Casey Liss

for reasons i don't know maybe that made sense on the iphone for some reason it's also enforced in the mac but anyway so it supports six languages but only supports three of them being installed at once so i have a simple picker on top to choose which three languages they all do english and then they all kind of split the other five languages because there's just there's way more english than any other ones um

So that's what that is, and I pick how many jobs I want, and I run them.

And if this app ever crashes or if the computer reboots, no problem.

LaunchD just starts it back up again, and it's totally fine.

And then this app checks in with my main servers.

each one of these checks in like you know once a minute or something like that and it reports its stats of how many jobs it has done uh in the last minute or whatever um you know so that way how many minutes of podcast has it transcribed that way the servers can then kind of watch out for anomalies so if for instance one of the mac minis doesn't respond at all it will alert me and i can go reboot it or something that doesn't happen very often um but also if one of the mac minis

is reporting like a suspiciously high or suspiciously low job count per minute or transcription minute rate per minute.

I can then go take a look and see like something might be wrong there.

And then the app itself, the Overcast Transcriber app that you see here, that app also tries to monitor itself.

So if, for instance, it can't get jobs for a long time, for more than a few minutes, or if a job never completes and it never refills its jobs after a certain amount of time, it will quit itself.

and let Longstreet restart it.

So if something weird has gotten wedged somewhere, this kind of thing doesn't happen at very high rates, but when you're running 48 instances of them 24-7 for months, they do occasionally need weird things like that to sometimes happen.

So anyway, that's what that app is.

Yeah, and so the main downside of this for my use case is that, yes, as John said, speed of the communication is everything.

And, you know, Ethernet between these Mac minis is just one gigabit because these are the base models.

So they don't have 10 gigabit ports.

I also don't have a giant 10 gigabit switch there, but, you know, that could be remedied.

Right.

They only have one gigabit ports, and these Mac minis only have Thunderbolt 4 because Thunderbolt 5 on the Mac mini currently requires the M4 Pro chip, which triples the price of the Mac mini and does not triple the performance for my use case, so I didn't get them.

So because I have the base models, I could only do it over Ethernet, and that would be probably slow enough that it would probably not be worth doing.