Sarah Rainsberger

How to Connect a Chromebook to Radisson Hotel Wifi | Sarah Rainsberger

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Can’t connect to wifi on your Chromebook when you stay at Radisson hotel because of their captive portal? No, it’s not just a matter of finding a non-SSL page to start your connection like with many other captive portals.

If you’re on a Chromebook, every few (5 - 60?) seconds, Radisson’s wifi connection will cut out, tell you you’re not online, and ask you to click to reconnect. In Gothenburg, Sweden, this happened every 2-5 seconds. Here in Riga, Latvia, it’s more like 8-15 seconds, but I can sometimes get as much as a full minute between connection drops. Reading Radisson hotel reviews on TripAdvisor, I can see this is also a problem for travellers in the U.S.

Here’s what I did to “approximate a working wifi connection” on my Chromebook at Radisson hotels. Maybe someone from Radisson will see this and upgrade their wifi system!

Already feeling my pain and just want the solution? Head directly to the tl;dr

The general problem, as I understand it:

Radisson hates Chromebooks! :)

OK, seriously, the problem is that, due to a Chromebook’s “mostly Chrome browser” ChromeOS, it is known to sometimes have trouble with public wifi. It often over-zealously doubts the security of the connection, since it was designed as a primarily always-online, secure machine. Captive portals often appear to “hijack” your internet connection, by directing you away from the (by now, probably “secure”) site your browser tried to navigate to, and instead, taking you to their connection page.

This is generally desirable behaviour, since you wouldn’t want to type in your banking website, but find yourself automatically redirected to a different website (which could be disguised to look very similar to your banking website, and could collect your login info if you tried to log in). Many of our devices are set to hit secure sites upon opening, and if your phone, tablet or laptop senses a security threat, it may never perform a “dangerous” redirect to take you to the page where you can log in to the public wifi.

While annoying, most of us have figured out a way around this common connection problem. The easiest solution I have found is to set my browser homepage to a non-secure website like the aptly named Never SSL where the browser’s security doesn’t kick in when you are redirected. If you didn’t ask for a secure page in the first place, then your device considers it less likely to be a security risk when your connection takes you to a different page than the one you requested. Even if my device’s browser tries to hit a secure site first (often it’s Google, on my Android device), it’s one click for me to hit the “home” button in my browser and force a non-secure page, and let the redirect happen.

The specific problem, as I understand it:

Sadly, the “I can’t connect to wifi on a Chromebook at Radisson hotels” problem is more than just finding a way to let this initial redirect happen on a Chromebook. The particular wifi portal that Radisson uses requires Chromebook users to hit a non-secure page that will redirect you to their own “portal status” page every few seconds to maintain an active internet connection. It probably also requires this of phones and other devices, but it seems that the security settings in ChromeOS do not allow this to happen transparently in the background while maintaining an active connection during all this traffic hijacking.

What does this look like to a Chromebook user on Radisson hotel wifi? After initially connecting via a splash screen, you can browse for anywhere from 2 to 60 seconds like normal. At some point, you will hit a web page (probably secure, since most pages are today), and you’ll be greeted with Chrome’s offline dinosaur, or a message that the website you were on has closed the connection, and perhaps a popup notification saying that the wifi connection requests that you sign in.

In Gothenburg, this was every two to three seconds. I often did not have enough time to load a single page before my connection had timed out, and my Chromebook was essentially offline for three days.

Here in Riga, I was at least getting 8 - 40 seconds of continued connection, so I could read a page or two of an online forum, then dinosaur/closed connection, then click to reconnect, and repeat.

The technique:

After searching the problem and seeing some online discussions (mostly about the general problem, not my specific problem), it seemed that the same trick to initially force the captive portal redirect might be useful in my situation, too. Often these captive portal splash screens require user action (checking a box to agree to terms, typing in your room number). But, in my specific situation, I wasn’t being asked to repeat those splash screen actions every time. I was just being redirected to the portal status page, not the splash screen itself. And, since I was constantly being faced with this portal status page, I could see that my device had 24 hours of authorization. All I needed to do was refresh this portal status page and my connection, if lost, would indeed auto-reconnect. And, thanks to the nature of Chrome, just the act of returning to any offline-error-message tab will automatically attempt to reload it. This seemed like a lot of stuff that could happen on its own if I could figure out how to automate it. . .

The tool:

After searching how to automatically refresh Chrome tabs (surely this had to be a thing!), I came across a a few auto-refresh Chrome extensions that seemed simpler than trying to execute javascript or do something that required a terminal. I eventually settled on Auto Refresh Plus for one very specific reason: Radisson hates Chromebooks! :P

Just as the length of the connection time out is unpredictable, so too is the action taken after the portal refresh unpredictable. Sometimes the portal status page simply refreshes. But other times, after a portal status refresh, that page redirects itself to Radisson’s menu page, and the portal status opens in a small pop up window.

What this means is that I can’t simply set an action to “refresh a tab” because every few refreshes, Radisson is hijacking it’s own tab, and redirecting it to an entirely different page. Refreshing that page does not re-establish my internet connection.

So, after trying a couple of Auto Refresh Chrome extensions, I had to choose the one that allowed me to specify which page is constantly refreshed in my tab. (And yes, every few minutes, I’m manually clearing pop up windows.) But, what I am able to do is set that extension to reload the portal status URL every three seconds (yes, three seconds), whether or not that tab has found itself redirected to Radisson’s own page. In both Sweden and Latvia, the captive portal status page URL is http://portal.mikenopa.com/status so that’s what I’ve used in the Chrome extension. It did seem like another non-secure page, like Never SSL, would work too. But, rather than cause a redirect to the portal status half the time, I decided just to use that page itself.

What my browsing experience is like now:

I have one pinned tab in Chrome with the Auto Refresh Plus Chrome extension set to ~~refresh~~ load the captive portal status window every 3 seconds. (As @jbrains pointed out, it’s not really a refresh since sometimes I’m forcing a different URL on the tab.)

If I am browsing, and click a link while my connection is active, all appears normal. These connetion windows last from a few seconds to almost a minute.

If I am browsing, and click a link while I have lost connection, I get a Chrome offline/connection closed page. If I do nothing at this moment and simply wait:

my portal status page will eventually (sometime in the next three seconds) be loaded in the pinned tab and my connection will be reestablished.
my offline page will attempt to reload itself as soon as a connection is reestablished.

And of course, I’m manually clearing a small pop-up window ever few reconnections.

What my Android app experience is like now:

Let’s just say, I’m using my phone. ;)

Actually, I am writing this on a Markdown app right now that is only synching locally, not online, so it’s fine. But, for example, if I try to use one of my Twitter apps (which I have set to manual refresh), I time my refreshes for the exact moment I’ve just seen (via a refreshed tab icon) my pinned Chrome tab successfully load the captive portal status URL. Otherwise, I get error messages (annoying) which then have to be cleared (more annoying), so I’m sticking with offline apps and the browser (which at least will auto reload when it can) for now.

Conclusion:

I have rather inelegantly but somewhat successfully imitated a stable Chromebook wifi connection at Radisson hotels by stringing together short connection windows (of 5 - 60 seconds) via automated browser refreshes. It is adequate for performing brief, discrete internet requests that can be completed during a connection window. And, if a request is made during a lapse in connection, as long as I am browsing, Chrome will automatically try again when it detects the internet again.

But, I’m timing any important actions like “buy” or “submit” to occur just after I’ve seen a successful refresh in my pinned tab. When the captive portal status page is loaded, there’s a discernable grey favicon that loads in the tab. When the page redirects itself to Radisson’s own page, there’s only a generic tab icon, and a pop up window is created which takes over and steals focus. So, I watch for the favicon to refresh to another favicon, and when it does, I know I have another good few seconds of internet to make a successful network request.

It’s like an internet connection!

Radisson, this is really not OK. Please know that your wifi is essentially unusable for an entire class of internet devices. While I can browse individual web pages, I can’t do anything that won’t survive a connection drop… every few seconds.

tl;dr

If you can’t maintain a wifi connection on your Chromebook at a Radisson Hotel (worldwide!) because it keeps wanting you to sign in (but not really sign in again, just hit that captive portal status window) . . .

Bear in mind your internet connection won’t be continuous: it will automatically reconnect every 5 - 60 seconds, but it should be enough to get you browsing.
Copy the website URL link from the captive portal status window pop-up, the one that tells you you’ve been online for a few seconds. (It’s probably http://portal.mikenopa.com/status )
Install the Chrome extension Auto Refresh Plus
Pin a tab in Chrome, and set that tab, via the Chrome extension, to refresh the specific captive portal URL (not just refresh the tab, because the tab will change on you) every three seconds
Be prepared to close a captive portal status pop-up window every few minutes
Don’t try to do anything that won’t survive a connection drop every few seconds, but browsing is mostly fine, with some waiting for auto connect.
If you get an offline Chrome dinosaur or connection closed tab, it should refresh itself in a few seconds once the connection has been restablished, but you can manually refresh.
I suggest timing any manual refreshing, or clicking important buttons like “buy” or “submit” to occur just after you’ve seen your pinned tab sucessfully refresh, and you can see the portal status icon in the tab.

How to Embed a Google Photos Album on a Web Page | Sarah Rainsberger

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Google Photos is great for storing your photos. It’s even becoming pretty good at sharing select photos with select people. But still, the problem for many of us from the Picasa Web Album days is displaying our albums publicly.

The problem:

There’s no good way to publicly display a specific Google Album, or a set of specific Google Albums, not even within Google itself.

Google Photos does not provide users with a public-facing Gallery page, so I have been using my Google Plus Profile Page and Google Collections to create something sort of resembling a public photo gallery of Google Photos Albums

If Google won’t give me a proper public gallery site, then I’d like to figure out how to make my own gallery from the albums I’ve already created in Google Photos.

The tool:

I stumbled across a tool at publicgallery.org that generates a slideshow of a Google Photos album that has been “shared.” (I am careful to differentiate that from a “Google Photos shared album.” Because Google.)

Entering the URL of a Google Photos album will give you some code that you can copy into html to produce a nice, if basic, slideshow preview of all the photos in an album. The slideshow can be played, or navigated through forwards and backwards, photo-by-photo. I added the few lines of code to the html of my Photography page where I wanted the slideshow to appear, and it worked.

You can see it in action on my Photography page.

So, thank you for this!

What it DOES do:

provides a nice, lightbox-y viewer for photos in a particular Google Album that can be viewed directly on my website
allows people to “scroll” (click back and forth) through the photos in an album one at a time
creates a playable slideshow online
allows me to manually add albums on a page (presumably as many as I want, organized in a grid to imitate a gallery page)

What it does NOT do:

generate a gallery-type, thumbnail preview of the images within a gallery so the entire contents can be viewed or scrolled at a glance
link back to the original album (So far, it seems that I would have to write my own title/link as a separate line, not part of the element.) It would be nice if the album title displayed within the viewer were a clickable link back to the album in Google Photos.
update to reflect changes in the original album after the slideshow was originally generated. If a photo is later removed from the album, then instead of simply not showing that photo, the “forbidden” symbol is shown in its place. If a photo is later added to the album, it won’t appear in the slideshow. And, strangely, after playing around with adding/removing photos from this album, now the photos that are shown are displayed in a different order that I can’t quite figure out.

Conclusion:

This works as a slideshow/click-through viewing of a set of photos that you do not intend to change.

(I was hoping I could add more photos to my sample gallery as I took new ones, but it appears that won’t work.)

If you…

have an album that is “finished” (its contents won’t change)
only need a one-by-one viewer (either automatically playing or advancing on-click)
have access to edit the html of a web page

… then this is a good solution and adding the code worked without incident for me to produce the album viewer on my web page.

MrHyde Android App on Chromebook | Sarah Rainsberger

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 13:35:23 +0000

Unexpectedly, I’ve been doing most of my blog post editing directly via a browser while logged into Gitlab.com instead of using an Android markdown editor. I wanted to revisit my options, however, so here goes a post composed via MrHyde.

I’d tried to make some minor edits to a post on my phone using MrHyde, but I found that pushing changes from there to Gitlab didn’t work. It had been a while since I’d popped open the app on my Chromebook, however, so I thought I’d try a post here and see whether I have the same problem.

MrHyde had been working very well for locally cloning my Gitlab repository, pulling the most recent version, allowing me to create a new post or edit an existing one and preview the site before pushing. But, on my phone it had started to fail at the pushing stage. It thinks it has pushed, but I see no evidence of that on Gitlab.com (which is the copy that then deploys to Netlify). Recently, the app on my phone also was unable to generate a preview of my website. So, I got out of the habit of using it and ended up working on Gitlab.com directly.

Feeling adventurous this afternoon, I thought I’d experiment again. On my Chromebook, I was able to successfully clone my repository, but attempting to preview what I’ve written in this post thus far has failed. (Error message that it didn’t work.) So, I suspect when I now try to save/push to Gitlab, the commit will similarly fail. Let’s see. . .

Well, that was a pleasant surprise!

So, I don’t get preview, but I do get a successful commit and push. That’s not nothing! And, the phone app appears able to commit+push again, too.

As you can see, it’s just a basic text editor, but it does the job. And, the fact that you can see that image at all is another success!

When the MrHyde app was first released, it wasn’t possible at all to navigate to the locally-cloned repository on the Android device. These files were instead kept in a hidden part of the system. After some discussion with the app creators and other users, the app was changed to make these files in a more accessible part of local storage. This means that I can now move images, or any other files for that matter, into my locally-cloned repository via an Android file explorer app. I’m currently using X-plore because the two-pane view is especially nice on a Chromebook. When I push+commit, the image files are uploaded to Gitlab in the folder I’ve put them.

None of this may sound particularly earth shattering, but it’s important to remember that I am on a Chromebook that cannot, itself, generate my Jekyll static site blog. (I haven’t installed linux and am not interested in doing so at the moment.) All the Chromebook can do is create/edit/manage files.

My website only gets updated when a commit has been pushed to Gitlab, so most of my experimentation revolves around the best way to update my Gitlab repository. Recently, this has meant logging in at Gitlab.com and manually editing markdown files online in my browser, as well as uploading individual photos one-by-one to my images folder.

Using MrHyde allows me to pull a copy of my repository and add files to (or modify files in) its existing folder structure, then commit and push. So, this is a pretty exciting development for someone trying to maintain a Jekyll static site with only an Android phone and a Chromebook!

Firstly, this method allows me to work offline, and in any Android text editor I want. I can work without an internet connection, and I’m not at the mercy of composing into a text input field on a web page. (Because nothing ever goes wrong composing into text fields!)

Secondly, it provides a snapshot backup of my files in the event that data is lost at Gitlab. True, it is not a full git history. But, in the event of sudden data loss, I have the files to recreate the most current version of the website. For my purposes, that’s good enough right now.

Thirdly, I can change more than one file at a time. I can add multiple photos to my image folder at once, rather than uploading each one individually and keeping track of which ones have or have not yet been added to Gitlab.

Additionally, it is pretty handy to just be able to whip out my phone and fix a typo on my website right in an Android app.

So, all in all, I am currently success!

IF Timer v1.0 | Sarah Rainsberger

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 15:30:23 +0000

A quick post to announce a very exciting thing:

I have an app, and now you can have it, too!

Get IF Timer now, or read more about it first. . .

Quick Introduction

Two years ago, I was frustrated by the lack of (what I considered to be) a very simple function that I couldn’t find in any Android app: “How long since . . . ?” In fact, you’re probably laughing now thinking, “Why don’t you just get a generic stopwatch/timer thing? There MUST be dozens, if not hundreds in the app store?” Yeah, you’d think. In fact, although what I wanted was a very simple idea, nothing (as of two years ago, anyway) did exactly what I wanted.

I didn’t need a timer. I didn’t need something to tell me when x minutes or hours had passed. I literally wanted to push a button when I’d done something, and then hours, or even days later, be able to return to it so I’d know when the last time I had done this thing was.

On a train from Germany to Slovakia just a week earlier, Joe and I had been pairing on a “tutoring app” for fun, since the idea I had was similarly basic and he thought it would be a good introduction to code for me. (By “tutoring app” I mean an app wherein a student who feels “stuck” presses a button and randomly gets one of my “familiar phrases” like, “What do YOU think you should do next?” or “What information in the question have you not used yet?”) As a result of that train ride, we got “Tutr”

Second Verse, Same as the First

A few days later, with some new skillz behind us and ready to tackle my actual problem, we created “Sinz”

Sinz had some issues, but it … worked? Yes, I could press a button and then whenever I checked back in with Sinz, it would tell me how much time had passed. Unless the app had stopped running in the background. Unless the screen had been rotated. You get the picture. But it was a nice little experiment and my first glimpse into solving my own problems with our* own tech. It wasn’t really my tech, though I was an active contributer with respect to requirements and logic and test cases. And it wasn’t something I could recreate on my own. I didn’t have a dev environment set up on my own machine and a few days of reading and following code certainly wasn’t enough for me to start writing code from scratch.

Time for MY app

A few months later, I heard of an upcoming webinar being given by Tara Reed of Apps Without Code. Conveniently, it was on one of Joe’s bowling nights, so I decided to participate. Thanks to her inspiring story, and an introduction to some services that can be used to implement the functions of apps, without actually coding an app directly, I signed up for a bubble.is account the next day and started playing around. I’d used IFTTT (If This Then That) to cobble together some other tiny systems before, so that didn’t seem too beyond me. (In fact, I implemented a sharing feature for the read-it-later service Pocket before they themselves had implemented proper sharing. And still to this day, my feature goes “one step further” than theirs. So, Joe and I are the proud, exclusive users of super-direct-insta-share in Pocket.)

I spent some time going through bubble’s tutorials (so unlike me!) to get used to how it worked. After a afternoon of logic and conditionals (and bad naming that will be addressed in version 2!), I found that I had a working web app that did exactly what I wanted.

Sinz 2.0 = IF Timer 1.0

One of the things I had wanted Sinz to track was my intermittent fasting. Joe and I now typically eat only once per day, and fast the rest of the day. I wanted to always have at a glance how long I’d been fasting without having to do any arithmetic in my head. How long has it been since we ate? 8 hours? 16 hours? Surely this seemed like a simple thing my phone could do for me. Version 0.1 of my app did exactly that. Reliably, without fail. (Unless, of course, I tried to get fancy and make misguided changes to the app that already worked, of course!)

I’m very pleased to announce version 1.0 today, which (cross fingers) not only works reliably, but has a few niceties, too. And, most importantly, this past week I figured out how to create a login feature (with, eventually, log out!) and support multiple users. (This was a big step for me since previously, in order to show anyone my app and let them play with it by pressing buttons, they’d be changing MY personal data!)

Allowing multiple users and figuring out how to maintain separate user data means that not only can I now show people my app (which I really couldn’t before), but I can now have other people use my app. And in fact, a handful of people currently are! (And you can, too.)

How to use IF Timer

You might not think of yourself as someone who fasts, but actually, we all do! If you sleep, you fast! Some people just do it a little more intentionally, or for a little longer than others. Anyone can use this app just to see what “state” your body is currently running in based on when you last consumed food.

There’s a little info button in the app to give you the pop-up cheat sheet for fasting: for 3 - 5 hours after you eat, your body is digesting. If you go a full 12 hours without consuming food, your body actually does start to “fast” (even though we think of it as fasting for 12 hours) and that’s when your body really starts to burn fat at a nice clip. In between, you’re “satiated.” So, if you press the “Start Fasting” button in IF Timer, then the app will hold on to that time and every time you come back to refresh the page (it’s a web app, so it just runs in a browser), your status will be updated and you can see at a glance how long you’ve been fasting and what fasting state your body is in (based on the theory of roughly how long your body does what).

Even if you don’t intentionally incorporate fasting into your routine, you can use this app to see how frequently you “hit green” and get your body into a nice, healthy fat-burning state. (There are other health benefits of hitting the fasted state, too. But most of us don’t need much more convincing than fat-burning!)

That’s all it does for now, but that’s enough for version 1.0 while I work on some other ideas.

If you’d like to try it, just head to IF Timer in any browser, on any device, and sign up with your email address.

Please bear in mind that it is version 1.0 and I’ve focused more on the function than the appearance. But, I have some ideas for improvement in mind already and am happy to receive constructive feedback.

