SoylentNews

Sometimes you randomly things of events from the past. This morning I was thinking about a girl I met at the wave pool when I was about 13-14. It's a slow day at work, so I'm sharing the story.

I was at the Wave Pool with my Dad and siblings. It was a pretty awesome wave pool with a water slide, hot tub, and rope swing to jump into the pool with. I've always been a skinny person, but at that age, I looked like one of those malnourished kids from Schindler's List. Bony, lanky, awkward. I was on the deck of the pool waiting in the little line to use the rope swing, and some girl comes up to me and says "My friend likes you" and points to some girl.

My preteen brain is like "OMG!! IT"S HAPPENING!! I'M GOING TO GET THE SEX!". Her friend and I walk over to her, and we end up in the Hot Tub holding hands. I assume we make awkward conversation for a while, but before too long, it was time to go. We both left at the same time.

I waited for her in the exit area of the pool. When she came out, I asked her for her phone number and she gave it to me. I felt really good and headed out to my dad's car. About 1/2 way home I realized that I didn't know her name. How was I supposed to call her without her name? "Uhh... Is there a girl around 14 that lives in this household?" I thought really hard about how I could call her, but couldn't come up with anything that wouldn't be super awkward (and let's face it, just calling a girl in itself was super scary). Needless to say, I never called her.

Sometimes I still think about her. Did she wait for my call that never came? Did she realize that we didn't know each other's names and that was a likely the reason I never called?

And that's the end of the story. That was the first time I held a girl's hand. It was a big milestone for me, and I never even knew her name.

Some say she's still waiting by the phone to this day...

Lenovo Unveils ThinkStation P520 & P920 ‘AI Workstations’: Xeon Plus Quadro RTX 6000

Ubuntu Linux based systems shipping with 10 or 24 cores, 128 GB or 384 GB of RAM.

Maybe that will be the new minimum in 15 years.

rdar://48664498
^--- This link works in Cupertino.

Preamble:

VLC 3.0.6 has been out for quite a long time; others complain of it online, but the VLC Devs must not yet know about it themselves, suggesting that it is uncommon configurations that give VLC such grief.

In my own case, I play YouTube Videos with _each_ of Safari, Chrome and Tor Browser, I watch local videos with _each_ of VLC and QuickTime Player, and I listen to music with _each_ of iTunes and VLC on my Mid 2015 MacBook Pro.

FWIW, I did the QA for MacTCP 1.0.1 and 1.1, and the plan and test tool for 1.2. Thus I know from Stress Testing as well as Corner Cases.

Summary:

Play a music video in VLC Media Player, then launch Safari. VLC's audio output halts though the video persists.

To activate VLC's window, to pause or resume then restart the music video are all of no avail. One must quit then relaunch.

Thus it is not possible to use VLC to listen to music videos while at the same time browsing with Desktop Safari.

Steps To Reproduce:

Drag any video file onto VLC Media Player's icon.

Launch Desktop Safari.

Expected Results:

One will continue to enjoy one's listening pleasure with VLC's window in the background while browsing with Safari in the foreground.

Actual Results:

VLC's audio output abruptly halts.

Upon activating VLC's window again, you will find that while the video continues playing, it is not possible to restore the sound. One must quit VLC then re-launch it.

Under certain conditions which I have not yet identified, one must reset VLC's Preferences to restore audio output. That is, it's not always sufficient to quit then relaunch it.

Regression:

Safari does not stimulate this behavior in QuickTime Player 10.4 (894.12).

To run two instances of VLC, one for video and one for audio will exhibit a similar bug but not reproducibly so. In this case - with two running binaries - one must always reset VLC Media Player's Preferences.

Configuration:

In addition to your sysdiagnose log I have attached a System Information Document; that's more convenient for most configuration reproduction than is the far-more verbose sysdiagnose.

Also attached is the VLC Media Player 3.0.6 Source Code.

Note that my day-to-day system is Sierra, as I'm a driver developer. Late tonight I'll regress with Mojave.

• macOS Sierra - 10.12.6 (16G29)
• Mid 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Display
• Model Identifier - MacBookPro11,5
• 16 GB RAM
• 4-Core 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
• Boot Rom Version - MBP114.0172.B25
• SMC Version (system) - 2.30f2

• AMD Radeon R9 M370X
• Vendor ID - ATI (0x1002)
• Device ID - 0x6821
• Revision ID - 0x0083
• ROM Revision - 113-C5670E-777
• gMux Version - 4.0.20 [3.2.8]
• EFI Driver Version - 01.00.777

• Intel Iris Pro
• Max Dynamic VRAM - 1536 MB
• Vendor ID - Intel (0x8086)
• Device ID - 0x0d26
• Revision ID - 0x0008
• gMux Version ID - 4.0.20 [3.2.8]

• Safari - 10.1.2 (12603.3.8)

• VLC Media Player - 3.0.6 Vetinari (Intel 64bit)
• VLC Media Player - 3.0.2 Vetinari (Intel 64bit)

I regressed with:

• QuickTime Player - 10.4 (894.12)

R. Kelly

R. Kelly denies sexual abuse allegations in explosive interview

R. Kelly was "unhinged" in interview with Gayle King, columnist says (12m36s)

Gayle King talks about her explosive R. Kelly interview on CBSN (7m18s)

Full interview is apparently around 80 minutes and has not been released in its entirety yet. Even Oprah wants the full video.

