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amyallen -- Verified

Text FRIENDS to 26797 ? today on #RegisterAFriendDay, we are challenging all our friends to register to vote. Please join me and @iamavoter in our mission to register 100,000 voters together by tagging 10 of your friends! ???

We have 100 days until Election Day, and reminding a friend makes them up to 2X more likely to vote! SO LETS DO THIS SHIT :) link in bio to register

BIG love xx A

NOTE: I've known Amy Allen for many years and she's as down-to-earth and upstanding as they come. She's also an extremely gifted singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist!

I'll be the first to admit I'm a fan.

First time I heard her play, was about 8 years ago. It was just Amy, a guitar, and a tambourine. Still a teenager and up on stage in front of maybe 100 people. By the end of the first song, I knew she was gifted. Outstanding voice and timing. When the crowd applauded after the third song, I heard her say "Awww!" in a "You like me, you really like me!" Sally Fields kind of way. She didn't know how good she was! I knew then I was witnessing something special.

Background: I played an instrument in band for 8 years (grade school through high school). In college, I was a member of the sound group that set up, mixed, and tore down concerts at the student union (and other venues). There's more, but suffice it to say I like to think I have an "ear" for music.

I saw her perform several more over times over the years as she went to Berklee School of Music in Boston, started a band, did some touring, moved to New York City (Brooklyn), and then to Los Angeles. She proceeded to co-write songs for other artists: "Back to You" -- Selena Gomez; "Without Me" -- Halsey (#1 Billboard charts); "Adore You" -- Harry Styles; et al.

In January of 2020, she was listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 for music. It's an annual list of the top 30 people under 30 years old who are recognized for their accomplishments.

On several occasions I had the good fortune to meet and chat with her. She has always struck me as a genuine, humble, down-to-earth person first and foremost as well as a gifted performer.

She signed with Warner Music about a year ago. She'd been working on an album and was on the verge of its release... and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Finally, the first single off her upcoming album is out. There's a video up on YouTube: "Queen of Silver Linings" -- Amy Allen. She has an Instagram page and an official web page which also has links to where the single is available..

More background info is available on her Wikipedia page.

UPDATE:

"Queen of Silver Linings" is a different style for Amy. She used to have a bunch of videos of her own up on YouTube, especially of when she was fronting her band (Amy & The Engine), but took them down a while ago. That said, other people who saw her perform had put up videos, as well. Some are of poor quality, so I'll spare you having to endure those. Here are some "historically representative examples". For starters, check out Get Me Outta Here (Vine Sessions), Love Me (Sofar Session), and Love Me (Live at Boston Tree Lighting )

Did you know that SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team? It has been a long while since status on our team's progress has been provided to the community, so here goes!

What IS Folding@Home?

First off, what is Folding@Home? Here is an extremely brief synopsis of F@H taken from Wikipedia:

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of hundreds of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems.[citation needed] Its main purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding. This is of interest to medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases. To a lesser extent, Folding@home also tries to predict a protein's final structure and determine how other molecules may interact with it, which has applications in drug design. Folding@home is developed and operated by the Pande Laboratory at Stanford University, under the direction of Prof. Vijay Pande, and is shared by various scientific institutions and research laboratories across the world.[4]

The Very Beginning:

Our F@H team got its start when Sir Finkus posted an entry to his journal. He announced (on 2016-02-09 04:04:00 UTC) that team SoylentNews.org had been created. There was an initial flurry of activity, which eventually settled down to a core group who have been contributing ever since. Of late we have had a couple members upgrade their rigs and graciously donated them to the cause. This made a much-appreciated impact on the team's productivity.

Team Rankings Over Time:

At the time of its creation we were team number 230,319; since we had not yet earned any points that made us tied for last place. I could find no records of the team' score before 2016-04-12 at which point we were at 1125th place in the world. Back when F@H got started, all work was done on CPUs and they were much slower, then. By the time we joined, it was much easier for a current-day CPU or GPU to complete a work unit and thus advance a team's score. So, in the early days, we were skipping right by those who gave it a try, saw their very slow progress, and quit. We were gaining hundreds of places in each of those first days! For the curious, here are our rankings on the first day of each month for which I have a record:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

2016-04 1125
2016-05 936
2016-06 726
2016-07 610
2016-08 537
2016-09 479
2016-10 399
2016-11 346
2016-12 331

2017-01 317
2017-02 314
2017-03 311
2017-04 308
2017-05 306
2017-06 297
2017-07 290
2017-08 284
2017-09 277
2017-10 261
2017-11 246
2017-12 248

2018-01 243
2018-02 241
2018-03 240
2018-04 239
2018-05 240
2018-06 243
2018-07 240
2018-08 242
2018-09 242
2018-10 242
2018-11 243
2018-12 242

2019-01 242
2019-02 240
2019-03 240
2019-04 239
2019-05 238
2019-06 232
2019-07 231
2019-08 227
2019-10 224

2020-01 215
2020-02 215

Current Ranking:

Team SoylentNews.org, at the time of this writing, (2020-02-16) is at 213th place in the entire world!

Woo Hoo!

There are two places on-line where one can get the latest statistics on our team. (1) On the official F@H team status page (2) Any of the different views compiled by ExtremeOverclocking.com such as their team summary page.

Our Team's Top Ten:

For posterity's sake, the 10 top folders on our team are:

1. cmn32480
2. LTKKane
3. Runaway1956
4. tibman
5. warlord
6. phred420
7. Booga1
8. EricAlbers
9. ealbers
10. malloc

Joining Up:

Are you interested in joining our team? Reply in the comments here and one of our team will help you get started.

Wow!

I am stunned at the outpouring of encouragement and support from the SoylentNews community in response to On the Road to Recovery after a Minor Stroke.

To offer some perspective, my only social media activity is right here on SoylentNews. I am generally a private person and have not created an account on MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. In fact my only other social media activity was on Slashdot up until the SlashCott and the creation of SoylentNews.

There is, however, something special about this community which overcame my reluctance about posting personal information on-line. If anyone here learned something about strokes and therefore took steps to make a change in their life as a result, then I will know my efforts here were not in vain. I greatly appreciate the well-wishes and cannot thank you all enough. It has heartened my resolve and my hope that I may continue to serve this community for many more years to come!

Among the recommendations I have received during the course of my treatment and recuperation so far:

• Don't smoke
• Watch my diet (lowered fat and salt, more fruits and vegies)
• Exercise
• Regular checkups
• Watch for high blood pressure

Again, please accept my great thanks for all the support and encouragement!

[Update: (20190327_122317 UTC) Looks like @The+Mighty+Buzzard; had the same idea. He will collect sayings from comments to either one. New quotes can be added later, of course, but I would suggest getting any suggestions in as soon as possible. It's currently Wednesday, a reasonable cutoff date would be recommendations made through Saturday, inclusive. --martyb]

What Got this Started:

Like many others here, I was saddened to learn of the passing of Michael David Crawford (MDC).

Then I saw takyon's comment with a suggestion:

Maybe we can put a quote or two of his in the quotations thing.

"You say that like it's a bad thing."
"I Am Eternally In Your Debt."
"The Mind Simply Reels."
"Thank You For Your Submission. Our customer service personnel will respond to your request in the order it was received."

I think that is a brilliant idea! Disclaimer: I have not discussed this with anyone else on staff. Absent any opposition, I hereby volunteer to take on this task. A quick look at the man pages for fortune and for strfile as well as references in the code suggests it should be relatively straightforward.

What I Need from the SoylentNews Community:

MDC was... prolific in his writings. On SoylentNews alone, I see 6683 comments and who knows how many Journal entries. I can read pretty quickly, but not THAT fast! Further, my reading of something may miss a nuance that was obvious to someone else. So, I'm asking for help from the community.

If there was an expression or phrase of his which you would like to be considered, please reply to this journal entry with:

1. The quotation you would like considered.
2. A link (or links) to where you found it.

I would hope it would be obvious why, but I need to ascertain that said quote was actually his. If the quotation was taken from SoylentNews, then please provide a link to the actual comment (the link under the (#nnnnnn) part of the comment title bar) or, at a minimum, to the story or journal article in which it appeared.

If the quote is from elsewhere, then please provide a link to where it appeared.

So what say you? What has Michael David Crawford posted on-line that you would like to see considered for memorialization on this site?

UPDATE: TheMightyBuzzard clarified that I did not need all that I was seeking here. Many thanks to those who read/replied. And, it looks like it unearthed a bug in our UTF-8 implementation!

I started down the path of writing tests for one of the bugs that was fixed in the upcoming rehash release. Specifically WRT how SoylentNews handles Ordered List (OL) and Unordered List (UL) elements, and while I was at it, I was going to toss in Definition List (DL) elements, too. I'd have these defined with various attributes all at the top level, and then with nested versions of these. It's a relatively straightforward (though time-consuming) exercise.

A quick stab at getting started on this for UL elements can be found in this comment on our dev server instance.

Then I realized "Am I the very first person who has wanted to do this?" I'd think that any HTML-consuming application would already have gone down this path. FireFox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, etc.

A quick search has failed to produce what I am looking for. It seems that if I were to download the development version of FireFox, that there is a set of automated tests that I might be able to leverage, but that would be a huge hit on my limited bandwidth cap, so I'm holding off on that approach -- I'd like to think that I should be able to just download the test cases themselves.

So, I ask my fellow Soylentils: Where can I find an exhaustive set of tests of UL, OL, LI, (and, ideally, DL, DT, DD) elements?

Updated... see below.

I was at a concert a while ago and recorded, what I found out later, was a debut performance of a song. As I am friends with the lead singer, I'd like to send her a copy, but there are a couple of "issues".

Part 1: Editing

So, I've got a couple video files that I want to "process". I have no experience with video and only very limited experience with audio file manipulation.

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 25.6 MB introduction:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'intro.mp4':
  Duration: 00:00:18.54, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 11342 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 11378 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 24.08 fps, 24.17 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 96 kb/s (default)

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 1099.8 MB song itself:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'song.mp4':
  Duration: 00:10:39.32, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 14092 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 14000 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 95 kb/s (default)

(1) At the outset I had accidentally activated the wrong camera on my mobile phone. I'd like to keep the audio of the singer introducing the song.

(2) The video of the song actually contains TWO songs. I'm only interested in extracting the first song (the first 4m40s) from this video.

(3) Optional, but would be really nice, I'd like to make a "title" with the name of the group, name of the song, date, and location with the intro audio playing in the background.

(4) Ideally, I'd like to catenate the intro from (3) to the video from (2) and create a single file.

I'm running Windows 7 Professional. Have you ever done something like this? What free tools would you recommend?

Part 2: Shipping

I expect the final file to be about 500 MB, give or take. How would you recommend getting the file to her? It is rather large to send as an e-mail attachment. I do not have drop-box or one-cloud or any of the other file-sharing services. I'd like to keep the file private. I can't be the first who wants to do this. What options do I have?

Update(s):

Update 1: 20170101a - Happy New Year!

I've completed step (1) and extracted the audio for the intro to a separate file, intro.mp3, using:

   ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -ab 96k  intro.mp3

Yeah, I know. 96kbps is not the greatest, but it's what was captured in the video, so I'm stuck with it.

Now to extract just the first 4m40s video of the song to a separate file. Looks like this could be done with ffmpeg?

Update 2: 20170101b

With many thanks to fn0rd666, got the "magic" incantation for ffmpeg:

fmpeg -ss 00:00:00.0 -i infile.mp4 -t 285 -codec copy outfile.mp4

Which means: start at the very beginning of the source, read from the file infile.mp4, copy 285 seconds, copy input straight to output (no transcoding), and send the output to the file: outfile.mp4!

It's my own fault, I suppose, but... OUCH! I'm hoping there is a solution in the collective wisdom of my fellow Soylentils.

My primary browser is Pale Moon (PM), a fork of Mozilla's Firefox (FF), which I run on Win 7 Pro x64.

Scenario: I tend to leave my browser open for days/weeks at a time. I regularly have 30+ tabs open with everything from SN's main site and editor-related pages, local weather forecast/history, Folding@Home stats, a few blogs I follow, etc. On occasion, depending on what I've been working on, I find myself with 70 tabs open. That is not a problem.

Once in a great while, I'll find myself switching back and forth between two tabs so often (like when submitting/reviewing a story), I find it easier to move one of the tabs to a separate window, so that I can see both on my screen at the same time. Or, on other occasions, I'll do a 'view page source' on a tab which is then opened in another browser window.

Event: On rare occasions, I need to reboot my system, or reload PM (after an update). I pre-emptively close PM and see a warning dialog displayed which states something like: "You have 37 tabs open; do you really want to close Pale Moon?" This is good! Yep, I know that I have a whole bunch of tabs open, no big deal. I let it shut down. Do whatever I needed to do. I relaunch PM and all my tabs are sitting there waiting to be reloaded. Usually.

NOTE: I suspect this capability may be a result of the Tab Mix Plus (TMP) addon I have installed, but it has become critical to my workflow and I don't want to lose the settings/features I've enabled, so I do not mess around with disabling it.

Problem: The problem arises when I have multiple Pale Moon windows open. I'll have, say, my main PM window open with those 37+ tabs, and another PM window open with a tab or two. I close the main window, get the dialog, confirm, and only then do I discover that I have another PM window open, with its one or two tabs. I complete closing this last instance of PM. Here's the problem... when I restart PM, I now only see the one or tabs from the last window I closed -- the other 37+ tabs are lost. (The workaround is to go through my browser history and try to find and reload all the prior tabs, but that is a major, time-consuming, error-prone pain.)

WIBNI: (Wouldn't it be nice if) What I would like to see is the warning dialog not only caution me that I have 37+ TABS open, but also warn that there are 'N' other WINDOWS open, as well. At that point, I could merge windows into one, or close the tabs in the other, non-main window. Only after closing all the other PM windows, would I then close my main window. Then, when I reloaded PM, I'd find all my tabs in all the same places and ready to reload.

Request: Has anyone else here run into this problem? Is there a setting, whether in TMP or PM, that I am missing? Do you know of a setting or addon that warns me when I am closing one of multiple windows? Any other suggestions on how I can avoid losing my window/tabs context for later restore?

This is a test story which contains a variety of 1-, 2-, and 3-octet UTF-8 chars. The purpose is to see how well the e-mailing of stories handles these characters. These chars were entered directly (actually, cut-and-paste) as opposed to being entered as decimal/hex/named character entities.

The following is taken from: "3. UTF-8 definition" in: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629 [ietf.org]

    Char. number range  |        UTF-8 octet sequence
       (hexadecimal)    |              (binary)
    --------------------+---------------------------------------------
    0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx
    0000 0080-0000 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
    0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
    0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

peugen 0x40 0x7f 0x0140 0x017f 0x0700 0x073f 0x0800 0x083f | peu2utf8 > bleh.txt
cat bleh.txt

@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
PQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmno
pqrstuvwxyz{|}~�

ŀŁłŃńŅņŇňʼnŊŋŌōŎŏ
ŐőŒœŔŕŖŗŘřŚśŜŝŞş
ŠšŢţŤťŦŧŨũŪūŬŭŮů
ŰűŲųŴŵŶŷŸŹźŻżŽžſ

܀܁܂܃܄܅܆܇܈܉܊܋܌܍܎܏
ܐܑܒܓܔܕܖܗܘܙܚܛܜܝܞܟ
ܠܡܢܣܤܥܦܧܨܩܪܫܬܭܮܯ

ࠀࠁࠂࠃࠄࠅࠆࠇࠈࠉࠊࠋࠌࠍࠎࠏ
ࠐࠑࠒࠓࠔࠕࠚ
ࠤࠥࠦࠧࠨ࠮࠯
࠰࠱࠲࠳࠴࠵࠶࠷࠸࠹࠺࠻࠼࠽࠾࠿

---
That was one block of 1-octet UTF-8 chars; two blocks of 2-octet UTF-8 chars, and one block of 3-octet chars, submitted as 'plain old text'

Here it is the first of June in 2015, and our dev team has been working long and hard to get the foundation code to this site upgraded to handle newer versions of perl and apache. I lent a hand with QA duties and can attest that this was no small feat. Many *many* thanks to NCommander and Paulej72!

And, this acts as a test that the journal code is still working. Please let me know if you cannot see it! ;)