ch00f

You always hear about gun sales in the US, but you never hear about what happens to the guns at the end of their lifecycle. I assume guns wear out eventually, and I assume you can't just chuck them in the garbage when they do. What happens to them?

I'm working on trying to streamline the process of ripping my blu-ray collection. The biggest bottlneck in this process has always been dealing with subtitles and converting from image-based PGS to textbased SRT. I usually use SubtitleEdit which does okay with occasional mistakes. My understanding is that it combines Tesseract with a decent library to correct errors.

I'm trying to find something that works in the command line and found pgs-to-srt. It also uses Tesseract, but it appears without the library, the results are...not good:

Here's the first two minutes of Love, Actually:

00:01:13,991 --> 00:01:16,368
DAVID: Whenever | get gloomy
with the state of the world,

2
00:01:16,451 --> 00:01:19,830
| think about
the arrivals gate
alt [Heathrow airport.

3
00:01:20,38 --> 00:01:21,415
General opinion
Started {to make oul

This is just OCR of plain text on a transparent background. How is it this bad? This is using the Tesseract "best" training data.

Edit: I’ve been playing around with ocr-to-pgs which also uses tesseract and discovered that subtitles having black outlines really messes with it. I made some improvements.

https://github.com/wydengyre/pgs-to-srt/pull/348

Upgrading a server for the first time in 10 years, so I’m a little out of the loop. I was surprised to find that the RAM I bought didn’t fit.

This is my first time dabbling in ECC RAM, so I figured there was some minor detail I missed when purchasing, but I eventually came across the data sheet for this stick, and the dimensions given don’t match the measurements I’m making. The tip of the caliper should be in the middle of the notch at 68.1mm.

What’s more is that the dimensions in the data sheet seem to match the dimensions on my motherboard. What’s going on here?

[SOLVED] I and Kingston are morons. I ordered RDIMM instead of UDIMM. The Kingston datasheet gives the wrong dimensions.

I hate the cloud.

This requires either multiple trips or a quick view theough your gadget into the new future.

Since 2016, I've had a fileserver mostly just for backups. System is on 1 drive, RAID6 for files, and semi-annual cold backup.

I was playing with Photoprism, and their docs say "we recommend placing the storage folder on a local SSD drive for best performance." In this case, the storage folder holds basically everything but the pictures themselves such as the database files.

Up until now, if I lost any database files, it was just a matter of rebuilding them by re-indexing my photos or whatever, but I'm looking for something more robust since I'll have some friends/family using Pixelfed, Matrix, etc.

So my question is: Is it a valid strategy to keep database files on the SSD with some kind of nightly backup to RAID, or should I just store the whole lot on the RAID from the get go? Or does it even matter if all of these databases can fit in RAM anyway?

edit: I'm just now learning of ZFS caching which might be my answer.

Working on a Christmas gift. I got the wood scrap, but I think it’s walnut. Eventually planning to polyurethane and fill in the engraving with black paint, but I’m stuck on how/weather to stain it.

I have a few stains from various projects, but on a sample piece they showed up really dark, and didn’t show the texture that well. It’s a little too late to do boiled linseed oil.

What would you recommend?

I’m working on driving a very finicky lcd. I have it working now with an FPGA dev kit. I had to use an FPGA because some of the timing requirements are in the tens of nanoseconds.

At the end of the day, I wrote a block for a one shot/continuous clock with a programmable duty cycle and initial delay. This block was repeated six times for the various clocks with their specific values.

Moving to the final product, this feels like overkill. In the past, I’ve managed to make this kind of thing work with a Rube Goldberg collection of on-board timer/counters on the microcontroller.

I’d like to avoid that mess this time around. If I can generate the clocks externally, I can have the host MCU send the data quickly using DMA.

An FPGA works great, but they’re expensive and there’s the issue of licensing for FPGA and and CPLD software.

I’ve seen this problem solved with a lookup table, but there aren’t a lot of cheap/small rom/ram options for what I’m trying to do.

Basically, what I’m asking is is there a component that can be easily programmed to generate a number of clocks, doesn’t need any costly software licensing, and comes in a very small package? (Like wlcsp)

Just finished 12 Minutes and Indika with my wife. Enjoyed the tight 5-ish hour gameplay with decent not-too-challenging puzzles and great story.

Basically 5-hour date night that’s more engaging than a movie.

Any other games that you can recommend in this category?

Given the amount of pull individual influencers have managed to amass over the last decade, it looks like the original 1985 prediction aged better than this 2009 rebuttal.

Back in my day, you could usually sip a few mA from a USB2 port without any trouble.

When I try that now, Windows pops up with a “device not recognized” error. I know you can draw up to 150mA before enumeration, but it looks like after some time, Windows will complain that you haven’t enumerated yet.

Is there an easy way to keep from getting this error without having to actually make the device smart?

I’m hoping for something dumb along the lines of USB-PD but facing the other direction. For the record, it has to work on a USB-A port, so USB-C hacks won’t work.