sheepit renderfarm statistics for the M4 Mac Mini

Compared to the earlier stats, the CPU speed is nearly double, but lack of NVidia GPU prevents many projects from rendering. Copy-pasting from the session information page (My account > Connected machine > (clicking on the machine) - 

OS	macm1
CPU	Apple M4 x 10
RAM allowed	11.0 GB
RAM available	16.8 GB
Max render time per frame
Power CPU	208 %
Scheduler	default

take a screenshot on Mac

 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102646

Shift + CMD + 3 = full screen capture

Shift + CMD + 4 = capture selected area

Shift + CMD + 4 then press and release spacebar = cursor turns to camera, click on window you want to capture.

Shift + CMD + 5 - capture using screenshot app. (This can also do screen recordings.)

I have put the screenshot app in the menu bar from Control Centre (which is accessed from the icon on top right corner.)

By default, screenshots save to the desktop with the name Screen Shot [date] at [time].

force quit on Mac

https://www.wikihow.com/Force-Quit-an-Application-on-a-Mac

Click outside the problematic app - my test build of OpenSpace in this case - to change focus to another app, then click the Apple Menu > Force Quit ... which gives a choice, to choose the running app we should force quit.

after resetting password for a user, recovery info in Google Workspace

Note to self - even though "no contact information has been added" is seen in the first tab of the user in Google Workspace, the Security tab will have recovery information and 2FA information which also needs to be reset if required.

running OpenSpace on Apple Silicon and modern Intel Macs

As written in the documentation, OpenSpace uses OpenGL double precision floating point operations extensively, and Apple Silicon does not have hardware support for it. Checking if it will downgrade gracefully to software rendering, found that OpenSpace would just crash, with Claude.ai telling me that the crash report 

Crashed Thread:        0  CrBrowserMain  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Thread 0 Crashed:: CrBrowserMain Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0   libsystem_kernel.dylib                   0x190856388 __pthread_kill + 8

1   libsystem_pthread.dylib                  0x19088f848 pthread_kill + 296

2   libsystem_c.dylib                        0x1907989e4 abort + 124

3   libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0ea63e4 glpPrimitiveTypeGetScalarType + 136

4   libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e8af20 glpLLVMLoadVector + 120

5   libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7c8f0 glpLLVMCGLValue + 1160

6   libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e771b0 glpLLVMCGAssign + 112

7   libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7788c glpLLVMCGCommaExpr + 268

8   libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7788c glpLLVMCGCommaExpr + 268

9   libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e771b0 glpLLVMCGAssign + 112

10  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7788c glpLLVMCGCommaExpr + 268

11  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7788c glpLLVMCGCommaExpr + 268

12  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e771b0 glpLLVMCGAssign + 112

13  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7788c glpLLVMCGCommaExpr + 268

14  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7b5f8 glpLLVMCGBlock + 516

15  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e722c8 glpLLVMCGNode + 632

16  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e7b234 glpLLVMCGFunctionDefinition + 2888

17  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e70f30 glpLLVMCGTopLevel + 1444

18  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0e985f8 glpLinkProgram + 10092

19  libGLProgrammability.dylib               0x1f0eb1ea0 ShLink + 208

20  GLEngine                                 0x1f104a3b8 gleLinkProgram + 1140

21  GLEngine                                 0x1f0fc6350 glLinkProgramARB_Exec + 180

22  OpenSpace                                0x1021f8aa4 glbinding::BasicCallHelper<void, unsigned int>::call(glbinding::Function<void, unsigned int> const*, unsigned int&&) + 44

23  OpenSpace                                0x1021f87d0 glbinding::Function<void, unsigned int>::call(unsigned int&) const + 184

24  OpenSpace                                0x1021f3a24 glbinding::Function<void, unsigned int>::operator()(unsigned int&) const + 32

25  OpenSpace                                0x1023470c8 gl::glLinkProgram(unsigned int) + 32

26  OpenSpace                                0x101e5dc2c ghoul::opengl::ProgramObject::linkProgramObject() + 44

27  OpenSpace                                0x101e5e668 ghoul::opengl::ProgramObject::Build(std::__1::basic_string<char, std::__1::char_traits<char>, std::__1::allocator<char>> const&, std::__1::__fs::filesystem::path const&, std::__1::__fs::filesystem::path const&, ghoul::Dictionary const&) + 1456

28  OpenSpace                                0x100a5dbac openspace::RenderEngine::buildRenderProgram(std::__1::basic_string<char, std::__1::char_traits<char>, std::__1::allocator<char>> const&, std::__1::__fs::filesystem::path const&, std::__1::__fs::filesystem::path const&, ghoul::Dictionary) + 316

29  OpenSpace                                0x1016ce084 openspace::globebrowsing::RenderableGlobe::recompileShaders() + 6156

30  OpenSpace                                0x1016cc82c openspace::globebrowsing::RenderableGlobe::initializeGL() + 208

31  OpenSpace                                0x100b47b88 openspace::SceneGraphNode::initializeGL() + 584

32  OpenSpace                                0x100ae4bb0 openspace::Scene::update(openspace::UpdateData const&) + 132

33  OpenSpace                                0x100a5a6d0 openspace::RenderEngine::updateScene() + 196

34  OpenSpace                                0x1007eb428 openspace::OpenSpaceEngine::loadAssets() + 972

35  OpenSpace                                0x1007ed234 openspace::OpenSpaceEngine::preSynchronization() + 156

36  OpenSpace                                0x1004303ac (anonymous namespace)::mainPreSyncFunc() + 80

37  OpenSpace                                0x100ce8b90 sgct::Engine::exec() + 288

38  OpenSpace                                0x10042d170 main + 14684

39  dyld                                     0x1904eeb98 start + 6076

indicates that 

The crash is happening in Apple's OpenGL shader compiler (libGLProgrammability.dylib) when OpenSpace tries to compile shaders for the globe rendering. Look at the stack:

Frame 26-29: OpenSpace is compiling shaders for RenderableGlobe

Frame 19-21: Apple's OpenGL implementation tries to link the shader program

Frame 3: The shader compiler encounters something it can't handle and aborts 

Now, this could possibly be due to some filesystem issues, restrictions due to running OpenSpace from command-line from a sub-folder of my home folder instead of Applications folder, but I got a similar crash when running OpenSpace inside UTM on Ubuntu 24.04 (using the daily build deb file yesterday) if I enable hardware acceleration. 

Unfortunately, mesa on MacOS doesn't seem to enable software rendering - 
brew install mesa

# Set environment variables to use Mesa's software renderer

export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1

export GALLIUM_DRIVER=llvmpipe

# Run OpenSpace

./OpenSpace.app/Contents/MacOS/OpenSpace 

But the same crash is observed. Claude says,

Unfortunately, Mesa on macOS is limited. The Homebrew Mesa package primarily provides: OSMesa (off-screen rendering) and some utilities

But it won't override Apple's OpenGL framework the way it does on Linux. macOS applications are hardcoded to use /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework. 

Then, tried disabling hardware acceleration and running the same OpenSpace deb file on Ubuntu 24.04, and that works. Around 8 fps, and the frame-rate does not seem to improve much beyond 20 fps or so even if we use something like onlyEarth.profile or loading individual assets to the empty profile, etc. But this could be still useful for offline work, validating single-precision builds and so on.

And so now to single-precision builds - I'll try to build for Mac Apple Silicon and see what happens.

Also, maybe I can try building for Intel Macs with these patches - with XCode for MacOS26, many of the incompatibilities and unsupported implementations are now ironed out, so we need far fewer patches. And github now has MacOS26 public runners.

Edit: 11 Jan 2026 - Finally OpenSpace for MacOS - Apple silicon - is up and running. Lots of shader patching, especially a tricky one here - Mac build - crashes when shader is called · Issue #75 · hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage

Cloudflare timeout - how to use admin site without cloudflare

Copy-pasting from an email thread, about a connection timeout Cloudflare error seen by one of our Wordpress site admins - 

The screenshot shows that you were trying to open a WordfenceScan page. Such pages usually take a long time to load, and it is natural for Cloudflare to time out. 

