Week Notes [2026 #32]

Monday - Aug. 10, 2026

• Was chatting with prof. of rhetoric buddy that turned into working on a blog post that's ending up becoming an intro post on leaflet.pub about NeoDoc.

  I started at 11am. Ate lunch and took a nap from 2-3. It's now 7 and I'm still going. Well, I'm taking a break, but the point is it ain't done yet. Figure I'm gonna go full send with it, because why the fuck not.

Tuesday - Aug. 11, 2026

• Did a bunch of work on the testing features for NeoDoc. It's much smoother now.

• Published the first set of tests on the NeoDoc site.

• Seriously considering going to NY for the AT Proto Meetup in a couple weeks.

• Learned a new Rust thing thanks to clippy.

Instead of doing:

let x = test_root.map(|p| PathBuf::from(p));

to change the type of an option you can just do:

let x = test_root.map(PathBuf::from)

That just clicked about why that works. The value from the map just gets passed into the PathBuf::from function directly.

So dope.

Wednesday - Aug. 12, 2026

• Saw the psychiatrist today. It's all good for me. Less good about someone else who was about to get backer acted.

  (for those unfamiliar, that's where they put you in the psych ward for 72 hours for observation whether you want to go or not)

• Made a good set of progress with the NeoDoc parser. I'm setting it up so that I can write one batch of code that generates a bunch of the repetitive parts for me.

• Streamed on stream.place while doing the coding. Not sure if anyone stop by, but no one chatted. It looks like they have multi-stream built in. I'll figure out how to hook that up so it goes to Twitch too at some point, but for tonight I was cool with just chill'n.

Sunday - Aug. 16

• Did a lot of work on NeoDoc the past few days. Mainly it was setting up a way to make testing easier and to auto generate repetitive code.

  I'm really liking where things are at.

• I did a recording of this post over the past few days. Took the better part of a day to record. There's about three hours of raw tap and that was with a decent number of full stops to look things up like how to pronounce names.

  Probably spent eight hours total editing it down (which was really just removing all the bad takes).

  I tried to post the MP3, but it's too big to go to github so I had to throw it to an S3 bucket. It's been forever since I logged into that, but it was ready to go.

• I decided to throw a video version up on youtube. I did the initial recording in Adobe Audible so there wasn't even a face cam to go with the audio. I've played around with rendering waveforms for audio in the past but never really solved it.

  I decided that today was going to be the day.

  I found this video which walks through how to do a waveform in DaVinci Resolve both with and without a plugin. The version without seems like it's more random and representative. So, I started down the path of installing the plugin.

  The video recommends using "Reactor" (which is a plugin manager), but DaVinci seems to have removed it's ability to run since the video was recorded.

  So, I found the plugin itself and installed it manually. this is where you can get the file which you download and drop in the appropriate folder for DaVinci to pick it up.

  In my case, that's this on my mac:

  ~/Library/Application Support/Blackmagic Design/DaVinci Resolve/Fusion/Fuses

  I got it set up and working nicely. Also, used the notes from this video to clean up the audio a little. I'd originally tried doing it in Audition, but I'm not sure what I'm doing there. The video made it really straight forward in Resolve.

  Then I went to render it. The 50 min video was going to take 10 hours to render. I could let it run overnight, but I'd rather see what other options there are.

  Biggest issue is I'm using my several year old mac that doesn't have a GPU with any umph. I could switch on my windows machine, that does have a card, but I'm trying to avoid that.

  So, I'm down another rabbit hole of looking at AWS Workspaces to fire up a machine in the cloud with a nice GPU to render on. TBD on how that goes.

  {Time Passes...}

  Well shit.

  The audio waveform plugin is CPU bound. The beefy remote GPU I set up didn't make a difference.

  Back to the drawing board to figure this out. (or leave the machine rendering over night)

• Still haven't finished the post I started on Monday. It's still on the stack though.

Outro

Good week overall.

I'm ready to solve for this waveform thing and finish up that leaflet post to get them finished up. They're both close. First 90% is done. Just gotta do the last 90%.

Hope you have a great week.

-a