Aegisub Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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This worked well on 3.2.2 Ubuntu 20.10. Recommended.
First import video with:
aegisub-3.2 ourbigbook-parent.mkv
They don't have an aegisub executable without the version number. Amazing.
If you already have a subtitle file that you want to edit, then just pass it on as well:
aegisub-3.2 ourbigbook-parent.mkv ourbigbook-parent.ass
Ctrl + P: play and pause video.
Ctrl + 3: set current substitle start time.
Ctrl + 4: set current substitle end time.
Enter: finish editing the current entry and start a new one.
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The best articles by Ciro Santilli Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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These are the best articles ever authored by Ciro Santilli, most of them in the format of Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro posts update about new articles on his Twitter accounts.
A chronological list of all articles is also kept at: Section "Updates".
Some random generally less technical in-tree essays will be present at: Section "Essays by Ciro Santilli".
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Bristol (synthesizer) Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Simulates vintage hardware synthesizers, and includes some pretty complex ones!
Aims to show an UI that looks exactly like the synthesizers in question.
For example for the Minimoog on Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt install bristol
startBristol -mini -alsa
This is a really good piece of software. You can search on YouTube how some classic synths, work, and the immediately start playing them!
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Build bsdgames from source Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-12-13
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Many of the games are disabled by default on Ubuntu. But we can enable some games and build from source with:
apt-get source bsdgames
cd bsdgames-*
sed -ri '/^bsd_games_cfg_no_build_dirs=/s/ number / /' config.params
./configure
make -j
Here we enabled the game number, so now we can:
number/number 123
which gives:
one hundred twenty-three.
We can also "install" it locally with:
make install
which puts the games locally under:
debian/bsdgames/usr/games/number
which you can add to your PATH environment variable.
Tested on Ubuntu 24.04, bsdgames 2.17.
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Ciro Santilli Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli is a male human software engineer and activist born in Brazil, Earth in 1989 AD.
Quick facts:
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
Figure 1.
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source.
Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a Monster of the Week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
.
The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Figure 3.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
.
Ciro Santilli fantasises that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
Chill and eat your bread in peace comes to mind. A scribe, in a library, reading and writing the entire day in peace and quiet. The life!
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openess, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many diffferent people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro once saw some cartoon on Wikipedia help pages of a turtle with a book in one hand, and typing into Wikipedia on its computer, TODO find it. That cartoon summarizes well the modern scribe life.
Another analogous version of this fantasy more in touch with Ciro's sinophily is the ideal of the Chinese scholar, notably including their stereotypical attributes such as mastery of the Four arts.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli piling boxes as a child
. A natural born engineer.
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cirosantilli/parsec-benchmark Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-07-29
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Ciro Santilli's fork of PARSEC. This fork was made to improve the build system and better support newer targets, including newer Ubuntu and Buildroot.
After the PARSEC website died in 2023, Ciro Santilli also uploaded the test data to GitHub.
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Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) log Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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  • battery life:
    • 2023-04: on-browser streaming + light browsing on Ubuntu 22.10: about 2h45. Too low! Gotta try buying a new battery.
  • 2022-01-04 updated firmward after noticing that ubuntu 21.10 does not wake up from suspend seemed to happen every time when not connected to external power. dmidecode diff excerpt:
     BIOS Information
        Vendor: LENOVO
-       Version: N1UET40W (1.14 )
-       Release Date: 09/28/2017
+       Version: N1UET71W (1.45 )
+       Release Date: 07/18/2018
    used the "Ubuntu Software" GUI as mentioned at: support.lenovo.com/gb/en/solutions/ht510810-how-to-do-software-updates-linux. Kudos for making this accessible to newbs.
    After doing that, another update became available to: 0.1.56, clicked it and was much faster than the previous one, and didn't auto reboot. After manual reboot, dmidecode diffed again:
     BIOS Information
        Vendor: LENOVO
-       Version: N1UET71W (1.45 )
-       Release Date: 07/18/2018
+       Version: N1UET82W (1.56 )
+       Release Date: 08/12/2021
    plus a bunch of other lines.
