Category: Uncategorized

Digital media – what we do

I’ve been working on and off to digitize photos, videos, music and other media. Some efforts have been relatively easy, some much less so. Here’s a quick summary of what I’m using:

Photos:

For long-term storage and organization, I’m using Mylio+ on Windows, iOS and Mac. This is a subscription product, about $130/year. This product stores all of your photos in “vaults” on devices you control (your hard drive, your mobile device, and others.) You can also setup mirrors of these vaults on other devices, and cloud-based backups as well. They’ve made many many enhancements since I started using the system a few years ago. Updating metadata for each photo is particularly key, and it has a reasonably robust system for identifying and tagging people, places and things.

For print photos, I’m using PhotoMyne. Another subscription, about $49/year. This app makes it fairly simple to arrange 1-10 photos on a flat, well-lit surface, take a picture of them using your iPhone camera, and then automatically separates them into individual photos, straightening them and cleaning them up. It was invaluable when I was gathering photos for my daughter Bethany’s wedding last year, many of which were taken before we started using digital. A caveat: I bought a cheap USB/LED lighting setup for about $20 to address lighting problems, a couple of “clickers” that operate the shutter button on my phone through bluetooth to avoid movement, and a flexible stand to hold my iPhone above the pictures. The photos really need to come out of photo album pages before you scan them, especially for really old albums.

Videos:

We have a fairly large (~100) VHS videotapes ranging from 20-40 years old. They are decaying, and we haven’t had a VCR attached to our main system for years. Fortunately, most of the tapes were “time-shifting” recordings of broadcasts (remember when people did that?) I was able to use an inexpensive (~$40) USB adapter to connect to one of our old hifi VCRs, and have been able to transfer some of the tapes using that an OBS Studio ($free). The quality is a bit less than great, and I might send some of the tapes off to professional services.

We have about a dozen 8mm videocassettes (Sony). I haven’t used our circa 1991 Sony Handycam in many years, and was disappointed to find it no longer powers on reliably or plays anything. For these tapes, I used a local-to-me conversion company, Heirloom Cloud Inc. Not the cheapest service at about $20/tape, but they did the work in about a week and I was able to download the results from their cloud service. I’ll probably use them again.

I’m not digitizing DVD or Blu-ray disks much, but it’s pretty easy to do using MakeMKV and an external drive. For now, I’m subscribing to a private Plex server that has virtually everything I own already on it.

I did setup a Synology NAS system with 4 drives, so I have a local network attached storage array with 20TB available. This also runs a local Plex server for my video collection, and runs a few other container applications for other functions. There are cheaper large external disks available, but I’ve had bad luck with most of them, as they stop working after a few years.

Music:

I’m using J-River Media Center for my digital music collection. This is about $40/version (lots of other price options) and runs on various platforms. It has been exceptional for organizing and fixing up the tagging on the music (getting the artists/titles/tracks/artwork/etc. right.) It plays back virtually all music formats and can handle high-definition devices like DACs for lossless playback. It also acts as a DLNA client and server, so I can play the music on various devices. I’m slowly but surely ripping CDs to FLAC files, which don’t play nice with Apple Music but otherwise seem to be the best format. I avoid using MP3 or other lossy formats, and am trying to weed out old low-res files. I occasionally buy a high-res copy of certain recordings, but have found that my 65-year-old ears are not quite what they used to be (I never was a “golden-ears” listener.)

My most critical listening happens through my iPhone, using a pair of Sennheiser Momentum headphones and a USB-C headphone DAC from iFi. I can play my network library several different ways using J-River’s J-Remote app, DLNA apps, PlexAmp and others.

A/V System:

We’re one of the shrinking group of people that have a 5.1 surround-sound system with a A/V Receiver and actual separate speakers – not great ones, but they do the job. We use an Apple TV 4 (the 2022 model) for virtually all of our video and music listening – by far the best option I’ve tried. The receiver is a Denon 7.1 model that we got from Costco. We do have an aging Sony Blu-ray player, which also plays SACDs. (I have a separate player than can rip them.) We have Roku devices in our other rooms.

We are “cord-cutters”. We were able to switch to AT&T fiber when they finally wired our neighborhood – this has been worlds better than Comcast, WOW or AT&T U-verse – fortunately we’ve always had choices here. Most of the time, we watch one of the paid services, and I’ve been paying for ad-free versions of YouTube TV, Apple TV, Netflix, and YouTube Premium (and for some reason paying to share the accounts with grown family members.) I find myself watching YouTube Premium more than anything else. We generally only watch news and some sports on YouTube TV, but that does have DVR functionality. We’ve tried using an attic antenna for over-the-air (OTA) TV, which generally works okay, but don’t have a device that can record from that. It’s surprising to me how hard it is to find a stream of the evening news programs.

I can expand on any of these – let me know if you’re interested!

Still here

I haven’t posted here recently, and since I have doubts about who looks or cares, that’s probably not much of an issue.

Why is a better subject. Aside from the usual “overwhelmed by life” problem, fear keeps me quiet. We live in strange times in America (perhaps everywhere.) Worry is everywhere, and I certainly have lots of things that I’d like to talk about, rationally, with other people. I am on nearly every social media platform – except for the truthy one, which I refuse to legitimize by even visiting. That will tell you one thing about me relative to the issues that have split us apart. Don’t talk about religion, politics or money in polite company, right? In mixed company or family gatherings, sure. But isn’t social media supposed to be a place where we can say what we think? I don’t because I feel that I will be attacked or shunned. Frankly, that’s a horrible feeling.

This blog is mine. Nobody else’s. I should be able to vent my opinions here. But I’m not convinced.

In the meantime, I continue to fill my life with the ongoing challenges of my job, video work, trying to digitize stuff, my wonderful family, church, singing with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra Chorus, keeping us with a variety of TV series and movies, and the proverbial “more”. My day job involves identity and access management for the College, using Active Directory, Entra, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, as well as being the email expert for Exchange Online. I also spend lots of time trying to organize and cultivate a very large personal collection of digital and physical media (music, video, photos).

There are lots of things I think we can discuss intelligently. Let me know if you want to know about any of the above, or anything else.

Witnessed a shooting in 1991

One of the more sordid memories from my past:  On my 30th birthday, April 8, 1991, I witnessed the shooting of 3 men outside the restaurant where I was having lunch.

3 Men Are Shot On Parkway Cigna Executives Hit By Lone Gunman; 1 Critically Injured

I had just finished lunch at the TGI Friday’s near my office in Philadelphia.  I was sitting with a good friend near the front window.  I had a front-row seat as I watched a man walk up to 4 men on the sidewalk, point what looked to me like an enormous revolver at them, and shoot 4 times.  Then, he turned and left.  The men lay motionless on the sidewalk, their blood pooling under them.  They were executives from Cigna, out celebrating Peter Foy’s 48th birthday.  Peter died on the 9th from his injuries.  Two other men were injured, and a fourth escaped injury by diving into bushes.

I initially thought this might be some kind of film scene.  After a few seconds, it was clear there were no cameras, and what I saw out the window was real.

It was over very quickly.  When people inside the restaurant heard the shots, they dove to the floor for cover, except for me.  It was a beautiful day outside, the street was relatively crowded, and there were lots of witnesses.  The police arrived quickly, and I eventually was brought over to the police station to give a statement.  It was an abject lesson in the unreliability of eyewitness accounts – I think I remembered correctly the shooter’s general appearance and the shirt that he wore, but not what the gun looked like.  I wasn’t called back or asked to testify.

Later I noticed that a bullet had hit the wall a couple feet from where I sat.  It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that I might have been hit.

The shooter was quickly found and arrested.  Dr. Jean-Claude Pierre Hill, who was scheduled to start a psychiatric residency at a nearby hospital the next month, was arrested on the 9th near his parents’ home in Virginia.  In short-order it was reported that he was mentally ill, and that he thought the mafia or the CIA were following him.

