My Diary #246

Life

Not a whole ton happened this week, as I didn't really go out anywhere and do anything of note, at least during the weekdays. And after the craziness of last week, this was a good thing. We're off work on Monday due to the Civic Holiday that falls on the first Monday of August every year, and although it isn't a statutory holiday in the province, my workplace does have this Heritage Day, as we still call it, off. I might go out either on Sunday or Monday to the Edmonton Heritage Festival, and if I do then there will be a separate blog post showing all the country tents as usual. If I don't, then maybe next year, eh.

I've still mostly been on a scanning break, although I've done enough to keep up with all incoming documents (i.e. mostly mailbox flyer clutter) and moved on some of my Vegreville stash over the past two weeks, so the pile technically has gotten smaller. I'm reviewing my retention policy right now though, and even though I already don't keep a lot of what I gather and scan, I'm contemplating tossing out even more. I haven't really figured out where the line is for what I want to keep vs toss after I scan, but I do know from past experiences that this sort of decision is made in little iterative increments that develop over time for me, sort of like making a decision, and then letting the after-effects sink in for a while to see how it tastes, and then adjusting, and so on.

The bulk of what I did do this week centered around the balcony camera, my new EmpireTech IPC-Color4K-T-S2, as I started work on Sunday with configuring its various camera settings and setting up a pipeline from the camera to my computer and then to YouTube. This involved a lot of different steps and a lot of places that needed configuration and tweaking, and in the end Gemini was a big helper with all this since I could ask it about individual settings and with help in troubleshooting issues that arose, while retaining control of the overall process.

A couple of days were spent on the overlay itself, as I wanted an overlay for the stream that I could prettify and tweak to show a bunch of different weather information. I used Gemini to generate some code that would integrate with the ECCC, or Environment and Climate Change Canada (local), specifically their API site (local), to pull the temperature, weather, wind speed, sunrise/sunset times, air quality levels, and other things, and initially came up with a comprehensive overlay for it all:

But it felt like too much information for casual viewers, so in the end I simplified it down to just the basic stuff:

I'm particularly proud of reducing the moon phases and current weather (when available) to just a single icon each, and although I got Gemini to generate the math code for the moon phases and a Javascript map for the weather icons, I gathered the icons myself from free .png or .svg sites (and in most cases, edited them in Affinity before uploading them) instead of using generative LLMs for them. I'll probably add more to this over time, since random icons that only I know the meaning of are good ways to add data without increasing the overlay density. (Right? Right.)

The overlay also pulls weather watches/warnings from the ECCC data, and aurora chance from the AuroraWatch website (local), and it displays the former on a new line whenever there is a warning/watch, and the latter on a new line when it is between sunset and sunrise AND the chance is over 50%, so the lines are invisible most of the time too.

The stream itself is pretty good, the video is high quality and sharp enough even at night. Initially, I thought that I could see lots of stars at night too, even those that I can't see with the naked eye, so I was surprised. For example, I thought I could see most of Libra and Virgo above the horizon in front of my camera at night, at least according to the data from the Star Walk 2 (local) phone app, and the TimeandDate website's night sky applet (local). But I guess that be a case of pareidolia or something, because from analyzing my video recordings thus far, even though the "stars" fade out between nights and a couple of them do move a little in position, they don't actually move across the sky between sundown and sunrise. Ergo, cannot be celestial. They're likely hot pixels or some equivalent of that, but I don't know for sure yet.

But more importantly, it does a good job of capturing the desolation of the carparks below at night, which I really like due to the liminal feeling that it brings. And also I can catch the occasional weird nightly crime event or something happening below, I guess, although I've never "for sure" seen one other than kids lighting a fire on the top level of that two-storey carpark.

It also captures the evening skies fairly well, although it doesn't do the ground lighting as well during this time period.

That stuff can be slowly tweaked though, I just have to make sure it's not too vibrant or overexposed. The real life photo is closer to the brighter image above than the darker one, despite it being so late at night.

It struggles in some other lighting situations like the mid-afternoon sun though, where the sky portion is usually just blown up entirely even if I keep the exposure value at 0. And also after a storm, when there's bright light in the distance but the nearby area is still dark. I haven't figured out what to do about those situations yet, and since I don't have that many settings to tweak on the camera and don't want to do manual adjustments as I go, I might just have to find best effort colour profiles and leave it, and just leave the extreme cases to get laughed at.

The camera switches between three colour profiles right now, a Day, Night, and Evening one, although I am free to add up to about eight or so. In the Camera settings screen, I can only set a different "schedule" for auto-switching per month though:

And that config page, by the way, is something I need to open in Edge (or Chrome, but I refuse to install Chrome on this machine) because on Firefox, all the pages with video feeds have the video misaligned and offset to the up and left.

Tis so silly. And I have no clue how to fix it. Anyway, the camera also has other issues I'm working through, like trying to work on its audio equalizer to smoothen out the sound a bit, and to deaden the wind noises during a storm. And at certain settings the screen flickers white now and then, though I'm not sure why. And at certain other settings, the camera just goes down with an "Abnormal Exit" error and restarts every few hours, though I'm also not sure why, and this tends to break the camera feed (which I send into OBS via their VLC media player source, and then record it to disk or send it right to YouTube from there). Untoggling and retoggling the feed does fix it, but I can't seem to find a setting that automatically forces it to come back up on its own if it goes down.

The better fix is to fix the crash in the first place though, and I've had some success with that turning down the processing a bit, but that's also still a work in progress.

Anyway, despite the occasional problems, I've been having a positive experience with this EmpireTech camera so far. I did end up doing one live-stream in the week, on Jul 28:

That stream starts in the evening, and shows an Orange Watch-level Severe Thunderstorm rolling in from the west, which is the horizon in the distance in this case, straight into my camera and then past it. Then the bright skies re-emerge from the west and sweep across the screen too. It's very problematic in many areas, since I was still tweaking both the video and audio (and still am), but it was a good test of various aspects of the setup as this was only the second or third rainstorm that it had gone through.

I was surprised at how many people came by too, considering that it wasn't advertised anywhere at all. I guess there definitely are people just organically Googling for Edmonton live cameras or weather cameras, since a bunch of chat were from people that I did not know but that were obviously from Edmonton.

I also did get a seemingly racist comment from someone at the end of the stream though, and that wasn't very cool.

In addition, because I also recorded many test streams offline, I took a look through them and found what seems to be a coyote wandering our apartment carpark area below, by The Village at Southgate near Southgate Centre, and I incredulously cut that segment out into a video. As a bonus, I also noticed a bunch of what seems to be twin pairs of drones (meteors? UFOs?) flying by, at 21:34 and 21:52 of the video, and possibly other timestamps too since I only skimmed it. Very cool. All these things are events that I would never have noticed otherwise.

One major thing I need to figure out before I look at maybe turning it into a 24/7 stream, is whether I want to be recording this all the time, and what sort of deletion schedule I want for the recorded videos. I definitely have no plans to record AND hoard the streams 24/7, maybe at most I'll do a regular security camera cadence of saving recordings for a week before deleting them. I can of course go through and skim the videos and cut out anything interesting to keep permanently from those videos too, there's just no real reason I think to keep every single video I record, especially with hard drive prices so expensive these days.

Then again, if I also livestream them onto YouTube, that could act as a sort of archive too, although they supposedly also don't always archive streams longer than 12 hours (local). I don't know exactly what that means though, as it's a very wishy-washy statement, though I read that they mean YouTube doesn't save streams that are longer than 11 hours and 55 minutes at all. I needed to find out for myself though, so I streamed again on Saturday evening when there was another yellow thunderstorm, and then left it on overnight.

What I learnt was that YouTube truncates the livestream so the first 12 hours (11:59:57) are saved, and the rest after that seems to be discarded. The live chat seems to disappear as well, so I need to find some way to download and save that besides a messy copy-paste. The stats on the second stream were even better than the first one though, even with zero advertising. Just people organically coming in and looking for weather cams.

