January 7th, 2025

Machine Learning, My Photo Backups, and 2025.

I don't need a 5090. It'll blow the fuse.

Merry Chistmas, and Happy 2025

It’s still Christmas and all, and now it’s 2025 as well. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and, of course, since yesterday was the Feast of the Epiphany, happy Epiphany to you as well. Quite a long list of “happies” and “merries”, but I don’t really mind.

I’m going to be changing the way I deal with files for this blog. Instead of “month-day-year” for all the backend files, I’m changing that to “year-month-day”. That way I don’t have to deal with posts from June 2024 being next to ones from June 2025 in the file manager.

Updates on Projects:

Project 1:

The iMac:

I decided to leave that one on the back burner for a bit. It’s still sitting there, waiting for me to do something with it.

Project 2:

Core (2) Duo:

I did get a chance to test both laptops on their web capabilities. Both are surprisingly usable, but I would not recommend that you go out and buy such devices.

Project 3:

Photo Backups.

This one went really well. It’s the one that took precedence over all of my other projects, and was a bit of a pain to set up.

The first thing I had to do was figure out Docker. Not too hard, and I managed to figure it out in around thirty minutes. After that, I had to figure out how to get Immich to read my “external library”. I ended up just following their instructions and it worked well in the end.

After all of that, I had around a week of waiting to do. Simply put, the AMD Athlon II X2 250 (try saying that fast) is not meant for machine learning. It’s meant for basic web browsing and office work. Leading to it and its two cores being abysmal for these tasks if you want them done fast. I ended up being patient, and it was worth it.

I can’t show screenshots of the face recognition for privacy reasons, but it is good for the most part. It had no problems picking up my face in most of my photos, as I have thousands of pictures of my face. It could even tell that me 9 years ago is the same person as me today. I did have to go through and manually name people, merge people it thought were different with the person it is supposed to be, and hide ones I didn’t care enough to see in the “people” page, but in the end it worked out really well.

The smart search and its object recognition is really good as well. It seems to be good about knowing what stuff is. I can search “California Missions” and lo and behold, photos of Mission Santa Inez and the such crop up. It doesn’t read location tags from the photos I’ve taken though, so photos of the missions in San Antonio, TX, and anything that has mission-like architecture shows up as well. It does well with birds too. I can search “crow” and photos of crows (with a couple doves mixed in) show up. Same goes for “dove”, “chicken”, “birdbrain” (And YES, that does work), etc. Besides birds, I can search for other things, like “imac”, and for the most part photos of iMacs populate the top results, with the results getting more inaccurate as you scroll down, something I’ve noticed with other queries as well.

It also transcodes my videos down to 480p, so that way I do not have to deal with slow streaming speeds. That took ages, but it was worth it, especially for drone footage that doesn’t play well on most of my PCs.

If it was a better PC with a real PC power supply (not this pre-built power supply straight out of the early 2000s), I could probably find a cheap GPU for its machine learning needs. However, I do not need that kind of power yet, and spending money on something like that, let alone a 5090, is in my dreams.

The app is less than optimal, however. It seems to not back up automatically in the background even though I told it to (configuration issue could be a problem, but I don’t know what is causing issues). It also has issues with downloading images and the such as well. The web interface works just fine though for downloads, it’s just that the app isn’t great yet.

All in all, I’m very happy with this, and I’d recommend Immich to anyone who wants to spend a hour or so getting this set up on a NAS they have, so long as that NAS is in a actual computer plugged into your Ethernet on your router/network switch.

Immich search results with various queries.

LineageOS 22.1, or Android 15

I use LineageOS on my phone, in this case Pixel 6. I have been using LineageOS for around two years on my daily phones, starting with the Pixel 4. Last year, when its battery went belly up again I bought the 6. It got Google Android 15 shortly after I got it, but I was staying with LineageOS, meaning I’d have to wait a while for a upgrade, which showed up on Jan. 1 this year. I ended up upgrading my sister’s Pixel 4 XL and my Pixel 6 that day. Mine had no issues other than Now Playing not working until I cleared Android System Intelligence’s storage and cache. The 4 XL, on the other hand, had issues that broke the experience. Specifically, Glimpse (the photo album from Lineage) would not launch without crashing, and Twelve, the new music player replacing Eleven, did not save her fifty thousand playlists, even though she says VLC picks them up. I have not had either of these issues, since Glimpse launches on mine just fine, and I use VLC since Eleven did not have search. If you’re still on LineageOS 21, I would not upgrade for another couple weeks or so due to the bugginess of 22.1 on launch.

Other than that, most of what I’ve bothered with works. The “improvement” of adding back the sliders for shadow and brightness to the Pixel Camera app along with adding white balance to those sliders has been nice so far, even though Google had them on my Pixel 4. Not to mention Guided Frame in said camera app.

Cheap SSDs are NOT worth it

Years ago, I ended up with two Chromeboxes. A HP one and a ASUS one. Both nearly identical. Well, I modded them, and got Linux running on them, and for some odd reason approved the purchase of two cheap 256GB Dogfish Technologies Gamerking SSDs. These things take those tiny M.2 SSDs, and those weren’t that cheap back then. So we bought them, and they worked fine. Until recently. I had a Chromebox set up for use as a PC for The Siblings, and with LMDE, it worked fine-ish. Well, it started having issues with date and time, not to mention the fact that LMDE’s time changing section disappeared for the most part. It still hobbled along, so I didn’t care, until it just got way too slow. I backed up the stuff from it for the most part and laid the SSD to rest somewhere on my desk. It would reach peak speeds of around 10 MB/s, and would go down to around 500 KB/s with large transfers.

This ended up happening with the other Chromebox, which led a long and happy life being the PC powering a projector at one point, and now powering the small TV. One day it crashed with things like the alt+tab switcher and whatnot on screen. I got it to power off smoothly, and the thing would not turn back on. The Chromebox died at that point, and would not power on. I tried backing up the SSD but it got stuck at around 44%, going at speeds of around 50MB per minute, according to Clonezilla.

The Sibling PC was replaced with a fairly decent laptop that has a i3-6006U in it, which scored well on my Cinebench tests. The performance improvement is amazing, and it has a nice SSD in it too, which I did not replace since it was a good one that came with the device.

I have yet to replace the Chromebox, but I have two Acer Chromebooks that have batteries that don’t charge anymore. I am planning to replace the Chromebox with one of these mostly useless laptops. They both take DDR3L RAM, and the Chromebook has a normal SATA SSD from a reputable manufacturer, so I feel comfortable with it being stuck behind a television. It only needs to handle 1080p YouTube playback. The Celeron 847 in it is slow, but I doubt anyone will care or notice that performance difference.

Mac mini Upgrade

I ended up upgrading the 2010 Mac mini I have from Sonoma to Sequoia. It was mostly smooth. Ensure you have the latest OpenCore first. I downloaded the update via System Settings. During that, OpenCore prompted me to download the patches for Sequoia ahead of time. After about a hour of download/install, it finally worked. Several times throughout the install it had a startup error, just turn your Mac off, then turn it on again and continue on. After that, it was as simple as logging in, installing the patches via OpenCore again, restarting, and carrying on with it like as if it was a normal everyday things.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas lasts until Feb. 2, so take advantage of these days to go drink chocolate, eat egg nog, and enjoy your Christmas lights and music, but also remember that this is CHRISTmas, stemming from “Christ-Mass”. It isn’t just about the presents and all that stuff. It’s about Jesus.

Christmas tree downtown. Not my tree.