Pete's blog

iPad HTML5 design

pete — Sat, 29 May 2010 12:31:11 +0000

Since a little bit I have been playing with the new Apple iPad and I have to say it is great. As a technology lover and hobby programmer, of course I had to dive in and test a view things myself. The first thing that cought my eye was the rotation and possibilities it gives for webdesign and therefore I was very surprised to learn that this is already supported in the new HTML5 (draft?) spec.
Anyways I want to share how you can make a page that looks different based on how you hold your iPad, which is actually quite simple.
You need two style sheets, one for each orientation of your iPad. Lets call them portrait.css and landscape.css. In your head definition of your page you put:

Also helpful if you want to start defining absolute sizes for your sheets depending on how you look at them, you can use:

With a quick definition of portrait.css and landscape.css you are now able to transform the look of your page based on the orientation!

In a follow up post, I will add some examples and also some other useful JavaScript I found that helps in making more advanced pages.

Enjoy!

Google Chrome on Slackware

pete — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:27:44 +0000

Thanks @bartv I was just remotivated to try and get Google Chrome working on Slackware. A previous attempt did not work and also this attempt took some work, so I decided to share it for other potential Slackware users.

Based on knowledge from this blogpost I made a few packages that should be easy to install and get you going.
These are based on ORbit2 and GConf from Slackbuilds and the original Google Chrome RPM (version 4.0.249.43). I used rpm2tgz to get the contents and then modified the doinstall script to not only install, but also copy the google-chrome.desktop file to /usr/share/applications and /usr/share/apps/kappfinder/apps (assuming you are using KDE).

For you, all you need to do is download these 3 packages and run installpkg on them. Pretty simple.

There is one important assumption in the Chrome package, which is that Firefox needs to be installed in /usr/lib/firefox (this is standard in Slackware). The install script of Chrome makes a few symbolic links needed to make things work. If you get library errors it is worthwhile to check whether the symlinks are made.
Goto /usr/lib/ and check for the following:

libssl3.so.1d -> /usr/lib/firefox/libssl3.so
libsmime3.so.1d -> /usr/lib/firefox/libsmime3.so
libplds4.so.0d -> /usr/lib/firefox/libplds4.so
libplc4.so.0d -> /usr/lib/firefox/libplc4.so
libnssutil3.so.1d -> /usr/lib/firefox/libnssutil3.so
libnss3.so.1d -> /usr/lib/firefox/libnss3.so
libnspr4.so.0d -> /usr/lib/firefox/libnspr4.so

Hope you succeed, if you do you can let me know on twitter.

Peter

New game - call of duty modern warfare 2

pete — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:37:43 +0000

It has been a long time since the last blog and I feel this has to change. So from now on, new content every week or perhaps more. My intent is to blog about my hobbies and the cool stuff we are doing over at shapeways

For today it is simple. Last weekend I bought a new game called Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2. Reviews can be found here. The game is almost photo realistic and if you like a tactical shooter, check it out. The day you are part of your own movie are not far away. More to follow.

File syncing with Unison how-to

pete — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:59:05 +0000

Just updated the Tech-notes pages with a short HOW-TO about using UNISON. It is an excellent way to sync two document roots across the internet.
If you find yourself behind different computers and struggling with current versions of documents it is an excellent tool. Look here for more info.

My page is located here

Where I work

pete — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:48:21 +0000

It is about time I get a bit more concrete about where I work. Just over a year ago now, I got a new job as venture owner at Philips’ Lifestyle Incubator. The Lifestyle Incubator is part of Philips Corporate Technologies.

The idea of Incubators was conceived by the previous CTO of Philips. It allows new ideas or technologies coming from every part of Philips to form into solid businesses. These new businesses can become a part of Philips or if they are not a strategic fit can go outside and become independent companies.

The venture of which I am CEO is called shapeways. You can find us at www.shapeways.com. Shapeways allows you to upload your 3D models (CAD files) to our site. They can be shared and previewed and if you want we will produce them for you using so called Rapid Prototyping. This is a technique which can be described as 3D printing.
If you want to see how it works click here

After a year we are currently testing the service in a closed beta. So, if you are interested do not hesitate to sign-up using the beta-signup.

More to follow…

MP4 for the iPod-touch

pete — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:30:53 +0000

A quick post about making videos for the iPod-touch.
Just recently I bought one of these little machines and quite frankly they are great! Of course I wanted to upload some of the
video content I already had and it took some figuring out to get it to work (especially because I wanted to get it to work using linux and ffmpeg). To prevent some of you the same trouble here my findings.

First: The format you need for the iPod is mp4 (h264) with aac audio.

Second: have a look at this excellent post from Robert Swain: here

Third: be carefull with the frame rate. The iPod does not like “23.96542-like” frame rates. So if you have a file with a frame rate like that, specify it like 23.96 or something.

Last: here the ffmpeg command line params I use (based on Robert’s post)
I use two pass encoding
ffmpeg -threads 2 -i "$file" -vcodec libx264 -b $VBITRATE -deinterlace -r $fps\ -an -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions 0 -me epzs -subq 1 -trellis 0\ -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -g 300 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40\ -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt $VBITRATE -maxrate 768k -bufsize 2M\ -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10\ -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -passlogfile "$file".log -pass 1 "$file".tmp.mp4 ffmpeg -threads 2 -i "$file" -vcodec libx264 -b $VBITRATE -deinterlace -r $fps\ -ab 112kb -acodec libfaac -ar 44100 -ac 2\ -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me umh\ -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1\ -coder 0 -me_range 16 -g 300 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71\ -bt $VBITRATE -maxrate 768k -bufsize 2M -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30\ -passlogfile "$file".log -pass 2 "$file".tmp.mp4


Where:

file=”inputfilename”

VBITRATE=”600″ # video bitrate

fps=”25″ # video framerate
Make sure you have a recent version of ffmpeg installed with support for h264 and libfaac



Really cool article on Wired
pete — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 13:59:46 +0000
Well some time ago I found this totally cool article on wired.com

click here

It is about a cross country time trial of a guy with an M5. It really reads like a

adventure book! Have fun, I did.



Nice sound on M3CSL
pete — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:22:48 +0000
Wow what a sound!!


BMW M3 CSL ONEandONLY Sound (E46)
Download!

Enjoy!
Pete



Some mad guys and an M6
pete — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:05:20 +0000
I found this on autoblog.nl.
Jeez these guys are nuts. Also check out the acceleration of the M6 wow!!


BMW M6 reaching 340km/h at Attiki Odos in Greece!
Download!




Trip back to San Francisco
pete — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 04:40:10 +0000
Today we went back to San Francisco. After a last visit to Monterey’s Fisherman’s Warf we were off around noon. It was a 2.5 hours drive to San Francisco. We needed to get gas, so we took an early exit and ended up in…. well we wanted to get back onto the freeway ASAP. This was not where we wanted to be….
Luckily we got to the hotel without a problem and when returning the car, a fuel pump was across the road. So end of the road for our loyal friend the Mustang. After 2000!! miles (3200 km) we were back walking.