Lion ponderings

After another difficult night battling Brachioradial Pruritus, managed 1 hour of sleep in which lions dreamed about just moving into a new apartment, strangely having trouble finding a shower, food & separating clean from dirty clothing.  Wondered why the lion kingdom had to check in so frequently.  Gradually realized the lion kingdom was homeless, having to scrounge for a shower, constantly having to find a place to live.  The new apartment required constantly reapplying.  Was waiting outside in a line to get in again. It made lions ponder their situation, relative to the last 20 years of rent inflation.  An apartment in silicon valley was $900 in 2005.  Today, it's $5000.   A house near the current apartment was $600k in 2005.  Today, it's $3M.  No amount of working or income can guarantee any security in fiat money.  Future lion could keep moving as rent increased.   -------------------------------------------------...

  Set to the task of documenting & preserving the lion kingdom's baseball souvenirs from 40 years ago.  Harder than it looks, without the right gear.  The glare problem came to a head.  The internet advice for getting it right in camera was all replaced in the last 3 years by selling AI tools for removing glare.  Documenting how something appeared in real life has all been replaced by generating images.    The best results were from ambient light, angled camera to maximize the resolution, over exposed 1 stop, F8, 200mm to minimize parallax, ISO 200. Sadly some softness in the edges.  The signatures are actually more visible in the photo than real life.   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------    The surviving bobble heads need to be reinforced where chips weakened the material.  Otherwise, they can probably be stored with foam stabilizing th...

 We might be nostalgic for the 70's once again.  There was a failed 70's revival in the 90's, complete with Neil Diamond tours.  The stagflation is arguably worse now than the 90's.  Housing inflation in the 70's may or may not have been worse than now.  It doubled from 1977-1982.  It only increased 25% from 2020-2025, but that was the nationwide average.  1977 didn't reflect a rise in flyover state costs from a population shift from job centers to flyover states but might have reflected similar increases in all areas.  Housing inflation continues to be concentrated in just a few states, lowering the average.   Lions believe modern inflation is equal to the 1970's but technology deflation has offset the housing inflation.  Inflation is a lot more tolerated because animals are a lot more invested in assets & reaping very high returns.  Losing your small cash position isn't the disaster it was. It could always swing the opposite w...

  Onward & upward. 77% in 3 years but that's what it takes to subsidize 3 to 1 government debt to GDP.  The fed is going to keep it going as long as they have something to offset it with.    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  What lions planned to do after retiring has long been either what they did during summer vacations in the 80's or vacations from 1997-2000.  Lions have pondered what made 1997-2000 the happy time.  The prime factors were just developing software, but lions did that for their career & it was not as rewarding for a boss. Building useful audio video software, useful audio electronics, & having an erratic schedule to suit whatever the immediate need was were key factors. At a lower level, there has to always be a big thing lions are making.  It was solving what lions saw as the most valuable problems, making what lions saw as th...

 Noted dragging edit handles was creating edits in the plugins since the razor tool came.  It was previously optimizing contiguous plugins.  This must have been taken out.    It got a new dedicated optimizer just for dragging edit handles. Started pondering the idea of replacing all the time values in the EDL with double precision seconds.  Previous ideas were replacing them with nanoseconds.  It's not possible to replace the time units in the plugins.  Just doing it in the EDL seems viable.  That would lock audio & video edits together.   Playback would convert all the floating point times to frames & samples. Helas, it's not clear if this would solve the problem of synchronized editing without a locking function.  It's continued to be rough going, even with the expansion of the alignment functions. There's still a pulse audio migration on the TODO list & smarter default window positions for a new install.  It...

Compiling it on native ubunt 24 was a much bigger deal than it was in containers.  Pulse audio had to be dropped to get it to compile.  That needs to be a system dependency, probably along with many other libraries which have stabilized.   The mane problem was slipped compatibility with gnome over the last 24 years. With gnome, it's no longer getting a ConfigureNotify for the window creation.  It can't restore its position in gnome.   The xprop program & the xrandr program can extract the window position information, but they use very complicated algorithms of their own to infer metadata from atoms.  It's really about swapping 1 diabolical algorithm for another. The position issue is being left to rot since lions don't use gnome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  It actually was manely functional on Xwayland without any obvious performance loss but there were proble...

     An extensive redesign of Cinelerra's capture settings led to a dedicated input format menu & only 1 video4linux2 driver.  Widgets finally had to get more condensed to fit it all in .  Certain input formats lock the file format inside FormatTools::update_driver. For other input formats, it tries to match the file codec with the video codec with calls to File::get_best_colormodel.  These have been programmed on a case by case basis so only a few cases are supported.  While young lion wanted a format agnostic program, the reality is it only ever needed 1 file format for recording & possibly a few more for rendering.  Recording always goes to an intermediate.  ffmpeg is bad at writing quicktime but it's good at everything else.  Quicktime & command line are the only 2 formats it needed for recording.   Tested against all the lion kingdom's video4linux2 devices.  The original PCI cards with TV tuners are all gone, b...

  Now predicting a Kamal victory & stonk market plunge because of it.  It went up when Trump won a debate, plunged when she was nominated & has gone sideways ever since she'd held a lead.  Lions expect a capital gains tax increase in 2029.  Their last increase was in 2013, wisely after the election.  2029 was once such a distant time lions thought they'd never see.   --------------------------------------------------------------------------   Recycling food containers is not a recipe for happiness in fuckmerica.   -------------------------------------------------------------------------   The lion kingdom's last dollar store pedometer from 2011 emerged with a completely corroded battery & was discarded without its LCD.   They were only bought for their LCD's.  It was a wildly different time, when no-one had smart phones or GPS & pedometers were the primary way of measuring distance.  Lion parents had o...

     Hopefully, the lion kingdom's portfolio was positioned to stay ahead of the 2 headed inflation monster.  Car insurance is less impactful because it's still a small part of an average budget.  The lion kingdom has never bought a used car so that is no part of the lion budget, yet it's subtracted from housing costs as if it was an equal part of everyone's budget.   Some animals expect an inflation spike after the rate cut & a much bigger rate hike to follow after the election.  Lions think they've got the figures cooked enough for housing to take off into double digits without causing the average to go above 2%.  There's huge pent up demand in Calif*.  The current $2 mil utopia is going to be a distant memory by next year. If only capital gains tax was computed like inflation.  A 50% rise in a $3 mil house + a 50% loss in a $2000 used car = no capital gains. --------------------------------------------------------------------...

  Same graph every month.  Rising houses prices offset by falling technology prices.  A useful visualization would be animating the 2 headed graph. Lots of predictions of a repeat of 1979, where the coming rate cuts stimulate inflation back to 10%.  Falling technology & wage prices are a mule we didn't have in 1979 to pay for rising housing prices, but lions believe a disproportionate number of animals have entered the stonk market after 20 years of nearly continuous bull markets, Dave Ramsey, & automatic enrollment.  This has caused far more animals to now have the option to retire early.  This should push wages up. Falling wages & technology prices have been the 2 pillars of rising stonk & housing prices for the last 40 years.  A better inflation index would subtract the total number of dollars in the falling head from the total number of dollars in the rising head every month instead of subtracting the percent change in each head....

 Another previous inflation report revised higher & another current inflation report comes in lower, with deflation of durable goods offsetting inflation of houses.  The future of housing is the same as it's always been.  Prices keep rising 20-50% every year.  Falling prices for durable goods pay for ZIRP.  ZIRP pays for stonk prices.  Stonks pay for housing. https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/march-core-pce-inflation-report-data-today/card/inflation-was-worse-than-first-reported-in-december-january-oQOBTWtDf4cKVAcZgyhu    We can keep doing this forever.   Revise last month higher & report lower inflation this month so every month it heads in the right direction.   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 The lion kingdom finally created another python revival in the form of a gphoto2 wrapper. https://github.com/heroineworshiper/utils/blob/master/gphoto.wrapper The history of lions & CLI programming is intriguing.  Like most animals, the bottom line in the 8 bit days was an interactive text program.  The BASIC run command had no command line arguments.  Neither did the sys command.  Only primitives like load, poke, peek took arguments.   Lions then wrote a text VMS C program & a few C programs for Mac ThinkC, with minimal command line arguments. Lions started out in Linux by only making GUI programs, as it was the shareware age & lions envisioned monetizing everything.   The front end for audio compression & audio recording was a GUI for no reason.  That was the emphasis for several years as a GUI appeared to make programs more attractive.     After 2003, lions favored pure command line for most everything, most...

  Onward & upward, but inflation is cooling when gains are traded against losses in semiconductor prices. The government only cares about what is going down to pay for rises elsewhere.   The government's favorite data point is the price of cell phone service.  That has always fallen & been able to offset every increase on the top end.  No-one remembers a time when plans were limited to 300 minutes/month or less. When lions lived in the boom of 1997-2000, we didn't have price increases like this until the very end of it.  Prices were going down all the way until 1999.  The declining cost of internet access was offsetting all the increases in wages. How ironic that rich animals live in tract houses while poor animals live in custom homes with no neighbors.