Posts by Reverend Jim

Any particular reason why you are also posting as Victor_43?

And less RI.

Two new knees.

Merry Christmas to all.

Since the underlying tool is ffmpeg, why bother with all the code and overhead? You can just use ffmpeg directly with the -r option.

Aside from this I enjoyed the article (and the others you have posted).

I worked at a desk (computer programmer/maintainerer/etc) for 31 years. For the last ten years as part of a group of hardware/software specialists I was required to attend monthly safety meetings. One particular meeting was all about repetitive stress injuries and how to avoid them. One engineer, whom I thought had no sense of humour until then, mentioned that he used a track mouse (a mouse with a track ball on the top). He held up his hand and moved his index finger left and right repeatedly and asked how to avoid an injury from the repeated motion. I thought (I am still not quite sure to this day) he was poking fun at the insanity of wasting all our time discussing a topic that could have been addressed with a minimum of common sense.

I took a more direct approach. I mentioned that for many years my father made his living as a vegetable farmer and that his reaction to someone complaining about a repetitive stress injury such as the one just described by that engineer would have been either mockery or disgust. I did not leave the meeting as my attendance was mandatory but I made it clear that I was not pleased about having been taken away from more pressing matters.

You might argue that repetitive stress injuries are a real problem and should not be minimized. I am sure they are for people who spend their day doing assembly line type jobs. But for people who …

Update. NAS is still running fine and I was able to add a media server that (wonder of wonders) is usable by Bigscreen Beta on my Oculus.

Had a couple of gotchas. I use TightVNC to remote into my various computers within my home network. I installed TightVNC on the pi and when I first ran it I was asked to provide two passwords, one for full access, and one for view only. After I did this I could no longer log in to the pi, even from a local interface. I had to rebuild it from scratch. This time, instead of using TightVNC I just enabled the native VNC interface. However, now I have to use RealVNC Viewer to connect. Not a big deal.

The second gotcha is that any time I reboot I have to remount my external drive, and restart samba and minidlna. I'd do this automatically but I can't seem to get rc.local to work. Again, not a big deal to do it manually since reboots are infrequent.

"Open command line." Today's users hate that?

Could always use something like Handbrake which is basically a GUI built on top of ffmpeg.

I don't know what it is you are trying to do but is it possible to use ffmpeg to do the changes? If you can tell us what your intentions are perhaps I can suggest an ffmpeg command line that will do it.

Lauren Boebert is the outrage GOP rep from Colorado who seems to spend most her time making herself look like an idiot. She's one of the right-wing MAGAts and is firmly in the "Jewish space lasers" camp.

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist/professor pseudo-intellectual who made a name for himself by refusing to bow to political pressure to use woke pronouns. While he actually made some good points, his reputation these days seems to be based on saying nothing at all in the maximum number of words. He tries to sound intelligent by using words and phrases like

1. proximal
2. distal
3. metaphorical substrate

but it all boils down to meaningless psychobabble. He counters any criticism with "that's not what I meant". With the word salad he spouts it is hard to refute him.

Whereas a normal person might say, "I'm hungry, I think I'll go eat something", Peterson would say, "In the mysterious realm of human existence, the enigmatic yearning of the inner self sometimes beckons to a realm of cosmic hungers, where the ethereal dance of undefined desires may or may not lead individuals to partake in the enigmatic act of ingesting sustenance, or perhaps not, as the boundaries of appetite and nourishment blur in the intricate tapestry of existence."

We haven't had any really silly discussions going on here for some time so let me start one with these two items:

Is it just me, or does Lauren Boebert (at least in the outrage/rant photos) look like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz?

and speaking of green things...

Is it just me, or is Jordan Peterson channeling Kermit The Frog? Listen to him with your eyes closed and then tell me I'm wrong. In my opinion at least, Kermit is far more worthwhile of my attention.

Your designs are safely stored in the Figma cloud, ready to be accessed anytime, anywhere.

Except from Google Drive, apparently.

Knowing how obtuse some error messages are, could it be referring to one of the URLs in either or both of the xml files?

I kinda wondered. Every character is unique.

Generally speaking, people are less likely to offer help when the request is phrased as a demand.

What's with the new trend of adding a "w" to the end of "hello"?

Forgive me for being old and cranky but I thought we already had enough words.

Also, in spite of the cranky tone above, welcome to Daniweb from a resident curmudgeon.

Typing your title into google gives...

An interface is the connection between systems or applications, while a protocol defines the rules for data exchange between these systems or applications.

I've been watching a fair bit of old TV shows and old movies. I've noticed that there were a lot more long shots in older shows. And by that I mean duration, not distance. It seems that camera work has followed attention span in that the average shot these days seems to last 2-3 seconds. Perhaps Max Headroom (pilot episode) had it right when they predicted/posited blip-verts. For those who never watched Max Headroom, blip-verts were commercials that were so highly compressed that when watched caused some viewers heads to explode.

