xrayspx's picture

This Still Isn't My Cat

Music: 

For the last year or so we've had a persistent stray cat that we've been kind of watching after, along with most of the rest of our neighborhood. As the weather gets cold we decided to try and see if he'd be willing to come in the house and maybe spend cold nights in the basement. Basement because this is a fully functional male cat and we prefer our stuff to be piss-free. Spoiler alert: It didn't work out so well. He hung out on the porch for a bit, but really wanted to get back outside. And he still managed to spray a pair of Natalie's boots even with us sitting right there with him. If we toss him in the basement I expect to hear him echoing through the heating ducts all night meowing and trapped and annoyed.

But now we have actual cold weather forecast for the first time this winter, with temps in the single digits during the next couple days and we want to make sure the little weirdo has somewhere to stay warm. So yesterday, Natalie banged out this little shelter. it's got fiberglass insulation with styrofoam inside with a decent amount of straw so the little guy should be able to burrow in and stay pretty warm. Now it's just a matter of getting him to use it. Today I started putting food in the far inside corner and he is getting more comfortable going in to get food. Hope he figures out that this is where you go when it's cold.

Yesterday we put the box out and introduced the cat to it:



"That's enough progress for one day"


Day 2 - Success?

Fixed Tags:
xrayspx's picture

Playlists

Music: 

Dr. Dre - Nuthin' But a G' Thang

I had a request to share some playlist management stuff so I thought I should explain myself. I've got a significant CD collection, and a somewhat-significant collection of TV shows. This is fine on its own, but lots of media is pretty worthless without well curated playlists that you really don't have to think about. So I built Spotify, MTV and Syndicated TV.

* NOTE: If you have a better way to do any of this let me know and I'll fix it. I particularly have the sense, which is not backed up by my testing, that "sort -R" isn't great.

Music's easier so we'll start there. I use Strawberry to manage my music. This was all running under Clementine and aside from some DB schema changes, the scripts are portable between them.

Until relatively recently I was never a big fan of "star" or "heart" ratings, but Clementine/Strawberry will store this metadata in the MP3 itself so I should be able to quickly recover if I lose my music database. In the app I have a few Smart Playlists like 3-Stars, 3 Stars + (This is 3, 4 and 5 star tracks), 4-Stars, 4-Star + and 5 Stars. To use 4 Star as an example, the rules look like this:

Match every search term (AND)
Rating - Greater than - 3.5 Stars
Rathing - Less than - 5 Stars
Ratin - Not Equals - 5 Stars
Length - Greater Than - 8 Seconds

That results in a playlist of 8423 songs with ratings between 4 and 4.99 stars. There was a bug in Clementine which I got fixed where ratings could exceed 5, so I'm a little careful to deal with weirdo cases, but it's pretty simple. I also have a bunch of manually selected playlists, so like an '80s one, '90s, and "Barn Radio". Barn Radio is our catch-all for the ubiquitous music we heard from the late '70s through late '80s. For Natalie that was largely with her dad in the dairy barn, for me it was the music of my 2 hours on the bus every day.

Anyway, I have all these .m3us stored in a folder along with my MP3s called "playlists_base". These are used by a nightly playlist generator that pulls ~200 tracks and makes daily playlists running 8 or 10 hours each. The reason for this is that streaming software such as Airsonic-Advanced kind of chokes on massive playlists. It could be Airsonic itself, it could be populating the mobile client, I don't really know or care, other than to say it works great with list sizes under about 1000 tracks or so, so I keep them shorter.

The x-Star playlists are all built from the database like this 4 Star + playlist below. You can see it do a couple of different Star Rating DB queries, dump out the tracks to $playlist_tmp.m3u, then cat that file and do a random sort to generate the final version. It's pretty easy to adjust the mix based on ratings, so if I wanted to weight high-rated tracks I could do that by adjusting how many tracks of the 200 are returned by each search:


#!/bin/bash

rm /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/4\ Stars\ +.m3u

i=1

while [ $i -le 100 ]
do

### Switching from Clementine to Strawberry ###
#       file=$(sqlite3 /var/tmp/clementine.db "select filename from songs where rating > "0.9" order by random() limit 1;" | awk -F "file://" '{print $2}')
        file=$(sqlite3 /var/tmp/strawberry.db "select url from songs where rating > "0.9" order by random() limit 1;" | awk -F "file://" '{print $2}')

        ### Clementine data encodes special characters and accent marks and stuff so I'm using
        ### Joel Parker Henderson's urldecode.sh to undo that: https://gist.github.com/cdown/1163649

        data=$(/home/xrayspx/bin/urldecode.sh "$file")
        if [ -f "$data" ]
        then
                ### Have to escape leading brackets because grep treated it as a range and would allow duplicates ###
                ### Can't do that in "data" because \[ isn't in the filename so they'll fail ###

                escaped=$(echo "$data" | sed 's/\[/\\[/g')
                #echo "$escaped"

                ### Avoid duplicates
                match=$(grep -i "$escaped" /var/tmp/4-star-tmp.m3u)
                if [ -z "$match" ]
                then
                        echo "$data" >> /var/tmp/4-star-tmp.m3u
                        ((i++))
                fi
        fi
done

i=1

while [ $i -le 100 ]
do
### Switching from Clementine to Strawberry ###
#        file=$(sqlite3 /var/tmp/clementine.db "select filename from songs where rating >= "0.8" and rating          file=$(sqlite3 /var/tmp/strawberry.db "select url from songs where rating >= "0.8" and rating 

        ### Clementine data encodes special characters and accent marks and stuff so I'm using
        ### Joel Parker Henderson's urldecode.sh to undo that: https://gist.github.com/cdown/1163649

        data=$(/home/xrayspx/bin/urldecode.sh "$file")
        if [ -f "$data" ]
        then
                ### Have to escape leading brackets because grep treated it as a range and would allow duplicates ###
                ### Can't do that in "data" because \[ isn't in the filename so they'll fail ###

                escaped=$(echo "$data" | sed 's/\[/\\[/g')
                #echo "$escaped"

                ### Avoid duplicates
                match=$(grep -i "$escaped" /var/tmp/4-star-tmp.m3u)
                if [ -z "$match" ]
                then
                        echo "$data" >> /var/tmp/4-star-tmp.m3u
                        ((i++))
                fi
        fi
done

cat /var/tmp/4-star-tmp.m3u | sort -R > /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/4\ Stars\ +.m3u

rm /var/tmp/4-star-tmp.m3u

Those Star Rating lists are called at the beginning of my overall static playlist script, but the Barn playlist and other manually selected ones are built from the "playlists_base" directory. I basically just edit those .m3us in place with Strawberry as we add CDs. They just the files, do a random sort and pull the top 200. This will use any .m3u in .../playlists_base/ and make a daily file from it:


#!/bin/bash

#scp xrayspx@pro:~/.config/Clementine/clementine.db /var/tmp/

### Switching between Clementine and Strawberry ###
#cp /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists_base/clementine.db /var/tmp/

cp /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists_base/strawberry.db /var/tmp/

/home/xrayspx/bin/3-star-playlist.sh
/home/xrayspx/bin/4-star-playlist.sh
/home/xrayspx/bin/5-star-playlist.sh
/home/xrayspx/bin/get-the-led-out.sh

ls /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists_base/*.m3u > /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists_base/m3us.txt

while IFS= read -r file
do

        filename=$(echo $file | awk -F "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists_base/" '{print $2}')

        echo Filename: $file

        rm "$file.full"
        rm "$file.scratch"
        rm "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/$filename"

        ###Testing a change since Strawberry creates playlists without EXTINF lines ###
#        array=`grep EXTINF "$file" | sort | uniq`
        array=`grep -v EXTINF "$file" | sort | uniq`

        printf '%s\n' "${array[@]}" | sort -R > "$file.full"
        head -n 200 "$file.full" > "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists_base/$filename.scratch"

        n=0
        while IFS= read -r extinfo
        do
#       echo $extinfo
                term=`echo $extinfo` # | cut -d "," -f 2-`
#       echo $term

 ###Testing a change since Strawberry creates playlists without EXTINF lines ###
 # grep -A 1 -m 1 "$term" "$file" >> "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/$filename"

        grep -m 1 "$term" "$file" >> "/Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/$filename"
        done 

        rm "$file.full"
        rm "$file.scratch"

done 

rm /var/tmp/clementine.db
rm /var/tmp/strawberry.db

For TV shows it's a bit more complicated. I've got individual scripts for things like Sitcoms, Saturday Morning Cartoons, Buddy-Cop shows, Nick-at-Nite, etc. Each script uses a text file which just lists the relative path to the directories I want to randomize. I just read in that text file then scan each directory and build an array that again I sort -R and dump in an m3u. You'll see a couple of my conventions here, like the "dvd_extras" folders I use for any extras that I want to keep but don't want to have show up in the mix, as well as a bunch of other crap I grep out.

This script references "./.sitcoms.txt", which looks like this:


./Archer (2009)
./30 Rock
./Absolutely Fabulous
./Alexei Sayle's Stuff


#! /bin/bash

array=$(
while read line
do
        find "$line" -type f;
done < .sitcoms.txt
)

printf '%s\n' "${array[@]}" | sort -R | grep -v -w "batch" | grep -v dvd_extras | grep -v "./$" | grep -v "\.m3u" | grep -v -i ds_store |
 grep -v "\.nzb" | grep -v "\.nfo" | grep -v "\.sub" | grep -v "\.sfv" | grep -v "\.srt" | grep -v -i "\.ifo" | grep -v -i "\.idx" |
 sed 's/^/..\//' > ./1\ -\ Playlists/Sitcoms.m3u

This dumps out to a folder called "1 - Playlists" inside my TV Shows directory, just so it shows up first. There's a folder in there for Blocks as well, in which I create blocks of 10 random episodes of a bunch of shows. This is built to replicate like TBS/TNT/USA in the evening where you just sit and watch a block of whatever is on. In practice I do this wrong and tend to be too picky about these and just watch blocks until I've worked my way through a whole series and wind up tired of it forever.

One thing I do for things like Nick at Nite and overall Sitcom lists and stuff is that I mix in commercials. I don't do this very well though, I just treat my directory of commercials like any other TV show. I'd rather do "pull a TV show, toss in two commercials, repeat", but I'm not there yet I guess.

The last type of lists I build are for music videos. I break this into a few different playlists, one overall catchall that pulls in all videos, a playlist for MTV 120 Minutes, and one for "Arcade / Pizzeria" music. Basically the ubiquitous music you'd hear in a pizza shop or arcade in the '80s or '90s. I do the same commercial thing here as well.

Example:


#! /bin/bash

array=`find ../120\ Minutes -type f;
find ../../../Commercials -type f`

printf '%s\n' "${array[@]}" | sort -R | grep -v dvd_extras | grep -v "./$" | grep -v "ERRORS$" | grep -v "\.sh" | grep -v "\.m3u" |
 grep -v -i ds_store | grep -v ".nzb" | grep -v ".srt" > 120\ Minutes.m3u

xrayspx's picture

Community? What's that?

Music: 

Jack Burton and the Lo Pans

I've had a bunch of people suggest that I post "content" and be a "YouTuber" and join the Retro Community and whatever.

I have never been interested in any community aspect to the Internet which doesn't involve face to face hacking on cool shit and putting it on the Internet. I can do that here and I really don't care about "engagement", "views", other people's opinions, or any of the rest. This is because I have no interest in dealing with the noise generated by other humans.

xrayspx's picture

Tech Henge

Music: 

Shriekback - Nemesis



As noted previously we basically just bought our way into a retro-computer collection with the addition of an Atari ST and two further 8-bit systems. This created problems for us, but we decided to solve them with craftsmanship and as a result Natalie built an impressive henge.

Previously my office had a bookshelf that Natalie built while I was out of town for work. It worked great for 10 years or so but the shelves were only 10" deep, and while I was able to cram an impressive amount of stuff on there, it had to change. So we designed one 24" deep with a work surface a couple of inches deeper than that, and then a 20" hutch for the top section. This will allow us to have several layers of display items with storage behind them.
Because as is my motto: "If It's Not Display, It's In The Way"

So we've spent the last week setting everything up and trying to consolidate all the new stuff into bins, test what's working and what needs repair, and cabling up all the systems and network hardware. We put two 12u racks in the bottom, one is full of network hardware, NAS, and webservers and the other has several Atari 8-bit peripherals that are hooked up and then storage for in-progress projects like the Kaypro II. We designed it with the three cubbies to accommodate our printer and scanner, but decided that they were better used with books and stuff, so as a bonus we swapped out the top on a metal cabinet we already had and it really fits in well.

You can already see there's room for 4 computers/keyboards and mice "comfortably", and we could probably have 6 going if we really wanted to add anything more. We'll be spending some time to come trying to find the most effective way to fill this thing, but I think it's off to a good start, and we can nearly eat on our dining room table again, so that's a bonus! I think all we have left to do is unfortunately send the Elvis tapestry on a permanent vacation and replace him with 3 or 4 bookshelves to hold all the software and documentation we got with this haul.

xrayspx's picture

What Have I Done: Atari Edition

Music: 

The Ramones - Somebody Put Something in my Drink

Yesterday we went out and collected what was left of the Atari collection we bought, so today we set up pretty much everything in one place. This is why we need to build furniture:

This collection comes to us from a man I was in an Atari computer club with back in the '80s, when I was an Overly-Enthusiastic 'Tween pirate. So while I don't have my personal childhood 8-bit and ST computers anymore, this is actually stuff I remember. I specifically remember the ICD enclosure with the Apple sticker stuck on it for example. The ST actually was lovingly packed in a suitcase with custom foam for the machine, Spectre GCR and external floppy. However when we got it home the foam utterly disintegrated all over our dining room, so that's all being replaced just in case we ever take it anywhere again, but I can definitely remember that case being lugged into meetups back in the day as well.

There are also lots of things I've never seen in person before, like the Atari-branded tablet, light pen or the Indus GT drive. Apparently you can retire quite comfortably off the sale of an Indus GT, at least according to eBay weirdos. I don't know, I just remember they looked real cool in magazine ads.

It should be noted that all those boxes of disks, and the other boxes of stuff not pictured, contain nearly all fully licensed commercial software and manuals. That's why I haven't posted any shots of ST demos and cracked game intros and stuff. There aren't any :-) Everything is legal and has manuals, which is great. One of the big issues I had when I was a kid is that yeah, I had tons of games, but no idea how half of them worked, not a problem for Jumpman, but big problem for SCRAMM or Silent Service or MULE, at least I never knew how to play them. While this definitely wasn't a "Gamers" computer, it's really going to be interesting to stick Natalie in front of Calamus or PageStream and show her the state of the art for 1988 design software. Spectrum 512 has already left us both stumped. I've got some re-learning to do for sure.

Natalie was super excited playing with the drawing tablet and I guess I might have to get a CRT just so we can try the light pen out too. We're also looking forward to projects with the AtariLab temperature and light modules, which just have a really interesting history.

My loose plan is to get a GoTek so as not to have to deal with physical disks as much, and a SCSI to SD that can live in that ICD enclosure (along with probably 15 Raspberry Pis!) so that everything is gainfully employed once its new home is ready. To use the Spectre GCR I'll need high resolution mode, which should be achievable with a VGA converter. Color requires a monitor to support a 15Khz refresh rate (or use of an expensive scan doubler), but monochrome should work just fine. I'm waiting eagerly for CheckMate1500Plus.com to start selling their "ultimate" retro computing monitors to actually solve that problem once and for all.

Once we get the new storage built we'll have much more room to get in and start opening stuff up on the bench and start some repairs.


Inventory





On the 8-bit side, inventory-wise, we've got:
130XE
XE Game System
XEGS Light Gun
1010 Tape Drive
1050 Disk Drive
Indus GT Disk Drive
CX80 Trackball
CX77 Touch Tablet
CX75 Light Pen
AtariLab Light Module
AtariLab Temperature Module

Of that, the XEGS seems to be totally fine, while the 130XE tests bad on a bunch of its RAM, so that will be a project. I don't know whether I'll just replace the 64x1 DIPs that are in there now or go for some over-the-top modern upgrade that might be easier to source. It's also likely got a bad keyboard membrane, but I have a spare to replace that on hand.











On the ST side:
Atari 1040 ST
SC1224 Color monitor
SF-314 Floppy Drive
ICD FA-ST 2x SCSI disk enclosure
Spectre GCR Mac Emulator
There's also an internal PC emulator mod that I've not tested yet
Gravis analog joystick

The external floppy at the very least has a bad power switch, and doesn't seem to do anything. There are a total of 4 SCSI drives spread between two enclosures, but none of them spun up immediately either, so some work to do there. The Atari mouse doesn't work (yet!), so we got a DE9 to USB adapter so we can use modern mice. However that Gravis stick will work as a mouse, and was crucial to getting the machine up and tested.

There's one broken key slider stem that can be seen in the picture, we have the key and got a whole bag of replacement sliders so that's handled.

The external mouse & joystick switch box kind of resolves the problem of those ports being buried under the machine.

xrayspx's picture

Fall Project Time

Music: 

REM - The Wrong Child

I recently started bringing in a truly special collection of Atari hardware. I was expecting to pick up an ST and some software, and when we arrived found not only that that ST had loads of peripherals and neat stuff to test out, but lots of 8-bit hardware and an XE Game System as well. I actually had to do this in trips just to make sure I had somewhere rational to store all of it while we inventory it and do any repairs and cleanup needed before we start trying to see what other more serious collectors might want to take in. But honestly how could I pass this up an XEGS for this room?

We really only need to make a stand for the 2600 that will let you see and use both systems. All the power and A/V stuff routes to that shelf so we can just fire them up in place and start playing.

But what this really spawned is a project to start building furniture in the office. Natalie has this habit of doing projects while I'm out of town on business as a surprise for when I get back, so in 2015, before the full house renovation, while I was on a trip to a datacenter for a week Natalie built this bookshelf. At the same time she uncovered the awesome tile floor in the office which had been hidden under the crappiest industrial carpeting for all these years.

However we're reached a tipping point with that thing. The shelves are 12" deep which is great for a bookshelf but not so great for cramming a bunch of computer equipment into. You can see it's way too narrow to comfortably fit that scanner for instance.

The goal is to build something deeper which can comfortably store an ST, Mac Classic, and some other small home computers as well as just bulk storage of Crap in My Office. At the moment all my network hardware, switches, firewalls and storage are buried under my main desk. Tidy and out of the way, but a hassle to get to if I need to plug new stuff in or actually work on anything. I don't want to be 70 years old crawling around on the floor to add a network drop, so we're going to get that stuff out of there. We also need just "Bulk Computer Storage" for larger systems like a Mac Pro, KayPro II. My desk and repair bench has been getting a little crowded lately, so I'm hoping a good amount of that stuff can move as well. Some of the details of what we're doing are going to be a surprise, but it'll be cool, I swear. I've told Natalie my only real goal is to have somewhere to put my laptop bag. All this stacking shit is making me itchy :-)

The ST is currently taking up exactly the surface area of a small storage cabinet, which is a little cramped for purposes of troubleshooting to say the least, though a couple of toys have trickled in since I got it, like an Atari 9-pin to USB adapter for a modern mouse and a supply of replacement key switch sliders/stems.

We'll be building more ST projects to share Real Soon Now, promise. Once we get our bearings from all the work office moves and re-shuffling these shelves. My word is as good as a Tremiel promising us all Falcons By Christmas!

So I wanted to save a quick "Before" of that space before we start tearing into the project:



That Panasonic boombox works and sounds AWESOME, but barely even picks up the FM transmitter from 10 feet away because the boombox's day-job is to hide multiple WiFi routers, a network switch and a 10 port power strip, so there's like 8 WiFi antennas right up against the tuner, not ideal. Be nice to clear that up.

xrayspx's picture

Photo Backup

Music: 

I'm just sticking this here because it seems Mr. Santorum is reportedly expending some effort to get this photo removed from anywhere it's found on the Internet.


So here's a photo of Rick Santorum with his arm around Russian spy and notorious honey trap Maria Butina. I mean, I'm not saying he fucked her, though it seems many other Republicans did. So if he didn't fuck her, then Santorum either missed out or dodged a bullet depending on how you look at it.




xrayspx's picture

Kodi Machine Screensaver Notes

Music: 

Veruca Salt - Born Entertainer

I've just spent too long messing with a small PC to replace my Raspberry Pi Kodi machine. Problem was that the system would blank the screen after 10 minutes and there's too much stuff to test, and each test takes 10 minutes. Make a change, reboot, wait 10 minutes, make another change, and so on.

The problem was the Xorg default screen blanking, and it was fixed by creating /etc/X11/xorg.conf, with only the following config in it:

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "IgnoreABI" "True"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

I had previously tried a bunch of stuff with setterm and enabling rc.local to run from Systemd, all to no avail, so I wanted to document this one for the next time.

xrayspx's picture

Twitter is going on the pile

Music: 

Josh Hawley memes are the only thing trending and showing up in my feed right now.

Kinzinger and Cheney are hopefully having to do some real thinking. The fact that their entire party is still either in avid support of Trump or had no problem with endorsing him while campaigning in 2020. This was so obvious for so long, and those two are the "Your Lifelong Conservative Parents" of Congress. They will not be in Congress in January by the looks of things.

One line, just barely too far for TWO members of congress. They get zero support from their peers in public..

Their leaders have run screaming away from their statements on the 6th and 7th. They are all actively stonewalling and obstructing the committee. Ignoring subpoenas. Literally /running/ from them, like with their actual legs. "Liberal Lies and Conspiracy". RINOs.

This could really really blow things up.

Hopefully we win.

But I'm glad to see no time was wasted scoring cheap political points after the speech against /exactly that thing/ we just watched.

xrayspx's picture

Linux Needs To Be Ashamed

Music: 

I'm a 25 year Linux user, 22 as my primary desktop. I like pain, and that's OK. But do I consider myself any kind of "expert"? No.

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