There are times that I realize that I don’t understand Facebook. No, I’m not talking about the Dreaded Algorithm that chooses what you see in your feed and often builds opinion bubbles; I’m confused about how Facebook chooses whether to put an image into a post that links to a website, such as my post yesterday to my blog.

I had put a photo of the zester I bought into yesterday’s blog entry, expecting Facebook to show it and add a little life to the Facebook post – but it didn’t. And I don’t know why. So I won’t go out of my way to find a photo for tonight’s entry.

After we watched City Lights’ version of A Christmas Carol last week, Diane said that she’d really enjoyed the version of the story on Topper. Somewhat to my surprise, it was easy to find that episode on YouTube; I downloaded it so we could use Plex to watch it on the big TV. As I was downloading it, I noticed that YouTube offered “automatically-generated subtitles”, so I downloaded them, too, in case the audio was bad.

Unfortunately, YouTube’s automatically-generated subtitles are in “Timed Text Markup Language” (TTML), which Plex doesn’t support – Plex supports SubRip Text (SRT) files. No problem – there are lots of converters on the web, and some converters written in Python on GitHub. I’d rather run the conversion on my own machine, so I downloaded alexwlchan/ttml2srt from GitHub and fed it the file I’d downloaded from YouTube. And I got an error message.

A little investigation showed me that the YouTube TTML file doesn’t come close to conforming to the standard. In particular, it doesn’t have a body element, and the timestamps are given as decimal seconds without a unit (10.3 instead of the correct 10.3s, for example). But it was easy to add support for the YouTube file to the program and generate the subtitle file I needed (and of course, I have offered my changes to the owner of the program).

I added the subtitle file to Plex and made sure it worked, then we sat down to watch the show; the audio was good enough that we didn’t need the subtitles – oh, and the automatically-generated subtitles weren’t all that accurate, anyway (the subtitle in the photo should say “Topper”, not “copper”).

But now I have a tool for the future – that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!

There were more firsts today than just being the first day of the New Year.

It was the first day that I was no longer officially the District 101 Webmaster (though I’m still on the team); I spent a couple of hours going through my code with the person who’s picking up the back-end code. Explaining code I wrote five years ago is hard work! While we were reviewing the code, I got rid of some code that hadn’t ever been used in District 101 (we used it in District 4) and that wouldn’t have worked for the last couple of years anyway (because I didn’t update it for Pathways). There’s more code to explain and clean up, as well as updating anything that talks to Dropbox so that it’ll survive their new authentication model.

We used our new zester for the first time (I had been using a Microplane “fine” grater until now); it seemed to do a better job than the grater did, and it was much easier to get the zest off the zester and into the food than it was to get it off the grater.

And tonight at Shir Hadash was the first service with our new Interim Senior Rabbi, Ted Riter. His sermon was about transitions, which seems rather appropriate under the circumstances.

19 days left until a BIG transition….