Cool. Stats! And here's the video itself for posterity's sake.

Moving on, not a whole ton happened outside of streams. When I was at the mall in the picture below last Sunday, I saw a small makers fair going on, but I was carrying too many groceries at that time to stop and browse it. This was apparently called the Agora Market, or the Agora Girl Summer Market (local).

I also made Asian-style macaroni soup for the first time in many years this week. It looks like the previous mention of me trying this in my blog was in Sep 2023, but even then that was a bit of a different dish, that was more my usual hotpot soup but with macaroni thrown in. This one only had minced pork (because chicken was too expensive), napa cabbage (because I didnt have the right leafy vegetable), Knorr chicken stock paste, and garlic as other soup ingredients. It still turned out nice though, especially since the chili sauce in the side bowl, which I had tried making a couple days before, was fantastic even though none of the sauces were the "right" recommended ones (according to both Gemini and recipe sites).

In the end, I made that sauce out of equal portions of Zhenjiang vinegar (I bought this 6-year vintage one back in Apr 2026), mushroom sauce (I bought some SXX matsutake sauce back in May on another T&T trip and used that), and Maggi Đậm Đặc (condensed soy sauce, but probably any dark soy sauce or even MSG would have worked). One teaspoon of each was poured into a small bowl with two chopped red chillies in them, and I would just dip the veggies and meat in them as I went. It was a great feeling!

I immediately made it again the following day. I also really liked seeing all my ingredients in all my little bowls:

This image makes me very pleased.

When I was at the local Dollarama store in Southgate this week to purchase some drain strainers and sponges, I also saw and ended up impulse buying a couple of cheap notebooks.

Autumn Aesthetic Club notebook and origami pony notebook? Yes please, sign me up. Both also came with lousy little pens but more importantly, a pen holder down the spine of the book to slide my own pen into. And at $2.50 each. Cute little pieces of stationery are my other weakness, along with cute little bowls, as I've mentioned before in various places around my blog.

And lastly, in lieu of any sky pictures this week (since I have sky videos instead), here's a picture that Jah requested of the actual physical layout of my camera, taken after a storm last weekend. It can still be somewhat improved, but the camera is on the right, wedged against the balcony railing. It's too big to physically fall through it. The stool is there to hold some of the spare wire ends off the ground, though I want to do something to seal those eventually. The box holds a router and connections to both the camera and the wireless access point, which is the white device seated on top of the box. Everything outside of the box is rated for snow and rain to some degree, but I still wonder what will eventually break first. I should also get a little table to put everything other than the camera on.

Games

Early in the week, most of my time was spent on Hades II (local). And my efforts paid off as I finally got a win! Several of them, in fact!

Why yes, Dora, I am very happy, and I do like root vegetables too.

I'm still not done the game though, as there's still an epilogue to achieve, and a lot of achievements to grind out. Also, there's two paths in Hades II and I've only beaten this one path still. I've been close to beating the other one but no bananas yet. However, now that I've beaten the game it can shift to a one or two runs a night sort of game, just like I did with the first one. Also, I like the conversations in the game a lot, and my favourite non-me character by far is Artemis.

Shine on yourself!

Besides Hades II, I've been playing a bit of Quasimorph (local) as well, as that hit 1.0 near the end of the week, which caused me to pick it up. Top-down, turn-based PvE extraction shooter checks quite a few boxes for me, though I've only played a couple levels in that thus far. So far, so good.

Satinel and I continued playing Zombie Army Trilogy (local) this week, and as of publication time we've finished 13 of the 15 levels now. It's a trilogy with 5 levels per game, combined into one bigger game, sort of how HITMAN World of Assassination (local) has Hitman 1, 2, and 3 levels all as part of the campaign. The game is still janky and buggy, and has hardlocked on me three or four times now, which caused me to lose collectible progress, but it seems to have done that less ever since I switched to actually playing the game in exclusive fullscreen mode, though the sample size is still fairly small with that. And it will remain fairly small, since we're likely to finish it this weekend and move on to something else.

