danielquinn

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Very likely. If I write this thing, I’ll provide both options.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

I was thinking of experimenting with a Firefox extension that upon hitting a YouTube page, it just launches yt-dlp [url] && mpv [downloaded file]. Is there any interest here in that sort of thing?

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Given that domain seizure is becoming such a common tool for this sort of thing, maybe we need a work around for DNS?

For example, we could distribute z-library name/IP pairs in the form of a hosts file via torrents and then write little wrapper programs for each OS that would just crawl the DHT for the latest version to update your local hosts file.

A more extreme option would be to build a pirate browser that has a bunch of name/IP pairs baked into it. People could just launch the browser and visit websites as usual without DNS being an issue.

I’m aware that using Tor is also an option, but there’s a bunch of problems there with usability like installation and setup (for non-technical people). Onion URLs aren’t easily discoverable either, and much of what you find in there just kids cosplaying as digital freedom fighters posting links that load really slowly… at least that was my experience the last time I tried out a TOR browser.

danielquinn, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

You know what? Insulting people isn’t helping. I’m just going to block you.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

…and it plays well with cookie auto delete!

danielquinn, 1 year ago

I don’t use the dock or a system tray really.

• Each app is opened on its own workspace and it’s always the same workspace. Slack on 1, Thunderbird on 2, Tilix on 3, IDE on 4, Firefox on 5, etc.
• Each workspace gets its own key mapping: Ctrl+F1 for 1, Ctrl+F5 for 5, etc. so switching is quick and easy with no mouse needed.
• To open a new program I just hit Win followed by the first 2 or 3 letters of the name and Enter.

I use the following extensions:

• Burn My Windows
• Pure Perfection
• Clipboard indicator (for clip history)
• System Monitor (to keep an eye on resource use)

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Related: a website that lets you listen to radio stations all over the world just by spinning a globe around.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

This one worked for me.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

It’s actually not as crazy as you might think:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ du -sh .Maildir/
</span><span style="color:#323232;">13G	.Maildir/
</span>

That’s going back to 2000 1995, both sent & received. The first email I have in there is from a friend of mine offering to send me an MP3 she downloaded.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

I still have every email I’ve ever received, going back now more than 20 years. My solution isn’t terribly fancy, but it gets the job done.

I have a Synology here at home running a mail server. You don’t need a Synology specifically, just a simple mail server with access to a lot of disk space. The server isn’t on the Open web or anything and doesn’t support SMTP. It’s just running IMAP to serve the local mail around the house.

I connect to it from Thunderbird on my various machines. I also use Thunderbird to connect to my actual mail servers to do my day-to-day mail stuff.

Every six months or so, I move old mail messages from my actual mail servers over to the archival one. Generally, I keep the mail on the archival server in folders; one per year, that keeps the loading time to a minimum. For example, come January 1st 2024, I’ll be moving mail from January 2023 - June 2023 to the /2023 folder on the archive.

Searching is done via Thunderbird just like you search any mail account, and on my desktop machine, I let Thunderbird keep copies of the mail locally for quick searching. On my laptop though, I ask it to not keep copies to save disk space.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

I use this chart when teaching Linux. I think it does a great job of showing Linux’s “bazaar” vs. Windows’ “cathedral”.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Is there another way to do this? This hack was the only way I could figure out how to get Firefox to invoke an external binary, but if there’s a more conventional way to do it, I’d like to know 'cause I have another more complicated project in need of a pattern much like this one.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

I don’t think I have it in me to put together a video, but I can describe it if you like.

Once you install the extension and follow the setup instructions, you just go to a YouTube page. The extension adds an ugly button to the top-left of the page that says “bypass”. When you click it, Firefox launches yt-dlp [the URL you’re at] -o - | mpv - which basically just downloads the video and streams the output through the mpv video player. So now you’re watching just the video, with no web page necessary.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Honestly, because I didn’t know (a) that ff2mpv even existed, or that (b) mpv could play YouTube URLs directly. So thanks! I learnt two things today :-)

It was still a fun project though 'cause I learnt how to write a Firefox extension and get the browser to launch programs on-click, so not a waste of time!

danielquinn, 1 year ago

That’s actually very helpful, thanks. I’ve been working on another project to open certain URLs in specific browsers/profiles, and wanted to be sure that I wasn’t missing a more obvious design pattern. The project is here if you’re curious.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Thanks!

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Really important question: where did you get those adorable little pirate headers???

danielquinn, 1 year ago

As far as I’ve seen, they don’t provide any advantage over a string with spaces, which doesn’t work well either when you’ve got values with spaces:

<span style="color:#323232;">not_what_you_think=( "a b" "c" "d" )
</span><span style="color:#323232;">for sneaky in ${not_what_you_think[@]}; do
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  echo "This is sneaky: ${sneaky}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">done
</span>

<span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: a
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: b
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: c
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: d
</span>

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Yup, that looks like exactly what was done in Alpine:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ docker run --rm -it alpine ls -l /usr/bin/[[
</span><span style="color:#323232;">lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            12 Sep 28 11:18 /usr/bin/[[ -> /bin/busybox
</span>

So while the Ash itself doesn’t support the [[ extension, this work-around produces the same effect. Nifty.

danielquinn, 1 year ago

Huh. So the link is unnecessary and Ash supports [[ out of the box? Good to know, thanks!

danielquinn, 1 year ago

There’s a couple angles you can take on this. My favourite is from the dotCommunist Manifesto:

Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility—reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge—at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude.

Essentially, this argues that the unethical position is the one that creates the false scarcity.

Another less extreme position would be that many countries allow for exemptions for format shifting: if you buy a CD with some music, you’re legally permitted to rip it so long as you don’t distribute copies. One could argue that someone in your position is operating within the spirit of these laws… provided that you haven’t torrented the videos since that necessarily includes some partial distribution.

Finally, the least generous interpretation would point out that you didn’t buy the videos in the first place, but rather a licence to let Vudu stream them to you. Given that you don’t own anything, you’re not morally entitled to own it in a different format. This is why many people have rejected the streaming model.

As someone in camp #1, I think you’re a-ok ethically, but I thought you might want a broader perspective.