2025-03-19 19:38:00
When I bought my first computer in 1993, an IBM PS1 Consultant, 486/33SX, it had a 140 MB hard drive. I kept the computer for three years, and although I added a CD-ROM, sound card and extra RAM, I never increased the amount of storage. A quick check of the computer I use today, an M2 MacBook Air reveals that I have 78 apps that take up more storage by themselves than I had available on that first computer. My camera, a Canon 6D takes photos so large that six of them would have filled the hard drive of that first computer.
I still have documents I created on that machine. In fact, I have a great many things I wrote and preserved from the 1990s, including digital photos from the expensive Kodak camera that belonged to my job. Many of the documents were written in Microsoft Works, a productivity suite it stopped selling 16 years ago. There was never a Mac version of it. At some point, I had to jump through some hoops to recover the information from those files using a document interpreter. These days, I save everything I write as plain text so that I don't ever face that problem again. I did not save everything I wrote from that era, but I was able to use The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to recover numerous web pages from my first blog.
When Napster was popular, you could download almost any song you could think of just by searching for it. I accumulated all 500 of the Rolling Stones top albums that way. While I was still living that pirate life, a short time actually, I also collected the full discographies of several prolific artists and groups and that's why I have 25+ albums (each) by Neil Young, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan.
In setting up my new home office recently, I rounded up the embarrassingly large collection of hard drives I'd accumulated over the years: 7 portable 1 TB drives, 2 portable 2 TB drives, 2 powered external 1 TB drives, 5 internal 1 TB drives and 2 powered external 3 TB hard drives. That's 24 TB of storage added to the 5 TB that I have available on the computers I use daily. The drives contained various collections of software, photos, music, podcasts, movies, TV shows, hard drive back-ups and documents collected over the past 30+ years.
I recently added over a thousand more files to keep up with when I downloaded our entire Amazon Kindle and Audible collections. We had over 500 books in each of those. My challenge is to consolidate all of that information, removing duplicates as I go along. My goal is to have a local copy, a copy kept offsite but readily available and a copy in the cloud. A lot of this information is only important to me. My kids will probably preserve the photos and may avail themselves of some music, but who will want an archive of decades of my writing? If you ask them, they'd most likely says yes, but it is a lot of work to maintain so many files and like all 21st century people, their collections of digital data are growing too.
My decision to create a home lab made things even more complicated since now I have three computers to maintain and a fluctuating number of virtual machines. This means I have a half dozen large USB thumb drives with operating system installations on them. Yay! More data! Having high-speed Internet also allows me to suck information off the internet at an outrageous rate. I can download dozens of GB of data in a morning if I feel like it, and of course, I often feel like it. I don't know for sure, but I suspect there may be a diagnosis associated with my personality type.
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2025-03-19 18:37:58
Street photographer, Jay Maisel, owned the famous 190 Bowery building, a six-story, 72-room building in Manhattan to which the sticker was affixed. He lived and worked there for several decades before selling it in 2015.
2025-03-19 08:30:00
Every so often in my adult life, I find a new passion. I'm not happy until I master it or come as close as I can. I've done it over a wide array of activities, cycling, photography, long-distance hiking, political activism and now blogging, I suppose. Based on all that, I know I have the capacity to learn new things. I am still curious. There are some areas of my life, where I'm not sure how to incorporate new things. The arts are a good example of this. I do not remember the last time I listened to an album by someone with whom I wasn't familiar. I used to get new music all the time but these days I am very much my own classic rock radio station. I'd like to discover some rabbit hole of a TV series to dive into. I'm in a rut of moving from one Netflix or Max new release to another one (with some Britbox thrown in). I have so much time now but I'm at a loss for ways to find new things. Time to do some research.
7 Ways To Expand Your Horizon And Push For New Frontiers - LifeHack
Top Recommended Websites To Discover New Music In 2025
6 Easy Ways to Find the Streaming Movies and Shows You Want to Watch | PCMag
17 Ways To Find Good Books To Read - Cushing-Malloy
Too Many Places: Overcoming the Paradox of Choice
2025-03-19 05:07:43
I'm in the process of removing my data from most of the big US
based tech companies in favor or smaller, more privacy focused
companies. I do not want my files to be subject to US government
subpoenas or other invasive security threats from which Google, Amazon,
Meta or Microsoft can profit. I've downloaded my photo backups from
Amazon and Google, made local backups and set up a self hosted photo
server. I will also be using Ente, a data
storage provider using E2E open-source software.