Using MarkdownX Android app for Blogging on Samsung Chromebook Pro | Sarah Rainsberger

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 11:30:23 +0000

I sat down to write a post about setting up my Twitter client on my phone, but this post quickly became about the app I’m using to write this post, instead.

My first post written from the Chromebook used the Android app JotterPad as a markdown editor. This time, I’m using the other app that made the cut when I was evaluating apps a few months ago: MarkdownX.

Let the showdown begin…

Live Preview

One thing I really do immediately like about Markdown X is the double-pane mode showing my markdown writing on the left and a live, updating preview on the right. You can toggle this display in the phone app, but the Chromebook automatically uses the tablet version and gives you only this multi-view. Half of the screen is enough horizontal space for me to compose on a 12-inch Chromebook, so this is great for me. Although, some reviewers in the Play Store wish they could turn off the preview when using smaller tablets.

The markdown preview, as in other editors, looks a little wonky at the top because it also displays the required yaml front matter for my Jekyll blog as well as the “more” separator used for displaying just the first bit of the post on my home page.

Otherwise, the preview is as you’d expect: links show up in the preview as coloured hyperlinks, font sizes and styles are rendered as well as all the other markdown-y things. The app has a built in cheat sheet you can navigate to, which is handy because I still don’t feel very fluent in markdown and have to stop myself from reverting to html tags that I already know. And, it has a markdown toolbar for some of the popular formatting options. So, it’s a very nice app to use while actually writing.

Unfortunately, there’s more to a markdown editor than just writing. What happens to those words? Where do they go? How do you return to them later?

File Saving / Organization

This has been causing me a bit of grief, to be honest. I’m not yet sure how much to attribute this to running Android apps on a Chromebook vs. using the app itself, but it’s a bit quirkier than I’d like.

MarkdownX can store your .md files either locally or on Dropbox. If locally, though, I can’t find in the filesystem where the files are located. This leads me to believe that the data is being stored somewhere I can’t simply navigate to through a file explorer. I like to have direct access to my files so they can be moved, deleted, backed up or even opened with other apps. There is a “share” feature available from the menu when editing a post, and the option to share as a markdown file or as html. But, I don’t seem to be able to “share to” my local file system (or “export” as sometimes this option is called). So, after saving my initial draft of this post locally, I switched to saving to Dropox. This is not without its quirks, either.

Saving a file to Dropbox will automatically create a new folder labeled “markdown” in Dropbox for you. That’s fine, I guess. But, when you are editing a “Dropbox” file, the autosave icon changes to an upload icon. So I assumed I had lost the notion of auto save and should therefore manually click the upload icon as I went along. (Maybe I hadn’t, but since the one icon replaced the other, it’s a reasonable thing to assume.) Doing so created another, nested “markdown” folder inside my “markdown” folder every time I saved. Losing the autosave is problematic enough, but if saving creates all these nested folders, then I don’t see how working off of a Dropbox hosted file is at all tenable.

. . . so untenable, in fact, that I’ve saved and reopened this file back up in JotterPad to finish it. A bit of a shame, since I liked composing in MarkdownX very much. But, I just didn’t feel comfortable enough with the file saving options. That and the app hadn’t been updated since 2015 and the website listed on the Google Play store was no longer in operation. Given that JotterPad was last updated 9 days ago, I think we have our markdown editor winner. :)

Don’t get me wrong, JotterPad is working well and looks very clean. I just prefer the split screen of MarkdownX to alternating between edit mode:

and preview mode:

In fact, what I would prefer to both of these options is something like what Typora for Mac OS does. Visit Typora’s website and check out how snazzy their live preview updating changing what you type to markdown preview as you type it is. It sounds like it might be distracting, but it’s actually amazing. In fact, the only time I felt I was coming close to actually learning and internalizing markdown was when I used Typora to compose.

I’m not done playing around with my options yet, though! Stay tuned for my next attempt at simply composing in markdown in the browswer window directly on Gitlab.com. (And, of course, I haven’t even installed MrHyde on the Chromebook yet…)

But, as far as Android markdown editor apps go, I guess I’ll be sticking with JotterPad.

UPDATE: I found the files!

OK, so it took a little more digging, and I needed to install a separate file explorer (I use AndExplorer), but I did manage to navigate to and move around my MarkdownX local files.

Most of my apps create their own data folder directly in a top level of the Android system, but some apps store their data under Android>Data>(developer/app specific folder). That’s where my MarkdownX files were stored. It took a while to find them because I’m on a Chromebook and with respect to viewing the Android-specific storage in Chrome OS’s file manager. . . well, “You can’t get there from here.”

In a Chromebook, you can navigate to the Settings panel (settings? really?) and select “Storage Management” which will give you a path down which you can eventually see the contents of the Android portion of your machine. Although menu items such as “copy” and “move” exist in this, let’s-call-it-a-file-manager(?), I didn’t find these to work, even when just trying to move files around within the Android storage portion. (“Share”, to either Google Drive or Dropbox did work.)

So, I think I will be doing a semi-complete 180 on my initial verdict! I did finally install MrHyde on this Chromebook, and holy crap are the early returns sweet! Whatever my final process ends up being, MrHyde will be play the starring role. I’ll experiment with a few things on my next couple of posts and report back. But the next task at hand is absolutely to make this a MrHyde-optimized setup. (This app has its own markdown editor built in, so it’s possible that I won’t even need a separate app, but I may prefer the markdown writing experience of a dedicated, more full-featured editor like MarkdownX or JotterPad.)

Stay tuned for more about MrHyde! It’s an exciting little app!

First Jekyll post written on the Samsung Chromebook Pro! | Sarah Rainsberger

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 10:19:45 +0000

The Samsung Chromebook Pro is here!

This is my first attempt to draft and publish a new post entirely on this machine…

In preparation for this move away from the Macbook Air, I had been auditioning a few Android Markdown apps. One of the nicest ones is JotterPad, and since I snagged the Creative Pack extension on sale a few months ago, I’m using it to start.

I’m currently typing a post in JotterPad on the Samsung Chromebook Pro, then will upload the markdown file to my Gitlab repository. (Normally on Android, I’ve been using the app MrHyde to locally clone and then edit my repository, but for this post, I’m going to try uploading the file directly to Gitlab via the Chrome web interface.)

And just to make things more interesting (and help me remember my markdown syntax), let’s try incorporating a photo. (And yes, I know the photo is sideways. That’s an entirely different issue, unrelated to this post, that I’ll tackle later. I’m just considering it a success that a photo even shows up at all!)

Jekyll Blog Post Entirely via Android | Sarah Rainsberger

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 21:01:45 +0000

The Samsung Chromebook Plus is already out in the wild and available for purchase. With the calendar flipping to March today, I can now say that the PRO model will be available next month!

While I was mostly ready to switch from Mac to ChromeOS/Android, the last piece of the puzzle was this Jekyll blog which is generated on my machine, then the static site is uploaded to Heroku. With no means of generating the site locally on a Chromebook or Android device, I had to spend some time figuring out my alternatives.

If you can read this, then our efforts worked! And here’s what we did…

Last year, I discovered the Android app MrHyde by Faudroids. This is a fairly basic app, but it allows me to access (push/pull/edit/preview) a GitLab repository. (Also currently works with GitHub and BitBucket)

This means that within the app, I can very easily checkout a copy of my repository and store it locally on my device. It also provides a built-in text editor for making changes to my files. These changes can be previewed, committed and pushed back to my online GitLab repository. It worked perfectly for maintaining the repository, but it didn’t solve the “need to run ruby to generate the static site” problem.

Last month, I spent time researching how the cool kids were choosing to push from GitLab to Heroku. Once I was confident I knew enough to describe the solution to Joe, he graciously took over. (The actual execution was beyond my current abilities.) We debated a couple of options, but settled on choosing to have Heroku itself generate the site whenever a new version was pushed to it. This eliminated the need for me to have a local machine that could run ruby. After he configured my Heroku app to be able to generate my site as a Jekyll blog, then he figured out how to set up GitLab CI (continuous integration) so that every new commit pushed to GitLab triggers an action to push the updated repository to Heroku. You can read the technical details at The Code Whisperer.

As to how this works in practice, when Joe noticed a small typo on my blog, I was able to quickly fix the typo and update the website right from my phone, without leaving the treadmill using MrHyde. I think that’s pretty cool!

However, that was just making a minor change to a file that already existed. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a huge deal, and I was thrilled. But, I also needed to write new posts (like this one), which meant adding new files to the GitLab repository. MrHyde does have an option to create a new text file using its own text editor, but not the option to import a text file created elsewhere. While MrHyde’s internal text editor is quite serviceable and markdown-friendly with built-in formatting options, it’s not necessarily my first choice of markdown editor for composing. I may also prefer to compose drafts outside of the app entirely, or have a template file as a starting point.

My initial reaction was to find wherever on my phone MrHyde was writing the local repository and see if I could simply sneak a file of my own in there by adding via a file manager. My hope was that the app would simply commit whatever changes had been made to that file structure, whether or not the changes were made within the app itself. Then, I could create my markdown files with whatever app, system or process I wanted and simply move the completed files into the proper place in my file structure. The problem was that for the life of me I couldn’t find the repository’s files in local storage on my phone. I knew they were there, but I just couldn’t navigate to them.

So feeling like a bit of an idiot, I emailed the developer and asked where the files were being stored and told him what I was hoping to do with the app. It turns out it wasn’t me: the developer had, by design for safety reasons, put the files in a non-accessible part of the phone’s storage. He opened an issue on the app’s Github page asking for opinions from other users about moving the location to somewhere public and accessible, though less secure. It turns out, other users had wanted the very same thing and were eager to have the storage moved, too!

After some back and forth with the developer and other users on the project’s Github issues page, we eventually got through the technical hurdles like different Android devices putting app information in slightly different public locations, or what worked fine for people with Github repositories didn’t seem to work for people with GitLab repositories. Last week, a new version of the app was available that worked for everyone who chimed in, and so tonight, I’m attempting my very first entirely Android blog post.

I started with a basic markdown template which I opened on my tablet in MarkdownX (a two-pane markdown editor that shows a live preview on the right while you type on the left). I’m composing on a bluetooth keyboard then saving the file back to Dropbox so I can grab the file on my phone and move it to my MrHyde directory there. (This step is only because my tablet is quite old and slow, so previewing with MrHyde on the tablet doesn’t work very well. But, it’s a much larger screen for composing with two panes. Otherwise, I could simply do all of this within the tablet itself.) On the phone, I’ll preview the post, make any fine adjustments in-app via its own text editor, then commit and push the changes to GitLab. Once I’ve done that, GitLab CI and Heroku will do their respective things and, about seven minutes later, this post will be live on my website. Let’s see whether we just made magic happen!

Creating your own Direct-Share-to-Friend feature in Pocket using IFTTT and Todoist | Sarah Rainsberger

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 21:30:23 +0000

Pocket is our “read it later” service of choice. Unfortunately, its current sharing options leave a little something to be desired.

Even though Joe and I both have our own Pocket accounts, for the longest time there was no in-app way to notify each other when we found something we think the other person should read. Even though that feature has recently been added, we didn’t just want a notification that required action. I wanted to directly add to his reading list so that articles would automatically be downloaded for offline reading with no action required on Joe’s part. So, I cobbled together my own direct sharing system so that I can simply tag an article in Pocket for Joe, and it will automatically show up right in his Pocket reading list.

This is how I did it...

How I Use Pocket

I throw pretty much ALL my reading in Pocket. I find that I can manage my time better when I don’t feel a false sense of urgency to read everything I see online right away, but rather put links and articles safely somewhere out of sight and out of mind until I decide to spend time reading.

All of my devices (phone, tablet, Kobo e-reader) can run Pocket, which downloads everything for offline reading. So Pocket is perfect for storing up items for flights, waiting in lines, showing up at choir rehearsal early, and anywhere else I might not have wifi.

I also use Pocket to send articles and links to Joe. I am his internet filter, scanning broadly for and evaluating tips, tools and other items of interest so that he only has to read a chosen few things.

What I Want

Pocket could make my life a lot easier if it had a built-in “push” system between users. But right now, Pocket’s idea of “sharing” an article with someone else consists of sending them an email with a link to the article.

Yes, it notifies them that there’s something to read. But, that person needs to have checked their email, read that email and clicked on the link. More likely, they’re going to avoid clicking on the link in the email because they don’t want to read it just yet. Wouldn’t it be easier if this article were just waiting for them the next time they opened up Pocket to read?

What I Did

As you can see, Pocket allows users to use optional tags to organize their reading list:

I created a few “Joe-specific” tags, like jbr for general reading, jbr-mood for items related to mood and motivation and jbrbiz for tech or business-related articles.

Then, using IFTTT (If This Then That), I created applets (formerly called recipes) so that adding a particular tag to an artcle in Pocket creates a new task in a particular shared Todoist project.

To do this, simply choose Pocket as your “trigger” service, and select “New item tagged.”

Then you’ll be asked to specify the tag, in my case jbr or jbr-mood or jbrbiz. The nice thing about using tags is you can create as many different applets as you want, either to send to different people, or like I do, to send to the same person but pre-categorized.

In step four, I choose Todoist which only has one action available: “Create task”

You’ll need to specify the project in which you want the task created (in my case JBR-Pocket) but the Task Content will already be filled with Title and URL. Those default ingredients are fine. That’s all you need for this to work.

There are other fields that can be filled in, but since the goal isn’t to actually create a to-do task with a due date and priority, you can just leave the rest of these blank.

What I Had to Get Joe To Do

The above was only one half of the solution. At this point, I could get tasks into a Todoist project that I shared with Joe. Now, I needed him to create his own IFTTT applets so that new tasks showing up in those projects would trigger an action to send the content of those tasks into Pocket.

This time, Todoist is the trigger service. A new task created in Todoist by my IFTTT recipe should be the trigger for his recipe:

Notice that the trigger says “New task with label” but we are using Projects instead of labels. That’s OK; you’ll see you can specify either one once you select the trigger.

And now Pocket is the service that performs the action in response to the trigger. Again, there’s only one action you can choose: “Save for later”

This time, however, we want to change the default values filled in the fields. We don’t want Pocket to save the task itself, we want it to save the content of the task, which is an article.

And, if you want these saved articles to have a certain tag, I’d choose the Project name as the tag. So, delete the pre-filled values and choose these:

And that’s it! Now, my workflow is simply:

I tag an item in Pocket
The item (eventually) is added to Joe’s reading list in Pocket!

And Joe’s workflow is:

Open Pocket.

My new (Google) Photo Organization Workflow | Sarah Rainsberger

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 16:11:45 +0000

It’s been exactly two months since the day my Desktop Picasa app stopped connecting to my Google account. The secret handshakes no longer worked. The known tricks for appending URLs were useless. Whether I was ready to or not, I had to move on.

I’m still trying to recover, but here’s more or less how things go now . . .

The Transition

Perhaps a blessing in disguise, we were also preparing to leave for a few months of travel, where photos would certainly be taken and systems would certainly be tested.

Transitioning to a new system required a huge shift in thinking, mostly with respect to my online album sharing. Picasa Desktop had allowed me to organize into folders by date and location. (As frequent travellers, we mostly cared about photos at the “Where were we?” level of organization.) Then, within that structure, I could selectively choose which photos per album would be mirrored and available online for public viewing.

But, now that my local laptop folders couldn’t simply be mirrored through Picasa Desktop as Picasa Web Albums, I had to switch to thinking about creating actual online albums separate from thinking about the folders on my machine.

My basic workflow remains similar to the process described in my previous photo organization workflow post, with some notable changes now that Picasa Web Albums no longer exist.

What happens when I take a photo on my phone?

Here’s my step-by-step procedure for creating and maintaining my online photo albums in Google Photos. It’s still a work in progress, and has become a little more involved now that I have Joe contributing some of his photos to my albums, too.

1… Culling: I first use a Gallery app (built-in Gallery, or Piktures) to go through new photos taken and delete any obviously bad ones, or chose favourites among duplicates and discard the rest. I’ve learned that it’s a lot easier to manage photos on my device first, before they get uploaded to cloud services. And, the fewer there are, the easier it is to manage them!

2… Google Photos *manual* backup only: I have decided to disable Google Photos’ auto backup, although I do regularly back up all my photos there. One reason to do so is that opening up Photos will show you a cloud with a line through it symbol for all the new photos that have not yet been uploaded, and this is very helpful for knowing which photos have/haven’t been organized yet. Because I want all my uploaded photos to end up in at least one album (further explained below), not just in the big shoe box that is the uploaded stream of photos, I can see at a glance which photos I haven’t yet placed in an album.

3… Add to a public Google Photos albums directly From the “not yet backed up” photos, I select the ones I want to be in a publicly visible album (usually not all of them) and “upload to album” choosing my current, public album. For example, right now that album is “2016-09 Sweden” but next week, I’ll create “2016-10 Milan.” Note: You don’t have to back up photos first; you can simply “add to album” and, by virtue of the fact they’ve been uploaded to Google Photos, they are now, in fact, “backed up.”

4… Add to a *private* Google Photos album directly Now, I go back to my list of photos and some will still have the “not uploaded” cloud icon in and among the stream of photos. I select ALL photos from the starting point of the “not yet uploaded” photos (including the ones that I just added to a public album) and upload them to my current PRIVATE album (in this case, “Fall on the road”) to ensure that every photo is uploaded into at least one album. The photos shared publicly are only uploaded once, but they exist in two different albums.

5… DropBox auto upload: In the mean time, all my photos, at full size, are uploaded via DropBox auto camera upload. Dropbox is a sneaky little thing, and no matter how quickly I manage to delete a photo locally, it seems it always gets uploaded to Dropbox. But, unlike Google Photos, there isn’t a nice way to see which ones have or haven’t uploaded if you disable the automatic upload. Furthermore, these files will only end up on my local machine, and are not the ones used in public albums, so I don’t have to think about which ones exist where. So, although it means I do have to go through these files separately and once again delete the ones I don’t want to keep, it seems to be the lesser evil of that or constantly disabling/enabling DropBox’s auto backup. This camera uploads folder is linked to my laptop, and eventually, these photos will show up as local files on my machine.

At this point, each photo exists on

my phone’s microSD card (original file)
DropBox (identical copy of file, renamed according to DropBox’s convention)
Google Photos (as a “high quality” copy)

Organizing Local Photos on my Machine

Move the files from DropBox “Camera Uploads” folder into a local folder named for the current place and time, deleting any photos I don’t want to keep. Since we travel fairly regularly, all of my folders are of the format “2016-10-03 Milan” (using the starting date of the trip). If we’re home for a while, then a folder would be named something like “2016-04-11 Spring in Summerside” and would be the “current folder” until either the season changed, or an event occurred.
Rename files (I use A Better Finder Rename 10) for easier identification. I struggled a long time with file names, because I want them to be meaningful independent of any application. If I send files to friends and family, I want them to be identifiable. I eventually decided on the naming convention: YYYY-MM-DD hh.mm.ss PlaceOrEvent-001
- The date/time stamp follows the same convention DropBox does and makes it easy to identify photos in chronological order, and to identify when they occured.
- Using seconds usually is enough to make each photo’s timestamp unique. If some photos were taken in rapid succession, I manually edit the seconds so that the photos are still chronological, but each with a unique name.
- Using text for a place or event name makes for easier searching and “reading” of file names. Most of the time, this text is a city name, and identifies a photo as being from a particular trip. But, it could be a conference, concert, tournament or other event. This is helpful in finding a photo that I know was taken in Munich, but I don’t know on which specific trip to Munich it was taken.
- I tried to live without sequence numbers, but I’ve realized that if I want to select or use a photo from an album, it’s much easier to pick out and remember photo number 237 from the list of files rather than selecting from an hh:mm:ss identifier. So, the timestamp is for ensuring the pictures can sort chronologically, but the sequence number at the end is for actually identifying individual photos from the album.
Backup folders to the home NAS. Our NAS has an identical copy of the “Pictures” directory on my laptop. This isn’t a sync, but a one-way copy. Typically, once a photos folder has been processed (created, files renamed) on my laptop, there are no changes to it, and it can then be copied over and archived on our NAS.
Backup my Mac using SuperDuper to create a bootable backup on an external hard drive.

