My friend and I routinely have conversations about factory design.

His ideal factory ships every ore in its raw state to a single building, which can then move the ore to different floors/sections for processing. He goes further than most and separates each product into its own "room", so all steel bars are made in one room then shipped to the steel beam and steel pipe rooms. Importantly the factory should be designed so that you can "infinitely" expand a room if you need more of that resource.

I prefer what I call "microfactories", where each component is created in a small, independent factory and the result is shipped to a main repository for builder use and for the space elevator construction. If you need modular frames, for example, you would find a group of ores and build a small factory on it and build every sub-component you can in it. Ideally, it would not rely on any other microfactory's outputs, but sometimes that's easier said than done. Often I will have a small cluster of microfactories all dedicated to shipping their output to a final microfactory for processing.

So what do you all use?

Note: He claims his design is more analogous to microservices (from software architecture) than mine, and that mine is something apparently called "pirate architecture". I think he's out of his mind on that one.

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

I love the idea of supporting small business and quality, handcrafted items. But Etsy seems to be more focused on drop shipping and it becomes a hassle to investigate every item I purchase to determine whether it ships from China or not.

Does anyone know of any alternatives with a good reputation?

I've recently started digitizing my mother-in-law's collection of home movies. What I would love is some recommendations or tweaks I can do to improve the quality and remove any combing or minimize static. I am not particularly concerned with audio quality, but I'll list it below as well.

And so far I'm enjoying the processes. It's really fun to see old videos and to learn a bit about video formats and encoding. I'm an amateur when it comes to these kinds of things so I'm learning as I go along. Each tape I make the picture clearer and the file size smaller!

Recording

• Sony Handycam (DCR-TRV27)
• Various DV 60/90 cassette tapes
• Seemingly ran in standard recording mode (tapes are 60 minutes)

VCR

• Elgato USB Analog Video Capture Device
• Handycam's VCR mode connected via S-Video Cable and 3.5mm audio jack*

* I have ordered a A/V to RCA cable which is the manufacturer's recommended connection, but unsure about the effects on quality

Software

• OBS for recording the VCR feed
  • Downscale Filter: Bicubic (Sharpened scaling, 16 samples)
  • Deinterlace - Linear 2x
  • 720x540 @ 29.97 FPS (NTSC) (upscaled from 720x480)
  • "Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size"
    • .mkv format with H.264 encoder
  • Audio Encoder AAC
  • Audio 48khz steroe
• Handbrake for re-encoding
  • 720x480 @ 29.97 FPS
  • H.264 (x264) MKV format
  • No additional deinterlacing
  • "Constant Quality" set to 20
  • Audio Encoder AAC

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/14695422

I got an Elgato capture card and a VCR off of EBay and have already digitized three tapes I've found at garage sales.

Any advice for cleaning up the image and audio? I recall there were VCR cleaners but never was confident of their efficacy.

I want to become a more knowledgeable gardener, and besides research and studying, I think a fun way to enhance my knowledge would be a fun gardening game. Are there any that are particularly accurate or relaxing?

Garden Life looks pretty chill but maybe not challenging or accurate to reality.

And to clarify, by accurate I mean you need to plant in correct lighting, water an appropriate amount, and fertilize to optimize for stems, flowers, fruits, etc.. Bonus points for having the option to pick your planting zone!