In Part One we looked at how to download our photos from Google Photos to a local drive. But now we’ll look at how to archive them into human readable folders that can be included in daily snapshot backups. Our Problem Now we have all our photos downloaded, but I really wanted things to live on my NAS with the rest of my important files. This would also let me potentially delete photos from Google Photos but keep things locally....

One service that I’ve come to rely on is Google Photos. For the last number of years, I’ve had photos on my phone (which is now my primary camera for trips) automatically backed up and categorized. It’s a slick service, but I feel most comfortable having local copies of photos and keep them in a snapshot backup system. Why I Did This Google Photos is great, and I don’t really have any issues with the service or its availability....

I suffered a pretty hard burn out a couple of years ago. I ended up changing jobs, and only then did I realize just how exhausted I was. I wanted to share my experience, what happened, how I think it could have been prevented, and remind everybody that their mental well being important. Quick Disclaimer: I’m not writing this to place any blame on what happened. This was mostly the result of circumstances beyond anyone’s control, so no one really is at fault....

I’m not a huge fan of meta posts, but this seemed like a fairly major change so I’m making one. I’ve updated my site to use Hugo rather than Wordpress. Wordpress is nice and all, but it’s fairly complex for this site and with horror stories of rouge plugins, I didn’t feel it was the best choice. Also, the new static site is a lot faster and a lot easier to work with, so those are also added bonuses....

This is something that bothered me when adding more than one server to PHPMyAdmin. The default configuration is very verbose, and largely isn’t needed for simple use cases. In my case, I boiled down the config options I use most frequently, and changed the format to be more inline. The format doesn’t look too good on the site, but it is pretty clean once in a wider editor. $cfg['Servers'] = [ 1 => [ 'host' => 'xxx', // MySQL hostname or IP address 'port' => '', // MySQL port - leave blank for default port 'socket' => '', // Path to the socket - leave blank for default socket 'ssl' => true, // Use SSL for connecting to MySQL server?...

So I recently have fallen in love with single sign on. I really like centralized user management, and being able to adapt it into many different application is really sweet. Plus, it makes compliance people happy! One feature I like is the ability to secure arbitrary Apache websites with it using a plugin called Mellon. Basically this acts like the native apache authentication, but rather than present a window for a username and password, it redirects you to your SSO provider to login....

One framework that I instantly fell in love with was Inky. Having built a number of emails using pure HTML, having the shorthand syntax was amazing. Coupling it with the inliner and CSS in Foundation for Emails, it’s dead simple to write a good looking email. Just one problem: Foundation for Emails assumes you’re either writing emails as standalone units, or integrated into a Node.JS application. What are you to do if you’re, say, running a PHP Symfony application?...

After a long a deep think, I’ve decided to retire my physical hardware and migrate all of my machines to Amazon Web Services. It wasn’t an easy choice, and I feel like I need to spend some time explaining why, just get some things off my chest. Reason #1 - Our Hardware is End Of Life Most of the reasons we’re moving are related to our hardware approaching the end of its useful life....