Remember Get Smart? If you’re of a certain age, you saw this when it was broadcast, or if you’re slightly younger, you saw it on reruns on Saturday mornings, or you might even have come across the 1990s remake, which I haven’t watched yet.
Anyway, the theme song was great. It’s instantly recognisable and the Melbourne Ska Orchestra did a great version of the Get Smart theme song with a ska beat. If you liked the original I think you’ll love this. Great video too!
Get Smart ska style.
I started to use Netnewswire in the last few months. I didn’t do much with it until a few weeks ago when Feedly made the headlines about their AI protest control thing.
I learned they have an exporter so I exported the OPML file of my feeds and there were so many of them. Netnewswire slowly started filling in the posts and surprisingly, considering the lack of attention I’ve paid my feeds in many years, it found plenty of posts. My unread count sat at over 10,000 posts at one stage.
Still, there are far too many where the last post was in 2009 or 2012. A few were still blogging in 2019. Yet more announced they were moving from Blogger or WordPress.com to their brand-new website at some custom domain that is now sadly a spam trap for unwary visitors. The long abandoned blogs are a deep dive into history. They celebrate events that happened oh so long ago. The sites are frozen in time.
I have to say, it was sometimes lovely to read the musings of a lost generation of writers. They’re either offline or now on Facebook or one of the other walled gardens we humans seem to love. I was going to list some of the blogs that are still updated, but it turns out there are quite a few of them. You’re probably familiar with most of them. Matt, XKCD, Laughing Squid, and Simon are some of the more famous blogs I have followed for many years.
Here’s a few you might not know. Feel free to middle-click and open them in a new tab. Go on, have a look.
And oh, there’s more! I’ve also come across some incredible photo blogs that I used to love visiting. I would always wonder how they managed to capture such breathtaking photos. And there are so many WordPress blogs too, with a wide range of topics and interests. I haven’t had the time to go through all of them yet, but being on Mastodon has taught me that it’s okay not to keep tabs on everything.
One feature that has been a game-changer for me is the “Today” smart feed. It shows me updated feeds, and just by scanning through it, I can quickly see which sites are still very active. It’s helped me realize that I don’t need to follow some overly busy sites any more. It’s been a freeing experience, letting go of the need to keep up with everything and instead focusing on the feeds that truly matter to me.
Also, “Mark All as Read” is very liberating.
BTW – I’m still blogging (after all this time) here (of course) and on inphotos. My last post there is the 840th daily post in a row. I gave a talk to Blarney Photography Club recently, showing some photos from Automattic meetups over the years. I found a bunch of old photos I wanted to publish. That’ll explain the American photos that went up recently!
If you ask ChatGPT to write a script to do some computer operation, it will.
It will write an actual script with an actor and narrator and then add a Python script to do what you wanted in the middle of it.
[INT. COMPUTER SCREEN – DAY]
A computer screen displays a folder containing a motion JPEG file named “Samsung_Camera.mjpeg”. The folder also contains various other files.
[INSERT: CLOSE-UP of the “Samsung_Camera.mjpeg” file]
NARRATOR (V.O.) Motion JPEG files are typically created by Samsung cameras and consist of both video and image frames interleaved together.
[INSERT: CUT TO a programmer, JAMES, sitting at his computer desk, wearing glasses and typing on his keyboard.]
JAMES (to himself) I need to separate the video and image frames from this motion JPEG file.
[INSERT: CLOSE-UP of James’ computer screen, showing a code editor open with a Python script.]
JAMES (V.O.) I can use Python to extract the video and image frames from the motion JPEG file.
[INSERT: CUT TO the Python script on James’ computer screen, showing the following code:]
……
[INSERT: CUT BACK TO James, who is now running the Python script.]
JAMES (excited) There we go! The video frames are saved as “Samsung_Camera_video.avi” and the image frames are saved as “Samsung_Camera_image_xxx.jpg” files, where “xxx” represents the frame number.
[INSERT: CLOSE-UP of the folder, now showing the extracted video and image files alongside the original motion JPEG file.]
NARRATOR (V.O.) James successfully separated the video and image frames from the motion JPEG file and saved them as separate files.
[FADE OUT.]
[END OF SCRIPT]
I asked ChatGPT asked to write a script to perform a task on my computer.
I asked ChatGPT to “Write a script to separate out the video and image from a motion Jpeg file created by a Samsung camera.” As you may guess from reading the “script”, the Python script it generated didn’t do quite what I had in mind. It created separate Jpeg files for each frame of the video.
Further prompts to produce a BASH script that did the same produced attempts that came close, but failed to extract the video, even when I used exiftool -b -EmbeddedVideo. That did work with motion photos from older phones, but maybe they changed something in the S23U.
So, unless you’re a budding movie producer, be exact when you ask ChatGPT to write you a script to do something.
You have probably seen the short film, One-Minute Time Machine already as it was originally released in 2014, but the YouTube channel it was on closed earlier this year. The creator of the film, Devon Avery, uploaded it to his own channel last month, and I think it’s worth another watch.
I’d love to comment on it but then that would spoil the whole thing. Go watch it!