Apple Photos to immich

In my continuing quest to ensure that we have local copies of all cloud data like photos, I re-discovered that we had about 11,000 pictures in Apple Photos from when we had an iPhone in the family.

iCloud Photos Downloader (icloudpd) is a command line utility which uses Apple's API to download your files from Apple Photos. Apple's API seems quite good, one can download the original resolution files without restriction or limit. icloudpd prints each filename to stdout as it runs. It took about 5 hours to download 11,000 photos and videos, 376 GBytes of data altogether.

Once downloaded to the local filesystem, immich-go imported the files to immich while suppressing duplicates as it went. Of the downloaded files, less than half were new. The rest had apparently made their way to Google Photos at some point, and already imported into immich.

As an added bonus with the photos deleted, we no longer need to pay Apple for so much storage and were able to drop down to a less expensive tier. We now have just enough to back up the iPads.

Mail-in Apostille in California

An Apostille is similar to notarization to certify a document, but intended for use in another country. Apostille is defined by a Hague convention between nations, and certifies that a notarized document in the originating member nation is true and suitable for use in another member nation. One might, for example, get Apostille certification of a marriage certificate to verify one's marriage elsewhere. The document, in English, would be trusted as authentic — though might additionally need a sworn translation into another language to be actually useful in that other nation.

The California Secretary of State is the certifying authority for the state. They run periodic pop-up locations in major cities for people to bring in their documents. In December of 2024 I tried to use one of these pop-ups in San Francisco, but the line was 3+ hours and I gave up before getting to the front.

One can instead mail documents to Sacramento, with a cover letter and return envelope. At the time of this writing the cost is $20 per document. I mailed in documents with a check on December 9th 2024, and received an Apostille dated December 21st. The documents arrived at our home on December 26th, slightly slowed by Christmas. So, expect roughly a two week turnaround.

Wind Turbines and Bird Deaths

The practice of painting one blade of a wind turbine in order to increase its visibility to birds is becoming commonplace. Avian brains are not wired to detect such enormous structures as a threat, but increasing the contrast and making the movement more visible helps them see it as something dangerous to be avoided.

To be clear: this is a good thing. Harming birds, even unintentionally and without malice, is bad and taking steps to avoid it is good.

But this is another example of bad faith attacks, launched carelessly and repeated endlessly, turning into a multi-year effort by the clean energy industry to respond to. The number of birds involved was tiny, less than 0.02% of bird deaths. A study in South Africa found 848 birds killed, over the course of four years, across 20 wind energy sites. This is not a large number.

The next set of allegations about wind power are harder to refute because they are completely fabricated: that wind turbines cause cancer, or that offshore turbines kill whales.

The people making this stuff up do not want to challenge clean energy to be better. They are not interested in seeing improvement to address whatever harm they cite. They are only interested in deterring the deployment of clean energy because money from fossil fuels funds their movement. It is all in bad faith, and the disproportionate cost falls on clean energy to address.

Hannover Stadtarchiv indexes online

My wife's mother was born in Hannover, Germany, and her family lived in the Hannover area for many generations before that. In the chaos of World War II the family lost contact, and her mother emigrated to the US having met only one set of grandparents and little information about earlier family history. Over the course of the last four years we've managed to find records of her family going back many generations, and find several modern cousins via DNA matches.

Which brings me to a bit of news: this research in the Hannover area is a bit easier now. The Hannover Stadtarchiv holds records which have passed the time ranges where they are protected by Personenstandsgesetzes (privacy laws, often abbreviated PStG):

• 110 years after a birth
• 80 years after a marriage
• 30 years after a death

The Stadtarchiv has been thinly staffed for over a year, and its response times to inquiries have lengthened greatly compared with several years ago. A request sent early in 2024 took eight weeks to get an initial response, and many more weeks to followup.

To try to improve the situation the archive has started putting more of its material online, starting with indexes of birth, death, and marriage registers. The indexes are free to access, allowing one to find a specific record before reaching out to the Stadtarchiv to get access to it.

This is really neat! For example the 1911 Geburtenbuch index from Standesamt Hannover I is available, and my wife's great uncle August Koch is on page 52.

The Arcinsys site is somewhat difficult to navigate, but does work. To give it a try you'd create an account and go to the Hannover Stadtarchiv object. Click "Show Associated Objects" to descend into the list of Standesämter and links for their available indexes.

 

This is a followon to two earlier articles about the process of genealogical research in Germany:

• German Genealogical Research
• Getting Started with German Genealogy

physicaladdress.com notes

We pay for a service to maintain a mailing address separate from our home address, where the mail is intended to be available from wherever in the world we happen to be. We settled on physicaladdress.com for this service. Our mailbox is at their Laguna Beach location, as we wanted a California address.

We chose physicaladdress.com based on their operating model: they directly operate all of their locations. Many competing services offering virtual mailing services subcontract the actual postal handling to Mailboxes, Etc and similar franchises, where one's mailing address could become suddenly unavailable with no recourse if the franchise closes or moves. We wanted more surety than that, some of our documents would be difficult to redirect on short notice.

When letters or packages arrive, the envelope is scanned and an email notification sent.

One can choose to immediately shred the envelope without opening it, or open and scan the contents. Much of our correspondence is fine with just a scan to act on. The tier of service we use includes 30 envelopes per month, ten of which can be opened and scanned.

For documents where the original is important it can be forwarded. A recent example cost $0.76 to send the original letter sized envelope, delivered via USPS in a slightly oversized beige envelope. It arrived at our home in three days. In a nice touch, the sending address is our specific mailbox so any problems in delivery will be sent back where we can see what happened. They can forward mail anywhere in the world, with appropriate postage charges.

We've been using the service for a few months and are quite happy with it.

Daily Google Drive backup using rclone

I still make regular use of Google's Docs, Sheets, and so on but make regular backups to a local drive which is itself backed up off-site. I've settled on the following script, run from cron in the middle of the night. It sends email on failure, and reports success on Mondays just so I'll see that it is working. It is saved as /usr/local/bin/gdrive_sync.sh.

root@pve:~# cat /usr/local/bin/gdrive_sync.sh
#!/bin/sh

tmpfile=$(mktemp)
/usr/bin/rclone sync --fast-list --transfers=32 --create-empty-src-dirs \
	--exclude-if-present=exclude-from-rclone-sync \
	--drive-acknowledge-abuse \
	denny-at-example-com-google-drive-backup: \
	/pool1/GDrive/denny@example.com > ${tmpfile} 2>&1

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	echo rclone Failed
	rm -f ${tmpfile}
	exit 1
fi

extra=$(grep -v -e "Duplicate object found in source" \
        -e "Duplicate directory found in source" ${tmpfile})
rm -f ${tmpfile}

if [ "${extra}" ]; then
	echo rclone errors found
	echo ${extra}
	exit 1
fi

dow=$(date +%w)
if [ ${dow} -eq 1 ]; then
	# Report success once per week
	echo Successfully backed up denny@example.com Google Drive
fi

exit 0

Vaccines Working Less Well Because of Antivax

Decades ago as an infant I received several doses of the polio vaccine, one of a panel of childhood vaccinations. Mass vaccination had already had a huge impact on the disease by that point, infections and serious consequences had already dropped substantially.

 

My Favorite Shirt

However there was no Varicella vaccine back then, the virus which causes chicken pox. We now know that Varicella is also responsible for the even more serious Shingles later in life, as the long-dormant virus can become active again.

I remember chicken pox. The thing I remember most about suffering through chicken pox isn't the itching, though that was bad. It isn't the blisters, it isn't the fever. The thing I remember most is that I had been allowed to wear my favorite shirt as a way to comfort me, and that shirt disappeared after I recovered. My parents said they didn't know what happened to it, it had been lost. I was upset about it, and remember the feeling of loss to this day.

It was decades later, after my parents had both passed away, that I realized: they burned the shirt. Chicken pox is so infectious that parents would often dispose of the bedding and clothing afterwards.

My children have little context for this. They never developed chicken pox, and don't know anyone who has. They've never even heard of anyone who developed chicken pox. The infection rate has dropped by 97% since the addition of Varicella to the childhood vaccine schedule in 1995.

In fact, until Covid-19, they didn't have to give much thought to disease at all.

 

Vaccines work

We're seeing the same rapid reduction in the many cancers which are triggered by the HPV virus. Rates of these cancers are dropping due to the introduction of widespread HPV vaccination a number of years ago.

Vaccines work. They work well at an individual level, but they work even better when a disease cannot gain any hold within a population — the much-discussed herd immunity. In the US we are rapidly losing this herd immunity as antivax sentiment gains strength and more parents decline to vaccinate their children.

We're heading into a world where, for the first time, vaccines won't work as well as they used to.

 

Booster shots

Several weeks ago I had blood titers run to gauge antibody response from the vaccines of my childhood. My wife and I got booster shots for Measles/Mumps/Rubella (MMR), Whooping Cough (tdap), and Polio, trying to compensate for a weakening herd immunity. This is the sad reality we have to prepare for.

Google Photos Takeout failure

Two months ago I exported all photos from Google Photos to import into immich, and scheduled followon Takeout runs every two months. I had naively assumed the subsequent exports would be incremental changes from the first one, but they are instead complete exports again. Oh well.

More significantly though, they seem to require re-entering my login every 20 minutes or so. When I click on a download link if I haven't logged in within the last few minutes I am asked to login again, but also downloads which do not complete within 20 minutes seem to stop. Clicking "resume" in the Chrome download window doesn't succeed.

 

Once this has happened enough times, Takeout disallows trying to download again.

 

ZIP archives #7 and #8 are now inaccessible to me.

I don't recall needing to login so often during the last export, two months ago. Though the downloads did sometimes fail, I also don't recall having the resume download fail because of the need to login again. It probably did not change in the intervening two months, but somehow I'm running into it this time.

Google Takeout really is a wonderful thing, but I'm going to have to do it again and — I guess — be especially careful about when to download the links. Do I have to be ready to click Resume immediately? That seems primitive.

LLMs for spoken language practice

One use-case for large language models that I'm especially eager to see evolve is in assisting humans in learning languages. Once one has achieved roughly A2 in a new language, progress becomes much more rapid by holding spoken conversations in the new language. It is something which an LLM should be reasonably good at:

• Large corpus of idiomatic written and spoken language available on general topics.
• Generate prompts for a few thousand hypothetical situations to navigate in the new language, as part of the curriculum.
• Doesn't require the LLM to be an expert in a factual area. Just converse.

One could offer 1:1 instruction with the human student paired with an LLM instance. The prompt could gradually adjust the sophistication of the language as the student progresses. The LLM could evaluate the human student's pronunciation and word choice, and offer tips for how to be more idiomatic.

The Running of the Proxmoxes

I update Proxmox every 1-2 years.

Today was the day.

Success!

Renewing US Passports early

If a US Passport is expiring in one year or less, there is now a very nice online portal to request a renewal. If the passport has more than a year left but one wants to renew it early, paper forms must be sent and the old passport mailed in.

We wanted to renew but our passports had a bit more than one year left, so we filled out the DS-82 forms and sent them with the old passports.

• We sent the mailer via certified mail in November, 2024.
• The new passport books were delivered to our home 17 days later.
• The new passport cards (first time!) were delivered to our home 1 day after that.

So passport renewals take less than three weeks right now, even without paying for expedited serice nor express mail shipment. The old passport books were returned a bit later, 22 days after we sent them in for renewal. We appreciate this, they had passport stamps which hold memories for us.

Installing Signal is Simple

In researching Signal Messenger I was left with the impression that it was difficult to use and tryig to get the whole family to use it would be painful. Having now finished getting it set up on everyone's phone I have to say: it was not difficult at all.

We each established a 1:1 channel with each other, and a group chat for the Family. I and one of the teenagers are admins of the Group. We've also used it for a 1:1 video call between an Android phone and an iPhone.

So far, so good.