Energy Boost

As I mentioned in the past couple of entries, I am getting some stuff done around the house… heh… it’s just at a much slower pace than anticipated. It’s all good though – it’s not like I’ve got some sort of housework schedule or chart that’s keeping track of me. 🙂🤷🏻‍♂️ Plus, while taking a break today, after flipping the recently-ignored box on its side… the beasts suddenly regained interest in it. Added a little bit of catnip to make the afternoon more entertaining for them and me both. 😊 I love seeing Maven w/ energy like this…

Odd Couple

These two are hard to explain. 😏 They obviously didn’t become best buddies as soon as I introduced Maggie to Maven… and months later, they’re still not anywhere close to buddies. But that’s not to say that they don’t get along sometimes, or at least tolerate each other. 😼😾 And actually, as you’ll see in this video, it’s kinda hard to put a name on how they feel about each other.

Usually, at least once a day, Maven will get huffy towards Maggie… often sending her running. Not because she’s scared of Maven, but because she’s confused why the old lady suddenly got in a grumpy-ass mood. 🙄 Most other times they just avoid / ignore each other. But then there are times like this where you can tell that even though they don’t like each other, they still like each other’s company… at least a little. 😏

But on top of moments like this, and it’s usually after I return home from being out, sometimes I’ll come in the house quietly enough that I can sneak back to the bedroom and find them both asleep on the bed together. 😊 Well, not together together… since despite being on the same bed, they’ll usually be snoozing in their opposite corners. 😏 So they may not be best friends, but it sure could have turned out a lot worse.

360 Degree Meh-tadata

• Update at the bottom…

All this screwing around that I’ve been doing with the test 360 degree video files… I’m starting to think that the problem isn’t with me, the camera, the app, or the PC software.

There are two common, different ways you can view a 360 degree video. You can use the mode where if the camera was facing north when you started recording, as the car drives and turns corners and such – from the viewer’s point of view, if they don’t touch the video, the camera’s view will always be facing north. So if it’s pointed straight ahead when you start, then make a 90 degree left hand turn – it will look like the camera’s view moves 90 degrees to the right, so it can continue to “face” in the direction that it had started.

The second method, and the method that I’m trying to make work, is called Direction Lock. When you start the video, if this works correctly, one of the two lenses on the camera will be the “main / starting” lens… so when that lens is aimed towards the front of the car, the video will start with a forward looking view. In this mode, if you make a 90 degree left turn, the camera just continues to use the main / starting lens without change – so its view acts as the view of a person who was sitting on the roof of the car, continuing to look forward no matter which way the car may turn.

Surprisingly, there isn’t much that comes up when you google “Insta360 youtube direction lock” other than some tutorials and example videos, and a few random posts and pages that don’t address this particular problem, so I’m kinda just on my own here. Now, in the Insta360 app, the direction locked version plays exactly like it’s supposed to. But no matter how many settings I tweak, or how many adjustments I make, YouTube will only play those same videos in the “floating view” mode. No bueno.

Especially for a 360 video that’s being shot from / on / in a car, our brains basically expect that if we are looking forward, and the car makes a left hand turn, we’ll still stay “looking forward” even though the car has changed directions. The floaty type mode just looks wrong and our brains don’t like it. Now, why doesn’t YouTube support the direction lock mode? No idea.

It used to be that you’d have to use a metadata injector to “prepare” your 360 degree video for uploading to YouTube. That was because their system apparently wasn’t yet ready to auto-detect videos that were meant to be displayed in their 360 degree viewer mode. But now, at least from what I’m reading, most major brands of 360 degree cameras inject enough of their own data into the resulting videos that YouTube does recognize them by default, and therefore displays them in their 360 viewer.

I’m not sure the recognition goes any further than that though. It could be that YouTube simply sees the metadata that says “this is 360” and doesn’t bother looking at any of the other metadata to see if there’s anything else that it needs to do. Because the videos themselves aren’t actually altered when you play around with the view in one way or another… it’s the metadata in them that tells the viewer what to do and when. I’m like 93.7% sure about that. And I think YouTube just ignores it.

I’ve got one more set of test uploads to try, and if none of these are successful then I’m going to consider my theory correct… but then I’m not sure what to do. My project, whether I actually finish it or not, kinda relies on having that direction locked way of viewing them. I suppose the next step will be trying them on another platform. I haven’t really used Facebook for well over a year, but I suppose I can set things to private and upload the test videos there. If they’re a success… well, I’m not sure what I’ll do.

But yeah, as you can see, this has been keeping my brain busy, so that’s a good thing, right?

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EDIT: Great googily moogily, I did it. One of my test videos uploaded to YouTube is actually playing the way that I wanted it to. Stays locked to the forward facing view of the car, so when the car turns left, the view turns left. Car turns right, view turns right… working just like a passenger in the car with their eyes locked forward. But then of course you can still scroll around in whatever direction you want with your finger, or with your mouse if you’re on a computer, but yeah… now to see if I can recreate it with all three videos that I shot the other day.

