2025
- TextSoap - $50, multifunctional, also available through Setapp
- PurePaste (free) from Sindre Sorhus - always a good choice. This app can exclude certain apps, preserve links, normalize (quotes, newlines, lists, etc.) and also remove tracking parameters from URLs.
- Some clipboard managers offer this feature as an option in their settings, including PasteBot($12) and ClipMenu (free).
- People
- Date
- Location
- Content
- Camera type
- Photos of various serial numbers we need when making warranty support phone calls
- Lots of pictures of IP addresses as reported by computers, printers, switches, and the like
- Bar code stickers with asset information for the organization we work for
Nazis With Good Manners
Unlike most normal people, I've spent a considerable amount of time with criminals convicted of some of the most heinous crimes you can imagine. I've had conversations with men who killed their children, their wives and police officers. I'm not talking about one-off conversations either. Don Woods killed his wife in front of their son while in a drunken blackout. I talked to Don every working day for years, since his prison job assignment was in the area I supervised. He was unfailingly polite and obedient, never complained, made me a card when my grandfather died and called me Mr. Plummer, even though he was 20 years older than me. And, you know what, prison was exactly where that man needed to be.
I don't think I ever spoke a cross word to Don. But, at the end of every one of his work shifts, I escorted him back to the cell block and I locked him behind the cell bars. I did that because he was a convicted murderer. The state found evidence that he'd committed that crime. They charged him. They convicted him. They sentenced him to prison, as they should have. There are consequences for the actions we take in this world, and every so often that just can't be mitigated.
In January, I closed the Facebook account I'd had for 16 years. I had thousands of connections, years of photos and memories of birthday parties, Christmas celebrations, and the birth of several of my grandchildren. I enjoyed interacting with people on the platform. The problem is that although Facebook didn't do me much personal harm, it's run by a man to whom the truth is not important. It's run by people who openly promised dictatorial governments to inform on their citizens. It's used by the enemies of my country to interfere in our political process. How in the world could I tacitly say any of that was OK by using that cesspool of a website?
When Bull Connor, the police chief of Birmingham, Alabama in the early 60s had the cities firefighters turn their high-powered hoses on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, there were journalists there to take photographs. There were editors with courage to run those photos in the newspaper. Faced with those images and others of police dogs being turned on people, the US finally got to the point it needed to get to. Despite the low opinions many had about "trouble-making Negroes", the average citizen decided that no one should be treated the way blacks were treated in the South. We passed a Civil Rights law. We finally got as close to universal suffrage as we are ever going to get.
I realize that there are many people today who would prefer to live in a nation where there isn't so much political tension. That's understandable. I don't like the tension either, but I'm not going to pretend the solution is silence or the acceptance of beliefs and behaviors that fly in the face of my core beliefs. A political disagreement is when we have different ideas on what the property tax rate should be. When we don't agree that all people are entitled to the same basic human rights, that isn't a political issue. It's an issue of morality and ethics. On that, there is no compromise, nor should there be.
It is not OK to think that anyone who criticizes Israel needs to be deported or that trans women should be arrested for using the wrong bathroom or that it's OK to decimate scientific research or OK to remove references to our nation's African-American heroes from museums. People with those attitudes are immoral and unethical. They are mistaken, and they don't deserve a comfortable life or any effort on my part or your part to respect our differences. I don't care how nice they treat me personally or how many hours they volunteer with the Boy Scouts. They are evil and despicable, and I don't want anything to do with them.
Have I made myself clear?
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It Might Be Time to Get Rid of Backblaze
Backblaze offers two products to Mac users. The first and oldest
is an always on backup service that backs up your entire hard drive to
the cloud. In the event of a hard drive crash, theft or disaster, they
will mail you a USB drive with the entire contents of your drive so that
you can restore to a new device. For incremental restorations, you can
recover files online after making a request for what you want. Their
other product is online storage similar to Amazon's AWS or Microsoft
Azure.
The personal backup plan is $9
a month or $99 a year. I've used the service in the past and was
impressed by how easy it was to use. I never had an issue
.
There seem to be numerous problems with the business end of the company that do not bode well for its future, however. Morpheus Research, a business analyst, recently released a pretty scathing report on Backblaze.
