I’ll spare you the long story of why I had to edit a JavaScript file, but today I learned that since Firefox 128 you can add a script override in the browser Debugger Panel. This downloads the JavaScript file in question, where you can edit it with your favourite editor. The file I was editing was minified, so Firefox doesn’t save the nicely unminifed file you were looking at, but it’s not too hard to unminify it. It was a small change I was making, so it wasn’t too difficult to find the right place to edit. Yes, yes, Chrome […]
Mac
Pause Time Machine for large files?
Warning: this is potentially terrible advice as it disables your backup system temporarily, or until you remember to enable it again. It also deletes backups which might be needed if you need to restore a file that was modified during this period. When downloading massive files like the 50GB tgz archives from Google Takeout on your Mac, you might consider temporarily pausing Time Machine backups. This can help avoid the creation of enormous snapshots that quickly consume your free space. It’s a bit perplexing, though—my Time Machine backup disk is always connected, so I’m unsure why snapshots are generated at […]
General
Playing around with Immich again
Immich is a self-hosted Google Photos. That’s the simplest way to describe it. It can run in a Docker container and will happily live on your local network, without access to the Internet unless you want to. They do warn you that, “The project is under very active development”, so bugfixes are happening all the time. At the same time, bugs are sometimes introduced, and breaking changes are sign posted weeks in advance. Immich. How do you pronounce it? I say it with a hard “CH” at the end, but others will say it sounds more like “image”, which leads […]
General
Organic cows suffer without medicine
TIL that “organic cows”in the US can’t be given antibiotics. If they are, they are never “organic”, ever again. In the EU and Canada, farmers aren’t allowed to sell the milk until there’s no sign of antibiotics. Personally, I’d prefer if an animal was correctly treated for any ailment they might be suffering from. And antibiotics might be the correct course of action. Feeding antibiotics to healthy animals in their feed is ridiculously irresponsible, however. How do you microdose veganism? Try eating less meat and dairy products. Go meat free once or twice a week. There are plenty of delicious […]
C64
Choo! Choo! Freeze64!
Well, chug along and check this out! Freeze64 Issue 68 steamed its way into my mailbox, featuring a review of a train robbers game I never knew existed. Plus, there’s another captivating instalment in Andrew Braybrook’s Uridium “making of” series. I always enjoy diving into the technical details of retro development. You’re constrained so much, it’s a challenge fitting a game into such an environment. Impossible Mission III looks great too. I wish I was able to get further in the original game. Maybe this one will be easier. C64 games are hard as nails, aren’t they? Quite unforgiving compared […]
Photography
Lossy DNG isn’t so bad
Have you ever converted a RAW file to lossy DNG and noticed how much smaller it was? You can make the RAW file 80-90% smaller! I always thought of lossy DNG files as JPEG files saved at a compression level of 10 or 100%. In other words, with barely anything stripped, but it’s more interesting than that. I discovered that a panorama I made in Lightroom was a lossy DNG. After I made it, I tried converting it to lossy DNG, and the new file was the same size as the old one. So, panoramas are lossy DNG. They used […]
Web
Now on http/2
This guide made it pretty easy to update Apache2 so it uses http/2 rather than http/1.1. If you notice anything gone astray, please let me know! There was no change in PageSpeed scores, but then it was pretty good already, thanks to Jetpack Boost! This Cloudflare article is a good, high-level description of what it’s all about.
Ireland
Debug code left on the SEAI website
I filled in the solar PV grant form on the SEAI website this afternoon. I tried doing it this morning, but there was a “permission denied” error on their dashboard, which stopped things working. There had been a warning that they were doing updates overnight, so I figured it was probably teething problems with the update. Hours later, upon submitting the grant form, I saw a “Paused on debugger statement” popup. Clicking play on it continued the process, and it all appears to work fine now. One wonders what happened to just submitting a form and processing everything on the […]
Photography
Howto: Geotag photos in Lightroom with Google Timeline data
One feature in Adobe Lightroom that many don’t use often is the Map module. It’s really useful if your camera has GPS, if it can connect to your phone GPS, or if you manually drag images onto a map. I use the Sony “Imaging Edge Mobile” app to connect my camera to my phone via Bluetooth, but this drains the battery quickly when I’m out for a long time. It’s not ideal. If I want to use the Bluetooth remote control (not the app, the physical remote) I can’t use the location feature. The battery life of my camera when […]
Travel
We’re out of water
That’s not really an announcement you want to hear from the pilot of your flight, but that’s what happened on my flight from Athens to Amsterdam recently. The pilot came on the intercom and informed his passengers there was no water to flush the toilets or wash hands. He said that’s the first time he’s had to make such an announcement. The flight had been delayed an hour at Athens, and then we spent 25 minutes on the ground while the congested air over Europe cleared. So I’m surprised someone forgot to fill the water tank. Water bottles were provided, […]