Re: top bar the way I want it
On Sat, 20 Jan 2024, at 05:53, Maureen L Thomas wrote: > I am using Gnome, and I found the stuff I needed to get my desktop the > way I wanted it. It might be sensible to screenshot the setup you like. If you have similar problems in future it would help enormously to be able to show people the layout you like vv the one you get immediately after a reinstall. And, of course, write notes to yourself for EVERY change like this, so you can remember how you did it. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: VAX emulation/simulation (was Re: systemd-timesyncd)
On Mon, 8 Jan 2024, at 09:17, Bret Busby wrote: > But, apart from the functionality that I have not seen in any other > operating system, of using an extra file descriptor of version number, > so the whole filename would be something like > .; IBM's MVS & its successors, most recently z/OS, have something similar called a GDG (or Generation Data Group). It's handed via system catalogs - which are the indexes which tell you where specific files are. Dataset names do not contain disk (or tape, or virtual tape) names and don't have the sort of hierarchical names relating to a root & mount point like most files in Linux. For a lot of files the catalogs say which disk a file is currently on & the disk's "VTOC" - volume table of contents - says where on the disk that file is. Anyway if one defines eg DEFINE GENERATIONDATAGROUP - (NAME(PQR.TEST.THIS) LIMIT(8) SCRATCH NOEMPTY) then the system will maintain 8 separate copies of a file named "PQR.TEST.THIS". You can refer to the newest created one as PQR.TEST.THIS(0) or the next oldest by PQR.TEST.THIS(-1) or its ancestor by PQR.TEST.THIS(-2) etc. You can refer to the whole lot (so eg to read all the contents of as many of these files as happen to exist at some point in time) simply by leaving the (n) part off the name. To create a new file you refer to PQR.TEST.THIS(+1); after you finish using the file the system throws away the very oldest one & rejigs its index of them all so this latest one is now able to be referred to via (0) - and the specific files previously referred to by -1, -2, -3 etc all shift up by one. For the whole duration of the process that creates a new generation of such a file, the index of subsidiary versions is locked so that no other process can simultaneously create new ones or delete any of them (ie not just delete the one about to be the oldest, no longer required one). The files are typically used for storing chunks of continuously occurring data, eg transactions or logs. You might start each business day with no files in such a GDG then accumulate any number of successive tranches of some sort of transaction data in them, then - perhaps at the end of day process the whole lot into one "daily" file & reset the GDG ready for the next day's processing. You might then have a set of daily GDGs which get merged into weekly files, monthly ones etc. You can also find out the internal name by which a specific generation of the file is named & refer to it directly, eg PQR.TEST.THIS.G00 - thus meaning one doesn't have to know such a file's relationship to the successive generation structure. Back in the 1990s when I last used these there could be up to 255 or so files in each GDG. That limit might have increased since then. Ref: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.2.0?topic=files-processing-generation-data-groups -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Mouse single click handling?
On Thu, 21 Dec 2023, at 13:36, songbird wrote: > i've > already worn some of letters off the keys. :( but, well, i got > it on sale for about $30 so i really can't complain. For years I've used Dymo labels to replace keyboard legends. (Not the 1960s/1970s thick 3d labels, but 'printed' ones). After sticking individual letters onto keytops (usually using tweezers to position them as accurately as possible) I put mutiple coats of clear nail varnish over them - which seems to lengthen their life & help to hold down the edges of the stickers. When they eventually need replaced it's sometimes difficult to get a Dymo letter off a key, needing something sharp (eg a needle or scalpel) to lift the sticky label off the key. Then I clean the key with isopropyl alcohol (as used eg for cleaning heads on tape recorders), & make & attach a new label. Mostly I use Dymo media corresponding to the colour scheme of the original keyboard, but - eg on a laptop which has white legends on black keys - I've replaced some legends with "black print on yellow tape" labels which are much easier to see and provide me with a few visual landmarks on the keyboard ... which helps me when I don't yet quite need to put a room light on. I keep hoping that my next laptop will have a backlit keyboard but very often the machines I choose (for other higher-priority criteria) don't have them. I've also tried a few clip-on mini lights (plugged into a spare USB socket) but many such lights come with poor quality clips &/ cables that are too short to reach the USB socket of choice (or indeed any USB socket). -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Mouse single click handling?
On Wed, 20 Dec 2023, at 04:25, Charles Curley wrote: > I suggest you buy a different rodent. I bought three Logitech rodents > some years ago on sale for $10 each. All three still work quite well. Until about a year ago my experience with Logitech mice had been good. Those that had died normally did so after falling off a desk, which I don't really see as a manufacturing fault. But since then several I've bought have all failed with the problem of LMB sending double-clicks when pressed once. That includes two separate "Pebble" mice. I read through a LOT of reviews on amazon uk, for cheap & pricey Logitech mice & discovered lots of people had similar experiences - that recent products don't seem to have the quality that older ones had. (In my case I need wireless optical mice, as they're often used running on a bed sheet under a duvet, with the laptop on an overbed table.) For now I'm using an Anker vertical mouse, which has lasted longer than the previous Logitech mice. It too has fallen to the floor a few times, but I have a theory that its odd body shape means that it tends to hit the floor then roll over (like a landing paratrooper) which damages it less than traditionally shaped rodents). As a side issue, the vertical form-factor - once I got used to it - has proved more comfortable for use when sitting up in bed, using the mouse approx half-way between my bum & knee, either on top of or underneath the duvet. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Image handling in mutt
On Mon, 11 Dec 2023, at 13:16, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> 4) File extensions are used by programs on every operating system.
Certainly on many OSes, but not all.
They're not present on native RISC OS systems (as in ex-Acorn micros).
Filetype data IS stored, but it is in files' metadata.
There's no concept of filetype in file systems used for the MVS side
of z/OS systems. (These days there's also Unix/Linux environments
& of course they do have more familiar file naming structures.)
By convention collections of separate files might all be kept in a set
very vaguely analagous to a directory - though with no parent
directory nor child sub-directories), known as a "PDS". The name
of a PDS is fairly arbitrary (subject to installation conventions &
security restrictions) & the names of files within ("members") also
have no real meaning unless an application chooses to interpret
their names in some special way.
One refers to a PDS as a whole by its name, eg "MY.SAMPLE.PDS"
& to a member within it, eg the file named "FRED", as
"MY.SAMPLE.PDS(FRED)".
While there are conventions for names of these PDSes, there's no
requirement that every file within, say "MY.SAMPLE.ASM" would
contain assembler source. Often only some of the files would do
with others containing notes etc.
If a PDS's name looks like it might contain binary executables AND
it is actually used in a place where that would be expected, then you
can infer that it does do; you wouldn't find plain text notes, sample
data etc alongside the executables (because other characteristics
of those file sets allow them only to hold executables).
You cannot tell from a file's name whether it's held on disk or
(virtual) tape or real tape, nor which device it's currently on.
--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: how to limit a CPU temperature?
On Sat, 8 Apr 2023, at 16:39, songbird wrote: > only with this change to the FTP software has it become > an annoyance that made me go look for a way to deal with > it. > > filing a bug against the FTP software is also something > i should do, but i've not gotten that far yet. ;) Meantime, what do you do with that FTP software? Are you asking it to upload lots of files? Have you worked out whether it (say) successfully uploads them, but perhaps doesn't realise that it has done - that might be due to a change in the server it's talking to - and then it retries the whole lot over & over again? What would happen if instead of one FTP invocation uploading n files, you ran n/2 times doing half the files, or maybe n times doing one file each time, with a pause of a few seconds (or more) between each file? Maybe - if the files ARE getting to the server ok but that's not recognised, you could use something else - curl or wget perhaps - to check whether each new file got there ok. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: how to limit a CPU temperature?
On Sat, 8 Apr 2023, at 15:26, songbird wrote: > songbird wrote: > ... >> i've been trying to find anything that will let me set this >> but no luck yet in my searches. Surely you don't need to set a temperature limit? If you do, the cpu will still run (far too much, but less than now) up to that lower max temperature. Wouldn't it be better to limit the amount of cputime that the hogging application is using? Google suggests that "nice" or "cpulimit" might do that. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Periodic refresh (or rwrite?) of data on an SSD (was: Re: Recommended SSDs and 4-bay internal dock)
On Sat, 14 Jan 2023, at 15:49, Dan Ritter wrote: > Let's separate the problem into three cases: > > - I recently deleted some files, I want them back. (Same as "I > recently changed some files, I want the old versions.") > > - I have lost a filesystem for some reason, I want it restored. > > - I need to have archival copies of some data which I probably > will never access, but just in case... > > > The deleted/changed files problem is best solved, if plausible, > with a snapshotting filesystem like ZFS, with automatic > snapshots and automatic deletion of sufficiently old snapshots. Although this is a debian list, not all my data is on systems that support such FSes. Eg on Windows ... There, I keep all the data where I want access to prior versions of files in Dropbox; I have a year's worth of old versions of all those files. (But finding the right one to reinstate is clumsy.) I also sometimes run a program that monitors selected filetypes and filenames within a specific directory and every time one of the matching files changes makes a date & time-time suffixed filename copy of that just-changed file. So if I was editing file xyz.pqr in a GUI appplication, every time I do a File->Save from within it as well as the xyz.pqr filebeing written to disk, a new file is created, named xyz (svd@20120716-190723).pqr containing a copy of the just-saved file. I first started using this when I was trying to reproduce, for the programmer, some file-corrupting tendencies in his application and wanted to make saved copies of the file after every change I made to it in the GUI. I kept detailed notes of exactly what I did corresponding to each "(svd@20120716-190723)" value. The programmer wasn't appreciative. He said "no other user complains as much as you do", rather than saying "thank you very much for providing detailed steps to reproduce each of these problems". Bah! > The restore-a-filesystem problem is best solved with a complete > filesystem copy to a similarly sized disk. SSDs are nice and > fast, but you may not actually need that speed if you don't have > to do a restore very often. ZFS send or rsync are good tools > here, or borg if you have special requirements. It's not so much the speed that attracts me to SSDs as the lack of moving parts and their resistance to shock. > The archive problem is best solved with spinning disks, which > are fast enough for most cases, much better priced per capacity, > and have well-understood stability over long periods of > unpowered time. Speed is not a colossal issue - backups can always run while I eat or sleep or whatever. Price is not that much of an issue either, as I know the hard way that angst & the time cost spent recovering lost data rapidly outweigh the minor capital cost of more backup devices. The long-term stability of spinning rust is certainly becoming a lot more important to me. But I already plan to store future backups on both types of disk. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Periodic refresh (or rwrite?) of data on an SSD (was: Re: Recommended SSDs and 4-bay internal dock)
On Fri, 13 Jan 2023, at 15:33, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > I've read some of that article, or, I guess, really the abstract and the > section labeled "Content" on that page: > > https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/potential-ssd-data-loss-after-extended-shutdown Is there a longer article? I have the impression that the Abstract & Content on that page is all there is. There seems to me to be some ambiguity about the way they write about "40C" which - I presume - is ambient temperature. Are they saying that these drives are rated to be used in temperatures not exceeding 40 degrees C (ie that if the temp is even higher the situation is likely (far?) worse than what's described here? That is, should the sentence "The JEDEC spec for Enterprise SSD drives requires that the drives retain data for a minimum of 3 months at 40C." be read as "The JEDEC spec for Enterprise SSD drives requires that the drives retain data for a minimum of 3 months at /temperatures of up to but not exceeding/ 40C." because this is also ambiguous "This means that after 3 months of a system being powered off in an environment that is at 40C or less, there is a potential of data loss ..." Either you can read that as implying the "40C or less" is part of the cause of data loss, or that it means "that after 3 months of a system being powered off in an environment that is /working as designed/ at 40C or less, there is a potential of data loss" that is, that it's the lack of power that's the cause, not the temperature. >From a chilly UK standpoint, 40 degrees C seems very high. I wonder if data retention is better or worse at - say - ambient temps of eg 15-20 degrees? I wonder how much worse home-user SSDs are than these Enterprise-rated ones. The whole issue makes me wonder if, say, I should plan on having several SSDs for each set of backup data (I mean separately from the common- sense approach of having more than one copy of anything anyway). Then every n weeks, delete the data from the least-recently written drive and copy a fresh copy (from the most recently written drive) onto that one, & verify that every file copied has the same hash as its original. (I suspect I'd want to keep lists of file hashes anyway, as a way of detecting when any backups start to go bad.) I'm not sure that that was clear. What I mean is that if I intended to keep a backup of a driveful of data, I might choose to have, say, this week's copy, last week's, and the week before. So apart from the original disk I'd have 3 other backup drives. Then for each of those there'd be two other drives in use, so 9 in all... -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Recommended SSDs and 4-bay internal dock
On Wed, 11 Jan 2023, at 14:58, Tom Browder wrote: > I plan to install a 4-bay, hot swappable SSD dock to replace the existing > DVD in my only 5.5" externally accesible bay. To fill it, I will get up to > four 2.5 inch SSDs of 1 Tb: MX500 by Crucial. My plan is to use the SSDs > for backup, but not in a RAID configuration. I can't advise on choice of dock etc, but I'm interested in the side issue of how long an unpowered SSD can be assumed still to be holding the data written to it. Does one need (just) to mount the drive once in a while? (How often?) Or does one need (say) to read every file on the drive once, so that the SSD controller can assess whether any data needs to be moved? Or does one need to read every byte, allocated or not? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Windows on VMware on Deb 11: safely usable?
On Wed, 17 Aug 2022, at 12:38, Jeremy Ardley wrote: > As an aside, a Windows host for a client sucks big time. Windows will > automatically restart periodically no matter what you do to prevent it. How often does that happen? I only ask because it doesn't for my pretty much always-on W8.1 laptop. I /choose/ to cold restart it every few weeks, when I remember, but it's not happening at random. No Windows Updates get installed automatically on that machine. I believe though that managing this gets harder on W10/W11 especially if one does not have the "Pro" or "Enterprise" versions of the OS. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Which Program does WebKitWebProcess belong to
On Fri, 27 May 2022, at 00:08, Greg Wooledge wrote: > That's presumably what you were going to get out of apt-file -- the name > of the package that contains WebKitWebProcess. Unfortunately that doesn't > tell you which *web browser* is using this library. > > Now, the OP probably knows which web browser they're running. Unless > they happen to be running more than one, in which case the confusion > is understandable. Isn't there also another possibility? Some programs which users don't think of as browsers use WebKit to present their user interface, I think. I'm fairly sure I've seen this on Windows machine, not sure about Linux. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: firefox and limited bookmarks. WTH?
On Sat, 22 Jan 2022, at 20:05, gene heskett wrote: > Since installing bullseye, and your version of firefox, discovering that > dissenter is history, I just found that firefoxes forever retention of > bookmarks now has a max limit set way too low ... I doubt my comment will be what you want to hear ... but I keep just TWO bookmarks in each browser (firefox, chrome, and in the past some others). Those are for google's advanced search page, & my local html disk file which is the starting point (*) for a set of html disk files which contain URLs of related-subject links that I often need. * - I don't actually have the bookmark point at a specific page of URLs, but instead at an initial file which contains a redirect to the first page of URLs. That way I can point it elsewhere if I need to, and that change will be seen everywhere. The html disk files are in Dropbox, so accessible to all my machines. If a browser forgets my two bookmarks, they're easy to reinstate, and they work on all browsers. As the bookmark files are just plain text files they can be searched by any utility, not something browser-specific. If I need to add a bookmark to one of my disk files, I edit it into place along with a description and any notes I might need related to it. I don't store any of my banking URLs on those pages; not because of a security concern but just because whenever I log in to a bank I will always be updating notes - not least the time & date of that login - and so I can refer to the URL stored in that bank's notes file. All the separate pages of URLs use broadly speaking the same html and simple CSS. They all contain a set of links to other similar files, and a reminder to me of what I'd need to type in a terminal window to open that specific page in a text editor. The simplest page (which doesn't tell you much about me & my interests) contains links to bits of the BBC's websites. See: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p8x9c7hkp6180lf/2022-01-22%20BBC_Bookmarks.jpg?dl=0 -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Firefox PDF download - strange behaviour.
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022, at 16:35, The Wanderer wrote: > So this could potentially be dangerous if the user chooses a directory > location that's high enough in the directory tree to have important > files already underneath it, but not if the user chooses e.g. a > dedicated Downloads directory. I'd expect malware using this mechanism to put forward a "plausible" reason why a naive user should select an unsafe directory, rather than a downloads one. >> I think I also read that once the code has a handle to a directory it >> can scan sub-directories as well. > > Yes, that appears to be correct. And that opens up the scourge of malware that correctly identifies what software one has installed, and/or aspects of its configuration, just based on what files/folders exist. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Firefox PDF download - strange behaviour.
On Tue, 18 Jan 2022, at 04:51, songbird wrote: > Jeremy Nicoll wrote: >> On Mon, 17 Jan 2022, at 05:19, songbird wrote: >> >>> you are right, but i just wanted to say that for some sites >>> the behavior is to generate a unique file name if they find >>> one that already exists with the same name and for other sites >>> it is not. i think this is dependent upon the website designers >>> and not firefox. >> >> Are you saying that code on a webpage can interrogate my >> file system to see whether certain files exist? I don't like the >> sound of that. > > you are running the webpage on your browser so it is your > own computer and your own program that is doing the accessing > just like any other program you run. The problem is that a user would normally only expect a browser to save a file to the file-system in two cases: (a) when the user has explcicitly chosen to download something, and then chooses where to put it (b) when the browser is cacheing content, or manipulating its own config files In both those cases it's code written by the browser's developers that's doing the writing. The new situation will allow any JS written by any page developer to access my files. I am unconvinced that this will never lead to malware doing things to files/folders on my system without my knowledge. It's a BIG change to users' expectations of what a browser can do. Users with no technical knowledge could get bitten by this. > what controls you wish > to put on the access to your file system and how you do that > is up to you and your own desires and capabilities. I don't think it should be up to me. I'd prefer to prohibit any JS in a browser from doing that. > but what i do is set where files are saved in a > specific directory and leave it at that That works fine while you can be sure that a browser is only saving downloaded files. What about when if can do anything it likes to any file/folder? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Firefox PDF download - strange behaviour.
On Mon, 17 Jan 2022, at 05:19, songbird wrote: > you are right, but i just wanted to say that for some sites > the behavior is to generate a unique file name if they find > one that already exists with the same name and for other sites > it is not. i think this is dependent upon the website designers > and not firefox. Are you saying that code on a webpage can interrogate my file system to see whether certain files exist? I don't like the sound of that. A quick google found me: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_Access_API which seems to describe ways that Javascript can read and write my files, and scan my directories (or will be able to when this API is implemented). There's not enough information, in my view, explaining how a browser user can prevent that. It says - if I'm reading it right - that it's secure because users are offered file pickers etc when a file is to be opened or file-save dialogs when something is to be created. But one of the code examples describes getting a handle to a directory and says if the directory doesn't exist yet it will be created. That suggests that rogue code could create folders on my system. I think I also read that once the code has a handle to a directory it can scan sub-directories as well. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Thunderbird not allowing local accounts
On Thu, 6 Jan 2022, at 05:31, Brad Rogers wrote: > Many CM users are successfully collecting mail from google using > oauth2. In the last couple of days there's been a flurry of discussion on the CM Developers' mail list about some problems with OAuth2 though. My impression, not knowing the ins, is that CM is ok with google but other servers that use OAuth2 - notably Microsoft ones - regularly revoke users' access tokens and the users currently have to set those up again manually. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Thunderbird not allowing local accounts
On Wed, 5 Jan 2022, at 19:52, Dan Ritter wrote: > Jeremy Nicoll wrote: >> On Wed, 5 Jan 2022, at 13:35, Paul M. Foster wrote: >> > Folks: >> > >> > I just restarted my machine, and am using Thunderbird 91.4.1 (the >> > latest) 64 bit on Debian 11. I didn't reinstall Thunderbird or upgrade >> > it... >> >> I've never used TB so these questions might be crazy ... >> >> Is TB able to import a set of mails stored in a folder somewhere >> else on a machine? > > That's the capability that appears to have gone away. Well, I said I'd not used TB. But on another client I used to use (until its author stopped maintaining it) these were separate facilities. One could define a mail account from which mails would be fetched, but they'd just be read from a folder. I did use that, when migrating from a client on a separate OS; that OS separated mail fetch from mail debatch so while still using that client on its own OS I spun off duplicate sets of incoming mails and had the new client debatch from those folders. Only once I was certain I had the new client working satisfactorily did I update it to fetch direct from mail servers and stop using the local folder source. Separately at any time one could manually do an import of mails from some place. Clearly the latter facility had to exist so that people could move mail from one mail client to another. In this situation I'd wonder if for example one could start TB from the commandline telling it to import from a folder, though that might not work if TB is already running. I'd also consider using some screen automation utility to automate the otherwise manual process of initiating an import via TB's menus. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Thunderbird not allowing local accounts
On Wed, 5 Jan 2022, at 13:35, Paul M. Foster wrote: > Folks: > > I just restarted my machine, and am using Thunderbird 91.4.1 (the > latest) 64 bit on Debian 11. I didn't reinstall Thunderbird or upgrade > it... I've never used TB so these questions might be crazy ... Is TB able to import a set of mails stored in a folder somewhere else on a machine? If it is, is that able to be scheduled somehow - eg via cron? Does TB have filter capabilities that affect what happens with mails as they're imported, perhaps separately from mails that are fetched from somewhere? If those work, would one need a separate mechanism to get the mails currently accumulating in "mail spool" or wherever into (exported?) a folder from which the import could pick them up? I know that if this affected me I'd be hugely upset having to consider abandoning one MUA and learning all the ins of another one, and would - in the short term anyway - prefer to find some way of making TB still see the mails concerned. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Identity Theft
On Mon, 20 Dec 2021, at 18:30, John Hasler wrote: > Jeremy Nicoll writes: >> How would Google intercept a financial institution's valid >> phone number? > > He was using Google Voice. When the OP "found" a number on screen, to ring, does that mean he eg clicked on the display of a number and then some software he has connected to a different number? Or did he use his eyes and read the number off the screen, then "dial" (presumably in software) that number he saw displayed (which later apparently worked properly) and got someone else? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Identity Theft
On Mon, 20 Dec 2021, at 16:12, John Hasler wrote: > Did you notify Google? Seems likely that's where the hole is. How would Google intercept a financial institution's valid phone number? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Mouse left button acts really strange
On Sat, 9 Oct 2021, at 19:52, sp...@caiway.net wrote: > I really like Logitech mouses (fast scrolling!), but when used often > they break each one/two year. I use my mice almost always in bed, with the mouse either on top of the duvet or running around under it on the sheet. (The laptop is on an overbed table.) What kills them most often is me forgetting where they are and getting out of bed causing the mouse to fly off the bed where it often collides with a bookcase (or worse) the metal frame of the overbed table. The poor mice expire traumatically, not even managing to call for help. No SQUEAK! Just a thud. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Help: explanation of secure flash?
On Tue, 6 Jul 2021, at 23:37, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > I've seen warnings (against hacks) that say (among other things) to enable > "secure flash". I've been googling to learn more about that, but I haven't > found any good explanation. > > I'm beginning to get hints that it is not so much a thing (to be enabled), > but > more the (a) process to update the computer's BIOS. (e.g., "'Unable to start > a Secure flash session' error message.") It might be a suggestion that you use your BIOS or UEFI to disable the machine's ability to boot off a USB stick ... because that - if it's on - allows anyone to reboot your machine with the OS and tools of their choice. So, you go into the BIOS, find the right option(s) and disable them, then make sure you have passwords set to control access to the BIOS if you didn't already have them set, then save & exit. If YOU ever need to boot from a USB stck you enter the BIOS again, supplying its password, and turn the option back on. Don't forget after that to disable it again. As to what the options(s) are actually called in your machine's BIOS, who knows? In my experience BIOS options normally have very terse names and the "help" text is only marginally more useful. But you should be able to google on the option name and the BIOS supplier's name and the BIOS version to find out more. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: examples for man pages
On Sat, 29 May 2021, at 21:03, Richard Owlett wrote: > The man page is, putting *mildly*, overwhelming. Is there a recommended > introduction to curl. curl is a big subject. While it's very useful to people who write scripts etc, on many platforms, the whole manual is aimed at programmers using it. Inevitably a lot of the information is quite detailed. If you're looking to learn more about one subject, getting distracted into learning about curl is possibly not a great idea! For a quick summary of some basic uses of curl, see https://curl.se/docs/manual.html For an longer, but much more educational read, try https://everything.curl.dev/ which was written by curl's author. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Piano live recording (was: Live recording)
On Tue, 4 May 2021, at 09:16, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > > I've just bought a Behringer UMC404HD audio interface and want to record live > piano by placing two microphones one at the trebles and one at the bass. The result of recording like this will (presumably) mimic what a player would hear, but won't sound so much like what any listener some distance from the piano would hear. You might also capture more noise from the mechanical action, than would be apparent at a distance. If people are listening to a pianist, in a concert hall, none of the listeners sit under or just over the piano, and none are usually hearing bass in one ear and treble in the other! In a concert hall, the ambience/reverberation characteristics of the hall will make a big difference to the result, as will things like whether (for a grand piano) wheher the lid is up a little or a lot. For an upright piano you might also think about whether its lid is open, and whether the piano is against a wall. There's also a philosophical difference between the sort of mic placement you're thinking of doing - close-micing an instrument and then (perhaps) applying digital effects, EQ etc afterwards, versus simply trying to capture the sound/feel of the instrument in the space it is in. > Is it better to use mono or omni directional microphones? Omni-directional mics are also mono, usually. The polar response (ie omni / figure of 8 / cardioid / hypercardioid) is not a mono/stereo choice. Stereo (or multi-channel) mics in a single body may also offer control over the "width" of the stereo image, or even (eg for Soundfield mics) the ability to adjust the array of capsules so they appear to tilt/point in different directions. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Multichannel audio playback (was: Multichannel audio listening)
On Tue, 27 Apr 2021, at 19:45, didier gaumet wrote: > I might be wrong (I don't mix nor record) but I think there are two > distinct problems: > > a) the wav file you generated is not supported by ecasound because its > type (codec) is neither (L)PCM nor IEEE_FLOAT > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV > So, either you produce a wav file encoded in LPCM to use ecasound, or > you use another tool than ecasound that supports the codec you used to > produce your wav file I'd want to use some other tool - "sox" perhaps - to verify that the file really does contain three channels of audio. Can, say, the three channels be selected one at a time and played back without using the Behringer box? I'd also need to be convinced that the alsa part of the command that someone posted did actually access the correct channels and try to send them somewhere. I'd probably want to try to use something else - maybe "sox" - to send test tones to three named places (as far as alsa is concerned) on the PC before trying to find out which of those arrived properly at the audio interface. > b) https://mediadl.musictribe.com/media/sys_master/h7e/hfb/8849567252510.pdf > your audio interface is a stereo one: it has only two channels (Left > +Right) as outputs. I'm not sure that's true; look at https://d1aeri3ty3izns.cloudfront.net/media/25/259085/download_259085.pdf (which is the second pdf linked to from https://www.gear4music.com/Recording-and-Computers/Behringer-U-PHORIA-UMC404HD-Audio-Interface/1WMY?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIheDYlJKf8AIVgQWiAx0ldgK6EAAYASAAEgI13fD_BwE ) which clearly states that the box can stream 4 inputs / 4 outputs. The PDF you linked to is one of those very annoying manuals that describe many different units, and it's very hard to understand what any single unit can do. Worse, there's no schematic showing where signals can flow to & from. I also looked at an Amazon listing for the box, but it had the same problem - people's comments applied to various different models. Although it does seem to support 4 separate outputs, these might be just copies of the signals supplied on the 4 mic/line inputs (so if one was using this box to record a couple of singers and guitarists - ie 4 inputs in all - copies of those signals could be played back to the performers). On the other hand there's a MIX control which appears to change how signals coming from the 4 inputs are mixed with those (from a PC?) that are being played back. Maybe if that's turned all the way to the PB position audio channels from the PC would be directed to the playback outputs? > Even if there are 3 groups of output, they all play > the same thing, a stereo signal. I think that's true of the "MAIN OUTPUT" but I'm not sure it also applies to the "PLAYBACK OUTPUTS". > As a sidenote: are we speaking of the same thing? Inputs are called > tracks. You could for example have 4 mono tracks for a rock band > (1:singer, 2:guitar, 3:bass, 4:drums) and each of these tracks are mixed > and panned to 2 outputs (Left and right) that are called channels. This unit has no pan controls, so panning the 4 inputs to positions on a stereo image must be something done by mixing software on a PC. That makes the buttons that refer to stereo/mono more confusing, as the box itself has no concept of stereo. Does it follow that the box sends 4 inputs to a PC, and the PC might send back either/both copies of those 4 inputs and a mixed stereo image? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Google Translate stopped working
On Sun, 14 Mar 2021, at 16:13, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote: > So I'm thinking this is not a problem in firefox. Might it be a Java > problem? Why would it be? Hardly anyone installs Java. The laptop I'm using right now runs Windows, doesn't have any JRE installed, and google translate seems to work fine. (That's with FF 86.0.1.) -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Social-media antipathy (was Re: How i can optimize my operating system?)
On Fri, 12 Mar 2021, at 19:03, Peter Hillier-Brook wrote: > I'm just guessing, but how do they access Facebook and yet not be able > to use a telephone? I think some of you miss some of the advantages of Facebook. It allows me to stay loosely in touch with around 120 friends, many of whom I have not seen face-to-face for maybe 30 years. They can see I'm still alive and I them, and I'm able to feel just slightly more in-touch with them. The overall effect is a bit like that of receiving a once-per-year round-robin letter from each of them, except that instead of a whole wodge of news coming once per year, one gets - shall we say - a fiftieth of the amount 50 times more often. It also allows one to comment immediately on something someone else has done, which requires a lot less commitment than a full conversation with someone whom, in fact, one perhaps no longer knows well. I would not expect most of these people ever to ring me, and by the same token I am not going to ring 120 people, who're now spread all across the world. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: swamp rat bots Q
On Fri, 4 Dec 2020, at 05:03, Gene Heskett wrote: > Fail2ban does not come configured to do anything. In this case, not even > waste cpu cycles. I've now read thru most of the configs, which may have > been semi applicable in 2013, the date of its last update. But this, in > case no one has noticed, is now the fading ragged edges of 2020. I was puzled when I read your plea yesterday, because 20 seconds with Google found me https://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Have you read all the info there? Also there's a support maillist. Why not join it and ask questions there? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Hijacking Threads [was: Re: rsync link corruption with -H and --link-dest]
On Sun, 22 Nov 2020, at 16:55, Gareth Evans wrote: > > Once one sets up an MUA correctly, one only has to click 'Compose' for > > all the required fields, apart from Subject, to be filled in. > > When does clicking "compose" have this effect? In a good (probably standalone) MUA. In Fastmail's webmail system there's not much of that flexibility, however in a specific folder's "Advanced Preferences" you can set the identity which will be used when you compose a mail when that is the current folder. So here, if I have my debian-users folder selected, then click on Compose (which annoyingly needs me to scroll the folders list back to the top), the new window will open with "From:" set appropriately. I have to set the "To:" address manually, but in contacts I defined all my mailing list to-addresses as "ML - list name" so typing just ML in the TO field gives me a picking list of valid values. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: "humor": "first bug?" (bug in my (backlit thin screen) computer monitor)
On Sat, 21 Nov 2020, at 12:09, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > I was hoping that I could crush it by pressing (reasonably gently) on the > somewhat flexible front protective layer of the screen - which would leave a splodge that you can't clean ... If you turn the screen off, so there's no backlight and no heat from that - I suppose that might take a while to cool, at least on the scale that the beastie is aware of - & mask the majority of the screen off from ambient light, can you tempt the thing to follow a focussed light (or unfocussed but revealed through a pinhole in a sheet of paper perhaps) off to the edge? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Replacement Email Client
On Wed, 28 Oct 2020, at 03:59, David Wright wrote: > I've found those sorts of emails (loosely coupled images) are easy to > deal with. In mutt, for example, press v for the attachments menu, > and again on any multipart or message/rfc822 that needs opening, > exposing the attachments within. Ages ago, using an email client that allowed one to edit the raw content of emails (handy for doing things like splitting OT parts of threads, changing Subjects to what meant something to me, etc) I had scripts that ran within my text editor which would do things like find all the attachments in an email and assign sensible names and content types to them. Then when that was saved the client's normal export/detach options could be used to process the files. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Replacement Email Client
On Tue, 27 Oct 2020, at 21:04, Dan Ritter wrote: > - Use a good MUA and resign yourself to occasionally sending an > email to a browser. Despite your protestations of "logging > in", having a browser display your email requires no such > thing. The MUA saves the email to a file, then hands the file > to the browser to open it. If the email also contained umpteen attachments each of which was (typically) an image, then the MUA needs to create a folder containing the html and the unpacked images. Depending on the way that the html referred to those images, the MUA also needs to revise the form of the image references inside the written-out html so that the written-out image files can be found by the browser when it processes the html. It's not quite as simple as you make out, especially if the code has to work on multiple platforms / file systems. In my experience such mails are usually forwarded jokes etc, and another problem is that they often contain forwards of forwards of forwards (etc) with nested sets of attachments (as a succession of technically naive users just forward the mail they received, rather than creating a new original one with just once set of contents). Some email clients also don't assign separate names to the attachments, so when they get written out the MUA has to invent a name sequence (and of course modify the html accordingly). -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Replacement Email Client
On Mon, 26 Oct 2020, at 13:49, Curt wrote: > On 2020-10-26, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > But what would the form's Submit action be? > HTML Forms > > ... which works fine when someone is browsing a page served by some website's own server... as that partial URL points to a php file which is part of the website concerned. But the point that Greg is making (I assume) is that if you view an html file that was part of an email, in a browser, that "/action_page" will not point anywhere sensible unless it contains a full URL. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Replacement Email Client
On Sun, 25 Oct 2020, at 20:18, Charles Curley wrote: > Indeed, same as claws-mail. M. Bartek is using claws-mail now, and > wants to get away from it because he doesn't want to log in to the mail > account? I'm not following, either. I think there's a difference between a mail which has an html copy of plain text, where images etc that might be required for the html page can be fetched from servers - in that case a browser will be able to display the page well ... and emails which contain html and a set of associated image attachments. In the latter case, just dumping the html into a temporary file and pointing a browser at it won't also give the browser access to the associated images, unless (I suppose) a folder full of images are passed to the browser as well as the html page, AND the image references inside the html somehow are modified from whatever would have worked inside an email client, so that they browser can pick up the images in the folder. By "logging-in", I guess the OP is referring to using a webmail system where the webmail server presents an integrated view of the html page and the unpacked embedded attached images. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Question: SSD speed
On Wed, 7 Oct 2020, at 17:40, Hans wrote: > Hi all, > > thanks for the reponse. However, it looks, I did not ask clearly enough. > > So let me ask again: If the ssd supports 6Gbyte/sec transferrate It doesn't. It's 6 giga bits per second which means about 600 megabytes. >, is there the > option to set the controller of the motherboard also to 6Gbyte/sec? I think you'd need to check the specific motherboard model and possibly its firmware with its manufacturer. No-one else will know. > And second: If the real transferrate is only 1,5Gbyte/sec, No, that's 1.5 giga BITS pr second... so about 150 megabytes/sec. > does this mean, > that the sata controller is not capable to higher transferrates or does it > possibly mean, that my configuration is wrong? You need to find out what your hardware is capable of. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Question: SSD speed
On Wed, 7 Oct 2020, at 12:14, Alberto Sentieri wrote: > Just a small correction: it I believe SATA uses 8B/10B protocol, which > means each byte uses 10 bits on the serial channel. I didn't know that. Divide bps by ten to get Bps is the rule of thumb I use for things like broadband connections, to allow for protocol overhead. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Question: SSD speed
On Wed, 7 Oct 2020, at 09:39, Hans wrote: > Hi folks, > > I have a little question. Smartctl is telling me, that my ssd drive is > 6Gb/sec > capable, but the actual speed is only 1,5GB/sec. If your SATA (presumably) connection from the machine to the SSD is a 6 Gbps one, the maximum data transfer speed in bytes across that connection would be one eighth of that (as there's 8 bits per byte), so about 760 MBps. That's about half of your "1,5GBps". That makes me wonder if your SSD uses two SATA channels at once - is that even possible? Alternatively, do any SSDs compress data before sending it across the SATA channel? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: FOSS friendly PDA?
On Wed, 12 Feb 2020, at 17:46, Richard Owlett wrote: > The Planetcom site states that Debian can be installed. All my systems > are Debian. > > I'll have to get back to the sites this evening. What the Planet website states is, I think, their original intention. My impression is that they provided a "loader" but don't themselves do the necessary Debian development, and there's been less of that than was expected. You really do need to find the forums (at I think the OESF place I mentioned before) and read about what is actually possible, eg at https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showforum=194 Also see: https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Linux_Flashing_Guide https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Debian_Notes -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: FOSS friendly PDA?
On Tue, 11 Feb 2020, at 16:09, Richard Owlett wrote: > I wish to enter/store data while away from home. The data will then be > transferred to my laptop via a USB cable. [Think the capability of one > of the old Palm Pilots in a smartphone(sic) form factor] You might want to skim through the discussions at https://www.oesf.org/forum - which discuss various PDA and similar machines. Eg there's lots of Gemini PDAs available ro likely to be because their manufacturer has brought out a new model - a thing called the Cosmo Communicator. They're not cheap, new, but second hand ones might be more affordable. My impression is that a lot of these machines although theoretically able to run linux don't have sufficient developers able to work on them for all the wrinkles to be fixed. That is, other OSes may be bootable but it's strictly "enthusiasts only" territory. > It must use a standard Linux (Debian preferred). Why? Surely all you need is a decent text editor, and a file manager. > The manufacturer should ship with the Linux installed. > Android is *UNACCEPTABLE*! Why? If you only use the machine to write data to an SD card, why is the OS a problem? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: local network capability scanner?
On Fri, 7 Feb 2020, at 07:04, Gene Heskett wrote: > But file moves to/from the machines in the garage seems to indicate > theres a slow connection of around 10Mb/s someplace in that path. Later you said: > But on really big writes, the ssd's decay to around 17-20 mb/s. Surely here you meant MB/s? If the SSDs will take data at 17-20 MBps then that will need more than just (17-20) * 8 ie 136-160 Mbps data to be transferred across the network, as far as I know. There's protocol/control data that is passed around as well. In the past I found it simpler to multiply / divide by ten, so for 17 MB to pass across a network I'd assume the network would move approximately 170 Megabits. Maybe things are more efficient now? Anyway if SSD speed is the issue, your network is presumably moving nearer 170-200 Mbps to feed the disks at their max rate. That's nearly 20 times the "slow" data rate you mentioned in your original question. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Progress {of a sort} - was [Re: Pluma's syntax highlighting]
On Mon, 13 Jan 2020, at 16:01, Richard Owlett wrote: > On 01/13/2020 07:57 AM, Jeremy Nicoll wrote: > > [ *MASSIVE* snip ] Fuck off. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Pluma's syntax highlighting
On Mon, 13 Jan 2020, at 13:03, Richard Owlett wrote:
> On 01/13/2020 06:13 AM, Jeremy Nicoll wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Jan 2020, at 11:52, Richard Owlett wrote:
> >
> >> I was looking for a description of what Pluma was trying to accomplish
> >> by their highlighting rules.
> >
> > Do you understand the purpose of syntax highlighting (in general)?
>
> Yes. Its specific goal is to aid a programmer WHILE coding.
> However, I'm trying to understand a vendor supplied bash script.
A programmer coding, is the same thing as a programmer (albeit a
different one, you) looking at a script written by someone else. The
colouring should, hmm, emphasise the role played by different
character sequences on the screen. Eg it may allow you to determine
the difference between
arrayname(expression) and functioncall(expression)
But it won't teach you the semantics of the programming language.
YOU still have to know how bash scripts work.
If the colouring distracts you, turn it off, and see if you find the
uncoloured script easier to understand.
> One reference explicitly said that Pluma associates a "sh" extension
> with the text being a bash script {matches my use case}.
>
> > [snip]
> > That apart, it would help enormously if you posted a screenshot of what
> > you're seeing, and some explanation of why you think the colouring is
> > wrong.
> There are cases where I would expect different keywords to have the same
> highlighting -- they didn't.
That may simply be because the logic driving the colouring process only has
a very small grasp of what the overall code does. If you like, for some reason
- maybe this specific editor's colouriser isn't as powerful as you'd like - it
can't tell the difference between
array(23) and function(23)
> The implication is that Pluma's highlighting is attempting to convey
> information that I am not receiving.
>
> Therefore I need to know what Pluma's goal was.
Its goal will be to /aid/ understanding. But I emphasis, these things very
rarely have the level of understanding of a full parser.
You should somewhere be able to look at the definitions that drive each
aspect of the colouriser's logic, and the colours assigned to each such
element. If you see elements with an unexpected colour, look up the defs
to see what the colours you are seeing represent, and then have a think
about how a program - that more than likely has analysed a specific line
of the script without knowing much or anything about the rest of the script
- might view just that line all by itself, & reach the conclusions it must have
done about those elements.
Put it another way, if you put just a handful of lines in a separate file, does
that file get coloured the same way?
--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Pluma's syntax highlighting
On Mon, 13 Jan 2020, at 11:52, Richard Owlett wrote: > I was looking for a description of what Pluma was trying to accomplish > by their highlighting rules. Do you understand the purpose of syntax highlighting (in general)? (It's to /aid/ a programmer, reducing the chance of them making silly mistakes when typing in code.) If so, do you understand that - in some text editors at least, maybe all of them - syntax highlighting is an /aid/, but doesn't usually exactly match the precise nuances of the programming language that's displayed. That's because the precise nuances would need the text editor to have a fully syntax-aware parser for every language it's capable of highlighting. So what usually happens is that the editor will recognise (having been told how to) the general shape of a certain language's characteristics. For example, it'll know how commenting works, rules for variable names, how if/then/else/endif etc should look, how strings are delimited ... and so on. Many text editor syntax highlighters only look at each line of the file in isolation, except for checking for block comments, string delimiters and the overall if/case/select control structures. So they might be able to keep track of nested indentation across many lines of the file, or spot what appears to be the start and end of long blocks of comments. Usually they can be fooled if you format/layout code in peculiar ways - ways that a language compiler will understand, but the editor can't. One of the reasons for this is that the highlighting needs to adjust how it colours a line very very fast, as a user types new characters or removes some. There's no time to run a complete 'compile'/parse of the whole file (between user keypresses) to adjust the whole file's colouring. It occurs to me that in your specific situation there may be syntax differences between different shell languages, and the editor may possibly be using the rules for one such language when in fact the script is written in a different one. That apart, it would help enormously if you posted a screenshot of what you're seeing, and some explanation of why you think the colouring is wrong. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: sed question
On Sat, 7 Dec 2019, at 14:20, songbird wrote: > The Wanderer wrote: > > ... about various characters and then @ in particular ... > > > As far as I can see, at least on my keyboard, that pretty much just > > leaves @. It does still sometimes occur in paths and filenames, so it's > > not really ideal, but it's probably less common there than any of the > > non-special-meaning others. > > my specific use wasn't for paths or file names but text in > general which i'd previously typed in as a summary. so rarely > any special characters in there at all (other than the end of > line characters). it was always delimited by triple "'s so i > had to split that chunk to get rid of those. On other systems I've got around this by translating the strings to a hex representation, then issued the command in hex terms, so eg instead of this = "first string" that = "new value" "c /"this"/"that"/" I've had thishex = c2x(this) ie: "666972737420737472696E67" thathex = c2x(that)ie: "6E65772076616C7565" "c /'"thishex"'/'"thathex"'/" which is to say "c /'666972737420737472696E67'/'6E65772076616C7565'/" -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: How to download email messages from Yahoo Groups in Debian?
