Make Windows open URLs in Linux .desktop files

Here’s a Python script that makes Windows open a URL (in your default browser) when you execute (double click) a Linux .desktop file that contains a URL.

If you use both Windows and Linux, and save links to websites from a browser in Linux, the link will become a .desktop file, which can be opened by Linux. .desktop files are a lot like Windows “shortcut” files, but are (of course!) incompatible with them.

This script lets Windows open the website link saved in a .desktop file.

It relies on Python already being installed in your Windows system.

You can use it at the Windows command line like this:

python launch.desktop.py <.desktop file>

To use it at the Windows GUI (to be able to double-click on a .desktop file to launch it), put the following line in a batch file in your executable path somewhere (one place that would work would be C:\WINDOWS\System32) as “launch.desktop.bat”:

python "%~dp0launch.desktop.py" %1

Then put the Python script in the same folder where you put the batch file, as “launch.desktop.py”:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
    Launches a Linux .desktop file that contains a URL, on Windows.

    Tested on Win10, Python 3.11.
    
    Note: Doing this in a Windows batch file is a problem because findstr doesn't want to open files with special characters in them
    (which Linux likes to put there). There are ways around that (make temp files), but Python doesn't mind the characters.

    """

__author__    = 'NerdFever.com'
__copyright__ = 'Copyright 2023 NerdFever.com'
__version__   = ''
__email__     = 'dave@nerdfever.com'
__status__    = 'Development'
__license__   = """'Copyright 2023 NerdFever.com

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License."""

import os, sys, subprocess

def main():
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print(os.path.basename(__file__))
        print("Launches a Linux .desktop file that contains a URL, on Windows.")
        print("Usage: python", os.path.basename(__file__), "<filepath>")
        return

    filepath = sys.argv[1]

    if not os.path.exists(filepath):
        print(f"Error: {filepath} does not exist!")
        return
    
    # open file, scan for "URL=" or "URL[anything]=", get URL from remainder of line
    url = None
    with open(filepath, "r") as f:
        for line in f:
            if line.startswith("URL="):
                url = line[4:].strip()
                break
            elif line.startswith("URL["):
                url = line[line.find("]")+1:].strip()
                break

    if url is None:
        print(f"Error: {filepath} does not contain a URL!")
        return
    
    # run "start" on the URL (launch default browser configured in Windows)
    subprocess.run(["start", url], shell=True)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The first time you double-click on a .desktop file, Windows will say it doesn’t know how to open it, and offer to let you choose a program on your PC for that. Choose “launch.desktop.bat” and check the box “Always use this app to open .desktop files”. Done.

Using AI to moderate online discussions

This brief post is here solely as prior art to make it more difficult for someone to patent these ideas. Probably I’m too late (the idea is so obvious the patent office probably has a dozen applications already), but I’m trying.

GOALS

One of my pet projects for years has been finding a way to promote civil discussion online. As everyone knows, most online discussion takes place in virtual cesspits – Facebook, Twitter, the comments sections of most news articles, etc. Social media and the ideological bubbles it promotes have been blamed for political polarization and ennui of young people around the world. I won’t elaborate on this – others have done that better than I can.

The problem goes back at least to the days of Usenet – even then I was interested in crowdsourced voting systems where “good” posts would get upvoted and “bad” ones downvoted in various ways, together with collaborative filtering on a per-reader basis to show readers the posts they’ll value most. I suppose many versions of this must have been tried by now; certainly sites like Stack Exchange and Reddit have made real efforts. The problem persists, so these solutions are at best incomplete. And of course some sites have excellent quality comments (I’m thinking of https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ and https://www.overcomingbias.com/), but these either have extremely narrow audiences or the hosts spend vast effort on manual moderation.

My goal (you may not share it) is to enable online discussion that’s civil and rational. Discussion that consists of facts and reasoned arguments, not epithets and insults. Discussion that respects the Principle of Charity. Discussion where people try to seek truth and attempt to persuade rather than bludgeon those who disagree. Discussion where facts matter. I think such discussions are more fun for the participants (they are for me), more informative to readers, and lead to enlightenment and discovery.

SHORT VERSION

Here’s the short version: When a commenter (let’s say on a news article, editorial, or blog post) drafts a post, the post content is reviewed by an AI (a LLM such as a GPT, as are currently all the rage) for conformity with “community values”. These values are set by the host of the discussion – the publication, website, etc. The host describes the values to the AI, in plain English, in a prompt to the AI. My model is that the “community values” reflect the kind of conversations the host wants to see on their platform – polite, respectful, rational, fact-driven, etc. Or not, as the case may be. My model doesn’t involve “values” that shut down rational discussion or genuine disagreement (“poster must claim Earth is flat”, “poster must support Republican values”…), altho I suppose some people may want to try that.

The commenter drafts a post in the currently-usual way, and clicks the “post” button. At that point the AI reviews the text of the comment (possibly along with the conversation so far, for context) and decides whether the comment meets the community values for the site. If so, the comment is posted.

If not, the AI explains to the poster what was wrong with the comment – it was insulting, it was illogical, it was…whatever. And perhaps offers a restatement or alternative wording. The poster may then modify their comment and try again. Perhaps they can also argue with the AI to try to convince it to change its opinion.

IMPORTANT ELABORATIONS

The above is the shortest and simplest version of the concept.

One reasonable objection is that this is, effectively, a censorship mechanism. As described, it is, but limited a single host site. I don’t have a problem with that, since the Internet is full of discussions and people are free to leave sites they find too constraining.

Still, there are many ways to modify the system to remove or loosen the censorship aspect, and perhaps those will work better. Below are a couple I’ve thought of.

OVERRIDE SYSTEMS

If the AI says a post doesn’t meet local standard, the poster can override the AI and post the comment anyway.

Such overrides would be allowed only if the poster has sufficient “override points”, which are consumed each time a poster overrides the AI (perhaps a fixed number per post, or perhaps variable based on the how far out of spec the AI deems to the post); once they’re out of points they can’t override anymore.

Override points might be acquired:

  • so many per unit time (each user gets some fixed allocation weekly), or
  • by posting things approved of by the AI or by readers, or
  • by seniority on the site, or
  • by reputation (earned somehow), or
  • by gift of the host (presumably to trusted people), or
  • by buying them with money, or
  • some combination of these.

Re buying them with money, a poster could effectively bet the AI about the outcome of human moderator review. Comments posted this way go online and also to a human moderator, who independently decides if the AI was right. If so, the site keeps the money. If the moderator sides with poster, the points (or money) is returned.

The expenditure of override points is also valuable feedback to the site host who drafts the “community values” prompt – the host can see which posts required how many override points (and why, according to the AI), and decide whether to modify the prompt.

READER-SIDE MODERATION

Another idea (credit here to Richard E.) is that all comments are posted, just with different ratings, and readers see whatever they’ve asked to see based on the ratings (and perhaps other criteria).

The AI rates the comment on multiple independent scales – for example, politeness, logic, rationality, fact content, charity, etc., each scale defined in an AI prompt by the host. The host offers a default set of thresholds or preferences for what readers see but readers are free to change those as they see fit.

(Letting readers define their own scales is possible but computationally expensive – each comment would need to be rated by the AI for each reader, rather than just once when posted).

In this model there could also be a points system that allows posters to modify their ratings, if they want to promote something the AI (or readers) would prefer not to see.

Advice on archival backups

Want a real archival backup that your great-great-grandchildren will be able to read?

Most media (CD-Rs, tape, disk, I think also flash) decay after 10 to 20 years. Having lots of redundant copies helps a little, but only a little.

If you want things to last a LONG time (say, 100+ years), I think the best options today are:

1 – M-DISC BluRay discs. They are designed to last 100 years. Of course this hasn’t been tested – the number is based on projections and knowledge of the decay mechanisms. From what I’ve read the chance of them being readable after 200 or 300 years is pretty good, if they’re stored in a dark cool place (say 5 to 10 C). Probably purging the oxygen from the container (flush it out with nitrogen) is a good idea too.

And, of course, multiple redundant copies.

2 – Multiple external HDDs, but keep them running the whole time (bearings often seize up after a few years if they’re not run). Actively migrate the data to new hardware every 10 years or so. (This requires money and effort of course.)

My understanding is that the ZFS (Zettabyte File System) is the way you’d want to store data across multiple HDDs – you can adjust the redundancy level as you like and ZFS will use all available space to create more redundancy if you want (as you originally where thinking).

3 – If you only have a little bit of data to store (< 1 MByte) – punched paper tape or punched cards. Store them in sealed containers purged of oxygen, in a dark cool place. If you’re really serious, use punched cards made of out of solid gold (gold is inert), and put the sealed container in a Nazi submarine and sink it to the bottom of an ocean.

Are you concerned that 100+ years from now nobody will have the hardware to read the media? Don’t be. If civilization doesn’t fall, it won’t be a problem (if it does fall, yes a problem).

I don’t think there’s any storage media used 100 years ago that we can’t today build a new reader for – easily and cheaply. And of course there will always be historians and museums who keep readers functional for common media.

Re uncommon media, a few years ago there was a project to recover data from some 50 year old tapes with data from NASA spacecraft. There were no working tape drives that could read it, so they built a new one from scratch. Anything we can build today at all, the technology of the future (assuming civilization doesn’t collapse) will find easy to duplicate.

Business opportunity: Cell Tower Map website

I feel like almost every day I see great business opportunities that nobody seems to be pursuing.

Here’s a straightforward one – make a decent cell tower map website. Put a few ads on it. (Non pop-up, non-blocking ads – you don’t want to drive your users away!)

It’s easy – the (United States) data is free from the FCC. And it doesn’t already exist.

The best one out there that I’ve found sucks hard – should be easy to do better.

Build it on top of Google Maps (cheap), OpenStreetMap (free), or Bing Maps (I don’t know).

So far others who have tried to do something similar:

  • Want to know “where you are” under the assumption that you’re interested in cell signal strength. But lots of people just want to know where the towers are – perhaps someplace far away. Just show the dammed map, please!
  • Make you choose from a list of 300+ countries and territories. Merge the data from the countries you cover into one database and show them on one map. Easy, simple.
  • Make you choose the cell carrier, often from a list that doesn’t match the public names of the carriers. But lots of people don’t care which carrier uses the towers – they just want to see where they are! Sure, show the details if the user clicks on it, and maybe (if you want to get elaborate) allow filtering based on the public names of the carriers (not the LLCs they own that nobody ever heard of).
  • Want you to download their phone app, demand a bunch of intrusive permissions, and suck up your battery – just to get a map!
  • Use a design and UI that sucks monkey balls.

Do better. This seems pretty easy and quick to me.

Don’t go around saying that there are no straightforward ways to start a business and make money. Just look around yourself and solve problems that haven’t been solved yet – they’re everywhere!

The world rewards those who fix it.

My hovercraft is Full of Eels

I’m so proud.

My next project is to get Mark Oliver Everett and one of his bandmates to come visit and pose for a photo in the hovercraft. (Hey Mark; I’m 8 miles from the SpaceX Boca Chica launch site – come visit and watch a launch.)

Oddly enough, I think I met his dad once in the late 1970s at a meeting of the TRS-80 Users Group of Eastern Massachusetts (then, TRUGEM); one of my brushes with greatness.

Use Beyond Compare to launch Word’s legal blackline compare (on Windows)

[Minor update 2020-09-06]

I use Beyond Compare a lot – every day. It’s the best “diff” utility I’ve ever found.

But I also need to compare Word documents a lot – also every day. And Beyond Compare isn’t very good at that.

Microsoft Word has it’s own “legal blackline” (sometimes called “redline”; I don’t know why) compare which works well, but is very tedious to start each time. To use it (in Office 365), you need to:

  1. Open a document
  2. Go Review>Compare>Compare two documents
  3. Find the original document and select it
  4. Find the revised document and select it (yes, even tho you already have it open)
  5. Click OK

If, as is often the case with me, the two documents are in different folders, this is a lot of work.

With Beyond Compare, on the other hand, you can just select two documents in File Explorer, and right-click on “Compare”. Done.

Here’s a way to get Beyond Compare (BC) to launch Word’s legal blackline, the same easy way. Step-by-step:

1 – Download script “Diff-Word.ps1” into the BC4 folder (usually “C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 4”)

(That file is modified from what I found at https://github.com/ForNeVeR/ExtDiff – many thanks to the author of that!!)

2 – Open Beyond Compare and do Tools>FileFormats, go to the bottom of the window that pops up and click ‘+’, then choose “External Format”.

3 – In the Mask box paste in “*.doc;*.docm;*.docx;*.dot;*.dotm;*.dotx” (without the double quotes).

4 – In the Quick Comparison paste in (again without the double quotes): “powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File Diff-Word.ps1 %1 %2”

5 – In the Compare View box paste in (again without the double quotes): “powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File Diff-Word.ps1 %2 %1” (note reverse order of parameters at the end – this is necessary)

6 – In the Description box past in (if you care): “Make Word open it’s own blackline compare.”

7 – Click Save, click Close, exit Beyond Compare.

Now to use it, the order in which you do things matters (because of the way Word’s compare works – it marks revisions against an “original”; if you do things in the wrong order you’ll be marking the original against the revised version, which isn’t the same thing).

So to use it:

1 – Right click on the ORIGINAL file and choose “Select left file for compare”.
2 – Right click on the REVISED file and choose “Compare to”.

That’s it. This will open 2 Word windows, one with the blackline change marks (revised marked against original), and the other with the revised document (no changes – ready to edit further).

If you don’t want that 2nd window (just want the changes), put a ‘#’ (comment) in front of the line that starts “$new =” in Diff-Word.ps1.

GoPro Hero 8 Black – Waterproofed for seaplane use

Following up from my last post, I wanted to mount a GoPro Hero 8 Black onto a seaplane. For this, my requirements were:

  • Method to start/stop recording
  • Support recording for up to 4 hours
  • Efficient way to get videos out of the camera
  • Camera must be waterproofed (water takeoffs/landings involve a lot of splashing)

Method to start/stop recording

After far more study and experimentation than ought to have been necessary, I discovered that the only reasonable way to start/stop recordings is to manually push the button on the GoPro.

All my attempts to start recording via the Android GoPro app resulted in recordings that stopped by themselves after less than 5 minutes. I don’t know why.

Support recordings for up to 4 hours

The internal battery on the GoPro only will record for about 90 minutes. So I needed to power the GoPro via USB while recording.

Efficient way to get videos out of the camera

As per my last post, I found that the only reasonable way to get recorded videos out of the GoPro is to physically remove the Micro SD card and read it on another device (a laptop is the most practical solution).

In theory the GoPro app can download recordings onto a phone, but I discovered this takes longer than there recording itself! I don’t want to wait around for 3 hours after landing to get the 3 hour recording into my phone.

(In case it’s not obvious by this point, I’m not at all happy with the GoPro – the only thing it does well is record video. All other functions are broken or awkwardly implemented.)

Camera must be waterproofed

Last, the camera needs to be waterproofed. You wouldn’t think this would be difficult with an “action camera” supposedly meant for rugged use, but there was no reasonable off-the-shelf solution.

My solution

The requirements above badly conflict with the GoPro design. On the GoPro8 you can’t attach the standard battery door while powering the camera via USB – there’s no hole for the cable.

And if you use an aftermarket door, then the camera isn’t waterproofed. So I had to use hot-glue to seal all the openings to keep the camera dry.

And if you hot-glue the door, then you can’t get the Micro SD card out to read off the videos. (At least, not without scraping off all the glue and re-gluing after every session!)

So my solution:

1 – Use Ulanzi G8-7 aftermarket door, with hole for USB-C cable:

2 – Get Micro SD card extender cable, so card isn’t glued in:

3 – Put SD card inside a waterproof film canister:

4 – Hot-glue everything to seal it.

Step by step:

I chose the shortest Micro SD extender cable I could find (15 cm long); I figure the shorter it is, the less likely it’ll have trouble from latency, capacitance, or noise pick-up.

Then, to get the Ulanzi aftermarket door to fit around the extender cable, I had to grind down one side (bench grinder).


