Vivaldi - 2025-02-24 at 20

My wife is exceptionally handy and seldom asks me to do much. We aren't big gardeners. Our yard is well established, and it's easy to maintain. We pay to have big home improvements done, and the smaller projects we either do together or she just knocks them out. I will never forget when we first got together. We lived in a house with a pool. One day the pump just died, She went online, found the right pump, ordered it overnight. The next day she came home from her CPA firm, took off her business suit, unboxed the pool pump and installed it herself. In an hour, it was done. I was amazed then and I am amazed now.

Since I am newly retired, I am working on making myself a routine and coming up with a few projects. Things I want to do daily include:

  • Going for a walk
  • A half-hour to an hour of housework
  • Cooking dinner

Writing can now take up a sizable chunk of my day. I have a list of software to download and test before reviewing it for AppAddict. I plan to spend more time coming up with ideas to create link bundles about for Linkage. As far as this blog goes, my goal is just get better. I don't know what that looks like, exactly. I can take my time now, polish things a bit, quit using the word "awesome" so much, get better at commas - that kind of stuff.

I have several tech projects underway. I used the process Jason Snell wrote about to download my entire Kindle collection instead of just select books like I did previously. It took just a few minutes to get all 555 of them from Amazon's servers to my hard drive. Now I have to set up Calibre and import them to remove the DRM and get them ready for use wherever I want them.

Now that Amazon is keeping people from actually owning the things they've purchased, i found a way to get all my Audible books converted. Using the free and open-source tool, Libation, I am downloading another 500-plus books, but this process is much lengthier. Thankfully, the new Mac workstation I just set up can work on this job around the clock.

I also want to get a local copy of all my photos for various reasons, mostly to use local search tools and for quicker access to them. I requested a Google takeout today and within hours I had 15 zip files of 10 GB each ready to download. I recently exported all my iCloud photos to Google, so hopefully the files I'm downloading will have all of them complete with metadata. I will let you know.

I'm also going to pull my music collection out of the cloud so that I can set up a music server that not dependent on my Internet connection. I have about 30K songs from the olden days when we were still buying our own music, including some difficult to find bootlegs from Dylan, as well as many do it yourself albums from bars and coffee shops that aren't to be found on Apple Music or Spotify.

To hold all this data, I've rounded up a pile of various hard drives I've accumulated through the years and looked at possible reusing the housing from some small external drives with upgrades. I found a supremely useful website for locating the lowest priced drives on Amazon, and I'll be keeping my eyes on that for bargains while I assemble this homemade NAS of mine.

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