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Mountain streams

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Whilst some people are perfectly happy sitting at a desk chatting to others via webcams I prefer to be out and about streaming daily life. Today was one example of what I like to do. I went up to La Dole for a walk with the n95 and streamed a few landscapes for people following me on twitter to see.



We finally got caught out by some hail and thunder but my phone survived.

I want more people to do this type of thing. Come out and have fun, stream life as it happens. Show us what’s outside your living room or home office.

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The Apple Watch does not fill a niche

Byrichard

The Apple Watch rather than fill a niche provides a fifth screen. According to Wikipedia the four first screens are the cinema screen, the television screen and the mobile phone and tablet screen. The fifth screen is the smart watch as designed by Apple, Samsung, Sony and others. Apple and others have designed phones that bring the mobile phone experience to the wrist.

Energy efficient

Suunto, Garmin, Fitbit and other brands fill the wrist worn niche effectively because they have designed devices with energy efficient displays that provide tracking whilst at the same time giving extended battery life.

Extended battery life in use

Health trackers by fitbit and other companies have been designed to last for a week or more whilst tracking movement 24 hours a day. Suunto, Garmin and other brands have designed watches that can track activities for hours or even days before they need charging.

Long stand by time

When not in use all of the devices mentioned above can last for weeks. In the case of the Suunto Ambit two I have found that it loses one percentage of charge per day. As a result of this it can be used as a watch for three months before I need to think of charging.

Data analysis

All of these tools are for collecting data about the route you took, the intensity of the exercise tracked, heart rate and complementary information. When synced on the computer or website a lot of information is presented. Garmin syncs with Runkeeper, Strava, Garmin connect and other services, Suunto syncs with Movescount and Strava intuitively. Fitbit syncs with the fitbit site and other fitness apps. The most interesting data is analysed on a computer rather than the wrist unit. This leaves the device to track information cost effectively, where cost is battery life, and effective is defined by how long you can track an activity.

Conclusion:

My passion for “smart watches” stems from scuba diving. I bought a Suunto D9 to track dives and loved taking dive data and analysing it in view of improving my diving ability. I tracked training at the gym, hiking and other activities with various phones and their weakness was battery life. When you go for a hike in the mountains, go for a via ferrata or do a number of other sporting activities for extended periods of time you want a device that can last as long as you do.

Suunto’s Ambit 2 filled that need very well, so well that I upgraded to the Suunto Ambit 3. As an android user I can’t  take advantage of all the features yet but that will come soon, this month in fact.

The Apple Watch does not fill any of the requirements I have listed above and for this reason I am not tempted. I see it as a fifth screen that does not fill a niche. Fitness trackers, fitness watches and other devices cost the same price or less and fill niche requirements effectively. Why would I want a gimmick?

KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

Byrichard

KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.


With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.


Simple Synchronisation


With KDrive you have a folder that is synched automatically from your device to the cloud, and from the cloud to another device. If you decide to move your images from one device to another you can do so by requesting that the images are downloaded, and eventually they will be synced. This is a key selling point.


Google One


With Google One you have two terabytes, which are shared between photos, file folders, e-mail and more. They are however, separated. You can access all of the files that you uploaded as files, but you cannot access all of your photos and download them easily. In the past I tried to download images from Google Drive and I found that I was blocked by how many hours it takes to download zip file after zip file for days at a time. This is not a good solution despite being cheaper than iCloud.


iCloud and Price


Aside from the size of the HD you need on your mac laptop or iOS device to download your galleries you also need to pay 120 CHF per year, in perpetuity. With Apple device you pay a premium for the phone, for the laptop but then you pay a premium for the apps, for the services and more. Apple wants 120 CHF per year to keep your data safe, when drives of that capacity are going down in price every single year. I object to paying a tax of sorts, every year, when I have already payed a premium for the products.


KDrive


KDrive, by Infomaniak, based in Switzerland has a number of advantages. The first is that the company is local, so it feels good to support a local effort rather than the giants. The second reason is that their price point is half as much as their competition, especially if you commit to two or three years. The third selling point is that all the files are accessible as if they were already on your local machine. This means that within a short period of time you can recover the files you want to recover, or backup the files that you want to backup.


Features


In the settings you have photo backup, and within this you can enable automatic backup but what makes this one different is that you can choose where to save the images, including which folder. It also creates directory by month and year. This makes it easy for you to find images when you are looking for them.. I like that you can select to upload photos, videos, screenshots and even delete photos once they are backed up, although this is in beta.


I like these features because I don’t want to backup videos because they’re heavy and take time to load, but also because they are not relevant to my photos. I prefer to take care of them separately. No other service offers the option to exclude videos.


Another great feature is that you can choose whether to sync your photos from “now” or all. That is useful. If you’re on a trip and you just want to backup recent pictures then that’s a useful feature. If you have all the time in the world, and enough battery life, then you can sync your entire image library. The fact that you can exclude video initially speeds up the process considerably.