I find this particularly bad in home reno shows (my wife loves these) in which they show the rooms of a house before and after reno, but you only get 1-2 seconds of any particular scene - not nearly enough time to assimilate what is being shown.

Creating exceptional content takes time. You need to take time to organize your thoughts, and you need to take time to express those thoughts concisely and coherently. You also need to take time to proof-read what you have written to make sure it accurately reflects what you want to convey. For example...

If you want to really drive conversions

Assuming that this should have read "If you want to really drive conversations" might I suggest one tip that has helped me? After you have created your content, read it back out loud. This makes a lot of errors pop off the page.

Unless, of course, your content is religious, in which case "conversions" may be entirely appropriate.

Welcome to Daniweb.

Welcome to Daniweb.

So your argument is that if a solution is not perfect then it is bad?

Home smoked jerked pork loin

Season two of Your Honor. Bryan Cranston is a respected New Orleans judge whose 17 year-old son hits and kills another teen boy on a motorcycle while suffering a severe asthma attack while driving. It turns out that the dead boy is the son of a local mobster.

Welcome to Daniweb.

An expression is typically something that reduces to a value (usually a part of a statement). A statement is something that performs an action. For example:

x + y * 5

is an expression

z = x + y * 5

is a statement that computes a value (from the expression), then assigns it to the variable, z (an action)

Typically a statement will cause a change of state. For example, the following two lines will cause two changes of state

int x                     allocates space for the variable x
x = 19                    modifies the location pointed to by x

whereas an expression will not change state (barring side effects). For example

x + 5

computes a result, then throws it away

rapid/exponential development in this area is likely to continue

For sure.

It also assumes that said AI will be vindictive (like the gods). Even if the supposition is true, once a conscious AI is created, what reason would it have to be vindictive? In any case, there is still no evidence that machine consciousness it attainable. We have had claims of consciousness by at least one engineer involved with the development of OpenAI but that claim was quickly disproved.

Believe in a super powerful entity that's gonna solve all your problems but you need to "worship" it unless you want to be tortured for the rest of your life/eternity? We already have that. It's called God, Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, etc. Take your pick. Show me evidence that any of these exist and I'll consider it. Otherwise it's at best a stupid thought experiment and at worst fear-mongering.

Please read Suggestions For Posting Questions.

Sometimes you have to work to convince the client that what they want isn't necessarily what they need.

Sounds like "data science" is the "new math". And we know how well new math turned out.

Welcome to Daniweb.

I offer my sincere apologies for any inadvertent mistakes I may have made thus far.

Not even so much as a grammatical error so far. Even meticulous comma placement. Well done ;-)

It turns out the problem was something that was not mentioned in any of the tutorials. The way the external drive is auto-mounted is incorrect. The account I set up when I installed the OS was named admin and the default mount point was

/media/admin/Media

I unmounted the drive (identified as sda1) and remounted it as

/srv/media

adjusted the path line in /etc/samba/smb.conf, then restarted samba and everything started working. As seems to be typical of linux, the one thing I needed to do was something that is likely obvious to linux gurus. So obvious that nobody mentioned it.

NetBIOS over TCP/IP needs to be checked (that setting)

I have no idea what you mean by that. It was also not mentioned in any of the tutorials I have gone through. Although one helpful comment was that I really have no business even attempting this without first becoming a linux guru.

I can ping it both by IP and name.

Ya gotta love how all the tutorials stress how "easy" it is to do projects on Raspberry Pi, while nor providing enough information to actually get the projects running. And this is certainly not unique to Raspberry Pi. I've gone through several of the step-by-step tutorials on setting up NAS. None of them mention "what can go wrong", or any of the various tweaks that are actually required. For example (problems and advice)

Your version of WIndows has access to remote SMB shares as a guest disabled. This has been the default for some years.

Guest access is enabled on the share but the [global} section has no, or an incorrectly set map to guest and your windows PC is attempting to login to the server with a user name that does not exist.

Permissions on the file system do not permit access by the Linux user/group Samba is mappign your windows user to (for guest access that's usualy nobody anf nogroup)

Ensure that the path /home/media/admin/Media has the right permissions set.

With no mention as to what the right permissions are.

Ensure that the necessary ports for Samba (typically 137-139 and 445) are open on the Raspberry Pi. You can check and adjust this with ufw or iptables depending on what you're using.

With no mention as to how to use these tools or what parameters to give them.

NetBIOS Name: In the [global] section of your …

OpenAI API is not free.

Probably should have been mentioned up front.

Having just acquired a Raspberry Pi Model 3, I am attempting to set it up as an NAS. So far I have set up the Raspberry Pi OS and configured samba. It appears to be working fine except for one minor problem. While I can remote in using TightVNC, I cannot map to any of my media folders from Windows 10 or Windows 11.

So far I have tried

1. forcing SMB2 protocol on Pi by adding "protocol = smb2" to smb.conf
2. enabling SMB1 in windows features

The instructions say to use "\raspberrypi\NAS" as the "browse to" folder. NAS is the name I set up in smb.conf. It asks for username/password but just responds with

I can browse to \10.0.0.177 or \raspberrypi and it shows my NAS share, but when I try to open NAS I just get the same error. There is probably some setting that needs to be tweaked that all the help sites I've been to are omitting because they are assuming I already know. Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

I already have file and printer sharing enabled (I can map to folders on other machines).

Ah. Turns out I had a test file in the same folder named asyncio.py and the openai package imports asyncio, causing it to import my local file. However, trying to run the code now just results in

openai.error.RateLimitError: You exceeded your current quota, please check your plan and billing details.

All I get when feeding it an audio file is

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Scripts\transcribe.py", line 5, in <module>
    import openai
  File "C:\Python\lib\site-packages\openai\__init__.py", line 15, in <module>
    import aiohttp
  File "C:\Python\lib\site-packages\aiohttp\__init__.py", line 6, in <module>
    from .client import (
  File "C:\Python\lib\site-packages\aiohttp\client.py", line 36, in <module>
    from . import hdrs, http, payload
  File "C:\Python\lib\site-packages\aiohttp\http.py", line 7, in <module>
    from .http_parser import (
  File "C:\Python\lib\site-packages\aiohttp\http_parser.py", line 28, in <module>
    from .base_protocol import BaseProtocol
  File "C:\Python\lib\site-packages\aiohttp\base_protocol.py", line 4, in <module>
    from .tcp_helpers import tcp_nodelay
  File "C:\Python\lib\site-packages\aiohttp\tcp_helpers.py", line 13, in <module>
    def tcp_keepalive(transport: asyncio.Transport) -> None:
AttributeError: module 'asyncio' has no attribute 'Transport'

This happens on the line

import openai

Welcome to Daniweb.

Hello, and welcome to Daniweb.

Yesterday (Sept 20) several authors, including John Grisham and George R R Martin, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that their LLM was illegally trained using pirated copies of their books. Their major concern is that, once trained, ChatGPT could be used to generate stories in the style of famous authors.

That raises two immediate questions.

1. How did they determine that the books used to train the LLM were pirated?
2. How is new material "in the style of..." a copyright violation?

I can understand the first claim in that the books would have to be either scanned and converted to text, or obtained in digital form, before being fed to the LLM for training. In that sense the books have been digitally reproduced without permission.

As for the second claim, according the their reasoning (I assume), were I to read all of John Grisham's books, then write a new story in his style (which I could not help being heavily influenced by), I could be liable to a copyright infringement suit. Assuming that this would not be the case, how is that different from an AI generated "in the style of" story? Typically, authors claim copyright on ideas, not styles. For example, Harlan Ellison famously sued anyone who used his ideas. He sued James Cameron when Cameron remarked that he got his idea for Terminator from an Outer Limits episode written by Ellison years before (which is interesting since Ellison himself admitted that he got his idea …

Welcome to Daniweb. What are your areas of expertise?

The only way to get good at something is by doing it. After decades of programming professionally in multiple languages I read several python book but I found that just "dabbling" was not sufficient to become comfortable with the language. I had to jump into the deep end of the pool (program almost exclusively in python) before I got to the point of thinking in python. It's a common thing to carry over programming practices from your comfort language. You have to unlearn certain habits.

One thing that I found prepared me (at least a little) was having programmed in APL. There are certain constructs in APL that make things like list comprehensions just make sense. In that case carrying over idioms from another language was actually beneficial.

I'm far from a python pro but if you have questions feel free to post them and I'll try to help.

By the way, Microsoft continues to be annoying as it seems they periodically reset this setting.

I don't buy that explanation. They could as easily have added text warning "you must lock your computer manually if you select this option" instead of treating their users as idiot children.

Face to face.

There are targeted treatments (similar to chemo) that help for a few years

This is devastating news. We can only hope that with the rapid progression of modern medicine, more effective treatments will be forthcoming while existing treatments keep the worst at bay. Look at how quickly effective covid-19 vaccines were developed with MRNA technology that was only recently developed. I know that this can only be minimally comforting at best. As always I will keep you in my thoughts and hope for the best.

I've seen this more often of late. They want to show how alone or isolated a character is (typically the lead) so they show that character unwinding by doing laps in a public pool. Somehow the character is the only person in the pool. No other patrons, no lifeguard, no other staff. Nobody at all. And the lights are always turned way down. I have never been in a pool when there wasn't at least one other person present, yet the lead character always swims in a pool completely alone.