Posts on Felipe Quintella

Lightroom - Synology - Google Photos Photography Workflow

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:15:00 -0400

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

I previously wrote a post on how important backups are and how I lost 34,766 photos in 2012. By now I have accumulated 59,917 more photos and have been through many different workflows while traveling and at home with regard to photo management. I want to share what is currently working for me and how I deal with so many photos, storing, editing, sharing, etc.

Synology for all storage

As I’ve discussed before, I use a Network Attached Storage (NAS) for most of my storage needs. It really is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made, and so easy to expand whenever I get low on capacity. I just buy one or two new hard drives with higher capacity and replace my old ones. The NAS does all the work of restoring and rebuilding the volume and within a couple of hours – or days if you really have a LOT of data – everything is ready.

The NAS I chose was the Synology DS918+, the top of line 4-bay NAS from Synology at the time I got it. As of my writing of this post I have two 3 TB drives and two 4 TB drives in an SHR volume, giving me a total of 9.6 TB of usable capacity.

Having all my photos and videos in one location makes it easy for me to perform backups and expand capacity whenever needed. Furthermore, a NAS that is online 24/7 allows me to remotely access it if I need to look for and download old photos wherever I am. Remote access also enables me to upload photos when I’m on trips and not physically present in my network. This is not the most efficient workflow – and I’ll explain more why later, but works in an emergency.

On my main Synology volume I have two shares where I keep all my media:

Photos
Videos

And within each of them I have individual events or photoshoots separated per folder. You could split per dates, but this is how I manage it best.

My main Photos share

Lightroom for all management

Regarding photo management, I really only use Lightroom. I’m a long time user and have kept it through lows and highs. I know it’s not perfect, and it can be really slow at times, especially when editing photos through the network, but I like the organizational features, and I’m really happy with the editing capabilities. Furthermore, I’m a subscriber of their Photography Plan and use Lightroom Classic on my computer, with some uses of Lightroom CC on my iPad and iPhone when the moment asks for it.

In fact, I’ve been digging Lightroom for iPad a lot this past year and love it for photo culling. I’m also doing a bit of editing there mostly because it is a consistent screen and I don’t trust my current monitor, as I got a really cheap one for business school.

As I mentioned on the previous section, all my media is stored in my NAS. Yes, that means Lightroom becomes even slower than it already usually is. But it gives me peace of mind. Plus, I’m not in a hurry to get things done. If I was doing this professionally, my choices would probably be different, but this works for my amateur photography needs.

Lightroom is not meant to be a network tool, and as such it is not possible to have your catalog files stored in a network share, even if your media is. Many years ago it was possible to have Lightroom’s catalog file in a network share, but even then it was highly ill-advised to do so. On top of it being a speed problem, Photofocus explains the main reason: even if it was possible to open a Lightroom catalog from a NAS up until 2015, Lightroom used to place a lock on the file, preventing simultaneous access to it.

Thus, my main catalog files still live on my laptop. At some point I had the catalog in a Dropbox folder, and later moved it to my Synology Drive folder, benefiting from automatic backup to my NAS. I’ve since moved it out of any cloud style folder. Catalog files consist of thousands of smaller files that get updated every time you make any change to your photos. As such, the Synology Drive software was constantly working through uploading all of these changes to my NAS, sometimes even creating conflicting copies, as the changes were so many and so often. Today, I have my catalog file simply located in my MacBook hard drive, no Dropbox, no NAS, no anything.

My Lightroom catalog lives on my MacBook hard drive

You might be asking yourself what happens if my laptop is stolen or my drive fails. This is where Catalog Backups come to place. It is really important to maintain regular catalog backups, and not only due to possible catastrophic losses. Lightroom’s catalogs are fragile databases, storing information on everything from photo locations to keywords, edits and compilations. They can easily be corrupted, making your life hell. You won’t lose your photos, but you’ll still lose all the work you’ve put into it, cataloging, culling and editing your photos. Lightroom offers regular catalog backup, and you should really make use of it. I cannot emphasize this enough!

On my case, I do weekly backups, and have Lightroom remind me to do it when I close it. This ensures I’m never more than a week behind, and most often only a day behind. As I don’t use Lightroom that often, whenever I do any work it has usually been more than a week from the previous backup and, when closing the program, I get reminded of the need for a backup and do it. Lastly, to ensure catastrophic hard drive failures won’t hurt me, I have my catalog backups in my Synology Drive folder. They get uploaded to my NAS and backed up to Wasabi through HyperBackup every night.

For setting up catalog backups you should go to:

Catalog Preferences;
General;
Backup;
Choose your desired cadence. In my case, `Once a week, when exiting Lightroom'.

All of these give me enough ease of mind so that I can sleep peacefully at night.

At home workflow

My workflows when I’m at home and traveling are very different. Being it just a stroll around the city or going to a friends house and bringing my camera with me, returning home at the end of the day makes it easier to transfer and store my photos than when I’m on vacation or traveling in another city. So, let’s start with being at home.

I will often go out when a new season starts to take a few pictures of the city and its changing scenery. Having been in Business School for so long as of the time of this post, I’m also constantly going to parties, events, gatherings and whatnot. And of course I’ll bring my camera with me whenever possible – for example, a couple of months ago I went out to watch the Boston Marathon and brought my camera with me. In cases like this I’ll take pictures and videos and come back home.

Scenes of compassion at the finish line. This is why I love going out to take photos: capturing moments like this.

Transfer and Lightroom Import

This is where the workflow starts. When at home, I’ll either connect my camera directly to my laptop or just use my SD card reader. Transferring is done straight from within Lightroom. I’ll copy the files from the camera directly into my NAS and import them into Lightroom Classic at the same time.

The settings I use for the import are the following:

Copy files
To my Photos folder share in my NAS
Don’t import suspected duplicates – just to avoid seeing all the photos I’ve already imported but haven’t deleted from the camera
Make a second copy to – my local hard drive in case something goes wrong before the nightly NAS backup
Rename files – I rename all my photos to a template I created: `Date (YYYYMMDD)-HourMinuteSecond_Filename'
Into subfolder – with the name I want to give this event/photoshoot
Organize `Into one folder'

This way I get all my photos renamed by date and time of the shot, so I can easily sort them by filename if I want, get a backup copy in case something goes wrong and have all files in a single folder for each event. By the next day, Synology’s HyperBackup will have transferred all new files to my offsite storage and I can delete the second copy from my local hard drive.

Culling/Editing

Culling is as important as editing, in my opinion. Here you separate the good from the bad, and can delete the bad to save disk space, if you so want. I’ve tried a couple of different ways to cull my photos, including Colors, Tags, Ratings and else. But nothing has been as effective to me as Flags. Flags are easy, they don’t require a lot of thought or cognitive effort from your brain. They are a single choice from two options – Flag or Not. You glance at the photo and make a decision. Sometimes, if there are too many photos, I will do a pre-selection by rejecting clear losers. In this case, the process is still very cognitively easy, Reject or Not.

Photo gallery after import

Photo gallery after the culling process, and filtered by Flag

By the end of this process I will often have reduced my photos to about a 1/4 of the original amount. From here, editing takes place. I might star a few favorites, color-tag a couple for use here or to share with friends, but I will eventually do some light editing on all the flagged photos. Mainly Lens Correction, Perspective Transforms and Basic Adjustments, in this order.

My reasoning for these adjustments is the following:

Lens Correction: I’ll get some lens warping and edge darkening corrected. I’ll always check Enable Profile Corrections and Remove Chromatic Aberrations so that my lenses profile are automatically applied.
Perspective Transforms: This will help me get a more level shot and correct any tilting distortions. If the photo looks better without it or has intentional tilt, I’ll remove and stay with the original.
Basic Adjustments: I will always start with Auto, and then tweak the Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks to my taste. I will also play with the White Balance in case the scene was too complex for the camera and tweak Vibrance, Contrast and Exposure when needed.

I am also starting to experiment with setting a Camera Profile before I start editing, but I’m still checking how that will influence my editing and final results. Andrew Gibson has a great article about it on Petapixel.

Most of the time when I’m shooting at home I have no need to share the final photos with anyone. It’s usually for my own sake and, to be honest, it might take me weeks to even look at the photos after I’ve transferred them.

On the few occasions I was shooting a party, barbecue or whatever event with friends, I’ll make sure to export the photos and upload to a shared Google Photos album. It’s still my best options today, as my home internet upload speed is not great for me to serve a shared album straight from Synology. I also LOVE Google Photos' AI. It’s so good at finding things through search, recognizing people, creating mini albums and recollections.

Travel workflow

So, traveling. That’s when I love to photograph the most. I’ll go on walking around with my big backpack, carrying lenses and camera, batteries and SD cards. I have my Peak Design Capture Clip attached to my backpack strap and my camera always ready. I’ll take anything from 100 to 300 photos a day on a good trip, and that means a lot of material to go through.

Photography

I really enjoy landscape and street photography, and I’ve been using two fixed lenses for a while, a Sony 24mm f/1.4 and a Sigma 85mm f/1.4. They are expensive lenses, but I love the f/1.4 flexibility at night, and specially enjoy the 85mm perspective for travel.

I have a few SD cards available, mostly because I accumulated them over the years:

64GB Sony SDXC II – this is my main card, and I’ll only swap it if I can’t offload the content
2x 32GB Lexar Professional SDHC II – these are my secondary cards, and I’ll turn over to them next
64GB Sony Professional SDXC I
32GB Kingston SDHC

It is rare that I have to use any card other than my main one, but it can happen every once in a while. Usually I’ll keep to that one card shooting during the day and transfer the contents somewhere else once I get back to my hotel at night.

Transfer and Lightroom Import

Once I get to my hotel or AirBNB at night, I’ll start to transfer the days' photos – or the past couple of days if I skipped any. The process will depend a bit on what I brought with me. Ideally, I’ll have my MacBook Pro, my iPad and my 2TB external SSD drive. Sometimes I may be traveling light and only have my iPad and external drive, or not even that.

Laptop and external drive: My laptop does not have a lot of hard drive space. I have a total of 256GB, of which usually only around 50 to 70GB are available., which is not enough for a full trip. Because of that, I have recently purchased a 2TB external SSD from SanDisk, the Extreme Pro Portable drive. SSDs have come a long way, and this one is tiny, rugged, affordable and superfast. I can store it anywhere, really, and have it with me whenever I need. It’s not Thunderbolt, but it has a next-generation USB-C capable of up to 2000MB/s transfers. When home at night, I will plug the camera and drive to my MacBook Pro and transfer all the SD card contents to the drive. If I have the time to spare, I will also load up Lightroom and import all the photos to my Library, but leave them all in my external drive for now. This can be achieved by selecting ‘Add’ instead of ‘Copy’ on the Import screen. Another great advantage of using an external SSD of this type is that the photos are lightning fast to load and to edit! I might even adopt moving files to this drive whenever doing a large editing project, even if they are already on my NAS.
iPad Pro: When I don’t have my laptop with me, I’ll connect my camera to my iPad, via USB-C and transfer the contents to it. This can be done in two ways, through the Files app or directly on Lightroom CC. On these cases I’ll usually transfer the photos straight into Lightroom, and have it backup everything to Adobe Cloud. The app does a good job and uploads the entire RAW files to the cloud, so I can later download them on my computer, which is the main thing I need.

I will often not delete the photos from the card straight away, and keep on shooting until it is full. I will try to keep these two copies of the photos for backup reasons, and so I will change to one of my other cards for the rest of the trip when the ones in use get full. Deleting photos will only happen if all cards are full, and I have already transferred photos to my drive or iPad. It is rare, though, that I will take more than 200GB of photos on a trip, unless it is a multi-week one.

At this point, my photos are transferred and in Lightroom in some way.

Culling/Editing

On trips, I have learned that culling is a lot easier if done on a daily basis. After the photos are transferred to Lightroom, I’ll do a quick culling the next morning, before going out -- and while I wait for my wife to get up.

The process is very similar to the one I described above. I’ll flag the photos I like, and that will usually reduce my gallery to about a 1/4 of the original size. If the hotel wifi is good enough, I might setup a trip Collection and mark it to Sync with Adobe Cloud, so I can cull on my iPad.

For when I import using only my iPad, I will take a very similar approach, flagging the photos I want to keep by swiping up on the left side of the screen.

If I want to post something or share with friends, I can do some light editing right there and then as well. The process is, again, very similar to the one at home. I’ll add Lens Correction and Transforms, and add some Basic Adjustments to add back some contrast and recover some highlights and shadows.

The important point here is to process the incoming photos every day, if possible. It reduces the effort and work needed a lot and makes it so much more enjoyable to work with your trip photos later.

If the hotel/AirBNB has good internet speeds, I’ll often try to upload my final selection to a Google Photos album shared with the rest of the group. I have had cases, though, when it was impossible. Uploading was gonna take more time than I had of trip days, so I will just wait until I’m back home and do it then.

Backup

This is so, so important. Because I am on a trip, somewhere new, and with lots of going to places and getting on airplanes, problems can happen.

My first approach to backups during trips, as I mentioned before, is to not delete photos from the cards unless I’ve run out of space. Yes, even if I’ve transferred the files to my iPad, Laptop or SSD.

Furthermore, when internet allows for it, I’ll make an offsite copy of the photos. The best way to do this is to VPN into my home network and transfer the files to my NAS. Unfortunately, this is really slow, and not often optimal. I’ll try to leave it transferring from my laptop during the day, when I’m out and about. Another option for offsite backup is to transfer it to an Amazon S3 storage or a cloud provider of some sort.

Back at home

At this point, I should have everything almost done. Photos are transferred, culled, mostly edited. When I get home, I plug my external SSD to my laptop, connect to my home network, and transfer the full trip folder from my SSD to my NAS. I’ll usually do this from Lightroom itself, but you can also copy it through your OS and then tell Lightroom where the folder has moved to.

If the original transfer was done to my iPad, the process is slightly different. I’ll have to wait until my Lightroom Classic downloads all photos from Adobe Cloud, and then move them to a new location in my NAS share, also from within Lightroom itself.

Once the photos are in my Synology share, HyperBackup will take care of sending it to my Wasabi account, and photos will be safe.

From here, I will further edit, select photos for publication, star and rate some if I feel like so, but the hard part is done.

Phone Photography

As the famous photographer Chase Jarvis once said, “the best camera is the one that’s with you”. Our smartphones are an incredible source of in-the-moment photography. I’ll take thousands of photos every year, and even during trips I might shoot a few with my phone if I don’t have my main camera with me or within easy reach.

I like to have all my photo library on the same place, and this place is Lightroom, you guessed right. So, how do I move my iPhone photos to Lightroom and my NAS?

Transfer and Lightroom Import

The good news is that the Lightroom iPhone app is pretty good. What I do is having Auto Add enabled to a collection, and it does all the import and upload work for me. Another setting to change is to include Videos for the Auto Add options, so that the videos you shoot are also uploaded. The one downside from this approach is that Live Photos are not transferred. You get the .heic file from your iPhone photos, and any videos you shot as a .mov. I’m not a big enthusiast of the live photos, although I do like them, so no problems for me.

Easy way to import all iPhone photos to Lightroom!

Sync is seamless, also

Don't forget to turn on Video auto-add as well

When Lightroom is then open on my computer, it will download whatever photos and videos got imported on your iPhone and keep them at a folder you define in your laptop drive. I will usually leave it like this for months until I eventually go through them. My process here is to try to categorize my phone photos at least once a year. Whatever fits to an existing folder/event will get move to that folder, and whatever can’t really be categorized will be moved to a ‘General’ folder per year. I don’t really cull and edit these, as they come mostly ready from the phone.

All your synced images end up in a folder on your computer

Another thing I do is to have auto upload enabled on my Google Photos app on my phone. Just like the Lightroom app, Google Photos will upload everything and work its AI magic.

Photo Services

So, Lightroom is where I keep all my raw files, categorization, tags, flags, edits, keywords, etc. But what do I do with the finished photos, galleries and collections? I’ve mentioned a bit above, but I’ll go into more detail here.

Lightroom Publish Services

One of the most underrated features of Lightroom, in my opinion, are Publish Services. Not a lot of people talk about it, but they are a great way to maintain a collection of photos published and updated. There are many publishing services built-in to Lightroom, including a Flickr and a Smugmug services, and many more available online. I’ll give a special shoutout to a long time Lightroom plugin maker, Jeffrey Friedl. He has made dozens of Lightroom Plugins available, including a lot of publishing services.

I have previously used the stock Smugmug publishing service, but currently take advantage of the Hard Drive publishing service to export carefully curated collections. These are published to another share on my Synology NAS (not the main Photos share), and get added both to the Synology Photos app and to Google Photos as albums.

Google Photos

I mentioned it before, and I’ll say it again: I love Google Photos' AI. They did an incredible job, specially of recognizing people. They find someone you tagged in the background of a photo, partially hidden, and even in videos. It’s amazing. And as long as no other service is able to catch up, I’ll keep on using them.

After I publish a collection from Lightroom, I’ll grab the entire folder and upload it to Google Photos. Unfortunately, there are two things I don’t like: you can’t have it re-create a folder structure as albums from auto-uploading, and it is impossible to update a photo after it has been uploaded.

For the first one, I don’t get why I can’t upload an entire folder and just have it auto-create albums from the folder structure. For the second one, sometimes I have a change of heart and change my editing of certain photos. I’d love to be able to re-upload it to Google Photos and have it be updated, instead of adding a new one. I guess that’s too much to ask for :(

Synology Photos

Synology also has a photo app. It’s called Synology Photos, and it’s becoming quite good, if I can be honest. What I do here is having my publishing folder in Lightroom be the Synology Photos folder. This way, I have them all ready right after publishing, and I can update them by re-publishing whenever I want. I can view them on my phone app or on my computer.

Synology Photos also has a sharing feature, and it’s reasonable. I don’t use it enough because of my home internet upload speed, but would love to be able to just rely on it for sharing with friends and family.

They also have some AI features, such as face recognition, but nowhere near what Google does.

Other ideas

Something else I’ve been thinking about is to try to set up a sort of FTP publishing service that can send my collections to a server, and have galleries be served from this site to friends and family – these would be different from my own published galleries posted here, but only a collection of photos to share. Let’s see if this will eventually work out.

I Graduated MIT

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 17:19:29 -0400

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

"The feeling when you hold your two MIT degrees :-)"

That’s it. It’s been two years since I started grad school at MIT and last month I finally graduated.

It’s such a bittersweet feeling, when you are happy that classes are over, that you are going to start earning a salary again – these two years converting from Brazilian Reais to US Dollars have been HARD – but at the same time you know your so recently made friends are going to scatter across the US, if not the globe.

When I applied to the Leaders for Global Operations program I had no idea that a global pandemic was going to hit us. It made things way harder than they should be. Starting with classes, I had an entire semester online, studying from Brazil because I couldn’t get a visa to go to the US. It turned making friends in such a harder task, as we couldn’t meet in large groups, so every gathering had to be with 6 people or fewer. But it also made the relations I built so stronger. We were all going through it together, facing the pandemic hardships and MBA and Engineering classes, problem sets and exams together.

From cookbook club – a Sunday dinner that Paige, one of my good friends, started on Zoom and eventually moved in-person, to fall getaways and spring retreats. Every interaction we had was with purpose and led us to where we all are now.

How to build relations in a pandemic world? Zoom cooking and dinner

Two years went by really fast. After the Summer semester online, I had a Fall MBA Core semester, a Spring semester filled with fun electives, six months of internship at Nissan, and a final semester where I tried to take it more chill, but still had to crunch out my master thesis. It wouldn’t have been possible without the support of so many incredible colleagues and family, specially my wife.

So, what have I learned during these two years? Besides the obvious academic points of an MBA and an M.Sc., I learned that good leadership exists, and that leading is an exercise of empathy, trust and example. Oh, and I also learned to ski 😊

I made the video below as a graduation video for my class, and it just shows how close we all became.

Finally, life does goes on. I’m taking a break from everything during this summer and will start working mid-August. I’m super excited about it and I will be in an operations related position. This will require me to move to New Jersey, more specifically Jersey City, and apartment hunting is quickly becoming my main task.

Today, I couldn’t be happier that I was part of this incredible cohort. LGO Class of 2022, it was a pleasure going through grad school with you.

♡

Auto-switching shortcode for Hugo posts - How-to

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 12:32:22 -0500

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

"This is one of the shortcodes I created to help with my workflow. Auto-switching from draft to live modes is great, as I don't have to go back to every post whenever I publish them"

After setting up the blog I decided I would store and distribute the site’s media (photos and potentially future videos) from a different place than Netlify. I didn’t want all my media files in a git repository, making Netlify transfer megabytes and gigabytes everytime I commit a change. But I also didn’t want to necessarily have all the files uploaded to wherever my media repository was before I started the post, as I would experiment with different pictures during the writing, or changing all of the image URLs manually once I got the draft ready. So I needed an auto-switching system that could take care of that for me.

Amazon S3 and Cloudfront

Before we get to the how, I need to go through the where. After reading a lot, specially Stammy’s Getting Started with Amazon CloudFront how-to post, I decided on going the Amazon S3 plus Cloudfront way. It’s relatively cheap and they have a 12 months free tier where you get 5GB of storage in S3 and 50 GB of transfer out data or 2,000,000 requests per month. I call it a bargain for you to start and test it out!

AWS Free Usage Tier

As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with Amazon S3 for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 5GB of Amazon S3 storage in the S3 Standard storage class; 20,000 GET Requests; 2,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST Requests; and 15GB of Data Transfer Out each month for one year.

