Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog (archived)

1. I want to download and play FLVs on my computer.

2. I don't want to use some crappy FLV player that only plays FLVs and has an interface from either 1995 or 2034 – I want to use my favorite player, like Media Player Classic.

3. Yes, VLC plays FLVs but it can't fast forward or rewind them. Yes, mplayer plays FLVs but I want a GUI. Yes, mplayer supports GUIs but they all pretty much suck. I don't particularly like VLC's or mplayer's interface – want to fight about it?

Enter the latest version of ffdshow. ffdshow is a decoding filter – think of it as a set of codecs for your media players. It supports …

If you are experiencing a weird feeling in your pants, it's normal. Here's to hoping they won't fuck it up. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/…

Updated: June 26th, 2008

I am usually very skeptical towards new startups, as most tend to do one thing and not so well or many things even less successfully. Zoomii, however, is what I found very useful. It creates the kind of feeling that you get when you're in control, when you can see at a glance what's going on. Zoomii is a virtual bookstore, with an Amazon backend. They took a different approach and made everything very visual, just like in the brick and mortar store – and I love it.

You can browse the latest releases or the top sellers, or perform a search and get hundreds of book covers, uncluttered by any text (until you click on any of them). …

Hey, it's Matt again from www.wherethehellismatt.com and his 2008 video is absolutely stunning. In short, Matt goes around the world and performs a little dance, purposely bad. The scenes from his videos were already amazing enough but this one absolutely tops them all. This my most favorite video in a long while.
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo. Be careful, you may turn all teary-eyed for a minute, even if you're a guy – yeah….

Updated: August 20th, 2009

If you haven't heard of Digsby yet, you have probably been living in some kind of a virtual cave or have no friends. Digsby is a multi-network instant messenger application, similar to Trillian, Pidgin (GAIM), or Miranda. I said 'similar', so what makes Digsy special? Reviews I read so far don't give the real reasons and don't dive into the features in depth. Instead, you get a standard load of marketing BS and in the end to you, the user, Digsby may end up being "yet another IM program." Some reviews describe certain features, but so far I haven't seen one that highlighted THE MAIN REASON why Digsby is different. And may I preface it with: finally somebody got a …

By now I think most everyone has used Google maps and seen the street view feature. Lately the maps team has been doing an amazing job covering the bay area, so now you can literally walk the streets for hours.

Virtual walking aside, there are some really creative uses of this feature posted in this video by the Google team today. I never myself thought to check my own street for street cleaning signs – saves a trip downstairs! Or look at the toll road prices (like the Bay bridge toll). Or at least watch people falling off their bikes. Anyway, just watch the video (thanks to zefrank for posting it).

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Updated: April 23rd, 2008

[WORK IN PROGRESS] Here is a list of commands that I use every day with vim, in no particular order. Out of a billion possible key combinations, I found these to be irreplaceable and simple enough to remember.

Updated: June 11th, 2015

Why do I dread doing taxes every year? One of the main reason was having to figure out ways to import hundreds of transactions from my stock brokers: Scottrade and InteractiveBrokers. I love IB but come on, it's 2008 and they still don't provide .txf files to import into TurboTax (or TaxCut, but I use TurboTax myself). Scottrade, on the other hand, is directly importable through TurboTax but it only imports sale amounts and not purchases, so TurboTax thinks I got my stocks for free and wants to tax me on the full sale amount rather than the profits. That is, of course, very incorrect. Here are the best solutions I could find to these problems:

1. Scottrade….

Read the rest of this article »

This is going to be epic.

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Updated: August 25th, 2007

Here are some pictures and videos from the magnificent Tiesto's Elements Of Life concert that rocked San Francisco yesterday, July 28, 2007.

Feel free to follow this linky for more pictures.

Videos by shotokun16, myself, and others from the party:

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The day is finally here. Blizzard just officially announced Starcraft 2 at an official Korean event! As someone put it on digg, if you didn't know that you can simultaneously cream and shit your pants, you will now. Here are the first videos that surfaced on the web.

Cinematic trailer:

The actual gameplay demo narrated by Blizzard. IMO, this is the best and the most well put together demo I've ever seen:

And some more gameplay videos:

A TON more trailers here: GameTrailers SC 2 Page…

Updated: March 18th, 2008

I went to see Borat with Milla, Greg, and his gf Marissa yesterday, and it completely blew away all expectations for a funny movie. I mean, I was already expecting funny jokes, having heard Borat crack them before, but not to THAT degree. All of the jokes, by the way, were original, I've never heard Borat use them before. The theaters were packed as all showings were sold out, and this only improved the experience: people were almost rolling on the floor beside me, screaming at the screen, choking on drinks.

I don't think I've ever laughed so hard that I started to gasp for air; the sounds that were coming out of me didn't resemble laughter anymore (for those …

Updated: December 4th, 2009

Received this set today from Amazon. This is the review I wrote:

Well, what can I say… this is hands down the best pair of earphones that I've tried so far. I went through:

– (of course) the ipod cheapies that are horrible at everything except for giving you pain,
– the ER-6i, which sucked so bad, they had to be returned to Amazon. They basically touched parts of my brain, literally, that's how deep they went in. I experienced pain and headaches almost instantly,
– the Sony MDR-EX71SL, which was actually quite decent for the price ($29.99 on Amazon). They were much better than ER-6i and sounded great, until they fell apart completely due to the …

Updated: June 23rd, 2008

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