I was glad of a day with nothing to do except get ready for our trip to Aberaeron tomorrow, but I got a bit distracted in the morning and while I was out exercising, called into our local Tourotec geek store to test the idea of buying a second hand laptop that's more capable of doing the kind of basic video editing which I seem to be doing more of there days. I bought a Lenovo with a Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD, and made the mistake of not seeing it run in store before taking it home.
When I plugged it in I noticed the charger cable was damaged, but current was running from it into the laptop, whose battery was empty. After a short while, I tried to switch it on but it wouldn't power up at all, I took it straight back and exchanged it for an equivalent device with a Ryzen CPU and similar specifications, an Honor 14 which I'd already seen had received favourable reviews.
It was fifty quid cheaper, so I spent that amount on a USB backup hard drive, to balance the amount I'd been prepared to spend. It's not quite in as pristine condition as the Lenovo, but never mind. It works well enough for my purposes, and will enable me to keep up with changing developments in Windows 10, so I can help others with maintenance issues from time to time. Now I can convert my desktop workstation to a Linux machine and give it a new lease of life, and continue to have access to Windows tools which I do need to use occasionally. For the most part, however, it's the Chromebook that I mostly use. The desktop workstation is valuable because of having a big screen for viewing photos in detail. Using Linux photo applications will be easier and faster than using Windows on a five year old machine.
I recorded and edited next Thursday's Morning Prayer, and made a slide show video and uploaded it to YouTube in the evening. Then I run into a problem I'd not had before. The video uploaded successfully but instead of taking several minutes for the AI vetting procedure to run, I went on and and on, as if it was stuck. I upload all my videos as fit for a general all age audience including children, and the YouTube bot doubted my decision. It's never happened before. Something to do with making sure youngsters don't get exposed to the kind of violent or obscene footage some adults seem fond of. I had used a couple of photos of Old Master paintings of the birth of John the Baptist, and like many post renaissance paintings, were not afraid of showing the bare flesh of a newborn infant, a symbol of purity and vulnerability. Nothing you could call lewd or provocative, unless you're a dumb robot, needing to check the world's image databases for a comparison, to be on the safe side.
I wanted to settle the matter before leaving for holiday, so I returned to the video editor and replaced the images with equivalent line drawings in cartoon style to illustrate the Gospel reading, and then uploaded the revised video to replace the one which was stuck in processing mode. This took another hour out of my evening and left me very annoyed when I had a repeat performance, with a new uncontentious version stuck in processing mode. In the end I gave up waiting to see what would happen and went to bed, an hour later than usual. I hope it sorts itself out overnight as I will have run out of time to do anything different.
The new Honor laptop is working fine but only partly set up. I have yet to set it up to work with my One Drive account, syncing a laptop with a Cloud account takes an age and slows everything down, so I need to pick a time when I won't need to use it. In fact, do I need to use One Drive, except for accessing it in a browser when I need to? It's what happens on my Chromebook satisfactorily, and my Blackberry. I'll have to think about this. I want the slickest fastest performance and in many ways, Windows doesn't deliver on my terms, plus it takes up too much time and resources updating the system in a clumsy way. I don't know why I bother really.
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