Today marks the first day of actual development on the youtube downloader version 2. For this version, I plan on adding a few useful features and changing the underlying workings and dependencies. Here are some ideas:
Feature additions:
Possible additions:
For one, I don’t think shelve is necessary for saving simple strings of urls. The multithreading is very nice in the previous version and I am very proud of it. I would like to organize this by making issues and refactoring the code so that it is more readable.
I haven’t seen my mom since Dyken Pond with my friends and it has been too long! My mom invited me and Lillian to say in Boston two night ago for the night of the 14th. We drove into the city and had dinner at Artu in the north end. The fettucini alfredo had an awesome spicy kick to it and my tagliatelle with proscuitto was nice and heavy. Just what I wanted. The burratta and country bread was delicious and I enjoyed eating there. The hotel was quite nice and since me and Lillian finished Scooby Doo Mystery incorporated this past Sunday (9/13/2020), we did a few crosswords and played Among Us.
Mystery Incorporated was an excellent show. The overarching plot alongside the classic scooby-doo mystery solving formula is very entertaining and gives something for everyone to enjoy. There were many twists and turns and lots of clever plot points and the character development and stories were interesting. I did enjoy this show and it was a solid 10/10 would watch again.
Today I have started to teach Ivy to lay down. She is doing well and has a very consistent sit and we are working on her come and heel. I am very proud of her, even though she still bites a lot!, she is understanding more and more everyday.
Tootles lmao
I have been thinking what I want to do with my online presence recently. The idea of create passive income sources has inspired me to create a bit of a business for myself online. I’m not really sure what I would do yet and have not found the time or headspace but I do think it is coming. I think this blog will be pushed to either a subdomain or under /blog/ or something like that.
I have a couple of ideas right now of things that I have always wanted to create or do. I love the intersection between technology, math, and computer science but I find the space is quite saturated with channels and information. There is not a ton of channels that combine easy surface level explanations of concepts with many following videos. I would love to create something that is very me and highly accessible to anyone looking to make or do something.
Probably will elaborate on this later or will be creating links to examples/products of mine to explain what I am talking about.
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Did you know squirrels are a signifigant cause for power outages in the U.S? They jump on the powerlines and accelerate the wear and tear of these utilities.
Also! Another fun fact: Fall is the most dangerous and delay-prone season for riding trains! This is because leaves on train tracks lead to a braking hazard if the trains need to slow down. This is very similar to what its like on the roads when there is heavy rain, cautious drivers!
Sources: Lillian and unknown.
Some minor updates – The firefox extension did not make it easy to implement the features I wanted so I transferred my focus to another cause, my youtube-dowloader. Someone else also decided to look at the issues I had created for new features to be implemented and decided to make a PR on my repo, this was so cool! I love seeing this kind of collaboration. During the next week, I started spending lots of time towards working hard, finishing the novel that I was working on Pierce Brown’s Golden Son (part of the Red Rising series). It was excellent, I am deeply impressed by the character development and the mind-bending twists and turns the plot makes. More on this book to come in its own dedicated post. I did well on my school assignments for the week but found myself feeling a little behind in 551 Scientific comp. so I attented office hours. I started planning for the weekend of Cody Champagne’s wedding towards the end of the week and got myself packed late thursday night (9/3/2020). We left early next morning with my grandmother who had arriced the day before (5:15am) for the airport to fly down to Birmingham, AL. We had a connection in Charlotte NC and then after a 1 1/2 hour drive out of Birmingham, we arrived at our destination, Clanton AL, Mitchell Lake. This was the location of the house for us to stay at (Near Walnut Creek). It was very beautiful and I even saw a Bald Eagle. After festivities friday night, a wedding ceremony and party the following night (9/5/2020) we went home early Sunday morning beginning my quarantine. Being around many people, even though I sported a mask and kept my distance, I believe it is better to be safe than sorry. I will be waiting with just the immediate family members that went down with me (Dad and grandma) until I get a negative test result or until it has been 14 days. I will not be in close contact with anyone and will be wearing a mask at all times in public.
Yesterday when we got home, we got to see Ivy for the first time. Ivy is the name of our brand new puppy (Silver Lab). She is 8 weeks old and is the most precious thing in the whole wide world. She is extremely docile, well-mannered, and has a great temperment. She takes lots of naps and loves to play tug of war. I love her and am looking forward to spending these first few days back home, while I am missing my girlfriend, distracting myself with the dog. Ivy comes from the color of her eyes and Hailey was inspired when a Frank Ocean song came on when she had picked her up much earlier on Sunday morning.
