My 42 TB storage is running out and Black Friday is around the corner. Deals are already out online. This sounds like a pretty good time for an upgrade. I need something that can last for a few more years. The plan? Same as the last time. Shuck external drives to get high capacity drives for cheap. Can't be a data hoarder without the capacity to store data, right?

Let's take a trip back for a sec, so we can compare past to present. Those WD (Western Digital) easystore drives have consistently been a nice way to get high capacity drives for cheap. Back in 2017, I needed more storage because some external 2 and 3 TB drives weren't enough. I wanted something overkill. Something that will last me for a few years. So I bought 4 of the 8 TB models for $160 each. That's just a bit above $20/TB when tax is considered. I have tweets with pictures covering these and what shucking them looks like. You can see those below:

As a University graduate student and teaching assistant, I have to attend and teach classes. Due to the events of the COVID-19 pandemic, classes have now moved mostly online. Zoom just happened to be the platform of choice where most classes are being hosted.

Back when I physically attended classes, I was that one student who sat in the front row and recorded every lecture. I don't really go back and listen to them, but they are useful if you forgot details about an assignment or if you wanted to double check the due date on an assignment being changed. Though, to me, the main reason was data. I wanted data... and I wanted as much as possible. When I teach, I also record everything. No matter the perspective, online classes make this much much easier.

So, what did I do? My usual. Made a completely overkill setup to preserve as much data as possible and accomplish the ultimate Zoom lecture recording. Speaking dramatically aside... Before I get to discussing the details on the setup, let's talk about Zoom and some technical details about it. This'll be important for later on.

On Black Friday last year, I got a pretty nice deal on an ultrawide HDR10 supported monitor by LG... so I bought two of them. One for my office at work, and one for home. It's definitely not a monitor used for mastering content, but it's a nice way to get into the world of HDR content creation. So, what can we do?

Well, as it turns out, there isn't a real way to record HDR at the moment via software (EDIT: Ok, maybe "Action!" can do it. I'll test that later). Content creators out there resort to using high quality capture cards to capture HDR10 gameplay. But why is there no software solution? Well, there is... sorta. But you have to get creative with it and manually do everything. For me, this is fine. I prefer being in full control in post. Let's experiment.

So I'm willing to bet that a lot of Linux power-users out there use terminal multiplexers to increase their productivity.

The terminal, at first, can be quite intimidating. I like to expose my students to it whenever I am teaching them how to program in C or C++. This is because UTK Computer Science major students are forced to use it to do their lab assignments eventually (usually in their second year).

The terminal, put quite simply, is just a single session for a user to input commands. However, there are so many ways to change this that it is ridiculous. Let's look at a general terminal running zsh:

Note: This is actually a pretty outdated post now. YouTube has updated their video processing and audio support tramendously. Not only do they support higher quality audio, but they also support 5.1 surround sound! I'll keep the original post here for archival's sake. Do I support downloading from YouTube? No. But I'm not going to hide the fact they've improved in the past three years.

tl;dr - It's a terrible idea.

A frequent question I see on YouTube music videos is "How can I download this song?". A common answer to that question is to use a "YouTube to MP3" converter which will take the video and extract its audio stream (AAC), convert it to MP3, and then let you download it. Yes, you get the song, but let's be honest... The quality of that file is pretty shitty.

Oh my, look how Windows 10 grew! With Windows 10 already available for about 190 countries, I felt like it was time for me to show a few screenshots of what Microsoft went through in the past few Technical Previews of Windows 10.

I must admit, I enjoyed being part of the preview. I got to see how Windows 10 grew and how it changed based on people's input/opinions. It was fun even though I never got to actually develop software like applications for the OS myself (yet).

Let's break down changes over the time via screenshots. You can see how graphical instances have changed, etc. Like all images on this blog, click the images to view their full resolution (mostly 1920x1080 PNG).

So as some readers may know, I own a Japanese Keyboard. The layout is slightly different on Japanese keyboards compared to US keyboards. I would have expected Windows 10 to adjust to this automatically, as Windows 8.1 was able to, but unfortunately, it hasn't. I was able to fix this via registry edits (Same as what I did in Windows 7...). Let's break down how to fix the issue:

Deep into the heard of the operating system is the registry. If you mess the wrong value up, it could result in your computer's functionality being terminated! Ah whatever, let's proceed.

To open: Press the Windows Key and R at the same time. It will open a text box asking what program to open. Type "regedit.exe" (Just "regedit" will do too) and press Enter. It will open up the Registry Editor.

Now you may be wondering, isn’t that just an English keyboard with stickers? Might fool you but look at the layout of the keyboard. :P This keyboard is a Bilingual Japanese/English Keyboard. I ordered stickers for Korean and Japanese here on the same day as I ordered the keyboard. Because of the stickers, the keyboard now has 3 languages: English, Japanese, and Korean. Why would I choose Korean? Because I am learning the Hangul alphabet right now. Why? I got so used to Japanese Kana that I actually got bored of trying to review on it and wanted to learn something new. My friend in College also wants to teach me some Korean since she comes from there :P. Anywho, All of the keys fit perfectly in the QWERTY layout, though the numbers above… eh not so much.

The overall format for the keyboard looks very nice. I love the colour indicators so if I ever have to look down at the keyboard, I can see what language I want to type in. White for US*, Yellow for Japanese Hiragana, Blue for Korean Hangul. The stickers feel very… unnoticeable and seem like they will stick on forever.