Zimena

Music CDs are fragile and annoying things, sometimes. Especially if they play perfectly fine, but cannot be read for conversion on the computer. I've run into quite a few CDs like that while working on digitalising my entire music collection. Sometimes, I've managed to find the same albums for download, so that I could add them to my collection anyway. The main difference here is that downloads are mostly in MP3 format, while I convert to FLAC when I do it from the CD.

Maybe this sounds silly, but I don't really notice that difference much, as long as the MP3 is not obviously of very low quality.

Anyway, googling for downloads of flawed CDs is time-consuming and often difficult, so I've learnt to check Youtube first of all. There are lots of full albums there, and they're even neatly sorted in playlists, which means you can get just one link for the entire album. With youtube-dl installed, it's possible to download these playlists, and with the right arguments set, you can save everything as MP3 instead of video files.

So, youtube-dl does what I want... only, it needs a bunch of arguments for that, and I don't really remember which ones are needed, so I used to look that up every time I wanted to download something. Now that I've become more aware of just how much material is available straight from Youtube, I figured I needed a script to simplify the downloading... and so I decided to try to make one.

You know I can't code, right? The most I've done before is make a few scripts that run a few commands in a row, and I've also done a few versions of the obligatory "Hello world" learning script, but that's all. For the youtube downloading script, I wanted to be able to use the same one both for playlists and single songs, so this is already a bit more than I've done before. I had a basic idea of what the code would need to do to accomplish what I wanted, though, so I figured it would be a fun challenge to see if I could make the script.

So, what does it do? It asks for a Youtube URL, which is then stored in a variable. Then it asks whether the URL is a playlist. (Yes/No or Y/N are acceptable answers, everything else returns "Invalid input"). Depending on your answer, it executes either the download code for playlists or individual songs. Oh, and files are saved to a specific "YT" folder under your "Music" folder.

Now, getting it to store the URL was easy enough. Then the first challenge was how to make sure the playlist question is answered properly. When I first tested this out, I simply created a variable for whatever answer the user supplied on that question, but of course that would be a bug if the user inputted some garbage instead of Y/N. Also, how to make it accept either full words, or just single letters, and make it case-insensitive? Okay, after a bit of googling I figured I could do it with a case statement.

So, the next bit proved the most difficult. Execute one bit of download code if the URL is a playlist, and another if it isn't. Understanding that I had to use an if/else statement for this was not the hard part... but I kept getting errors no matter what I did to my commands inside those statements. I didn't understand this, as the same commands work fine when used directly in the terminal window - I was simply copy/pasting the same set of command and arguments I always use.

Now, at first I was simply typing my code up in a regular text editor, but then I downloaded one that has both a built in terminal for testing, AND code highlighting (and probably a ton of other coding functionality that I have no chance of understanding yet). Okay, now it got much easier to see which code belongs together, and whether there is a missing closing " or ' or ) somewhere, because if something is not closed, the whole rest of the code gets the wrong colouring. So, the first flaws I noticed were a couple of extra spaces. Then, after some more fidgeting around, I finally figured out that I needed quotation marks around the path to the YT folder in the downloading command/arguments.

And, yes - I have a working script to download music from Youtube, now!!

Also, yes - I realise that it still needs a few tweaks. Like, right now everything is saved to the same folder, so if you download more than one album/song, you need to go in there manually and put things in the right folders if you don't want that folder to get messy. It should be possible to add a question to name a subfolder that will be used instead of the main YT folder.

Also, I haven't checked yet, but I believe there must be a bug that makes the script break if you input an invalid Youtube URL. Surely, there should be some way to check that the URL is valid - or at least that it follows URL structure, and isn't just "yajldjfldaj" or some other garbage.

This is for tomorrow or some other day soon, though. But right now, I'm quite proud of making my first "real" script that actually does something useful.

Time for a little update:

✮ The hot weather seems to be calming down a bit, so I'm starting to feel a bit better than I have been for some time. Feeling better might also have something to do with the fact that I escaped to Denmark for one and a half day recently, though. The weather there was partly overcast, and partly with a few showers of rain, and I honestly believe that humans need rain just as much as nature does. My mood is at least a lot better now.

