Software

Destruction of trust and faith, supplemental

by

Well, that’s fun and interesting. Several attempts at removing / reimporting later, I found that results would not change. But in between importing and quitting, if I used “Show in Finder”, it decided to open one of the missing tracks–right out of the trash. Emptying the trash, deleting the album, quitting the app, relaunching, and re-importing seems to have worked. Watching the activity window, it even worked its way through sound check information.

So, I guess it can be made to work–Apple Music just can’t be trusted unless you’re prepared to quit app and review that every import matches what it should. ‘Cuz that scales so well \o/.

Yeah, my urge to press my old ThinkPad or Latitude into song management duty is rising.

The way to destroy all trust and faith in your music software

by

Eons ago when I had first encountered iTunes, I will admit that I really hated it–but I will also admit that it *worked* which is ya know, like the most important thing ever about software? We just had a difference in opinion on how things should work, but it did work, and for that I respected iTunes despite the sour taste it left in my mouth. For friends, it was often the gold standard unless they were fellow unix nerds.

Importing music into Apple Music is mostly painless. Drag a folder of tunes onto the icon and boom, it’s imported. The tag editor even makes it easy to add album art and metadata, if so inclined.

And here’s the rub?

Drag and drop “Alan Jackson – 34 Number Ones” onto the icon, it imports, it plays, the files get organized into “$HOME/Music/Music/Media.localized/Music/Alan Jackson/34 Number Ones” by way of the default copy and organize settings. Yup. All good. Everything working perfectly! Now quit and relaunch Apple Music, and go open the album. Suddenly tracks 4, 20, 32, and 33 are present out of tracks 1 through 37 but here’s the real kicker: the files are still in Apple Music’s library on disk, they just are not in the database after quitting the app!

Now I know why the fucking hell partial albums were showing up on my iPod for some of my content that came from my old MP3 files rather than re-rips to fresh AAC/M4A generated in Apple Music. At first, I thought that it might have been because these are later 320 Kbit/s files encoded for quality unlike the 128 Kbit/s typical of older files. I considered those worth breaking out the stack’o’discs and external optical drive for ripping again, but these don’t need anything else.

Why is that a problem? Well, guess what: Apple Music just destroyed any faith or trust I have in its ability to _ever_ manage my music collection. Because if you can’t reliably import and database files reliably, you cannot be trusted to manage them safely. I could forgive throwing up your digital hands in horror with an error message decrying the files as unable to be imported; that would be fair because it’s descriptive if you encounter some kind of error. Silently flushing data into the aether on the other hand, not so much, even if you leave the files on disk.

For shits and giggles, removing the album removes the 4 tracks from its place on disk and leaves the other 33 behind. Which suggests that it really is a logic error somewhere, as if Apple Music imported the files but forgot to mark them as imported, so it doesn’t actually manage them. Trashing the entire folder on the other hand and re-importing, has a more interesting result. The GUI loads the entire set of files but only the same 4 tracks are copied into the library.

SMH, seriously what the fuck, Apple!

As far as I can tell, this occurs irrespective of the location of imported content. I’ve copied the file server’s master copies to my laptop, so that I could non-destructively sort them into imported and review folders after reviewing what’s ready to drag’n’drop as is, which will need updating metadata, and which require some thought (e.g. albums with mp3/flac and mp3/wav side by side), and so on. That eliminates any possibilities of the network or removable media, and ya know, checksums are kinda reliable at detecting oops a file is corrupt. I don’t think that I’ve had any problems with content directly ripped from disc, only with files imported.

A nice gander at the Apple Lisa

by

While the video might be a tad boring by contemporary standards, unless like me, you have an interest in such ancient technologies 😛. I think that this does make a nice demonstration of the system.

Since the guy is using actual hardware, it is also slow as crap by modern standards. Let’s just say that the world has come a long way since a Moto 68k and a meg of RAM was plenty. But I think it’s fairly impressive and innovative a system for its day.

I kind of like the more Electronic Desktop metaphor than the conventional Files and Applications approach that the typical Windows 9x PC functioned as some decades later. I love the document centric rather than application centric view as a concept. Seems like it was a good attempt at creating an environment for office workers, who weren’t computer people. The ability to have files with the same name is odd, but interesting if likely impractical for software developers. The natural saving and manipulation of content is nice.

In addition to the UI design, its relationship to the early Mac seems fairly apparent. In particular, one of the odd things that I encountered digging into 1990s PowerBooks and System 7 is how the classic Mac OS treats placing files on the desktop (basically a flag saying its on the desktop) and handling of floppy diskettes. Both rather different than modern systems of any sort. The Lisa looks like a lot of its concepts made their way into the original Macintosh and later system versions.

It’s kind of a shame that the Lisa was insanely expensive and (IMHO) rather slow, like $10,000 for a basic system. While I’m not convinced that the original Mac could be a good idea without at least a second floppy, its base price of $2,500 was at least less comical than the Lisa. Or should we say, a 512k and way more storage would probably have been worth every penny and still way cheaper than the Lisa.

digiKam databases

by

Well, this is nifty. According to the documentation, digiKam supports using MySQL/MariaDB as a backend as an alternative to local SQLite files. Plus it documents the constraints relevant for using digiKam across multiple computers with respect to databases and collections.

On the whole, I’ve found the documentation pretty good and comprehensive. Sometimes the English feels a little off once in a blue moon. But the docs are pretty solid. I guess between 17 years of active development and growing professional grade feature sets, I should have expected the docs to be worth more than five minutes.

Good on you, digiKam contributors!

Thoughts on photo management

by

Along with taking the day for mental health and generally trying to be sane. I’ve been thinking about the future of how my photos are managed and how that needs to evolve.

The present system is pretty much this:

  1. Photos are cached to preferred cloud storage (+2 copies).
    • One is cleared periodically ‘en mass’ after draining.
    • One is cleared periodically during ‘archiving’.
  2. Photos are archived to my file server (+3 copies).
    • Master copies under my Plex media library.
    • Periodically backed up to another local location.
    • Entire file server is backed up locally.
  3. Photos are archived unfiltered to cloud storage (+1 copy).

Now, there’s a few problems with this scheme. Aside from getting off my butt closer to quarterly or yearly than monthly to drain cached images into the master. Over the years the definition of 3 has changed a bit. Another problem has been the evolution of format: I’ve generally migrated from classic JPEG to HEIC, as I’m seeing on the order of 50% disk savings. But of course Plex doesn’t speak HEIC, and therefore viewing outside of mounting the network drive hasn’t worked in years!

I don’t think there’s a good solution to how often I process photos through this pipeline, relative to any other habitual behavior.

There’s also the fact that whether I am draining the cache or actively looking for images, such as building my ‘Remembering Corky’ or ‘Photo Frame’ albums, that doing this at OS level kind of sucks. Explorer and Finder have actually gotten pretty good at dealing with photos since circa 2000, but aren’t exactly fun. More than once I’ve wished for something like Geeqie that my previous Unix machines had. In suffering the native tools, I found that building my Photo Frame album was really damn painful in finder’s gallery view, until I decided to just copy everything to a memory card and go through a process of deleting whatever I don’t want to move.

Actually, the general work flow and process has sucked enough that I’ve considered writing a bit of software to help compensate, or transitioning my master copy into something more cloudy and photo centric. Something that can offer better navigation / movement than a file-centric manager and a little bit more database goodness than my Photos/${YEAR}/${COLLECTION}/ approach to on disk storage.

Then in putzing around Steam Deck, taking its desktop mode for a test drive made me remember an old KDE application called digiKam. It has features for basically everything but pulling free disk storage out its digital back oriface.

In the old days, I never messed around with digiKam. Partly because it and KDE, were kind of heavy weight on my laptop back when I was a KDE user. Partly because by the time digital cameras and smartphones were part of my life, I had no KDE systems and an increasingly heterogeneous computing environment.

I’m thinking that digiKam may be a good solution to the solvable problems. It certainly should be able to handle my photos archive, which is over 40G and 14,000 image and video files. Actually, when the heck did this get so large? It feels like just a lustruum ago, I could fit everything on one Blu-ray layer 😆. Actually, maybe I should run WinDirStat or Grand Perspective over that. On the flip side, digiKam will probably offer much of the goodness I remember Google+ Photos having back when I used that. For me personally, being both cross platform and open source are huge pluses. It’s also helpful that it is one of the more cross platform KDE applications, as KDE off Linux/*BSD has become a thing.

As far as I can tell, there’s two problems to this plan.

Problem one is the file wrangling. My photos will remain on my file server with its redundant 8 TB of storage, and the SQLite databases of digiKam are best kept locally. This means that it will need its own backup management. A simple path is using my Mac and its Time Machine destination for that. How well sharing digiKam’s database files across different systems, I’m not sure, but in any case the trend has been for me to prefer one set of muscle-memory.

Problem two is transient image management. See, most of what I do with images fall under two categories: either my master repo, or some pipeline stage denoted above; or ‘a directory full of stuff I want to peruse’. I’m not sure that digiKam really handles that perusal factor. One of the things that I liked about running Debian and FreeBSD on my laptops, was being able to throw geeqie at that problem. Although, it might be viable to just create a staging area and export things.

In any case, it’s looking like digiKam is probably the best non-proprietary solution for the photo management hoopla that doesn’t involve me writing code to scratch itches.

by

 Well, that’s kind of neat. Windows Defender can run Edge in a Hyper-V session as part of “Application Guard.”

Considering that browsing the world wide web is pretty much a living definition of remote code execution, it’s probably about time someone tried to make a standard feature of isolating the browser. If WSL2 is any indication, Hyper-V also offers great performance if your machine doesn’t suck.

by

Microsoft’s Edge browser is crashing if you have Google set as default search – There’s a temporary workaround

Considering how much of Edge is Google, and both companies histories, I do find this kind of amusing. Given the isolation it almost makes me wonder if some Googly interface somewhere has changed its response in a funny way, or if a Microsoft change relative to Chromium induces a crashola.
In any case, looks like people using Edge should stop sending their address bar inputs to Google ala Chrome.
by

Here’s what Bill Gates said about the internet in a Microsoft internal memo 25 years ago today: It’s a ‘tidal wave’

I find this timing a touch interesting myself. Until circa 1998 our family PC was an old Tandy 1000. But it was Web TV that introduced us to the World Wide Web in around 1995 or 1996. It wasn’t that long before this became known as MSN TV, after already getting strong influences from the new corporate overlords.

Actually, I find it kind of interesting that Microsoft was an ISP for a time. In the era between getting our first Pentium based machine, and eventually going to aDSL, they were actually one of the better dial up options available in our area.

by

Not sure who writes release notes for Evernote these days, but I like the cut of your jib.

Release Notes for Version 6.22

Note: Versions 6.22 is supported in Windows OS versions 7 and up.

Windows 6.22

Fixed:

– If you opened a note via your shortcuts or after searching for a tag, any links to other notes in your account would be broken. That defeated the whole purpose of having links so we fixed it.
– Editing shared notes with images inside them would sometimes cause the app to crash. That’s now a thing of the past.
– Occasionally the app would crash when you clicked on a note in the note list, which you probably did quite often. But it should be smooth sailing now.
– If you opened an image pasted from Snipping Tools, the app would sometimes freeze, but no longer.
– You can now edit your notes to include hyperlinks with a UNC path (in other words, \host-nameshare-namefile_path).
– Updates to templates
– When you click on a note link in a tagged note, the app will now show you the note you wanted. A big improvement from before.
– We tweaked the text on one screen to make it easier to read.
by

https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1480613325

While I’m not particularly fond of Photoshop, and there are people who aren’t entirely happy with its first showing on iPad, but I like the concept.

For Adobe: they can either take the path of being a leader as iPadOS grows or be left behind as others grow with the platform. So it’s good sense for them to maximize what Photoshop can do on the platform. I’m also pretty sure their are crazy people at Adobe who would like a more desktop grade Photoshop on their iPad: just as some of their customers do.