youtube-dl is Dead, Long Live youtube-dl The popular command-line utility for downloading videos from YouTube and over 300 other websites is now abandonware. Because youtube-dl is open source, however, developers and community members made forks. Additionally, there are other projects providing similar functionality to youtube-dl. yt-dlp yt-dlp is a fork of a fork: it’s based on the defunct youtube-dlc. It has many features, but its most salient are: Improved format sorting Cookie support SponsorBlock integration YouTube search with ytsearch: and ytsearchdate: Partial mitigation against YouTube throttling Multiple, concurrent video fragment downloads To install it, run:

The Market Structure At the center of the domain name marketplace is ICANN, the non-profit entity managing the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The US government created IANA in 1988 to manage the allocation of IP addresses and the DNS root zone. Below the IANA are domain name registries. These are entities that control a particular top-level domain (TLD), such as com or net. Domain name registries are wholesalers for domain name registrars, retail marketplaces for domain names.

Market Failure Many Americans pay too much for slow internet with terrible customer service and poor coverage. In local markets, where market concentration matters most, there is often only one broadband provider; in 2018, the FCC found that 30% of Americans have only one broadband provider, and 13% have zero. The telecommunications sector is a natural monopoly: fixed costs are high, marginal costs are low. It’s expensive to start an internet service provider and cheap to add a new subscriber, giving the incumbent provider a huge advantage.

Privacy is Constantly Assaulted People are surveilled on two fronts: Governmental Corporate Both are pernicious and ubiquitous in all of our lives. People either goad themselves into believing it’s not as deleterious as it is or are oblivious to its existence or full extent. These two entities may ostensibly seem separate, but they’re interwoven. The capabilities of government agencies and profit-seeking firms have aligned to generate the malignant throng that is the surveillance state.

Wayland King Kitty is a wayland compatible, cross-platform, feature rich terminal emulator. A new kid on the block, the project started in 2017. I have used it since I switched to wayland, and it’s left me thoroughly impressed. After using it for 7 months, I don’t think I can go back to other terminal emulators. Features Kitty has a broad range of features that make it a joy to use. Some of these include, but aren’t limited to:

What is Murmur? Murmur is the server component of the Mumble communications platform; a federated Voice over IP (VOIP) application that provides low latency, high bitrate audio communication. This tutorial instructs you how to install and configure Murmur on Debian, though you can apply these instructions to other operating systems by changing commands where necessary. Obtaining a Server If you or your organization doesn’t have a server, you must obtain one.

V4L2 Saves The Day! V4L2 is video capture API for screen capturing in real time. It’s primarily used by webcams. We can exploit this API to create a dummy video device that receives the realtime video feed of the desktop screen and share the “webcam” with whatever WebRTC screenshare platform is being used. You’ll need the V4L2 loopback kernel module for this. After installing, we run the following to instantiate the dummy video device:

What is it? The initramfs, or initial ram file system, is a file system image that is loaded in memory that contains the necessary tools to mount the file systems on the operating system before init process is called. Ideally, this image contains only the drivers necessary to bootstrap the kernel. Despite this, it is most often the case that your initramfs is bloated with unnecessary options for things you don’t need; when compiling a custom kernel, the initramfs will become huge without module stripping and most Linux distributions choose a generic image to support more hardware out of the box.

Using VNC to Workaround Pipewire Woes For some time now, various screen capturing functionalities have worked very smoothly on Wayland. Take screenshots for example: grim works very nicely and when used in conjunction with slurp, it can select any region the user wants. Likewise with screenrecording, courtesy of obs-studio with the wlrobs plugin (there are other plugins for other desktops like GNOME). One sore area thus far in my experience has been getting WebRTC screensharing working.

Tools of the Trade I’ve recently made an introductory post on what knowing some bash can do for automating many system tasks. It showed some of what’s possible, but didn’t describe the imperative nature of having the proper ancillary tools in your environment that are crucial to writing quality bash. Beyond your text editor of choice (come to the dark side and use vim or neovim already if you haven’t), you’re going to want these tools.

What is it? Bash is the Bourne Again SHell. It was made in 1989 as a replacement for System 7 UNIX’s Bourne shell and is part of the GNU project. Since then, it has become ubiquitous in the Linux world as the default shell in nearly every Linux distribution. For most Linux users, it’s worth while becoming acquainted with it. It’s power is in automating system management tasks and various other things.

HiDPI Scaling In Wayland, HiDPI displays work very well and are trivial to configure. GNOME and KDE have historically handled HiDPI without issue and under sway, you can set a scale factor like this: output output-name scale 1.25 This is adequate for 1440p. If you’re using a compositor such as hikari that lacks settings for scaling, then QT and GTK can be upscaled with environment variables and terminal text can be scaled as well.

The Free and Open Source Software Movement The notion of free and open source software on its face is that the code base of the software is available for all eyes to see (open source) and that the user has a high degree of flexibility in controlling said software (free as in freedom). This concept has served for the locus of a full on free software movement whose primary focus is to promote the proliferation and usage of free and open source software.

Overview File formats specify how content is encoded to a file and tells software applications how to display/handle the encoded bits. They are usually identified by a file extension that is appended to the file name. Sometimes, file types are denoted by metadata, typically stored as a header at the beginning of the file or as a magic number (in this case, some pre-determined value that denotes the file type). A rudimentary example of this is the shebang at the beginning of a script (i.