Project completed!

I managed to get the rest of the sorting done this week. And by “this week” I mean mostly today. The rest of the sorted files are now uploading to Google Drive, and then I can finally call myself a responsible computer user.

My music folder is now down to just under 20 GB. I ended up deleting the “movie trailer” music, except for a few songs I really liked that weren’t on Spotify. I also found a bunch of video game soundtracks that were on Spotify as well (mostly Blizzard music), so even more space saved there.

Also (and this will seem unrelated to the project at first), remember the Rubik’s Tangle I solved earlier during this project? That was a 25 piece puzzle, and my javascript program took 5 minutes to run and find all solutions. Today I worked on an Advent of Code programming puzzle that was pretty much the same thing, except it was 144 pieces. I thought about it for a while and ended up writing a program that, in my mind, should be way more efficient. My new program ended up solving this puzzle in mere seconds. Now, it also took 6 hours to code, while I thought it would take 1 or 2. This is where I doubted I would get my hard drive sorting done today, since I spent all of my afternoon on this, but somehow it all worked out.

Final thoughts

Once again, when I actually start doing something it usually isn’t as scary (or as much work, in this case) as I think it will be. I put this off for years, and now I can finally stop having it in the back of my mind.

Time to starting thinking about a project for the upcoming official DK30. See you then!

Main music folder is done… well, mostly…

I thought I was done with my main music folder. Then I found a subfolder with like 20 albums that I think I already added to Spotify, but not 100% sure… Not a problem though, I’ll tackle it tomorrow.

My music folder started out at 88.5 GB in size. It’s now 64.6 GB. I’ve also heard a lot of music I hadn’t listened to in years. Good times.

There’s also still a 37.5 GB subfolder containing “movie trailer” music. Stuff from Immediate Music and X-Ray Dog and such. I used to use these songs for my World of Warcraft boss kill videos. I haven’t played WoW in almost 10 years, and I almost never listen to this music anymore. I think I might as well toss it. Will think about it some more.

Started sorting music

That’s right, I actually started doing the main objective again.

I use Spotify for all my music these days. The sorting system I’ve decided on is the following:

• Open the album in Winamp (don’t judge me).
• See if there’s actually any songs I like. If not: delete the album.
• See if the album is available on Spotify. If it is, add the album to my albums list and delete from hard drive.

This should thin things out quite nicely. It also takes a lot of time since I actually have to listen to the albums I’m not sure about, and I have to try finding things on Spotify. I’m going alphabetically and got A and B done today. Will try to do this an hour or 2 every day.

This might actually still take me close to 30 days, haha

Uhh… I did things… Just not the things I was going to do…

I watched a bunch of AGDQ this week. I Also didn’t sleep very well and didn’t feel like doing serious things after work.

I could’ve sorted my music today (sunday) because I definitely had time, but instead I wrote a bunch of code to solve the Rubik’s Tangle I had laying around for like 25 years and never managed to solve the intended way. I ended up using a recursive function that just tries everything until it gets stuck, then backtracks and tries some more. Usually my head explodes when I even think about doing recursion, but I couldn’t think of a better way to do it.

Coding my way through this Rubik’s Tangle is something I thought about doing for a long time, but I figured going through the 15 septillion possibilities would take years, even on a fast pc. It ended up taking about 5 minutes to fully run and find all solutions. I guess most configurations are dead ends pretty fast.

So, I swear I will get this hard drive sorting done before these 30 days are up. This week just wasn’t a good week for it. It should go a lot better this coming week.

Progress… Well, sort of? Not really :P

Today I assembled my second studio light and made photos of my 35th anniversary Mario coin.

While editing I found out I didn’t take enough photos for a full focus stack, so some parts are a bit blurry. Maybe I’ll redo it some day.

I guess I didn’t sort my music today like I planned to. Oh well, plenty of time left in this DK30 :P

As it turns out, sorting files doesn’t take anywhere near as long as I expected. I put this off for years because I was afraid of how much time and effort it would take, haha. I’m kind of done sorting. I put a bunch of important stuff on a separate drive, which is now uploading to the cloud.

I haven’t really done much with my music yet. Nowadays I use Spotify for everything, but there’s a bunch of stuff I have that’s not on there. It’s kind of sorted, but not really that well. There’s also some duplicate albums and loads of stuff I never even listen to. I want to back them up too, but not before I delete probably half of it. That’ll be next.

Just so we’re clear: You probably don’t want to watch what I’m doing here. It’s important work, but also really boring. I’m just using the DK30 platform to set myself a date by which I want to be done. I don’t even know what my updates will be, really.

A quick glance at my drives revealed at least 4 “Backup” folders, files dating back to at least 2011, and various stuff scattered all over the place.

The most important things are probably my photos. One of my hobbies is photography, and I’d hate to lose what I’ve got so far. I don’t have any award-winning pictures, but I do like them a lot.

My final goal is to set aside one drive for backups, and synchronize it to Google Drive for cloud backups.

Let’s get going…