Category Archives: General

Using OpenCV to automatically skip recurring post-roll ads

Posted on 2016-08-13 by Stephan Sokolow

TL;DR: Install OpenCV-Python, download this script and follow the instructions in the script’s –help output. While I like The Young Turks, they’ve recently started adding the same two or three carnival barker-esque appeals for subscribers to the end of all … Continue reading →

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“Gypsy Bard” and the My Little Pony Fandom’s Creative Output

Posted on 2016-07-29 by Stephan Sokolow

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve a certain fondness for throwing characters into interesting situations to see what makes them tick and, as I’ve also mentioned before, I got lured into the My Little Pony fandom by the wide selection of … Continue reading →

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Chickasaw Mountain by Leslie Fish

Posted on 2016-07-24 by Stephan Sokolow

I’d like to take a few minutes to wax poetic on a song I just recently discovered: Chickasaw Mountain by Leslie Fish (lyrics, buy) There are so many reasons I love the song. However, I’ll focus on the lyrics since I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion | 2 Comments

Working around Pidgin’s mis-designed certificate error dialog

Posted on 2016-07-02 by Stephan Sokolow

The Pidgin developers apparently haven’t thought things through very well when it comes to TLS/SSL support because, if you want to connect to a network which uses a self-signed cert, they’ll present you with a permission dialog every time you … Continue reading →

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Fixing “Steam refuses to start (without error message) under VirtualBox”

Posted on 2016-06-04 by Stephan Sokolow

TL;DR: Disable 3D acceleration for the guest export CPU_MHZ=2000 find ~/.steam/steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/ -iname ‘*libstdc++.so*’ -execdir mv {} {}.bak \; Since GOG has introduced GOG Connect, I decided I might as well try to turn some worse-than-worthless unredeemed Steam keys into actual … Continue reading →

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Quick Hack: Global Hotkeys for SMPlayer

Posted on 2016-04-23 by Stephan Sokolow

I have a family member who has grown used to pausing Audacious Media Player with a quick press on their XF86AudioPlay key, but half of what they listen to is video files, so I wrote a quick shell script to … Continue reading →

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How To Report Stoic Studio to Kickstarter and the BBB

Posted on 2016-03-30 by Stephan Sokolow

I just discovered that Stoic Studios has decided to be a language lawyer (See their comment (screenshot) on backer-only update #62) and claim that, since they never explicitly said I’d get DRM-free copies of The Banner Saga, episodes 2 and … Continue reading →

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