Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2019-09)

Updated 2022-10-23.
Tech updates: lack of instant podcast fame, .wav from awk, 5 per day, charge profile, explicitly not.
Adding more metadata, mainly to quiet Yandex' checker tool! Also emitted another couple of podcast episodes, including one audification/sonfication (the audio equivalent of visualisation) that's received some interest. And tidied up datasets for Google's benefit.

2019-09-22: Explicitly Family Friendly

Mainly for Yandex, I have marked all my videos isFamilyFriendly.

I'm doing the same for audio, which is also consistent with the (not) explicit flag in the podcast RSS feed.

2019-09-21: MBA Charge Profile

visible charge profile of MacBook Air from about half full starting a little before 08:00Z

(This may not be not the right place for this note; I should possibly move it.)

I set my (lid-down, sleeping) MacBook Air to charge from off-grid ~07:40Z. See extract from power management log below (see "P" values) and graph. The MBA battery was maybe a little under half full, thus needing ~25Wh to fill. See demand peaking at a little under 60W and tailing off not quite to zero over the next couple of hours. Base consumption by everything other than the MBA is about 1W. (See the first sample before MBA charging started.)

I have noted before that cutting the initial peak demand would be kinder for off-grid applications. A softer start would reduce strain on external storage and converters/inverters.

2019/09/21T07:30:06Z AL 244 B1 12589 B2 -1 P 919 BV 12562 ST OK - m A1P 2975 B1T 17 UC 65
2019/09/21T07:40:06Z AL 302 B1 12580 B2 -1 P 56535 BV 12140 ST OK - s A1P 4183 B1T 17 UC 100
2019/09/21T07:50:06Z AL 334 B1 12204 B2 -1 P 37479 BV 11727 ST L - L A1P 4032 B1T 17 UC 41
2019/09/21T08:00:06Z AL 368 B1 12171 B2 -1 P 35589 BV 11718 ST VL - L A1P 4515 B1T 17 UC 31
2019/09/21T08:10:06Z AL 484 B1 12241 B2 -1 P 29514 BV 11840 ST L - L A1P 5904 B1T 17 UC 34
2019/09/21T08:20:06Z AL 520 B1 12333 B2 -1 P 23421 BV 11971 ST L - L A1P 6312 B1T 17 UC 42
2019/09/21T08:30:06Z AL 563 B1 12385 B2 -1 P 19011 BV 12075 ST L - L A1P 6961 B1T 17 UC 45
2019/09/21T08:40:06Z AL 580 B1 12433 B2 -1 P 15442 BV 12168 ST L - L A1P 7233 B1T 17 UC 49
2019/09/21T08:50:06Z AL 588 B1 12461 B2 -1 P 12736 BV 12234 ST OK - m A1P 7369 B1T 17 UC 51
2019/09/21T09:00:06Z AL 638 B1 12430 B2 -1 P 10877 BV 12290 ST L - L A1P 7988 B1T 17 UC 41
2019/09/21T09:10:06Z AL 679 B1 12485 B2 -1 P 9115 BV 12347 ST L - L A1P 8456 B1T 17 UC 48
2019/09/21T09:20:06Z AL 730 B1 12546 B2 -1 P 8155 BV 12431 ST OK - m A1P 9150 B1T 17 UC 58
2019/09/21T09:30:06Z AL 788 B1 12623 B2 -1 P 7385 BV 12516 ST OK - m A1P 9905 B1T 17 UC 72
2019/09/21T09:40:06Z AL 858 B1 12702 B2 -1 P 6479 BV 12609 ST OK - s A1P 10856 B1T 17 UC 85
2019/09/21T09:50:06Z AL 923 B1 12778 B2 -1 P 5751 BV 12694 ST OK - s A1P 11777 B1T 17 UC 98

2019-09-16: Five a Day

Talking with my dad this evening, he reminded me that it took about a day for him to make five minutes' worth of finished TV way back when. Thus a week to make a half-hour nationally-networked prime-time programme.

My "rad sounds" episode took about a day (~8 hours all told) and produced about three minutes, so the same ball-park. I was doing only audio, working to purely my own agenda, etc, which all helped, I think!

2019-09-15: Podcast City, Population 4

Well, that was interesting.

In the latest podcast episode I got to play with Audacity a little more, learning how to insert sound clips into the speech.

Those clips were in part made by abusing awk to generate binary WAVE (.wav) files, as well as resampling input data to get the correct steady sample rate.

Yes, outputting binary using printf("%c", int(value)). Even though just because you can does not mean you should, I did!

The "rad sounds" episode is going to be played on Sunday morning on the next estate soundwalk!

2019-09-08: Podcast City, Population 3

Shockingly enough, having pushed out the third ~3-minute episode, and worked my way into the Apple and Google catalogues (and some smaller ones), I am not some kind of instant famous influencer!

I can see little evidence of the .mp3 files being downloaded by actual humans. (Though Google caches the audio files for its users, so not listen would be visible to me in logs anyway.)

(I can see the .rss file being pulled reasonably regularly, though apparently more so by the smaller players!)

It does seem like the original reason that I created the first two episodes, to support Walk with Jane on the Cambridge Estate, went ahead yesterday evening, using Solar Panels in My Garden.

Hurrah!

I have an idea or two for another topical episode, so I may commit to both at least one of these "Website Technicals" and a podcast episode each month. I'm guessing that the podcast episodes will have to be a lot less technical, but we'll see.

Ideas floating around in my head right now: