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Bumbling around Boston

I’ve been way too lazy posting this – it’s been a whole week and a half…

We met up with my mother in law last weekend for a couple of days in Boston towards the end of April. I’d been there a couple of years ago on a similarly-short trip, I think sometime in the summer. I was mostly on my own that time, so a great deal more shopping was done this time.

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General

Bean soup

Bean soup

Ingredients:

  • dry beans, such as great northern or navy
  • onion, carrot, maybe celery
  • leftover cooked sausage

Economic apocalypse means it’s a good time to cook some beans! First soak the dry beans overnight, maybe with a little lemon juice added to the water. Discard the soaking liquid and rinse the beans a bit. Put them in a pot, cover with water, and simmer until they’re tender and maybe a little overdone – I think that’s when the oozy bean soupy stuff happens. When they’re nearly done, dice up the onion, carrot, and celery and soften in oil, butter, or (ideally) the pan you cooked bacon in that morning. Dice up the leftover sausage and add that to the beans with the softened vegetables. Simmer a while then enjoy!

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flickpress 0.7

Inspired a bit by Svein’s comment, I added a feature to search Flickr for Creative Commons and public domain photos. It’s probably still a little rough, but seems to work pretty well so far. Since most licenses require attribution, I’ve turned on the caption by default – and it now includes a link to the photo’s owner.

Download flickpress 0.7: flickpress_0.7.zip

Also, flickpress is now at the WordPress Plugins ranch, so you should be alerted to upgrades now.

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More cherry blossoms

I got brave last weekend and rode the bike down to Hains Point. It turned out to be a traffic nightmare and the bike and I got pretty hot, but I did manage to find a parking spot along the Potomac side of Potomac Park, where there were plenty of blossoms and not very many people.

White blossom Delicious pink center Blossom canopy and sky

Yesterday the Tidal Basin was way too crowded so today I decided to make a Metro-and-foot trip down, knowing rain and Monday would thin the crowds a bit. The rain and wind weren’t fun, but the Tidal Basin was very quiet and the blanket of petals all over everything was well worth getting a little wet.

Blossom benches Blossoms with bokeh-blossoms Jefferson Memorial and blossoms

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Image renaming bash script

As part of my photo archiving process I like to first change the image file names from their original nonsense names to something based on the date and time. This way, if I upload a low-res image someplace, such as Flickr, I can easily use its original filename to locate the high-res version in the archives. This also means all of my images have unique filenames.

To batch rename files, I used to use a script called “irename” that I got from varp.net a long time ago. Unfortunately, it would fail to rename images that were taken too close together. Looking at the code, it didn’t include a way to automatically give unique names to images taken really close together. So, I looked at the code to see if I could fix it. It turned out the script was parsing the EXIF info in image files itself – which I guessed an external program could do more reliably. There’s a Perl library and command-line tool called exiftool that does a great job of parsing EXIF info. It even does exactly the sort of image file renaming I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to have to type all this every time:

exiftool -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-c.%%e "-filename

When you find yourself typing stuff like this at the command line repeatedly, you should put it in a bash script with a name you’ll remember, place that in your “bin” folder, and make it executable. I called my script “camcon” because I didn’t have anything on my system with that name and it sounded easy to remember. Download camcon: camcon.zip