Feb 26Automatically generate captions as Final Cut Pro subtitlesSomething like 95% of all video consumed on endless scrolling social media platforms is watched without sound. Subtitles are a neccessity on these platforms, like facebook and instagram. If you make videos in Final Cut Pro like…3 min read
Apr 27, 2021How to hike to Everest Base Camp with as little stuff as possibleHowdy. I’m Ben. I’m a minimalist. I hate owning stuff. And even more than I hate owning stuff, I hate carrying stuff. So when Paul invited us to trek the Himalayas with him in the beginning of April 2021, I set out to do it with as little stuff as…Everest9 min read
Published in good robot·Aug 1, 2020Wrangling Janus and your robot server into a React AppThis is part II of a series about building a web controlled robotics platform. Part I was setting up Janus and serving demos with Node.js. Part III will be hooking up a robot! Today, we’re going to build a react app to manage Janus, and create and serve streams programatically…Web RTC2 min read
Published in good robot·Aug 1, 2020How to recover video from an SD card if you accidentally reformat itWe all make mistakes. I recently deleted a whole folder of important video from an SD card, and then emptied the bin on my mac, permanently deleting everything without realizing I had no backup. I cried and I panicked, but…File Recovery7 min read
Published in benlearnsblender·Mar 28, 2020Using vertex colors in Blender 2.8I’m creating a pickable scene in Blender, using two flat colors. It looks like this. Each object in the scene has a light and dark material, and I wrote a script to change the material color when an object is highlighted. …Blender4 min read
Published in good robot·Feb 2, 2020Use Visual Studio Code SSH without crashing your servertl;dr: Have you used the Remote SSH extension in Visual Studio Code? You may not have realized, but with default settings it eats up a RIDICULOUS amount of cpu on the host. On small or shared core servers, this can easily exceed 100% cpu capacity, shut down critical…Visual Studio Code4 min read
Published in good robot·Jan 18, 2020How to run Janus on a Google Cloud Compute instance and build your own WebRTC streaming serverJanus is sweet! Here in the good robot lab, we use Janus to stream video live from a Raspberry Pi all over the world with about 100ms latency. The actual transport technology is WebRTC, but Janus is an open source signalling server which allows computers to make Peer to Peer…Web RTC7 min read
Published in good robot·Nov 15, 2019Connect your Raspberry Pi to eduroam (special instructions for Raspbian Buster)Connecting your Pi to eduroam is great, coz it means you’ll have net access automatically on more than 600 college campuses worldwide. Getting synced up with eduroam on a Pi is mostly a matter of following the eduroam linux setup instructions, but with a couple caveats: On raspbian buster, there’s…Raspberry Pi5 min read
Oct 4, 2019Not before noon(or Francis and Nadine get a drink in Stockholm) With God’s own grace, Francis sat at the bar on a stool, working his nail under the seal of a bottle he had climbed up on the counter, reached above, and stolen. …Short Story6 min read
Jan 3, 2019How To Do AnythingLots of us want to achieve stuff, which is great, but our big dreams often get hung up when we’re actually faced with the nitty gritty every day lil mountains we have to climb to make progress towards them. I want to play jazz piano like Herbie, speak german in…Self Improvement4 min read