✮ Some fun with new toys: I'm currently testing out the Vivaldi web browser. So far, I'm really liking some features here (vertical tabs, notes tab on the sidebar, bookmarks sidebar, nice show/hide system for the sidebars, nice themes and possibility of customising the colours to your own liking). It also works well with my password manager, and I've not seen any "broken" sites yet, so let's see if I'll switch to it as my main browser after some more testing? Especially the vertical tabs are amazing, and much more convenient than having endless tabs on top of the page. I tend to still move the mouse pointer to the top when I want to switch tab, though, so I guess I need to get rid of that habit.

✮ In a moment of stupid craziness, I installed cDock to change the Dock appearance on my computer. I've used it sometimes in the past as well, but it tends to stop working for a time every time a new version of macOS comes out, so I delete it then. Well, this time it wasn't that simple. No matter what I did, even after deleting the app and its obvious entries in Application Support, my Dock still kept coming up with some ugly theme on it - not even one of those I would choose if I was actively trying to use the app. In the end, I found a hidden cDock bundle in the SIMBL part of the Library folder, and that one apparently activated automatically each time the Dock started. So, put it in the trash can, emptied the trash, and finally I have a normal-looking Dock again. It's not supposed to be this complex to get rid of an app!

✮ I sold all my Playstation 2 and Playstation 3 stuff. I'm not usually one for selling games and consoles, as I prefer to collect it and replay it sometimes. I tend to replay older stuff than these, though, so getting rid of things I haven't touched in several years sounded like the right thing to do, especially now that we've started clearing out stuff in preparation for moving at some point. (Before you ask: no, there's still nothing definite about these plans). I'm especially excited about the PS2 sale, because I sold it online, and I went to post everything only yesterday afternoon, so I really hope it'll reach the buyer safely, and that he'll be happy. I'm a bit nervous, of course, but also excited, because I got quite good money for it, considering how old it is.

✮ What else? Yes, there are European Championships on in various sports at the moment. The athletics one is the most important one to me, so I'm off to watch it soon.

I need a reason to write something. I mean, other than DW posts and the occasional fic, which don't need any special and cool tools. Of course I still check out endless amounts of writing software just for these tasks, though.

Now, I've recently rediscovered Nisus Writer. I had a license for the Express version back in the day, but I haven't been using it for a long time. Then, while looking at writing software reviews last night, I came across a comment that said something to the effect of: "No Nisus on your list shows that you have no clue." And so... I had to go back and look at Nisus again myself.

I have to say that this looks neat, and it's also quite feature-packed while still being pleasant to look at. The main reason for this is the fact that there is a special toolbox drawer for all sorts of settings, so there is no need for the MS Word-style ribbons or toolbars. It's all in one place, and from what I've seen so far, it's highly customisable so that you can have the features you use together in what feels like the most logical place for you, and of course you can also hide what you don't use at all.

My main gripe with Pages (the word processor I've been using for more advanced documents since getting rid of MS Office for good some time in late 2016) is the fact that it simply lacks advanced features. Sometimes, there are simple things that you just cannot do with it, or maybe you can do it, but it's via some incredibly dumb shit workaround, because Apple likes to keep things so simple that they sometimes become stupid. (The same problem applies to Numbers, btw, but I have yet to find a suitable Numbers alternative that isn't an Excel lookalike lacking some important features.) Either way, Nisus Writer seems to be a better choice than Pages, at least - and can I just mention one feature I love? There is an easily accessible language picker, and it can also automatically select the keyboard layout that goes with your chosen language.

It's just such a pity that I don't have any "advanced" writing tasks that need doing at the moment. It would be fun to test this out on something actually useful, not just sit and click around while imagining what I could do with all these features and settings.

Seems a nice program, though, so I hope I'll find a good reason to have more fun with it soon.

Remember my post about my printer not wanting to print anything with black ink some ten days ago?
Yes, that.
That was only the beginning...

