Devlog #3 - Captain’s Deck, Shorts that look like Shorts, and a queue i babysit less

devlog 1 and 2 were the “why is everything on fire” posts. this one is what i built after the pipeline stopped dying every hour: UI, demo voyage, edit preset, Drive auth, and ops controls that matter when the factory is still my laptop.

the dashboard stopped looking like a spreadsheet

i tore out the generic admin chrome and rebuilt it as Captain’s Deck - One Piece-inspired voyage language without ripping logos or characters. Crow’s nest, Ship’s log, Lost cargo, Crew, Sea lanes. day watch = turquoise sea + parchment; night watch = deep navy + lantern gold. Pirata One for display. sky washes, wave shimmer, ship-sail motion when something lands. still dense ops tables underneath, but it finally feels like a product.### demo mode + the crew briefingpublic submit was already open. missing piece: a safe admin poke. read-only demo watch - demo login boards you with write actions locked. Stretch, Navi, Cookie and the doodle crew run an interactive voyage tutorial (spotlight + mascots) when you land. replay tour is one click. filter Ship’s log, open Cargo bay - you just can’t smash retry/delete on live jobs. public demo without yeeting production. :)

shorts were uploading as normal youtube videos

caught it live in studio: short clip, landscape preview, regular upload not a Short. ffmpeg did speed + bgm but never forced 9:16. source stayed landscape, so youtube stayed “normal video.” shared edit now always outputs 1080x1920, asserts dimensions after encode, fails loud if not. IG gets the clean export. YT can still get niche brand c-text (ShonenSnaps / CrackleCrumb / ScoreMorsel) when there’s no burned-in hard captions. preset: 1.2x speed, stronger filter, original audio, quiet bgm (~5%), no logo watermark on IG. :D

drive auth + knowing if the laptop is awake

invalid_grant wiped jobs because the oauth refresh token was minted while the google app was still in Testing. publishing consent to Production does not resurrect old tokens - mint a new one after. worker health probes Drive; claim skips when Drive is dead. vercel can’t ping my private worker, so the topbar has a remote laptop signal (supabase heartbeat): offline vs connected and ready. if that light is dead, the queue is sleeping.

ops controls when soft limits park everything

rolling 24h soft daily upload cap still parks niches at the limit. sometimes i need one job through. Ship’s log swaps Retries for a Force button on those rows: one-shot soft-limit bypass for that job only (platform hard caps still apply). also pause / unpause / abort so one hung Playwright session doesn’t hold the door. deferred jobs recheck sooner so the queue doesn’t look cursed when a slot frees early. =_+

where it stands

submit is public. demo voyage read-only. real uploads still need my pc awake with chrome profiles + docker n8n. last stretch wasn’t another playwright ghost story - shape, Drive health, Captain’s Deck polish, and operator controls so the queue cooks without me hovering. still local. still weird. closer to “drop the link and walk away” than where #2 left me. ;)

the video attached is sped up 16x the orignal tho +_=

live: https://ap-i.techxtreme.me
github: https://github.com/its-techxtreme/project-ap-i