Spring Update

Spring Update

Howdy y’all. I have partially made good on my push to declutter. I tabled the first MIT Swap of the year and got rid of 2 bins full of suff. I obviously still have more things to parse through, but overall feel pretty good about getting rid of 2/3 of my older electronics components and dev kits! GG has been thriving at preschool, Somerville HS Makerspace has been a decent little gig to get back to tinkering with. Upcoming, it looks like I may be doing some outdoor education and/or bicycle advocacy stuff this summer, more to come!

Re: various devboard projects, I have not done too much and have sold off all but two boards I was tinkering with, the funhouse and the esp32 with screen.

I have been looking to focus on two things for the summer.

First, I need to finish the archiving of all my old homefilms. Most everything has been converted to digital files, but I still have the heavy lift of categorizing, editing, etc. My biggest gripe right now is although the archive shouldn’t take up too much space storage costs have gone up! Once I am done with videos for my immediate family, I should work on my partners, and a nice stretch goal would be to also do my Uncle’s tapes. So I will have to outline a good workflow and best practices for cold storage as well as making the content viewable for younger and older generations alike. I have a few ideas:

• Some family still have DVD players, a chaptered and menued version of the tapes might be nice, but that seems like a lot of work.
• Almost everyone has an iPhone and iCloud, clipping out each tape and adding some metadata may be a nice option for that sharing technique.
• A Jellyfin or Plex library with the first option would be nice for the former option to have on network.
• Some combination of the above with everything archived on spinning drives in multiple locations and cloud storage seems ideal for longterm archiving.

My current workflow is looking like the following: 1 - Start with cleanest video file I can get 2 - Chapterize Video 3 - [Automate] Clips to smaller files 4 - Export and store in various places: DVD, HHD, Cloud, etc.

What is kinda wild for me is that this project has now been ongoing since 2020 in some capacity!

My hope is to finish this for at least my own families videos by mid-summer. Stay tuned!

Second, I need to loop back on my genealogy work. My partners father has given me access to his family tree data, so I have a lot of manual data entry to do, enough that it grow the current tree out considerably.