MediaSlurper - November Updates

Another month, another bunch of updates to my "MediaSlurper" tools to fix a bunch of annoyances that have be gnawing away at me every time I'd been using them recently.

Such is the curse of writing personal tools: If it breaks, no one will magically fix it for you between when it broke and the next time you use it!  On the other hand though, considering that I literally use these things *MULTIPLE* times every day   (like, 2-3 times most nights to run backups of my devices), deciding to build these and getting them working well for the 95% of the times I use them has been one of the most satisfying and worthwhile things I've done this year!

Anyway, this month, I finally got annoyed enough to look seriously into the following 2 things:

   1) A longstanding bug in my SD Card (Camera Photos) download tool, relating to the duplicate-download prevention algorithm.  Basically, the problem was that it was redownloading any images that had their modified time bumped due to something like a description being added (even if subsequently removed), OR if I deleted the copy locally (i.e. it as out of focus), without having gotten around to removing it from the camera.

   2)  An optimisation to the login prompts for my Android FTP downloading tool, so that I wouldn't need to punch in the IP + Port numbers (or confirm the defaults) each time I used the tool, while retaining the ability to actually dial in a new value on days when new IP + Port values may randomly be required.

 

Yesterday's Thunderstorms

As you may have read, yesterday we had some crazy weather here. Crazy is probably the right word...

 

For those who aren't aware:

Yesterday, we had a sudden thunderstorm front pass through, where the weather went from sunny and mild, to suddenly storm + overcast, with dark ominous clouds, which quickly turned into thunder + lighting + hail + heavy rain (with surface flooding). Most affected were all the folks who had headed out to the final day of the A&P show  (i.e. farm folk bring their animals to town, to let us city people see their critters + lifestyle) and/or the horse races (i.e. where ladies dress up in fancy dresses, and consume too much wine) - as both of these events are held outdoors, and in the areas where the most hail fell. Large hailstones I might add apparently... From the photos I've seen, it was such a hailstorm, that it looked like snow had fallen out that way - it was everywhere, and enough for folks to make little snowmen (oh... *ahem*  "hail people") out of that white stuff!

 

Unfortunately, it seems we missed most of the most fun/exciting parts!  

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330356928

Silvereye Season - Rain Day

Yesterday's rain day provided a lot more interesting SIlvereye Photos than I had been bargaining on!

Looking through all the photos, I realised that most of the day, I basically had two visitors (and an occasional mystery third or forth one).

 

As you'll soon seen in the following posts, I ended up naming these two:
1) "Mohawk"
2) "Humperdink"

"Mohawk" was the main one I saw, but it turns out "Humperdink" showed up a bunch of times too. Also, I reckon that actually, both may have been juveniles (or at least Mohawk definitely was!)

Emirates "NBA" A380

Yay!  After missing its last few visits for various reasons (including being out of the country, a snowstorm, and being far away from the airport occupied with other activities), today I finally got to see the "NBA" livery A380 (A6-EOD) with my own eyes at last!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330215352/

Silvereye Season - Super Wednesday

Finally getting around to posting some of Wednesday's silvereye goodness today

Some highlights:
1) Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head

2) Check out this funky shadow cast on its head by the unopened (?) flowerheads

  

3) A different pair that happened to come at the same time but stayed apart. I love how this one looks like it's breaking the fourth wall

 

4) The juvenile - You can only tell from this photo from the slightly "fanned out" wings (i.e. whereas adults usually have those folds tightly packed, juveniles seemingly have some trouble with that, and often fan those out slightly and flutter them, along with their microtonally off-tune 3-note (f'' d#'' e'') repeating calls whenever their parents approach with food)

 

Loads MOAR pics here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330132688

Silvereye Season - Mr + Mrs Harakeke Heads

Well, this happened way earlier in the season than I had been expecting!

A BIG thank you to Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head for giving me the chance to take this shot during their lunch visit (having missed capturing them during their breakfast visit).