On Sun, 27 Oct 2019, at 00:35, Gerardo Ballabio wrote: > Thank you, but I need some more help. > > I've downloaded the script, but the README says that I need to supply > "the T and Y cookie" and that I should be able to extract them from my > browser. > > My browser is Firefox. I've checked and it doesn't seem to provide a > way to extract cookies. Under Tools - Web Developer - Storage Inspector (at least on FF v70) there is a display of Cookie names, values etc. > Furthermore I don't know what "the T and Y cookie" are and how to find > them among other cookies. Maybe their names are "T" and "Y"? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Top 7 Programming Languages That Employers Really Want
On Fri, 18 Oct 2019, at 23:34, John Hasler wrote: > I guess some people who started with BASIC do eventually recover. It's not all that bad. At my first place of employment, we ran WATERLOO BASIC (from the University of Waterloo) for students to learn how to program. This was on an IBM mainframe, running VM/CMS, and the text editor (Xedit) was programmable. I wrote a set of fairly complex Xedit 'macro' programs which allowed students to write code in an extended non-line- numbered syntactically-sugared version of the language, with what appeared to be 'proper' procedures/functions. As they exited from the editor, the macros converted the code they'd typed back to the more basic form of the language for it to be run, and as they started to edit one of these programmes the GOTO-ridden code would be transformed into the apparently more structured version of the language. Unfortunately we could only let the more competent students use the 'better' language, because they had to understand the 'on the fly' changes that were made... so they could cope with runtime error messages from the actual (less sophistcated) code, which didn't precisely match what they saw in the text editor. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Top 7 Programming Languages That Employers Really Want
This discussion is spammed across a whole bunch of linux dstro mail lists. On Fri, 18 Oct 2019, at 19:56, ghe wrote: > Pascal teaches you to think good thoughts. It's was a wonderful language > to learn back in the late 1970s. Yes, or Algol... > Perl's mantra is "There's more than one way to do it". That's part of > the reason Perl's considered (by some) a write only language -- you > can't understand what you wrote last week. Perl is a whole lot more readable than APL. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Email based attack on University
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, at 10:03, Keith Bainbridge wrote: > Details are at > > https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/anu-cyber-hack-how-personal-information-got-out/11550578 > https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/the-sophisticated-anu-hack-that-compromised-private-details/11566540 It seems to me that everything follows from whatever access the initial 'unclicked email' malware gave to the hackers. But how can malware jump from an email that's not "clicked", into some part of the university's systems? Unless... the email was being viewed via a webmail system running on a server not owned by the university? Then... is this just malware of the sort that any website could deliver to any visitor? Even if it was, one might expect the viewer to have been using a desktop PC of some sort, with - surely - whatever anti-malware software the university deems appropriate for their PCs? Or... do all their staff use a mish-mash of personal devices, and those don't have to have any anti-malware apps on them? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: not wanting to delete somebody's home directory
On Sat, 6 Jul 2019, at 16:37, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > The classic method to make both sorting criteria match is to prepend > '0' characters to the shorter numbers so that all number texts have the > same length. Then lexical ordering yields > > 01 02 03 11 12 ... 19 21 If you don't know beforehand whether you're aiming for two-digit or three- or four-digit numbers an alternative is to number your files from eg 1 so they get names 10001 10002 10003 .. 10021 -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Speed Problem Copying Files
On Thu, 9 May 2019, at 15:17, Gene Heskett wrote: > ... and its one of the reasons > an SSD seems so much faster because they seek in a microsecond In what sense does an SSD have "seek time"? Seek time is a tightly defined thing. There must be delays in SSD firmware's processing, I suppose, but it isn't seek time. Also, I wonder how you can say that that delay is a microsecond long? Which manuafacturer, which product, what level of firmware? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Flushing all Buffers Before Exiting
On Fri, 22 Mar 2019, at 00:53, Martin McCormick wrote: > Opening, appending and closing for each new line of > output made me a bit squeamish. ... You could always count lines written and do a close & reopen every (say) 1000 lines. That way there's less overhead but the amount of data you might lose is reduced. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: cups "Filter failed" | filter rastertopdf stops with status 1 | local printing works; remote printing not
On Mon, 28 Jan 2019, at 15:11, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > Maybe I am morphing into a cat, but what does bananian mean. Googling didn't > help, showed me Banyan (a fruit) and talked about a website and whether it is > safe for children. The very first hit I get is for a linux distro. And I didn't ned to be a sophisticated Googler; I provided just one word (I think you can guess what it was) as the search argument. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: librecad
On Sun, 9 Dec 2018, at 01:47, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Saturday 08 December 2018 17:53:01 Jeremy Nicoll wrote: > [...] > > The pid was there so that when writing and testing the script > > I could tell which was which in taskmanager, which saw them > > all as the same thing - an instance of the script language's > > interpreter being run. > > > I can see where that could, if you "got your head" around it, be pretty > handy. But half or more of my gcode mistakes are typu's. And the rs274D > interpretor is very VERY good at recommending you learn to type. ;-) In the music typesetting thing, one of the BIG problems was that a sequence of things done via its GUI (obviously) changed the file, but apart from my errors, bugs in the software meant that a session reloaded from a previously-saved file didn't always behave as the edit session where one had made the changes behaved. I haven't used it for a while but I'm sorely tempted to learn how to use another system [Philip Hazel (of Exim & PCRE)'s PMW], where plain text files are interpreted to create PostScript scores. I think that the non- GUI approach suits me better. > > The script is written in ooREXX > Back when we did most of our scripting on amiga's, ARexx was the language > to top all the rest... Most of my REXX was written on MVS (now z/OS) systems and was what's commonly called 'Classic REXX', somewhat predating even ANSI REXX. On a PC, I use ooREXX but nearly none of its oo capabilities - one can write code that's very similar to Classic non-oo REXX. > Computers are to reduce one's work, not multiply it times 15. Call me > lazy, but it "works for me".. I'm no longer wholly enthusiastic about learning completely new things (because of chronic illness) but I keep meaning to try to get to grips with Linux... which is why I lurk here. If and when I do, I expect to keep using ooREXX. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: automating reactions to file system changes
On Sat, 8 Dec 2018, at 23:49, David Christensen wrote: > On Linux, the inotify(7) is an alternative to polling: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify Windows has event-driven ways to do this too, (one can] google for, for example, WMI and PowerShell event-based scripts)... but I'd have had to learn a whole lot more to do it that way. What I wanted was an immediate solution to get me through a nightmare in music typesetting, not an excuse to learn another programming language and more about Windows internals. If the simple approach had been horrendously inefficient, I might have looked for a better method, but the overhead of doing it the way I did was negligible. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: librecad
On Sat, 8 Dec 2018, at 18:59, Gene Heskett wrote: > ... but the lack of a plainly marked, multiple step undo gets > me into a dead end box that results in a quit w/o save every time. I had a similar problem with a music-typesetting package under Windows. I guess a versioning file system (as discussed here fairly recently) would help, but I don't have one. Eventually I solved it with a script which examines a set of files (I specify a pattern for those) in the folder I'm working in. When it starts and every few seconds (eg 10 secs) afterwards, it looks at the files whose name matches that pattern. For every file it finds for which there is not a corresponding backup copy, it makes one. A backup copy of a file has (svd@mmdd-hhmmss) appended to its extensionless leafname, where the date & time correspond to the time the backed-up file was last saved (not the time that this script saved the backup). So as soon as the script starts it makes a copy of each matching file (assuming none of those had prior backup copies) then whenever such a file changes and is written to disk again, another backup is made.So eg Some song or other.pqr could yield: Some song or other (svd@20120716-184500).pqr Some song or other (svd@20120716-190723).pqr etc I experimented with the monitor delay, and found (on a modern PC) when not using a filename pattern that matched huge numbers of files, that there was no performance hit at all whether I looked at the files every second or two or a good deal less often. I made the script pop-up a message box though when it had successfully made a copy, and got into the habit of waiting for that confirmation every time I'd just saved a file. Rather than writing the script, what took longest to do was getting used to remembering to save the file(s) I was working on so often. I used to keep detailed notes about I was doing to the musical score, as well, and stored the incrementally changing backup filenames in the notes so it was easy to go back to previous points. Not only was this useful for undoing my mistakes, it proved useful for finding bugs in the typesetter AND being able to send the author of that test files and 'what to do to recreate the problem' notes. It was quite often a day or two after I made some change to a file that I found repercussions of that change, so notes (to help me find the key files) were really important. The script itself would run until stopped. I controlled that by having each script generate a carefully-named flagfile and as soon as that was deleted the corresponding script would stop.I could have multiple instances of the script running at once, and both the flagfiles and the typesetter (or whatever else) files were kept in folders visible from other machines/userids (all me though). So flagfiles had in them - a representation of the monitored filename pattern - the monitor time interval - the machine name - the userid name - the time the script started - the pid under it was running The pid was there so that when writing and testing the script I could tell which was which in taskmanager, which saw them all as the same thing - an instance of the script language's interpreter being run. The script is written in ooREXX; anyone who wants it can have a copy. I expect somethig similar could be written in loads of other langages, but it's the one I know best. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: librecad
On Thu, 6 Dec 2018, at 22:32, Gene Heskett wrote: > Or is there an even better 2d app for such? There was a discussion here starting in Nov 2017, entitled "software to do drawings of houses, gardens, etc." where several people bemoaned the difficulty they had in getting any GUI-based CAD program to do what they needed, without a huge learning curve. Someone described how they'd instead used hand-coded PostScript (which is in essence a set of drawing commands, normally sent to a laser printer) to draw plans for house changes. Something like that might be easier to get to grips with. A /big/ advantage of using scripts is that one gets to place comments in the script explaining what's going on, why one did something in a particular way etc. Also scripts easily allow parameterisation of values - eg (for the house plans) what the thickness of a piece of timber is, or what the spacing between regular items should be. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Output lagging from terminal
On Sun, 28 Oct 2018, at 12:07, Per Dalgas Jakobsen wrote: > From shell running: while true; do date +%s.%N; sleep 1; done > > In all cases, the output content is as expected: regular increment of > the time displayed, however the time at which the lines are displayed is > not regular. How much variation? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Advice on mailing list software -- special requirements
On Tue, 23 Oct 2018, at 14:53, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > (Aside to Jeff: Just sending you a copy of this for your information.) > > Background: I am working with a Linux SIG that used to be part of a more > general computer group. We plan to change the name to mention "LUG" (GLVLUG > -- Greater Lehigh Valley Linux User Group). > > I want to establish a mailing list for the group. > > I want to find either: > >* a "service" that would host a mailing list for the group for free Try: https://www.freelists.org/ I've been a subscriber on several mail lists hosted by them, for years, and the service does seem solid. As far as I know they do not offer any sort of web- based interface for subscribers (the login option on their website is - last time I looked, anyway - for the administrator(s) of specific lists. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Car Audio USB Jacks
On Fri, 27 Jul 2018, at 09:00, Curt wrote: > wav is lossless, I believe, not lossy, but your tongue (or some digits) > probably > slipped. Wrong. Wav is a container format, which can contain compressed or uncompressed audio. The compressed stuff may be lossy or not. And... anyone could add at any time a new format so even if lossy compression wasn't allowed now (though it is, you can have mp3 data in .wav files) that doesn't mean it can't happen in future. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Strange LAN IP Address.
On Tue, 3 Jul 2018, at 07:19, john doe wrote: > You are correct in the case of an ADSL "router". > > Sadly, in the case of my European ISP I'm stuck with what they give me! > I must say that I've never investigated how I could use my own cable > modem and understand the kind of restriction they're using to prevent me > from doing that!!! :) I've a Virgin Media cable connection in the UK. They supply a combined modem/router.But the unit can be put into modem-only mode, and used with a different router. So far as I remember the first of these combined things that I received came with only very basic instructions that did not mention the way to do this - it was Virgin's own technical support people who told me how to do it.Subsequent improved models have come with instructions that mentioned the possibility. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Multichannel audio listening
On Thu, 8 Mar 2018, at 19:43, Doug wrote: > Somewhat off topic, but I'd like to know, if anyone reading here does, > what to do with a phono player that has four-channel output: > Four RCA jacks in the familiar red and black colors. I know there were > for a short time four-channel disks, but I only have a modern stereo > input amplifier. I believe that the original intent was to have two > speakers in front of you, and two speakers behind you. And of course, > I only have stereo (2-channel) recordings. Anyone know what to do > with these outputs? If you have no 4-channel discs, then I doubt it matters. You might want to try either the supposed-front pair, versus the supposed rear pair to see if you prefer the sound from one or other... supposing that the cartridge in the player is also 4-channel-capable. If the cartridge is a 2-channel one then presumably only one pair of outputs are connected anyway? There's maybe a risk that playing stereo discs on the player will damage the discs or the player. I have no idea. There may be websites, forums, or newsgroups where you could get better advice. I used to spend a lot of time on "rec.audio.pro", though asking there would be more an appeal to people who might know of such machines rather than a pro-audio question. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Multichannel audio listening
On Thu, 8 Mar 2018, at 14:17, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> What I want now, and for what I
> started the present thread, is, as I said, to keep those three channels
> separated and listen to them through three different loudspeakers. Thanks to
> the kind help from you listers, I understand that I need one of those
> multichannel sound cards...