I’m Ready

It’s approaching midnight on Friday, and I think that I’m finally ready to face this week. So, these next couple of hours better watch out, because I’m not feeling too bad at the moment. 😏 Heh… but seriously, this week has felt more “challenging” than usual. Although, as I’m sitting here trying to explain why, I can’t even really think of anything specific that should have made it feel that way. 🤔🤷🏻‍♂️ I dunno… I think all the “get ready, we’re opening” talk / news has just made my brain tired and my sleep shitty, which made every other small or “normal” thing feel that much more laborious. (I still got some chores done and got out of the house once or twice.)

But I’m not gonna sit here and try to remember all of the things from the past week that made it suck, ‘cuz I might end up damaging my calm. But yeah, this week… it definitely took me the entire week to be ready for whatever comes – and for the most part, nothing came. 😐🤷🏻‍♂️ So now that the weekend is here I’m much more prepared for it than I was the current week. 🤓 Hopefully that makes sense.

Ahh, I do know one thing that has improved my mood over the week… getting my two cats to tolerate each other. 😏 Yeah, I’ve officially adopted Maggie – a cat that I was formerly just babysitting – so it’s been a week of anxiously hoping that her and Maven didn’t feel the need to murder each other. 😾😅🙏🏻😾 Thankfully, possibly because they’re both too old to be bothered with such things, they don’t seem to have any desire to fight or be a pain in each other’s asses. (Although Maven does grump at her every now and then.)

They’re not even close to being buddy buddy, but they at least tolerate each other. In fact, I think they both actually like that there’s one “other critter” around, even if they don’t necessarily want to interact with that other critter. 😏 I have a short video of them simply sitting upright next to each other, no more than a foot apart, but neither one of them wanting to look at or acknowledge the other… 😁 … but both of them seeming to enjoy the moment in some way. (Purposely “ignoring” each other while making sure the other noticed.)

It would be too much to explain here in the blog, how I ended up with Maggie, but basically I was watching her while her previous owner was moving – but with things not going as planned there, the environment wouldn’t have been great for a kitty who’s already anxious and nervous all of the time. 😳😬 On her first day upstairs she went around the house looking for her former roommates, but once she realized they weren’t here – it’s almost like she felt relieved, because she started actually acting like a cat again rather than just hiding all the time and trying to avoid anything and anyone. 🥺😊

Maven and I lead a pretty tame life here in the house, and that’s exactly the kind of life that Maggie needs right now… so it just made sense for me to adopt her officially. It all depended on Maven being okay with it though, and since she hasn’t really done anything to indicate that she objects – it looks like this is a done deal. 🙂 See, just typing about the situation has made me smile… so hopefully I’ll hang on to that feeling through the weekend too. (As long as these two buttholes continue to play nice.)

LOAD”*”,8,1 … READY … RUN

I don’t want tomorrow to feel like today did, so I’m gonna try my hardest to push aside all of the bad things in my mind – and hopefully do some things that I know should be fun. It’s so strange how the past few years have kinda stolen “fun” in general from me. I’ve got two current game systems, several different cameras, that Playstation VR system I haven’t even set up yet, a couple decent musical keyboards, the C64 Mini system I got the other day… and all of it just sits here.

I think the more that bad, sad, or unfortunate things started happening to me, my friends, and my family… the less able I’ve been to allow myself to have fun. Even if I have moments where I’m not feeling bad about my own shit, I guess I sorta feel like it’s not right for me to have fun when some of my friends and family are dealing with their own bad, sad, unfortunate shit. I know it’s dumb, and I kinda know how I got here… but that doesn’t matter… what matters is changing my way of thinking and letting myself just enjoy shit now and then.

I have to just accept that some people might roll their eyes or have something shitty to say if they think I should be doing “this” when I decide to do “that” – because if I live my life making sure I make everyone else happy… well, that’s just some bullshit… but believe it or not that’s how I’ve been for a long while now.

Meh… but anyway, tomorrow has to be different. I think once I straighten up the living room a little bit I’m gonna hook up both the C64 Mini and the PSVR. Who would have thought, back in the late 80s, when Mom, Dad, and Aunt C bought me a C64C, 1541-II disk drive, Okidata 120 dot matrix printer, and 13″ color TV… that almost 30 years later I’d be so excited to have a baby version of that old computer that I can play on my 50″ HDTV. Oh, and I also have that CD of scanned slides that I still need to check out.

So many things stuck with me from my childhood. The computers, the classic video games, the nerdy interest in photography, radio, musical keyboards, and tech in general -and even a lot of the music from back then that still means the most to me… all of those started as these little seeds that were planted back then, which are still growing strong in me to this day. Well, maybe not “strong” for some of them, but I still want them to be…

Tomorrow’s gonna be different. Even if it’s just tomorrow.