We were busy today, but there wasn’t much memorable or unusual about what we did. We visited the chiropractor and barber; we got flu shots; we went to the supermarket and Trader Joe’s; we edited photos; we watched TV; we walked; we read.

The rose bushes in the back yard are probably putting forth their last blossoms of the year – soon, it will be time to start harvesting lemons again!

For more than 30 years, I’ve been an occasional participant in the Old Maltese’s trivia and map contests.

I started with the Great Maltese Circumglobal Trophy Dash, which used real and fictional maps to take you on a journey around the world – it was fun and very creative.

I’ve also participated in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which uses a real atlas to take you around America. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I did do better than Ken Jennings – I finished the whole thing!

But the contest that kept me coming back was the Almaniac, which gave you a copy of the World Almanac and about 80 questions – your job was to find the answers. I finished 28th one year (well, tied for 28th – which probably meant that there were a few hundred people ahead of me) and got a small plaque to commemorate my success.

The Almaniac has two editions per year, and there’s a small discount if you pay for both at the same time, which I did this year. I won’t do it again, though, because the postcard announcing this fall’s Almaniac bore sad news – it would be the last one.

Good thing I still have Learned League to feed my trivia habit!

We celebrated the first night of Sukkot at Shir Hadash, where we also celebrated paying off the mortgage on the Sanctuary Building and thereby making the congregation debt-free.

Originally, the committee planned to burn the mortgage at the celebration, but when they told Rabbi Nico, he wasn’t sold on the idea. He suggested burying it in a genizah, but the committee didn’t like that. They wound up deciding to compost the mortgage instead of burning it, so we each got a page, tore it up, and put it into a composter. I suspect they’ll have to add other ingredients to actually get useful compost, but it’s a start!

The evening included a sustainable dinner – all vegetarian, including “Impossible Kebabs”. If there hadn’t been a sign saying that they were vegetarian, I wouldn’t have known; this was my first experience with “Impossible” products, but it won’t be my last.

Hag Sameach!

I had a brilliant idea after writing last night’s post – what if I could automatically kick off the Google Reverse Image Search after taking a screenshot, but only if I was doing it from Lightroom or Photos?

I was pretty sure I had the right tools:

• Hazel to watch the desktop and “do something” if a file with the right name was added
• Keyboard Maestro to be the “something” Hazel would activate; it can check to see if the current application is one whose screen shots I care about
• and I’d already written the Shortcut to search Google, so I could call it from Keyboard Maestro.

It seemed simple, but I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why the Shortcut saw the name of the screen shot, but the script inside the Shortcut got the name of a temporary file whose contents was the name of the screen shot.

And then I realized that that was a problem I didn’t have to solve – I could just call the script directly from Keyboard Maestro and avoid the trip through Shortcuts.

And that worked right away. I’m saving time and effort every time I need to do the image search – I might never save as much time as I wasted trying to debug my problem, but that’s a different issue, right?

I even used the new technique on a photo I took on our morning walk today – I present a California Scrub Jay. I think.

Diane was in a photo “virtual crop” session this afternoon and evening, so I had seven full hours available to cull and tag several days worth of Africa photos and watch one or two sessions from the Lightroom Virtual Summit.

So naturally I started the afternoon by watching David Sparks and Stephen Hackett talk about their backpacks.

And then I started playing with Raycast as a possible replacement for LaunchBar, which hasn’t been updated for a very long time. I went through the Raycast tutorial and ran into a weird problem – it couldn’t find files in my user directory (though it could find the exact same files if I started at the root directory on the machine). After much digging, I eventually discovered that my Spotlight index was damaged, so I rebuilt it and now Raycast is able to find files properly.

And then I actually did start to cull photos from Africa. I’m tagging all the photos with the animal (or bird or flower) that they contain so that I can look at, say, all the warthogs and pick out the best photos across the entire trip. It’s easy to recognize a warthog – but I need help identifying flowers and birds. Google Image Search is my tool of choice, but using it can be a pain. I created a keyboard shortcut in Lightroom which exports a photo to my desktop, resizes it, and sends it to Google Image Search, and that works well. Unless the thing I’m trying to identify doesn’t take up much of the photo, like a bird in a landscape – Google tells me it’s a landscape, which is not helpful.

I’d been cropping the photo to emphasize the object in question, then doing the search, then uncropping, but that seemed unnecessarily complicated. What I wanted to do was to zoom in on the object, then search based what was on the screen. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet, but I did find a way to take a screenshot and automatically pass that to Google Image Search. To do that, I had to be able to find the most recent screenshot on my desktop, which was clearly a small matter of programming. Some time later, I had the solution, a Shortcut which ran a shell script:

cd ~/src/reverse-image-search
. ./setpaths
if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
  target=$(gfind ~/Desktop \( -iname 'Screen*' \) -printf '%C+ %p\n' , \( -iname 'searchme.jpg' \) -printf '%C+ %p\n' | sort -r  | head -1 | cut -f 2-99 -d ' ')
else
  target="$1"
fi
./reverse-image-search.py "$target"

What could be easier than that?

And then I got back to culling and tagging and eventually finished with the day we spent in Chobe National Park – I threw out more than half the photos I took that day (and there are more to be culled).

Diane’s session ended about the time I finished culling the photos – and I still haven’t watched any of the Lightroom videos. But she’ll be cropping again tomorrow, so there’s a chance.

Shabbat Shalom!