As written previously, I have a new PC. And I am still looking for a way to get technology to make my life easier and retain ownership of my data. Because I already have a workflow that works nicely.
Up to now Adobe Lightroom has been making my photography life easy
All my images are thoroughly catalogued (that’s my own effort, Adobe just provides the tooling)
Yes, almost all 98.000+ of them (it’s about 700GB)
When my friends ask about a party 10 years ago where so-and-so did something, I can produce the images within 5 minutes on my mobile (it’s a real use-case and getting more so the older we get)
It’s my visual memory of everything
My mobile images are automatically added to my online library
I have an automated local backup and all the images in the Adobe cloud.
I can easily share albums with friends and family, I get asked for images quite often, because just for one family I have over 500 images of the four of them for this year.
I can access my photo collection on all my devices
This technology has made my life easier for a price that I am more than willing to pay. It’s really good value to me.
BUT.
Adobe is one of those companies that loves their walled garden and does not want me to have my data. The raw images: sure. But they are trying very hard to keep my cataloging data for themselves and that’s almost half of what makes my collection so valuable to me.
And I am beginning to be less willing to accept that.
I have also freed my data from Adobe
tagged all the photos inside lightroom with album and face recognition information manually
exported all images “Original with settings” to our NAS → in that case and only that Lightroom exports the information into exif data of jps or xmp sidecars for raw images
imported images into Digikam
imported images into Darktable
What I lack now and am looking for are the missing links in the workflow:
how do I create a backup, ideally cloud-based
how do I enable access from my mobile
how do I enable sharing images with friends quickly
how do I auto-import my mobile images?
I have considered my Nextcloud installation but I would need to add lots and lots of space. But I would need to find a way to add cheap online storage to the server.
Nextcloud has working photo import from mobile
It is accessible on all my devices.
It can display photos
It allows me to share stuff
So how do I add 1 TB of space for it for under 200€ a year? edit: Ha. I probably know how to do it: Hetzner (my hosting provider) offers cheap enough Object storage which is very likely exactly what I am looking for.)
In a sort of parallel thing, I’ve downloaded all my collection and play information from BGG and written some local software to handle play logging. At the moment I’m logging in parallel, but having my own data immediately to hand rather than behind the fiddly API is making my life much easier. It’s not so much that I despise BGG, but sooner or later they will go bad in some way I’m not prepared to work with.
I’m still using BGG Thing IDs, but I have my own lookup table - so for example my copy of 6 Nimmt is listed under that name rather than Take 5, and my V-Commandos is still that not V-Sabotage. And my expansions are now correctly labelled as such.
I should probably have used SQLite, and eventually I may, but for my convenience I’m keeping everything in CSV files - and using DBD::CSV to get an SQL interface onto them.
already done. that was indeed very simple.
I should log into the server console more often.
and it is well within my budget.
Now all I need to do is upload 750gb of photos.
Our NAS (synology) has an option to directly sync to S3 storage. The whole setup seems to be rather easy. This is making me suspicious that it is all a very bad idea…?
Nextcloud was also very easy to set up with S3 backend.
The only remaining issue I have is minor: I want to also use it to store my 30GB of ebooks but I also need a (server-)local filepath for my calibre web-frontend and my first attempts to do that have not worked out.
I confess that calibre pushed all the wrong buttons for me even before the developer drank the AI Flavor-Aid recently. Library management and conversion and device comms and ratings and comments all in the same monolithic GUI program? (And it used to ship with way more suid-root than it had any right to or need for.) I’ll still use ebook-convert occasionally, but the rest I do more simply with little command-line programs.
I quite like Calibre, hadn’t heard they’re adding AI features…
I suppose I haven’t used any of the features beyond library management / conversion / device loading, which I find super handy to sync stuff over / remove it from my Kindle without having to organise the files myself.
Will continue to ignore the larger feature set!
I didn’t know anything about AI features either.
I mostly use it for cataloging. I am a fan of cataloging (that was before I worked on a huge cataloging software for 3 years)
It would be better if it was a plugin that wasn’t going to be in by default at all.
I am already spending massive amounts of time getting rid of Adobe Lightroom in my photography workflow. I need to choose my “data battles” and right now Calibre is not it.
AI boosters never do this. They always want to force it into everything. This is one way to tell they’re fundamentally dishonest. (That most of them are ex cryptocurrency grifters is another way.)
The New Year has been giving me a lot of more or less nasty surprises.
my yoga subscription paid for in August says “account does not exist” — had trouble even finding a contact address (her youtube channel had one but they have yet to get back to me)
my todoist subscription recently upgraded from legacy to their new price (because I do want to support my favorite tools) suddenly says “nope you don’t have a subscription” --at least my account still exists
I tried to move my authenticator / two factors to the Proton App I just found out about… it doesn’t work in the process I destroyed my Paypal Two Factor thingy and now Paypal is giving me errors when I try to reestablish it.
I failed abysmally to get my tax program running on Linux with wine
Our Roborock vacuum disconnected from the WiFi and subsequently reset itself completely forgetting all the programs and map data…
Every day there is something new that doesn’t work. I already spent too much time over the Xmas break to work on my Lightroom replacement (this seems to work now mostly) and had to deal with so much tech failure
I am really sick of it.
I have looked into various alternatives to all these tools.
Sadly I have no alternative for Todoist. I tried various things over the years and I am unwilling to write my own. I recently tried to integrate with Nextcloud and Tasks but all the apps that would be compatible also want money and are far worse than todoist.
I can do Yoga on my own it just sucks that I paid good money for an adfree subscription. (next time I’ll pay for youtube premium from my Überstunden budget, I can get tax-reduced vouchers from that, I found out from my colleagues.)
Despite having a European payment alternative now for sending money to friends (Wero), paypal is still a major thing I use to avoid giving out my credit card details to anyone and everyone I want to pay for their services (see todoist). I try to avoid it where I can but when I have a choice between VISA directly or Paypal as buffer… I mostly go with the latter.
I expect the authenticator thing to work out eventually. But for now the Proton thing sucks. I’ll keep trying though.
I tried both jes and gnucash for bookkeeping on linux. The former just didn’t even start or install. The latter… is too big for me and my small amount of accounts I use (I have about a dozen) and I am not sure I trust the banking thing it wants to talk to. I have a nice German software I have been using for 10 years–that only runs on Windows or MacOS. Also I really want the automatic upload of my data to the German Elster tax system.
As for the stupid vacuum: I briefly considered throwing it out the window and then just sent it to remap the one floor we are actually using it on (the house has 2 floors and 3 rooms connected by stairs on different levels from the main floors. I previously mapped everything. No more. If the thing is just going to forget again…
I don’t know anything about that beyond “todo list manager”, but as I know there are some mobile apps based around the plain text org-mode syntax (which originated in Emacs but is now supported by a number of not-Emacs things), it might be worthwhile having a play with some of those.
What I’m doing, which may well not be what anyone else wants to do, is to use Orgzly Revived on the Android phone. That can sync over webdav to the homenet (and other things too, but that’s what I use). So any sort of note that I make on the phone and want accessible on the desktop, or vice versa, goes in there.
Probably there’s something using VTODO and CalDAV (the way I already sync address book and calendar) but I’m already using an org-mode to-do list.
The yoga thing was my own fault, I mixed up my email adresses due to using this exclusively on my tablet and the updates from the tablet back to my keepass have always been plagued by file conflicts (long story).
Todoist came back to me after about 5 days and fixed the subscription. In the meantime the app didn’t change anything for my items that subscription level so that’s nice.
I am so happy I figured out the yoga mixup this morning because I have had a lot of lower backpain since Xmas (assuming sciatic nerve is involved) and was almost ready to see a doctor about it but my previous experience with the same type of pain says that doing the guided backpain yoga will help me see this through.
And since firefox added such features as well, I thought it might be of interest to some here maybe to find out how to turn them off. It does not feel trivial at first. Except that it is.
From my partner via heise. This points to justthebrowser. Since the provided command kind of wanted to immediately sudo my paranoia kicked in and with a few clicks I managed to do the same thing but with full user agency (you know the thing that so much software is trying to take from us).
On Linux: Just create the file /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json and switch off whatever you like. Documentation on mozilla.org. Proposal from the justthebrowser site.
You can check if it worked if you go to about:policies in your firefox.
(there are also scripts, documentation for how to do the same for edge and chrome, but I don’t use either of those enough… occasionally I use Brave)
This is one of the reasons we still have an almost twenty year old computer. That and the fact that all our photo managing stuff is on there and I can’t be bothered changing to new stuff when it all works perfectly well!
What’s your plan for it dying? 20 year old computer equipment isn’t terribly reliable, and it’s well beyond its expected lifetime.
I have – or had, I couldn’t find it just now – an external cd drive. onnects via usb. Works great, cost like 20 bucks. I’ve used it on macs, windows, and linux machines.
I recall thinking we should get an external CD drive precisely for if it does eventually die. But I didn’t get round to it. If they still exist (?) that’s probably the plan. And all the actual photos are on something else as well so we don’t just lose them if the thing goes completely kaput.
I quite like Calibre, hadn’t heard they’re adding AI features…