FFmpeg by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
FFmpeg is the assembler of audio and video.
As a result, Ciro Santilli who likes "lower level stuff", has had many many hours if image manipulation fun with this software, see e.g.:
As older Ciro grows, the more he notices that FFmpeg can do basically any lower level audio video task. It is just an amazing piece of software, the immediate go-to for any low level operation.
FFmpeg was created by Fabrice Bellard, which Ciro deeply respects.
Resize a video: superuser.com/questions/624563/how-to-resize-a-video-to-make-it-smaller-with-ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -filter:v scale=720:-1 -c:a copy output.mkv
Unlike every other convention under the sun, the height in scale is the first number.
FFmpeg video synthesis by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video with a solid color:
Display count in seconds on the video:
Bibliography:
Biochemistry by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bmb.2002.494030030067 Surprises and revelations in biochemistry: 1950-2000 by Perry A. Frey (2006). This should be worth a read.
convert -size 256x256 gradient: out.png
convert -size 256x256 gradient:white-black out.png
convert -size 256x256 gradient:red-blue out.png
convert -size 256x256 radial-gradient: out.png
convert -size 256x256 radial-gradient:white-black out.png
JCVI-syn3B by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.19.508583v1.full
CVI-syn3B strains differ from JCVI-syn3.0 by the presence of 19 additional non-essential genes that result in a more easily manipulated cell. JCVI-syn3B additionally includes a dual loxP landing pad that enables easy Cre recombinase mediated insertion of genes
It is also interesting to see how they are interested in co-culture with HeLa cells, presumably to enable infectious bacterial disease studies.
At biology.indiana.edu/news-events/news/2023/lennon-minimal-cells.html (2023) they let it re-evove to it it would regain some fitness, and it did.
Open source software by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
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.
PostGIS by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The third part module, which clutters up any serches you make for the built-in one.
Input: a sequence of complex numbers .
Output: another sequence of complex numbers such that:
Intuitively, this means that we are braking up the complex signal into sinusoidal frequencies:
  • : is kind of magic and ends up being a constant added to the signal because
  • : sinusoidal that completes one cycle over the signal. The larger the , the larger the resolution of that sinusoidal. But it completes one cycle regardless.
  • : sinusoidal that completes two cycles over the signal
  • ...
  • : sinusoidal that completes cycles over the signal
and is the amplitude of each sine.
We use Zero-based numbering in our definitions because it just makes every formula simpler.
Motivation: similar to the Fourier transform:
In particular, the discrete Fourier transform is used in signal processing after a analog-to-digital converter. Digital signal processing historically likely grew more and more over analog processing as digital processors got faster and faster as it gives more flexibility in algorithm design.
Sample software implementations:
Figure 1.
DFT of with 25 points
. This is a simple example of a discrete Fourier transform for a real input signal. It illustrates how the DFT takes N complex numbers as input, and produces N complex numbers as output. It also illustrates how the discrete Fourier transform of a real signal is symmetric around the center point.
Open knowledge by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli's raison d'etre, one of his attempts: OurBigBook.com.
The outcome of closed knowledge is reverse engineering.
Browser platform game by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
gobattle.io/#! 2D top down dungeon crawler/brawler, controls feel good.
Ciro Santilli can accept closed source on server products more easily than offline, because the servers have to be paid for somehow (by stealing your private data).

Pinned article: 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!
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
  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:
    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.
  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