Now, I have the original DropBox copy of the photo on my machine, a backup on the home NAS and a backup on an external hard drive. This is in addtion to the original file still on my phone.

(Note: Since I have shared access to Joe’s Camera Uploads folder on DropBox, I also include any of Joe’s cell phone photos in my local photos.)

Google Photos is my primary photo sharing tool. Most of my family uses Android, so they all have Google accounts and this is the easiest way for family to keep up with our travel photos.

Albums intended to be public

are shared with individual family members so that they receive notification that the album has been created, and whenever new photos are added to the album. Sharing settings are further refined depending on whether I want others to be able to add photos to the album or be able to comment on photos.
are shared to one of my Google Plus “Collections” that are visible from my Google Plus profile. Currently, I have different collections for Family photos, Travel photos, my Nature photos (I take a lot of bird pics with my ultra super zoom camera) and Bowling photos from Joe’s various tournaments and competitions. This is my attempt at creating my own Photo Gallery pages, since Google Photos does not currently offer a generic landing page where people can see all of your public albums. This way, anyone can view all my public albums, even if I haven’t shared anything with them personally.

Albums intended to be private

are created as private (unshared) albums. All items created in Google Photos are private by default.
are created in order to work with my third-party Picasa apps. Back when Google used Picasa Web Albums as its online photo system, there was no “photo stream” or “photo archive” - only albums. Every photo in PWA was in an album. When Google started to offer mobile photo backups, it created several (annoying!) auto backup folders, sometimes several each day because every photo had to be in an an album. So, all of the older apps created to view and manage Picasa folders operate on the assumption that all photos exist in albums. In order to keep using those mobile apps (which are more full-featured than Google Photos currently is) to view and manage my photos, I need to organize every photo into in album, whether I intent to share it or not.

Integrating Photos Taken on my Camera

In order to give me some extra uploading and editing flexibility, I use a micro SD card in an SD adaptor in my Nikon Coolpix P900 camera. This means that I can insert the card directly into my Samsung Galaxy Note tablet’s micro SD card slot and access my camera photos as if they were taken on a mobile phone. Then, I can upload to Google Photos in the same way I would from my phone. If I wanted to, I could also have these photos upload to DropBox and then process them on my laptop by moving them out of my Camera Uploads folder into local folders, renaming them in the process.

But, Nikon’s importing software for Mac OS is actually pretty nice. After initial set up, it’s essentially a one-click import, rename and choose destination folder. And, especially if I’m somewhere with poor network speeds or connectivity, then uploading to DropBox simply to redownload from DropBox can be painfully slow. So, lately I have tended instead to import my camera photos directly to a folder watched by the Google Photos Uploader for Mac. Once the photos in that folder have uploaded, I move them into the appropriate local folder in my “Pictures” directory.

In both cases, I can fully integrate my camera photos with my mobile phone photos both online in Google Photos and locally in my file system.

Synching All Photos Locally on my Mobile Devices

The final step is to make all (and, I do mean all) my photos available for offline viewing on my phone. This is where my third-party Android apps, and consequently, all the extra albums in Google Photos, come into play.

The app Picasa Tool (now called “Tool for Google Photos”) is an exceptionally reliable offline sync for previously Picasa, now Google Photos albums. This app has downloaded tens of thousands of photos in hundreds of albums without fail, and all are available to view offline. Not only can I then view my entire photo collection without using any data, but also I have access to these photos when I’m offline. Picasa Tool downloads and stores low res versions of the photos, but they are perfectly fine for viewing and looking up past events.

In Conclusion

My system is similar to my old system, except that now I think of, and manage, my online photos completely separately from my local photos:

Now, there is no direct link between the primary copy of photos on my laptop and my online albums. My online system is my online system, and separately, copies of the original files are stored locally on my machine, and the NAS.

With credit/thanks/apologies to Tim Minchin:

This is my photo management system

And it’s fine

It’s where I spend a vast majority of my time

It’s not perfect, but it’s mine

~ Tim Minchin, “Not Perfect”

Lesson Learned - Never create a shared album in Google Photos! | Sarah Rainsberger

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 14:05:45 +0000

“Shared Albums” in Google Photos are great for collaborating. I finally got Joe on board with adding his travel photos directly to my shared albums, and it worked perfectly! So, if you think you’ll want this set up where multiple people contribute to the same album, you should probably just create a “new shared album” right off the bat, right? WRONG!

"Shared" means . . . shared?

So, first off all, what is a shared album? Well, it’s either an album that you made and “shared” to other people for viewing, or an album that you intend others for to collaborate on and add their own pictures to. Google does not appear to be making the distinction between the two, and simply calls any album that someone other than you might be able to see, and possibly add photos to, “shared.”

This means that you can make any existing album a shared album simply by letting others view it. At that point, your album will have “shared settings” where you can further fine-tune whether or not others can comment, add their own photos, etc. You do not need to decide, when initially creating your album, whether or not it will be a “shared” album. In fact, it probably makes sense that for a lot of your albums, you’ll create them first, and then at some point later decide you want to share them with (make them visible to) other people.

"The system kind of broke down..."

This is one of our favourite lines to use at home when things don’t function as we intended them to. And, sure enough, this system did break down when I thought I’d get all smart and proactive and stuff and create a “new shared album” so Joe and I could both add our photos from Milan. Normally, I would create an album, then through various means, I would make sure I had copies of Joe’s “album-worthy” photos and upload them myself. I even showed him how he could add a couple of photos to the album of photos from our recent Munich trip directly from his phone (which I had of course “shared” with him so he could see the photos). But, if now we’ve decided we will both contribute to the album, I thought it made sense to create a “shared album” up front.

The Problem: "shared" albums are not recognized as "albums" by any of my other photo apps

Third-party apps such as Picasa Tool are a key part of my photo organization system. These apps, written for Google’s previous photo system Picasa, allow me much greater access to and control over my photos than Google Photos currently does. Perhaps the most important feature to me is the ability to download low-res versions of my albums for offline viewing on my phone and tablet that take up very little space on my devices. The caveat, however, is that these apps can only access “albums.” Picasa, unlike Google Photos, didn’t have the concept of a stream of added, unorganized photos: if a photo existed in Picasa, then it also existed in an album. Therefore, all my third-party apps only know how to deal with albums, and the photos therein. If a photo hasn’t been explicitly added to an album, whether public or private, these apps can’t see it.

My workaround has been to create albums (so. many. albums.) to ensure that every photo uploaded exists in an album, somewhere. Some of these albums are only for my private viewing, and essentially function as a catch-all to make sure I can access these photos through my third-party, Picasa-based apps. So yeah, I’ve gone a little overboard with the albums, but that’s solved my problem of being able to see these photos in apps like Picasa Tool and Pics Pro. Imagine my surprise when my latest album “2016-10 Milan” (yes, I’m writing this in Milan!) wasn’t showing up in either of these apps.

Insert montage of me testing various conditions and lo and behold, new albums created as shared albums are somehow entirely different from plain old new albums, and my apps cannot see them.

One of these days, Google Photos...

So, Google Photos is basically the worst photo organizing/management/sharing service, except for all the others. I can’t keep trying all the others, only to notice that they suck in some even worse ways and lack things I already have, so I’m here, and I’m going to be a Google Photos hanger-on until it kills me.

Today’s lesson, therefore, is DO NOT BE FOOLED: NEVER MAKE A SHARED ALBUM. Always make an album, then decide to share it, which could mean simply letting other see it, or could mean letting others add to it, because apparently it’s not worth it to Google to differentiate. All these settings can be changed (or changed back) at any time, but shared albums (if created as such) break shit. Do not want.

(Google) Photo Organization Workflow - Revisited | Sarah Rainsberger

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 11:05:45 +0000

Well, it finally happened: no more Picasa Web Albums! I’ve spent a few months trying to come up with a decent Google Photos workflow and Picasa alternative, and here’s what I’ve settled on (for now)…

In a nutshell . . .

My basic workflow remains similar to the process described in my previous photo organization workflow post, with some notable changes now that Picasa Web Albums no longer exist.

Maintaining Online Albums Separately from my Local Album Folders

Since I’d really grown to love my one-folder-fits-all solution, it took a while for me to wrap my head around a different approach to photo management. Trying to view the situation through unbiased eyes, I realized that I can make a not-entirely-horrible workflow without Picasa that might even offer some advantages.

Once I’d come to the realization that my online albums were inherently different things from my local albums anyway, I gradually became more comfortable having two separate processes, one for public albums and one for my master collection of files. Creating a different workflow for public albums has actually improved my photo sharing experience, though at the expense of the warm fuzzy feeling of having one master file system of photos.

The Problem: online albums are no longer synched with offline photo collection via Picasa Desktop

While the Picasa Desktop application opens on my machine, and can still be used to view my folders of photos, this long-since unsupported application can no longer log into my Google account. Thus, no communicating with my albums online.

This has been the hardest change to deal with. Selective synchronization with one master offline collection truly was the basis of my photo system for over a decade. I’m not yet convinced that my new solution (still a work in progress) is anywhere near as elegant as what I had. There are some advantages to the new system, and as I come to appreciate them, I will probably tweak things to make better use of those features (instead of cry over the features I’m missing).

Previously, I maintained one master copy of my photos on my laptop. (This was of course backed up on an external hard drive, on our home NAS and in the cloud.) But, everything was a carbon copy of my laptop: photo edits, file and folder names, structure hierarchy. My online, shared, public photo albums were a subset of this structure. Not every photo in my collection ended up in public album because Picasa allowed me to selectively designate, from my existing file system, which folders (and which files within those folders) would be uploaded online and which wouldn’t. So while not every photo was online, the ones that were online were identical to the photos in my local storage: same filename, same edits, same album title.

I’ve had to abandon this system with respect to my online albums.

Yes, I can still create folders and subfolders in my file system. Yes, I can still batch rename photos within a folder based on date, time, context, sequence. Yes, my backups (actual backups on other devices and services) mirror what’s on my laptop. But, especially since most of these photos are taken with my phone, it has become annoying to use this file system as the basis for my online albums.