It's been interesting to see how the "story" (or lack of) and level design (or lack of) has improved over the course of the game though, and how they reuse and remix some of the maps from Sniper Elite v2 Remastered (local) right into this one, just with zombies. And now in the third game, a few new mechanics have been thrown in to the mix too, so they must have figured out that their game engine could do a couple new things between the earlier games and the third one. It still doesn't hold a candle to the later Sniper Elite games though, but maybe the 4th iteration of the Zombie Army game will. We'll play that someday too, I'm sure.

Plushie of the Week #239

I don't actually have a ton of time left this week to finish this blog post for some reason (note: reason being lots of time spent on video stuff), so for Plushie of the Week this week, here's one from Kel's place in Guangzhou that I have no idea of the context about or backstory for. I took these pictures on Mar 13 2026, and it's a Merlion plushie, so it's almost certainly from Singapore, and it wasn't there the last time I visited Kel's place, so it must have been from her most recent trip there, sometime in 2025?

I'll probably need to touch base with her to see if she can remember anything about this specific plushie, because I have nothing written down for it otherwise, but in the meantime, here's the merlion plushie in her full splendour!

Side:

Other side:

Front:

Dreams

Jul 29 2026

• Snippet: I was at a train station and there was a train with three carriages waiting there, almost ready to move off. However, it needed a certain number of people before it would move, and one of the carriages was still one passenger under its minimum number needed, so I boarded that train just before its departure time to ensure that the train ride would not be cancelled for everyone else.

Jul 30 2026

• I was leaving my parents' house and requested a ride from Dad to the nearest bus stop, where a bus home was coming in about ten minutes or so. Dad took me near a Buddhist temple that he wanted to visit first, and I then left him sitting on the side of the road as he took care of some prayer, while I headed off south toward the nearby bus stop.
• Or so I thought, but I could not find the right bus stop, even with the aid of a map app on my phone. I kept on finding bus stops for wrong buses, including a 117 that went nowhere near where I wanted to go, and a 62 that looped around Yishun to the west instead.
• I needed a different bus that went to Tampines to the east, but when I finally paused and looked up where I was in comparison to my parents' house, I realized that the temple was much further north in the current neighbourhood than I expected, and the correct bus stops that I needed were only found in the south side. Dad hadn't realized that when he dropped me off near the temple.
• Since I knew that I had missed the bus for sure at this point, I took a moment to decide what to do instead. I contemplated walking to Tampines, which would have taken me more or less straight east for an hour or so, which would bring me to a Tampines bullet train station, and then around a large construction area by the bus terminal that I had seen before in prior dreams, before finally reaching the bus stop next to the local train station that I would originally have alighted from the bus and took the train home at.
• However, I felt that that was too far. My other option was to take the road west instead, to Yishun, whose train station was about half an hour away. I would also get to wander under a number of void decks along the way, as well as pass near enough by Yishun 799 and Yishun 723 to get a good, nostalgic look at them again. I could also catch the 62 bus partway there, which did a big loop around the Yishun neighbourhood, if I wanted to.
• I decided to do this, slowly heading off north and west from where I was. Among other miscellany, I passed by a spider web that had been woven between a parked car and a large flowerpot next to it, with a white, circular, coin-shaped thing caught or perched in the middle of the web. I didn't stop to take a closer look at it. I also opened my Pikmin Bloom phone app and found a bunch of shared mushrooms nearby, including a bunch from South Korea, and one from North Korea welcoming visitors and inviting them to learn the local language. I wondered who went near enough to that to join the mushroom and share it over here as a broadcast.

