Adobe Flash by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Uranus by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
The first planet not known since antiquity.
GNU package by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Molecular biology technique by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Open source software by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
What happens when the underdogs get together and try to factor out their efforts to beat some evil dominant power, sometimes victoriously.
Or when startups use the cheapest stuff available and randomly become the next big thing, and decide to keep maintaining the open stuff to get features for free from other companies, or because they are forced by the Holy GPL.
Open source frees employees. When you change jobs, a large part of the specific knowledge you acquired about closed source a project with your blood and tears goes to the trash. When companies get bought, projects get shut down, and closed source code goes to the trash. What sane non desperate person would sell their life energy into such closed source projects that could die at any moment? Working on open source is the single most important non money perk a company can have to attract the best employees.
Open source is worth more than the mere pragmatic financial value of not having to pay for software or the ability to freely add new features.
Its greatest value is perhaps the fact that it allows people study it, to appreciate the beauty of the code, and feel empowered by being able to add the features that they want.
That is why Ciro Santilli thought:
Life is too short for closed source.
But quoting Ciro's colleague S.:
Every software is open source when you read assembly code.
And "can reverse engineer the undocumented GPU hardware APIs", Ciro would add.
While software is the most developed open source technology available in the 2010's, due to the "zero cost" of copying it over the Internet, Ciro also believes that the world would benefit enormously from open source knowledge in all areas on science and engineering, for the same reasons as open source.
List of compilers by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Arithmetic mean by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
FFmpeg video synthesis by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Video with a solid color:
  • 2 second white video:
    ffplay -autoexit -f lavfi -i 'color=white:640x480:d=3,format=rgb24,trim=end=2'
    Also add some audio:
    ffmpeg -lavfi "color=white:640x480:d=3,format=rgb24,trim=end=2[v];sine=f=1000:d=2[a]" -map '[a]' -map '[v]' out.mkv
    TODO how to ffplay the video + audio directly? -map does not seem to work unfortunately.
  • 2 second white followed by 2 second black video:
    ffplay -autoexit -f lavfi -i 'color=white:640x480:d=3,format=rgb24,trim=end=2[a];color=black:640x480:d=3,format=rgb24,trim=end=2[b];[a][b]concat=n=2:v=1:a=0'
  • bibliography:
Display count in seconds on the video:
WhatsApp by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
They've had a few breaches: www.whatsapp.com/security/advisories/
Video 1.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum talks about their Journey by Roots (2017)
Source. Good talk, explains how everything happened in the perfect location at the perfect time: unemployed people who knew how to code, bought an iPhone, the next big platform, at its very beginning, they had just release the required push notifications API, and he travelled a lot and knew how much SMS sucked, especially international.
Google Search by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Pidgin (software) by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Dots in Gmail address by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
This allows you to create multiple non-anonymous accounts on any website that doesn't account for it, as this is not part of the email protocols in general.
Google Chat by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Proton Pass by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ordnance Survey by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Has some of the best map data available for the United Kingdom, but their data appears to be proprietary?
OsmAnd by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Kind of works! Notably, has the amazing cycling database offline for you, if you fall within the 6 area downloads. It is worth supporting these people beyond the 6 free downloads however.
Society by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
File manager by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli used to use file managers in the past.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    • to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
    • as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact