Category Archives: Multimedia

I get out to the movies and watch TV once in a while.

A YouTube Channel Post

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I share a short post on my YouTube channel.

About Buy Me a Coffee

If you haven’t heard of this service, Buy Me a Coffee is an easy way for folks to contribute to the efforts of their favorite creators. I signed up years ago and, over the years have gotten a reasonable number of contributions. Occasionally, I’d go to my account and sweep the balance into my savings account. Easy peasy.

Then, for reasons I don’t understand, Buy Me a Coffee got a third party credit card company involved, Stripe. I had to jump through hoops to set up a Stripe account and provide a lot more personal information than I wanted to in order to get my money. (I don’t see why they need a photo of my driver’s license to give me $46.) So I decided to stop using them and, instead, set up a Buy Me a Coffee item on my Square account. This way when folks make a contribution, Square takes its fee and just puts the rest in my bank account. Very easy and no need for a third party intervention.

Unfortunately, a bunch of those old Buy Me a Coffee links were still out there and that’s what my latest contributor used. So I spent this morning squashing every link in my blogs. I still need to go through all of my YouTube video descriptions. I’ll wait until I know I’ve squashed all the links before doing a final sweep and closing my Buy Me a Coffee account.

It never ceases to amaze me how many organizations need to get a piece of the action every time a creator is receives money for work.

This morning, I got a notification that a YouTube channel subscriber had contributed $25 to my publishing efforts via Buy Me a Coffee. His accompanying message to me told me a bunch of things that he liked and wanted to see.

I Need Motivation

Getting positive feedback — yes, with money, although that didn’t really matter as much — reminded me that I usually don’t just sit on my ass and watch the clock hands spin my life away. I’m usually working on creative projects like my blog or YouTube channel content or the book I started writing about my Great Loop adventure. Or making jewelry in my studio (or mobile studio).

But lately I’ve been feeling kind of meh — I think world events and the fall of the United States’ democracy have something to do with that but won’t discuss it here — and have been spending entirely too much time on social media (Mastodon), doing word and number puzzles (even I think 8 sudokus a day is extreme), and watching YouTube videos. It was only over the past two days that I decided to practice using my drone and exploring livestreaming from it that I’ve been making better use of my time.

And that’s what prompted my latest supporter, who watched the livestream, to contribute and speak up. So that’s all good.

It also got me motivated to check out new comments on my personal YouTube channel and respond to them. And to write a post letting subscribers know I was still alive and what my plans were for the next few months. Here’s that post.

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More Thoughts on Claude’s AI Summary of a Video Transcript

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An update to my October 13, 2025 blog post about the Claude AI system summarizing the transcript of a video I really liked.

I’ve been thinking about the 30 Habits video I shared earlier this month a lot. Maybe too much.

First of all, I really do like the 30 “habits” listed in the video. Maybe not all of them, but most of them. I really think they are good things to make part of your life. (If you haven’t watched the video and are looking for little things to make your life better, please take less than 20 minutes of your day and watch it.)

I decided that in order to make them part of my life I needed to be reminded of them. The idea was to make myself a little cheat sheet that I could put in my daily planner and look at once in a while. No one can expect me (or anyone else) to remember all 30 things on the list.

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A Short Self-Improvement Video, an AI Summary of It, and What I Think about Both

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I’m impressed by a 15-minute you tube video and surprised by how the Claude AI/LLM summarized it.

I’ll try to keep this short. Let’s see how I do.

As some people know, I often watch boring YouTube videos on my iPad in the middle of the night to help me sleep. The other morning — probably too late to get back to sleep anyway — this one was suggested to me. I tapped it and was soon pulled in by the concise way the creator presented 30 excellent tips in about 15 minutes.

If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare and think your life could use some improvement, I highly recommend watching this. (If you don’t think your life can use some improvement, you’re only fooling yourself; we can all improve.)

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Jewelry Studio Tour Video

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I finally create a new jewelry studio tour video.

Now that I’m home more than I’m away, I’ve made some huge improvements to my jewelry studio, getting it better organized and cleaned up and adding a whole classroom area. And, in an effort to attract jewelry making students and other silversmiths to share this space with me, I’ve created a brand new Studio Tour video.

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Another Clouds Time-Lapse

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With clouds in the valley before dawn, I set up a time-lapse camera to capture the cloud movement throughout the morning.

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely love time-lapse movies. They make it possible for us to see movement that is normally too slow to perceive.

On October 31, 2024, there were thick clouds in the valley below my home. I know from experience that our winter thermal inversions can put on a good cloud show and those inversions are happening earlier and earlier every year. I set up a GoPro in Hyperlapse mode and let it run all day. Here’s the first few hours of the cloud show, sped up with the hyperlapse as well as a 400% increase in speed in video editing. The result is a smooth, high-speed look at what the clouds did that morning.

Enjoy!