Sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - the little cat gave us a not-so-little health scare, and that ate the weekend and my extra brain capacity yesterday.

Fortunately she is much better again, and it was not something utterly serious like a tumour, but "only" a very severe eye infection. 

And yes, you are getting a cat pic.

The vet confirmed our estimate that she must be around 20 years old now, so we always hear the clock ticking softly in the background. For now, though, she is mostly back to her normal self, keen on food (more than would be good for her), often up for a cuddle, and moving slowly and with care - no wonder, as she's almost blind at this point.

Today was definitely and undoubtedly an Aaargh! day. 

If you've been following this blog for a bit, you will be familiar with my search of a new image database to use instead of my old one, which is not supported anymore. Well. I had a go again yesterday at the migration process, looking at some possible pitfalls... and there was not just one, but two rather large ones. 

The first is the lack of support for videos. I asked in the support forum, and they'd like to add it, but that has not made it to the development timeline/plan yet... so whether it will come at all, or if so when, is unclear. That would have meant organising all the video files in a separate programme, or in a somehow separate way, which would have sucked.

The second one, though, was the absolute bummer. My current system relies on there being a watch folder; the programme, as the word implies, watches that folder and imports everything new into the database. No caption, no tags, obviously, only the exif data contents - but then I can go through the new files and finish giving them metadata. Tropy, the thing I thought would save all my problems, also allows you to set a watch folder. Unfortunately, though, it allows you the setting, but at least in my case it does not do the watching. None of the files in the watch folder appeared in the database. 

And that makes it a hard no, and a back to square one for me. 

So. Any of you has a hint on what programme runs locally, refers to an existing file structure without re-naming or shifting or copying files, supports video formats (at least to include them, internal viewer entirely optional), supports fuzzy dates (as in a date range, or only the year), has keywords/tags, and bonus points for it being free/open source or at least a single-pay license, and the possibility to sort into albums/boxes/lists or whatever virtual subgroups independent of the folder structure. Oh yes, and it should be possible to install, set up and run it without learning how to program first.

Sometimes it's really frustrating.

So... AI. You know, that ChatGPT guy and its colleagues.

There's quite a few things that I do think these helpers (because that's what they are) should not be used for, and I am not too happy about how some of them were trained. (Yes, I'm looking at you, illegal use of books for training, without informing or paying the authors.)

However... for some things, AI assistance can be really nice. A two-liner just helped me fix a website problem that I had, and my only complaint is that I should have done that earlier, as it would have saved me quite a bit of reading help files and trying to figure out what to do that needs to be done. 

My problem with code is that I can understand what I'd need to do from reading the help files, but I lack the basic knowledge to know what environment I need to do it. So... yeah. That's a slightly awkward place to get stuck in, by the way.

In this case, it was integrating a font in a special way - and my workaround only worked halfway, because one of the commands in the workaround just refused to do what it was supposed to do. Enter the Most Patient Husband of Them All, who let me explain the problem, tried to see if there was anything I had overlooked (yes, he did, but while that would have prevented the best code from running, it did not solve the non-existing sufficient code problem)... and then, as I was about to let it rest because I had already lost way more time than intended, he casually said something like "and this is actually where AI can be a real help, you tell it to write a php-file for you to do the job you need done, and then you only have to check if it's all okay and correct". Well. I can check code, I just can't write it. 

So, five minutes or so later... problem solved. 

(Another use that can be a real help, by the way, is translating chunks of text. You will still have to check to see if it's not weirdly wrong at some points, but it saves my dictionaries from a lot of wear and tear.)

And now I can try to actually get some other things done!

Well. Nothing utterly new, or such things. I'm more or less trying to prep the next event (a workshop for a volunteer group at a museum), get the image database updated and finally transferred to the new system (fingers crossed nothing will explode there), and try to get more done on the other open or have-to-be-maintenanced things.

Yesterday evening was mainly spent on preparing a new batch of cat food, so Madame can go on having food she enjoys (a little too much, at times), and we spent part of our lunch break today outside photo-hunting insects and obsidentifying them.

Have I mentioned that app before? It's what we use these days to identify plants or animals that we don't know. It's usually quite good and quite reliable - sometimes there are hallucinations, but these are typically easy to catch. The app is called "Obsidentify", here's the website with information about it, and by using it you become a citizen scientist (or, in this case, more a citizen science minion) helping to track species and, via that, climate change and other changes in habitats.

We now know that there's a special kind of aphids hanging out on willows. In our case, that's also the meeting place and orgy location for a lot of Asian Ladybugs... or, as we call it, the "Ladybug Swinger Club".

The little hedgehog is about ready to roam free again - with continued support in form of food offers. (There's just too few insects out and about for them to find enough food when just foraging. Feel free to google about the loss of insect mass in the last years, but sit down before you do.) So we built a cat-safe hedgehog food station and it had the first trial run yesterday.

This morning, when I went to take out the food bowl, I found this: 

I had not thought that hedgehogs were such scathing restaurant critics! Good thing the little prickly lady does not have internet access, or we'd probably have found a zero star google review as well.

(Hedgehog station told me that they quite like to do that. I guess it's no problem when you are roaming and just drop your thank-you where you ate the bugs, but dropped in a plate, it does have a defintitive comical value.) 

Here I am, back at work, the cat hanging out on the desk (over my arm, of course), and me catching up. Not quite at a snail's pace - but then, they actually are not that slow when they want to get somewhere. 

We have quite a lot of grapevine snails in the garden, to our delight. I'm not so fond of the slugs, but the snails are all welcome. (It probably helps that we don't have a lot of things growing that are attractive to snails and slugs, and/or so delicate they will get eaten up.)

This one here is clearly on the way somewhere. Maybe to some snail meetup - a few days ago, there was a group of three of them very close to each other...

Well, not quite holidays, but the Most Patient Husband of Them All has a few days off next week, so I will take some time off as well. Because, uh, I think I don't need to explain the reasons here, right?

Anyway, this means I will take off the blog next week; I'll be back on May 5 with the usual mix of random things I found on the Internet, cat pictures, weather reports and the occasional rant about stuff going on here. And while I'm doing whatever, you get to enjoy this image of the little hedgehog we found a few weeks ago.

She's now back with us, spending a few days in a corral to get used to the surroundings again before we'll open everything up again and she can roam freely.

(She was named Katrina, by the way, by the hedgehog station staff.)