to destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

I don’t know why, but the fact that Roman soldiers had their eyesight tested and were taught to swim is rather surprising to me.