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17 After the Event- Carrying the Conversation Forward

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

There are two key events I have been to since the beginning of summer. These are PodcampUK and the Twitter Meetup. Both of these events have been followed up by a continuing collaboration between participants.

The first event was the London twitter meetup. I went there knowing just two participants, Sizemore and Jess. Over the night I would end up with interviews with quite a few members of the London twitter community but nothing much would be done with this footage as a result of not having known that I would be doing these interviews.

It meant collaborating with Jess and getting an edit ready in the hope that GETV would use it. They didn’t so that was slightly dissapointing.

I met another individual. Nik Butler of Loudmouthman.com. Following on from a good conversation on the twitter meetup night we decided that we would collaborate on other projects. One of these is ongoing, Twittervox. Twittervox is a weekly roundup of the week’s twitter news in review. It’s had over 2600 views over that time with up to four live participants at once around the world ranging from the US to different parts of Europe.

That project has been featured by Operator 11 on a number of occasions which I would like to believe is testament to it’s good content.

Twittervox is also of note because it introduced me to Phil Campbell and his work. Since this was a few weeks before Podcamp UK it meant that I would know at least two members of the conference.

At Podcamp UK I got to meet quite a few of those who are part of the British podcasting landscape, from teachers to academics, broadcast professionals and hobbyists. This broad range of people would lead on to more projects.

There were some interesting conversations and presentations which brought me some new ways of seeing certain aspects of the podcasting stream of content creation. It would make me think of podcasting as the equivalent of Amateur sports in relation to it’s “threat to broadcasting.” Within a week I was sitting at the Frontline Club listening to Andrew Keen but that was written abo

I’m glad I met Documentally whilst at Podcamp because of possible future collaborations we may work on in the near future. As of yet nothing is set in stone but already I’ve met him a few times to work on three or four projects which you can find on his website and on a number of video sharing websites already.

From what I’ve described above what I’ve found is that the conversations from events are leading onto some interesting projects and that it’s been a good transition from the student life into the professional one. It’s been a great opportunity to meet some interesting people and through blogs, twitter and meetings in the real world the conversation is as healthy as ever. I feel I’ve gained from these events and their aftermath and look forward to participating to many more in the weeks and months to come.

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Editgrid is a spreadsheet website for the iphone

Byrichard

Whilst listening to Macbreak weekly I heard about Editgrid, a web based spreadsheet that resembles many others with a difference. It’s optimised for the Iphone if you go to iphone.editgrid.com. It’s an interesting implementation which can as easily be edited online as offline. This is great for those that may need quick access to a spreadsheet without the weight of a laptop at the same time.

It’s a simple to use application which doesn’t take a long time to sign up to and gives you flexibility.

There is one major disadvantage. It’s hard to select a cell to add data and inputing date by hunt and peck is very slow. I’d therefore recommend using it as a tool for referencing rather than data entry.

See if your views differ from mine.

Time Machine Backups

Time Machine Backups

Byrichard

Yesterday while freeing space on a number of drives I found that one failed to mount so I had to use the recovery tools in disk utility to get it to mount. The process took a few minutes. Once this was done I decided to move all data from that drive to a safer place. In the process I came across the frustration of backup.backup, or some similarly named folder. It’s the time machine backup folder.

The Problem

The problem with Time Machine backups is that they assume that you want to recover data straight from Time Machine on another mac, rather than directly from the file system. At first I tried to delete program files and other folders that I didn’t want to backup. That failed. I didn’t have permission. I tried to sudo into the drive but that didn’t work either.

The reason for which I wanted to tidy up the backup, to keep just the files I wanted to keep is that there are gigabytes of program files and others, that have no value to me. It’s my personal folder that I wanted to recover. If I could delete all the rubbish surrounding my files I could have just moved the files of value.

I couln’t do this so I went into time machine and noticed that I could mount this old backup from 2009 or so and use it as a current backup disk. Before doing that I backed up my current files.

Once I had backed up my current files I went back and mounted the old drive to the backup tool but couldn’t see the files. I considered running a backup but chose not to because initial backups take hours and I didn’t want to spend hours backing up to a drive that I wanted to remove from circulation.

The drive is only one terabyte, and is an old dinosaur from another age of hard drivess. The noise it made yesterday exhausted me. I was happy to turn it off when I had achieved most of my goals last night.

In Brief

When you’re consolidating drives there is a chance that you find a lot of extrenuous filess such as program files, render files and more. These take up terabytes of space and prolong transfer time. By making file systems as lean as possible, before consolidating files from external drives to a centralised system it pays to remove as much chaff as possible. System files can easily be 80 gigabytes depending on how many programs you install

The Slow Solution

I had two options. I could have copied my user folder for each backup to the secondary drive but that would mean several gigabytes of files with only incremental changes. Instead I went to a full system backup. These usually start with “macintosh HD” rather than “username”. I went in and backed up the pictures, downloads and one or two othr folders from the most recent full backup and oldest full backup.

