Silly software wishlist

VR's best use was always documenting historical places, but it was only really used for selling VR startups.  A key feature is being able to toggle between the historic view & the current view to see where objects were in the current context.  Sutro Baths would be a key destination.  

There are some VR programs for viewing Pompeii.  

Lions are now about as good at navigating with the screen program as they were in their 20's, but they have bigger dreams of automating the thing.  

Lions have had manely success using pm-suspend to suspend the confuser, but it closes all the networking & ADB connections.  The way around it would be a single script that ran ssh & adb commands in multiple screen program windows.  Even better would be a script that created the screen program windows, labeling them as ADB or SSH.

The screen program has a feature called "stuff"  which sends commands to any console in any screen program over a network.  It also has a way to remotely create new consoles.

Youtube downloaders were originally necessary when Firefox & Chrome couldn't play anything.  They got to the point where if you drop kicked the browser enough & ipccleaned after their incompetent ipc management, they could play audio, but now there are so many commercials & the audio is so bad, the browser player is unwatchable again.  

Most of the original downloaders don't work anymore & new ones aren't being written anymore.  Lions believe most of the content is now being viewed on phones, where the 2 corporate app stores are simply banning anything that circumvents commercials. The lion kingdom currently uses an old version of Macx.  It's heavily crippled & can't download most of the current videos.  The latest versions don't support screen scaling.  MacOS disables VNC based on many conditions, so it requires easy access to the console.

Making a better youtube downloader should involve just wiresharking Macx.  Theoretically, it uses ffmpeg to remux the streams.  The goo tubes have had a pretty stable API for the last few years.  Lions have lost their taste for GUI's so much, it would be a command line program.

UPDATE:

Gootube downloads are back, for the moment.

After a bit of research, a lot more people have worked on youtube downloaders since 2018, when the browser player started becoming really unwatchable.  The task is not as easy as simply wireshark or chrome network analysis.  The lion kingdom managed to get youtube-dl to work.  It even has source code.

https://github.com/heroineworshiper/utils/blob/master/tube.py

To list the available format codes:

./youtube-dl -F

Note each format is either audio or video, but not both.  To download a specific format:

./youtube-dl -f <format code> --no-mtime

It doesn't automatically multiplex the audio & video streams.  You have to specify an audio & video format in the -f argument to get it to create a single multiplexed movie.

./youtube-dl -f 137+251 --no-mtime

Unfortunately, every movie has different format codes.  The mane task for lions was making a wrapper that selected formats based on the codec & resolution.

With that, the lion kingdom finally has a better solution than MacX:

https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1380505906331200/tube.py

It tries to select codecs based on the desired resolution & whether you want just audio.

It downloads a playlist if the URL contains "&list=".  The mane problem with youtube-dl's default playlist function is it tries to download a fixed codec even if each movie in the playlist contains different codecs.  It really has to select different codecs for each member of a playlist.

youtube-dl needs another hack to generate .mp4 files from OPUS & AVC1.  It tries to enforce standards compliance by only outputting .mkv's without indexes.

Sadly, 9 months after the lion kingdom wrote tube.py, the goog has enforced bandwidth throttling for all downloaded videos.

It was the next step after enforcing in stream commercials for all videos, some videos requiring clicking through 10 commercials to watch 5 minutes of video.  That must have caused a big uptick in downloads.  There are many theories about how they detect an unauthorized download.  1 theory is they require starting & ending positions of the chunks to match a certain algorithm.  The way around this hurdle is to use yt-dlp 

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

instead of youtube-dl

The only things missing from the virtual reality boom may have been an environment that was artistically worth living in all the time & which allowed continuing to be productive all the time.  Lions call it full time virtual reality.

It could have also been a limitation of the polygon count, frame rate, or heavy goggles.  A compelling enough work of 3D art might have overcome the limitations.  Lions never found a VR app that was easy to navigate in & which visually transcended looking at a dumpy apartment.  

When most animals think of a 3D environment that's more compelling than their dumpy apartment, they think of the Mediterranean villa in Star Wars episode II or the beauty & the beast castle.

The virtual environments in movies have gotten a lot more ornate & baroque, through automated modeling.  None of that ornateness has made it into VR.  

The other problem is the virtual environment can't become full time if it doesn't allow the same type of productivity as the real world.  The mane need is a representation of our real computer screen & user interface in the virtual environment.  Virtual representations of all our real tools could be the most important step, with the artwork being less critical.  Perhaps it could just render all our real furniture & tools in their real positions relative to our bodies, but surrounded by a different room.  The problem then becomes determining the position of our bodies in the real room.  Openpose can get most of the way there.

The closest lions came to a compelling virtual environment was wearing the goggles while exercising.  Instead of showing a virtual representation of the exercise area in a better looking room, they showed a movie, but the pieces were there for a lion to not have to take the goggles off to be productive & better off.   Just getting to a point of showing a movie in a virtual screen, superimposed on the real location of the exercise mat in a more appealing room might be good enough.

Existing VR exercise environments show a poorly rendered game rather than a movie or any kind of environment that looks better than reality.

https://www.youtube.com/c/VRFitnessInsider/videos

Has a quick rundown of the current state of what would be the closest to a productive VR replacement of reality.  None of the programs allow any kind of productivity besides the workout & the graphics are all terrible.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With the Quest 3, we can finally live in a full time virtual environment for a reasonable price.  It has a depth camera & passthrough cameras.  It can pass through everything within 3 ft & replace everything beyond 3ft with a virtual environment.  It could overlay your keyboard & mouse on a 360 video from somewhere else in the world.  It could render a virtual monitor.

The mane problem could be the depth camera not having enough resolution to produce a convincing outline.  There could be a green screen under the keyboard & mouse to aid the overlay.  Lions believe even a blurry outline from the depth camera would be acceptable.  Without the depth camera, it would have required green screening the entire room.

  Maybe 3ft is too close for the cameras to pass through any more than paws.

That could seriously disrupt real estate.  A tiny home with no windows wouldn't matter anymore. The mane reason they're not doing it could be the target customer being rich enough to travel or exactly that they don't want to disrupt real estate. A lion with absolutely nothing else to do could conceivably do it. It's just too obvious to believe it hasn't already been done.

Now that the goal seems to be attainable, the problem is it's still just a toy.  There's no way for lions to go back to valuing toys as much as socks.

Lions absolutely won't waste any time on this, but if it was still 1985 & that was all there was, the lion kingdom would consider creating a virtual 640x400 or 1280x800 desktop for the C64, much like X windows of the last 30 years.  There were a lot of 80 column emulators that were barely legible.  Word processors of the late 80's used proportional fonts to fit more characters in.  Nothing tiled together full resolution screens to create a larger virtual screen that you could scroll around in.

The C64 had a bitmap mode which burned 8000 bytes for the framebuffer + 1000 bytes for color information.  It could store 8 monochrome framebuffers in RAM, all sharing the same color buffer, leaving nothing for a program.   It could tile 4 framebuffers with enough left over for a program.  Bits could be memcopied to scroll sideways or it could switch banks to instantly switch the entire framebuffer.

There was also a character mode which burned 1000 bytes per framebuffer + 1000 bytes for color information.  64 monochrome character screens could be tiled in all the RAM.  A more reasonable 16 character screens could be tiled in 16k of RAM to create a virtual 1280x800 desktop.

The C64 couldn't wrap any unchanged programs in a tiled mode. There were window emulators which could multitask very simple BASIC programs in a single framebuffer, without any changes.  Any useful program would have to be rewritten from the ground up to use a tiled framebuffer.  

There aren't many programs which could have used a virtual desktop for anything they didn't already do.  Most programs had scrollbars to scroll in the document.  It would manely be for running multiple programs simultaneously, but there wasn't enough RAM to really do that.  There were bank switchers which could run BASIC programs in a dedicated screen, simultaneously.

Extend a cable & reset button for firmware flashing to the outside of the enclosure.

Make it show ETA based on percent completed.  

Show the filename currently being printed.

