ITT I am documenting my adventures in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This thread is intended to be an interactive travel vlog, where viewers can participate both live and retrospectively.
From Raleigh to Nagās Head
In this live stream I am driving from Raleigh to the Outer Banks via NC Highway 85. On this roughly three-hour drive, we pass by rural towns, industrial farms, and large wildlife preserves before arriving at Oregon Inlet Campgrounds, where I will be staying for the next five days. During that time, I intend to live stream as much as possible, and I will continue to update this thread as I do so.
In retrospect, there are a few things about this stream I wish I had done differently: first of all, I should have had the camera configured correctly from the start of the trip. Now that this has been fixed, I donāt imagine I will have to do so again; however, I think viewers may enjoy a slightly different camera angle. Also, if I were to do this again, I would want to share my route at the beginning of the stream and then publish GPS updates along the way. I would have liked to have been able to publish this data alongside the video.
Overall, though, I think this was an interesting way to kick off this trip. Live streaming the drive felt like having a passenger riding alongside me. Tomorrow I will be taking the stream on more adventures.
This is a working vacation, so most of each day will be spent in my car and on my laptop. That said, OBX has plenty of amazing views to choose from. Today, I am parking at Pea Island Wildlife Refuge to enjoy the views from the Bonner Bridge Pier parking lot. I live streamed the journey across Oregon Inlet Sound. It wasnāt particularly active, as I have yet to streamline a process for announcing upcoming streams.
00:00 Introduction
23:53 First camera reset
26:35 Second camera reset
27:35 Third camera reset
29:19 Fourth camera reset
34:01 Back at the car
Description
Today I attempted to live stream my exploration of Bodie Island. Though known for its lighthouse, I am instead exploring the adjacent marshlands. In addition to technical difficulties that caused frozen footage throughout the stream, I was thoroughly bombarded by mosquitos. Between the two, I ended the stream fairly quickly. Even so, it was an interesting experiment to take my mobile live streaming setup into such a remote location. I had also intended to publish GPS logs documenting this excursion; unfortunately, due to user error, the data was not usable (I forgot to turn it off back at the car). I have more adventures to go on this week, so I intend to continue iterating on the workflow to improve broadcast quality and data collection. The CalDAV protocol needs to support checklists.
I was awake early enough this morning to live stream the sunrise. My cameraās battery was low and it was very windy, but beautiful views nevertheless. I think the silhouetted dancer made for a nice touch in this one. I am currently charging my devices and will be working from my car again through much of the day; otherwise, I will be looking for more opportunities to live stream.
Welcome to Jockeyās Ridge State Park! In live stream, persisting hardware issues lead me to host a stationary stream, which offers the distinct advantage of allowing me to focus on the chat - which is the focus of this stream. After a brief introduction in the parking lot, I find a scenic area to silhouette myself against the scenery. I was joined by one viewer in the chat and a fellow visitor to the park.
A few takeaways from this stream: my USBC connection from the Latitude 7230 to the EOS R6 Mark II is unstable, which causes OBS to crash and the stream to restart. I have a few other options for a hardware connection between these devices, so I will experiment with those in the future. Also, it is nice to have streams dedicated entirely to the chat, so I will probably host more streams from scenic locations with that purpose in the future - perhaps even sunrise or sunset tomorrow!
Tonight I have returned to Pea Island to enjoy the sunset with @Zephyr and @ThisNurseKills. Determined to persevere through my USBC issues, I strapped the cable to the handle of the Latitude 7230 to add stability and was able to complete the stream with no connection failures! There were two network failures during the stream as I entered and exited the park, but otherwise I was able to stream continuously! This was certainly the best executed stream so far in this series. After exploring the island and enjoying the sunset, I headed back to my car and took the stream across Bonner Bridge to finish off the stream. As I mentioned, I might try to get up early tomorrow to stream the sunrise, and then later I will probably stream the drive home as well.
The batteries on both my camera and laptop were quite low this morning, so I was only able to stream for a few minutes. I was also a little too early to catch the main event of the sun peeking over the horizon (which was an awesome sight). I was still able to enjoy the sunrise and having things to improve gives me all the more reason to come back. Unfortunately, I might not be able to charge my devices enough to stream the journey home later today. We will have to see when the time comes.
Oh thatās super cool! Iāve been looking at a number of cameras WRAL has made available for Raleigh as well. I might have to add this to my playlist.
After watching some of these videos again, I both am pleased with the results and feel there is much to be improved. Given this was my first time making something for the Travel category, I think it went about as well as I could have expected. The videos are sometimes quite rough, but I learned a lot through making them and have many ideas about how to improve. I have more trips planned for the near future, including the Appalachian Mountains, Washington D.C., and New York City. I would love to hear your thoughts on this bespoke way of sharing my travels.
I think you did a great job of the effort considering you are exploring not just a geographic landscape but also a technical one. One problem that re-occurs is that pesky USB-C connection. Is this where the Mobipiā¢ would potentially come into play?
Great story about Old Fort at the end there. The name itself conjures an image of a final destination: āWelcome to Old Fort! This is your forever home now.ā
I have returned to the Outer Banks for the 2025 winter solstice and will be spending the next few days exploring the islands and experimenting with some mobile Music making. I have a few activities planned involving my laptop, guitar, and car, and today I started the adventure with LABR.online internet radio during the drive to Nags Head. There were some audio issues towards the end of the drive, but after restarting the stream upon arrival at the campsite, I was able to resume the broadcast with a walk on the beach. I will be streaming often over the next few days, so following the Owncast instance on the Fediverse will be the best way to receive notifications when I go live.
Well that trip ended sooner than expected. I ran into three major setbacks and decided it was time to head home to try again another day. First of all, I started the trip a few days late. I had originally planned to leave Friday and return Tuesday morning (today), but instead left Raleigh on Sunday and returned the following morning. I found that I wanted to stay in Raleigh on Friday night, and then spend much of the following day working through technical issues on the mobile live streaming rig. Once these issues were resolved, I hosted a driving tour of the city and decided to make the drive to OBX the following morning.
As is shown at the end of the previous entry, I arrived at the campsite Sunday afternoon and immediately took a walk on the beach. Immediately after turning the camera off and putting my equipment away, I discovered the second major setback of this trip: the campground bathrooms were closed! Having spent precisely 3 hours 49 minutes and 51 seconds on camera, this was a concern. Fortunately, there are many public restrooms on the island (namely Walmart), but it didnāt make for a particularly comfortable nor immersive camping experience. Sun set shortly thereafter (I was there for the solstice, after all), and I stood outside on Jeanetteās Pier uploading the driving stream to MinIO. It was cold and very windy, but I enjoyed some of the most spectacular stars Iāve seen in a long time. In fact, I enjoyed those stars throughout the night, as one rarely sleeps through the night when car camping. In my opinion, that alone made the trip worthwhile. Even so, the next morning I was unable to boot my laptop. I had to make space on the boot partition to recreate the initial ramdisk during a routine update, and failed to restore an important file. Simple to fix with a bootable USB with Arch Linux, and I attempted to create one at the Olā Faithful, Walmart. Unfortunately, the demo computers did not have sufficient permissions to create the bootable drive, so I was unable to restore the bootloader until returning home. At this point, there was very little left for me to do at the Outer Banks, so I decided it was time to call it on this adventure and try again another time. Overall, I enjoyed the trip, but I am glad I came home when I did.
ITT I am documenting my adventures in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This thread is intended to be an interactive travel vlog, where viewers can participate both live and retrospectively.