Ideal Solution One

The first ideal solution is to be able to get admin access to the hard drive and remove all program files, all system files, all users that I am not interested as well as all “noisy” files that I know are either backed up or no longer needed. Ideally I would be left with the pictures folders, and when it’s tidied up I would copy files from 2005 to 2005, 2005 to 2005, and so on, until all files are consolidated in a primary folder, rather spread across secondary folders.

Ideal Solution Two

In theory Time Machine is designed so that you can go to Time Machine and find files within a specific folder over time. This would make backin up all images easy, just copy all, and reject the duplicates. Within 20 cycles you’re up to date and you’re done.

In practice this works once you have synced files and folders between the current mac and the old backup and this takes hours. In this context it’s faster to do things manually, especially since you may lose the very files you’re trying to save as the oldest backup gets squashed by the new files.

Time Machine and Drive Durability

I have been using Time Machine to back files up for several years now and in that time I have had several drives either overheat and fail, before recovering, or failing and requiring a reformat. Yesterday the drive that failed was a Time Machine backup drive. By this I mean a normal drive that I used for backing up, rather than the propietary solution.

Silver Lining

Swapping between Time Machine Backup drives is easy. It takes a few seconds. This gives you the freedom to backup between two or three backup drives. If one drive fails then you can fall back to one or two others and lose a week of data, rather than a few months.

And Finally

Whilst it makes sense to ensure file integrity if you use Time Machine as a backup and recovery solution it is not as useful if you want to recover files, years after you have switched computers and Time Machine Backup drive. That you need to understand file and folder structure to recover files is sub-optimal, especially since you have so little control.

While Time Machine is used as a live backup, it’s okay. Once it is a dormant archive style backup it should be possible to streamline the folder structure for a human to sort through and tidy up a file system.

Conclusion

PhotoPrism

For a long time we could swap ram and hard drives in laptops but recently you are stuck with the drive that you can afford, internally, and rely on external hard drive for storage of photos and other media files. That’s why self-hosted cloud solutions like PhotoPrism and others are so good. With a Pi running PhotoPrism, connected to a four terabyte hard drive you instantly double what you could store with iCloud and other solutions, and you don’t need to delete photos from a local drive, because if you run out of space on the drive connected to a Pi you can upgrade that drive to a higher capacity, over and over.

Nextcloud

The same is true of Nextcloud. With Nextcloud you can download your documents folder to your own self-hosted version of iCloud and you have a backup of files as soon as you create them.

If we use PhotoPrism for personal photo albums then we free up the space that we would have used on our local machines. If we use Nextcloud then our files and folders are backed up every time we save them as they sync to the cloud whenever required. If your laptop drive fails you can recover from the Nextcloud backup, and if you have iCloud running two, then you have a local copy, a local cloud copy and an external cloud copy.

I would consider backing up from the PhotoPrism Originals folder to Kdrive, for cloud backup. iCloud is okay for docs and more but for photos you need up to two terabytes so kDrive is cheaper than iCloud and Google Drive.

The Apple Watch As an Ipod Nano

The Apple Watch As an Ipod Nano

Byrichard

Four or five years ago I tried to download an audiobook to the Apple Watch and I gave up. I saw that it would take hours so I gave up. At the time we would download podcasts to our laptops or phones, and play them once we had them stored locally. The same is true of audiobooks, especially since audiobooks can be hundreds of megabytes.


A Different Age


That failure, half a decade ago resulted in me never trying to play audio books or podcasts from my watch, and yet it is the most rational thing to do. it’s rational because when you’re at home, walking around, listening to a podcast and going from room to room, having an apple watch and airpods makes more sense than an iphone with a tethered connection. At the time airpods were still young. I don’t remember whether I had them yet.


Why the Experiment


At the moment I need to charge the watch up to three times a day. I need to charge it before going to sleep, if I want to track sleep. I then need to charge it before going for a run, bike ride or walk, to avoid the battery dying while I’m walking and finally after I wake up, if I tracked my sleep.


When you need to charge a device three times per day you’ve pushed its endurance to the limit and replacing the device may be valid. I’m still working to justify upgrading to a new watch. I need to prove to myself that I use it.


The Podcast and Audiobook Player


Looking for audiobooks and podcasts on a small screen is fiddly, if you want to browse through several podcast series and hundreds of episodes but if you want to listen to a specific audiobook for the duration of that book then the Apple watch works fine. The same is true of podcasts.