I didn’t want to have a USB-C cable permanently dangling off the camera, so I installed a small right-angle USB-C connector; this lets me glue in the connector (sealing the camera from water) and still disconnect the cable.

I put the end of the extender cable that holds the Micro SD card into an old 35mm film canister (mine is a Kodak one from the 1980s; but you can still buy these canisters online). They’re reasonably waterproof.

I cut a hole in the bottom for the extender cable.

And left enough cable slack inside to reach the card easily.

Put the (removable) cap on the film canister, and the whole thing should be reasonably waterproof – once the gaps are sealed up.

Then, hot glue on all gaps – around the Ulanzi door, around the USB-C adapter, around the cable (both ends – coming out of the camera and going into the film canister).

Then I mounted it on the seaplane.

And used a zip-tie to hold the canister on the back of the camera.

I haven’t tried it in flight yet. I’ll post something here if I get some nice videos.

How to transfer GoPro videos from Android to Windows

I have a GoPro Hero 8 Black. It’s a fine camera, but the software leaves much to be desired.

I power the camera via USB while recording (reasons…). To do that, I bought this aftermarket battery cover at Amazon (the standard one doesn’t have a hole for the USB cable):

Unfortunately, that cover doesn’t have a rubber seal to waterproof the GoPro. Water can definitely get into the battery compartment and SD card area. To solve that, I used hot-glue to seal everything up (sealing in a USB-C cable).

So I can’t remove the SD card to get videos out – I can only get them out via WiFi using the GoPro app.

Fine.

Except it’s really slow – downloading a video (2.7k/60p) that way takes almost as long as the video itself. (A 45 minute video takes 35 minutes to download!)

To do that:

  1. Connect to GoPro camera with phone (GoProApp>Camera icon)
  2. Download to phone (must be within WiFi range of GoPro – a few meters); be patient, this is really slow

Now you can delete the videos from the GoPro, if you want.

Here is the only way I’ve found to get the videos from the Android phone (I’m on a Google Pixel 2 XL now) to Windows:

  1. In the GoPro App, click Media (icon has little mountains on a screen)
  2. Long-press all videos you want to export
  3. Click the arrow in the top right that points right (“export” arrow)
  4. Choose Save to Phone
  5. Plug the phone into the PC via USB
  6. On Android do Settings>Connected Devices>USB>Choose “File transfer”
  7. The phone will now show up as a drive on Windows; files are in This PC\\Internal shared storage\Pictures\GoPro-Exports

From there you can drag-and-drop files from the phone to the PC as usual.

(You may need to press F5 to refresh on Windows before the files will show up.)

If I find a better/simpler method I’ll update this post.

It’s 2020; I’d have thought we’d have simpler ways to do things by now.

Force remove an entire Windows folder tree at the command line

Supposedly del /f/s/q [target] will delete an entire folder in Windows.

But often it doesn’t – excessively long file names, excessively long paths, and other things, break it. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to fully clean out a folder.

There are many solutions (cygwin‘s rm is pretty powerful) but here’s a simple batch file that harnesses the power of Robocopy (which comes pre-installed with Windows) to do the job:

@rem thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/97875/rm-rf-equivalent-for-windows
@echo TEP – Terminate with Extreme Predjudice (die, die, die)
@echo off
setlocal

SET /P AREYOUSURE=Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to irreversibly delete folder ‘%1’ [y,N]?
IF /I “%AREYOUSURE%” NEQ “Y” GOTO abort

set emptyFolder=%TEMP%\tep_%RANDOM%%RANDOM%%RANDOM%
mkdir %emptyFolder%
@REM robocopy will mirror an EMPTY FOLDER into the target
robocopy /mir %emptyFolder% %1
rmdir %emptyFolder%
rmdir %1
goto exit

:abort
echo Nothing done.
:exit
endlocal

The only thing I’ve found that this won’t delete is open files.

Humpback whale breaching, July 29 2018, off Provincetown MA

Last weekend I went on one of the New England Aquarium‘s whale watch tours.

About 6 miles northwest of Provincetown MA, I captured this video of a humpback whale breaching. Just dumb luck.

Pretty impressive.