Monthly Archives: November 2023

Frightened Rabbit – Holy

On a long drive through Arizona I was reminded about how good this song is and how perfect the lyrics are.

https://youtu.be/j2GkM9FWvag?si=STuJKwepy9T23nvO

I’d embed it for you above but there is no video anywhere but YouTube and YouTube is going through what Cory Doctorow has coined “enshittification”.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Cory Doctorow, TikTok’s Enshittification

Fortunately Frightened Rabbit still has a website and the gorgeous lyrics for Holy are there.

The song is gorgeous and I’d love to share it with you.

Default Apps 2023

It’s a blog trend!

Every once in a while, everyone wants to share the tools they are excited about.

When I saw Ankur Sethi’s post about it on Mastodon, I was in.

  • Email: Outlook (because work) / Thunderbird on the laptop
  • Calendar: Outlook (because work) / Thunderbird or a pinned google calendar tab
  • Reminders: put it in the calendar.
  • Chat: Beeper (because it handles everything) or Slack (because work/school)
  • Photos: the iOS camera app
  • Books: BookWyrm, Libby, CloudLibrary, Aldiko, and the Kobo app. But I only really use my Kobo.
  • Mastodon: Ice Cubes
  • RSS: newsblur
  • saving things to read later: Pocket – which syncs to my Kobo
  • Browser: Firefox
  • Search: duck duck go.
  • Music: play:Sub or Navidrome
  • Podcasts: Overcast
  • Audiobooks: I don’t. I don’t understand how the rest of you can. I’m glad you enjoy it.
  • Photo Editing: Whatever iOS provides natively or I use the GIMP on my laptop.
  • Todo: Vim and todo.markdown in project folders, Trello for family projects, otherwise, pick a time and put it in the calendar to get done.
  • Grocery lists: a pad of paper
  • Presentations: Vim and markdown -> pandoc -> reveal.js is incredible.
  • Writing: Vim
  • Code editing: Vim
  • Spreadsheets: Google Sheets
  • Budgeting: Google Sheets
  • Terminal: Whatever is handy, but tmux inside of it.
  • Git: the git commandline. (or fugitive inside vim).

For more of the tools other folks use, Robb Knight is collecting these lists on App Defaults.

Every Frame a Wallpaper

Years ago, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos made 28 video essays about film form called Every Frame a Painting and it’s incredible in teaching outsiders a whole new way to think about the art of film. The title is perfect. The content is just stunning, simple ways to look at masters of a form at work.

Lots of folks are known for one-shot takes, but this shows how Spielberg sneaks in gorgeous “oners” that do work without calling attention to themselves.

This essay on Fincher is great, but I love the little golden nugget about how spacing shows the evolving relationship between Mills and Somerset

That title always struck me. Every Frame a Painting. That’s gotta be a bar filmakers strive for. Some make it.

Some movies are just so damn beautiful. Just gorgeous.

Like Across the Spider-Verse. Yowza!

Like Sita Sings the Blues! Beautiful.

Like The Fountain

Like the one that you like that isn’t my cup of tea.

Might be nice to see an image from it, right there behind all of your terminals and windows and such, set as your wallpaper. If every frame’s a painting, set a random one as your wallpaper whenever I like it.

So here’s the plan. I want it. So I made it for me. You can have it. But here’s the terms of the deal. I made it for me, so if it doesn’t work for you, you have to make it work for you. If it causes you problems, those are not my problems. If you don’t agree, this isn’t for you.

This will take as an input a movie file, anything that ffmpeg can deal with. You’ll need to install ffmpeg – look on the official site for instructions.

By default, it won’t use the first 5 or last 10 minutes since that’s often the credits. But you can override this.

We’ll find out how many frames are in that remaining part of the movie.

We’ll pick one randomly and extract it from the movie.

Then we’ll set it as your wallpaper. Nice!

Want to change this often? Set up a cron job!

Pulling a single frame out the middle of a movie is CPU intense, so you probably want to use nice in your cron job so it doesn’t interfere with the rest of your work.

