Mac

I have a Mac Book Pro that is dormant at the moment. I retired it because it became slow and unreliable. It’s a 2016 Mac Book Pro. This was never a great machine. I bought it cheaply because my good machine was stolen. I replaced the battery a few years ago and I was going to do the same, until I saw that it was retired by Apple. Without updates I didn’t see much point in paying 200 CHF for a battery for a machine that will run Linux when I can get a machine for that price.

This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.

There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake. With an exteranl disk in target drive mode you can experiment to your heart’s content with an SSD that you can wipe, and reformat, and start again, if something messes up badly.

Recently I have been sliding between Windows, Linux distributions and MacOS throughout the day. I use a mac for blogging, and Linux to experiment and learn new skills, and windows to watch Netflix and YouTube. I might be over-simplifying but that’s the simplified version.

Pi and Linux

I find that I have come to be at ease in all three environments, especially since playing around with Raspberry Pi devices. “Why?”, you may ask. Because with a Pi you can try dedicated images for Nextcloud, for PhotoPrism, for Immich and more. You can also try them for Ph-Hole and others. The advantage is also that you use microSD cards. This means that you slot in card A and try A1, then you slot B and try B1 and finally you try C with C1. In the end you’re trying instances with what could be thirty seconds with your Pi being a PhotoPrism server, before it becomes a NextCloud server, and so on. With enough SD cards if you mess up you can revert to something that you enjoyed using with a minute or two.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2gb of memory to work as a Nextcloud server is quite easy. Download the right ISO from nextcloudpi.com, flash it, put the card into your pi device and after two or three more steps you have a local machine running Pi but you still need to setup port forwarding, open a UPnP port to access the server externally and other steps.

The simpler solution is to download the Nextcloud app on your phone, as well as for the desktop/laptop that you’re using. I set it up so that any picture I take is automatically synced to a server in Holland. As soon as I take a picture it syncs to the cloud. The images are then synced from the cloud to my local machine, and from there I can archive them either to an external hard drive or another local Nextcloud instance. Once the images are synced I can remove them from the mobile phone, saving money, and reducing the need for an expensive higher capacity phone.

Picasa is now available for mac and it works well. It works so well it took just 30 seconds for me to crash the application. On a more serious note Picasa is an interesting application that auto indexes all of your pictures in the Pictures folder and indexes your images within the application. As a result you have easy access to those images. At the same time as it can do those things it also makes uploading images to picasa on the web, to blogger e-mail and more. What I like most about this application is it’s ability to read geotags to place images on the map both locally and on the website. The weakness though is that it’s per album for the moment, rather than for every image at once. It would be fun to see all my images from around here scattered on the map.