In case those pages don't have any option to email you the results of the scan or such workarounds, you can disable cloudflare for yourself by directly accessing the site, without cloudflare proxying, by editing the hosts file on your computer.

On Windows, you would do this by going to the start menu, and start typing notepad.exe, right click on Notepad, choose Run as Administrator, and open the file

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

(since it is just hosts and not hosts.txt, when using File->open to find it, you must choose the drop-down "All files *. *" option.)

In that file, you can add extra lines at the end,

1.2.3.4 ourserver.org

4.5.6.7 staging.ourserver.org

When you are through with your admin work and if you want to access through cloudflare again, you can comment out each of these lines by adding the # symbol as the first character on those lines. This is optional, you can continue to access without cloudflare also.

Why this solution is better than just disabling cloudflare - this can allow general users to have the snappiness of cloudflare proxying while only admins can access the unproxied direct URL.

(After making changes to the hosts file, you may need to close your browser, open it again, and perhaps re-login for the changes to take effect. Or perhaps restart your computer.)

Xcode update - "Xcode 1.5 not supported"

Copy-pasting an answer from one of the LLMs (I don't remember which one, maybe duck.ai)

The CMake error "Xcode 1.5 not supported" when building on macOS 15.5 indicates a version mismatch between your CMake installation and your Xcode installation.

Understanding the Issue:

• Xcode 1.5 is a very old version of Apple's integrated development environment. It predates many modern macOS features and compiler toolchains.
• macOS 15.5 is a relatively recent operating system. This means it likely requires a much newer version of Xcode and its associated command-line tools to function correctly.
• CMake needs to be able to find and interact with a compatible Xcode installation: to generate build files and compile your project. If CMake detects an unsupported or outdated Xcode version, it will throw this error.

Resolving the Error:

• Update Xcode:

  The most likely solution is to update your Xcode installation to a version compatible with macOS 15.5.

  • Open the Mac App Store and search for "Xcode."
  • Download and install the latest available version.
  • After installation, open Xcode to complete any initial setup and agree to the license agreements.
• Install Xcode Command Line Tools:

  Even if you update Xcode, you might also need to explicitly install or update the Xcode Command Line Tools, as these contain the compilers and other utilities that CMake relies on.

  • Open Terminal and run the following command:

Code

        xcode-select --install

• Follow the on-screen prompts to complete the installation.

• Update CMake: While less likely to be the primary cause, ensuring you have a recent version of CMake is good practice.
  • If you installed CMake via Homebrew:

Code

        brew update
        brew upgrade cmake

• If you installed CMake manually, download the latest version from the official CMake website and follow the installation instructions.

• Verify Xcode Selection: Ensure that your system is pointing to the correct Xcode installation.
  • In Terminal, run:

Code

        xcode-select -p

• This should output the path to your current Xcode installation (e.g., /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer). If it's incorrect or points to an older version, you can set it using:

Code

        sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

(Adjust the path if your Xcode is installed elsewhere).

After performing these steps, try running CMake again to generate your build files. The error should be resolved.

steps to creating an iOS app via wpmobile.app

wpmobile.app creates an app from a wordpress site, and one of our institutions wanted support with uploading such an app to Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

For Apple App Store, the first step would be to enrol into Apple Developer Program

... looks like enrolling into the Apple Developer program is a long-drawn-out process. Currently it says, "You will be sent an email soon." (2 working days). 

How long does it take for Apple to process your Apple Developer Program enrollment? : r/iOSProgramming

didn't get it within 2 working days, I contacted support and asked them to expedite, then it came through.

From https://wpmobile.app/en/help/

needed account / pw of wpmobile dashboard 

then to create app specific password for the apple account which has the Apple developer account

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102654

Where to find my Team Name and Team ID

Log in to your account at https://developer.apple.com/account/
Go to Subscription details
The Team ID is the team identifier
The Team Name is displayed at the top right of the page (your first and last name if it’s an Individual account).

Next, the 2FA will come on the iOS device (iPad in my case) when trying to log in to the apple account via the wpmobile.app dashboard. After a few minutes, the dashboard shows App generated with success.... The build will be pushed to your Apple account in few minutes. Download the certificate file for notification and upload it on the WPMobile plugin > Notifications > Settings > iOS. (on the wordpress site).

