Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Got my first ever Cedar Waxwings in the back yard the other day! Just as I was thinking that all the interesting birds were gone for the winter, a small flock of these guys came in.

Very cool-looking birds.

#birds #birding

If possible, it would be interesting to collect a bunch of performance stats for my computer use over the course of a few years to see how often I bottleneck on things like “hard drive read/write speed”. Not sure if it’s worth my time and $100 to replace this SATA with NVME.

I suspect that in almost all cases where I’m reading to or writing from the hard drive, the bottleneck is somewhere else — e.g. network, a drive I’m transferring to/from, speed to parse or serialize whatever data I’m reading/writing.

I imagine my most likely bottlenecks on IO would be during start-up (which is rare and I don’t find it especially slow anyway) or if I’m reading/writing some memory-mapped file (can’t remember the last time I’ve done this), but it’d be nice to get real data on this.

Of course, once I took my laptop apart to install the new hard drive I realized that my current SSD is NVME M2 and I don’t even have a SATA cable for this… 😅

I ordered one, we’ll see if I notice a drop in speed for any of the tasks I do regularly.

Recently got a new 2TB SSD for my laptop and I transferred everything over from my old SSD using a USB 3.0-SATA cable and it took about 30 minutes to transfer ~400 GB with rsync, which I found extremely impressive (especially since it was a lot of little files).

This looks more like what I was looking for at the time: https://codecalamity.com/encoding-uhd-4k-hdr10-videos-with-ffmpeg/

I’ve written a little Python script wrapping the advice here and it seems to be working very well (though I haven’t tried it on any non-HDR and non-x265 content…)

I think this actually boils down to this bug: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/7037

If I had more time to play with OSS and more experience in this domain I might jump on it. Probably in the meantime I’ll try to cobble together a script to mostly-automatically carry over the HDR metadata in transcodes.

Resurrecting this because I finally got around to trying it: unfortunately, this didn’t work well for me. I get a lot more opportunity to tweak the color palette, but I haven’t gotten one that turns out quite right yet, which makes me think this approach would need about as much tweaking as manually figuring out the parameters to copy over HDR metadata.

Additionally, Tone-mapping requires using zscale to make the inputs linear, which requires compiling with --enable-libzimg, which Arch linux and most docker containers I’ve found don’t do. I managed to create a docker container that installs ffmpeg-full from the AUR, but that was a whole complicated affair, unfortunately, and takes forever.

Any one familiar with #ffmpeg want to take a crack at this question?

https://superuser.com/q/1613217/205461

Given how long it’s gone without any bites, I’m guessing the answer is going to be “it’s complicated/impossible” or something, but it seems like it really should be possible.

Maybe @lynne@pars.ee knows?

There is a new upstream tzdata release (2020f), but it makes no changes to the data, and the only thing likely to be affected by updating the PyPI package is the version number, so don’t panic if we skip this one!

I ask because I’d like to post photos of my family on various platforms but I am not yet comfortable with the idea of posting my son’s face in public or semi-public settings.

I’d love to keep the essence of the photos without necessarily posting his face, though…

Does anyone know if there exists a program that I can run locally on a Linux computer that will take a photo and replace a specified face with another face with the same expression?

Seems like it should be possible with deepfakes / animoji type stuff.

BTW, some relevant context for those outside of Hyderabad who are going to watch this talk, this is what Google Image Search says Hyderabadi haleem looks like:

The video from my PyConf Hyderabad 2020 keynote, “The Stable Interface Paradox” is now available!

https://youtu.be/aRqulQUgiIA

I had a lot of fun with this, I think it’s the first time I’ve actually felt compelled to take a selfie to commemorate a talk:

And also, if you know any Russian legislators, my perennial recommendation here is to show them this: https://codeofmatt.com/on-the-timing-of-time-zone-changes/

It would be shocking if changing the time zone with less than a week’s notice did not result in a bunch of easily avoidable problems.