As we wander into another week of restrictions, I am taking a quick look at what I have been doing with my time not spent commuting to the office, and having to stay up late with the kids whilst they do their homework.
So, I have gotten my home hosting sorted and tied up. I now have two systems up running docker. The first is running the services I would want on the outside. Things like my calendar, music, files, photos, and movies. The other is running internal monitoring services.
My next project is to finish setting up a decent VPN solution (probably wireguard) and drop the external access. Since I am not going anywhere currently, I have already dropped inbound connections to the house. This web site is not served from the house.
My two other, um, obsessions? right now are cleaning up my MP3 collection (23K+ songs taking up 142 GB before cleanup). and getting back into photo editing with Corel’s AfterShot Pro.
The music collection has been not really managed, and it turns out that when I ran some tool over the years to clean it up, those tools actually created many duplicate songs. Now, the files are not direct copies, so I cannot easily use a tool to clean them up, but I have been working through by hand to clean things up and set up a naming convention I like.
As for AfterShot Pro, I used to use it a lot, but for some reason I really do not remember, I stopped using it, and did not really set it up on the ’new’ laptop. I was watching some random YouTube photog talking about their editing flow and I liked it. I was never able to figure out how to easily moving through a collection of photos in DarkTable with just the keyboard, so I was never as fast with it. AfterShot Pro, however is a competitor to the Adobe suite, and as such, has among other things, great keyboard navigation.
In playing with it, I found some short videos to refresh myself, and to pick up a few new things, and went to town. Here are four photos from the last week which I was able to quickly edit:
As we enter week 4 of me working from home full time, things are different.
For me, the only hardship about working from home full time is having the kids and the wife also working from home (going to or teaching, depending) which makes work calls for all of us interesting.
On the plus sides, last time I was in the grocery store (last week sometime), I noticed that most things were back in stock. Some things are still a little low or no choice, but you can get it.
I do have more time for random things, and one of the things I did tonight was to use a tool call muffet to check for broken links on this site. As of this writing, there are no more broken links!
Welcome to the new world order know as Corona Virus. We are fortunate to live in a spread-out city, and then live in the ‘burbs on top of that, so we are mainly facing annoyances, not hardships. I will take that any day.
The image is from the our grocery store. That isle normally has paper products like toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, etc. Been empty for about two weeks now.
My $JOB told us all to go full time work from home for the duration this past Monday. This was not a big deal for me as I already do that two days a week, and in the past I have done it full time. The biggest issue is that the kids and the misses are home from school as well. They should be starting the new school on Monday, all on-line.
The logistics of getting the teachers ready are hard. Harder still is making sure the students have all that they need. While for most of the kids in the district, this will not be an issue was we do live in a fairly well off part of the world, however there are kids who will have issues with things like no access to a computer (or a home!), language barriers, or other challenges to learning. I know our district is trying to help all the students, but I worry about the other districts without the resources we have.
Upside for me? Well, more time with the family, more time for projects both on-line and off-line. It could be worse, I hope it will not get there.
Take care, check in on people, keep your distance until told otherwise, and wash your hands!