Doctor Arrested In Shootings Had No Known Ties To Cigna Executives

After this, there wasn’t much more information.  In fact, I don’t remember hearing about the trial or sentencing, even though the shooter’s name was permanently burned into my memory.  I just looked it up today, and found he received a life sentence on December 12, 1992.

Hill To Start Serving Life Sentence At Farview Psychiatric Facility

The account of his sentence includes details of how the shooter lied on a federal form 10 days before the shooting in Virginia to buy guns, including the murder weapon, and had purchased two Colt .45 pistols, four gun clips and 270 rounds of ammunition.

I didn’t know any of these people, and can only imagine the pain all of the families and victims experienced.  It was a random, tragic crime.  I’ll never forget.

You can probably guess how I feel about gun control now!

Repost: What to do when your email address sends spam

I run into this fairly often at the College, usually after a student or unsuspecting employee gives away their password by “opening a shared document”.

What to do when your email address sends spam

Thinking about religion

This post on Salon got me thinking once again about my beliefs, or lack thereof. I find this a very difficult subject to address even privately, except with my wife, because so much judgmental behavior can come from discussions. Yet, I have significant doubt of my own faith.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/religions_smart_people_problem_the_shaky_intellectual_foundations_of_absolute_faith/

What am I up to lately?

Just a quick update:
– Finished the CSO Chorus year with a big concert last night with Westminster and the Spoleto Orchestra – went really well
– Been trying out FourSquare. Sorry to my Facebook friends who get annoyed by too many updates – I’m trying to find the balance
– Got ahold of a collection of Rolling Stone Top 500 songs of all time – cool stuff

Moved to WordPress

We’ve moved – from Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.  This was really Microsoft’s choice – and was the simplest choice for migration.  Microsoft is shutting the Spaces feature down.

Hello!

You found me!  Welcome to my little corner of the web on MSN’s new Spaces blog feature.  This is an augmentation to my website, http://jfschroeder.com, which I’ve struggled with for years trying to determine purpose and whatnot.  I’ve simply found that it’s tough to keep a website up to date and relevant, and it’s not terribly dynamic.  Plus, I’ve been trying to figure out if the website is for my ideas, my history, my business, or whatever.  And despite what Microsoft might want you to believe, it’s not easy to add things like blogging, unarguably the hottest Internet communication technology out there, to a website using their own tools like FrontPage, which I use exclusively for web publishing.

I have strong opinions about many things, even though my wife thinks I simply believe what the latest critic has said about a subject.  As I’ve gotten older, I find that I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like to know, nor do I have the time to learn as much as I’d like, but my years and experiences have given me perspective to reason through things.

I’d probably best be described as a liberal, Democratic northern-born Episcopalian living in an arch-conservative state.  I am straight, married only once and for almost 19 years to my social conscience, Laura.  I have three beautiful children:  Alexander is 14, big for his age, smart and a gifted singer; Benjamin is 12, autistic, a handful, occasionally a joy, and also smart in his own ways; Bethany is 8 going on 18, social, pretty, smart, and also a singer.  Laura sings also!

I’ve watched my religious denomination and my political party get torn apart recently by nearly unresolvable issues like homosexuality and war.  Our president seems bent on destabilization of the Middle East in the name of preserving us from terrorism, while seeming to be blind to the incentive that his efforts give to increasing terrorism.  We are constantly being preached to about morality and values, frequently by people who have been married multiple times.

My family has experienced tremendous challenges, and has been helped by a wide variety of family, friends, church and even governmental generousity.  We understand the meaning of charity, and have been repeatedly humbled by people willing to give without expecting to receive.  We’ve lived without health insurance for years at a time, and have seen the devastation of lengthy unemployment and disability first-hand.  Our kids challenge our time and the meager resources of our educational system, particularly in special education.

I’ll expand on much of this in future posts.  Thanks for stopping by!

 -JFS