Weeknotes 63

I haven’t seen snow like this in years.

I’m going to try to keep this quick as I want to try out my new running shoes before C wakes up. The feeling of having eaten too much at every meal is becoming far too familiar.

C has various place mats, posters and books that all feature cupcakes for the letter C. In an act of pointless defiance, I am insisting on calling them “buns” instead.

My parents’ house is shaped like one long corridor so I bought them a BT Whole Home Wi-Fi system a few years ago. Now there are three of us working from home (not to mention my dad’s binge-watching of any Netflix show that has more than three seasons), we’re especially vulnerable to any problems with the internet.

The day after upgrading their router to the hub BT insisted on sending them, we started to have problems. I spent that evening meticulously re-arranging the various nodes in the mesh network, trying to ensure a reading of “Excellent Connection” for each one (with mixed success).

The very next day at 8:30 am, all of our internet cut out unexpectedly.

C had pushed the router off a side table, turning the whole thing off.

For Christmas, I put together and printed a photo album of C’s 2020 using Mimeo Photos as they used to be the provider of Apple’s official photo books.

I’ve been very happy with the result but during my upgrade to Big Sur, I downloaded my photo library afresh from iCloud Photo Library after experiencing syncing problems with a restored backup. I clicked on my Mimeo project before all my original photos had finished downloading and it threw a “Some Photos Are Missing” warning, immediately gutting the project of all its photos.

Thankfully, I still had a backup of my entire photo library including the full project and, sure enough, loading that into Photos.app worked fine but there was seemingly no way to transfer that project over to my new library.

This led me to take the following steps:

1. Disable iCloud Photos.
2. Drag my entire photo library to the Bin.
3. Restore my working (but now out-of-date) photo library from my backup.
4. Without opening my Mimeo project, delete the entire contents of my library.
5. Re-enable iCloud Photos so that my library is re-downloaded, hopefully fixing my project.

Step 4 took over three hours to complete.

It didn’t work.