Backblaze, in our view, is the archetype of a failed growth business and its latest "restructuring" will do little to resurrect the company's woeful capital market performance or transform its undifferentiated storage offering. Its capital markets story has been kept alive by allegedly inflated cash flow forecasts, hidden internal investigations and accounting tricks, which appear to fuel exit liquidity for insiders.
What that means is the company has been using voodoo accounting tricks to hide its massive losses, and the stock and the company are headed for a big crash that could leave any Mac user who depends on Backblaze in a bad place. I would suggest moving to another service as quickly as possible. Wasabi has plans starting at $6.99 per TB per month that allow you to use your own backup software, like Arq to back up to their cloud servers.
Bighorn Sheep
It’s always a thrill to see native wildlife that we don’t have where I live. I took this photo of a bighorn sheep in Colorado.
Rocky Mountain Beautiful
Man, the Rocky Mountains sure are pretty. As an Easterner, all my mountain experience has been in the Appalachians, but these western folks just might have something going on too.
Answering The Forking Mad Questions
David, my favorite Scot, over at The Forking Mad blog has posed a set of simple questions for we IndyWeb types to tackle. Here are my answers. I'd love to see yours.
Do you floss your teeth?
If you are my mom reading this, the answer is, yes, every day. For the rest of you, the answer is no, mouth too small, hands too big.
Tea, coffee, or water?
I like them all, but I only get emotional over coffee. I like an artisanal pour over as much as the next guy, but in a pinch, five-year-old instant Nescafé will do.
Footwear preference?
I don't like laces so for the last eight or so years I've opted for Keene's slip on sandals. They last forever.
Favourite dessert?
I'm partial to fresh watermelon served with quality feta cheese.
The first thing you do when you wake up?
I hit the button on my coffee brewing machine, answer nature's call and check my phone.
Age you'd like to stick at?
I'm going with 48, my age when I last got married and also the year I was in peak physical condition and hiked 2,200 miles in one long epic backpacking trip through the Appalachian Mountains
How many hats do you own?
Twenty-three, primarily baseball style with a couple of flat caps, visors and winter beanies thrown in.
Describe the last photo you took?
My wife and grandsons moments after they finished an eight-mile ascent and descent of McAffee Knob in Catawba, VA.
Worst TV show?
Dukes of Hazard, casual racism and misogyny while mocking Southerners.
As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?
At various times I wanted to be a vet, a soldier, a writer. Two out of three ain't bad.
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RSS in an Integral Part of the IndieWeb Experience
In 2023, I was recovering from an illness and bedridden. I picked up my old iPad and opened my feed reader, which I hadn't done in years. Many of the blogs I'd initially followed circa 2014 were dead, but there were still a few actively posting. Out of boredom, I began to clean out the dead feeds and look for newer and better ones to replace them. That experience led to this blog post. I found so many interesting independent blogs that I decided that even someone like me could get in on the action.
In case you are wondering, RSS is a method of content delivery where information created by bloggers and publishers is delivered to a special program or website that you set up. You can subscribe to RSS feeds, usually for free, and whenever that blog or website is updated, the new information shows up in your feed reader.
Many people I now consider to be my good Internet friends are people I first discovered by seeing them on someone else's blogroll. I spend part of every day looking at my feed reader. Aside from the basic RSS mechanism I describe above, there are ways to use the protocol to do all kinds of things. The best site I have found to not only educate you on RSS but to provide you with access to a huge variety of tools and services is GitHub - AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS: A list of RSS related stuff: tools, services, communities and tutorials, etc.
I encourage everyone from newbies to co-inventors of the protocol to have a good look around. Click on a few links. Try out some new tools for discovering interesting content.
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Make dupeGuru Part of Your Maintenance Toolbox
As a non-developer, I appreciate how difficult writing good software must be. There are a few tasks that it seems are nearly impossible to prefect. Finding duplicate images is one of them. Apps that use machine logic to identify images with different file names, different creation dates, file sizes and even image dimensions seem to have an almost impossible task. One of my ongoing projects is curating a lifetime of photos that include scanned paper photos, images from various digital cameras and every smartphone my wife and I have ever owned. The images have been in iCloud, in Google Photos, Amazon photos and one various Macs and backup drives through the years.
