Category Archives: Geek Stuff

A Compromise Between Substring and Prefix Matching

Posted on 2016-09-18 by Stephan Sokolow

A.K.A.: How to write what human intuition actually expects substring matching to be While the changes aren’t yet ready to be pushed, I’ve been working on one of my hobby projects quite a bit over the last few days and … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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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