Photos on my phone can easily get to Google Photos (where my public, shared, online photo albums live). They can get to my laptop after going through both upload, then download via Dropbox. They can, less easily than getting there directly from the phone, get to Google Photos from my laptop after they’ve been organized and processed. But, if they do make their way back to Google Photos, they show up as a second, identical (except for the filename) photo. Not to mention that the Google Photos uploader for Mac OS is not without its issues. (I’ve had to uninstall and reinstall in order to kill a process, because there is no “cancel,” for example.)

And it’s slow. It’s slow uploading the photos. It’s just plain an inherently slow process overall, waiting for photos to appear from my phone via Dropbox (which, is not without ITS issues, either!), culling all but the keepers, batch renaming, agonizing with an inefficient uploader (actually, I now just upload through the website if I must)… and THEN, after all THAT, I need to create an entirely separate, public album with only the photos I actually want shared. Gone are the days of Picasa’s simple “star to include in your online album, otherwise this is just a local photo” feature!

I used to brag that I only needed one folder for each set of photos. Knowing which ones were visible online was easy (the photo was starred) and although the process had its quirks, changing a photo’s online status was (in theory) as simple as toggling the starred setting.

In addition to being easy to understand which photos existed where, the old system simply meant fewer albums. There wasn’t a “Trip to Stockholm” folder with all my Stockholm photos, then a “Trip to Stockholm” folder with photos I wanted to display. Nor was there a “Photos I took to remember which restaurants/cafes we liked in Stockholm” folder, nor a “Photos of our receipts from Stockholm for reconciling with the credit card” folder… there was one single Stockholm folder, and all photos whether public, private, boring-to-the-public, potentially-interesting-to-the-public-but-DEFINITELY-private etc., existed in this folder on my laptop.

Completely Rethinking My Online Albums

The good news is that I had previously discovered how to create my own gallery page of photo albums in Google Plus, since Google Photos still won’t give me one. This is a key part of my strategy and is essential for allowing people to find (and refind) your albums without needing to know each album’s specific link. It means that you can be regularly updating a public, or selectively-shared album which people can easily revisit to check for new photos. Now that people knew where to go for my photos, I could experiment with how I was going to put them up online. Some of my discoveries are listed below, all of which I’m pleased to say have led to me sharing the photos I do take more quickly, more easily and/or more effectively. (And, by sharing I mean simply getting out there for public viewing, separate from organizing.)

File Names:

I have always been insistent on having consistent, meaningful file names for my photos. This makes sense for a local photo collection, and I do still batch rename the files on my laptop based on date, time, context and sequence. However, this meant that an album was never really ready to publish until it was “done” - until all the photos had been collected (from both Joe’s sources, and mine) and until file names for the whole set had been processed.

Now, I’ve realized that my online albums for public sharing don’t necessarily benefit from these descriptive file names … especially since I’ve discovered searching in Google Photos does NOT match on file names when you search?! (Um, that’s kind of been my whole point!) So if the file name doesn’t matter, then I can just upload willy-nilly (image of me flailing my arms about, recklessly) to a Google Photos album on a whim. Madness, I say!

Quick Edits:

Google Photos seems at the moment to retain Picasa’s flexibility of editing a photo and choosing whether or not to save your edits as a copy (new photo) or simply overtop of the old one (with the ability to revert back to the original). Today, I used this option when I grabbed the photo at the top of this page to use in this post, but found there was way too much of the kitchen cluttering the background. I had uploaded the original photo to my “blog photos” album (both for ease of finding it, and for sharing reasons as I describe in this post about obtaining a direct link to a Google Photos image for use on an html page). While in this album, I selected this photo and chose to edit (crop) it a bit. After choosing “save a copy of this photo” to create a new image, I now had both images in my “blog images” album. I simply went back to the original photo and opted to “remove this photo from album” since it no longer needed to be in my album of images for this blog.

This is an easy way to adjust a photo that’s already been uploaded to a public album whenever I have the time or energy to improve it. It doesn’t have to stop me from getting the original organized in the right album immediately, knowing that I’ll remove it if I later decide to edit the photo. This works better for “sharing a moment” than waiting until I have the time to make my images perfect before adding them to an public album.

Annotations:

This was another painful change of mindset. In Picasa, photos could be “annotated” with a “caption” (different from a “comment,” which was something other people wrote on your photo). I’ve had to abandon annotations/captions since Google Photos long stopped showing captions (except hidden behind a couple of clicks). Some of my photos aren’t self-explanatory, since they mostly capture things we encounter while traveling. And, sometimes I would use series of photos to string out a long sentence or description so that the captions told a story in that particular sequence, but otherwise may have not directly related to the image itself.

In one way, breaking me of my photo-as-journal habit is a good thing. Previously, a caption would stay with a photo no matter in which context it was viewed. So, some of these annotations really made little sense if you didn’t see it in a particular sequence, within one particular album. (e.g. “. . . and yet, again . . .”) So, for using photos in multiple contexts, not having an annotation embedded into the file is, I must admit, better.

Also, many times I’d be hesitant to publish my albums until I’d had a chance to sit and annotate them all. Now realizing that people would have to work hard to find the captions anyway, there’s again less pressure on me to do more work before just getting the photo out there. Perhaps I’ll be motivated to look for a dedicated photo-journaling app at some point. But for now, I’m finding that I’m getting my photos up and out the door much more quickly, and family and friends have an easier time checking in on how things are going up to the moment in Sweden, for example, rather than waiting until I’m already in the next city to then publish hundreds of Sweden photos.

A New Workflow in the Works

In a later post, I’ll detail step-by-step my new system.

(It’s very closely modeled on the old one.)

Following new Blue Jays twitter accounts - adding to the muting/filtering/spoiler-proof systems on Tweecha (Android) and Yoru Fukurou (Mac OS) | Sarah Rainsberger

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 12:27:45 +0000

Although I have what I believe to be the most awesome, practically spoiler-proof system for reading Blue Jays tweets in “alternate time” as we watch PVR-delay or archived games (including a comparable Android version), when the Blue Jays sign a new player or I find a new Jays fan to follow on Twitter, new accounts need to be added to this system.

This post describes what happens when I want to follow a new, potentially-Jays-spoiling Twitter account.

When I find a new Twitter user to follow that tweets about the Blue Jays at least semi-regularly, I have to assume that there may come a day when one of his or her tweets might spoil the result of a game we haven’t watched yet.

Follow the user on Twitter
Add the user to my "Blue Jays" Twitter List. (This is primarily for the Android solution.)
In Yoru Fukurou on Mac OS: Using "Add User to tab" - My tab settings are already set up so that adding users to my Blue Jays tab redirects tweets both from and mentioning this user out of my regular timeline and into my Jays filter tab for reading later
In Tweecha on Android: Using "Mute Settings - Definitions" - I do need to manually add the user to the list of muted users. If it's an account others may be tweeting about, then I also add this user name (and/or their real name, in the case of baseball players) to the list of keywords to mute. (Remember, Tweecha allows selective muting, so you're not completely muting a user, just hiding their tweets from certain views. In my case, I mute these users from my Timeline but not when reading my Blue Jays Twitter List.)

After these few steps, I can read Twitter in two different “timelines” (occurring in two different “times”) on either Mac OS or Android: real-time (or as caught up as I happen to be reading my normal twitter timeline) and a separate “Blue Jays time.”

This “alternate Blue Jays time” could be a “#PVR Delay” (since we record every Jays game, even when we’re home, and start watching on a delay so we can fast forward through the commercials) or could be even a day or two behind if we’re traveling and watching archived, completed games much later on MLB TV. This system maintains two separate timelines, in two different “current times” so that I don’t simply miss tweets (ie muted and never seen) that might spoil a Blue Jays game.

App Links:

– Yoru Fukurou (Night Owl) - https://sites.google.com/site/yorufukurou/home-en

– Tweecha - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sinproject.android.tweecha

Customizing My Twitter Experience Through Muting, Filtering And Lists with Tweecha on Android | Sarah Rainsberger

Wed, 25 May 2016 22:27:45 +0000

There are two major criteria I have for a Twitter client, given the way that I use Twitter.

1. Keep track (and hold on to a lengthy backlog) of unread tweets.

2. Keep certain tweets out of my main timeline but still accessible to me when I’m ready to go back and read them. (ie Not simply “muted” or “blocked”)

I discovered last year that Tweecha did one very well. Months later, I’m pleased to report that it also does the second very well.

I wrote last year about the Android Twitter client Tweecha’s superb ability to retain thousands of unread tweets that I could catch up with later (with careful attention to detail on my part). It can’t be simply left for days on end like Yoru Fukurou, since it’s a mobile app that expects to close itself (unlike a desktop application that can sit running as long as the computer is on).

Since Tweecha is the only Twitter client I found that will live up to the demands of criteria #1, it instantly became my primary Android app. I was so happy with how it handled unread tweets (given mobile constraints) that it took me a while to explore all its features and realize that it also mostly satisfies criteria #2 with some tweaking (although again, not quite as well as Yoru Fukurou).

It’s the only app I’ve come across that even remotely handles one of my two criteria, let alone both. It’s not quite Yoru Fukurou for Android, but it’s as close as it gets. Additionally, with active development and keeping up with Twitter’s changes and newer features, I’ve actually come to enjoy reading tweets on my phone just as much as, if not more than, on my laptop. This has never been the case before.

Tweecha is highly customizable… so much so that it can seem a little overwhelming. I haven’t even tweaked every little thing that I could. The “choose to keep your position in the timeline when you refresh” option was the one that sold me, as it allowed me to load new unread tweets even when I was behind in reading tweets I already had loaded in the app. New tweets simply added to the top without my position changing. (Criteria #1)

I don’t know whether more configurable options were recently added, or whether I only recently discovered them, but Tweecha’s current “mute settings” allow such specific customization that I can almost imitate my Mac experience of filtering tweets. (Criteria #2)

I can now save Blue Jays baseball tweets to read later (not simply mute/block) while still reading non-baseball tweets in real-time… all in Tweecha. The key is Tweecha’s finely-controlled mute settings. Most apps are all-or-nothing when it comes to muting. Either your app has blocked out these words/users, or it hasn’t. Tweecha allows me to apply (or not apply) my mute settings differently in different parts of the app. So, I can have spoilers muted from my main timeline only, while reading tweets from a Twitter list in a different tab which is not muted.

