2022-10-06

Thursday, October 6

Shit is le fucked -

All of the videos on this site and the main site need to be reimplemented in terms of a custom media platform. The transcoding that works for me locally has failed on multiple downstream user browsers, which is a massive pain. Lessons I’ve learned:

• Never delete the original/source video. Most of these have been .mov exports from an iPhone and have been transcoded into .mp4.
• There is more to media encoding than one-line CLI ffmpeg answers 😅.

Back of the napkin idea:

I’ve wanted to implement some stuff in Elixir for a long time. I’m thinking of building something with the following:

• Elixir platform using Phoenix and Membrane, that will let me:
  • upload raw/native video and audio files,
  • will automatically push them to Rumble, Spotify and Youtube,
  • enable LiveView embedding of players from Rumble/Youtube/Spotify
  • allow for local format and resolution transcoding for non YT/Rumble/Spotify friendly clips
• build custom playlists (something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I don’t like the YT/Spotify format)

Major Events

Josh

Spoke to my oldest and best friend Joshy boy today. We’ve been friends for nearly 20 fucking years, but I haven’t seen the legend for about 4? years now. I miss that cunt. Talking to him lead me to introduce him to docker and some basic programming stuff. I think he’s going to help (or at least touch his toes) into the world of software development; see the “shit is le fucked” opener above. To help him along his journey I wanted to get him started with some digital material to get his head around some concepts and give him a kicking off point, leading me to…

Kavita

I spent about 4 hours moving a decade of books and papers etc into the excellent Kavita Reader tool. I have lots of purchased materials stored on a random sync drive, but I’ve always found it very hard to keep on top of everything and where I’m at with stuff.

I found Kavita randomly on r/selfhosted and was like holy shit its like netflix for books. It took me ages to get a grip of how it works, especially because its primarily angled for manga so it calls a “book” a “series” etc. Also, I was hoping that it would auto-parse and put some tags in for me automagically but alas it did not.

I set up a docker container for this with a bind mounted volume into the resources (required) but also into the sqlite database it uses internally. At first I had to import the collection into the volume via a “library” entry.

After that, I spent hours moving stuff around, tagging related resources into “collections” etc. Its slightly cumbersome, but like all data entry tasks like this you’re always better off just kicking rocks and doing it one unbroken hit.

Once you’ve set up your collections its dramatically easier for you to know where to look for things, allowing you to construct reading lists very, very easily.

I really can’t express how happy I am with this. I converted most of my documents into epubs (or got native epubs) a long time ago as I find the readers far superior, but I find apple Books a nightmare to work with in particular. Being able to convert, register and parse all of these books has been freaking awesome and I can’t wait for it (especially my technical manuals/resources).

How I started:

How I finished: