Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 June 9

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June 9

webcamera

how do make my webcamera work again after formatting the previous os — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.21.125.190 (talk) 08:26, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

You probably need to install a driver. Possibly the web cam came with a disk with the software, or maybe the manufacturer has a web site with a driver available for you operating system. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:54, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Get the required driver from trusted download source, if not installed automatically. See the device manager, when using Windows. When completed, in the video software, select the camera as the video source of your choice. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 13:04, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

We can give better answers if we know which camera and which operating system you mean. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 14:35, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Help on bot

Hello, I do not know programming and I want to control a bot. What can I do? Can someone else create a bot for me That tells users that their added data needs citation? a bot with any function will actually do. --VarunFEB2003 (talk) 08:29, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

If you are looking for a bot to use on Wikipedia, the right place to ask is WP:BOTREQUESTS. If you are talking about bots in general, you probably need to be more specific about what you want. Dragons flight (talk) 09:57, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

An editor should choose who gets such a message so it doesn't sound suited for a bot. You can manually post one of the messages at Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace#Facts or {{subst:Uw-refimprove}}. Twinkle can make it more efficient to post such messages. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:30, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia, User:VarunFEB2003! You're welcome to contribute to our encyclopedia project!

You should carefully review Wikipedia's policies on automated editing (bots), Wikipedia:Bots.

If you are not familiar with the design and operation of a bot, you should practice by learning some basic programming and learning how MediaWiki operates. Install and operate your own wiki for a while, learn how it works, and test your bot on that server before trying to launch it on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a very large and complex public-facing website; it is more technically challenging and there are more rules about how your bot must behave; it's a terrible place to experiment and learn if you aren't already an expert wiki bot operator. It's sort of like asking for permission to drive a large truck on the highway, except you do not yet know how to drive a small car in a parking lot. You ought to start small, for your own sake! You'll learn a lot more and you'll become prepared for future endeavors.

There is great technical documentation on the Installation Guide to help you set up your own wiki for experimentation!

Nimur (talk) 15:47, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

@Nimur: Have you seen Bitnami's MediaWiki stack? It is awesome for lazy potatoes like myself. It makes installing MediaWiki very quick and easy. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 16:36, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

Neat! I install MediaWiki every once in a while... and when I do, I usually need it for something "special," so I'll grab the latest source... if I'm feeling lazy and need a wiki in a hurry, I just flip a switch in the configuration UI and turn on my computer's built-in Wiki software. It ain't MediaWiki, but it's fast, easy, and works with LDAP out of the box! On the whole, I am not sure that my workflow(s) work well for novice users, but the interested enthusiast can build an industrial-strength httpd server from source too, if they're so inclined! Nimur (talk) 17:15, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

@Nimur: Thanks Nimur a lot — Preceding unsigned comment added by VarunFEB2003 (talk • contribs)

Odd default in audacity save dialog

I recently installed Audacity on my Fedora Linux machine (using DNF to obtain it) and have been using it to do some simple sound editing, using LAME to convert between MP3 and WAV files. For example, I might do:

 lame --decode foo1.mp3 foo1.wav
 lame --decode foo2.mp3 foo2.wav
 audacity foo1.wav foo2.wav
   (in audacity, export files as foonew1.wav and foonew2.wav)
 lame foonew1.wav foonew1.mp3
 lame foonew2.wav foonew2.mp3

For the export step, I use File -> Export Audio, or equivalently Control-Shift-E. My question is about the Export Audio dialog that pops up at this point. In the "Type" pulldown it shows "WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit PCM", the same as the file I read in, but in the space for the file "Name", it always shows foo1.aiff by default and I have to change the aiff manually to wav every time. This even happens for multiple files opened in the same session of Audacity as shown above.

Just to see what happened, I once tried exporting a file without changing the name field, and it popped up a warning dialog saying that for a WAV file the ending of the name is normally .wav and since some programs depend on this my file might not be usable. That makes sense, but if it knows that .aiff is the wrong ending, why is it defaulting to it? I have never used it with an actual AIFF (Apple audio) file, and this effect did not happen when I used Audacity on a previous Linux computer several years ago.

It's a trivial nuisance, but I'd like to understand why it's happening.

--69.159.60.83 (talk) 18:06, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

You can install audacity-freeworld which has MP3 support compiled in, from rpmfusion, then you won't have to decode by hand. That said, I have the *.aiff thing, too, which is annoying, but I don't know why Audacity does that. Asmrulz (talk) 00:26, 10 June 2016 (UTC)