busybee fluffy rambles

The dress

It’s a custom-tailored slinky black dress that I got at eShakti. It’s what I was wearing during my Song Fight! Live performance.

If someone else here is interested in getting this dress, it’s the Chelsea Knit Dress. Regardless of whether you get this or something else, use referral code JSHAGAM when you order. eShakti is pretty great.

First day at work

The contrast between this place and my previous job is immense. There’s actual, like, onboarding docs, and a culture of documenting stuff and preparing incoming employees with a 1-week, 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day progress plan. The team I’m on cares about quality and maintainability. There’s a company-wide policies that spell out ways of being effective on Slack and on the wiki, and both are pretty well-manicured and curated because everyone actually cares about making life easier for everyone.

I’m also not the only trans person there by far, and that feels great. (I’m the only one on my team but my team is only four people.)

They assigned me an incredibly high-end laptop but I don’t have a good way of integrating it into my workspace. Fortunately, my existing Intel NUC is totally acceptable per IT policy and so the nice setup I had settled on at my last job is what remains.

Camera hax

My main camera is a Sony ɑ6000. It’s pretty nice and it takes great video. Unfortunately, when setting it to 1080p60, it has a tendency to overheat in 5 minutes, and even if it doesn’t overheat (because I’m recording at a lower setting) it has a hard cutoff of 00:29:59 because of EU tariffs.

Fixing the overheat was… slightly annoying, but not terrible. The short version is: open it up, and replace a useless plastic shield with a thermal conduction pad.

When you do open it up, though, be very careful; when you take the top off it’s way too easy to shear off the internal connector for the flash.

Fortunately I never use the flash anyway, so it’s not a huge deal to me. But still, it’s annoying that this happened.

Anyway, the time limit hack is even easier: it turns out that many Sony Alpha cameras (including the ɑ6000) have an Android-based application stack, and there’s an easy(ish) way to sideload apps onto it. And Android apps have, for some reason, access to hidden settings on the camera itself, including being able to disable the time limit, as well as enabling wifi for more apps. And there are some great additional apps like a time-lapse recording mode (which is bafflingly not standard on the ɑ6000) and stuff for uploading the SD card contents directly to a NAS and so on.

So, I have had my camera recording at 1080p60 50Mbps (its highest quality) for a while, and I was able to record for 50 minutes before a thermal warning appeared. And it was just a warning, not a rapid shutdown like I was getting before. The entire camera body is warm instead of there being a tiny hot spot right in the middle. Go figure.

Bonus

My new iPad finally arrived (after a month of waiting). It’s pretty nice. Pencil 2 is so much better than the original Pencil. Love the bigger screen and smaller form factor. Haven’t played with the LiDAR sensor yet but I have a lot on my plate right now, jeeze.