Pastebin As a Media Host

agentd00nut — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 21:59:33 +0000

Summary

After purchasing a pastebin pro account a few months ago during a sale for relatively cheap I tried to see what I could use it for.

I discovered that by sending the raw data of a media file through their API the raw page of that bin would properly display! You'll need at least a free account so you can get a dev key from their api pages.

This is interesting because using the web interface to paste a media file doesn't work!

I've made a barebones php script that lets you play with this, there's a lot to be desired but it should work enough to let you try to upload your own images. Just remember paste bins size limits are pretty small if you don't have a pro account!

agentd00nut / pasteStore

Barebones CLI php script to upload to pastebin.

pasteStore

Easily send files, including images and most media types, to pastebin.

Setup

Get your developer key from the api pages and save it into the devKey file.

If you want to make private posts do the same but for your user key and save it into the userKey file.

Use

Passing data in from a pipe sets a random name and the contents to STDIN. cat myImage.jpg | pasteStore.php

Passing data in from a pipe with an arg sets the paste name to the arg and the contents to STDIN. cat myImage.webm | pasteStore.php thisIsMyCoolPaste

Passing just an arg treats the argument as the path to a file and pulls its contents. pasteStore.php myImage.mp4

Manually edit the code to change if its uploading as private or if its going to expire.

Better yet, write some argument handling and make a pull request!

View on GitHub

Examples

For images, gifs, and webms you can visit the links directly and they work. For .mp4, .webp, and others you need to embed them into a webpage for them to work.

I only tried png and jpg's. I'm sure nearly any common image format would work.
PNG

GIF

webm

mp4 and others

.mp4, .webp, and other video formats don't work directly. Instead I found you need to wrap them in video elements and set the source like this...

<video width="320" height="240" controls>
    <source src="https://pastebin.com/raw/exQT7F6z" type="video/mp4">
/video>

Thoughts

Is this useful? Sorta! I like the idea of being able to upload a whole bunch of my images on a server I don't pay bandwidth on!

It's much less useful if you don't have a pro account since you have a 500kb max upload size.

You could do something goofy though like pool a few peoples pro accounts together and host one of those image storage sites that, on the backend, just links to unlisted paste bin posts.

Maybe you could write a web player that seamlessly plays all the videos in a list, and then divide bigger files into 10mb chunks and host large videos right off pastebin.

For now It's mostly just interesting and a decent way to quickly share an image with someone. I think if pastebin adds support for API uploading into folders it could become much more useful.

Finding the "best" Camera Settings for Rocket League.

agentd00nut — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 19:01:35 +0000

By pulling the camera settings from 150,000 replays and only considering the settings of the team that won we can pretend to have found the "best" configuration.

Red bars indicate default camera settings.
0 is invalid data but i left it in because why not.

Graphs showing the wins per configuration per option.

About the Data

SunlessKhan on youtube put out a video for https://ballchasing.com/ recently which is a site that lets users upload replays from rocketleague. It provides a pretty awesome way to view the replay in your browser, but also provides a ton of analytics, stats, and info about the match.

Camera settings always seem to be an interesting debate in the community. So I decided to find out what settings most people are using.

Getting the Data

I'll be honest, i was going to write out what i did but it actually turned out to not be very interesting. It boiled down to.

Use css selectors to select the data you want.
You can use selectors to get links to the pages that contain the data you want, and to get the links to paginate to the next page. This is especially useful for websites that don't have simple pagination urls.
Use node and cheerio. Node makes it easy to scrape asynchronously while.
Use timers or timeout to be nice to the server.
Sometimes it's easier to output messy data and clean it up with things like sed and tr.

Here's the tool I used... it's pretty poorly written by me about a year ago and there's no comments in the code itself and it almost always mostly works.

agentd00nut / css_scraper

Simplify web scraping through css selectors.

Css_scraper

Simplify web scraping through css selectors.

Easily scrape links, text, and files from a single page by specifying multiple selectors for each data type.

Combine the output to easily read the results.

Dump raw output for easy processing with other tools or to disk.

Scrape multiple pages by specifying a next link selector and how many pages to scrape

Scrape many pages by specifying a next page selector.

Control what page to start scraping on.

Specify load timeouts.

Use sleep intervals to wait before getting the next page.

Specify prefix text to add to links or file src's

Scrape multiple pages by specifying how a url paginates

Specify custom delimiters for output

italics are soon to be features.

Don't be a jerk

Obviously use discretion when using anything that scrapes data from web pages It's your fault if you get your ip banned from a site you like or…

View on GitHub

The real power is that you can combine the -n next pagination selector with the -d depth selector.

The depth selector will apply all your -t -f -l selectors to every link it finds.
The next pagination selector will follow the link it finds to get to the next page.
Use -p to paginate only a certain number of times.

You'll likely want to use the -r to get non json styled output.

Making the graphs

Again this ended up not being very interesting. I just used matplotlib in python to increment a counter in a dictionary where they key was the camera setting for the team that won the match.

Forem: agentd00nut

Pastebin As a Media Host

Summary

agentd00nut / pasteStore

Barebones CLI php script to upload to pastebin.

pasteStore

Setup

Use

Examples

mp4 and others

Thoughts

Finding the "best" Camera Settings for Rocket League.

Graphs showing the wins per configuration per option.

About the Data

Getting the Data

agentd00nut / css_scraper

Simplify web scraping through css selectors.

Css_scraper

Don't be a jerk

Making the graphs

I'm not even sure why i explained any of this.