Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

Sorry I went silent. I've been too busy to even check Mastodon, let alone post on it.

Today, however, I self-nerd-sniped and implemented a one-click aspect ratio correction userscript for 320x200 screenshots of DOS games on MobyGames:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/400983-mobygames-click-to-aspect-correct-screenshots

(See https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/No_MSDOS_games_werent_widescreen_Tips_on_correcting_aspect_ratio.php for an explanation of why it's necessary.)

#retro #dos

@freemo It's clear we have very diffierent perspectives on what has taken place.

Unfortunately, it's rooted in perceptions of trends (ie. "But overall") and I don't have time to go dig up a big pile of citations right now to counter that.

@freemo I dunno. From what I've seen so far, democratic misconduct has been primarily focused on character attacks, while the Republicans have been the ones making the mistakes with direct consequences for the nation as a whole.

@freemo True. Personally, I think the republicans have been more destructive with their dishonesty and incompetence, though. Like Brian Kemp ordering the beaches open under penalty of fines or incarceration or Trump's oddly insistent pushing of hydroxychloroquine when it has not yet been proven effective and can have serious side-effects.

@freemo You won't see me disagreeing there. Both sides are incompetent in their own ways. The democrats blend theirs with spinelessness.

@freemo I'd rather not get started on how Jared Kushner was given too many jobs and was under-qualified for them.

@freemo My intent in posting that was to get to the kernel of truth behind the criticism of Trump.

That criticism being that, whether it was people he appointed directly or decisions made by them, Trump isn't blameless in this, even if only because he appears to be a very poor judge of how people he brings on will affect the function of the organization as a whole.

@freemo Point. Not all of the relevant decisions were direct trump appointments, so I should have been more clear that some of it is decisions made either by or as part of internal politicking for/against people he did appoint.

@freemo I remembered what it was that Trump did wrong about the CDC.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/28/michael-bloomberg/did-donald-trump-fire-pandemic-officials-defund-cd/

TL;DR: When top national security officials handling pandemics left in 2018 (supposedly pushed out by Bolton), he either didn't replace them or replaced them with friends and allies rather than properly qualified people.

@arteteco @hrisskar At the moment, I'm using something I hacked together using rxvt-unicode, a customized version of its kuake plugin, and GNU screen for tabs but, when I use something polished and ready-made, I use Yakuake.

(Partly because I'm a KDE user and partly because, when I last evaluated the options ages ago, it felt most polished.)

@brandon @cosullivan *chuckle* I remember seeing the discussion of that here.

Anyway, Google Translate does have a few other quirks that need to be massaged. I'm not sure whether I mentioned it in another branch of this thread or elsewhere, but I'm compiling a guide for what I'm learning while dogfooding an experimental Tesseract OCR frontend I've been cleaning up to push to GitHub, intended for OCRing manga and the like

(It was a sleep-deprived rush experiment, so it needs refactoring first)

@hrisskar *chuckle* If you want to be a TRU3 H4X0R, the first thing to do is get a drop-down terminal emulator like Yakuake, Guake, or Tilda.

https://kde.org/applications/system/org.kde.yakuake

http://guake.org/

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/tilda.htm

@hrisskar @hrisskar "pushd" is basically just a version of "cd" which adds a new entry to the directory stack you can view with the "dirs" command.

If you always use "pushd" (or "cd" with AUTO_PUSHD) to change directories, then "popd" acts like a Back button for directory changes.

@hrisskar Not my cup of tea. I'm more into melodic music than rhythmic.

Anyway, I need to prepare for bed but, if you'd like, once I'm up again, I could show you some other interesting zsh stuff I use.

(For example, if you're not already using it, "setopt AUTO_PUSHD" will make "cd" act like "pushd" and build up an undo stack you can rewind with "popd")

@hrisskar :)

Is it working with multiple URLs in a single youtube-dl command now (no &&) or do we still need to fix that?

@hrisskar No problem. I enjoy sharing knowledge.

With youtube-dl, are you referring just to the post-download conversion or were you also aware that some sites (YouTube included) offer separate audio and video streams to their players, so you can download just the audio and avoid having to discard the video before converting to your desired format?

For example:

youtube-dl -f 251 -x --audio-format vorbis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwe-pA6TaZk

("youtube-dl -F THE_URL" will list the formats you can ask for with "youtube-dl -f")

@hrisskar That "no matches found" is the key. You *are* running zsh with one of the globbing options which prevents it from passing un-matched globs through verbatim.

Try running "setopt NO_NOMATCH" and, if that fixes the problem, add it to your ~/.zshrc

If it causes the URL to be omitted from the command, also run "unsetopt NULL_GLOB"

@hrisskar Oh, correction. Put quotes around that. Right now, I just want to get you to reliable not needing ` && youtube-dl` while I find the name of the shell option I suspect of being the culprit for needing the quotes.

@hrisskar Hmm. Unlike bash, zsh's "which" is a shell builtin, so it'll identify functions and aliases.

That it gave you a path suggests that it's getting converted to "youtube-dl -ciw ..." some other way. (Or I misunderstood you.)

First, try prefixing it with "command" to see if that alters its behaviour (eg. "command youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc4xYacTu-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2br1fAKOGU")

("command" tells a shell like bash or zsh to bypass aliases, functions, builtins, etc. and call the on-disk command)

@brandon @cosullivan Most of the time, the latter will do but, sometimes, going a little further toward the former is necessary.

Google will occasionally throw something at you where you get the gist but have to recognize the equivalent idiom or turn of phrase in the destination language to make it feel natural to the way a character speaks.

A more mild example would be having Google give you "such a girl" when it needs to be "a girl like that".