Walker Griggs

Recently

hello@walkergriggs.com — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always enjoyed Mac Wright’s ‘Recently’ posts. They remind me of a modern, retrospective reinterpretation of John Carmack’s .plan files. I’ve always kept my Claptrap (IYKYK) so “recently” pages feel like a good way to hold myself accountable. Or at least, to attempt to.

Stylesheet

hello@walkergriggs.com — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

bold, underscore, italic, inline code, Hyperlink

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

FOMS, HLS Interest, and Demuxed

hello@walkergriggs.com — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What a week. I’m mostly recovered from the last ~14 straight 12+ hour days. They were good days, exciting days, but long days.

In the rearview

The week started on a high note with FOMS @ Crunchyroll HQ. The Foundations of Open Media Standards is a long running un-conference for media engineers to collaboratively identify industry pain points and action items. It’s entirely volunteer organized and I took over as its steward a few years back. I prefer the term ‘steward’ over ‘organizer’ or similar because this conference has been organically growing and shaping for longer than I’ve been a professional developer – this was its 17th year. There were organizers before and will be organizers after me.

Reading

hello@walkergriggs.com — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000


11/24	David Hume	Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
	Lau Yee-Wa	Tongueless
10/24	Gaston Bachelard	The Poetics of Space
	James Rachels	The Right Thing to Do; Basic Reading in Moral Philosophy
09/24	Mariana Oliver	Migratory Birds
	Thomas K. McCraw	Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction
08/24	Xu Zechen	Beijing Sprawl
	Mikhail Bulgakov	The Master and Margarita
06/24	Thomas Nagel	Mortal Questions
	Robert M. Sapolsky	Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
05/24	Haruki Murakami	Sputnik Sweetheart
	Haruki Murakami	Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
	Roger Zelazny	The Dream Master
	Susan Sontag	Regarding the Pain of Others
04/24	Isabel Wilkerson	The Warmth of Other Suns
	Daniel Mason	North Woods
	Adam Smith	The Wealth of Nations
03/24	Ryan Britt	The Spice Must Flow
	John Cassidy	How Markets Fail
	Miranda Fricker	Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
	Arkady Martine	A Desolation Called Peace
02/24	Samuel R Delany	Babel-17
	Ira Katznelson	When Affirmative Action Was White
	William H. Whyte	The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
	Christopher Alexander	A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
	Jennifer L. Eberhardt	Biased
01/24	Richard Rothstein	The Color of Law
	John C. Bogle	The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
	Tracy Kidder	Rough Sleepers
	Matthew Desmond	Poverty
	Jane Jacobs	The Death and Life of Great American Cities

VDD '24, Seoul

hello@walkergriggs.com — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the rearview

A host of friendly faces – old and new. I’m in Seoul this week for Video Dev Days and some needed time off. The leaves are turning, the food is predictably remarkable, and the conversations could not be more different from those at Demuxed – swap CMCD, DRM, and CMAF HAM for AVX2, dav1d checkasm, and mailing list Shenanigans.

Figure 1: VDD ‘24 @ Kwangwoon University

Mux, Browserbase, and Beyond

hello@walkergriggs.com — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the rearview

I’ve often told people: “I feel uncomfortable being comfortable.” Back around the new year, I started feeling comfortable again. I couldn’t recommend Mux enough to prospective employees, but I started to crave a role with outsized responsibility given my scope as an engineer. I wanted to burn the candle from both ends and inch slightly closer to maybe founding a company of my own – so I left.

PSSH; Primordial Soup of Secure-ish Headers

hello@walkergriggs.com — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Given at April ‘24 SF Video Technology meetup and Demuxed ‘24

Recording

Slides

Abstract

Consider our friendly, neighborhood PSSH box.

The semantics are simple – to identify encryption keys – but, as with any permissive specification, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. In some cases, they contain deeply nested little-endian UTF16 XML. In others, we’ll find protocol buffers containing base64-encoded JSON. In all cases, they have surprising amount of personality.

Coding Diddles

hello@walkergriggs.com — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“If you fail in copying from a master you succeed in birthing an original art”, Kushal Poddar

Last year, a colleague of mine picked up woodcarving. They told me about their battle with the “originality demon” and how, even when learning a new and productively right-brain skill, they felt every knife stroke needed to be an original one. Each complete whittle needed to an attractive addition to a catalog of novel works.

Basic English

hello@walkergriggs.com — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It takes only 400 words of Basic to run a battleship; with 850 words you can run the planet.

Ivor Armstrong Richards

I’m terrible at learning foreign languages. In fact, I studied Latin for 8 years – a dead language for all intents and purposes – and hardly remember a thing. Recently I tried learning Italian; that fell by the wayside too.

My experience with foreign languages could probably be summed up in one word: overwhelming. Gerunds and gerundives. Participle. Present perfect imperatives. Yet, somehow, there’s a sizable population of polyglots out there who learn languages, or at least the basics, in just a few weeks. How? Enter: Basic English.

Learning Go Generics with Advent of Code

hello@walkergriggs.com — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a living draft and may be revised. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please reach out.