Here’s the code, save this in a file called every_frame_a_wallpaper.zsh and then chmod u+x every_frame_wallpaper.zsh

#! /bin/zsh
# This is a pretty processor intensive set of tasks! You should probably nice this script
# as in call it with nice -n 10 "every_frame_a_wallpaper.zsh /path/to/video.mkv"

SCRIPT_NAME=$(basename "$0")

# I like a nice log file for my cron jobs
function LOG() {
  echo -e "$(date --iso-8601=seconds): [$SCRIPT_NAME] :  $1"
}

# set up some options
local begin_skip_minutes=5
local end_skip_minutes=10
local wallpaper="$HOME/Pictures/wallpaper.png"
local usage=(
	"$SCRIPT_NAME [-h|--help]"
	"$SCRIPT_NAME [-b|--begin_skip_minutes] [-e|--end_skip_minutes] [<video file path>]"
	"Extract a single random frame from a movie and set it as wallpaper"
	"By default, skips 5 minutes from the beginning and 10 from the end, but this is overridable"

)

# the docs suck on zparseopts so let this be a reference for next time
# -D pulls parsed flags out of $@
# -F fails if we find a flag that wasn't defined
# -K allows us to set default values without zparseopts overwriting them
# Remember that the first dash is automatically handled, so long options are -opt, not --opt
zparseopts -D -F -K -- \
	{h,-help}=flag_help \
	{b,-begin_skip_minutes}:=begin_skip_minutes \
	{e,-end_skip_minutes}:=end_skip_minutes \
	|| return 1

[[ -z "$flag_help" ]] || {print -l $usage && return }
if [[ -z "$@" ]] {
   print -l "A video file path is required"
   print -l $usage && return

} else {
   MOVIE="$@"
}

if [[ $DISPLAY ]]
then
  LOG "interactively running, not in cron"
else
  LOG "Not running interactively, time to export the session's environment for cron"
  export $(xargs -0 -a "/proc/$(pgrep gnome-session -n -U $UID)/environ") 2>/dev/null
fi

LOG "skipping $begin_skip_minutes[-1] minutes from the beginning"
LOG "skipping $end_skip_minutes[-1] minutes from the end"
LOG "outputting the wallpaper to $wallpaper"
LOG "using file $MOVIE"

LOG "Let's get a frame from ${MOVIE}";


LOG "What's the duration of the movie?"
DURATION=$(ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 \
  $MOVIE);
DURATION=$(printf '%.0f' $DURATION);

LOG "Duration looks like ${DURATION} seconds";

LOG "what's the frame rate?"

FRAMERATE=$(ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 \
  -show_entries \
  stream=r_frame_rate \
  -print_format default=nokey=1:noprint_wrappers=1 $MOVIE)




FRAMERATE=$(bc -l <<< "$FRAMERATE");

FRAMERATE=$(printf "%.0f" $FRAMERATE);

LOG "Looks like it's roughly $FRAMERATE"

FRAMECOUNT=$(bc -l <<< "${FRAMERATE} * ${DURATION}");
FRAMECOUNT=$(printf '%.0f' $FRAMECOUNT)
LOG "So the frame count should be ${FRAMECOUNT}";


SKIP_MINUTES=$begin_skip_minutes[-1]
SKIP_CREDITS_MINUTES=$end_skip_minutes[-1]

LOG "We want to skip $SKIP_MINUTES from the beginning and $SKIP_CREDITS_MINUTES from the end".

SKIP_BEGINNING_FRAMES=$(bc -l <<< "${FRAMERATE} * $SKIP_MINUTES * 60");
LOG "So $SKIP_MINUTES * 60 seconds * $FRAMERATE frames per second = $SKIP_BEGINNING_FRAMES frames to skip from the beginning."
SKIP_ENDING_FRAMES=$(bc -l <<< "${FRAMERATE} * $SKIP_CREDITS_MINUTES * 60");
LOG "So $SKIP_CREDITS_MINUTES * 60 seconds * $FRAMERATE frames per second = $SKIP_ENDING_FRAMES frames to skip from the ending."

USEABLE_FRAMES=$(bc -l <<< "$FRAMECOUNT - $SKIP_BEGINNING_FRAMES - $SKIP_ENDING_FRAMES");
UPPER_FRAME=$(bc -l <<<"$FRAMECOUNT - $SKIP_ENDING_FRAMES")
LOG "That leaves us with ${USEABLE_FRAMES} usable frames between $SKIP_BEGINNING_FRAMES and $UPPER_FRAME";

FRAME_NUMBER=$(shuf -i $SKIP_BEGINNING_FRAMES-$UPPER_FRAME -n 1)
LOG "Extract the random frame ${FRAME_NUMBER} to ${wallpaper}";
LOG "This takes a few minutes for large files.";
ffmpeg \
  -loglevel error \
  -hide_banner \
  -i $MOVIE \
  -vf "select=eq(n\,${FRAME_NUMBER})" \
  -vframes 1 \
  -y \
  $wallpaper