It seems XCode (the platform used to compile Mac and iOS apps) will push the build to our App Store Connect account. ... the app is seen there....  need to go through the process of editing the description etc and related online paperwork, and then send for review. appstoreconnect.apple.com/apps

In order to install the app before reaching the app store, we need to invite that particular user using testflight - and we need to invite using the Apple id which is associated with that particular iOS device. 

Edit - In our case, the app review said that since this app was supposed to be used by the members of a particular organization, they would not approve public distribution. So, applied for unlisted distribution (where searching the app store will not find it, but we can link to the app from our website). And that was approved.

Initially submitted Dec 5
Rejected Dec 6
Applied for unlisted on Dec 8
Approved for unlisted distribution Dec 11
Again sent for review with this approval Dec 11
(respond to App Review directly in the App Review section in App Store Connect)
Review passed Dec 12
(available for distribution at apps.apple.com)

building an iOS app using github actions

 Just like building Android apps on github actions, we can build iOS apps too - https://www.andrewhoog.com/posts/how-to-build-an-ios-app-with-github-actions-2023/

But of course, the Apple Developer program is $99 per year.

tuning lossless ffmpeg command-line with Claude

The ffmpeg command

ffmpeg -y -r 30 -i in_%05d.jpg -i ../NormPeak-6dBENG.wav -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset lossless -global_quality 18 -pix_fmt nv12 -c:a aac -b:a 192k ~/Downloads/4kframes.mp4

gives the following warnings - 

[aist#1:0/pcm_s16le @ 0x59f7e96fbfc0] Guessed Channel Layout: stereo
....

[in#0/image2 @ 0x59f7e96f4e40] Thread message queue blocking; consider raising the thread_queue_size option (current value: 8)

[swscaler @ 0x59f7e97ae500] deprecated pixel format used, make sure you did set range correctly

    Last message repeated 3 times

[hevc_nvenc @ 0x59f7e9701880] The selected preset is deprecated. Use p1 to p7 + -tune or fast/medium/slow.

[hevc_nvenc @ 0x59f7e9701880] Using global_quality with nvenc is deprecated. Use qp instead. 

Claude's suggestion to fix - 

ffmpeg -y -r 30 -i in_%05d.jpg -thread_queue_size 512 -i ../NormPeak-6dBENG.wav -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset p7 -tune lossless -cq 0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -b:a 192k ~/Downloads/4kframes.mp4

MIDI-mapper for OpenSpace (or any javascript API)

With the help of Claude.ai, I've put up a MIDI-mapper for OpenSpace at OpenSpace MIDI mapping.

The readme.txt lists the prompts used, and usage. Copy-pasting from my post on OpenSpace Slack: With this, we can control OpenSpace using any MIDI control surface or MIDI instrument. Interesting effects like speeding up time for one (MIDI) violin string, slowing down for another string, etc can be thought of.

I've used our KORG nanokontrol - earlier version of this product - to do the development and testing.

By adding suitable functions, this could be extended to call any javascript API using a MIDI controller or MIDI instrument.

Bosch Wiper blades for Hyundai Santro

 PB helped me out with the following info:

Attached is the wiper blades size for Santro
List shows 20" on Driver side and 16" on Passenger side

TYPES OF BOSCH WIPERS
Bosch Clear Advantage — a flat-blade / beam-style wiper. Designed to give uniform pressure across the windshield, better contact, smoother wiping, and more streak-free clearing (especially good in heavy rain or at high speeds).

Bosch ECO (conventional / bracket-frame wiper) — a more traditional wiper with a metal (or mixed) frame + rubber blade. Usually more budget-friendly and covers basic everyday wiping needs.

AMAZON LINKS
Bosch Clear Advantage 16"

Bosch Clear Advantage 20"

Bosch ECO 16"

Bosch ECO 20"

I have been using Bosch ECO, and it works well. 

Will try Clear Advantage next time.

And, found that there were video guides on how to fit the blades, in the amazon listings. Also available on youtube, at Bosch ECO and Clear Advantage.

