A fun little video of Scarlett going from QUITE far away to pretty local in demonstrating where we live.

In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.

We went apple-picking just about midway into October, but this year only the Stayman apples had ripened by that time.

They had this creepy-looking building near the apples, so I decided to take a photo. While I was processing it, I couldn’t decide which look I liked best, so here are my favorites:

A while back I wrote about geotagging my photos when I was using Lightroom. I wanted to demonstrate how much easier it is with Digikam as everything’s built in and it works nicely and quickly.

https://youtu.be/mVgLWcRqfL4

Here’s how it can look as you click on each photo:

For the first time in something like 3 years I took my Sigma 120-400mm lens to the zoo. I had intended to get some Firefox (Red Panda) photos and videos, but they weren’t there. That was also a bummer for Scarlett as seeing the Red Pandas was the reason she’d asked us to take her to the zoo.

First off we saw one of the pandas:

But what was a lot of fun was taking photos of the birds; birds that would have been quite hard for me to see in the wild. I think they came out pretty nicely considering the darkness in the bird house and the fact that I was hand-holding the lens. It seems like some of the higher ISO photos didn’t even have too much noise, so I’ll explore using it in the future to get the exposure a little more correct in camera. (if the photos look blurry when you click on them, give it a little time to load)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First a quick note for when this appears outside of Goodreads (on my blog, for example): This review will have SPOILERS and outside of Goodreads I don’t think the spoiler tag is going to work to shield you from the spoilers. You have been warned!

In my last review I (rhetorically) asked Ms Rowling to surprise me - to make Harry lose sometimes and perhaps have the kids not always succeed at saving the day. Ms Rowling gave me that and so much more. As I noted before, she delights in Red Herrings (these books being something like Teen Wizard Noir), so my attention was on high alert this time around. Looking back at my status updates I was right or almost right about the following (will be in a spoiler tag):

A mixture of a growing Ebook library, tracking my goals in Goodreads, and Calibre’s ability to generate a catalog have made me decide to start tracking things quarterly in the book dimension as well. Here’s my second report.

Total Ebooks: 419 (includes catalogs; increase of 2 books)

Total Unread: 304 (decrease of 9)

Goodreads 2015 Challenge: 65 of 30 books complete. Last time I went way over. We’ll see what this year brings.

After getting to MGMT alphabetically, I tired of going through the list alphabetically. While I have rediscovered some music, I wanted to go back to my auto-playlists which would give me my favorites. I could always get back to going through things alphabetically in the future. One way to accomplish what I wanted was to see which songs don’t have a score - another would be to create a low score playlist I could run every once in a while to see if anything that had scored lowly was now something I wanted to hear.

Recently we went to the pumpkin patch to get a couple pumpkins for the house and for Scarlett to have some fun at the farm. Here’s a gallery of my favorite photos from that visit and aftermath: