I’ve been trying to figure out a related sort of video streaming setup for work (without Owncast, but with a similar sort of 24/7 goal plus other considerations) and have been looking into using ffmpeg’s capabilities to output either HLS or DASH segments + manifests. (FFMPEG can do both but I don’t know which would be better for my needs yet.) The sources I’m working with are RTSP/RTP instead of RTMP and I only need streaming to browser clients currently – although it working with VLC naturally by pointing it to the manifest is nice.

HLS and DASH work by having videos split into small chunks that can be downloaded over HTTP, so just replacing the manifest allows for continuous streaming (the client pulls it repeatedly) without the server needing to maintain a continuous connection to the client.(Fan out to CDNs works naturally since the video chunks are just files that can be served by any web server.)

It should be possible to do some creative things by either creating / modifying the manifests myself with scripting or by piping chunks into another instance of ffmpeg from a script. (I’ve done something similar using -f image2pipe in the past, but that was for cases where I need to do things like create a video from an image gallery dynamically.) That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it myself though.

I don’t know what the right answer is either, but I’m also interested in finding out and hopeful you get additional responses.

I have an older version of TrueNAS on it from when it was still FreeBSD based (instead of Linux). I might replace it with Scale whenever I get around to doing maintenance on it next – or maybe just go to stock Debian or something since I don’t use most of the bells-and-whistles.

I run my NAS that way too. I just mount it and play videos with VLC if I want to watch something I have on it. The main reason I have a NAS is because I ran out of drive bays in my main system a few years ago… Works fine for my needs currently; no need to make it more complicated.

You can use tesseract -l jpn input.png - on the command line to have it print out the text from input.png into the console if you’ve got the language files for Japanese installed. (There’s also language files for vertical text and a few others for script in my package manager.) Alternatively give the filename (w/o extension) instead of - to write the output into a .txt file.

On Mint, I think I did sudo apt install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-jpn to get it working for the simple case of horizontal text; been a while though.

What was the most ridiculous or funny boundary push you saw?

Trolling someone by attaching a camera to the ceiling right above their keyboard. I’ve been paranoid since I saw that stunt pulled… They got their point across about physical security though.

I’ve worked for a university before and it was very common for staff to remote into their systems from home – usually with SSH for CS types or Remote Desktop/Team Viewer/etc. for less computer-focused folks. (The former usually didn’t have much issue – the folks using the latter mechanisms got compromised a number of times… -.-) There was also a campus provided VPN that was required to access certain systems with instructions to students and staff on how to use it, but other systems just got public IP addresses.

If what you’re doing is related to your work and campus IT doesn’t object, you’re probably fine to do it. I’ve run various kinds of websites and web apps for colleagues to collaborate on research projects. Being able to do things like that is kind of the point of the internet.

Having seen a number of students, uh, push the limits and find the boundaries of acceptability the hard way though… I’d strongly advise you not to install cryptominers, run TOR exit nodes, or torrent TV shows/movies/etc. That kind of thing tends to get your systems in hot water with IT or other parts of the bureaucracy…

In principle, sure. I’m not aware of an existing out-of-the-box solution that’d do what you want, but it also wouldn’t surprise me terribly if someone’s cobbled something together to do this before.

If I wanted to make something like this personally (and couldn’t find an existing solution), I’d start by doing some research into PBX software like Asterisk, what derivatives and extensions people have made for that, etc. – being mindful that I’d likely be digging into a deep rabbit hole…

You can run docker containers with multiple volumes. e.g. pass something like -v src1:dst1 -v src2:dst2 as arguments to docker run.

So – if I understood your question correctly – yes, you can do that.

Giant middle finger from me – and probably everyone else who uses NoScript – for trying to enshittify what’s left of the good parts of the web.

Seriously, FUCK THAT.

Two quick ideas on possible approaches:

1. Static page route. You can just write some Javascript to load the image from a file input in HTML, draw it resized to a canvas (based on an input slider or other input element), then save the canvas to an image. (There might even be simpler approaches if I wasn’t stupidly tired right now…) This can be done in a single file (HTML with embedded JS – and CSS if you want to style it a little) that you toss on any web server anywhere (e.g. Apache, nginx, whatever). Should work for JPEG, PNG, and probably WebP – maybe other regular image types too. Benefit: data never needs to leave your device.

