brightblack dot net

Hello!

So what is this site?

It’s a place for me to roughly document whatever small personal projects I’m working on really. There might be some build write-ups, some simple writing, film reviews, or even a look back at old content. Basically, a collction of non sequiturs. Check out the ‘About’ section for more.

This is my ‘indoor’ homepage if you like. I’m also very much an outdoor person, and for reasons lost to time and tea, for that kind of content, better to have a look at nanikore.net, as that is more focussed on motorcycling, photography, snowboarding and other outdoor stuff these days.

Apple Photos and Its Sometimes Odd Library Structures

I’ve been using Apple Photos, and before that, Apple iPhotos, to manage my, er, photos for a long, long, time, likely back to their introduction in 2002. Over that time I’ve made a few libraries, for family and some for other things, and then at points I’ve merged them back together to make a larger single library. However, a few months ago I was checking my SpiderOak backups, which basically take a backup of the ‘Masters’ folder inside the photo library bundle, which is where the original photos are kept nowadays, and I noticed that I had no ‘year’ folders for 2001-2003, but I knew that I had photos from those years as they were viewable as normal in the application. Poking around further, I found whole missing month ranges, and when quickly looking at folder sizes, saw some months and days were disproportionately huge. Note here that I generally only looked at the backup at the Masters folder size level, which looked fine most times. ...

My Laptop Usage in the Summer of 2018

I’m still happily dragging my 2014 Thinkpad Edge E440 around, and since I’ve had it nigh on four years, and coincidentally have re-installed the OS over the last couple of weeks, I thought I’d put together a long term review the machine, and the changes which have come (and gone) on the software side and why. Usage Most of what I do on the laptop now is still in a text editor of one description or another, the odd venture into LibreOffice Calc for some spreadsheet work, or RedNoteBook for journalling, and still now and then Scrivener for longer form prose, but as I’ll note later, this is now the Windows version in WINE, not the ’native’ version I used to use. ...

What My Mobile Setup Looks Like in 2014

{::comment} Written around October 2014 {:/comment} My mobile setup doesn’t change very often. My iPhone 4 was three years old in August, my old Core Duo MacBook (2006) died last year, and I was ready to replace it. The iPhone’s button and battery were both on the way out, and the iOS 7 mandatory upgrade had slowed the thing to a crawl. Having had a couple of Nexus 7s for a couple of years, I wasn’t wed to the iOS ecosystem, and SoftBank’s LTE based plans for the iPhones all carried big price increases per month over my 3G plan so I shopped around and found virtual carrier Y! by Yahoo! Japan. ...

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