I’ve been trying to figure out a related sort of video streaming setup for work (without Owncast, but with a similar sort of 24/7 goal plus other considerations) and have been looking into using ffmpeg’s capabilities to output either HLS or DASH segments + manifests. (FFMPEG can do both but I don’t know which would be better for my needs yet.) The sources I’m working with are RTSP/RTP instead of RTMP and I only need streaming to browser clients currently – although it working with VLC naturally by pointing it to the manifest is nice.

HLS and DASH work by having videos split into small chunks that can be downloaded over HTTP, so just replacing the manifest allows for continuous streaming (the client pulls it repeatedly) without the server needing to maintain a continuous connection to the client.(Fan out to CDNs works naturally since the video chunks are just files that can be served by any web server.)

It should be possible to do some creative things by either creating / modifying the manifests myself with scripting or by piping chunks into another instance of ffmpeg from a script. (I’ve done something similar using -f image2pipe in the past, but that was for cases where I need to do things like create a video from an image gallery dynamically.) That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it myself though.

I don’t know what the right answer is either, but I’m also interested in finding out and hopeful you get additional responses.

Heliocentric orbit like this:

More info:

• Wikipedia article
• Media page on Wikipedia

I have an older version of TrueNAS on it from when it was still FreeBSD based (instead of Linux). I might replace it with Scale whenever I get around to doing maintenance on it next – or maybe just go to stock Debian or something since I don’t use most of the bells-and-whistles.

I run my NAS that way too. I just mount it and play videos with VLC if I want to watch something I have on it. The main reason I have a NAS is because I ran out of drive bays in my main system a few years ago… Works fine for my needs currently; no need to make it more complicated.

Historically, I don’t know, but personally, I prefer YYYY-MM-DD style dates since they sort naturally in basically all computer software without having to think about it.

I have a folding card table that currently serves as my desk. I don’t know how old it is – 1960s, maybe, based on the style of the brand/sales label on the back? It’s almost certainly older than I am, at least… Got it from my uncle back when I was in college and its still working well enough that I haven’t bothered to replace it.

Well, there’s roughly 8 billion people on Earth, and the Wikipedia article for “human” says:

The average mass of an adult human is 59 kg (130 lb) for females and 77 kg (170 lb) for males.

Male vs female is roughly 50/50 IIRC. Ignoring distribution of adults vs kids for simplicity, then roughly 4 billion times 59kg + 4 billion times 77kg = 544 billion kg or 1.2 trillion pounds, if I did my math right.

Pretty sure you can do much better than that now (plus or minus tariff insanity) – quick check on Amazon, NewEgg, etc. suggests ballpark of $5K for 1TB RAM (Registered DDR4) + probably compatible motherboard + CPU.

You can get motherboards with enough slots if you’re willing to pay enterprise prices for them. I have a system with 1TB of RAM at work that I use as a fast data cache. I just mount tmpfs on it, write hundreds of gigs of data into it (overwriting it all every few hours), and it works great. Cost was somewhere in the $10~15K (US) range a few years ago, IIRC. Steep for an individual, sure, but not crazy for an organization.

What they mean is you can just do something like mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk to get a file system using regular RAM already.

What was the most ridiculous or funny boundary push you saw?

Trolling someone by attaching a camera to the ceiling right above their keyboard. I’ve been paranoid since I saw that stunt pulled… They got their point across about physical security though.

I’ve worked for a university before and it was very common for staff to remote into their systems from home – usually with SSH for CS types or Remote Desktop/Team Viewer/etc. for less computer-focused folks. (The former usually didn’t have much issue – the folks using the latter mechanisms got compromised a number of times… -.-) There was also a campus provided VPN that was required to access certain systems with instructions to students and staff on how to use it, but other systems just got public IP addresses.

If what you’re doing is related to your work and campus IT doesn’t object, you’re probably fine to do it. I’ve run various kinds of websites and web apps for colleagues to collaborate on research projects. Being able to do things like that is kind of the point of the internet.

Having seen a number of students, uh, push the limits and find the boundaries of acceptability the hard way though… I’d strongly advise you not to install cryptominers, run TOR exit nodes, or torrent TV shows/movies/etc. That kind of thing tends to get your systems in hot water with IT or other parts of the bureaucracy…

In principle, sure. I’m not aware of an existing out-of-the-box solution that’d do what you want, but it also wouldn’t surprise me terribly if someone’s cobbled something together to do this before.

If I wanted to make something like this personally (and couldn’t find an existing solution), I’d start by doing some research into PBX software like Asterisk, what derivatives and extensions people have made for that, etc. – being mindful that I’d likely be digging into a deep rabbit hole…

You can run docker containers with multiple volumes. e.g. pass something like -v src1:dst1 -v src2:dst2 as arguments to docker run.

