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.
- 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).
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:
- People
- Date
- Location
- Content
- Camera type
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:
- 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
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
Calabash Sunset
This little community on the coast right at the border between North Carolina and South Carolina is regionally famous for its cluster of seafood restaurants. Folks come from miles around for the fresh caught fish, oysters and shrimp, served with hush puppies, coleslaw and iced tea.
What I've Learned on the IndieWeb
My White Collar Job
The one thing I haven't learned on the IndieWeb is how to spell it. I prefer the variation that uses "Indy" like the car race, the Indy 500, but it seems like the reluctant consensus, as evidenced by IndieWeb.org uses a different spelling, so for once in my life, I'll be compliant and go along with the crowd.
The first time I blogged, back in the 90s, the audience I interacted with the most were all older than me. I was in my late 30s , but my blog was about the Vietnam War, in particular its effect on families. Most of the people I corresponded with were veterans, which was fine, although I was trying to connect with people like myself who were in the next generation. I was glad to lend an ear to the men and women who wrote me. I'd been around those people all my life.
When I blogged my way down the Appalachian Trail, I really didn't have the time or energy (or the connectivity) to form relationships with people online. If someone left a nice comment on our guestbook or sent me an email, I'd respond, but mostly I just told the story of our unlikely honeymoon. A lot of what I wrote was to keep the memories of that time and place fresh for me whenever I wanted to time travel.
So, then I took a 12-year break from blogging. I was on Facebook a lot. I never left Reddit. I dabbled with Twitter and Instagram, but never anything serious. I had photographs on Flickr and SmugMug and a few other sites, but mostly, I didn't spend much time or energy being creative or writing for an audience any larger than myself and the voices in my head. When I became less mobile because of health issues and desperately needed a productive pastime, I luckily landed in front of my laptop with some ideas.
Here's what I have discovered since January 2024 when I wrote my first post on Micro.blog.
There are still friendly people
Since I've been around for a while, I know enough about Internet culture to avoid being a reply guy I also tend to be someone who is quick to hand out deserved praise and to treat people like I want to be treated. Lo and behold, using those "few simple tricks" seems to be the key to mostly avoiding toxicity. I lucked up be quickly finding OMG.LOL, the Mastodon instance I call home, which has puts people first. It's costs $20 a year, and that keeps out the cheap-ass trolls who spoil things for other people. I participate in other communities and have blogs on four different platforms, but the one closest to my heart are the smart, lovable weirdos who habituate OMG.LOL
The US is just a part of the world
The person who inspired me to get involved in Indie Blogging is Robb Knight, who is from England. The IndieWeb scene is decidedly International, and I count that as a Very Good Thing because my own country is a bit of a mess right now. I regularly interact with people from Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, Japan, Scotland, Canada and beyond. It's taught me to look at things differently, to explain things in a bit more detail sometimes and to read with much interest the little tidbits of other people's homelands. If I ever have to take an English driving test, I am quite prepared for multiple questions about trams, as I am told the licensing folks put a lot of those on the tests.
It's OK to be honest
I am absolutely uninterested in creating an online version of myself, who doesn't talk about certain subjects, who has few faults, hasn't made many mistakes and knows all the answers. Instead, I'm the real me, who says what's on my mind, not to be shocking or provocative, but just because life is easier that way. In real life, I am a recovering alcoholic (16 years sober) and I've lived with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder for nearly 40 years, so that's the man I'm going to be online. I readily admit having been married more times than most people, and to have struggled with being a the father I wanted to be. I lack formal education, and I'm not ashamed of it. The people who decide not to interact with me over any of that stuff are not missed.
There are no perfect bloggers
I happen to be a prolific writer, a virtual fire hose of prose, if you will, but that does not make me anything apart from a person who has many files to keep up with. The people who craft one or two gems per month are 100% some of my favorites. IndieWeb blogging is not a competitive sport. It's not about Follower counts, monetization, or page views. As much as I admire clever web design and aesthetics, it's not about that either. To me, IndieWeb blogging is about community, honesty, and creativity. It's being a good neighbor and a helpful and hopefully inspiring presence because, damn, don't we all need a friend and some inspiration?
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Quick App Launcher - Pro, A Well Thought Alternative
There are various ways to launch apps on a Mac. The most obvious
and the one used most by new Mac users is clicking icons in the dock.
Apple also has Launchpad another built-in launcher. More advanced users
sometimes move on to keyboard-driven methods, starting with Spotlight
and advanced launchers like Raycast or Alfred, although some don't want
the added system overhead or extra features. Some like the convenience
of a menubar launcher like Xmenu
or Folder Peek.
Lately, there has also been a growing popularity among so-called pie
menu launchers like Pieoneer.
Another choice now available from developer Baser Kandehir, is a well-thought-out pop-up palette of applications through which you can sort in various ways. The app is called Quick App Launcher - Pro. You summon the application window with a user-defined keyboard shortcut or by clicking its icon in the menu bar. You can choose one of three window sizes to display your installed list of applications, which, without filtering, are displayed in alphabetical order. As you begin to type, the apps filter based on what you've entered. If it works for you, you can scroll through the list and click on what you are trying to launch. There are several methods of launching from the menu, including entering the numbers 1-9 to correspond with the grid pattern, typing a partial match, and clicking one of the choices or typing until nothing else matches, at which time the app will launch.