Today (9/7/2020) we all got a test from ConvenientMD in Pembroke MA. I was very productive this past weekend and also today and want to continue this trend. The youtube downloader has helped tremendously by completely separating me from the time-engagement focused youtube algorithm. Things have been well! The dog is great and I am really proud of her and I think we got a really great, calm, easy to train puppy that will be a loving family member for years and years to come.
Update - Negative test recieved yesterday at 3pm (~26 hours after I had gotten tested). What a turn around time!
See ya!
It’s over. I have decided the youtube does not contribute anything tangible (in the way I use it) to my life. I am fed up and frustrated by how dangerous and how easily I fall into its trap and I am done with it. This morning, I woke up late for class because I should have went to bed earlier. It is nothing but a time waster.
Here is my plan. I need to start valuing my time more. I am going to put my current hourly value at minimum wage ($12.75/hr). Every hour wasted per day on youtube (and other time wasting excessive behaviours) I must transfer those funds to my Titan holdings and the money will not be able to be spent.
To help enforce this, I am going to start try and write a firefox extension that can track my youtube usage.
This may be the start of something new, something better, and possibly a lot less spending money. Hopefully I can hold myself to it.
What is new in my life? A lot of things actually. For starters, today is the first day of my sophomore year at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It was a rather uncerimonious start as there was no move-in day, no meeting up with friends, no going to the dining hall, and no walking around the campus that I desperately miss. Instead, I woke up to my 7:45 alarm this morning, stayed in bed for 3 minutes and then got up and did my morning routine. Once ready, I popped on the 8am zoom call for my B.S. general education requirement, BIO 151. The professor seemed nice and for the first time, I saw a lot of students turn on their cameras on the zoom calls. I joined in this too hoping that it would increase my attention for the class and my retention of information. I am very comfortable with biology and do not find it hard to grasp and absorb which makes me hopeful fo this class. Right after, I hopped on to another zoom call for my Scientific Computing class. Both classes were moderately interesting and will definitely have something to offer. After a bout of laziness and youtube (my youtube python bot was written last week on Thursday! But it is broken) I headed into work at AirCycler to continue programming Bubbles Upcoming, I will be getting a puppy in all of six days from now and I am very anxious/excited for it. I look forward to it as a transformitive and learning expirience that will bring me a best friend, ‘a man’s best friend.’
Yesterday (8/23/2020), me and Lillian decided to leave early in the morning to head out to Captains Flats. We saw lots of wildlife: moon snails, hermit crabs (a huge one too), birds, horse-shoe crabs, crabs, dead sand dollars, and even living sand dollars (first time seeing those!). The morning fog had still not lifted and we found ourselves far away from shore and withough any visual references to where land could be. We left our phones on shore as to not get them ruined by the salt water and the sun was far overhead making it difficult to discern the cardinal directions. The only thing that guided us back to shore before the tide went too far out was Lillian’s Apple Watch, which she had downloaded a compass app onto days before. We started heading west and eventually we ran into a guy and his dog who was able to point us in the right direction. He was standing quite close to shore but it was completely impossible to see through the fog. This was a lot of fun because it was a small ‘survival-like’ scenario but was not dangerous at all. We made it all the way to shore (Thanks Dave and Bodie) and even kept most of our dead sand dollars intact.
Last week for me was a bit of a blur but a couple of cool things happened.
Today I have also been exploring Mini-PCs, NUCs, and SBCs looking for a solution to my small but powerful and cheap server wanting problem. I don’t have to have it look perfect do I? I might need to actually start allocating some discresionary income.
Yesterday evening, after preparing for school and such, I finally got around to finishing ‘Red Rising’ by Pierce Brown and boy, oh, boy, that was one good book. It truly kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. So many twists and turns, artfully crafted sentences, rich and deep characters, intertwined destinies, all so great. I loved every moment of it and ordered the next book to read.
That’s all for now! Been feeling inspired by a couple of people around me (Russotiro, NODE, and others) to write my own theme for hugo, or just style my own webpage using html, css, and a little javascript. I love the look and simplicity of nodes webpage
Back from a great weekend at the lake with friends. A lot happened over the weekend and we got to do a lot of the things that I wanted to do. Firstly, the dates. Lillian and I left on Friday at around 1:30 - 2 and arrived at 5ish. Dinner had already been prepped by the both of us a week in advance so all we had to do was put on the spaghetti in advance, dress the chicken parm, and make a salad. The first day we swam and went out on the boat a bit to look at the stars. The sky was spectacular and we saw many shooting stars. I was able to identify (Saturn/Jupiter), Mars, Ursa Major, Polaris, Arcturus, and the Milky Way in the sky.
