"Click-through" is a term for being able to interact with buttons and controls on a background application without clicking first to activate it. Click-through is normally disabled in OS X. There are some exceptions where the first click is active, like iTunes player buttons, Safari UI, and Chrome UI (but not active webpage content area). […]
Music Streaming Snapshot
Monthly Users According to Facebook - February 2012 Service Launch Date Monthly Users % Change Spotify Oct 2008 15,800,000 +20% Pandora Jan 2000 9,200,000 +3% SoundCloud Oct 2008 3,100,000 +24% Bandcamp Sep 2008 1,200,000 +21% Grooveshark Jan 2006 1,100,000 0% Slacker Jun 2007 150,000 0% MOG Dec 2009 140,000 -30% Rdio Aug 2010 100,000 +43% […]
Universal's Audible Watermark
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone. Update, April 8, 2013: Can you hear it? Take the watermark listening test. Update, January 14, 2015: Check out the results of the listening test. A while ago, I wrote about my confusion regarding Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns out […]
WFS Paper Presented at AES 131
I presented a short paper derived from my thesis work at the 131st Convention of the Audio Engineering Society in New York City. The paper is titled Wave Field Synthesis in Three Dimensions by Multiple Line Arrays. The paper focuses on subjective assessment of a modification to traditional wave field synthesis. I met Dr. Frank […]
Mac OS X Speech Synthesis Markup
I put a Sound Blaster 16 in my first computer. It came with a CD-ROM full of goodies like Dr. Sbaitso, the talking psychologist. One app was called TextAssist and it had a special syntax that let you string together phonemes, specifying pitch, duration, even vibrato. I spent hours composing weird robot jingles. Itsy Bitsy […]
Gaze-Enhanced HDR Viewing
Someday, Walmart will sell TVs capable of blinding you. But until then, we have to deal with weak displays that cannot reproduce the sun's luminosity. And High Dynamic Range images will have to be viewed by proxy. Tones that fall in the HDR range of the histogram are tones that are impossible to display on […]
OpenCV 2.1 and 2.3 with Visual Studio 2010 Quick Start
I am using OpenCV 2.1/2.3 with the newer C++ style OpenCV interface. There are a few tricky parts and changes that aren't mentioned in the cheatsheet. Hopefully the OpenCV documentation will continue to improve as it grows. Anyway, here is a quick start guide that might help beginners out. Camera Capture in OpenCV 2.x #include […]
Google Latitude is Cool
Google Latitude is starting to look a lot like my original Stractor location tracking concept work. They have pie charts that illustrate where you spend your time; work, home, out and about. Google Latitude: Stractor: Okay, that's nice. Here are some other Stractor concepts...maybe we'll see some of these soon: http://www.butterscotch.com/news/168/Google-Continues-To-Improve-And-Streamline-Maps-In-New-Update