Managing Multiple iPhoto Libraries

The Macbook Air is a wonderful laptop. It is blisteringly fast, amazingly light, brilliant screen, looks awesome, but…

… it has an infuriatingly small solid state hard drive (SSD). I went for a 128gb model, it was a hefty price jump up to the next size of 256gb. Even at that larger size it would be just over half of what my old souped up MacBook could hold.

In general I live a pretty cloud based existence. I stream my music from Spotify, I have my old mp3 collection backed up and stored by iTunes Match, my email is held by Gmail, I use google docs. But one area I just couldn't get a hold of was digital photos. Slowly but surely I accumulated over 40gb of the stuff, clogging up my svelte SSD.

Naively I thought it should be a pretty simple task to siphon off the older less relevant content onto an external hard drive, but iPhoto had other ideas. iPhoto manages all of your photos within a single overarching library. It isn't a trivial task to break it up into sections and have those sections live in different places.

However where there is a will, there is a way.

It turns out if you press and hold the option key while opening iPhoto you get to see a secret menu that lets you manage multiple libraries. You can create a new library or choose the library you wish iPhoto to boot up there and then. By default iPhoto will try to load the last library you accessed if you open the application as normal bypassing this menu.

So with a brand new fresh library created 'iPhoto Archive', I set about the next challenge, getting the older content into this new home. Again not as trivial as you might hope. There is no magic bullet for this so you have to do the following:

1. Export all the files from the old library to a folder of your choosing. Be sure to choose to subfolder them by Event Name. This will ensure they dont just get imported into the new library as one big event.

1. Quit iPhoto
2. Open iPhoto using the option key
3. Choose the new library to boot
4. Import all files into new library
5. Delete files in desktop folder
6. Delete files from old iPhoto library

As I was perilously close to running out of space this whole process was complicated by the fact I had to break it into bite sized chunks as there wasn't enough space for me to have 3 versions of the same file co-existing.

And voila, you should have yourself a nicely partitioned library and some reclaimed hard disk space to boot!

3 Cheap, Awesome and Unusual Buys

Today I offer you a very random collection of recent purchases. They all share a couple of things in common:

• They were purchased on Amazon
• They cost under £10
• They give a disproportionate amount of enjoyment for their price

Item #1: The World's Best Knife Sharpener

Price: £8.40

 I had spent my entire adult life thinking that 'good' knives were the preserve of professional chefs. Every evening I would labour through the slicing and dicing of vegetables with something akin to blunt marshmallow. Then on a whim I purchased the little blue contraption pictured. A couple of ear tingling swipes of each knife blade and I was the proud owner of an awesome set of knives. I do live in fear of chopping off my fingers but prepping the vegetables has become a piece of cake.

Item #2: Therapeutic Head Massager

Price: £2.67

It looks like a instrument used to study craniology but in fact it is an amazing giver of head massages. I don't quite know how it works or why it feels so good but it does! I like to think it works as a stress reliever but i think that might be pushing it.

Item #2: Lambswool Insoles

Price: £1.95

Trying to be frugal, I bought these hoping to breathe a little extra life into a pair of haggard boots. They were a revelation. Super soft cushioned lambswool for your feet. They felt like walking on a pillow. With the added benefit of being snug and warm for the winter months. A pair of boots almost destined for the bin became my favourite go-to shoe for any amount of walking.

The Sunday Evening Feeling

It's Sunday evening, you feel like the weekend has vanished before you in the blink of an eye. A feeling of slightly unplaceable dread descends.

Tomorrow, you can't get up at 10am, make some bacon and eggs, go back to bed and browse aimlessly on your iPad for an hour.

Tomorrow, you can't just spend the day wandering around town, hanging out in cafes or taking a walk down by the river.

As a kid, this was a familiar feeling each weekend of the school term. 6pm each Sunday, Sky1 would air the newest episode of The Simpsons. Whilst the episode played the weekend was but yet young, once the closing credits rolled, it was dead in the water. I would suddenly remember some bit of homework that wasn't done or a test I hadn't studied for. At that point on a Sunday, the following Friday seemed a long long way off. Once school holidays rolled around, it was a whole new ball game. Days rolled into another. Was it a Tuesday or a Saturday? Who knew? Who cared??

