Mark's Blog about Tech and Cool Stuff

Fitbit does not natively integrate with Google Fit on Android.  However Prevaeen Kumar Pendyala has developed an excellent open source Python based utility to perform the data synchronisation. You can read more about his utility here: https://pkp.io/blog/fitbit-to-googlefit-sync/ And download the code, and access his installation instructions here: https://github.com/praveendath92/fitbit-googlefit The code will work on any computer, and detailed instructions/video are provided for installing on Windows, MAC or Linux.  The purpose of these instructions is assist with deploying on a Synology NAS.  The benefit of using your NAS is you don't have to remember to turn on your computer.

I use a calibrated monitor for editing photos, and recently I've had photos where the colours were clearly wrong and couldn't be fixed without complex adjustment layers. The problem was most evident in portraits.  For example, this image taken in sunlight: Original image captured in sunlight Instead looked like this, where her hair has turned an orange/magenta colour, and she also has what appears as a feint orange rash on her forehead.  Note this is a photograph of the monitor, and I've tried to adjust white balance, contrast and saturation to reflect accurately the colours I was seeing. Photograph of screen showing incorrect colours What had gone wrong? Image fault on my Dell U2311H monitor Sensor problem on my Canon 7D Mark II DSLR (9 year old) ColorMunki Photo spectrophotometer could have developed a fault Photographic software playing up.

I made a YouTube video of my daughter back in 2010, and it briefly went viral.  To date it has reached 113499 views, 438 likes (6 dislikes) and 86 comments still listed. Today I received a copyright claim by "AdRev for Rights Holder".  It states that they have a copyright claim for the music "Medieval.-16004-RFR - Manuel Kempter".

Julian calendar The Julian calendar was introduced in 45BC by Julius Caesar, taking over from the  Roman calendar . Under the Julian calendar each year has 365 days, except for a leap year  every four years which has 366 days.  This averages to 365.25 days.  This however does not approximate the actual tropical year  (e.g. based on the cycle of the seasons) close enough.  Specifically the average year was slightly longer than it should have been (365.24219). So how bad is the Julian calendar? 365.25 - 365.24219 = 0.00781 days 0.00781 * 24 * 60 = 11.2464 minutes It was gaining about 11.2464 minutes per year.  Hardly consequential - right?  Well, that results in an increase of 1 day every 128 years or so.  By now (2017) it would be 13 days out.  Though after 46,766 years (or so) the Julian calendar would be correct again... Gregorian calendar The problem was (mostly) corrected with a new calendar introduced by Pop...

I have a lot of travel photos taken on my DSLR that are missing the GPS location.  Having the location is handy for friends and family to see exactly where the photos were taken from.  Over time your own memory fades too. Most of my photos are in raw format (Canon CR2), and I can use Picasa to set the GPS location, but only after the photos have been processed and saved as JPG (or TIFF etc).  If I add the location to the raw image, then it saves the location to metadata that only Picasa recognises. If I go back and reprocess the raw photo, then the new JPG will have lost the location information.  What I needed was software that could add the location to the raw photo. I looked around for alternate software, and did try a few things.  Usually they didn't work on raw files, or were just clunky to use.  Many applications are also designed for taking coordinates from GPS loggers - which I don't have. Furthermore, I don't want to have to type in GPS c...

Picasa  is a quick and handy picture viewer and organiser for all the photos on your PC. Picasa was discontinued by Google in 2016 when they chose to focus exclusively on the cloud. Even though it was discontinued, Picasa is still my preferred software for viewing, searching and managing photos. This post will explain how you can still use Picasa, and specifically integrate with the new Google Photos cloud storage. In short Picasa is still useful.  Furthermore by integrating with Google Photos, you get great cloud hosting for backup and sharing.

How to fix the GitLab 502 error Occasionally when starting GitLab, I get a 502 error ("Whoops, GitLab is taking too much time to respond").  It appears to happen when my Synology NAS has restarted after a power outage. Checking the Docker GitLab log, I can seen continual messages about trying to restart the "unicorn" process.  This also causes high CPU usage. 2017-03-27 00:35:08,892 INFO spawned: 'unicorn' with pid 27723 2017-03-27 00:35:09,896 INFO success: unicorn entered RUNNING state, process has stayed up for > than 1 seconds (startsecs) 2017-03-27 00:35:14,277 INFO exited: unicorn (exit status 1; not expected) ...