Detecting Youtube Movies

I play Youtube movies as background noise on a small USB monitor in the hall.  However, there seems

to be no way to determine whether a Youtube clip is a “still image” thing or a real moving clip.  Lots of people just show a still image of an album cover and put some music on top.

That’s really boring to look at.

So I wondered whether there’s an easy way I could filter out still images.  I could download them before playing, and check whether they’re “big enough” to seem to be movies, but some clips are so long that that’s not practical.  I could alter mplayer to monitor the video bit rate…  or I could just dump the USB bus and see whether there’s anything transferred to the USB screen.

The latter solution sounded more fun, so I wrote a script to make this more convenient. 

It turns out that most “still image” clips still output a bit of video data on the USB bus (probably due to Youtube post-processing or something), but it seems to be at least a factor of 100 difference, so it should be no problem to use, I think.

I just have to hook this up to the flutter script and maintain a blacklist of Youtube clips not to display.

I should patent this revolutionary technology and license it to Google!  Then they could offer filtering!  Yeah!  That’s the ticket.

Clairvoyancy

Last night I dreamt that I was mentioned in the index of Martin Aston’s 4AD biography “Facing the Other Way”.  Which I bought a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t looked at yet.  So I just checked…

… and I’m not.

But it turns out that I’m on the akwnowledgement page.  (With a mention of eyesore.no.)

.

So!  Does this mean that I’m clairvoyant or not?  In any case, I’ll have to read the book now.  I mean, I would have anyway, but it’s 640 pages long.  C’mon! 

I mean, great! 

Meh. Amazon.

I was reading yet another story about how Amazon working conditions totally suck, so I thought it was about time to ditch Amazon.  And I’m someone who orders stuff from Amazon like every other day.

But the question remains, as ever: Why do all non-Amazon web shops suck?  Badly?

For books I’ve now used bookstore.co.uk for a week.  Amusingly enough, the name of the site doesn’t resolve.  You have to put www in front.  And the search engine is so slow that it’s not even funny.  (I just can’t understand how you make a book search engine slow.  The number of books in the world fits into the RAM of the cheapest phone you can buy, these days.)  But I’ve managed to order a few books from them nevertheless.

Play.com used to be a bigger company that sold DVDs, but these days it’s a portal.  Which is nice.  I can imagine the DVDs being packed by nice grannies in Wales.  And it has a nice search engine.  The sign-on thing is kinda odd.  When registering, you have to give a “description” for your credit card and your address.  I tried using “Wat?” as a description, but it wouldn’t accept that until I deleted the question mark.

Now I just need to find a DVD and book supplier in the US, and I should be set.

Free range DVDs and books!

IT”S SPREADING!!1!

As all y’all remember clearly, some kinda weird white fungus attacked a pretty big aloe and killified it totally. 

But look!  This plant was totally OK just a couple weeks ago:

It’s spread!  To a different room!  But it’s still only attacking aloes.

And, eww.  It’s leaving this grey residue on the sill:

I think I probably should throw away all aloes I have…

And scrub down.