Photographer and open source software fan. I’ve also made a few tutorials at http://youtube.com/@AnAustralianPhotographer
Blog: https://anaustralianphotographer.wordpress.com Webshop: https://anaustralianphotographer.threadless.com/ where you can buy prints and other merch featuring my photos.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 6th, 2024

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  • If it was me, I would go in, dressed smart casual, be on time, polite, own up to the issue, say sorry I forgot to get it renewed and I hadn’t realized it needed doing, inform the judge of any mitigating circumstances that might have distracted you and ask that because it’s your first offence if they could be lenient as there were no other aggravating factors (speeding, drunk, crashed car with injuries rtc).

    Was the car or truck in pretty good condition ?. It’s what I’d try if all indications are you are an otherwise legal and safe driver. I’m not asking for you to answer to me, but they seem relevant to a judge. I hope things work out ok for you.

    The only other thing I could think of is if someone could be a character witness but the court might not want to hear them.

    Maybe you have a good reason to ask for the fine to be waived if you have sick kids etc, or have been saving for a worthwhile cause and this would be a major setback or a penalty like losing your license would make you unable to work or look after kids.

    If you are pleasant and don’t make things harder then they might have discretion to adjust the penalty and decide to do so. But the law might also be written so the judge has no say in the penalty or a minimum penalty is required.

    I know of some drivers over here if they have an established safe driving record they can write and ask for a speeding fine to be reviewed and possibly waived (if it was just a few kms over, cant see it work gor 30km/h+ over).

    I think there’s also been a few cases where people who would otherwise have their license suspended over here get an exemption for work etc.



  • While I don’t want to say this is a perfect solution, it is a free solution, and one id checkout early, that said I’d still recommend shopping around to see what best meets your needs.

    You could get a Gmail account for the business/ website and then register for a free WordPress site. WordPress is both software you can download for self hosting and a website service where they take care of everything (for free or a price. The free version may end up with the website having ads served to viewers and only has limited upload).

    As for design, there are a few free as well as paid templates. They can also get your site a domain like yourbusiness.com , but you can get a free subdomain at WordPress like yourbusiness.wordpress.com

    If you wanted to go complex, you could self host or hire a virtual computer to host from a cloud provider, but things like making sure software is up to date and security patches applies are up to you. You might already have a server / network attached storage device which could be the server and get the domain linking to it and have your router forward incoming traffic to it, but it depends on how hands on you want to be.



  • Edit: my comment isn’t about exactly the same thing, but …

    Some new camera tech might be opening a can of worms about whether what’s pictured can be taken literally.

    There was a story late last year of a woman trying on a wedding dress in front of two mirrors and someone snapped a photo.

    When they looked at it, the reflection on the left mirror had a different pose to the reflection on The right mirror.

    And this cast doubt on what exactly was going on the moment the shutter was pressed.

    It looks like the camera had one of the stitch together the best photo of the people pictured (e.g. don’t show shots of people blinking etc) and it treated the mirror images as different people.







  • Ive downloaded imagemagick and used the convert program to make them smaller.

    convert -quality 85 input.jpg output.jpg

    should make it smaller, the 85 is a % factor which determines how much compression the algorithm uses. 100% is big files with high quality, the default is something like 92% .

    convert -resize 1920x1080 -quality 85 input.jpg output.jpg

    also adjusts the resulting image size.

    For the image i used, it was 3840*2160 and 3.0 meg. When compressing with 50% quality, the file size was 850kb, when resizing down, it was 250kb,

    How much each file size shrinks with % compression will likely depend on what the image is.


  • There isn’t a lot of detail in your question, I’m trying to get a better understanding of what your trying to do as there might be a better tool than ffmpeg to do this. I’m thinking that ImageMagick and it’s convert tool could be the best tool for the job.

    Is there a specific reason for ffmpeg to be the program to manipulate the files?

    Is the compression factor the only thing you want to change?

    I have a camera that takes 40003000 pixel images, I’d your looking to reduce the file size, would it be acceptable to also use less pixels? Converting to say 20001500 which would still look great on a full HD screen of 1920*1080 pixels.







  • GPG uses a public key encryption algorithms. Widely known encryption uses symmetric encryption, ie the same passphrase is used to encrypt and decrypt.

    Public key encryption algorithms have two keys, a public key and a private key. They are created as a pair.

    When someone creates the pair, they can safely widely publish their public key which is essential to encrypt a message to the receiver. But a different key is needed to decrypt the message (the private key).

    They can also be used in reverse. A person with a private key can sign a message saying they created a document and it has this hash. We can use their public key to confirm the message they send out has not been altered.

    A hash is a computer algorithm which examines a files and creates a short pattern of characters. If the file is changed then the hash of the file also changes.

    As a example, If we had a written letter, a very simple hash could be to assign a the number 1, b 2, c 3 etc and full stop could be 27, comma 28, and the digits 0-9 29-38. For every character we keep adding the assigned numbes and keep a total. When we get to the end, we take the last 3 digits and have a number between 000 and 999. (Technically this is more a checksum than a hash, but please just go with it. A hash like MD5 or SHA256 is complex and has ways to detect if the message contents was shuffled that the described hash wouldn’t)

    Continuing the example, I may receive a letter from a relative who asked me for some money or something. If I wasnt sure if it was real or not, I could calculate the hash and call the relative and confirm the hash.

    But back to your example, there might be a press release from the presidents account saying something like

    "Dear constituents, Please find attached a link to download the lastest video update from the presidents. It can be downloaded at URL, and it has a SHA256 hash of abcd12345 Signed President GPGSignature for president@example is ‘ajfuebslch’ " Once we download the file, we can use SHA to generate the has of the file we downloaded and GPG to confirm the signature of the message we received matches the text of the message we received.

    If we didn’t have GPG and the Public key of the presidents account, an attacker who makes deep fakes could send us spam purporting to be from them and include in the message the correct hash for their deepfaked video.

    I dont quite fully understand how public key encryption works, but the GPG signature allows us to confirm the message was sent by whoever has the matching private key to the public key we’ve got and the hash lets us confirm the file we downloaded is the same as the video the semder wants us to receive.