One of the reasons I welcomed working at an office again after 20 years of doing my own thing was relying on someone else to pay for things like air conditioning, or letting someone else manage the computer network, or letting someone else s upply the endless quantity of filtered drinking water. Alas, the past two days have come up aces for most things but the lack of air conditioning on weekends and major holidays is not what I would have expexted. It’s unclear why only one part of the operation is denied a/c while almost everyone else in the company gets it. Boo hoo, I know. We are all growed-ups here so the complaints are measured and laced with sarcasm and jokes. Still, it’s uncomfortable af when bodies start to stink and sweat in a white collar office.

Not much to report from the last 24 hours of this precious gift of life. I’ve been uploading 24-hour long videos to archive.org. I don’t know any other free service that hosts 24-hour videos. YT used to but no more, they limit videos to 12 hours. Unless I hosted it myself, which is not entirely unreasonable, archive appears to be the only choice. These 24-hour videos are from the live webcam I set up a few years ago. I don’t remember now if I originally intended to save the 24-hour chunks of time. I discovered it was impossible to assemble the videos in Adobe Premiere, and nothing could be done to change that. But seriously, dumping this quantity of videos into any video editor is not the smartest approach. What I have is a 1-minute video for every minute of the day. That’s 1440 files in .mp4 format.

To assemble them into a seamless 24-hour file I use a Windows command line prompt and an ffmpeg command to do the assembly. There is an option to omit the audio but I leave it in even though it is very tinny. A single 24-hour video takes about 20 minutes to produce. I think uploading and editing meta content takes longer than assembly but I don’t time the uploads.

An ongoing glitch of sorts is that once uploaded the videos often do not start playback when you click on them. Sometimes it takes a second click to get started, other times it seems they will never get going. I don’t know what to blame that on or if there is any solution available to me.

Another glitch is that the videos show lengths not of 24 hours exactly but there are usually phantom minutes added. This must be due to occasional lagginess in the camera writing to the memory card. If not then it is likely I have discovered a crack in the tyranny of time.

Once it gets going, though, I really find it pleasing to watch the diurnal, everyday machinations of the street on which I have lived for something like 24 years now. Part of me wishes I’d set this up long ago but in truth I would not have captured anything different from what I get now. The past is the past, but in this case I think the past is pretty static. Every day the same so you can see the past in every present moment.

The view is not spectacular but of interest to me is that until setting this up I never really had a view to the intersection seen in the frame. I would have to stick my head out the window to watch the delivery peepsblow through red lights like they do not exist. Now I can watch it at my leisure.

When I say the view is not “spectacular” I mean no gripe or complaint. THis is what I think webcams should be. A real, non-beautified, non-1080p’d look into an everyday scene as would be seen by actual human eyes. Nobody sees the world at 60fps.

So it’s been interesting to see the collection take shape. I will not get every single day, and some days will not be the full 24 hours. I said that production of each video takes about 20 minutes, but emptying videos from the memory card onto the PC for processing takes about 2 hours. If all of this sounds like I’ve taken on a huge time commitment it’s not really like that. Copying all those .mp4 files and producing the videos are all passive activities. Uploading is a small amount of work before letting the upload go and then backgrounding it.

I like to keep busy.