  • 2021-06-05 upgraded to Ubuntu 21.04 with a clean install from an ISO. Selected
    • "Minimal installation"
    • "Erase disk and install Ubuntu". Notably, this erased the Microsoft Windows that came with the computer and was never used not even once
    • "Erase disk ans use ZFS"
    • Encrypt the new Ubuntu installation for security
    After this, the GUI felt fast, who would have thought that erasing a bunch of stuff would make the system faster!
    lsblk contains:
    zd0               230:0    0   500M  0 disk
└─keystore-rpool  253:0    0   484M  0 crypt /run/keystore/rpool
nvme0n1           259:0    0 476.9G  0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1       259:1    0   512M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2       259:2    0     2G  0 part
│ └─cryptoswap    253:1    0     2G  0 crypt
├─nvme0n1p3       259:3    0     2G  0 part
└─nvme0n1p4       259:4    0 472.4G  0 part
    and lsblk -f:
    zd0               crypto_LUKS 2
└─keystore-rpool  ext4        1.0   keystore-rpool
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1       vfat        FAT32
├─nvme0n1p2       crypto_LUKS 2
│ └─cryptoswap
├─nvme0n1p3       zfs_member  5000  bpool
└─nvme0n1p4       zfs_member  5000  rpoo
    Then:
    grep '[rb]pool' /proc/mounts
    contains:
    rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq / zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/USERDATA/ciro_czngbg /home/ciro zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/USERDATA/root_czngbg /root zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/srv /srv zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/usr/local /usr/local zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/games /var/games zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/log /var/log zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib /var/lib zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/mail /var/mail zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/snap /var/snap zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/www /var/www zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/spool /var/spool zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/AccountsService /var/lib/AccountsService zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/NetworkManager /var/lib/NetworkManager zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/apt /var/lib/apt zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq/var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg zfs rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
bpool/BOOT/ubuntu_uvs1fq /boot zfs rw,nodev,relatime,xattr,posixacl 0 0
    which gives an idea of how the above map to mountpoints.
    Had two GUI freezes since installation, a fixed images shows no matter what I do, possibly graphics only, but impossible to tell (next time I'll try SSH access). No Nvidia drivers installed yet.
2020-06-06: dropped some lemon juice on the bottom left of touchpad. Bottom left button not working anymore... I'm an idiot. There are many other alternatives, but very aggravating, I'll replace it for sure. Can't find the exact replacement part or any videos showing its replacement online easliy, dang. For the T430: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lzV9uXRjU Asked at: forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P-and-W-Series-Mobile-Workstations/P51-left-bottom-button-below-trackpad-mouse-left-click-stopped-working-possible-to-replace/m-p/5019903 Also I could not access it because you need to remove the HDD first: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Klawxc7T_Y and I can't pull it out even with considerable force, unlike in the video... And OMG, those button caps are impossible to re-install once removed!!! Then when I put the whole thing back together, the upper buttons were not working anymore. FUUUUUUUUCK. When first opening I pulled on it without properly removing the cap and it came off, but it didn't look broken in any way and I put it back in. Keyboard works thank God, so right black connector is fine, left white one oppears to be the one for upper keys and trackpoint, both of which stopped working. The hardware manual confirms that they are both part of the same device, so basically a mouse :-) TODO can it be bought separately from te keyboard? Doesn't look like it, photo of keyboard part includes those buttons. The manual also confirms that the bottom buttons are one device with the trackpad "trackpad with buttons", thus forming the second entire mouse.
2019-04-17: popup asking about "ThinkPad P51 Management Engine Update" from from 182.29.3287 to 184.60.3561, said yes.
Ubuntu 17.10 setup after buying it:
Battery life shown by Ubuntu battery app after installation:
  • before NVIDIA driver setup: 8h
  • after: 6.5h
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Polytechnique USB flash drives Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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~8GB, lsblk reports 7796176 * 1KB = 7983284224 bytes.
We got a handful of those from École Polytechnique at the end of studies I think.
They are shaped like bicornes, which is super cool, but also super impractical!
Markings: "AX ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE PROMOTION X2009"
20.04 gnome-disks program reports it as: "SMI USB DISK".
From Ubuntu 20.04 on an ext4 formatted one:
/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   28656 MB in  1.99 seconds = 14421.31 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 Timing buffered disk reads:  42 MB in  3.03 seconds =  13.88 MB/sec
With Linux Unified Key Setup + ext4 the results are similar, maybe hdparam bypasses it?
/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   28326 MB in  1.99 seconds = 14251.55 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
 Timing buffered disk reads:  38 MB in  3.11 seconds =  12.23 MB/sec
gnome-disks LUKS + ext4 benchmark with default params also gives about 14 MB/s.
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Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:
Ha, so I can write my own books, and so can anyone, for free?
he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!
One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdf
Not long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:
  • at the University of São Paulo that they had some "UNIX" computers in some classes, and at the library
  • at École Polytechnique, he took a course about mathematical analysis and there was a "lab" where students were supposed to use FreeFem, great initiative BTW. And Ciro distinctly remembers being paried with a nice Chilian colleague, and the guy was alreay super at ease with the shell: "cd", "ls", etc. WTF was all that!
University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.
Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.
And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!
Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.
The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.
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Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.
His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.
In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:
  • answer important questions found through Google which he needs to solve an actual problem he has right now, and for which none of the existing answers satisfied him, and close duplicates.
  • monitor less known tags which very few people know a lot about and where the knowledge sharing desperately lacking, but in which Ciro specializes and therefore has some uncommon knowledge to share
In practice it also happens that Ciro:
When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.
He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.
The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!
For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the 1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.
The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!
VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936
Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:
The more patents a research project generates, the less actually working products it produces.
and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.
In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)
There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.
Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.
What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.
Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.
There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!
For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.
Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about. He likes it when he goes insanely deep into a subject, way beyond what OP had in mind, exposing full root causes and broader causes, see e.g.:
Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Santillis or even simpler answers such as:
There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".
Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.
After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:
Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.
Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.
Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.
Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.
His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.
Ciro's first upvote was for his 2012 question: How to run a Python script portably without specifying its full path?
When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!
When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.
Figure 3.
Ciro Santilli with his Stack Overflow 100k reputation cup
.
From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:
  • save the world through free education
  • It feels especially amazing when people in the real world start taking note of you, and either close friends tell you straight out that you're a Stack Overflow God, or as you slowly and indirectly find out that less close know or came to you due to your amazing contributions.
It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.
Ciro feels that his Stack Overflow alter ego is kenorb.
Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:
Follow me on Twitter and tell me what canonical questions you would like me to respond to!
so another necromancer.
Way to go.
Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.
Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:
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Csound Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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XML file format (but with 99% of the action of interest in a domain-specific language on the CsInstruments and CsScore elements) that can be played and the reference implementation. Offers complex effects out-of-box apparently.
Allows you to easily define instruments with seemingly arbitrary mathematical functions, and then use them to play notes at given time intervals.
The instrument functions can be parametrized, and each note played can have different parameters.
The instrument definition actually defines a block diagram graph, much like a hardware synthesizer would.
Csound is so not-bloated that it contains an UI system. And it includes an interactive virtual MIDI keyboard that interacts with parameter knobs: www.csounds.com/manual/html/MidiTop.html
But hey, it's fun. And like any other good domain-specific language, debugging it is barbaric of course.
If only it had been written in Python... the array manipulation boilerplate would be likely perfect for NumPy, and this would have been exactly what Ciro Santilli wanted!
CSound states that one of its design goals is backward compatibility, and it shows. Some of the stuff is utterly arcane, e.g. you have to remember what GEN10, GEN11, etc. mean instead of having named enums.
It just worked on Ubuntu 20.04 no questions asked:
sudo apt install csound
git clone https://github.com/csound/csound
cd csound
git checkout 92409ecce053d707360a5794f5f4f6bf5ebf5d24
csound examples/xanadu.csd
which runs this file: github.com/csound/csound/blob/92409ecce053d707360a5794f5f4f6bf5ebf5d24/examples/xanadu.csd and this plays a relly cool sound demo:
Video 1.
