Does the Mind Need a Break?

I’ve read many articles over the years emphasizing the importance of downtime, of relaxing, and sometimes “turning off your brain” (possibly my translation, but either way, definitely a phrase I’ve heard).

However, I ran across the following in the book “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day” by Arnold Bennett: “One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change – not rest, except in sleep.”

Audio Tweets

I first heard this story yesterday, but didn’t read any of the details until today. Apparently, Twitter is going to allow users to record audio and then… tweet it. And in a throwback to the original 140 character limit, these can be 140 seconds long.

I checked, and I don’t have the feature yet. Which is fine, as I barely use Twitter at all, logging in only once every few weeks.

So NOT a Massive DDOS Attack

Here’s an interesting Twitter thread I ran across today from Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. Apparently the “massive DDOS attack” that I heard about yesterday was actually another series of events. It’s a fairly quick read, but definitely worth it for the tech-inclined, in my opinion.

There’s a lot of buzz right now about a “massive DDoS attack” targeting the US, complete with scary-looking graphs (see Tweet below). While it makes for a good headline in these already dramatic times, it’s not accurate. The reality is far more boring. 1/X https://t.co/4wDIlKnfQg — Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) June 15, 2020

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Kdenlive for the Win

Earlier this evening I was attempting to open a 25+ GB mp4 file to edit (1920×1980 resolution, 35 mins long). I tried using Premiere Pro on my Gaming rig (Windows), as I figured that I would get the best performance on that machine, and I’m the most familiar with Premiere Pro out of all of the Non-Linear Editors. However, the program locked up for almost 10 minutes on the initial import, and was pretty much unusable once the video was imported. I could attempt a proxy setup, but I didn’t think that the video should be that hard to import.

Things That Work: Soundiiz

A few months ago, around the time that the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect the Untied States, I began playing a weekly round of Name That Tune with my family. The premise is simple: I create a playlist with a variety of songs, and then the rest of the family attempts to guess, within the first 90 seconds of the song, the song’s title and artist.

Prior to the start of these games, I was primarily using Apple Music for all of my music-streaming needs. It wasn’t perfect, but in general everything I was looking for was present in that ecosystem. However, as I began to put playlists together for the NTT games, I quickly decided that I was going to need an alternative to improve the workflow. Apple Music doesn’t have a good web or Linux client, and I didn’t feel like using my old MacBook Pro for all of the work. Plus, I was getting fed up with Apple Music’s playlist system. I briefly looked at YouTube Music/Google Music, but quickly decided that was also not going to work, and so I switched to Spotify.