Tomorrow I will be driving for twelve hours and I hope that I find it as relaxing as the last drive but I doubt that I will be that lucky. We will see how traffic and other conditions are.
I hope that I have a good two or three audiobooks to listen to, so that I may be entertained and focused. We will see.
Garmin allows you to select the number of steps you want to take in a single day, or let it be set automatically. For a year or two I allowed the goal to set. The result is a step goal that fluctuated from 12,000 steps per day to 15,000 steps or more. This was fine, because I ignored it.
A few days ago I decided to set it to a fixed ten thousand steps a day. Many will say that the 10,000 steps per day doesn’t matter, and I agree. I took 21,000 steps today so I overshot the mark by a little.
I run every two days or so, and I walk for an hour and a half or more each day. Although I do this sometimes I undershoot the goal by a few hundred steps and the streak is lost. The streak, too, doesn’t matter, because it is meaningless. What I find interesting is the number of steps taken in a year. Once it was five and a half million. Now it is currently about 4.3 million.
These numbers too, don’t matter. If you run, or if you cycle you’re either making more effort, or your steps are not counted. In both cases the step count tells one story but other metrics tell another.
Last night I read about how you can increase your Vo2 max up to a certain point, and after that it doesn’t increase. What does change is your resistance to fatigue. You go from being able to run for 2 kilometres to being able to run for 2.3 kilometres, and more.
Today I walked for two hours in drizzle. I passed by two Camino stamp opportunities and collected them in a booklet that is not designed for this use. I collected them as a curiousity, and to give this walk a different purpose.
Yesterday I started the proper migration of my Google Photo assets from Google Takeout to PhotoPrism. The first step was to mount the drives to the linux system, the second was to transfer the photos from the external hard drive to the internal SD card, unzip them, and then start imposing assets.
The first bottle neck is exporting 800 gigabytes from Google drive to a local drive. I chose to download the files in one gigabyte packages in fifty gigabyte sets over many hours. This depends on your connection so the experience will vary.
The second bottle neck is when moving the files from an external hard drive to a microsd card. The transfer can be quite time consuming which is part of my reason for using a Pi, rather than a laptop. A laptop would be much faster but it will time out unless you tell it not to sleep. The issue with that is that laptops are not designed to be un for days at a time, without sleeping every so often. Once the Pi is working you can leave it to work.
Ideally I would keep the files on the external drive and skip this time consuming step. I wanted to test the feasability of using an SD card, to keep things tidy once the time consuming phase is over.
PhotoPrism needs files to be unzipped to work. This can be a time consuming task if you do so with the Pi, rather than a laptop or desktop. I would recommend unzipping the files ahead of moving the files from an external drive to an internal drive. At the time of writing I did not find a quick way of unzipping files with a single command.
PhotoPrism has an import folder. This is where you extract your unzipped Google Takeout Folders to. Select “move files” to delete all files that have been automatically imported. Click import and then PhotoPrism does the rest. This is the stage that takes the most time. PhotoPrism orgqanises the photos by year, month, date, location, tags, and people. This is the stage where you can go for a walk, or enjoy a good night of sleep because it will take hours to complete.
I am not clear whether the JSON files for images are always zipped within the same archive or whether they are zipped once every few files. This is part of my reason for experimenting with ingesting several gigabytes at a time, rather than one folder at a time. The second reason is that if I give it tasks that take hours it gives me no excuse to procrastinate. That’s what I did before writing this blog post.
PhotoPrism recognises faces but it doesn’t create a “person” until it has several images. When it does have several images it gives you the opportunity to name that face, or add it to a pre-existing face. It’s nice to watch as faces from your past re-appear, and amusing when you realise how many names you have forgotten, as well as seeing which ones you clearly remember.
At the moment when I am writing this post it has recognised 200 places and 15 states. When it recognises a place you can search by country via the search tool, or by location with the map. States are towns, villages or regions. This is a useful way of organising photos because it shows how much you travel, but also how many places you have been to, once you zoom in enough.
This tool, by reading EXIF info, makes it possible to search for photos by camera. You can search for 360 photos with insta360 or photos from years ago with canon s70 or Canon EOS 5 MkII etc.
If you’re looking for photos of food, or aircrafts, or goats, or sheep, or monuments, or historical, you can. It also allows you to seach by colours, for example teal for grass and diving or blue for sunny days and more.
It is possible to search by year or by month, or both. You can search for December images to see if you can find images of snow, or you can search for June and yellow to find images of drought.
Two tabs that I spent time watching last night when I first started to import Google Photos properly were “import” and “log”.
The import tab is important because it allows you to know whether files are being imported or not so this allows you to decide whether to import more images or not. I prefer to import 50 gigabytes, clear the import directory, and then import the next 50 gigabytes, rather than to leave it to run for hours and assume that everything was imported correctly. If something fails I like to know when it’s easier to fix. So far I am under the impression that photos are, at the very least, imported into folders by year and month, as well as indexed automatically based on content.
I like to watch the logs to see if errors occur, but also to see when new faces are recognised, whether thumbnails are being generated correctly as well as when a new face cluster is ready to be named.
