Declaration of VAR

Mac OS service for checking media streams

I needed to be able to quickly find out if a movie/episode contains subtitles. “Quickly” means without opening the file in a media player and getting its information there.

So I just created a Mac OS service that gets this info with FFmpeg:

And here’s how it works:

Migrating from Octopress to Hugo

Octopress is a great blogging engine/framework, and I was happy with it for several years, but recently I discovered a new one - Hugo.

I liked it so much that I decided to move my blog to it.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

Stieg Larsson wrote 3 books from the Millennium series. Unfortunately, he died before he could write more.

It was not a nice surprise when I suddenly discovered that the greedy piece of shit publishing company Norstedts contracted some random author David Lagercrantz to continue the series. And there are already 2 more books published, the first of which having the title “The Girl in the Spider’s Web”:

The Girl in the Spider's Web

Бинарник программы в 2725 байт с графическим интерфейсом пользователя и мультимедиа ресурсами, позволяющий управлять “онлайн” системами обороны (включая пуск ракет) различных стран, который нельзя копировать и можно только перемещать, а также который несколько минут грузится с серверов NSA (нечеловеческий объём ~2.6 КБ) - и это кино про Лисбет Саландер?

Всё остальное выдержано в том же духе. Ну и актёры не вывозят.

Поразительно, что Финчер принимал в этом участие, пусть и как продюсер. Хотя думаю сцену с подвешиванием на троссе это как раз он добавил - типа он это всё не одобряет.

Что могу сказать создателям: FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKS.

Fixing "corrupted" JPG files on Mac OS

Sometimes when I save certain images from particular imageboards, I cannot preview or open those on Mac OS. They work fine on Windows, but I cannot even edit those on Mac OS using graphic editors. If you ever saw this infinitely loading preview, then you know what I am talking about:

If video doesn’t play in your browser, you can download it here.

So far my solution was to re-save the picture on Windows using GIMP or something else, but as I suspected it can actually be fixed on Mac OS as well - by editing the file in a HEX editor.

Telegram bot via webhook

Some time ago I wrote an article about creating a Telegram bot, and there I promised to update it with a webhook method description, but never did. Now I finally got time to do that.

Эта статья на русском 🇷🇺.

Telegram бот через webhook

Я тогда давно написал статью про создание Telegram бота, и обещал дополнить её описанием настройки работы через webhook, но так и не дополнил. Вот только сейчас дошли руки.

This article in english 🇺🇸.

How to upgrade U-Boot

Yet another manual about upgrading U-Boot on your development board.

With a Boundary Devices i.MX6 SABRE Lite device as an example.

Convert PNG to ICNS on Mac OS

Developing an application for Mac OS, sooner or later you’ll want to add an icon to it. And Mac OS uses Apple’s own format for application icons - Apple Icon Image format - files with .icns extension. But how does one create such a file?

It is actually not so hard, but there are some tricky moments. I’ll cover those and as a bonus I’ll show you how to use .icns icon in Qt-based application (deadly simple).

Qt for iOS - setting up development environment

I already wrote about Qt for Android, and today it is turn for iOS.

And this article will be much shorter.