Week 5

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: