tech related – Page 4 – Richard's blog

Audiobookshelf and Driving

Byrichard 17 February 2024

In an ideal world I would use Audiobookshelf when I’m driving tomorrow. In the real world I can’t, or at least shouldn’t. The reason for this is simple. There is no iOS app which, in turn, means that there is no car play app. Combined this means that if I want to use the app during a road trip I need to fiddle with the app’s website when one podcast ends and the next begins.

Focusing on the Road

At 120 kilometres per hour you do not do such things. At 120 kilometres per hour you want the app you’re using to switch from podcast A to B to C automatically. You want this when you’re walking too. This is especially of walks on rainy days.

Long Audio Books

In my experience it’s better to find books that are seven or eight hours long, if you listen to books. Longer books will eventually give me headaches as I focus on the road and the book at the same time. It’s good to vary what you’re listening too, for focus, and for endurance.

No Pause during Driving Directions

Usually I use the GPS in silent mode. During most drives you have plenty of time to see the display change, understand what you have to do, and do it, without audio guidance. In the cases where you get audio guidance you want it to pause the podcast or audiobook. It’s frustrating to miss ten to fifteen seconds just because of a driving instruction

Setting Up a Playlist

I tried setting up a playlist but that is very slow. You need to add each podcast manually to the list, without the option to bulk add, and it doesn’t seem to auto-play the next podcast anyway.

Podcast or Book

When I walk and drive I like to listen to podcasts and books, so today I’m considering whether I will listen to books, or podcasts. In the past I have listened to two books during that drive. Tomorrow I think that I will start with podcasts.

And Finally

The web interface works very well and I am very happy with the app. When I get onto the testflight version of the app I will gain access to that functionality and then I will be able to use that app for road trips. For now I have to use the Apple Podcast app.

If it wasn’t for traffic I would set off now but it’s better to drive when the roads are quiet. That’s why I drive on Sunday mornings.

social media | tech related

Who Killed Twitter – My Opinion

Byrichard 16 February 2024

Two authors wrote books. In these books they speak about whether Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter. The answer is neither. If Twitter was alive and healthy it would never have been sold to an individual for four times its value, because its growth potential would have made this absurd.

Twitter died by 2007, with the advent of hashtags. That’s when twitter went from being a community of friends to being a community of strangers trying to get a million followers, and using hashtags to jump into conversations that they were not devoted to. At the first tuttle meetups and tweetups everyone knew everyone else from twitter. No one was a stranger to anyone else.

It’s when I went to a tweetup and I heard someone say “i’m not really a twitter user, I just came to the tweetup because it’s being hyped up.” That’s when twitter declined even more.

If we fast forward by a little more than a decade I believe that the pandemic killed Twitter, and Social Media. I believe this because before the pandemic normal people were on Facebook, and possibly Reddit and other social networks but they were not on Twitter. To a large extent they weren’t on FB either.

During the pandemic social media became more unpleasant. Trolling became more common. Trolling is the reason I dumped facebook for two to three years. Amplified loneliness is why I dumped Instagram and never returned.

The idea that Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter is erroneous. Marketers did. Public relations firms did. People who took a utilitarian view of social media killed Twitter.

Twitter was fantastic, when it was a network of friends chatting with friends. It stopped being that in 2007-2008. I still used it but my ROI had declined dramatically.

Is this due to moving from London to Switzerland? I don’t think so. I just think that Twitter was best, when it had value to small communities, rather than marketers, public relations people and other groups with a utilitarian agenda.

Articles like this one are never written by people who live and breath social media. They are written by outsiders looking in. We could read them, but because of my perspective they have no value. By perspective I mean my attitude towards social networks and social media.

And Finally

Twitter wasn’t killed by Dorsey or Musk. It was killed by the people who took a utilitarian approach to social media. They turned Twitter from a tool for communities to have conversations, and build projects together to a place where marketers and public relations firms could hijack conversations, and make it about following celebraties, rather than conversations.

When Twitter pivoted from being a social network to social media, it became less interesting. I deleted my first twitter account by 2008 or so, and only returned because Swiss television interviewed me about the social network.

When Musk bought Twitter it was already worthless.

