September 26, 2023

Which image format should I use?

Many image file formats exist, but which ones are better for what task? Here is a quick overview in my little series of PhD advice blog posts (the previous being tips on dissertation writing and the public PhD defense). Two different image types When choosing a file format for your image, the first thing is to figure out whether you are dealing with a raster image (photos) or a vector image (line illustrations).

September 22, 2023

Reflections on Open Innovation

I have been challenged to talk about innovation in the light of Open Research today. This blog post is a write-up of some ideas as I prepare my slides. Looking at my blog, I have only written about innovation once in the past, in connection to a presentation in Brussels about Open Innovation. Then, I highlighted how my fundamental music research led to developing a medical tool. That is an example of “classic” innovation, developing software that solves a problem.

September 21, 2023

Some tips for a public PhD defense

Yesterday, I gave some PhD dissertation advice. Today, I will present some tips for PhD candidates ready for public defense. In Norway, the public defense is a formal event with colleagues, friends, and family present—we typically also stream them on YouTube. The good thing is that when you are ready for the defense, the dissertation has already been accepted. Now it is time to show lecturing skills in the trial lecture and the ability to engage with peers in the disputation.

September 21, 2023

What should a PhD dissertation look like?

I am supervising several PhD fellows at the moment and have found that I repeat myself in the one-to-one meetings. So I will write blog posts summarizing general advice I give everyone. This post deals with what a PhD dissertation should look like. The classic Ph.D. dissertation Dear PhD fellow (in Norway, PhD fellows are employees, not students): All dissertations are different, yours included. You can write it however you want as long as it is good!

August 7, 2023

Making image parts transparent in Python

As part of my year-long #StillStanding project, I post an average image of the spherical video recordings on Mastodon daily. These videos have black padding outside the fisheye-like images, and this padding also appears in the average image. It is possible to manually remove the black parts in some image editing software (of which open-source GIMP is my current favorite). However, as I recently started exploring ChatGPT for research, I decided to ask for help.

August 2, 2023

Finding duration and pixel dimensions for a bunch of video files

As part of my #StillStanding project I need to handle a lot of video files on a daily basis. Today, I wanted to check the duration and pixel dimensions of a bunch of files in different folders. As always, I turned to FFmpeg, or more specifically FFprobe, for help. However, figuring out all the details of how to get out the right information is tricky. So I decided to ask ChatGPT for help.

July 5, 2023

Horizontal and Vertical Averaging is not the same

For my year-long StillStanding project I am generating videograms for all the scenes. Since there is not much motion in these 10-minute recordings, they typically look like stripes. Looking at today’s recording of an unspectacular hotel room in Kongsberg, I noticed how different the horizontal and vertical videogram look: It is fascinating how two averages of the same video recording can be so different. The explanation is simple; they are based on averaging in two different dimensions (horizontal and vertical).

July 4, 2023

Sound and Light vs Audio and Video

People often refer to “sound and video” as a concept pair. That is confusing because, in my thinking, “sound” and “video” refer to very different things. In this post, I will explain the difference. Sound and Audio In a previous blog post, I have written about the difference between sound and audio. The short story is that “sound” refers to the physical phenomenon of vibrating molecules, such as sound waves moving through air.

July 1, 2023

Half a year of standing still

Today, I am halfway through my year-long #StillStanding project. Not so much has changed since I summed up the first 100 days. I still enjoy the experience, and there are new things to learn every day. Here is a 10-minute video I have recorded that presents the project, explains its rationale, and reflects upon some experiences so far: The biggest challenge moving forward is finding new spaces every day. I have already stood in the most accessible spaces, so I need to spend more time looking for unexplored rooms both at the university and close to my home.

June 30, 2023

Writing Explanatory Tripnote

I read somewhere (but never stored the link) that people should add a more lengthy description in their trip notes (or vacation messages or whatever people call it) and decided to try it. Usually, I have only added a very brief message about when I return, but I think the point of adding a longer one is to explain why one cannot be as accessible as one usually may be.