It's not normal to do that I mean I understand why you want to, I
think. But consider: if someone records an orchestra on - say - 96
channels... they don't have 96 loudspeakers to listen to each of the
inputs at the same time.
Instead, a mixing desk would allow you to listen to any individual
channel through your studio loudspeakers ('monitors'). A decent
mixing desk usually offers, for each channel, something called PFL
(Pre Fade Listen) which lets you hear the signal on that channel
even if the fader on the channel is not turned up (so you can check
the channel is working alright before bringing it into a mix). There's
also 'Solo' which when the button is pressed would let you hear one
channel instead of the whole mix, often/usually 'in place' which
means in its position in the stereo mix. So if that channel was panned
all the way to the left, when you Solo it you'd hear it only in the left
monitor.
Mixing desks (or equivalent audio software) tend to let you 'group'
channels together. So eg (in an orchestra) you might have multiple
mics on the strings, more on wind instruments etc... and in the mixer
you might choose to group the wind instrument channels together,
so you could listen to all of them as one unit (in stereo), or all the
strings together.
Mixing desks (or software) don't just produce a single mix of the
source channels. In a theatre or concert hall there might be
several places that some sounds have to be sent to, apart from
an overall stereo recording.
--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Multichannel audio listening
On Wed, 7 Mar 2018, at 21:29, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Fantastic... On the back of the device I read `PLAYBACK OUTPUTS'. I wish to > better understand those entries: two white, two red and four black. Please > what's the difference between them, and how do they work? There's 4 phono (RCA) sockets - the white and red ones, giving you conventional RCA/phono connections eg to an amplifier. Those will be 'unbalanced' connections ie each has a signal and a screen. Each of the four outputs is also provided on a 1/4-inch jack socket (the four black holes you can see). It's just a different type of connector providing the same output signal, possibly 'balanced' on a TRS (tip, ring, sleeve) jack... The specifications listed at http://www.musictri.be/Categories/Behringer/Computer-Audio/Interfaces/UMC404HD/p/P0BK1 do not make it clear whether the four output 1/4" jacks are TRS or not, though it does say that the 'main outputs' (presumaby a stereo monitor mix) are available on balanced TRS jacks as well as balanced XLRs. Ah... the "Quick Start Guide" available on: http://www.musictri.be/Categories/Behringer/Computer-Audio/Interfaces/UMC404HD/p/P0BK1/downloads has a more detailed list of what each socket is - those 4 'black holes' ARE 'TLS' jacks, ie balanced - that is there's three connections for each channel - the +ve half of a waveform, the -ve half, & the screen. So if you were connecting the four channel outputs to domestic audio/hifi equipment you'd use the RCA phono jacks (the white and red ones) and if you were connecting it to studio equipment that could handle/expected balanced connections you'd use the TLS jacks (black sockets). -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Multichannel audio listening
On Wed, 7 Mar 2018, at 09:06, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Fantastic... thanks, Joel. I want to buy one of those multichannel > soundcards... Do you think this one could be all right...? > https://www.strumentimusicali.net/product_info.php/products_id/51790/behringer-umc404hd.html?gclid=Cj0KCQiAuP7UBRDiARIsAFpxiRKgsptPW1qxkEw793ahs684ltlhyh5dcIgzLJXtDh39CZA8IEX3qgIaAnquEALw_wcB You have two sets of requirements... the first is whether any box you select will actually work with linux (and of course Debian). This discussion suggests it may be ok: https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=17231 but there's always a risk that a firmware update on a box might alter the way it works. I'd suggest you google for more recent discussions of that box and linux. You also of course require the thing to do what you want muscially. There will be lots of reviews around.I'd suggest you read all the reviews on Amazon and other sellers - it's when people mention the things they don't like about some unit that you'll learn more than when they talk about things that just work. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Multichannel audio listening
On Mon, 5 Mar 2018, at 16:14, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Let's then have a two-channels audio file, let's call it input.wav. Sox > should > be told to send channel 1 of input.wav to soundcard 1 and channel 2 of > input.wav to soundcard 2. Having a look at sox manual, I didn't find anything > such... I did say earlier: > >> Maybe 'sox' can direct audio to multiple channels, but I think you > >> will need to tell sox which hardware devices to use. The section > >> of the sox manual, page 3, "Playing & Recording Audio" might help. You'll need to adapt the definition of the output device to whatever your hardware requires. That is, I expect that setting AUDIODEV will be the answer, but I can't say HOW you would set it.You'd need to look at the manual for your specific hardware, I think. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: can someone tell me how to make FF fill out, or type into a form, and submit it?
On Mon, 5 Mar 2018, at 15:30, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > On Sunday, March 04, 2018 11:50:35 PM Gene Heskett wrote: > > On Sunday 04 March 2018 23:35:37 rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > > > On Sunday, March 04, 2018 10:19:00 PM Gene Heskett wrote: > > > > I have just completed trying nearly all the browsers in the wheezy > > > > repo's, without finding one that can do that. All, when arriving at > > > > such a page, spin the mouse cursor forever, blocking any progress > > > > from that point on. I can with most, type into the form, but the > > > > spinning cursor prevents any response to the submit, or next page > > > > buttons. True even when no pluggins are installed. > > > > > > > > Is there a fix for this? > > > > > > Do you have an example of a form / URL that doesn't work? I don't > > > think I have any trouble. > > > > <https://cqrcengage.com/gunowners/app/write-a-letter?2=445634; > > ep=C2Flc0NpcGhlcjAxhwtCJFUCsnlrluM4QSDJeqmcYN5jmug6V2q9RP_8-SOOx5PXb4pa > > ZhXnlxtyGH9YCL4UVSCeBoIFgSVb6g9EgGPRJvaj0kX1ncsMZDmmLMc=0> > > Well, that page did not work for me with Firefox ESR 52.6.0 (64-bit) on my > Wheezy system, even after enabling Java and Javascript and disabling NoScript. The first page of the form works just fine in FF 58.0.2 under Windows, though I invented mainy random garbage to fill the fields. When I clicked the button at the foot of the page there was a "revolving cursor" for maybe a couple of seconds, then the next page showed up with a template letter . -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Multichannel audio listening (was: Live recording)
On Mon, 5 Mar 2018, at 09:39, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Hi all. > > After learning, some months ago, thanks to listers' help, how to live record > into a multi channel audio file, I was wondering about the reverse problem: > now > I have my multi channel audio file, e.g. composed by three different channels. > Is it possibile (I guess it is), and how?, to send each of the three outputs > into a different loud speaker and so listen to the song...? Does your computer, or attached soundcard(s) have capacity to drive three outputs at once? If it does I think you'll need to tell whatever software controls that hardware where to take audio-data from. Maybe 'sox' can direct audio to multiple channels, but I think you will need to tell sox which hardware devices to use. The section of the sox manual, page 3, "Playing & Recording Audio" might help. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: WTF does Firefox 58?
On Sun, 4 Mar 2018, at 20:26, Michelle Konzack wrote: > Yesterday I was working on the website > <https://www.miila-mahe-aed.eu/animals/dogs.html> > and if I reload the page, Firefox is prefetching ALL HTML5 Videos!, > mean 900 MByte! > > WTF is this? You might be better-off asking at: mozilla-support-fire...@lists.mozilla.org -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: domain names, was: hostname
On Tue, 20 Feb 2018, at 19:42, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 07:36:49PM +0000, Jeremy Nicoll wrote: > > Do you mean when someone outside the LAN is trying to connect to my > > machine? > > No. It's for when you try to look up a hostname without a domain. > > For example, if your local area network uses "Greek gods" as its hostname > theme, and your machine is named "hermes", you might try to "ping zeus" > and see if it's up. > > In this case, "zeus" has no domain name attached to it, so the values in > the /etc/resolv.conf file (search and/or domain) will be used instead. > > Suppose your /etc/resolv.conf contains this: > > search pantheon.gods > nameserver 10.20.30.40 > > Then your "zeus" gets turned into "zeus.pantheon.gods", and will be looked > up in DNS (using the recursive resolver at 10.20.30.40). > > (Unless of course it was already found in /etc/hosts or however you have > configured your local /etc/nsswitch.conf to behave.) Ah... light is dawning.(Probably a god has created another world.) I've only done pinging of other machines on the LAN before (using either Windows or RISC OS) with static machine addresses & named pcs defined in each pc's /etc/hosts or equivalent. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: domain names, was: hostname
Thanks to everyone who replied, not just Dan... So... On Mon, 19 Feb 2018, at 13:30, Dan Purgert wrote: > Jeremy Nicoll wrote: > > What, on a home LAN, is that used for? > > In general terms, supplying domain information at setup time adds a > "helper" record to /etc/resolv.conf (or whatever RH, Windows, etc. > uses). Note that if you use DHCP, this step is usually skipped, as the > DHCP server provides the information. On a Win8.1 system, ipconfig /alldoes show me a hostname (the same value as %COMPUTERNAME%) which happens to be a combination of the machine's manufacturer name, and model There's no domain value at all, though DHCP is in use... but I suppose I configured the DHCP server (in the router/switch) and maybe left fields blank there... > In short, the "helper" record appends the domain name to a hostname, so > you don't have to type out a FQDN when you're trying to get to a remote > host. Do you mean when someone outside the LAN is trying to connect to my machine?I'd assume that makes sense only on a corporate / company LAN with a static IP gateway address and that address would be defined in DNS matching the company's domain name... and - if that's right - I can see that telling each pc on the LAN that it's part of the company's domain makes sense... Other than that, opinion seems divided on whether for a home LAN it makes more sense to leave domain name unset, or to provide a value (picked carefully, perhaps ending ".test" or ".invalid"). In some ways I like the idea of providing a planned/known name, if only because I'd recognise it for what it is if I saw it in error messages, logs etc in future. I almost wonder if, to avoid any potential name conflict, one would be sensible to register a domain, and then NOT have it point at one's own home LAN - because unless a dynamic DNS service is used, how could one keep that uptodate (my cable internet ISP does change my WAN ip address occasionally) - and use its name on the home system. But then again that might have unintended consequences. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: domain names, was: hostname
On Thu, 15 Feb 2018, at 16:21, Dan Purgert wrote: > > Later, once you understand how a local network works, you can come > > up with a theme. Or some convention that lets you identify the > > computer by its name. The name that you have chosen. Machine-naming makes sense to me - having done that with a variety of (blush) Windows machines in my LAN. I've toyed with versions of Linux, and used a few live-CD ones over the years, and I'm fairly sure that as well as being asked to supply a hostname I've also been asked to supply a domain value. What, on a home LAN, is that used for? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Filter logcheck reboot messages?
On Sat, 9 Dec 2017, at 01:19, Richard Hector wrote: > Nobody else uses logcheck? Everyone is fine with how it works? Can't say... but having never heard of it I googled it, found my way to the project page and its mail-lists, and noticed that there's been hardly any traffic there for years. On the other hand, there's a tiny amount of activity shown at its git repo. (I'm not a Debian - or any form of linux - user yet, just lurking and trying to get a better feel for it.) -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Password managers [WAS: Re: when do I get a browsere that will do internet purchases?]
