Eric Walker

👋 G Suite legacy free edition, it was.. fun? This was an easy one to start with but the family domain will take much longer 🤦‍♂️

As with everything the project list seems to continue… I wrote this post earlier yesterday and of course last night I found out I need to start figuring out what to do with my G Suite accounts that we have used for years 🤦‍♂️. Guess I won’t get bored anytime soon.

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.

Just got done with a conference call to check in on the kids in their various quarantined rooms 🤣

Another step in migrating a lot of my stuff in one place has been completed. I wish I could say this was a super simple process that took an hour or less and was done. However, due to some user confusion, it took me more hours than I would like to add up. I was probably trying to do too many tasks at once but I ended up uploading a lot of duplicates which then required me to click into each Uploads page and Posts page and remove said duplicates 🤦‍♂️. Now in theory I would not have had to do this as it would only annoy anyone flipping through old posts but seeing how that for sure will be me it would annoy me and now seemed like the best time to clean it up before it really annoys me in the future (future Eric better thank me).

Thinking back there are probably two things I should have done differently or paid closer attention to:

• Really understand what and how things were going to get pulled over to Micro.blog. I know it was said many times in what I had read on the post about it but I kind of forgot that I had a bunch of Instagram posts where I had 10 pictures in each. They were when we were traveling and I did a daily recap of our days. So… that then created 10 M.b posts that really require clean up as it also didn’t pull over the caption for one or any of the 10 pictures.
• Do smaller bathes of photos and remember to clear the selection after it is uploaded. I think this is where my duplicates came into place. I think I would start selecting the next batch before the first finished. So when I then clicked Import the next time some were duplicated.
• Hashtags - Wow this seems like a fun idea when you are using Instagram but it is really a pain when you import all of them and you have a ton of hashtags for a photo. Now I should say, it looked fine but I just couldn’t live with myself having the hashtags that were of really no use to me in my new setup. This is one of those times I wish I could just do a find an replace. 😆
• Emoji’s - Not sure why but theses didn’t really come though all the time. Some many times they were garbled. I guess it would have been good again to check this first but I think in my earlier or later times on Instagram I didn’t use them as much as I did at one time.

I should say even though I had some frustration cleaning up the issues from the import. I don’t really blame the program as it was really my own mistake in not fully paying attention or understanding.

One interesting thing I did find when going back though and cleaning up the pictures, there was a time that I posted some of the same things to my old blog as I did Instagram. As of now I kept them both there. I know I need to do some more cleanup so when that time comes I might remove some of them.

Next up… I don’t know if there is much else left to bring into M.b. I have some other older sites that my wife and I used when we went to Peru and then when our son was born 6 weeks early. Those two were merged many years ago and then it was more or less a family site that we kept updating with pictures of the kids. However, each year that goes by we use it less and less and I am pretty sure we didn’t use it at all last year. If I decided to bring it in, I think it would only be parts and I would need to go back and make sure all is fixed before I do that as I don’t want to cause more problems for myself 😆.

Can’t believe this girl is 10 already! 🥳 🎂 🎉

Don’t mind the masked COVID creeper in the background - We let him out of the basement to watch gift opening from afar 😂 Then he joined us for cake via FaceTime 🤪

However, Madiana ended her night out with both her and I testing positive for COVID so Happy Birthday 🤷‍♂️

Well… that escalated quickly 🤔

We now are 3/5 down as our birthday girl got it today too. Not sure if it is a good birthday present or not yet. She is excited for no school tomorrow 🤦‍♂️

Catching up on all things after a busy weekend of sports and then finding out Sunday night that our son tested positive for COVID. He is doing well but bored after only a day. For the rest of us, we have been negative so far but I feel like our time is coming.

Glad we were able to make it back to the cities after an out of town hockey weekend in time to see our favorite basketball boy play his last game of the day! Their team was short players this weekend, so a fearless five boys rocked back-to-back-(to-back🤪) games without breaks or subs. They only lost one game by 2 points and won the other two (one of which was by 12 points). Overall, they played great!!! 🏀🤩

Had such a great weekend watching this our #11 and her team play their hearts out. Not to mention they all just had fun hanging out as much as they could and still being as safe as they could.

Overall, they won 2 and lost 2. On a personal note, our #11 Madiana scored 2 goals of which another parent had a great video from behind the net showing her picking up the rebound!

Watch our #11 white jersey hold her ground around the net and then quickly put in the rebound for a goal