Pixelhum

Very interesting article in the New Yorker about how we perceive. Via kottke.org.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

CHDK is a firmware add-on for Canon's Digital Ixus/Powershot range of compact cameras that enables a bunch of cool new features. RAW support, scripting, exposure bracketing and more.

There's quite a few posts of this type around the web, I just thought I'd document what seems to work best for me. The main thing this fixes is font rendering in Firefox, now it looks just as nice as it does in Epiphany!

Put the following in ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
            <const>none</const>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
            <const>hintmedium</const>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font">
        <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

Perian is an open source Quicktime component that adds support for AVI, FLV, and MKV file formats, along with H.246 and XVid/DivX support among others.

I've just migrated the blog to Habari. That was painless...