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trying to resist the (very rare!) temptation to make a twitter bot
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ok ok, i'm doing it. first test output (the bot part can come later). does this loop?
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it does, although it is real potato quality encoding...
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if anyone has an recommendations for encoding image sequences with ffmpeg into stuff that twitter will accept *and also* that encodes geometric forms so they look nice... do let me know
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barbaric that in TYOOL twenty twenty two i am trying to optimise gif filesize in order to give Twitter an image sequence that they can then transcode into an mp4 that looks somewhat decent
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okay, mp4 time again??
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ugh, yeah - preview frame looks good, but as soon as it starts to move it's a muddy mess. but at least it uploads!!
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I should stop taking my own advice @v21/988050683650805760
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does this work?
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yeah! that seems... pretty alright, actually!
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(oh, yeah, btw: if you wanna mess with a similar circle-pattern like thing, check out v21.io/epicycles/)
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btw, the ffmpeg incantation i am using for twitter video is: ffmpeg -i ${tmpDir}/img_%06d.png -framerate 40 -vcodec libx264 -profile:v high444 -tune animation -pix_fmt yuv420p -strict -2 ${videoPath} i write this here mainly so i can look it up later
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& making a new twitter app + authenticating the single bot account on it using v21.io/iwilldancetheoauthdanceforyou/
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i still need to actually, y'know, automate it, but in the spirit of sharing: it's up! @epicyclesbot/1562922847202226178
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you can see the tweet text get more refined over time. here's p much what it started as: @epicyclesbot/1562908258922565633
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i do really enjoy tweaking these kinds of systems, trying to get some of the wilder variance in but also keep the "core" of their output tuned to the sweet spot parameters.
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especially with Twitter bots, this is a nice thing to play with - it's fine if many of the tweets are kind of bad, it makes the ones that really go for it stand out. a durational performance, not a collectible.
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oh, this is a good one @epicyclesbot/1562925639757602816
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setting this up on a server... man, i really need to migrate stuff away from my old server, modern node doesn't run properly any more due to a mismatch between userspace & kernel architectures
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but, y'know. the old stuff runs fine, so instead i'm just setting this up on the new server, which i *also* have. ... i love a chore that costs you money every month you put it off.
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wish it was easier to get temporary read access to a private repo, so you could clone it down. but i understand that the main thrust of software dev is to put in complicated solutions to automate this kind of process.
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i guess i am in the awkward middleground where i don't wanna make a fullblown personal SSH key with proper github access (the bodge way of doing it) and i also don't wanna make a deploy script for this thing i hope to never touch again after this week.
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maybe i'm even in a weird middle ground by running this on a server with a persistent context, but that isn't a literal humming box in the corner of my living room.
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more "coaxing things to work" - the server doesn't have ffmpeg, i don't want to globally install it, so trying github.com/kribblo/node-ffmpeg-installer. which doesn't work locally, but maybe just because I've got an M1 Mac. let's see if it works server-side??
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two conclusions: 1) no, it doesn't. but maybe i'm calling it wrong 2) flip, i forgot to eat lunch, let's do that now
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good lunch! nice to be home & eat basically the same bowl of rice & mackerel & cucumber every day again aaaand... gave up on the nice installer thing, manually pulled down a static binary, and: @epicyclesbot/1563164166654832643
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now just to deal with crontab, logging, etc...
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aaaand... i think i'm done?? time to make an announcement tweet & go rest my wrist for a bit
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announced! @v21/1563173851689000962 and thanks for following along at home :)