(Unfortunately, the image is not quite in focus - or at least not quite in the way that I really wanted, but will take this one for now, as it's better than nothing! Will try again when you next come :P)  

In case you don't know, the last few years, I've been trying to move from "single stationary birdy" into "multiple at once" and/or in motion. So being able to capture what looks like a mating pair (given how they arrived together, and happily feasted from the same flower in close proximity to each other is a relative rare thing)

Linux Migration 2nd Attempt - Part 2

In this update:

The saga continues. Turns out the distro I initially tried is quite badly configured for what I want in general, but the other two I will subsequently trial will also have their own set of issues too! 

Status: Still trying to figure out a good base setup via a VM.  (Actual hardware support when I finally finish up enough ongoing projects to justify rebooting will be another matter later - and will likely require another round of figuring out if the problems are worth self-diagnosing vs just trying something else)

 

Update 2025/11/12:  I've managed to get the audio problem on my Manjaro VM sorted by running the instructions from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/Troubleshooting#stuttering-audio-in-virtual-machine, though I did have to restart the VM (as the systemctl command kept complaining about not being able to access other users / etc.) 

Silvereye Season - Early Birds

This year the Silvereye Season officially kicked off *way* earlier than usual, with the first flowers opening last Sunday on 26th October!  (Previously, this didn't happen until after 1st November)

The first bird sighting was the next day (though I didn't get any footage of that, given it was a fleeting visit behind net curtains, with no camera on hand, and a phone that couldn't focus in time).

In the days that followed, were the first photo of one (through the net curtains) on the morning of the 29th:

 

Fast forward to this morning, when I finally got my first "proper" shots - of a "Harakeke Head" no doubt:

Birds of Feather - Birding on New Brighton Pier in Strong Winds

This is one of my favourite photos from the other day when we headed out to New Brighton over the long weekend 

I got a whole bunch of footage I'm quite happy with, but what I loved the most from this set was all the photos I got of the seagulls being able to literally hover at a fixed point in space with their wings outstretched, due to the really strong winds out there that afternoon (which seemed to really pick up by the time we were halfway along the pier)

With this particular photo, I'd been taking photos of the gulls just hanging in the air, and then I hear + see this AirNZ jet starting to turn in for a northern approach, so i knew I just had to try and line them both up together in a frame together... somehow! 😂  

Upper Riccarton War Memorial Park

Last night, I finally got around to paying the Upper Riccarton War Memorial Park a visit. It's recently been opened on the site of the former War Memorial Library, utilising a few heritage items from the former library in its design.

What was most surreal though was standing there trying to photograph this "most Kiwi" of artworks (complete with a Buzzy Bee, Anzac Donkey, and Red Poppy), while smelling the fragrant dinner-rush exhaust from the nearby Chinese restaurants!

Crusade Against Smoking

It should probably come as no surprise to most folk that I am avowedly and firmly in the camp that is against any of the following:

* Smoking

* Vaping

* Recreational Drug Use

 

And yes, in case you're wondering: 

* I class "cannabis use" under "Recreational Drug Use" 

* I can't stand the smell + taste of alcohol either 

 

Windows 10 EOL -> Linux Migration Attempt - Part 1

With this week's official EOL of support for Windows 10, the impetus to try to look into migrating to Linux again for my personal desktop workstations has grown stronger again. Especially as I refuse to have my personal machines associated with Microsoft Accounts that will inevitably mean that various personal info gets inadvertently leaked onto OneDrive (including various sensitive files / settings / etc.), it feels like time to give this another crack, now that I'm using actual desktop workstations instead of laptops with weird hardware...

As I documented on this blog many years ago, the last time I tried switching to Linux, things didn't go so well back then. Particularly, as I was on a HP laptop that had a bunch of very-hard-to-support crap, and I was trying to dual boot it. I'm hoping though that things go smoother this time through a number of different decisions!