Seasonistas general thread: yakking, joshing, news and pictures

Linda -

Please check your PM. I may be able to help you...
 
...Now the reason that I am concerned is because if I die tomorrow my family won't be able to go to my channel and find ALL of my vids...
That's just not going to happen Linda. After all, you are due to host Season 290. Everybody knows that hosting a Season postpones your demise until at least the wrap-up video.;)
 
hey linda. i just went to your youtube channel, selected videos/uploads, and got it to sort by oldest video first, the first one up is brahms lullaby, posted 8 october 2013, for season 86 - was that your first season vid?
 
In order to help Linda save her videos, just in case she cannot get them back from her computer, I am currently using a Python program called "youtube-dl" to batch download all videos from her YouTube channel, and after speaking with her later, I will make them available somewhere else online for her to download them again back to her computer.

[original technical details that were here have been removed, since in the hands and mind of someone with malicious intent, this information cane be dangerous and/or used for abuse, i.e., don't give a loaded gun to someone who is not trained with firearms :)]


This is likely to run by itself for a few hours, and if something bad happens, it can be restarted and will resume where it left off, so it will not download everything all over again...

I live in Python for my 'day job'. Welcome to my world! :)
 
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I don't know about you guys, but I've really been enjoying the one song limit this season. I can actually keep up with the entries!
 
Well I made it through the day while I traveled back from the cool mountain to the heat today! ;-)

Pa, I did do a search back to the first video I made. It was TERRIBLE but it did play fine. If I go into my manager I can get all my vids to show up but I am the only one that can access that. On My Channel I can only go back the April of last year. It won't take me any further than that.

Geoff, I have been meaning to pick up an external HD for some time. I normally would have burned all these vids but my procrastination made 550+ vids an overwhelming thought. I figured if I crocked anytime soon and my children really wanted the vids for some reason they could download them with a program like the one I use...................WHAT??? I just realized it is missing from my YT channel????

Now I have to contact Rex who recently asked me what it is and redownload it! :wallbash:

About a month ago while I was in the mountains I recorded a vid for the season and my computer started to glitch out like they do when they are out of room. I fought with the decision about deleting everything while I was there and made the poor decision to delete all vids knowing I had YT as a back up. Believe me that was hard to do knowing I hadn't bought a external HD and taken care of it when my gut told me to do it. Everyone go get one today and don't do what I did. I should have just closed the laptop for a week and taken care of it properly when I got home.........but the seasons........well, you know the rest!

Steve, thank you for willing me to live until season 290 :bowdown:

Lynda, That is very interesting. Thank you for checking. Yes season 86 was my second season. I think I have my terrible season 85 "wonderful world" private. Thank goodness I was at least smart enough to do that! Maybe my children would be able to find my vids after all. I do have at least four weeks before season 290 to solve this problem unless of course the universe want me to go this young. 28 is way to young to die!

Booli, You are a dream! I was hoping you would have some way of helping me through this. I haven't read my PMs as of yet but I plan to put on my thinking cap and try and understand your computer lingo as soon as I can :) You are very generous with your knowledge and offer. I will PM soon!

Thanks everyone for your response and help. I really appreciate this group of great people.

<insert heart emoji here>

L
 
and

bravo to our tech genius :bowdown: booli

and robin, i gotta agree - although people who know me from my 8 vids a week persona will no doubt laugh! - but a one song limit really focuses the mind... so many songs to choose from this week, but that question - ok if you can only do one, which one is it gonna be? - and i knew at once which one it had to be! plus - now i've done my uke-ing for the week, i can spend the rest of my time plinking away on the 1 string cbg without a guilty conscience!
 
...Booli, You are a dream! I was hoping you would have some way of helping me through this. I haven't read my PMs as of yet but I plan to put on my thinking cap and try and understand your computer lingo as soon as I can :) You are very generous with your knowledge and offer. I will PM soon!...

Linda -

I will do absolutely everything possible that I can think of and am capable of to help. I do not give up easily.

So far most individual videos are downloaded in about 1 minute, and several times I've had to restart the program (no biggie).

I am not sure if it fails because YT does not like what I am doing, as in the geek world, this is referred to as 'leeching' (mass downloading faster than a human could watch or listen in real-time) and I'm sure that they have protections against this and view it as a form of 'abuse'...but they cannot hurt me, nor stop me, and I have methods to circumvent anything they might do...

The other source of the issue could be my ISP, which is Optimum Online, and we've been having trouble this past week, and talking with their tech support on the phone previous to today, it seems they are clueless (and I was in fact offered a job [which I declined] when I was finally able to get in touch with a 'Level-3' tech), so it could be my internet connection. But no matter. I will make it work. :)

I suspect that the issue is also related to Net Neutrality, but that is a topic beyond the scope of saving Linda's videos from oblivion...

