Weblog

A Year Along the Geostationary Orbit

The latest trip to space doesn't have to stop at NASA live stream. Go beyond with the unusual time-lapse of planet Earth by Felix Dierich.

Should iPhone users trust Apple’s promises about the iOS 13.5 Contact Tracing API?

iPad and iPhone users should be very wary of upgrading to iOS 13.5. There's no path backwards: it will track and trace you in entirely new ways.

How to Brave the New (Coronavirus) World in Style

Like most of you, coronavirus, or more accurately COVID-19 has hit Foliovision like a cement mixer barrelling down a country road. In Slovakia, masks are now de rigor everywhere. This includes at work, walking in the streets in town or dining out.

The parliament had to quickly rewrite that last law when they figured out the day after passing the law that it's impossible to eat or drink with a mask on.

Keep reading How to Brave the New (Coronavirus) World in Style

How to build user-friendly software licensing: The Newsletter Plugin vs FV Player

I've just had another very poor licensing experience with independent software. It's encouraged me to share some general guidelines on how to license open source software.

Keep reading How to build user-friendly software licensing: The Newsletter Plugin vs FV Player

PASSAGE

A special mixed reality technique developed by studio Theoriz first to be seen in short movie involving elements of dance and new technologies.

Is WordPress Free? Not according to Flywheel – try $599/month

I've been working in WordPress for a long time. The original impetus behind the creation of WordPress was a free alternative to Movable Type, after SixApart introduced $299/website pricing for their version 3.0 in 2004. Most webloggers at that time were fairly techy and most sites were personal weblogs (they'd be considered mixed now), so right away they fled to b2 which quickly was forked to WordPress by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little (in the right place at the right time). Mike Little's a very personable guy who truly believes in open source and sharing. Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic who have taken $617 million in venture capital, the publisher of WP Tavern (the main WordPress news site). He's also owner of WooCommerce, which was more or less stolen from the original publishers by WooThemes, making Mullenweg effectively the buyer of stolen goods (as Mullenweg paid Woo but not the original publishers when he acquired WooCommerce for $2.1 million).

Keep reading Is WordPress Free? Not according to Flywheel - try 9/month

Key Video Player Features for Online Learning: Interactive Transcripts and AB Roll

How Programming Electronics Academy takes advantage of the advanced features in FV Player to keep its members happy.

Lost Recording No.38

A poetic short movie by Berlin-based duo The Apiary honours the sensation of a well-curated home with the design furniture from the Dutch Moooi.

Watch Multiple Videos Simultaneously with FV Player

We're really happy to announce that it is now possible to watch multiple videos simultaneously with the new 7.4.17.727 update!

How to convert Markdown to Wikitext

We're looking at long term newsletter, marketing automation solutions now. Preferably open source. Mautic came up but there's no Wikipedia article on Mautic.*

I decided to quickly put one up. Alas, I can't stand writing wikitext, it's very slow. I can edit it on other people's articles slowly and carefully. I wanted to write in Markdown so I did. It turns out there are no usable conversion tools. At first I was directed to Pandoc. We've got an online version which handles unlimited characters. I didn't have much success with our version. I tried the official version. No luck there either. Other people were facing Markdown to wikitext Pandoc conversion issues as well.

There's some command line utilities which have to be installed (no thanks) after installing npm first. Or there's online utilities which are no longer available. Finally I was redirected to our own Pandoc converter.

Keep reading How to convert Markdown to Wikitext

How to Protect Your Facebook Videos from Downloaders

So you now have a website with all your videos encrypted with FV Player Pro using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elastic Transcoder or Coconut.co (full FV Player integration coming soon )? Or perhaps your video platform is Vimeo and you can just put up FV Player Vimeo Security and stop at least the known video download tools. Bravo!

Now you want to post some of your videos to Facebook. Are your videos protected from download there? Not really, not even in a private group. Using FV Player Pro with independent hosting is not really an option. Facebook doesn't play well with independently hosted videos, you really have to upload to their platform, which we don't control.

Here's some good strategies to minimise your risk.

Keep reading How to Protect Your Facebook Videos from Downloaders