HIGHLIGHTS
It’s back-to-school time in our household: our daughter has enrolled in college with a new major, and Rosalyn teaches. So I do a lot of support for both. I am still involved in a big remodeling project, which really should get done before winter hits.
PRODUCTION
Setup the camera-direction (“cam”) Blender file for the new control panel shot in “Suiting Up” (Lunatics S1E01). This looks a lot better in the edit than just using the animation file, which is a bit of a relief (this is a GL render, not final shading):
Private video of insulin/fish experiment for biology lab.
Worked on a couple of unrelated sculptural art projects: a distressed-wood icosahedron and a dodecahedron made of household wire and wirenuts. Both are recycling unreusable construction debris (well, except I had to buy new wirenuts), and are meant mainly to deal with my psychological issues (i.e. burnout) by giving me small projects to complete. I think I need to do more of these.
Towards the end of the month, I decided to finally work on a small video project with stop-motion animation, to accompany my son’s rap version of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. This seems like an extension of doing small projects for my morale, and a chance to develop some new animation skills (maybe).
I’m also thinking about creating animated explainers for rocket equation and staging and for the basic problem of launching into orbit. If they’re short enough, they might pad out the pilot episode of “Lunatics!” to a standard 22-25 minute episode length. It’d be an extra/filler bit at the end.
MANAGEMENT
Patreon is changing its terms so that there will be no more “per-creation” funding in 2025. I had hoped to find some way to switch to a monthly model without betraying my existing patrons, which I thought would be best to do by switching after releasing episode 1. This new change means a hard deadline to release the pilot in 2024. Which I should do and planned to do anyway, and yet this gives me huge anxiety, because I’m not sure I believe it. I will have to create a “safety” version of the episode that I can release, even if I’m not fully done with it as planned.
Added a LiberaPay account and documented that and my Ko-Fi as alternatives.
My New Patreon Policy article explains details.
DOCUMENTATION
I have switched over to doing video logs to report on my progress, rather than relying on timelapses and summaries. I think these are more explicit and understandable, and they make it easier to talk about non-production work (see reports below).
WEBSITES/PROJECT IT
This month I split the services I’m hosting on Digital Ocean into separate “static” and “dynamic” servers. The static server is running a simple Apache2 setup, with no fancy configurations, except what I need for certbot, while the dynamic server is running YunoHost as before. This is preparation for moving the dynamic server to a self-hosted/co-location setup, where I’d be more responsible for server maintenance. The idea is that the small static server can remain on Digital Ocean to retain our web presence, even if the dynamic site goes down.
Experimented (offline) with methods to use iframes to embed dynamic content from the YunoHost server into static HTML pages on the static server. This would allow me to put a stable wrapper around the less-stable back-end.
This did not go as smoothly as I would like: a lot of the dynamic application software is setup to resist embedding for security reasons, and setting it up to work correctly not only requires skill, but is different for different applications. At least the WordPress and PeerTube apps seem to work okay with this.
HOUSEHOLD MAINTENANCE
Finally resolved the fuel blockage problem with the riding lawnmower, and I’ve been able to mow the yards and trails on our land.
This took weeks to solve!
The final repair was blowing air back through the fuel line into the tank. Some debris had gotten caught in the connector.
I also repaired other problems I found along the way, including a bad drive belt and a disintegrated idler pulley (responsible for the bad belt).
Big relief to get that done. Between the mower and the car problems, this was a hell of a Summer for maintenance problems. It took a lot of my time and stressed me out, not to mention costing a lot of money.
Continued work on remodeling the bathroom. This is a pretty slow grind, and I’m worried about how long it’s going to take.
