I am not sure how this happened but I have gone down what I will call the rabbit hole of projects lately by having too many and all of them are in flight right now. Each will be great when they are done and all serve different purposes. Here they are in somewhat a specific order of events:

  • Micro.blog - I got this idea finally to try making Micro.blog my home for all Posts, and Pictures. This involved rolling up my old Website and then importing my Instagram photos. Both of the projects are “Done” in theory. However, there is a lot more clean-up than I anticipated so this will be an ongoing project for a while. I thought I had the website import done and cleaned up but now that I am still working on the Instagram stuff I am finding more that did not come through due to the issues I outlined in that post.
  • Plex.tv - I got this installed on an old Mac I have stashed away in the basement after hearing it come up from time to time in conversations from others. My first thought was to use it as an easier way to access Pictures and Videos I had stored on a central storage device in my house. We store all of our pictures and videos there (which is then backed up to Backblaze) but sometimes getting them back or finding them again is not as easy as it should be. File sharing is slow to display previews and standing in the laundry room to use the computer isn’t ideal either. So I have only added at this point the 2021 photo library we have as the scan on this old thing takes a while and I also need this computer to do other work (see below)
  • DVDs (Part 1) - I got this crazy idea to clean out this DVD shelf that has too many DVDs of which never get used but you can see it in the background of all my WebEx calls. I realized that I could just box them up and put them away but some of them I realized I don’t have digitally and now that my kids are getting older I might want to watch with them. Unfortunately, before I started to box any of these up my wife reminded me that we do use the DVDs sometimes when we go Camping since streaming is not an option. Sometimes it is nice to have some on hand as a backup when it rains. Hoping there was a way to figure this all out I was reminded of an article from fellow Micro.blog friend Jason Burk describing how he created the Golden Set by converting his DVDs to MP4s. BINGO now I had a project. *Current status is after a couple trial and errors, I have done about 150 of our DVDs and I feel like I have a long way to go.
  • DVDs (Part 2) - Due to some of the trial and errors of the first project I dug out an old computer I had gotten long ago. Come to find out it would be the perfect DVD machine but I realized that it did not have windows on it and that sent me down a path of digging through old CDs to find some sort of Windows CDs from past systems. I did find an old copy of Windows 8 which was working fine until I couldn’t seem to get any updates to fix the mouse drivers and whatnot. The solution was going to be to buy Windows 10 (which I wasn’t excited about) but I found out I was eligible for a free Windows 10 upgrade. That all worked well but it took some time to get to that point.
  • Storage 🤦‍♂️… As you work through the above projects you can only guess this leads to the question of do you have enough storage for all of these DVDs that you are going to now make digital? The answer is NO.. No, I do not. However, this was going to be an issue before this project took off as a couple of months ago I realized my 4TB HD was getting within 100GB of reaching the end of its life. To me, that is too close. I need to still figure this out in the meantime I had a 2TB removable drive that I am currently putting all the movies on after I pull them off the DVDs. However, I don’t want this to last too long as they are not getting backed up to Backblaze and that would be a pain to have to do it all over again.

Well hopefully some of these projects come to completion this week or throughout the next couple of weeks but I am sure they will drag on much longer than that.