Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

Deleting the Duplicates

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As I try to get my 43,000-photo library under control, I find photos from my life.

R22 with Stagecoach
This isn’t one of the duplicates, but it is one of the oldest photos in my Photo Library. Shot in 2002 with a Canon Powershot 300 camera, it shows my first helicopter, a Robinson R22 Beta II, parked in my hangar. That is an authentic 1800s stagecoach behind it; I got the hangar, in part, because I agreed to store the stagecoach. That same stagecoach is now on display at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, AZ.

I’m in the midst of a big project to downsize my computer setup. For years — heck, since I started computing in 1984 — I’ve always had a desktop computer. When I began writing books about how to use computers in the 1990s, I added a second desktop. And then a third when I started writing books about Windows. After a while, those extra computers turned into more practical (and space saving) laptops. When I started traveling, the Mac laptop went with me. Eventually, I stopped writing about windows and ditched the PC laptop. But that left me with a desktop and laptop Mac. (And an iPad, but that serves an entirely different purpose.)

I’m traveling more and more these days and my current Mac desktop — a loaded 2007 27″ iMac — was giving me a lot of trouble. Slow performance, weird error messages, system lockups. It definitely needed help, but since I mostly used my laptop — a stripped down 2021 13″ MacBook Air — I just didn’t get around to tracking down the problem. The only thing I really used the iMac for was video editing and when I got burned out doing that, I hardly used it at all.

Now, as I plan for an extended journey on my boat, I started to think long and hard about why I actually had a desktop computer. I loved the big screen — and the second 24″ monitor set up beside it — but it certainly would not fit on my boat. Besides, did I need it? Apple had just released a new 15″ MacBook Air with a faster processor and SSD hard disk. After a lot of thought, I realized that a machine like that could probably replace my current laptop and the desktop computer that was giving me so much grief. When I learned that Apple would give me a $500 credit toward the purchase of the new computer if I traded in the old one — which had only cost $1,000 two years before — it was a no-brainer. I took the plunge.

Moving the Files

Unfortunately, the problems with the iMac came to a head as I was getting ready to make the new computer purchase. I’d connected my iPhone to the iMac to manually copy the 3000+ photos I’d shot during my 5 months on the boat from December 2022 through April 2023. For some reason, about half the photos were copied to the iMac and deleted from my phone and I couldn’t get the iMac to take the rest.

Insert long boring story about troubleshooting here. Actually, no. You don’t want to read it any more than I want to write it.

Rosie and Lily
One of the duplicates: my dog Rosie, front and center, while Lily’s attention is elsewhere behind her. This was shot at Roche Harbor in September 2022.

I eventually used Disk Utility to determine that there were directory issues on the iMac’s main hard disk. It would need to be reformatted to be fixed. By that time, of course, Finder had stopped working and I couldn’t do a damn thing on the iMac, let alone open the Photos app to see if the missing pictures were actually there.

I had two backups. One was a Time Machine backup, but I didn’t trust its integrity enough to rely on it for restoring my data. The other was a SuperDuper! backup that basically duplicated the disk. It was a few days old and I couldn’t remember whether I’d made it before or after copying those photos.

Understand that I wasn’t very worried about the rest of the data on the computer. My important documents either live on or are backed up to the Cloud. I mostly use Dropbox for the important stuff, but I had some other stuff floating around on various other clouds that I had free space on. I also had very important stuff backed up to my web server at my ISP.

It was the pictures that concerned me. Judging from what was missing from my phone, it looked as if trip photos from December through at least February were missing. The only place they currently existed was in the Photos app library on that sick iMac hard disk. (If they were there at all.)

I was worried.

Insert more geeky computer-fixing tasks here. No, not really. I’ve already written more about this than I wanted to.

End of long story: I was able to copy all of my Home folder to an external hard disk. So I now had three backups of my data and could move forward to put them on my new MacBook Air, which, by this time had arrived and already received files from my old laptop. That old laptop was already in Apple’s hands.

As I still struggle to understand how the Photos app on Mac OS works with my iPhone to collect photos behind the scenes, I did the simple thing: I copied my 500+ GB (not a typo) Photo Library file from the backup to the new computer’s Photos folder. When the disks stopped whirling, I wound up with a 43,000-photo library on my new computer.

And that entire computer is backed up throughout the day every day to the Cloud. (Yes, I’ll add Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups when I start traveling and have sketchy Internet access.)

Colorado San Juan ConfluenceThis was one of the first duplicates, from 2006. It’s an aerial view of the confluence of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers over Lake Powell. If the water levels get anywhere near this high again by next year, I’ll be putting my boat in the lake for a few months in autumn 2024.

Deleting the Duplicates

Duplicates
Here’s an image from Photos showing some duplicates. I’ve already gotten rid of at least half of them. These photos are from a cruise to Alaska I took back in 2019 on a 70-foot, 90 year old wooden boat.

And that brings me to what I really wanted to write about here: deleting the duplicates. You see, the Photos app has a feature where it’ll go through the database of photos and videos and identify duplicate images. It then displays them side by side and offers a button (that looks like a link) to merge them.

Of course, I didn’t know how it worked at first. When I clicked the sidebar item labeled duplicates, Photos dutifully began looking for duplicates among the 43,00+ images. I waited. Nothing happened. I had chores in town so I left it to do its thing.

When I returned, the computer was sleeping. I woke it up and did some other stuff before I remembered the task I’d given it. I switched to Photos and saw that it had found more than 2,000 duplicates. That’s when I learned that I’d have to go through them one by one to delete them. I settled down with my dinner to start the task.

And that’s when I started seeing my life flash before my eyes.

Well, not really. Not in that dramatic you’re-about-to-die sort of way.

Instead, it was random photos, in chronological order, from my past. It started with aerial shots I’d taken — or maybe my wasband or a client had taken? — from my old helicopter over Lake Powell in 2006 and progressed to various photos shot since then. Some of them were great snapshots of amazing places while others were mundane photos of my dog or a sunset or builders using a forklift to bring huge sheets of sheetrock through the door on my deck into my home under construction. They were snapshots of my life, taking me through the years.

David B
This is the David B, a 70-foot, 90-year-old wooden boat I cruised on, with just 3 other passengers, from Bellingham WA to Ketchikan AK in 2019. I captured this image with my drone.

I don’t know why some photos were duplicated and others weren’t. I do know that there are more duplicates in later years than in earlier years — but then again, there are also more photos from later years. The photos from 2006, for example, would have come from an actual camera. I had a Canon G5 digital camera in those days; my Nikon was a film camera. It wasn’t until my trip to Alaska in 2007 that I finally bought my first DSLR. And even then, those photos would have to be manually added to iPhoto (in those days) on my Mac.

What the hell?

It’s hard to believe that I used to write books about using Mac computers when I barely have a clue about how the “new” Mac OS features work. Truth of the matter is, when I stopped writing about Mac OS, I stopped updating the OS regularly. I became a mere user, and not even one who cared about running the latest and greatest version of the OS. My iMac is still running Maverick; I resisted upgrading to that as long as I could.

What does that mean? It means that there are a lot of Mac OS features that I simply don’t use or understand these days. How Photos and my iPhone work together is a perfect example — they’re obviously doing something together that I don’t know about. I’ve come a long way — mostly down — from knowing how everything works. It’s weird and it bothers me a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. I spend far less time in front of a computer than I did for the 20+ years I wrote about them.

And that’s kind of nice.

But nowadays, almost all the photos I take are taken with my iPhone. Why not, right? It has a great camera. I take photos every day — sometimes dozens of them. I suspect that in more recent years my phone started uploading them to iCloud which then somehow put them on my iMac. Or maybe when I got home and was connected to the network and my iMac was turned on, some sort of transfer happened. I don’t know (and yes, that bothers me.) When I manually added them using a cable — yes, I’m old school — I got duplicates.

Anyway, the plan is to remove all the duplicates first and then go through all the photos, delete the ones that are crap, and pull the ones I don’t need off my computer for storage on some sort of archival media. Probably hard disk drives (duplicated, of course) and/or CD-ROM discs. The goal is to get that 43,000+ photo library down to a more manageable 5,000 photos. And I suspect that’ll take a long, long time.

Until then, I’ll enjoy this look back through the last 10 to 15 years of my life, which have been full of travel and adventure and all kinds of new and exciting things.

Do It Now at Roche Harbor
The last of the duplicates is this great sunset shot from September 2022 at Roche Harbor. It was my first trip in Do It Now, a two-day cruise from Olympia and San Juan Island for the Ranger Tugs/Cutwater Rendezvous. This photo was shot the evening before I started the trip back to Olympia, just me and my pups.

Back It Up, Folks!

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If you’re not backing up your important data, you’re just waiting to lose it.

I was chatting with a fellow pilot the other day about archiving all the videos we accumulate with our GoPro cameras.

“I went to the store and bought a 5 TB hard drive for under $100,” he told me. “Every single photo or movie I ever recorded is on that disk.”

“How often do you back it up?” I asked.

He looked at me blankly. The truth is, he didn’t have a backup for it. He had every photo on one hard disk drive and it wasn’t backed up.

Hard Disk Crashes Happen

I’ve lived through more hard disk crashes than the average person. I’ve even lost a manuscript to a hard disk crash. I think it was that loss that taught me how important it is to back up every file I don’t want to lose.

As I type this, my 5 year old iMac is copying files from its internal hard disk to a backup disk. The iMac has been acting funky for a while and it got to the point where it just wasn’t functioning at all. I booted from the internal recovery disk and ran Disk First Aid on it. It found sectors it couldn’t fix. When I restarted from the normal startup disk, Finder wouldn’t work. For those of you who use Windows and don’t know Mac OS, it’s as if Windows won’t open anything for you. The solution was to go back into Recovery mode, make a new startup disk on an external hard disk, restart the Mac from that, and back up all my important files onto that new hard disk.

You might say, “Maria! Didn’t you already have a backup?”

To that, I say, of course I did. I actually have TWO backups of the entire going bad hard disk. But how can I possibly know if both of them are good when the source is bad? Why take chances? I’ll copy all the files over to make a third backup I know is good. Then I’ll reformat the bad drive and, hopefully, the problems will go away. Then I can reinstall the data files on the newly formatted hard drive. Or, in this case, on the computer I bought to replace it anyway. (I need to get that old iMac running to trade it in for the maximum cash back.)

As for backups of the new computer — a brand new 15″ MacBook Air I got to replace a 2 year old 13″ MacBook Air and the 5 year old 27″ iMac — I’ll periodically back up to an external hard disk, but I’ll also likely back up to the cloud. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s a good and reliable solution and I’m already paying for that cloud space. It would be dumb not to do it.

My Media Storage Solution

Going back to my GoPro and other media situation…

My media file archives and backups work like this: Each year, I buy a pair of 2 TB portable hard disks. I name one for the year and one for the year followed by BU. So this year’s disks are 2023 and 2023 BU. As I travel about, I copy all of my photos and videos from my phone, my Nikon, my GoPro, and my DJI drone to the hard disk for that year, organized by date. So a folder containing the videos from a flight I do today might be named 061923 Wenatchee Flight. When I get home from my travels, I use an app like SuperDuper to synchronize the two hard disks, using the primary one as the source. So if I add or remove files on that primary disk, those changes are automatically reflected on the backup disk.

Understand that the video files I accumulate are huge and take up a ton of storage space. The more I have, the more disk space I need. I’m trying very hard to keep total storage per year under 2 T, but this year I wound up buying 5 T drives because that’s all I could find. I’ll still just put one year’s worth of files on it.

If any of my original or backup disks go bad, I still have the other disk for that year. To lose a whole year’s worth of media, I’d have to lose both disks, which are seldom in the same location for any considerable length of time. To lose all my media, I’d have to lose all of my disks — there are about 6 years’ worth at this point so that’s 12 hard disks.

My friend, in my opinion, is putting all of his eggs in one basket — and that is never a good idea if you don’t want to lose all your eggs.

Snowbirding 2022: The Power Problem

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I finally track down and solve an annoying battery power issue.

The problem first reared its ugly head at Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge on Saturday night — the day after I’d left home. (I’d spent that first night at a campground in Idaho with a power hookup.) Nighttime temperatures were forecasted to be at 20°F or lower so, like anyone who values comfort, I stacked some extra blankets on my bed at nighttime and turned the heater on.

How It All Works

My RV’s heater is forced air propane. That means there’s a propane burner that heats the air and a battery powered fan that blows the air into the living space. So in order to have heat, you need propane and battery power.


My rig’s batteries in their compartment. The space is so limited that only a few different battery models will fit — so please don’t lecture me about 6v systems because I’ve already explored that option.

My RV has two 12v deep cycle marine/RV batteries on board. They are connected to the rig’s internal converter (which converts AC to DC power when I’m plugged into an external AC power source), a power connector to my truck (when the camper is on the truck and plugged into it), and my solar panel controller (which is attached to two 100-watt solar panels on the rig’s roof). That gives me three ways to keep those batteries charged: external power (if I’m plugged in), power from my truck (as I’m driving down the road), and solar power (during the day, which varies depending on how sunny it is).

