Methods of downloading YouTube videos have changed over the years. Here are two of my preferred methods for doing so in 2022.
tl;dr: easy:
Use a Youtube-Mp3 converter site, if you know how to Google then you’ve probably found one of these already.
tl;dr: is asked to fix printers:
Get the latest ‘youtube-dl’ fork like yt-dlp. Use ffmpeg to convert.
Easy
Yeah there’s really nothing else you need here
The Other Method
Get yt-dlp. Put it in a folder somewhere in C:\ like ‘youtubedownload’. Rename the .exe file to yt.exe.
Get ffmpeg. Put it in the same folder. You could rename this .exe file if you want as well, the names will be the commands used in the future.
Press the WINDOWS key, and type ‘path’. (INCOMING WALL OF PICTURES)
Choose ‘Enviroment Variables’
Then,
You can then add a new entry for the ‘path’ environment variable. The system uses this to allow the executing directory to be in any directory listed in the path. Meaning, when you run a command in CMD, the system will always check any directories in the ‘path’.
Click OK on all open windows after adding the directory the exes are in to the ‘path’.
Right click on your Desktop > ‘Open Command Window Here’. If you don’t have this option in the context menu, you can download these registry edits to add it.
Next type the name of the yt-dlp .exe followed by a space and the url. So if you renamed it ‘yt’ like stated previously, it would look like so: yt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIMdcJWOEFM Hitting enter will start downloading that video to the desktop directory you just launched the CMD window in. (Hint! If you want to use a Soundcloud URL like we have below, that will work too! Isn’t technology great?)
If you want to convert the resulting video to a proper audio file like .mp3, you have two options. You can use the quick solution right from yt-dl:
You can ignore missing (“unavailable in your country”, or removed) videos with an -i flag. If your playlist isn’t working and the URL contains v=<ID>, remove it so just the ?list= item is in the query string.
Or, since ffmpeg is useful for other tasks (and you should have it anyway), you can use it directly. A simple syntax of an ffmpeg command that would convert to an mp3 would look like ffmpeg -i [input file name] [output file name].[output file extension]. But wait, we don’t want to type that long, ugly file name in that yt-dlp just spit out onto our desktop… luckily we have a trick for that.
Run ‘dir /x‘ in the open CMD window. This is an extremely helpful windows command that will show ‘short’ filenames for files, making working with longer file names a breeze. Windows is telling us in the screenshot above that we can refer to the video we just downloaded as ‘moving~3.web’. Now assuming no renaming of the ffmpeg .exe took place in the setup step, our command simply becomes:
ffmpeg -i moving~3.web output.mp3
And you’re done! You now have ‘output.mp3’ on your desktop saved as the song we were just playing on YouTube. I’ve combined this process with scripted metadata adding/titling for an offline library. And, with the right yt-dlp commands it can even become an efficient way to export entire playlists of music.
Link rot is a problem that affects everyone using the internet on a daily basis. This is when a link becomes dead and no longer links to where it’s supposed to because of site changes. Either the owner stopped maintaining and paying for the domain/hosting, the structure changed, or it was deleted or inaccessible for another reason. Nothing is permanent online (unless it’s your ad data 😉), regardless of what your parents may have said.
Research from Harvard Law School shows about a quarter of all articles on the New York Times suffer from link rot, meaning resources linked on the page are no longer accessible. Additionally, links are not immutable. I personally have links such as ‘https://l.gmr.dev/tiktok‘ that link to my TikTok blog post and that can be changed so I can always keep it up to date. This can be a disadvantage if the site goes offline or the link is mismanaged however.
The problem can be combated by using web archivers, and linking to primary, trusted sources as much as possible. Additionally, it’s helpful to copy + paste the information that’s relevant from the site you’re sharing/linking in case it dies somehow later on.
Factcheck.org, which launched in 2004 now has almost 6,000 dead links. Roughly one third of all the links on Pagella Politica, the Italian fact-checking website I edited before joining Poynter, are currently broken. At the same time, trying to manually keep tabs on the state of a site’s links is too time-consuming to be feasible.
cjr.org
The advent of ‘online-only’ services have marked a period full of slow, buggy, overly designed applications, such as Creative Cloud or Epic Games, that run at all times on your computer to feed you advertisements or update notifications. Engines like Unity have transitioned more and more of their editor services and features to online services. Or, they’ve deprecated more traditional methods that would eliminate the need to connect to “Unity Teams” and/or login to their accounts & manage organizations.
When Flash was purged from the internet a few years ago, one of the largest issues Flash archivers faced were games that required connections to servers. Because those servers are no longer around, a game’s functionality can be crippled or even completely broken without a solution. This can easily happen to any server in the future. A program’s functioning that exists on something that may not be there in the future… well, it makes relying on that utility poor planning at best. Many modern day software applications ship without any sort of offline mode or planned use case 20-30 years from now, so that will be interesting to see.
Photos, old posts, and media people thought would be around forever are constantly being deleted. Make any playlist on YouTube with a sizeable number of videos and soon enough a fair number of them will be unavailable. My music library exists entirely on my own servers streamed to me because I can’t trust that Spotify or an alternative will be around in 20 years with the same music I listen to or want to stream now.
Jailbreaking iOS is an increasingly difficult task, and I switched to Android away from Apple’s walled garden a few years ago, but even now most companies are locking it down more and more in the name of security and the common user experience. Samsung removes the ability to unlock the bootloader in most US variants of their new models, so rooting Android is out of the question for me as well.