Of course I tried to fix the printer issue in various ways, but nothing would work. However, as the coloured inks were still working, I was hoping to use up those before buying a new printer. I had to give up that plan, though, because so much of what I print is from PDF format, and then I cannot easily change the font colour something other than black.

Well... of course getting a new printer IS very nice, I have to admit that, too. After having had HP printers for several years, I chose a Canon Pixma TS8051 this time. Can I just say that I love how it prints - and I love that there's a rear paper feeder (for photo paper and other things that come in "weird" sizes, as you can set the size each time you load a new type of paper) as well as the usual paper tray for A4 sheets. I also tried to print things like photos, and they come out looking really nice - and much nicer than with my old printer - so I'm happy about that, of course.

Getting this far wasn't easy, though...

Getting the printer to connect to my network was easy enough, but the troubles started when I wanted to run the setup software, which was supposed to also download a bunch of other software - for scanning, photo printing and whatnot. The setup program simply would not run. Or rather, it seemed to try to open and then immediately shut down again. In the end I tricked it with sudo - found the path to the setup program inside the package, then dragged that to Terminal and tried to run it with sudo. And... voilà!

For a moment, I felt a little proud of coming up with the solution myself.

Well, when I had everything properly set up with the printer, I couldn't stop thinking of how I had to run a simple setup program in this way, and somehow I got worried that I had screwed up something with the permissions on my computer when I installed Linux some time ago. Long story short: I'm not using my Linux install much, so I decided to remove it, and to merge those partitions to my main one again.

Bad move. Very bad move.

After some thinking, I think I've worked out what happened. Back when I installed Linux, I most have put its boot manager on the Linux partition. Then that boot manager must somehow have become the main choice? So, when I deleted everything on the Linux partition, I also screwed up macOS boot process, and all I got was a huge stop sign on the screen when I tried to boot into macOS, too.

Imagine my mood at this.

In the end I had to reinstall macOS - so I'm on High Sierra now, because that's what I got at reinstall. Not only that; I also had to reinstall it from the Internet, because my Recovery HD partition had somehow disappeared earlier in the summer as well - probably also in connection with some of my Linux Adventures, but I can't quite work out how.

Luckily nothing important was lost, because I have nice backups in Time Machine to restore from, but it's taken me 2-3 days to get everything back to normal.

Now I'm here, though. And if you're also still with me in this post after all this Mac-babble, then thank you - you are awesome :)

You know me and my tendency to get fascinated with new software, right? Especially new writing software. Today’s new toy is called Bear Notes App. I’ve had it for a few days now, and so far I’m liking it a lot.

I tend to type up a lot of random stuff on my phone. Sometimes I’ve even written whole fics there, but mostly it’s little snippets of text, info that I need to have easily available, shopping lists and task lists. In the old days before the overly white design of iOS 7, the phone notes app used to be enough for me for these things. However, the white design killed the appeal of that one for me, so I’ve tried out endless notes apps since then. I ended up using Google Keep quite a bit, though. It’s a nice app that does what I want, but I never quite settled on being fully satisfied with it.

Bear is something quite different - it’s simple enough to be a notes app, but also with some cool advanced features. Most importantly, you can tag your notes (and even use nested tags). That way, you can group similar stuff together, and there is a separate sidebar which displays all your tags neatly.

Also, it uses markdown for formatting. Because I mostly care about my notes looking nice and readable on screen, this can be a either an advantage or a drawback, depending on how it’s done. The first markdown editor I ever downloaded would display the markdown coding along with the text, without actually showing me how these codes changed the text. So, not a good solution for reading mainly on screen. Bear does something else, though - it displays the markdown coding in a somewhat dimmed colour, so that you can easily see what does what. Oh, and it also does the thing to your text that you’ve asked for - so, headers and bold text and italics and whatnot all come out looking like you would expect. It looks neat on screen, and it means that you can do simple formatting easily.

Oh, and if you for some reason want more formatting options, just export the note to RTF format and import it into your favourite more graphical piece of writing software, but this is not what I need a notes app for.

