Things continue happening (it's ok though) (Patreon)

Ever wonder what it feels like to buy $1200 of computer hardware that you don't remotely want? well, probably not. neither did I! nonetheless, I have now had this experience, and I wrote like ten pages of complaints about it.

None of this is meant as an excuse or a plea for sympathy - even with all this crap, I still have it much easier than most people In This Economy. I just figured, if I'm going to periodically make cryptic "things are a mess but ultimately okay 👍" posts, once in a while I should explain what the "mess" part actually amounts to.

First though, two business matters.

One: I expect to have this latest video out in... another week? Hopefully? I know I'm going to have to go in and shoot a ton of B-roll, and probably at least some pickups, but I think????? I managed to get a clean principal shot in the can and most of it will be usable. It might be another week after that though; no promises.

Two: As reimbursement for your extreme patience, I will most likely publish a Little Guys episode soon, which I thought I'd put on Patreon months ago but apparently never did. Is it good? Probably not? But it's two hours of me doing stuff that at least some of you will enjoy. So that's some good news, in theory. However:

The process of making this video has been absolutely grueling, for largely unclear reasons. I've been dealing with brutal writer's block, and an extremely long research and rewriting process, and the inability to find props - fortunately I was able to come up with pics of the TPC IV keyboard and a pair of actual IBM 5170s on very short notice, so I got all my material needs resolved, at least.

But then I finally got into the studio and started shooting. That was on Monday... and I didn't finish until Wednesday. That's pretty rare for me; these days, basically all my shoots take just one day, and a second if something goes really wrong. Like, if i can't start shooting until 4PM due to some kind of misadventure getting set up and have to stop when I get too tired to think, I might come back the next day, but that's rare.

This week though, while nothing specifically went wrong, I was in a dreadful mood the whole time. I couldn't seem to do more than two paragraphs without getting irritated by nothing in particular, and i have no idea why. I'd feel fine in the morning, but when I'd been performing for about fifteen minutes, I'd just start getting really upset about stuff that didn't matter. This sometimes happens to a lesser degree, but never three days in a row, and I have no idea where it came from.

And of course, being irritable compounds other frustrations. Sometimes reading a complicated passage sucks because my brain just won't form it into words correctly, so I have to do several takes, but after four or five of them I start to forget exactly where the previous take left off, so I'm not sure where I can cleanly cut. This means I'll redo a paragraph over and over, then get nervous and want to go back two paragraphs to be sure I have something I can stitch together. And eventually it gets so bad that I'll want to go back ten paragraphs, because I don't really have a way to play back what I've recorded without a big, complicated, 15 minute process that takes me completely out of any groove i was still in.

This can really waste a lot of time, but this time around it got so bad that in the middle of Tuesday, I turned off the cameras, walked into the other room, and built an instant replay system from scratch. I should probably do a little video about my studio setup at some point to illustrate all the systems I've built to solve problems like this, because I'm pretty proud of them, and this one I'd been thinking about for years and I wish I'd built it sooner because it really wasn't very hard.

I have a streamdeck control pedal under my desk that I've been using for a couple years to switch camera feeds on my preview monitor, but i've retooled it so that when I step on the right pedal, it tells OBS (which switches and processes my camera feeds) to stop recording and then start a new clip. i do this every time i start a clean take - that is, every time there's a pause in the narration that i'm sure i can cleanly cut to. then, if i lose track of where I am in my performance, i can hit a button on my phone which instantly pulls up the latest clip and plays it on the preview monitor.

this immediately paid dividends by keeping me from reshooting a ton of perfectly good takes - or, at least, we'll find out if that's true when i finish editing the video. maybe the result will be all stilted and unnatural, but i doubt it, i think this approach works.

it wasn't until wednesday that i thought of an even more valuable enhancement though, which was pretty easy to add: now, whenever I step on the take pedal, it also writes a timestamp to a text file. at home, i run that through a script that converts it into an EDL, which i can import into Davinci Resolve as timeline markers. The end result...

Rather than having to watch every single second of my footage to figure out where each take begins - and, potentially, wasting time editing takes that i later discard - i now have markers for the beginning of every one, so I can quickly jump through and figure out where the last (and presumably best) take in a given segment was.

I actually set this up so the left and right pedals mark "Good take" and "Bad take", but didn't end up using that feature this time around because it was too much mental load and the pedal was a bit awkward to use that way, so I just marked everything "good." In the future I intend to try this again, because it would theoretically save loads of time editing.

I may also find out that this whole idea is bunk, but hey, I've wanted to try it for ages, so here's the acid test.

Speaking of being tested though, I had multiple infuriating technological failures during this shoot.

First off, on Monday, when I gave up on shooting and went home, I plugged in my footage SSDs, started copying data... and after about five minutes i got the USB "ba-dunk" noise and windows spit a bunch of disk errors into event log. Then it wouldn't talk to that drive anymore.

This has been happening lately. I have to assume Microsoft released a bad patch (do not begin talking to me about how you don't like Windows, we are not having that conversation) because it's been doing this crap for about five months, on two different PCs. I might have been able to mitigate it a few different ways, but I was at my wit's end at this point with USB issues.

So, in a fit of rage, I drove to the Apple store, credit card in hand, ready to make an extremely ill advised purchase. Because if there's one thing I'm certain about, it's that Apple never screws up their USB implementation - I mean, if they did, none of their dongles would work, and thus your Mac would become a pumpkin, so it's gotta be rock solid.

Imagine my surprise to arrive at the Apple Store and find out that you cannot buy a Mac Studio or Mini because - per the employee at the store - the moment they receive any, they get bought up by AI people instantly. They just simply can't keep them in stock. The only computers they had were Macbooks, and while I momentarily considered one, I only had to look up their encoding performance to realize that would be a booby prize. $2200 for a Macbook Pro with an M5 Pro, only to get less than 60fps encoding 4k60 in Resolve... uh, yeah, no.

I went home, rebooted my PC, and it fixed the problem. Sigh.

The next day I struggled through another three hours at the studio, then when I tried to do a technical demo, the software wouldn't run. It took me two hours to reverse engineer the reason - it turned out to be that the Java app was missing a mingw32 dll. Did it tell me this? Of course not; it would be out of character for Java to do anything sensible in an error condition. I had to work it all out myself through intuition and liberal application of a DLL dependency crawler.

Wednesday wasn't pleasant either, but I managed to get it done. Took the rest of the night off, then the next day I hooked up all my SSDs, started editing... and discovered one of them was connecting at USB 2.0 speeds. Meaning my crappy Kingston USB-C dock had failed in some inscrutable way.

Remember my video about the NAS i built, years ago, to offload my footage? Yeah, that worked for about two months. At the time, all my shoots fit within four terabytes, so that's how much storage I'd bought, but a few months later I got a second camera body and started shooting twice as much footage, and no longer had enough space. I always meant to upgrade the array, but I was busy and it was expensive... and then the last couple years happened, and it became fiendishly expensive, so I never did it. I had to go back to editing straight off the SSDs, which I've been doing ever since. It sucks, but what could I do other than spend several thousand dollars about it? I really didn't want to do that when I had a system that was, more or less, working.

Well, when the Kingston dock died, that tore it. it's essentially just a hub, but you can't really buy USB hubs anymore, they don't make them. They used to make them, but they're passe now I guess. The only things you can buy are docks - even if they're CALLED hubs, they're still docks, so they have a bunch of spurious garbage like SD card readers, HDMI ports and ethernet jacks, none of which I want.

For one thing, I don't want a bunch of dead weight hardware polluting my PC and potentially causing problems (OS randomly decides to switch audio outputs to the dock DAC in the middle of the day, spurious monitor in display properties that can randomly decide to enable itself, etc.) But besides that, and perhaps more importantly, none of these things actually have enough ports.

I need four USB ports, minimum. I do not need them to all deliver 10gbps - I mean, I'd be really happy if my SSDs could all share a single 10gbps uplink, since I don't need to hit them all at full speed simultaneously, but a hub that plugs into my 40gbps C port and provides 8 USB 3.0 ports, each promising 5Gbps, would be perfectly adequate for my needs - unfortunately, nobody will make that.

