Ghost looks clean and elegant compared to WordPress but with one serious hurdle, price. Hosting solutions for Ghost range from 13-16 USD per month, which is huge compared to “free” for wordpress, but also in regards to the volume of traffic our blogs get. Is it worth spending 15 CHF per month for a blog that no one reads?

Full Ghost Clone of This Blog

Two days ago I was playing with Ghost locally. I tried to export my blog to ghost via the full export tool, failed, and then tried again via the JSON tool and this time I had success. I then instantiated an instance on the laptop I’m blogging from, before importing the json file.

For years I thought, “I want a smaller kettle so I can boil enough for a cup of tea or to make coffee, without throwing out two thirds to three quarters of the water I boiled. For years I thought that getting a smaller kettle was a waste of money, as they are often more expensive than larger ones. That is, until a certain person was elected for a second time and that nation showed real hatred towards the entire world.

Internet coelacanths like @documentally remember a different era. We remember internet video communities in the early days of Seesmic and Qik. Seesmic was a video instant messaging platform. We could either post disconnected videos about anything, or we could reply to each other and have converssations. KDFA had “Le Bar est ouvert”, Documentally had the English language equivalent. We had conversations on a daily basis.

Every week, if I remember the frequency correctly we had Seesmix, a summary of the top videos either from that day or that week. The conversation was strong. We had the “London” group, we had the Francofous/French group and more.

It’s interesting that my use of Immich has evolved with my adoption of Gemini. I know that the cool thing would be to vibe code an Immich clone, and then show off about it to the world. I don’t want to do that. I don’t find it interesting to re-invent the wheel. I think it’s more interesting to get a model such as Gemini to help me make Immich stable on a Pi 5.

In the last two days I ran 8.7 and 7.6km. I also walked 7km and 6 or more kilometres. I’m also recovering from a cold. That’s why yesterday I broke a fundamental rule, by catching a bus.

For clarity, I am opposed to buses because their frequency is low, and at 3 CHF per trip per direction the bus is an expense I don’t need, as I am happy to walk.

For several days I either had bad allergies or I had a cold. Both are possible because we went from cold and rainy, and cold and snowy to spring like so three or four trees at once dumped their loads of pollen into the sky at once.

Since so many people are coughing and spluttering at the moment, it’s likely that some generous individuals onpassed the virus to me. The result is that for several days I didn’t run or cycle. I even had one or two short walks, rather than long ones. My short walks are still long for many.

If I was up to mischief I would say that some people, especially Apple users, suffer from clouded judgement. Of course I mean this as a pun. If you use Android devices, or Windows machines, or Linux, you can purchase a microSD card and within seconds have one or even two terabytes of extra storage. With such a vast amount of storage you can keep decades of photos and videos with greater freedom.

When I migrated my Photoprism library from an HP Laptop to a Pi5 I found that there was a nine thousand photo hole in the total photo count. It’s when I looked closer that I found that the gap between expected photos and actual photos is down to Photoprism and the Pi5 not playing nicely when it comes to HEIC files.

I decided to experiment with Claude AI as it is flavour of the month and the first advice it gave was “force reindex the entire library”. Anyone who has played with raspberry Pi will know why that was an absurd proposition. I played along anyway and within minutes my Pi was sulking so I went for a walk, on the off chance that it would be ready when I got home. It was still sulking, and worse than that, pings took up to 30 milliseconds or more.

Due to the Raspberry Pi 5, and older, having issues with heat throttling and more it makes sense to build a Photoprism on a “normal” laptop before migrating towards the Pi. The process is an interesting one.

Photo Consolidation

The First step is to consolidate your photos from Google Photos, Apple Photos, Flick and any other source you might have. The simplest method is to organise them chronologically, and then to spend time removing as many duplicates as possible. There are tools for that. They will help you add exif data back into the photo exif fields, as well as look for duplicates.

Years ago I was interviewed by the RTS to speak about Twitter and my conclusion is that it would never pick up in Switzerland because there are too few users and they’re too dispersed. That is still true.

Social networks that are alive and well are Meetup, GoSocial, Strava and Whatsapp. It’s absurd that Whatsapp is in the list given that it is owned and controlled by Facebook, so people that hate Facebook would, rationally avoid Whatsapp too, but they don’t.