Tuesday, June 30, 2026
7:52 a.m. Room A1 Makhota Vibe Inn
Melaka, Malaysia
I’ve been talking a bit about the weather recently, and how it is changing. I saw it again last night and this morning. It was an unusual night of heavy rain. But, as often happens, it stopped before the sun came up. That’s my favorite kind of rainy season when there are heavy downpours either at night or just for thirty minutes in the afternoon. And then the sun comes out.And though I’m not really bothered by extreme heat, I don’t mind if the temperature comes down a few degree as a result of the rain.
Struggles with 360 Video
Yesterday was a fairly casual day. The Dragon Boat Races were over, and I didn’t make plans to go out exploring anywhere new. So the day was devoted to somehow taking all the video I shot of the races and wrangling it into some sort of coherent shape. I’m not sure that I got very far. And that’s because I used my Insta360 X3 camera so heavily on the first day. Before I can even start the editing project, I have to take all that 360 video and convert it into something I can use. I have to reframe it.
I’ve had a very rocky relationship with 360 video recently. A week or two ago, I decided to revisit the possibility of reframing the video on my phone BUT rendering it on my laptop. Insta360 has a feature built into their software that allows for this. But it never worked for me. The problem is that this feature only works if you edit the video directly on the camera. What I like to do is remove the MicroSD card from the camera and attach it to my phone and copy the raw 360 files directly into the memory of my phone. Once the files are stored on my phone, it’s a breeze to reframe it. But if you do it that way, you can’t save the reframing data and transfer it to your laptop. You MUST render the video on your phone as well, and that can take up to an hour PER video clip on a phone like mine.
If I want to render the video on my laptop, which is ten times faster, I have to connect the camera to my phone via WiFi and Bluetooth and do the reframing that way. But this technique is fraught with problems. The biggest one is that you can’t view the full video files. The WiFi connection isn’t fast enough to view the video in full resolution. So you have to use a proxy copy, and even that will glitch and freeze and stutter and lag. This really confuses me because when I revisited this technique two weeks ago, it worked flawlessly. I was able to reframe the video using the full resolution original video. The WiFi connection was fast and strong enough. The experiment worked so well and I was so happy about it that I wrote a long journal entry about that very topic and posted it to Patreon. I gave that post the title “A Miracle Discovery About Editing 360 Video Faster!!!”. I even used three exclamation marks because I was so excited. But I just tried to replicate that success with my Dragon Boat Race video, and it wouldn’t work. As always, I tried every possible technical fix imaginable. I did all the usual things and spent hours trying to locate the problem. But I wasn’t able to do it. I was stuck using a slow and poor WiFi connection, which defeats the purpose of doing it this way. It’s supposed to be faster and easier and save time. And if it isn’t faster, then I might as well just use the old method.
Even worse than the poor WiFi connection, I ran into a problem with the data. And this problem is even more of a mystery and even more out of control and dangerous. I reframed a total of eight video clips on my phone using the WiFi connection to the camera. And the reframing was fine. I aimed the camera in all the correct directions to match what I was talking about on the video. And then I saved the reframing data. This creates a special file on your camera that contains all the reframing information. And then when you open this video clip on your laptop, that reframing data gets applied. So I rendered all the video clips and once that was done, I started editing the actual final video. And suddenly, in the second half of most of the videos, the camera was pointing in all the wrong directions! Somehow or other, the reframing directions contained in the data file did not get applied correctly. For example, the camera was supposed to be aiming at me according to how I reframed the video clip, but the final rendered video had the camera pointing in a completely different direction and just recording empty space. So there is no guarantee that if you use this technique that the reframing instructions will get applied correctly. In this case, I lost another two hours just trying to figure out where the problem was. I did test after test after test to try to get it right. I confirmed that the reframing was perfect. I confirmed that the data file had been saved correctly. I confirmed that it had been applied to the laptop copy. BUT the camera was still aiming in all the wrong directions. Basically, the reframing data starts to drift after a few minutes until it is completely wrong. After about two hours of this testing, I had no choice but to go back to my phone and render that video clip on my phone. That took another hour, and then I had to copy the final giant video from my phone to an external drive and then from the external drive to my laptop and finally insert it back into the editing project. That took forever. So I wasted a lot more time. But at least the final video clip was now correct because I had both reframed it and rendered it directly from my phone. It seems that using this WiFi technique is not reliable.
