Shallow Thoughts : : Aug

Signs on the Way to San Antonio Hot Springs

This week's group hike was to San Antonio Hot Springs, in the Jemez above La Cueva. It was nice and cool up there, especially since the trail is mostly shady, winding through ponderosa forest with views of San Antonio Creek below and towering rock walls above.

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Zenity for Notification Dialogs

When I wrote about Getting Linux System Notifications under Openbox, I ended up tossing out the whole notification system and using zenity to pop up a dialog directly. Specifically, a command like XAUTHORITY=~/.Xauthority DISPLAY=:0 zenity --title "Hello" --info --text="Hello world"

But customizing zenity to make it more attention-getting turned out to be more difficult than expected ...

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Getting Linux System Notifications under Openbox

I've been a fan of Linux's lightweight window managers, particularly Openbox, for many years.

But admittedly, there are some things they don't generally handle. One of those is system notifications.

Mostly, I've been happy to go without notifications. Firefox is forever asking me whether I want to turn them on for particular websites (which wouldn't work, but Firefox doesn't know that), usually websites I'm visiting for the first time and probably don't ever want to visit again, let alone let them spam me with ads as notifications outside my browser.

But every now and then it would be handy.

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Appreciation for Running Water

We were visiting relatives in Colorado when Dave's phone rang. Someone from county utilities, letting us know we had a major water leak at the house, it had been happening for more than a month, and this month's water bill was going to be over $700. Yikes! And ... gee, thanks, for waiting a month to let us know about it.

(Aside: the county recently force-upgraded everyone to new "smart meters" which are supposed to send alerts for problems like this. However, that only works if you can log in and set up an email address — and we'd been going back and forth with the county for months about why the system wouldn't let us set up an account, but nobody in the utilities department seemed to know much about how the online access worked.)

We had them send someone to turn off the water to the house. When we returned home a few days later, we called again to have the water turned back on briefly so we could see what was going on. The leak was somewhere between the meter and the house, making it our responsibility (natch). The county said they had no way of telling precisely where: it could be somewhere under the driveway, or under the garage (ouch!)

It was Friday, so of course there was no chance of persuading anyone to come out and take a look.

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Triaging Videos Using VLC's Python Bindings

A few days ago I wrote about finding a way to triage videos by adding captions to mplayer. Better than nothing, but I really wanted something like pho or MetaPho where I could add the tags in the program itself, rather than keeping notes on a piece of paper.

Turns out it wasn't that hard using VLC's Python bindings.

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Triaging Videos by Adding Captions to Mplayer

I've recently hit a wall that I'd been avoiding: how to triage a bunch of new videos and decide which ones are worth keeping.

For still photos, I do that with my Pho program if I just want to make yes or no decisions, or maybe mark two or three categories. When the time comes for real tagging — which images have sunsets, which have bicycles, which have coyotes and so on — I use my MetaPho. I take a lot of photos, so efficient triaging and tagging is important to me.

But what about videos?

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