We need to talk about modernity. But to do that I have to tell you a story of a young 19th century girl.

Back in May of 1816, a small group of friends got together in Geneva Switzerland where they were spending the summer. Due to the “incessant rain” of what had become “that wet, ungenial summer” that June turned into, this small group of friends got together and over the course of three days they turned to reading of ghost stories as a way to turn the dull, raining doldrums into something more thrilling. These friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Mary Godwin set to one upping each other with a writing contest. Out of this meeting came the first published vampire story, “The Vampyre,” written by Polidori, “A Fragment,” another vampire story this one by Lord Byron, and finally “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” by Mary Godwin or, as more popularly known as Mary Shelley.

Mary Shelley was a few months away from her 19th birthday when she wrote “Frankenstein.” It is an impressive work of romantic literature. But simply judging Mary Shelley based on this one work would really be selling her short. I took a moment to read through some of her diary entries looking for more information about that summer of 1816 and found an entry for all the books she read in 1815. She had read 97 books in 1815 starting when she was 17 and transitioning to 18 years of age. If it was just a list of 97 books that is a pretty impressive feat, but then I realized that a number of the books were multi-volume books and this was not a list of easy books either. This was a list of 97 very impressive books that this young girl had read. (see list below)

Now back to discussing modernity. We moderns have accomplished a great deal. We have long, reasonably healthy lives. We have every modern convenance and means to provide us with a tremendous amount of leisure time. Despite this, I think any one of us would be hard pressed to read 97 books in a year especially of the literary quality as did the 18 year old Mary Shelley. Sitting around reading German ghost stories and discussing the mysteries of life with a group of friends is just not something a modern would do. This is too bad. Perhaps the achievements of modernity come at too great a price.

Mary Shelley’s 1815 Reading List

Posthumous Works. 3 vols.
Sorrows of Werter.
Don Roderick. By Southey.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall 12 vols.
Gibbon’s Life and Letters. 1st Edition. 2 vols.
Lara.
New Arabian Knights. 3 vols.
Corinna.
Fall of the Jesuits.
Rinaldo Rinaldini.
Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds.
Hermsprong.
Le Diable Boiteux.
Man as he is.
Rokeby.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin.
Wordsworth’s Poems.
Spenser’s Fairy Queen.
Life of the Phillips.
Fox’s History of James II.
The Reflector.
Fleetwood.
Wieland.
Don Carlos.
Peter Wilkins.
Rousseau’s Confessions.
Leonora: a Poem.
Emile.
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Life of Lady Hamilton.
De l’Allemagne. By Madame de Staël.
Three vols, of Barruet.
Caliph Vathek.
Nouvelle Heloise.
Kotzebue’s Account of his Banishment to Siberia.
Waverley.
Clarissa Harlowe.
Robertson’s History of America.
Virgil.
Tale of a Tub.
Milton’s Speech on Unlicensed Printing.
Curse of Kehama.
Madoc.
La Bible Expliquée.
Lives of Abelard and Heloise.
The New Testament.
Coleridge’s Poems.
[Pg 124]First vol. of Système de la Nature.
Castle of Indolence.
Chatterton’s Poems.
Paradise Regained.
Don Carlos.
Lycidas.
St. Leon.
Shakespeare’s Plays (part of which Shelley read aloud).
Burke’s Account of Civil Society.
Excursion.
Pope’s Homer’s Illiad.
Sallust.
Micromejas.
Life of Chaucer.
Canterbury Tales.
Peruvian Letters.
Voyages round the World.
Plutarch’s Lives.
Two vols, of Gibbon.
Ormond.
Hugh Trevor.
Labaume’s History of the Russian War.
Lewis’s Tales.
Castle of Udolpho.
Guy Mannering.
Charles XII by Voltaire.
Tales of the East.
Pastor Fido.
Orlando Furioso.
Livy’s History.
Seneca’s Works.
Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.
Tasso’s Aminta.
Two vols. of Plutarch in Italian.
Some of the Plays of Euripides.
Seneca’s Tragedies.
Reveries of Rousseau.
Hesoid.
Novum Organum.
Alfieri’s Tragedies.
Theocritus.
Ossian.
Herodotus.
Thucydides.
Homer.
Locke on the Human Understanding.
Conspiration de Rienzi.
History of Arianism.
Ockley’s History of the Saracens.
Madame de Staël sur la Literature.

