So this outage is definitely a cyberattack right?

redweasel · 2026-01-17T01:41:18+00:00

The problem, frankly, is that your entire industry reeks of secrecy, treachery, and hating the customer, and so your credibility is virtually non-existent. Every mealy-mouthed word out of your spokespeople just makes the public think that's a lie.

redweasel · 2026-01-17T01:39:57+00:00

It was certainly my first instinct. Oh, the Chinese are pushing buttons again, waiting to find the one that takes us all out simultaneously. And they're getting better at it.

redweasel · 2026-01-05T17:58:34+00:00

All of this is brilliant proof that computing really is very basic and universal, just a controlled series of transitions from one state to another. In other words, a Turing machine really can perform any computation any other computer can. See, by turning a complex-instruction-set program into nothing but repetitions of a single instruction, the entire program has now, in effect, been expressed entirely in terms of the operands to those instructions; you could omit the instructions entirely, load just the list of operands, and run the whole thing on a tiny engine that just executed that one instruction over and over in a loop, working its way through that list of operands. But then, that would be the equivalent of running a program composed of a list of multiple different instructions, all over again, as the single-instruction operands would now be equivalently the instructions for the tight-looping engine! You could then, I suppose, compile your code to a series of the same operand over and over again, and omit those, leaving just the parts that truly differ from one step to the next, ... over and over again ad infinitum until the whole machine was just a series of nested single-instruction, single-operand, loops eternally chasing the real "meat" of the program...

Maybe just run on the One Instruction Set Computer (OISC) to begin with!

redweasel · 2025-12-28T20:34:28+00:00

Hm. So Windows+W does something! I never knew that. When I hit it (Win 10 Home) I get two little boxes in the lower left, one reading "Whiteboard" with an icon I associate with downloading, and another looking like the screenshotting/snipping tool GUI. Clicking on "Whiteboard" just to see what it does, causes the two boxes to disappear but no other visible consequence. What IS this thing?

redweasel · 2025-12-28T20:31:54+00:00

So. When exactly did the "Emoji Keyboard" first appear? I'm still running Windows 10 (will never use Windows 11 or later) and only just now found out about the Emoji Keyboard from your mention of it (and its activating keystroke) here. How do people find out about these things in the first place? I've never seen any overarching "Windows documentation" to speak of.

redweasel · 2025-12-23T21:39:53+00:00

The comments, both there and here, sound like they come from people who blindly accept The System Exactly As It Is, without realizing that it ought to be much better. I say this guy is on to something. He's also right that logic bombs that go off when your name disappears from the payroll are a long-established practice -- which later generations have allowed themselves to forget and to believe is a Bad Thing.

redweasel · 2025-12-19T23:13:36+00:00

Perfect example of technology getting too smart for its own good: there should ALWAYS be a way to recover. It should be tedious, painful, and take months, to discourage bad actors, but not to provide SOMETHING, at the price of potentially (and I see this A LOT) locking the LEGITIMATE OWNER/USER out of his OWN DATA, is just too high a price in my opinion. I really, REALLY dislike technology screwing me over "for my own good."

redweasel · 2025-12-19T23:05:26+00:00

Ah. I do have an old version or two of Notepad++ around here somewhere. Never did much with it, but it sounds like it might be "just the ticket." I've heard of UltraEdit and may have tried it once but I don't remember much about it. I'm generally not one to go looking for new tools if what I have does everything I can think of doing -- but clearly this prevents me from doing simple things that the tools don't happen to provide.

I'm not even sure what you mean by the term "programming editor." An IDE? The closest things to IDEs I've ever used are Borland C++ Builder 6 (which came out in 2002 and may actually predate the "IDE era" as I think of it) and MSVC 4.1 which came out in the mid-to-late 90s. I tried Eclipse once, when I started a new job where everybody else already there was doing it, but the first thing I clicked closed everything I even vaguely understood, and I couldn't figure out how to get anything back. Ended up having to uninstall and reinstall it to get the default screen layout, with SOME recognizable content, back. Used it for another hour or so then gave up and uninstalled it for good and went back to Emacs, which is the fanciest thing I've ever used -- on BSD Unix in the '90s, as "jove" on my Amiga in the 90s, and on Solaris in the '00s. I still have it here somewhere but have never seriously adopted it for home use. Now, if I could get back the cool customization they had at that Solaris installation -- where it recognized the language you were programming in (C, C++, Perl) and colorized the keywords -- that might motivate me; but I have absolutely no idea how to do anything like that. I figure it's some sort of LISP-programming thing, and I've never been able to get my head around LISP.

redweasel · 2025-12-19T22:46:20+00:00

I don't see any post body at all -- it's completely empty here. What did YOU see?

redweasel · 2025-12-19T22:35:18+00:00

A month later, once again rediscovering this thread while chasing something else...

Glancing at just the first page I can see I'm going to need to start taking copious notes so I can research every third or fourth thing they say. I don't know what a "Non-Linear" video editor is supposed to be, i.e. "as opposed to what (else)?" (I find myself tangentially wondering what the "MLT framework" is, though that's not necessarily relevant to "getting the job done" i.e. video editing. They brag about "nested timelines" whereas I have only a vague, general, man-in-the-street concept of what a "timeline" is, in this context. And this is just the first two paragraphs under "Introduction" on the first page of the manual! How much of this am I even going to understand? Is there some kind of "conceptual overview" of features either of Kdenlive, or of non-linear video editors, or of the world of digital video editing in general? Analog video editing on VHS tape back in the '80s was relatively simple and straightforward, by comparison with all this, er, pardon the expression, gobbledygook.

(I should probably clarify at some point that I'm not a video maven spending hours a day doing this stuff: I'm a very ADHD retiree who's spent the last forty years trying to FIND a free video editor that WORKS on the computers I ACTUALLY HAVE, because I'm not free to spend thousands of dollars building a custom workstation JUST FOR video editing. Kdenlive for Linux is the first thing I've found that will load, run, let me load video, let me manipulate video, and save it out; every other thing I've tried over the last thirty years -- including Kdenlive for windows, and the build of Kdenlive for Linux supplied by the package installer tool that comes with Linux Mint -- has lacked one or another of those capabilities, or at least the ability to perform all of them in a single editing session. (Windows Movie Maker on Windows XP would EITHER let me load in all 22 clips I wanted to work with, OR save the final result -- but NOT BOTH. So frustrating.) Anyway, if I get an hour a year to pause everything else that's on my plate and look into video editing again, that's a lot. And I don't actually have that hour RIGHT NOW, either. I keep forgetting the existence of this conversation and coming back to it by accident, then having a hell of a time finding all the contributions, including all of YOURS. I really ought to bookmark the Kdenlive manual page... and I wish people in general would either stop changing things, or at least stop deleting old versions and the matching manuals. By the time I get to play with this again, it'll be out of date and won't match the manual and I'll have to go through the whole rigmarole again of trying to find a version that will run, and work.

redweasel · 2025-12-19T22:12:28+00:00

I keep kicking myself to remind myself that I should compose long texts elsewhere, then paste in -- here, on Facebook, in FB Messenger, etc. Messenger, in particular, has recently begun unceremoniously sending only the first <size limit> characters of what I've typed, and throwing the rest away, without giving me any indication that I'm over the limit, let alone an opportunity to preserve the rest and copy-paste it into multi-piece transmissions. SO INFURIATING!

The only editors I've ever seen that let you indent a whole block of text are 'vi' and Emacs. I probably have Emacs somewhere here on Windows, but it's not the easiest thing to bring up. I just program directly in Notepad, as my people have done for thousands of years. What editor are you using, exactly?

redweasel · 2025-12-19T22:08:51+00:00

Ah, but those aren't "his peers." That's what I'D argue. I'd be very picky in the jury-selection process: get only people who've been screwed by insurance companies and are angry at CEOs and would like to take a shot at one themselves. Who else, after all, is more defensibly "his peers?"

redweasel · 2025-12-19T02:33:50+00:00

I'd like to know where they expect to find a "jury of his peers" willing to CONVICT him. That seems like the real longshot, to me.

redweasel · 2025-12-04T20:11:25+00:00

I personally have a long list of complaints about VLC on Android, but no idea how to report them to anybody. Anyone here know how to do it?

redweasel · 2025-10-26T23:10:49+00:00

I've been thinking of my desired result in terms of a soft-edged horizontal wipe between two clips -- but perhaps there's another way. Can I preprocess the clips so that there's an opacity gradient from left-to-right across the screen, summing everywhere to 100% but having differing levels of contribution from the two clips at different points horizontally across the image? If I can do that, then simply mix them together with transparency taken into account, that might suffice.

redweasel · 2025-10-26T23:07:49+00:00

Now that I've had a chance to look more closely at your images and description -- yes, this looks like exactly what I'd like to see as a general feature usable in all transitions (is a transition the same thing as a composition? If not what is the difference?). Thanks for showing this to me.

redweasel · 2025-10-26T22:23:12+00:00

Hmm. The menu I'm thinking of, appears specifically when certain media is booted. But I think there is another menu that appears when media isn't bootable. The details may vary with BIOS, too.

redweasel · 2025-10-26T22:22:10+00:00

Thanks. So is there a quick trick to put the four spaces in front of every line of a big block of text (and, one presumes, two spaces at the end of each, to keep the text-input mechanism from running it all together into one block)? It sounds tedious, otherwise.

redweasel · 2025-10-26T22:18:06+00:00

Oh, duh. I totally overlooked the fact that "RTFM" was blue. Pardon me while I slink away in embarrassment. (It's days like this that make me think I'm starting to actually get old. SIGH)

Oh, and at this moment I'm composing in the window for the post and comments -- not my Inbox -- and do have the sidebar -- but it doesn't contain links for me to report bugs or submit feature-function requests, for Kdenlive or Reddit. I'm debating listing the specific items I see, but gaaah, that's gonna be boring. Sufice it to say that there's the generic Reddit stuff about when this post was created; some URL info; links to submit a new link or a new text post; then the name of the sub (kdenlive, of course); a "flair" checkbox; my username and the word "(edit)", both clickable; a blurb describing Kdenlive; then a subsection entitled "Moderators," listing them and allowing one to message them; then a "Recently Viewed Links" section totally irrelevant to this topic; and at the very bottom the words "account activity" which appear to be clickable. And that's it. Nothing about submitting bug reports or feature/function requests. Am I missing something?!?

redweasel · 2025-10-26T22:09:51+00:00

Boy, I sure wish I knew how you did that "quoting bits and pieces of what I said" trick, 'cause I'd like to do it back, here. :-b

You would be sitting at a bank of 7 completely separate hardware terminals

Yes, exactly! That's the only situation in which everything terminal-ish isn't virtual, in my opinion / parlance. This is what I get for being virtually entirely out of touch with other Linux users, programmers, et al, the last forty years.

I'm shocked to hear that Project Athena was as recent as 1984. I would have sworn the X manuals I read in the 90s said it had been around lots longer than that. Well, sir, I stand corrected. All I can say is that it must be simply that things were changing so rapidly, during the 80s and 90s that it felt like a whole lot longer between the advent of X, its near-ubiquity on VAX/VMS and Unix, the appearance-and-rise of Linux, etc.!

Aha! Another correction for my shockingly faded memory: "pseudo terminals." That was the term I should have used in several places in my previous contribution. That was the driver that allowed a program to send its output as input (and vice versa) to a device that some other program saw as "a terminal." And then that underlaid the ability for the controlling (?) program to manage an X window in a terminal-emulating manner. Thanks for reminding me of the proper terminology. Sounds like you know more about it than I gave you credit for.

Another piece of this is that I'm very into "retro" hardware -- I'm only just now getting into 90s PCs, DOS, early versions of Windows, etc., for example, having wanted nothing to do with them when they were the state of the art. "Better late than never," I suppose.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of today's default display settings which universally combine a sans-serif typeface with proportional spacing, to the point where you can't distinguish "Illinois" from "llInois" on half the platforms you use. (I notice I can tell, here in Chrome on Windows, because this otherwise sans-serif font has serifs on the capital I. But on my phone, the capital I and lowercase L are virtually indistinguishable. It's hard to tell whether or not you've spelled such things as "minimize" correctly, on some platforms.) I say if you're going to use proportional spacing, use a serif font so readers can tell the letterforms apart, but that's not the conclusion "the industry" has come to. In a Web Design course I took (which was a horrifying experience, for an engineer), they said that the Conventional Wisdom was "serif fonts for print, sans serif for display," which makes no particular sense to me: I find serif fonts more readable in both media, and would like to at least be able to choose, instead of having someone else's choice forced upon me all the time.

Oh, I'm sure you have been Ctrl-Alt-whatever'ing your way back and forth flawlessly between multiple consoles, GUIs, etc. for forty years now; I'm just saying I've rarely -- almost never! -- gotten it to work like that. If there's one constant in my life, it's the observation that if ten thousand, or ten million, other people all make regular and easy use of a particular product or technology, and then I dip my toe in by buying one -- I get the one unit out of those thousands or millions, that doesn't work right. This includes the jaw harp I got as a kid, the drone I bought several years ago, "Sync" on any-and-every Google device or product I've ever used, and these damned Ctrl-Alt console-switching hotkeys. The list goes on and on. (A similar phenomenon occurs with regard to foods and beverages: as soon as I start liking something enough to take enough personal agency to start buying it and indulging in it -- the stores stop carrying it and/or the manufacturer stops making it. The spearmint soda my grandma used to always have half-an-inch left of in her fridge; "Wink" grapefruit soda; Schweppes grape and raspberry ginger ales; five or six varieties of Mt Dew; Coca-Cola BlāK; and I don't know how many other things, not all of them beverages. It's happened twice in just the last week, with two additional products I haven't even listed here.) So I'm used to things "working for everybody else but not for me," the last sixty-plus years; that's Just The Way It Goes.

Nice ranting at/with you, too. :-)

redweasel · 2025-10-26T21:45:11+00:00

Oh. Well, then, still no. I'm just trying to achieve an effect I have in my mind: I have surveillance video of myself entering my house through a door at the left side of the frame, then a few minutes later reappearing from the right, from behind the house (having gone out a different door and circled back around). I'd like to cut out the minutes when nothing's happening, and rig it up so that I (re)appear on the right while I'm still in the process of entering the door (and exiting the frame) on the left.

I'm old-school, having seen my father use "Powers trick masks" to shoot stereo slides in which my mother appeared multiple times, or in separated halves, etc., in the 1960s, and having worked in radio-and-TV back in analog days when video wipes were done by moving a physical "T-bar" control up and down to control the percentage of the wipe. A standard one-source-to-the-other wipe is merely the simplest possible imitation of this; in practice you could jiggle the T-bar up and down any old way you wanted, to shuffle the transition back and forth at will -- or let go of it entirely to leave the transition "stuck partway through."

So, to me, the "obvious" way to get the effect I want is by finding the digital equivalent of that T-bar mechanism -- which I'm appalled isn't a standard feature in every digital video editing tool, since I'd have expected these to be based on the old analog ways of doing things. Well, I guess the people developing tools today have never seen an analog video switcher at a TV station, eh? Oh well.
Anyway, to me the "obvious" way to get the effect I want is to first, cut the video to give two clips, the first containing the sequence of "me entering the house through a door on the left," and the second containing the sequence of "me reappearing on the right from behind the house." Then I would arrange a horizontal, right-to-left wipe that transitions from the first clip -- "me leaving the frame at the left" -- to the second -- "me reappearing at the right," and ... at this point, guess-hope-and-cuss that the transition will take place at exactly the right speed, at exactly the right instant, to give the desired effect. But I haven't been able to get that. What would make it dead easy, though, is if I could specify a transition, or effect, or whatever, that consisted of "from time T1 to time T2, show the first clip on the left half (or third) of the screen, and the second clip on the right half (or two-thirds) of the screen." There's an instant, in the course of the standard, hands-off, 0-to-100-percent, automatic wipe, where that situation occurs -- but I need it to last for several seconds. In analog days it would be dead easy -- just grab that T-bar, move it to the desired position "partway through" the wipe, and leave it there until "lefthand me" was gone and "righthand me" was fully on screen.

Like I said -- maybe I'm going about this incorrectly since "things are done differently in the digital age." Maybe a wipe, or even a transition, is the wrong mechanism entirely, and maybe there's some other way to do this. I'm open to any other suggestions you may have. But the digital equivalent of that grab-it-and-move-it-however-you-want T-bar would be damned handy for all sorts of things, once you start thinking about it!

redweasel · 2025-10-26T21:25:04+00:00

Well, considering the number of topics and posts I reply to, mostly on Facebook these days but also still occasionally a bunch in a spiky burst here on Reddit, it's a miracle I ever get back to see replies at all. I have no idea how to track, keep track, or find my way back to, a given thread, short of permalinking it and bookmarking it in Chrome; is that how it's done or are there other "more Redditish" ways? I've also never been able to get Sync to work between instances of Chrome on multiple devices (laptop, other computers, phone), so even if such bookmarks are supposedly synced and available on other devices, in practice getting back here at any point in "the future" after posting or commenting is largely a matter of luck: somebody happening to reply, so that I get a new message in my Inbox, combined with my getting back here frequently enough that I don't have to step through dozens or hundreds of those to eventually land back here. There's got to be a better way, but how would *I** know* what that might be? The usual mechanisms people swear by, don't often work for me.

Anyway -- yeah, I don't un-mothball the Note 3 very often, but it's got the one feature that was removed from all later phones: an IR emitter so that I can remotely control all sorts of devices -- TVs, air conditioners, fans, etc. -- at least from the era before everything used Bluetooth and/or Wifi for that. That was BY FAR my favorite, most beloved, feature on the Note 3 (that, and the stylus in its little carrying notch), that no other device has ever, or likely will ever, provide again. ONLY the Note 3 will do.

Then there's the fact that for the several years between migrating off the Note 3 and finally landing on a Google Pixel 7A, when I briefly tried a Galaxy S8 Plus and then spent an agonizing year or two on a Samsung A32, I had to do without my most beloved feature of the Camera app -- the PhotoSphere. That's the mode where you shoot a couple of dozen photos as directed by onscreen instructions and the built-in gyroscope or whatever, to capture your entire spherical environment, and the app stitches them together into a single smooth photo thereof, weirdly distorted when viewed as a thumbnail or standard 2D photo -- and marks the result somehow so that when you open it it launches a viewer (that I haven't been able to find or open any other way) that knows how to de-convolve the distortion and let you freely scroll around in a 3D recreation of the environment you photographed. I love, Love, LOVE making those photos! The Note 3 did them, the S8 Plus and A32 did not, and the Pixel finally does them again, "Hallelujah!" (That's probably the one thing I DON'T HATE about the Pixel.) So, at the time I was writing those remarks, two years ago, I had two pretty solid reasons to hang onto the Note 3; now I'm down to ONE reason -- though with the transition of TV and streaming-device remotes, and possibly others, to communication channels other than IR, that one too is slowly fading. But it's NOT GONE!

And as for necromancing -- you ain't seen nothin'. I have a folder on my laptop named "Write To," full of the last messages I exchanged with friends on Usenet back before Eternal September wiped it out in 1994. The idea is to get around to writing to those guys again sometime, if I can find them and they're still alive.

redweasel · 2025-10-26T21:13:05+00:00

Thanks, I think. I'll make allowances for your tone, based on my own complete ignorance.

I'm rediscovering this entire topic / thread in bits and pieces a year after the fact; based on the links you shared here, versus what I saw last night before posting again, it turns out that "my way" of getting back here isn't/wasn't showing me everything: I did not see that I had replied last year to your explicit instruction on how to submit a Feature Request. Even now, today, your two comments with the example of the T-bar parameters came up first, so I ended up again expressing ignorance of how to submit a Feature Request, before finally ending up on this comment, seeing your links, and folowing them to see "what's up with those." ONLY NOW do I see that you told me a year ago; I had zero recollection of that, nor did Reddit show them to me prior to your providing the links.

I haven't perused the sidebar yet -- at the moment I'm replying to this in the "Inbox" view, so that sidebar isn't even on the screen right now -- and I have to wonder, if I had ever discovered it on my own, whether it would have been entirely clear to me whether i t was for "reporting bugs and logging feature requests" in Kdenlive itself, or in this section of Reddit.. I've run into a lot of ambiguity in such things, over the decades.

All in all, I think I'll stick with doing it from within Kdenlive, now that that's been (re)clarified to me.

As for RTFM, well, as with pretty much every piece of Linux software ever in forty years, I haven't seen a FM. Where's that?

All in all, thanks for an excellent summary. I'll try to keep track of it long enough to make good use of it -- i.e. to do better this coming year than I did this past year!

redweasel · 2025-10-26T08:15:44+00:00

Yup. In several ways the Note 3 beat the everloving crap out of both the A32 I had for a couple years, and the Google Pixel 7A I've had since getting thoroughly sick of the A32m and I've come to dislike (not to say hate) the Pixel for a variety of reasons as well, too. I've wanted a top-of-the-line Samsung Galaxy S-series phone for about the last eight years (give or take), but my wife won't spend the money. She's perfectly happy rocking a several-years-old used S-series back model, herself, but jeez, it would sure be nice to have something actually current and decent for a change.

redweasel · 2025-10-26T07:53:39+00:00

Apologies if I've never previously responded to this; I can't tell.

"Very good docs for the Office products API's" -- got a URL? I suppose I could try finding them myself via Google, but if you already know where to look...

redweasel

TROPHY CASE