Your Personal Micro Blog(s)

I have a Ducky shine 5. RGB, programmable from the keyboard with no software.

 

It's kinda dark under the bed so photo was kinda shaken and all that:


I guess I type too much as letters and space bar are loosing black paint, but it is fine, I don't need to see what letter is printed on key to use it.

 

RIP
I have a portable folding RGB keyboard that is painted like that, and I am awaiting the day that happens to it. The Ducky is double shot ABS keycaps, so if I wear through them its probably time for a new keyboard xD

 

I went to see a live orchestral performance of Star Wars a New Hope. A large projected screen played the movie without music, while an orchestra played all the scores.

It was extremely fun, although i left with my neck wanting to be cocked 20 degrees up, because I sat near the front of the theater.

 

Hey Goolag! My WinXP plus Firefox (or Chrome, as much as I hate having it on my computer) can still play a few videos on YouTube! Obviously you haven't made enough pointless behind-the-scenes changes to the player and video formats! Better change more things, that way I'll have no choice but to spend money I don't have on Cortana the government stool pigeon... and a better computer to run "her"... because obviously I'm not already having enough trouble just keeping a car on the road...

 

To be completely frank about it, you really should not be running Windows XP at this point. If modern Windows is that much of a problem then you should have switched to Linux already. That said, you can turn off Cortana, on my Win10 laptop she is no where to be seen, disabled at the group policy (or registry, can't remember) level.

I can only speak from personal experience, but Windows XP seems to be a lot heavier than many of the Linux Distros such as Mint*. Especially once you factor in running anti-virus on top of WinXP. Plus many distros like Mint will work on 32bit systems as well as 64bit, unlike Ubuntu. And ofc it is free to install.

*We have an old school Atom device that seems to run much faster on Mint than WinXP.
Of course most Anti-Virus programs don't support WinXP any more due to its inherent insecurity, but those that do have to be super invasive and slow things to an absolute halt.

 

Meanwhile in America: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45730367

I fear this is the beginning of something terrible...

 

I just got that, haha

 

I have been goofing around in blender again, you'd be surprised just how much you can pull off with some color ramps, noise and wave textures.

 

But your will be blown away what few nodes can do, I think you will like these
https://blenderartists.org/t/planetcreator-2-procedural-planet-atmosphere-and-cloud-shader/660793

https://www.blendernation.com/2015/11/11/tutorial-creating-a-procedural-planet-model-in-blender/

 

How many of these free-to-install distros can work at a reasonable speed on a 10-year-old school district cheapo special? Ancient Core2 Duo, integrated graphics, the works. Only thing that's better than stock is 4GB RAM, up from 1GB before.

What really irritates me is that while YT says "your browser does not recognize any of the video formats available", switching to Chrome makes zero difference as to which videos can play. Furthermore, many of these are music videos I've played many times in the past, so why would the format have changed now (hence what I said about pointless changes). Finally, once you get the format error, any other video you reach from there on will get the same error until you use the "back list" to go back to a known good video. All of this together tells me that some kind of browser and/or OS sniffer is in play, which 1. is not unheard of from YouTube and 2. seriously irritates me. I remember years ago when I was stalling getting rid of IE7, YouTube decided to end support for it, and they did this by installing some kind of browser-sniffer script that would detect if you were using IE7 and block videos with a "not supported" message if you were. You'd be halfway through a video (with zero playback issues, honestly none had playback issues) only for it to suddenly realize you were using IE7, immediately stop playback, and throw an error. That right there, is the kind of stuff that makes me want to punch someone, and I now suspect it's happening again.

(Previously I'd get these kinds of errors if I clicked on a video too soon after it was uploaded, but in those situations it would usually become playable after having time to render. Not sure if that means anything, but whatever.)

(At least one of the songs was put up for free download by the author but only as a crummy MP3 file with none of the crispness of the original upload... and considering the way YouTube murders things, that's saying a lot.)

 

http://www.clipgrab.de search from youtube, copy url of video to that program, it is bit buggy if you search within program it will ban your IP...

 

Knowing YouTube's close relationship with the Copyright Monster, are you sure that's a bug and not a feature?

 

Bug, it sends search query each time you type a character, leading to temporary ip ban. You can paste search terms and it works fine.

However it is better to use other thing to search and just copy and paste url

Also there is yt-download script, which is better, but more difficult to use.

 

SITREP: Tried it, threw an SSL error hissy fit, closed Firefox. When I opened it back up and went to YouTube, it defaulted to the "old" style of YouTube from before its most recent visual refresh. Videos don't play any better, but I realized that I'd forgotten how much I missed simple things like not having to wait 2 years for the sidebar to open when I click on it. That alone was worth it, though I'm concerned about actually downloading videos getting me accused of piracy.

NOPE NEVER MIND it went back to the stupid slow new design. Knew that was too good to last.

 

Oh yes, it does require Windows 7 or newer to work.

Try this instead, maybe it works with WinXP:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

 

The current way of making tracks for MM2 is very tedious. Today I set out to fix it.


EDIT: Improved intersection generation

 

Linux Mint should work. If you want to try it without wiping your computer, you can install it on a USB drive, and run it off that. It will be somewhat slow whenever loading anything is involved because USB sticks are not that fast, but it will give you a good idea whether Linux is for you or not without removing Windows.

As for the tracking, Its called "user agents". It's commonplace for websites to look at them. For example whenever someone visits my website, I can see (roughly) what operating system they are using, what Web browser they are using etc.
The reason I say roughly is because you can spoof them. You can tell your web browser to report as being a different browser or operating system. Back when Opera was it's own Web browser I had to tell Google I was using chrome for Google Docs to work properly (for school work).

So you could give that a look into if you think it's your user agent causing the issue. (but I would still suggest moving from WinXP to anything modern)

However, it may also be web browser based in some respects. Since I know for sure that if you try and Download the latest version of Opera on WinXP, they will actually give you one that is more than 10 major versions old. Since it's the latest version that they made that supported xp.

One thing that I think should work if nothing else does is trying something like Kodi or Zoom Player. Since they can both play YouTube videos without a browser.

 

Wanna know what I did? You wanna know what I did!?






…..I got sick.…..