Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am coming back with my monthly photo chest project. Let’s get started!
There’s a reason this project is being given the slow milking treatment. It’s a monumental task, and I don’t even have all the hardware necessary for the full project. While it would be fun to build a small machine from scratch, I need to keep scale in mind. This isn’t some arbitrary task I have infinite focus for decades on.
At present, I am looking into Network Attached Storage (NAS) to host the files. NAS can come in a small variety of few forms, but all the ones I’ve looked at appear to be small computers with lots of hard drive space. On the lower end, you have monolithic units where you can store stuff, while something a little more sophisticated will have anywhere between 2, 4, 8, or even more bays you can plug individual hard drives into. Some come ready to use with drives preinstalled, while others expect you to use your own drives. Often, you will find they have some sort of special software to manage the NAS system as a whole.
Admittedly, I am still specing out the system with my father. We are leaning in the direction of getting four 8TB drives specially designed for NAS applications, specifically from Western Digital’s red line.
The NAS controller is still a bigger unknown. We’ve had one for years, but I’ve always found their controller software a bit annoying to deal with, so I’ve only bothered getting it to work about five times — ever. However, I suspect knowing a bit more about its underlying structure will make it easier to deal with in the future. At the same time, I still want something I can connect to on whatever terms I deem fit. One lowball priced bay was quickly blacklisted over this consideration.
In other news, the photo trunk has been unloaded and we have started building an extensive catalogue of what we have, starting with school photos.
But before the real work could begin, a couple decades can really do a number on the smell in a confined space. It was so bad, I had to use a box fan to pull air out of the chest into the room and another fan to exchange the air room with outside. Needless to say, when my mother needed the room for drying face masks, the procedure was put to a halt. It took a couple days, but it’s down to bearable levels.
The bottom of the trunk felt a lot better organized than the top tray. There were two handbags and a cardboard box we could pull out. The rest was mostly almost empty albums and framed photos. One of the handbags contained a lot of school pictures (mostly) in their original envelopes, so we decided to begin there.
Using my freshly untethered laptop, my father set up a spreadsheet. To help speed up measuring pictures, he laid down some tape and marked off the inches. For my part, I already had a lot of the school pictures sorted into a bucket, and we’ve been going through that bucket, documenting everything we have. The plan is to work on it a little each day.
Final Question: How would you go about bringing order to near chaos?