Curious if this would have any noticeable energy savings. Basically thinking of taking old semi-disposable plastic containers (the ones that like deli meat, butter, etc come in), freezing them outdoors, and letting them defrost (absorb heat) in the fridge/freezer. Basically back to the "ice box" model.

Anybody doing that and/or have any results to share? Mostly curious if it would be worth the effort.

The woman reportedly screamed out in pain as she was being taken out of the machine.

An anonymous medical provider reported the strange incident to the Food and Drug Administration in April 2023, though it’s received renewed media attention this week. The 22-year-old woman reportedly screamed out in pain as she was pulled out of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine following a scan, which then prompted her delayed admission of having had a “butt plug” inserted.

Cross-posted from "1.4.28 Released" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

1.4.28

Note: I only crosspost release info here when there are new features worth mentioning, so I copied over some of the notes from the previous release that I didn't post. Also, the image is just the only clearly visible new feature (formatting help/cheatsheet). I added that just so it would roll-up the two announcement posts into cross-posts.

This release brings a few bugfixes and several quality of life improvements. Also, mods are now able to see the votes on submissions to their communities (if their instance is on 0.19.4 or above).

Bugfixes

• [Bug/Annoyance] When highlighting text in the markdown editor and using the toolbar buttons (e.g. highlight a word and click "bold"), the text area would annoyingly scroll to the bottom. No longer does it do that.
• [Bug] Default moderation template had a missing piece (community) and didn't really make sense.
• [Bug] Don't poll notifications from Notification system timer handler if no active profile. The poll function didn't actually run, but no reason to call it if no profile
• [Bug] Usernames in direct message headers were improperly truncating
• [Regression] The 'Filter Annoying CC Licenses on Comments' option wasn't working since the markdown pre-processor re-write.
• [Bug] Ensure post titles are not linkified. This includes both regular URLs in the title (typically flotsam from Mastodon) and unwanted mailto:[email protected] email links when the titles contain [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) or @[email protected].
• [Bug] Dynamically import separate CSS themes for HighlightJS depending on app theme. Makes code blocks easier to read since the default styling assumed light theme.
  • Known Quirk: Unfortunately, this is not reactive to changing the app theme without refreshing the page.

Minor Changes

• [Settings] Moved inbox/notification related settings to new section in /settings page.
• [Notifications] Notification poll interval is now configurable
• [Infrastructure] Removed unused settings key for notificaiton rate
• [Infrastructure] Can now specify section URL param on /settings page to open the specific panel (useful for linking to a settings section; yet to be implemented elsewhere)
• [Direct Messages] Updated the message header to be more email-like
• Can now set an option to expand all inbox, reports, and/or registration applications by default.

Vote Viewer Now Available to Mods

If connected to an instance running API 0.19.4 or higher, the vote viewer is now available to mods for items in their communities. I had always planned for it to be, but I wasn't aware that had been implemented in the API already. Apparently it's been available to mods at the API-level since 0.19.4 (thanks @[email protected] for pointing that out).

For those unaware, the vote viewer is accessible from the Moderation Modal -> View Votes... button.

Link Menu / Alternate Source Selector

The link menu / alternate source selector for YouTube-like videos now lists all user-defined Piped/Invidious instances instead of a single, static link to the currently-selected instance.

Added "RemovePaywalls.com" as an option in the archive link selector

Community Profile Modals

Post Drafts Less Likely to be Accidentally Lost

When creating a post in the community profile modal, the "Return to Home" back arrow will now prompt you for confirmation if there is anything in the post form. Helps prevent accidental loss of post draft via mis-click.

Upload Cleanup

When clicking the "return to home" button from the "Create Post" panel, the resetForm function from the post form will be called which will take care of cleaning up any uploaded media that would otherwise be abandoned.

Markdown Editor

Added new buttons to the toolbar

• Insert User Link
• Insert Community Link
• Table
• Code Block
• Formatting Help

The "Insert User/Community Link" buttons will let you search for a user and/or community and insert links to them in the body at the current cursor position. The inserted links are in the @[email protected] / [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) format. Inline auto-complete is in the works but needs to bake a little longer.

The "Table" button will create a markdown table template.

The Code Block button is a menu which will let you select the lanaguage (or plaintext/other).

The Formatting Help button will load a modal with a markdown cheatsheet.

Toolbar Now Reflows

The markdown editor toolbar (with the formatting, emoji, image, etc) buttons will now reflow on mobile/small width screens rather than scroll horizontally.

Various Tweaks to Markdown Editor

1. Heading button is now a menu; can select headings 1 through 4
2. Fixed bug where highlighting text and using the toolbar buttons would always scroll it to the bottom
3. Numbered and bullet lists now give you three entries
4. On spoiler, code block, and lists, the cursor now goes to inside the block or in position for the first list item (respectively)
5. Highlighting text and clicking the "Link" button will now automatically put the text into the link label. For example, if you highlight the text "Home" and clicked link:

• Old behavior: Home -> [Label](url)Home
• New behavior: Home -> [Home](url)

Get Tesseract

Docker

• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.28
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.28
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest

Links

• Github: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract
• Hosted Instance https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

My power is generally pretty reliable, but when it does have issues, it often flickers violently. More than once, I thought the control board in my fridge got fried, but was luckily able to do the refrigerator equivalent to Ctrl+Alt+Delete and reset it.

I have an extra 800W UPS laying around, so I figured I'd give it a try and see if it would run it. I'm not really looking to use the UPS to keep it powered during an outage, just to deal with the power flickers/surges/brownouts that may damage it (surge protectors won't protect against brownouts). Any additional cooling time during an outage would simply be a bonus.

To my surprise, it works. Not only works, but only seems to draw between 110 and 160 watts (compressor on, door open). However, I expected it to draw power in the 700-900 watt range. Granted, the last time I worried about refrigerator wattage was years ago when I lived in the boonies, had an older fridge, and had to resource-manage when I was running from the generator on a long outage.

Is that normal for a 26 cu ft refrigerator? I'd say it's probably close to 10 years old. AFAIK, the UPS reports the wattage draw correctly (at least, the values were within expectations when I was using it with my desktop workstation). The manual for the fridge says 115v / 10 A but it doesn't seem to use anywhere close to that.

Additionally, are there any hidden risks to running a refrierator from a UPS? It's a pure sine wave UPS, so the power should be as clean as or cleaner than utility.

VOY 2x01: The 37's

For effect and respect:

Have some interesting Voyager trivia?

• Header Template
• Text/Icon Template

I put way too much work into this for a shitpost. Did all the editing with ffmpeg for some stupid reason.

## This is a lot easier since I'm not dealing with audio

# Download the source video
wget https://i.makeagif.com/media/7-26-2016/cjRcwx.mp4 -O homer-brain-float-away.mp4

# Scale up the tiny MP4 from the GIF site
ffmpeg -i homer-brain-float-away.mp4 -vf scale=960:540 homer.mp4

# I want to splice the bit of Flanders talking from the middle onto the beginning. Start at 6 seconds and copy 1.5 seconds of the source video into a new file.

ffmpeg -i homer.mp4 -ss 6 -t 1.5 homer2.mp4

# Concatenate the extracted bit onto the beginning 
ffmpeg -i homer2.mp4 -i homer.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v] [1:v] concat=n=2:v=1 [v]" -map '[v]' homer3.mp4

# Create a .srt subtitle file with the dialog
cat <<EOF > homer3.srt
1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,000
     VENDOR:  
  SEO this, SEO that.

2
00:00:03,000 -->  00:00:06,400
     MY BRAIN: 
  Screw this, pal. 
  You're on your own.

3
00:00:06,700 --> 00:00:09,500
     VENDOR:
  And even more about
  SEO.

00:00:10,600 --> 00:00:11,999
     VENDOR:
    Thoughts? 
EOF

# Burn in the subtitles
ffmpeg -i homer3.mp4 -vf "subtitles=homer3.srt" -c:v libx264 -crf 20 homer_finished.mp4

# Convert the mp4 to a GIF
ffmpeg -i homer_finished.mp4 homer_finished.gif

I get it - Google sucks for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately, they own the largest video sharing platform, and it's difficult to avoid. Many people opt to use and share links to 3rd party web interfaces that greatly de-enshittify the experience (Piped/Invidious), and I'm glad for that and that those projects exist.

That said, when sharing a YT video, please just share the canonical YouTube link rather than a link to a random Piped/Invidious instance and let people handle using a 3rd party interface themselves.

Why?

Most People Who Care Probably Already Have a Mechanism in Place

People who want to use 3rd party YT frontends probably already have a mechanism in place to deal with that: integrated Lemmy client support, browser plugin to automatically redirect YT links to their preferred instance, mobile apps that handle YT links, annoying bot, etc.

You're Forcing Someone to Use Their Non-Preferred Instance

With YouTube having a relatively small number of domains, it's infinitely easier to detect YouTube links and automatically/transparently re-write them to a Piped/Invidious instance of the user's choice than the other way around.

It's much more difficult to do the opposite and account for all the random Inv/Piped instances in the wild, and there's no way to really identify them by URL alone (aside from a big list which is difficult to keep up-to-date or be all-inclusive).

The Invidious/Piped server you're linking to may work well for you, but could be on the other side of the planet for someone else. It may also be unreliable, slow, overloaded, or otherwise sub-optimal for sharing links with a wide audience.

Combined, this makes it much more difficult for people to use a local or preferred Invidious/Piped instance while also contributing to a degraded experience.

Boulevard of Broken ~~Dreams~~ Links

Invidious/Piped are in a constant cat and mouse game against Google. In between Google making a change to break Invidious/Piped and those projects implementing and deploying workarounds, we end up with a lot of non-functional links that need to be re-written to another instance or back to YT. That's not even accounting for Invidious/Piped instances that shut down/go permanently offline. Again, it's infinitely easier to re-write a YT link to another Inv/Piped instance than detect every possible Inv/Piped link and redirect those.

Conclusion

So, while people's desire to de-Google is laudable, please be aware that it can also be counterproductive. Sharing the canonical YT link allows the link to avoid dying due to numerous circumstances while also making it much easier for Lemmy clients, browser plugins, etc to use the user's preferred instance to avoid a degraded experience.

One of their later songs, but takes me back to my college days.

Cross-posted from "1.4.26 Released [Troll Buster 5000]" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

1.4.26

This release brings bugfixes, ability to upload videos, and new moderation capabilities.

Bugfixes

• Add /reports route that redirects to /moderation so the email links from the API work correctly if you're using Tesseract in place of Lemmy-UI as your default frontend.
• Add moderation button to crosspost items
• Long links in the modlog were not wrapping when reflowing to mobile
• Pause markdown videos/audio when leaving viewport instead of destroying (same as how post videos are now handled).

Bugfixes from 1.4.25

Didn't do a post for 1.4.25, but there were only some minor bugfixes in that release.

• When viewing a user's submissions in the profile modal from a /c/community page, the post meta is hiding the community and treating inCommunity as true.
• Removed code to switch between community icon and user avatars in CommentMeta component since that's actually useless since you can't browse just comments in a community.
• Comment card colors were not reactively updating when user was banned with content removal from site/community
• When removing/hiding a community, the local cache of the community details was not updated to reflect that; had to open the app in a new tab to get a new session in order to fetch it again. The cache now updates on block/unblock/hide/unhide.

New Features

Support for Video Uploads

Less a "new feature" and more a bugfix to canonize a feature I didn't realize already existed and mostly worked lol.

The file upload handler sets the supported MIME types, but it has no way to enforce them (it's more a suggestion to the browser). A user reported that they forced a video upload, and it worked, but the process was buggy. This was a surprise since I'd never actually tested or even thought about supporting video uploads.

So I patched up the upload handler to support video/mp4 and video/webm formats. The previewer will only show the first frame as if it were a static image, but it will no longer glitch out. It will also automatically disable and hide the "Pre-convert to webp" options if a video is detected.

I'm not sure how useful this will be since most instances limit upload file sizes or disallow videos, but if you're on a supported instance, hey, you can do videos now.

Edit/Clarification: You've always been able to link to a video. This addition allows you to upload a video to your instance's pict-rs as you would an image.

New Moderation Capabilities (aka Troll Buster 5000)

Added support for community moderators and admins to issue bulk community bans/unbans. For several releases now, Tesseract has had the ability for mods (or admins) to directly ban/unban a user from a community (Community Modal -> Ban/Unban User -> Enter username -> Ban/Unban).

Now, there's an extra option to allow issuing either action in bulk for every community you moderate.

Highly useful if a known troll is roaming about (you probably already know which one I'm talking about) and you want to quickly ban them from all of the communities you moderate (whether they've posted there or not).

I'm all about being proactive, so if a known troll is making rounds, I see no reason for them to have to make a mess first when I can simply prevent the mess (or further messes).

