Tong Family

Ok, it’s fix things Sunday, so here are the small things that I’ve been trying to fix and their status:

1. Apple Photos. On my OLCPed MacBook Pro 2014, when I run Apple Photos, I don’t see the first entry which is “All Photos”. It’s bizarre it started with Photos > For Your Shared Library, Memories, and the usual stuff, but there is no All Photos entry. I’ve tried to start a new Photo Library three times now and it happens each time.
2. MacBook Pro 2014 Display Bugs on Ventura. I think this has to do with the video drivers. I might try the iGPU fix and see what happens
3. HomePod Reset. One of our Apple HomePods would not come back after unplugging and replugging. The guide says you plug the HomePod in and *then wait 10 seconds* and then hold the thing on top. AND IT WORKED! I love the Internet.
4. VueScan. It developed this terrible buzzing noise, I went back to Version 9.8.27, but I think this could have been the multicrop or some other setting, so trying it again.
5. Child Bridges. Homebridge runs on my little Raspberry Pi, but they have this feature called Child Bridges which basically is supposed to improve response time. It is a pain to use, you go to each plugin and click at the upper right and say make a child bridge. This removes it from Apple Home. Then go to Apple Home and choose Add Accessory, you see the name of the bridge. Then go to the Homebridge Web application and it will give a synthetic homebridge id. Anyway I did all this and my UniFi Protect works much better. I’m also supposed to install Scrypted with Docker, but that’s another day.

Programming Bash Tip

While no one in the next decade will ever write a program again, here are some tips if you still are in the last decade 🙂

Bash Associative Arrays. They are a strange hack that was added, so how to use them is a bit strange. You have to declare them with declare -A _name_. You cannot index into an index of them, so a construct like ${A[key][3]} where A has an element which is itself an array. Instead, you have to run a loop to find this with "{!A[@]}

Identifying a photo by its location for historical photos

There is a scary application that lets you look for things. This is something that is in OSINT (Open Source Intelligence). Obviously, if you have Google Maps, if you have some idea where things are, you can use the Satellite view to figure this off. And you can use a Street View to look for the position. This is completely manual of course. I think there is an application that does.

You can also use Google Reverse Image search which is pretty hard to find. Go to Google Images and then the second button is a camera icon, click on it and you can upload. This actually worked amazingly well where I found an old photo was taken a Regent’s University in London. You plug that into Google Maps and you have the Lat Long.

I’m trying to do this for old family photos and figure out their location but this isn’t turn out to be so easy.