For more information about KDrive. The Prices.


And Finally


Google Drive and iCloud complicate rather than simplify your life, when you are dealing with photos. KDrive simplifies it. If you can migrate your photos away from Google Drive and iCloud to a solution that is more user friendly then you can also reduce the amount of space you need on your devices, as you have offloaded them to the cloud, but then the files that were offloaded to the cloud can be synced your local machine seamlessly. As a media asset manager I greatly appreciate this.


KDrive is now a speedy and efficient solution for the sharing of files, with some intelligent features for the backing up of your phones’ photo galleries. I am in the process of doing that now. I hesitated with other services in the past, but to me this is a clear winner.

Installing Immich Alongside Photoprism

Installing Immich Alongside Photoprism

Byrichard

Last night I installed Immich on an HP laptop with ease. The issue I came up against is that laptops sleep and hibernate after a few minutes unless you are actively using them. This means that you need to use them whilst files are being transferred if you do not want tasks to be interrupted. That’s why, this morning I decided to try installing immich on two different raspberry Pi devices. The first is the one running Nextcloud.

Trial and Error Installation

I struggled with this install because first I had to download the right docker packages and then I had to unpack them and then I needed to check that docker was up and running and then I had to try to get Immich to launch but I encountered an error message. “no matching manifest for linux/arm/v8 in the manifest list entries”. After a quick search of the web I found that version of Linux and ARM processor are not supported via this instance so I searched for whether Jammy Jellyfish is. It is and that’s when I tried to install on my other Raspberry Pi 4 device. This time was a success so I have Photoprism and Immich running on one Pi and Nextcloud running on the second.

Best for 360 Photos

The biggest difference I noticed with Immich is that it supports 360 photos. If you’re the type of person to take spherical photographs you will be happy with this version. Another strength is that the app is free. It gives you the option of uploading in the foreground or the background, and on or off wifi.

With this experiment I am uploading the photos from a secondary iphone that I retired from outdoor use due to the battery getting old. I am now uploading 19,000 images and videos from that device to Immich to see how it copes. With the laptop it struggled against the device’s desire to sleep. Now it should run until it’s done on the Pi.

Jobs Status

If you look at the administration page you will see job status for a few jobs. These are: Generate thumbnail, extract metadata, library, sidecar metadata, tag objects, smart search, recognise faces, transcode video, storage template migration and migration.

With this instance you see that each job has “active”, “waiting”, “clear” and pause.

Server Stats

The server stats aren’t as complete as Nextcloud. These stats tell you about total usage in terms of photos, videos, storage as well as info by user about photos, videos and size of photo gallery.

Image Tagging

Image tagging is off by default in settings. It uses microsoft/resnet-50 as the image classification model.

Video Transcoding

Immich gives quite a bit of control for video encoding. It gives you options to control Constant rate factor, preset for how quick or slow an encode is, audio codec, video codec, whether h.264, hevc or vp9. You can also select video encoding from 480p to 4k.

It gives you control over max bit rate, threads used, transcode policy, tone mapping, two pass encoding hardware encoding and more.

The Phone App

The phone app has four tabs. Photos, search, sharing, and library. Photos shows all photos that the app is allowed to see, as well as clouds next to the images that have been synced and clouds with a line for images that are yet to be synced. The library tab shows you the albums that are on the device.

The backup icon at the top allows you to select which albums you want to include or exclude, as well as the total number of images, the number of images backed up and the remainder.

The uploading file info gives you the file name, creation date and id info for immich.

It’s in the backup settings that you can choose automatic foreground backup, for when you open the app and want to sync, automatic background backup if you want background options as the nuance to only upload when charging.

With Photoprism and Immich I noticed that you have the option not to backup iCloud images. Immich and Photoprism indicate when they are downloading images from iCloud to the phone, and uploading from the phone to themselves.

Geeking Out

When files are uploaded from the phone or other device they are moved to the uploads folder and from there Immich reads their metadata and sorts them into folders by year, and then by individual days of the year. The format is year-date-day. The images are then stored with their default name.

Export from Google Photos – Takeout

Yesterday I came across Immich-Go which is a tool that can, among other things import from zipped archives without prior extraction. This is great, considering the eight hundred or more zip files from Google Takout, containing all my photos. With this tool I can save a lot of time and effort but it does come with two disclaimers:

?? This an early version, not yet extensively tested
?? Keep a backup copy of your files for safety

Immich comes with the same warning: “The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!”

Since I have Nextcloud, Photoprism and now Immich running I think I’m spreading the risk of all three failing at once.