As part of the AWS Free Usage Tier, you can get started with Amazon CloudFront for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 50 GB Data Transfer Out and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests each month for one year.

Your usage for the free tier is calculated each month, is aggregated across all AWS edge locations, and is automatically applied to your bill – unused monthly usage will not roll over. Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

After one year costs are pretty minimal, specially if you’re just starting.

S3 Storage costs of $0.023 per GB for your first 50 TB of data
Transfer costs between S3 and Cloudfront are free
Cloudfront Transfer costs are $0.085 per GB for your first 10 TB of data

Shortcodes

Live distribution worked out. With media uploaded to S3, Cloudfront was serving my pictures fast and reliably. But how do I write my draft posts without the need to upload everything to S3 beforehand, or doing it while I’m writting? I often test out different pictures, or just use unedited versions for layouting, and just after that edit final versions. So uploading and reuploading dozens of times during the writing process would become too cumbersome to go through.

Hugo shortcodes for the rescue! I had already read how powerful they could be, so I decided to give it a try.

What I wanted was to just drop my media in a draft folder in my disk while I’m writing the post and being able to see it while running Hugo Server in draft mode, styling it and making adjustments when needed. Once the post is done I would upload the entire media folder to S3, change the post to live and everything would work fine.

In my hugo folder structure, I’ve created a media-drafts folder inside of the static one, and I use it to store all my media. The folder is itself structured as my content one is: subfolders for the posts and photos categories, and then a folder for each actual post.

Ideal placement and folder structure for draft post media

Having the media folder inside of static means Hugo can easily serve from it while in development server mode

Hugo Content Management

Static Files

Files that get served statically (as-is, no modification) on the site root.

By default, the static/ directory in the site project is used for all static files (e.g. stylesheets, JavaScript, images). The static files are served on the site root path (eg. if you have the file static/image.png you can access it using http://{server-url}/image.png, to include it in a document you can use ![Example image](/image.png)).

So, to make this work I just need an automated way to change each image’s url from the media-drafts folder at the root of the site, to the Cloudfront server in production.

For this, I created a media shortcode that I use in every image I need to include in my posts. It also has a few parameters you can define when using the shortcode:

src: the actual filename for the image you are including, no path necessary
class: to define the figure class so that it can be stylized and modified by your design/css
title: to define a title for your picture that will be output as an h4 tag
caption: to define a caption for your picture, shown as a p tag. Can be used in conjuction with a title
alt: to define the alternate text for an image, if the image cannot be displayed
link: if you want the image to also be a hyperlink, you can include the href value here

Draft or Live

First thing we need to do is figure out if the post being rendered is in draft mode or already set for live. We do it through the Page.Params.draft parameter, from the post’s front matter. If the draft parameter is true, we generate an url variable that points to the media-drafts folder, and if it is false we generate the url variable pointing to the Cloudfront distribution address. In both cases we use the Page.Type and Page.Params.Slug to target the url to the post folder, and finally the src shortcode parameter to get the image filename.

{{ $url := "" }}
{{ if $.Page.Params.draft }}
    {{ $url = (printf "%s%s" (printf "%s%s%s%s%s" "/media-drafts/" $.Page.Type "/" $.Page.Params.Slug "/" | urlize) (.Get "src")) }}
{{ else }}
    {{ $url = (printf "%s%s" (printf "%s%s" "https://turbo.felipequintella.com/uploads/" (printf "%s%s%s%s" $.Page.Type "/" $.Page.Params.Slug "/" | urlize)) (.Get "src")) }}
{{ end }}

I’ll use the url variable as the <img> src parameter. And this is the main part of it. After that, we simply use the rest of the shortcodes parameters to build the entire Figure tag.

Other Shortcode Parameters

To include a hyperlink I look for the link parameter and create an <a> tag if it is present.

{{ with .Get "link"}}<a href="{{.}}">{{ end }}
    <img src="{{ $url }}" />
{{ if .Get "link"}}</a>{{ end }}

I’ll also use the alt parameter for the alternative text, or the caption in case the user has not included an alt.

<img src="{{ $url }}" {{ if or (.Get "alt") (.Get "caption") }}alt="{{ with .Get "alt"}}{{.}}{{else}}{{ .Get "caption" }}{{ end }}"{{ end }} />

Below the image I’ll include a title and/or a caption, and also make sure to have the figure class if the user has defined one.

{{ if or (or (.Get "title") (.Get "caption")) (.Get "attr")}}
    <figcaption class="text-sm font-light">{{ if isset .Params "title" }}
        <h4>{{ .Get "title" }}</h4>{{ end }}
        {{ if or (.Get "caption") (.Get "attr")}}<p>
        {{ .Get "caption" }}
        {{ with .Get "attrlink"}}<a href="{{.}}"> {{ end }}
            {{ .Get "attr" }}
        {{ if .Get "attrlink"}}</a> {{ end }}
        </p> {{ end }}
    </figcaption>
{{ end }}

Final shortcode

To sum up, this is the final shortcode. It works amazingly, and is pretty simple. I don’t have to worry about re-writting my image sources everytime I publish a post, and I can freely work in my own local machine.

<!-- image -->
<figure {{ with .Get "class" }}class="{{.}}"{{ end }}>
    {{ $url := "" }}
    {{ if $.Page.Params.draft }}
        {{ $url = (printf "%s%s" (printf "%s%s%s%s%s" "/media-drafts/" $.Page.Type "/" $.Page.Params.Slug "/" | urlize) (.Get "src")) }}
    {{ else }}
        {{ $url = (printf "%s%s" (printf "%s%s" "https://turbo.felipequintella.com/uploads/" (printf "%s%s%s%s" $.Page.Type "/" $.Page.Params.Slug "/" | urlize)) (.Get "src")) }}
    {{ end }}

    {{ with .Get "link"}}<a href="{{.}}">{{ end }}
        <img src="{{ $url }}" {{ if or (.Get "alt") (.Get "caption") }}alt="{{ with .Get "alt"}}{{.}}{{else}}{{ .Get "caption" }}{{ end }}"{{ end }} />
    {{ if .Get "link"}}</a>{{ end }}

    {{ if or (or (.Get "title") (.Get "caption")) (.Get "attr")}}
    <figcaption class="text-sm font-light">{{ if isset .Params "title" }}
        <h4>{{ .Get "title" }}</h4>{{ end }}
        {{ if or (.Get "caption") (.Get "attr")}}<p>
        {{ .Get "caption" }}
        {{ with .Get "attrlink"}}<a href="{{.}}"> {{ end }}
            {{ .Get "attr" }}
        {{ if .Get "attrlink"}}</a> {{ end }}
        </p> {{ end }}
    </figcaption>
    {{ end }}
</figure>
<!-- image -->

Home page and other locations

Of course, when you’re writing your draft post, your cover image also shows up. On this case, I have made an auto-switching piece that does pretty much the same as the shortcode above.

I’ll check if the post is a Draft or not, change the image’s source accordingly, and create the image. On my index page I’ve even included a visual DRAFT flag to show me which posts are still unfinished. It’s a visual reminder I still have work to do!

{{ $image := .Params.coverimage}}
{{ with $image }}
    {{ $url := "" }}
    {{ if $page.Draft }}
        {{ $url = (printf "%s%s" (printf "%s%s%s%s%s" "/media-drafts/" $page.Type "/" $page.Slug "/" | urlize) .) }}
    {{ else }}
        {{ $url = (printf "%s%s" (printf "%s%s" "https://turbo.felipequintella.com/uploads/" (printf "%s%s%s%s" $page.Type "/" $page.Slug "/" | urlize)) .) }}
    {{ end }}
    <figure class="photoset-item">
        <img data-src="{{ $url }}" class="w-full rounded-xl mb-3 md:mb-6">
    </figure>
{{ end }}

{{ if .Draft }}<span class="font-bold text-gray-300 text-base" draft=true>DRAFT</span>{{end}}       
<h2 class="text-green-700 text-2xl">{{ .Title | markdownify }}</h2>

It looks really good, and the Draft flag pops out to show me where I need to work on

My home page showing draft posts with cover images appearing and Draft flags. You can also see my under-work New York photo gallery with the nice Draft flag on it

The posts listing also shows draft cover images and Draft flags

Conclusion

I hope this has showed you the power that a Hugo shortcode can have. It will streamline your workflow and help getting those posts out! I know I am guilty myself of not writting, but I’m getting back in the game, so let’s see!

Catch you next time.

Creating a Cozy Home Office Space

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Sun, 21 Nov 2021 17:20:00 -0500

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

"My current setup. It's okay, but can definetly get better"

After I moved to Cambridge to start grad school I had to make do with a lot of second hand and low-quality furnitures. It didn’t make sense spending money on new stuff when we had so much to buy at the same time. It’s now been almost 1 and a half years since and I’m quite sure I’ll stay in the US for about 2 years more after I graduate, so it’s time to plan on getting a better, more functional and ergonomic setup.

Working from home on a COVID world

After having a very weird year, a lot of zoom calls, hybrid classes and virtual happy hours I decided that a standing desk is a must-have for me to have a productive home-office setup. Spending hours sitting at an uncomfortable desk with non-ideal table height, off-center monitor and still using my MacBook keyboard instead of a standalone one took its toll on me and week after week my willingness to keep doing work reduces. My arms stay positioned at a non-natural angle because my chair had to be lower than optimal due to the desk having drawers below it, and the sharp corners cut into my fore-arms. So, yes – I decided to spend some money and build myself a nice, comfortable and hopefully cozy home office.

But of course, being the tech-crazy person I am, it can’t just be a simple task. I’m prepared to go full research on this! So, to start, I built a wish list of what I want to buy, no brands or models, just what kind of items I want. The essentials are:

Standing desk;
Standalone keyboard;
Monitor arm.

And the extras that I’ll hopefully build within some time:

New curved monitor;
Laptop dock;
Desk mat;
Filing cabinet.

The Standing Desk

There are now so many options that it becomes hard to find your ideal one! Specially online shopping, when you can’t really see it and feel it. I love to online shop, but to be honest some things are better done in-person – yes, I’m talking to you, ‘zoom happy hour’.

Anyway, I’ve researched a bit and found a feel contenders: the Jarvis from Fully, the V2 from UPLIFT and the Sway from Ergonofis. All three of them offer premium desks with wood/bamboo desktops which I was looking for. The cozy feeling of warm wood tones are something I’m aspiring to have in my home office.

After this first downselection it was a matter of choosing the best fit. For the best value I decided going with the UPLIFT V2. It shows up in first at most ‘Top X standing desks’ and comes with a lot of free accessories you can choose from. It’s not super expensive – the Sway alone goes for $1300, while the V2 starts at $600 and offers a lot of customization.

And on that note, I customized it as such:

Narrow version, 24"x48";
Bamboo desktop;
White V2 C-frame;
White grommets;
Advanced comfort keypad;
Free bamboo motion x-board;
Free small half-circle white desk drawer;
Free bamboo desk drawer;
Advanced wire management;

All of it for $847.

Kinda cozy setup I hope to achieve

Standalone keyboard

Let’s be honest, writing on your laptop is okay when you’re working from a coffee shop or your college library, but for a more long-term session the writing comfort is not optimal. And that’s not even getting into the fact that you have to be looking at your laptop screen or risk getting a stiff neck by staring sideways to your main display.

After a very short research, of course I fell into the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole. I know I’m late to this one, but it is only now that I’m feeling the need for a standalone keyboard… As a beginner in this field, I wanted a pre-built unit, but one that I could later on tweak and update with new switches and keycaps if I end up going further down this hole.

I didn’t know how complicated a keyboard could become, and started looking into all of the customization aspects of this hobby. Mechanical Keyboards is a great reference source for anyone going into it!

Switches

These are basically the “activator” of the key-press. There are different types that give you diverse tactile feedback and have bigger or smaller travel distances and sound profiles. Some are more clicky, other travel without any feedback to it. Which one you get will depend a lot on your own preferences – and those of the people around you. Another important parameter when choosing a switch is the pressure you need to put on it to actually make it travel.

There has been a sort of standardization in terms of how each brand calls their switches, with a few expections.

Red switches are usually linear – meaning they don’t offer tactile feedback when pressed, and have the quieter sound profile. They are often used for gaming, as they offer constant response to increasing pressure and so gamers can rely on them more.
Blue switches are clicky and so offer a lot of tactile feedback. They are the noisier and may botter people around you quite a bit. They are recommended for typists that require precision and speed when typing.
Brown switches are a middle ground between the two above. They offer some sort of tactile feedback without being excessively noisy, and a quiter operation, closer to red switches.

Switches from HyperX, who offers a variety of red, brown, blue and silver switches

There are many many brands out there, and it is hard to judge and choose without ever having typed in one. That’s the good thing about a pre-built keyboard, they’ll choose a switch brand for you and you can test it out.

I decided going with a Gateron Phatom Brown switch. It comes with the pre-built keyboard I chose, reviews are not terrible, and a brown switch serves a middle ground of wanting some tactile feedback without too much clicky noise that might disturb my wife. I might try a blue switch at some point, if I decide I’m actually doing a lot of typing.

Keycaps

This is what your fingers will be touching and pressing every single day. They have to be good quality plastic, and feel good to your fingertips. They are also what you are gonna be looking at and how you can create a look and feel that matches your taste.

Nice brownish keyboard pattern

You can go crazy with customization here, and get the most outrageous keycaps you might want. Seriously, there are sushi caps lock keycaps, which does not look comfortable to me. You can also mix and match colors, patterns, and create a keyboard that looks just how you want.

Mjollnir hammering your escape key

With regards to materials, there are basically two types of keycaps: ABS and PBT. I’m skipping metal keycaps, but they also exist if you want some. Related to manufacturing processes, you can have them molded with printed labels, or ‘double shot’, which means the labels are a part of the key and will not fade with use. PBT is also more resistent and less prone to oily coats after a lot of use, while ABS is the cheaper option.

Again, you can see a lot more at Mechanical Keyboards. I’ve chosen to go with my keyboard’s stock keycaps, and see how I go from there!

Other aspects

Here I really want to talk about two main things: casing material, connectivity and layout.

I wanted my keyboard to feel premium quality and to last a long time. If I can customize it and change switches and keycaps as time goes by, it means the casing and board needs to be durable. I’ve chosen to go with a CNC machined alumninum keyboard that feels heavier than plastic casings, and that will look great on my desktop.

