I found an inexpensive “dog repeller” that I am quite looking forward to employing on the neighbor’s dog. Making unpleasant faces has not silenced the racket to date, so I’m thinking this bit of strategic escalation will improve my lot substantially.
Also, on an unrelated product review, I don’t know how you get a “Real Name” badge with the following handle:
“Oh yes, we always did love that Shaggy1944 McDaniels. Too bad he always spoke in all caps.”
We are embarking upon what I see as probably the final two phases of the moving and settling in to the new house, with a final push to hang pictures and get our decor items spread throughout the house, plus painting a few more rooms upstairs. Then, pretty soon we’ll be furnishing Claire’s “big girl room” and getting all that settled. It will be nice to feel like we’ve properly settled the house within a year of moving!
Although as I type this the whole site is rebuilding itself (and will be for a few more hours), I’m proud to announce that Clarity has been replaced by photos.antesonic.org. This is being served by my Raspberry Pi (now using a stable, high-speed SD card).
It’s implemented just as planned. btsync synchronizes my photos from my desktop to the Raspberry Pi. Then, a custom Python script identifies all starred photos using the picasa.ini file in each folder and creates a “staging area,” which is a version of my photo library that only includes symlinks back to starred photos and excludes unstarred photos. Then, Sigal processes the staging area, generating reduced-size and thumbnail-size versions of the staged photos, along with accompanying pretty HTML galleries.
This will all update nightly (incrementally, as needed) via cron script. I’m quite proud of the results, and hopefully they will be up and ready to go in the morning!
Now that I’ve detailed the dumpster fire that is my photo management situation (I kind of think of it as the room in my data house that would be on Hoarders), I have been wanting to talk about reading flow, which in what I might term the “evolved smartphone” era turns out for me to be one of the more critical aspects to managing information and devices.
I started using Pocket (formerly Read It Later, as they always seem to inform you) shortly after joining the tablet family last year. The idea was that I would app-ify just about all of my reading, with Reason magazine via Play Magazines (it’s now called Play Newsstand and is a typical Google rewrite/repackage/merge trainwreck in version 1), books via Kindle, and articles via Pocket. This has worked fantastically.
Pocket seems like a nonsense app when you first see it: it just print-formats articles from the web and syncs them to the reader app at startup. You “add to Pocket” articles via bookmarklet in Chrome, a Chrome add-in (my method at work), or using the Share button in an Android app.
Pocket worked great for me routing articles from Chrome (on both Android and PC), but I really didn’t feel its full power until I started using IFTTT for automated queuing and Twitter for manual discovery. I have an IFTTT rule, for example, for any articles added to Mark Steyn’s RSS feed on National Review Online. When they show up there, IFTTT queues them in Pocket with an ifttt tag so I know where they came from.
Twitter is pretty much a link sharing site now with a chatty overlay, and even the clunky official client has a long-press-then-short-press route to the Share menu in Android, so I can quickly queue articles that are interesting to me. This is of course augmented by manual adds via Chrome when I hit an article that’s too long to read at the moment.
In addition to being a fantastic way to gather offline reading in a nice format, Pocket also maintains reading history, which can be handy for the “I recall reading that, but I don’t remember where” moments.
A lot of effective smartphone usage comes from app-ifying clunky activities and staying away from the browser as much as possible. Getting the Twitter to Pocket connection allows for that much easier than hitting an aggregator like RealClearTechnology via Android Chrome and reading the old fashioned way. My bigger goal now is to broaden my IFTTT rule set to include more of the authors from whom I want to read everything.
Clarity, as a practical use project, has partially succeeded from a technical standpoint and has failed from a practical perspective. The idea was that it would be a sort of super-curated photo blog, but the practical side was that it basically served as an ersatz photo library that didn’t naturally insert itself into my workflow to maintain and update. It also did a terrible job of scaling the original photos, which was probably more of a “me” problem, but since it’s a “me” app this is a big problem.
I’ve designed and started assembling/coding a system that generates exported HTML photo libraries based on the photos we star in Picasa. That sounds like the kind of system that might actually work for me. Picasa and I are always kind of on the edge of breaking up, but depending on Picasa stars to generate public photo albums would probably stick us together for a long while.
Our issue, which goes far beyond the scope of the photo gallery project, is that our 2012 and onward (post-DSLR) photos are currently organized in a Claire-centric fashion. As cringe-worthy to the data-head as this might be, it actually made sense at the time to name folders things like “Fifteen Months Old” and “Halloween.” I almost need to revoke my weekender computer scientist status for failing to consider what I would name the folder with the second year of Halloween photos, let alone what to do with multiple children’s timelines.
It’s bad enough for the above reasons, but these names also don’t alphabetize and therefore would wreak havoc on any kind of auto-generating sequence of photo albums. So I have to go back and re-sort everything into month-based folders with YYYY.MM prefixes, which thanks to my default “N Months Old” structure will require splitting every single folder into two folders, with overlaps for almost every month. Plus special events get broken out and photos from other cameras get woven in.
In addition to post-DSLR and merged family photos, we have the gigantic turd that is iPhoto maintaining its own library of iPhone photos and all our travel photos from Turkey from the old point ‘n’ shoot, all in a semi-locked format that needs to be busted up and merged into our indexed system. Afterwards I will burn iPhoto with fire and never look back.
Plus, we have annotated, curated Picasa Web Albums – oh wait, I mean Google+ Photos! – libraries with aforementioned photos from Turkey, that are in the process of being exported from Google and hopefully merged into all this as well.
When it’s all done (which despite the troubles honestly won’t take that long), we’ll start using Amazon Glacier to do the “what if there’s a fire” level of backup, and everything will btsync throughout the household for a distributed, harmonized backup copy. Then, my Raspberry Pi will read the .ini files Picasa drops into the folders and copy/symlink the starred photos into a library export staging location, after which Sigal, likely modified somewhat, will blast all this exported, curated stuff into HTML pages and serve via subdomain from the house.
And I am nothing of a builder But here I dreamt I was an architect And I built this balustrade To keep you home, to keep you safe From the outside world But the angles and the corners Even though my work is unparalleled They never seemed to meet This structure fell about our feet And we were free to go