On my (new) Santro, the 20" blade seems a bit short. Perhaps I'll try the 21-inch blade next time.

hardware accelerated video encoding on Intel Iris graphics has issues with jpg frames input - resolved

 From ChatGPT,

ffmpeg -i filename_%05d.jpg -c:v hevc_qsv -preset veryslow -global_quality 0 output_lossless_qsv.mkv

For 4K (4096x4096) files, this was running at around 8 fps on my i5 laptop, as against 2 fps for non-accelerated libx264. The mistake I made earlier was to put the preset before the -c:v.

• -i must come before input options end.
• All encoder options (-c:v, -preset, -global_quality) must be placed after the input and before the output filename.

If you place -preset before -i filename_%05d.jpg, FFmpeg thinks it’s a decoder option, causing the error:

Codec AVOption preset ... is not a decoding option.

With audio, we would need something like

ffmpeg -r 30 -i KG-LS_%05d.jpg -i audio.wav \

  -c:v hevc_qsv -preset veryslow -global_quality 0 \

  -c:a aac -b:a 192k \

  -shortest \

  output_with_audio.mkv

# or on Windows,

ffmpeg -r 30 -i KG-LS_%05d.jpg -i audio.wav ^

  -c:v hevc_qsv -preset veryslow -global_quality 0 ^

  -c:a aac -b:a 192k ^

  -shortest ^

  output_with_audio.mkv

Edit - this produces a low-bitrate video with colour issues on VLC (and perhaps on other players. The python front-end presets, like the command below, might be useful - 

FFmpeg command to copy-paste:

ffmpeg -y -i in_%05d.jpg -i map_x_directp2.pgm -i map_y_directp2.pgm -i weight_alpha_mask.png -filter_complex '[0:v][1:v][2:v]remap[remapped];[3:v]format=gray,scale=4096:4096,colorchannelmixer=rr=1:gg=1:bb=1[mask_rgb];[remapped][mask_rgb]blend=all_mode=multiply[blended];[blended]scale=3840:2160,setsar=1,setdar=16/9,format=yuv420p[out]' -map '[out]' -map '0:a?' -c:v hevc_qsv -preset fast -crf 23 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -b:a 128k D:/out-W4K.mp4

So, without warping, that would be - 

ffmpeg -y -i in_%05d.jpg -i audio.wav -c:v hevc_qsv -preset veryslow -crf 1 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -b:a 128k out.mp4

But unfortunately, even the warping command produces a low bitrate video with colour issues. Green tinted instead of purple tinted for the earlier videos. Even changing the codec to libx265 did not help. So, some incompatibility in the input frames is suspected. Maybe I'll just use avidemux instead instead of trying to troubleshoot.

From ffmpeg -h

Getting help:

    -h      -- print basic options

    -h long -- print more options

    -h full -- print all options (including all format and codec specific options, very long)

    -h type=name -- print all options for the named decoder/encoder/demuxer/muxer/filter/bsf/protocol

ffmpeg -h encoder=hevc_qsv
....

  -preset            <int>        E..V....... (from 1 to 7) (default medium)

     veryfast        7            E..V.......

     faster          6            E..V.......

     fast            5            E..V.......

     medium          4            E..V.......

     slow            3            E..V.......

     slower          2            E..V.......

     veryslow        1            E..V.......

....

  -profile           <int>        E..V....... (from 0 to INT_MAX) (default unknown)

     unknown         0            E..V.......

     main            1            E..V.......

     main10          2            E..V.......

     mainsp          3            E..V.......

     rext            4            E..V.......

     scc             9            E..V.......

    

Claude.ai pointed out that the colour tint issues are probably due to wrong pixel format, and the low bitrate is probably because "QSV's CRF implementation is unreliable". So, suggestion is to use nv12 pixel format and global_quality instead of CRF, where quality of 15-20 is near lossless. Or force a high bitrate if that doesn't work - -b:v 20M -maxrate 25M

ffmpeg -y -r 30 -i in_%05d.jpg -i audio.wav -c:v hevc_qsv -preset veryslow -global_quality 18 -pix_fmt nv12 -c:a aac -b:a 128k out.mp4

And that solved the problem.

