Category: Administration

Related to computer administration, utilities, etc.

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Uncommon Knowledge: NTFS Allows Weird Filenames

The whole internet confuses NTFS and Windows. If you try to find what characters are disallowed on NTFS, you’ll probably find what Windows blocks:

But NTFS doesn’t actually have this limit. As far as I can find, the only limit is the NULL character. I don’t know of an operating system that will let you use a forward slash (“/”) in a filename, but technically it is allowed.

Not only is this relatively unknown, but it is hard to find information on because most searching will bring up results about Windows only. 😀

Sources

(Note: All resources are archived using the services linked to on Archives & Sources.)

  1. Discussion: Edge cases of file naming in NTFS/FAT/etc, Windows/Linux. The only specific affirmative answer I could find.
  2. Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces Microsoft does mention namespaces, but doesn’t go into detail.
  3. Filename Namespaces – Concept – NTFS Documentation & the 101th page (pg. 93) of NTFS Documentation (PDF) (different formats, same source) The NTFS Project states that only NULL and forward slashes are not allowed. (The forward slash is disallowed by the NTFS project, not NTFS.)
  4. Filename – Wikipedia (Comparison of filename limitations) Mentions that Posix namespaces remove some character restrictions, but doesn’t specify details (and is also flagged as “dubious” lol).

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YouTube Censorship Made Me Write a Script

Updated 2024-10-11: I updated the link to point to the repo where it’s being maintained. Notice: The current version assumes you have an account logged into YouTube through the Firefox browser, because recent blocking attempts has made downloading videos more difficult.

YouTube’s been forcing creators to censor their works more and more, and often times after a successful publish of said content. More history and valuable information is being lost every day because a corporation controls the largest source of video content freely available.

At the same time, I’ve been running commands using yt-dlp over and over again for my own purposes, aside from this censorship. The syntax is relatively easy to forget despite being very clearly defined, so I finally made a script to handle it for me.

It’s in Lua because that’s what I prefer to use, and available on GitHub. Because it is based on yt-dlp, it works for any website supported by yt-dlp. Here’s how to use it:

Usage:
  ./video-dl.lua [action] <url>
[action]: What is desired.
  video (default): Highest quality video (maximum 720p).
  backup, clone, copy: English subtitles (including automatic subtitles), thumbnail, description, highest quality video (maximum 720p).
  music, audio: Highest quality audio only.
  metadata, meta: English subtitles (including automatic subtitles), thumbnail, description.
<url>: Source. YouTube URL expected, but should work with anything yt-dlp works with.

Information wants to be free. Help it.

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File Size Statistics Script (Lua)

I used ChatGPT to write a script for generating a list of file statistics based on everything within the directory it is placed in. It uses LuaFilesystem, and generates a final output like the following after it’s done processing through the files:

2359    files found.
Average (mean) file size:       44842.524374735 bytes
Standard deviation:     320478.50592438
Multiple modes:
Mode 1: 126     bytes
Mode 2: 204     bytes
Frequency:      7
[####################] 0.00 - 199271.16: 2245 files
[##########          ] 199271.16 - 398542.33: 59 files
[#######             ] 398542.33 - 597813.49: 16 files
[#######             ] 597813.49 - 797084.65: 14 files
[#####               ] 797084.65 - 996355.82: 6 files
[#####               ] 996355.82 - 1195626.98: 8 files
[##                  ] 1195626.98 - 1394898.14: 2 files
[#                   ] 1394898.14 - 1594169.31: 1 files
[#                   ] 1594169.31 - 1793440.47: 1 files
[                    ] 1793440.47 - 1992711.63: 0 files
[                    ] 1992711.63 - 2191982.80: 0 files
[#                   ] 2191982.80 - 2391253.96: 1 files
[                    ] 2391253.96 - 2590525.12: 0 files
[                    ] 2590525.12 - 2789796.29: 0 files
[                    ] 2789796.29 - 2989067.45: 0 files
[##                  ] 2989067.45 - 3188338.61: 2 files
[                    ] 3188338.61 - 3387609.78: 0 files
[                    ] 3387609.78 - 3586880.94: 0 files
[                    ] 3586880.94 - 3786152.10: 0 files
[                    ] 3786152.10 - 3985423.27: 0 files
[                    ] 3985423.27 - 4184694.43: 0 files
[#                   ] 4184694.43 - 4383965.59: 1 files
[                    ] 4383965.59 - 4583236.76: 0 files
[                    ] 4583236.76 - 4782507.92: 0 files
[                    ] 4782507.92 - 4981779.08: 0 files
[                    ] 4981779.08 - 5181050.24: 0 files
[#                   ] 5181050.24 - 5380321.41: 1 files
[                    ] 5380321.41 - 5579592.57: 0 files
[                    ] 5579592.57 - 5778863.73: 0 files
[                    ] 5778863.73 - 5978134.90: 0 files
[                    ] 5978134.90 - 6177406.06: 0 files
[                    ] 6177406.06 - 6376677.22: 0 files
[#                   ] 6376677.22 - 6575948.39: 1 files
[                    ] 6575948.39 - 6775219.55: 0 files
[                    ] 6775219.55 - 6974490.71: 0 files
[                    ] 6974490.71 - 7173761.88: 0 files
[                    ] 7173761.88 - 7373033.04: 0 files
[                    ] 7373033.04 - 7572304.20: 0 files
[                    ] 7572304.20 - 7771575.37: 0 files
[                    ] 7771575.37 - 7970846.53: 0 files
[                    ] 7970846.53 - 8170117.69: 0 files
[                    ] 8170117.69 - 8369388.86: 0 files
[                    ] 8369388.86 - 8568660.02: 0 files
[                    ] 8568660.02 - 8767931.18: 0 files
[                    ] 8767931.18 - 8967202.35: 0 files
[                    ] 8967202.35 - 9166473.51: 0 files
[                    ] 9166473.51 - 9365744.67: 0 files
[                    ] 9365744.67 - 9565015.84: 0 files
[#                   ] 9565015.84 - 9764287.00: 1 files
0th percentile: 0       bytes
10th percentile:        167     bytes
20th percentile:        317     bytes
30th percentile:        476     bytes
40th percentile:        692     bytes
50th percentile (median):       986     bytes
60th percentile:        1428    bytes
70th percentile:        2101    bytes
80th percentile:        3650    bytes
90th percentile:        38917   bytes
100th percentile:       9764287 bytes

With minimal effort, you could change it quite a bit, because it’s written as pure functions. I wouldn’t have achieved this myself, nor produced it so quickly, if I didn’t have ChatGPT do the easy stuff for me. I found the experience quite helpful. While ChatGPT did once forget that Lua indexes tables starting with 1, and made a few weird decisions and downright inefficient code in some places, it allowed me to focus on making it work exactly how I wanted it to, instead of just mostly correct or “good enough for now”.

(Btw, the example output above is from my Obsidian vault. You can read a bit more about how I use Obsidian to organize my notes here.)

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Paywalls Suck, We Forgot About Bookmarklets, Information Needs to be Free

I can’t afford most things. 12ft.io proclaims “Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.” I proclaim copy-pasting links when I just hit one of those pesky paywalls is too much effort. Create a new bookmark with the following, and then you can click it any time you really need to read what’s being blocked:

javascript: window.open("https://12ft.io/" + encodeURI(location.href), "_self")

Just remember: If it has a paywall, it probably isn’t worth reading. I’m not kidding about that.

A quick reminder that using archival services like the Wayback Machine and archive.is can also remove paywalls. (I maintain a list of archival services on Archives & Sources.)

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Google Chrome’s DNS Fucked Up, What Do?

Google Chrome's domain does not exist error page.

Google Chrome on my laptop randomly decided my blog’s domain doesn’t exist. Except, it clearly does. Searching for a solution tells me to do everything from restarting the computer to deleting all browser history – which should be obviously wrong, not to mention annoying. Here’s the laziest quickest way I solved it:

Google Chrome's net-internals' DNS page.
Step 1: Clear host cache.
  1. Go to chrome://net-internals/#dns and click “Clear host cache”
  2. That didn’t work.
  3. Go to chrome://settings/security and use a different secure DNS provider from the default
Google Chrome's security settings page.
Step 3: Use an actually secure DNS provideer.

Considering Google decided to be evil (notice those are 3 separate links) and does the same mass data hervesting and privacy violations as every other big tech company, we shouldn’t be using anything they touch. However, the least we can do and still have a compatible browser is to stop using their “secure” DNS provider anyhow..