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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 7th September.
by Viperfang 04 Sep '18

04 Sep '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Photo management handling of IPTC, EXIF, etc.
by Chris Green 22 Aug '18

22 Aug '18

I think I've been here before but still..... Is there absolutely no standard at all for photo image metadata? Yes, I know there's EXIF and IPTC and XMP, but they only define the names of the fields one can store, they don't tell you *what* the fields are for. Firstly there's a ridiculous number of fields, the full list goes on for pages and pages, you might as well say 'store anything with a name like exif.abd,def'. Secondly there are no rules about what you put in which field and every program I can find seems to have a different idea of what you put where. As a result it's all pretty useless apart from a very few IPTC fields like Copyright. There doesn't even seem to be a 'most popular program' that has managed to set the default usage. All I really want to know is where to put:- Title Longer Description Tags While one can come up with sort of semi reasonable defaults for Title and Description there really doesn't seem any remotely useful way of handling tags if you want any sort of semi-sane hierarchy. To make *any* sort of sense tags need hiearachy. E.g. for our horses an image needs animal/horse/Mikey or something of the sort. Similarly for places one needs USA/Alabama/Birmingham or UK/Warwickshire/Birmingham. Birmingham by itself is fairly useless (as Mikey might well be!). Plus a final rant, there seems no widely accepted way of handling extended character sets, some programs reject ISO 8859-1, others reject UTF-8, etc. Bla, bla, bla. It's just *awful*. Is there no way out of this mess? -- Chris Green

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Good/bad/indifferent places to keep python modules and bash scripts with functions?
by Chris Green 13 Aug '18

13 Aug '18

I'm beginning to gather a number of Python modules and also bash scripts which contain just functions. I.e. these are all files that one doesn't run directly, they are imported/called by other scripts. I know *how* to do most of this, e.g. I know about setting PYTHONPATH and PATH etc., what I'm looking for is some recommendations about good names and places to put things. I have all my top level scripts (i.e. stuff called directly) in ~/bin which gets added to one's path automatically by the default .profile (at least on Ubuntu family). So ~/bin is a sort of linux default for these. What I'm looking for is, maybe, a default for python modules and other scripts. Currently I have python modules in ~/bin/pymods and I don't have bash 'libraries' anywere. Are there any obvious 'defaults' or should I just invent names I fancy and stop being so OCD? :-) -- Chris Green

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Looking for a simple, efficient static web gallery generator
by Chris Green 13 Aug '18

13 Aug '18

I'm looking for a simple, efficient way to generate an HTML gallery from a hierarchy of jpeg images. I.e. I have a directory ~/pictures which contains quite a deep hierarchy of sub-directories oranising my pictures organised as I want them. It's quite big, something like 30 thousand images which total something over 50Gb. I want a way to generate a web gallery with much smaller iamage files (e.g. maximum image size something like 1024x1024) in a hierarchy with simple HTML (or whatever) to make it navigable with a web browser. This is 'all on one system', not for export to the WWW, it will just be displayed using the apache server on the same system. I also want to be able to select just a few images and generate a gallery which will be possible to export to a web server. This is for showing people a few pictures by sending them a link in an E-Mail. Currently I use Photofloat (https://git.zx2c4.com/PhotoFloat/about/) which does a fair amount of what I want but I'm looking for something better. Photofloat's disadvantages (for me) are:- It puts all of its output in one directory, so for my whole hierarchy there are well over 100 thousand files in one directory. This makes some operations rather difficult and slow. As a result of the above it's also difficult to find the reduced size version of any particular image which I sometimes want to do for attaching to E-Mails etc. The navigation controls while adequate could be better. It's not particularly easy to run Photofloat on a subset of my images, I've written a script to do it but the whole thing gets a bit messy. So, any ideas for a relacement? -- Chris Green

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Keeping configurations in step on multiple systems - ways and means?
by Chris Green 08 Aug '18

08 Aug '18

I'm not expecting simple glib answers to this, just fishing around for ideas and possible approaches. I have quite a few systems spread around the place all running Debian derived versions of Linux:- Desktop machine in my study, main work machine, runs xubuntu Laptop, used around the house and when away, runs xubuntu Backup machine, headless, in garage, runs xubuntu Raspberry pi on home LAN for DNS/DHCP etc., runs raspbian Virtual machine on Gandi, runs ubuntu Beaglebone Black on our boat, runs Debian I have several bits of customised configuration that I would like to, somehow, keep in sync on all the above machines, these are things like:- ~/.vilerc - editor configuration ~/.dircolors - colours for ls ... Can anyone suggest a way of doing this? If it was automatic (like syncthing) than that would be lovely, but even a simple way to say 'please update all instances of ~/.dircolors' would be handy. I'm using syncthing to keep the laptop and desktop machines in sync and it works well but it's not perfect for synchronising just a few files. It also seems a rather heavyweight program to run on the pi and the BBB just to synchronise two or three files. I don't really need 'instant' synchronisation either (as provided by syncthing), something run by cron once an hour or even once a day would be fine. I can't just run rsync with a list of files from cron because not all systems (not *any* in fact) have ssh access to other systems without needing a password or key. -- Chris Green

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Can one execute a command on the *client* after ssh login?
by Chris Green 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

I need to run a command on the *client* machine immediately after making an ssh connection, is there any clever way to do this? Specifically I want to execute an rsync command whenever I connect to certain systems, I have 'ControlMaster auto' set in my ssh config file so the rsync command will run without asking for a password/key. Any ideas anyone? I suppose one could alias the ssh and fire something off in the background with a wait before the actual ssh but this does seem a bit crude. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 9th August
by Viperfang 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 9th August at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 3rd August.
by Viperfang 31 Jul '18

31 Jul '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Re: [ALUG] VHS archiving (Mark Rogers)
by Phil Wade 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

I can't help with the main question (automated skip empty tape) but a few words based on my own recent and ongoing experience of transferring VHS tapes to digital. When were the tapes last played? If it's some years (5+ or worse?) then there's a danger the tapes are a little "stuck" together at some points. I "Fast Wind Forwarded" them (not fast forward play) to free up any such sticking points. The VHS player showed what recorded time was being passed on its display, and stopped increasing this time figure when nothing was on the tape. I let them run on a bit to check it wasn't just a gap in recordings, then rewound. I understand that not all players will display this time figure when forward winding as opposed to FF playing. The PROBLEM I had was that those tapes that were a bit stuck completely F'd the player's ability to play the tapes, by stretching the drive belts (I think) when it came to a sticking point. I can now use both these players (yes, I F'd two of them...) just for forwarding and rewinding. I have a third player that is used for playing the freed-up tapes only. It's a friend's, so I have to be careful :( Not the technical answer you need, but maybe a useful warning. Phil

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VHS archiving
by Mark Rogers 23 Jul '18

23 Jul '18

A long shot, probably, but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience of this? This is one of those subjects where Googling gives you lots of suggestions, none of them definitive, mostly questions without answers... I, like many people, have a box of VHS tapes. Stuff recorded from TV and other sources, none of it looked at for a decade or more. I want to go through them, archive the content on my PC and ditch the tapes (and VHS player). Many of the tapes aren't labelled (and the ones that are, I don't necessarily trust). Many of the tapes will be almost or completely empty. Most are 240m EP tapes (ie up to 8hrs). I have a USB video capture device that seems to work although suggests welcome. What I want to do is be able to put a tape in, rewind it, press "play", then walk away and leave it. Rinse and repeat until all the tapes are "imported". If I can do this without any interaction at the PC end at this point that would be even better (it means I can get the wife to cycle tapes through when they finish if I'm not here too). This seems simple in principle: I need my PC to "watch" the incoming video and record anything that isn't noise to a new file. Not recording the noise is the key challenge: if I put a tape in and leave it overnight, say, then there's potentially 8-12hrs of "recording" which will be mostly noise, and that's a lot of disk space to be using up. In an ideal world it would also detect program changes within a tape and split them into separate files too, but I think that might be asking too much and that's not so hard to do manually once they're on disk. Suggestions? Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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