A third problem I encountered had to do with audio. And this problem might be the biggest one of all. The issue is that the only reason I used the 360 camera to begin with was to be able to film myself while talking to other people. It’s difficult to go to a big event like the Dragon Boat Races and record your casual conversations with other people. These conversations happen by accident. They aren’t planned. So then you are faced with the question of how to take video of it. You have to stand there talking to this person while trying to hold your GoPro out at arm’s length and getting that person or the two of you in frame. It’s awkward when you are your own cameraman. The 360 camera solves that problem to an extent because you “aim” the camera while reframing. You don’t have to worry about the camera during the conversation. But then you are still dealing with audio, and audio is always the bigger problem. At least it is for me. I don’t know how other YouTubers do it, but I simply can’t get good audio of anything other than my own voice. My Rode Wireless Go microphone records my voice nicely, but that’s it. It is not designed to record the voices of people around me. This was very apparent from the Dragon Boat Race video. I was very lucky in that when I was standing at the fence looking out over the races, I had the chance to talk with a member of the racing team from Singapore. This woman was standing right beside me, and I asked her a whole bunch of questions about how the races are organized and I asked her about the history of dragon boat races and about the significance of the dragons. She answered all my questions in-depth. But her voice wasn’t recorded in any usable way. The Rode picked up my voice asking her the question. But since she was two or three feet away from the microphone, her voice wasn’t recorded. What little of her voice came through was drowned out by the ambient noise of the crowd of cheering people around us. I cannot think of a way to handle these casual encounters with people. How do you capture both the video and the audio when you are just one person? It has been an unsolvable puzzle for me.
The end result is that I devoted a LOT of time and energy to using my 360 camera for precisely this reason: to record conversations with people I meet. And in the end, I was unable to use any of those conversations in my final video because there is no audio. I might as well have just used my GoPro the entire time. In fact, after using the 360 camera on Saturday and seeing the poor result on Saturday night, I gave up on using it. On Sunday, I shot just one clip with the 360 camera and that’s it. Instead, I focused on using my Olympus camera and my GoPro. And using the Olympus introduced a host of new problems. You’d think after years of shooting video for YouTube, it wouldn’t be so hard from a technical point of view. But it still is. I’ve never figured out a good approach to physically shooting video or recording audio. It’s always a struggle.
New Version of Ship Graveyard Video
I’m continuing with my experiment with the video about the ship graveyard island outside Melaka. I’m still disappointed that this video didn’t connect with a wider international audience. I thought it had all the ingredients to be of interest to more people. I decided to take the video and rework it and repost it. It probably won’t make any difference, but I’m curious to see the results. I honestly have no idea what works and what doesn’t work on YouTube, but from a certain perspective I can see problems with the original video. For one thing, I started it with a “Coming up…” teaser clip that showed me walking on a narrow I-beam from one of these abandoned ships. It shows the scenery of old ships. But right after that teaser, the main video opens with me talking about the island and where I am and how I got there. There is suddenly a lot of exposition. And I can see a lot of people seeing the thumbnail and being interested in the topic enough to click. Then they get the teaser, which promises the rusty ships. And then there is all this video of some guy just talking and talking. So they get bored and stop watching. That’s a theory anyway.
So for this new version of the video, I deleted the teaser and I deleted all the parts where I was talking at the beginning. Instead, I used a clip in which I was pushing my bicycle along the shore to the bridge to the island. And instead of talking about how I saw a van with potential security guards, this video clip shows that happening in real time. So my idea is that it is more story-based rather than storytelling-based. And the same thing for the ending. Rather than ending the video with me talking about the island and what might happen to it in the future, now I end it with me pushing my bicycle away and chuckling about my encounter with the security guard as I was leaving. There’s no big conclusion now. The video just fades to black. I have no idea what the response will be to this new version of the video. People in Malaysia who already watched the first version of the video and even commented on it will be confused. They will wonder what happened to the first video, and I will have to explain the story. But this new version of the video is not aimed at them. In my mind, it is meant for an international audience because I reduced the emphasis on Melaka and Malaysia.
World War II with Tom Hanks
On the pop culture side of things, I’m continuing to watch the series “World War II with Tom Hanks.” I’m enjoying it very much. Watching it is like a refresher course in World War II history. But it feels like I’m being introduced to lots of new ideas and learning things I didn’t know. The series is really helping me answer some basic questions about the war and why certain countries did the things they did. I often watch documentaries about individual events in World War II, such as the Normandy landings or the battle for Midway or the German invasion of France. But this series is about ALL of those events and ties them together and puts them in order and explains the sequence of events and how one thing led to another. Sometimes these big world events don’t make any sense when you think about the whole big picture. For example, when you step back and ask yourself why in the world Germany would attack all of Western Europe and all of Eastern Europe and then attack the Soviet Union and THEN declare war on the United States, there is no answer. There’s Germany sitting there being a normal country minding its own business. And then one day Germany says, “Hey, let’s attack the entire world!” That obviously doesn’t make any sense. What actually happens is a slow and steady war creep of events. Germany first annexed and invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia. The other European powers let them get away with that. Then Germany invaded Poland. And this makes some sense from a national and military point of view. Germany figured they could take over Poland easily and then get some more land and resources they can add to Germany. Britain and France hadn’t stood up for Austria or Czechoslovakia, so they figured they could get away it easily. So maybe that one decision is logical and sensible for them. But now that they invaded Poland, Britain and France come to Poland’s defense. So now Germany is at war with those two major powers and invades them. And on and on and on. One event led to another to another until the entire world is at war. When you see all the events lined up in a big documentary series like this, it starts to make more sense. I’m enjoying the series very much.
A Sheep Detective Story
And this connects with the other movie about World War II that I watched recently and enjoyed very much: Pressure. That’s another movie I could happily recommend to anyone, assuming they don’t mind a slower, thoughtful story. And yesterday, I stumbled across an absolute delight: “Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story.” I’m only about halfway through this movie, but I just love it. It’s quirky and fun and imaginative and heartfelt. I laughed out loud several times during the first half. It’s just delightful. And more than that, I really admire how they anthropomorphized the sheep BUT kept them as sheep. What I mean is that these sheep are able to talk in sheep language with each other. And they are able to understand people when they speak English. They’re intelligent and have their own society and things like that. Yet, they aren’t people. Yes, they can talk and are intelligent creatures, but they are still sheep and behave like sheep and have sheep characteristics and feelings and even a sheep society. They don’t behave like humans that just happen to look like sheep. They still behave like farmyard animals. It’s a great movie with great humor and lots of great characters, and it’s anchored in a murder mystery couched in classic murdery mystery tropes from detective stories. It’s a pure delight.
Vigilante Citizen
A movie that is not a delight in any way is “Vigilante Citizen.” On YouTube, I was seeing all kinds of clips from this new movie by Uwe Boll, and it seemed to be causing a big pop culture stir. Everyone was talking about it and getting outraged by it. So I thought I should check it out and see what all the fuss was about. It’s a relatively short movie at less than 90 minutes, and the director put in so many redundant long repetitive sequences that it feels even shorter than that. There is barely enough actual story there to make a 60-minute movie let alone a 90-minute movie. He really had to stretch it out and slow things down and repeat things to reach that movie length. In the end, I can’t really join the Internet in being outraged by this movie. It’s far too dumb to even be upset about. My main reaction to the movie was about how dumb and stupid and bad it was. Most people are upset by the message about vigilante violence against immigrants and Muslims. People are upset that this movie is encouraging that kind of violence. But I find it hard to get upset by that message when it is packaged in such a bad and dumb movie. None of it makes sense even as bad movie. There are some movies out there that are so bad that they are still entertaining. They’re so bad they’re good. But this one is just lazy and pointless. It’s so pointless and badly done that I can’t take it seriously in any way. It feels like someone knows what a movie is supposed to look like. They have a vague idea of what parts you need to make a movie. And they just put a bunch of stuff together without having the slightest clue what they were doing. They didn’t even try. And that offends me more than the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim message. I can’t take that message seriously when it’s packaged in such a lazy and ridiculous way. Nobody should take this movie seriously.