The Prusa MK3S upgrade kit comes with a pack of Haribo gummy bears, to be eaten in proscribed amounts at the end of each assembly step. Finishing the X-Axis is relatively easy, so only four Haribo this round.
The upgrade of the Prusa MK2S to the MK3S has begun. Y-Axis assembly is complete. The manual said it should take 2 hours; it took more like 5. But who’s counting? It’s a fun diversion, akin to putting together a really complicated Lego set.
Do not throw away your shot: youtu.be/YMmkXAIRX…
Cherry blossoms!? More like cheery blossoms, amirite?
🏒🎬 While I wait for the world to return to normal and for the NHL season to return, this documentary about the history of black hockey players helps fill the void. Interesting, enlightening, and inspiring. Top shelf. Soul on Ice: Past, Present & Future on Amazon Prime Video
An answer to one of life’s little mysteries: Why do the British drive on the left? – The Straight Dope
Sweet Pea LOVES when it’s time to make the bed.
The ceiling of the Great Court at the British Museum.
Camden Market, London.
Different eras. Camden Market, London.
Flowers at Camden Market, London.
A horse head carving from one of the stalls at Camden Market, London.
Saw “As You Like It” at Shakespeare’s Globe tonight. Loved the production, and what a great place to see a play. I’ve attended as a groundling, but much prefer the seats we had tonight in the front row of the second level. Just so good.
When you take a walk in the countryside in the UK, the public walkway sometimes goes right through someone’s field. Growing up in the US, it’s so ingrained to avoid private property that this just feels weird. But, when in Rome, etc…
Walking alongside a canal near Melbourne, Derbyshire, UK.
We discovered Jameson Black Barrel during our trip to Ireland last year and have been enjoying it ever since. It’s got a caramel-vanilla quality and a smoothness to it that’s hard to beat. Sláinte.
A year ago today, I went with my friend Coco to watch the Blue Angels from the observation deck of Columbia Tower in Seattle. I wasn’t quick enough to catch the really close pass one of the jets made, but this one was not too far off. What a thrill.
With Descript, transcribing audio can be -- dare I say it ? -- fun!
Every once in a while I do a project that requires transcribing recorded audio. It’s never something I look forward to, because creating the transcriptions can be tedious and time consuming, and getting them onto the video can be a chore, especially if you’re doing them in a program like Final Cut Pro X.
In the past, I’ve used rev.com to transcribe audio . For $1 / minute, Rev will create transcriptions or captions for your videos. They have quick turnaround times and high-quality output.
But today I decided at the last minute that I needed to caption a 3-minute video and didn’t want to wait two hours for Rev, if I could help it. So I did a quick search for transcription apps and was reminded of Descript, a combination app and service that provides both automatic and human-powered transcription.
Long story short, Descript is amazing. I downloaded the app, dragged my video file into the main window, waited a minute or so, and had a pretty darn good automatic transcription that I could start cleaning up in the app. Descript lets you quickly bounce back and forth between editing the transcript and playing the audio, so it was a snap to go through and fix the small number of errors I found. (If I had been willing to wait a bit, I could have sent the audio out for a higher-quality human-powered transcript.)
When I had the text the way I wanted it, I used Descript’s share button to output the file as time-coded subtitles to an srt file, which I further tweaked using BBEdit. I then used Handbrake to burn the subtitles onto a new video file.
(I also tried burning the subtitles using VLC, which offers more options for displaying the text over the video, but the app got stuck in a continual loop when I tried to export.)
Total time, including researching how to do each step: about an hour. If I had known what I was doing, I could have easily done the work in less than half that time.
If I had wanted a very specific or higher-quality look to the video, I could have created Photoshop files using automation and placed them in the video using Final Cut Pro X. But the output I got from the method I used is very good, and probably suitable for most purposes.
(I should note that YouTube does a decent job at auto-captioning videos, and supports adding your own srt subtitle files. But this video wasn’t going up on YouTube, so that wasn’t an option for me in this case.)
Descript is such a well-designed program that I kind of wish I had more captions to do. But for the next time the need arises, it’s nice to know that what’s usually a dull, mundane, and frustrating task can be as close to pleasant as it gets.
📺 Damn. HBO’s Chernobyl is good. I mean, really good. Great writing, terrific score, sharp performances, outstanding direction and production design… the full package.
My friends and I used to quote so many of Artie’s lines from the “Party” episode of The Larry Sanders Show. Rip Torn’s performance still makes me howl. Someone condensed the episode here. The only line they missed: “Jeannie! What a delight!”
RIP, Rip Torn. Thanks for the laughs.