On Fri, 20 Oct 2017, at 02:27, Garreau, Alexandre wrote: > I’d especially like to notice that there are the packages > *xul-ext-gnome-keyring* and *xul-ext-kwallet5* which make both Firefox > and Thunderbird use respectively GNOME and KDE’s password > managers. That’s way more secure imho, and especially with the package > xul-ext-pwdhash. But haven't Mozilla, just phased-out xul support in Firefox, requiring extensions to be written using the 'web-extensions' API? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Raspberry Pi Jessie has Broken Cron/at
On Tue, 19 Sep 2017, at 14:35, Martin McCormick wrote: > This raspberry Pi is running jessie lite. Raspberry Pi > documentation says that cron and at jobs are disabled by > default. There is a very odd fix recommended by some > documentation in which one edits a file named > > /home/pi/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/script.raspbmc.settings/settings.xml > > You supposedly edit that file and change a variable which allows > cron and at jobs to now run. Since unix-like systems have had > running crons for decades, is there a more conventional way to > restore this functionality? I've no idea, but the obvious question is: is this because 'Jessie lite' clearly doesn't have all the features of a full OS? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: [solved] Re: Live recording
On Thu, 17 Aug 2017, at 08:57, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Jeremy Nicoll <jn.ml.dbn...@letterboxes.org> writes: > > You do realise that merging files, adjusting balance etc are all possible > > with sox? > > > > One reason I do that sort of thing with sox is that by keeping note of the > > commands I used to do each stage, I automatically document how I manipulated > > a set of audio files. Documenting anything done via a GUI as in Audacity is > > a great deal more difficult. > > > > It's worth documenting what you do so that if necessary you can exactly > > repeat the process at a later date. > > > Thanks... In fact, what you suggest is exactly what I wanted to do but > didn't > manage to... In fact, suppose I have two files: piano.wav and voice.wav, > created by sox in recording piano and voice respectively, simultaneously. > piano.wav is a stereo file, with the two channels, left and right, inside > it; > whereas voice.wav is a monophonic file. When I put them together to > create the > final, say, result.wav, I must properly allign them. Now, Audacity makes > this > job easy thanks to the graphical possibility of seeing the waving forms > and > magnifying them. Instead, with sox, I tried to use the `delay' option > with no > success. Maybe can you suggest a better and proper way to do that...? I've never tried that. The sox mail list is a good place to ask for sox help. One thing I'd suggest (since sox is potentially complicated) is that instead of trying to use sox with one command that does everything, you try to do it in stages. That way you can check that what you get at the end of each stage is what you expect. Sox has effects that will tell you about what is in a file. I think first I'd check simply that I could create a file containing all three channels, eg by: sox -V2 --no-clobber -M piano.wav voice.wav threech.wav The -V2 sets a fairly high level of verbosity; you might need -V3 The --no-clobber prevents sox from overwriting a file. It's easy to get a command wrong and accidentally destroy an original file; personally I work on copies of files AND use --no-clobber. -M tells sox to merge the files. You should end up with a 3 channel file, with the piano audio on channels 1 and 2 and voice on 3. If that works (and ironically, Audacity might be an easy way to make sure) I think I'd next try to make a file with the voice channel offset from the others, perhaps by (guessing again!): sox -V2 --no-clobber threech.wav delay 0 0 2t voicedelayed.wav For an experiment, it's worth making the delay substantial, for example the two second value (2t) here. It'll be easy to tell if that worked. Later you can try different values to get the audio aligned where you need it to be. (Also note that there's an effect named 'silence' that can be used to chop unwanted 'silent' or at least quieter than the wanted sound audio out of a track, so a different approach that might help would be to make sure that none of the tracks have much silence at the start, before you merge them.) Note that so far, none of the three channels have had their relative volumes changed. To do that, and create a stereo file from the three, you'd need to use the remix effect. > One more thing: I remember, Jeremy, your suggestion of purchasing a > multi-channel audio interface, to be preferred to a mixer, and will do in > future. But do you think that the solution I'm adopting for now: > different > files on different single-channel audio cards and then merging them - dou > you > think this is a good solution as well...? What difference between this > cheap > one and more or less expensive multi channel interface...? Your current solution is the cheapest I can think of, and no doubt you'll learn quite a lot doing this. I'm afraid I've no idea about what's currently available in cheap audio interfaces. Reading buyer reviews in eg Amazon is a good way of finding out what can and cannot be done with equipment though. More expensive interfaces will be sold on the assumption that people using them are using higher quality equipment, eg decent microphones. As price and quality of mics increase you expect to get things like: mics that add little (or barely audible) noise to a recording; mics that are more accurate, mics that can better cope with both quiet and loud sounds... Such mics though typically need 'phantom power'. They'd probably be on 'balanced' audio cables (so 2 wires plus earth/screen per mic), and possibly XLR connectors... There comes a point where the box you plug the mics into needs to be designed for that. Then, the signal that comes from a mic is (especially with very sensitive mics) very small. It needs to be amplified - which is what microphone pre-amplifiers do. Cheap mic pre-amps tend to add noise or ru
Re: [solved] Re: Live recording
On Thu, 17 Aug 2017, at 01:37, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Thanks... But for my present needs, it seems that sox and audacity are > sufficient: with sox I record tracks from multiple audio cards into > different > files; then with Audacity I merge those tracks into one final file, and > have > the possibility of adjusting at pleasure the balancing between left and > right > channel for each track and also adjust the relative volumes. In my litte > basic > experiments, I don't note any minimum effect due to time drifting or so, > about > which I read... You do realise that merging files, adjusting balance etc are all possible with sox? One reason I do that sort of thing with sox is that by keeping note of the commands I used to do each stage, I automatically document how I manipulated a set of audio files. Documenting anything done via a GUI as in Audacity is a great deal more difficult. It's worth documenting what you do so that if necessary you can exactly repeat the process at a later date. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Mon, 7 Aug 2017, at 23:41, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Fascinating...! But now I got very interested in the multi channel audio > interface you suggest... Before looking for one to buy, I'd like to > better > know and understand how it works... They're just boxes which can have more than two mics (or line-level signals eg from instruments) plugged into them. Inside there's multiple analogue- to-digital converters. The digital data from all of these is then sent along the USB connection to the computer. Some interfaces might send all the channels so they arrive in a single file on the computer, which then contains multiple separate channels, others may directly generate separate files on the computer. It's unimportant which you get because a file containing multiple channels can be split into separate files (with eg sox), or a set of files can be combined (with eg sox). I can't advise you on what to buy... because I suspect you're going to spend a great deal less than I did when I last bought one... That was a Tascam box: http://tascam.com/product/us-2000/ which you'll see can handle 16 separate inputs at once... There's a more recent version of that these days... A box like that is aimed at people used to using professional audio equipment. There will be lower-spec interfaces around too, but you obviously need to find one that's known to work with linux. You also probably don't want one with eg XLR sockets for mics. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: [solved] Re: Live recording
On Sun, 6 Aug 2017, at 17:18, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > To add a third microphone for human voice (the former two are for piano), > I plan to use a second PC as suggested by Fungi4All. This way I'll > continue to do without mixer or audio interface, till the moment I'll want > to do things more professionally. Now, they're just home made records... The single best reason for using a multi-channel (ie not just a stereo) audio interface is simplicity. All the channels will be in-sync with each other and all the audio signals can be captured on a single computer. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Sun, 6 Aug 2017, at 21:09, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > M... Otherwise I'll have to buy a mixer. > > Rodolfo If you can capture multiple channels' audio and have them in separate files on your computer then you can mix them using sox. You don't have to have a physical mixer. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Help with USB audio card
On Mon, 7 Aug 2017, at 13:15, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Hi all. > > I just bought an external USB audio card. Which one? Where can we see a description of its capabilities? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Sat, 5 Aug 2017, at 10:43, Curt wrote: > My understanding is that a stereo microphone is comprised of two > microphones in a single unit. That's pretty black and white. Yes. You also get units with more than 2 capsules in them. > Why you would use such a device rather than recording with two discrete > microphones in an X-Y, ORTF, or MS (et al) configuration (but I read > there are single, MS recording units) I dunno. One reason is that it's sometimes physically easier to mount (or suspend from the ceiling) a single unit than a pair. It's tricky if suspending mics to get them to point in exactly the right direction; the weight of the mic cables can drag the thing away from the alignment you want. You can't use a floor stand for mics if they have to be high above an audience (I've four floor stands that each put mics up to 14 feet above the floor, but they're not usable where audience seats are where the stands would have to be, and public safety precludes use of such things if people can trip over them or walk into them. They're eminently useful for recording sessions in halls where the public are not present, or eg for putting mics above sections of an orchestra or in front of a choir.) Another reason is on some of these mics the directional sensitivity of the two (or more) capsules is controllable from the box of electronics at the other end of the mic cables. So you can decide for each mic if you want a tightly focussed hyper- cardioid response (if you like, a shotgun mic) or something slightly directional, or figure of 8 (ie responsive to sound from both sides but not in front/behind), or omni- directional, or various points inbetween. Since no-one can put their ears where the mic is (if it's eg 60 feet down from the ceiling and 20 feet above the floor), the ability to fine tune what the mic(s) are doing remotely saves an awful lot of time. Otherwise you'd have to haul the mics up to the ceiling, adjust them, lower them again, listen for a while, and repeat. (Or lower them to the floor then raise them again ... needing several people to do that and walkie-talkies to communicate). These are the sorts of mics you often see high up in the space in a concert hall auditorium. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Fri, 4 Aug 2017, at 00:22, deloptes wrote: > > 3) mic2 is stereo. > now way - such thing does not exist - one can not be two .. Wrong. Such things do exist. But they're aimed at professional users. For example, a relatively cheap thing: http://www.coutant.org/m22rp/ (this single body has 2 elements in it recording what's known as M+S - Middle & Side - where there's a front-facing microphone as well as a figure-of-8 response thing recording what's happening on each side of the microphone. It can't be plugged in to a normal pair of mixer inputs without some trickery (or in this particular model, use of the 'matrix' box it comes with). And something less cheap (if you can find one at all these days): http://www.proaudioeurope.com/info/classic-catalogue/akg-microphones/akg-c422-microphone Then there are single-body mics with multiple capsules, eg this: http://www.soundfield.com/ (four capsules; this mic gets plugged into a controller box and - if you buy the most expensive version you can adjust the width, depth & even height (for surround sound) of stereo image produced from it. It is VERY expensive - many thousands of pounds.) -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Thu, 3 Aug 2017, at 16:45, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Thanks. But all my 4 microphones terminates in 3.5mm, and the splitter I > was > talking about is two 3.5mm female and one 3.5mm male. Is this you > mean...? No. Look at: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x1q9MXvjDlM/maxresdefault.jpg That should show you pictures of two, three and four contact mini jack plugs. A two-contact one is used for one audio channel (the two contacts being signal & ground). A three contact one is used for two channels (signal 1, signal 2, and ground). A four contact one is for three channels (eg on a stereo headset which has L & R speakers, but a single mono microphone) - the four contacts being L, R, mic and ground. (The tip/ring/sleeve terms that someone else mentioned are names for the different contacts on a three-contact jack plug.) Which type of plugs do you have on your mics? On 'professional' equipment it gets a bit more complicated when three connections are used for a single audio channel, being the +ve half of a waveform, the -ve half, and ground. (These are known as 'balanced' connections, and typically use either XLR plugs & sockets or 3-contact 6.25mm audio jacks.) -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Thu, 3 Aug 2017, at 13:23, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > 3) mic2 is stereo. Not necessarily. It might be a mono signal that's been duplicated across two outputs. It's only 2-channel if it can record two separate sounds at the same time. You can get microphones which, in a single unit, record more than one channel at once. Their labelling or artwork on them normally makes it clear that they have L and R (or more than that) inputs. What makes and models are your mics? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Wed, 2 Aug 2017, at 08:07, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Jeremy Nicoll <jn.ml.dbn...