Auto-skip for YouTube

The new UserScript YouTube Auto-Player auto-skips X seconds at the start of a YouTube video. Possibly kind of useful, for those who habitually skip the first 90 seconds or so, as soon as a YouTube video starts playing. Just input your own numbers.

How to remove the “Cashback” alert in Opera

How to turn off the invasive third-party “Cashback” alert in the desktop Opera Web browser.

1. First, is it enabled for your version of Opera? Visit eBay or similar, and if you see this invasive element-box adjacent to the Address Bar, then you have it…

2. Top Menu (left hand side) | Settings | Privacy & Security — and then in the Settings search-box search for cashb or cashback

3. You should then be shown the Settings panel section for an unknown service called “Dify”. It appears to be enabled by default. Toggle its button to “off” and then exit Settings.

4. Reload the eBay page and the noxious item should now be gone. The “off” setting should persist for future browser version upgrades.

I assume the process is much the same for a mobile version of Opera.

OpenAI’s Whisper

OpenAI’s Whisper can transcribe spoken audio from English and 96 other languages, and can then translate to English text. Not yet a public service, but it can’t be long now — as there’s a new technical paper and open source-code under an MIT licence.

It appears that these are the languages it performs best with…

I found specialists independently saying, elsewhere, that 8% is a “quite decent” score for auto-translation from clearly enunciated and well-recorded audio. So above you have the range roughly either side of that 8% figure. Of course the average lecture-hall recording or iffy phone+skype podcast interview may do significantly worse.

But generally the makers hail the “high accuracy and ease of use”, compared to other methods.

History of Art Bibliography

History of Art Bibliography, new and open-access. 1910-2007. Tests show an impressive range in the results, straying into industrial archaeology in one test re: ceramics. Although a search for “Tolkien” shows only six results, indicating that back-filling is still needed in places. I’d have expected at least 50 results for books on Tolkien’s own visual art alone. The site’s speed is good, the results instantly legible and skim-able.