My Dell monitor has a built-in KVM, which is great. The included Mac software allows you to bind a hotkey to flip between machines. There’s no such thing for Linux, but I found this post on the Dell support forums that explains how to use ddcutil to trigger a switch.

The posted C to make it a little executable was victimized by Dell’s HTML sanitization, so here it is with the needed includes:

// switch_screen.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main()
{
    setuid(0);
    system("ddcutil setvcp 60 0x11"); // Change this for each computer
    return 0;
}

I compiled it and made a custom keyboard shortcut for it in GNOME (Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> View and Customize Keyboard Shortcuts -> Custom Shortcuts).

It works really well. More reliably, in fact, than the Dell-provided functionality does on the Mac, where the machine periodically forgets it is actually connected to the monitor.

There’s some latency when you switch, too: maybe 4 seconds to switch from Linux to Mac, and upwards of 8 seconds going in the other direction. Still better than reaching around the back of the monitor to use the hardware button to open the menu and pick a machine.

Photo housekeeping

With a decent machine under the desk I’m going to take another run at learning Darktable, so I spent some time today making sure everything is backed up correctly. I’ve had my photos from before 2018 backing up to Backblaze for a while, but was semi-trusting a combo of local network drives and Adobe sync to handle everything since. Today I set up backups from the Thunderbolt photo drive to the Synology, and then I’ll set up backup jobs from the Synology to Backblaze.

Al and I were having a chat about my occasional impermanence jags and she wanted to know, maybe a little nervously, what the implications of that were for my pictures.

After dealing with double-checking the health of a bunch of automated backups today, and prepping to make detaching from the Adobe ecosystem a little easier, I’m revisiting an idea I had a long while back of making yearly physical books. I’ve got terabytes of photos, but when I go through and do the exercise of picking “five star” images from each year since ~2000, it … it doesn’t come down to terabytes. I’d like to do that exercise again, or at least review my choices, make a few redundant online archives, and make a few physical books: One for us, one for Ben.

Whenever I think about what I’m trying to do here, I realize that I archive and keep much, much more than I want because I haven’t taken the step of specifically preserving what seems worth preserving. So I lug around terabytes of data, zealously preserving all of it and fretting about losing any of it. Making a few physical editions and stowing a few backups of digital proofs of what matters would do a lot to make it all feel less burdensome.