Focussed On The Future

The area around the kitchen sink doesn't get much light so a few years ago we bought a small flourescent light and mounted it directly above the sink. There are no kitchen outlets nearby for it to plug into, so instead its power cord snakes through the bathroom door to plug into the outlet beside the bathroom light switch. This means that if you want to fully close the bathroom door you have to unplug the sink light first.

The lack of an outlet near the sink also means that any meal preparation done on the counter beside the sink had best not involve any powered appliances.

A week ago we bought a small freezer which will fit nicely under the shelves in one corner of the bathroom. It will use the last remaining outlet in the bathroom. If I want to shave I'll have to unplug either it or the sink light first.

Instead I did what any sane person would have done years ago and installed some outlets into the counter beside the sink. It took me twice as long as expected, including a quick phone consultation with my brother, who is expert in these matters. I shouldn't be surprised, though, as  it takes me twice as long as I expect to do pretty much anything.

But now it's done, the kitchen light is plugged into its own outlet and guests will no longer have to wonder what to do to get privacy while they pee.

I spent last week with my folks then on Sunday caught a bus to Toronto. I'm working out of the office there for three days before heading back home. Haven't been here in four years so it seemed like it was high time for some face-to-face with my co-workers. It also gives me a chance to visit with my friends in Toronto without having to tie up my mother's car and spend hours driving to and from the city.

The hotel I'm at in downtown Toronto is quite nice. My room has en-suite washer, dryer, dishwasher, fridge, hotplate and, most important of all, free high-speed internet. The company was too cheap to spring for my flights, but two of my bosses did a bit of arm wrestling with upper management and pried loose enough budget to cover my hotel and living expenses for three days. So that's nice.

Oddly, although there is a two burner hotplate in the room, there are no pots to use on it. And while the cutlery drawer contains an egg lifter, there is no frying pan to use it with. No doubt the hotel would provide me pots and pans if I asked, but it just seems a bit odd, as if the kitchen has been outfitted by aliens who have studied the habits of earthlings without quite grasping all the subtleties.

The time with my folks was enjoyable but a bit tiring. It was my brother's birthday and both he and I wanted my mother's stuffed spare ribs. Large dinners are getting to be difficult for my Mom to handle, so I offered to do all of the preparation, cooking and cleanup, with her supervising. In the end I think I only managed to do about 60% of the work, but that was still enough for me to get a good understanding of just how exhausting it can be. Especially in the last half hour or so when you're trying to get all of the elements of the meal to come together at the same time.

Nor did I do myself any favours by staying up waaaay too late playing minecraft a couple of nights. Ah well, it wouldn't be a true vacation without a touch of sleep deprivation.

It's nice how the internet allows us to overcome language barriers.

Episode 7 of my series of Minecraft videos is now up on YouTube.

It took a while to put this one together because I've been spending a lot of my time recently working with a couple of other people on a tool to allow the videos to be generated from inside the game, rather than using external screen capture software which is how we all do it now. It's called MineVideo and it's now working well enough that I can get sustained frame rates of 36 fps as opposed to 24 fps at best using my old method. That likely won't mean a heckuva lot to many of you but it's thrilling for me. I can at last get smooth movement while playing the game and recording it at the same time. If I can make it just a little bit faster then it will be good enough for me to do HD recordings. :-)

Our cats seem to view us in two different ways. As a cuddly source of warmth when we're lying down, and as a monstrous source of terror when we're standing up. It's understandable that they would be leery of having these large, awkward masses looming above them, but we've always been careful with our feet and the only cats we've ever stumbled into are the ones least concerned about it. So their fear seems out of proportion to their experience.

Timid is the worst. She's all purrs and head-butting if we're lying down, but flees the instant we get up and won't come near us while standing. Sitting seems to confuse her: she'll draw near and ask to be petted, then flee halfway through.

Bang and Cal are less extreme but they, too, like to keep their distance when we're on our feet and prefer that we at least crouch when trying to pet them.

Shadow and Bacchus are at the other end of the scale. They don't really seem to care what our orientation is, so long as they get attention. Indeed, they have a bad habit of wandering directly ahead of us while we're walking. They've both been accidentally kicked a couple of times, but it doesn't seem to have phased them.

Persis is, to my mind, the most sensible of the lot in this regard. She likes to cuddle with use whether we're standing, sitting or prone, but she gets out of the way when we're moving.

Episode 6 of my series of Minecraft videos is now up on YouTube. In this episode I try doing a bit more farming and really learn to loathe chickens.

Yesterday I uploaded the fifth episode in my series of Minecraft videos. It's here if you want to take a look.

The central conceit of the series is that I am a newbie who is playing the game for the first time. Knowing only the rudimentary mechanics of the game, such as how to move, I must discover the game's secrets for myself. Since I've actually been playing the game for over a year this involves a degree of acting on my part. I'm quite open about that, BTW. I let people know in the very first video that I'm not an actual newbie, I'm just trying to recreate the newbie experience.

For the most part I can draw on my own memories of how I figured things out and adapt them to the specific circumstances of the series. However there are a few bits of knowledge for which I cannot do that because I never did figure them out for myself. When I first got interested in Minecraft and started to read up on it, I came across recommendations that I watch a short video about how to survive my first night. That video taught me a few basics like how to harvest wood without any tools, how to make a crafting table and, most importantly, how to make a torch.

The recipe for a torch - a wooden stick with a piece of coal or charcoal at the end - is not, to my mind, obvious since in the real world torches aren't made that way. They're made by dipping strips of absorbent material, like cloth, in a flammable liquid like oil, tar or pitch, then wrapping that around the end of a stick and igniting it.

Now it's impossible for Minecraft to contain within it every material and artifact that we have in the real world. There's no oil, tar or pitch in the game, and no cloth per se. Instead, Minecraft uses a symbolic language of sorts. For example, coal takes on role of a generic source of fuel for flame as well as the instrument of its own ignition. Unfortunately, a torch is the first time a new player really runs into that sort of symbolism which creates a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. In order to figure out the recipe for a torch you need to know that Minecraft uses materials symbolically, but in order to find that out you need to have seen the recipe for a torch.

In episode 5 I finally reached the point where I could no longer get along without a portable light source. I had to figure out how to create a candle or lamp or lantern or torch (or which only the torch is possible in the game). Without memories of how I first discovered the recipe, I had to imagine what my thought processes would have been had I not already known the recipe. It took three takes to get it right.

In the first take my logic quickly led me off on the wrong path. Even worse, the predicates I'd built up were such that it would be impossible for me to end up with the correct recipe except through blind luck. I killed off that recording and tried again.

In the second take I did manage to get to the torch recipe, but I felt like I had to take a shower afterward. It was all too contrived, too perfect. Like a highschooler mulling over the curious precession of Mercury's perihelion and by gosh developing the Theory of General Relativity to explain it. It was possible but incredibly unlikely. I deleted that one, too, and tried again.

The third take worked out much better and that's the one I went with. There's still an element of serendipity to it, but I think every Minecraft player has had a few such serendipitous discoveries, so it's not too unbelievable. Or at least it didn't feel so to me.

The torch recipe was the last bit of information from that introductory video for which I'd not yet found a reasonable way to "discover". Now that that's behind me the sailing should be smoother for while as I'll be able to use my memories of how I found the answers. Eventually the recipes in Minecraft became sufficiently abstract that I was no longer able to work many of them out for myself and I started using the Wiki like everyone else, but when the series gets to that point I'll end it. If you happen to be one of my handful of fans, have no fear for I already have an idea for my next series.

Videos take up a lot of disk space so today I went out and bought a new 2 terabyte internal drive for my system. The new drive is about 25% faster than the existing one, which will help when capturing video from the screen, but the bigger win is simply in having a second, separate physical drive. That means that I can record audio and video to separate drives which reduces contention. The result of this is that the frame rate at which I can record 480p video (480 = 854x480 resolution, p = progressive, i.e. non-interlaced) jumps from about 22 frames per second to 29. That makes for smoother video. Even better, the jerkiness and lag that I was experiencing in the game while recording it is almost completely gone.

The trick still doesn't give my system enough oomph to record 720p video (1280x720) at a decent frame rate, but at least now my 480p vids will be clean. Yay!

The third installment in my series of Minecraft videos is now up on YouTube. You can find it here if you're interested.

In this episode hunger becomes a pressing issue. Given the choice between trichinosis and salmonella, rotten zombie flesh starts to look attractive.

Now that I've finally got a set of tools that work reasonably well together and am getting better at using them, the making of gameplay videos has become much less frustrating and a lot more fun. I just finished up my third video and am currently in the process of uploading it to YouTube. The upload takes a little over two hours. Oof!

I've generally considered myself a bit of a loud talker so it was quite a surprise when I started editing videos and found out how quiet my voice actually was. I think that's because it's generally very quiet around the house, with just the sounds of keyclicks and cats licking themselves to break the silence, so I subconsciously adjust myself to that and almost end up whispering. With each new video I'm getting better at remembering to speak up, though, and for those times when I do fall back into whispering I can use the audio editor to boost the sound level up. Alas, the sound editor is not yet good enough to convert my occasional incoherent mumbling into lucid speech.

I find the editing process enjoyable. Every time I'm able to seamlessly remove an unnecessary chunk of audio and video it's a small victory. Keeping the pacing up and the length of the video down can be difficult for me, given my propensity to ramble on in detail about minutiae. If nothing else it should be good practice for giving technical presentations, of which I have at least one later in the later.

Being more comfortable with the basics is also allowing me to get a bit more adventurous with things like transitions, overdubbing and interstitial cut scenes.

It does take a fair bit of time, though. This latest video, which is 20 minutes in length, took a total of about 10 hours to record and edit. It took three takes before I finally got a recording that I liked. In the first take I failed to set up the audio stream for the microphone properly and my entire commentary was lost. That problem should be resolved when I upgrade to a newer version of ffmpeg as that will allow me to completely automate the video and audio setup, removing the potential for human error. In the second take I spent too much time bumbling around without any clear direction. While that's an accurate portrayal of how I play the game, it hardly makes for enjoyable viewing. In a game like Minecraft you cannot completely script out what's going to happen, nor would I want to, but it helps to have some goals in mind, like "in this episode I'd like to find some cows, get some leather and see if I can make armour from it".

Editing will always be time consuming, particularly for a perfectionist. I can see the process getting faster as I get more experience, but I know that I will also start doing more complex things. As I noted earlier, that's already happening. Still, I hope that I can eventually get the production time for a 20 minute video down to around 6 hours in total.