I was walking home yesterday and I just happened to come across an HP LaserJet p2035n sitting by the dumpster, waiting to be taken away. I've never owned a printer, but this thing looked like it came from an era when such devices were made to be reliable instead of forcing DRM-locked cartridges, so I picked it up and took it with me. After getting situated I started some online research and I figure this brand of printers was manufactured from about 2008-2012, and my printer has a 2012 date.

As it turns out, this tossed printer works perfectly fine. I plugged it into power and ran a test sheet, and it prints almost perfectly. I plugged it via USB-B into my PC running Fedora 41 and immediately it gets picked up and added as usable printer. I then plugged the printer into its Ethernet port and fortunately this thing is new enough to have Bonjour (i.e. mdns) services so once again my PC just immediately finds it and can print. Awesome!

My laptop is a MacBook. While it did detect the printer over the network, it couldn't add the printer because it couldn't find a driver to operate it. I honestly don't understand why that's a problem since I assume macOS also uses CUPS just like Linux. But at any rate, I found the solution:

With CUPS on Linux I can share the printer. After configuring firewall-cmd to allow the ipp service now my iPhone and my MacBook can also print to the shared printer using the generic PostScript driver. So, in conclusion, Linux helped me 1) use this printer with no additional effort of installing drivers, 2) share this printer to devices which were not plug-and-play ready, and 3) print pics of Goku and Vegeta. As always, I love Linux.

I disable animations either through Gnome's accessibility setting or KDE's slider to instant. I find that Gnome's animations are just too slow by default and KDE's tend to be janky. So while I want my window manager to have instant animations, I don't need my applications to do so.

Is it possible to disable the animations from the DE's settings but to keep them like normal in Firefox? Example: when I press ctrl+t it's OK if the new tab has an animation when it's created in the browser's UI.

https://archive.is/H38tt

Mr. Wright has argued that there is a moral case for fossil fuels, saying they are crucial for alleviating global poverty and that moving too quickly to cut emissions risks driving up energy prices around the world. He has denounced efforts by countries to stop adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere by 2050, calling that a “sinister goal.”

"Has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organised human life on Earth?" -- Noam Chomsky, 2017

I would love a program where I can browse the world and see countries, cities, oceans, all fully labeled (preferably in English which I speak, but a dual English+local native script would also be good). It would be all the nicer if there were stats and facts and some representative photos and stuff to learn a little about different places, without needing to dive into a full Wikipedia article.

Basically, what I'm hoping for is like a modern MS Encarta Atlas, but offline and good.

As for web options, Google Maps, unfortunately, works really well. But I despise Google. OpenStreetMaps doesn't have all that extra data, it is just a map. What are the options available, if any?

When I first set up my web server I don't think Caddy was really a sensible choice. It was still immature (The big "version 2" rewrite was in beta). But it's about five years from when that happened, so I decided to give Caddy a try.

Wow! My config shrank to about 25% from what it was with Nginx. It's also a lot less stuff to deal with, especially from a personal hosting perspective. As much as I like self-hosting, I'm not like "into" configuring web servers. Caddy made this very easy.

I thought the automatic HTTPS feature was overrated until I used it. The fact is it works effortlessly. I do not need to add paths to certificate files in my config anymore. That's great. But what's even better is I do not need to bother with my server notes to once again figure out how to correctly use Certbot when I want to create new certs for subdomains, since Caddy will do it automatically.

I've been annoyed with my Nginx config for a while, and kept wishing to find the motivation to streamline it. It started simple, but as I added things to it over the years the complexity in the config file blossomed. But the thing that tipped me over to trying Caddy was seeing the difference between the Nginx and Caddy configurations necessary for Jellyfin. Seriously. Look at what's necessary for Nginx.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/nginx/#https-config-example

In Caddy that became

jellyfin.example.com {
  reverse_proxy internal.jellyfin.host:8096
}

I thought no way this would work. But it did. First try. So, consider this a field report from a happy Caddy convert, and if you're not using it yet for self-hosting maybe it can simplify things for you, too. It made me happy enough to write about it.

For many, many years now when I want to browse a man page about something I'll type man X into my terminal, substituting X for whatever it is I wish to learn about. Depending on the manual, it's short and therefore easy to find what I want, or I am deep in the woods because I'm trying to find a specific flag that appears many times in a very long document. Woe is me if the flag switch is a bare letter, like x.

And let's say it is x. Now I am searching with /x followed by n n n n n n n n N n n n n n. Obviously I'm not finding the information I want, the search is literal (not fuzzy, nor "whole word"), and even if I find something the manual pager might overshoot me because finding text will move the found line to the top of the terminal, and maybe the information I really want comes one or two lines above.

So... there HAS to be a better way, right? There has to be a modern, fast, easily greppable version to go through a man page. Does it exist?

P.S. I am not talking about summaries like tldr because I typically don't need summaries but actual technical descriptions.

[2.1.0] - 2024-05-17

API updates

• One config parameter added within the padding size. Config param structure size remains unchanged
• Presets 6 and 12 are now pointing to presets 7 and 13 respectively due to the lack of spacing between the presets
• Further preset shuffling is being discussed in #2152

Encoder

• Added variance boost support to improve visual quality for the tune vq mode
• Improve the tradeoffs for the random access mode across presets:
• Speedup of 12-40% presets M0, M3, M5 and M6 while maintaining similar quality levels
• Improved the compression efficiency of presets M11-M13 by 1-2% (!2213)
• Added ARM optimizations for functions with c_only equivalent

Cleanup Build and bug fixes and documentation

• Use nasm as a default assembler and yasm as a fallback
• Fix performance regression for systems with multiple processor groups
• Enable building SvtAv1ApiTests and SvtAv1E2ETests for arm
• Added variance boost documentation
• Added a mailmap file to map duplicate git generated emails to the appropriate author

[2.0.0] - 2024-03-13

Major API updates

• Changed the API signaling the End Of Stream (EOS) with the last frame vs with an empty frame
• OPT_LD_LATENCY2 making the change above is kept in the code to help devs with integration
• The support of this API change has been merged to ffmpeg with a 2.0 version check
• Removed the 3-pass VBR mode which changed the calling mechanism of multi-pass VBR
• Moved to a new versioning scheme where the project major version will be updated every time API/ABI is changed

Encoder

• Improve the tradeoffs for the random access mode across presets:
• Speedup presets MR by ~100% and improved quality along with tradeoff improvements across the higher quality presets (!2179,#2158)
• Improved the compression efficiency of presets M9-M13 by 1-4% (!2179)
• Simplified VBR multi-pass to use 2 passes to allow integration with ffmpeg
• Continued adding ARM optimizations for functions with c_only equivalent
• Replaced the 3-pass VBR with a 2-pass VBR to ease the multi-pass integration with ffmpeg
• Memory savings of 20-35% for LP 8 mode in preset M6 and below and 1-5% in other modes / presets

Cleanup and bug fixes and documentation

• Various cleanups and functional bug fixes
• Update the documentation to reflect the rate control changes

"I tend to spread positive energy," Hassouna says. "But when the war started, there was no positive energy."

His darkest hour came on Feb. 12.

The Israeli military unleashed heavy bombings to provide cover for commandos during a successful hostage rescue mission. At least 74 Palestinians were killed in that bombing campaign, according to Gaza health officials.

Hassouna's mother, father, brother, sister-in-law and young nieces and nephew were among them. They were killed as they slept in the home where they were sheltering. It was the one night Hassouna happened to sleep over at a friend's house.

"Now I am by myself," he says. "Why should I live my life without a family?"

And an extra article giving more background and lead up https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-general-runs-out-of-road-kyiv-washington/

Does anyone know how to determine the level of grain synth used in an encoded video? I have .webms that I've encoded with ffmpeg and svt-av1 but I don't have that grain synth information anymore.

In fact it would be nice if I could just see any other information about an encoded video (rate factor, preset used, etc). These details don't appear when using mediainfo so I presume they are lost and unknowable. But grain synth occurs at decode time, so that should still be something I can figure out, right?

Archive link. https://archive.is/N4Rqj

Some personal editorializing: This is a pretty remarkable first because of how captive we Americans are to pharma prices. Famously, when Medicare Part D was brought into existence by law it restricted the federal government from negotiating Part D drug prices. To me, shopping for drugs in Canada is tackling the symptom and ignores the cause. I wonder if this gets more traction with more states how it might affect drug prices in Canada, too.

The real solution to all this, of course, would be nationalize the healthcare industry in all aspects and to create a single payer healthcare system.