No colour tint, hevc_qsv encoder resulted in a 25 Mbps video, libx265 encoder with the same preset and quality settings but without the -pix_fmt nv12 resulted in a 7 Mbps video, both of good quality.

Brevo transactional emails and DNS setup.

After email discussions spanning a few days, I set up google workspace accounts and added a couple of subdomains to google workspace - Brevo's setup includes CNAMEs for DMARC and DKIM records in the format subdomain1.ourdomain.org is a cname for b2.vsubdomain1-ourdomain-org.dkim.brevo.com and so on. 

So, set up email1@subdomain1.ourdomain.org as an alias for email1@ourdomain.org and so on, pointing the MX records to google workspace, so that bounce messages would be able to go somewhere. The reason I'm just not creating email ids like email1@subdomain1.ourdomain.org without aliases is because Brevo uses DMARC (a method of email server authentication) which would cause emails sent from google's servers to be marked as spam if we set Brevo to send authenticated emails from those email ids.

There were lots of back-and-forth emails saying emails are not being delivered. Finally, the dev team set up the domain authentication once again (which they had not done for subdomain2.ourdomain.org), sent me the details of the cnames & txt records to be added, I added them, and then all was OK.  

strategies for dealing with Google Workspace account filling up

Copy-pasting from an email:

Here are some ways to clear up space in <google workspace account>

1. From https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/14300711

You can go to drive.google.com/drive/quota. There, you see how much storage you use in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. It also lists the largest files in your google drive, which you can delete if not needed.

2. If GMail is the service which is using up most of the storage, then you can consider deleting files based on how large the attachments are, or based on how old the email is.

To find the emails with attachments greater than 10 MB, enter the following in the search box at the top of your GMail - 

has:attachment larger:10Mb

and hit Enter. 

Similarly for attachments greater than 5 MB etc. 

(You can also use the advanced search link on top of your GMail to achieve this.)

For finding emails older than a particular date, there is a drop-down, "Any time" just below the search email box. To find all emails earlier than 2015, say, you can first clear the "Search mail" box and then choose the "Any time" drop-down, and choose custom, like the screenshot below.

Using these search methods, you can try to delete unwanted emails, spam, internet forwards, outdated correspondence, and so on.

Once emails are deleted, you will then need to go to "Trash" and choose "Empty Trash Now" if you want the space savings to be applied ASAP. Even after this, Google might take some time before the % used decreases.

In case you are not able to free up space in this way, and need to back up old correspondence, here are some ways of doing that, by forwarding to another account, or by using a product called mailstore, etc, details in the link below - 

https://hnsws.blogspot.com/2019/04/mailstore-for-achiving-emails.html

Send user digests - Moodle task fails - sends hundreds of emails to Admin

On one of our Moodle instances, emails are supposed to go out through Google Workspace using Google SMTP servers. That being the case, we can't send an unlimited number of emails. So, email notifications had been globally - Site Administration > General > Messaging > Notification settings, which is located at server.url/admin/message.php

When there was a request to allow emails of a particular type to particular users, after enabling the email notification plugin at the above page, the next time a forum post was made, there was a cascade of Send user digests failed and Send user notifications failed messages.

For the immediate failure messages to stop, deleted all the adhoc tasks from mod_forum,

delete from prefix_task_adhoc  where prefix_task_adhoc.component = 'mod_forum';

I had previously set emailstop=1 on the database users table, for all users except the handful which should receive emails. Possibly the reason for the failures was that forcesubscribe=1 was set for many forums for many / all users. 

So, now I set it to zero (email disabled) for all forums on this instance, with

update prefix_forum set prefix_forum.forcesubscribe = 0;

and also updated the defaults,

Site administration > plugins > plugins overview > (chose mod_forum) > settings >

site.url/admin/settings.php?section=modsettingforum

and set subscription mode = subscription disabled for both defaults,

forum_announcementsubscription

and

forum_subscription 

Also, went to prefix_forum_subscriptions table and deleted all entries - which I suppose would be various users' subscriptions to various forums.

Hopefully this is sufficient to prevent the hundreds of failed send notification tasks. 

Update 13 Nov - Again received hundreds of task failed messages. Asked Claude.ai, and made the following changes as suggested, in addition to the above.

