Zimena

So, I have a new... I dunno, I won't call it a project, but I've decided to try to make some better choices with what digital stuff I pay for. It seems a lot of things are unnecessarily expensive, and there are cheaper - sometimes even free - alternatives available. So far, I got rid of two things already, and it means saving some money each year - money which will undoubtedly go to OTHER digital stuff instead, but that's beside the point.

First of all, my 1password subscription was ending a litte while ago. I've been semi-annoyed with how 1password works for some time already, because there are too many places where it just... doesn't work well, and I need to go into the app and copy the necessary info instead of having it fill it in automatically. And their phone app is quite pretty, but annoying in the same way. When they sent me a notification that my subscription would be renewed in a week, I went to look for alternatives. I found Bitwarden, which is free for the way I use it, or much cheaper than 1password even for a paid subscription. So far, I'm very satisfied with that - also because it works more seamlessly both from the desktop computer and the phone.

Secondly, I've been a Day One (Mac/iPhone diary app) user for several years. However, the last redesign of the app put me more and more off it, as it's simply too white for my liking nowadays. Only the background of some elements have some colour now, everything else is whiiiite and veeery boring. Also, let's not forget, they keep adding all sorts of features that I don't really use - all I need is an attractive and colourful diary/writing app with tags and calendar, and a way to list and find past entries. I don't really need it to register my tweets and IG posts (eh? no, thanks!), or be able to open it from the menu line - it's fine to click the app/shortcut whenever I need it. If I can have multiple journals, then that's a good thing, too, in order to avoid total chaos in there.

A little while ago, I decided to check out Penzu - when I did it, it was mostly to have a place for my Czech language notes/learning - but I liked it, and it's definitely much nicer than Day One. So, when my Day One subscription expires in a while, I'm not going to renew that. And in fact, I've already replaced it with Penzu everywhere, and I'm much happier as a result.

Just for fun, I made a spreadsheet to see how much money can be saved in this way in a year - as in, by replacing expensive/bloated software with free/cheaper alternatives. Could be interesting to see, I think!

I'm still working on getting my entire music collection converted to digital format. I'm using ABCDE for the actual ripping process, and I've made a simple script that runs abcde with the needed options, then ejects the disk when the ripping process is done.

This has been working fine for months and months.

Until now. Suddenly, I kept getting errors about the CDROM drive not being found, despite the disk being in the drive, and being visible everywhere else on the system.

I have no idea what caused this error, as I have done nothing out of the ordinary that I can think of.

Tried a number of obvious solutions - upgrading my homebrew installation, updating abcde itself (no update available, it was already on the latest version), restarting the computer... none of that solved anything at all.

Checked my ripping script, and added an option to specify where to find the CDROM drive. I never needed to be this specific in the past, as it would simply choose the only available CDROM on the system by itself.

Now, though? With this little addition, everything works again.

Yay, of course, but why so picky, suddenly?!

We're still working on cleaning out the attic and basement. Sometimes it feels like it's a project that will go on for all eternity, and I'm not even sure what we are doing is "helping" in any way. There is an unbelievable amount of stuff in both places, and getting something done just means making space to sort through the next batch of stuff.

Things I've found fairly recently:

* My own old school workbooks from primary school. (I can't believe I even turned into a decent human being - it seems I was only drawing in these books, there's very little actual work in them.)
* Old photos of various family members. Including at least two different wedding photos of couples I can't recognise at all.
* At least five photo albums - of course with only a few photos in each, if there's anything in them at all.
* My uncle's school materials from higher education/advanced mathematics.
* Two school textbooks issued in 1942 (as in, during occupation and wartime, so these are essentially nazi textbooks. An interesting find, but scary and disgusting at the same time).
* Books, books, books, books, boo.... you get it already.
* A broken chair I can't believe we didn't throw out when it broke....
* Various old computer stuff on CD-ROM - all of which could easily go in the bin nowadays. Why were these things in the basement, still?
* A bunch of football posters from the 1990s. Mixed in with a few pop star posters, and a Barbie poster, and a horse poster. (Interesting how this shows how the teen me was also still a kid in some ways - sports fan wanting to be a "cool" teen on one side, kid liking Barbie and horses and trying to be like "normal girls" in the other).

On to sorting more books.... tomorrow.

I've started that huge CD ripping project I mentioned here a while ago. In the beginning, I ripped everything with iTunes, to Apple Lossless (ALAC, or actually M4A) format. However, I had some doubts about this method, because:

1) I don't actually like iTunes anymore. Some years ago, I used to like it much more, but nowadays it's getting less and less useable with each update. Not to mention, uglier with each update as well.

2) Using an Apple-specific format sounded like a bad plan, in case I decide to move to a different OS as my main one in the future. Right now I'm at the point where I continue to use macOS because it's what I have, and what I know best, but I'm not certain that my next computer - a few years into the future - will still be some kind of Mac.

Still, I went with the obvious choices at the start of this project, because I wanted to get started with the ripping, and I didn't feel like researching alternatives. However, after ripping a good few CD's, I started getting annoyed - with iTunes and with it being unable to rip CDs that I know are perfectly good in other contexts, with having ALAC files instead of FLAC, with my own nagging thought that I'm doing this to preserve my music collection for the future, so why not do it properly from the beginning... and so I started looking for alternative ways to do things.

... and I have them. I have a ripping setup I really like now.

First of all, I replaced iTunes with Clementine - which I already had once before, back when I was testing out Ubuntu a few years back. I liked it a lot then, and I still like what I'm seeing now - it's certainly a lot better than the current iTunes - but I still need to get used to it, and there are probably lots of cool features I haven't discovered yet.

It's apparently possible to use Clementine for ripping as well, but I found a much cooler alternative. There's a nice command line tool called abcde ("A better CD encoder"). When I first installed it, I didn't really know what I was doing or how it was supposed to work, but after some research it now works fine. It uses a configuration file to specify ripping options, like which format you want to rip to, which folder you want to save files to, which online database you want to use to fetch CD info, this sort of stuff, so once everything is set up nicely in that file, you just insert your CD and enter "abcde" on the command line.

...Well, except not.

I found that I needed to unmount the CD drive before ripping, and then mount it again after ripping is done, so I made a tiny bash script file which does that, and also ejects the disk when it's done ripping. So, I now have a folder with my own bash scripts (with just two files in so far - this one for the ripping, and one more which converts all files in a folder from ALAC to FLAC, as I needed to do that with the stuff I'd already ripped), registered in PATH so that I can use them from any folder. Learning more about what I can do with such scripts is definitely on my list of things to do, as these ones are just simple things - but they're simple things that I made for my needs, and I feel a little bit cool for that :)

Also, while I was researching abcde and stuff, I also found out that there is a nifty little thing called Midnight Commander - a file manager kinda like the old Norton Commander, so I installed that one as well. That proved to be a bigger challenge than I thought, because it somehow started up with menus and everything in Czech, with the odd Norwegian word thrown in here and there. Well, fixing that at least taught me to edit my .bash_profile. And, as a bonus cool side effect, I've also set up Midnight Commander - or mc - to always exit to the current folder I'm at.

Believe me, it's so much more convenient to browse the file system this way, instead of clicking in the Finder endlessly. Plus, MC shows hidden files and system folders, which is also a big plus while working in the terminal and trying to learn things there. In the old days of MS-DOS, I used to be a huge fan of a file browser/manager called LIST.COM, so for that reason I never really used the old Norton. However, MC feels strangely familiar in a computer-nostalgic way, even with the Norton-style dual-pane layout.

Imagine the work it would have been to convert 20+ folders of ALAC files to FLAC via the graphical file manager interface. Lots of clicking, plus I'm not even sure macOS has FLAC as an alternative to convert to - it probably doesn't. What I did instead? Used mc to browse to the right folder, exited and ran my convert script, then used mc again to go to the next folder and repeat the process. No clicking at all, no moving my hands from the keyboard, no unnecessary click-clickety-clicky stupidity.

Before you ask, no, I don't hate using the mouse, but I do find it a slow alternative to using the keyboard efficiently. And yes, I'm that old, now.

At least I've learned a number of new things - and now I'm off to rip some more CDs.