The helper that was never called, and a release that shipped the wrong build

The helper that was never called

Snatch — the video downloader — had its first public release an hour after last week's post went up. 1.0.0, and then 1.0.1 the next morning, because most YouTube videos would not play at all: the copy of yt-dlp inside it was five months old and YouTube had moved on. One video in five played before that; five in five after.

Then the interesting one.

YouTube makes a downloader solve a small puzzle before it will hand over the picture qualities. Snatch ships a little program to solve that puzzle — one of the things 1.0.0 was pleased with, because the alternative was telling you to go and install Node.js first. Snatch had been naming that program in a way yt-dlp could not read. So it was never used. Not on any release, not on any platform, not once.

What you saw was a video that appeared to have sound-only versions and nothing else, or one that refused outright with "Requested format is not available". On the video that was reported: 4 entries before, 37 after, 25 of them picture qualities.

A separate cause did the same thing to different videos. Saved cookies made YouTube hand back sound-only versions only; Snatch now tries again without them, keeps whichever answer actually has picture in it, and says so in the status line. On that video, 4 entries became 53.

Snatch can also update its own downloader now. When YouTube changes something, yt-dlp has to change with it, and until now that meant waiting for a whole new Snatch on three platforms. It offers to fetch a newer one at startup, keeps the copy it shipped with, throws away a download that arrives broken, and has a "Revert to bundled" button if a new one misbehaves. Nothing downloads without you saying yes — and unlike the old route, nothing asks for your password or touches anything outside Snatch's own folder.

Smaller, but it had been annoying me: every text box in the app now has a right-click menu with Cut, Copy and Paste. And the picture library Snatch uses to show video thumbnails had 12 published security advisories against the version in 1.0.0 and 1.0.1. All 12 are fixed in the version bundled now.

A release that shipped the wrong build

Last week I wrote that DOOM Ants 0.7.1 had gone out. It had. It was the wrong file.

The release tool decided a file was "already built" by looking for something with the right name — and the name carries only the version number. So a test build made earlier in the day counted, and that is what got uploaded: both files, Windows and Linux, made before the fix the release was cut for. The tag was right, the notes were right, the tests passed. Nothing anywhere looks at the file that actually goes out.

It was live for about ninety seconds before I spotted it and replaced both files by hand, so I doubt anybody got the wrong one — but that is luck, not a process. I went back afterwards and checked every earlier release one at a time, by opening the shipped binary and looking for something only that version's code contains. All of them are clean; 0.7.1 is the only one this happened to. Each build is now stamped with the commit it came from and only reused for that exact commit, and after publishing, the tool downloads what it just uploaded and compares it byte for byte with what it built.

Two more holes in the same tool closed with it. A release cut with an empty changelog section used to publish with a completely blank description — it now stops and names the section. And the version number used to move in the changelog and the README on only one of the tool's two routes, so a hand-written changelog left the README still advertising the previous version. Everything moves together now, and it refuses to tag while anything lags.

The other DOOM Ants story this week is about a fix that worked and broke something anyway. A plain wall was glowing when it should not have been. The fix stopped it — and quietly took most of the glow off the things that are supposed to glow, because the brightness dial had been set against the old arithmetic and nobody re-set it. Nothing caught it, because the check confirmed the wall had stopped glowing and never asked whether the lamps still did. What caught it was me looking at the screen and saying I could not see the bloom. It is measured and re-set now: the light strip in the test spot reads 6.54 against 7.03 before any of this started, and the plain wall stays at zero.

Fourteen out of fourteen

Last week Games Hub had a legibility switch — the one that makes a game's board and its words bigger — and two of its fourteen games answered it. I said there would be no release until more of them did.

0.4.0 went out that evening with those two, and then the other twelve followed over the week. Chess, Reversi, Draughts, Minesweeper, Solitaire, Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid, Hearts, Snake, 2048 and Pinball all answer it now. Nine of them previously drew no words at all on the board itself — not the score, not whose turn it was, not "game over" — and said it only in the strip along the bottom. They say it on the board now. Chess grew its coordinates, Minesweeper its neighbour counts, 2048 its tile numbers, Pinball its score, and Hearts names the suit that was led. 0.4.0 is still the download; the other twelve are written and waiting for the next one.

Canasta had a heavy week of its own. The version the family actually plays now has its own rules: the round ends when you throw your last card away rather than by laying your hand down, a completed canasta squares up and lies across the team's red threes so the stack can be counted by its edges, the card that freezes the pack lies as a T, and reaching the target score is how you win — so a hand that carries both sides past it is a draw, and the table says so instead of naming a winner. Classic Canasta is untouched by all of it.

The Expert computer got harder to cheat, too. Throwing away a card that several people have already discarded is usually safe. A crafty player exploits that by feeding the same rank into the pile one card at a time so it looks safe. The pack now remembers who threw each card, and Expert counts how many different players let a rank go rather than how many cards are sitting there. Old saved games still load; they just do not carry who threw what.

And the test suite can now take a picture of the app without opening a window, which is how a layout gets checked without a person looking at it.

A way back into your own vault

finbreak 0.1.22 went out last Wednesday with a tidy fix — on a credit-card statement running over several pages, "Continued on next page" was being tacked onto the end of the transaction above each page break. Amounts were never affected; the descriptions were messy.

The bigger one is not released yet. Forgetting your master password has always meant losing everything in your vault, which is correct and also terrifying. finbreak now shows you a recovery code once, when the vault is created: keep it somewhere safe and it can unlock the vault and let you choose a new password. You can decline it, or replace or remove it later. finbreak keeps no copy — losing both the code and the password is still unrecoverable, because anything else would mean someone else could get in too. Existing vaults are upgraded the next time you unlock them, with a copy taken first and only removed once the upgrade has been checked.

Importing a spreadsheet also got less tedious: finbreak now reads the file's own column headings and fills in the mapping for you — Date, Description, Amount, and the usual variations like Transaction Date, Narrative, Withdrawal and Deposit. Everything it guesses stays visible and changeable before you import.

A new project: Pressless

Pressless is on the site this week, marked as coming soon.

Most people who want a website of their own end up renting one: a monthly fee, somebody else's editor, and the box changes under you. The free route is to publish plain files to a service like GitHub Pages, which costs nothing and is fast — and expects you to be technical. Pressless is that free route with the technical part taken away. It runs on your own computer, opens in your normal browser, and publishes with one button. Every entry stays an ordinary text file in an ordinary folder, readable with Pressless deleted or never installed.

It is very early — there is nothing to download. What exists is the styling language everything else will render through, and it was proved against a real twelve-year archive: 556 entries come out byte-for-byte identical to what produces that site today, so nothing moving across loses a line of a poem.

Short notes

OneUp — no release, but a lot of work behind one. The window has been reworked so there is one obvious thing to press: two buttons in the title bar instead of four, "Run selected updates" first, Stop taking the place of Check while a run is going, and clicking anywhere on a task's row turning it on or off rather than only the small switch at the end. Eight colour themes to pick from. Sixteen controls that showed nothing at all when you tabbed to them now show where you are, in every theme. And if you pressed "Show download size" before starting an update, OneUp asked for your password twice — sometimes with both boxes on screen at once — because it was running the whole updater twice over. Once now.

Ants Terminal 0.7.106 is out, with the usual pile of work under the floorboards. The one I liked: a new check reads which work was finished since the last release and lists anything that never made it into the release notes. The first run found 19 things that had shipped without being written down, one of them closed on the very day of the release it was missing from. The check that already existed only looked the other way round — that everything claimed had really shipped — so this half was invisible.

Local Web Server Manager — each project can now open in its own browser, picked from the ones already installed, so one project can be Firefox and another Chrome. You can hide a project you never use and bring it back from the View menu. The window reopens at the size you left it, the title bar says which version is running, Enter in the filter box jumps to the first match, and your whole project list and settings can be exported to a file and imported on another machine. Underneath, a run of safety work: a settings file that cannot be read is no longer saved over, a launcher that points outside its own project is refused, and stopping a project holds its slot for the whole stop rather than letting something else grab it midway. Still no download.

LottoTracker — the thing it was actually for, finally. Two draws before a ticket runs out, the tray tells you once, naming the game and the date of the last draw so you know what to go and buy. It reads the calendar and never the results, so it is right with the machine offline and the archive missing. Checked against every ticket that has already finished, the projected final draw matched the real one 257 times out of 260 and was a day out in the other three. The bound that mattered most was the one that looks like decoration: a ticket with no draws left is never warned about, and without that rule the first run against the real data fired 559 notices. The page now also shows the numbers you chose beside the numbers that were drawn, with the PowerBall or bonus ball marked apart rather than reading as a sixth number.

Vestige 0.1.70 is out — it carries last week's light-shaft fix and a long backlog of engine work that had never been written into a dated section. Since then the light shafts got the performance check they never had, and it promptly caught something: on a GTX 1050 at Medium, the effect takes 1716 microseconds against a budget of 1750, and goes over on two runs out of six. The budget was derived from what a 60-frames-a-second frame can afford rather than fitted to a machine, which is the only reason a measurement could fail it. Recorded rather than papered over.

Album Builder now accepts .aac, .aiff, .aif, .oga and .wma alongside what it already read, and the documented command for running it has been corrected — it never worked as written.

What changed on the site

Quite a lot, and most of it is about reading things here rather than elsewhere.

Every project now has a hand-written About section instead of its GitHub README. A README opens with badges and build flags, buries what the thing actually does, and changed the shape of the page whenever the repository was edited. And every project with releases now has its whole changelog on this site — every version, newest first, with a link you can point at a single release. "What's new" goes there now instead of sending you to GitHub. Where a release was cut with no notes at all — 24 of 180 here, including all 11 of OneUp's — the notes come from the project's own changelog file instead of the page reading "shipped without written notes" over and over.

Every download button now starts a file. Five of the thirty-one used to land you on a GitHub page and leave you to work out what to click; those five are projects with no packaged build yet, and they now hand you the source archive directly, which is what their instructions tell you to use anyway.

And the site has analytics now, which needs saying plainly. Nothing loads until you press Accept on the bar at the bottom — no script, no cookie, no request to Google at all. Declining is remembered and never asked again, and the choice is kept in your browser's own storage rather than in a cookie, because a cookie recording that you refused cookies is its own punchline. There is a /privacy/ page that says what happens in English, and the build refuses to publish if the code and that page stop agreeing.

New downloads this week: Snatch 1.0.1 (Windows, Linux and macOS), Games Hub 0.4.0, finbreak 0.1.22, Vestige 0.1.70 and Ants Terminal 0.7.106. Pressless joins the list, marked coming soon.