Also, the pro version syncs seamlessly between the phone and the desktop computer. Apart from this sync feature, the other differences between the free and the pro version are that pro users get more colour themes, and they also get a few more export options. I don’t care about the export options, but the other Pro features are definitely important.

Oh, and for me another nice feature is that this app actually looks good on the phone as well as on the computer. The phone version seems to have almost all the same features as the desktop version - including the tag list.

For now my biggest problem with this app is the fact that I liked it so much that I feel like doing all sorts of stuff in it, but there’s only so many notes I can think of making right away. I’ve even been looking for screenshots online so that I could see how other people use their tag list, and maybe there would be some cool ideas there. Suffice to say, I found a couple of new uses for notes that I hadn’t thought of before, so yay?

…oh, and I also find it strange that I’m not allowed to choose my own font freely from all the fonts installed. Instead, I can select the font from a pre-set list of 5-6 rather plain and common ones. I guess that’s easily remedied because there is a theme file for each of the selectable fonts. That file seems to be in XML format, so getting some cool font to work is just a matter of replacing the font names in one of those files. If you make sure to not rename the actual file, it should be possible to simply change your least favourite font profile file to use a font you like more, and then pick said least favourite font from the in-app list.

Yes, I actually tried the above trick out, and it works!

…That’s my app squee of the day.

I need a new haircut. After the little disaster that was my previous visit to the hairdresser's, I feel like doing something new to my hair this time. I've been looking at various hairstyles online... and yes, I know that's a silly thing to do, because things that look good on pictures of other people might not necessarily look good on me. I'm considering a style kind of like this, though. I also want to dye the top part (rather than the whole hair), but I haven't decided on the colour yet. I guess either dye it red or bleach it blond, though.

Let's see what will happen. First of all, I need to poke my nose out of the door - which I didn't do so far today, so meh.

I've also changed back to a smaller keyboard and a trackpad instead of my regular mouse and keyboard combination. Honestly, I prefer the bigger keyboard (with proper arrow keys, not arrow keys squeezed together in a corner, sort of), but my regular mouse has been "cheating" for so long that I got tired of it. Cheating as in randomly interpreting single clicks as double clicks and being unwilling to make the drag and drop motion. Like, if you try to drag something across the screen, it's likely to just get dropped three times on the journey.... or also, it just refuses to get picked up in the first place. Oh, and forget doing things like autofilling whole columns in spreadsheet programs, because if you try to highlight a couple of cells and then try to drag to autofill that info to nearby cells, the highlighting is lost before you've autofilled two cells.

I'm tired of this, so trackpad it is... for a while, at least.

What else? Yes, I've made two new icons today. One is on this post - some of you might recognize my favourite singer, actually. If not, he's Czech, and his name is Ladislav Křížek. This pic is from 1991 or thereabouts, so he doesn't look ANYTHING like this anymore (he still sings, though - and he still does so fabulously well!) Anyway, a girl can dream, right? Even though my mind knows that this is years and years ago, I still always think of him like this.

I might be weird, but eh.

So, I have a working dual-boot system now, with macOS and Ubuntu 16.04.

This time, installing Ubuntu was significantly more challenging than when I did it last time around... or rather, installing was okay enough, but once I booted into Ubuntu for the first time, it would simply take over the whole boot process. So, no rEFInd, no macOS, just Ubuntu - directly, and without any sort of boot manager in sight.

Okay, I fixed that via Recovery mode, where I could set my usual disk as the start-up disk. That worked fine, so I could just reinstall rEFInd (again, yes!) and now there is a proper boot manager which lets me pick which OS I prefer to boot into at startup.

...and that was only what happened before I had set up anything.

I have had Ubuntu up and running for a couple of hours now, so let's see what I've noticed so far:

Installing things is not just about picking what you want from the Software Center. Half of the time you need to add repositories and download your apps via the command line instead. I quite like doing things via the command line... if I understand what I'm doing and which parts of a command does what. Here, though? I've already had a few instances of having to copy commands from the net, because they're long and I can't fully decipher what they do.

In a similar vein to the above - Opera web browser actually claims to have an installer that should work with the Ubuntu software center. You download the installer, open it, it opens the software center with an install button, but once you click on that one, nothing much happens. It seems to attempt to start installing, but it just aborts after a second. I am typing this from Opera, though... because I installed it problem-free via the command line, heh.

I have also installed Gimp. Learning to use that has been on my list of things to do since forever, but whenever I've looked at it in the past, it has always done my head in. I suppose part of the problem is that I know how to do what I'm trying to do in Photoshop, and when things don't work the same way in Gimp, I get frustrated and return to the more familiar environment. Let's give it another chance, hm?

There's a slight difference between the macOS keyboard layout and the more Windows-like one that Ubuntu seems to use. Even if I selected the Mac keyboard option, some things are just not where I would expect. Especially the apostrophe (') sign had simply disappeared from Ubuntu's understanding of a Norwegian Mac keyboard layout, so for now I'm using the standard layout instead.

Generally speaking, I'm liking the colours and menus I'm seeing around me here. The menu font also seems to be beautiful and nicely readable. I believe it's called Ubuntu as well, and I had that font package installed even in macOS for a long time, because I quite like it. I don't like the default font in things like gedit, though - or in this online text area, for that matter. I can't quite point my finger at what's wrong with it, though, because it's definitely easily readable.

More impressions later. These are just the first thoughts.

I'm having one of those days where nothing gets done, and I don't feel like getting started on absolutely anything. I have a few things to do - grocery shopping, try to hang the outdoor carpet on our veranda over the edge/railing (?) of the veranda, so that it can dry after the recent heavy rainfall, try to make a list of tasks and then call someone about getting the front of the house painted...

... the latter task is not even my task that much. Mom is probably going to make the call once we have that stupid little list ready.

The shopping and the carpet, though? Wouldn't take me too long, either, but I just have absolutely zero energy to do it.

I'm not even doing useful things on the computer today. I'm practically just clicking around mindlessly, reading messages that I have already seen, playing brain-dead games that do not even make me think, or just generally sit around feeling annoyed at myself for being plain and uninteresting and boring, even online.

Not saying this to fish for compliments and make you tell me that I'm not... just saying it because that's how I feel right now.

Also, I'm - for the n'th time - considering installing Ubuntu alongside macOS. I had a dual-boot system a few times before, but I never truly found a good use for Linux as long as I still also love macOS and have a good system for everything on here. I can't help it; I'm fascinated with how Ubuntu looks, and I want to try out some interesting and unique window managers. Ratpoison seems especially cool - yes, to me it would be fun to learn something like that. Would also be fun to use if I'm going to show someone something on the computer, and then the system would have no menu line or other obvious way of opening applications. I'm trying to imagine the "huh?" look on the other person's face :)

... but of course, if I'm going to get there, I have to learn this myself first. And I guess installing Ubuntu purely as a learning environment (and, let's face it, also for the learning experience of getting it installed alongside OS X, even though I have done that before) would be a lot of work for a not-so-obvious reward? Because... what am I actually going to do with it, once I have it up and running?

Good news first: I feel better today. I was still headache-y and dizzy during the night, so I'm still a bit tired and such, but other than that I'm okay. That's a good thing at least.

In other news, we have - wait for it - 33 degrees centigrade outside my window right now. It's also sunny and the sky is completely blue, without a single cloud in sight. It's actually too hot to be outside for very long, but I'm going to find a nice shade spot on the veranda soon, and hopefully I can sit there for a little while.

Also, I haven't been online all day. Now that I finally have some computer time, I'm not really doing anything useful with it. All those nice things I planned to do while I wasn't here? Just escaped my mind now that I can do them. Instead, I've been playing around with Avatar Maker (for now, this is me). I also tried to clean up an old and mostly unused Gmail account. It's full of junk, except for some stuff on the Google Drive, so I guess I can try to download that, and then just get rid of the account.

... That's a task for tomorrow, though. Mom is off to Denmark with Mrs Neighbour then, so that should mean a nice evening by the computer for me. Yes, I'm looking forward to that. If all goes well, I might actually write something then, too. Or do some more Swift lessons? Let's see what will happen - it should be fun, either way.