Through 10/23/22 · BibleDocs

Video

Summary

Unfortunately, I didn’t get through quite as much I had hoped this cycle, in terms of forward progress I think most people will actually care about. I did write up a draft for documentation on discussion pages, but wasn’t able to completely finish since I was waiting to take screenshots until I had a couple more discussion pages fleshed out, but then was blocked from actually doing that (temporarily) for various reasons. I got even more stuff done on the “workflow” side of things – continuing to set up voice recognition, handling Markdown in Microsoft Word, mics and monitors, etc. – still maintaining the hope that eventually all this upfront work will be worth it, and I can kick production into full gear.

Timestamps

0:00 0:00 - Introduction
01:34 01:34 - Outline
03:32 03:32 - This video is coming kinda late…
06:02 06:02 - Did various things to experiment with improving video quality
08:20 08:20 - Set up additional things with voice recognition
12:17 12:17 - Figured out how to be able to use Microsoft Word as my primary content editor while at the same time working with Markdown files
19:24 19:24 - Got the wireless Rode Go II mic system set up, for recording content videos
20:33 20:33 - Also got the portable dual 24" monitor arrangement set up properly, and tested it
22:06 22:06 - Got all the documentation for discussion pages written up
23:29 23:29 - Struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft Windows
31:08 31:08 - Upcoming work
33:53 33:53 - Outro

Content

This video is coming kinda late…

The last ministry progress summary video was delayed due to actual technical barriers (the video editing workflow I had was having issues that I had to iron out).
This time, it was just perfectionism in the way. I had a certain order I wanted to complete tasks in, but kept not finishing things, which pushed everything else back. I could give various other reasons (like the fact I worked three and a half hours of overtime one of the days this week, for example), but basically, I didn’t prioritize getting this video out on the Sunday or the Monday, and then it just slid.
I’m going to formally declare here that I’m going to try and not let this happen again. I don’t want it to become a pattern, and it has become apparent to me that I need to set that expectation out for myself, otherwise there will always be something else in the way that comes up (things have a funny habit of turning out that way). I’d like to have very good consistency, so that’s what I’m going to try to hold myself to.
So it may not be every other Sunday exactly (the boundaries that control which things I talk about) – it may stretch to the Monday some or even most weeks – but that will be the schedule. No later than Monday.

Did various things to experiment with improving video quality

Primarily dealing with lighting matters. I explained some of this at the beginning of the last ministry progress summary video. Adjusting frame rate, shutter speed, ISO settings, color balance, and so on.
And of course switching to recording somewhere with better light. Hence why I was in the master bath last time I was recording: it is, at the moment, the private place in the house (that is, somewhere I can close a door to record without bothering my roommate and/or company, and so on) with the best inside lighting (contrast relying on outside light from windows).
Today, however, I’m recording in the master bedroom, just with all the curtains thrown open to get good natural lighting from outside. Probably comes off a little less strange than recording in the bathroom.
At some point, I may get a smaller (narrower) standing desk with wheels to use as my recording platform (and put my portable monitor setup on it to be able to see notes and stuff when I am recording), but today I’m just using my tablet alone, resting on a somewhat zip-ties-and-duct-tape platform assembly I cobbled together, fulfilling the same basic purpose as that standing desk with wheels would eventually, should I actually go through with that in the future.
Recording in the master bedroom like this just means I need to record the videos during the day when I can get the good lighting from opening the curtains.

Set up additional things with voice recognition

I added additional custom vocabulary entries for various punctuation characters (open and close quotes and brackets, for example).
I also added/edited a couple custom commands (or shorter forms of commands Dragon already has), like one for adding new lines, and one for instantly deleting the last word (basically, sending Ctrl + Backspace)
I did a lot of research about some voice commands in Dragon
- Navigation commands (navigating to before/after words, beginning of document, end of document, end of line, etc.)
- Selection commands (current paragraph, last paragraph, next paragraph, specific words, arbitrary strings of words – including sentences or longer, etc.)
- Correction commands, and how training via correction helps improve Dragon accuracy
- How all of these things can only happen in very specific applications where Dragon can fully track cursor position. Like Microsoft Word, for example. The supported application list is pretty small, and, notably, does not include the programming text editors that I’ve lived in the last few years (like VSCode and IntelliJ).
After subscribing to Microsoft Office 365 Personal to get Microsoft Word (and subsequently enabling the Dragon add-in therein), experimented with all these navigation/selection/correction commands in a detailed fashion. I am quite happy with how the voice commands work, and the eventual speed it should enable, once I practice more.

Figured out how to be able to use Microsoft Word as my primary content editor while at the same time working with Markdown files

Microsoft Word is typically used with, well, Word documents (the .docx file extension). But all of my content is written in Markdown, and that’s not going to change, since it needs to be in Markdown for the static site generator I use to work properly. So, if I want to be able to unleash the full power of Dragon, I will need to work in Microsoft Word (since Dragon basically only “completely works” in Word and a couple other similar programs, like OpenOffice and WordPerfect), and to be able to do that, I need to figure out how to handle Markdown files in Microsoft Word.
I did a lot of research, and found out that there is a third-party paid extension that does the heavy behind-the-scenes lifting to auto-convert from Markdown into Word and vice versa when opening and saving files, so that you can work seamlessly with Markdown files in Word. This is precisely what I want, so I bought it. It is called Writage.
I was delighted to see that it fully supports tables and footnotes. Honestly speaking, so far I’ve found that working with these things in Word is actually easier than in the text editors I was using before.
This Word plugin mostly “just works”… except its parser/auto-converter automatically strips HTML (… but why?), auto-backslash-escapes #’s and <’s and >’s and so on, and does a couple other silly things besides. Because it is completely non-configurable (boo, hiss), I will have to write some additional Python code in my pre-processor app to clean up the messes this plugin makes in my Markdown files every time I save after editing something. After saving a file, it breaks things to the point where I can’t even see the in-progress work on the local Hugo webserver without it erroring out.
This isn’t a showstopper since after I set it up once and get it working it should be more or less automated forevermore in the future, but I didn’t get to writing the Python code to enable that this cycle. After determining it will be possible to get all this ironed out in the future, that was where I stopped this time. I’m not particularly looking forward to it, but if it will be necessary for me to properly mix Dragon voice writing and voice commands with Markdown (which it appears it will be), then it’s just another thing I’ll have to grit my teeth and code support for. Eventually at least. Progress always has a price.

This cycle, I also worked a lot on setting up custom Word styles (for headers and such), hotkeys for navigating the menus and file outline in Word, voice commands for changing between header formatting (like h3, h4, h5, etc.) and normal text styling, and so on.
Specific workflow details, basically. I’ll leave it at just that so that I don’t bore everyone with the techno-babble, but it was a lot.

Got the wireless Rode Go II mic system set up, for recording content videos

Not too much to say here. I can connect the mic receiver to the GoPro to get clear wireless mic input that is in-sync with the video coming from the GroPro.
I’m actually using the wireless mic system right now, as I record this video.
It did take me a good while to figure out how to set everything up and get it all working together nicely.
I also did a good bit of research regarding setting microphone gain properly: the balance between increasing gain to get strong input signal levels without at the same time leaving yourself too little headroom such that things clip if you ever exceed the 0 dB ceiling. Took me a while to wrap my head around things.

Also got the portable dual 24" monitor arrangement set up properly, and tested it

After all the necessary components were finally here, I tested everything out, and made sure it all worked well together. It does, fortunately.
I set up and tore down the dual 24" monitor arrangement a couple times while timing myself to get a sense for the time it takes. It’s between 4 and 5 minutes to get it set up or taken down, looks like. Not too bad, considering the amount of functionality it offers.
I used it in the public library on one of the Saturdays in this cycle. I was pretty happy with how I was able to work in the public environment with little reduced work efficiency given the dual 24" monitors. So it looks like my purchases will fulfill their purpose.

Got all the documentation for discussion pages written up

Not too much to say here either. It sounds simpler than it was, as it took me a good bit of time to figure what I wanted to say to help explain what discussion pages are and how they work.
This first pass in drafting things, I left TODOs for all the screenshots I plan to have, because I was planning to process several more lessons so that I could get through the third lesson in the SR4 series that has two discussion pages. That way I’d be able to have a screenshot with more than one discussion page visible, to show that there can in fact be more than one, with the order of them properly respected according to page weight.
But I ran into some hiccups in getting these additional discussion pages processed and got blocked for a while, which I’ll talk about in a second.

Struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft Windows

This one is another technical issue that I will try to keep short. (Well, at least not terribly long-winded). Basically, when I was trying to build the folders for the new discussion pages, I wasn’t able to name them what I wanted initially because of path length limitations baked into Microsoft Windows. (I use Windows 10 on my tablet, and Windows 11 on my desktop). Windows, by default, only lets you have paths (N.B. – full paths, not just files) of up to 260 characters, and after that, stuff breaks. So if you are in deeply nested folders and they have long names, you may run into this. Particularly with cloud storage folders, at least in my experience.
The first discussion page I had done had a path of C:/Users/steve/Dropbox/projects/bibledocs.org/content/longer-topical-studies/ichthys-sr4-satans-world-system/introduction-to-sr4-satans-world-system/level-of-depth-calling-many-deceived-too-harsh-why-god-allows-satan-control (224 characters here, which is less than 260, so that’s why I had no issues when I did this first one).
But then one of the next discussion pages I was trying to set up I wanted at the path of C:/Users/steve/Dropbox/projects/bibledocs.org/content/longer-topical-studies/ichthys-sr4-satans-world-system/purpose-in-this-dark-world-only-comes-by-faith-which-makes-us-outcasts-here-but-chosen-by-god/against-monasticism-and-the-idea-of-complete-separation-from-the-world (273 characters, which exceeds 260). So I couldn’t name it what I wanted. File Explorer just wouldn’t let me.
There were no helpful error messages, it just silently wouldn’t work, which was frustrating. Fortunately, I have pretty good debugging instincts given that I am a software engineer by profession (= I constantly have to debug stuff in the course of my job), so quickly figured out that I was getting blocked by path length limitations.

Actually resolving this problem once I’d identified it was another matter altogether. It took hours, and many of them at that. There was no simple system setting to toggle on support for longer paths, as the path length limit is heavily integrated into operating system things itself. Not so much for new things, but for backwards compatibility purposes, I would guess. I suppose supporting longer paths natively hasn’t been a priority because many normal people don’t bump into this issue.
I think part of the reason it took me so long here was that I was incredulous that it was as hard as it was to do this thing, this thing that it seems to me ought to be easily possible here in 2022. We aren’t in the dark ages of computers anymore, after all. I kept feeling like I was just searching with the wrong terms or something and missing the real “correct solution”. So I spent more time searching for that “correct solution” (that it turns out doesn’t exist) rather than just immediately going with the things that seemed more hack-ish the second I came across them.
The thing that did eventually work was manually adjusting a registry value to toggle on long path support. Then I was able to cd into directories and rename folders and files on the PowerShell command line, even if the new full paths after renaming would exceed 260 characters (even by a lot).

