Cyber Monday

As we approach the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, just around the corner looms the Monday after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Cyber Monday.  While Black Friday has traditionally been known as the unofficial start of the end-of-year holiday shopping season with retailers having their brick-and-mortar stores jam packed with ravenous shoppers looking for good deals, Cyber Monday is a term that marketers have used to describe the following Monday when people would resume shopping online using their computers at work.

While online shopping may have spiked on Cyber Monday in previous years, I wonder if the same trends apply today.  The reason is that about a decade ago when the term "Cyber Monday" was coined, most homes were equipped with dial-up modems, if any at all, while their connections at work were significantly faster.  For example, does anyone remember their employers having ISDN lines (a whopping TWO sets of 56K modems in parallel) or DSL?  Nowadays, home broadband connections are commonplace, and even though I have a 50 Mbps connection, Speedtest.net gives my connection a "B" grade, stating that my connection is faster than only 68% of the United States:

Speeds in this range are more than sufficient to shop online.  Therefore, I hypothesize that while there may still be a surge in online shopping on Cyber Monday, it may be far less pronounced than in previous years since many online shoppers will have already done that from the comfort of their own homes over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Might we see a day when we will retire the term "Cyber Monday" from our vernacular, similar to "record player" and "rotary phone"?  Will we someday have to explain to our children (who will have broadband connections in their cars, watches, and eyeglasses) what "Cyber Monday" once meant?

December 18, 2015

There are many ways to categorize humans.  For example, we can categorize people by gender (e.g., male, female), race (e.g., White, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian), age group (e.g., baby boomers, generation X/Y/Z), handedness (e.g., right, left, ambidextrous), eye color (e.g., brown, blue, green), and the list goes on.  While not widely known, we can also categorize people by whether or not they understand the significance of the date December 18, 2015.  Does this date have meaning for you?

Video Conversion with HandBrake

I recently wrote about My Digital Content Workflow, and in step 7 I describe how I had been using Xilisoft Video Converter to resize videos from 1080p ("full HD") to smaller sizes like 720p ("HD"). Given that a new version of HandBrake (0.10.0) was released just 2 days ago, I thought I'd give it another look. HandBrake is traditionally known for being used as a DVD ripping application, so I had never seriously considered it for video conversion, although it has had those capabilities for quite some time.  With release 0.10.0 comes several new encoding schemes which I'll probably never use, but it's nice to know that the developers are staying current with newer codecs like H.265 (even if it is still in early development at this stage).

For a vast majority of my needs, I will generally start with a preset and make further adjustments from there.  For example, the iPad present defaults to a 720p resolution, and I might just modify the bitrate to achieve a level of quality that is suitable for the contents of the video that I am converting. I find that a bitrate of 5000 kbps results in pretty good quality, especially for viewing on mobile devices and YouTube, although it is possible to get away with 3000 kbps or less if the video does not contain a lot of fast-moving images.

Overall I'm pleased with HandBrake as a video conversion tool, and given that it is free, it is hard to beat HandBrake in terms of value.  Furthermore, HandBrake is available for both Mac and Windows (and Ubuntu, if you're into that).  If you have any other recommendations for video conversion, I'd like to know!