VideoBrains

Near London? Like thinking and talking about video games? You should check out VideoBrains. It's a monthly meet of games journalists, developers, academics and other enthusiasts which takes place in an esports bar near-ish Kings Cross.

Each event features panels and talks by smart people, who so far have had only interesting and thoughtful things to say. If it sounds like your thing, you should really check it out.

Also, previous talks are posted on their Youtube channel, so you can get a flavour of what it's like. But if you do watch them, consider throwing the organiser a dollar or so; he puts a hell of a lot of effort into making it as good as it is.

A quick javascript hack to fake adjusting HTML5 audio elements' timeupdate event frequency

I was trying to make a bunch of elements change position as an audio file played, using a snippet something like:

$(audiohtml).bind("timeupdate", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("play", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("pause", onAudioUpdate);

function onAudioUpdate() {
	// Move the elements here
}

But the trouble was that the audio element's timeupdate event only fires once every 200ms or so on my browser (this is set by the HTML5 audio specification and isn't modifiable as far as I know).

200ms was slow enough that the animation of the elements looked jerky (5 fps).

Instead, I used a 10Hz setInterval clock to trigger the movement functions, and used the audio's play and pause events to create and destroy the clock: