Random Thoughts

I’ve written previously about the problem of screenshotting web pages (which I think is a bit important for web preservation) and how my solution was to use the Easylist/Ublock block lists to remove annoyances like cookie banners (that often just obscure the entire page).

And it seemed to work pretty well… except on sites like Twitter, where the banners stubbornly remain. I assumed that the HTML was just so obfuscated there that things didn’t work at all, but after thinking about it some more, that just seemed unlikely to me: These lists are updated pretty often, and these are big sites, so you’d think the list people would be handling it.

Less than ideal, eh?

So I started debugging, and it turns out that there are two kinds of selectors — normal DOM selectors, and extended selectors, and my code was just ignoring all those extended rules.

Now, writing code to emulate Ublock Origin here sounded like a lot of work, so I just asked ChatGPT to do it, and after prodding it to really do it a couple times, it apparently did. It spat out 830 lines of code, and after hooking that up to the screenshot thing:

It works! I’m sure it plagiarised a bunch of code to do this, but…

I’m kinda starting to understand how people end up in LLM psychosis — you can just do things that would take you so long to do manually that you wouldn’t bother to even attempt doing them…

Rah rah LLMs?

I’m still tweaking my Easter project a bit.

Beau Travail (from where I gratuitously stole some frames) is in 1.66:1, while my sideways TV is 9:16. Fortunately, Denis Lavant mostly keeps to the middle of the frame, but sometimes he dances off to the edges. I briefly contemplated editing this myself, manually, by using video editing software…

But then decided that that sounded too much like actual work. Most of the work would be getting the video editing software working again; I haven’t used it for many years.

So I asked an LLM whether it could script something up for me. The results are above.

But the shifts are kinda abrupt and mechanical, right? So I asked it to make things more natural, and:

I think… that’s OK? It also fixes an issue I was pondering: Since I’m basically displaying a grid — even if most of the blocks are “off” — perhaps there would be further burn-in on the blue blocks? Burn-in was what made this TV ready for being dumped in a river somewhere anyway. (I mean recycled. Recycled!)

So perhaps I should just declare this project done. (Which means that I’ll think of something else to tweak in 3… 2…)

While falling asleep yesterday, I was thinking about frame rates for the hall er installation. I was playing the pixilated imaged at a six frames per second frame rate, and it does look kinda cool. But I wondered — the original film is 24 fps. Would it be possible to interpolate the images and then run the resulting mp4 at a higher frame rate? Make things less jittery?

Now, interpolating film usually looks pretty bad — artifactey and smeared — but in this case I have a 200×100 grid of monochrome pixels, so interpolation means “just move these blocks around a bit to be more in the position they should be in the next frame”, right? So perhaps it’ll look interesting?

I asked ChatGPT to write the script, and the (no doubt horrible) results are on Microsoft Github, if you’re curious. But this kind of hobbyist tinkering with one-off scripts is something that LLMs have gotten pretty good at. They know the syntax for ImageMagick commands much better than any human in the history of computing, so you just have to correct certain things like “no, -threshold 5% means the opposite of what you think” and then you have something that works for you.

(Unless the LLM suddenly decides to put in a supply chain attack into your script — you never know. And remember to stop before slipping into an LLM psychosis!)

Anyway, after running the script for six hours…

It works! I think?

Heh, and Denis Lavant’s pixels look good in the hall mirror, too:

And finally, for no reason at all:

A music video.

A few years back, my OLED TV started displaying some problems — the middle section of the screen was much darker than the parts to the left and the right. I tried running all the OLED “refresh” things, and upgraded the firmware, etc, but nope — the middle bits remained stubbornly burned in.

It’s all my fault — this was my first OLED TV, and I didn’t know how fragile they are. I stupidly used to display the image of the currently playing album on the screen (when I wasn’t watching TV, which was most of the time), and that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do: Album covers are all (pretty much) the same size, so you have a square in the middle that gets a lot of pixels lit up, while the bits on the end aren’t.