2. Process on server route. Use Python with a simple web server library (I usually opt for tornado for stuff like this, but flask or cherrypy or similar would probably work). Set up a handler for e.g. an HTTP POST and either pass the image into a library like Pillow to resize it or shell out to ImageMagick as others have suggested. (If you want to do something clever with animated GIFs you could shell out to ffmpeg, but that’d be a fair bit trickier…) The image can be sent back as the response. Be careful about security if you take this route. Probably want some kind of login in front of it, and run it in a VM or some other secure environment – especially if you’re using AI to kludge it together…

Best of luck and let me know if you need any help. Will probably have some time this weekend if you can’t get it on your own. Happy hacking!

I would be happy with a FOSS desktop app I can install in linux too

On the command line, you can do this with ImageMagick (e.g. use the command convert once it’s installed).

With a (desktop) GUI, there’s a bunch of programs. GIMP is probably the most well known and has a ton of capabilities but is a bit complex. I use Kolourpaint as a quick-and-dirty “MS Paint”-like program for very simple tasks where I want a GUI.

If you want a simple web UI I’m sure there is one already, but I don’t know one specifically. It wouldn’t be too complicated to hack something up if all you need is a quick-and-dirty file input and percentage rescale or something like that. If you don’t get a better suggestion and don’t know how to make something like that yourself, let me know and I can write an example.

People have already covered most of the tools I typically use, but one I haven’t seen listed yet that is sometimes convenient is python3 -m http.server which runs a small web server that shares whatever is in the directory you launched it from. I’ve used that to download files onto my phone before when I didn’t have the right USB cables/adapters handy as well as for getting data out of VMs when I didn’t want to bother setting up something more complex.

I don’t have an answer to your original question – I think it would likely depend on exactly how you set up your network, how you encode your data and decode your output, what qualifies as “original” etc. I’m mostly familiar with RNNs from their relation to IIR filters (in audio) than however they are (or aren’t) used in ML these days… but the idea of trying to set something like that up to deliberately spit out names just makes me feel tired thinking about it.

If you’re looking to do this for procgen in gamedev or something, a Markov chain (state machine that follows transitions based on probability) is likely to be a lot easier to reason about.

Why are you trying to use an RNN instead of something like a Markov chain for that?

Check your language settings. Usually that means you have the language that the comments are tagged with disabled. (Usually either English or Uncategorized is disabled)

I’ve had to review resumes when we were trying to find someone else to bring on the team. My boss dumped hundreds of resumes on me and asked if any of them looked promising – that’s after going through whatever HR bullshit filters were in place – on top of all the other work I was already behind on since we didn’t have enough staff. That is the state of mind you should expect someone to be in while looking at your project.

If anyone looks at your repo, they’re going to check briefly to see if you have any clue at all what you’re doing and whether your code likes like it’s written by the kind of person they can stand working with. Don’t make any major blunders that someone would notice with a quick glance at the repository. Be prepared to talk about your project in detail and be able to explain why you made the choices you did – you might not get asked, but if you are you should be able to justify your choices. If it gets to the point of an interview and your project looks like something that could’ve been done easily in 100 lines of Python you’d better believe I’m going to ask why the hell you wrote it in C in 2025… and I say that as someone who has written a significant amount of C professionally.

If you say you have multiple years of professional programming experience and send me a link to a repo that has .DS_Store in it… your resume is going straight into the trash.

Don’t know about PGE’s API, but for the OCR stuff, you may get better results with additional preprocessing before you pass images into tesseract. e.g. crop it to just the region of interest, and try various image processing techniques to make the text pop out better if needed. You can also run tesseract specifically telling it you’re looking at a single line of data, which can give better results. (e.g. --psm 7 for the command line tool) OCR is indeed finicky…

It’s really about lowering cognitive load when making edits. It’s not necessarily that someone can’t figure out how to do something more sophisticated, but that they’re more likely to get things right if the code is just kind of straightforwardly dumb.

The last two are definitely situational – changing things like that might lower cognitive load for one kind of work but raise it significantly for another – but I can see where they’re coming from with those suggestions.

Do you agree with this?

Yes, at least for hobby use. If it really needs something more complex than SQLite and an embedded HTTP server, it’s probably going to turn into a second job to keep it working properly.

Frankly, the only sane option is an “Are you over the age of (whatever is necessary) and willing to view potentially disturbing adult content?” style confirmation.

Anything else is going to become problematic/abusive sooner or later.