When I set up the Instagram account I used a business account and it created a Facebook page for me to manage too. It automatically linked the facebook page to my personal profile which I'm not so happy about. I was trying to keep things a little separate but it appears that it's almost impossible to do that nowadays. I only found out as my cousin started following my Instagram account. I haven't really posted anything there yet but I guess that the cat's out of the bag and that other Facebook friends of mine will either have already seen the link or will figure it out at some stage. I've managed to keep this blog separate for the moment, but I guess as time goes on my wife will probably catch on and want to see what I've been up to when I've been mashing away on the keys each day (Hi Wifey! for whenever you might end up reading this 😉).
I've realised that I don't really know how all this social media works and I should really find out a little bit more as my kids are going to be all over it before I know it and that scares me.
I grew up with a predominately analogue childhood. Most music was on tapes, although my brother loved buying his on records. CD players were only just coming onto the market when I was in primary school. We didn't get the internet at home until some time in high school and we didn't need to use it for homework, we had encyclopaedias for that, something like 20 big books full of information.
I had a PC at home that I purchased myself (with a loan
from my Dad). I got that when I was in year 11 or 12 I think, it was an IBM Compatible 486DX with a maths co-processor, I didn't really understand what all that meant when I got it and I still don't. It didn't
have the internet, it ran a very early version of Windows. The PC
started up in MS-DOS and if I remember correctly you actually had to
type "Win" in the command line to launch Windows. Or you could just run
other programs directly from MS-DOS.
I purchased my first mobile phone when I was nineteen, there wasn't such things as smart phones or even feature phones. It was an ugly Philips Twist and I used it primarily as a
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| Philips Twist |
business phone for the Mobile DJ Business I was running. If I remember correctly, I actually lost it for a few days and it showed up out the front of a girlfriends house where I usually parked my car. It looked like I'd run over it.
After that I think I had several of the Nokia phones, everyone was in a competition to get make their phones smaller and smaller. Who would have thought that Nokia wouldn't really be around anymore, everyone had one and if you didn't, everyone knew that you had an inferior phone. None of those phones had the internet, it wasn't until I was in my thirties that I got a phone that had any sort of screen capable that was able to do anything on the internet and that was just a feature phone not a smart phone.
I first really started using the internet in my early twenties, that was on computers and now like nearly everyone else I can't live without it. Well, can't is probably too strong of a word, but I do find it very useful and I've embraced a lot of modern technology and want faster internet and faster PCs and more gadgets and dohickies. I'd love to fully automate my home but I don't think the majority of consumers are ready for that yet so everything is still really expensive.
Bomber
Feeling old.
Well, that's a full month of daily posting on this blog. To date I have about 145 page views according to the stats page. I only found the option for my visits to the blog to not be tracked in the last ten days, when I last wrote about visitors to this site, so some of the visits prior to then are a little hard to determine if they were me or not, but I really don't think that I've visited that many times and I know some of the visits have been from overseas if the stats are to be believed. I try not to visit the site myself, occasionally I've gone back through and checked my spelling after posting but I try and do most of my editing prior to posting. I've been writing some posts in advance and scheduling their release but I usually give them a quick look over each day and also update anything that may have changed. For example I might say that I want to do something, but in the day or two since I started drafting the post I end up actually doing the thing I was hoping to do, so I update the post to be about what I did, not what I was hoping to do. Does that make sense?
Habits hey, I'm enjoying writing daily and putting my thoughts out there, I never thought that this would be my thing but there you go.
I sometimes wonder what I'm going to write about but then I find if I go off and watch some YouTube or do some research into something to do with video editing or basically anything, an idea for a post starts to form in my head. I often have a couple of drafts started waiting for me to finalise and they help with getting the writing juices flowing again.This post is an example of exactly that, I started drafting it several days ago so I'd remember that today was one month in. I actually jumped on to try and write about something else and noticed that this post had already been started, so I started drafting the other post and you'll see that in the next couple of days when I get around to finishing it
I still have 0 followers and 0 comments on all posts, so I don't know why I keep addressing these posts to an audience, but it does help keep me motivated if I believe that someone does actually want to read my daily dribble.
Bomber.
Wondering when I'll run out of ideas.
109kg.
I'm very happy that I'm still losing weight and that I'm managing to stick with the routine of walking, avoiding snacking on junk and eating healthier for lunch at work. It's not really hard work, just a little bit of self control and that's about it. A couple of times this week I've thought that maybe I could cheat a little, but I managed to keep myself in check. Once I'm down below 90kg, then I can cheat occasionally, but by then I may be more keen on still losing more weight, I guess I'll have to wait and see.
I've swapped to Weetbix this week but I still haven't changed what I eat for dinner or how much I eat. I'm not trying to starve myself or lose weight in a hurry. I want this to be sustainable and I don't believe that going on a shake diet or radically changing anything around your diet is a sustainable way to live, who really wants to live on shakes all the time. I like food, I like eating, I like beer, but I don't like being overweight. I do wonder though just how quickly I could lose weight if I gave the shakes a go, I just don't know if I could stick with them and even though I know it is vain of me, I don't want anyone at work to see me drinking weight-loss shakes. I don't know if they'd have enough go in them to keep me going through to lunch if I had one for breakfast, my work can be quite physical at times. I couldn't have them for dinner, I like eating with my kids and I couldn't very well tell them to eat their meal if I wasn't even eating the same thing as them.
