class: center, middle ## Through 10/23/22 --- ### Summary Unfortunately, I didn't get through quite as much I had hoped this cycle, in terms of forward progress I think most people will actually care about. I did write up a draft for documentation on discussion pages, but wasn't able to completely finish since I was waiting to take screenshots until I had a couple more discussion pages fleshed out, but then was blocked from actually doing that (temporarily) for various reasons. I got even more stuff done on the "workflow" side of things -- continuing to set up voice recognition, handling Markdown in Microsoft Word, mics and monitors, etc. -- still maintaining the hope that eventually all this upfront work will be worth it, and I can kick production into full gear. --- #### Outline - [This video is coming kinda late...](#4) - [Did various things to experiment with improving video quality](#5) - [Set up additional things with voice recognition](#6) - [Figured out how to be able to use Microsoft Word as my primary content editor while at the same time working with Markdown files](#7) - [Got the wireless Rode Go II mic system set up, for recording content videos](#8) - [Also got the portable dual 24" monitor arrangement set up properly, and tested it](#9) - [Got all the documentation for discussion pages written up](#10) - [Struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft Windows](#11) - [Upcoming work](#12) --- ### This video is coming kinda late... - The last ministry progress summary video was delayed due to actual technical barriers (the video editing workflow I had was having issues that I had to iron out). - This time, it was just perfectionism in the way. I had a certain order I wanted to complete tasks in, but kept not finishing things, which pushed everything else back. I could give various other reasons (like the fact I worked three and a half hours of overtime one of the days this week, for example), but basically, I didn't prioritize getting this video out on the Sunday or the Monday, and then it just slid. - I'm going to formally declare here that I'm going to try and not let this happen again. I don't want it to become a pattern, and it has become apparent to me that I need to set that expectation out for myself, otherwise there will always be something else in the way that comes up (things have a funny habit of turning out that way). I'd like to have very good consistency, so that's what I'm going to try to hold myself to. - So it may not be every other Sunday exactly (the boundaries that control which things I talk about) -- it may stretch to the Monday some or even most weeks -- but that will be the schedule. No later than Monday. --- ### Did various things to experiment with improving video quality - Primarily dealing with lighting matters. I explained some of this at the beginning of the last ministry progress summary video. Adjusting frame rate, shutter speed, ISO settings, color balance, and so on. - And of course switching to recording somewhere with better light. Hence why I was in the master bath last time I was recording: it is, at the moment, the private place in the house (that is, somewhere I can close a door to record without bothering my roommate and/or company, and so on) with the best inside lighting (contrast relying on outside light from windows). - Today, however, I'm recording in the master bedroom, just with all the curtains thrown open to get good natural lighting from outside. Probably comes off a little less strange than recording in the bathroom. - At some point, I may get a smaller (narrower) standing desk with wheels to use as my recording platform (and put my portable monitor setup on it to be able to see notes and stuff when I am recording), but today I'm just using my tablet alone, resting on a somewhat zip-ties-and-duct-tape platform assembly I cobbled together, fulfilling the same basic purpose as that standing desk with wheels would eventually, should I actually go through with that in the future. - Recording in the master bedroom like this just means I need to record the videos during the day when I can get the good lighting from opening the curtains. --- ### Set up additional things with voice recognition - I added additional custom vocabulary entries for various punctuation characters (open and close quotes and brackets, for example). - I also added/edited a couple custom commands (or shorter forms of commands Dragon already has), like one for adding new lines, and one for instantly deleting the last word (basically, sending Ctrl + Backspace) - I did a lot of research about some voice commands in Dragon - Navigation commands (navigating to before/after words, beginning of document, end of document, end of line, etc.) - Selection commands (current paragraph, last paragraph, next paragraph, specific words, arbitrary strings of words -- including sentences or longer, etc.) - Correction commands, and how training via correction helps improve Dragon accuracy - How all of these things can only happen in very specific applications where Dragon can fully track cursor position. Like Microsoft Word, for example. The supported application list is pretty small, and, notably, does not include the programming text editors that I've lived in the last few years (like VSCode and IntelliJ). - After subscribing to Microsoft Office 365 Personal to get Microsoft Word (and subsequently enabling the Dragon add-in therein), experimented with all these navigation/selection/correction commands in a detailed fashion. I am quite happy with how the voice commands work, and the eventual speed it should enable, once I practice more. --- ### Figured out how to be able to use Microsoft Word as my primary content editor while at the same time working with Markdown files - Microsoft Word is typically used with, well, Word documents (the .docx file extension). But all of my content is written in Markdown, and that's not going to change, since it needs to be in Markdown for the static site generator I use to work properly. So, if I want to be able to unleash the full power of Dragon, I will need to work in Microsoft Word (since Dragon basically only "completely works" in Word and a couple other similar programs, like OpenOffice and WordPerfect), and to be able to do that, I need to figure out how to handle Markdown files in Microsoft Word. - I did a lot of research, and found out that there is a third-party paid extension that does the heavy behind-the-scenes lifting to auto-convert from Markdown into Word and vice versa when opening and saving files, so that you can work seamlessly with Markdown files in Word. This is precisely what I want, so I bought it. It is called [Writage](https://www.writage.com/). - I was delighted to see that it fully supports tables and footnotes. Honestly speaking, so far I've found that working with these things in Word is actually easier than in the text editors I was using before. - This Word plugin mostly "just works"... except its parser/auto-converter automatically strips HTML (... but why?), auto-backslash-escapes #'s and <'s and >'s and so on, and does a couple other silly things besides. Because it is completely non-configurable (boo, hiss), I will have to write some additional Python code in my pre-processor app to clean up the messes this plugin makes in my Markdown files every time I save after editing something. After saving a file, it breaks things to the point where I can't even see the in-progress work on the local Hugo webserver without it erroring out. - This isn't a showstopper since after I set it up once and get it working it should be more or less automated forevermore in the future, but I didn't get to writing the Python code to enable that this cycle. After determining it will be possible to get all this ironed out in the future, that was where I stopped this time. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, but if it will be necessary for me to properly mix Dragon voice writing and voice commands with Markdown (which it appears it will be), then it's just another thing I'll have to grit my teeth and code support for. Eventually at least. Progress always has a price. --- ### Figured out how to be able to use Microsoft Word as my primary content editor while at the same time working with Markdown files - This cycle, I also worked a lot on setting up custom Word styles (for headers and such), hotkeys for navigating the menus and file outline in Word, voice commands for changing between header formatting (like h3, h4, h5, etc.) and normal text styling, and so on. - Specific workflow details, basically. I'll leave it at just that so that I don't bore everyone with the techno-babble, but it was a lot. --- ### Got the wireless Rode Go II mic system set up, for recording content videos - Not too much to say here. I can connect the mic receiver to the GoPro to get clear wireless mic input that is in-sync with the video coming from the GroPro. - I'm actually using the wireless mic system right now, as I record this video. - It did take me a good while to figure out how to set everything up and get it all working together nicely. - I also did a good bit of research regarding setting microphone gain properly: the balance between increasing gain to get strong input signal levels without at the same time leaving yourself too little headroom such that things clip if you ever exceed the 0 dB ceiling. Took me a while to wrap my head around things. --- ### Also got the portable dual 24" monitor arrangement set up properly, and tested it - After all the necessary components were finally here, I tested everything out, and made sure it all worked well together. It does, fortunately. - I set up and tore down the dual 24" monitor arrangement a couple times while timing myself to get a sense for the time it takes. It's between 4 and 5 minutes to get it set up or taken down, looks like. Not too bad, considering the amount of functionality it offers. - I used it in the public library on one of the Saturdays in this cycle. I was pretty happy with how I was able to work in the public environment with little reduced work efficiency given the dual 24" monitors. So it looks like my purchases will fulfill their purpose. --- ### Got all the documentation for discussion pages written up - Not too much to say here either. It sounds simpler than it was, as it took me a good bit of time to figure what I wanted to say to help explain what discussion pages are and how they work. - This first pass in drafting things, I left TODOs for all the screenshots I plan to have, because I was planning to process several more lessons so that I could get through the third lesson in the SR4 series that has two discussion pages. That way I'd be able to have a screenshot with more than one discussion page visible, to show that there can in fact be more than one, with the order of them properly respected according to page weight. - But I ran into some hiccups in getting these additional discussion pages processed and got blocked for a while, which I'll talk about in a second. --- ### Struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft Windows - This one is another technical issue that I will try to keep short. (Well, at least not terribly long-winded). Basically, when I was trying to build the folders for the new discussion pages, I wasn't able to name them what I wanted initially because of path length limitations baked into Microsoft Windows. (I use Windows 10 on my tablet, and Windows 11 on my desktop). Windows, by default, only lets you have paths (N.B. -- full paths, not just files) of up to 260 characters, and after that, stuff breaks. So if you are in deeply nested folders and they have long names, you may run into this. Particularly with cloud storage folders, at least in my experience. - The first discussion page I had done had a path of `C:/Users/steve/Dropbox/projects/bibledocs.org/content/longer-topical-studies/ichthys-sr4-satans-world-system/introduction-to-sr4-satans-world-system/level-of-depth-calling-many-deceived-too-harsh-why-god-allows-satan-control` (224 characters here, which is less than 260, so that's why I had no issues when I did this first one). - But then one of the next discussion pages I was trying to set up I wanted at the path of `C:/Users/steve/Dropbox/projects/bibledocs.org/content/longer-topical-studies/ichthys-sr4-satans-world-system/purpose-in-this-dark-world-only-comes-by-faith-which-makes-us-outcasts-here-but-chosen-by-god/against-monasticism-and-the-idea-of-complete-separation-from-the-world` (273 characters, which exceeds 260). So I couldn't name it what I wanted. File Explorer just wouldn't let me. - There were no helpful error messages, it just silently wouldn't work, which was frustrating. Fortunately, I have pretty good debugging instincts given that I am a software engineer by profession (= I constantly have to debug stuff in the course of my job), so quickly figured out that I was getting blocked by path length limitations. --- ### Struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft Windows - Actually resolving this problem once I'd identified it was another matter altogether. It took *hours*, and many of them at that. There was no simple system setting to toggle on support for longer paths, as the path length limit is heavily integrated into operating system things itself. Not so much for new things, but for backwards compatibility purposes, I would guess. I suppose supporting longer paths natively hasn't been a priority because many normal people don't bump into this issue. - I think part of the reason it took me so long here was that I was incredulous that it was as hard as it was to do this thing, this thing that it seems to me ought to be easily possible here in 2022. We aren't in the dark ages of computers anymore, after all. I kept feeling like I was just searching with the wrong terms or something and missing the real "correct solution". So I spent more time searching for that "correct solution" (that it turns out doesn't exist) rather than just immediately going with the things that seemed more hack-ish the second I came across them. - The thing that did eventually work was manually adjusting a registry value to toggle on long path support. Then I was able to `cd` into directories and rename folders and files on the PowerShell command line, even if the new full paths after renaming would exceed 260 characters (even by a lot). --- ### Struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft Windows - But I still couldn't rename stuff in File Explorer (rather than on the command line). I got sucked into another research black hole trying to figure this one out too, wasting time in much the same way as I just described above (that is, thinking there must actually be a proper way to do it, if only I could find it). Like c'mon, if the operating system itself supports longer paths if you set the registry value, why in the world would the operating system's *own* file manager not properly support it? Who would design things that way? - Microsoft, apparently. Here we are in 2022, and it is still officially impossible to deal with long paths in Windows natively. File Explorer (Windows' built-in file manager), even if you set the registry value appropriately to support long paths at the OS level, just straight up doesn't support it. And apparently there are no plans to make it work in the future either. - So after being defeated there too, I then had to turn myself to the task of finding a replacement Windows file manager that *does* support longer paths. And of course I didn't want to be excessively hasty in choosing a new piece of software I'll be using a lot, so I felt compelled to do research on different file manager options, weighing pros and cons, and making sure whatever I picked supported all the things I needed it too (such as properly integrating with Dropbox's Smart Sync functionality, for example). - Long story short, I settled on a free one called [FreeCommander](https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/freecommander-xe.install), and now I can properly name my folders for the discussion pages. Only took like 3 days of research and debugging... --- ### Upcoming work - Now that I can properly name the discussion page files and folders what I want (even though the paths are long and they are deeply nested), my top priority is going to be to get through organizing a few more of the early lessons from the SR4 series content, so that I can finally make good screenshots for the documentation about discussion pages (showing multiple discussion pages at the same time), so that I can finally push said documentation up to the live site. This will be priority #1 in the short term. - Then I'll turn my focus to finishing the full organization for all the rest of the SR4 content that is up thus far. Once I finish that, I'll be done with Phase II in my plan ([explained a couple ministry progress summary videos back](https://www.bibledocs.org/ministry-progress-summaries/2022/through-9-25-22-add-bb6a-study-page-make-meta-videos-on-channel-plan-future-work/#phase-ii-supporting-discussion-pages-videos-fully-organizing-all-the-already-existing-sr4-content)), and can therefore finally start uploading new content again, as well as start getting more involved in local church groups. At least that's the plan. <!-- Footnote List --> <div class="footnotes"> <ol> </ol> </div> --- #### Outline - [This video is coming kinda late...](#4) - [Did various things to experiment with improving video quality](#5) - [Set up additional things with voice recognition](#6) - [Figured out how to be able to use Microsoft Word as my primary content editor while at the same time working with Markdown files](#7) - [Got the wireless Rode Go II mic system set up, for recording content videos](#8) - [Also got the portable dual 24" monitor arrangement set up properly, and tested it](#9) - [Got all the documentation for discussion pages written up](#10) - [Struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft Windows](#11) - [Upcoming work](#12)