Pantz.org - Technical Reference Site2024-01-14T05:11:33Zhttp://www.pantz.org/Pantz.orgSaving money switching from Spotify to YouTube Premiumhttp://www.pantz.org/software/youtube/saving_money_switching_from_spotify_to_youtube_premium.html2024-01-14T05:11:33Z<p>After signing up for YouTube Premium it dawned on me that it also includes YouTube Music (YTM). I had never used
YTM before, but if it had all the artists I listen to, and enough of the features I need in a music streaming
service, I could possibly replace it with my Spotify Premium account. This would be some nice monthly savings.</p>
<h3>Preparing to live with YouTube Music for a month</h3>
<p>I decided to try to live with YouTube Premium for 1 month vs my Spotify Premium account. First thing was to make sure
I could listen to YTM on all the devices I wanted to. For me that was the web browser, the phone, and the car. YTM had
me covered on all 3. For the car I wanted Android Auto support and Apple CarPlay was supported also. Now that I can
listen to the music anywhere I wanted, did YTM have all the music artists I listened to?</p>
<p>The short answer is yes. According to Spotify wrapped I'm designated as an "Adventurer" personality, which means I
seek out new music, and listen to a lot of different artists. I could not find 1 artist I cared about, that YTM did not have.
So no problems here. Time to start the move.</p>
<p>I had to get my playlists moved from Spotify to YouTube. There's no way these services were going to allow the transfers of playlists
between each other easily, so it was off to find a way to do this. Luckily I'm not the first person to have this problem, and
someone created a pay service to move playlists between different music services. I used <a href="https://soundiiz.com/">Soundiiz</a>
to move my playlists from Spotify to YouTube without much trouble. At the time of this writing it cost $4.50 for a 1
month subscription (cancel before the month is over). The playlists transferred in less than 24 hours without much issue.
There are some songs that don't quite match up between the services, but these were a very very small amount.</p>
<h3>Using YouTube Music for a month</h3>
<p>Spoiler, things went really well. I did not have any technical issue using YTM vs Spotify Premium. Do I miss some
Spotify features yes. Here are the things that I missed from Spotify.</p>
<ul>
<li>YTM does not allow you to organize your playlists in a hierarchy type structure. Seems it has been a request of many
people over the years, but YTM does not to seem care at all about us people who like to organize things. I can
live without this as I don't have a massive amount of playlists, but it would be hell for someone with a lot of playlists
to deal with this.</li>
<li>I like Spotify's Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists quality better than YTM's version of the same things.
Much of this quality might be because YTM is still learning my music tastes. The YTM playlists they make for me are not
terrible, just not as good as Spotify's yet.</li>
<li>The quality of the Spotify editors created playlists for different genres and topics is really good. YTM has
similar playlists, but their quality does not seem as great. Still need more eval time for this.</li>
</ul>
</p>
<h3>Did I end up switching to YTM?</h3>
<p>Yes! I did cancel my Spotify Premium membership. The account will fall back to a free account automatically. You won't
lose any of your playlists, and if you want to switch back at anytime Spotify will take you back with open arms. I really
do think I was one of the better candidates to be able to make this switch from Spotify to YTM. For myself I don't need
Spotify podcasts or audio books. I have my own podcast app with plenty of podcasts I download for free (long live RSS!).
I also don't need all of the social Spotify features. For someone that just straight listens to music and does not need
all the frills, YTM works well enough for me. I can overlook the few things I don't like about YTM for now, to save that
extra monthly Spotify payment.</p>Pantz.orgSort a YouTube playlist from oldest to newest videoshttp://www.pantz.org/software/youtube/sort_a_youtube_playlist_from_oldest_to_newest.html2023-12-24T05:14:50Z<p>There have been many times when I've wanted to go to a YouTube channel, and watch all the videos from
oldest to newest. I swear this used to be much easier in years past, but trying to do this recently on YouTube
is not easy at all. In fact it almost looks like YouTube is actively trying to hide how to do this. After much
searching around I found out how to do this and thought I would share it here, as opposed to being buried in
message boards on the web.</p>
<h3>Steps to sort a YouTube channel from oldest to newest</h3>
The following works as of 12/2023. YouTube may disable this at any time.
<ol>
<li>Go to the main YouTube channels "Home" link.</li>
<li>Click the "<b>Videos</b>" link in the top row of links.</li>
<li>Click the "<b>Oldest</b>" button.This is currently right under the "<b>Videos</b>" link.</li>
<li>Open the oldest video up in a browser tab, and copy the string/characters after the "<b>v=</b>" in the url. This is the videos id.</li>
<li>Go back to the channels main page and click the "<b>Home</b>" button again.</li>
<li>Scroll down the page slightly, and in the "<b>Videos</b>" section, click the "<b>Play All</b>" button. This will start a playlist from latest video.</li>
<li>Edit that url in the bar, and replace video id string after the "<b>v=</b>" with the oldest videos id you copied earlier.</li>
<li>Next, at the end of the same url replace the characters/string after "<b>&list=</b>" with this "<b>ULcxqQ59vzyTk</b>".</li>
<li> Then hit enter to go to the url. This should reverse the playlist starting from the current video. </li>
</ol>
<h3>Tips/Observations</h3>
<ul>
<li>Save the url after each time you stop to start in the same place next time.</li>
<li>For some reason this reversed playlist does not autoplay. I don't know why. Reach out to the email in the About section of my site if you know how to fix this.</li>
</ul>Pantz.orgFixing GPG not asking for a passwordhttp://www.pantz.org/software/gpg/fixing_gpg_not_asking_for_password.html2023-01-02T22:49:39Z<p>Tried SSH'ing into a Linux machine with the same user that was also running a the gpg-agent daemon.
I tried to decrypt a file with the basic "<b>gpg -d ~/filename</b>". This output info about the file
and then just hung. No password prompt at all. If you do this via a GUI term on the same
machine you get a pop-up box with a password prompt. Seems like the gpg-agent is taking this request, and not
presenting anything back to the same user SSH'ed into the machine. Had to find a way around this.</p>
<h3>Pinentry mode</h3>
<p>I finally found some posts on the net with people having the exact same problem. The gpg pinentry mode
"loopback" fakes a pinentry by using inquiries back to the caller to ask for a passphrase. Buy doing this
with the command "<b>gpg -d --pinentry-mode=loopback ~/filename</b>". This will get you back your password prompt,
and allow you to decode the file remotely over SSH.</p>Pantz.orgChrome on Linux website login freezehttp://www.pantz.org/software/chrome/chrome_on_linux_website_login_freeze.html2021-10-03T19:45:50Z<p><b>TLDR</b>: The gnome keyring daemon is causing authenticated web pages to not load.
Kill the gnome-keyring-daemon process for a fast fix (sudo killall gnome-keyring-daemon).
See below about how to keep this from happening.</p>
<p>If you are trying to login to websites on Chrome on a Linux desktop, and your browser
freezes after clicking the login button, the Gnome keyring might be the cause of your
agony.</p>
<h3>What is happening?</h3>
<p>On Linux, when Chrome loads a web page where credentials are involved, it seems there
is a hook in the Gnome desktop software, where if Gnome keyring is turned on, it
will try to save your credentials before allowing the web page to load in Chrome.
Unfortunately, if the box for this does not pop up, or the pop up window is buried behind
other windows, it looks like your Chrome web page (likely Firefox as well, but I have
not checked) just freezes and it will not respond to any input at all.</p>
<h3>How do I fix this?</h3>
<p>For a fast fix you have to kill the gnome-keyring-daemon process.
Usually it's just "sudo killall gnome-keyring-daemon". It might be called something
else on your machine. I suggest looking for something with "keyring" in then name.
After killing it your pages should load as expected. But your wondering how do you
keep this from happening again?</p>
<h3>Keeping Gnome keyring at bay</h3>
<p>To keep Gnome keyring from doing this to you again you can try a few things.</p>
<p>First thing to try is turning off the Gnome keyring daemon, if you are not going
to use it. The daemon is used to store credentials like ssh keys or passwords for you.
If you know your not going to use it just turn it off. Usually on different desktops
there is a area in the settings that will show you what things run on desktop startup.
You will have to find that for your Linux desktop distro (there are to many ways for to
many desktops to list here), and see if Gnome keyring daemon is there. Then uncheck a
box to turn it off. The logout and log back in.</p>
<p>The second way to handle this is to leave the keyring daemon on, and just set
a blank password (insecure yes, but if you are not going to use it then who cares).
For an example on how to do this in the MATE desktop you go to Applications ->
accessories -> passwords and keys. Delete the "Default" Keyring that has the lock
symbol. Close your browser and open it back up. Go to a web page that requires a
login, and try to login. Gnome keyring should now ask you to choose a new password. Don't enter
a password, and click the ok button. It will warn about credentials being unencrypted, but
that is ok if your not going to put things in it. This will now keep it from
opening again in the future.</p>Pantz.orgSpotify client on Linux opens and immediately closeshttp://www.pantz.org/software/spotify/spotify_client_on_linux_opens_and_immediately_closes.html2021-01-18T00:34:23Z<p>TLDR: "rm -rf ~/.var/app/com.spotify.Client/" your Spotify home dir and start over.</p>
<p>I just installed the latest Flatpak (from flathub) of the Spotify client (1.1.46.916.g416cacf1) on
CentOS 7. After doing this and trying to start Spotify back up, it proceeded to just open the
Spotify window very quickly, and then close itself. Trying to start it up from the command line
gave some more output to try to diagnose this issue.</p>
<pre class="code" style="height:200px;">
# start the spotify client from the command line
flatpak run com.spotify.Client
/app/extra/bin/spotify: /app/lib/libcurl-gnutls.so.4:
no version information available (required by /app/extra/bin/spotify)
[spotifywm] attached to spotify
[spotifywm] spotify window found
</pre>
<p>After doing this, the window was nowhere to be found. I thought it might be and issue with the file it
could not find which was the "libcurl-gnutls" error above. I eventually found out this had nothing to
do with the issue and it could be ignored. Eventually the only thing that fixed this issue was removing
my whole Spotify home dir (which wipes out any downloaded files, settings, and your login info). Removing
the dir is easy as just deleting directory "<b>rm -rf ~/.var/app/com.spotify.Client/</b>". Then run the
command to start up the Flatpak again "<b>flatpak run com.spotify.Client</b>". It should start right up
and you will have to login again.</p>