It was just getting too distracting, so I got a new TV, but what was I going to do with the old one? I mean, nobody would want it, since it is indeed very annoying — when watching black and white movies, for instance, the bits in the middle got a sickening yellow tint — but throwing it out just seemed… eh… so dramatic.

So it’s been sitting behind some chairs in the hall for some years now.

But then I remembered those rather kick-ass art installations in the Oslo Airport… and I also remembered the kick-ass final scene of Beau Travail. It has Denis Lavant dancing! Could I combine those things somehow?!

So today I snipped that section out of the movie and tried to figure out how to drop the backgrounds.

That shit’s hard, so I wondered whether there were any services out there that could just do that for me.

And as you’d expect, this field is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, because it’s all “AI”.

They all seem so innocent and go “hey, try me out! it’s free!”. And then you try one, and then:

And then after creating the account, you can’t actually try it after all until you add money… and if you try to buy “credits”, you’ll find that a monthly subscription is cheaper than even the lowest amount of credits you can buy.

I guess they’re so desperate for the Monthly Recurring Revenue, as it’s the only thing that worth pointing to. They’re presumably losing money hand over foot, like everybody else in this field.

I also tried to make the site centre Denis Lavant in the frame, but…

THE HORROR THE HORROR THAT”S NOT DENIS LAVANT ANY MORE

It, of course, substituted a different man wearing different clothes, as LLMs are wont to do if you try to get them to edit something.

Oh, well. Nice to get your anti-LLM prejudices confirmed.

After these horrible, horrible struggles, I then took the background-less video and created a whole lot of PNGs, and then used ImageMagick a lot to get a blocky LED-ey look…

And then a more yellow, blurred look… And then finally put things together again into an MP4 file.

Is this going to work!?

Well, the TV has been switched off for… three or four years now, I guess? Is it dead now?

I plugged in a normal three prong thing back there, but it didn’t really say “click”… But I think that’s something that ought to work?

That’s the problem with debugging — when nothing works at all, it can be anything. But it’s usually the cables, so I rooted through all my old cabling boxes, and I found one that looks right.

TV’s still dead. The remote does nothing, either.

Oh, there’s a physical button on the back there somewhere?

THE TV IS ALIVE! But no way to switch input…

And the remote still does nothing. Is this even the right remote? It was one of two Sony remotes I could find in my electronics boxes…

Tried changing batteries… nothing…

But then I changed batteries again, so I guess those batteries in that box there were dead? Typical! Debugging physical things are fun.

BEHOLD! I was going to buy a new Raspberry Pi 5 to do this stuff, but while rooting through boxes, I found a cute li’l Celeron box, so I’m using that.

It’s Debian installin’ time.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have put the TV up that way before installing stuff, but it’s so heavy that I’m just not bothering to fix that. My neck can complain all it wants.

And amazingly enough, the cables were just long enough — I thought the cosmic rule was that no matter what you want to connect, either the cables are three metres too long or ten centimetres too short? Karma.

Aww, doesn’t that look like a cosy arrangement?

NO DON”T LOOK THE OTHER WAY

TADA! It’s working! But everything looks very greenish… he should be yellow.

And tada! I found a wifi dongle in a cupboard! I’m really getting a lot of mileage out of stuff that I’ve just had squirreled away today…

Perfect.

Hey, when it boots it’s kinda giving The Matrix. (The good people of Hoppers look on with scepticism.)

OK, OK, I should play a bit more with the aspect ratio, because Denis Lavant’s pixels should fill more of the screen…

And don’t look behind the screen!

OK, now Levant is looking bigger. And he’s still looking a bit green on the photos here, but he’s looking more yellow in reality.

I have to move that Jamie Hernandez poster, though.

OK, I think this is gonna work.

Hm… did I forget to switch on TearFree? *stares at screen*

Heh, I should adjust my camera settings…

There.

I have to buy one thing, though — an HDMI CEC injector so that I can hook this into my “home automation system” so that it can put the screen to sleep when I go to sleep (like all other screens do).

Easter projects, man.