But I still couldn’t rename stuff in File Explorer (rather than on the command line). I got sucked into another research black hole trying to figure this one out too, wasting time in much the same way as I just described above (that is, thinking there must actually be a proper way to do it, if only I could find it). Like c’mon, if the operating system itself supports longer paths if you set the registry value, why in the world would the operating system’s own file manager not properly support it? Who would design things that way?
Microsoft, apparently. Here we are in 2022, and it is still officially impossible to deal with long paths in Windows natively. File Explorer (Windows’ built-in file manager), even if you set the registry value appropriately to support long paths at the OS level, just straight up doesn’t support it. And apparently there are no plans to make it work in the future either.
So after being defeated there too, I then had to turn myself to the task of finding a replacement Windows file manager that does support longer paths. And of course I didn’t want to be excessively hasty in choosing a new piece of software I’ll be using a lot, so I felt compelled to do research on different file manager options, weighing pros and cons, and making sure whatever I picked supported all the things I needed it too (such as properly integrating with Dropbox’s Smart Sync functionality, for example).
Long story short, I settled on a free one called FreeCommander, and now I can properly name my folders for the discussion pages. Only took like 3 days of research and debugging…

Upcoming work

Now that I can properly name the discussion page files and folders what I want (even though the paths are long and they are deeply nested), my top priority is going to be to get through organizing a few more of the early lessons from the SR4 series content, so that I can finally make good screenshots for the documentation about discussion pages (showing multiple discussion pages at the same time), so that I can finally push said documentation up to the live site. This will be priority #1 in the short term.
Then I’ll turn my focus to finishing the full organization for all the rest of the SR4 content that is up thus far. Once I finish that, I’ll be done with Phase II in my plan (explained a couple ministry progress summary videos back), and can therefore finally start uploading new content again, as well as start getting more involved in local church groups. At least that’s the plan.

Video/audio transcript

0:00 - hey guys right now I’m going to be making the ministry progress summary video here uh for events through October
0:06 - 23 2022 so this video is coming out a little bit late I just got really tied up with stuff this week and I’ll go over
0:12 - that in just a little and how I want to keep myself more consistent but uh long story short still kind of in the setup
0:19 - phase of things still making more work or sorry rather making more progress on the workflow and uh continuing to get
0:26 - things set up on the discussion pages so that I can organize more content now we’ll jump right into things here in a
0:32 - second with the outline but you know just going to show my face here on screen I’m pretty happy with the way
0:38 - things are going you know I’m hoping that I only have like a week or two more here I mean I know I kind of said that
0:44 - last time too but uh you know we’ll get into a little bit of that as I go over the things I got done but uh you know
0:50 - you may notice that the recording Locale has changed here I just kind of did decide you know I mean even though the
0:55 - lighting was good in the bathroom um you know right now I am actually in the math master bedroom so I’ve got the
1:01 - windows open and I played with the color balance and stuff on the inside profile here and I think this is like a little
1:09 - bit less strange than recording videos in the bathroom probably and so I actually do have the wireless microphone
1:15 - going too as well it’s why I’m standing a little bit back here um so I have the lapel mic on my collar here and then
1:20 - it’s hooked up to the wireless receiver on the GoPro so some of the video recording stuff starting to stabilize a
1:26 - bit but I certainly won’t bore everyone with the details on that I will go ahead and jump right into the actual content
1:33 - that I got done here in this two-week cycle all right so these are the things here
1:39 - in the outline first I’m going to go over kind of why this video is a bit late and kind of how I want to do better on this in the future uh just keep
1:46 - myself very consistent making these videos every couple weeks to keep the progress going so I’m recording this uh
1:52 - probably like six days late here you know I had intended to actually record it over the weekend but I was really busy and then stuff came up at work this
1:58 - week and so you know I’ll go over that a little bit I’m going to talk about how I continue to kind of change things with
2:04 - the video quality I just mentioned that a little bit here you know recording out in the bedroom with good natural light rather than artificial inside lights
2:12 - here I set up more stuff with voice recognition people may get kind of tired of me continuing to go over this but you
2:19 - know it is kind of a big deal how I want to make things moving forward this one’s big dragon which is the voice
2:25 - recognition software that I use kind of only fully integrates with a few programs and Microsoft Word is one of
2:31 - them and because I write most of my content in markdown I have to figure out how to be able to write my markdown in
2:37 - Microsoft Word so this was something that I was working on for quite a while here I got the wireless microphone
2:43 - system set up I’ll mentioned that a little bit at the beginning of the video as well I also completely tested out the
2:49 - portable dual 24-inch monitor setup I mentioned that in a previous Ministry progress summary but I actually took it
2:56 - to the library set up the full system it takes a little bit to set up and tear down but uh you know lets me be very
3:01 - productive if I do decide to go work out in a public place I got the documentation written up for the
3:07 - discussion Pages this was one of the big outstanding to Do’s I had for this phase I did get blocked on some stuff and that
3:13 - was because of path limitations in Microsoft Windows so I’ll get to that you know maybe kind of explain this in
3:20 - over much detail here but you know I was going to make even more progress organizing things this cycle but ended
3:26 - up getting kind of blocked because of this issue I was having naming things and then finally we’ll go over what the
3:33 - upcoming work that I’d like to get done is so starting out here we’re going to be going over kind of why this video is
3:39 - coming out a little bit late so the last one which I did release on like a Friday that one was late because I was actually
3:45 - having a full technical problems you know I was having issues with the video editing process that I had I worked out
3:51 - some of the Kinks You know I was having video audio sync issues having set up a new video profile on the GoPro which was
3:57 - causing the audio to drift relative to the video and uh you know it was kind of quite a chore to get it all ironed out
4:03 - last time although I think I’m kind of on a better path here so this time it wasn’t so much that I was strictly
4:09 - prevented from making the video earlier as I was a bit of perfectionism here on my part
4:14 - oh I kind of had a certain order I wanted to complete tasks in but kept like not finishing things and then that
4:20 - ended up pushing everything else back so I could give kind of a bunch of reasons you know I had to get my house inspected
4:26 - by the termite inspectors you know to maintain the termite warranty I have other practical stuff like that I also
4:32 - worked uh like three and a half hours overtime one of the days this week because we were really busy deadlines
4:37 - and stuff at work and so the basic gist though is that I just didn’t prioritize getting this video out on the Sunday or
4:43 - the Monday this week uh you know I didn’t push everything else aside to keep that schedule and kind of in the
4:49 - future here I’m going to try not to let this happen again where the video is coming you know quite a bit later in the
4:54 - week because I’m trying to hold myself to this two-week pattern here to maintain that consistency and so I’d
5:00 - like to have that consistency I’d like to maintain that schedule you know both for me to hold myself to it and then
5:05 - also for people who follow these updates so that they can maintain that kind of consistent status
5:12 - on what’s going on in the ministry so moving forward the goal uh may not exactly be every single Sunday that’s
5:19 - where the boundaries for things are you know I’m doing things every other Sunday uh is kind of where I cut off the content boundaries for uh the tasks that
5:26 - I I talk about in these updates but it might roll to the Monday just because sometimes I have to process the video
5:31 - and things like that but either the Sunday or the Monday every two weeks that’s when I’m hoping to have these
5:37 - videos out by so I’m saying that being a little bit hypocritical here um that means that the next video from the time I’m actually recording this is only
5:43 - going to be in about a week I mean I have gotten some stuff done this week too which I will talk about in that video but you know all this to say
5:49 - they’re going to try to actually hold myself a little bit better to that time window of Sunday or Monday rather than
5:55 - letting it slide back later in the week so if I need to I will bump other things on my task schedule to make sure that I
6:02 - maintain a bit better consistency with these videos here so that Preamble aside going to go over
6:07 - just a couple more of the things that I’m trying to do to improve video quality here so uh just going to really
6:13 - go through this quick like I mentioned actually recording in the master bedroom right now uh I had recorded the last
6:19 - video in the bathroom one of the advantages of using like inside artificial light is that I don’t have to
6:24 - only record videos when it’s bright outside but I could do it you know later at night once the sun has gone down but
6:30 - you know even so it’s just kind of odd recording in the bathroom so I thought better of it a little bit just decided
6:35 - you know what uh probably just seems a bit more natural to record in a room you know I’ve got like the bookcase in the background here and things like that and
6:42 - so that’s what I’m going to try to shoot for it just means that I have to record the videos when it’s bright outside basically and so I fiddled around with
6:48 - some GoPro settings still uh you know made sure that I got the profile I’m shooting with the inside light here uh
