Another week, another YouTube video published, and I’ve started preparing the video for next week. I did slip back a little this week, and I made no progress on the podcast episodes, I really must address this.

I was right in thinking that I wouldn’t make too much progress on investigating Sensei or taking the next steps on updating my website, so I think this weekly journal will be short. It was dry as the weather forecast predicted, and I got in the garden on Sunday and did some mowing (in December) which should hopefully save me a lot of work next spring, mowing being much faster than strimming.

I attended the UK and Ireland User Group meeting for Maximo, an opportunity to ask whether people had heard of my website, some had, several had not. Those who had were very complimentary, “wow, you did all that yourself, I’ve learnt so much from your site”. I’m not sure how I feel about those who have not discovered it yet, on one hand a bit disappointed, it has been around for 6 years, on the other hand there is still plenty of scope for new people to discover it. I did manage to get a 2-minute stand-up at the end of the day before the audience of 130-150 people departed, a bit of open promotion needs to be taken whenever it can.

The one thing I noticed more than anything else was how few people I recognised, perhaps the stalwarts of MRO, the name of the company before we were acquired by IBM 15 years ago, have all retired now, or moved on. The other thing I noticed was how young the attendees were, or so they seemed to me.

The YouTube channel had a significant milestone, the 700th subscriber and next week I’ll pass the 400 watch hours, 1/10th of what I need in any 12-month period in order to request acceptance on the YouTube Partner Program. The new look Stats page for the Maximo Secrets website has bounced back from its normal dip over US Thanksgiving holiday. It looks like the views and visitor numbers will both be close to my yearly targets set eleven months ago, I’ll not quite break 300K views unless I was super successful in promoting the website to an audience who were no doubt thinking of their journeys home.

I received the Godox ring light and tripod stand. It did come with a UK plug, thankfully. After I had set this up and tested the light, I then discovered that it could not sit on my desk, not without a significantly deeper desk. One of the tripod legs would be roughly where the space bar of my keyboard is currently positioned. I’ve had to move the desk away from the wall by 5 inches and the tripod is now on the floor with its front foot slightly off the ground, the tripod being pinned against the wall by the back of the ring light which fortunately can tilt forward. It isn’t going to move far if I kick the tripod leg. Not ideal I know, but it is serviceable.

The Godox light comes with two attachments for a mobile phone, one will do for me. I presume that when people use a phone as the video camera it is the selfie camera they are using, the other way around would make it difficult to see the screen. There are several things I have learnt from my early experiments, two of which are significant issues. There is no optical zoom when taking video on the front camera. The camera must be pointing downwards and be higher than my eyeline otherwise I get a lovely light blue ring on my glasses which completely obscures my eyes, a reflection from the ring light.

There are other issues to overcome. The background while it can be out of focus in cinematic mode, you have control over the f-stop, the background still needs to be something which you wish to be on display. I can’t have the ceiling light on, a darker background is better, but then I would need to supplement with additional lighting to avoid the iPhone complaining that there is not enough light. When I am looking down at my laptop keyboard and consequently not looking at the camera, well there is no point taking a video of the top of my head. It does look as if the video of the presenter and the video of the screen capture will need to be separate and pieced together. I can’t see that I will quickly overcome these issues, so I’ll have to rethink how I will be able to shoot the videos I was intending.

For the 20 published videos I started the process of updating the .JPEG slides for .PNG files (screen capture) which are much clearer when shown on the website at full width. I added a Table of Contents, Captions and Alternative Text to the first two video transcripts. When I discussed this with Tadas he hadn’t noticed that the slides were clearer, but I know there is a significant difference.

Tadas did make a comment on the transcript, where I had referenced something on a slide with a white number in a filled red circle, then it would be better for the transcript to show something similar rather than a number in parenthesis, for example (7). With the help of the community and Tanya I did find the Unicode characters for circled numbers ⑰ which you can colour using more-background in the Paragraph block’s toolbar, the range for these characters is 0 to 50. The negative circled numbers are also possible ❼ ⓱. At first, I thought the numbers 1-10 were smaller than 0, and 11-20, but the example disproves this, unless when the article is published it resorts to a smaller size. It is the negative circled numbers I want to use, a range of 1-10 would be restrictive but up to 20 should be sufficient, they must be the same size for me to use them. Now to put it into practise.

I did create the quiz for the second video, another 10 questions. It might be a struggle finding exactly 10 questions, but when I created a set of quizzes a few years ago, each one did have exactly that. I suspect at some point I will find it hard finding a meaningful last couple of questions on a subject, but we’ll see. I didn’t use Sensei for this as I hadn’t made any progress on Sensei during the week, so it is another post which I will have to convert.

My objectives for Week 49 will be:

• Create the weekly YouTube video but be sufficiently far enough ahead on the next as I have a short week before my Christmas break.
• Continue the process of updating the 20 published video transcripts and slides, now with the negative circled numbers.
• Continue to work on the first Sensei lesson with a priority being the quiz and answers, so that the quiz for the third video goes directly into Sensei.
• Investigate the interactive image, interactive video, and flip card blocks all of which have potential in a Sensei lesson.
• Continue to build out the lesson format for each type of pupil, beginner, intermediate and experienced.
• Investigate how to test a lesson as a pupil would see it.
• Start using the Lavalier microphone, Power Director 365 video editor and add the soft box diffusers to the recently purchased lights.