July 4th Road Trip: Day 4

We got an early start this morning as we drove into Yellowstone National Park (crossing into Wyoming) hoping to beat some of the traffic and crowds. Driving into Yellowstone was incredible … steaming geyseys and hot springs everywhere. At times it almost looked like those post-apocalyptic (or pre-historic) wastelands you see in the movies, just amazing.

We arrived at the Old Faithful visitor’s center around 9:30am. I had called the park’s prediction line before we left so I knew we’d have enough time to walk around the grounds before the next eruption at around 10:15am. The geyser erupted just about “on time” as predicted and was a pretty cool site to watch. After spending a little more time in the surrounding area and getting some ice cream at the Old Faithful Inn we started driving back out of the park. We made a few more stops at the other hot springs and scenic views (like the Fountain Paint Pots). It was definitely getting more crowded and we were glad we were working our way out of the park by now instead of trying to get in.

At 12:30pm we were back in West Yellowstone and heading west on US-20 into Idaho ten minutes later. The route south on US-20 was very scenic and different from the plains and prairies of North Dakota and Montana. We stopped in Idaho Falls at 2:30pm for lunch at Smitty’s Pancake & Steak House (I recommend the potato pancakes and sourdough waffle!). After lunch it was back onto the interstate system (I-15 now).

At 5:00pm we crossed the border into Utah and by 6:30pm we were checked into our hotel in downtown Salt Lake City. We had wanted to go to Caffé Molise across the street but it was closed for the July 4th holiday. 🙁 So instead we took the opportunity to get some laundry done and just had dinner at the hotel restaurant instead.

Tomorrow is a sight-seeing day!

July 4th Road Trip: Day 3

Happy Independence Day!

Since we only had 8 hours of driving scheduled for today, we slept in a bit and were on the road by 10am after eating breakfast at the hotel. About an hour down I-94 we made a quick scenic stop at the Painted Canyon. Having just been to the Grand Canyon four months ago it wasn’t that impressive but still a pretty view. Half an hour later we crossed the border into Montana (with an 80MPH speed limit!).

1pm found us in Miles City for lunch (Subway) and then two hours later we made a stop at Pomeys Pillar outside of Billings. The Pillar is the site of the only remaining physical evidence of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: Clark’s signature (and the date, July 25, 1806) is carved into the side of the rock. Very cool!

At 6:30pm we were in Bozeman and left the interstate for US-191. The trip west across North Dakota and Montana on I-94/I-90 was scenic, but heading south towards (and through a small portion of) Yellowstone National Park was really impressive (and we’ll see more tomorrow). At 8:00pm we were in West Yellowstone and checked into our hotel by 8:30pm.

The town was hopping with July 4th activities and crowded with tourists (like ourselves). Our plan had been to go out to dinner before the fireworks show so we walked over to Wild West Pizza a few blocks from the hotel. The wait time was 40 minutes so instead we put in a take-out order which would only take 20 minutes. That gave us some time to pick up drinks at the grocery store next door and also wander through a few shops looking for souvenirs. We ate our pizza on a bench on Canyon Street, watched the sun set, and still had time to walk back to the hotel in time for the fireworks show at the end of Yellowstone Avenue.

July 4th Road Trip: Day 2

Today we got up and drove over to Macalaster College where we spent the morning in an information session and taking a tour of campus. By 11:15am we were on the road, heading northwest out of Minneapolis/St. Paul on I-94.

At 2:15pm we made a stop in Fergus Falls to see the library sign and continental divide markers (thanks to Roadside America). We also made quick roadside stops in Moorhead, MN to see a replica viking ship, and then across the border in Fargo, ND where the wood chipper from the movie “Fargo” is kept. At 4:15pm we had a late lunch/early dinner at the Mediterranean Grill before getting back on the interstate.

We also made a stop in Jamestown, ND to see the world’s largest buffalo and check out the Buffalo Museum. This turned out to be a really cool stop, and we caught a glimpse of Dakota Miracle, calf of the albino buffalo White Cloud.

Just before getting to Dickinson, ND as the sun was setting, we spotted Geese in Flight marking the start of the Enchanted Highway. According to Roadside America this is a pretty cool set of large sculptures along 32 miles of a county highway. Unfortunately, it heads directly south and wasn’t along our way so we only saw this first sculpture. By 9:00pm we were in Dickinson and checked into our hotel for the night.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and we’ll spend most of it in the car. 🙂

July 4th Road Trip: Day 1

Today we kick off another family road trip over the July 4th holiday. The next seven days will see us through seven states and three college visits!

This afternoon we flew to Minneapolis on Delta. Somehow we ended up with two aisle seats and a middle in the exit row. I tried changing the one aisle to the window so we could all sit together but for some reason the system wanted to charge me $35 for that seat even though it was in the same row and I had already paid for the exit row seats! I tried last night online and at the airport but couldn’t get the seat changed (and I wasn’t going to let Delta gouge me more). By the time we got to the gate to talk to a rep, the seat was already assigned. Oh well. Other than that, the trip was uneventful (always good).

After getting our bags and picking up our one-way rental car for the week (a Nissan Rogue), we checked into our hotel for the evening across the street from the Mall of America (we were last here back in 2010 for our Mount Rushmore/St. Louis road trip). By now we were hungry for dinner so we walked over to the Mall. Unfortunately we forgot it was a Sunday evening (vacation time!) so most of the retail shops had closed at 7pm, but luckily the restaurants were still open (we ended up at CRAVE).

After dinner and a brief walk around the (now empty) mall, we drove out to get supplies for the road trip. We went to three places (Target, Walgreens, and Wal-Mart) and were unable to find a simple styrofoam cooler so we had to buy a smaller (and more expensive) soft-sided cooler to hold our snacks and drinks for the drip.

Tomorrow, the road trip begins!

My first Piwigo plugin

I switched from Gallery to Piwigo back in 2015 for my photos website software. Since then, one thing that has always bugged me is how Piwigo handles “physical” albums. The “normal” Piwigo user just uploads photos through the web interface, which puts all of the photos into a “/upload/year/month/day/randomfilename.jpg” folder structure. You can then link the photos into one or many “virtual” albums. While this is a pretty flexible approach, I prefer to use a physical album structure: where the albums in my Piwigo site match the physical folder layout on disk.

The problem with using physical albums, however, is that I tend to occasionally re-organize and move a photo or video to a different folder. For example, maybe I had a single photo of the Statue of Liberty which I dumped into my “New York” album, but then I had a few more photos so I decided to create a “Statue of Liberty” sub-album under “New York” and move the exiting photo there. With Piwigo’s synchronization process the file’s original location is deleted from the database and re-added in the new folder location which means all of the metadata associated with the item (tags, description, etc.) are lost and need to be re-entered.

For the past two years I’ve been dealing with this manually: make a note of the description and tags of the photo, physically move the file, run Piwigo’s sync process, and then edit the file and add back the description and tags. Finally, I decided to write a plugin to do this automatically. PPM (Physical Photo Move) is an attempt to alleviate this inconvenience by allowing an existing item in a physical folder to be moved to another folder and keep all the existing metadata.

I just published the first release to Piwigo’s plugins repository tonight and my source code is here on Github. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Defend the Land!

For the third time in a row, my Cleveland Cavaliers are the Eastern Conference Champions!  They’ll face the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, also for the third time in a row:

Cavs-Warriors 2017 Finals

Game 5 against the Celtics was amazing (almost as amazing as Game 2 where they crushed Boston by 44!) and saw the Cavs set franchise records for playoff points scored in a quarter, half, and game. Lebron James also passed Michael Jordan as the all-time playoffs scoring leader (5,995 points).

I know there are probably people that are sick of this match-up, but now they know how I felt when for years it seemed like it was always the Lakers, Bulls, Spurs, or Heat. Now it’s my team and I’m enjoying every minute of it while I can.

Go Cavs! Defend the ‘Land!

Moving from Google Photos to Amazon Prime Photos

I’ve been using Google Photos since it was announced back in 2015 as a belt-and-suspenders second cloud backup of my photo library (my primary backups are still in SpiderOak). I was using the “High Quality” setting since most of my photos are less than 16MP and didn’t want to pay for the extra storage required for “Original Quality.” For no real reason (other than wanting to get more out of my $99/year Amazon Prime subscription), I decided to switch to Amazon Prime Photos on my Amazon Drive.

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Zoning in on the Zesty Zapus

It’s mid-April, which means it’s time for my annual post about spring sports and Linux upgrades! 😉 First, sports …

For the first time in four years my Tampa Bay Lightning are not in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. They were in last place back in February and just missed squeaking into the last wild card spot but fell short. The Cleveland Cavaliers are back in the NBA playoffs, though, and start the first round against the Pacers tomorrow looking to defend their 2016 Championship title. The Tampa Bay Rays and defending 2016 American League Champions Cleveland Indians are off to slow starts, but it’s only April and there’s a long road ahead. On the NFL front, everyone is wondering what the Cleveland Browns will do with their #1 draft pick in two weeks and will actually play the Bucs here for a preseason match-up.

Now on to the new Ubuntu release, 17.04 Zesty Zapus.

Despite being released, I had to use do-release-upgrade -d to kick off the upgrade to Zesty (without the “development” flag it thought there was no new release available yet). Unlike last time, I had no issues with screen and the whole process (downloading the new packages and applying them) went smoothly. I re-applied my customizations to the affected configuration files, rebooted the server, and was back in business.

$ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 17.04
Release: 17.10
Codename: zesty

$ uname -r
4.10.0-19-generic

As expected, I had a few post-upgrade issues that needed to be addressed (nothing major):

  • calibre wouldn’t start in my vnc session: I had to resize the library.png splash screen image from 1024×1024 to 256×256
  • home-assistant wouldn’t start: I had to re-create the python virtualenv setup (I haven’t posted about using home-assistant yet, I’ll try and get to that)
  • the upgrade to vim 8.0 caused a few annoying problems: I had to tweak some settings in /etc/vim/vimrc
  • rather than using my old static /etc/motd, I customized and started using the /etc/update-motd.d scripts for a dynamic login banner

Canonical has now reached the end of the alphabet for their release code names. What name will 17.10 bring us in October? Check back with me then (when hopefully my Cleveland Indians are back in the World Series)!

Southwest Road Trip: Day 4

Since we rode the Tramway yesterday we slept in a bit this morning and then went over to the Anderson Abruzzo International Balloon Museum. Then we drove down to Old Town where we had lunch at Hacienda del Rio on the square (which inadvertently happened to be the same place we ate back in 2000) and then did some shopping.

Later in the afternoon, we drove past UNM and Kirtland Air Force Base before turning in the rental car (1,086 miles driven total!) and taking the shuttle to the airport, er, I mean, Sunport.

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