There are hubs on amazon etc. that look like they have enough ports, but in practice they're all USB 3 at best, they're slow and unreliable, and almost every single one has a 4" hardwired cable that will not reach to the back of my computer. Because, of course, I'm not supposed to be using a desktop PC, or at least, not one that I can't place in the center of my perfectly clean, otherwise-empty desk.

see above: the only computing environment any hardware vendor is willing to admit exists, though none of them will ever show you what it looks like to actually use (e.g., a 20 square-foot desk where 15 sqft are taken up by tree-trunk-thick TB4 cables, arcing gracefully out of both sides of your computer because their minimum bend radius is 48", which you dare not so much as breathe on lest you get the dreaded ba-dunk ba-dunk as all your file handles get invalidated.)

Anyway.

It's a mess, and even the docks that look like they have enough ports aren't trustworthy, because it turns out some of those are often USB 2.0, and in some cases, some of the USB C ports aren't even for data, they just pass through PD. It's absurd. There are exceptions, but they're either no-name crap that I don't trust, or overbuilt Caldigits for $350, or "docks" for $185 that just barely deliver the ports I need, while having a bunch of unnecessary junk I can't disable.

It's all very frustrating, and it means I couldn't really just go out and buy a replacement for the Kingston dock, since it's the only thing I've ever seen that takes in a single USBC and spits out four ports that can all use the entire bandwidth of the host port. Thus, I was basically paralyzed and unable to work.

So, sighing heavily, I did what I should have done years ago: I went out and bought 8TB of high speed storage to put in my NAS, so I can copy the data over from the SSDs one drive at a time, and stop putting up with all this USB crap entirely. And, since the only option at this point is high performance NVMe SSDs, the most expensive form of storage available, that's what i had to buy.

Had I bought these two years ago, maybe I could have spent half as much, but that ship sailed, so whatever. I have a credit card, which... isn't maxed yet, and this is a business need, so as much as I hated doing it, I spent this absurd sum of money just to get back something I'd already had, albeit somewhat more reliable. And naturally, despite throwing so much money at it, this process ended up taking all day.

The first Best Buy I went to was out of any drive larger than 2TB. The second Best Buy was out of 8TBs, but did have 4TBs for exactly half the price. So, I bought two 4TB drives and put them in a PCIe carrier, which went into my server.

...except it wasn't that simple, because of course the obnoxious ROG carrier I had on hand is designed (I think?) to hold the drives down with it's integral heatsink. But the drives I bought had big chunky heatsinks built in, because they're meant to be used in a PS5 - you can't buy anything else right now in 4/8TB, it's all sold out, so this is what i had to get, and it wouldn't fit on the carrier with the big heatsink plate installed.

Simple fix: Just don't install the heatsink. Except there's no standoffs; nobody includes m.2 standoffs with anything anymore. Not the card, not the drives, and you can't buy them at best buy, and it takes days to get them shipped. So I went back out, for the third time that day, and spent two hours at REPC looking for standoffs.

I tore apart several laptops, but all the standoffs were press-fit. I went through every boxed motherboard I could find; no standoffs, or they're press-fit. I went through every bag of screws I could find, accumulated from decades of laptop service; nothing. Finally, someone climbed into the huge box of dead motherboards and dug through them like Scrooge in his money bin, and after searching every single one, we came up with two workable standoffs. There were some others, but they all fit the wrong size screw, so in that ENTIRE warehouse of discarded computer hardware, I found the only two m.2 standoffs that could be obtained same-day in, seemingly, this entire city.

Finally I installed the card in the NAS... and spent another three hours doing performance tuning, because at first it wouldn't copy any faster than 1Gbps. In the end I only got it up to about 6, when it should be a full 10, so I need to tweak it more later, but that's another story, and this is, at long last, good enough.

Like I said at the beginning, none of this is really the desperate plea for succor that it might sound like. Things are, after all, ultimately okay - though after this video I am going to strenuously challenge myself to do smaller and simpler things for a while, because I am sick of these huge projects, and I have a million things hanging around that deserve to be on camera instead of in boxes. Here's hoping I manage this time. Thanks for sticking around!