Why use PhotoPrism, NextCloud and Immich?

iCloud, Picasa and other tools were great for storing photos on our laptops until we lost the ability to swap out the default drive with a bigger drive. Now that we the same storage on our mobile phones, as on our laptops we need external devices to back up images. If we use hard drives then we need to plug them in before each sync and this takes time, and limits mobility. NAS storage solutions are interesting but if the NAS driver fails then we have hard drives that we can no longer access. The beauty of using Raspberry Pi, thin clients and Bare bone PCs is that we have redundancy.

If a Pi dies we just remove the SD card and within seconds our photo gallery is restored by inserting it into a second device. We could start with a 256 gigabyte SDXC card and move up to a 500 gig sd card before moving up to a two terabyte card.

For more resiliency I would use a USB drive connected to the Pi to really increase storage capacity from half a terabyte up to 120 terabytes, in theory, with certain multidisk storage solutions.

With this setup if the Pi fails you just swap out the Pi.

And Finally

I reconfigured my Pis around. Now I have one Pi with photoprism and Immich. I have another with Homeassistant, a third with Nextcloud and a fourth running Pi-Hole. By swapping cards between Pis I got to see whether installations were easily transferred between devices. Home Assistant was, but the Pi-Hole wasn’t happy. Until this experiment I had just copied and pasted instructions. With Immich I did this too, but because I saw that I had to download specific packages to get docker to work I practiced using curl, and then replacing version numbers for an unpack command.

I encountered an error that meant that one setup woudln’t work, but instead of destroying a Pi configuration that I had a added to another one and it worked. It’s easier to start from scratch and get things to work, especially if they have a Pi image, like Photoprism does. Photoprism and Immich run on docker, so they both need the same base setup, which is why they work in parallel.

To conclude, with Docker you could install Nextcloud, Immich and Photoprism on the same Pi and have the three of them running on the same system. Each one uses a different port so they do not clash. You could even add a splash page so that when people browse to this device they are given the choice of all three storage solutions.

On Potentially Removing Google Adsense from this Blog

On Potentially Removing Google Adsense from this Blog

Byrichard

Recently I have been toying with the idea of removing Google Ads from my site and adding a donation option instead. This escalated, when, yesterday I was seeing ads in the admin panel of my wordpress blog. Ads are disruptive enough for users, with full screen invasive ads that require you to acknowledge the ads, as well as others that take up the lower third of the screen.

These ads bother me so much because they’re impossible to see subconsciously. They’re not passive. They’re invasive. On quite a few sites the ads are so invasive that it interrupts your browsing experience. What makes this so bad is that we choose to give free reign to place ads as Google sees fit, but rather than place discrete ads that are noticed subconsciously they want ads that stop us in our tracks.

Initially ads would be inserted in the blog feed so that every few paragraphs or every few posts you’d see an ad. Now they interrupt your browsing experience on every single page load. Not only do these ads disrupt the browsing experience, and encourage people to browse away from our pages, losing views and interest but they don’t generate any income anyway. We’re bugging people for nothing.

Google is getting the long tail income from all those disruptive ads, and we’re providing a bad user experience to those that browse to our site, rather than read what we write, in feed readers.

Recover Revenue From Ad Blockers

It gets worse. Not only does Google Adsense spam us in our admin panel but it wants us to pester people to turn off ad blockers. People turn ad blockers off in the first place because of how obnoxious they are. If an ad fills your entire screen you’re likely to turn ad blockers on. If ads take up almost all the screen you’re likely to turn ad blockers on.

I used ad blockers on YouTube because I didn’t want to see a minute of adverts before watching a video for ten seconds before deciding that it’s crap.

A Need for Better Adverts

When I use Twitter I block every advertiser I see. Anyone that advertises on Twitter deserves to be blocked. I hardly use ad blockers because I do want websites to benefit from my visits.

iOS App ads

When I use several iOS games I sometimes watch ads to speed up game progress but in so doing I get frustrated that the ads last for thirty seconds to a minute, and that they’re for spam games, rather than fun games. I call spam games those that require you to watch crappy adverts to progress, and that pay for ads for you to play games that are so awful that they need ads, rather than word of mouth to gain users. Ads are barely ever for something useful or desired, despite “we want to show you personalised ads”.

Looking for Advertisers

I currently write blog posts every single day about a diversity of topics. That I have written daily for 317 days or more should be a selling argument for encouraging brands to pay me directly for placing ads on my blog, rather than taking the easy “Google Adsense” route. If my blog was niche I could target specific brands or companies, but because it varies from day to day I could find a number of advertisers, or ask for donations. It depends on how pro-active, or passive I want to be. Google Adsense was a good option but now it has lost steam.

And Finally

With what I have learned over the last few years I could take control of how Google ads are displayed on my site, to make them less disruptive. It’s simply a matter of taking the time to tweak the layout to display ads in a way that I am content with. If I switch my blog to Hugo then the change is very easy to make. With Wordpress it will take a little more time.

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