Splitting up

After the windowsill-pot flooded during Monday's heavy rain due to having no drainage holes, I finally got round to pricking out the remaining kale seedlings (of which I shall now have far too many, save that the plants are still being devoured by caterpillars).

Annoyingly, I lost my second expensive 'new' cycling glove, after having lost the first one only a month or two after I bought them this time a couple of years ago; those gloves just seemed to be that little bit too bulky to stay safely in my pockets compared to the old ones. So having been wearing one new glove and one of the old ones I am now down to two worn-out gloves, although it's just as well I did keep them...

I went back to look for it, but looking for a single black glove at midnight in the rain with fallen leaves heaped along the gutters and cars parked on the road was a fairly hopeless task, and even though I walked for a mile or so searching from the pavement, then cycled back all the way up the hill to retrace my route from the carriageway side, then cycled back down again, I didn't find anything and wasn't surprised not to do so :-(

Speedreading video

After spending so much time referring to YouTube's auto-generated transcripts to try to decipher Russian (they are basically a timestamped listing of all the auto-generated subtitle text, I think, so they enable you to look back at the context of an entire phrase as opposed to just the handful of words visible on the screen at any one time), it dawned on me a couple of days ago that it is of course possible to read the transcripts of *English* text as well. Which is particularly useful in the case of videos which are basically a voiceover with marginally-related images screened for visual appeal, because it is possible simply to read the transcript and not bother to actually listen to the speaker at all, especially if the title appears to be clickbait :-p

It's the equivalent of playing the sound back at 6x speed, without the high-pitched gabbling effect :-) Of course the text isn't formatted into neat sentences and proper names are often weirdly mangled, but it makes it possible to skim through to the actual relevant content, if any, and/or go even faster in order to ascertain that there isn't any...

In Russian, ironically, reading the transcript is actually considerably *slower* than simply listening to the entire video. ( Read more... )