Notes for September 22-28

It was a moderately exciting week work-wise (in a positive way), but a recurrence of the highly disruptive habit people have of booking meetings the very next day or early the day after (even when any sort of effective work would take a day or so to yield finished results) made it hard to, well, do anything at all…

But there were a few things of note:

Over the past semester I’ve been gradually increasing the amount of daily exercise I aim for, and I’m getting new minor aches and pains every day that seem to stem directly from a continuous (but moderate) exercise streak. Between a compact treadmill I got at the end of January and a few other tricks, I slowly nudged myself to the point where I now need to pause work mid-morning and take a brisk walk, so that’s a good milestone to keep track of.

I got a LattePanda Iota in the mail along with a bunch of add-on boards, and initial impressions are great—I’ve put up a very short video on it and am putting the board through its paces. In the process I’m realizing things take four times as long if I have to capture video, which is one of the reasons it’s taken me this long to get even moderately serious about YouTube.

I am stubbornly pursuing two approaches to video editing—a cross-platform approach using Blender as a desktop editing and compositing tool (which is OK except that video stabilization and audio editing are too much of a manual process to be enjoyable) and, simultaneously, trying to use my iPad as a video editing station.

The latter is mostly winning solely because I can do it quietly on the couch (and bed) in the evenings (and nights), but I am constantly switching apps to figure out how best to manage media, edit voice-overs, add simple titles that I can have some control over, etc.

This has meant experimenting with various video editing techniques as well, and right now DaVinci Resolve is squarely trouncing Final Cut Pro on account of its image stabilization and having flexible, editable titles that weren’t designed by hippies with Victorian influences, even if its iPad UX was apparently designed for ants and I can’t seem to be able to record a voice-over directly in it (which is a pain).

My Authelia setup broke after a few months, so I spent a couple of not-so-entertaining hours rejiggering my Cloudflare tunnels and discovered selkies, which had flown under my radar until now. It works OK atop a tunnel (to the point where I can use this container image to run Obsidian remotely without a lot of fuss), but it’s still slower than RDP and for some reason the Remmina image has a weird runaway CPU usage bug.

I used it as a rather roundabout way to share my Linux desktops in video calls since (to my continuous frustration) Cloudflare’s RDP web client still doesn’t work with xrdp, so I spent a while trying to figure out a fix (to no avail yet). So right now I’m rebuilding my Azure Linux bastion to run… Windows (don’t ask).

As an encore, I updated my notes on my new Cudy access points with an arguably better “roaming” setup, the effects of which are only noticeable if you’re doing video conferencing as you walk around the house to check if all the windows are shuttered (ask me how I know).

I refactored one of my projects to use sqlite-vector instead of sqlite-vec with reasonable success, but that one’s still hampered by the need to use fastembed, and that is just dog slow on a CPU-only setup.