“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak, or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
While I have your attention, watch this video, where Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson interview Jane Fonda. It’s a great interview where you’ll learn about her activism and her life.
Immich is a self-hosted Google Photos. That’s the simplest way to describe it. It can run in a Docker container and will happily live on your local network, without access to the Internet unless you want to. They do warn you that, “The project is under very active development”, so bugfixes are happening all the time. At the same time, bugs are sometimes introduced, and breaking changes are sign posted weeks in advance.
Immich. How do you pronounce it? I say it with a hard “CH” at the end, but others will say it sounds more like “image”, which leads me to think that’s probably the way to pronounce it.
It looks uncannily like Google Photos. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of it’s older, proprietary inspiration, but it does have some very useful features.
I love the face and object recognition in Immich. I can search by people on the Explore page, and search for objects too. It doesn’t present animals on the Explore page, but searching for “chihuahua” leads me to lots of photos of Diego. It’s face recognition that doesn’t go to feeding a gigantic corporation too. It works pretty well, but make sure your Docker install has enough RAM, or it will silently fail.
It has partner sharing too, which is of course a handy feature for families. I noticed that partner shared photos can’t be discovered through the Explore page, where you find face recognition and places. There’s a GitHub issue about this, so it’s something they’re aware of. To be fair, Google Photos has the same limitation (I think) unless you’ve copied the photos to your account, using your precious free space.
To get around this limitation, I symlink any shared photos to my wife’s account. I use External Libraries for 99% of my photos, and 100% of the photos that come from Adobe Lightroom. I export photos to “single” or “shared” directories, and a shell script moves them all to my Immich External Library, and symlinks the shared photos to my wife’s one. On the External Libraries admin page, I simply “Scan new library files” to import the symlinked files. Immich is smart enough to pick up the new files in my External Library. Files are scanned twice, with thumbnails made twice, and face recognition done twice, but the overhead in space used isn’t too bad.
The Quick Start docs tell you to use Docker to install, and if you are at all familiar with Docker, this should be easy enough to follow.
When you do get Immich installed, make sure you perform backups. I have all the images stored elsewhere, but I back up the database file with the docker command listed on that page. Syncthing copies it to another machine, where it’s backed up daily.
Another option is the Nextcloud Memories app which is very slick and looks great. It has face and object recognition too, but it depends on another Nextcloud app to do those jobs. It doesn’t have partner sharing, however, which is the main reason I tried out Immich.
If you do decide to expose your Immich install to the Internet, take a look at Cosmos Cloud. There are other options too, like Caddy or Nginx Proxy Manager. Getting an HTTPS certificate has never been easier. If you don’t know your IP, have a look at https://checkip.amazonaws.com too.
TIL that “organic cows”in the US can’t be given antibiotics. If they are, they are never “organic”, ever again.
In the EU and Canada, farmers aren’t allowed to sell the milk until there’s no sign of antibiotics.
Personally, I’d prefer if an animal was correctly treated for any ailment they might be suffering from. And antibiotics might be the correct course of action. Feeding antibiotics to healthy animals in their feed is ridiculously irresponsible, however.
How do you microdose veganism? Try eating less meat and dairy products. Go meat free once or twice a week. There are plenty of delicious vegan meals to be made, and you won’t miss the meat.
In the follow-up podcast mentioned, they guide the listener through how someone who wants to reduce animal suffering (but also still eat animals) might think through their dinner menu. They recommended eating good quality beef, which surprised me, but given how prevalent battery hens are, it might be easier to discover if a cow was grass fed.
We’re spoiled in Ireland. Most cows are grass fed, and the EU has laws regarding how densely packed chickens can be. EU MPs voted in favour of banning caged farming by 2027 after intense lobbying by activists.
11Km of tunnels were built between some of the islands of the Faroe Islands, and right in the middle of one of those tunnels, 70 metres underground, is a roundabout. It enables drivers to go to Runavik or Strendur. It cuts travel time from just over an hour to 16 minutes. Hugely impressive.
What was the last thing you returned to Amazon or other online retailer? I think mine was some faulty electronic goods last year. 10% of online purchases are returned. It’s usually for free, but of course, it’s not free. The price is built in because they expect a certain number of returns.
Anyway, could 2023 be the last year when free returns are a thing? It might mean more transparent pricing, and even a slight reduction in price! (LOL, who am I kidding?) Have a listen to this episode of “What’s your problem?” and decide.
When I saw the title of that episode, I immediately thought it was something to do with travelling to the Moon.
PS. Oh, cool. Gutenberg has an embed block for Pocket Casts links. So nice!
Yesterday would have been Charles’ 100th birthday. He is the creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip, you know, the one with Snoopy and Charlie Brown! Charles passed away in 2000 at the age of 77, but yesterday the Charles M. Schulz Museum featured comics by syndicated comic artists on their site as a special tribute to the great man.
There are some great strips there and if you’re a Peanuts fan you’ll love them. I must find my Peanuts books and have a look at them again.
This tweet prompted me to look up flightradar24.com and look for the remotely piloted aircraft observing what’s happening in Ukraine right now.
I won’t pretend to know anything about the capabilities of these craft but a “Northrop Grumman RQ-4B Global Hawk” with the flight designation FORTE11 is flying all over the country.
It was joined by Forte12.
A third drone was launched from Sicily and is flying the same flight path as FORTE12.
To learn more about what’s happening there follow Gavin Sheridan’s Twitter list of “Ukrainian accounts, journalists, news orgs, foreign journalists in or near Ukraine & OSINT”.
On the 22nd day of the 2nd month of the year 2022 I was almost in time to photograph the time display at 20:22. Almost.
Google sent out an email today to Feedburner users with the ominous subject, “Upcoming changes to Feedburner”.
It’s Google so my first thought was that they were about to shut it down. No, it’s not quite that bad, but they are shutting down parts of the service.
Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time.
This blog and my photoblog each have email subscribers through Feedburner. If you are reading this through one of those emails come visit the site and scroll to the end of the page. There’s a “Subscribe via Email” form you can use to join the 9,145 others who read whatever it is I post here. (How is that number so large? Is that accurate? Reply here please if you are one of them. It’s WordPress stuff you’re looking for isn’t it? Sorry, I haven’t been posting much about that in a long time!)
If you’re reading this through a Feedburner URL and I know there are a few of you out there it might be safer to use https://odd.blog/feed/ instead. You know, just in case Google kills it off. I know it’s unlike them to do that but you never know.
Google Takeout doesn’t include a “Feedburner” directory either. I must export the Feedburner stats and take a look at them. Here’s the tiny graph they show you. Look at that in 2010. Whoah! It’s all been downhill since then. If you’re still reading this blog since then, thank you. I really appreciate your attention since you now have Twitter and Facebook to distract you.
Happy new year! As if living through a pandemic wasn’t bad enough, and Ireland is worse than ever with more than 7000 confirmed infections yesterday. Christmas and New Year celebrations really did a number on the country. Last night the US Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters. Check out Saul Loeb‘s photos of the event. I grabbed screenshots of the pages. Getty has more photos here.The contrast between politicians and rioters is striking.
The FBI is seeking information related to the rioting. There will be arrests, especially when they documented themselves so clearly!
I despair at what’s happening in the world. I don’t have anything insightful to say about what’s happening now except the obvious:
“Stay at home!”
On a brighter note, it snowed last night. Looks lovely.