Xanadu Csound demo
. Source.
Save to file instead of playing:
csound -o xanadu.wav xanadu.csd
or direct ogg output:
csound --ogg -o xanadu.ogg xanadu.csd
or pipe to stdout to FFmpeg TODO: stackoverflow.com/questions/64970503/how-to-pipe-csound-output-to-ffmpeg-for-conversion-without-an-intermediate-file
TODO find the most amazing set of songs made with it on GitHub? Some examples:
Documentation-wise, it's a bit lacking. The only dude who can explain it really well, Dr Richard Boulanger, made the "The Csound Book" closed source, so, congrats, this will forever hurt the popularity of Csound.
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Csound FLOSS manual Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Very good open source book: github.com/csound-flossmanual/csound-floss
Includes introduction to the basic sound synthesis and their implementation in Csound.
Examples run on browser via Emscripten and just worked on Ubuntu 20.04!
Examples can also be downloaded all at once from: www.csound-tutorial.net/floss_manual/ Shame not in Git as standalone files.
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E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease is a whole cell simulation model created by Covert Lab and other collaborators.
The project is written in Python, hurray! But according to te README, it seems to be the use a code drop model with on-request access to master, very meh, asked rationale on GitHub discussion, and they confirmed as expected that it is to:
  • to prevent their publication ideas from being stolen. Who would steal publication ideas with public proof in an issue tracker without crediting original authors?
  • to prevent noise from non collaborators. They do only get like 2 issues as year though, people forget that it is legal to ignore other people :-)
Oh well.
The project is a followup to the earlier M. genitalium whole cell model by Covert lab which modelled Mycoplasma genitalium. E. Coli has 8x more genes (500 vs 4k), but it the undisputed bacterial model organism and as such has been studied much more thoroughly. It also reproduces faster than Mycoplasma (20 minutes vs a few hours), which is a huge advantages for validation/exploratory experiments.
The project has a partial dependency on the proprietary optimization software CPLEX which is freeware, for students, not sure what it is used for exactly, from the comment in the requirements.txt the dependency is only partial.
This project makes Ciro Santilli think of the E. Coli as an optimization problem. Given such external nutrient/temperature condition, which DNA sequence makes the cell grow the fastest? Balancing metabolites feels like designing a Factorio speedrun.
There is one major thing missing thing in the current model: promoters/transcription factor interactions are not modelled due to lack/low quality of experimental data: github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease/issues/21. They just have a magic direct "transcription factor to gene" relationship, encoded at reconstruction/ecoli/flat/foldChanges.tsv in terms of type "if this is present, such protein is expressed 10x more". Transcription units are not implemented at all it appears.
Everything in this section refers to version 7e4cc9e57de76752df0f4e32eca95fb653ea64e4, the code drop from November 2020, and was tested on Ubuntu 21.04 with a docker install of docker.pkg.github.com/covertlab/wholecellecolirelease/wcm-full with image id 502c3e604265, unless otherwise noted.
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Install and first run Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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At 7e4cc9e57de76752df0f4e32eca95fb653ea64e4 you basically need to use the Docker image on Ubuntu 21.04 due to pip breaking changes... (not their fault). Perhaps pyenv would solve things, but who has the patience for that?!?!
The Docker setup from README does just work. The image download is a bit tedius, as it requires you to create a GitHub API key as described in the README, but there must be reasons for that.
Once the image is downloaded, you really want to run is from the root of the source tree:
sudo docker run --name=wcm -it -v "$(pwd):/wcEcoli" docker.pkg.github.com/covertlab/wholecellecolirelease/wcm-full
This mounts the host source under /wcEcoli, so you can easily edit and view output images from your host. Once inside Docker we can compile, run the simulation, and analyze results with:
make clean compile &&
python runscripts/manual/runFitter.py &&
python runscripts/manual/runSim.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisVariant.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisCohort.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisMultigen.py &&
python runscripts/manual/analysisSingle.py
The meaning of each of the analysis commands is described at Section "Output overview".
As a Docker refresher, after you stop the container, e.g. by restarting your computer or running sudo docker stop wcm, you can get back into it with:
sudo docker start wcm
sudo docker run -it wcm bash
runscripts/manual/runFitter.py takes about 15 minutes, and it generates files such as reconstruction/ecoli/dataclasses/process/two_component_system.py (related) which is required to run the simulation, it is basically a part of the build.
runSim.py does the main simulation, progress output contains lines of type:
Time (s)  Dry mass     Dry mass      Protein          RNA    Small mol     Expected
              (fg)  fold change  fold change  fold change  fold change  fold change
========  ========  ===========  ===========  ===========  ===========  ===========
    0.00    403.09        1.000        1.000        1.000        1.000        1.000
    0.20    403.18        1.000        1.000        1.000        1.000        1.000
and then it ended on the Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) at:
 2569.18    783.09        1.943        1.910        2.005        1.950        1.963

Simulation finished:
 - Length: 0:42:49
 - Runtime: 0:09:13
when the cell had almost doubled, and presumably divided in 42 minutes of simulated time, which could make sense compared to the 20 under optimal conditions.
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EPUB Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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This is a good thing. It basically contains an entire website, with HTML and assets inside a single ZIP, and a little bit of metadata.
It is incomprehensible why browsers don't just implement it as they already have all the web part, and also ZIP stuff:
The situation is so sad. Ubuntu 21.04 doesn't come with a reader installed by default:
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GHDL Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Examples under vhdl.
First install GHDL. On Ubuntu:
sudo apt install verilator
Tested on Verilator 1.0.0, Ubuntu 22.04.
Run all examples, which have assertions in them:
cd vhdl
./run
Files:
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gothinkster/realworld Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Basically puts together every backend with Front-end web framework to create the exact same website.
The reference live demo can be found at: demo.realworld.io/#/ It is based on Angular.js as it links to: github.com/gothinkster/angularjs-realworld-example-app TODO backend?
There are however also live demos of other frontends, e.g.:
Note that all those frontends communicate with the same backend.
As of 2021 Devs are seemed a bit too focused on monetizing the project through their "how to use this project" premium tutorial, and documentation could be better: just getting the hello world of the most popular backend with the most popular frontend is not easy... come on.
github.com/gothinkster/realworld/issues/578 asks for community support, as devs have moved on since unfortunately.
Remember:
  • by default, the frontends hardcode the upstream public data API: https://conduit.productionready.io/api so you have to hack their code to match the port of the backend. And each backend can have a different port.
  • when you switch between backends, you must first manually clear client-side storage cookies/local new run will fail due to authentication issues!
Important missing things from the minimum base app:
First you should the most popular backend/frontend combination running, which is the most likely to be working. We managed to run on Ubuntu 20.10, React + Node.js Express.js as described at github.com/gothinkster/node-express-realworld-example-app/pull/116:
Then just:
npm install
npm start
on both server and client, and then visit the client URL: localhost:4100/
One cool thing is that the main repo has unified backend API tests:
git clone https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld
cd realworld
git checkout e7adc6b06b459e578d7d4a6738c1c050598ba431
cd api
APIURL=http://localhost:3000/api USERNAME="u$(date +%s)" ./run-api-tests.sh
so the per-repository tests are basically useless, and that single test can test everything for any backend! There is no frontend testing however: github.com/gothinkster/realworld/issues/269 so newb.
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How to hardcode subtitle into a video with FFmpeg? Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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On Ubuntu 20.10, just:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt" output.mp4
To change font size: stackoverflow.com/questions/21363334/how-to-add-font-size-in-subtitles-in-ffmpeg-video-filter
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt:force_style='Fontsize=64'" output.mp4
The default appears to be 24, so just multiply that by whatever seems like a reasonable factor.
Note howver that .ass subtitle files can contain style information, which ffmpeg respects. Aegisub can produce and preview such styles, making .ass one of the best options.
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How to mine Monero Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)
At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:
xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>
Seems simple, well done devs!
Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:
./xmrig --bench=1M
gives:
948.1 h/s
which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.
So clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.
www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!
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