Peter Forret
because eloquence is, like, whatever
Peter Forretbecause eloquence is, like, whatever
I was driving home after work and I had a vague idea:
what if I could represent a video with an image where the X axis was ‘time’ and the Y-axis was something that represented the images (it was this vague in my mind: “something with the colors”) in that video?
Three hours of work later, spread out over the same evening, I got it working, assisted by A.I. every step of the way.
TL;DR: I have started using mkdox (which uses mkdocs, material and Docker) to create a static documentation site for every repository/project I’m working on. It’s easy, light and fast. It also invites me to document everything in Markdown, which is great for coding agents.
Decades ago, back when I organised the first Belgian Barcamp events in Brussels (2006), I had a created a presentation of my own: I was scraping the ‘playing now’ feeds of several Belgian radio stations, using that data to detect ‘trending music’, new songs that started being played a lot on radio. I remember that one of the songs that came out of the algorithm was ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley, and since it was first time I heard that name, I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it.
This is a personal project of mine: I’ve recently recorded 2 hours of interview with my parents.
The purpose is to have a record of their life stories, their memories, their anecdotes, told by them.
The idea came to me when I heard some friends talk about their parents, who had passed away, and how they wished they had recorded their voices, their stories, their laughter.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am doing a lot of research into using A.I. to facilitate cinema advertising operations.
Let me tell you about a recent experiment I did with a movie news analysis tool.
I’m doing lots of research these days on using A.I. (generative or other) in the daily operations of cinema advertising, which is my area of expertise.
Let me tell you about one topic I recently explored: using artificial intelligence models to help in video quality control.
It all started with Instagram Reels showing me too many yummy cooking videos. I wanted to try some recipes out myself.
But I didn’t want to have to keep my phone in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to have to keep unlocking it to see the next step.
I wanted to print the recipe out, and have it on the counter while I was cooking.
Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just print that video?
I’ve started using my setver bash tool for easy semver versioning of components and projects. One of the design decisions I made back then, is that I would always have a VERSION.md version file in the root of my project. This file only contains the current version number. This version is also stored in the composer.json (PHP), package.json (JS) files and git tags, but I wanted a system that also works for my bash projects. In the end, it turns out that was a clever decision.
Every end of the month, as I spend several hours getting on top of all my receipts, expenses and invoices, scanning barely legible paper tidbits with my phone,
I’m thinking to myself, surely there must be a better way? I mean, we are 2022, after all?
I wanted to demonstrate the power of my splashmark image markup script and did the following experiment using splashmark, Wikipedia, and Unsplash:
One of the projects I started during the lockdown is @squaredforwork
which is now named “Guess the movie?” .
It is based on years of experimenting with image manipulation and information reduction.
Basically: how much visual information do you need to recognise a (familiar) image?
I mostly worked with movie posters, since those are often universally recognisable images.
Some examples of earlier tests might give you an idea (working with large square pixels here:
Pixel Movie Quiz):
I’ve decided to start a new email newsletter about my favourite tech topic: bash/shell scripting. It’s something I’ve become quite proficient in during the years, and I still discover new tricks, tools or applications every day. So I will bundle the best information nuggets in “#!/Bashful/Thinking“, a new weekly newsletter for bash enthusiasts. Get yours now!
COVID19 has had a huge impact of pretty much everything. For portrait photography, the 6-feet-apart, no-travelling, use-mouth-mask lockdown had made it almost impossible to do an in-person photo shoot. But every limit is also a challenge, Is it possible to do an interesting remote shoot via the internet? The answer is yes. I will give you some tips on how to do this.
This is my 2nd QR Experiments post: make QR-codes from images, also check the first one on QR Roulette!
I started to do some QR code (two-dimensional matrix barcode) experiments recently and this is the first result: I developed an animated QR code, ‘QR Roulette‘ or QRoulette.
Imagemagick is a command-line tool to create and modify image files. It is an essential program if you want to work with media files (just like ffmpeg and sox). I have used it very often in my career and I still discover new applications. This blog post is about one of these experiments. How few pixels does one need to recognise a familiar/known image, in this case a movie poster? I created the Pixel Movie Quiz.
I saw I was getting quite some traffic from Russia on my tech news aggregator. It turns out I have a Russian site that published a post on nuuz.io. I made it onto their ‘Web projects of the year 2019’ list, next to Nomadlist and Deepl.
Let me describe an idea I had for the intelligent cloud-connected mobile device charger that keeps all my mobile battery devices charged optimally.
A lot of hosting companies already offer one-click installs for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, dotProject. These are mostly content (CMS) tools. They’re useful, but they cover only a part of what a corporate customer would want. I would love to see a hosting company that offers branded tools as a service:
UPDATE Nov 2019: my idea has been validated! I just discovered a sleek aluminium version, called the LineDock! Extra (USB/HDMI/DisplayPort) ports, extra battery power and up to 1TB of SSD disk space.
Update Sept 2017: FreshDesk just release a new product FreshTeam that does exactly what I specified below.
I was driving for 6 hours the other day and my wife was asleep, so what does one do: work out the details for a new kind of hosted communication service in my head.
Every tech geek has his/her preferred tools and one of mine is without doubt Tobi Oetiker’s MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher), which I’ve used to make pretty trend lines of much more than routers or traffic.
Some drivers love fancy chrome wheel rims, some add a huge wing spoiler on their car, or fuzzy dice hanging from their rear-view mirror. Me, when I bought my new car, I decided that I wanted a Wifi network in my car. So that any passenger with a laptop/iPod could read his email. And I imagined driving to distant holiday locations while my passenger where watching movies streamed from a NAS disk built into the car.
I am doing some really cool research lately concerning video conversion and one of the issues I ran into, concerns infrared imaging. In short: all the ‘cool’ thermographic (colour is dependent on radiated temperature) images are in color, and the images you get from cheap IR cameras is black and white. How do you convert the B/W into colour?
(I had this idea in June 2011 and wrote this post in Oct 2011, but I decided to wait with publishing until my lovely colleague Sylvia could get the scoop and use it for a marketing action).
When a friend of mine recently got his MacBook stolen, I quickly verified if I had installed Prey Project on each laptop/desktop PC I have. For those who do not know Prey:
I remember that before I started photography on a serious level, I had some understanding of shutter speed, but none of aperture and focal length. Even when I read what they meant, I still couldn´t ‘picture’ it, had no feeling for the numbers. Let´s leave ‘aperture’ for another time and just concentrate for now on the concept of focal length.