If you only want to use Quick App Launcher - Pro on a subset of your apps, that's no problem. In the settings, you can toggle off anything you don't want to launch with the app. Everything is turned on by default. You can also choose whether it launches Safari Web Apps or not. Other options in the settings include choices for the background of the application window, toot tip visibility, and whether numbers appear beside the apps while you search. Currently, the numbers are a little difficult to see, so hopefully that feature will be improved. The tool tip and window background features still need some refinement, as the changes I toggled were not apparent. The app does have dark mode compatibility.
The developer told me he is working on additional features and refinements. I would like to see the following:
- The ability to open folders in the finder
- The ability to open files
- The ability to open URLs
- Being able to specify what folders to search for applications, since some people offload big apps to external drives or keep them in non-standard locations.
Quick App Launcher - Pro is $5.00
as a one-time payment. It
collects no data and can be used in Family Sharing.
The Blog Questions Challenge - TV Edition
What TV Character from a Beloved Show Do You Wish You Could Be Best Friends with in Real Life?
I would really have enjoyed living in the world of Halt and Catch Fire, a show about a ten-year span of the early to mid-80s into the early 90s and the birth of the Internet. My brief interaction with corporate tech culture fell far outside the world of Halt and Catch Fire where the characters worked on cloning the original IBM PC, video games and an early search engine. My favorite character was Cameron Howe, a prodigy of a programmer, a genius and an anti-social, but fiercely loyal teammate. I've worked with some talented women in my career and enjoyed it. I would have loved to live in the era of this show, working at Cameron's video game startup, Mutiny. I love an inspiring, hardworking leader instead of someone who goes home early every day and reeks of their self-importance. Cameron was outspoken, driven, and unpredictable, all qualities I aspire to.
If You Could Binge-watch an Entire Series Again for the First Time, Which One Would You Choose and Why?
When Hill Street Blues had its run on NBC in the 80s, there was no such thing as binge watching. The best you could hope for was that your favorite show would get picked up for syndication. That would not have been a good fit for the show, as it had storylines that lasted throughout the season. Every time I missed an episode, the chances of me ever having a chance to see were slim. Then I got a job working during the show's airtime and totally missed the last seasons. By 2020, when I retired from the public school system, the entirety of the seven season run was available to stream. The only thing I liked about that period of my life was the 90 minutes a day I spent immersed in the fictional world of the unnamed American city where the show took place. It broke so much new ground for TV drama in general and police shows in particular. One of the lead characters was the recovering alcoholic police captain, played by Daniel J. Travanti. The other characters were all believably human. The writers were top-notch. Like many shows from the past, it couldn't be done today. The language was too raw and the topics too fresh. That's a shame.
Name a TV Show that Changed Your Perspective on the World or Taught You Something Valuable
Because I was the kind of kid who paid attention to the news, read the papers and listened to the radio, I grew up with a distinct, but distant familiarity with places like the Shankhill Road, the Falls Road, Derry, Omagh and greater Belfast. All of those places in Northern Ireland were the locations of bombings, demonstrations, attacks, and counter-attacks during The Troubles, the 30-year civil war that came to an end in 1998. Not until much later in my life did I come to know anyone from Northern Ireland, a place I later studied and toured. The show Derry Girls, about three Catholic Girls and their English cousin, was a coming of age comedy made ever so poignant by its setting during the last years of that era. It did a good job humanizing the struggle and the people affected by it. The first episode has British soldiers boarding a school bus to look for a bombing suspect. There were other episodes featuring attempts to bridge the gaps between Catholic and Protestant youth and even one that featured Irish Travelers.
Final Thoughts
I appreciate good TV. When I was too poor to afford cable, I told myself that avoiding television was good for my mental development, That may have been true, but I missed some good shows! I have fond memories of a great many TV moments, nevertheless, from the afternoon sitcoms of my youth (Andy Griffith) to the much anticipated shows of the 70s (Happy Days) and finally the golden era of the 21st century (The Wire).
Inspired by JoelChrono's Post answering the same questions
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Internet Life Hacks
Every once in a while, there is a post on Reddit that gets enough high quality responses to warrant being bookmarked and referred to time and again. Such is the case with this recent classic.
# What’s a personal internet hack you use that makes life easier but isn’t widely known ?
Some of the suggestions:
- ctrl+Shift+t - Reopens the last browser tab that was closed. Really handy when you accidentally close the wrong tab. (on a Mac it's command+shift+t)
- Get a great music recommendation each day and don't rely on your streaming services algorithm loop: https://1001albumsgenerator.com
- Don't support Google -> Stop using Chrome. Try Firefox with the uBlock (ad-blocker) extension, it's awesome!
- Don't support Google -> Use https://duckduckgo.com/ or try another one, they're in general pretty good these days.
- Temp emails, great for throw away accounts on various services: https://10minutemail.com/
- Get past paywalls: https://archive.ph/
- I always complete my emails and look over them before I put the destination email addresses in. Prevents me from accidentally sending something I don’t want to send.
- I pay for an email and domain service with the catchall redirected to my own email address - when I sign up for a service I set my email for that service to be [servicename]@mydomain.com, this way when I see spam coming in I know which bastard service sold my details, I then never use them again.
- Use https://cooked.wiki/ to view just recipes -- skip the long, meandering essay that leads up to what you really want. It's like a super-power.
- If you put swear words in your search, you won't get the AI generated answer.
- Learn to paste stuff using ctrl+shift+v It strips away any bold, italics, or colors and some other formatting options. Besides being useful removing crap from the clipboard and making your life easier when pasting for example data to excel it might be helpful when pasting data that came from an a.i. that could be detected and get you in trouble.
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