Using open source tools to create small but high quality animated gifs — First we convert the video into individual frames using ffmpeg into a temporary folder. 5 frames per second is usually good enough, for screen capture animations. You can bump this number up if the source video has a lot of rapid movement. ffmpeg -i hluttaw-committee.mp4 -r 5 frames/frames%03d.png We will…

Parliamentary and Malaysian Government Document projects get much needed love and support through recent in-kind hardware donations and updates to document processing scripts. A bit of history Malaysian Parliamentary Documents or pardocs initially started when we realized that thousands of official parliamentary answers to oral and written questions by our parliamentary representatives were not…

Equipment and packing tips for civic tech researchers and journalists — Important note that these are my generic packing tips.What you bring/pack for is situational, always know the situation you’re travelling to such as weather, transportation and political situation. In addition to the typical conferences, if you’re doing civic tech research or investigative data journalism, you are going to need to…

Building image corpus of politically exposed persons for facial recognition for investigations — I’ve written about using Google Photos for facial recognition before. In order for it to be more useful, an extensive corpus of images is needed, such that when given a photograph, faces will be tagged automatically.

Using JACK Audio Connection Kit and Calf Plugins high quality equalizer for listening to music on Linux With tools such as Ardour, LV2 plugins such as Calf and JACK Audio Connection Kit, Linux is more than capable for professional audio and music production. …

Packing for civic tech work travel working near water such as floods, rivers and coastal areas, with electronic gear After being stuck in traffic, and then having to get out and wade through knee deep water during Jakarta floods of 2007, I resolved to be better prepared when travelling during…

Using OpenVPN and VMs for cheap, flexible and resilient hosting — Making the most out of limited resources series. We will look at how CPU and storage heavy, but low traffic sites can be hosted in the “cloud”, providing cost savings but also a bit of resilience. Managed services and virtual server hosting are very cost effective, heavily reducing the costs…

Google Photos image recognition feature can be used to privately build a database of photos to match and search for faces Simply keep adding photos of persons of interest, particularly groups photos such as launching of events, dinners and other social events. These photos are easily found on news sites…

Malaysia’s controversial Anti-Fake News law was rushed through parliament and the senate, just before the general elections were announced. Once passed in parliament and senate, it then requires approval from the current Agong or King of Malaysia before it is gazetted and published by the Attorney General Chambers Federal Gazette…