In many ways that 'Sunday Feeling' never left as I grew up. Working for a number of years as a Management Consultant, I preferred some projects over others, usually those that afforded me greater autonomy. On those projects the feeling subsided. On the terrible projects the feeling grew exponentially.

The last year or so has been different though. I am a founder of a startup, Teddle. I can't work out if it is because of my poor work/life balance, where in effect everyday feels somewhat like a work day, or because I enjoy it so much more, but the 'Sunday Feeling' is gone. Writing this after 9pm on a Sunday, I am actually eager to get back into the office tomorrow.

One of my co-founders is back from holidays, we haven't been in the same room since before christmas. We have a brilliant friend of the company, coming into town for the week to help us on our marketing strategy. It is our final week working with our current UX lead and I am really keen to finish off a redesign of a core piece of the product. We just launched a new product last week and I'm excited to see how the data is looking. We have a massively important meeting with some very influential people. And most likely a whole heap more things that I can't even recall right now.

Don't get me wrong, it certainly isn't all plain sailing and I don't hop out of bed every single morning waiting to embrace the day, but its so refreshing not just to be trying to kill time until the next 5.29pm Friday.

Week One: Resolutions Update

Not quite a week in but setting a precedence for the coming weeks, on Saturday I will look back at how successful I have been at sticking to my New Years Resolutions.

Goal One: Blog Daily
Yep, so far all good on this one with four posts (before this one under my belt). The topics have been pretty diverse but it feels good to publish content.

Goal Two: See London
Check! Today myself and Simon visited the National Gallery. Actually went there on the mistaken assumption that it was showing the Landscape Photographer of the Year exhibit. Turns out that was the National Theatre!

Goal Three: Get Fit
Sorta check. I've been making a conscious effort to eat healthier at work. Soup and crackers are the order of the day. Snook in an hours Yoga session on Thursday lunchtime. Also started reading Starting Strength in anticipation of setting the world of barbell training alight.

The Illusion of Wealth

Wealth, or at least the perception of it, is a funny thing.

Personally I've never been wealthier than when I was earning €18,000 per year working as an intern at IBM during my final summer of uni.

Sure, I've had jobs that have paid many multiples of that since then, but I've never had the same feeling of financial freedom.

It's all about perception though. I had spent the previous 18 years of my life living off pocket money or the earnings from a 6 hour a week job at a corner shop. Suddenly I was getting €1500 into my bank account. Every Month. I was a millionaire.

It didn't hurt that I lived at home and had no expenses or commitments. No rent, no car payments, no mobile phone contact, no gym membership, no electricity, no gas, no council tax, no credit card bills. I wasn't even earning enough to have to pay some in tax. It was mine, all mine.

I sometimes wonder if millionaires and billionaires have the same feelings. Their bank balance may look astronomical to us but maybe the Lear Jet repayments make it all seem relative.

Years later, living in London, in a relatively high paying Management Consulting job I couldn't touch that feeling of financial freedom. Somehow, imperceptibly, over the years my spending habits had increased. Anyone that knows me would say I'm not exactly exuberant in my expenditure but even still the little things still added up.

Sure, I guess we can go out for that dinner on Thursday.
Fine, we can get a cab home since it's pissing down rain outside.
I suppose we can go for the slightly more expensive flights that don't leave at the crack of dawn.

Nothing major, just small little excesses that eat away at that disposable income. Like little trophies of success you begin to accumulate monthly nooses around your bank balance. Car insurance, magazine subscriptions, mobile broadband and iPhone contracts, weekly cleaner bills…

This was driven home to me last year as I faced the prospect of a year without a salary. I took a career break to devote myself full-time to my startup, Teddle. Starting to strip away all the expense clutter I had gathered I was shocked at just how much subconscious spending I had. Over the course of a year it was literally of thousands of pounds being frittered away on stuff I didn't even appreciate.