So far, I've lost 5kg in total, I don't really feel any lighter but I am pulling my pants up more often so I put another hole in my belt between the one I've been using and the next one down as that was just too tight. I'm going to have to put some more holes in my belt if I keep losing weight as once I'm out of the halfway hole I'll be in the final hole. That'll actually be pretty cool, it'll hopefully give me some more motivation to keep on losing weight and I won't have to measure my waist or anything.
I do think that in general I've been sleeping better and I've also haven't been getting as hungry in-between meals. At bedtime in the first week, I was getting hungry but I haven't felt hungry at bedtime in the last couple of weeks. I'm hoping that isn't my metabolism slowing down too much and that the water is doing the trick in keeping me feeling fuller for longer and that my body isn't craving as much sugar as it used to. I did read somewhere a long time ago that once you have a fat cell, you have it for life (unless you get them surgically removed) but keeping yourself hydrated is a good way for the fat cells to not retain as much water themselves. It had something to do with back in the day where we could go through periods of feast where we would pack on pounds and retain fluid to help us get through times of famine. I'm very blessed to live in Australia, there are so many other places in the world that are so much worse off than here that I think we're spoiled and don't really realise just how bad it really is out there. Wow, that's getting a little too deep for this blog I think.
Bomber.
Feeling blessed.
It's been a very busy week and I'm feeling quite tired. My knee has started hurting a little again today. I hope that I'm not developing a dickey knee, that would really suck.
I went for a walk at lunch and my fitbit counted it as exercise, I'd also done 10,000 steps by 2:30pm so when I got home I asked the kids if they wanted to go for walk, when they said no, I decided that it was probably best to rest my knee. Hopefully it's not too bad tomorrow.
My fit bit is already claiming that I currently average over 10,000 steps a day, so I'm pretty happy about that. I should find a way to link to my Fitbit profile so you can see what I'm actually doing if anyone actually finds this blog and is interested.
It's meant to be pretty cold (13°C) and windy tomorrow and they are also predicting rain, if it's not raining in the morning then I should make an effort to get out and do something. I still need to prune the apple tree in the backyard and as my wife loves using the shredder it may be a good time to do that.
Everything else is still kind of on hold, I'm still waiting on a few things to arrive in the post before I can head out and test things properly. I haven't really had a chance to do much this week with regards to the YouTube channel or really anything else.
Last night I put together a flat pack desk that we bought to put in the sunroom for the kids computer, which is one of my old ones. I've got to rebuild it tonight or this weekend and set it up so that it can be used by them. My son is so excited by the idea of having a computer that he can use.
Anyway that's about all I've got for today, take care out there.
Bomber
Going to sleep well tonight.
After quite a bit of back and forth in my mind, I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and subscribe to Epidemic Sound so I can have some great music in my YouTube clips. As I want each video to be over 10 minutes long, I'll need two or three songs in each video. Epidemic Sound has heaps of great tunes, I have been listening to lots of the tracks just as background music whilst writing posts for this blog and I'm really enjoying it (I'm doing it right now 😄)
The way I look at it is that I already pay about $17 a month for a family Spotify account, that covers four of us for however much music we want to listen to and create and download playlists. Epidemic Sound is $15 a month for me to be able to publish videos with their music in it, that covers up to 500,000 channel views a month. When you do the math it's a pretty good deal. I plan on putting out a video every week for 20 weeks, that's four videos a month. I'd need to be getting more than 125,000 views a week, with each video having 2 tracks in it of say 3 minutes a track.
6 minutes of music per video x 125,000 veiws = 750,000 minutes of music or over 520 days of non-stop music being consumed a week (if everyone watches to the end of the video). $15 per month to cover off over 5 and half years worth of non-stop music (520 days of music per video x 4 videos a month), I think that's pretty reasonable. I haven't told my wife yet, I'm hoping that once I put together some footage I can show here just how must of a difference that good music will make and she'll hopefully agree.
There is some decent royalty free music out there that you don't have to pay for, but you always run the risk of the artist changing their mind at a later date and you'll either lose monetisation from the video(s) that contain their work, have to remove the video completely from YouTube, or, re-edit the video with new music. I've probably halved my beer consumption so that alone would pay for the music subscription. 🍺🎵🤣
I mentioned previously that I had a list of locations that I'd like to try and visit to film at, this week I've been working on how the video should run. I've looked at similar videos that I've enjoyed and tried to put together a run sheet on how I'd like the video to be produced. I think this will help me with making sure I get all the shots I want and have enough useful content to actually make decent videos. I plan to take the run sheet with me and work my way through it. I've included reminders to myself to check things like storage space left on the SD cards and when a good time might be to charge the battery bank. I think if I'm armed with a plan before I leave home, then it's likely to be a successful trip. I plan on doing something off the bike in each video too, whether that is going fishing, walking up a mountain or visiting some waterfalls, just something other than riding and setting up camp.
I plan on doing two or three night trips, but the first one or two will only be single nights so I can get the feel for it and find out just how long it takes to set things up properly. I am a little worried about setting the camera up on the side of the road to capture a ride by, I'm worried that someone else will see the camera and stop and steal it when my back is turned.
The run sheet should also help me in post-production as I'll know what order things are in on the storage cards and how I wanted to put them together in the final video.
It's a long post today, I'm almost done, I promise.
Finally, I've being playing with a program called Audacity which is an amazing piece of free software. It's great at editing and refining audio, I managed to tidy up and remove a lot of the background noise from the audio that I captured using the bluetooth headset, unfortunately the voice quality is still really bad, it's good for a phone conversation but not good enough for what I want to use it for. I'm not holding any great hopes for the $2 lapel mic that is coming, I'm thinking that it will also produce quite tinny sounding voice but you never know. The audio that my phone captures from the built in mic is pretty good but I don't really want to hold it like a microphone in my videos either and it won't really work if I'm not close to it. To get a mic that connects to my phone and has decent reviews I'd be looking at around $25, that would be for a BOYA BY-M1 after that it would probably be a RODE Smartlav for over $100 and they keep going up. I don't want anything too expensive as I'll probably break it fairly often.
Bomber.
Ok, I'm done.
I've been spending some time recently learning how to use Davinci Resolve, that's the video editing software that I used to make the test video. It's got some really cool features and it seems pretty easy to use. I've never done any video editing previously and I'm really enjoying it. I have a Certificate II in Electronic Publishing but that was from over 20 years ago and concentrated on things like Photoshop and layout for magazines using an Adobe product. It also included time running an actual old school printing press and making the plates to put in them. Since that time I've only done a little bit of photo editing a few flyers and things for my Mum who used to run her own business.
The test video I put up I've redone several times now using different settings from within Resolve to try and improve the image quality. I haven't updated the uploaded YouTube video itself, I've just been making changes and seeing what the difference is like on my own PC. I think that will be the trick with making videos for motocamping too, double and triple checking the finished video before uploading it to YouTube.
I've been learning how to make animated text, adjust the colour balance and stabilise footage amongst other things.
I'm still waiting for the Android adapter for my Insta360 One so I'm hanging to try out some of the features of the phone app. There seems to be a few options that I can't find in the Insta360 Studio that other people have shown in their own videos so I'm hoping that they are in the phone app AND that I can export those videos in decent quality. Being able to edit videos on my phone could also make the whole post production process a bit easier too, as I could start editing footage on my phone whilst still out camping. I'll need to make sure that my solar charger works properly before I head off on any multi-day trips otherwise I could be having the adventure of my life but not able to record it.
Also I managed to update the camera to the latest firmware and calibrated the gyroscope. I need to test the camera again to see if the gyroscopic stabilisation is working better now. The waterproof case showed up this week so I'm feeling better about getting out with the camera on the bike as it should help protect the camera and the lenses should I accidentally drop it or if it gets hit by a stone or bug. Once I've got all the bits and pieces that I've ordered I'll upload another sample video to YouTube to see what the improvements are like.
Bomber
An old dog with new tricks
Dear Lord, What a mess I got myself into. I decided that I would set up an Instagram account linked the YouTube and Facebook accounts for the motocamping channel. I've never used Instagram before and I stumbled my way through settings things up. I did some searching and found that I could link Instagram to Facebook pages and not my personal Facebook account. So I tried to link accounts and it got messy, I couldn't figure out how to link it to the page at all, I then couldn't figure out how to unlink the accounts. I did some more searching and there is supposed to be a way but it wasn't showing up as it should for some reason.
Anyway, I found that I could change my Instagram account to business account. As that seemed to suit what I was trying to do a little better I went and ahead and did that. What happened is that Instagram tried to be so clever and create a Facebook page for me, but of course I already had one with the same name... I ended up deleting the one that I had created and tried to use the new one that Instagram had set up for me. I manged to do a test post and it all linked up and worked, however the page address was what I wanted plus a whole heap of random numbers afterward eg facebook.com/mynewpage-12398762366 where the address had previously been just facebook.com/mynewpage. So then I deleted the page the Instagram had set up for me and as I still couldn't unlink my Facebook and Instagram accounts, I deleted my Instagram account.
After all that, I went back into Instagram and tried to create a new account and do things right this time, of course my username was no longer available.
I tried again the next day and I still couldn't use the username I wanted so I had to put a full stop "." in it. I've now got things set up correctly (I think) and I can post straight from Instagram to a Facebook page. If I promote my Facebook page I think I can also promote my Instagram page at the same time or vice versa. I need to look into that further but I'm looking forward to uploading some actual content and trying to get some subscribers and followers.
Bomber.
I thought I knew stuff.