My batteries showed fully charged — per the voltage reading on the solar controller — when solar power eased off late in the day. That was fine; that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The system is set up so that if I’m parked in a sunny place during the day, the batteries will fully charge before nightfall. I’m extremely conservative with my power use because, although I have a generator, I don’t like to run it.

Between sunset and the time I went to bed, power seemed to drain out of the batteries a bit more than I remembered it doing. Keep in mind, however, that I hadn’t been “dry camping” since the previous winter, so I really didn’t remember what kind of power drain I’d been experiencing. (The batteries were new; replaced in January.) I went to bed with the heat set low to just take the big chill out of the air.

The Problem Rears Its Head

I woke early and noticed that my refrigerator was showing an error code that meant it wasn’t getting enough power. My refrigerator runs on propane (when I’m not plugged into external power) but, like my heater, it requires a certain amount of DC power to operate its thermostat and interior light and who knows what else. When power drops below a certain level, the refrigerator shuts down and the error message appears.

I checked the solar charge controller. It read 10v. That was very bad.

I got up and turned everything off. And then I got back under the covers, which was pretty much the only way I’d stay warm until it was light enough for the solar panels to go to work or late enough for me to run my generator in a campground where other people might like to sleep past 5 AM.

I had a hell of a time getting the generator started later that morning in 18°F temperatures. I thought it was a problem with the generator itself but I think it was more the fact that the previous user — who was not me; when will I learn not to lend out my stuff? — ran it dry of fuel. Later, I managed to get fuel and get it running and everything was back to normal.

Or at least I thought it was. I figured that I’d just expected too much from the fully charged batteries the night before. Instead of running the heater all night, I’d leave it turned off the next night and turn it on in the morning to warm the place before I got out of bed. In the meantime, the batteries were charging fine in the bright sun of my campsite.


Here’s my usual generator setup. There’s an adapter that makes it possible to plug in my 30 amp RV cord to a standard 20 or 15 amp outlet.

But the next morning, when it was only slightly warmer than the morning before, the batteries were already dead — without me running the heat at all!

I waited as long as I could and then said, “F*ck this, I’m running the generator before I freeze my ass off.” And I started the generator at 6 AM. Fortunately, my closest neighbor had left the day before and my 2KW Honda is pretty quiet. Plugging the camper into the generator is pretty much the same as plugging it into any AC power source; I had power and the batteries would charge.

Plugging In, Then Trying Again

Meanwhile, winter weather — rain and wind in that part of Nevada — was moving in. I decided that what I needed was either a campsite with a power hookup or a campsite in a remote area where I could run my generator anytime I had to.


At Valley of Fire State Park. I’m not totally opposed to campground living; I just don’t really like it when I don’t need it.

I went to Valley of Fire State Park and enjoyed two nights plugged in at one of their campgrounds. Surely being plugged for more than 40 hours straight would fix the battery issues. But I had my doubts. I’d dry boondocking — that’s camping with no hookups — one more night before I tried to get the batteries replaced.

So I spent the night at Stewart Point on Lake Mead. I had a great campsite and I would have loved to spend more than one night there. But it was the same story in the morning — freezing cold with no battery power. I didn’t even bother running the generator. I made my coffee in a travel mug, loaded up my pups, and left the campground right around dawn.


Boondocking at Stewart Point. I could have stayed here a week if it weren’t for the power problems.

Tracking Down the Problem

That was Thursday.

I already had reservations at Willow Beach campground on the Colorado River for Sunday and Monday night. I changed them to that night. If I couldn’t fix the power problem, I’d need a power hookup again. I was tired of freezing my ass off in bed and very tired of seeing my pups shivering, even with their coats on, as they tried to sleep. I was starting to wonder whether I should just give up and go home. I was seriously sick and tired of dealing with the problem.

I headed in to Henderson, NV where there was a Camping World. Camping World is a chain of RV sales and service places that are usually quite large and well-stocked. I had already called them the day before to see if they could replace my batteries while I waited. I was not going to deal with a place that made an appointment two weeks from Tuesday.

Long story short: because the Interstate brand batteries were less than a year old, they were covered under warranty. But because Camping World didn’t sell that exact model, they wouldn’t swap them. I wound up going to the Interstate location in Las Vegas. All this time, I’m trying to get the folks who sold me the battery to email me a copy of the receipt as proof of purchase.

One of the Interstate techs came out and tested the batteries. By this time, the drive plus the sun had fully charged them. The first battery tested good. I started thinking about how I’d track down the power issue if the problem wasn’t the batteries. But the second battery tested bad. And the guy found the date code on the battery that proved its age so I didn’t need a receipt after all.

There was some trouble with how I was going to swap them. They didn’t do installations on RV batteries — just car batteries. And they wouldn’t give me the new battery unless I left the old one. And then they also were trying to sell me the replacement or even a replacement for the one that wasn’t bad. They gave me the number of a mobile installer — likely someone they get kickback from — but I also called Camping World. Camping World wanted $149 plus tax to swap the batteries.

Once again, I found myself saying, “F*ck that. I’ll do it myself.”


It’s the battery on the left that needed replacement. One terminal had just one fat cable while the other had two fat cables and three skinny cables. It was difficult getting them all back in place, but I managed.

I dug out my junky $49 Harbor Freight toolkit, which lives at the bottom of one of my outside storage compartments. I took a photo of the mass of wires I’d have to disconnect and then reconnect on the battery terminals. I disconnected the wires on the bad battery. And then I got the Interstate tech to take the bad battery out of the cabinet and lift the replacement battery up into its place. (I don’t think I could have lifted them myself; I tipped him $5.)

I got to work with a couple of wrenches and fastened all the wires where they needed to be. No sparks, no flames. I went inside my camper to look at various things that would indicate success or failure. The solar charge controller was registering properly, the fridge was on, the stereo’s clock was lit up. It all looked good.

I put everything away and left.

The Test

I had a celebratory lunch in Boulder City. It was more of a reward for dealing with everything I’d dealt with. Then my pups and I took a bike ride on the Historic Railroad Trail that starts at the Lake Mead Visitor Center and goes all the way to Hoover Dam. I put the bike and my pups’ trailer away and we headed down to Willow Beach.


Here I am, parked at a nice level site with a full hookup at Willow Beach. It’s a nice enough campground, but I think the price is outrageous. It’s half price for 65+ with the right paperwork so I have something to look forward to — in five years.

I considered not plugging in so I could test the system right then and there. But I was paying $57 for that campsite for one night and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to use every single one of its features. So I enjoyed 30 amp power and “city” water and dumped the RVs tanks. I also had a good shower and did a load of laundry before leaving on Friday morning.

I’d decided that I’d test the system at Kingman Wash, a camping area about 3 miles from pavement on Lake Mead. I didn’t want to get any farther away from the Las Vegas area; if the problem wasn’t resolved, I’d need it troubleshooted and I stood a much better chance at finding an experienced RV repair person in a metro area than 100 miles south in some podunk town.

I drove down there, found an excellent camping area with just one other camper, parked on a high point overlooking the beach, pulled out my generator, and set it up. If I was going to need it, I wanted it all ready for me. I discovered that because the site was down in a canyon, I’d only have direct sunlight for about 6-1/2 hours a day — I was in shadows by 3 PM. But the batteries were charged when I went to bed.


I’m parked nearly dead center in this photo. Most of the vehicles by the water were for a SCUBA certification class that showed up during the day on Saturday and Sunday. You can see the afternoon shadow creeping toward my rig.

I left the heat off. It was warmer there than it had been at previous sites. In the morning, I still had 12.5v on the solar controller. I fired up the heat. And some lights. Everything worked fine.

The second night was the same.

For the third night, I got a little daring. I put the heat on before I went to bed. Again, set low to keep the chill out. It cycled on and off as needed all night. In the morning, I still had more than 12v of power.

I didn’t need to run my generator at all.

The problem was resolved.

Current Status

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m boondocking at Six Mile Cove on Lake Mohave. I set my generator up again before going to bed last night and left the heat on overnight. Power levels were fine in the morning, but it’s overcast today and I wanted to charge my laptop and a few other things so I ran the generator for about two hours. Now I’m just finishing up this blog post before a lunch break. This afternoon I’ll edit more video.


It’s a crappy day at Lake Mohave but it’s quiet and private, especially since my neighbors just “went into town” for a tire for their RV. (The closest town that might have a tire is Boulder City, which is about 90 minutes from here.)

The camping area is large, right on the lake, has garbage receptacles and pit toilets. It’s just me and a couple in a big fifth wheel toy hauler. Yesterday, I helped them get their rig out of the sand where it was stuck. They invited me to join them at their campfire and I did. My cell signal is weak, but I seem able to get online enough. I’ll spend another night here and then head over to the campground at Cottonwood Cove where I can get a full hookup while some more weather moves through. By that time, I’ll need to dump my tanks, top off my fresh water tank, and maybe buy some propane.

After that, back to boondocking. It’s the kind of RVing I like most — and you really can’t beat the price.