With PhotoPrism you can set several images or videos as private at once. You select the first image and then before clicking the last image press shift as you click and it will select that range. You can then click on the lock and those images or videos will be marked as private. Having the ability to select a range of images and apply changes, such as privacy is useful. I use privacy as an example but you could just as easily add a country, or keyword, or anything else.
I realise that I should mention the index tab. Indexing runs automatically, as soon as it detects images in a directory or a mounted drive it will attempt to index those files which is both useful and likely to cause a mess. Luckily PhotoPrism comes with a “cleanup” tool to make clearing up orphan files and tidying the index easier.
Despite indexing thousands of files, adding metadata, recognising colours, adding categories and labels, as well as generating thumbnails it’s fast. I can load images almost instantly when scrolling up and down. This is despite running on a Pi whilst it’s working hard. This is a great self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and iPhotos. Remember, before cloud storage was a default tools like Picasa existed, and these were great for organising photos. The difference is that now they’re cloud solutions where the cloud is your home Raspberry Pi rather than an app on your phone or laptop.
When you use PhotoPrism for free you can have just one user. If you pay 2 Euros per month you can have “Super Admin, Admin, User, Viewer, Guest” accounts. This allows you to create individual users, to add friends and family.
If you don’t desire to have your own private instance running at home you have a cloud based solution that starts at 6.50 Euros per month but it’s unclear what the cost is for storage.
Initially I thought that I would use Nextcloud for media asset management but when it failed to display video files as thumbnails and when I saw that I couldn’t easily get rid of orphan index entries I hesitated between Immich and PhotoPrism. What made me commit to PhotoPrism is that I saw that they had a tool to import from Google Takeout built in. Instead of spending hours or even days or weeks re-organising photos the software would do it for me.
Adobe Lightroom costs 99 CHF per year. Kyno by LessPain Software costs 150 Euros per year and CatDV costs several thousand CHF to purchase. If you know how to setup PhotoPrism you can save money, or upgrade the hard drive to a higher capacity once per year, to ensure less risk of drive failure due to age.
Reblog via harmonicarichard
https://mastodon.social/@jpmens/111532759490595481 I hate the cybertruck for this reason. No decent human being needs a car that can run people over without being damaged. Imagine cycling in a world with bastards driving cybertrucks. It’s frightening enough without the cyberfucks.
“I don’t need to go for a one and a half hour walk. I said that to a neighbour before my walk. I could have cut it short, if it started to rain too heavily. Paradoxically for most of the walk it was grey and drizzling. Nothing to worry about. I was almost dry for almost the entire walk.
It’s as I walked the last one and a half kilometres that it started to rain heavily. Within a few minutes my trousers were soaked, and within a few more minutes my shoes and socks were soaked. Luckily the walk ended before it started to whick up through my t-shirt. The rain was so strong that when I took off my trousers my legs were soaked, as if I had just come out of the shower. I had. It was a rain shower.
I am fully equipped to walk in the rain for hours if it is required, but according to the doppler radar I did not expect rain. I was wrong. I got wet. I don’t mind. Humans are waterproof.
Yesterday I mentioned that I was studying WPRig. I finished the course. It looks like a very powerful tool to design wordpress themese but I think there is a learning curve and the course, pushed me beyond what I was comfortable with. The next course I’m studying is WordPress: Custom Post Types and Taxonomies and this looks like it will teach me just what I want to know to convert this website to a fully wordpress experience. When the site is ready I will play with permanent redirections before deleting the old pages forever. One more step into modernising this website.
There is a good chance that tomorrow I will go for a walk along the Toblerones from Prangins to the lake side and on to Nyon. For this walk I have the luxury that I can walk to the starting point before doing the group walk.
The issue is that the walk to the starting point is about 8km which will take at least an hour and a half or more so I need to set off at least an hour and a half early if not more. Due to the activity starting at 1300 that’s quite easy to do, with a relaxed morning.
The train ride takes three minutes, once I have walked 20 minutes to the train station, so really it takes 23 minutes, every half hour. In contrast the walk takes one hour and 20 minutes. The train will cost about 4CHF whereas walking costs time.
The loop, if I walk the entire thing, will be about 14-20km, so a good day of walking. Due to the walk being linear, starting in Gland and heading to Nyon it doesn’t make sense to drive to Gland because I would then have to walk back to get the car. I could take the train but it seems absurd to spend so much on such a small journey. Having said this, if I drove there and back I would spend 4 CHF in petrol. 😉
There are two things to consider. The first is that this is a tame walk. For the most part walking from Nyon to Gland, and Gland to Nyon is relatively flat. The second consideration is that i like to walk loops rather than linear walks. By walking the loop I get to experience new portions of road that I have previously cycled rather than walked along.
From Nyon to Gland I would walk along the top of Nyon, and then head down towards the road that runs from Prangins to the aerodrome, and from there either to the left through the industrial zone or to the right down to the bowling, climbing gym and then up to the train station where I would wait for people. I would then walk the “toblerone” walk back to Nyon and from there home.
If the experiment is a success then I will have a new, ambitious walking route that I could enjoy on Sunday, without the need for a car. I have walked from Nyon to Coppet and up towards Crassier but I have barely done any walking beyond the East of Nyon. This is a good opporunity to range.
