MediaSlurper - Phone Data Archiving Tools

Mwahahaha... had very productive hacking session yesterday on my MediaSlurper tools  (mainly on the phone backup side)

Main Changes:
* Hacked together fancy new thing custom-op mode to make it possible to go through and selectively archive screenshots, while moving the old ones out into their own folders. 

This makes it easier to archive a whole bunch of the less important ones, then just delete them from the phone 1-2 years later to free up space

(Unfortunately, web-browser ones cannot be distinguished from the filenames alone, and will need OCR processing integration to solve later - I have a tool I can integrate, but I'd like to switch that away from Windows OCR since I'm moving away from the platform soon-ish, and need these tools to keep working)

* Hacked together another custom-op mode that only does the moving-between-directories on phone too

* Then plugged a whole bunch of cases where timeouts could bring down the ship, by wrapping all the native calls with a wrapped-API that makes it retry several times before giving up

* Then bolted on mechanism to get these custom modes to run before a nominated main mode (i.e. so the "main / fixed" one won't double-capture these files)

 

2025 Roundup

It's the end of the year again, and time for another "year in review" post! (Just a quickie, to get it in before the end of the year - I'd intended to include a photo collage with this post, but don't have time + energy to put that together)

 

Highlights:
* First trip to Canada  (Vancouver + Okanagan Valley)
* Getting promoted to Principal Software Engineer + Getting to apply a release to the live system
* Staying overnight at Tekapo for the first time + capturing a lunar eclipse there
* Creating my "MediaSlurper" tool for automating backing up Camera + Phone data (which I've since been using *heavily*, multiple times a day)
* Formally wrote up a spec for "WhioDoc"
* Celebrating Dad's 70th birthday
* Getting my pretty ball dahlia
* Switching to new standing desk setup  (+ including a proper "Luxo" style lamp)
* Seeing one of RNZAF's retiring C-130H Hercules doing a short-field landing at the Airforce Museum in Wigram (i.e. its new permanent home)
* 1st full year living with a heatpump in my room! 

 

Canada Highlights:
* Treating Mum + Dad to High Tea at Empress Hotel
* A&W
* Victoria Tour day
* Capturing pair of Osprey at Vaseux Lake
* Spotted Lake
* Meeting relatives + family friends for the first time - Most notably, meeting a frail elderly relative who had a bad fall + subsequently passed away a week after our visit (!), along with getting to see see some others again for the first time since covid / or for first time in 30 years.

 

Challenges:
* Dad getting hospitalised + being out of action for ~2 months with a badly infected leg (+ subsequent slow recovery) - To say the least, it was a highly stressful, scary, and very sobering experience. I'm very thankful that we are all still able to celebrate the end of the year together!
* Disruptive Uncle staying with us for a month - Ugh... yeah, let's not mention this again. An even more stressful experience, but for different reasons...
* Losing my old desktop workstation to PSU failure (but *still* haven't managed to get around to fixing it)

MediaSlurper - December Updates

Merry Christmas!  It has been years since I've posted stuff here on Christmas Day, but since this is a personal project, this doesn't really count as "work-stuff" (and besides, I haven't been feeling that burned out this year by this time that I need a complete break)

This month, I added a bunch of quality-of-life tweaks to MediaSlurper to address a few issues I'd been increasingly running into, and couldn't delay addressing any more. Oh, and added a cute-as seasonal variant of the mascot, in homage to the VLC icon (which I also adore seeing at this time of year!)

Maybe one day I'll have everything generalised enough to release this tool for others to use too. But in the meantime, it's still only really for my own personal use... Expressions of interest may expedite when I consider making a public release possible...

Linux Migration Attempt 2 - Part 3 - Bare Metal Tests, Tangles with Secure Boot, and Rethinking Distro + Setup Choices

This update covers a whole bunch of milestones, including finally testing + getting a working LiveUSB Linux distro running on one of my desktop machines, and a whole bunch of new learnings about not only distro choices, but also the impact of different KDE Plasma versions, and also configurations that I like and/or install steps needed to get various distros ready to use. All in all - lots of interesting learnings since the last update!

Scott Jenson's Talk At Ubuntu Connect 25.10

Quick post that I'll probably expand upon in followup posts eventually, but this is one of the more inspiring talks I've heard in a long time! 

"Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10" -- Scott Jenson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ

It's been a while since I've been reminded of what got me into HCI research in the first place. *THIS* is the type of stuff that I love doing TBH. It's really refreshing hearing such a senior industry figure talking about trying to get innovation in these areas happening again.

 

Another interesting point:  The following interesting link from the end of the talk to some folk doing some very interesting stuff!

https://www.inkandswitch.com/

Ooh... now we're cooking! I've got a few project ideas that overlap quite heavily with some of these headlines on their landing page 🤓 

(The main challenge currently is just finding the time + energy to actually work on these things... not to mention that fundamentally, making the prototypes I want to make is currently constrained by the tools I want not being in place)

 

Late Night Birding Rabbit-Hole - Alternate Maori Names for Silvereyes

I was rearranging some files when I came across the pukupuku videos recently, and was reminded of the alternate Maori name for Silvereyes: "Pihipihi"

TBH, I've long disliked the standard one that textbooks often refer to (i.e. "Tauhou", as I've always found it hard to figure out the pronunciation of, and just didn't like the meaning either). Granted... tonight I have managed to narrow it down to sound like "Tau - Hor" (i.e. rhyming with, "Chow Hor" - i.e. fried thick rice noodles, such as "Beef Ho Fun" 😋)

But "Pihipihi" - well that I can certainly pronounce (and the name does have some links back to the sounds they sometimes make - e,g, when they hopping around the undergrowth, making contented vocalisations from all the feasting they're in the midst of... or maybe it's another way of expressing those rapid "fleeing triplet calls" - i.e. "cli cli cli" / "chie chie chie")

In addition, it turns out there are a bunch of *other* names too now that some tribes may have used. In particular, the ones that stood out to me are:
* 1) "Poporohe" - Yeah, that one sounds easy enough to remember + pronounce again
* 2) "Pikariahe" - Slightly less convenient, given the macron on the first i (which I won't be using)

* 3) "Whiorangi" - Given that I now have a code-documentation system named after the "Whio"   (blue-duck), calling them "blue-ducks of the sky" is a tempting idea!

I'll have to do some more research into all of these to double-check what's going on, but don't be surprised if I start adopting these names for various purposes going forwards  (e.g. for a photo editing + management tool being the most likely beneficiary!) 🤓 

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)