I’ve been fascinated with the Raspberry Pi since it came out years ago. I have at least one of every model, including the new mini board with wireless built in. I’ve done a lot of tinkering with them, but never actually did anything that I could call a completed project. I’ve set one up with RetroPie as a game emulator, but had trouble getting it to work and gave up. I’ve had plans to make a birdhouse with a camera in it, but never got that off the ground. Finally today I actually did something with one of them.
A few weeks ago I was cleaning out the closet in my home office. It’s had boxes of stuff stashed away in it since we moved in, mainly because I had nowhere to go with any of it. I finally decided to sort through it and decide what, if any of it, I even needed to keep. I’m a pack rat, especially when it comes to electronics. Finally though, the line had to be drawn.
Among other interesting things, I found a large bag of photos I had taken since before I moved away from PA. We’re talking early 1990’s. I found pictures of my parents, my family gatherings at holidays, people at school, my girlfriend before she ditched me to join the army, and various AOL Gatherings in Allentown and Sarasota. I thought many of them were gone and was happy to find them again. I came up with an idea to scan them into a library, but I would need a repository for all of them. I currently have no central location for all things digital other than a web site no one knows exists, plus I don’t want Facebook to own my images (I’ve actually been trying to pull away from Facebook a bit, hence the revival of this blog.) So I made a plan. First, buy a flatbed scanner on a pre-Black Friday sale. Settled on an Epson V600 because it does photos and negatives, and says it can do scratch and dust cleanup. Second, set up some sort of network storage so I am not the only one who can access the stuff. I decided to take advantage of a really good deal on storage at Newegg and got two 4TB hard drives and an external drive bay that can hold four drives. Am I going to NEED 8+ TB of storage? Not at first, but that led to another thing that I have been meaning to do for some time now. Paula and I were moving stuff around in the living room, changing out an old entertainment cabinet for a fake fireplace and getting rid of an old bookcase. The bookcase held a bunch of movies that I like to watch every now and then and don’t want to get rid of. Well, wait - I have used Handbrake to rip DVDs to hard disk before, all I need is storage space. Okay then, two problems solved with one purchase. Today the storage bay showed up two days early, so that was my afternoon. How-to in another blog post.