i watered my mung beans this morning. today is actually the 5th day of my mung bean germination experiment and it seems to be a failure. mung beans have sprouted, but they're not going to grow long enough to eat, i need another week at least to get to that stage. a couple of of reasons why it didn't work out, maybe because i'm using old beans, maybe it's just not warm enough in my house. i'll try again using a heating mat to see if that'll make a difference. but at that stage it might be more economical to simply buy bean sprouts if i'm going factor in the electricity cost to warm the beans for 3-5 days.

had a classic breakfast for lunch: scrambled eggs, kielbasa, homemade sauerkraut, and matcha latte. i updated my bbedit (v14) so it'd be 64-bit compatible, but it screwed up my preferences so i had to manually set everything, including my grep patterns and website URLs.

i also looked into finding a replacement digital asset manager (DAM). i've been using media pro for many years now but that software hasn't been updated since 2018 and phase one had already stopped development. it's not 64-bit compatible so i've kept my macos at mojave (10.14) other i can't use it to see all my photo catalogs. i'm not the only one, there's a bunch of mac-based photographers who are in similar position, always asking online to find a worthy successor. so far none can come close to the ease and simplicity of media pro.

all the DAM's i tried were folder based instead of creating a unified catalog. that right there is already a strike against them. neofinder has a simply interface but too simple, with no ability to show labels below thumbnails. XnView MP does the opposite, show too way too much info, can't seem to turn them off. the UI is also way too cluttered, like they were trying to cram as much into the window as possible.

photo mechanic seems to be an industry standard. it comes closest to media pro in terms of display options and i managed to figure out how to customize the labels. however for some reason doubleclicking on an image opens it up in a large window, but doubleclicking again doesn't close the window, you need to manually close it from the window close button. it seems like such an obvious thing to have, it's really weird it doesn't have that. i will say photo mechanic is fast, i can scroll through a bunch of photos with ease, and slide between large size photos effortlessly.

it's something media pro can't do, with its outdated 32-bit code. media pro also doesn't take advantage of retina resolution, and images look particularly pixelated until you view them at actual size. photo mechanic has a plus version of their software that allows for cataloging: it costs $230. the only one i haven't tried yet is adobe lightroom; i've played with it in the past, it has a slick interface, but the way it catalogs photos is very complicated and uses up a lot of space. in the meantime, seems like i'm stuck with media pro. if i was a better program i'd try to make my own mac app, copying some of media pro's functionality.

i also downloaded a copy of cleanmymac X and cleared about 8GB worth of junk off of my computer. it didn't find any virus or malware, but it did find a copy of adware on my computer which i don't remember installing (i promptly erased).

in the late afternoon i went out to return a few things. temperature was 39 degrees, warm considering how cold it was the past few days. i went to whole foods to return an unused outlet tester and a contour gauge. the contour gauge was supposed to be used to figure out the cutout for the piece of exhaust vent poking out of my bathroom wall, but i'm just going to bend a piece of long wire to figure out the shape. as for the outlet tester, i didn't need one that fancy (or expensive $20), i'll buy a cheap GFCI tester for $5 the next time i visit harbor freight. i noticed whole foods put in some self checkout stations, just like how star market did last week.

afterwards i biked to the UPS store to drop off two boxed packages containing fleece jackets my mother wanted to return.

i tried another type of licorice tonight, the zout. it tasted like licorice, but once you've tried dubbel zout, regular zout just can't compare. these remind me of american black crows licorice: hardy, chewy licorice, biting on them makes them stick to your teeth. the licorice flavor also wasn't very strong, like a mild licorice.

baseball hall of fame announcements was tonight, and david ortiz got in on his first-ballot selection. the news were showing highlights from his red sox career, and it gave me goosebumps reliving the 2004 world series championship season.

for dinner i microwaved the last of my semi-vegetarian frozen meals: general tso tofu this time around. it's actually not bad, but the serving size is so tiny, i want to make my own if i ever have it again, even though it was filling enough that i didn't feel hungry afterwards.

i did one final mung beans watering before going to bed. it doesn't look promising.