Camera, code, coffee

My humble jumble of PHP code I call Mejiro celebrates its 10th anniversary today. As good an occasion as any to raise a glass and get all nostalgic. Cheers!

Although I use Mejiro pretty much all the time, I haven't done any work on it for quite a while. Mostly because it does what it's supposed to do, and I didn't have any ideas for improvements. That changed last weekend. I wanted to tweak Mejiro a bit, and I ended up spending the entire weekend, and then some, fixing and improving the application.

Maybe because I'm not a coder to begin with, it never ceases to amaze me how much I can accomplish with just a few lines of PHP. Girasole PHP script is a case in point. It's so short and simple that it hardly deserves to be called an application. Yet it fulfills a huge need I've had for quite a while. It may have something to do with age, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the joy of reliving memories through my photos. I'm not keen on uploading my entire library to Google Photos or a similar service to make use of their "photos from the past" functionality. Because 1) pushing several terabytes of data would take forever and a day, 2) would be prohibitively expensive, and 3) I'm not enamored with the idea of entrusting my most private data to a third party, no matter how good their privacy protection track record is.

I've decided to get filthy rich by starting my own search engine. I mean, if Google and Microsoft can pull it off, so can I, right? And like any great artist, I started with stealing forking an existing project.

So far, I've been taking the code apart to learn how it works, removing stuff I don't need, and tweaking the overall appearance to my liking. Basically, because I don't know what I'm doing most of the time, I've been pulling an Elon Musk: I'd remove a chunk of code and check if the thing still works. Despite my efforts, the thing does seem to work, so ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gufo.

I can't code to save my life, but that doesn't stop me from trying. One of my latest creations is a case in point. Since stuff tends to disappear unceremoniously from the Web, I usually save local copies of interesting articles. Up until recently, I used the SingleFile Firefox add-on for that, but the process involved too many manual steps for my liking. After several failed attempts to make Archivebox work, I decided to roll out my own tool based on monolith. The latter a simple command-line utility that saves complete web pages as single HTML files. It took me a few hours to cobble together a crude but usable tool that I named Hako (it means box in Japanese, and it sounds a bit like hacky, which I find somewhat appropriate).