@scruss@xoxo.zone
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

scruss

@scruss@xoxo.zone

auld hairy scottish git in Toronto. Does futile things with electronics, including trying to sell them. This ended very badly, so now I build cameras instead. I've built and operated wind farms in many places: I may know what I'm talking about here.

I've been known as scruss since 1981. Some people know me by it and may not recognize my real name.

(he/him)

formerly https://mastodon.social/@scruss

Hey! If you follow me and you've got 0 posts and 0 people following you, I'm going to block you.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

peter, to random
@peter@area51.social avatar

For those after sound effects, there's a new collection available on the Internet Archive as 3 ZIP files - just over 23G worth,
covered by the CC0 Creative Commons License.

https://archive.org/details/sound-effect-libraries-red-gold-sunset-editorial

Some interesting ones in there from what I've seen (just under SSE Library) including original Star Trek & Batman (TV) effects from the 1960's!

Wav file counts & disk space usage:
Gold Library: 1233 13G
Red Library: 1554 8.7G
SSE Library: 1022 4.7G

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@peter These are also available as individual playable sounds with descriptions on Freesound, where they were originally uploaded by Craig Smith, Academic Sound Coordinator in the School of Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts:
https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

school memory: calculator racing to 100 against a friend: enter "1 ++" then hit the = key really fast until the display showed 100. The Casio FX-82 was the fastest at this. Modern (algebraic) calculators can't do exactly this

bitprophet, to programming
@bitprophet@social.coop avatar

3.1 / 3.2 out now, after months of hacking, rewriting, cursing ancient design decisions that don't work w/ non-OpenSSH targets, & so on & so forth.

Most of this is opt-in, experimental, and incomplete - but hey, it works well enough that my colleagues can get their ssh-agents and passphraseless pubkeys working with both and !

Solid foundation, living room furnished…rest of house forthcoming 😂

https://www.fabfile.org/changelog.html#3.1.0
https://www.paramiko.org/changelog.html#3.2.0

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@bitprophet thanks for that. paramiko helped us work with a client who had no idea about their own ssh security setup

RainofTerra, to random
@RainofTerra@terra.incognita.net avatar

A modern 8088 retro laptop with GPL violation drama? Has somebody been peaking at my Christmas list? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/brand-new-laptop-recreates-1981s-ibm-pc-complete-with-8088-cpu-and-640kb-of-ram/

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@RainofTerra Sergey Kiselev is so helpful to the folks who build his designs, it must really hurt for him to see one of his hobby projects being ripped off commercially.

(I have one of his Z80 designs, and it's rather good)

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

is Garmin USB GPSs no longer showing up under Linux a thing now? I've tried different cables and different ports and - while the thing powers up - it doesn't even generate a kernel message

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@johnefrancis nope

It was eventually recognized on a windows box when plugged in and left alone for about 10 minutes.

Then again, this is the same company that decided that the complete and correct contents of my GPS's SD card should be 64 K file of zero bytes called JOURNAL/JEFF.BIN ...

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

backslashes in python strings make me sad and tired: all I want to do is output a backslash followed by a close bracket so that PostScript doesn't get confused

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@vik no! I end up with \) in the output, which is not what I want.

If I start with ")" or "\)", I end up with "\)". Which PostScript sees as the end of a string with last character ''

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@vik no, I get two slashes, always

something about str vs repr and I hate everything about it

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@vik then again, this might be write() versus print().

Either way, my programming languages need to Do What I Mean, and Python is needlessly pedantic for a scripting language

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

World of Commodore 2011 - NABU Network Reconstruction at the York University Computer Museum - YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWnCfNd8mRA

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@Wintermute_BBS this was before I was involved with TPUG, but I'm amazed how long YorkU have been supporting the Nabu

scruss, to animals
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

Port Hope Public Library has a stick library for dogs

https://porthopepubliclibrary.ca/

a wooden box sitting on mulched ground. It is open at the top, and is part-filled with sticks Written on it is (dog paw print) Port Hope Public Library Stick Library

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@johnefrancis make sure to check yourself in
ಠ_ಠ

blinry, to random
@blinry@chaos.social avatar

I'm staying in a neighborhood called Ōkubo, which has a big Korean community.

So here's 1 kg of peeled garlic!

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@blinry wait until you see the 10 kg bags of ground cayenne pepper

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

Swedish Radio is streaming birdsong: go here and click on P1
Kanaler | Sveriges Radio — https://sverigesradio.se/kanaler

aallan, to random
@aallan@mastodon.social avatar

Both and have the @Raspberry_Pi 4, 4GB, in stock right now. Both are based in the UK, but ship worldwide. If you've been looking for a board, here's your first chance. You'll have more and better chances as we move towards Q3. Supply is improving. Both are authorised resellers, so you're buying at RRP. Some restrictions — one per customer, your account in good standing — are in place to avoid scalpers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HrbU2G6fU4

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@aallan @Raspberry_Pi some ARs have been refusing to sell to buyers overseas

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@aallan Hey, I know. I used to work for an AR ...

Also: margin? What margin? ☺

brouhaha, to random
@brouhaha@mastodon.social avatar

I've written some C++ code that is using the qpdf library to create a PDF file containing some vector graphics and text. I want the text to be horizontally centered around specific points on the page. This looks to be a nightmare, because PDF doesn't directly support that. I have to calculate the left origin of the text such that it ends up centered, which means I have to deal with the font metrics.
Don't even get me started about kerning.

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@HunterZ @brouhaha I'm a big fan of ocrmypdf for this sort of thing. Sure, it uses tesseract, so it has limitations, but it's pretty solid

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@HunterZ @brouhaha I thought they used Abbyy? I'd never seen notice of ocrmypdf in any of the logs.

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@HunterZ @brouhaha oh, hang on, they are using tesseract now, my mistake. They were using ABBYY FineReader 11.0 from at least 2016-2019.

There are very few good open-source tools for working with PDF. Heck, Adobe tools produce PDF that Adobe tools can't even work with

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@brouhaha @resuna @HunterZ I suppose you could have the PS as an attachment to the PDF. Attachments are kind of underused in the PDF world, but are super handy. I may have made a tool once that attached a zip file to a pdf of a listing of the archive contents to get around a site that wouldn't allow zip file uploads

Wintermute_BBS, to random

Can you read this?

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@Wintermute_BBS No

dgar, (edited ) to random
@dgar@aus.social avatar

For those wondering, ′′how did i do it?":
I boiled 10L of water, added 2 tablespoons of vinegar, 1 teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate, two cups of coke, and half cup of lemon juice, then stirred well. Waited 3 minutes, put the pan in the solution for 45 minutes, then added a quarter cup of chlorine bleach to the mixture. Then I brushed it with a firm toothbrush and put it back into the liquid for another 25 minutes. I took it out, rinsed it, and it looked exactly the same, so I threw it away, and went and bought a new one.

Edit: Please don’t actually make this concoction! The resulting mixture may produce poisonous gases! This toot is a joke, the pictures are not even my pans. I didn’t throw any pans away. Following these directions, despite the fact it probably won’t do anything useful, would be fucking stupid and you may win a Darwin Award.

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@dgar I love all these "you can do this at home" things that have so many specific failure points that's they're impossible to repeat and the author will blame you for failing.

scruss, to random
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

the only king I recognize

scruss,
@scruss@xoxo.zone avatar

@vik ah. We have "lawful heirs", which has got to mean a republic eventually

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