Alvin Ailey, Red Team Blues, and Czkawka: ttftw 2023w16

Three things from this week.

Three more things from this week. No code this time, just a few random things from my week. One event attended, one audiobook backed, and one piece of free open source software to add to your kit.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

My wife and I were watching a Hallmark movie on a lark around Christmas time. I’d link to the moving but it was so unremarkable that I couldn’t remember enough details to find it. I remember there was a woman who was a baker in New York. There was a guy returning to New York with the fiancée who he’d met while living on the west coast with his daughter. The important bit for my story today is that one way that we could see that he was a sensitive and caring man is that he was going to take his daughter and fiancée to see Alvin Ailey. Of course she was the hardnosed business type so she had more important things to do and it fell through. My wife is very into dance so she immediately observed just how poorly matched this couple was. She said of course going to see Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a wonderful opportunity and she’d love to see them. I honestly think she didn’t expect me to take anything away from that brief observation. I’m no fool though, I went and found out who this dance company is and when they’d be nearby. I found some tickets for us so we got to go see them on Saturday in Berkeley. It was a great experience and of course the dancers were amazing. If you’d like to get a taste for it here’s a nice playlist on YouTube.

The guy in the movie ends up with the baker, but you already knew that.

Red Team Blues by Corey Doctrow on Kickstarter

Corey Doctrow has another book project on Kickstarter called Red Team Blues. I really appreciate the work he’s doing to resist the normalization of DRM. Releasing the audiobook without DRM means it won’t be on Audible which is apparently where most people get their audiobooks. I backed the audiobook version since these days I need someone else to read to me or I just don’t get to them. You should back the project too, or just know about it. Maybe go make a derivative work based on Corey Doctrow’s writing because you can do that too if you want.

Czkawka Duplicate File Finder

A downside of giant hard drives, memory cards, and NAS devices is the extra effort to organize all those files. Having more storage space and ad hoc backups means it’s a lot easier to end up with duped files all over the place. Czkawka is a fast open source tool for finding them. It runs on Linux, Mac, and Widnows. I haven’t done a lot with it yet but I ran it over some directories where I know I had a lot of dupes and it cranked through them pretty quickly. It’s also got features specifically suited for duplicate music and video files, giving some choice over which fields to compare. The name is a Polish word for hiccup and I had to click the little speaker on Google Translate to hear what it might sound like.

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