My friend Ton has been blogging up a storm on the blogging-about-blogging front of late:

• From Semi Freddo to Full Cold Turkey with FB
• Algorithms That Work For Me, Not Commodotise Me
• Revisiting the Personal Presence Portal
• Adding a Wiki-like Section

He is, as such, a man after my own heart.

And he’s inspired me to recall the long-dormant feeling of how it felt to be building the Internet together, back in the days before we outsourced this to commercial interests as a way of saving money, learning curve and messiness.

The difference now, a year after I decamped from the commercial web, is that when I did that I was focused on a combination of “the commercial web is evil” and a profound sense of personal failure at having been part of letting that happen, whereas now I’m filled with tremendous hope.

It’s not a coincidence that I work under a banner called Reinvented: time and time and time again over the course of my life I’ve found utility in returning to earlier iterations of technology.

Letterpress printing has taught me so much about the true nature of letterforms, in a way that the digital never could.

Keeping a ready supply of cards, envelopes and stamps in the office has kindled a practice of regularly thanking people for kindnesses, advocacies, and boldnesses.

Teaching myself to sketch has changed the way I look at architecture.

What Ton’s writing–and the zeitgeist that surrounds it–have made me remember is that we invented blogging already and then, not completely but almost, we threw it away.

But all the ideas and tools and debates and challenges we hashed out 20 years ago on this front are as relevant today as they were then; indeed they are more vital now that we’ve seen what the alternatives are. And, fortunately, often we’ve recorded much of what we learned in our blogs themselves.

So I propose we move on from “Facecbook is evil” to “blogging is awesome–how can we continue to evolve it.” And, in doing so, start to put the inter back into the Internet.

Nine years ago Oliver presented a delightful video tour of our Yotel room at Heathrow Airport; it may be the best review of anything, ever (of course I am somewhat biased in this regard).

In this spirit, albeit in a non-narrated and decidedly less delightful manner, I recorded a tour of my room at the Yotel in Boston, where I stayed last week en route back to PEI.

Last year I posted some instructions–mostly for my own use–for transcoding video I’d recorded and uploading the results to Amazon S3 so that I could embed video in an HTML5 video element here on the blog.

While that proved useful, and a commercial-free alternative to posting to YouTube, the friction involved in the multi-step process was enough to dissuade me from posting video as often as I would like.

So today I set out to streamline this through automation, and I’m documenting the process here, both so that I don’t forget how I did it and as a guide to others.

The starting point is a video recorded on my Nextbit Robin phone: videos I record with the phone are automatically synced to Google Photos where I can download them as MP4 files.

So I begin, say, with a file called goldingjobber-newhome.mp4 on my Mac desktop:

To have a version of that video that will play across different browsers requires that I transcode (aka “convert”) the video to Webm format. I experimented with doing this locally on my Mac using ffmpeg, but this took a really long time, more than my day-to-day patience would support.

Fortunately, Amazon Web Services has a very-low-cost web service for doing exactly this called Amazon Elastic Transcoder, and it works relatively quickly by compare.

So I wrote a Mac Automator script to do the following:

1. Upload the MP4 file on my Desktop to Amazon S3.
2. Transcode the video to Webm.
3. Put a chunk of HTML on my Mac clipboard that I can paste into the source of a blog post.

The Automator script looks like this:

say "Uploading original video to S3"
/usr/local/bin/aws s3 cp $1 s3://images.ruk.ca/ --acl public-read
say "Transcoding to Web-M"
/usr/local/bin/aws elastictranscoder create-job --pipeline-id 1523992573945-p552kg --input Key=$(basename $1),FrameRate=auto,Resolution=auto,AspectRatio=auto,Interlaced=auto,Container=auto --job-output '{"Key":"'$(basename $1 .mp4)'.webm","ThumbnailPattern":"","Rotate":"auto","PresetId":"1351620000001-100240","Watermarks":[]}'
echo "<p>
  <video controls='' style='width: 100%; max-width: 100%; height: auto;'>
     <source src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/$(basename $1)' type='video/mp4; codecs=avc1.42E01E,adpcm_ima_qt)' />
     <source src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/$(basename $1 .mp4).webm' type='video/webm; codecs=vp8,vorbis' />
  </video>
</p>" | pbcopy
say "HTML copied to clipboard"

Going through this line by line, here’s what’s happening:

/usr/local/bin/aws s3 cp $1 s3://images.ruk.ca/ --acl public-read

This takes the file I’ve highlighted on the Desktop and sent to the Automator script ($1) and uses the Amazon Web Services command line tool aws to upload it to Amazon S3 as a publicly-readable file. When this is complete, I end up with a file at https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/goldingjobber-newhome.mp4 that I can then use as the starting point for transcoding.

