Blue Birds and a Mastodon Talking

One Hundred and One Posts with Hugo

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I was using Day One to blog but I found the process slow and clunky. I then switched to writing blog posts with VIM and that sped me up by a lot. I then switched to Hugo and VIM. Now I use VS Code with Front Matter to generate the pages, and then wrote plenty of posts using VIM. Now I’m still using FrontMatter CMS but with VS Code without touching VIM.

I didn’t fall out of love with VIM. I ran out of writing inspiration so I spend an hour or two trying to think of something to write, and by the time I decide to start writing I have chosen not to use an app that is surplus to requirement.

I really like blogging with VS Code, FrontMatter, git, and git ftp push because I don’t need to login anywhere, I don’t need to wait for wordpress admin panels to load, or other slow and clunky things to happen.

Fast and Efficient

The Workflow

  1. Create the Front Matter with FrontMatter CMS
  2. Add the tags
  3. Write the blog post
  4. Proofread
  5. version control with git
  6. Hugo – to create the publish files
  7. cd public – add the publish files to git
  8. git ftp push

And you’re done. It might sound like a lot of things to do but it’s actually very quick and efficient. The faster you can type, and the faster the whole process goes.

Slow and Clunky

WordPress

With WordPress you need to go to the URL for the blog, load wp-admin, load the new post page, write the post, add the image, add the tags, add the category and then publish. All of this takes time. You also need to scroll and navigate to the right parts of the right pages. WordPress now feels slow and clunky, especially with all the bloat wear that has been added.

And Finally

I much prefer Hugo to WordPress now but I still use both, due to legacy. I no longer use WordPress tags. The Fediverse takes tags and turns them into hashtags and I have a deep hatred of hashtags. On web forums and well designed sites you have threads and categories.

Hashtags made sense, in the age of Twitter by SMS, but Twitter by SMS died years ago. Bandwidth is also no longer an issue so the practice of using hashtags is obsolete. I can’t control mastodon instances, to display tags as I think they should be tagged, so I don’t bother with them on WordPress. It saves me five or so seconds and it avoids frustrating me when I see my posts on the Fediverse.

If you want to get an idea of WordPress scale on the Fediverse follow the hyperlink. 46,000 authors, 2.9 million posts and 2460 wordpress instances, so far.

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Of Rain and a Pi 5 4GB
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Of Rain and a Pi 5 4GB

Byrichard

Rain was forecast today. If rain had not been forecast then I would have driven to Ins, near the Lake of Murten near Neuchatel to go around the lake at a slow up. I didn’t go, not because rain was forecast, but because rain was expected although not quantified. I like to drive and do things, sometimes, but if I drive so far, especially to do something in relative solitude I would prefer to do it when the weather is good, rather than rainy. By driving so far in the rain I am contributing to global warming for very little

That’s why I’m going to write about my current experiment. I saw, a few days ago, that the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB model was being sold at a reduced price so I decided to get one and experiment. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu on one SD card, but I also swapped the SD card from the 8gb pie to the four GB pi. So far I find that the 4gb pi copes well with Facebook, watching facebook reels, YouTube videos of 18 minutes or more and other simple browser based tasks.

It is easy for us to fall into the trap of looking at expensive laptops and thinking “I want the latest mac book pro” or “I want the latest framework laptop” and so on.

The truth is that for web browsing a Pi is good enough, especially the Pi 5.

Heat and Pi Crashes

As I was browsing, looking for more inspiration for this post I got the Pi to crash, simply scrolling down a Facebook page. In my experience Pi crash when they become too hot. It’s not that they have stopped working, but rather that they overheat and slow down, to the point to appear as if they have crashed. If you get a fan and blow air on them they usually revive.

That’s why it’s worth getting a fan to go with the Pi, to help with cooling.

I use the Raspberry Pi default case with the Raspberry Pi integrated heatsink and fan and it works reliably. I was using the Pi 5 default case with the default fan when it overheated and slowed to the point of appearing as if it had crashed.

One Pi5 works as a server that is always on. The second works as a laptop replacement, and the third is for experimentation, so that I stop breaking my main laptop replacement. I was recently experimenting with other desktop environments and was unable to recover. The third Pi was bought because it was cheaper than usual, so that I could experiment and learn more skills. It takes very little time to reconfigure a Pi as I want it but if I use it with Immich then that does take time to recover.

And Finally

If the weather was good I would be hiking and writing about the experience but since it’s rainy and overcast I am experimenting with a Pi5 4gb, crashing it, and then reverting to the Pi5 8GB to conclude the post. The official fan/heat sink costs 14.40 so it’s not that expensive but once it’s on the board it is hard to remove.

Next Sunday I should be doing something more interesting.

Experimenting with the Photoprism App

Experimenting with the Photoprism App

Byrichard

While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.

Photoprism is a photo management app like Lightroom, Google Photos, iPhoto and plenty of other app. It is open source and can be installed quite easily using this Raspberry Pi Solution. With less trial and error than with Nextcloud I was able to get it up and running within an hour or so.

My first try was wwith a slow 16gb card but that took ages so I thought that I would set another card, this time with 512 gigabytes of storage going overnight. In the time it took me to heat dinner the card was ready for me to experiment with and my first impressions were good.

I tried to upload a few images from a PC, and then from the mobile phone via a web browser before playing with Photosync.The beauty of Photosync is that it will upload even when the phone is sleeping, or another app is open. I let it synchronise photos while I slept, and as I went shopping for bread for a Fondue later today. The moment it seemed to lose momentum is when I got back to the parking after shopping. That’s where I lose the mobile phone signal. As I wrote this, after fourteen or so hours of working almost non stop the files were synced between the phone and Raspberry Pi 4 2gb. They recommend using a Raspberry Pi 4gb or higher but for the sake of tests it seems okay with a lower spec machine.

Indexing

With this app you need to tell it to index photographs. This doesn’t happen automatically.

It can recognise people, create labels/keywords for images, moments, places and more. It also gives you a log of everything it’s doing, from indexing photos to adding locations, to adding keywords, to asking you to name faces that it recognises. Remember that this sits on your personal device, and does not need to ever touch the cloud, if you do not want it to.

Another feature that this app has is to detect and flag low quality and low resolution images and this can be a very good feature to have. Sometimes you get junk images from old websites or other directories. This makes it quick to get rid of them.

When Photoprism indexes photos it creates a seperate file with the new file names, creates thumbnails of various sizes and then when it completes its task, or when you stop indexing, it then merges the old index with the new index.

You have the option of a “complete rescan” which reindexes everything or you can choose to “cleanup” which deletes orphaned index entries, sidecar files and thumbnails. It’s because Nextcloud doesn’t have an intuitive way of re-indexing files that no longer exist that I was tempted to try this piece of software.

If I was to change two things with indexing then I would add a status indicator to tell me how many images remain without an index. It runs fine in the background but it would be nice to know how many images remain. I saw that someone else said that they wish indexing would run automaticall, until all images are indexed, and then again when new images are added.

EXIF Data

The app allows you to see image exif data, for example latitude and Longitude but also a title based on the location, iso, exposure, camera used, lens, f-stop, focal length, copyright, subject, description and keywords.

For key wording it uses colours, location, keywords in the local language, such as “Lac”, “rue”, state, country and more. You can add notes and click done if you change anything.

Humour

It has labelled a cat as a dog, human climbers as lizards, a sign for road works as a monument the LHC tunnels as wood.

Filtering

You can filter photos by countries, cameras, newest, month, category, colour, year and more. This makes searching for images quick and intuitive. I also like that it automatically keywords images with the most obvious tags. This allows the human being who is sorting these images to add specific tags, such as people involved, event keywords and more.

Video and Photos

With Nextcloud when you upload videos it doesn’t recognise them immediately so you get a grey box. With Photoprism you see a keyframe and you can then watch the videos within seconds so this tool can be used for photographs and video.

Downsides

Unless you pay 2 USD per month you only have one user, so you can’t have admin as just the admin, and use your own name as a user. This is sub-optimal for security but also for family sharing.

Photosync is also not free. It wants you to pay 6 CHF for the app, and encourages you to pay for Photosync Premium.

If you pay for the bonus features you will pay 6 CHF for the app, 25 CHF for lifetime Premium, and another 2 CHF per month for the right to create more users on your own system.

Google Photo is 100 CHF per year. iCloud is 120 CHF per year. Lightroom is 10 CHF per year to 55 CHF per year.

A few years ago I used Kyno by LessPain Sotware and that is 159 USD per year.

It’s cheap compared to the competition and by using it you’re supporting a European product, rather than American.

And Finally

Whilst Nextcloud is great for file sharing, time tracking, tasks, news reading and more Photoprism is great for managing photographs. It is quick and easy to install on a Pi. You find the URL, you tell Etcher to burn it to an SD card, you put the SD card into a Raspberry Pi and within minutes with a fast card, you can connect either by SSH or by web interface. Within minutes you can be using the Raspberry Pi as a photo management tool locally.

If you install tailscale and Photosync you can be backing up your mobile device images within a matter of minutes and it remembers what has been synchronised, whether you use the local IP address or the tailscail VPN one. When you’re synchronising thousands of files you want a solution that remembers what you have synched.

I was so convinced by Photoprism that I considered replacing Nextcloud with it in the 8gb Raspberry Pi, but chose not to, for now, because Nextcloud has time tracking options that I want to experiment with, for now.

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From One Culture To Another Through Podcasting

Byrichard

At the moment I’m listening to a lot of podcasts. Probably 5-10 a day on average. I go through one collection of podcasts and once that one is finished I move onto another. As a result of this, the culture of those I am listening to is sinking through.

Yesterday I listened to four or five of NBC’s meet the press and I found them interesting. I wasn’t always paying attention to what they were saying but it did make a change. I recently listened to the whole of the Net@night series and the previous series on the RSS feed as well. As a result, I’ve learned quite a bit about new technology. It’s been fun. It’s about web 2.0 and how everything is “innovative” although ten years ago people were doing the same it was called differently. It’s all O’reilly’s(sp?) fault.

Today I listened to something quite interesting. It’s the Mac break weekly recorded in Dolby headphone surround or some similar tech. It’s interesting because it does paint an auditory landscape. Leo Laporte was in front whilst the girls on that podcast, Justine and Kendra were to the right, and the guests, whilst two others were to the left.

Walking to the shops with that sound was a little disorienting at first but I grew used to it and it’s more fun. I want to hear more podcasts recorded with that technology.

I am going through a phase of cultural assimilation. I watch and listen to all these podcasts that are coming from the US and as a result, I’m starting to absorb the culture. I’m telling myself that I should move to SFO where municipal wifi is a reality rather than a dream. We’ll see what I do once university is finished and I have the rest of my life in front of me.

We may find that the work experience module teaches me to think more creatively about getting a job. If it does then it’s truly worth writing up tomorrow when I get up.

I’m rambling so I’ll leave you to wait for the next post.

Ciao ciao

Experimenting with Paperless

Experimenting with Paperless

Byrichard

As I was experimenting with a Pi zero 2W I came across Paperless NG which is a simple to install app that allows you to catalogue paperwork automatically on a local machine rather than in the Tech Giant Clouds like Google, Amazon, Apple et al. It didn’t like being installed on the Pi Zero so I installed it on the Pi5 and it works well.

The aim of the app Paperless is simple. Every time you get a letter or document you can upload a photo of it, a PDF, or other form of files, and it will run OCR to read the content, establish who the correspondent is, and help to automatically catalogue your correspondences over time. In this way you get a letter, scan it, feed it to paperless, and it will keep an organised record of correspondences from this moment on.

The advantage of this app over projects like Nextcloud is that it has a specific purpose so you can use it to deal specifically with documents. The more you use it, the more intelligent it becomes, and the more practical it becomes. If you’re lazy a photo is good enough for OCR to work, and if you’re more meticulous you can scan documents and have them automatically catalogued.

And Finally

At the best of times paperwork can be boring, and at the worst of times it can be stressful. With a solution such as this you can scan documents in seconds, and OCR will take care of the rest. When it comes time to fill in tax documents everything is ready and waiting. Instead of taking hours to find bits of paper, everything is a keyword away.

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

chatGPT, GPT3 and Reading Time

Byrichard

Time for a new discussion to take place. Reading time. Do you read through articles or do you skim them. Is reading the headline enough or do you read every word of the article? I ask because in the age of chatGPT and GPT3 I would ask the same question as I asked about social media.


If you want to discuss ROI for businesses and PR firms or advertisers then you need to discuss ROI for users too. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter wanted to control the timeline by using a “home” feed. The Home feed is an algorithm driven feed that shows you popular content, rather than content by friends, that you and they would converse about. The result is a lonely social media experience. The ROI goes down, That’s why I took a break from Twitter to play with Mastodon and revive my blogging habit.


Now we’re coming to the new discussion, about chatGPT. From the tests I have run with chatGPT it is a glorified encyclopaedia rather than AI. It spits out predetermined answers, rather than showing signs of learning and logic. I played with Copperman years ago, and other projects. With those, the more you chatted with the app, the more intelligent it would become. With chatGPT it always gives standard responses. It’s boring. It has no humanity. It has no character.


Writing is a creative process. You sit there, knowing that you want to create content but you need to spend time thinking of ideas, and then you need to write to the word count that you, or others has set. That process injects humanity into what you write. It also means that someone has taken the time to develop an idea, and maybe even proofread it.


By making it easy to generate content for WordPress and other platforms chatGPT, GPT-3 and other technologies are making it harder to find content worth reading. One of the biggest challenges when looking for content., reviews and information about products is the spam. the boiler plate content that people generate for a Casio watch, or other products.


Content should be written by humans for humans. The more noise we generate by fake AI, the more difficult it will be to find human content, by humans, for humans. That fake AI will also create formulaic answers to specific questions, rather than original content.


I love technology when it replaces the need for humans to do boring and repetitive tasks that can be automated, but something creative, such as writing we should keep humans. One tech mag recently allowed AI to write articles and those articles then had to be proofread and corrected by human editors.


ChatGPT is Hype


Recently I was reading a book about AI and deep learning and it wrote about how there is a cyclical habit of people to say “this is a great step forward in AI” only for interest to flare up, and then die down again as the miracle solution is understood and interest wanes again. chatGPT might seem exciting to some, but to me this looks like a human language search engine, rather than proper AI. Give it random words and it doesn’t do anything. I asked chatGPT “how fast does a squirrel run and it crashed, twice. It isn’t intelligent.

Zyb – quick contact syncing for mobile phones

Byrichard

Over the years I’ve jumped from one phone to another and each time I’ve had a backup of all my contacts on at least three other devices at all time. The latest service I’ve played with is Zyb. Whilst still in Beta it’s a simple to use interface for s60 phones like the N95 that allows you to synchronise all your contacts with one simple action.

Among the features I like are the ability to see which of your other contacts are using the service as well as the easy merging of duplicate entries. That’s particularly interesting when, like me, you’ve had to synchronize across a number of platforms over the years and ended up with a few duplicates. It’s also online which means your contacts are always accessible as long as you’re online should you lose your phone or the batteries die.

In so far as I can tell there is no automatic syncing so the updates are as frequent as you remember to do them unlike with paying services like missingsync where updates are as regular as you are close to the machine you synchronise with.

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