Sergey Pisarenko

I have always fancied the idea of having a dedicated storage system to keep personal data and backups. For the last 3 years I have been happily using an off-the-shelf solution - acer easyStore H340.

Acer H340 has 4 hot-swappable SATA slots, occupies little space and looks well. The on-board Atom N230 CPU is not powerful but has low TDP (4W). I have replaced the stock fan with a quieter one and the stock PSU with a passive one to make the server quieter.

In terms of software I had installed gentoo Linux with tons of different packages: file-sharing through NFS/CIFS, DNS server, OpenVPN, Bittorrent sync, transmission-web, BackupPC, various proxies and even Pandora ripper! I’ve run a RAID5 on 3 disks using mdadm and used the 4th drive for backups.

But recently I’ve decided to switch to a custom-built solution:

Material things break all the time - one slightly wrong move and your beloved possession is cracked, damaged or shattered. My camera is no exception. Another SLR has slipped from a hand of my friend and landed on the corner of the preview screen of my Canon 500D causing an ugly crack:

Many folks like to buy new things whenever old ones break or pay a lot for repair. I prefer to fix as much as I can myself. It’s fun and very much in-line with the growing stoic inside of me.

Is it possible to fix this problem yourself?

With yeach passing year the number of photos in my collection is growing. The trend only hockey-sticked once I got my own camera. I’ve tried various programs to organize and browse photos. I recall using or trying ACDSee, digiKam, Adobe Bridge, IrfanView, F-Spot, Shotwell and possibly others that I don’t recall.

In the previous post I have introduced photofs - a tool I have written for myself that universally solves my photo management problems.

With photofs I can easily locate photos by albums, tags, dates. But how would I add the tags in the first place? I use Adobe Lightroom and absolutely love it! I don’t use it to manage photos. Lightroom is a gateway from the camera to my collection. Once I’m done processing photos Lightroom kisses them goodbye.

About two years ago I had very little experience in programming in Python. I’ve heard of Django and felt excited how flexible it is and how complicated web applications can be elegantly written.

Tracking expenses has always been important for me. At the time I’ve relied on KMyMoney program. Frankly, I did not (and still don’t) like any such programs. They’re either clunky and look like Windows 95 or too complicated or too inefficient. I’ve decided to write my own web application in Python using the Django framework.