The Logan Family

Month: February 2024

  • Mardi Gras, Making cake, multi-media

    Mardi Gras, Making cake, multi-media

    When there is a daddy daughter dance, attendance is not optional. It is not the dad’s night to shine on the dance floor (though a few did).

    We got our tickets to the daddy-daughter dance before they sold out. Yes, I have a weird tone when writing these posts, but the event did actually sell out. A friend of ours was really sad learning about the dance that day through his daughter, and realized he couldn’t go because he didn’t have a ticket.

    We went last year (here is a link to last year’s event for all my mega-fans that want to see it).

    Rosie got a special dress for the occasion, and she got to choose the fine-dining option, no place was off the table.

    The final decision, between Applebees, a steakhouse, and a taco place, she chose the taco place. The conversation was delightful.

    The place was packed with dads and sweaty kids. The snack table was popping. The moms worked their butts off to make this night possible, where no moms were allowed.

    The 360 Photo Booth was a hit. But the highlight of the night was the daddy dance off. Our host, Brian, shared that he wasn’t going to participate; when sharing that, I didn’t quite remember any dance off happening from last year’s event. Oh, but it was so amazing:

    Daddy Dance off.

    The dad that did the split took home the prize this year: pride, and a torn hamstring.

    The whole night I kept thinking to myself: “Rosie is just like her mom.” No, this isn’t a slight towards her or Taylor. She is just like her mom when, in the early days of our marriage when we were attending what seemed like an endless amount of weddings, Taylor would often disappear, only to turn up having a conversation with yet ANOTHER friend/coworker/someone she grew up with/sorority sister/parent’s friends kid, what-have you. Taylor was just very social, it drove me crazy and it is one thing I really love about her.

    The whole evening at the daddy daughter dance, I kept looking up, and Rosie was GONE. But, she would always turn up, just like her mom did.

    Making Cake

    We had fun at the Super Bowl this year. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a ton of pictures to really share about the evening, but Rosie and Taylor spent some time making a great cake for the event.

    24″ pizza
    Mercy watching Usher
    Tay leading the charge

    Rosie in the zone

    Mardi-gras

    A few fans wrote in that they were disappointed about not getting a post last week. I apologize deeply on this shortcoming, as this should have been posted last week.

    Our neighborhood does a pretty fun Mardi-gras event each year. And by pretty fun, I mean the parade is led by 4 riding lawnmowers kind fun. Beers in coozies, kids in beads eating sugar kinda fun.

    So much fun, we invited our friends from the country to come join us this year. Houston made it at the end after addressing a plumbing emergency at his house, but we had a blast in all the ways listed above:

    The parade this year was the most impressive one on record:

    Multi-media

    Ok, I wanted to come back to this one, and answer the question about where and how to store the ever-growing collection of videos and pics on your phone. What do you do with them?

    This is part II; last time, I shared a bit about our current setup:

    • WD Mycloud to store videos locally
    • Amazon Photos to store all photos
    • Plex server to watch videos on the tv.

    This works ok, but it has its issues:

    • Videos are hard to organize
    • Videos need to be formatted properly
    • Lacks many features we like on images, like location, finding people in videos, etc.

    Update:

    Currently there is no service that does what we want it to do, which is to format videos and keep them organized with a great user experience, without storing them in the cloud. Plex is the service used, but even that just puts all videos into the same folder, and they cannot be searched via date, location, etc. Plex was designed to serve movies, like a personal DVD collection, and can be extended for home movies. The features just aren’t the same, and formatting the videos to be the right format for a tv is time consuming and technical.

    Also, we want to keep our videos in the same place we keep our videos.

    One note here: if the goal was to just keep our videos stored, and access them occasionally, I am quite happy with our current setup. The biggest difficulty is organizing, and watching on the tv.

    This leaves us with one of a few different ways to proceed:

    • Google Photos- now called 1Google. If on android, this is the way to go. 2 Terabytes, $100/year.
    • iCloud+. A great option. I am toying with the smaller plan to see what is available, and really like it. It syncs pics with my computer to quickly edit them for this blog. It can be shared among people in the house with Family Sharing. If you have an Apple TV, use this one. $9.99/month ($120/year) for 2TB
    • Amazon Photos. This is what we have been using to backup our photos for years. Currently, we have 59,000 photos. We also have FireTv in our house, so it just made sense to use this one. The app on our phones automatically backs up all photos/videos. Currently I am uploading all videos stored on our local drive. Currently I am using the 1TB for $60/year, but will eventually jump to the 2TB for $119/year.

    A couple caveats here. Bandwidth is important. No matter what solution you use, your upload speeds are very important for this. One good place to check is speedtest. No matter what solution you are using, if you are uploading a lot of content to the cloud, it will take some time. We have a 500MB internet plan with fiber, and it took about 6 hours to upload 220 gigabytes so far.

    However, we are done with this task. The next step is to continue uploading our videos, and then, possibly sell out WD Mycloud server on eBay. A lot of time was spent on this task trying to avoid lock-in with a specific cloud provider, but the features are pretty great, and it seems like the best way to go for now.

  • The zoo, and the cloud

    The zoo, and the cloud

    On Saturday, we had nothing to do. This doesn’t happen…ever in our family. Normally there is at least something to clean/organize. But this time, nothing.

    “Let’s go to the zoo!”

    There’s not much to say about the zoo, but I did take lots of pics, so enjoy this little video.

    This visit did make me wish I had a better camera- especially with a zoom. Do you have a camera? If so, what kind? There are some great options, and people who do photography seem to have a lot of fun with it.

    The cloud

    What do you do with all of your videos/photos that you acquire, year after year? The library of media only gets bigger each year, as phones with better cameras take increasingly larger sized images for each shot.

    The options are either:

    1. Store them in the cloud.
    2. Keep them on a file in your house (locally)
    3. Not bother; delete them when you get a new phone.

    Before deciding what option is best, I think it’s important to figure out what you want to do, because there is no one-size fits all solution. My goals are:

    • Keep all photos
    • Record 4k videos, as my camera has that option (most cameras do now)
    • Be able to watch those videos in 4k on our tv
    • Have a good app to look up photos by time/location/person
    • Keep videos, but all videos don’t need to be available at all times.
    • Save money.
    • Automatically sync my media, as well as Taylor’s

    option 1: the cloud

    This is the best option, and the most expensive. There are three major options out there, and each seems as good as the other, in my opinion. I am not going to go deep into the details on these, but here are the three major options, and reasons why they may be the best fit. Some prices are listed, all for the size of the library we currently have at our house, which is about 2 terabytes

    • Google photos. Has an app on the phone. $10/month. Best if you have google chrome cast.
    • Amazon Photos. Has an app on your phone. Photos are free for prime members. The app is great: sort by person, location, time, etc. $12/month. Best if you have fire TV.
    • Apple iCloud+. Just buy extra storage. The app is also great. $10/month. Apple TV supports this to play things on the tv.

    Whatever you use to stream your tv with will have the best way to show your photos/movies. Also, month after month, year after year, this can get expensive. And uploading terabytes of data to the cloud will take a long time, depending on the upload speeds of your internet. Once the initial upload is past, you are pretty much good to go.

    Option 2: local storage

    One of my goals is to avoid the monthly fee each month, so I went with this option. This is a NAS: Network Attached Storage. It is one of the cheaper ones, but a good way to get started.

    It plugs into your router, not your computer, and is a one-time expense, and should last a couple years before we max out the storage capacity.

    Pros:

    • one time expense
    • Automatically uploads all media from Taylor and Is phones.
    • The app is good, but limited.
    • Don’t have to worry about file size, or 4k videos.

    Cons:

    • Western Digital is a storage company, so their priority isn’t to make the best app. We got spoiled with the amazon photos app (others act the same way) where location, person, even things are searchable).
    • App cannot search by location, person, etc
    • Playback on a tv.

    This brings up an important point about metadata. Each time you take a picture, besides the name of the photo (the file name), all sorts of other information is recorded in the photo.

    At this point, we have all of our photos (Taylor and I) backing up to Amazon Photos automatically. This is a great app, and again, free for prime members. We have been using this for years, and love it.

    We have all of our videos being backed up to our local storage device, a wd mycloud 4 terabyte device next to our router. Here is a link to learn more about that, if you are interested: https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd/my-cloud-home

    But we still don’t have a great way to watch these videos on our amazon firetv stick.

    For each photo/video that gets created, there is a ton of metadata included. Your phone keeps a local database of every image, who is in the picture, what else it thinks is in the picture, the location, time of day, the camera settings, and a whole lot more. Here is a screenshot of what I got when writing some software to get the metadata for a video I wanted to see:

    The reason this is important is because we have a way to play these videos on our tv, but each tv/software has certain limitations: videos have to be in the right format to be played, including resolution, file extension, bitrate, size, and there has be enough bandwidth to stream the file to the tv without any interruptions, so you better have good wifi.

    There is a free, local media server option that can do a lot of this for you. It was created as a server to keep all of your movies and music (think back to when people had VHS tapes). However, it has been tweaked to be able to show home videos that are stored as well: https://www.plex.tv

    It is the recommended way to interact with your videos on our wd-mycloud, so I set it up. We got spoiled with our other ways to view photos and videos (the google photos app, iPhone photos, or in our case, amazon), so this interface seemed terrible:

    But, it is free, and allows us to view home videos.

    But there is one last problem, and this is where that metadata became important: Plex only plays videos in the proper (landscape) format. This means that every video recorded in portrait mode (up and down), doesn’t play properly on the tv.

    After combining all of our videos into a single file, I wrote a bash script to go through and get the metadata for each video. In our case, we wanted to get the orientation of the file: 0 degrees, 90, or 270. If the video was 0 degrees, we are fine: it is landscape, no further action is needed.

    If it was a 90 or 270 degrees, it is portrait. We would need to:

    1. Move the original file to a new folder.
    2. Format the video by adding black bars on the sides, so it will play on the tv.

    Here is the code for that:

    Now, we can view our videos, even the portrait mode, on our tv, through the janky plex interface.

    That is a lot of work, for a video interface that is pretty bad. What if there was another way?

    At this point, we have almost everything we wanted:

    • Photos backed up to amazon photos
    • photos AND videos are backed up locally to our WD Mycloud
    • Videos can be played on the phone through the app.
    • Videos can be played through the Plex app, but the interface is terrible. We can do better.

    If you have a TV that can do Airplay, you can stop here; just stream the video (stored on WD Cloud), to your tv. This is a great option. But I want more.

    What we need is an app that can make use of all of the metadata from a photo/video. The job of the Plex media server is to make sure your videos can be played, and if not, format them to the right format. Running some computer code to get the job done isn’t ideal.

    Is there something else that can work with the files we have (not in the cloud) that can show them on the tv, without having to use Plex or running computer code?

    Just yesterday I bought an Apple TV 4K to give this a try. If it works, I can sell the WD Mycloud on eBay for about the price of the Apple TV; if it doesn’t work, I can return it. Here is what I have so far:

    • It can show photos AND videos from an external drive, connected to a MAC, through the PHOTOS app. No need for the Plex server. To do this, you need to enable media sharing on your Mac.
    • This external photos library needs to be the System Photo Library, or, the main library used by the photos app on the computer.
    • The Apple TV need to be signed into the same Apple account/userID as the Mac.

    The Pros of this approach:

    • My files are still saved locally; no monthly cloud fees
    • Fairly easy to set up.
    • No more Plex server for watching videos on TV
    • Can see 4k as it was filmed.
    • We have iPhones, so the same apple ecosystem makes it nice.

    The cons I have found (so far):

    • Had to buy an Apple TV. I can sell the WD MyCould for about the same price though?
    • The interface on AppleTv for photos isn’t as great. Cannot search by location/year/person.
    • Photos on the local external drive can only be viewed through the “Computers” part. Again, not the best UI for searching for videos from a place, or featuring a person.
    • Syncing photos. This approach doesn’t automatically sync photos/videos from Taylor and I’s phones. There may be a way around this by syncing to iCloud+ with a shared photo library, and then importing that to our local drive every month or so. This is something I am going to look into.

    One of the takeaways is that the premium you pay with storing your photos and videos in the cloud is that they have stellar apps that can make use of the metadata in your media, and create versions of your videos to play on any device, at any time. If you steer away from that and still want the same niceties, you will have to put in some work to get there.

    I have 2 weeks to return my AppleTV. In that time, I am going to see if there is a solution to the syncing issue, while still showing videos saved on our 4 terabyte external drive, connected to the Mac. Stay tuned.