My plants, (not) growing, LIVE! On Twitch

For long, I have been having fun with timelapse videos of my plants growing. Some of those videos have reached
this blog @ https://arturmarques.com/wp ;
and
my main youtube channel @ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUa0DzKskGo0iRYP8QzWsvA/

Today, I decided to combine the streams from four of the cameras that take the raw snapshots for the timelapse videos, into a single video feed. I am putting it live on Twitch:

@ https://www.twitch.tv/arturmarques_dot_com

It is live from my place, but it is all fully automatic. I am not monitoring the Twitch room and feedback, if any. It is an experiment, to check how reliable the stream can be, and what kind of interactions it can ignite on self-motivated spectators.

Four of the vases – the ones on upper-right corner of the video stream – are trying to grow Chili seeds, since yesterday. I read that it is hard to do it, with temperatures below 30. The temperature in the room where the plants are, is below that, so there is a high chance of failure. It is very probable that nothing will happen for many days.

The plants are on artificial light for ~8 hours/day. The rest of the time, they live with whatever ambient light the room gets, which can be very irregular. When the room gets dark enough, the plants will remain visible with infrared lighting.
In an effort to have something on camera, due to the difficulty in growing Chili, I have also planted Dill and Mint.

Enjoy, if you can.

Bad Eyeglasses = "Eyekeeper Petit" + Suertree "Anti-Bleue"

I had never used eyeglasses until recently. The many hours surrounded by computer monitors, require permanent close-distance focusing from the eyes, which is much more tiring than long-distance focusing.

Two doctors diagnosed me +1.50 diopters eyeglasses, but I had already started using them, on my own, self-diagnosed, after having experimented with +0.5, +1.0 and +1.5 affordable spectacles.
I think doctors can do better, in cases where the problem’s main source can be simple tiredness. They subject the patient to optical devices, to measure the proper needed corrections on sphere, cylinder and axis values, and may even request “tracking laser tomography” exams. However, it is rare for someone to have the initiative to talk about the effects of screen size, screen hours, screen light composition, (no) usage of screen filters, etc. Hence, I have been self-discovering.

I found that I do NOT always need the same correction and that a good “blue-light filter” can be extremely helpful. For example, as I write, I am using some very affordable “Eyekeeper” +1.0 glasses (~5 euros a piece!), and they focus exactly what I need. But, some six hours ago, all I needed was a negligible +0.5 correction, using my favorites: a product from Gunnar, featuring their “patented” lenses and light-filtering technology (~90 euros). They do rest my eyes! Hours after “Gunnar”, I often do NOT need glasses at all; but, after some time, I restart to feel that I could benefit from assistance.
After a full day of work, during the night, I might go +1.50. For those diopters, my affordable favorite is from “Prospek”. I also always need the +1.50 power, when using very high-resolution tablet devices.

My key finding is that the visual assistance that I need, while working, is not always the same – it fluctuates, from NO correction, to +1.50 diopters. The shape of the lenses and some light-filters can make a strong difference. I love the “Gunnar” brand for that.

I keep searching and experimenting, but I prefer to shop online, and I think there is NO good ecommerce for these products yet. I have been buying them from Amazon, with inconsistent availability and inconsistent results.

I spend more than I should at several Amazon stores. My current favorite is amazon.de; years ago, it was amazon.co.uk; occasionally amazon.es beats both. However, on August 2020, amazon.fr, where I had never shopped before, was the place to go for affordable, available, and deliverable to my location, spectacles with “blue-filter” and/or configurable diopters.

I bought a trio of “Suertree +1.50” with “90% blue filter”, and a single “Eyekeeper Petit +1.50, no blue-filter”. I disliked both and reviewed both with 2 (out of 5) stars. Here are copies of my reviews, left at amazon.fr.

For the “Suertree”:
“I own several +1.50 glasses and I can say there is something wrong with the item that I got from Suertree. Their focus is not sharp, as if I had picked the wrong diopters. Moreover, the blue filter interferes with the overall vision quality, mainly contributing to mirror effects with peripheral light (light that comes NOT from the center, but from the sides).”

For the “Eyekeeper”:
“I have other Eyekeeper glasses, and the brand became, to me, an icon of good products at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, not this time. These glasses look good, are light, but do NOT focus as sharply as other Eyekeeper I own, of the same +1.50 diopters, which is frustrating. On top of the focus issue, the frame gets in the way, meaning you can see it while wearing the product, because the lenses are smaller than they probably should be, and there are times they do not embrace the full vision field. Very disappointed with this item.”



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Technical Details

Pet Shop Boys – Hotspot

Not bad at all! In the 1990s, I loved “Pet Shop Boys” (PSB) – they were innovative, managed to blend intelligent lyrics with electronic music and psychoacoustics to make the listener feel good. There was an époque, when PSB were constant in my music consumption habits.
Then, with the Internet, the “Music Industry”, and/or music itself, changed forever. The sudden availability of the entire world’s music, not only changed business models, but also exposed people to creations previously unknown to them, increasing competition, highlighting differences, and causing seismic changes in tastes and listening behaviors.
Past PSB music, remained engrained in me as “great!”, but some releases, from the late 2000s and 2010s, failed to seduce me – there was better music to listen. The “Market of Attention” was causing its disruption.
Today, on Spotify, I decided to listen the latest PSB album, titled “Hotspot”, and I have to admit “not bad at all!”. In fact, “pretty pretty good”, as CYE’s Larry would say.
“Hotspot” is no “fly away” album. It does not cut roots, nor could or should it. Still, it feels a real “creation”, not a mere reformulation of the old. It has building work in it. You can feel the pain of the need to balance PSB’s past signatures with something new. It hurts; not all tracks are seductive. The closing track, “Wedding in Berlin”, was a poor finish, to me, but, overall, the album is fresh and enjoyable.
I am back to PSB. I will now (re)discover what they’ve been selling for that past decade.

URLs "p1" 20200915 – 125 resources

I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.




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    Kai Whiston, HDMIRROR Remix – Fall in Your Hands

    I have absolutely no idea who Kai Whiston is, except for the URL he (?) publishes on Twitter:
    http://smarturl.it/DEARBOYEI

    What I know is that KW’s music probably leaves very few indifferent, or at rest. It induces change, shock, contrast. It is charged, menacing, so unexpected at times, that I enjoy it and revisit it, to shake/unlock myself in my own creative activities.

    This music probably gets classified as “electronic”, but the classification is now vague, embracing nearly all the music that is produced, if the term is interpreted as “involving artificial, electronically produced rhythms”.

    The “fall in your hands” track is the sixth from the album “No World Eternal”, which is quite a work of art and joy, for my ears.

    URLs "p1" 20200910 – 118 resources

    I am an avid WWW surfer, with hundreds of websites visited each month, sometimes daily. I bookmark them all, at least for logging purposes. These posts having the "urls" category, capture what was on my browser on a specific date. I hope you enjoy some of these shared resources.




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