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Thursday 25th March 2021

 Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot:

Technical Musings

Jitsi Backgound Removal

It was immediately noticed by the attendees that Jitsi's UI had changed (Jitsi is the videoconferencing platform that The Thirsty Robot uses...). Other than the obvious changes to the screen furniture (which used to be called 'chrome' before that became the name of a browser), background detection is now available so that the background to any video can be replaced with a still image, whilst leaving the person's head in the video intact (both physically, metaphorically, and in the video). Github mentions a number of other open source projects that were used as references:

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5860


Including one (deepbacksub: 501 lines of C++) which a regular attender at The Thirsty Robot has their own fork of... and has mentioned in previous meetings. 


The addition of background removal should. increase the appeal of Jitsi, and attendees wasted no time in making the most of it, and then mostly reverted to the usual 'No Video, Initials only' format that seems to be correlated with technical discussion. See this previous meeting blog post summary for a possibly related topic.


Interestingly, Unsplash, the photo-finder application used by this blog, was unable to provide any good illustrative photos for 'background removal', and the best that could be found was one for 'green screen'. This is NOT the technology used in Jitsi!


Green screen
Photo by Dane Kelly on Unsplash


Web Layout Engines


There was some discussion about Web Browsers (which one to use, which ones not to use - the usual discussions), which led to Web Layout Engines, a topic much more suited to The Thirsty Robot! There are a surprising number of graphical engines used by browsers (and a lot of browsers!). It was noted that Firefox is still using Gecko, now written in Rust as part of the larger Quantum work to migrate away from C/C++. Brave was mentioned as an interesting current Blink-based browser. 


In-Jokes


No technical blog can last for long without a reference to Stack Overflow (or Reddit, or...):

https://www.quora.com/Does-reading-Copying-and-Pasting-from-Stack-Overflow-make-you-a-better-developer

Which turned the conversation in the direction of the InterWeb meme of 'Books covers for books which don't, but perhaps should, exist'. There are thousands of these on Pinterest (serious and parodies/funny, and everything in between), and some enterprising people have turned it into a commercial enterprise: https://www.buyfakebookcovers.com/


And finally, the posh, academic version: https://lithub.com/10-books-that-dont-exist-but-should/


Oh, and a book that didn't exist, but then got written later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_on_the_Half-Shell


Recommended Movies/Films


Iron Sky (1: Good, 2: Not so good, Director's cut: No opinion, 3 (The Coming Race): No opinion) 

[ We could not find any UK streaming service which is currently showing any version of Iron Sky... ]


Overlord is a movie that has some thematic similarities to Iron Sky, but without the humour (and a much larger budget). 

[ Netflix UK ]


A late entry for movie recommendations was:


The Hunt 

[ Amazon Prime UK ]


As usual, we reckon it is best if you don't know anything before watching a film! So only click on a link if you want your experience to be potentially spoiled...


Recommended Games


Mentioning Iron Sky led to various related suggestions...


Beneath a Steel Sky

[ Steam ]


Recommended Further Reading (Books, Blogs...):


Derek Lowe's famous blog: 

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride


The 'Ignition' book from John Drury Clark (and a foreword from Isaac Asimov): 

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Ignition/wELgCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover


Any mention of Isaac Asimov always gets a reference to Thiotimoline, one of the most amazing fictional chemical compounds ever invented: 

https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/Thiotimoline.pdf


And something from a different age: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/fun-and-uranium-for-the-whole-family-in-this-1950s-science-kit


And very finally, Thiotimoline led to Bernice Summerfield, a very useful 'canon' companion to Doctor Who, who has a lot of books and other media devoted to her, and will allegedly get you huge kudos in quizzing circles if you have heard of her...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernice_Summerfield


Books you aren't supposed to know about:


A new heading, just for the unauthorised 'alternative viewpoint' to 'The Lord of the Rings':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer


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A lot of discussion happens at The Thirsty Robot. This blog is an edited, biased summary of just a small fraction of the conversation, links/IURLs and references that were mentioned. It is an imperfect record and is definitely not complete - for that you should visit The Thirsty Robot!

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The next online meeting at The Thirsty Robot is on Thursday 8th April 2021 at 7:30pm GMT.




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