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Software

Binary code, ones and zeroes in an off-white font, fills a computer screen with a dark blue background. It is tilted so that the text runs down and towards camera.

Thanks go to the contributors of many shared tools. The internet is only possible because innumerable other open standards, languages, and programs enable the internet. For promoting the Web and open standards, the organizations of W3C and Mozilla deserve social praise.

Playing Music, Podcasts, and Videos

You may have already downloaded audio and video files. In this case, you may find that VLC performs very well, playing almost anything and being easy on computer resources. In addition to its original home on the desktop, it is available for both iPhone and Android (Google Play and F-Droid).

Arguably, the mobile versions are better for having an audio library and reading tag items such as Artist, Album, Track, and Album Artist (hidden but used in sorting). Unfortunately, version 4.0 is on hold still, which means that neither version of VLC can handle gapless playback properly.

If you listen to prog rock albums or classical symphonies, gapless playback is important to you. Only files with lossless audio, Opus audio, or Vorbis audio properly support gapless.

With Apple software (such as iTunes or Apple Music), the only way to have gapless playback is to convert FLAC to ALAC or to use AAC in custom MP4 files that were made on Apple computers. You will find that this is a recurring problem with Apple.

Playing Videos with the Smartphone Screen’s Off

Most of us care less about gapless playback for most purposes. A common annoyance, however, is being unable to listen to videos with the screen off on your smartphone. A solution exists, however:

  1. Install Mozilla Firefox for mobile for iPhones or for Android’s Google Play (or as “Fennec” on Android’s F-Droid)
  2. Within the menu of Firefox, install the extension of Video Background Play Fix so that you can play music or videos even while Firefox is hidden
  3. In addition, navigate to “Extensions” to get the extension of uBlock Origin in order to block ads

Podcasts

For the playback of podcasts on dedicated app on smartphones, you have multiple choices. For iPhones, the included Apple Podcasts may be the best. On an Android phone, the free and open-source program AntennaPod shows great promise because of its contributors.

Apple Podcasts can display transcripts that are auto-generated or from files that the author supplies. If the transcripts are VTT, then the app will show speaker names and changes in the speaker. In addition, Apple Podcasts the app and the Web directory of the same name will show season and episode numbers. With a “serial” series, the app and the directory will group everything into seasons and sort episodes in order from first to last. (In contrast, an “episodic” series will be sorted by publication date, from last to first.)

Antenna Pod also supports the speaker labels of VTT files. This app is available on Google Play and F-Droid. As of version 3.9.0, however, AntennaPod does not display season numbers or episode numbers.

For both iPhone and Android users, the free and open-source program of Pocket Casts (App Store and Google Play) may be worth a look. This app can show transcripts. With author-supplied VTT transcripts, this also means speaker labels will show up. The app also displays season and episode numbers, but it cannot yet sort serial shows by season and episode number.

File Formats for Universal Use

  • Text encoding
    ASCII, Unicode1
  • Documents
    PDF,2 Word document3 (.doc), Excel spreadsheet4 (.xls)
  • Images
    JPEG (.jpg or .jpeg), PNG, GIF, SVG
  • Transcripts, Captions, and Subtitles
    SRT, VTT
  • Audio and Video
    Waveform Audio File Format (.wav), MP3, FLAC,5 Opus,6 H.264 video,7 MP4 container8 (also .m4a and .m4v), MKV container,9 Ogg container10
  • Storage
    tar, zip, bzip2 (.bz2), gzip (.gz), 7-zip (.7z), rar, KeePass (.kpdx)

  1. UTF-16LE (a.k.a. UCS-2) and UTF-8↩
  2. You can export your slideshows and decks from PowerPoint, Keynote, LibreOffice, or Google Office as a PDF file. Alternatively, use the Beamer function of LaTeX.↩
  3. Originally proprietary but almost universally supported. This is not Word OOXML (.docx).↩
  4. Originally proprietary but almost universally supported. This is not Excel OOXML (.xlsx).↩
  5. Apple, the company that makes Macs and iPhones, does not support FLAC, but it is a lossless format that you can convert to Apple-only ALAC. VLC, however, plays FLAC just fine.↩
  6. Apple does not support Opus, which along with Vorbis, is a lossy format without gaps on playback. Many apps from Signal to Mumble rely on Opus. Opus also has no patents and would save money for companies and nonprofits alike. VLC plays Opus without problems.↩
  7. This format, in 8-bit color YUV with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, below a resolution of 1920x1080, in the Rec. 709 color space, sees near universal support. It carries patents, however, and imposes costs for device makers and content creators.↩
  8. A container usually holds both video and audio. Unlike MKV, however, Ogg usually only holds audio, with the .ogg ending for Vorbis audio files and .opus ending for Opus audio files. Vorbis is not an outdated, but still open and free format.↩
  9. This format is universal except with—you guessed it—Apple’s own apps.↩
  10. Once again, this is a format that Apple refuses to support in its apps. As a result, the only foolproof audio solutions are naked Waveform or MP3 files. The MP3 files can include ID3 tags within the audio stream, but the major downside is a lack of gapless playback of any MP3 on any device. This makes MP3 files a poor choice for continuous music split across separate tracks, as with Classical symphonies, jazz, or prog rock albums.↩

Tools and Protocols for the Modern Internet

  • Cryptography and web or chain of trust
    AES, GCM, HMAC, X.509, PGP, SPF, DMARC, DKIM, SHA-1, SHA256, SHA512, Blake 2b, Blowfish, Argon2, XTR, Poly1305, ChaCha20, ECDH/ECDH-E, KEMAC (Kyber), RSA, EdDSA, ECDSA, DH/DH-E
  • Internet
    ECMAScript (JavaScript or JS), SSL (TLS) HTML, CSS, XML, TCP/IP, IMAP, OAuth, SMTP, PHP, Node.js, Markdown, HTTP, DNS, DoH, DoT, BitTorrent, FreeBSD, Linux, GNU, Apache, nginx, Kubernetes, BitTorrent, WebTorrent

Programs in Content Creation

soxr (0.1.3), libmpg123, LAME (3.100), Audacity (3.7.x), EasyTag,* (Lua)(La)TeX, MPV,*† VLC,†‡ x264,† FFMPEG,† Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, LibreOffice, OpenSSL, GNU Image Manipulation Program, Ghost, WordPress and the PowerPress plug-in, Debian GNU/Linux


* This is only available on Linux. On Windows and Mac, MP3Tag is a good substitute for Easy Tag. It has one major caveat, however. The default setting for MP3 Tag is to write new ID3 tags as version 2.4, and you may want to change this to version 2.3 in the settings. Many devices and apps support only version 2.3 and not version 2.4.

† If you use this to encode or decode content in a patented format and you are in a jurisdiction that respects software patents, then the law may demand that you get a license from the patent holders.

‡ If you use this to decrypt the anti-copy features on DVDs or Blu-Rays, then you may want to check the laws where you live. People in the USA are beholden to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The Library of Congress allows for “fair use” with respect to the DMCA, but the Library must declare the special exemptions every three years.

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