Category: Meta

Assuming knowledge of package managers and the TeX ecosystem the title just might be understandable. In short: because I wanted to work with a newer version of TikZ than was available through debian stable software repositories, I decided to switch from apt-maintained texlive packages to installing the texlive distribution using the installer availble from the texlive homepage.

Installation was straight forward. All binaries where in /usr/local/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-linux/ which obviously is not in $PATH. In order to use the new distribution one can either add this directory as the first option in $PATH (if /usr/bin is search before, the debian binaries are used instead) or create symlinks to /usr/local/bin/, which is alread part of $PATH. sudo /usr/local/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr path add did that.

Some error that I don’t remeber what is was improved after a sudo texconfig rehash.

Still my document in question would not compile, but complain about a missing font txsys, which was not very easy to find information on search engines. this error could be fixed by running sudo updmap-sys. What a nice name.

That did the trick. So to be able to have my new texlive installation work, after the install script I needed to run:

sudo /usr/local/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr path add
sudo texconfig rehash
sudo updmap-sys

Maybe this will save somebody some trouble sometime in the future.

to cut out a 6 minutes and 56.935 seconds long piece of video which starts 6 minutes and 20.112 seconds into input_file.MTS using ffmpeg and not reencoding the file, you can run:

ffmpeg -ss 00:06:20.112 -i input_file.MTS -c copy -t 00:06:56.935 output_file.MTS

from the ffmpeg man page:

       -t duration (input/output)
           When used as an input option (before "-i"), limit the duration of data read from the input file.

           When used as an output option (before an output url), stop writing the output after its duration reaches duration.

           duration must be a time duration specification, see the Time duration section in the ffmpeg-utils(1) manual.

           -to and -t are mutually exclusive and -t has priority.

       -to position (input/output)
           Stop writing the output or reading the input at position.  position must be a time duration specification, see the Time duration section in the ffmpeg-utils(1) manual.

           -to and -t are mutually exclusive and -t has priority.

       -fs limit_size (output)
           Set the file size limit, expressed in bytes. No further chunk of bytes is written after the limit is exceeded. The size of the output file is slightly more than the
           requested file size.

       -ss position (input/output)
           When used as an input option (before "-i"), seeks in this input file to position. Note that in most formats it is not possible to seek exactly, so ffmpeg will seek to
           the closest seek point before position.  When transcoding and -accurate_seek is enabled (the default), this extra segment between the seek point and position will be
           decoded and discarded. When doing stream copy or when -noaccurate_seek is used, it will be preserved.

           When used as an output option (before an output url), decodes but discards input until the timestamps reach position.

           position must be a time duration specification, see the Time duration section in the ffmpeg-utils(1) manual.

       -sseof position (input)
           Like the "-ss" option but relative to the "end of file". That is negative values are earlier in the file, 0 is at EOF.

and from the ffmpeg-utils man page

   Time duration
       There are two accepted syntaxes for expressing time duration.

               [-][<HH>:]<MM>:<SS>[.<m>...]

       HH expresses the number of hours, MM the number of minutes for a maximum of 2 digits, and SS the number of seconds for a maximum of 2 digits. The m at the end expresses
       decimal value for SS.

       or

               [-]<S>+[.<m>...]

       S expresses the number of seconds, with the optional decimal part m.

       In both expressions, the optional - indicates negative duration.

       Examples

       The following examples are all valid time duration:

       55  55 seconds

       12:03:45
           12 hours, 03 minutes and 45 seconds

       23.189
           23.189 seconds

Today the algorithms introduced me to Gabor Mate. Finally some one who both understands and critiques Jordan Peterson. On this note I found him, the video is about a variety of more valuable topics though.

oftentimes it seemed strange to me, how strange I seem to many for not feeling this need of constant competition. Some think it’s fear; some generosity. Of those who don’t, still many seem to think one must suppress desires, or be a bit behind, to not engage with it.

I don’t thrive in competition, in matters of importance. And honestly, I don’t understand how people think they need a looser to feel winning.

What do you think of competition?