I am fine with using multiple tools. I realize after working on this for a while that no single application is going to find all the duplicates.
I found a great many dupes using Gemini by Macpaw.
I also used the freeware duplicate finder, ZeroDuplicates.
I'm now scanning the same directories with another free app and still finding files to remove. The app I am using is a free and open-source offering available on GitHub for macOS, Windows and Linux. It's called dupeGuru and it is pretty powerful in its own right. It has three modes: regular files, music, and images. "dupeGuru is customizable. You can tweak its matching engine to find exactly the kind of duplicates you want to find. The Preference page of the help file lists all the scanning engine settings you can change.
dupeGuru is safe. Its engine has been especially designed with safety in mind. Its reference directory system as well as its grouping system prevent you from deleting files you didn’t mean to delete.
Do whatever you want with your duplicates. Not only can you delete duplicates files dupeGuru finds, but you can also move or copy them elsewhere. There are also multiple ways to filter and sort your results to easily weed out false duplicates (for low threshold scans)."
This Week's Bookmarks - Famous Literary Couples, Stalingrad Incident, Web Design Museum, Unusual Landscapes, Eternal Helpdesk, Film Mistakes, Crucial Musical Tracks
F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
Famous Literary Relationships from Best to Worst ‹ Literary Hub - There have been plenty of great legends about literary love affairs over the years, though of course a great legend doesn't always mean a great love affair. In fact, it often means just the opposite. Here, I've collected a few of the worst (and a few of the best)—from what we can tell from our outside vantage, at any rate. You never do know what goes on in other people's homes. But you might have a better chance if they happen to be writers.
The Stalingrad Incident - In a historic depression, a black american seeks freedom from discrimination and professional limitations in an unlikely place: Russia. The forces of racism follow him overseas, putting his reputation and life in danger.
Web Design Museum - Discover old websites, apps and software - Web Design Museum exhibits thousands of screens and videos of old websites, mobile apps and software from 1990s to mid-00s
24 of the world’s most unusual landscapes - While there are plenty of awe-inspiring man-made destinations around the globe, nothing is as creative as nature. From trees that resemble monsters, to colorful sinkholes, towering rock formations and waterfalls of molten lava, these are some of the most unusual and fascinating landscapes in the world.
The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing - If you sit at the James E. Foy Information Desk in the Melton Student Center at Auburn University, answering the phones on a Wednesday night, you might be responsible for answering a question like this: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?”
FXRant The Movie Mistake Mystery from Revenge of the Sith - Not just Star Wars - this site has mistakes that made it on to the screen of Goodfellas Aliens, Glory, The Dark Knight, The Abyss and more
Crucial Tracks – the songs that made you - There are points in your life that are defined by music. Whether it’s a song that introduced you to a genre of music that changed the direction of your tastes and style, or a lyric that made you think about the world in a different way. Songs represent relationships. Songs trigger memories. These are all crucial tracks.
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Juvenile
I watched this youngster grow up. I spent so much time with him that I became invisible in his eyes. He often came within a foot or two of me and seemingly learned to pose for pictures.
Red Pandas - Virginia Edition
The red pandas at the Norfolk, VA live in a habitat that visitors wall through. It’s a series of giant oak trees interspersed with towering decks.
A Beautiful Three Day Hike on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia
I'm often asked to recommend hikes along the Appalachian Trail, a national scenic trail in the Eastern United States that stretches from Georgia to Maine, touching 14 states. My suggestions are typically conditional. If I don't like you, I'm definitely going to suggest you go to Pennsylvania, a state notorious for its extremely rocky conditions that makes hikers curse the slow going and their painful feet.
If you are a stone badass, I'll tell you to head for New Hampshire and Southern Maine. It's often said that 80% of the hard hiking on the AT occurs in that final 20% of the trail.
If you're a good friend in average shape, then I'll advise you to head for the area near Roanoke, VA where you can find a 37-mile loop that will take you to Virginia’s Triple Crown of hiking.
