hobbies in a time of coronavirus

Like most people living Life in a Time of Coronavirus (and Trump Adminstration Year Four), I am forever searching for new ways to stave off anxiety attacks, panic attacks, a full nervous breakdown, and extreme boredom while leaving my home as little as possible.

Masks For All Occasions

Sometimes, I buy new masks and now I buy just from here: Bizzy Bates Creations

So far, these are bar none the best masks I have found anywhere. I talked about it on twitter but forgot here so: why I love these.

1.) They fold out to fit your nose and your chin without gapping.

This is my favorite part. The designer was an LPN and obviously got what faces are like in three dimensions and what masks need to do. It fits to the contours of your face amazingly.

2.) Fits under your glasses so no fogging!!!!!

3.) Adjustable straps to fit me and Child, whose head is bigger than mine.

4.) A lot of options for fabric that changes frequently and excellent design work. These are pretty and the fabric is excellent. We have five so far and I just made my July order.

5.) Preinstalled cotton filter and totally washable.

I cannot emphasize enough; I've bought many masks from different places and people, but hers are the best and most comfortable I've tried. The fit is incredibly good, and it fits close but not too close; the fold out means you can fit it to your face. Like, the only way I could get a better fit would be hire a seamstress to custom design one to my head.

Also! She also now sells silk-lined bonnets for textured hair that are gorgeous.

Note: Sherry is amazing; she's warm, kind, friendly, and responds to email promptly. I've emailed her a few times, including today today about the bonnet since I want to surprise a friend with one but since I'm not black and don't have textured hair (and I wanted to surprise her so couldn't ask her), I wasn't sure about maximum hair length or type, as friend does many kinds of updos and braids as well as extensions and Marley braids. She wrote back very quickly to assure me it would fit. I just ordered two--one adult, one child--for a friend and coworker whose been very stay at home since she has a five year old with asthma.

Hobbies in the Time of Coronavirus

I feel like my Shelter At Home learned skill is Ripping with MakeMKV and Encoding With Handbrake Every Movie I Own in All Possible Formats to Play on Anything Then Buying More Movies to Do It More.

And I am well on my way. Currently, my media server is technically 22 TB, because I had to add another 8TB hard drive. Yeah.

After getting NVIDIA Shield TV Pro--RECOMMENDED HOLY SHIT--I hooked up the four bay hard drive enclosure directly to my router via USB 3.0, which works gangbusters. And so.

Drives:
Video
- Size: 3TB (actual 2.68TiB)
- Used: 354 GB
Television:
- Size: 3TB (actual 2.68TiB)
- Used: 1.56 TiB
Movies:
- Size: 8TB (actual 7.22TiB)
- Used: 3.34 TiB
- Movies without a 4K version
Movies2: - NEW!
- Size: 8TB (actual 7.22TiB)
- Used: 4.14
- Movies with a 4K version

The reason for having to get a second 8TB hard drive is my Shelter in Place hobby.
( video encoding is a drug )

I Blame Spreadsheets

My Ubuntu Server Spreadsheet is the reason this happened, by the way. I wanted to get a full list of all my movies, and I thought, why not organize it? Then I thought, why not pull all vital statistics on a video file? Then I thought, why not create multiple sheets to break down the raw stats into readable information?

This was a process, is what I'm saying. A terrible escalating process. But what, I ask you, is more soothing to someone with ADHD, anxiety, and depression than finding new and amazingly anal organization schemes?

Which means there are the following separate sheets:
DATARO - this is a text file created by a bash script on my server that gets a list of all movies and formats it using information from the file name and location and imported into Excel.
DATAROM - this is a text file created by a bash script that run mediainfo on every single movie file and gives me vital statistics like: number of audio streams, number of subtitle streams, video encoder, source, and the name of each and every audio stream. Yes, this is where everything went wrong.

SPOILER: DATAROM is where eeeeeverything went to hell.

MoviesAll - created by VBA from DATARO. This is a straight list of all movies with the following fields: Title, Size, Unit, Resolution, Format, Date Added, Subdirectory, File Name, and Bytes, which is how I get Size and Unit.

That sounds great, right? No, it's not nearly anal enough. I now had DATAROM.

MovieType - created by VBA from DATAROM. This consolidates all movie files by title and resolutions, so I can see on a glance how many resolutions a movie has and its format(s).

SPOILER: this is how the 'create 720p for everything' began.

MovieInfo - created by VBA from DATAROM. This goes movie file by movie file, pulls the name of each audio stream, and categorizes it in a easy to reference table under one of four audio stream types and twenty-three subtypes: Dolby (8 subtypes), DTS (7 subtypes) , AAC LC (5 subtypes), and Other (mpeg, pcm, and other).

The last one is my beloved because it took me for fucking ever. This is where I learned all about how names have no meaning, all the meaning, multiple names for the same thing, and sometimes, astrology, I have no idea.

Behind the cut is a (very guesswork) breakdown of categorization of audio streams. I cannot emphasize enough how much google and guesswork went into this. If anyone sees this--and bold of me to assume anyone read this far, I don't think anyone is that bored--and wants to correct my interpretation of audio stream types, feel free please God I may canonize you when I get my new religion off the ground.
( VBA Select Case Table for Audio )

Anyway, that visual breakdown is what alerted me to the DTS-only problem and how I ended up here today. I have no regrets, and that may be worrying.