Tech

Found a tiny table clamp. It works well and looks super clean.

Also I’m pivoting. Literally. I realized the whole point of my workdesk monitor is being able to pivot it in front and to the side. That’s not gonna work with a bunch of cables anchored to the desk. Now how to mount this beneath the monitor safely… I first considered mounting to some plastic tabs on the back, but i worry that would make for too weak a structure… Maybe shim the vesa mount?

It ingests through a directory in the application data… On the nvme disk.

Oh I could of course just have done

vidid=$(grep 'comment=' meta.txt | tr -d '\n' | tail -c 11)

instead… Which would also avoid getting a false video ID from a link in the description. Ask me how I know.

I’ve been backing up youtube videos from a select few channels for reasons for quite a while now, though I never got around making them actually easy to watch. It feels very silly to have the files available locally and still stream them from an unreliable service. So I’m gonna give Tube Archivist a try.

#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p out
# mp4 files are located in channel subdirectories
for file in ./*/*.mp4; do 
    if [[ -f "$file" ]]; then
        #Extract file name
        dirname="${file%/*}/"
        basename="${file:${#dirname}}"
        # Extract file metadata with ffmpeg
        ffmpeg -i "$file" -f ffmetadata meta.txt
        # grep video id, trim the newline and select the last 11 characters (IDs are always this length)
        vidid=$(grep -oP 'watch\?v\\=([A-Za-z0-9_-]{11})' meta.txt | tr -d '\n' | tail -c 11)
        rm meta.txt
        # Rename into out directory, as ta expects everything flat
        mv "$file" "out/${basename%.*}[$vidid].mp4"
    fi
done

Found a bunch of smaller harddisks in the trash a while back. A recent (enjoyably accessible) L1Techs video on hdd diagnostics and recovery reminded me I should probably see if I could find some place to get them back into service.

My usually disk ripping machine is taking the duty of hdd tester. I have motherboards with enough sata sockets to process everything at once, but I just want it running as a background activity that requires minimal thinking or memory on my end.

Yea something like that. Need a clamp to keep it in place though.

Working on little patch panels for my work desks

The idea is to minimize any cable clutter on the desks while making it easier to set up a device or tool. So if I need to use a scanner, I can pull it from its drawer where it’s packed with a power and usb cable, and just plug it in.

Some future confusion avoided…
Got a USB cable tester just out of curiosity. I found:

• Three actually bad cables. Two mini and one micro USB. One had clear rust marks. One had limited insertion depth. One showed no signs at all.
• A bunch of mini USB and some micro USB cables don’t have the shield connected. Perhaps optional in the spec?
• Mac USB-C cables have strange behavior of apparently tying the CC pins to ground/shield at one end? Either that or perhaps they have some internal electronics going on.

How hard could it be?

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