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The last post contained lots of StreetView frames, and it took me a while to work out how to get them to appear properly. WordPress automatically adds <BR /> tags to the line endings, which is kind-of ok for text, but really messes things up if it chooses to do it in the middle of a block of embedded HTML. There’s a plugin which fixes this – it’s called PS disable auto formatting. It doesn’t work quite how you’d expect though. What it does is disable auto-formatting completely, therefore changing the appearance of all your past posts, and means that for all future posts you’llRead More →

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This post, whilst a bit geeky, might be useful to anyone who’s got to write documents with references in them… I’ve recently discovered Citeulike, a website that organises your references and bibliographies for you in a nice shiny web2.0 kinda way. A colleague pointed me at it a while ago and I was sceptical – because it would be terrible to have all of your references and bibliography saved on an internet site and then for that internet site to go bust. But you can always download the database files (they export to many formats) and keep your own backups, and now they’re now sponsoredRead More →

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Another geeky interlude with mplayer and mencoder… See this earlier post on streaming video for video download assistance. You can get the software from here and it’s free. Taking a video file and splitting it into a load of numbered jpeg files is a useful thing to be able to do (particularly if you can’t get video input to work with OpenCV). This can be done really easily with mplayer: mplayer input.avi -vo jpeg:outdir=output_directory Replace “output_directory” with the directory you want the files to end up in and there you go. You will of course end up with lots of files if your video isRead More →

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General geeky interlude… From time to time I need to download, grab from a webcam, convert, cut, and generally manipulate video files, and every time I do it I have to look up the settings for mplayer, mencoder or ffmpeg again from scratch. So I thought I’d put some recipes for common tasks up here just in case they are useful for anyone else. These use mplayer and mencoder which are available for windows, macosX and linux, but I can only comment on the linux version so don’t ask me any windows questions! Finding a webcam Lots of people put webcams pointing at sites ofRead More →

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Short Geeky Interlude: If you find your paper abstract appearing on a page on it’s own, using the IEEEtrans class, check you do not have a line break between the opening and closing abstract tags, and the abstract text.

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I used the online generator at yourfonts.com, the process was really very straightforward. I can’t see myself using the font much but hey, it’s a geek thing.