Posts

Videos not working in Irfanview

 I love Irfanview. It's great, I use it as my picture browser and quick-edits tool. I use it to browse through folders which might contain MP4 or Webm videos, as a substitute for gifs. However, for the longest time, and on repeat occasions, the videos don't render -- I can hear it (if it has audio), but I can't see anything. A long time ago, I googled for a solution, and basically found none -- but I figured out that if I open a video in Irfanview, and then open a *second* video in a separate Irfanview instance, the second one works perfectly. And I've been suffering along with this method for ages. I finally figured out the root cause: Codecs. Aside from Irfanview, I also use the K-Lite media codec pack, because not being able to open an MP4 encoded in some arcane encoding format is horseshit. And at some point in the past, I must have picked it to use hardware encoding of some variety, instead of software. (Or it defaults to it.) THIS IS THE PROBLEM To fix, just updat...

Atom editor: Hide project tab / tree view

 Atom does not have an option for doing this by default, and I'm not the only one who wanted to change it. From https://discuss.atom.io/t/hide-treeview-by-default/7718/46, Jake posted the most functional way to correct this behavior. To change this: 1) Go to File -> Init script... 2) Paste: atom.workspace.onDidOpen ({item}) -> itemName = item.constructor.name if (itemName != 'TreeView') # no action if open TreeView intentionally dock = atom.workspace.paneContainerForURI('atom://tree-view') if dock && dock.isVisible() dock.hide() 3) Save On next startup, the project tab will be hidden. Works at this time of posting.

Removing the watermark from LIV

So, if you're reading this, you've been trying to make use of LIV, the mixed reality app. It's rather neat -- creates a virtual camera so you can see an avatar in a VR game like Beat Saber, or so that you can green screen yourself into it. What isn't rather neat, however, is the fact that the program watermarks the fuck out of the output -- do they expect you to buy it? No, the program is free, they insist, and they don't want money unless you're a commercial user, which is fair and fine, since I'm not a commercial user. But if they don't want me to pay for it, then what do  they want, aside from pissing me off? According to them, the "official" way to get the watermark removed is to join a Discord  and go to a channel. Discord is nice, but I don't use it religiously, and I'm certainly not inclined to be forced to join a community just to pump numbers, and if your validation system requires third party services... well, I've ...

Migrating Windows 10 to a larger hard drive

The idea of copying a Windows 10 install to a new hard drive seems like it should be easy on the outside -- you have the old hard drive, and you just copy it exactly to the new one, not hard, right? As it turns out, very wrong -- while I was able to migrate from a HDD To a SSD in the past, looking back, I was migrating from a 1TB drive to a 1TB drive; and this is not a problem to do with a utility like Gparted, which can be run off a USB. However, today, I was trying to upgrade from a 500GB SSD to a 1TB SSD; and GParted cannot  simply clone the 500GB drive to the 1TB drive -- even if I don't resize anything, Windows still shits the bed. Google was my next stop, and there's plenty of articles which seem to all concur on using some sort of commerical program to clone the drive. But I'm mistrustful of apps which seem to get presented as the "super easy third option" in a guide, moreso if they're called "EasyClone" or some shit like that. As it t...

Pleroma for Dummies

With the recent surge in popularity of Twitter alternatives, I found myself giving Mastodon a shot -- I'm hardly at risk of being censored on Twitter, but I fancied a place that didn't fuck with my timeline. In doing so, I discovered that Mastodon is simply one facet of a greater Fediverse -- and while it seems to be one of the more polished facets, there's an awful lot of mastotooting going on ( Mastotooting; verb: to post ("toot") about how great the Mastodon social network is, from inside the Mastodon network itself ) and, according to some technically-minded souls, not the most efficient facet. ( And if you want to get into community politics, some criticize the lead developer's approach, that he just wants to be @jack 2.0. ) And so, I was introduced exposed to Pleroma . Like Mastodon, it integrates with the Fediverse, but unlike Mastodon, it consumes a lot less resources and is generally more suited to running on a smaller private server for one per...

Fun with Database / Wordpress Migrations

There's websites that like to be moved, and then there's Wordpress . Wordpress both does, and does not like being moved. While you can transplant it to a new hosting platform, and put it in the same folder so it would be visible at the same place, the data may not migrate so easily. The guts of Wordpress is the database, which is not in the web files themselves. If you're exporting and re-importing manually, you might run into errors when importing on the new platform; one of them is below. If you are trying to import a database and getting an error like “#1273 - Unknown collation: 'utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci'”, this may be related to trying to import from a system running MySQL v5.6+, and your new platform uses a version of MySQL less than v5.6. You could upgrade the server to MySQL v5.6, but if Mohammad can't go to that particular mountain, then we'll bring the mountain to Mohammad, and convert the database. First, please try exporting the database...

"I DON'T KNOW YOU": A Windows 10 tale

So, in the name of vanity, I did something rather dumb. I changed my Windows 10 account's username. Not just changing the user's name -- that's cosmetic. I mean, I fully changed the actual username; the goal was to change my root folder path, but as it turned out, this did not work as expected, and all I did was break my Windows 10 login. I started by running the command netplwiz . This let me get my grubby little mitts on my own user account, for which I edited the properties and promptly changed, swapping the username (Which is ancient, from when I first built the computer and went by a different handle on the internet) to a more current one. I saved it, and thought nothing of it. Start Menu then did not work; I tried opening my account settings, and it locked up. I thought a reboot would fix the problem. It made it worse -- Windows 10 home edition tries to sign you in with the last username you used. Which was my old username. So no matter how hard I tried, my...