My Favourite Tiling Window Manager

My Favourite Tiling Window Manager

Sorry the title is totally misleading and referencing a conversation I had on Mastodon. I've never used a tiling window manager in my life so if you came here to read about my preference of them leave now!

This post is a bit about technology though. I've had a mini DV camcorder since they first became “affordable” last century. Pretty sure I paid just under £1000 for a Sony one in Dixons in 1999. I used to carry it everywhere and just filmed all sorts of random crap I saw. Also would film with friends and family gatherings. Nothing special or formal, just the everyday stuff. I must have a shoebox full of tapes I've accumulated. However I've literally never done them, never copied them, edited them produced anything with them. Just the recording of them seemed more fun than the laborious process of making something with them.

One upshot of lockdown in this household is we've been doing various chores we'd had near the bottom of the to-do list for a long time. One of them was sorting out a cupboard full of crap. In that cupboard was lots of tech stuff which I've pretty much just binned but in there was the camcorder and the tapes. So I decided to import the tapes onto my Mac mini and have a go at editing them. This turned out to be a lot less straightforward than I imagined. The output on the camcorder is a DV port (also known as an IEEE-1394) and I had a DV – firewire 400 cable. Which is pretty useless on a modern Mac. So after much searching online I ended up buying a firewire400 to firewire 800 dongle, then a firewire 800 – to thunderbolt dongle. It all arrived so I daisy-chained the cable and dongles from camcorder to Mac and turned it all on. And nothing happened. After checking and double checking and going through all the menus and options I could find it still didn't work. Not only was I crestfallen but I was out of pocket too as the dongles weren't cheap. In desperation I checked through the camcorder box for other cables and remembered that my original camcorder had broken in the last week of warranty so had claimed on the warranty. Due to some sort of mix up with couriers I ended up with a brand new camcorder and still had the broken one. Which had lost the functionality on the touch screen so couldn't set the menus or do any playback on it. Thinking I had nothing to lose I plugged that into my cable/dongle/dongle combo and it worked! Hallelujah! That feeling of making some tech work is brilliant. So I've been transferring hours of footage to my computer. Now I just need to do something with it. Which should keep me busy for the rest of lockdown and beyond.

100 Days to offload is a blogging challenge started by Kevin Quirk. Check out https://100daystooffload.com and see if you're tempted to join in yourself.