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:

This is my phone. It’s a 2016 iPhone SE, and for the past seven years, it has been my main computing device and the centre of my digital life. It’s outlived four laptops, three pairs of headphones, survived through dozens of trips away from home over three continents, a couple drops, and one close call with a broken umbrella in the fierce Ontario summer rain. It’s had two battery replacements, some lint picked out of the sleep button, and a few scratches on the screen from keys and grit.

I’ve realized recently that I have to very carefully create boundaries around my hobbies to protect them. I like to take pictures. Sometimes of my cats, other times of neat things I see while traveling or exploring, and always to document things that I find interesting in the physical world. The encroachment of legitimacy It starts with a cheap sewing machine before spiraling into boxes of fabric, rare and vintage patterns, accessories and notions.