The End of an Era

There was a time when Twitter was Twitter, Facebook was Facebook, Instagram was Instagram and Whatsapp was whatsapp. Over time they have all been bought or rebranded, and the things that made them so fantastic were destroyed. Society saw social media as an addiction. This attitude destroyed social networks.

tech related

Migrating Photos from Facebook to Google Photos

Byrichard 15 February 2024

There has been a shift within cloud services such as Google, Facebook and others. That shift is to make migrating photos from one service quick and easy. The old fashioned method would be to download media from service A before re-uploading it to service B. This requires lots of space on hard drives and this could be a luxury you do not have, especially with laptop drives being as small as they are.

By some paradox laptops have become so slim and small that we are still using 250gb to 1TB drives in devices, that if fatter, could hold 8TB disks. Imagine a laptop with an affordable eight terabyte drive. Imagine how different laptop user experiences would be.

Clicking Easy

That is not the point of this blog post. The point of this blog post is to say that moving photos from Facebook to Google Photos is as easy as to or three clicks, and most clicks are to say “yes, allow meta to access blah blah”, in this case Google services.

Fast

Moving Data from Facebook to Google Photos was very fast. It took a few minutes. It moved all the files from Facebook to Google before then incrementally adding photos to the relevant albums. Remember, back in the zeros and the tens we would upload photos deliberately and add album names. Facebook has sent these to Google Photos and Google Photos is now populating all of these albums.

Temporarily empty

Plenty of albums are “empty” as I write this post, but that’s because it takes time for Google Photos to read the JSON files and re-create the album structures with the right photos and other data.

Wrong Date

The other issue is that all the photos are marked as being created today, i.e. the date that the photos were moved from gallery A to Gallery B. I suspect that this will be corrected at a later stage, once the albums have been populated with the right images.

The Nice Thing

The nice thing about this quick experiment is that Facebook made photo sharing awful. There was a time in 2007 when Facebook was a network of friends, and friends of friends, but from Zynga onwards it became rubbish because it became about marketers and others getting ROI, at the cost of users getting rubbish.
Now within seconds I have access to photos from two decades of my life. I can, at a glance see photos, with the name of the event, and be transported to another era. It’s nice.

And Finally

This experiment was done with my backup Google account rather than the primary one. This experiment was with the free account and I am using 8.5 GB of 20 GB. I am well within the free tier.

Try it, it’s “free” and you’ll find exploring photo albums easier.

tech related | Video

Experimenting with Linux

Byrichard 14 February 2024

This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.

There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake. With an exteranl disk in target drive mode you can experiment to your heart’s content with an SSD that you can wipe, and reformat, and start again, if something messes up badly.

It also gives you a chance to check that wifi, the keyboard, and other things are still working well. In my case I found that wifi is not working with my mac book pro so I need to trouble shoot this. The advantage is that once I finish experimenting I can switch back to the internal HD via the option key, at boot, and I’m back in Mac land. There is the advantage that if you boot into Linux it will keep booting into linux until you tell it not to, and then your Linux box becomes a Mac once again.

WSL

With Windows you have WSL to play with, if you want to practice with using the command line. It offers a good oppportunity but it’s limited in that you can’t experiment as easily with a GUI.

Raspberry Pi

I find that Pi are great for experimenting. What makes them great is that they’re cheap, especially if you want to use them with Ubuntu Server rather than various GUIs. The advantage of using Pi is that you can experiment with single app setups like PhotoPrismPi, NextCloudPi, HomeAssistantPi and more

You can also experiment with installing ubuntu server, snap installing Nextcloud, adding docker, and then adding Immich, PhotoPrism and Audiobookshelf.

If you come from the windows or Mac world you think “but that’s easy, just install app one, then app two and then app three and you’re done. You’re not. When you install apps they install what they require. If you install nextcloud via snap it becomes the default localhost site, and photoprism sticks to :2342, audiobookshelf to :13378, pi-hole to /admin and so on.

The advantage of having Nextcloud on the locahost route is that you can then add “external websites” that point to the other services that are running in paralel. This allows people to navigate, without having to remember port numbers.

Linux is Stable

The key difference between Linux and MacOS and Windows is that Linux requires you to install the OS, rather than buying it pre-installed in most cases. This is the barrier to entry. If Linux machines were as common as Macs and Windows machines people would use them more often. Linux is stable. Once it is configured correctly it runs for weeks, months or even years without crashing, and without needing to reboot.

Linux is Flexible

The point of using WSL, Pi devices and target drives is that it gives you great flexibility to experiment and fix things, if they break, and restart from scratch if you can’t fix them. If approach A doesn’t work, you try approach B, and then C, until you get something that works.

By taking notes, along the process you develop a work flow to install servers with services as you want them to run. Initially I needed one Pi per service. With trial and error I can get one Pi to do everything, so I should consolidate all the services onto one device.

KDEnlive

The advantage of having the Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu is that I can then install KDEnlive and experiment with this open source video editor. As the Mac Book Pro is made obsolete so the opportunity to experiment with an open source version is all the more interesting. I wanted to build a video editing system on Linux and soon that is what I will have.

And Finally

Originally I was using a one terabyte SSD as a Time machine backup drive. Recently as I spent time freeing space on disks and moving things around I decided in install Linux on that SSD. Now I have a mac that can run either macOS or Linux, depending on which option I choose at boot. The advantage of using an SSD, rather than a spinning drive, is that it can be moved, while on, whereas a spining disk should only be moved, once it stops spinning.

I have been using Ubuntu on a Pi5 and it works well for almost everything, but if I can use a Mac Book pro then I have more power and flexibility, and it becomes portable. I can then switch the Pi 5 to Ubuntu Server and it will be stable enough to run for weeks or months between crashes or reboots.

WSL is good for command line experience and practice. Pis are good for simple apps, but a mac book pro running KDendlive is a good opportunity to finally reach my desire of editing video on an open source solution.

Swiss walks | tech related

Tired of Garmin and Apple, Playing With Casio

Byrichard 13 February 2024

For a while now I have been wearing a Casio and an apple watch or a Garmin and an Apple watch, or a Casio and a Garmin watch or a xiaomi smart band and a casio or a xiaomi smart band and… it goes on.

A Break of Routine

The reason for which I’m flying between so many devices is two fold. I have too many devices. There was a time when I went climbing, hiking, cycling, diving, swimming, on via ferrata and more and I was happy with just one watch.

Collecting

Now, with the pandemic and other factors I seem to have more devices than arms, and no loyalty to either. I believe that it’s due, in part to walking the same loops over, and over, and over again. Every so often I walk clockwise and then I walk counter clockwise. I take the short route, then the medium route, and then the long route, and then the extra long route, and sometimes I backtrack, especially on weekends.

To break from that monotony I think I fiddle with various watches and tracking devices.

We think nothing of wearing a different pair of socks every day, or trousers, or t-shirts, but if we switch between watches, or wear two at once we’re lunatics.

Compulsion

If I wanted to be nasty about myself I’d say that I’m not a lunatic, I’m an addict. I feel the need to preserve my step count on as many services as possible, as a result of which I feel the urge to wear multiple devices each week.

Personal Fitness Tracking

There are two solutions to this. The first is a learning opportunity. Home Assistant and NextCloud have fitness tracking sort of built in. If I worked on updating HomeAssistant automatically, with data from Garmin, Apple, Casio and Xiaomi then I would have by data in a central place, and I could wear just one device at a time as the data aggregator I care about is my own.

Apple and Garmin

Apple and Garmin have frustrated me with their apps. They have taken fitness tracking and tried to make it an addiction. Apple and Garmin want you to push yourself every day, seven days a week for years. I burned out on Apple several times and yet I can’t stop wearing their device. My steps are counted by my phone anyway. Garmin has been faulty on occasion. It has crashed on some walks.

Stop Hesitating

The second solution is to pick one device and to stick with it, without flitting between one and the other. I feel myself drawn to Casio at the moment. I like that it tracks without nagging, and without judgement. I also like that I can go for months or even years without the need to charge.

The Paradox

Garmin, Apple and Xiaomi don’t care about walking as fitness habits, so you wear them every single day, but they won’t mark your fitness as progressing. You’re quantifying for the sake of quantifying, and wearing a casio would be fine.

Yesterday Garmin asked if I wanted to join the beta so I did, but I need to run or cycle for two weeks for the app to provide me with feedback.

And Finally

For years I wore a Suunto, and then for years I wore an Apple Watch, and then I played with an Apple Watch and a Garmin device, and now I feel like experimenting with Casio, as I did when I was a child.
Casio stand out now, because everyone already has an Apple Watch or a Garmin device, but few wear Casio.

tech related

Waiting

Byrichard 12 February 2024

As I write this I am waiting for my Apple Laptop to complete two tasks. The first task is to convert all my audible books from AAX to MP3 format. This is taking days to complete because I have over 500 books and my mac book pro is slow, due to it being from 2016.

Very Slow Time Machine

I’m also waiting for my mac book pro to backup to a one terabyte external HD, before repurposing a one terabyte SSD. It’s a waste to have an SSD working as a time machine backup when it could be used for more interesting tasks.

Flickr Backup

I recently downloaded all of my photos from flickr. I want to consolidate my photos from iPhoto, now Photos, with Picasa photos, Now also Photos (but by Google), as well as by flickr, which is still just flickr. I checked and PhotoPrism is written so that it can get metadata from Flickr export files and populate PhotoPrism.

Unzipping

At some point I need to spend several hours unzipping over one hundred and fourty files. I want to use a Linux system because with Linux images are unzipped into a single folder structure, whereas with MacOS each zip file becomes an individual folder, and when you have 140 zips you don’t want to go through 140 folders to reconcile all the files into the structure they should be in.

This is important, because exported image files are organised by folders, but their creation date and modified date correspond to when the zip was created, rather than the files. This means that I need Photoprism to see the photo files and find the JSON data that goes with them. I wanted to reorganise my files manually, by date, but I can’t.

PhotoPrism Duplicate Detection

there is a silver lining. PhotoPrism is designed not only so that it can see the photos and read the json files with exif information but it can also detect duplicates. I was going to do it manually because I thought it would be faster, but it isn’t faster, and could become very messy later, if I mess around with photo files. JSON files will no longer have the right information to go with the photo files.

Replacing Time Machine and Google Backup with NextCloud

In theory I don’t need to wait for Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive because I could setup Nextcloud to take care of backing up for me. I will do that, once this backup is over.

Ubuntu From Target Drive

In the past I have run Linux on a mac using the Target Drive mode but the issue is that you need to shut down the machine if you want to move it. With an SSD I could theoretically move the computer whilst it’s hibernating or sleeping. It would give me the flexibility of having a Linux system, without having to wipe MacOS.

I want to wipe MacOS from that drive anyway, but first I want to ensure that Ubuntu or another version of Linux runs well before taking the plunge.

And Finally

Time Machine

Time Machine is demonstrating why it makes sense to replace it with a self-hosted instance of Next Cloud. It shouldn’t take a day and a half or more to backup a laptop. With Next Cloud I will have an always on backup of files from the laptop.

AudioBookShelf

Yesterday I moved audiobooks and podcasts from the Pi SD card to an external hard drive and it worked flawlessly so I know that this migration is easy, as long as I update the docker-compose file.

PhotoPrism

At the moment I have a photoprism library, that I will need to reconcile with my flickr and local versions of photos. I know that some duplicates remain so the question is whether to place flickr in one folder within import, and the local versions of photos in another folder, and import both at once, or should I import local files first, and then move the flickr files?

Time Consuming

I have been collecting files for at least two decades. By experimenting with self hosted versions of PhotoPrism, Nextcloud and more I was pushed to clear the chaos in my drive collection. It has taken a lot of time but the result is that I will soon have a few drives free to re-use for smaller projects.

A Good Feeling

It takes hours to move files from smaller drives to larger drives, and to detect and remove duplicates. It can feel overwhelming and tedious but in the end you get something worthwhile. I now have all my photos in one place organised chronologically, all my videos across two drives, organised chronologically and soon all my audiobooks and favourite podcasts organised.

When all your files are across several drives you lose track of where things are. Now, I might spend hours waiting for files to move from drive to drive, and for photoprism or openaudible to convert files but the result is that I regain access to files that were lost in a chaos of drives and duplicates.

I also regain several terabytes of space on hard drives, providing space to store and work on new projects.