Interests: programming, video games, anime, music composition

I used to be on kbin as [email protected] before it broke down.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • I’ve been trying to figure out a related sort of video streaming setup for work (without Owncast, but with a similar sort of 24/7 goal plus other considerations) and have been looking into using ffmpeg’s capabilities to output either HLS or DASH segments + manifests. (FFMPEG can do both but I don’t know which would be better for my needs yet.) The sources I’m working with are RTSP/RTP instead of RTMP and I only need streaming to browser clients currently – although it working with VLC naturally by pointing it to the manifest is nice.

    HLS and DASH work by having videos split into small chunks that can be downloaded over HTTP, so just replacing the manifest allows for continuous streaming (the client pulls it repeatedly) without the server needing to maintain a continuous connection to the client.(Fan out to CDNs works naturally since the video chunks are just files that can be served by any web server.)

    It should be possible to do some creative things by either creating / modifying the manifests myself with scripting or by piping chunks into another instance of ffmpeg from a script. (I’ve done something similar using -f image2pipe in the past, but that was for cases where I need to do things like create a video from an image gallery dynamically.) That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it myself though.

    I don’t know what the right answer is either, but I’m also interested in finding out and hopeful you get additional responses.








  • the thumbnails now are even more clearly 4-pixel potatoes

    pictrs’s thumbnail parameter uses dumb raw pixel sampling – which leaves something to be desired… It has other sampling options implemented (with resize, according to the docs), but they don’t seem to accessible on my instance. You can remove thumbnail=96 if you want to get the image without that thumbnail sampling, at least.

    make everything zoom 150%

    I do this with my browser’s UI (ctrl-plus keyboard shortcut in FF-based browsers works for me).

    e.g. right side bar

    [...document.querySelectorAll(".side")].forEach(sidebar => sidebar.remove())

    You could also just adblock the element with class side.



  • Voting

    You could support this by making vote buttons submit a form if JS isn’t enabled. (That’s what mlmym does.)

    Can’t manually switch between dark and light mode

    Hmm… There are some pretty nifty things you can do with a hidden checkbox, label, and some clever CSS (e.g. html:has(#element:checked) + CSS variables – though FYI :has is baseline 2023.)

    Making it persistent would require some more effort – e.g. form + cookies + server side style sheet selection, most likely. mlmym lets users change their theme w/o JS by submiting a form on the setting page. I’d have to think a bit if there’s a good way to make it persistent across multiple requests for logged out users with a CDN caching things in between though…

    only automatically based on browser settings

    Doesn’t actually work for me in a FF138-based browser w/ JS blocked via NoScript – I always get light mode despite having a dark mode preference set. (Where do you have your prefers-color-scheme media query?)

    Also, FYI I had to manually override font restriction – otherwise all your buttons end up as tofu characters. (I think NoScript is being kind of unreasonably strict there by blocking first party fonts.) That’s a papercut kind of issue, but figured I’d point it out in case it might save you some debugging time if you get confused NoScript users in the future.


  • I picked an RNG name since my old common username (from reddit, etc) was not available when I started on kbin.social (RIP) and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be called. I deliberately kept it short though. Not sure what to make of other RNG names – esp. long unintelligible ones – but I’ve seen at least one account that I think is legit which has a long, bizarre RNG-looking username and a non-English display name, so 🤷️






  • I’ve worked for a university before and it was very common for staff to remote into their systems from home – usually with SSH for CS types or Remote Desktop/Team Viewer/etc. for less computer-focused folks. (The former usually didn’t have much issue – the folks using the latter mechanisms got compromised a number of times… -.-) There was also a campus provided VPN that was required to access certain systems with instructions to students and staff on how to use it, but other systems just got public IP addresses.

    If what you’re doing is related to your work and campus IT doesn’t object, you’re probably fine to do it. I’ve run various kinds of websites and web apps for colleagues to collaborate on research projects. Being able to do things like that is kind of the point of the internet.

    Having seen a number of students, uh, push the limits and find the boundaries of acceptability the hard way though… I’d strongly advise you not to install cryptominers, run TOR exit nodes, or torrent TV shows/movies/etc. That kind of thing tends to get your systems in hot water with IT or other parts of the bureaucracy…