video | The Wrath of Kon

Random Life, Data Hoarding, Pictures

The Random Life project is running out of steam, which is fine. I have posted 100 videos, and I’m about out of footage. They’re scheduled to come out one a day for the next month. 81 are live as of this second. I might get bored and post all of them in one big deluge. I’ve pretty much scoured all of my old tapes and what’s come out of my digital cameras. Maybe a second pass through the old Hi8 would reveal more, but I think doing more on this involves me leaving the house, which won’t happen any time soon.

I had some vague idea that I’d take all of the footage — I’m not sure how long it is, maybe an hour? — and glue it all together and make one long “movie” out of it. There are a few problems with that, most notably that that aspect ratios of things differ. The other is that iDVD was the perfect software for making a nice version of this, and it died a few years ago. Also, I thought it would be neat to list it using CreateSpace, and I could order DVDs on demand, but they stopped doing that a while ago. And I don’t know how I would even play a DVD anymore, without digging out an old external drive. The other issue is that with no plot or linear story, people wouldn’t “get it,” which is probably why the project has mostly gone nowhere. But I’m sure in a year or two when this is completely out of my head, this will seem interesting again.

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So, I’ve had FreeNAS installed on my data hoarding server since maybe 2014, and never updated it. The machine itself is a Lenovo TS-140, which is great because it’s low-power but also supports server-type stuff like ECC memory. I threw FreeNAS on it and set up a ZFS pool with three drives in it, which gave me something like three or four terabytes of redundant storage. I run Plex on it and it can transcode videos on-the-fly, which is good because every time I have an AVI or something and I need to watch it on a real TV, I don’t want to have to google the entire history of video compression to figure out how to view it. The server is also a black hole of large PDFs I will never read. There’s about a half-terabyte of government PDFs about UFOs, and I now have zero interest in that, but I can’t just delete them.

Anyway, I had a drive fail in that pool in 2019? or so, and it was an easy and fun process to replace it. No data loss, because of the redundancy. I bought a larger drive, swapped it out, and it “resilvered” it with the stripes of redundant data from the other ones and magically healed itself. The pool size is calculated based on the smallest drive in the pool, and that thing had two 3TB drives and I replaced the dead one with a 4TB, but didn’t have the cash or will to buy three new drives. I replaced the 3TB with a 6TB, and that expanded the pool to 5TB. If I was smart, I’d do the math and come up with some schedule where I rotated out the oldest drive with the biggest I could afford at some regular interval, but I’m too lazy to figure this out.

Felt a need to upgrade this thing, because I’m sure it’s full of security holes, and my TV started complaining it needed a newer version of Plex, and the NAS wouldn’t upgrade it anymore until I upgraded the OS. I thought maybe I’d do incremental upgrades, like go from 9.0 to 9.1 to 10.0, etc etc. I did the first minor upgrade and it bricked the machine. So I needed a different plan.

I’d heard the new versions of TrueNAS (they changed the name from FreeNAS for some damn reason, probably money-related) kill USB thumb drives, which I was using to boot for the last 7 years. I’m surprised that one lasted as long as it did. So I bought a small SSD drive (120GB) for thirty bucks, and installed that in the box as a boot drive. Then I got the latest TrueNAS installer, booted from that, and did a fresh install. Imported the old pool, installed a fresh Plex install, added an AFP share so my Macs see it, and done. I ran into zero kinks in the install, and the web dashboard looks all shiny and new.

I just realized nobody will care about the last few paragraphs. I run into that a lot. Why do I even do this anymore? I think someone famous said “I write things down so I won’t forget them.” Or maybe that was the marketing slogan for a hipster notebook. I didn’t write it down, so I forgot.

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Oh yeah, Shuttle photos from the trip are on Flickr: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWub6uW

Also, I have a ton of pictures of NAS Alameda that need to be sorted and labelled and organized, but here’s a raw dump of all of them: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWwqwem

I don’t know who still uses Flickr, if anyone. I noticed my last photo dump was my Vegas trip right before the pandemic started. I’m not sure if that’s because of the lack of travel, or my general apathy about sorting and organizing photos.

* * *

I have to drive to the dentist in a minute. I’ve already covered this earlier, but I still go to the dentist I had in 2008 when I lived in South San Francisco. The drive stinks, but he’s a good dentist, and he’s open Saturdays. His practice is attached to a rapidly dying mall, and there are all of the usual ghosts from living there way back when. Oh, and he’s got to drill up two teeth, and I have to pay for it.

One second every day, 2019

You’ve probably already seen this if you follow me on some of the other dumb social media sites, but one of my projects this year was to take a second of video every day, to make one big video of the whole mess.

Here’s the link on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iURF0m4MEQg

I did this with the app 1 Second Everyday (sic, that should be “every day”) which enables you to shoot the video on your phone and mash them all together. More about the history of the app is here. I saw someone else use the app back in 2018, and started late in the year. I also posted my results monthly, but then did one giant nine-minute video on the last day of 2019.

The name is a bit of a misnomer. The app actually allows you to use two videos per day, and they can be a second and a half long. I may have missed a day or two, but I often did two videos a day.

A few observations about this project:

I spend a lot of time in malls.
A lot of my video was shot on my daily walks. I tend to walk in the same half-dozen places, so there’s some repetition there.
You do see some slight change in season in the app, but we don’t really have seasons in California, so there’s that.
One of the things I noticed is a lot of things in the video are already gone or changed. One of the most striking is that the new townhouses across the street from my condo were roughly framed in at the start of the video, and by October, they were done and people are moved in.
There’s also a lot of retail in the background that has already died.
If you watch really closely, you can tell the point where I replaced my phone, because the video quality improves. I got a replacement of the same exact phone, but you can really tell the difference. Maybe reinstalling the app changed something.
Vacations and trips are over very quick in the video. Like I spent a week in Vegas, and it’s only a few seconds in this trip. You have to choose wisely to represent the entire vacation in the video, and I probably could have given this more thought.
I didn’t shoot people in general, and did more landscape and nature stuff. (And malls.)
Lots of cats, though.
The sudden volume changes are a bit of an issue. I think you can buy an in-app purchase to add your own music, but that would be silly.
I think my favorite non-cat shot is the ice cream truck driving by on the abandoned military base.

Anyway, I don’t expect many people to sit through the whole thing, and I probably don’t have the patience to do this in 2020, but it’s there if you’re curious. There’s some other junk on my YouTube channel that might be fun (like the December 2018 video), although I don’t do much other video stuff. Maybe I should at some point.