When downloading my stored photos, I am dealing with cell phone photos, scanned images, DSLR photos and downloaded Internet images. The files from cell phones and cameras contain EXIF data. The scans and Internet files do not. To set the file creation date to match the EXIF data, I used A Better Finder Attributes. by PublicSpaces.
To rename the files so that they file name matches or contains the date the photo was taken, I am using Transnomino, a free file renaming utility that offers renaming based on factors as simple as text replacement to complex replacements based on regular expressions and text-based file attributes.
For dealing with large amounts of zipped archives, I'm using Better Zip because of it's feature that allows you to save workflows that unarchive the files in a variety of locations. It also deals with archive errors better than other utilities that aren't really designed for queued files operations. Better Zip also provides a Quicklook plugin that allows me to see the contents of archives without having to open them.
To sort the files (there are over 100,000), I'm using Hazel which is easily able to separate the videos from the still images. It then moves the files based on the creation date to a folder named for the month and year the image was captured. If the folder does not exist, it creates it.
To move and copy the huge volume of files I'm dealing with, I am using RsyncUI, a graphical front end for the powerful CLI program, rsync.
To view the local files on my Mac, I am definitely NOT using Apple Photos. Right now I am using the free app, XnViewMP, but I am preparing to set up Musebox a one-time purchase app ($15). with capabilities similar to Lightoom.
2025-03-18 14:47:00
One thing I learned prior to traveling to Ireland is that the people of that country grow really and truly tired of Americans (meaning people who were born and raised in the United States) coming over to the Emerald Isle and proclaiming themselves to be Irish because one of their 32 great-great-great-great grandfathers was from County Cork. I made it very clear to any of the Irish people I spoke to that I was not one of "those" Americans. One fellow couldn't believe that I wasn't trying to claim to be his long lost cousin. I explained that my grandmother was of Scottish descent. He asked me her family name. "McFadyen," I told him. He assumed a triumphant look and led me to a monument located right beside the famous Free Derry wall. The monument was to a man whose last name was, you guessed it, McFadyen. He told me that I might not claim Ireland but that Ireland would claim me.
Honestly, I don't really care that much where any of my long dead relatives came from in the sense that i just can't identify with national pride. It's seldom a good thing is it? It leads to nationalism and feelings and acts of unearned and undeserved superiority. I'm fine with other folks who feel some sort of spiritual kinship with the home of their ancestors, as long as they aren't obnoxious about it. Just don't tell me that you know you'd be good at bullfighting because you have Spanish blood or any kind crap like that.
As a general rule, most cultures have two sides. For every selfless act of sacrifice, there tends to be a corresponding act of something horrible. Even the Irish, a people I hold in high esteem for persevering under years of exploitive English colonialism, seldom talk about their Nazi sympathies. Wait, what? Well, after Irish independence, certain folks decided that any enemy of England was a friend of Ireland and well, that kind of led to a certain acceptance of Germany that was most underserved. Read about it in the Irish Times
The heroic American Army of World War Two had soldiers stationed in America guarding their fellow citizens in Japanese Internment Camps. That doesn't take away anything from the men who landed on Omaha Beach, it just solidifies the fact that it's a very grey world, no matter how black and white we wish it could be.
For my fellow pale skinned brethren, expressing something as warped as racial pride is just weird AF to me. Thankfully, the tendency of white people to express that notion was on the decline prior to the last election, although it seems to be making a comeback. I can see where traditionally oppressed people have a sense of "Yay! We survived!" but I'm not sure what their genocidal oppressors have to celebrate. Don't even come at me with an "But not all white people" argument either.
I am much more inclined to identify with my self-chosen tribe of freedom fighters. I celebrate my people based on what they did and not on geography or the amount of melanin in their skin or the shape of their eyes. Our real families are the people we choose and not the blood in our veins. My people were the abolitionists, the Freedom Riders, the IWW and the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. My people were Susan B. Anthony, Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Korematsu and Sitting Bull. My people started Occupy Wall Street and rioted in the streets of Seattle. They were gunned down at Kent State by the Ohio NationalGuard and in a Greensboro housing project by the KKK. My people are finding ways to resist the tide of fascism right this red hot minute.
If you feel the same way, then you are my sister or my brother. I love you.
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