So even with restarting the program about 6 times so far, I have successfully downloaded 99 videos in about 125 minutes, and will keep going until all of them are received.

More later...:cool:
 
Firstly, I agree with you Robin and Lynda. Having time to concentrate during a week is refreshing. I don't mind the unlimited weeks at all because Ive learned to pull the reins back and gain some self control but there is something about having a host control me for me :)

Secondly, Booli I am in awe of your advice and abilities and desire to help. I will never be able to repay you for this so just know how very grateful i am for all this work.

Thirdly, Alan you've got the right idea. Keep on burning!
 
Say Booli, would a flash drive be as good as a disk backup? I have a bunch of 64 g flash drives they take up a lot less space and energy. They are pretty cheap too, compare to disks.
 
Say Booli, would a flash drive be as good as a disk backup? I have a bunch of 64 g flash drives they take up a lot less space and energy. They are pretty cheap too, compare to disks.

IMHO, they are good for ephemeral storage, but not permanent storage, such as long term archives or daily backups (written to every day for X number of years), especially if data is deleted/written/modified frequently because the type of NAND flash (silicon storage chips) in most consumer flash drives have a limited number of erase/write cycles, after which are either locked into a read-only mode, or worse, simply just fried. The short version is that they wear out.

If spinning hard drives are too bulky, noisy or take up too much space, you might be better served with using a 2.5" SSD in a USB enclosure, for they are rated for at least 100x more erase/write cycles, and the better ones (like Intel and Samsung) go into a locked read-only mode, so although you cannot write to them any more, you can still read from them. Also, SSDs use a different type of NAND flash silicon that is designed for millions+ of cycles and designed for 'abuse' that would rapidly wear out a flash drive if subjected to the same stimulation.

I have a Samsung 850 EVO as the boot drive in my main computer and it is one that has a warranty for 7 yrs against failures, and to me that's a pretty high vote of confidence from the manufacturer. I have seen several reports of synthetic benchmark tests that simulate the wear of 7-10 yrs of use on SSDs, and all of them showed this one to be reliable as per the advertised spec.

Higher model # Intel SSDs are similarly rated. Most of our computers will be too old and slow to browse the web in 7 yrs with the bloat that is infecting web sites.

OTOH, I have hard drives in service for more than 10 yrs that are running without any issues at all, but they are all also in drive mirror configuration with newer drives that I rotate every 2 yrs with new, and the main factor that kills hard drives aside from electro-static discharge is excessive heat.

So I have everything cooled with 120mm fans, and yes, in my office it sounds like I'm in an airplane cabin at 30,000 ft due to the brownian noise created by even the lowest dba level fans...ambient fan noise is at about 35 db, but I find it peaceful to hear, however it does suck when making a video, and usually I have to go into another room for that, otherwise the fan noise infects the video, and even with software 'noise removal' the results sound bad still.

Apologies to those rolling their eyes at the above wall of text and tech jargon, but hopefully this info is of use to all of you in some way. :)
 
Status Update:

I have successfully completed the download and backup of lelouden/Linda's entire YT channel.

With about a dozen restarts due to what seems like YT aborting the connection, and then manually restarting/resuming it each time, total download time @3Mbps on Optimum Online in NJ was 3 mins shy of 6 hrs, and total size of all 557 videos combined is 17.5GB.

Funny how when I do any number of different online speed tests, I get a 21-25 Mbps download speed, but usually, real-world speed is about 3Mbps.

This speed limit is not just this one time with YT, for if it was, I'd think that they had imposed a threshold or throttling, but instead IMHO it is more indicative of just how much they lie in their tv ads, and that they have some how compromised a handful of speed test web sites to show artificial download speeds...yes, yes, tinfoil hat talk, I know...shhh don't tell anyone that I am on to their game...

Anyway, the happy news is that Linda will be able to have her videos back, despite if YT were to disappear tomorrow, and she and I will make arrangements for her to receive them from me.

Also, I have to give credit to BEVOMU/Lynda, for it was her post about viewing Linda's Braham's Lullaby video that inspired me to investigate how to capture/backup lelouden/Linda's YT channel, so PROPS and KUDOS to BEVOMU for the inspiration and thank you BEV, even though you had no idea, as I would have not been able to think of this solution without the spark of an idea after reading your comment...

happy days!
 
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@ Booli

Was that the standard youtube-dl, or did you tweek it, (just curious).

