Kibibytes, Mebibytes, and Gibibytes, Oh My!

charles 3 March 2004

So, we all know that a 'kilobyte' is not 1,000 bytes but 1,024 bytes (2^10), right? Wrong. A kilobyte is actually defined as 1,000 bytes, and therefore is a rather useless word to everyone except hard drive manufacturers. What we really mean to refer to is a kibibyte. Seriously. And scaling up there are mebibytes and gibibytes. Or so the International Electrotechnical Commission decreed in December 1998. The topic was discussed in the March 1999 Tech Beat, the online publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology

GeoCaching

charles 3 February 2004

Charles gets bitten by the travel bug

Late in 2003, a good friend of mine suggested that I might be interested in a new outdoor activity that he and his family had recently been enjoying. It combines hi-tech resources with elements of a traditional treasure hunt, and it's known as "Geocaching". I later learned that this was basically Letterboxing with gadgets, but it was the gadgetry that piqued my interest.

If you've never heard about it, there's an entire web site devoted to Geocaching. I guaranty there's a geocache near you!

Mac OS X Audio/Video Tools

charles 4 November 2003

I have found the following tools to be valuable on a sliding scale between useful and indispensible. Here they are with a brief description, grouped by command-line and GUI.

Terminal/Shell Based Apps

You can find most of these on sourceforge.

  • ffmpeg: The swiss army knife of audio/video tools
  • flac: Free Lossless Audio Codec. Compress/Decompress without losing quality
  • lame: The standard for compressing audio to MP3 format
  • macape: Monkey's Audio (ape) compression/decompression
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