Yesterday, the Go core team released go1.18beta1 which formally introduces generics. There isn’t a whole lot of info circulating yet aside from git history and go-nuts experiments, but the overall reception feels very positive.

Personally, I’ve been hands on with generics for the better part of a week all thanks to the Advent of Code, which has been the perfect venue to take generics for a spin. If you’re not familiar with AOC…

ZNC, the right way

hello@walkergriggs.com — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve setup ZNC one too many times.

Sometimes I forget it’s riding shotgun on a spare droplet heading to the trash heap. Other times, my payment method expires and so too does the instance. Other times I’m too lazy to host it in the cloud at all, so I run it locally. In any case, today I wanted to set up ZNC the right way… for the last time.

I also want to document the process for posterity and stop scouring the web for the same articles time after time.

A Year with Emacs

hello@walkergriggs.com — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It is important to preface that everything in this article is opinion and based off (roughly) a year of heavy Emacs usage. It is also important to know that this article will be updated along side my configuration and tastes. So without further ado…

We all know Emacs is an immensely powerful beast. We also know how easy it is to venture down a rabbit hole of elisp and never surface. I liken it to a carpenter replacing a door. After removing the old door, he notices the hinges are askew. He removes the hinges only to notice rot in the door frame. By the time he replaces the frame, he notices a slight difference in shade between the new frame and old moldings… The learning curve for Emacs is wonderfully circular. That being said, I would like to take a moment and explain my configuration in moderate detail.

Ergodox Infinity LCD Firmware

hello@walkergriggs.com — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So you’ve got yourself an Ergodox Infinity. Congratulations! Everyone probably thinks your a little bit crazy spending that much on a keyboard that strange with LCD displays that small and a layout you’re struggling to type on. But it’s ok – anyone who shares this strange obsession probably understands.

This post is really to demonstrate how to change the default layer’s LCD logo. Asciipr0n has a very clean guide to this, but I find that parts of it are (if not the majority of it is) out of date. Since the firmware has been updated, I thought I’d update the guide.

Pipewire in Docker

hello@walkergriggs.com — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Pipewire is a graph-based multimedia processing engine that lets you handle audio + video in real time! I’ve had way too much fun playing with it recently, but spent longer than I care to admit spinning it up in an Ubuntu container.

Most of the examples I saw floating around were using systemd or Fedora, but my requirements were

Ubuntu 22.04
Processes run as background sub-shells without systemd
Built from the latest source
Drop-in replacement for PulseAudio

Side note: I spent some time tinkering with 18.04 LTS, which requires either a PPA or building Meson and Alsa utils from scratch (Pipewire requires versions not available older Debian systems). I highly recommend the PPA if you head that route…

Zettelkasten, Rhizomes, and You

hello@walkergriggs.com — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Figure 1: Chris Korner, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a collection of odd websites that called themselves “brain dumps.” On the surface, they seemed like collections of disjointed thoughts – fragments of ideas that linked to seemingly unrelated topics. Often, they bridged disciplines altogether.

That’s when I learned about Zettelkasten.

Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten (sometimes referred to as Zettel or Zet) is a system for taking notes that is specifically structured to develop ideas, not just collect them. The method has existed for hundreds of years under various names, but at its core, it consists of “bite-sized” notes written on slips of paper that are linked by a heading or a unique ID. These slips, often index cards, are filed away in a place that can be easily referenced and traversed.

The Guy Who Likes Lemons

hello@walkergriggs.com — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“I want to be remembered as the guy who likes lemons.”

About 10 years ago, I asked a college admissions advisor what she considered the most memorable essay she’d ever read. She responded without pause: “I want to be remembered as the guy who likes lemons.”

She explained. There are always wonderful essays about ambition and adversity, but this one, semi-sensible essay took the cake. The first sentence was “I want to be remembered as the guy who likes lemons.”

Timestamp Troubles

hello@walkergriggs.com — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recording

Slides

Abstract

Video is hard, and reliable timestamps in increasingly virtual environments are even harder.

We at Mux recently broke ground on a new live video experience, one that takes a website URL as input and outputs a livestream. We call it Web Inputs. As with any abstraction, Web Inputs hides quite a bit of complexity, so it wasn’t long before we ran up against our first “unexpected behavior”: our audio and video streams were out of sync.

Data Preservation, Alf's Room, and Spicy P

hello@walkergriggs.com — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Figure 1: Alf, “Welcome to Alf’s Room. I am Alf”

A colleague of mine recently bought a capture card to record their Nintendo Switch. I asked if they wanted to stream on Twitch or post to Youtube. “No,” they explained, “I just like saving the recordings for my personal archives…something to remember.”

They explained that they once posted often on a Youtube channel and were proud of the content. Even with some regular viewers, though, they decided to delete the channel and contents along with it. Looking back, they deeply regret that decision – understandable.

How to Overcomplicate Offline Storage

hello@walkergriggs.com — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Seven years ago, I made the decision to keep offline backups of all my personal data. What started as a 1 terabyte external harddrive loaded with a few sentimental photos, zipped folders of school projects, and maybe the odd 360p DVD rip has turned into a 40TB NAS and 26TB worth of offline drives.

Figure 1: LTO Tapes: the dream no one can reasonably afford