WALLPAPER_PATH="file://$(readlink -f $wallpaper)"
LOG "Set the out file as light and dark wallpaper - using ${WALLPAPER_PATH}";
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri-dark "${WALLPAPER_PATH}";
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri "${WALLPAPER_PATH}";

In my crontab I call it like this:

# generate a neat new background every morning
0 4 * * * nice -n 10 ~/crons/every_frame_a_wallpaper.zsh -b 5 -e 12 /home/mk/Videos/Movies/Spider-Man_Across_the_Spider-Verse.mkv >> ~/.logs/every_frame_a_wallpaper/`date +"\%F"`-run.log 2>&1

The Black Angels – Young Men Dead

Apropos of nothing in particular, certainly nothing that’s going on right now, a video of found footage where lots of people died, where the cameras are all focused on one side as protagonists. Where bombs go off far away but we get close ups on the artillery being fired. Absolutely top notch song though.

I’m against young men dying. I’m against people starving each other and murdering each other and driving each other from their homes. I do not think death is the solution for much and stories don’t stop just because we think it’s a good conclusion.

I’m sure everything is more complex, I’m sure, I’m sure – but that’s where most of my reactions stem from.

A Victim of a Random Act of Kindness

Max rides with me on this to school. We got it from some parents who don’t need it anymore and we fixed a flat tire and replaced a stolen seat.

We don’t have a great private place to secure it. It’s all just locked up on the street. One day we came out and one of the handlebar grips was gone. Ah well. People can be jerks. Such is life. No big deal.

We just ride without the grips and make do. “It’s fine!” says Max.

Today we came out to take Max to Brooklyn Game Lab for Dungeons and Dragons club. This is what we found:

Someone bought new handlebar grips and installed them on the bike for Max. Those are good ones, too! Better than what we had by a lot.

We were blown away by this thoughtful kindness!

Maxwell’s reaction was that he wants to learn how to fix things for other people. We have no idea who did this for us. If I figure it out I’m gonna hug the hell out them and thank them so much.

Just wanna share with everyone this feeling.

Moving on from GoodReads to BookWyrm

Friends, I’ve read a lot of books.

I started tracking books a long time ago on LibraryThing, when LibraryThing was giving out a CueCat. I liked LibraryThing, but they never got as popular as GoodReads, and I had friends who actually used GoodReads. So I moved on to GoodReads to be with my friends, since community trumps technology. I really wish I could have used the functionality of LibraryThing but still kept tabs with my pals. Sadly, these folks want to have a walled garden and don’t value interoperability.

Both of them ended up shutting down their APIs, which sucks because I wanted to use my data for me! I ended up routing around their damage.

But what a bunch of palaver!

I don’t want to give my data directly to Amazon (the owners of GoodReads). I don’t want to lose APIs or access to all the data that I’ve been putting in. I also care about my friends, but not that they use the same website as me!

So I was incredibly excited to discover a great book tracker in the Fediverse!

I think you should come with me and you should join BookWyrm.

BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.

https://joinbookwyrm.com

BookWyrm is open source, decentralized and federated. It’s built on top of the ActivityPub protocol like Mastodon.

What does that all mean and why is it important?

BookWyrm is open source. The lead developer has a day job as a baker and isn’t trying to build an empire. When I wanted a feature that didn’t exist, I didn’t have to ask a product manager, I was able to open a Merge Request to contribute a solution! The documentation is also open and easy for anyone in the community to help improve.

BookWyrm is decentralized. That means it isn’t just one website like Twitter, GoodReads, FaceBook, LibraryThing, etc. It is made up of many sites – there are 22 sites live as I write this. If you don’t like one of them, you can leave and move to another, you’re not locked in to the choices and beliefs of whoever owns a server.

And Federated means that all these sites speak about books to each other in a special set of ways called ActivityPub. Some of these sites are for folks who speak a certain language or live somewhere or are interested in a certain kind of book… But if you have a friend on a different site, you can still be friends! The sites all speak to each other in a federation of small common websites. Bookwyrm has good people on it – you can find a good like minded community or span across communities.

And because BookWyrm speaks ActivityPub, it means that people who left Twitter for Mastodon can be friends with you on BookWyrm – they can comment on your books safely from their own community! It’s as natural as sending emails from your work to someone else’s.

And when I want to just get the books that I marked to-read so I can search for them across multiple places, I don’t have to spend a ton of time faking my way to get my own data. BookWyrm is here for me, not as a place trying to find a business model to exploit me.

So when you join BookWyrm, please – say hi and let’s chat about books– I’m @mttktz@bookwyrm.social!