I was on Twitter yesterday and ran across a couple of posts by Federico Viticci where he describes a workflow he has created that allows him to automatically download YouTube videos to a server he owns and then uses Zapier to notify him when new videos are downloaded via a Pushcut notification on his iOS device.

Apparently a lot of people have been asking him to write up an article on how he does all of this. Federico is busy with Macstories and keeps pushing it off so I thought I would write up how to do the server side of the download. This is going to use youtube-dl, bash, and launchd. You can switch out launchd with cron if you are not on a macOS system but I was recently forced to convert my home Linux server to a gaming machine for my son and now my home server is on a Mac mini that it replaced.

A caveat if you are on Linux, download youtube-dl directly instead of using your distro package. It updates often and it can become unusable if you can’t keep up.

On macOS, I install both Bash and youtube-dl using Homebrew.

A caveat if you are on macOS Catalina, Apple has switched from Bash to Zsh as the default shell. You can change this back to Bash fairly easily just make sure you are pointing to the Bash version installed by Homebrew which is usually at /usr/local/bin/bash.

While macOS doesn’t utilize the XDG Base Directory Specification, I am going to use it simply because it keeps my home directory neat and tidy and it makes it more compatible with running this on a Linux server. Basically it means that I will be using a directory called .cache to store some information that the script will be needing.

The basics of what we are going to do is take a list of YouTube channels and feed them to youtube-dl which will check if any videos exist and if so will dump them to a directory we specify (in my case to my Plex server), along with the video description, caches the video it downloaded so it doesn’t try to download it again, and then writes a log of what was down to a file for debugging purposes.

Federico uses Dropbox which he then watches with Zapier to kick off the notification portion of the workflow. While I will not cover the notification portion of what he does, you could probably simply use Gmail along with Zapier and edit the bash script so that the last thing it does is send the email.

Downloading videos will take up a good deal of disk space really quickly so you probably want to limit what you download to only the channels that you watch and don’t want to miss. The first thing you need is to get a list of the channel URL’s. For this example I am going to use Tech Craft (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT-GpMtIFhX9EMA0Eauevhw) and 512 Pixels (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZzXBTOSdtmOz9_VMYffr4g). You can have as many in your list as you want.

First thing I want to do is build out the youtube-dl command.

1: youtube-dl "$i" \
2: --dateafter now-1day \
3: -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best' \
4: --download-archive ~/.cache/youtube-dl/youtube-dl-seen.conf \
5: --write-description \
6: --output "/Volumes/Ext1/Videos/YouTube/%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s"

Note that the #: is not part of the command but just makes it easy for me to reference it here.

Line 1: We will replace the $i with the YouTube channel we want to get videos from.
Line 2: This line tells youtube-dl to only get new videos in the last 24 hours (there might be a better way to do this)
Line 3: Since my plex server runs on macOS I want to get the best quality video and audio that is in an mp4 format.
Line 4: I want to keep track of the videos that I have downloaded so I don’t download them again. This says to cache the videos in the specified directory.
Line 5: This line tells youtube-dl to also download the video description and save it in a text file along with the video.
Line 6: Download the video to the specified directory (in my case it is my Plex server directory) and in a directory for the channel, name it by the upload date and video title.

With that complete we simply create a bash script that will loop over all of the YouTube channels and then utilize the command we just constructed to download the videos.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

array = (
    "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT-GpMtIFhX9EMA0Eauevhw"
    "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZzXBTOSdtmOz9_VMYffr4g"
)

for i in "$[array[@]}"
do
    /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl "$i" \
    --dateafter now-1day \
    -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best' \
    --download-archive ~/.cache/youtube-dl/youtube-dl-seen.conf \
    --write-description \
    --output "/Volumes/Ext1/Videos/YouTube/%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s"
done

Finally, setup a launchd agent to run the script once per day. To do this we will create a plist file and save it into ~/Library/LaunchAgents. This plist file will tell launchd when to run the script (11pm daily), where the script is to run, and where to log any output.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>local.DownloadYouTube</string>
  <key>Program</key>
  <string>/Users/jking/bin/yt.sh</string>
  <key>StandardOutPath</key>
  <string>/Users/jking/.cache/yt/yt.log</string>
  <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Hour</key>
        <integer>23</integer>
        <key>Minute</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Finally, load the Launch Agent to start it running.

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.elroyjetson.yt.plist

To download any of the code go to the project on Github.