You will hit three beautiful and iconic locations:
Apps For Travelers
When I travel, my phone ceases to be an entertainment and
diversion device and turns into a real tool. Whether I'm staying in town
or on an outdoor adventure, I rely on my phone for directions and
information about things to do and places to go. Here are a few of the
apps I find helpful.
History Pointer
History Pointer uses your current location to show you locations on the National Historic Register. I was amazed to see how many places in my own hometown were listed. You get maps, Wikipedia excerpts and an augmented reality tour. ($4.99)
Gas Buddy
Last weekend, my gas light came on while I was way out in the country carrying my granddaughter to work at the horse farm that employs her. Luckily, I have Gas Buddy installed. I use it without signing in and only letting it use my location when I'm actively searching for gas.
Organic Maps: Offline Maps
There are some excellent offline map apps that are very expensive. Then there is Organic Maps, an excellent offline map that's free. You just need to plan ahead and download the maps for the area where you plan to travel. It does directions for walkers, cyclists and drivers. It uses Open Street Maps data and was just updated this month.
Rego
Rego bookmarks geographic locations. Whenever we travel, it's easy to find places where we've enjoyed eating in the past. The same with coffee shops and hotels and rental properties. Adding a new location can be done onsite, from an address or pulled from the metadata from a photograph. Bookmarks contain GPS coordinates, street address where applicable, notes, date added and a stock photo or one or more of your own. You can also use custom pin colors and designate any location as a favorite. ($9.99 yr. / $24.99 lifetime)
iExit
If you do any traveling on the Interstate highway system, iExit, helps you find gas, food and bathroom access. I use it on every trip. The information is plentiful and up to date. (IAP $1.99 to remove ads)
Street Photography
Although I prefer black and white for street photography, occasionally something about an image calls for color. 
I've Never Been This High Before
At the summit of Pike’s Peak after riding the train up from Manitou Springs
Get Plain Text - Adds a Feature the Mac Lacks
People who work with text a lot are familiar with the Mac shortcut to paste the clipboard as plain text - Command + Shift + Option + V. This shortcut works in many native Mac applications like Pages, Mail, and Safari. When you copy content from a source and use this shortcut to paste, it automatically strips away any formatting. While the shortcut is highly versatile, it only works sometimes. Applications like Microsoft Word or third-party software may not support it natively. You can learn application-specific methods of pasting as plain text. Word has a way to do it. So does Google Docs. It is easier, however, to find and use an application that will just take care of this for you.
A good choice is an app that has been round for over a decade, Get Plain Text, available for free (with an IAP to tip the developer if you'd like to.) "It instantly removes everything unneeded: colors, typeface size, style (for example, boldface/italics), hyperlinks, images, etc. In other words, everything that isn’t plain text! Now you can put plain text in your letters and documents using the copy/paste functions, without having to clean it up manually. Get Plain Text will convert any bit of text into plain text, no matter where you copied it from (a website, PDF document or elsewhere). You can activate the feature manually, or check “Automatically remove formatting” to make the app take care of it every time you copy something."
There are other apps that offer similar functionality if you are sketched out by the length of time since this app has been updated (9 years, LOL). The handling of text formatting is long-established, programmatically, so IMHO, there's nothing to fear.
Tips for Organizing Photos
One of my ongoing projects is organizing a lifetime of digital photos. My collection includes all the smartphone photos taken by my wife and me, the DSLR photos we've saved and scanned photos of multiple generations. The images have been gathered from iCloud. Google Drive, Amazon Photos, family photo albums and many different backup drives accumulated over time. The process includes the removal of duplicate images, renaming, adjusting date information, performing face recognition , tagging and backing everything up. I realized soon after I started that I also need to segregate images that aren't personal, meaning illustrations for blog articles and the many, many photos I've taken at work that still have some usefulness but aren't appropriate to be included in a family collection.
The ultimate goal of organizing photos is being able to quickly find what I am looking for based on these criteria:
So, if I want to find a picture of my brother holding a parrot from a beach trip in 2014 that I took with my iPhone, I have multiple ways to narrow down the search. For people willing to let Google, Amazon or Apple have complete access to their photos, this is simplified by letting their powerful servers do a great deal of the hard work. If, like me, you want to have more privacy, you have to do a great deal of the organization manually or find applications that can do the work on your computer without relying on the Internet.
I decided to use a free and open-source image management program that works on Mac and Linux called Digikam.
I am temporarily using another application with local AI, called Peakto, which can find photos according to subject without using the Internet.
Here are a few tips on photo management
The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Photos Tips and Tricks - Are you tired of scrolling through endless photos on your phone or computer, trying to find that one specific picture? Organizing your photos can seem like a daunting task, but with the right tips and tricks, it can be a breeze. In this ultimate guide, we’ll cover everything from creating folders to utilizing software programs, so you can finally have all your memories in order.
What are the best practices for photo organization - Organizing your photos is not an easy task. Where do you start? What is the best way to proceed? Often, we wait until we need to find those photos for a birthday album, website or book before we realize that our photos are disorderly and difficult to locate. Rather than wait till the last minute, only to find ourselves frustrated and annoyed, we could be proactive and follow the advice of experienced photographers.
How To Organize Your Photos, From Backing Up To Tagging Life Kit NPR - We take hundreds and thousands of photos these days because we can. Long gone are the days of film rolls limited to 24 shots. Storage is trending cheaper and more infinite. You don't want to miss any of your dog's cute moments or your kids' as they grow up. But when we have so many digital images and we want to cull them down a bit and get organized, where do we even start?
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Past Me, Present Me, Future Me
The person who causes me more unnecessary work and aggravates me to no end, is that jerk, Past Me. Let me tell you how much he has complicated one of my current projects.
I got an Aura frame for Christmas. It's one of the best gifts I've ever received. It's an electronic picture frame to which my kids can add photos from an app on their phones. I get regular updates on what they are up to. Wonder Woman will sometimes just sit in our living room and watch the photos flow through, commenting on each one as we relive favorite memories. Don't judge me, but there are more than one computer screen also visible in our living room. I got the idea to have them scroll through our entire photo collection using either a screen save or one of several apps. I would rather not curate a collection for it to use, so I just set it to shuffle our library.
Wonder Woman is always doing favors for future Wonder Woman. One of the things she does id quickly delete any non-keepsake photos or memes that end up in her photo library. There is no version of Lou that can be bothered to do this regularly. As anyone in IT can tell you, there are certain types of photos that populate our photo collections. The usable life span for these images is about five minutes, just long enough to get back to a computer and enter information from the photo into some sort of tracking system or management console. These images include:
As a 21st century citizen active on the Internet, I also find it pleasurable to find and share memes that are funny and though provoking. I've done this thousands of times. I know this because I have thousands of undeleted meme in my photo collection. The mad girlfriend meme is represented no less than 22 times in different versions. As humorous as this is, it's not something I want to show up while I am trying to enjoy photos from old trips or my family.
I'm also one of those people who take pictures of my food. It doesn't have to be remarkable or beautiful food either. It's just a way to tag my location when I go out to eat. I have so many damn pictures of fried eggs sitting on top of SOS on toast. I could make an entire album out of just taco pictures. Haha, funny, except Wonder Woman doesn't think so when they scroll past her.
The other categories of strange photos, of which I have way too may, include random shots I took at particular venues to geotag a location for later use. There are also many images from the grocery store that I took, so Wonder Woman could give me the assurance that I was purchasing the correct product. A life-long bad habit of mine is writing down phone numbers but not recording who the number belongs to. I compound this by taking a picture of the naked number and leaving it in my collection. I have dozens of sticky note photos to demonstrate this.
AI is getting better at identifying objects in photos, but it is not good enough to quickly find ALL of anything, especially in large collections like mine. No matte how many times I scan my photos for pictures of bar codes or grocery carts, there are always remnants still lurking about. If I were a smarter man, Present ME would start doing future Me the favor of regularly culling this stuff from my phone. The problem is that Present Me is too busy cleaning up after past me to have the energy or motivation to worry about Future Me, mostly because without any evidence, I tend to think that gentleman will have unlimited time and resources. He is wonderful!
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Sunset over the Albemarle Sound
The waterfront at Edenton, NC, an old colonial town located on the Albemarle Sound.
Red Bellied Woodpecker
I love the distinctive sound these make, except at dawn, then it can be a little annoying. #birds
