Category: geek

  • SpamSieve

    geek

    I’ve tested a few spam filters for my email over the last year, including the built-in one in Apple Mail, SpamFire and SpamSieve, and decided on the latter of the three as my final solution. SpamSieve does a great job, using Bayesian filtering to detect the probability of a message being spam, and it integrates well with Apple Mail, as well as several other email clients.

    The programmer, Michael Tsai, was interviewed in Daring Fireball a while back, which is mighty interesting, and he also wrote the eminently useful DropDMG.

  • Anti-Spam

    geek

    Wow! Finally, a way to combat comment spammers that seems it will work! I found this excellent comment verification code on Jeff Barr’s blog. Instead of the type-in-a-name method, I went with the simpler checkbox next to the phrase "I am not a spammer." Simple to implement and easy to use for readers. Yay!

  • 16fps Countdown

    flicks, geek

    I found this awesome little 16-frame-per-second film countdown leader on an old tape, and reconstructed it, bringing it back to 16fps from a wrong-speed transfer, and removing the timecode burn-in. If anyone wants the full-rez version of this let me know, and we can work something out. Enjoy!

    [The original is in the SheerVideo codec, but I’m looking for a way to convert it and post it here. Might not happen, since I don’t own a machine that can actually read the old codec, though —Ed. 2015-08-15]

  • Removing 4:2 Pulldown?

    finalcutprose, flicks, geek

    Calling all video gurus: Help!

    I have a few clips that I’ve got from a stock tape that exhibit a weird pulldown pattern. The footage looks looks to be originally shot in 25p (such as european film might be), and then converted to NTSC 30i in a 4:2 pattern, so the frame progression goes like this:

    AA BB CC CD DE EE

    Has anyone seen this pattern before? Does anyone know how to remove it? Conversion to “PAL proper” is not required— all I need to do is extract and reconstruct that D frame, and get the clips back to a 25p frame rate.

    I have After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion and have access to Combustion. I would also be willing to pay for a moderately priced plugin or helper application if it’ll do the deed.

  • Allowing .htaccess Use in Mac OS X

    geek

    I found this solution to the problem I was having trying to use .htaccess files in my web server (Apache under Mac OS X Server) to block access to certain spam-dumping IP addresses. I was formatting the .htaccess files properly, and putting them in the right places in my server folder hierarchy. I had even […]

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Mark Boszko

Film & Video Editor, Voiceover Artist, macOS IT Engineer, and Maker

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