I've been using ffmpeg's xgrid filter (similar to hstack and vstack, but allows for arbitrary grids) to produce virtual choir videos for my church choir during covid. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oeg9w8X6hrA.
A lot of people are producing virtual choir videos right now, but I suspect few use a process similar to mine. I use Audacity to edit the audio separately, then crop the input videos using a face-aware cropping script (which uses https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition), then generate a video grid using ffmpeg + xgrid.
Nice, this was super timely as I was literally building the same thing. And I had just reached the part where I was annoyed that all the submitted videos had different shapes and sizes which as you know would be tedious to correct manually.
Sorry, we know all the people on your team are good, but you have to fire five of them. And . . . don't bother picking them, HR already did that without your input.
Ha, this happened to me. I found out I was getting laid off before my boss and boss' boss did.
As a gay subscriber, I completely agree with "manly enough without scaring off the metro-sexual or gay crowd." Masculine without being defensive about it.
I think a lot of folks tend to assume others are like themselves. Sometimes difference is obvious: my female and asian coworkers are obviously not white men like me.
Sometimes we assume others like the things we like. This year, I got a secret santa gift of an inflatable portal 2 turret. Although I'm a software developer, I don't play video games; the gift was lost on me.
When we're talking about diversity, we need to move beyond assuming homogeneity and seek to understand and celebrate difference. Getting there can mean visibility, and that can be tough.
Gay people, bi people, trans people, and some people of color can fade into the background if we don't make our presence known. Wearing that rainbow Mickey at a conference could mean a lot to a queer person who feels alone in the tech world.
I think that a lot of people in tech have experienced growing up being different. Different in some way that made people uncomfortable, didn't help them fit in, and possibly got them made fun of.
At least so far, I've found the tech world a pretty easy place to be gay. But I do make sure to come out early at every place I've worked. Not only does it avoid any awkward (for both parties) questions about a girlfriend, it helps us move toward a world where we celebrate our differences.
I just bought a $69 Nokia Lumia 521 (Windows Phone) off contract. Mozilla isn't at the forefront here - both Nokia/Microsoft and Motorola are driving down the off-contract price point.
These phones are actually pretty damned decent for the money!
I'm looking to equip everyone in our startup with a 'company' phone, that is to say one that I can wipe remotely without anyone being upset.
Once 8.1 is out, the 521 will allow me to put a secure VPN connection, easily toggleable, has a good enough for hell RDP client running some powershell.
I can also fairly easily make something to use WMI to query a bunch of important details for our prod environments.
That's really not a bad price point for such a device.
Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised.
At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having, identify bugs out in the wild, and get feedback on our products. We may sometimes sound a little robotic, since we're not going to divulge insider info or participate in arguments, but we are listening and trying to help (and attempting to figure out what is actually happening on peoples machine's, which is tough). We also provide feedback to our customer service folks in the forums, giving them answers to common problems we do know about and identifying when they provide misinformation and correct that.
I suspect that Apple reads their own forums but doesn't respond. The optimist in me says they're investigating this Wi-Fi issue due to the noise in the forums. They may not have or know a good workaround or at-home fix at this point. And frankly, it's really difficult to get any useful diagnostic information from folks in the forums (especially angry ones who turn to personal attacks on engineers - been there, done that for me on answers.microsoft.com).
I have seen many product forums where threads go on and on, and useful information is buried in a avalanche of noise.
On the other hand, censorship/terms-of-service removal is a grey area and by removing the information you're removing the ability of readers to make judgement calls for themselves.
Really, it would be nice if there was a way to filter/optimize the noise of normal forum spew into just the useful bits, while still having context/links to the original ginormous piles. Seems to get the best of both worlds.
Requiring that posts stay on topic isn't censorship. Terms of Service are Terms of Service. There are lots and lots of other Apple/Mac/iPhone forums around the web.
> Requiring that posts stay on topic isn't censorship.
Censorship is exactly what it is. I understand it's an emotionally or ethically charged term for some, but there is no doubt about what they're doing:
"to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable"
We all understand that there are terms of service. They're enforcing them via censorship. Whether it's the censorship or the ToS that the censorship is meant to serve which are particularly objectionable is a pretty uninteresting argument.
It's totally within the terms of service as far as I can see, since it is on topic.
Exercising your warranty rights is a perfectly valid solution to a technical problem.
It's always been common to suggest to people that they try restarting their devices to fix a problem or going as far as reinstalling the software in question. When neither of those work, replacing the device if it is non-functional is the next step and exercising your warranty rights is a legit way to implement that technical fix.
I hope that you are not talking about social.technet.microsoft.com. No offense, but I always dread, when I search for a solution and the results contain this site at top positions. I've never found a solution for my problem there, just moderators following a script, without trying to really help.