Church of JPEG

Some time has passed since I last wrote about the antics of the IJG, purveyor of the well-known JPEG image manipulation library. With the major Linux distributions as well as the Firefox and Chrome browsers having switched to the libjpeg-turbo fork, there has been little reason to pay attention to the IJG. Nevertheless, I decided to have a look at what they’ve been doing the last few years, and I was not disappointed. Continue reading

Shades of black

Some time ago now, I was looking for a new laptop. Having compared the technical specifications of a number of models, I turned my attention to the most important aspect: the colour. Everybody knows black is the best colour, but which particular shade of black? There are, apparently, quite a few to choose from.

While some may settle for the plain Black, others will demand something more distinguished. The musician, for instance, might find Piano Black more attractive, while Ebony Black has, perhaps, an organic touch. For a more “hi-tech” feeling, there is Carbon Black, and if that is insufficient, Ultimate Carbon should hopefully do the trick. The French-sounding Intense Noir might, I speculate, be designed to evoke quasi-artistic images, whereas Platinum Black to me rings mostly of expensive and hardly at all of black. The last entry on my list is Liquorice Black, for which interpretation I refer to those capable of ingesting this vile substance.

To this day I remain completely clueless regarding any actual variation in physical appearance, as for my purchase I selected black, plain and simple, and spent the difference on a RAM upgrade.

Analytics-enabled video lifestyle management

Press releases are always rich riddled infested with current buzz-words, but this one is better than many.

The analytics-enabled video lifestyle management of the title is, apparently, some kind of video surveillance system targeted at home users. According to the press release, it uses mobile video intelligence (MVI), which has got to be a good thing, even having been given an acronym. With all this power, it delivers proactive, video-based information, and does so in a manner that fits today’s connected, mobile lifestyle.

This must be a truly amazing device. It provides users with better lifestyle management, and to top it off, the surveillance footage it supplies is allegedly so great that it also changes how consumers view video – from a passive, entertainment form to a source of rich, real-time information. Not a bad feat for a video of your back door, I must admit.