@ All

External hard drives are so cheap these days, why haven't you got one.

re: youtube-dl

The standard one from the author on github, but had to experiment with the proper parameters, one of with was using the --external-downloader option to pipe the download function to wget. I also tried curl as external downloader, but curl does not retain the original timestamp of the file by default, so with curl all files had today's date. wget preserves timestamps by default. PM me if you want the full tech details, which I am happy to share.

At one time in the past I was playing with rabbit-youtube, and was attempting to fork both programs and combine into something new, since I work with Python almost every day, but had to set it aside for a while due to other commitments, but youtube-dl is actually very clean and well written if you look at the source code which is freely available to download from the author.

Keith - Do you do anything with Python?

re: external drives
I have a server that runs Ubuntu 16.04.3 with all drives formatted to ZFS, and it receives daily rsync backups from all of the other computers in my house, which are then ALSO rsynced to a secondary array of mirrored hard drives. For those that dont, know rsync is a file copy/archive program that runs in the terminal window on Mac, Linux and Unix-like systems and is very robust, and itself is the foundation underlying the pretty GUI interface of MANY Mac backup programs such as Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper....

I also have a secondary backup machine, that serves as an 'oh sh*t - the house is on fire' item for me to grab in the case of an emergency, that is powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, running Raspbian standard, and has 8x2TB USB hard drives connected via a USB hub, all inside a standard computer mid-tower case WITH A HANDLE ON TOP. The hard drives are not ZFS but ext4, since ZFS is too heavy for the R/Pi. My primary server backs up to the R/Pi ALSO via rsync every 4 days...

I had also evaluated NAS4FREE, FreeNAS, and OMV (OpenMediaVault) but all of them are too heavy a software setup for me.

Once you know enough Linux or FreeBSD, setting up drive mirrors via ZFS zpool/vdevs or ext4 via mdadm is pretty easy and you can use SMB, NFS or ssh for connections, all of which are built-in and robust protocols, and rsync is highly reliable, and has not failed once in 5 yrs unless the destination machine was powered off...

I use either webmin (which lets you manage the entire machine from a browser window on another machine, or even your tablet or phone) or ssh to manage from the command line. There are zero Windows computers in my house and I'd rather take a bullet to the brain than ever use a Microsoft product again. I jumped that train back in 2005 for Mac, and then moved to Linux full time in 2014, and soon might be moving everything over completely to FreeBSD.

I also have a bunch of USB flash drives that serve as storage for config backups and scripts for various things, and also have the installers and rescue ISO files for everything...

And for the total geek-out - I am running pfsense as my router, which is on a shoebox type pc with 3 Gigabit ethernet ports and 802.11 ac WiFi.

I will NEVER buy a Netgear, Belkin, Dlink or Linksys router ever again, as they are all vulnerable to exploits once the manufacturer stops providing firmware updates.

pfsense is based upon FreeBSD and is rock solid, and ALSO managed from the web browser, just like any other router, and frequently gets updates and has been in active development for about 10 yrs or so....unlike the $300 Netgear gaming router I bought that never got updates after the first year and was vulnerable to all kinds of attacks and exploits....

Mind you none of the above is cheap, but is is affordable, and it is VERY reliable and once set up, takes maybe 5 mins per month to maintain. The biggest cost is in TIME to learn if you do not know Linux or FreeBSD, but once you reach a certain comfort level, it becomes really easy.

I have had some form of server lab or network lab at home for over 25 year because of my work, but the above stuff is just for my own peace of mind and protection...

now I can create entire test environments with VirtualBox and AMD FX-series 8-core CPUs are like 1/4 the price of similar Intel i7 chips while you can also get 32GB of RAM for about $140, and these specs are what you need if you want to Virtualize a few servers and a few workstations. It sure beats having a whole wall covered with a row of 5x 19" racks filled with individual machines, and your ELECTRIC bill will thank you to use VirtualBox...

if you add Vagrant and Ansible to the mix with VirtualBox, you can automate deployment and have things like a fully configured Ubuntu or FreeBSD server or desktop up and running in about 3 mins...

but, I am going too far off the deep end and none of this has anything to do with MUZIK, so I will take a break, and apologize again for any transgressions of derailing this thread - please forgive me ...

I have to go to sleep now...nitey nite! :)
 
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I think you've got more than me. :rofl:

Was just curious if youtube-dl could do it on its own. :)
I used to use wget, if I couldn't use a regular downloader from FF.
No, I don't program, only ever wrote 'one liners' - just use shell scripting, when needed.
(Debian based Linux & the occasional BSD since 1999.)
 
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