@letterboxes.org> writes: > > If you do that you'll be recording at most 2 channels, > > > Mmmhhh... this is not clear to me. Why only two...? Suppose the mixer > has 3 > channels, can't I plug three mics into it..? Say two for the piano and > the > third for the voice...? You described connecting the mixer to your computer's line-in port. The line-in is stereo ie 2 channels. So, yes, you can connect more than 2 mics to a mixer, but then use the mixer to mix/merge those signals into just two which you send to the computer. It mean the decisions on how to do that mix have to be made at the time of the recording... which is not easy if there's background noise, or hardly any time to do it, or you are listening on headphones whereas later on you could also listen on speakers... A multi-channel USB audio interface lets you record all the signals at the time, then do the mixing and experiments later. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Wed, 2 Aug 2017, at 06:09, David Christensen wrote: > On 08/01/17 14:04, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > > As much as I can understand, the simplest solution for me to live recording > > with several microphones is to buy a - say - 6 channel mixer and plug it > > into > > the line-in PC entry... > > That can work. If you do that you'll be recording at most 2 channels, which means you have to decide how to mix the more than 2 mics' signals into a stereo image at the venue. That can be difficult to do, if you can't hear the incoming sounds (eg in headphones) clearly, because of background noise, and the decision you make then is what you're stuck with later on. If you can possibly afford a multi-channel audio interface, do that instead. Then the mics etc are connected to that external box, which if needed powers the mics, amplifies their signals, digitises the analogue signals, then sends the digital info via USB (usually) to the computer. You can then fiddle with the balance and everything else later on using software, and experiment with different settings. > Make sure you understand phantom power and how you plan > to connect everything before making a purchase: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_power > > (If you feed phantom power to a device that is not designed to use it or > withstand it, you can get degraded performance and/or destroy equipment.) Yes; you can also destroy a mic by plugging it into a socket on a mixer while the phantom power is on; you need to make sure that phantom is only turned on after all the cables are connected. And turn phantom off again before unplugging any powered mics. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Sat, 29 Jul 2017, at 09:56, Weaver wrote: > How almost all professional grand piano recordings are made, whether in > a concert hall or studio, is with two mics on boom stands, projected > over the strings. Bass on the left, treble on the right: the way a > pianist hears it. As a non-pianist I'd never really thought about the way that a pianist hears what they play in such a different way from an audience. On the other hand, the standard BBC micing of chamber music concerts (eg for transmission of concerts during the Edinburgh Festival) is (or was last time I was at one) basically a stereo pair slung over the first few rows of the downstairs audience. Sometimes I think they may have used a M mic. It could be that use of a slung pair is partly so that a standard way of micing the hall works for all the concerts given there over several weeks. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Sat, 29 Jul 2017, at 07:16, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > What I want to do is recording live piano: I'd like to use two mics for > that, > one on the grave and the other one on the high notes. Besides, some > times I > will need to add human voice: this requires, in my idea, a third > microphone... Suppose you were standing next to someone playing the piano. You'd think what you were hearing sounded great... and you wouldn't have one ear at each end of the piano. If the piano's in any normal room (ie NOT a sound-deadened area in a recording studio) part of what you want to hear is also the way the piano sound reverberates around in that space. Add a voice? Nothing changes. There's many a classical music concert recorded with just one pair of mics. The performers balance the sound (so eg the pianist doesn't drown out a singer) anyway - they have to, for the audience to hear a good result. In a good sounding room or hall (which is something that most concert or recital rooms are) a decent pair of mics put in the right place is all you need. In a crappy room, with background noise, players who can't judge their own relative volumes, and mics that can't be put in the appropriate place... its harder to get a decent result. The same can be true of an orchestral concert. Modern tendency though is often to put a huge number of mics in place, both close to each set of instruments in the orchestra, and eg over areas of it, as well as mics just behind the conductor and further away. And yet... the conductor's job is partly to choose how loud each instrument group should be compared with the others at each part of the piece that's being played, and to manage that as the performance takes place. The audience depend on that, as none of them will hear whatever is being mixed by the people in the truck outside the hall. I don't really understand why people do it that way. I've recorded choirs, orchestras, opera etc for maybe 35 years now. I have used multiple mics, but not huge numbers of them. It's useful eg in a concert where a relatively unskilled orchestra and choir are performing together. More than likely the choir won't be able to sing loudly enough to be heard over the orchestra. Mics between orchestra and choir help one sort that out - not for the audience - but for a recording produced afterwards. It can be useful to 'spot mic' an instrument that's got to play a solo especially if you think the performer might have an attack of nerves and not play loudly enough - later you can make them seem a bit louder than they really were. It's useful to mic solo singers (singing in front of an orchestra) - partly to catch more detail of the words they're singing... and also to help 'fix' them in the stereo image. Concerts in churches (in the UK) often have a U-shaped balcony that wraps around the sides and rear of the church. The sound that a singer projects forward from the performance area bounces off the front edge of the balcony. Singers sometimes turn their heads as they sing, and that can cause their voices to move from side to side in the stereo image... which - once you realise what's going on - can sound very peculiar. A spot mic on a singer can let you - say - add just a little of their voice in a fixed (eg just to the left or right of centre) part of the stereo image. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Live recording
On Fri, 28 Jul 2017, at 20:11, Rodolfo Medina wrote: > Hi all. > > According to: > > http://www.upubuntu.com/2013/05/how-to-record-your-voice-from.html > > I record live sound via microphone just doing: > > $ sox -t alsa default output.wav > > Now I was wondering about the stereo o non-stereo character of such a > home made > recording... I tried to use two microphones together, plugging them > together > into the PC with a small common connection doubber. Can we say the > result is > stereo...? I would doubt... and how to have - if possible - a stereo > effect > with the above basic recording instruments? If you have a sound-card, or external 'audio interface' that can process signals from more than one channel at once, then you can record either 'double mono' or stereo. Which you get depends on the directional characteristics of the microphones and how they are positioned relative to each other. Stereo is not just two sounds at once, but (generally) two sounds captured at the same point in space. Sound recordists would usually use a pair of 'cardioid' response mics, arranged in what's called an 'X-Y' or 'crossed-pair' configuration. You can google these terms. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: How to set ISO date/time with en_US.utf8 as system default?
On Sat, 27 May 2017, at 16:24, gwmf...@openmailbox.org wrote: > A lot of Europe does it, and it is wrong! It goes back quite a while to > when it was fashionable to use a dot (.) as a symbol for multiplication. I don't think it's a straightforward as that. Mathematics (at university level) uses dot that way, sometimes. But is also uses adjacency of symbols so eg "xy" means x times y, as may "x.y". > So Europe stopped using a dot to signal a decimal point to avoid > confusion (they should have stopped stopped using a dot as a symbol for > multiplication). In the U.S. and G.B. an X was used for multiplication > symbol so they continued on using a dot for decimal (as it should be). But mathematics also used dot and x to refer to concepts named dot-product and cross-product. In other words, what's acceptable/normal depends entirely on the audience. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Seeing this, is it something I have done or?
On Sat, 27 May 2017, at 03:54, Joe Ennis wrote: > I went into my clawsrc and set: > > hide-quoted=0 > & > hide-quotes=0 > > fixed it for me. There's a bug in claws, though, where this collapsing feature can also collapse some of the content of attachments. See what's written in this bug report, but beware that the discussion at the start is about something else (or at least about behaviour that seemed to be something else): http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3824 -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: [trinity-users] Re: Strange clicking noise from my laptop hard drive
On Fri, 19 May 2017, at 14:24, Philip Ashmore wrote: > I got a new hard disk. > I still get the same clicking Could it be the laptop's fan? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Which driver for RealTek RTL8168 ethernet interface card? [SOLVED]
On Sun, 15 Jan 2017, at 09:16, M.A. Perry wrote: > 3. From 1. and 2. I have concluded that the non-free > "programming" added to the interface hardware > is non-volatile (i.e. persistent); which raises the > question how does one de-install the non-free > firmware should that ever be necessary in the > future? [Or have I got it wrong again??] I doubt it's persistent. The error message you saw seemed to be from a post-boot command, presumably executed every time you reboot, that loads the optional firmware into the chipset. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: curl and form submission
On Wed, 8 Jun 2016, at 17:16, Bob wrote: > Well Tomas, I like to share with you that your guess is again correct. > This link quickly redirects to http:// (seems the session checked > here) and then to home page. I'm tying to figure out the cookie part now. It's important that at the start of this process you have an empty cookie file. Then you give its name to curl on every call; curl will store any cookies that the site sends to you in that file (you shouldn't have to pay any attention to what they actually are). In every subsequent curl command, you again specify the same file and the cookies whose values are stored in it are sent back to the server by curl. Each time the server might change cookies but the whole thing should just work. At the very end of the process, throw the cookie file away. Also, in the curl command you can specify names of files into which curl will place the HTML of the page you just fetched, and you can sepcify a second file to have the headers (which accompany every page sent to a browser, but users don't ever see them) stored. It's good to do this because those headers will include any server error codes - useful for diagnosing problems in the whole process - and they also contain eg redirection instructions, if the server wants you to make another request for a different page. if you don't have the headers file for your script to read and check it can be really difficult to make this sort of thing work! -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: curl and form submission
On Tue, 7 Jun 2016, at 16:33, Bob wrote: > Hello list, > > I'm trying to automate my internet login which is based on a web form. I > have already checked few tutorial/posts on form submission by curl. I > have tried various combinations too but nothing worked in my case. > > When I inspect the form I get following for username/password text box > and submit button > > > > > > Don't you have to find out what validateForm() would do if the values provided are ok, and make curl do the next step? That may also depend on whether there's code to run for form submit, even if validation has been ok. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: Delay at boot - network
On Mon, 23 May 2016, at 08:49, Hans wrote: > > I see. Sorry I'm a bit pressed now. Look through those two bug reports > > and let us know wheter anything sounds familiar: > > > > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=798314 > > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754218 > > Yes, both bugreports describe, what I also discovered. However, my > environment > does not use NFS (like one uses), and I have not to wait at shutdown, as > the > other one describes. But the behaviour at boot is the same, as in these > bugreports is described. When you get this delay, what's in the scrolling messages in the last few lines before the delay itself? Are they (on your various machines) always the same sorts of lines? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: My script almost works but spams the terminal its launched from if useing dash.
On Sun, 17 Apr 2016, at 14:28, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > Let's assume a subordinate script ... Thank-you! That's devious. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: My script almost works but spams the terminal its launched from if useing dash.
On Sun, 17 Apr 2016, at 12:46, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > Jeremy Nicoll wrote: > > Why is the "2>&1" part needed? Wouldn't stderr go to the terminal by > > default. > > Goal is to redirect both to /dev/null. > > So these would do: > > bin/mailwatcher 2>/dev/null >/dev/null & > > bin/mailwatcher >/dev/null 2>&1 & Yes, I understand that. > But as Michael Milliman pointed out, > > bin/mailwatcher 2>&1 >/dev/null & > > redirects only stdout to /dev/null and leaves stderr directed to where > stdout was pointing before. And I understand that too. But I was asking from a different perspective. What I meant was, if someone is trying to redirect stdout to /dev/null and leave stderr directed to the terminal (which seems to be the default), would anyone ever code: bin/mailwatcher 2>&1 >/dev/null when surely all they need is bin/mailwatcher >/dev/null -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Re: My script almost works but spams the terminal its launched from if useing dash.
On Sun, 17 Apr 2016, at 07:25, Michael Milliman wrote: > Yes, this is the correct incantation. The difference is very subtle. > With ... 2>&1 >/dev/null, the error output is redirected to be the same > as the standard output, and then the standard output is redirected to > /dev/null -- leaving the error output still going to the original > standard output (terminal). Why is the "2>&1" part needed? Wouldn't stderr go to the terminal by default? -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