The good news is that I really don't miss it. Living on a lot less was a bit of an adjustment but no great hardship. There are definitely things I would like to buy/experience that I forego because of the cost but it doesn't define my lifestyle. I know though that should my income rise again I will probably repeat all the same mistakes. Perhaps it's just human nature.

The Reluctant Writer

When I was in the first year of secondary school, Sr. Mary, was the headmaster of the then all girls convent school. It was an amazing building. Ramshackle, with almost condemned pre-fab extensions. There was an actual hole in the wall between our classroom and the next. It had nuns living in the basement, a PE hall in the attic and a magnificent 4 storey staircase that was strictly out of bounds for pupils.

At the end of that first year, our version of a decrepit Hogwarts was shut down and we were moved to a sterile new education factory on the outskirts of town. The convent became a state funded secondary school and Sr. Mary was relieved of her duties. During our 2nd year we often wondered where she went, with various theories being espoused. That she had left the order and was now backpacking around Asia, being my particular favourite. By the September of our 3rd year, the mystery was over, she was back, and our English teacher.

A small, wiry woman with striking grey hair, which made her appear older than her years. She was a fierce combination of strictness and intelligence. She was the exact opposite of her dopey predecessor who needed our help to spell the word 'business' on the blackboard. Forever a try-hard goody two shoes I tried my damnedest to win her approval.

In my own nerdish rebellion I decided I would forgo the prescribed reading list and instead would base my state exam on a book of my choosing, Nick Hornby's About A Boy. Not exactly an obvious choice at the time. Sr. Mary went with me and my respect for her only grew when she read it so she could properly critique my analysis. I can't remember what the thrust of my argument was but I'm sure I wrote something profound and deep about the emptiness of materialism. The edge was taken off that profoundness when it was later adapted into a Hugh Grant box office vehicle.

That year, she asked me what I wanted to study after graduation. I told her of my plans of completing a Computer Science degree. She said it would be a waste of my English skills. I respected her enough that her advice really did make me second guess my choice. I wavered and in the end chose hidden option C, beginning a degree in Economics and Financial Maths. I would later boast I managed to graduate without writing a single essay.

From that point on, my writing has amounted to little more than buzzword laden technical reports during my management consulting career, some intermittent travel blogging and the occasional epic email.

But close to 15 years later, somewhere within me I feel a need to write. Not a novel, not even an essay but just merely to commit my thoughts to paper and publish them. In some ways Sr. Mary was right, I have wasted whatever English skills I may or may not have had. However I really wished I hadn't listened to her advice on not pursuing my dream of studying Computer Science. Although its impossible to tell how that would have worked out for me, I find myself now many years later having taught myself to code, quitting my day job in management consulting, founding a tech startup and never having used a day of my Economics degree since graduating Uni.

Here's to you Sr. Mary, I hope you are off backpacking around Asia by now!

Distractions

It wasn't like this in the factory or down the mines, sure I don't have calloused fingertips or crippling back pain but being a knowledge worker, despite the wanky title, takes its toll.

I seem to spend the entire day fighting temptations to stray off course into the candy shop that is the wonderful world of the web. Desperately trying to get into the zone whilst constantly finding myself on an open Twitter tab, mindlessly reading Hacker News, browsing stories on the Guardian, indulging in some guilty tabloid voyuerism on some Daily Mail link bait.

All of it disposable, none of it useful and certainly not helping me get my work done any faster. I understand this. But still my cursor wanders.

Its procrastination, plain and simple. If a task appears a bit difficult or I'm not quite sure where to start, the natural impulse is for me to head to one of my time-sink haunts. Any break in play, reloading our ruby environment, pushing code to production, waiting for a response on Skype... I'm off.

I started using Rescue Time to track where I was spending my time. Turns out I do put in the hours but undoubtedly more than I have to, in order to get my productive work done. I had hoped just tracking it would make me change my habits. It didn't.

This evening I have installed StayFocused, a chrome plugin, to force the issue a little further by limiting my time on black listed sites to an aggregated total of 10minutes per day.

Perhaps it's just a utopian fantasy but I imagine a time when I can work productively from 9 - 5 with breaks away from my desk. How hard can it be?