Example: You're scrolling /all and see some vile, racist troll posts from a brand new account. Rather than having to wait on an admin to ban them or waiting for them to hit your communities before you can do anything about it, you can simply click their username and [pre] ban them from everything you moderate. Easy peazy.

Basically, every time "that guy" goes on a trolling spree, Tesseract's mod tools adapt and get more powerful. A less polished version of this feature has been in my "private" build for a while now, but since "that guy" shows no signs of buggering off, I figured it was time to mainline it and give everyone else the same defensive capabilities I've thus far hoarded for myself.

Note: Please do not use this feature as an "I really don't like this person" button. In the wrong hands it's got high potential for abuse, I admit, but the benefits it offers outweigh the risks of a few bad mods going on a power trip.

This is a powerful feature. Please use it responsibly.

If time passes and it seems like I've handed loaded guns to a bunch of toddlers, I'll absolutely yank this feature and move it back to my private build.

Modes of Operation

It works a little differently depending on where it's invoked and whether you're a moderator and/or an admin.

In all cases, the expiration date, reason, and whether to remove content applies to all communities (i.e. the API is called for the same user with the same options and loops through the list of communities you moderate).

User Profile Modal

New option in the user profile modal to ban/unban that user from all of your moderated communities. Available to Mods + Admins

This button is also available in the Moderation Modal as well as the quick actions on the moderation reports.

Ban Instance Modal (Admins) With Option to Ban from all Remote Communities They May Moderate

For admins, there's a new option in the "Ban User..." form to "Ban All Remote Communities". Will issue community bans for all remote communities you may be moderating in addition to the instance ban for your home instance. The "remote" filter is to avoid spamming the modlog in case you're an admin of a large instance (technically you moderate all local communities you're subscribed to).

Community Profile Modal:
The "Ban/Unban" option has been extended to allow optionally banning/unbanning the supplied user from all the communities you moderate. Available to Mods and Admins.

Here, the user is not pre-populated and you can enter the username in any of the following formats:

• Actor ID: https://instance.xyz/u/username
• @ Format: @[email protected]
• Lemmyverse Link: https://lemmyverse.link/u/[email protected]

While "Ban" is the action shown in the screenshots, these work in reverse as well to unban them from all. The only thing that's not automated is restoring content if "remove content" was selected during the initial ban. I'm working on that, but there's no clean way to do it without restoring everything, even things that were removed prior to the ban action. As always (since this is the case for all UIs with mod tools), take care when selecting "Remove content" when issuing bans.

Note for admins: Since you technically moderate all communities on your instance, it will only issue bans for communities on your instance that you are subscribed to. The preferred flow for admins is to just instance ban them and select the option to "Ban All Remote Communities" if needed/applicable. Care should also be taken to not select that if they violate a local instance rule but not a remote community/instance rule.

Get Tesseract

Docker

• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.26
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.26
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest

Github: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract

Hosted Instance https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

Turning a Lada into an EV with 50 Cordless Drills, Because Why Not?

[Garage 54] is no stranger to vehicle-related projects of the “because why not?” variety, and their latest is using 50 cordless drills combined into a monstrous mega-motor to turn a gutted (and extended) Lada into an electric vehicle (EV).

Doing this leans on some of [Garage 54]’s earlier projects, such as replacing the aforementioned Lada’s engine block with a frame containing sixteen chainsaws. That means they don’t need to start completely from scratch, and have a frame design that can drop into the vehicle once the “engine” is constructed.

Here’s what’s in the new engine: each of the drills has its chuck replaced with an aluminum pulley, and belts connect each group of drills to an output shaft. Ideally, every drill motor would run at the same time and at exactly the same speed, but one works with what they have. [Garage 54] originally worked to synchronize the drills by interfacing to each drill’s motor control board, but eventually opted to simply bypass all controls and power each drill’s motor directly from the batteries. Initial tests are done by touching bare cable ends with a turned-away face and squinted eyes, but we expect “Just A Big Switch” to end up in the final assembly.

It looks wild and we can think of more than a few inefficiencies present in a system like this, but the output shaft does turn and torque is being transferred, so the next step is interfacing to the car’s factory gearbox.

If it powers the car in any meaningful way, that Lada might very well become the world’s most gloriously hacked-together EV. And hey, if the power output of the EV motor is disappointing, you can just make your own.

-- Via HackADay