AllDup Photo De-duplicator

Like a lot of people I was mad when Google Announced that they were ending free photo storage for Google Photos a couple of years ago. I’d become pretty used to storing all of my photos there, and I didn’t really feel like paying Google more money than I already do, so I figured I’d find a way to manage all my photos myself. I’ve got a nice giant NAS and have got into Home Server stuff lately (more blog posts on that in the near future) so why not?

Well I had one major problem… my photos were a mess. I had kept some of them backed up on my NAS, my local PC, and some where only on Google Photos… and a few maybe just on Facebook? There was definitely a lot of overlap, so I needed some way to find the duplicates and remove them. It’s easy to find and remove IDENTICAL files, but what about a copy of the same photo that was re-compressed by Google or Facebook? The problem seemed too large to tackle, so I left it for a couple of years, trying to keep all new photos going forward organized and vowing to come back to the problem when I had a proper solution for it.

That solution is here, and it’s not even new! I came across a windows program called AllDup that does EXACTLY what I need (and it’s been around for years). It makes a tiny thumbnail style version of each photo you throw at it, and then logs any that meet a certain threshold of similarity (I found the default setting of 92% to work very well). You then go through the list and delete the ones you don’t want. Simple as that! You can even throw it two separate folders to compare against each other which worked great for comparing my Google Photos library against the mess of photos on my desktop. That way you can tell it “delete the ones from this folder where a match exists” if you know, for example, that the photos from Google will be more compressed than the ones already on your desktop.

Just switch the Search Method “find similar pictures” and you’re good to go!

I noticed very few false positives. It only happened when there were many shots in quick succession (with very little change between them) from a photo shoot, which were easy to identify and ignore. Overall a VERY impressive program!

So I’ve Been Playing a Lot of LETHAL COMPANY

this video contains all of my screams

The kids keep me pretty busy these days so I don’t get up to as much gaming as I used to, but a few of my friends and I heard about this LETHAL COMPANY game that’s been blowing up on Steam and had to give it a go. Holy crap this game is fun. Again, I do not have a lot of free time, but I’ve been drawn to spending most of it playing this stupid and hilarious game the last couple of weeks

For the uninitiated: you work as a team of 4 flying a spaceship to various moons so you can rummage through abandoned warehouses and haunted mansions looking for enough scrap metal and other junk to sell to the company so you can make quota. Also you have to run away from monsters. It’s so beautifully stupid. What ties it all together is the excellent proximity chat. There’s nothing more terrifying than hearing your friends scream cut short in a nearby room…

I’m always amazed at what weird little game concepts blow up big. It’s crazy to think that one solo dev made this game and it’s outselling all these massive blockbuster games with multi-million dollar budgets made by hundreds of people.

So all that said, if you want to see me scream in terror and swear a lot at every new monster I encounter… then this highlight video is for you (you weirdo).

Fixing the 3DS Black Screen of Death

My 4 year old is obsessed with Super Mario 64 (good choice!) and I sometimes let him play the hacked port version on my New 3DS XL, but the other day it stopped working almost entirely. When you pushed the power button the blue light would turn on, and you could hear some sounds… but the screen never lit up. I did some reading online and I guess this is a fairly common 3DS issue with a multitude of possible causes: The black screen of death (BSOD).

Well I ran through the list and nothing was working. I tried leaving it on for 10 minutes, pulling the battery, updating the Custom Firmware, performing a CTRTransfer, restoring a NAND backup (thankfully I made one when I installed the CFW in the first place), even trying the more insane sounding CTRTransfer Type D9 script (and I had to find an older copy of the CTRTransfer file as the newest one didn’t seem to work with this script), and NOTHING worked.

Then I refined my search with the additional information that I could still hear the sound, and that let me to this thread post claiming that the camera might be broken, and unplugging it’s ribbon cable might solve the issue.

Holy crap that worked! I have no idea how anyone ever figured out that a broken camera could cause your system not to boot but I sure am thankful they did!

  • Image from the GBATemp Form post detailing the issue.

Anime “Time for Lunch!” Announcement

Story Time: On days we are working remotely, my coworkers and I have a pre-lunch virtual meeting to catch up on our plans for the day. My boss famously ends the meeting with almost the exact same sign-off every day. I secretly recorded him once so I could play back the video on days he’s unable to attend (whether or not my coworkers want me to) and have consistently kept that up for the past few months.

Last week one such coworker semi-jokingly asked if I could redo the video as an anime scene, and of course I had to do it. Six hours of work later and here it is!

New short! Tronne’s Dilemma 2: Political Flyers

It’s been a while since we made a new video, hasn’t it?

Well we’re back! It’s a short one, but it’s a sweet one. Tronne’s Dilemma 2: Political Flyers finds Tronne eager to respond to a political flyer left in his mailbox. That is, before his entire world comes CRASHING DOWN.

Written by and Starring: Tronne Kalthoff
Directed and Filmed by: Jordan Mann
Audio by: Nicholas McCracken