TakeoutExtractor v1.1

At the start of the year, as part of my general effort to minimise my exposure to Google, I ordered-up a Google Takeout and cleared-out and archived my photos and videos from Google Photos.

To this end, I’ve just released version 1.1 of Takeout Extractor over on github. This releases adds fixes for a few issues discovered during the year, including some kindly reported by other github users. It now correctly handles photos edited using the Google One add-on photo features, to which I subscribed some time back in the last year. I also updated the projects to .net 7 and did some general freshening up. As noted in the readme, this is a source-only release because publishing maui apps currently seems to be broken in Visual Studio 2022. I’ll see if this is resolved by future VS updates. For Windows and MacOS apps (sadly sans the latest fixes) see the v1.0 release

See here for some background on the project. I hope it is useful to someone.

Year End

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, via Maria Popova

Happy new year. Maybe, just maybe, although I can’t see how, 2024 might just be better less bad than the one ending. We’re all going to have to try pretty hard though.

Time to burn the dying year down and start again.

SLotD: Pushing the model

Software Lesson of the Day for 16/10/2024:

Sometimes you will try something and it works. And then you extend it a bit. And then a bit more. And it stops working and/or doing what you want.

Consider the possibility that the fact it initially worked was just a false signal, and that actually you should never have done it that way at all. Because the model or pattern for doing $thing$ is actually somewhat different — and whether you approve of that pattern or not, and whether you like deleting superficially working code or not, that’s the way you have to do it. Because we rarely write software nowadays without what we write having to fit into a more or less opinionated container. So make sure you actually understand the pattern, not simply what you want it to be.

(This post is brought to you by trying to implement an Android ViewPager with hard-coded child elements in the layout xml. No matter how hard you try, you can never defeat the PagerAdapter‘s beliefs about page instantiation and caching.)

West

“I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string  and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool that seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go someday. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: ‘Flee, all is discovered.’ It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”

— from All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren