Organizing

Sorting Out all My Writing

Coding Python isn’t the only project I’ve been working on recently, though it IS the major one.  Another project I’ve been working on, that is at least tangential to “modernizing how I code” is organizing all of my writing.  I write a LOT.  I sometimes list “writing” as a hobby, but I almost never list it as a “Primary Hobby” but it’s arguably the one hobby I have done the longest, even longer than collecting toys, and that I would like to think I do, pretty well.  Ok, no scratch that, I’ve been a “Gamer” since before I could really write.  Actually, it seems like all of my “major hobbies” started when I was like 5-10, so I guess those “formative years” really do matter.  My first programming was on the family’s old Franklin PC with two 5/25 floppy drives, writing BASIC that my dad had taught me.  He had been going to college for Computer Science at the time.

Anyway, writing.

I write, a lot.  I write about all sorts of topics.  Sometimes I write technical write ups, sometimes I write (purposely) shitty Final Fantasy VII Fan Fiction. I write casual blog posts about music, and movies and toys, I write detailed instructions for work or FAQs for Video Games. They aren’t all “winners” but I have gotten a lot of compliments of the years for my writing style and methods.  i also save everything.  I mean, literally EVERYTHING I create.  There are a few things I no longer have and I still think about them sometimes, and wish I had copies.  A few years ago I even started transposing some of my old paper journals and stories into digital text.  

The end result is that I have a lot of files in a lot of formats. Some are text files, some are Word Files, some are exported XML archive files.  A few are PDF based exports as well as some olf “Windows Live Writer” files.

As part of my personal journey to “level up” a bit on my computer skills (which are already pretty great), I have been working on getting more accustom to using Markdown.  Markdown is essentially “Fancy Text Files”. They are plain text files, with special symbols inserted occasionally to make things look prettier in a Markdown reader.  The thing is, this means they are very compact in size and can still be read by even the most basic reader (albeit with the random symbols inserted sometimes).

Most of this effort involves a LOT of copy and pasting.  I’ve converted a bunch of Word Docs I had over to Markdown files. Text docs aren’t generally huge to start with, but the Markdown files mean files that are sometimes 1/4th the file size.  When we are talking hundreds to thousands of files, this is significant savings.  So far, I’ve been skipping reviews if they have embedded images, but I already have those images saved elsewhere, so I may revisit that concept.

This also means finally sorting through some other “to sort” boxes.  For example, for a while, I was posting blog posts with Microsoft’s now discontinued “Windows Live Writer”.  The shitty part is, it used a proprietary format that even Word can’t open.  Fortunately, there is a open source alternative, “Open Live Writer”.  I don’t use it to post, but I can open those old Live Writer Files and convert them to useful Markdown Files.

One fun thing I did was export all of my Reddit Posts, and pull out anything over 500 characters as a “Journal Entry”.

Another source is old WordPress Exports. I have used my newfound l33t Pythonista Skills to build a sweet little script that takes a WordPress XML export, and parses through it for dates, titles, and content. Next, it cleans up the post content a bit (it’s not perfect sadly), and spits it all out to a series of files in the format I want.This script could easily be modified to work with other similar data exports like Reddit)

That code can be found over on Github. It’s probably buggy, but it works for the most part.

Which brings up sorting.  I have posted a few times about digital organization, and I’ve gotten the text down to a science as well.  A folder called “Journal” in my One Drive, which syncs to several PCs and my NAS.  Inside it’s sorted by year, inside each year are files in YYYY.MM.DD – TOPIC.md.  I’ve also incorporated this into my blogging workflow, and so partially written posts in the current year get X_ added to the front, so they all sort to the bottom, but I have an idea of when I had the idea.

This whole new system also allows me an easy way to just Journal occasionally.  One thing I’ve been trying to work on is that “not everything has to be a blog post”.  Sometimes it’s good to just, write, for myself, date it, and spit it out.

It’s healthy to get those thoughts out sometimes. For example, would you like to know how many times I’ve randomly bitched about the show Glee over the past 10-15 years?  Because it’s more than is probably healthy.

Anyway, this project is still a work in progress, but I’ve made a LOT of progress and I’m pretty happy with how it’s been going.

Organizing Digitally – Backups

Backups are the real key and benefit to digital media. It’s also best to have a multi layered plan for back ups. Specifically, i like the 3-2-1 plan that is often pushed. Three copies, Two different storage devices or media, One copy off site. I would like to add that it’s best if at least one of these is automatic. Ideally, you should have some sort of versioning, in case the backup becomes infected or locked by malware, but that tends to be more costly to do, and it’s kind of overkill unless your data is absolutely mission critical.

Old Backup Methods\

I wanted to touch on some old back up methods I’ve used over the year before going on to my current set up. Many of them were alright, but often had pitfalls. Though I am sure my current system has holes as well, it works well enough, for now.

The classic “oldest” would be CD-Rs. And an extension of this with DVD-Rs. I have not really relied on this method for something like 15-20 years but it’s one of the easiest methods of doing back ups of important data. Burn the data to disc, label the disc, store it away, A plus is that if you date the discs, you can also end up with redundant copies easily, in case one disk is damage or fails. Basic DVDs do have a shelf life, though which is a downside. There are long lasting archival discs available, and I’ve actually considered adding these into my Backup workflow again. I have since pulled all of my old archival DVDs and CDs forward to more modern solutions and sorted the data.

For a while I used a large capacity USB drive. It was something like 500GB, which was huge at the time. Eventually, unfortunately, this drive failed. I had also failed to have a second copy of the data, it was just an archive of data, so, while I managed to recover a lot of the data, I lost some family photos files.

For a while I used Amazon Photos as a backup. This worked fairly well, I get unlimited storage with Amazon Prime for photos. There were still several problems with this method. One, it was unlimited for Photos ONLY, which meant videos absolutely had to be sifted out since other files were limited to a measly 10GB. Eventually support for the automatic part that worked with my NAS was ended as well, so that pretty much killed that as a reliable backup. It also was flaky when deleting files. My wife had sorted out out photos and deleted fuzzy or duplicate images, and many returned and were re-synced from the cloud copies. To get around this I had to disable and disconnect the backup, purge out everything int he cloud, then let it re-sync entirely up after she finished sorting files. Not ideal.

Google photos has similar problems, coupled with Google’s new policy removing unlimited photo back ups. There also isn’t an automatic API based sync on my NAS for Google Photos.

One Drive

After shopping around on several different systems compatible with my NAS, I went ahead and chose One Drive. Specifically, Office 365 Family. I’ve considered subscribing since Office 365 was launched and based on quick rough calculations, for the same cost of something like Amazon EC2 or Glacier or Backblaze, or whatever (I can never keep all these names straight honestly), I decided I could get Office 365 Family instead, which effectively gives me 6TB of storage to work with. O365 Fmily gives 6 accounts 1 TB each. I also have 5 members in my family, all of which use Office to varying degrees (currently using an outdated copy I purchased for cheap through a work program). Except none of them are ever going to really use a lot of that 1TB, so I could easily create connections as needed through the NAS to sync backups to each account.

For now, most of the data sits in two accounts, mine, and a new account created solely for core backups. The fun part is, I could even manually push data up to one of the other accounts occasionally (say, yearly), as a slow backup if I wanted. The Core Backup has all of the Family Photos and Videos and a folder of important documents like taxes and bill statements etc pushed to it. My Onedrive has a copy of my personal document archive and personal photos archive.

The nice bonus is I can now access my documents more easily from anywhere. One Drive sharing also allows me to access the backup drive, using my main account. It also all syncs automatically, even though primary access to these files is all done over network shares. Plus it’s more reliable than Amazon Photos.

I also dumped Dropbox in favor of One Drive, with this new storage available. I had mostly been using Dropbox as a sync for “working files” between my laptop and desktop. Now I just use One Drive.

Flash Drives and Regular Drives

But hey, 3 copies right? More can be better though. I bought a couple of large capacity flash drives that I dump all of the family photos and important files to on an annual basis. These go in the fire safe.

Three Copies, Two (Three) different media types, One off Site.

I also have an external USB adapter for SATA Drives, and a pile of drives in storage. For general “data security”, I basically never throw out old hard drives. When I donate an old PC, I will always strip out the drive and dump it into storage somewhere. These are not always large drives, but they do usually still work. Hard Drives also have a longer shelf life than Flash Drives, so occasionally I will make a sort of “Deep Archive” copy of the data to a spare Hard Drive, that gets wrapped in a static bag and stored away.

The entire point of all this, is basically to avoid ever losing data again, like when my old USB drive crashed. It’s not 100% bulletproof, but it’s good enough that little damage could easily be done. If there were some sort of ransomware attack, I always have the drives backups, even if it got synced to One Drive. If the house burns down, there is always the cloud.

Organizing Digitally – Videos

While I have been pretty diligent about organizing my Digital Photos, for the longest time I have severely neglected my Digital Videos. Partially because I didn’t really have any good/easy way to watch them, partially because they were just… sort of a pain to deal with.

That isn’t to say that I don’t know how to work with video files. I have worked in the technician back end of the broadcast and cable television industry for over 15 years now, and I have done end to end production (recording, editing, mastering out) of some local events in the past. Granted, I’m not adding tons of graphics or after effects, but I do know what I am doing. The real issue is that it’s super time consuming, on top of the thankless part mentioned above, of no real convenient set up to watch them.

VHS Tapes

In 2020, I decided it was time to fix this problem. It sort of started with my wife asking if I could digitize all of her mother’s old VHS tapes of family events. This actually ended up being slightly trickier than expected. First off, I sort of had an old VCR, but it died halfway through the process, which is why it was a “sort of” to begin with. I borrowed her mom’s VCR to finish the task. The second issue was the input to the PC. I have 3 or 4 different types of digital capture devices that take RCA and cable input, but getting Windows 10 to recognize these is extremely hit and miss, even with the correct drivers.

At one point we were going to set up my daughter to do the recording part, so she could review them as she recorded them. After trying for too long, I simply could not get her laptop to recognize any of the capture devices. In fact, I could not get any of the laptops to recognize them. Using numerous different drivers, including pulling the drivers from my Desktop (where it does work) off. Even my desktop only ever manages to work with one of these devices and occasionally requires a reboot to get it to show up at all.

I’m not sure if it’s old hardware in the Capture cards or just old technology.

The second issue is recording software. There are a fair number of older TV tuner software packages out there, but as near as I can tell, most of them are also not particularly compatible with modern operating systems. What I did find worked well though was OBS, or Open Broadcast Software. It was a simple matter of adding the capture device in as a source, it basically shows up as a web-camera, then using OBS’s record function. I’d already been doing something similar doing screen captures of some concerts, so that workflow was already there.

This all leads back into the “It takes a lot of time” aspect of the original issue. There isn’t any quick way to digitize a VHS tape. You stick it in, hit record, and wait for however long it plays out. I also didn’t want stray sounds showing up in the recording (despite setting up OBS to only capture the VHS input, I just didn’t trust it), plus I didn’t want to accidentally create any heavy lead moments that might glitch the recording, so recording also meant not actually using the PC during this wait.

Digital Videos

I also had a ton of digital videos piled up and semi sorted, and somewhat renamed. I’ve used at least half a dozen cameras over the past 15+ years of recording family videos, plus probably another dozen of phones from old flip phones to cheap androids, to better androids. Each includes it’s own file naming scheme and slightly different file format.

One problem I came across as I started compiling everything into the Synology Video server, was that not every format was compatible for playback. This meant finding a format that DID work, and converting everything to match. I kept an archive on an old drive of the originals “just in case” but I set about using FFMPEG to convert everything to a compatible, size efficient mp4 format.

I did this on my secondary project server, which has a ton of storage for temporarily holding a lot of video, and a convenient command line interface for running the conversion. It takes a long time for the conversion, but it’s something I can easily run through Screen over SSH, then leave to run for a few days, while it chugs through a year’s worth of video. The command I used was:

for i in *; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}-c.mp4"; done

For each file in the directory, run ffmpeg on it to convert it, then name it [Original Filename]-c.mp4.

The -c added tot he file name was for “converted”, and it prevented the program for stopping if it came across a file that was already .mp4, which would produce a “do you want to overwrite this” prompt. I didn’t want to overwrite the originals, because I often just kept the original files, but sometimes I still wanted to convert them, in case there was a significant file size savings.

One key step here that I almost forgot was renaming the files BEFORE the conversion. I use a pretty standardized convention when sorting digital files of YYYY.MM.DD – File Description.

For example: “2007.07.04 – July 4th”.

The renaming needs to be done before the conversion, because often I am pulling the date from the file metadata on the original file. Ffmpeg is creating a new file, so all of the NEW metadata is inaccurate. The Date Created, Date Modified, etc, is all based on the day the conversion was done. Sometimes you can still pick the date out from the original file name, for example, one of the phones would make files like “VID_20070704_193606_001” which would be cone for something like “VID_Date_Time_Filenumber”, so I could still find the original date after conversion, but often they are just “IMG4089.AVI”. Which is just a sequential number of which file was created.

Combining Videos

Another step I took during the sorting of the videos was to combine video segments into meaningful, single videos. This also meant deleting out short nothing videos of the floor, or a restless crowd while waiting for a school function. It also meant cutting down some of the cruft around the edges. Part of the motivation for doing this was, after getting the Synology Video set up going, it was clear that playing a series of single videos such as:

2015.05.20 - Concert Band Concert 01.mp4
2015.05.20 - Concert Band Concert 02.mp4
2015.05.20 - Concert Band Concert 03.mp4
2015.05.20 - Concert Band Concert 04.mp4
2015.05.20 - Concert Band Concert 05.mp4

Was incredibly cumbersome. Often when recording kid’s school programs, I would record the opening, then stop and restart for the first song or act, then break in between songs for band or chorus. Sometimes it would just be a series of short, but related events, like videos of people sledding.

I took these individual videos, dumped them into Adobe Premier in order, trimmed them up, then exported them out as a single video, for example:

2015.05.20 - Concert Band Concert.mp4

Cat Videos

We have had a total of something like 15 cats, and currently have 7 cats. Everyone loves recording videos of the cats. When getting to the end of the process, it became clear that the cat videos needed to be pulled out into their own folders, so that if someone wanted to just watch cats, they could do so, and someone wanting to watch family videos, could just see family videos.

Youtube

I have several mostly neglected Youtube channels. As I finished up videos, I selected some that I’ve been slowly uploading to Youtube, on my “Personal Channel“. I’ve been trying to sort of “get into” the idea of actually doing some more produced videos, and this is mostly a push to try to motivate myself to do so. In case you were wondering, I also have a more popular channel that’s basically for Lameazoid.

Process Flow

The overall process flow started with renaming the original “Home Movies” folder on the NAS to “Home Movies to Convert”, then copying all of the files to a folder on my secondary server titles “Home Movies Originals Backup”. The copy, as you might expect, took a very long time, as it was 341 GB of video files.

The next step was to move the files out of each yearly folder to a different folder on the File Server. this also meant watching each video, at least a little, to rename the ones that needed renamed. Afterwards, i would run the ffmpeg conversion on the folder and wait.

Once the videos were converted, I would set about combining them in Premier and rendering the files out. In some cases the video didn’t need edited and was already a single file.

Often while working in Premier, which took a few days and sessions to get through a year, I would start the next batch of conversions for the next year.

Once the videos were converted, or not if not needed, I would dump them all back into a new Home Videos folder, named for the year of those videos.

Each video is named per the convention above, with “YYYY.MM.DD – Description”, chosen because it means everything always sorts in chronological order by name, and the videos are sorted into folders by year, or “Cats”, then by year. The VHS videos are sporadically placed across the 90s, so they are simply in a folder together titled “VHS”.

The End Result

The final end all of this work was two fold. One, I wanted it to be usable in DS Video on the Fire TV. Second, I wanted it backed up in One Drive.

One of the biggest secondary benefits of this process was file size savings. The end result was that the new Home Videos folder is a mere 133GB in size, over 200GB less. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it helps. Some of the original videos, particularly the ones I had recorded on my Panasonic DVC camera, would clock in at close to 25GB in a single file.

the nice thing is that going forward, keeping this up to date will be easy. Most of the newer videos we as a family record, are compatible with the Video Station software by default. So no need to convert them all. Also, all of my kids are out of school. So I will be producing way less videos in that regard. Basically around 2017 or so, you would think all the kids transformed into cats. This was around the time they were all done with school events and the time they all got modern cell phones. The number of kid videos dropped to almost nothing while the number of Cat videos skyrocketed.