Jul 31 2026

• It was my first day of school at an overseas gifted school that I had qualified for. Qualification involved an interview by a panel of three judges and resulted in a piece of paper being sent to me at my parents' house, and the school itself was located in a city with a Mexican-sounding name that was similar to Curacao.
• I was preparing to leave from my parents' place, and Mom and Kel were there to see me off. Dad was going to drive me to a shopping centre where we would meet up with some other students and teachers and fly off together from. Before we left, he gave me a recipe which he said was something he used in school to calm down with, if I ever felt nervous. It was the name of a drink, made up of two or three Malay words that I didn't recognize.
• Dad held my bag for me as we headed out the door, and I had some papers in hand that I had scanned and was going to throw away. I brought them to the recycling bin but Kel wanted to look through them, and ended up keeping some of them for herself before tossing the rest away. I bid Kel and Mom farewell and headed off to the shopping centre with Dad.
• We met the other students and teachers there with about an hour and a half to spare, but I was confused as to why part of the papers I had received, two sheets stapled together that were supposed to be our school registration papers, were not filled in properly, so we didn't know exactly what classes we'd be taking. One of the other students showed me one of her sheets, and it was even less filled in than mine. A teacher took a look at my papers too and shrugged, but pointed out that the first sheet contained my student ID and that I should conceal that number from the other students as it was private information.
• I wandered away from the group to look for a washroom to use. We were on the second level of the mall, and I went up to the third floor and the ladies' room there but it was dirty and there was no actual stall to use, just a few wooden chairs that looked stained. I left and went up to the fourth floor but the toilets there were unusable too.
• I had to go all the way up to the sixth floor before I found a usable one there, in a large, communal bathroom where a toddler holding something was the only occupant of the room and was toddling his way out as I headed in. There were three usable seats all out in the open, but two of them had no toilet paper and the usable one had rust all over the seat, but a few pieces of tissue paper took care of that and I finally relieved myself.
• In the meantime, I could hear voices from the other people in my group talking from back down on the second level, and even while searching for a toilet I had been ready to bolt off and reconvene with the group if it sounded like they were going to leave. One of the male teachers said that they were headed to the chefs' kitchen though, and that we were not allowed to just take any food we saw but were allowed to buy something or accept any gifts that we were given. I headed back downstairs to reconvene with them.

Aug 01 2026

• Snippet: I remember being in a school setting with a bunch of friends and having various conversations and plotlines with them, but not any specific details, except that at one point we had to individually fight a "third boss" that was newly introduced. He was Chronos, although only by name, and nothing like the fight in Hades II. I didn't want to get hit so I ran around dropping bombs and exploding them on him over and over and whittled down his health bar slowly until he died. This set a new school record.

Aug 02 2026

• I was playing a first-person, co-op game where each player had a different fantasy-based class like tank, warrior, healer, mage, and so on. We moved as a team from encampment to encampment between levels, with each encampment acting as a staging ground that offers a variety of quests, though only three of us could go on each one at once.
• I had just finished a quest and announced that I was going to AFK to have dinner in real life, but Tes offered me an invite to a group that he had going with Mell where all three of us would be mages, and I accepted, thinking that we would form up now and head off after dinner.
• Instead, the two of them were already ready to go and he started the mission once I joined. I protested at that, pointing out that my character wasn't back to full strength yet either, and he apologized and said that since I was partially weakened, the two of them would tank the incoming monsters instead and I would just follow behind.
• We wound our way up a long, square stairwell that went up over 10 storeys, fighting various ratmen as we went. We all got bit a few times and although we could carry in three items that cure debuffs each, I had gone through two of mine and then picked up another debuff that made my screen tinted slightly red and changed the background music to be a bit more tinny. From what I saw of the actual in-game effects though, they weren't too adverse so I left that one alone.
• The stairs opened up onto a sprawling floor, with a large, central office room and other rooms to the east and west. We went towards the eastern exits when we suddenly got a message that said that the remaining rats had decided that they were not going to wait any longer, and we found a corner of the room to defend ourselves against the incoming swarm of rats there.
• We did end up winning this fight, although Jess, Mell's character, did not survive it, according to the character profile sheet that I saw at the mission end screen. The group successfully completed the quest though and she got credit for it too though, after respawning at the encampment just fine, so that wasn't a big deal in the end.
• I bid thanks and said that I was going to leave now, and then I woke up.