Ivy Jackson

Most of my exciting work this week was recording and editing the tutorial video for My Life In Months. I did not expect how long this would take, from all of the script edits and redubbing that I had to do.

When I sat down to record the video, I expected to record the project in one take, and then trim down the unnecessary pauses

What I expected to look like this:

Actually looks like this!

This is because I had to redub a majority of the original video because when I get anxious, I tend to stutter and mess up words.

Through the magic of post production, I was able to come up with a product I was happy with.

While reviewing the rendered video footage, I realized that I had forgotten that MacOS includes thumbnails of documents in the downloads folder. Because some of these documents included my address and other information I had to go back and block them out.

I tried using the blur tool, but I believe this was more for use with 3D moving objects, since it was trying to track objects, and I didn’t have any luck using it.

Eventually, I had to settle on an overly complicated method on using nodes that looks like this

This ended up dropping my framerate to from 60 FPS to 4 FPS during playback for some reason.

When I finally finished editing the video, I rendered it under the “YouTube” export settings. However, when I did this, I was not able to open the video file on other devices.

This was all fixed when I actually uploaded it to YouTube though.

Here’s the video:

This week, I have made progress in trimming down the my-life-in-months chart library down to the core necessities so that it can be used by other people. In the future, I think it would be a good idea to create a seperate repository for this file and create a package.json file for it so that people can use it with a package manager like NPM.

On Wednesday, I have received hardware upgrades that have allowed me screenshare the website while in a Teams meeting without constant stuttering like I was previously having while trying to run multiple programs.

When attempting to collect sample charts from friends and family, I have received feedback from a user that stated that they did not understand how to use the website. This gave me an idea of creating a tutorial of how to use the website. I added the video player on my need-help branch, but currently it just plays a placeholder video.

I have written a script for the tutorial, but I am waiting for changes to settle down before actually recording it and uploading it to the site. Because of my recent hardware upgrades, I do not think I will have an issue with the recording or editing.

Here’s a short test recording. It was recorded at 1440p60, but for some reason YouTube only shows 1080p60.

The first week of classes has came and gone and My Life In Months is coming along nicely. On Friday, there was planned network maintenance that was supposed to last from 5 PM to 8 PM but has lasted from 7 PM and is still affecting login to the Hendrix Student network.

I didn’t expect Teams to be this computationally intensive, and I am expecting to get a new laptop soon. Currently, I am unable to pull up the webpages that I am working on when I am in a meeting, and I expect that it will be a great help.

Now that I’ve looked into limitations of Github Pages, I’m not as worried about getting an angry email from Github about traffic/bandwidth usage, since I know that is an issue with a lot of smaller sites on r/InternetIsBeautiful.

For housekeeping purposes, I think it would be a good idea to remove some of the code that we don’t use, such as the Table2CSV, and use CDNs when they are available.

Wow, what can I say about this summer?

Part of it felt like “summer break” never happened, but at the same time, it felt like it moved at a glacial pace because of how each day blended into one another. One simply existed, and not much else.

On the other hand, I’m excited to be back at school (despite it being online) because it means I finally have something to do in order to break up the monotony of waking up, doing things until it is time to go to bed, and sleeping, rinse and repeat.

In Disco Tray Studios, I’m excited to explore mobile development, as I have previously explored some Swift and iOS development in High School, but I haven’t delved too far into it.

So far, Javascript and front-end development leave me scratching my head sometimes, but I am excited for things to come.