It was a cold, rainy November night in 2013, and I was hunched up over my desk trying to get my sound card working. In my teenage years, I had taken on a keen interest in “Hackintoshing”, that is, installing Apple’s Mac OS (then OSX) on regular non-Apple PC hardware. While my box was fairly well behaved, it had two quirks that were eluding me. My sound card didn’t work properly, and the graphics driver for my video card didn’t really work correctly until the system got all the way to the login screen.

I finally caved and bought one of the no-name 8" mini laptops from Aliexpress. I’ve had my eye on these for a long time. Really, since the days of my youth with the Sony Vaio P and other iconic UMPCs of the early 00’s. The game changer was the original GPD Pocket from a few years back. Now, there’s a cambrian explosion of cool tiny computers coming from China. This particular one was sold under the name “Topton”, but also appears under “Crelander”, “Aslay”, and a few other storefront names.

Database recovery is tricky at the best of times, and it never seems to happen when and how you expect. In this case, my self-hosted Zoneminder server crashed hard and came up broken. It appears to be related to some index or table in the database getting corrupted, but I’m not enough of a “database surgeon” to say with any certainty. When this crash happened, the first sign was that the mariadb service was crashlooping.

A neat feature of almost every modern digital camera is that every single photo you take includes detailed metadata, including all of the photo’s settings including shutter speed, aperture, sensitivity, and focal length. The focal length, or simply the “zoomness” of your photo is of particular interest. All of the other settings are very easy to change by adjusting a dial (or using some annoying menus), but this one can only really be adjusted in a large way by changing lenses.

Taking photos is fun and easy. Just kidding, it’s a fractal of complexity, FOMO, and slowly realizing how little you actually know. However, one nice thing is that using some simple Unix/Linux tools, it’s remarkably easy to mass produce good looking JPEG images from your raw photos, without having to actually learn Lightroom. After a few days of fiddling with the settings, I’ve come up with this bash script to process my images: