koldfront

Duration on thumbnails on my desktop

I was looking at a folder full of videos, trying to decide which one to watch. The title and the thumbnail help me decide, but a third criteria popped up in my head - how long is the video?

So I was annoyed that this piece of information wasn't readily available.

But why not do something about that?

On my computer it turns out the thumbnails that the file manager (Nemo) shows are generated by totem-video-thumbnailer, via a configuration file in /usr/share/thumbnailers, so I set out to make a wrapper, that would put the duration into the thumbnail.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

# video-duration-thumbnailer - wrapper for totem-video-thumbnailer
#
#    Adds duration to the thumbnail.
#
#    Put this script somewhere, edit
#    /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer changing
#    "Exec=/usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o" to
#    'Exec=YOURPATH/video-duration-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o'
#
#    Thanks to Klaus for the Python snippet for url decoding.
#
# Copyright (C) 2025. Under GPLv2. By Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk>

INPUT=$3
OUTPUT=$4

# Run the original thumbnailer:
/usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer "$@"

# If possible, overlay duration:
if echo "$INPUT" | grep --quiet 'file://'; then
    FILE=$(echo "$INPUT" | python -c 'import sys; from urllib.parse import unquote; print(unquote(sys.stdin.read().strip()))')

    DURATION=$(ffprobe -i "$FILE" -show_entries format=duration -v quiet -of csv="p=0" -sexagesimal | cut -d. -f 1)

    TMPFILE=$(mktemp -t vtt-XXXXXX)
    convert "$OUTPUT" -gravity SouthEast -font DejaVu-Sans-Condensed -pointsize 24 -fill white -stroke gray -annotate +2+2 "$DURATION" "$TMPFILE"
    mv "$TMPFILE" "$OUTPUT"
fi

And now when I look at a folder of videos the duration is shown (after pressing Ctrl-R to update the thumbnails)!

I ❤️ Free Software #free software #ilovefs

GNU Emacs, Debian GNU/Linux, Linux, Gnus, X.Org, Postfix, GHC, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, Firefox, Apache, ejabberd, Dovecot, git, GnuPG, XMonad, jabber.el, Magit, rdiff-backup, LaTeX, Gimp, VLC, Syncthing, Sakura, chrony, Fail2ban, WeeWX, DejaVu fonts, ripgrep, lirc, MPD Flameshot, lots of GNU, the list goes on and on - thanks everybody!

Trentemøller, Pumpehuset #music

I caught the third in a row sold out Trentemøller concert in Pumpehuset, Copenhagen last night.

I was not that familiar with the music, but it was nevertheless an enjoyable concert - if you get the chance, go see them!

.... and don't let the name of the new album "Dreamweaver" fool you - it's not about Macromedia and late 90s shoddy web-technology, as far as I can tell!

RacketCon 14: Keynote presentation #programming #emacs

The keynote presentation at RacketCon 14 was given by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman of "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"-fame - often the book is just referred to as "SICP", which turned 40 this year.

(I'm sort of ashamed to admit that I never read it, but hey.)

During the questions after the keynote speeches I picked up a set of quotes about Emacs from Sussman:

"If I was starting again, I'm gonna say something nasty, if I was starting again, making the software for SICM, I would probably be using Julia."

"Which is basically a Scheme, with a syntax. I hate syntax, I'd rather use Lisp syntax. But I'd be using Julia, since it's even better at numerical chrunching on very, very large scales."

"Racket is a wonderful thing, but it has one problem for me. It doesn't play well with my most famous and favourite interface in the world, which is Emacs."

"By contrast, I know it does have an Emacs interface, but when I have tried it, it doesn't play well with Emacs. And I live in Emacs. I hardly touch a computer to do anything else than Emacs."

"The real thing I love is Emacs."

The lectures were given remotely, which gave a couple of fun moments reminding me of the Statler & Waldorf Muppet Show videos.

The video ends with a nice surprise gift for the two presenters and authors - check it out - with Abelson telling the surprise party that they are in the middle of a lecture, but do come in and say hello to everybody at the conference.

Stupid DNS DoS again #net

After taking most of August off the annoying Denial of Service "attack" hit me again (previously: March, May, June), culminating in so many requests yesterday that my feeble home router was starting to fall over.

So I threw the towel in the ring and moved the DNS for asjo.org to domæne.shop.

I really like hosting things myself. I think it healthy for me and the internet in general that people do so - instead of having megacorps silo everything.

And more often than not, it's really not that complicated. Not even for email, regardless of what people always say.

So I did not like giving up, but I was growing tired of trying to block /8 networks and still having my servers receiving several thousand packets a second.

For looking up asjo.org, for crying out loud: the zone is 36 lines long:

virgil:/etc/bind$ wc -l db.asjoorg
36 db.asjoorg

Anyway, now it takes several minutes for each of my three DNS-servers to receive 1000 DNS packets.

It is no 3.8 Tbps DDoS attack - I don't even know my case is actually an attack, but annoying nonetheless.

I still have no idea why, who, or what the hell. I guess it is just one of those things.