I am currently reading Stephen King’s new book “The Institute”. It’s great, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s about a bunch of kids that were kidnapped and taken to “The Institute”, a building complex located out in some remote woods. I’m not sure exactly what state it’s in at this point in the book, but I’m guessing, since Stephen King wrote it, it’ll be in Maine. The details are so rich you actually care about the kids. I’m about 35% done with it, mostly listening to it to and from work, but I’m going to start listening to it on the treadmill, as it’s getting to the point where I keep wanting to drive “just a little further” to listen a bit more.

We’ve had some nasty thunderstorms the past couple weeks, so there’s been a lot of flooding in the area. Nothing at home though, our sump is working well and keeping us dry. The puppies aren’t phased one bit by the storm either. We’ve conditioned them early, giving them treats for tolerating loud noises. Now they look at us like they’re begging for food during thunderstorms.

Kevin and I went to see “IT: Chapter Two” last weekend. We loved it. Quite different than the miniseries, but that was expected. It was much closer to the book than the miniseries, and with the actors they cast in the adult versions of the kids for the second part, they made it much more amusing than the first part, but I think that lightened it up just enough. Stephen King even made a cameo appearance in the second half, completely confirming that this version has his blessing. Much more work of Stephen King and Joe Hill (his son) is coming too, and I’m looking forward to all of it.

On the geeky side, Google recently removed “Google Photos” from “Google Drive”, which is disappointing. Their Google Photos service allows you to backup every single photo and video you take automatically to the cloud, and I have used it for years. And since all Google Photos showed up in Google Drive, it worked out perfectly for me, because this way I was able to use my full backup of my Google Drive, which I have on my PC at home, to access any photo or video I’ve ever taken in one place on a single drive. This is great, especially if you’ve only accessed photo online for awhile. It’s just super-quick for everything this way, with all photos and videos “local”, right there on a hard drive. So, when they separated Google Photos from Google Drive, my local copy of Google Photos on my Google Drive hard drive no longer updated. No more simplicity. Thanks Google. They claim too many users got confused about the two services. I don’t believe that. I’m thinking there was something much more technical (or legal) involved, so they had to completely separate the two services. Anyway, it sucks, so I’m trying to work around it now.

My main use for a local copy of my photos is to copy them all to my SD card on my phone. I have 1TB of space on my phone (512GB internal, 512GB SD card), so I have plenty of storage and plenty of room to copy all of my photos to my SD card–I’m talking close to 60,000 photos I’ve taken over the years and even those I’ve scanned from photo albums. Even every screenshot. Anything and everything saved as an image, actually. I just found something that works pretty good too. It’s called Bulkr. It works exclusively with Flickr to allow you to very easily backup your photostream, or any group of photos individually. Since way back when I started using Google Photos, I’ve also used Flickr. I bought a “Pro” subscription of Flickr, which offers unlimited photo & video storage, giving me a alternate/additional backup for all of my photos and videos, which are also backed up automatically from my phone just like Google Photos does. Maybe it’s overkill, but if you come from an IT background from “way back” like I do, you know the pain of permanently losing something as a result of data loss, and having multiple backups provides a lot of peace of mind in the area.

Bulkr will simply “Backup My Photostream” with just a click of that button. It looks at your Flickr account in its entirety, then looks at the folder you want to copy your photos stream to, and it instantly knows what’s already there backed up and copies only new photos and videos it finds. This makes it really smart and simple, which I haven’t found with any other tool or app I’ve tried to use. So what I did was create a “Flickr Photos” in my local Google Drive folder, then I run Bulkr’s Photostream backup and it backs up to my Google Drive. This makes it work pretty close to the way it was with Google Photos worked, except that I have to periodically open and run Bulkr to update my Flickr backup. If I could further automate that part to run weekly, or even once a day, that’d be awesome. I’m looking.