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video and websockets
Tuesday, May 19 2026
It was stiflingly hot today, with temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. So, for the first time this year, I put the laboratory minisplit in air conditioning mode, supplementing and then replacing a fan I'd started using yesterday. I spent much of the day alternating between two different desktop pursuits: editing video for the modest film productions of her reading her poetry for that collection of animal advocacy poems and beginning the work on adding a faster, less latency-swamped means of communication between my ESP8266s and the backend.
That second project grew out of communications I'd been having with ChatGPT about websockets. My existing ESP8266 firmware depends on polling, but I'd become aware of websockets and the fact that I could even use them with both my ESP8266s and PHP. This made me think it would be great to be able to switch into a low-latency websocket-based communication protocol as needed. This would help particularly when I wanted to have more of an interactive command shell experience with my distant devices. Indeed, initially the only form of communication I intended to support this was would be interactive commands; the normal data exchange would continue via polling. I was able to build a basic websocket server and even add a websocket mode to the ESP8266 firmware that did something on the server when it was engaged. There will be a lot of tweaking before it does something useful, but its beginning to happen.
As for my video production efforts, Gretchen seemed happy with the results, which was all I really cared about. She can be very fussy about such things, and she did have some things she wanted changed, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I even went outside and shot some B-roll footage of plants blowing in the wind and such when I felt like I didn't have enough materil. A two minute poem requires a large amount of video, particularly given the attention spans we've been trained by our media landscape to have.
I took a little break in the cool of the evening to do a little work on the nearby Woodshed Path wall, which is now a continuous line of rocks from the hemlock east of the woodshed all the way to the Stick Trail. That comes to more than 300 feet.
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