A bit rambly, but I don’t think there’s much to do about this other than being personally careful about what technologies I enable and what I work on. I’m simply commenting on the current direction of the Internet as a whole because I want the best for it. I’ve become more and more aware of how fragile the current state of everything online is, and began saving and archiving everything preemptively.
Voting with your money and just being aware is probably the best move, and I’ve personally been more and more selective about digital media or programs I’m choosing to spend time, data, energy and finances on.
Stack Overflow decided to release their April Fools joke as a real product on Drop, as a Macro Keypad. I thought it looked cool and might be a good place to display a few artisans or something. They allow to reconfigure the keys using something akin to QMK’s software, and there is some custom work going into bringing the full QMK configurator to the device, but for now you can do simple remappings.
Unfortunately it’s not Bluetooth enabled but at least it comes with a USB C connector. Even still, it’s a bit much to hook up an entirely separate 3 key setup all the time as a joke. It works better on a machine that won’t be moving frequently such as a video editing workstation or desktop setup.
…is hopefully almost over. The past few years have seen GPU prices skyrocket, and most GPUs are unobtainable even today because of a chip shortage.
This has led to it being a hostile environment to build a desktop computer in and pushes newcomers away from the PC building scene.
In fact, it’s actually made the age old advice of building your own computer over buying a prebuilt almost obsolete, as many prebuilt PC prices are now as competitive if not a better option for those looking to acquire new hardware.
More than ever, it makes sense to choose a laptop or similarly priced alternatives rather than a desktop PC.
Now I don’t hate Windows by any means, and I use it as a daily driver myself, and that being said, I want what’s best for its development and future. It can only get better through criticism imo.
I keep seeing articles about Windows 11, so I collected some thoughts here for consideration.
In my last post about Windows 11, I pointed out that Windows 10 should have been iterated upon instead of Windows 11 being released. That post includes a few reasons I won’t mention again here including the taskbar button being moved to the center and destroying a key UX design feature that Windows themselves must have forgotten they implemented so long ago.
Let’s talk instead about more bad things about the OS that have come to light.
Duh
As usual, the new release of Microsoft’s major operating system has lots of bugs.
Did anyone not expect this?
This is why I still recommend waiting for a while after release to upgrade, even if you like the new look of Windows 11.
When asked about the performance issues of the OS, Microsoft had this to say:
tl;dr: we know it’s slow – we’re working on it
While they are aware Windows 11 is slow – this is a key reason I’m choosing to stay on Windows 10 for now. It took a long time for Windows 10 to get to a reasonably stable version, and I’m expecting the same for Windows 11. Give it a year or two and then see where it is.
Default apps settings
Surprise again, Microsoft is making it harder to change your web browser away from Edge. In Windows 11, you must change every file protocol related to html documents, links, and other web related entries as opposed to having a simple “Web Browser” option like in Windows 10. This is anti-consumer and doesn’t make using the OS easier at all.
Context menus
Context menu options that before were one click away are now hidden for “ease of use”. This may or may not be preferred by some though, I can see users who don’t typically need the extra context menu options being more encouraged to right click and use the simplified menu.
Personally I don’t find the widgets they have interesting or useful in the slightest, and the widget pull out goes halfway across the screen, so it’s almost useless for multitasking. There are no community or custom widgets, so you are stuck with what Microsoft decides to develop. If I know them, they may release one or two more before forgetting about the feature entirely or disbanding the division of developers that work on it.
As always Windows team takes a good step forward (New Design, store, settings, etc) with Windows 11 and then takes two steps back. Here are some of the lost features from Windows 10
No option to choose different App Icon sizes and end less customization options available in tiles grid
No App Folders
No option for Named Groups
No way to resize start menu
No option for full screen start menu
No show more apps option (Current view displays only 18 apps without scrolling)
Ability to remove pinned apps and show all apps view only
Usability – Not mouse friendly, lot of mouse travel for every action. No way to remove recommended section, app and all apps buttons are far away from reach. Also you need additional click to reach All Apps. Even for touch users it is very difficult to reach new start menu or apps in two handed mode.
No refresh option in context menu, there are many instance where explorer fails to auto refresh.
Context menu is missing many options like shortcut, send to, share with, restore previous version and 3rd party customizations (Windows has poor history of developers embracing new platform features, so not sure when Devs will add these to new menu)
Quick access toolbar has been removed. So no option to pin my favorite commands like copy path
When “Turn off the store application” and “Disable all apps from Microsoft store” group policies are configured, basic windows apps like notepad, mspaint, etc will not work. This also blocks users from launching cmd or powershell from Windows + X menu
To sum things up, Windows 11 is having some issues, as is expected of a needless full OS upgrade for feature removing UX and UI changes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Starcheat is a player save editor for Starbound that gives you greater control over characters, mainly their inventories. You can add and modify items easily, along with accessing the raw item JSON of each individual slot in a file. Other internal information and stats are displayed as well. This simplifies complex item modifications.
The character parsing and asset loading have been fixed and updated so it’s much faster than previous versions (a large character that would take 5 minutes before now takes a couple seconds), and it’s been fully stabilized to work with the latest Starbound version flawlessly. There are a couple other neat tools included but you’ll have to test it yourself and see. No serious issues exist with this release that would break your character but you should always back up your storage/player folder before and when modding for safety.
This game and the community have had a wonderful place in my heart since I joined it 8 years ago. This is my gift back to the community. Since it doesn’t seem like there are going to be many more Starbound updates, especially to the player file structure or foundational changes of that nature, this will probably be one of the last Starcheat versions needed.
Starcheat will never request funds for its use or development. Make sure you only ever download from Starcheat.net. There are plenty of malicious versions out there.
