So it’s been a while since my last post, the reason being that about
two weeks ago I came off furlough and have been going back to work.
So whilst that time of peaceful bliss has passed I do intend to keep
up with the writing albeit at a bit more of a slower pace now. To be honest if
I can manage one or two a week that will be great and there are a few ideas
currently in the pipeline that should be making their way onto here soon.
However for today I thought I would reflect on some of the projects
completed during the lockdown period just to show how productive I’ve been and
to record for prosperity.
So here is a list of some of the things I have had time to do:
Sorted my stuff from Japan
As my mum downsized house in Japan a few years ago, a lot of things
from my formative years (books, comics, CDs, toys) were boxed up and put into
storage. Fast forward to earlier this year and these boxes were now sent over
to the UK via sea-mail. All 16 of them.
As I was busy with work, sorting through them all was a slow process
and so I ended up just piling them up in the box room, doing a bit every now
and then when I had a spare moment. In lockdown I finally managed to complete
this project with most of the stuff going into bookcases (ordered and built
from Ikea) or being stored up in the loft. The Lego pirate ship you can see here was part of this project. You see
that Billy Bookcase with Oxberg doors? There is another one on the opposite
side of that box room plus another half size Billy next to it. Yes, I am the
king of storage. And an IKEA building expert. In fact I would say around 80% of
our house interior is from IKEA. It’s been 2 months and they still haven’t sent
me that spare shelf that was missing from my order though… Their customer
service isn’t the best.
Digitised my CD collection
Of the 16 boxes mentioned above, at least 3 of them were crammed
with CDs. As an avid music fan I used to buy a lot of CDs back in the day, the
bulk of which were from between the time when I left school up to when I finished
uni. Of course I’ve hardly bought any CDs since, what with everything these
days being available digitally downloaded or streamed via the internet. But
that heady period resulted in me amassing a huge collection of 300+ albums and
the majority of them (bar one or two embarrassing purchases when I was really
young: Wet Wet Wet album? Pocahontas Soundtrack? Ace of Base album?) are albums that I
still treasure and would listen to to this day. I even bought a CD player off
eBay so that I could play some of them through my speakers in the living room.
But alas, CDs are a pain to keep chopping and changing and I tend to
prefer to have my songs/albums as mp3s for ease of use (such as being able to
put on an iPod - although even that is considered kinda old school these days!).
So I undertook the mammoth task of ripping every single CD I owned complete
with correct track listing and album artwork. During this project I processed
on average about 20 albums a day so that gives you an idea of how long the whole
thing took. The mp3s were then put on a hard drive and sorted by artist and
genre, with each folder also showing the artwork so you get a decent at-a-glance
view of all the albums within each genre. A good job done!
Sadly I didn’t get around to ripping every single CD I own – I have
plenty of promo CDs (that they always used to give away with music magazines
back in the day) that I haven’t ripped yet and there is about 100+ of those and
I had lost the will to live by then. Maybe one day...
During the above process I naturally discovered a fair few of the
jewel cases were smashed or cracked during their transit from the other side of
the world so I replaced all of those as well. Now my collection is sitting
beautifully (sorted by genre and alphabetic order) in the bookcases of the box
room.
Sorting out my music hard drives
Further to the above, I also had a huge music collection on various hard
drives (mostly stuff I had accrued during uni and since). Two main libraries
with thousands of songs on each and hardly any cross over with stuff that I
actually own on CD.
This was always something I wanted
to sort out for the longest time and I finally had time to do so. The first
pass was going through and deciding what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to
delete. There were many partial albums or random songs I had accrued over the
years that I would likely never listen to so I got rid of those. Next I grouped
by artist and then by genre. Another good job done and it should now be much
easier to search and browse the collection. Saved to a hard drive and backup made. Done!
Retroarch on my Switch
Using custom firmware is a bit of
grey area so I won’t go into too much detail here but I have always loved to
hack my consoles, particularly the handheld ones.
A project I completed during my
lockdown, as well as upgrading the custom firmware on my Switch, was to get
Retroarch running on it - a retro game emulator front end. A few NES,
SNES, Gameboy and Megadrive games are on there now but the main focus was to
get Arcade games working which I managed to be successful in for about 90% of
my roms. Since the Switch screen can easily by flipped on its side for ‘Tate’
(vertical) mode and having turbo fire button options available (both of which
are supported by Retroarch) makes shoot-em ups a dream to play. A surprising number of
arcade titles have been ported to Switch anyway, but it’s nice to be able to
play many more (and often niche) titles on this excellent and surprisingly versatile little console.
Playlists are really finicky in
Retroarch so unfortunately I had to rename every single arcade game (100+) and
save it as a ‘favourite’ once confirming which core it best worked with in
order to have a decent playlist to be able to select the games for subsequent play - but
in my opinion was worth the time spent doing it in the end.
Video editing projects
As previously written about here, I finally got around to finishing
my Japan trip video that was on the backburner for over a year. You can see the
final result of that here.
Though that particular video did
take a fair few hours to complete, it did allow me to get to grips with the new
iMovie and therefore enabled me to put together future videos very easily and
much quicker. I was able to therefore put out time-lapse videos for two lego builds
as well as one for a jigsaw puzzle. Even since I have gone back to work I have done
videos for a further lego build and puzzle and these will be posted about soon.
Click here to see them all.
Lego photography
Apart from the odd snap during my
trip to Japan in October 2018 and the US in October 2019 I haven’t really been
updating my Lego photography accounts on the regular since about September 2018. I
guess I got to the point where I was feeling a bit burnt out with it all as it
ended up feeling more like I job rather than something I truly enjoyed. I was
after all keeping up with a schedule of posting a pic every other day for the
majority of the time.
However lockdown made me reflect
on my creative outlets and re-inspired me to carry on with my projects and as a
result I started up my Lego photography again. Looking back on my accounts I
had been posting since 2014 with over 700+ Lego pics posted! That’s quite an
achievement already but I feel that I’m not quite finished with it yet and felt having settled into my new house
the time is right to get back into it. I think the key is to try and be less
strict about the scheduling so as not to feel too pressured about regular posting.
Maybe when I get to 1000 pics I
may call it a day, but for now I’ll carry on as I still have many more figures that I
have yet to take pictures of!
Blog writing
And finally we get to this: the writing
for this blog. I know hardly anybody reads the majority of these posts in
reality (thank you if you are someone who has actually read this far!), but the
truth is, writing this blog has been more for my personal development and
discipline rather than the readership numbers. Again, being in lockdown has
made me examine the skills I want to develop and achieving a steady writing
output is one of them. Looking at the yearly post numbers I have now already
managed to write more articles in 2020 than in any year since 2014 so I am
happy with that achievement.
As stated earlier, being back at
work full time has made it more difficult to post regularly but I will try and
continue regardless - albeit at a slower pace than I was posting during my
furlough. As with the Lego photography it seems a shame to give up on projects
I’ve spent years working on and will challenge myself to continue.
28th June 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment