A firefish holding a phone

Shifting from Tutorials to Practical Experience

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Since getting the Raspberry Pi devices my shift has moved from following tutorial after tutorial to experimenting with setting up a number of server projects fron Home Assistant to Nextcloud to Photoprism and Immich to name a few. In the process I have instantiated and then pulled down plenty of instances before finally deciding to keep certain instances up and running for longer, to see whether I can use them. I also experimented with CUPS and set up a printer/scanner for remote use.

Tools That work

Nextcloud, Photoprism, Home Assistant and Pi Hole work well so I can now use them without thinking about them too much. Both Ad Guard and Immich were slightly less successful but this might be due to fatigue, and running two things at once. The issue with Ad Guard is that it seemed to block 192.168.1.1 which I need to be able to access. I also noticed that when I switched things around Windows stopped being able to see local devices.

Immich Potential

I see a lot of potential in Immich but there is one flaw. If your library is too large it loses the ability to crawl all the files and upload them before timing out. I got to 14,000 images backed up, and the last 4000 are currently in limbo, waiting to recognise that they can be moved from the phone to the Immich server. With Nextcloud and Photoprism I was able to transfer all files from the phone to both services and now I can add the latest images with ease.

An Experimental Close Call

This morning I had a close call. I plugged in a one terabyte drive to the Pi with Photoprism and Immich. My plan was to mount the external hard drive, move the files from the SD card library to the external drive library and then to change the .env file to read from the external hard drive rather than the local drive. This didn’t work.

After some quick searches and practicing my AI using skills I had set things up as I thought I wanted them and started to copy from one location to the other. I wanted to check on progress a few minutes later but noticed that I was copying between two partitions rather than between two drives. I aborted the copy. No data was lost.

That’s why you experiment in a context where it doesn’t matter, and why you don’t assume that data is safe until it is backed up off site once, and locally twice.

In the worst case scenario I would have lost my Photoprism and Immich instances.

The Postponed Experiment

Before the setback described above my idea was to see whether the Android App would allow me to backup photos from Google Photos to Immich. It can’t. It only sees what is on the phone locally, not online. For the second part of the experiment I wanted to copy images from Google Takeout to Immich using Immich Go.

If Immich detects duplicates it will mark them as duplicates and throw them away. The reason for which I want to experiment with the tool is that I have eight hundred one gig files to get through, and to do this manually will take more than five minutes. I also need at least a terabyte of space free on another drive, so that when the files are unzipped and added to immich there is enough space for the task to complete successfully.

I want to experiment with the Uploads folder that I noticed in Immich, as well as Immich go.

The Concern

My concern with unzipped Google Photos files is that they will have lost exif and other data so Immich will import them as being created tomorrow or the day after rather than the day they were actually created, along with exif data for location data, camera used, and more.

Immich Go is meant to read the image file and the relevant JSON file to ensure that the relevant metadata is attached to the relevant image. iPhoto and Google Photos tend to strip this data to make migrations more difficult.

And Finally

Tutorials are great for building a good foundation but it’s by playing with practical examples that we learn to think about things in the right way. We consolidate what we learn both through repetition, as I did with Nextcloud, or by finding the right packages for docker and a specific OS, before changing OS and getting Docker to work on that instance. It’s about encountering an error and knowing how to fix it.

My next challenge will be to install Immich, Nextcloud and Photoprism on a single system.

Similar Posts

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.

Very Quick Thoughts on Mylio

Very Quick Thoughts on Mylio

Byrichard

When looking at hard disk options I noticed that with the Seagate One Touch Hub they offer six months with Mylio so I decided to try the app, without buying that app. My first thought is that it claims to replace Google Photos and iCloud and yet the cost is similar per month. If you compare it to self-hosting solutions like Immich, PhotoPrism and NextCloud then it’s not that interesting, especially since it is for windows and mac but not Linux.

The Downside

After a few minutes of playing with the app on Windows, two iPhones and a Mac Book Pro I find the app confusing to use. It doesn’t align with what I expect. We can tell it where to find photos and tell it to keep them there, but I don’t see an option to tell it to use an external drive as the storage space. I also find navigation confusing. It’s not as intuitive as I would like.

The Upside

The best feature that I have seen with this app is the ability to download photos from instagram and Facebook but also frame.io and flickr. I especially want to be able to download my photos from Flickr because I have decades of memories, especially from 2005 onwards which I want to verify that I have saved elsewhere before dumping the service. Once I download the photos I can dump the paid account and forget about flickr.

For this option to work I need to be able to tell it to copy files to an external drive as I have gigabytes of files to rescue, dedupe and store.

Photo Dedupe

As you take photos and export them to a hard drive or laptop you sometimes keep them on the card as a backup, in case the laptop or other device fails. The issue is that you may import the same photo three or more times. If you organise your files by year-month-day then it’s easy to spot duplicates and delete them.

Mylio, Immich and PhotoPrism all have duplicate detection. PhotoPrism detects them when ingesting. I think Mylio detects them later, when you run the app.

Similar to Immich and PhotoPrism

Some of the features are similar to PhotoPrism and Immich. It has facial recognition, tagging, sorting by various EXIF data and more. It also allows you to sync between your phone, ipad and laptop as well as mark which images to keep private for you, semi-private for a group of friends, or public.

It also provides you with Spaces. Spaces are photo galleries where you can choose to sort photos by activity, or group. You could have a hiking space, a diving space, a via ferrata space and more. You could also have a space for a conference, or for photos with university friends, and more.

Cost Comparison

Flickr is 80 dollars per year for unlimited storage. iCloud is 120 dollars per year for 2 terabytes. Infomaniak kDrive is 67 CHF per year for two terabytes. Mylio is 99 USD per year for unlimited storage but the question is how many gigabytes or terabytes of storage do you need. I’m not a light user and I don’t hit the two terabytes of photos limit. I do hit that limit with videos.

The second question is whether you use this as your offsite backup, or your primary backup. If you use it as your primary backup then you are trapped, until you can export your files.

And Finally

In writing this article I looked around and found that in order to use an external drive you need to commit to a subscription. You can test it for free for thirty days, but you need to pay to backup your own photos to your own external drives and this is a fatal flaw, for me. I am happy to pay for apps, with a one off. I paid for Final Cut Pro X a few years ago, and most recently I paid to have all features of the PhotoSync app. I was fiddling with the app one day and saw a promotion to get lifetime premium for 15 CHF and took it. Now I can sync my phone to plenty of apps automatically, including PhotoPrism.

More than a decade ago I paid about 1600 CHF for Final Cut Studo because I wanted to own it, for professional projects, after using university copies during my studies. I refuse to pay for Adobe Creative Cloud and other monthly subscription plans because I want to own an app, and use it when I need it. I don’t want to pay monthly for an app that I may not use for weeks or months at a time.

Adobe Creative Cloud costs 40 CHF per month and 480 per year. FCP X cost me 300 CHF and I have owned it for years. Every four years you would have paid for Final Cut Studio with the subscription model.

Back on Topic

The reason for using PhotoPrism, Immich and NextCloud is to stop paying monthly fees. Mylio goes the other way. “Backup your phone and your laptop, but once the internal hard drives are too large start paying 99 USD per year, or 149 USD every two years. In theory it’s unlimited, but normal people probably don’t have eight terabytes of photos, they have as many as fit on their phones, and not much more.

Conclusion

Carbon Copy Clone charges 44 CHF for the use of their product. OpenAudible charges about 30 CHF for the use of theirs. PhotoSync costs about 21 CHF once for all functionality. Mylio costs 90 USD to sync your files to your own external hard drive. That functionality should be 20 CHF, once, I do not want to be charged a monthly fee to use my own hardware.

|

Mapping wifi availability easily

Byrichard

Wifi is something that should be ubiquitous so that our digital lifestyle may not be limited to being online at home or at work. It should include, bars, restaurants and city squares. In some cities wifi is easy to find but in others that’s not the case.
The lazy way to do wifi mapping could be with the geo loc software on the n95, a flickr account and free wifi. Everytime you find free wifi, get the GPS co-ordinates, include them in the exif and upload them to twitter. Once that’s done get the rss feed of the geo tagged images and feed them to google earth.

|

Twitter is Suffering

Byrichard

jaikutwitter.jpg

source

Twitter is suffering and Jaiku is showing off about how great that website is in comparison. They omit to mention two facts.

  1. It’s (giving the impression of being) proprietary, interesting mainly to Nokia users (at the moment)

  2. It’s better online (requires a browser to take full advantage)

Twitter is a mobile status tool of sorts

–edit note–

All text in italics is an edit following on from Petteri’s comment.

Trying To Read Nested Data From a JSON File

Byrichard

Over the last two evenings I have been attempting to read nested data. I have tried to parse the data and other methods but without success. I have browsed the web to try to find solutions but for now I am getting stuck. Learning is also about trial and error, and knowing where to find the right information. For now I am lost. At the end of this process I will be more self-sufficient.


Learning by watching courses is good, and we do make progress, but it doesn’t require us to think about problems in the same way. We learn to follow instructions but not problem solve, and that’s what I want to learn. So far I have spent two hours on this specific problem, and I could easily remove a few lines and it would no longer be nested. I will persevere.


Playing with Comments


Since I am trying and failing to accomplish what I am trying to accomplish I am now using comments to mark what I still need to achieve, whilst looking for solutions and ideas.


Prototypes and CSS


I have also continued studying prototypes, factories and more. I see some overlap between this topic and CSS. For those with experience and time both allow for more depth and complexity than is comfortable when you are starting out. The short version is that with prototypes and factories you can cut down on the lines of code in a project, making it easier to read, and lighter.


The Pandemic Continues


It is now the weekend but the pandemic is still alive and well. Governments are deciding not to do anything to stop the spread, preferring to tell people that for vaccinated people it’s no worse than the flu, whilst ignoring the fact that children from 0-18 have not been vaccinated. There is a certain degree of indifference by governments that is hard to observe. They expect the next few weeks to be difficult, and that’s as far as their sense of responsibility goes. It is a challenge not to be disappointed by this attitude.


| | | | |

Of live video streams and Paleo

Byrichard

I really enjoyed what Nicholas of K had to say in the interview we did last night for Musicorama.tv. He spoke about projects and how we can achieve anything we want as long as our mind is in the right place. I’ll let you know when that interview is online.

This year Paleo has been a different experience from previous years because I went as a “radio/TV” person as opposed to a collaborator (work for free, get free food and free non alcoholic drinks as well as invites for friends), in the latter case you sleep so little it’s not unusual to take a week to recover.

I enjoyed myself. I enjoyed seeing all the live acts and I streamed quite a few events, from Iam, The Justice, The goose, Massive Attack and more.

We also had interviews with BB Brunes, K, The DO, The Dodoz, Marvin, Girls in Hawai and Caribou if I remember all of them.

Here are some of the Live streams

Listen as the people realise what song it is. listen to the crowd roar 🙂

Tikan Jah Fakoly was good too. Nice relaxed evening. He was playing before Manu Chao

Manu Chao played for over two hours but I had work the next day so I left early.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.