Weeknotes: 2025-W01

Published: 6 January, 2025, updated: 6 January, 2025

Summary

A somewhat productive week working towards putting together some video weeknotes (that may never be published), including getting more familiar with all the tools and techniques involved in capturing audio and video footage, ingesting it, processing it, editing it, and putting it all together into a finished product.

Repurposed my basement office from my old “work from home” office into, well, my new work-from-home office. Mostly this meant moving stuff that was more hobby-oriented (like my photography and videography gear) downstairs, leaving my previous “personal office” mostly just for storage, my home lab servers, and my gaming PC.

Played around with some transcription and local LLM options, largely settling on using whisperfile for audio transcription of the voice notes I’ve started taking on my walks for planning my day or potential projects.

Also signed up for a woodworking course later in January, something I felt I wouldn’t have the necessary energy/time/willpower to achieve while I was working full-time. The idea of doing it during the weekday rather than week nights or weekends is probably even more enjoyable than that of going to the cinema during the work day.

Another fruitful photography outing during my usual walk on Sunday - so many ducks, and a few geese, coming close to me, and a slightly less affable river otter.

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

Mallard hen on Lake Washington

Mallard drake on Lake Washington

Most likely a Barberry, maybe a Nandina?

Bubbles on a pebble beach

Enjoying

Reading:
- Assassin’s Fate (Fitz and the Fool #3) by Robin Hobb
Watching:
- 📺📅 Shrinking season 2
- 📺📅 What If…? season 3 (completed)
- 📺🏃 Perception season 3 (completed)
- 📺🏃 Superman and Lois season 4
Playing:
- Assassin’s Creed Mirage on PS5

Newly discovered

Dave Fogler at the Cinedrome

This is another surprisingly-high-production-value YouTube channel, leaning mostly on story-telling, editing (especially transitions and non-traditional layouts/presentation), and sound design.

Three videos to consider:

Studio upgrade: Custom Cabinet for 99 Film Artifacts: A great example of how you don’t need fancy tools to get things done, nor complex jigs or joinery or finishing, to make a piece that does its job well and fits the space with character, as well as a view into Dave’s experiences during his career at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). Also, shows the sorts of mistakes even seasoned veterans make to counteract that feeling of utter stupidity when making your own mistakes…
Fitting a Tiny Portrait Studio Inside a Tiny Art Studio: A good example of creative storytelling and presentation, and taking advantage of the framing opportunities of the familiar enclosed space.
First Looks: SAVING our 1880s Maine Lakeside Cabin: The start of a series on restoring an old family lakehouse summer home in Maine.

Highlights

Technical debt can be classified into three main types: 1) things that are preventing you from doing stuff now, 2) things that will prevent you from doing stuff later, and 3) things that might prevent you from doing stuff later. Every other classification is a subset of these three. Minimize having lots of stuff in #1 and try to focus on #2. Ignore #3.

– “Good software development habits”, Zarar Siddiqi

I think this formulation can be improved a bit, but I agree with the idea that you should try keep some class of technical debt small (the sort that makes all changes harder or slower, for example), make progress on others (the sort that makes somewhat frequently-changed parts of the code harder or slower to deal with, for example), and wait until you know for others (the sort that would be making a change to something rarely changed, for example).

In that article I proposed two categories of content that are low stakes and high value: things I learned and descriptions of my projects.
I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I’ve found.
That’s the purpose of my link blog: it’s an ongoing log of things I’ve found—effectively a combination of public bookmarks and my own thoughts and commentary on why those things are interesting.

– “My approach to running a link blog”, Simon Willison

I’m starting to think this is a key missing piece in the ecosystem, a “discovery” mechanism that’s distributed and that you can subscribe to. I want to know what a particular set of people found interesting, not some algorithm over everything that any person has read or clicked a like button on…