Today, I decided to leave Twitter. I have been in doubt for a while; I wanted to see how the platform would develop after Musk’s take-over. Unfortunately, things have been steadily declining, and I am now at a point where I don’t want to support the company any longer. I leave the platform with mixed feelings. I have used Twitter as my primary social media platform after I decided to say Goodbye to Facebook some years ago.

In my ever-growing collection of FFmpeg-related blog posts, I will today show how to add subtitles to videos. These tricks are based on the need to create a captioned version of a video I made to introduce the Workshop on NIME Archiving for the 2022 edition of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). This is the video I discuss in this blog post: Note that YouTube supports turning on and off the subtitles (CC button).

I am not a huge fan of Facebook, and the future of Facebook makes me even more sceptic. Besides all the technological lock-in issues, I have a major problem with how Facebook makes people forget that they are communicating private things in a (semi)-public space. This is also the reason I have turned off my Facebook wall. I consider Facebook a public communication channel, but I have experienced that many others use it for more private communication.

At any point in time I always have 20 or more blog post drafts stored in MarsEdit. Whenever I get an idea for something I want to blog about, I try to write it down. But then, for whatever reason, I decide not to post it right away. This may be because it was an underdeveloped idea, one that I feel I have to think more about before I actually post it.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that University of Oslo now openly supports RSS- and Twitter-feeds from the official employee web sites. Now I see that social linking has also been embedded in the new profile, as can be seen for example here. These types of links have been around for some years, but many academic institutions seem to have been very reluctant when it comes to jump on the web 2.

University of Oslo is brushing up the web pages this year, and now the turn has come to my department. When I updated my official profile I found (to my big surprise) that it is possible to include RSS and Twitter feeds. Wow, not bad, not bad at all! I am very happy that the university sees the possibilities in promoting blogging and social fora among the staff. Another good thing is that publications are now automatically extracted from Frida, the Norwegian publication database that we have to use.