The next day was a lot of water sports and good eating. We were all sore by the end of the day and we played a lot of BANG! the card game. I am going to reread the rules because after about 5 mins of reading them while writing this, I can tell that there have been a few fatal differences between how we play and how this game is supposed to be played. My mom also showed me how I can fix the boat when it is being afflicted with the bad gas from Stewarts (water in the gas) and we got the boat running for the whole weekend.
Sunday (8/16/2020) was a bit of a crazy day. Around lunch my mother got a call from Shane that Alannah was not doing well. I could tell by the questions she was asking that it was quite serious. My mother remained calm for the majority of the day and came and went as she was tending to the situation. Lillian cut my hair for the second time that afternoon. During dinner my mom had to leave and we said goodbye, Alannah passed away that night.
Sunday and Monday morning were relatively normal. I kept in contact with my mother (who had flew out to Atlanta on Monday morning) as well as continued to host my friends until we started cleaning up around 4. Lillian and everyone was a huge help because earlier I had sliced my big toe on a glass that fell after I cleaned it. I then hobbled over to the bathroom and for the second year in a row (this time because I was hopping around on one foot) I smashed the light fixture in the Dyken pond bathroom. My hand had minor cuts but my foot had a small but moderately deep cut that I had to dress with cotton balls, gauze, and waterproof tape. Everyone left the camp, sad to go, at around 4:40. There are still some things that I want to do up there with them that we did not get around to. I would like to bring everyone over to the environmental center for a hike out to the petrified bog. I would also like to bring everyone to ramblewild or something like that. I would also have liked to show all of my friends my mom’s house down in center Berlin and her back yard. I would also have liked to have enough time to show everyone the pet Emu’s that the people on Airport Rd. had. This will have to wait till next year.
It is now Tuesday morning and I have just arrived at work at around 10:10, ready to use my brain, ready to work hard even with this slashed big toe. I am still working on Red Rising, Rust programming language, and am now prepping for the fall semester. I didn’t hear back from any of the scholarships I applied for and my financial aid is unfortunately going to have to change for the fall semester. I have a lot of stuff to do to prep for the fast approaching fall semester and I am anxious to get learning again. This weekend I also have become more comfortable with the idea of not being able to have a normal spring semester. After hearing some very preliminary data on campus life during the pandemic, I deem it unlikely that campus life will be back to normal in any meaningful way, even with a vaccine, during the spring. This is okay with me because I will get to have more continuous time with the new puppy which we will be getting on (8/29/2020) and also I will get to pay less money for not living in a dorm room.
All for now, updates will keep rolling in as I go. A lot of motivation to work on the youtube bot though!! Can’t wait to see where that project will go. - You all know who’s writing this.
What a journey the last almost three weeks have been.
Quick summary:
That’s basically the rundown! I have been very unmotivated to work on this website because the DNS (on Github pages end) keeps breaking and I don’t want to keep fixing it. This night, 12:18 am on Aug 14th I finally re-read Github pages documentation which gives a good rundown on the DNS setup. It also seems like there have been lots of improvments to github pages recently too!
I have been slowly beating back the bad habits monster but I am definitely feeling best this week out of the weeks I have been working (been trying to go into the office 9to5).
Anyways, I will hopefully be updating this while I am at Dyken Pond. Bye!
Yesterday I took a day off from work and just relaxed for most of the morning by myself. My dad was coming home early from work and my grandmother was arriving later that day. Unfortunately during this, I was not disciplined in following my youtube restrictions and have slipped into a cycle of regression instead of progression. But alas, this morning (after a night of staying up far too late watching videos), I am remaking the commitment that I have made months before. A commitment to improvement and one to limiting how I interact with youtube as a platform.
Today, my Aunt Kim and Uncle Peter are coming and I expect a lot of family discussion about Cody’s wedding in the fall. It is still very up in the air as travelling and doing a family gathering like a wedding at this time is quite impractical and discouraged. Yesterday I also started another little project of mine. The minecraft mapping project. During the week, I found a great piece of software that takes in a minecraft world and creates a scrollable map of the entire world https://overviewer.org. My friends and I have played many multiplayer worlds together over the years and I think a fun way of archiving them would be to have an overview of them online to explore. Unfortunately, this will not be version-controlled through github and implemented directly on github pages because of the enormous size of the file structure and render files themselves (Their system is a bit inefficient storage-wise imo but it is probably to have good LOD layers and high preformance when zoomed far out). So another solution is due, probably something like a dedicated piece of hardware?? Who knows?
Anyways… Seeya! Jack