Make "stop printer" the last item on the menu instead of the 2nd to last.  

Make highlighted item inverted instead of an outline.  

Make navigation faster.

Fix bug where it sometimes highlights the wrong item.

Sort files by date.

Helas, the physical interface should have a joystick in addition to the encoder.  Imagine moving the print head with the joystick & the Z axis with the encoder.  A joystick button would be the select button for gcode scripts & the encoder button would be for navigating menus.

Play live brushing & paint spraying sounds with the CP33.  Other sounds: page turns, crumpling paper

For some reason, lions have always found it easier to enter music or beats with an instrument rather than a GUI so they never think of anything but a MIDI interface for creating sensory inputs.  They used Finale for creating sheet music, but could only do it effectively with the piano for entering notes.  This project kind of coincides with the long time desire to make a free interface that converts instrument input to shortpaw music notation.  The shortpaw notation is just whole notes on conventional staffs which lions can later convert into proper time steps or just space out according to time.  

This would be better as a phone app with a wifi interface for downloading the data.  It would have a common MIDI recording routine.  The output would be the ASMR synthesizer, TF-39 engine synthesizer, or music notation.

These sounds are pretty good at nuking lions:

It could be a mobile app with sliders to adjust the mane sounds.

Rumble volume

Fan pitch

Fan volume

Shriek pitch

Shriek volume

Or it could be a simple throttle with automatic adjustment of the sounds.  Lions had a tough time designing sounds for a game.  There are many variations going on in the recordings besides just throttle.

There's a useful video series about the TF-39 sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IQ75FnVUWg

Another idea is a TF-39 musical instrument sound.  Maybe it could be a vocal.

https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1380505906331200/stopwatch2.c

This was a revival of the lion kingdom's very 1st programs on the commodore 64.  Printing large characters out of 8x8 blocks was the goal, but it took some time to figure out what petscii character was an 8x8 block.  It was an inverted space & the way to print an inverted space in BASIC was ctrl-9 (reverse on) then spacebar.  

Nowadays, we have VT100 codes for inverting the space.  

<0x1b>[7m to print inverted spaces & <0x1b>[7m to print normal spaces

A bit of elementary school character printing yielded a stopwatch in giant letters.  The lion kingdom had an earlier stopwatch program which printed a single line of text, but it was found inadequate.  Perhaps the single line will become an option.

For 2020 tax filing, the lion kingdom banged on its Brother HL2040 again.  The original configuration files from 2007 were hacked to work & lost when the hard drive was replaced later.  It never could be made to work again with any configuration files Brother released after 2007.  The printer now always feeds 2 sheets & jams while feeding the 2nd sheet.

The 1st hack is in /usr/local/Brother/lpd/filterHL2040, setting the yshift parameter to a small number from 0-100.  The more positive yshift is, the more the printout is shifted up in the page.  The more negative yshift is, the more the printout is shifted down in the page until it starts printing on the 2nd page.  The more positive  xshift is, the more it's shifted right.  The more negative xshift is, the more it's shifted left.

In a configuration which has become very broken since 2007, it picks up RESOLUTION & PAPER_TYPE from /usr/local/Brother/inf/brHL2040rc.  If PaperType=A4 is replaced by PaperType=Letter, it prints properly but still feeds 1.5 sheets.

Then, it uses PAPER_TYPE to extract the WIDTH & HEIGHT from paperinf

It's supposed to extract the xshift & yshift from /usr/local/Brother/inf/brHL2040init, but this file was deleted at some point, so lions just add some hard coded lines inside /usr/local/Brother/lpd/filterHL2040.

There hasn't been a way to stop it from starting a 2nd page without using the manual feeder.  Then, it doesn't try to feed a 2nd sheet.  For a long document, it's a pain to feed 1 sheet at a time.

Lions long ago abandoned the clunky lpr & lpd system.  All you have to do in the lion kingdom is 

cat printout.ps | filterHL2040 > /dev/usb/lp0

For future lions, the hacked configuration files are

https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1380505906331200/brother.tar.xz