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Doing anything else is not living or being in the moment. Anything less than truthfulness is an attempt to distort the past or control the future. 

When you’re busy trying to distort or cover or rearrange the past, you’re not in the present. 

When you’re focused on managing and controlling the future, you’re not in the present.

You are in a time that does not exist: past or future.

When you focus on the past or the future, you opt out of existing in the present. As long as you choose to stay there, in the not-now, you don’t exist in the now.

Since now is all that exists, we might say you opt out of existing at all. Until you return to what does exist, the only thing that exists (if anything does): the present, this moment, now.

Is it because of common interests? Somewhat, but it’s far from the whole answer. Maybe because of distance? Nope, these people are scattered across quite a large area.

I believe it comes down to the Swedish term lagom (just the right amount). Not in terms of the actual number of people, but how much time we spend together. We talk, text, and meet in a way I feel is lagom.

As soon as I feel a kind of neediness in people, that constant pull for attention and interaction, I keep my distance. Otherwise, I get drained. It gets too much for me to handle.

So I’m subconsciously cautious, guided more by feelings than facts.

And somehow, it lands at ten percent being lagom.

osxphotos

Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata.

I installed it with using Homebrew:

# Add the tap
brew tap RhetTbull/osxphotos

# Install osxphotos
brew install osxphotos

This thing is brilliant. It has a million options and can do pretty much anything with an Apple Photos library. Here’s the command I ran to export the entire library in a way intended to work well with an Immich import, along with its output.

osxphotos export /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport \
> --skip-original-if-edited \
> --sidecar XMP \
> --touch-file \
> --directory "{folder_album}" \
> --download-missing
Using last opened Photos library: /Volumes/MinistackSSD/Photos Library.photoslibrary
Created export database /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport/.osxphotos_export.db
Processing database /Volumes/MinistackSSD/Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Photos.sqlite
Processing database /Volumes/MinistackSSD/Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Photos.sqlite
Photos database version: 5001, 11.1.
Processing persons in photos.
Processing detected faces in photos.
Processing albums.
Processing keywords.
Processing photo details.
Processing import sessions.
Processing additional photo details.
Processing face details.
Processing photo labels.
Processing EXIF details.
Processing computed aesthetic scores.
Processing comments and likes for shared photos.
Processing moments.
Processing syndication info.
Processing shared iCloud library info
Done processing details from Photos library.
Exporting 47508 photos to /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport...
Exporting 47508 photos ━━━━━━━╺━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━  18% 0:15:032025-12-05 13:27:39,721 - osxphotos - WARNING - photoexporter.py - 1172 - AppleScript export has failed 10 consecutive times, restarting Photos app
Exporting 47508 photos ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:00
Processed: 47508 photos, exported: 47731, missing: 35, error: 0, touched date: 95260
Elapsed time: 1:08:39
➜  ~

If there’s a better combination of options for that export command, it’s too late now. Besides, just look at the README. It’s overwhelming!

Immich CLI

Immich has a handy CLI. I used it to import that entire Apple Photos export.

Installed the CLI via npm:

npm i -g @immich/cli

Then, after authenticating with immich login, I ran the following:

immich upload --recursive /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport --album

Three hours later, all of my photos were in Immich, with the original Albums and metadata intact. Most of the duplicates were skipped, and I used the Immich duplicate finder to remove the remaining ones. Immich is still chugging away at scanning for faces and running OCR on text in the images. This will take a while, but my library is all there.

After running a backup on the Immich library, I deleted all of my photos from iCloud. Scary, but they’ll be in “Recently Deleted” for 30 days, just in case.

The plan is to treat my iPhone as just another camera. I configured the Immich iPhone app to import everything from Photos automatically, so all I’ll need to do is clean things up and delete them from Photos every so often.

This is a big change, but it alleviates some of my concerns about relying on Apple/iCloud. It feels good having everything locally on my NAS. Sure, I’m now responsible for everything, but when it comes to my photo library, that’s OK.

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I find this topic quite interesting, so I’m gonna take a moment to share my thoughts. I don’t have skin in the game, I’m not on any of these social media platforms, and I frankly don’t even care about the outcome of this situation. I’m just an external observer in this context.

Quick summary of the situation:

• Pixelfed is a decentralised Instagram alternative built on the ActivityPub protocol and focused on images and videos
• In order to do that, the app is designed to silently drop content that doesn’t contain images or videos, and so text-only content is not displayed on people’s timelines
• In his post, Ploum is arguing that this is wrong because, in doing that, Pixelfeed is not behaving in a way that is in line with the rest of the Fediverse and can undermine the whole ActivityPub endeavor

I can’t stress enough that this is just a quick summary, and you should read the original post. There’s also a discussion happening on Mastodon, if you want to see what others are saying.

I can see where Ploum is coming from, his concerns are definitely valid, and he’s motivated by good intentions. At the same time, though, I find his position a bit perplexing. Isn’t the point of an open protocol, like ActivityPub, to provide a structure that can be used by others to build whatever they want?

If someone wants to build a service, on top of AP, that only displays content of a certain type, they should be able to do so. Granted, they should make it very clear to the people who sign up for it that some filtering is happening, but if those same people are cool with that, then I don’t see the issue.

If tomorrow I wake up and I want to make an AP-based service that only serves audio content and is designed to encourage people sending voice messages to each other, I should be able to do so, without being required to also implement everything else that’s available on the protocol.

In his post, Ploum uses the idea of a TextFed service “that will never display posts with pictures”. If you ask me, that would be a totally reasonable project, especially if you want to build something that is not very resource-intensive, since you’re only dealing with text, and you don’t want to mess with media content. Why shouldn’t you be able to build such a thing on top of AP? Why should you be forced to accept videos and images coming from the rest of the Fediverse if that’s not what you want?

Also, it’s hard for me to square this whole line of argument with the concept of moderation. If you can’t trust a user to figure out by themselves that by signing up to something like Pixelfed, they only get a subset of the content available on the fediverse, then I don’t see how you can’t trust them to understand that, depending on which server they join, some other servers might be blocked. Does that mean the Fediverse should not have moderation?

A protocol is either open or it is not. And if it’s open, we should accept that some people might use it in ways we do not agree with. And that’s ok. But again, I'm not a fediverse user, so maybe my intuition here is entirely wrong. So feel free to reach out to let me know why I'm wrong.

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People seem to like Telex which makes developing WordPress user interfaces easier, via AI. Software is gradually adjusting this way, putting the AI where the problem is. For example I wanted to do a Google Form a few months ago and the best Gemini could do was tell me what commands to choose. But now if you go to make a form, using the Forms app, it offers to do it via AI. #

People using feedland.org -- may notice that some old items will appear in your timelines. I just installed a version of FeedLand on that server that does a better job of figuring out if a feed item has changed. There will be fewer false positives, which makes the software considerably more efficient, and means that you don't have to see things that didn't change. It should settle down fairly quickly, but it may be a little chatty for a while. Still diggin! (Also these changes will come to feedland.com as well.)#

My obsession with the past dates back to my childhood. I’ve always look back to the 70s, 80s, and 90s for inspiration on how to live and how to be entertained. I’ve gone out of my way to study and embrace the lifestyles of distant years, and now, I realize that in order to be happy, I need to stop looking behind me, and instead look ahead. I need to find contentment in the present and put my efforts into achieving that.

The moment I embraced this idea, and realized that the past was holding me back, so much in my life begin to shift. My belongings lost their meaning, so many of my thoughts became exhausting, and my hobbies useless. It sounds bad, but it was liberating. It was like I was shaking off something that no longer fit me, and I now had room to explore and find something new. I was no longer being defined by what I owned and what I liked, and instead, I was free to just be me.

During this period, my forty-second birthday passed, and I remarked to my wife that this birthday felt more like a transition than when I turned forty. I had so much anxiety and expectation that forty was going to be some great awakening, but it was just another day. And while I can’t say my birthday played any part in this, I do find the timing convenient.

It was also around this time that my wife and I had a long talk about happiness. She mentioned that when we first met, six years ago, I seemed to be in a more peaceful place. She is right. I feel like I lost what grounded me during COVID, and I’ve never completely recovered. We chatted about how life has changed, and what may have played a part in this shift, and while I can’t point my finger at anything particular, I do think the way I use the internet and my free time have played a major part in this slow slide into anxiousness. I spent more time absorbing negativity online, and I don’t spend near enough time offline, countering that with healthy habits.

It was during this discussion that I revealed to her my thoughts about how something has changed and the reasoning behind me donating so much of my belongings. I wanted to reassure her that I was not struggling or going through a midlife crisis, but I felt like this was the next step in my natural evolution. My things, my interests, my obsessions… had served their purpose. They had provided me with the necessary distractions that I needed throughout my twenties and thirties, but now as I progress through middle-age, they are no longer needed. Much like a young child with a favorite blanket or teddy bear, I’ve evolved past the need for these distractions to make it through the day, and it’s clear my way forward is with a less attached mind.

That’s not to say I won’t ever watch a favorite TV series or get excited about a video game, It’s just now I am able to put these things into perspective. My entire mood won’t shift based on how these things are received, and I’m not going to jump through hoops or spend lots of money to experience them. I want a simple, low-maintenance life, and I’m going to do everything in my power to experience that. This is my number one priority moving forward.

My wife asked me the hard question, “What does that look like to you?” And while I confessed, I was still rumbling with these new thoughts and hadn’t fully formulated a clear view, I know I want to rely less on external items/interests for my happiness. I want to find ways to simplify my daily life and activities, and I want to begin to make decisions based on whether something would invite chaos, distraction, or aggravation into my life. I want to read more, spend less, and move my body. I want to explore ways to cultivate happiness within and to set more boundaries. In many ways, I want to take ownership of my life as I transition into this next stage.