/usr/local/bin/aws elastictranscoder create-job --pipeline-id 1523992573945-p552kg --input Key=$(basename $1),FrameRate=auto,Resolution=auto,AspectRatio=auto,Interlaced=auto,Container=auto --job-output '{"Key":"'$(basename $1 .mp4)'.webm","ThumbnailPattern":"","Rotate":"auto","PresetId":"1351620000001-100240","Watermarks":[]}'

This is where the heavy-lifting happens: I use the aws tool to create what Elastic Transcoder calls a “job,” passing the name of the file I uploaded to S3 as the input:

--input Key=$(basename $1)

And setting the output filename as that same name, minus the .mp4 extension, with a .webm extension:

--job-output '{"Key":"'$(basename $1 .mp4)'.webm"...

The pipeline-id parameter is the ID of an Elastic Transcoder pipeline that defined the S3 bucket to look for the input file in, the bucket to save the output file in, and with what permissions:

The PresetId value is the ID of an Elastic Transcoder preset for transcoding into Webm:

The end result of this process is that, moments later, I end up with a transcoded Webm version of the video at https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/goldingjobber-newhome.webm.

echo "<p>
  <video controls='' style='width: 100%; max-width: 100%; height: auto;'>
     <source src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/$(basename $1)' type='video/mp4; codecs=avc1.42E01E,adpcm_ima_qt)' />
     <source src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/$(basename $1 .mp4).webm' type='video/webm; codecs=vp8,vorbis' />
  </video>
</p>" | pbcopy

Finally, I use the Mac pbcopy tool to copy some pre-configured HTML onto the Mac clipboard, ready for pasting into the source of a blog post.

In Automator, this all ends up looking like this:

While this seems all quite complex under the hood, actually using the script is dead-simple: I simply right-click on the video file on my Mac Desktop and select “Transcode and Upload Video to Blog” from the contextual menu:

The result is that all of the above happens, and I end up with this HTML on my Mac clipboard:

<p>
  <video controls='' style='width: 100%; max-width: 100%; height: auto;'>
     <source src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/goldingjobber-newhome.mp4' type='video/mp4; codecs=avc1.42E01E,adpcm_ima_qt)' />
     <source src='https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/goldingjobber-newhome.webm' type='video/webm; codecs=vp8,vorbis' />
  </video>
</p>

When I embed that HTML into a blog post, the result looks like this:

I made this spontaneous declaration to a friend this afternoon

Johnstons River is the new Brooklyn.

Mark my words.

Spotted in Rova magazine, which caters to the #vanlife crowd, an ad for Amazon CamperForce, a recruiting program for people who live in their campers to come and work for Amazon from August to Christmas while living at an Amazon-sponsored campsite.

Libby Osgood on learning how to learn about sustainability in the novitiate:

Learning how to learn about sustainability is not something I expected to learn in the novitiate. Ever in the process of transformation, I recognize that to be a sister means to have an endlessly renewed openness to the cries of the world. Today, that is ecological sustainability. Tomorrow… we’ll have to wait and see (and hopefully be open to whatever challenge comes).

An “endlessly renewed openness to the cries of the world” is something we should all cultivate.

A perforator being for sale in Okotoks is the start of a great short story.

For my old friend John Muir, who introduced me to BB Gabor 33 years ago, this lovely rendition of Big Yellow Taxi.

I noticed that my electronic boarding pass for my flight from Montreal to Charlottetown this afternoon had ITD OSS above the QR code, which I’d never seen before.

Some poking around revealed this this is an indicator for International To Domestic One Stop Security, and is the new system at Trudeau Airport that allowed me not have to exit customs, go back groundside, and go back through security again to continue my journey when connecting from the Boston to Montreal flight.

This is the first time I’ve benefited from this: upon arrival in Montreal, I was directed to a special customs area for connecting passengers. I went through the normal customs procedures, and then exited directly into the airside departures area.

This was a huge time and anxiety saver: at busy times in Montreal, having to exit and re-clear security could add 45 minutes to a connection.

It truly is spring here in Boston: 14°C and sunny. So I could eat my chia pudding, drink my cappuccino, and read my New York Times out on the patio of the coffee shop around the corner.