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we are already beyond the november midpoint. as much as i'd like to see this month be over (freddy will be leaving by then and i'll have the house to myself again), i also think the days are moving along much too fast. that's always the case when daylight saving time ends, since the days get darker sooner, as well as the naturally shorter winter days. winter! it's almost here. there's something very bleak yet exciting about wintertime in new england, like everyone is in survival mode, and choices are easier to make because you basically just want to stay warm. will it be a bad winter? who knows, but that's one of the things that make it so thrilling.

there was nothing to eat in the house this morning. i needed to visit the supermarket but was too lazy to do so and didn't leave until after i watched the midday news. i took the bicycle to market basket, bought a few things for breakfast (i'm thinking breakfast bagel sandwiches the rest of the week) and a few things for making ricotta spinach pie on friday night. only when i came back home around 1pm did i suddenly remember i had frozen burritos in the freezer. i heated one up in the microwave to eat (they really should be toasted, microwaves heat inconsistently).

in the midafternoon i left for belmont via motorcycle. nobody was home, but i started disassembling half of the wire shelving. when my parents finally came back close to 5pm (my mother was actually in quincy for much of the day), we spent some time rearranging the kitchen. by taking apart the wire rack i ended up making two smaller shelving. it looks better than the full height rack from before, but it's still a little ugly, more about functionality than anything else. maybe we'll leave it like this for the time being, and change it again after thanksgiving. at least now we have an open island table to work on.

after dinner i returned to cambridge. before i left i saw that freddy was already home, so i turned on the heat for him. ideally it'd be great to set up a raspberry pi with a motion sensor to detect when somebody is home, or when someone wakes up in the morning, then automatically contact the nest thermostat to turn on the heat.

i strip off geotag data from certain photos i don't want strangers to have the locations to. there's no easy mac app that does this, so i rolled up my using the automator program and exiftool. it was always sort of clunky, and had an annoying habit of creating these _original suffix backup files that i then had to erase manually. i finally did some digging tonight, and now that i'm slightly better versed in command-line application, i discovered there's an -overwrite_original tag i can add to the script to disable backup file creation:

for f in "$@"
do
   /usr/local/bin/exiftool -overwrite_original -gps:all= "$f"
done

i did a few tests, it seems to work pretty well. that's going to save me a lot of time when it comes to photo processing.

tonight i also learned a way to control my radio-controlled etekcity remote outlet switches wirelessly over the internet and possibly by voice command as well using a 433Mhz Rf transmitter and receiver. looks like i have yet another raspberry pi project to work on.