December 2020 updates: shipping, Twitch
2020-11-29 shop toronto video news
I'm looking forward to a little bit of relaxation in December. I won't be going on vacation this year as I usually would, and that means I can fill orders throughout December. However, my local post offices have become unsafely crowded on weekends through a combination of increased demand, closures and reduced hours, failure to enforce safety rules, and the general emergency conditions that prevail in Toronto at the moment. So until further notice, I will only be shipping out orders on weekdays (Monday to Friday).
Canada Post has already been warning people for a while that they expect to be overloaded throughout December, so if you want to buy gifts from North Coast Synthesis and have them arrive before Christmas or other similarly timed holidays, I think that's still likely to work but it'd be better to place the orders sooner, not later. Times in transit may be longer than usual.
I've set up a Twitch account and I'm planning to do some regular live streams there: https://twitch.tv/matthewskala/.
The current schedule is every Monday at 3pm Eastern Time (which is currently UTC-5, so that will be 18:00 UTC). I may change that schedule in the future depending on what's convenient for me and for viewers. I used the name "Matthew Skala" rather than "North Coast Synthesis" because it's not necessarily always going to be synth stuff on there, but it will probably usually be synth stuff. The plan for the next stream is to prepare some Leapfrog and Coiler kits. Maybe I'll also get into building some assembled Coilers, depending on how fast the kit prep goes. In general, I expect I'll usually be streaming some of the work I do making my products. I may also do some extra streams at unscheduled times, or continue my scheduled streams longer than the officially advertised time; the Monday 90-minute time slot is only a minimum.
There is one stream on that page already, just a brief one I did to test out some of the technical setup. It's not great video quality - in particular, the frame rate was way too low because I hadn't yet figured out how to properly configure that on the cameras I was using - but I think I've got that issue fixed now and the next one, which will be November 30 (tomorrow as I send out this email), should be better quality.
I'm expecting to archive completed streams on my existing video server . That may not happen instantly. Completed video streams will appear on the Twitch page itself for at least a little while after each broadcast.
This update is an excerpt from my December 2020 email newsletter. If you'd like to get such information delivered directly to your email, along with other items that don't make it into the Web log and a monthly discount offer, then you may want to subscribe.
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