February 13 2024 code golf, SimpleScreenRecorder, Kdenlive, Audacity

Mike raised a problem he had had. Having changed a setting, he was unable to get back in to change it back. He knew where to make the change but could not find a way to get there. John suggested SystemRescue which has the virtue of not touching anything unless you tell it to do.

Once running, enter:

fsarchiver -v probe

to identify the partitions and their names. Mike can then mount the relevant partition in /mnt, go into the partition, make the change, for example, with nano and quit.

Darren introduced the code golf example he had obtained from the York CoderDojo using this paper to flesh out the details. The example focused on efficient data storage with strings stored as alphanumeric characters preceded by the number of characters and a colon, numbers in mantissa exponent format, lists enclosed in the letters ‘L’ and ‘T’ and dictionaries and their keys stored in a similar fashion.

Bernard commented that it would be important with strings to clarify whether the number before the string related to characters or to bytes as utf8 characters can have between one and four bytes. He noted that Python2 was ASCII based whereas Python3 is Unicode based.

Bernard then shared some experiences of making screenshots for a YouTube tutorial. He had found a neat way to display the relevant files using Thonny, a Python IDE, and been able to record them using SimpleScreenRecorder. A very useful discovery had been wmctrl which allows you to manipulate the windows in a window manager. Then he had put everything into Kdenlive — which he demonstrated. Finally he demonstrated how Audacity could remove the noise from his slightly noisy microphone line.

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