Fiddly Audible Books


If you’re wondering, “Why not use the iphone?” or “Why not just get an MP3 player and sync what you want?” the answer is simple. If you listen to a DRM blocked audio book you need to strip the DRM and convert the book to MP3 format, before you can listen. Once you’re setup you’re good for the duration of the book, but setting up is a pain.


Constantly Updated Podcasts


If you have spent years listening to podcasts you probably have dozens of series that you listen to and each is updated either weekly, or daily, and to keep up to date would require synching every day. When you’re downloading MP3 files, and moving them around manually it takes time. That’s why using the Apple Watch as an iPod Nano makes sense.


Keeping the iPhone out of Sight


Sometimes I go for a walk, with the iPhone charging. I usually start playing audio files once I am out of the village. If I use the iPhone, and I’m charging it, then I need to keep it and the external battery in one or two pockets at a time, and with the geeky cable going from battery to phone, like an Ingress player. If I replace my iPhone habit with the Apple Watch as an iPod Nano habit then the phone can be comfortably in the bag charging and I can select which audio file I want to listen to, conveniently.


Although iPhones are weatherproof, and “getting thrown into a swimming pool” proof it’s better to keep them safe from the rain on rainy days. If you put the phone in a dry bag you keep it safe, and you can use the watch as a standalone device, especially if you have the 4G/LTE version.


And Finally


I am not tempted by the Apple Watch Ultra or the Apple Watch Series 9. They offer a little more functionality but at price I am not willing to pay. I broke the screen of my Apple Watch Series 3 indoor climbing so I don’t trust the screens to survive extreme sports. The Series 9 offers a little more functionality but not functionality that I feel is worth an extra one hundred or more francs.


I might upgrade to the 40mm SE LTE.

Initial Thoughts on Setting Up a Pi Hole
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Initial Thoughts on Setting Up a Pi Hole

Byrichard

Today I installed Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 and configured it so that the router routes traffic through the Pi Hole before returning to the devices on my network. Installing Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 is relatively straight forward. Find the two or three lines of code, run them, and a minute or two later the device is ready and waiting.

You’re then asked to give the Pi a static IP address, and to modify the DHCP DNS listing so that traffic from the Swisscom router, in my cae, passes through the Pi Hole before arriving at the desired machine. I had to reboot the router to get traffic to go from the router to the Pi Hole and from the Pi Hole to the laptops and mobile phones. I write laptops but I have used just one laptop and mobile phone.

I thought that Pi Hole would block all ads but it doesn’t. If ads are servied by YouTube you’ll see them. Ads from swiss ad providers are still shown on Swiss newspaper sites. For Pi Hole to work best you would need to keep updating the list of hosts that you want to block. Since this requires Wireshark or Little Snitch it’s faster to use other ad blocking tools.

If you want to see a list of everything that is blocked by default you can check this list. At the time of writing this blog post the list was last updated in November of 2023.

And Finally

Installing it is straightforward if you follow the instructionsl, but getting it to be useful requires an investment of time.

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Podcast listening and more

Byrichard

Since I finished my dissertation my biggest time sink has been listening to podcasts. For some reason, I download the entire series of podcasts and work through them one at a time until there are no more. It’s a way of relaxing. It’s also a way of getting information quite easily.

In London, I hardly ever leave home without the iPod whilst in Switzerland due to my driving I can’t listen to podcasts when traveling by car. When it’s on foot however I can.

I found a loop that I do that’s about an hour’s walk and if I chose to I can make that loop last a shorter or longer amount of time depending on which paths through the fields I’ve chosen. Over the past few walks, the rain started falling onto me but it was warm enough and the rain so weak so as not to inconvenience me.

During this podcast listening, I’ve learned a lot about technology and the opinions of a team of people. I’ve seen the evolution in attitude between various podcasters. We see the evolution from being fairly new at certain podcast programs to being quite weathered in by the entire process. As a result, the content is more relaxed and feels more familiar. It’s more familiar to me as well. I know these individuals now, as they’ve talked over time. It’s not quite as remote anymore.

As I listen to podcasts I’ve started to think that they’re not that innovative. They’re doing what radio did years ago but rather than concentrate on music and other such topics they concentrate on technology and those behind the scenes. In so doing there’s been a shift from a celebrity culture of films and music to one of the bloggers, web developers, and more. We’re in a time when being online is so easy and so normal that everyone is there. Within the past 8 months, Facebook has gone from having two or three of my friends there to over 200. That’s quite a big shift, quite a change.

The online world is no longer the realm of the geek. In fact, it would seem that being online is no longer a geeky pastime.

I was also thinking about how social networking websites have become the new portals. Remember yahoo, Altavista and others attempting to become portals, the starting point for most people’s web experiences. Now Facebook, at least within my real-life circle of friends, seems to be the most important. Everyone seems to be there now, or almost. How long will Facebook remain popular?

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