# Individual discussion subscriptions might still exist
DELETE FROM prefix_forum_digests;
DELETE FROM prefix_forum_discussion_subs;

UPDATE prefix_user SET maildigest = 0 WHERE emailstop = 1;

# Users might be getting auto-subscribed when they post
UPDATE prefix_forum SET trackingtype = 0;

TRUNCATE prefix_forum_track_prefs;

run 'Issue Certificates' task more often

There was a request for setting up email notifications for one Moodle course, a particular user to be notified when any user completes that course. I had earlier set many tasks to run less often due to our server being overloaded. 'Issue Certificates' task was one of them, especially since it needed some optimizations as per this thread. Checking the logs, I could see that issue certificates was taking between 30 and 120 seconds - so, increased the scheduled task cron frequency from once a day to once an hour, for two of our Moodle instances. 

Set to run every hour at the 30th minute (8:30, 9:30 etc) on one instance and at the 45th minute (8:45, 9:45, etc) on the other instance, in Site Administration > Server > Tasks > Scheduled tasks > \mod_customcert\task\issue_certificates_task 

installing python modules on Linux and Windows

For trying out LLM-generated python scripts for "warping", (still works in progress)

https://github.com/hn-88/python-ffmpeg-warp

https://github.com/hn-88/realtime_video_warper

https://github.com/hn-88/realtime_warp_c

On Windows, various python modules can be installed with 

pip install modulename

where we sometimes have to do an internet search to find the exact modulename. 

Eg. How to Fix "ModuleNotFoundError: No Module Named 'PIL'" in Python

pip install pillow

On my Linux Mint machine, where I've installed python using the default deb package with apt, 

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'imageio'

and when trying to install with pip,

× This environment is externally managed

╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install

    python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to

    install.

sudo apt install python3-imageio # this worked.

proctoring plugins for Moodle

Copy-pasting from an email exchange:

 ... would require us to conduct a proctored test. Moodle has several plug-ins. They are promoting 'Proctoring for Moodle'. I also find Quilgo to be good. Can we install these 2 plug-ins (and any other plug-in recommended by you) in (our dev server) for us to test them out?

Here is a list of proctoring plugins for Moodle, probably you would have seen this already. https://moodle.org/plugins/?q=proctor

'Proctoring for Moodle' is free software, but if you want to use the automated face-recognition, they ask us to contact them. "Moodle Proctoring plugin is a Quiz Access plugin designed to capture a user's picture via webcam to identify the individual attempting the Moodle quiz."

A demo is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcrE1OIj6_Q

In that video, it is mentioned that features like capturing student's screen for "suspicious behaviour" like copy-pasting into Google etc, requires Proctoring Pro.

But the "purchase" Proctoring Pro link seems to be broken. -

https://proctoring.elearning23.com/ 
https://elearning23.com/moodle-proctoring-pro-details/
https://elearning23.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Proctoring-Pro-v2.0.0-User-Manual.pdf

(page not found etc)

"Quilgo® Proctoring for Moodle is a highly scalable plugin that allows you to include a camera, screen, track activity, and receive reports on test completion. Online assessments become easier and more reliable. Easy to use, no API customization or maintenance required." But the free plan is only for 20 tests, and the cheapest paid plan is $1200 for a year or $140 for a month.

https://quilgo.com/products/moodle 

A demo/tutorial is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pwwImIprSM

I have installed 'Proctoring for Moodle' and "Quilgo® Proctoring for Moodle" on (our dev server) now.

can QUIC be added to our dot net app

There was a request from the developers asking if we can enable QUIC support to the back end of an app for which we had disabled QUIC at cloudflare to prevent issues.

My reply was,

QUIC on Apache web server (which we use as the reverse proxy for dotnet) is experimental. 

https://www.linuxbash.sh/post/configuring-http3-quic-with-apache

We would have to use the experimental module, or shift to another web server like nginx etc. 

Since migration to a different web server is not simple, and the QUIC module is experimental on Apache, I would recommend against enabling QUIC for now. 

Also, QUIC security headaches for admins - 

https://www.networkstraining.com/what-is-quic-protocol/