So – if I understood your question correctly – yes, you can do that.

Giant middle finger from me – and probably everyone else who uses NoScript – for trying to enshittify what’s left of the good parts of the web.

Seriously, FUCK THAT.

Two quick ideas on possible approaches:

1. Static page route. You can just write some Javascript to load the image from a file input in HTML, draw it resized to a canvas (based on an input slider or other input element), then save the canvas to an image. (There might even be simpler approaches if I wasn’t stupidly tired right now…) This can be done in a single file (HTML with embedded JS – and CSS if you want to style it a little) that you toss on any web server anywhere (e.g. Apache, nginx, whatever). Should work for JPEG, PNG, and probably WebP – maybe other regular image types too. Benefit: data never needs to leave your device.

2. Process on server route. Use Python with a simple web server library (I usually opt for tornado for stuff like this, but flask or cherrypy or similar would probably work). Set up a handler for e.g. an HTTP POST and either pass the image into a library like Pillow to resize it or shell out to ImageMagick as others have suggested. (If you want to do something clever with animated GIFs you could shell out to ffmpeg, but that’d be a fair bit trickier…) The image can be sent back as the response. Be careful about security if you take this route. Probably want some kind of login in front of it, and run it in a VM or some other secure environment – especially if you’re using AI to kludge it together…

Best of luck and let me know if you need any help. Will probably have some time this weekend if you can’t get it on your own. Happy hacking!

I would be happy with a FOSS desktop app I can install in linux too

On the command line, you can do this with ImageMagick (e.g. use the command convert once it’s installed).

With a (desktop) GUI, there’s a bunch of programs. GIMP is probably the most well known and has a ton of capabilities but is a bit complex. I use Kolourpaint as a quick-and-dirty “MS Paint”-like program for very simple tasks where I want a GUI.

If you want a simple web UI I’m sure there is one already, but I don’t know one specifically. It wouldn’t be too complicated to hack something up if all you need is a quick-and-dirty file input and percentage rescale or something like that. If you don’t get a better suggestion and don’t know how to make something like that yourself, let me know and I can write an example.

People have already covered most of the tools I typically use, but one I haven’t seen listed yet that is sometimes convenient is python3 -m http.server which runs a small web server that shares whatever is in the directory you launched it from. I’ve used that to download files onto my phone before when I didn’t have the right USB cables/adapters handy as well as for getting data out of VMs when I didn’t want to bother setting up something more complex.

I used to use Game Maker waaaay back in the day – starting from when Mark Overmars had it hosted on his university website (before the .nl site even) and checked out of that community sometime after YoYo Games took over – which was… 18 years ago!?

I wrote a substantial amount of C++ code with GLFW and occasionally other libraries for many hobby projects over the years. I lost a lot of enthusiasm when Unity became popular, and at some point after that I realized that games are mostly art projects, and I was more interested in the tech side of it.

These days I mostly write Python and JavaScript with the occasional bit of C++ (or whatever is needed) for work. Sometimes that work gets visual, but a lot of it is webdev.

If I ever get back into gamedev, it’ll be indie dev to scratch a personal itch – most likely with my own code rather than an off-the-shelf engine.

I’m glad you enjoyed my characters. :-)

I don’t know if I’m the kind of “artist” you’re interested in, but I’ve been making a bunch of silly drawings and posting them lately. Some people seem to enjoy them. I’ve also written a fair amount of music but I generally don’t share that. I used to want to be a game developer and ended up getting good at programming, so-so at music, and basically hated everything I tried to make as far as graphics went.

Recently though, I’ve found it incredibly liberating to allow myself to make “bad” art – to not be too concerned with the quality and just concentrate on having fun trying to express an idea however I can.

This has mostly taken the form of “MS Paint”-like drawings that I’ve posted to !sillydrawingrequests@sopuli.xyz (and occasionally other communities). Usually I make them with KolourPaint. Sometimes I also use the GIMP or my own custom software.

I think my own overall personal favorite, so far, is “Sock Trek”. I posted it back in 2023 from kbin (RIP) to Otter’s sockpuppetsociety community, I think:

Probably the best of my recent silly drawings in terms of technique is this one in response to “An expressive window suffering from / enjoying the weather”:

The most popular (based on upvotes) seems to be my response to “E.T. (the alien) eating an unreasonable quantity of free samples at costco”:

I’ve occasionally made some other things that might be interesting to look at, like this hypnotic color spiral animation (first 90 seconds) from a program I wrote to experiment with graphics techniques a few years ago – https://files.catbox.moe/8y6d0n.mp4 – and a number of custom composites from anime screenshots.