If I can do this, then surely you can customize Tweecha to do what you want/need it to do for your particular way of using Twitter!

Here’s how I have configured Tweecha to customize my tweet reading experience:

Choose keywords, users, hashtags to mute
Create a Twitter Blue Jays / baseball list for those users I’ve muted
Use Mute Settings options to

Disable mute settings for viewing Twitter Lists
Enable mute settings for viewing my timeline (if we’re behind on baseball) or disable mute settings for viewing my timeline if I’m caught up and don’t need to avoid spoilers.

How I use Tweecha most of the time (when we’re caught up on baseball games):

I simply make sure that Mute Settings for my timeline are disabled (unchecked), and all the tweets come flowing in my main timeline.

How I use Tweecha during a live-airing baseball game, until we have finished watching the recorded game:

I have mutes enabled for my timeline, but disabled for lists. (In fact, mutes are always disabled for lists. I always want to see baseball tweets if I’m viewing my Blue Jays Twitter list.)

During the game, I read my regular Twitter timeline as normal. I can be caught up to real time knowing that baseball tweets (those containing particular keywords or from particular users) will be muted from this view. At the same time, I can be reading my Blue Jays Twitter list in another view, only reading as far as where ever we are in the game recording.

Since, as previously mentioned, Tweecha has excellent unread tweet management, I can be refreshing this Twitter list tab even if I’m not caught up on reading all its tweets. I simply scroll a little bit at a time throughout the game to simulate following the game on live Twitter. When I have finished watching the game, I simply keep reading the Twitter list until I’ve caught up to the same point in time as my main timeline. Then, I can go back into mute settings, uncheck timeline muting, and continue reading all tweets in my normal timeline.

The last 5%

Yoru Fukurou is really a 99.9% solution (in terms of how well it works): all the tweets from people I follow are collected and held somewhere in the application, marked as unread until I read them. Once or twice a year, a tweet might show up in my timeline that is actually a spoiler. This is usually because the language of a tweet is ambiguous or innocuous enough not to get caught by my filters but, in context, it’s obvious to me that it’s about the Blue Jays game. A simple “Blew it again!” tweeted by a Toronto sports fan around the time the game should be ending is a total giveaway to me, but sadly not to my keyword filtering. This is the only potential flaw in the system, and the failure rate has proven to be incredibly low. It works.

But, relying on Yoru Fukurou means relying on my laptop. And, though I’m late to the game compared to many people, I have come to quite enjoy my phone. It’s more likely to be on me (and easy to get to) while out and about and especially while traveling; it can connect to cellular data service; it runs more modern and updated Twitter clients that incorporate Twitter’s newer features. So, while Yoru Fukurou operates exactly the way I want it to when I use it, it’s not always the application I can or want to use.

My Tweecha solution has technical limitations that only bring it up to more like a 95% solution:

It can’t run, non-stop, in the background collecting tweets without being prompted to do so.

It requires attention, but at least my phone is almost always on me and I’m usually able to manually connect to Twitter frequently enough.

Because it employs muting and not filtering, there is a very specific group of tweets I’m liable to miss.

During game time, Tweecha is muting tweets from my main timeline and showing me tweets from a Twitter list (certain set of users). If someone I follow who is NOT on my twitter list tweets about baseball in such a way that it is muted as a spoiler, I will not see that tweet. This is unfortunate because a tweet about baseball from someone that I follow who isn’t a “baseball twitter” person is exactly the kind of tweet I want to see! For example, this could happen when a friend or collegue who isn’t really a baseball person gets excited about the Jays’ playoff run. They’re not “baseball enough” to be on my baseball list, but their tweets about baseball during a game will be muted.

I have a semi-workaround for this, too: another list! I have a list with a small number of family, close personal friends etc. whose tweets I want to see, no matter what. Periodically, I view and refresh this other Twitter list (not subject to muting) and would be able to see those baseball tweets there. It is another “thing to do” manually, however. And, I already have an efficient way on Yoru Fukurou to notice these few, errant tweets that slip by (by anyone, not just people on this short list). So typically I’ll just get those tweets from my laptop. But in theory, this would at least give me access to a subset of the tweets I’d miss.

This refers to another way in which I use Twitter on Yoru Fukurou: designating certain tweets as higher priority by filtering into tabs which show an unread number. I choose to have a search tab for people tweeting to/from/about Joe as a tab, a tab for “deals” that are tweeted that might be time sensitive, and a tab for tweets from mostly family members so I can keep up immediately with their tweets. Most twitter clients provide notifications for things about YOU, but not necessarily notifications for anything you can dream up. (A hit for a search result, a tweet about another user etc.) In fact, these are not notifications from Yoru Fukurou, either. But, given that these tabs are always collecting new tweets and showing the unread count, they function like notifications when I glance at the app.

Tweecha does have the option to “favorite” a user and receive notifications whenever they tweet, but only if you have the native Twitter app installed (to provide the underlying function, I believe). Furthermore, the settings warn you that this uses a lot more battery life. And, it requires an internet connection. Instead, from the Twitter website, I have chosen to receive SMS notifications of Joe’s tweets (as you can do for any individual user) which uses neither any extra battery draw on the phone nor any kind of wifi/data usage. But, I don’t do this for my entire shortlist which I can set as a filtered tab in Yoru Fukurou, nor is this a replacement for hits in a Yoru Fukurou search tab.

To the future, and beyond!

Yoru Fukurou is gives me the most customization, despite being (and feeling) like an “older” Twitter client. When Apple releases a major update to Mac OS, Yoru Fukurou shows signs of life with a small update making sure it’s still compatible. At least, thus far it always has. As it is, I rely heavily on another app that at least has come out and said it’s no longer supported, so I know I can’t upgrade my current laptop until I find an alternate solution for that app. This may mean that my four-year-old Macbook Air is not destined to be replaced with another Mac product. The two applications really tying me to Mac OS are Yoru Fukurou, which at least will work on the latest Macs and Picasa Desktop, which runs neither on the current version of Mac OS, nor on retina displays.

With the recent announcement that Chromebooks will now have access to Android apps via the Google Play store, I have been contemplating whether a Chromebook, or even high-end Android tablet could be the successor to this machine. Apps like Tweecha, which come very close to replicating my Mac applications, make this a not-immediately-ridiculous prospect. This is why I’m perhaps expending a little more time and energy than one would expect evaluating my apps, pushing them to their limits, and seeing exactly how functional I can make them.

I’m very pleased to report that Tweecha is definitely one of those powerhouse apps that comes so very close to replicating all the power and features I’ve become accustomed to in a powerhouse desktop client. Especially if you’re looking to create and customize your Twitter experience, I really suggest checking it out! It seems up to the challenge. :)

App Links:

– Yoru Fukurou (Night Owl) - https://sites.google.com/site/yorufukurou/home-en

– Twitpane - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twitpane

– Tweecha - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sinproject.android.tweecha

How to make a public album gallery page in Google Photos - like Picasa had | Sarah Rainsberger

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 14:38:45 +0000

Can I start yet another post with “One issue (among many!) that people are having with the transition from Picasa Web Albums to Google Photos is …” ? Well, here goes nothin’!

Today I attempted to create a public photo album gallery page in Google Photos, something PicasaWeb Albums generates automatically for its users but Google Photos does not. Here’s what I did:

The Problem

PicasaWeb Albums is (soon to be was) an online photo album service purchased by Google years ago and maintained (for various definitions of maintained) as a Google product ever since. Users could create web-based photo albums with a few different privacy settings available for each individual album. One of the best features of PicasaWeb was the “Public Gallery Page” where all of your public albums were listed. This meant that your friends, families, clients, colleagues etc. could always visit the same page and see every album you’d ever posted.

Google’s latest photo endeavour, Photos, still allows you to share albums, but a link must be generated for each individual album you want to share. Unlike PicasaWeb, Google Photos does not automatically create and update a public gallery page when you create a new public album.

Individual one-off sharing might seem sufficient to share photos with your family from the trip you just took, but what happens when your parents want to see photos from the time they visited you three summers ago? Do you think they still have that URL kicking around? How would they even know what to look for when Google Photo’s generated links are long strings of meaningless characters? (For comparison, PicasaWeb created an individual album URL based on the album title. So, if you spotted the link in the wild, you’d know exactly what it was.)

(PicasaWeb Public Gallery Page)

Google has claimed that, although the Picasa Desktop software is now unsupported and the PicasaWeb website itself will cease functioning on May 1, they have plans to provide “some” of PicasaWeb’s exclusive album features “somewhere” for those of us who have grown accustomed to them. There is no indication whether or not this new online space will include a public gallery page, nor whether the new space provided will be a temporary area or eventually worked into the core features of Google Photos.

My Attempt at a Solution

Not knowing whether or not I will have a public online photo gallery page after May 1, I decided to try using Goole Plus Collections to achieve something similar. (Of course similarly, I have no idea how long to expect Google Plus, whose photo features have been streamlined and separated, to continue to function as it currently does. But such is life when using Google for photos!)

Fortunately, I do have (and don’t mind having) a Google Plus account. For those who specifically opted out of G+, using a Collection as a public gallery page isn’t an option. From Google Plus, I have the option to create a Collection, which near as I can tell, is simply a grouped stream of individual Google Plus posts.

1. Create A Collection in Google Plus

(From my Google Plus page, I can click on "Collections")

2. Share Albums in Google Photos as posts to your Collection

Once in a “Collection,” I can click on the “+” button to add a new post. This is just like a regular G+ post, and can be text, an image, or in this particular case, the link to a public Google Photos Album. Conveniently, an Album from Google Photos can also be directly shared into a Collection as a post. So after you’ve created a Collection, you don’t need to be in your Collection in order to add Albums to it.

(In Google Photos, select an Album and choose to share to Google Plus. Then, inexplicably, select to "Continue to Google+" which takes you not to Google+ at all, but to the next screen)

(Be sure that the proper Collection is selected at the top of your post. If not, you can click on it to change which Collection your Album is posted to)

Unfortunately, this meant in order to create a kind of public gallery page, to “build my collection,” I had to spam my G+ timeline with almost 100 individual posts. (I opted to create a Collection for just my travel photos alone, only a third of my existing PicasaWeb albums, due to the volume . . . not only for the sake of my timeline, but because it took a good 4 or 5 clicks to share each album to the Collection and was taking quite a long time.) Each individual album became a separate G+ post that was a contribution to this “Collection.” Going forward, this will be less of a problem since posts will be added as albums are created, not dozens at once.

Also, notice the visual difference between my PicasaWeb public gallery page (pictured earlier in this post), whose screenshot shows at least two rows of five thumbnails on my 11” Macbook Air screen, and viewing the contents of a Collection. Since this “Collection” is simply a string of individual posts, I was really struggling to fit two items on my screen at the same time for this screenshot.

(Inside each "Collection" I can see each individual album as its own post, complete with title and thumbnail... though not very many of them at once)

Conclusion

In no particular order, here are my thoughts on this “Collection as Public Album Gallery” experiment:

It's not automatic - Every time I create a new photo album, I have to navigate to the album in Google Photos, share, choose to Share to Google+, continue to Google Plus, verify the post is destined for the right collection (i.e. my self-designated gallery page) and finally click "post." For an album, this isn't so bad. Doing it for more than a hundred albums to set the Collection up to match what I already had in PicasaWeb Albums wasn't great. When a new album is added to PicasaWeb, my PicasaWeb Public Gallery page of albums is automatically updated with no action required on my part.

Finer control - Admittedly, it did always bother me that the first album visible to viewers on my PicasaWeb Public Gallery page is "Photos from Posts" (as in, G+ posts). This album cannot be deleted as long as you have G+ posts, and will always show up as the first album on your page. I've come close on several occasions to deleting every post I ever shared on G+ just so there would be no photos to display and this album would disappear. Using Collections, I can specify exactly which albums show up in this new "gallery" of sorts, and can exclude the ones that Google auto creates. In fact, what I ended up doing was splitting my large collection of albums into a few major categories. This way, people who are only interested in travel photos don't see the albums of family visits.

Prominent public listing of Collections - For now, as one must always say with Google products, my Google+ profile page shows my list of Collections. It's like a public gallery of public galleries. It used to have a tab for "photos" that visitors could click on, but of course, that has changed. Listing "Collections" on my profile page is admittedly better. Now, instead of a Public Gallery Page, I can simply direct people to my Google+ profile page, and they can see *all* my Collections, which themselves are broadly categorized public galleries of photo albums.

I don't know how long this will last, when things will change, and which features will disappear - It seems just when I figure out one system, Google up and changes how everything works. Even as I type this, I know that May 1 will bring *some* kind of changes . . . I just don't know what. So, I continue to live at the mercy of Google's software developers and engineers, and what they think "the next best thing" is.

Photo Organization Workflow | Sarah Rainsberger

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 12:11:45 +0000

I’m less of a “photographer” and more of a “photo management addict.” I may not have great photos, but the ones I have are immaculately organized! Many have asked me about my process, so here’s a description of what I do to keep on top of the many photos, from many sources, I accumulate.

In a nutshell . . .

Everything auto-uploads to Dropbox and is auto-renamed YYY-MM-DD hh.mm.ss.jpg

Cell phone photos (both Joe's and mine) are auto-uploaded. (Joe has shared his Camera Uploads folder with me, so I have access to all photos from both cell phones on my laptop.)
Digital camera photos are shot on a microSD card in a full SD adapter so that the microSD card can be placed in my tablet, where Dropbox recognizes and auto-uploads the photos into my Camera Uploads folder.
At the same time, all photos from my phone and tablet (including my digital camera photos on the microSD card), but not Joe's, are auto-uploaded to the organizational void that is Google Photos.

The two "Camera Uploads" folders (mine and Joe's) are each used as a temporary inbox to pull photos onto my laptop (the primary copy of the files).

I manually create date-based folders under "Pictures" and move photos out of Dropbox and into these folders based on dates taken.

Since we travel often, each folder includes a city name (perhaps with description) and corresponds to time spent in each location, for example: 2015-12-11 Milan or 2015-12-21 Christmas in Oshawa
Folders in between trips when we're home are typically named 2016-01-01 Winter in Summerside or for events such as 2016-02-12 Summerside Bowling Tournament

Photos combined from all sources and organized into folders by time/place/event are viewed in photo viewing/management software (Google's Picasa) and any unwanted/duplicate photos are deleted.

The remaining photos are batch renamed (using A Better Finder Rename, which can perform multi-step renames).

Step 1: Add text placename- This is useful for searching at a later date, since a filename is easier viewed across systems than a tag.
Step 2: Add sequential number starting at 001 This is useful for identifying photos within a folder quickly.
Final filename example: 2015-11-21 10.31.50 Copenhagen-677.jpg

In Picasa, I "star" all the photos to be uploaded to a Google (PicasaWeb/Photos) online photo album and add any annotations.

Picasa is especially nice for this purpose because you can use its "starring" function to toggle which photos are or are not uploaded to an online photo album corresponding to your local folder.
Using this method, all of my Copenhagen photos, for example, can be kept locally in a single folder, even if I only intend to upload some of these photos. I do not need to create a separate album or collection of photos that I wish to share.

On my Android devices, I use the app "Picasa Tool" to download and sync offline copies of these online albums.

One huge downside to Google Photos is that you must be online to view any photos. Picasa Tool is a 3rd party app that downloads lower resolution versions of your albums (although perfectly acceptable for viewing on a mobile device) so that I have access to my entire online album collection (yes, the WHOLE thing!) on both my phone and my tablet.
Even with no connectivity, I can look up the photo of the wine served at that restaurant in Malmö in 2012 or check which hotel we stayed at in Oulu in 2006.
One compromise with this system is that only photos uploaded to albums ("starred" photos) are available to Picasa Tool. So photos that for whatever reason I have chosen not to upload to an album (that weren't taken on my phone) are not on my Android device.

Further backups: home NAS, Google Photos, laptop external backup

NAS: after photos have been renamed, annotated and starred (since those edits in Picasa will be saved with the file), folders are copied over to our local NAS. This networked copy can be accessed from any device over our home wifi.
Google Photos: Every photo that "passes through" one of my mobile devices, one way or another, is automatically uploaded to Google Photos. Also, any photos uploaded to an album via Picasa are added to Google Photos. So, any photos of Joe's that are uploaded to an online album will also end up in my Google Photos account. This isn't all of them, but probably the ones worth an extra backup.
Laptop Backup: I keep a bootable backup of my laptop on an external hard drive, created with SuperDuper. </ul>
Sharing Albums via Picasa public gallery page: https://picasaweb.google.com/sarahrainsberger

What good is having all these meticulously-organized albums if people can't see them! PicasaWeb creates a gallery page for every user where all your public albums are visible.
There is no need to share or provide links to each album as you create them; people can find or revisit all your photos from one convenient link.
Every PicasaWeb album also automatically is available as a Google Photos album, but Google Photos has no public gallery page, so every album requires a link to be generated every time you want to share it with someone.

picasa.google.com

Alternatives and Replacements

Lyn App

Sarah Rainsberger

How to Connect a Chromebook to Radisson Hotel Wifi | Sarah Rainsberger

The general problem, as I understand it:

The specific problem, as I understand it:

The technique:

The tool:

What my browsing experience is like now:

What my Android app experience is like now:

Conclusion:

tl;dr

How to Embed a Google Photos Album on a Web Page | Sarah Rainsberger

The problem:

The tool:

What it DOES do:

What it does NOT do:

Conclusion:

MrHyde Android App on Chromebook | Sarah Rainsberger

IF Timer v1.0 | Sarah Rainsberger

Quick Introduction

Second Verse, Same as the First

Time for MY app

Sinz 2.0 = IF Timer 1.0

How to use IF Timer

Using MarkdownX Android app for Blogging on Samsung Chromebook Pro | Sarah Rainsberger

Live Preview

File Saving / Organization

UPDATE: I found the files!

First Jekyll post written on the Samsung Chromebook Pro! | Sarah Rainsberger

Jekyll Blog Post Entirely via Android | Sarah Rainsberger

Creating your own Direct-Share-to-Friend feature in Pocket using IFTTT and Todoist | Sarah Rainsberger

How I Use Pocket

What I Want

What I Did

What I Had to Get Joe To Do

My new (Google) Photo Organization Workflow | Sarah Rainsberger

The Transition

What happens when I take a photo on my phone?

Organizing Local Photos on my Machine

Viewing and Sharing my photos

Integrating Photos Taken on my Camera

Synching All Photos Locally on my Mobile Devices

In Conclusion

Lesson Learned - Never create a shared album in Google Photos! | Sarah Rainsberger

"Shared" means . . . shared?

"The system kind of broke down..."

The Problem: "shared" albums are not recognized as "albums" by any of my other photo apps

One of these days, Google Photos...

(Google) Photo Organization Workflow - Revisited | Sarah Rainsberger

In a nutshell . . .

Maintaining Online Albums Separately from my Local Album Folders

The Problem: online albums are no longer synched with offline photo collection via Picasa Desktop

Completely Rethinking My Online Albums

File Names:

Quick Edits:

Annotations:

A New Workflow in the Works

Following new Blue Jays twitter accounts - adding to the muting/filtering/spoiler-proof systems on Tweecha (Android) and Yoru Fukurou (Mac OS) | Sarah Rainsberger

Customizing My Twitter Experience Through Muting, Filtering And Lists with Tweecha on Android | Sarah Rainsberger

Here’s how I have configured Tweecha to customize my tweet reading experience:

How I use Tweecha *most* of the time (when we’re caught up on baseball games):

How I use Tweecha during a live-airing baseball game, until we have finished watching the recorded game:

The last 5%

It can’t run, non-stop, in the background collecting tweets without being prompted to do so.

Because it employs muting and not filtering, there is a very specific group of tweets I’m liable to miss.

Not spoiler-related, but it doesn’t provide the same visual cue that a tweet I might care about seeing NOW has come in.

To the future, and beyond!

How to make a public album gallery page in Google Photos - like Picasa had | Sarah Rainsberger

The Problem

My Attempt at a Solution

1. Create A Collection in Google Plus

2. Share Albums in Google Photos as posts to your Collection

Conclusion

Photo Organization Workflow | Sarah Rainsberger

In a nutshell . . .

Alternatives and Replacements

How I use Tweecha most of the time (when we’re caught up on baseball games):