6:53 - you know with natural light coming in through the windows make sure all of that is working well things like that but basically uh for now gonna probably
7:01 - try recording in this setup here in the master bedroom for the foreseeable future because it’s a room where I can
7:07 - kind of be closed off you know not bother my roommate or anyone else who’s over and things like that now in the
7:12 - future I might kind of get a more formal like portable standing desk something that has wheels because I would want to
7:19 - actually take that out to go if I have people over for Bible studies we have the big projector out in the living room
7:25 - and I’d want to have my presenting set up there as well with the portable monitors the the Dual 24-inch monitors
7:31 - that I’ve mentioned for now I kind of just like zip ties and duct tape put together like a platform assembly and
7:37 - then put the tripod on that so I’ve actually got some like sheaves of printer paper like three of them to to
7:43 - raise it up a little bit and I think it’s going to work okay in the short term but maybe longer term going to try
7:49 - to get a standing desk with wheels there to make it a little bit more of an official presenter platform so I think
7:54 - that’s all I’m going to say about this you know I’m continuing to try to improve the video quality and the audio quality here with the mic as well just
8:01 - to make sure that the quality of the content it’s as good as I can make it you know given my somewhat limited set of skills
8:07 - and knowledge here you know I think I’m getting better but uh you know it’s certainly not something that I have a lot of formal training in so self-taught
8:13 - for the most part but I do think that things are better now than they were at the very beginning for example so kind
8:19 - of keep trying to leverage that make sure that the content ends up as good as I can make it next going to talk a little bit about
8:25 - the things with respect to voice recognition that I got done this time so I did add some custom vocabulary entries
8:31 - more things for punctuation also continuing to practice here to get that speed up and get my comfort with uh
8:38 - dictating sentences rather than typing things out a little bit faster I also added a couple custom commands or
8:45 - shorter forms of commands that Dragon already has so like one for adding new lines uh you know their their command
8:51 - for it is new line but you know again that is ambiguous possibly with things that you would say normal speech so I
8:57 - came up with my own brief for it then another one for deleting the last word um you know their command for it is
9:03 - delete last word that’s just a little bit wordy and so I came up with a single syllable thing that does the same thing
9:09 - you know just deletes the last word so kind of like control backspace now this was important especially towards the
9:15 - future here as I start dictating full time and trying to do a lot of my editing with the dictation software as
9:22 - well is there’s a lot of commands that you can do with Dragons so there’s like commands to navigate around in a
9:28 - document so that’s like between paragraph sentences beginning the file into the file things like that you can
9:33 - select things you know select arbitrary words in the sentence or phrases you know like this word through that word
9:40 - the entire sentence you’re in the next sentence the last sentence the next paragraph the last paragraph the current paragraph all of those sorts of things
9:47 - and then correction commands which is if mu are dictating something a dragon gets it wrong because it for example makes up
9:54 - hominins or something you can actually correct it and then in the future it will remember that so it’s smart machine
9:59 - learning type thing you know it will kind of correct itself over time as you train it and so all of these things very
10:06 - important for you know getting faster with doing things with voice now something that’s important about all of
10:12 - this and this drove a much of the other workflow stuff that I did this cycle is that these things can only happen in
10:18 - very specific applications where Dragon can fully track cursor position so Mike Microsoft Word is an example also like
10:25 - open office and wordperfect and a couple other programs but the supported application list is actually pretty
10:31 - small it’s mostly like word processors the kind of programmer text editors or Ides that I’ve been using like vs code
10:37 - and IntelliJ not on the list and so if I want to be able to navigate by voice
10:43 - commands or select text by voice commands and do the corrections so dragon learns over time I have to be in a program that actually supports drag
10:50 - and tracking cursor position and so Microsoft were definitely the biggest program um kind of like the one that is you know
10:56 - the most feature Rich and well supported um I mean I think it works about equally well in all of them you know Microsoft
11:01 - Word just has a lot of features that might make it more attractive over other options so that’s what I decided to go
11:06 - with and so for that reason I actually needed to get word so far I’ve kind of squeaked by just using the online form
11:13 - of the Microsoft like office thing so Word and Excel you can use them online
11:18 - for free and so I’ve just been doing that because I don’t really edit files that much all right most of my stuff in
11:24 - markdown at Google Docs but you know decided that you know if I need this for Dragon well then I’m gonna have to buy
11:29 - it so I got an Office 365 subscription I got the dragon add-in enabled there and
11:35 - you know tested it out here and then I tested out all of these commands that I was mentioning the navigation commands
11:40 - the selection commands the correction commands all of these things for Dragon uh to kind of unleash the full power of
11:46 - the voice recognition when I am dictating text here so pretty happy with how it turned out actually I definitely
11:51 - need to practice a lot more before I’ll kind of be able to do it more fluidly and and uh and kind of without pausing
11:58 - to think about what things I need to say to make it happen uh you know kind of get that that it’s not muscle memory I
12:04 - guess because you’re talking but the the talking memory uh very equivalent to muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts and
12:10 - stuff but I am pretty happy with how it turns out um I think once I do practice and once I get this speed I think it
12:16 - will work very well so this was the things that I was setting up on the voice recognition front now big problem
12:21 - caused by this is that all of my stuff for static side generators you know the content that I write for my website it’s
12:27 - written in markdown and Microsoft Word but usually does not use markdown it
12:32 - usually use uh you usually edit Word documents in word so uh things with the docx file extension but because all of
12:40 - my content is in markdown um that’s not going to change either because the static site generator so
12:45 - like not just the one I use but almost all of them uh you know use markdown as what you write your content in and so if
12:52 - I want to completely Unleash the Power of dragon with all those types of commands I mentioned the navigation
12:58 - commands the selection commands the correction commands I will need to work in Microsoft Word or one of the other
13:03 - programs uh you know but I picked word and so I need to work in Microsoft Word but I need to figure out how to handle
13:10 - markdown files in Microsoft Word and by handle them I mean like not just opening them up so that they’re plain text but
13:16 - I’d like syntax highlighting or something similar enough to it for the markdown headers and the ability to like
13:22 - open links um you know either control clicking them or things like that and uh so uh you
13:29 - know I basically decided I want to be able to actually use markdown uh edit markdown in a fluid sort of way using
13:36 - Microsoft Word where I have all of this uh Power using the dragon uh voice recognition commands and so I actually
13:43 - did a bunch of research and found this uh add-in for Microsoft Word it’s a third-party paid extension that kind of
13:50 - does the heavy lifting to Auto convert between markdown and word when you’re opening and saving files and so if you
13:55 - have a markdown file you can open it in Microsoft Word and then basically when it’s opening it in word it will like
14:01 - convert it to word behind the scenes so you work at it you work with it like it’s a normal Word file then when you save it it auto converts it back to
14:07 - markdown so pretty neat this is basically exactly what I wanted so I bought it you know it was you know not
14:13 - super cheap it was more than twenty dollars but one time a licensing fee or whatever it’s called writeage so there’s
14:19 - a link here you know I’ll go real briefly open this and so so uh you know
14:24 - it’s this this plugin for Microsoft Word that basically lets you uh do markdown stuff in Microsoft Word uh now of course
14:31 - me being me I did have some issues with it um it actually completely removes HTML
14:37 - which kind of puzzling to me since that was one of markdown’s big selling points was that you can just kind of mix HTML
14:42 - with the text that you write but regardless of this plugin removes it I guess it’s probably just because it was
14:48 - designed kind of for normal people in mind you know uh you know for me I would have been more liable to kind of do
14:55 - things with pandok which is a command line converter for various file types but you know that’s not completely
15:01 - automated I suppose I could set it up with like things that track if you save something and then Auto convert it but
15:06 - this is more seamless it’s just that the parser isn’t very flexible so it strips
15:11 - HTML which is annoying and um kind of Auto backslash escapes number signs that
15:16 - aren’t part of headers so for example I use them for anchor tags when I automatically generate headers with the
15:22 - preprocessor application and then the angle brackets as well automatically escapes those and so basically every
15:28 - time I run something through this plugin to work with something in Microsoft Word and then I save the file it kind of
15:33 - messes up my markdown file now it’s kind of a limited set of ways that it does this it’s not like it it screws
15:38 - everything up it’s just these few things and so I’ve decided that once I set it up and get it working I’ll be able to
15:45 - actually kind of write additional functionality in the preprocessor
15:52 - application that I’ve been writing in Python to after I have been editing these files in Microsoft Word I’ll just
15:57 - have to rerun the preprocessor which I do anyway to build the subject index and I just have to be smart and kind of undo
16:03 - the ways in which this plugin messes up my markdown files now it’s not awful it’s just that because their parser
16:10 - doesn’t have any customization like I can’t tell it hey I don’t want you to do this you know I can’t check some check boxes and say turn off this feature you
16:17 - know basically I would just rather it doesn’t mess with my files that much but it kind of does these things and I guess probably just because because it’s
16:23 - trying to be user friendly and stuff for people who aren’t familiar with markdown whereas for me I’m very familiar with
16:29 - markdown and I’ve used it almost exclusively for the last five years or so it’s just I now I need to do it in
16:34 - word and so I think it’s kind of going the other way and that’s why it’s kind of frustrating for me but you know I think I’ll be able to you know write my
16:41 - application to kind of undo the things that are supposed to be helpful so that it will actually work for my use case
16:46 - and that way I will be able to write markdown files in Microsoft Word where I can use all of the Dragon commands now
16:53 - one other thing to note I was actually pretty delighted that it supports tables and footnotes exactly how you have them
17:00 - in word and so you have wysiwyg tables and footnotes on the bottom of the page and honestly these things actually work
17:05 - better in word than they have been in the text editors that I’ve been using so there are like keyboard shortcuts where
17:10 - you can like tab between cells in tables in things like vs code or the markdown
17:16 - plugin for IntelliJ you know so it’s not like they’re awful in those but uh you know the the what you see is what you
17:22 - get that’s what wysiwyg stands for tables in uh Microsoft Word definitely better you know it’s just a little bit
17:28 - easier to work with I think and so I was happy to see that it just kind of supports it out of the box it uses the
17:34 - GitHub flavored markdown tables and so I’m not like unhappy with this plugin I just wish that there was a bit more
17:39 - customization so that it didn’t break things in my workflow so much but I think it’ll be fixable the one thing
17:45 - that won’t be super fixable is the stripping out of HTML that’s just kind of like tough I will have to refactor to
17:52 - use make my own comment short code in my static site generator to get around that so A few pain points of frustration here
17:58 - but this was something that I spent time on so that moving forward in the future I’ll be able to draft all my content
18:04 - with voice recognition in markdown so you know maybe not very interesting for most people but will be very important
18:11 - in the future as I continue uh chipping away at this voice recognition stuff to try to be faster and faster in how I
18:17 - draft content um you know one other thing I did after I got a word set up initially I did a
18:23 - bunch of a customization type stuff so I set up custom styling for the headers and I kind of reduced the font size so
18:29 - that headers were just color coded rather than being really big so they take up less space on the screen and
18:34 - then keyboard shortcuts for navigating the menus and the the file outline then
18:40 - voice commands for changing between the header formatting so I’ll say something like header three and then that will apply the header 3 styling or normal
18:47 - text and that will change the styling back to normal text things like that so uh voice recognition command specific
18:53 - for how I’m setting things up in Microsoft Word and then you know just a bunch of other workflow details and am I
18:59 - going to try to bore everyone with the technobabble here but there’s like a lot of configuration uh more things like
19:05 - that you know and I I’m not even completely done um you know I I mentioned that I will be able to fix some of the problems that
19:11 - this plugin causes in my markdown files but I didn’t actually do that this time I just kind of like reasoned my way
19:17 - through it figured out it would be possible so that this actually will be a solution to being able to write markdown
19:23 - in Microsoft Word I’ll just have to go do that at some point before I start doing this kind of more full-time so
19:28 - I’ll stop uh rambling there um this also real quick I did get the wireless microphone system set up again
19:34 - I’m actually using it to record this right now um it did take me a while to get
19:39 - everything set up and figure out how it all connects together and the wireless signal and I did also do a good bit of
19:45 - research here uh kind of figuring out how to adjust gain settings properly so kind of the balance between getting
19:52 - strong input signal levels while leaving enough headrooms so that you don’t clip so that you leave enough ceiling here
19:58 - that you don’t exceed the zero decibel threshold where you start getting clipping in your audio so you know I
20:03 - again not uh pretending to be professional here I’m learning as I go although I do think I am gaining enough
20:10 - knowledge in these things that hopefully the content quality will keep improving over time but um so you know it’s worked pretty well
20:16 - I’m happy with the purchase I mean it was expensive enough but the Wireless receivers they work with the GoPro and
20:21 - in fact right now the wireless receiver is plugged into the GoPro which in turn is plugged into the computer so I’m
20:27 - using it as my webcam and the audio is actually coming in through the capture card interface and I even that’s working okay so kind of complicated but happy to
20:34 - get this system set up too um also with the portable 24 inch monitors again you know did mention not
20:40 - the most interesting content week again I promise guys I’ll get there eventually but uh still doing all of this setup
20:46 - stuff here I did get the all of the components for the portable monitor setup here the Dual 24-inch monitors
20:53 - came and finally I tested everything out and made sure it all worked together um it did which I was happy about you
20:58 - know I didn’t have any real hiccups in the process here I had the drivers for the displays installed on my computer a
21:04 - so-called display link lets you hook up these uh kind of displays over USB with
21:09 - like a USB hub that I have so I set up and tore down the setup a couple of times you know it takes me like
21:16 - somewhere between four and five minutes to set it up and take it down and say you know that’s like a reasonable
21:22 - reasonably large amount of time investment so it kind of makes it worth my while if I’m going to be somewhere for like several hours working having
21:29 - all of that extra screen real estate rather than just my puny tablet screen really does help me be more efficient
21:34 - and so I did actually test it out in the real world situation I went to the public library on one of the Saturdays
21:40 - in this cycle and I was actually pretty happy with how well would let me work you know I put my headphones on in that
21:46 - environment and really knocked some stuff out with the two monitors letting me kind of work without taking a big
21:51 - efficiency hit even though you know I didn’t have my full uh you know 4K TV as my monitor display that’s normally what
21:57 - I use at home but you get the idea you know happy to test out the setup and see
22:03 - that it worked more or less how I had designed it and intended for it to so you know more things on the setup here
22:09 - now actually as to uh things kind of making more forward Ministry progress
22:14 - itself I did get the documentation for the discussion Pages written up uh not a
22:20 - lot to say here you know maybe that sounds pretty simple um I actually had kind of a tricky time figuring out what I wanted to say to
22:26 - help explain what discussion pages are and how they work on the site now this first pass I did kind of leave to Do’s
22:32 - uh for adding screenshots for a lot of the things that I’m talking about um so you know screenshots showing how
22:39 - various bits of the discussion page process work on the site that’s because I wanted to be able to show that you can
22:44 - have more than one discussion page and right now the only thing that I think I actually have more than one discussion
22:50 - page is actually the third lesson in the sr4 series and so far I only did the first one and so I decided that I wanted
22:56 - to you know get a couple more lessons processed so the second lesson the third lesson in the discussion pages for all
23:02 - of those so that I’d have this example with multiple discussion Pages for the same content page because that’s something that can happen and you know I
23:08 - just wanted to show it was possible and explain how that worked but in the process of actually trying to get the rest of that content processed I ran
23:14 - into a roadblock that’ll be one of the last things we talk about here for this cycle because this really blocked me for
23:20 - like several days here but that’s kind of what I was doing I was getting the documentation Pages written then I was
23:26 - going to organize several more of the lessons in the sr4 series so that I’d be able to have this example with multiple
23:32 - discussion pages and then when trying to do that got blocked by pathlink limits so this was a configuration issue that I
23:40 - really beat my head against the wall for a while on um I was struggling through issues with path length limitations on Microsoft
23:46 - Windows so I use Windows 10 on my tablet it and then Windows 11 on my desktop at
23:53 - home and it turns out that Windows only lets you have full file Paths of up to 260 characters by default and a file
24:00 - path is like not just it’s not just like the name of the file is this you know
24:06 - like my C drive user Steve Dropbox projects etc etc so the complete length
24:11 - of this cannot exceed 260 characters because if it does it just won’t let you it won’t let you exceed that and so if
24:18 - you if you go above that um I I take it for backwards compatibility reasons some stuff breaks in like the windows kernel apis or
24:24 - whatever and so it just it doesn’t out of the box support it and so I think the
24:29 - reason why this hasn’t been a huge priority to fix is that many people don’t have an issue with this so just as
24:34 - an example for me uh the first discussion page that I had done that actually worked so discussion pages are
24:40 - highly nested because so this is the kind of content organization you can see that I have my website currently set up
24:47 - in my Dropbox folder here so it’s automatically backing up to the cloud um so you know my my user path and then
24:54 - Dropbox projects bibledocs.org this is the website and then within the site
24:59 - directory we go to the content directory then the content type which is longer topical studies then the name of the
25:05 - study which is the sr4 study so if this is sr4 Satan’s World system and then
25:10 - after that the name of the content page in the study so this one was the introduction uh this first this first
25:16 - lesson was the introduction so introduction to sr4 savings world system and then this right here is the name of
25:22 - the discussion page so level of depth is calling many deceive too harsh why God allow Satan control those were the
25:29 - discussion topics that we went over in this video and so this entire path is actually 224 characters long you know I
25:34 - put that into like a character counter on the internet and that’s less than 260 and so that’s why I didn’t have issues here now for this one uh you know same
25:41 - general path you know we’re still in the same same study a different content page this time so this content page is
25:47 - actually a lot longer and so the reason why I was having issues was because I just wanted to make uh the folder
25:52 - structure here just match the titles I find that very intuitive um even though it leads to like long paths
25:59 - um I I don’t see a great way to do that otherwise like I find this the most intuitive
26:04 - um you know it matches the titles and the paths uh you know like why wouldn’t you do that aside from the length limits
26:10 - that we have here so the title of this one uh the lesson was purpose in this
26:15 - dark world only comes by faith which makes us Outcast here but chosen by God right an important spiritual concept for
26:21 - us and then the discussion page here uh is called against monasticism and the
26:27 - idea of complete separation from the world so that’s not a very short file name either right these are the names of
26:32 - the folders that contain the index files that have uh the actual content in them but all said and done all of these paths
26:39 - together come out to be 273 characters which exceeds the 260 that’s the limit on windows by default now it wasn’t like
26:47 - I got a message that hopefully popped up and said hey you can’t rename this file because it exceeds the link limitation it just didn’t work and so for a while I
26:54 - was sitting there scratching my head figuring out you know why isn’t it letting me rename the file I don’t understand and now thankfully I have a
27:00 - lot of experience debugging stuff because I’m a software engineer that’s my full-time job my day job and so I
27:07 - have reasonably good instincts because I have to do this sort of thing a lot at work and so you know I figured out
27:12 - pretty quick oh it must be because of the file length now after I figured that out actually resolving the problem it
27:17 - was not that easy um so it took hours and many hours at that um there wasn’t any simple system
27:23 - setting that I could check that said yes I would like to support longer files thank you very much and it does not just
27:29 - work and so part of the reason why I think this took me so long to iron out was I was just incredulous that this
27:35 - wasn’t easier to do you know like we’re in 2022 now not the dark ages of the internet so uh you know like why can’t
27:41 - we why can’t we just have file names that aren’t really short like or sorry not file name file paths that aren’t
27:47 - really short like this stopped being a technical problem a long time ago is what I’m saying uh you know not when computers were very new and memory was
27:53 - expensive and things like that um you know I kind of see the case for it then but the fact that this is so
27:59 - complicated to set up on like a modern Windows computer is what puzzled me so I kept thinking that like I was just like
28:04 - not looking in the right place I wasn’t using the right Search terms or whatever and then if I just searched a little bit harder I’d find like the actual real way
28:11 - to enable this because I was like sir certainly it can’t be this hard right um and it actually was that hard so the
28:16 - thing that I actually had to do to enable this was I had to go manually edit a registry value to turn this
28:23 - support for long file paths on it the operating system level and so once I’ve done that I could rename files on the
28:29 - Powershell command line to whatever I wanted basically I mean I’m sure there’s an upper limit probably like the thousands of characters or whatever but
28:35 - you know plenty long enough for me you know I was just a little more than 260 probably going to end up being like under 300 most of the time but more than
28:41 - 260 at any rate and so if I could rename stuff on the command line and then it was actually working fine now the
28:47 - problem was I still couldn’t rename stuff in file explorer and so again another black hole of research here
28:53 - going down being like certainly certainly if you can enable it at the operating system level you can have it
28:59 - supported in the file manager right so file explorer is the default file manager on Windows and I figure if they
29:05 - support it in the operating system it wouldn’t make any sense for them not to support in the file manager right but um so I asked you know who would design
29:12 - things that way so that the operating system supports it but the file manager the chips with the operating system
29:17 - doesn’t well micro yourself apparently because here we are in 2022 and you
29:23 - still actually cannot it’s officially impossible for you to deal with long paths in Windows like natively you just
29:29 - can’t do it um so even though the operating system supports it if you go dig into the bowels and you change the
29:34 - registry vowel or sorry the registry value uh file explorer just will not it
29:39 - cannot and they have no plans of making it in the future because there’s stuff that relies on file explorer and uh for
29:46 - backwards compatibility reasons and stuff I mean I was reading some of this it doesn’t even sound like they’re going to support it in the future and so after
29:52 - all of this research I was kind of put out I was disappointed because I’d spent all this time and then I had to go
29:58 - actually research file managers myself because the file explorer can’t do it I have to get a different one because I do
30:04 - want to have the longer paths again because they match the titles of my content and I think that makes sense and
30:09 - so after all of this I had to go research file managers because you know I’m going to be using this a lot and you
30:15 - know I have other requirements too I use Dropbox and so it needs to integrate with with the smart sync functionality that’s a part of Dropbox for example it
30:21 - needs to let me support the longer paths and stuff and so a long story short after all that research I settled on a
30:28 - free option it’s called free Commander I’m pretty happy with it you know I played around with it for a while and got it set up but now after all of this
30:34 - I can properly name my folders for the discussion Pages what I want them to be so you know with the name of the content
30:39 - page and then the name of the discussion page I can have it all match the title so that it’s intuitive but it took me
30:46 - like two or three days you know going through all of this on top of my my job you know I actually sacrificed an entire
30:51 - Sunday to this and it just took me a long time to figure out how to actually get this all to work and I’m still kind
30:56 - of disappointed that it’s so hard to enable this it just seems like it’s something that ought and be that hard given that we live in the modern day but
31:03 - apparently it is and so you know this was something that sucked up a bunch of time and this is one of those reasons why I didn’t make as much progress on
31:10 - the content front as I wanted to all right so that was the cycle you know a lot more on the workflow stuff I did
31:15 - write up the documentation for the discussion Pages you know that did give me close are here and so now that I fixed this issue with the paths the file
31:23 - paths so that I can actually name the folders what I want and I kind of got myself unstuck the next thing after this
31:28 - is going to be organizing those early lessons in the sr4 series so that I can get through the third one that has two
31:35 - discussion pages so that I can finally take the screenshots so that I can finally finish the documentation page so
31:40 - that I can finally publish it to the website so that’s going to be priority number one here in the short term and then after I finished that I’m going to
31:46 - turn my focus to finishing the full Organization for all the rest of the content in the sr4 series and so once I
31:53 - do that I will be done with phase two and the plan that I’ve had kind of for
31:58 - moving forward here in the ministry I explained this back uh I think like two Ministry progress summaries ago so here
32:04 - we are talking about what’s in phase two that was going to be fully coding support for discussion Pages writing the
32:09 - documentation for discussion Pages what I just did and then catching up on all the organization here
32:14 - um after this I will start making new ministry content again you know this is kind of one going to give myself permission to be you know a little bit
32:21 - more proactive about making new content again because I will caught up on some of the old stuff then I’ll mix uh you
32:27 - know catching up on the rest of the peripatology series that’s already up on YouTube with making new stuff so I don’t
32:32 - burn myself out um and then I’m also probably going to start getting a little bit more involved in local stuff you know once I’m kind of
32:39 - making new stuff again on a consistent schedule I didn’t want to go uh you know kind of start getting really involved
32:45 - and really busy until I kind of started making stuff again I got that process set up and uh you know saw what my time
32:52 - commitments were like and things like that but hoping to start making new content as well as getting involved in local stuff maybe even starting up the
32:59 - local Bible study here at the house you know my roommate and I have organized our house for this pretty hyped about it
33:04 - I hope it turns out well again if we can find people who are interested in this but all of this can kind of start once I
33:11 - finally get that content uh once I finally start making content again consistently which is going to happen as
33:16 - soon as I finish the organization here so I why I said I am close you know I am getting ever closer to this as I keep
33:22 - going here but looking forward to hopefully being able to finish that so that I can start making new content
33:28 - again so that all these other things can happen so um now that I finally finished the path issues I’m gonna get the rest of that
33:35 - content organized for the first few things then publish the documentation page and then get all of the other Pages
33:40 - organized too so I have probably like 15 videos or so that I need to do this for I’m going to try to do like one a day or
33:46 - something make sure that I split out the work so that I don’t burn out from it and then after that that’s when I’ll get
33:53 - to the other things all right well uh closing out here um I
33:58 - know again this one maybe not the most interesting ever um but I do hope that anyone who’s
34:04 - interested in following some of the things that goes into uh you know building the the websites and the
34:09 - content and everything uh you know it really is a process that takes some time uh you know again especially for those of us without lots of audio and video
34:16 - experience and so I’m learning a lot as I go here but I am hoping that once I set all of this sort of thing up for the
34:22 - first time once I get the process worked out then moving forward in the future uh things will just kind of happen more
34:27 - naturally I’ll be able to make new content in a much faster pace and kind
34:33 - of turn my focus to content generation rather than some of these configuration matters that have taken my time so far
34:39 - so um thanks for watching this video and I hope this was helpful in explaining uh
34:44 - kind of where I got to up through the 23rd of October and I will pick up in the next video in two weeks time

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