Technical setup
MacOs
In the last 6 years I have worked on a Windows laptop; nothing wrong with that; it was obligatory as was using all the Microsoft software that came with it. As I’m doing the FA26 in my own time it means using my own computer which is a Macbook Pro from 2018 with 16Gb RAM and 512Gb storage.
During our local lesson today we discussed various operating systems. I already installed Linux/Ubuntu on my machine using Parallels desktop (sorry no documentation there ;-)) as I thought this would better work later on when programming Arduino etc.. But Henk, our local instructor, said that all FA26 work can be finished using a Mac.
No I did not delete Linux yet but for now I’ve put it to sleep.
Time mgt
As time mgt is of the upmost importance I have decided to use an Agile way of working. In particular a Kanban way of working instead of Scrum. I have used and taught both methods but in my eyes, sprints would be more suitable to work as a team, fixed cadence and fixed work. But first of all it is just me, myself and I. Yes the cadence part is weekly but my feeling says that the content/work per week can and wil change all the time. But both methods let me use a board to keep track of the things I want to accomplish.
Atlassian is a fine source to get more info about both methods. Difference between Kanban and Scrum
(show picture)
Time mgt tooling
Next question is what tool to use. Neil’s presentation mentioned a lot of ways but from my experience I know that GitHub has a way to deal with this. I think therefore that GitLab can do the same. As part of my weekly assignment is to look into a GitLab tutorial I will look this up too.
Visual Studio Code
Yes it is from Microsoft but it is something I used before and I can live with the Big Tech regarding this. It says on it’s website that is it open source … as is VS Codium …
Appearantly VSCodium is based on the same code base. But I used it before in my work and with Arduino development. I don’t need fancy stuff that would get me in trouble.
MKDocs
While Henk was demonstrating how to setup a website with MKDocs I decided to use it as well; simply because it looked good and I'm not into styling; it will not be my focus for the weeks to come.
Note
Based on the second week I've updated this page
Video
I will use Quicktime player (which is standard on my Mac) for recording screens with sound. To convert I will use ffmpeg.
ffmpeg
HTML5 MP4 ffmpeg encoding
codecs H.264: good compression, widely supported H.265: better compression, less widely supported
~megabytes/minute compression for Web
variable bit rate 1080p MP3:
ffmpeg -i input_video -vcodec libx264 -crf 25 -preset medium -vf scale=-2:1080 -acodec libmp3lame -q:a 4 -ar 48000 -ac 2 output_video.mp4
fixed bit rate 1080p MP2:
ffmpeg -i input_video -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -vf scale=-2:1080 -acodec mp2 -b:a 256k -ar 48000 -ac 2 output_video.mp4
no audio:
ffmpeg -i input_video -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -vf scale=-2:1080 -an output_video.mp4
crop size (width:height:xoffset:yoffset):
ffmpeg -i input_video -vf crop=1500:800:200:100 -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -an output_video.mp4
trim time (-ss start time, -t duration):
ffmpeg -i input_video -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -an -ss 00:00:10 -t 00:00:10 output_video.mp4
mix audio and video:
ffmpeg -i input_video -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -vf crop=1120:876:0:100 -i input_audio -acodec mp2 -b:a 256k -ar 48000 -ac 2 -ss 00:00:20 -t 00:00:20 output_video.mp4
crop, pan, composite:
ffmpeg -i input_video_1 -i input_video_2 -filter_complex '[1:v]crop=175:95:930:860[cropout];[cropout]scale=350:190[scaleout];[0:v][scaleout]overlay=10:10[outv]' -map '[outv]' -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -map 0:a -acodec mp2 -b:a 256k -ac 2 -t 00:00:05 output_video.mp4
numbered images to video:
ffmpeg -r 30 -i %04d.jpg -vcodec libx264 -b:v 1000k -vf scale=-2:1080 -an output_video.mp4