I've seen bigger spiders in my life but this the biggest in this house by a long way. Was hanging out on the garage wall yesterday. Seems to have disappeared today.

I actually really liked the thing, hence it sticking around these 11 years since I got it. One thing I especially liked about it was that it initially just did the one thing. I went to a website or sometimes used an app, either in my phone or computer and pressed a button and whatever still image or video I'd been looking at on that source device, showed up on the TV I plugged the Chromecast in to.

Technically it still works, but it's getting harder and harder to do this simple task. It's been whinging about me not being signed in if I use it with YouTube and for an outrageously long time displays some kind of media control overlay that takes up a massive portion of the screen. That's what the phone or computer screen is for and the Chromecast gen1, not having been designed for this, is way too slow to do it properly so it struggles. It's increasingly difficult to actually get the cast button to appear even on Chrome on desktop, and there's some confusing shit to do with "web apps" on just about every website with media involved that I see no reason to indulge when the media plays without them anyway, but I assume that refusal has something to do with the damn thing not working anymore. Basically google have all but killed this device.

I see those Roku things as an alternative but that seems to be a full media player solution intended to essentially function as a smart tv in a removable stick. I basically just want a wireless HDMI input receiver that will work with web browsers or any media streaming service/app just like the Chromecast USED TO! Do they exist?

I want to be able to, without hassle, decide on a whim to send whatever media I'm looking at on a device, to the tv screen wirelessly.

I used to be able to do it fine on my computer without really needing to do anything, I don't know why that was, maybe something to do with ublock origin? I didn't really look in to it because it worked. Then I started having to actually deal with the problem because eventually the browser couldn't just load the video no issue anymore. I had to either use Newpipe on my phone or yt-dlp to watch locally. Recently neither of those options worked. I also tried invidious or other various proxies hosting youtube videos, they are met with the same age restriction issues.

My final last recourse had been using Shutter Encoder which somehow managed to download age restricted videos that yt-dlp couldn't which is odd because I was fairly sure it was actually using yt-dlp but now even THAT doesn't work.

I'm learning Blender as I'd like to try it out as a tool for 2D animation. I was following a tutorial on making a bouncing ball. Everything was fine until we started adding materials, ever since, Blender has become very unstable. I can be doing fine following along with the tutorial but then if I hit space to play and then space to stop playback, either the whole thing freezes and the UI is unresponsive yet the force quite menu reports no issue with Blender that would indicate it wasn't responding, or, it renders bizarre frames that are not at all what I drew before then crashing in the manner described again.

The only way I can fix it is by reloading the project file but even then sometimes even after I've restarted the session, the fucked up frames that don't correspond to anything I actually did as part of the project appear at random intervals. At first I thought maybe they'd tweaned that way and they're really part of the project, but the same frames don't always display the weird artifacting or incorrect shape of things I've drawn. you can move the playhead to a frame, see something wrong with it, move it away to another frame, move back to that original problem frame and suddenly it no longer has the issue, but now another frame will. Sometimes the whole sequence is suddenly ok again but I live in fear of the next crash.

I've installed NTFS-3g but as far as I can tell it only allows me to mount and write to NTFS partitions, I need to actually create one. Free as in beer.

Is anyone else getting this? I've heard it a few times but the 2 recent examples I bothered to remember were this one:

https://youtu.be/oSG7HpdQ34w?si=sqra8x0x1igNFzRs&t=876

Where at around 14:37 the entire video actually, not just dialogue in this instance, went mute mid sentence and remained that way until 14:49

And then this one again today:

https://youtu.be/hS2emKDlGmE?si=XFpt_MsY2Nrff_MV&t=1788

At around 29:48 where only the dialogue cuts out. The first few times I ran in to this I assumed the video had just had an editing error but it's happening too often for that to be it. I noticed recently that my laptop will do some kind of automatic downmixing of 5.1 audio so I can hear it in stereo, but only if playing through my laptops speakers and not through the dock it's connected to with attached speakers, in which case it only monitors some channels in a 6 channel audio source but I checked that by switching to the internal speakers for the sections of mute video in question and it made no difference.

I used to search for a video file using spotlight and it would return several results and when it was a file I accessed more than a couple of times it'd be the top result. I'd see an icon of the application used to play the media type and the name of the file.

Nowadays, with the same keyword, I frequently can't find the file I successfully found before but also, even when it does find it, it doesn't display it anywhere near the top results, it's down in a section called 'photos from apps' which presents a grid of options, rather than a list, all of which represented by the VLC icon as it's my default media player but with NO filename. I have found it before because usually it's the one preselected, although not always. It's super frustrating not being able to actually see what's found. I think this is probably supposed to display photos as photographs or maybe videos using thumbnails, to make it easier finding an image compared to filenames given the name of the section 'photos from apps', but I'm not even looking for an image anyway and besides if I was and the thumbnails actually worked, I'd have to have typed the exact or at least similar filename to the image I'm looking for anyway making a visual search pretty useless.

To be clear, I'm not looking to get rid of the ability for spotlight to be able to search media such as videos or images, I just want the results of that search presented in the sane way they used to be back on High Sierra. (Probably persisted beyond that but I jumped from HS to Sonoma and now Sequoia).

This used to be an option, now it isn't. I found command line solutions which would be fine, but they're all for scheduling sleep for set times, I want set durations.

When this feature first came out I immediately disabled it because I noticed you couldn't stretch windows across two screens. I thought I might try putting up with it, but at the time I found it made it damn near impossible to use Avid Media Composer effectively.

It's been disabled in all the years since and I've never thought about it since until just recently where now twice in one month I've come across situations where something only works if it's enabled. One is for disabling the behaviour where fullscreening a video makes a second monitor turn black and now with Sequoia, the ability to use the native window tiling they just introduced.

I've always used magnet and then later rectangle to achieve the same and will probably just revert but I thought I'd try and give the native option a shot. I checked to see if that stupid shit with not being able to span windows has been fixed in the intervening period but it hasn't. Does anyone know if you can make it work with separate spaces enabled or at least why it works this way?

I have been trying in vain to do this in both automator and shortcuts.

The trouble seems to be happening right at the very start. I can't seem to figure out how to get selected files from finder to be passed as input to a shell script running exiftool.

I actually thought this might be a good thing for me to test using chatGPT for as it's meant to be good at this type of thing and while I assume the shell scripts it was generating were probably good, it couldn't seem to get me passed this basic first step.

I've tried making the shortcut a quick action, which by default adds the 'receive' action to the shortcut, but somehow it seems to be impossible to get the output from that to be the input for the shell script, nothing works. This was tested with a few debugging steps to log the output and it definitely looks like that first step is where things are going wrong. I really don't get it. This was way harder than I expected.

I'm trying to avoid having to throw away my decklink mini monitor 4k that I used in my old PC build. It's a PCIe gen 2 4-lane card.

To replace this card with something new of similar function that uses external ports, I have to either buy something quite a bit worse in terms of function for a little bit more than my current PCIe version currently costs, or something equivalent in function for way, way more than the 4k decklink costs.

I figured best bet would be to just get a PCIe enclosure to keep using my old card with the new laptop but the costs of those enclosures are STAGGERING, just unbelievably high. The cheapest I could find is 2nd hand and so old it uses TB2 ports. I thought that might be okay with thunderbolt adaptors for modern connectors but it occurs to me that Apple Silicon driver support could be an issue. Any idea if it would even work?

I guess it shouldn't bother me, after all I try my best to avoid watching anything on youtube that I didn't go there to watch in the first place but nevertheless, it's hard not to see the clickbaity thumbnails for suggested videos to the right of the one I'm watching, and also, when I'm researching something it's undeniable that sometimes it genuinely was actually useful to have another video on the topic suggested that was relevant.

But this has really started to freak me out, Youtube has gone bananas recently. I'm constantly getting suggestions decrying woke this or woke that, in particular a lot of videos of compilations of police bodycam footage with titles about various people being 'idiots' or 'entitled' or various other terms suggesting a strong pro-authority angle. Those suggestions were annoying but it's starting to get disturbing now because they're veering strongly towards incel themes. Today I've seen suggestions for: a video about catching a woman faking a rape accusation 'caught on camera', another about a 'high value' man winning in court against a woman wanting him to pay reparations because she refused a DNA test, another about why men don't approach women anymore, and on and on. They stick in my mind because I can see exactly the the world view this constellation of fucking garbage is catering to.

On the one hand, I guess I could take some comfort in the fact that if the algorithms have gotten it this far wrong then maybe Google really didn't manage to snag so much data about me as I assumed but on the other, it's definitely used something it reckons it knows about me to make these assumptions. I can't for the life of me figure out where the fuck it got the idea I would like this or why it's so persistent despite the lack of positive reinforcement. I am not signed in, so I can't even attempt to manually give negative feedback and as far as I can tell people who do that say it doesn't work anyway.

This all seems to have coincided with a dramatic change in recent viewing habits, so I'm guessing that's what has triggered this, but it's still weird as fuck that there's apparently some overlap here. I've been in the market for a new phone and so have been watching a lot of videos about various phones and I was also considering a pixel as one of the options because if I went with that, I could use GrapheneOS. This has meant watching a lot of content content on GrapheneOS as well. This does seem to have had the expected effect of a lot of suggestions along those lines but it's definitely coincided with the fucking alt-right starter kit. This is certainly a counterintuitive link. Shit makes me want to puke. Normally when I see these kinds of surveillance economy mechanisms at work I just look at them with a detached kind of wry amusement at the shitty state of things but this actually really did offend me, I mean yuck, makes my fucking skin crawl.