busybee fluffy rambles

Okay, so, I kinda-sorta had my streaming setup working pretty okay, with the big problem that I wasn’t able to get audio to come through digitally, and instead had to mix everything through the analog outs, going to the noisy input on the external USB audio interface. Not ideal. Also, the AVermedia drivers are unreliable and the app is crashy, and I didn’t have a good way of running the app at 1080p anyway (my laptop’s internal screen is only 768p and the HDMI dummy display I had was being unreliable about setting 1080p and there was no way to maximize the window without being able to click on it anyway, and on and on and on).

So, I went to Amazon and found a couple of devices (affiliate links) which simply convert HDMI to a standard webcam input – exactly what I wanted, because this could let OBS capture the audio and video as if it were a webcam. Which works really really well.

Unfortunately, neither device worked quite right; the one with the built-in splitter acts as a TV (for obvious reasons) and the HDMI passthrough thus uses a television colorspace, which doesn’t look right on the connected RGB-only DVI monitor. But audio works well.

The one without the splitter (using the external splitter) had all sorts of weird inconsistent colorspace behavior depending on which order things were plugged in, and I could never get audio to work at all.

Oh, and another thing I tried that almost worked was to plug my piano monitor into the second monitor output on the laptop, and run REcentral full-screen on that monitor. The resulting lag was a little annoying, but much worse was REcentral completely crapping out and going garbagey while I was trying to use it. Plus, I’m not a fan of any setup where I need the Windows machine to be on and fully-working just to use the external monitor. So that worked even worse than I’d expected.

So, for now I’m using the one with the built-in splitter and just dealing with weird colors on the monitor, and in the meantime I’ve ordered a cheap 24" HDTV that I can put up in place of the monitor. because of course I’m going to throw more money at this problem, because it’s irritating that I can’t get things to work quite right.

Oh, and meanwhile, I was also running into issues with macOS always detecting the capture device as preferring 720p, but fortunately it turns out that SwitchResX handles this. I was prepared to pay the $15 for it when I realized, wait, I already bought it back in 2005! And my license is still good for the current version! Yay! (Unfortunately this means my deadname is on the registration screen. I suppose I could ask them if I could get the name changed on the serial but I doubt it. If it really bothers me it’d probably be easier to just pay another $15. The software’s improved so much since then that it’d be worth it anyway.)

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I can theoretically get my game streaming setup working again (I gave up on it because I could never get the AVerMedia to work reliably and it would usually crap out about 10 minutes into my stream), since the non-splitter one plus the external splitter is perfect for this.

And then I can sell the AVerMedia on eBay or something, I guess? Wow, their going price is extremely random, everywhere from $50 to $100. And I suppose I’d then have an extra monitor I should sell too.

Anyway, then I decided to try actually doing a music stream while a bit weedy and it wasn’t a fun time. But I was already frustrated from this tangle of tech. Why I keep on throwing myself into this never-ending morass I’ll never understand.

So yeah the last um… two months have seen my fibromyalgia getting worse and worse, and my sleep getting worse and worse, and my pain getting worse and worse, and me just plain feeling like garbage and falling apart and constantly falling asleep throughout the day.

I still haven’t heard back from last week’s in-lab sleep study, but finally I decided enough was enough and two days ago stopped using my CPAP.

Two days ago I thought I might have to cancel all my weekend plans. Today, however, I felt absolutely fantastic, and did those plans and then some. And I still feel fine.

I am pretty sure the CPAP has been doing more harm than good, and I need to make the sleep doctor understand that while one metric (AHI) was going down, it’s only because the more important metric (amount of actual sleep managed) went down moreso.

Like, yeah, I wasn’t suffocating in my sleep, because I wasn’t sleeping.

Anyway. Tomorrow I will probably stream the iPhone battery replacement at, say, 2 PM PDT; if you want to see me possibly destroy the only phone I have which works properly, follow my twitch channel and “ring that bell,” as all the YouTubers say.

And I hope that with this newfound state of feeling pretty okay I’ll be able to start making music and comics (and therefore streaming!) more regularly again.

Jacky:

Oh yeah my plan for the indieauth profile service was to also provide h-card and (optional) micropub endpoints. :) I wrote more about that on one of my Subl-related blog posts (which I’m short on spoons to find at the moment).

So I’ve been thinking about this more and more. Having an intermediate service that lets people log in from a silo is excellent for the case you’ve ((@fluffy@queer.party)[https://queer.party/@fluffy]) mentioned. I think I got too far with this and was wondering if they’d use this to do replies, likes and the whole range of responses one could do from their own site.

Having the intermediate service be log-in-able via a silo would certainly be an option but what I was suggesting was actually having an intermediate service where you can also log in with a username/password or whatever. Like, it could be a “silo.” Like, have it as a bootstrap for people getting into IndieWeb without needing to self-host anything.

What I meant by “provide MicroPub endpoints” was me being overly terse and just saying that on the profile you set up on the profile service you could also link your profile to arbitrarily many other services (hosted by others), including MicroPub, as well as authority sources for RelMeAuth or whatever. Basically, a little catch-all tool to fix the bit that I feel is currently missing from the IndieWeb experience for someone who doesn’t have/want to self-host anything.

Incidentally, this is the blog entry I mentioned in that thread where I kind of rambled about this stuff. Also since then I’ve come to realize that there’s no real reason to integrate Pushl directly into Publ since now it does a lot more stuff and more generically than what is suitable for putting into the Publ side of things. (That said, you absolutely can use the same pipenv/venv for both Pushl and Publ, which is how I have things set up on the dayjob website. But that’s getting off in the weeds of minutiae.)

Also, it seems that both of our respective Markdown implementations have gotten confused by the parentheses around the queer.party link. Neat.