Google Photos app on Android doesn’t offer a way to mass-download

Apparently the Google Photos app on Android doesn’t offer a way to mass-download a bunch of photos to the local device (which you might want to do for, just to pull an example out of thin air, taking GPS-tagged photos with your phone for reference while walking around a park and then saving them to a tablet where you can use an OpenStreetMap editing app that will show GPS-tagged photos on the local device on the map you’re editing).

You can download local copies individually.

You can remove the local copies of a selected group.

For this batch I just downloaded them one at a time. It took less than a minute. For bigger batches, though?

Huh… I bet Nextcloud has a download-a-bunch-at-once option.
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I should also look into desktop OSM editors that’ll show GPS-tagged images. It wouldn’t surprise me if JOSM could do it.

Now I wonder if I can run Vespucci on Waydroid and copy photos to someplace it can access…

Whatever. Something to dig into after work, not just during a break.
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Re: trying to get away from using Google Photos

Same. It’s very good at pulling your data in!

I keep meaning to look into something that would work as a complete replacement, but so far I just have Nextcloud auto-uploading to S3 storage at Linode. That way I at least have an offsite/online copy I can get at through the app, web interface and DAV mounts. I think link-based sharing should work with the S3 backend. Something to test.

The main problem I have is that there isn’t a good way to sync deletes AFAIK. So every so often I have to go into those folders and clear out a bunch of temporary photos I already deleted from my phone and Google.
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Article at Reactor about the planning it took to get five years of Babylon 5 to tell a complete story, the curves thrown at i…

Article at Reactor about the planning it took to get five years of Babylon 5 to tell a complete story, the curves thrown at it by outside circumstances (actors leaving, premature cancellation, etc.), and the seat-of-the-pants swerves that sometimes worked out better, sometimes not as good as what could have been.

Babylon 5 Was the Ultimate Exercise in Plotting vs. Pantsing

In its very bones, Babylon 5 was a unique experience. It was a bold attempt to experiment with the conventional format of TV, with a serialized storyline and continuity, unlike earlier shows like Star Trek or Quantum Leap or any number of other “story of the week” style science fiction programs. Here in our current era, post-prestige TV, that kind of storytelling is common, but in the 1990s, when Babylon 5 first entered pre-production, it was nearly unheard of.

#TV #scifi #babylon5

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Fedora 40, X and Wayland

Good to know:

1. #Fedora isn’t actually removing #Xorg support yet, just dropping it from the default installer.
2. They’ve pushed that change back from Fedora 40 to 41.

https://alternativeto.net/news/2024/3/fedora-workstation-41-to-phase-out-default-gnome-x-org-session-in-favor-of-wayland/

That means I have more time before I “need” to switch to an AMD card or to a distro that still has Xorg for #LinuxGaming. I can keep an alternate X-based session around until I have a better reason to replace the current #Nvidia card. Or who knows, maybe it’ll reach the point where XWayland windows run well enough on Nvidia that I won’t need an X11 session anymore.

(Desktop apps running directly on #Wayland run just fine on here, and judging by the fan speed, use less power than the same apps running on an X11 session of the same desktop.)

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Some useful articles for configuring the

Some useful articles for configuring the #iptables #firewall on #linux — specifically #AlpineLinux using #awall:

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-awall-on-alpine-linux/
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Zero-To-Awall
https://www.zsiegel.com/2022/01/13/configuring-alpine-linux-firewall-with-docker

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Getting intermittent segfaults on Snac

Getting intermittent #segfault crashes on the admin page for #snac2. I submitted as much debug info as I could get:
https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/issues/147

Also posting here in case someone having the same issue looks on the fediverse first before going to Codeberg.
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A week later…

So, to follow up on this: It was crashing on a several-hundred-post-long thread. It seems to be specific to musl, since Grunfink’s test server linked against glibc was able to generate the HTML…eventually. And setting a nesting limit of 48 seems to fix the problem.
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Whoa…the email forwarder I’ve been using for more than 25 years (ok, *that* makes me feel old) is discontinuing one of thei…

Whoa…the email forwarder I’ve been using for more than 25 years (ok, that makes me feel old) is discontinuing one of their non-email features: URL forwarding. You could set up a redirect from your username on their website that would always point to your current real website, no matter where it was. I used it extensively in the late 1990s as I moved from AOL to one set of school servers to another and finally to the domain name I registered after graduation.

I wonder how many links to that old URL still exist somewhere online. (Not counting the Wayback Machine.)

I finally got the invitation to the #ArcBrowser for Windows beta.A couple of months after I stopped using it on my work Mac…

I finally got the invitation to the #ArcBrowser for Windows beta.

A couple of months after I stopped using it on my work Mac.

And it only runs on Windows 11 for now.

I guess that saves me the trouble of trying to decide whether to test it on a VM, an actual Windows machine, or a fresh Wine bottle.

Wayland/NVidia status update on my machine

I’ve had no problems running GNOME and Wayland-native applications on Wayland and my NVidia card for the last…year?

XWayland, however, still has issues on this card. 2D apps are a bit laggy, but running 3D games? Slow, flickery, or both.

Which means I’m still logging into an X session to play Minecraft or anything from my Steam library.

I tried running Minecraft directly under Wayland over the weekend after installing the latest driver update, but it’s still not playable.

With Fedora planning to drop X entirely soon, I’m going to have to start thinking about what to do if the remaining compatibility issues aren’t fixed by the time F39 hits EOL.

  • Stay on an unsupported OS?
  • Switch to another distro?
  • Move all my games back to the Windows partition (just in time for Windows 10 EOL)?
  • Buy an AMD card…and a new motherboard that doesn’t have this one’s incompatibility with Radeon GPUs, and a new processor to go in the new board, and probably new RAM…

On the plus side, if I do that, I should be able to switch the rest of my Windows games over to Linux+Proton (except for bedrock Minecraft) and reclaim that space instead of staying on a soon to be EOL Windows version.

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I think if I wasn’t already looking at buying a new laptop I’d be more inclined to upgrade multiple components at once.

I need to dig up my notes on what exactly was incompatible between this mobo and the Radeon GPU I tried to use a few years back, and whether I went with NVIDIA because the board conflicts with AMD GPUs in general, or because I just didn’t want to go through more rounds of compatibility testing. Or just redo the research from scratch. Assuming I can get a search engine to actually show matches for the specifics instead of what it thinks I should’ve asked for.

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Argh…the only post I made about it was too vague, only mentioned that “Indications pointed to chipset compatibility problems with the mobo.” And I couldn’t find any notes on my computer about what chipset was likely to be the problem. No bookmarks either. The only thing I found was a reddit thread I’d saved to Pocket, which suggests that the ASMEDIA driver on the board for the SATA controller can interfere with AMD driver installation on Windows (one of the problems I had at the time), but switching it to IDE mode clears up the conflicts. Oddly enough, I ran into another issue with the ASMedia controller a year later, which involved Windows completely losing track of drives attached to that controller, which I solved by moving the cables over to the AMD controller instead.

It’s possible I saved the thread to Pocket because of the disappearing drives, but it’s also possible it’s the same underlying issue, and now that I don’t have anything attached to that controller, an AMD GPU will work properly on here. If so, that’s a much simpler (and cheaper) upgrade than swapping in a new mobo/cpu/ram combo at the same time.

Hot Cha Cafe

The Hot Cha Cafe at So Cal Landmarks:

In about 1932, a small, hexagonal shingle-style Victorian building in Long Beach got a programmatic makeover, adding a large, angular percolator made of metal and glass on the roof, to become the Hot Cha Café. The name changed to the Koffee Pot Café, but it remained a coffee shop into the 1960s…

If this was still a cafe I’d totally go there just for the style. I’m glad it was restored instead of demolished!

A small, red, one-level octagonal building sandwiched between what looks like a house and a garage on a sunny day. A tree sticks in from out of fram, and cars are parked in the street out front. It looks like there's only space for a single room, and the windows and glass door feature a logo and the name of a salon that you might be able to make out on a bigger display than the one I'm using. Most unusual: A stylized coffee percolator sits a top the pyramidal roof.

#Architecture #ProgrammaticArchitecture #coffee #cafe #LongBeach

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WordPress Firehose

Reply to 404 Media article via Fediverse post:

My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.

But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.

And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.

Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.

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Just got an email from Niantic that they rejected the spelling correction I submitted for the name and description of a Pokés…

Just got an email from Niantic that they rejected the spelling correction I submitted for the name and description of a Pokéstop whose sign is clearly visible in the main photo…

…back in 2021.

Probably one of those automated “no activity on this issue for 3 years, closing” things.

But c’mon, the correct spelling is RIGHT THERE.