My long-time goal of saving 24-hour video captures of the street outside my apartment has finally come to fruition. Originally I intended to use archive.org for this but upload speeds got throttled so bad it was like uploading through a dialup modem. I’ve not found any explanation for why this throttling occurred or who is responsible for it.
Sunswick.com has nothing to do with the bar by that name, which used to be my every day regular. It refers to the historic Sunswick Creek which is now buried. I bought the domain name a long time ago with some intention of making it Astoria-centric in some way but I mostly just filled it with poetry.
I like watching the videos. They are calming. I’m also a fan of NY511’s traffic cams, and traffic cams in general. I guess it’s in the same spirit as being someone who likes to read the phone book.
After failing to get peertube to do anything I settled on a more modest platform. Piwigo is not designed for videos but the VideoJS plugin is perfectly adequate for this task. At least for now. I would like to get a more robust platform for video sharing going but I ran out of gas trying to get peertube to cooperate.
The goal of hosting all these gigabytes of video was made possible by finding a dedicated server concern that offered more credible quanties of storage than most other ISPs. This machine has over 20 terabytes available. My previous dedserv, which I leased for something like 9 or 10 years, was constantly experiencing disk space issues on the root partition. I never had the nerve to try and expand the root partition. It seemed like too many things could go wrong.
But I like amassing this type of collection. I like to think I am documenting the world passing by while I’m not looking, and when I cannot possibly be looking. I do not intend for the collection to be complete and comprehensive of every 24 hour period that passes. But it will have a lot of days.
Originally I pieced the 24-hour videos together with a batch script on Windows. Now I save 10-minute chunks of video to the 20TB server and intend to automate the process of stitching them all together.I think I’vew collected about a month of days, with occasional interruptions for server reboots.
My other long-time goal, in the same spirit, was to have the live stream run 24/7 without use of a PC at home. That’s been happening but results are mixed. I don’t bother streaming to YouTube because it’s too fussy. I thought I had it going steady with twitch.tv/sorabji but now I can’t get the stream to start on Twitch even though I am certain the camera is working the same as ever.
I am sitting here at my dead-end low-paying job. I don’t usually write personal stuff from here but no one seems to care. I remember one person here said that when they saw me with this setup, a bluetooth keyboard and mouse used to type into a cell phone, they knew I was different. I thought that was funny. It’s true you don’t see this seteup too often, at least I don’t remember ever seeing it.