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Just got back from a really enjoyable trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains with podmates. Feeling a bit more relaxed. Hurray!

The Pleiades peeking out from behind the trees at our place in the mountains

This will make it so your microphone doesn’t pick up all the clicky-clacky while you’re on Zoom calls. It uses a little CPU to do the audio processing but works pretty well.

Turn on keystroke suppression on your computer’s microphone. This works for the Lenovo Thinkpad T470s and maybe other computers.

Tap the Windows key. Type “control panel” and hit Enter. In the search bar in the upper right, type “audio” and hit Enter. Click on “Manage audio devices”. Double-click on the “Recording” tab. Click on the “Microphone Array” icon. Click on the “Enhancements” tab. Click on the “Keystroke Suppression” checkbox.

Ok, this is a ridiculously long image but it’s a beautiful view into Abigail’s (not technically) Kindergarten at Step One!

Maybe right-click and open link in a new tab. then click on that image.

Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors – happening almost daily – would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them.

Find the list here

A local copy here

(via JWZ)

We managed a happy Thanksgiving with our podmates. Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving as well!

I only have one DVD drive in the house and no DVD drive connected to our new “smart” tv. So here’s how we watch DVD movies on the Smart TV.

First, set up Plex It’s a Windows program that let’s you serve videos around your house. They’ll also rent you videos and such. I leave the computer running all the time.

• Use (local download) DVD Decrypter for Windows to rip a copy of the DVD onto my computer. I use the rip below and also save it since the DVD format with commentary and extras isn’t saved perfectly in the next few steps.
• Sometimes DVDDecrypter craps out. When that happens, I try using MakeMKV to rip the DVD. Failing that, I try using VLC. Failing that, I get a copy from ThePirateBay.
• Point MakeMKV at the rip and turn the DVD into several .mkv files. The big file (usually 1-6 gigabytes) is the movie and then there’s often extras like a Making-of and such.
• Move the big file directly into my Plex movies folder
• Use MKVToolNix GUI to merge all the other files together into one because I like having a “Movie” and a “Movie extras” file but having 5-10 “extras” files is just a cluttered mess.
• Look at the created “extras” file and make sure it worked. I don’t know exactly why but some merges don’t work. 1/2 way through the merged video, the audio or picture will crap out. This might be because the merged files were in different formats or something. If it doesn’t work, I abandon the “extras”, I haven’t figured out how to fix that problem.
• Some videos have trouble fast forwarding and rewinding on Plex, especially on my Visio TV. I found that if I transcode them into H.264 using Handbrake (mp4 format, Align A/V start (dunno if I need it but it doesn’t hurt)) I don’t have that problem any more. I’ve had this problem with some videos downloaded from the internet. H.265 makes the smallest files but Plex handles H.264 natively so it doesn’t have to pin the CPU on the server to transcode it on the fly. It takes 1-5 hours to transcode a movie in Handbrake, depending on your settings, so set up the Queue and run it overnight!

Notes on above:

• The rip takes about an hour. The other steps take just 1-5 minutes total.
• To use MKVToolNix GUI: drag the first file onto the Source Files area. Then grab the rest of the files and drag them there. It’ll ask how you want to add them, choose “Append to an existing source file”. Then push the “Start multiplexing” button at the bottom. It might throw an error and refuse to merge the files. This is because the files are, in some way, not the same type. Look in the error log. A common error is “The number of channels of the two audio tracks is different.” To fix that, I use Handbrake to transcode all the files, making sure to set the audio “mixdown” to “stereo”; that way, fancy Dolby 5.1 audio is pushed down to stereo. This doesn’t always fix the problem. I haven’t figured out all the fixes yet, sometimes I just bail on putting all the extras into one file.

Here is a political message for people tired of political messages. Hint: a return to civility.

OK Go playing their song, This Too Shall Pass, for marching band.

Not gonna lie, I cried a little watching it. Maybe it’s the pandemic, presidential politics (which became “everything” politics), daughter, seeing glimpses of my own mortality, murder hornets, race riots, or 8 months of quarantine. Not sure.

My aunt N asked why I felt this way, she said she couldn’t hear the words to the song. Here’s my response:

It’s funny, the only words I really hear in the whole song is the plea “Let it go, this too shall pass.”
I’m overwhelmed by all the threats and perceived threats in my world. So hearing that message is both welcoming and terrifying!

And I feel like the ORIGINAL  music video for this song is this one:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
(though they both came out about the same time) It’s an amazing Rube Goldberg machine of a music video! I first saw this video when I was teaching classes at the Crucible… building things and teaching and such. I seriously considered starting a Rube Goldberg class based on this music video. That was, in many ways, a better time. I didn’t think quite as much about the “this too shall pass” message. But now that I’m seeing the video with the marching band, I think about the old times and the current times and…. it’s overwhelming.

….and the marching  band video is so ludicrous and gently irreverent and reminds me of my own youth, it just accentuates how far I’ve come. And not in a good way.