By the end of August, I was starting to feel a little persecuted by all the water problems and exhausted by self-imposed deadlines. We needed a break.
The last week of August was a staycation (The vacation fund having been decimated for many years to come thanks to the house) that started with replacing that dishwasher. We made a day-trip to Jasper on the 31st and I took about 140 photos in the few hours we were in the park. Mostly of waterfalls and such. Additionally, I had the opportunity to shoot the night before which was the Perigee Blue Supermoon. It was marginally successful. That’s the photo I used for the header in the last post.
The trip to Jasper was a fast one. We arrived after lunch and left by just after dinner time. We had to get home to feed Bandit and Grey after all. All the way to the park, I wondered what I’d be shooting because there was still a great deal of wildfire smoke in the air causing a noticeable haze around everything and super moody skies.
Details. Smaller things, closer things. We hiked to somewhere between 4th and 5th bridges at Maligne Canyon and back. A good workout, especially when you’re carrying camera gear.
Then September was I.T. catch up time. A couple of machines here needed drive replacements and that’s always disruptive. I also decided to move the database I’ve been keeping of my knitting/spinning/weaving projects to home from a cloud hosted option I had been using. They changed their plans and announced that they were only interested in big corporations so it was time to look at the options. This is one reason why Software as a Service (or SaaS) doesn’t work for this IT person. Microsoft 365, accounting programs online, Adobe Creative Suite, even cloud services like iCloud are expensive, security is suspect (some use encryption but you don’t have the encryption keys so you have no idea how secure it actually is) and what sort of data redundancy do they employ? The unknowns make me nervous and as a geek from way back, I have seen too many companies go belly up, get sold to someone with different priorities or change their business models and we become acceptable collateral damage, or they don’t respect your data. At home here, I’m responsible for my own data and business continuity and I’m diligent about it.
A note: While I’m talking about a fibre related database here, there’s no reason this discussion can’t relate also to a vintage sewing machine maintenance database, or quilt fabric stash or even a rewrite of the one I was working on years ago but ran into limitations from the software back then. Heck, it’s on my list to recreate the sewing machine portion of that old database already. That will be easier in the 2 programs I’ve landed on.
So I began to look into options that were “low code or no code relational databases” similar to what I’d been using at Airtable. Lots of them have popped up in the past few years, some more mature than others.
I tested out a half dozen projects available to most of us. Some still cloud hosted, some installed on a local computer or self hosted on a webserver like that which hosts Archaic Arcane’s website.
I tried Notion but I didn’t like that it was also cloud hosted. The security is a little questionable too. They claim end to end encryption but you don’t have the keys, they do. So you don’t really control the security of your data. For a fibre stash database, it’s not necessarily that important but it’s more about the underlying philosophy upon which the program is developed.
The more I thought about it and the more I tested software packages, the more tired I grew of vendor lock in for the data, I opted for a solution I could host here at the house. I narrowed the choices down to 2.
- Nocodb – it’s a nearly direct replacement for Airtable. There’s an installable version, a cloud version and very good documentation how to run it in Docker from the source code (which is well beyond the scope of this post). Their development team is very responsive and when I requested an enhancement that makes the software friendlier to those of us with a tendency toward migraines, they took it seriously and made the change in a fairly short period of time. The issue was that the gallery view (something I use a lot) had a slideshow feature that was on by default and caused some vestibular disturbances which result in migraines and nausea for me. Something similar happened with Ravelry’s website redesign those couple of years ago which is why I host my own fibre database now. Previously, the motion from the slideshow would trigger something in the part of my brain responsible for balance to say “Well! We’ve been poisoned, everything out of the digestive system and … stars. Stars and dizziness would be appropriate here! And pain. Crushing pain in the skull. That will teach us!” They fixed it in an update a month or so ago and no more issues. This one as I mentioned is an almost direct replacement for Airtable and so would be the easiest for most folks to migrate to if they had previous experience with Airtable. Also as mentioned, it has a Gallery view which is a pretty big thing for a visual sort of database – like fibre projects, quilting projects, sewing machine repair logs, almost anything I can think of that I’d try to use a relational database for. If you used the cloud version, you’d also not have anything to install or maintain and you’d have access when you were away from home but I haven’t used that version to date.
- Grist – which not only amused me with its name (because it’s a term we use in the fibre world too!) but seems to be in very, very active development as well. They’re also very visible and receptive to feedback in the community (based on several reddit threads I’ve read.) There is a cloud option for those who don’t want to host themselves and a version that can be installed on a desktop (Grist-Electron) and shared out (or not) to a local network. They’ve also got a static version that can be uploaded to a website and updated periodically and if you really want go that far, you can even install directly to your website or other computer. At this point I didn’t know how far I wanted to go so I’m using Docker and Grist-Core at the house and the static version on a test subdomain of this website so I can access the data while I’m out. They have some really great tutorials and example databases to learn to use their software. Documentation is quite good but maybe a tiny bit higher level than someone would want if they were just learning to install Grist and especially if they were new to Docker. This isn’t an issue with their cloud hosted product or the Grist-Electron version though. The only longer term drawback here is the lack of a gallery view which is pretty key for this sort of database in my mind.
For now, I’m keeping a copy of my data in each program to see what I end up gravitating towards in the end. It’s cumbersome in the short term but I doubt it will take much longer for me to choose one over the other and I’m not usually a terribly prolific crafter… so the maintenance isn’t that bad for 2 databases.
Neither project however is a poor option. Visually, I prefer nocodb – largely because of its image handling/gallery view. Grist has the potential to be a lot more powerful in the long run which will give me way more interesting information from my data and they’re working on the images side of things. Maybe we can even convince them that a gallery view is needed or who knows, I may finally dust off my coding skills and get involved in my spare time. If I ever find some spare time!
I still kept shooting photos throughout September with varying degrees of success. Things I’ve not been terribly successful with in the past were slightly more so. We’re entering a period of solar maximum so the Aurora Borealis occurs more frequently and between the smoke in the air and some good close moon phases, I’ve had time to practice my night photography. Though it gets cold pretty fast at night, so the sessions are short. The change of seasons has been slow this year but it’s definitely been noticeable at night.
October, I switched gears though. I think I just felt like the previous 3 months had robbed me of my crafting time. That will be another post hopefully this week. I always say I’m going to make shorter, more frequent posts but I was thinking maybe monthly for now. I’ve been holding onto some news for longer than I should have so if I aim for monthly, maybe at least news won’t be “Breaking” but still current when I do post.
Post Title: Late September Dogs – Melissa Etheridge I just love the atmosphere and emotion in this song.
“Just outside my window I hear the late September dogsAnd I understand their warning I understand their songSince you left I feel the change in the airAnd night after night I’m searching for mercy everywhere”