With regards to connectivity, I’d prefer to have the flexibility of being able to connect wirelessly and wired, and being able to switch between Mac and Windows layouts.

Finnaly, the layout. I’m still going through different thoughts regarding this. I’d love to have a full 100% keyboard, because I love using numpad when needed, specially when working and writting lots and lots of numbers on a spreadsheet. The one thing I really want is to have a slightly separate arrow keys. Whenever I use keyboards that mush everything together, I have hard time finding the arrow keys by tactile and memory only. Having a small separation, and some empty space, really helps me typing without looking.

Final contestants

I ended up narrowing my options down to the following three keyboards:

Keychron Q1 - US$ 169.00
Drop CTRL - US$ 149.00
TOFU96 - US$ 199.00

For my final decision, I went with the Keychron Q1, which is currently out-of-stock on its fully assembled option but hopefully will be restocked for the holidays soon. On why the Q1, basically the only item on my list it doesn’t cover is the wireless capacity. Otherwise, it looks super pretty, comes pre-assembled and is hot-swappable, so I can customize it later if I decide to, has good quality case, switches and keycaps and comes with a nice coiled USB-C cable, which looks better than the Drop CTRL one. The Drop CTRL is also a bit bigger without the advantage of a full numpad, so kind of the worse from both sides.

I’m waiting for the re-stock to pull the trigger on this one!

The Keychron Q1 looks great and is fully customizable so I keep options for the future

Monitor Arm

If you are working on a standing desk, a raised monitor is very important. The height of a desk for your arms to lay comfortably on a keyboard is usually such that a monitor standing on top of it will not be directly at your line of sight, and you’ll have to keep looking down-ish to see your screen.

Because of that, you’ll either need a monitor raising stand or a monitor arm, so that you can raise it to be directly in front of your eyes.

Either works fine, but having the extra desk space that a monitor arm provides is great. I also want to upgrade my current monitor in the near future, moving from my current 24" cheap HP to a better and bigger 32" to 34" 4K curved display, so I need an arm that would be able to hold that weight in the future.

In terms of asthetics, I prefer one of those bi-articullated arms that comes from the side and diagonally brings the monitor to the center of the desk, instead of those vertical poles that have one articullation only.

This narrowed my search a bit, and I ended up with the two following options:

Fully Jarvis Single Monitor Arm - US$ 110.00
Ergotron HX Monitor Arm - US$ 310.00

While the Ergotron HX is much more of a heavy duty arm, holding up to 42lb, it is also a lot more expensive, almost triple the price of the Jarvis. The specifications of the HX also show that it can hold a minimum of 19lbs, which is the maximum the Jarvis can hold.

Yes, I would love to future proof my setup, but my current monitor weights only 9lb, and my current next option weight about 17lb, so I guess my choice was not really a choice at this point.

The Jarvis looks great, specially the white version, and has cable management, gas spring loaded arms, can be mounted in a grommit or at the side of the desk. So, I guess that is it.

The Jarvis monitor arm

Further improvements

This sounds like my thesis final chapter, but it’s just a place for me to keep my current ideas for the future of my desk setup :)

My current monitor is okay, but if I will use only one monitor in the future – laptop will be closed, I do need a bigger one. I currently have an HP VH240a, and would love to get a 34" curved display, preferably 4K, but these are running quite expensive right now so an Ultra WQHD like theh Samsung S65UA will probably have to do.

Regarding a laptop dock, or just a place to keep it while not using it ‘as a laptop’, I’ve come across these beautiful mable wood dock from Grovemade, linned with merino wool felt to protect the MacBook agains any scratches. The maple wood goes really well with the bamboo tones. I originally saw it on @maisyleigh_ TikTok videos, and later on her Youtube channel.

hello 👋🏼 #desksetup #tech pic.twitter.com/QqL02Fa3SS
— Maisy Leigh (@maisyleigh_) September 29, 2021

For the deskmat, I already have a Tesobi Desk Mat that I enjoy, but for the newer setup I’d love to get an Orbitkey Desk Mat in Stone. I love that it has a document hideaway and a magnetic cable holder, which will come in very handy for my keyboard cable. Another shoutout to @maisyleigh_ for this item as well!

Last but not least, with a standing desk comes almost no storage space. So a filing cabinet will be quite welcomed in my setup. I haven’t yet looking too much into it, but preferably one that has wooden tones would go quite well.

Summary

Alright, so here is the rundown of what I’ll probably end up getting:

UPLIFT V2 Narrow 24"x48" – US$ 847.00
Keychron Q1 – US$ 169.00
Fully Jarvis Monitor Arm – US$ 109.00
Orbitkey Desk Mat – US$ 79.90
Grovemade Mable Wood MacBook Dock – U$ 120.00
Samsung S65UA 34" Curved Monitor – US$ 699.00

For a grand total of US$ 2024.

I’ll keep updating this post and writting some new ones once I get my hands on all of this. For the time being, thanks and check with y’all later.

Grad School Is Busy

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:34:47 -0400

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

"MIT's signature dome during a snowstorm in Cambridge, MA"

It turns out that graduate school is harder than I’ve been told. People often say that starting an MBA is like taking a 2-year vacation from your work, but it has been nothing like that!

Don’t take me the wrong way, I’m loving every part of it, but starting a double-degree M.Eng/MBA is way more time-consuming than anything else I’ve done at work. COVID is also a part of it, as I’ve been trying to front-load my academic requirements. I will be mostly staying home after all, so might as well use the time to be done with requirements and have a bit more free time during the second half of the program, when things will be (hopefully) back to a somewhat normal pace.

And that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been posting. A 66 hours per week workload + social stuff whenever possible.

OK, to be honest, I’m not good at finding topics to post about, and I always debate whether the subjects I’m thinking about will be as interesting as I find them, or that someone else has already been through it in a lot more details than what I can bring to the table. I have to just jump in and write. And a little bit of research on the topics will do me good as well.

The Importance of Backups - How-to: Synology and Wasabi

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 16:16:39 -0500

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

When it comes to storage, one is none, two is one and three is the minimum you should have. In 2013 I lost 34,766 photos spanning 10 years of my life and took measures to prevent it from ever happening again.

Early days

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I started taking photos more seriously around 2006 when I got a Sony DSC-R1, but had been using digital cameras since 2003 with my beloved Kodak CX6330.

My beloved CX6330

For a long time I kept my photos on my main hard drive and copied them from PC to PC whenever I got I new one, and then to Macs once I migrated over. I accumulated photos from my teen ages and on, going through my period in France and back to Brazil, including many many trips.

Eventually I got my first DSLR and started using Lightroom as part of my workflow. My library and photos were still kept on the same drive, until it became too small to remain my photo storage. From then onwards I got external USB drives that would serve me as photo libraries, and everytime it got close to full I expanded to a new external drive with my entire collection.

Backups never crossed my mind and I had been lucky to never have had a drive failure before. After I got back to Brazil I started looking into more robust Lightroom workflows for my photos and the idea of backups popped into my head. I decided to start fresh and bought two 1TB My Passport drives from Western Digital - one to be my main drive and the other a full backup to protect me in case of any failures.

My setup then became:

Lightroom library stored on my main drive with weekly backups, also stored on that drive;
Photo collection stored on one external USB drive;
When photos were imported to the Lightroom catalog, a secondary copy was performed to my main drive - deleted after a couple of months;
Monthly backups of the photo collection to the secondary external USB drive.

And it worked for a long time.

Disaster

In October 2013 I took a month long road trip with some friends throught the US Pacific West, from the Monument Valley all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway. After going back home I had imported everything to my catalog and decided to export and make copies of the collection to sent my friends. The drive started falt-ing.

Photos were taking too long to load, something was happening. At one point it just occured that the drive was dead.

Well, that’s what we have a backup for! Plug in the backup drive, open it. The folders start to take a while to open, weird noises from the reading head.

The backup drive is dead too.

What happened, you may ask? I honestly have no idea. Maybe it was a manufacturing defect, maybe something hit both drives and warped the plates, maybe the drives fell and hit the ground. I guess I will never know. The facts are they were both the same exact model, bought at the same time and from the same vendor.

I lost 34,766 photos I had taken from 2003 to 2013.

Recovery (or not)

I tried whatever I could. Living in Brazil, triggering a warranty from WD was hard. I tried recovering my data with dozens of softwares to no success and then contracted a professional data recovery service that offered no guarantees and tried to recover data from my two hard drives to a total cost of US$750. “The disks are too damaged”, they said.

As a last-ditch effort I managed to recover Lightroom generated previews of all my photos. Depending on the “use” of each photo Lightroom keeps a higher or lower quality preview alongside its catalog, in my case, on my main drive, still operational.

I got all preview files extracted with a nice script from Adobe themselves and managed to get a lot of things back. Some are really low-res 160 pixels wide thumbnails and others usable 2000 pixels wide posters.

I’m really happy I managed to save all I could and if Adobe has a script to extract photos from previews, that means a lot of people are facing the same unfortunate fate.

In case anyone is here for this same problem here is how to get your low-res photos back:

After you download the script open Lightroom and navigate to Edit > Preferences (on Windows) or Lightroom > Preferences (on Mac);
Go to the Presets tab and click on Show All Other Lightroom Presets to open the presets folder on Explorer or Finder;

Lightroom preferences

Create a new folder named Scripts, if one doesn’t already exists;
Paste the ExtractPreviews.lua script file from Adobe inside this folder;
Restart Lightroom so it loads the script, select all photos you want to recover and run the ExtractPreviews script;
Select the folder you want the extractions to be.

You will end up with the best avaiable preview for each photo extracted, with the dimensions of the preview appended to the filename.

Backup

Now for what everyone should be doing. Backup.

After my incident I searched for a long time what available backup solutions I could use. I ended up landing on CrashPlan from Code42 and stick with them for a while. After a few years they decided to terminate their Personal Plan option and maintain only Small Business pricing schemes. That, added with the fact that their software was a joke (so slugish and a CPU killer), made me look around for other options.

At the same moment I was moving towards a more robust system, buying a Synology NAS to keep all my important files, including, of course, my photos. Synology provides a built-in backup platform called Hyper Backup, with support to lots of different ways to backup your data, from Local Folders, USB drives, Remote NAS, File Servers (rsync and WebDAV) and many different Cloud providers - Microsoft Azure, Dropbox, Google Drive and S3 Storage to mention a few.

Synology also provides a more streamlined sync service called Cloud Sync, target towards simple file transfer to cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, with no incremental backup and limitations to file sizes and names.

I wanted to keep my transfers to a minimum and maintain versioning of my files if possible. That meant sticking with Hyper Backup. From the service providers I researched, the one that popped due to service options, good reviews and price was Wasabi.

Wasabi works with S3 Storage, compatible with Hyper Backup;
Price is a fraction of Amazon’s - US$5.99/TB instead of vs US$23/TB;
I can keep smart versioning on within Hyper Backup and not worry about versioning in the provider.

Setting up Wasabi with Synology’s Hyper Backup

Starting a new account with Wasabi is easy and you can get a free 30-day trial right of the bat. So, no harm trying!

Wasabi signup trial

After creating a new account you can create a new bucket:

On Buckets click on Create a new bucket

Click on 'Create a new bucket'

Give it a name - it has to be unique for all of Wasabi;
Select a region for the Wasabi data center;

Set a name and region for your bucket

When asked if you want to enable bucket versioning choose No, as Hyper Backup will take care of that for you;
I also kept no logs, Hyper Backup also stores it’s own logs separately.
Hit Create Bucket

Now you need to setup Access Keys so that your scheduled backup tasks can connect and backup to Wasabi.

Create a new access key for your backup task

On Access Keys click on Create a New Access Key;
You can choose to generate a sub-user key only and protect root access (for that you need to create a new user as well);
I went with root access, since it is a private and personal backup only;
Make note of your Access Key and Secret Key - you will need them both later and once you close the window the Secret Key is never displayed again.

Make note of your keys

To setup your backup task, open Hyper Backup on your Synology DSM:

Click on Create > Data backup task to start a new task;

Create a new backup task

Choose S3 Storage;
On S3 Server choose Custom Server URL and add the service URL for your bucket’s region:
- Wasabi US East 1 (N. Virginia): s3.wasabisys.com
- Wasabi US East 2 (N. Virginia): s3.us-east-2.wasabisys.com
- Wasabi US Central 1 (Texas): s3.us-central-1.wasabisys.com
- Wasabi US West 1 (Oregon): s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com
- Wasabi EU Central 1 (Amsterdam): s3.eu-central-1.wasabisys.com
Choose your signature version as v4;
Add your Access Key and Secret Key;
Choose the bucket you want to backup to;
Choose a directory inside the bucket - this will be your backup.

Add your account details

On the next screens you can choose which folders and which Synology application settings you want to backup.

After that you can give the task a name and setup a few details. I’ve turned on Task notifications, Compress backup data and Enable transfer encription, and set backups to occurs daily during the night and integrity checks once a week.

On the next screen comes the power of Hyper Backup versioning. I’ve enabled Backup Rotation through Smart Recycle, which enforces the following versioning rules until the number of versions you setup is exceeded:

Hourly versions from the past 24 hours: Keep the earliest version created each hour;
Daily versions from the past 1 day to 1 month: Keep the earliest version created each day;
Weekly versions older than 1 month: Keep the earliest version created each week.

I chose 80 versions, which seems to work fine to me, giving me a bit more than a year of versions - 15 months to be precise.

After this you click Apply and your task is ready!

All set!

If you have 2, you have 1

As I said in the beginning of the post, if you have 2 you have 1. And 3 is the minimum you should have.

Where is my third copy, then? Well, inside Synology itself. Synology runs a proprietary RAID system that adds redundancy to the storage - they call it Synology Hybrid RAID, or SHR.

SHR protects me from any 1 single hard drive failure within the NAS, keeping 2 copies of every single byte in different drives at all times. In reality this is not a backup, just redundancy, as if something happened with the unit itself - fire or flooding, for example, redundancy would serve me for nothing. But it works fine for me by having a third copy in the cloud with Wasabi.

One day I might have enough financial power to get a secondary (and preferably remote) NAS to where I can make a real third backup.

I hope I will never need a backup again, but now I can sleep well knowing my files as secure if I need them back. And you should too.

Why Hugo and Tailwindcss

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 23:15:25 -0500

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

"My current (Jan 2021) setup for coding this blog."

There are so many different ways, languages and frameworks out there to build and publish your site that you might feel overwhelmed by the choices. It’s easy getting swamped in why React or Vue, using Bootstrap for your CSS needs, and building static pages with Jenkyll or Hugo. And that’s not even mentioning CMSs like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. I’ve experimented with my fair share of these and it never moved forward. In this post I’ll try to reason why I decided on Hugo for building my site with static pages and Tailwindcss to design and layout it.

Hugo

Hugo is awesome. It an extremely fast site compiler based on markdown files and layouts. According to the creators:

The world’s fastest framework for building websites.

It builds thousands of pages in miliseconds. Not that I really need all that power, but it’s good to have it laying there just in case.

After so many years of hankering for a good system that would let me take control of my posts and my files, I decided to try something different. My main needs were:

Serving a static site, gaining on the speed of not having to deal with databases and python-based servers;
Being able to build a custom template that I could style with CSS of some sort;
Allowing me to showcase blog posts and photosets
Did I say being wicked fast?

Hugo checked all the boxes and would make for a heck of a fun project.

Learning

The only way I really learn is by doing. To start off I bought the Build Websites with hugo from Brian P. Hogan and completed the project. It tought me to style, to template, to add CSS and JS, to use Hugo’s Pipes and to eventually deploy the site. It’s a pretty good learning asset to start if you want to get into Hugo.

When I start a project I often rely on hundreds of internet resources and smart blog posts. This time it wasn’t different. Creating partials, navbars, single and list templates, shortcodes and of course my home page.

But I also didn’t want to just get a ready-template and post. I wanted to make a template, even if by copying some ready design. Making it myself from scratch is the best way for me to learn.

I started a build from zero and using Brian’s workflow I styled my own template. At first I was using Bootstrap, but it quickly became apparent to me that Bootstrap has a very standard feel to it and that it would be hard to make future customizations or changes to the layout.

By mere luck I stumbled upon a tweet from a fellow LGO, @ItsTayFay.

It’s funny how now that I use @tailwindcss , I understand css WAAAAYYY more than when I had a million css files floating around my project.
— Taylor Facen (@ItsTayFay) January 1, 2021

Well, coming from Taylor “TwoLines” Facen I take it as the truth.

TailWindCSS

Styling with TailWindCSS is a breeze. ~~See what I did there?~~ Anyway, it makes styling so easy without you mostly ever needing to leave your HTML. Of course there is a learning curve and getting to understand and know all of its classes syntax takes a while. But then it’s just full speed!

Want to make it a lighter but bigger font? Just add text-2xl font-extralight to your class and you’re done.

Weird color and rounded blob? text-indigo-500 border-2 rounded-lg inline

Looks awesome, right? I know. There are still a few things that bothered me but that have easy workarounds. Especifically speaking, TailWindCSS’s extensions, variants and the @apply feature mostly fixes it all.

If there was one thing I might want right out of the box, it would be a bit more options for widths and more colors to choose from.

Conclusion

After the initial setup everything seems to be working pretty well. From time to time I have to adjust something either on mobile or desktop versions, or add a new shortcode to Hugo. It’s something that will give me the joy to write and exercise my desire to build new things.

I might do a bigger post detailing my setup for the blog, including Netlify’s integration and serving media through S3 and Cloudfront. I even wrote a small shortcode that changes the media url’s from my local draft’s folder to Cloudfront when the post’s front matter changes from draft to published.

For now, thanks for following and til later!

The Beginning

felipe@felipequintella.com (Felipe Quintella) — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 19:47:01 -0500

This post was designed and though for reading on my website. Please read it here if you would like the full experience.

I’ve had this personal domain for the past 10 years, since I got it for myself as a birthday present in 2010.

Soon after, I set it up to a photo sharing service called Smugmug. I always loved photography and it made sense having a place I could control in more detail than the usual MySpace, Tumblr and Facebook (or Orkut for us back in Brazil - that was the gem!) of this grand world-wide-web.

Smugmug was targeted to photographers and they provide amazing service and options in their website, so I decided I would create a nice layout, upload my photosets and showcase them to whomever wanted to see. And after uploading a couple of nice photos I quickly became bored with it. No one was finding it and it felt like just a place I was using to gloat about a few nice pictures I took.

I can’t exactly put a finger on what it was, but it just didn’t feel like something I wanted to advertise, and I ended up only adding maybe 4 or 5 new photos after the initial hype. It’s not that my love for photography vanished, on the contrary. I actually bought more (and more expensive) equipment, invested in a backup system and got a great NAS that I would be able to expand as my collection increased. I even started making short travel videos to register and remember good vacations times - oh, and speaking to all of you from the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is nothing I miss more than having some good nice vacations, getting to know new exciting places.

But I’m digressing now. My original idea was to have a site where I could post anything I wanted and to train my design and coding skills. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve coded since I was around 10 years-old, always relying on internet material and the thousands of blogs I’ve read over the years. These blogs helped me in so many different things and my idea was to start one myself, where I could register my thoughts and, maybe one day, help someone. But mostly do it for myself.

I found Paul Stamatiou’s site a few years ago, searching for good PC setups for Lightroom use. I was coming from a Mac-only world and wanted to get back into the PC game - funny thing, I’m now back to Mac. I loved his site and his content is amazing. It made me want to go back and re-visit my original idea of having a personal site. I’ve procrastinated for too long, mostly due to the daily life of a salaried worker, but now I finally had the time to put my ideas to action. Yes, my design has been deeply inspired by Stammy’s, but I hope this is just the beginning and that it will eventually morph into something of my own.

To be honest, I’m not sure where this is going to get. I really hope I’ll start the habit of writing about whatever it is I like, and posting even if only for myself. I’ll start curating my photos and making some photosets. Hopefully this will get me to revisit the many, many photos I take on every trip - and home - and never look back.

Building this site has been a great IAP project - during the winter term MIT has an Independent Activity Period for students to get into whatever project they want. And who am I kidding? It’s January 2nd, 2021: everyone is stuck at home hoping for when we will finally be vaccinated. It’s not like I have a lot of things to do either way.

It took me 10 years, but it’s finally here.

Posts on Felipe Quintella

Lightroom - Synology - Google Photos Photography Workflow

Synology for all storage

Lightroom for all management

At home workflow

Transfer and Lightroom Import

Culling/Editing

Sharing

Travel workflow

Photography

Transfer and Lightroom Import

Culling/Editing

Sharing

Backup

Back at home

Phone Photography

Transfer and Lightroom Import

Photo Services

Lightroom Publish Services

Google Photos

Synology Photos

Other ideas

I Graduated MIT

Auto-switching shortcode for Hugo posts - How-to

Amazon S3 and Cloudfront

AWS Free Usage Tier

Shortcodes

Hugo Content Management

Draft or Live

Other Shortcode Parameters

Final shortcode

Home page and other locations

Conclusion

Creating a Cozy Home Office Space

Working from home on a COVID world

The Standing Desk

Standalone keyboard

Switches

Keycaps

Other aspects

Final contestants

Monitor Arm

Further improvements

Summary

Grad School Is Busy

The Importance of Backups - How-to: Synology and Wasabi

Early days

Disaster

Recovery (or not)

Backup

Setting up Wasabi with Synology’s Hyper Backup

If you have 2, you have 1

Why Hugo and Tailwindcss

Hugo

Learning

TailWindCSS

Conclusion

The Beginning