Twelve Hours Of Focus

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Today I drove for twelve hours with hardly any breaks and finished two books. Twilight of Democracy and Almost Human.

These were good books to read during a drive because they are both entertaining and informative. They are also well read. I think my day of rest yesterday helped too.

12 hrs, three countries, 1200+kilometres and I felt comfortable almost the entire time. I did see a scene in a cafe that reminded me that I am tired of solitude, but pandemics are not a good time to break out of solitude.

If the drive felt like this more often then I would make the trip more often. This is how I expect a long drive to feel.

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Images from the Via Ferrata de Lavanchy

Byrichard

Despite the warning that rain would fall after 1700 today we went up to explore the Via Ferrata De Lavanchy. it is a via ferrata that requires a 45 minute walk up hill. You walk up towards a cirque and then turn left and continue upwards through some trees. When you get close to the base of the cliff walk straight up to get to the base of the via ferrata. The via ferrata is simple and short.

Reading to Understand The Past

Reading to Understand The Past

Byrichard

When I read books i read to be transported back to a different time and a different way of thinking. That’s why i read James Bond books, among others. The books are old-fashioned but it is that obsolescence that makes them interesting.


They take us to a time before travel as we know it today. Imagine reading about being sun burned and sun oil. Imagine reading about speeding cars. Imagine reading about a time before road safety laws and speed limits. Imagine reading about when scuba diving was still exotic and more.


Recently people have been reading old books and destroying them by changing words and meanings. By editing books to be socially acceptable today we are behaving like the priest with a bell in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Do you remember the scene. Clang clang clang, insert a paper into the film reel where the kiss has to be spliced out.


The morality police isn’t splicing kisses or sex. It is neutralising gender, offensive terms and more. Words that make children giggle and laugh are being removed by grown ups.


They, the adults, see this as a social good but I don’t. In the age of Brexit, COVID denialism and a shift by political parties to the Far Right why are we worrying about books when the real social ill comes from what politicians are saying, of how populism is being used, to mislead people to vote against their own best interests?


A book is just a glimpse into the past and i am worried about the present.


My view on books is that we read them to understand how people saw the world before, whether from the 90s, the 50s or a century ago. We read Jane Austen A) because our English teacher told us to, but second to understand a different age and way of seeing the contemporary world. The world, contemporary to the writer, not to us.


I remember reading The Tiger that came to tea, thinking, “this is old fashioned and sexist” but that doesn’t stop me from reading it for a sibling’s offspring. Instead, it would be an opportunity for a well brought up child to say “but that tiger was not kind, that tiger was rude, and so was the dad when he came home.”


This brings me on to “All Creatures Great and Small”. “Oh I do wish you would pay attention” and more. Siegfried tells James off on a number of occassions for what he told James to do. James gets angry, but doesn’t say anything.


The issue with sensitivity readers is that they are moving on to adult books, with adult themes. James Bond is old fashioned, but if it is re-written then it loses some if its allure. I read James Bond while working in a humanitarian organisation. I knew that it was written in a different age, when people had different values and norms.


I worry about what contemporaries think, say and write, rather than what people wrote 60 to seventy years ago. The past is the past. Modern conversations, and modern books should reflect modern values. Will old films be re-edited to remove smoking? Will old films be edited for modern values?


Where will the line be drawn, on changing the past, to suit the views of people today?


And Finally


Roald Dahl was edited for modern audiences but the originals are still available, so you can have the “modern politically correct version” or the old fashioned historical version. Will you read the old fashioned version, and have a conversation about values, or read the sanitised version, and skip the conversation on morality and ethics?

Of Blogging and Substacking

Of Blogging and Substacking

Byrichard

A month or two ago we had the chance to jump on the Substack wagon while it was hot and to ride the wave of new followers and experience a growing community. I could have joined in. I could have become one of those “I’m one of you people” but I didn’t. 


Substack Life


Substack went from being a newsletter to almost becoming a community of writers. I say “almost”, because for me to consider a community a community it has to behave like a community. It has to be a network of friends of friends, and it has to be about individuals connecting with other individuals, through their community. 


With Substack it went from “Wow, notes look great” to “My follower numbers have exploded”, “oh so have mine”, and that’s when I disengaged. People behaved the same way on Twitter and the community was degraded into a network of strangers following each other and fighting for attention. Within the space of hours the network that it could have become was degraded to a popularity contest. I have no interest in these. If I wanted to join one I could socialise in the physical world of bars and other places. 


What I don’t like about Substack, and social media in general, is that it’s about users creating content for the owners of the social network, and then making money off of our backs, without giving us anything in exchange. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other networks have all made this move. 


On Blogging


With tools like WordPress, among many others we have the freedom to generate content, and choose whether to pay for our own hosting, and manage our own websites and attempt to monetise them, or jump onto Wordpress.com and other solutions. and just create content for the pleasure of it. 


I mention pleasure, because with blogs we write because we have inspiration. Either we have done something that we want to share, or we have an opinion on something, that we want to get out of our minds, by putting it on screen, and then forgetting about it. 


I prefer to blog because although it could be e-mailed to someone it is usually just one post, in a timeline, among many others. People can look at it, think “this is dull and boring” and move on. With blogs there is no obligation to read any post. It’s all about whims. 


With Substack the opposite is true. You write a post, you e-mail it, and people have to swipe to it, keep it on screen until it’s marked as read, before moving on. 


I like e-mail for private conversations, but feel that newsletters et al would be better served by being blog posts that we can opt in to reading. or skip and ignore. 


And Finally


I prefer blogging to Substack Newsletter writing for two reasons. The first is that I want to write about anything, rather than on a specific theme. The second reason is that I don’t want to generate content that someone else will benefit from, more than I will. I don’t want to be used and exploited. With blogs I do not feel that way. With Substack I do., I went from being a person to a statistic within hours of Substack Notes being created. 

Day 63 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A 15 Kilometre Loop

Day 63 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A 15 Kilometre Loop

Byrichard

Today I walked a 15-kilometre loop because I saw people walking two abreast and decided to retrace my steps a short distance before trying a new bifurcation. By the end of this walk, my legs were starting to get tired. I walked non stop for over two hours before a quick stop at a petrol station to get some drinks before heading home.


Before going on my walk I finished the CSS course on Linkedin Learning before starting another one on HTML. It’s not that I need to learn about HTML so much as I have a desire to complement what I already know.


After passive learning I re-worked some more pages on the HTML part of my website, adding CSS to two or three pages. As a result of what I have learned over the last two or three weeks doing the same thing as I did for the index page for another directory took half an hour or less. What I learned is sticking in my memory. I still cut and paste, but the process is much faster.


Links from HTML Essential Training by Jen Simmons


The more I look up and learn, the more ideas I have for how to modernise my website. For ages I wanted to keep my website as a museum of what the web used to be but as I made pages mobile friendly that desire to keep things the same has altered and now I want to modernise it.


From a visitor point of view this may be a waste of time, as certain parts of the website have little to no traffic. This doesn’t matter, because in the grand scheme of things every page I modernise gives me experience in dealing with CSS, Javascript, navigation design and more. I may be slow on the first pages but as I work my way through the website my efficiency will go up, and with that so will my employability.


We constantly need to learn skills and working on a website, rather than browsing social media, is a great way of doing so. As I looked through Flickr galleries I saw that some people have images of people re-enacting Roman soldiers and other people have images of Rome as it looks today. I could easily breath life back into that part of the website by contacting people and getting permission to share their images.


I’m glad I am working on my website as a project again. It is effectively filling my time, encouraging me to learn more, and getting me ready for a line of work I enjoy.


See you tomorrow.

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.

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