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T582: software

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  1. I really do like Thunderbird. It’s such a great email client, and having actual local software feels like such a rare thing these days. I think my favourite features are

    1. local folders, so I can store email actually where I want (and sync it into Nextcloud… but that’s another story); and
    2. one-button automatic annual archiving (select emails, hit a, and they’re moved to year-named folders on my local disk).

    The one thing I don’t like at the moment is that I can’t easily switch to Maildir (from Mbox) as the storage format. I’ve only ever, in 22 years of paying attention to this sort of thing, had a problem. But that did annoy me, that one time that I got a corrupted email folder! (Actually, I haven’t really looked at the state of Thunderbird’s Maildir support recently, so I’m probably way out of date on this.)

  2. I can’t believe I’m finally working on a functional photo album system for myself. I think I wanted this in about 2003, but everyone said you shouldn’t build your own thing because it’ll just be crappier than whatever existing open source application that already exists, and it’d be better to work on integrating the missing features into the mainstream tools.

    But sod that. I don’t think anyone else wants what I want, or if they do they’re not so worried about silly little things (like storing photo times in UTC so they’re properly ordered; as far as I can see, all photo album software just takes the Exif datetime and uses that). So I’m going to carry on building my own thing, and enjoying the satisfaction of making it just so.

    Sorry Piwigo, and MediaWiki, and WordPress…