Highlights

This month was mostly about moving, organizing, and checking the source repositories and working copies of the Lunatics Project. By the end of the month, I had figured out how to get the project hosted on Nextcloud, with the source itself in an External Folder, so that other software could work with it as well.

Production Workflow

A lot of my Nextcloud work this month was to figure out the right way to put my Lunatics project source files into Nextcloud, sync them to my workstation, and provide for contributors to sync data for their work.

The sheer volume of the data introduces a lot of problems. My first naive attempt, which was just to put the whole package in one big “External Storage” and share that with Nextcloud was kind of disastrous. At one point it was predicting it would need NINE DAYS to synchronize with my workstation, which is, you understand, in the same room with the server!

That attempt was trying to create two complete copies of the EXR and PNG stream renders from the project, due to Nextcloud expanding symlinks. It was messy.

Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about the “Renders” symbolic links in my source tree.

I almost had it working at the end of May, but I think I may ultimately have to just put stub (empty) folders in the source code, and keep the Renders as a separate archive, with simple rsync scripts to keep them synchronized (easier to control that way and avoid wasteful copying).

Later this month, though, I figured out that I could shadow the symbolic links on the external storage by placing a stub “group folder” at the same path location. This results in the stub folder being seen from Nextcloud, but there can be a symbolic link to an external folder (for “Renders”) for data I don’t want to be tracked in Nextcloud.

This appears to work, so I set up the LunaticsProject this way.

Documentation/Reports

I started doing short direct-to-camera reports each week this month. These are fairly low-impact: fast to edit and publish.

I’ve gotten kind of burned out on the time taken up by creating the “Topical Summaries” from my daily worklogs (though I am still doing those), and when I’m not doing production or development work, I’m not sure there’s much value in producing a monthly “timelapse” video. So perhaps I won’t do those every month.

In the process of organizing the source tree for Lunatics, I have added a lot of Markdown-syntax “README.md” files to provide more internal documentation.

I did an extensive check for integrity of Blender files and Audacity files, taking notes to assist in correct attributions for the credits. I also converted all of the Audacity 2 formatted projects (stored as “.aupz” compressed archives) to Audacity 3 unitary project file format (a single file for each project).

As an economy measure, I have eliminated my annual “Vimeo Plus” membership. At the end of July, the account will revert to the free Vimeo account, which I will continue to use for streaming current videos, but I’m changing my video posting policy so that these will no longer be permanent.

Instead, I will post:

• ALL project videos on tv.filmfreedom.net PeerTube site
• Major/permanent videos on my Archive.Org uploads site (“legacy”)
• Current major videos on Vimeo (for faster streaming?)
• Limited promotional videos on YouTube

Development

I did a little experimental work towards creating a dependency-checker script for Blender, but I did not complete the software.

Server IT

I started setting up a new droplet on Digital Ocean with a simple Apache web configuration. I want to set this up with a simple configuration for the static sites, and pull them off of the YunoHost droplet. This should make switching to co-lo a little easier.

Purchases

Solder/Rework Station

This month, I acquired a proper soldering and rework station for through-hole and surface mount repair and projects. This is not entirely related to Lunatics, but it could be useful.

Inkpad Color 3

E-reader, mainly for reading my now-extensive collection of technical e-books and PDF documentation. I did not like reading this stuff either on my desktop workstation or on my smartphone. The reader is a big improvement.

Although e-ink color is still primitive compared ot LCD displays, it greatly improves the clarity of many color illustrations.

Weekly Video Reports

2024-06-09: Nextcloud Thoughts

2024-06-16: Nextcloud Shadow Trick

Report for the week ending June 16th, 2024.

Clearing up some misconceptions about the Nextcloud file system, Group Folders, and External Storage Folders. And then discovering a nice little trick to “have my cake and eat it too”: I did figure a way to have a stable Nextcloud share, but also use the files for rendering from Blender, using the symbolic link to the Renders folder on the filesystem, without including that in Nextcloud.

2024-06-23: Audacity 2 to 3 Migration

2024-06-30: Blender Review & E-Reader Demo

Selected Art

Some fun things I found while poking around in the older source files:

Selected Photos