Turmoil or manipulation?

Previously: R. Kelly Contracts Ligma
R. Kelly Exposes Himself

I Am Absolutely Serious.

It was dark there. I could have been eaten by a grue.

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras: The most fun you'll have with a history lesson

Patricia Clarkson on leading the Mardi Gras group breaking with tradition

In New Orleans, The Fight Over Blackface Renews Scrutiny Of A Mardi Gras Tradition

Mobile mom says shoes thrown from Mardi Gras float sent her kid to the ER

Popeyes might be onto something with chicken-tender-cradlin’ Mardi Gras beads

Sounds like a great way to get grease all over your shirt on Fat Tuesday.

One of my favourite Soylentils, ~realdonaldtrump, has been missing in action for several weeks. There were no tweets since Feb 19th, and I was worried that something had happened.

Thankfully, ~realdonaldtrump is back. I can only assume that he was on vacation (perhaps in Vietnam?). Anyways, I'm glad he is back and tweeting here again.

And so I found a decent Debian Stretch build (from here), and it seems to be much more suitable for my purposes than Ubuntu Bionic. For one thing Debian seems to be actually maintaining an ARM build of Transmission 2.94 even if it is in Sid, something which the Ubuntu Transmission PPA doesn't have, much to my irritation. NextCloud proved fairly easy to install, but I found some irritations with setting up MariaDB as its database backend. The mysql_secure_installation script that is the minimum that one needs to do to secure MariaDB/MySQL is broken. Though it says that it will change the MariaDB root password, after prompting you for a new one, IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY DO THAT. MariaDB still uses a blank root password even after that rigmarole. You have to do this bit of black magic in order to actually change the root password:

use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD("mynewpassword") where User='root';
update user set plugin="mysql_native_password";

Then restart MariaDB. I then had to check whether the script even actually did all the other stuff that it said it did. That shit's beyond idiotic.

Moving the old LetsEncrypt certificates I got for the dynamic domain I have with afraid.org from the Odroid to the ROCKPro64 was relatively trivial, as was the dynamic DNS update script I've been using, so now I can get some access from the outside to the NAS.

NextCloud was relatively easy to install after that, but there's some weirdness involving php-imagick and libgomp in Apache ("cannot allocate memory in static TLS block") that I was never able to satisfactorily fix. I've begun uploading pictures from my phone to it with the NextCloud Android app but I noticed that it's dog slow doing that, and it might actually be faster to use the web interface to do bulk uploading of that kind. The app has all sorts of missing in it, as you can't tag pictures with it for one (you have to use the web app to do that for now), and I've been thinking of using tags to organise the rather sizeable collection of pictures Mrs. Wyrm and I have been accumulating. But I suppose it's a start, and I can install it on Mrs. Wyrm's phone and have it automatically upload the pictures on her phone to the NAS whenever she's at home. I'd rather keep such things there than continue to entrust them to Google as we've been doing.

Now, it's off to building Kodi. This is proving to be as big a challenge as I've expected it to be, given the way the current LibreElec builds are described as alpha-quality. Looks like I'm going to have to Use The Source, and the information on doing that is sparse to say the least. This is complicated by the fact that no one seems to have built a working X on the RockChips and so Kodi needs to run on framebuffer. I found one reference that seems like it might be a good start, but there's scads of dependencies that need to be installed before Kodi will even build. And so I'm partying in Dependency Hell like it's 1999... More updates on this as I make progress. If I get really pissed at this I'm going to stick to Kodi on the Odroid with my movies and TV shows on an NFS or other distributed file system mount from the RP64. I want to later repurpose the Odroid as a secure auth server for my home machines once I've gotten Kodi working on the RP64, but if this is not feasible I'll have to buy some other smaller SBC to do that.

I just googled for "Ammonium Nitrate" without thinking to use Tor.

It's for a book that I'm writing.

A novel.

A work of fiction.

I just got this email:

"Your satnav has always been there to guide you, now it needs your help. There is an issue that may impact the functionality of your satnav and requires your attention before 6 April 2019.
Please take a moment to check its status and learn if it will be impacted."

It is TomTom.
Does anyone have an idea why this update is needed? I'm worried it may 'update' a forced retirement on my wife's TomTom (it is getting rather old).

Why April 6?