Google Photos lets you download your photos, which is good since they’re you’re own damn photos. But when you do, every photo’s file will be stamped as having been created on the day you downloaded it. This is pretty much a disaster, especially since the photos have names like “IMG_20170619_153745.jpg.”

Ok, so maybe you noticed that the file name Google Photos supplies contains the date the photo was taken. So maybe you want to just munge the file name to make it more readable, as in “2017-06-19.” If you do it that way, you’ll be able to sort chronologically just by sorting alphabetically. But the files are still all going to be dated with the day you did the download, and that’s going to mean they won’t sort chronologically with any photos that don’t follow that exact naming convention.

So, you should adjust the file dates to reflect the day the photos were taken.

It turns out to be easy. JPG’s come with a header of info (called EXIF) that you can’t see but your computer can. There’s lots of metadata about your photo in that header, including the date it was taken. So, all you need to do is extract that date and re-set your file’s date to match it.

Fortunately, the good folks on the Net have done the heavy lifting for us.

Go to http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/ and download the right version of jhead for your computer. Put it wherever you keep utilities. On my Mac I put it in /Applications/Utilities/, but it really doesn’t matter.

Open up a terminal. Log in as a superuser:

sudo -i

Enter the password you use to log into your computer and press Enter.

Change to the directory the contains the photos you want to update. You do this with the “cd” command, as in:

cd /Applications/Users/david/Downloads/GooglePhotos/

That’s a Mac-ish path. I’m going to assume you know enough about paths to figure out your own, how to handle spaces in directory names, etc. If not, my dear friend Google can probably help you.

You can confirm that you’ve successfully changed to the right directory by typing this into your terminal:

pwd

That will show you your current directory. Fix it if it’s wrong because the next command will change the file dates of jpgs in whatever directory you’re currently in.

Now for the brutal finishing move:

/Applications/Utilities/jpg-batch-file-jhead/jhead -ft *.jpg

Everything before the final forward slash is the path to wherever you put the jhead file. After that final slash the command is telling the terminal to run the jhead program, with a particular set of options (-ft) and to apply it to all the files in that directory that end with the extension “.jpg.”

That’s it.

If you want to run the program not just on the directory that you’re in but in all of its subdirectories, this post at StackExchange tells you how: https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/27245/is-there-a-free-program-to-batch-change-photo-files-date-to-match-exif

Many thanks to Matthias Wandel for jhead and his other contributions to making life with bits better for us all.

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I know you’re all wondering how I was able to build such a magnificent succah, and how I managed to combine inexpensiveness with convenience. But most of all, you’re wondering what the hell is a succah?

A succah is essentially a temporary Jew shack that you eat in during the holiday of Succos (AKA Sukkot). It has to meet certain requirements that make it somewhat sturdier than a pillow fort: It has to be temporary, covered incompletely on top, closed on at least three sides, etc. If you’re an observant Jew, as elements of my family are, you eat all your meals out there during the 8-day holiday. Some Jews even sleep in them. Far more commonly, the custom is to have guests as often as possible so that meals are extended and highly social. In some Jewish communities, succah-hopping is a thing. A good thing.

For the past 20+ yrs, I’ve been constructing it out of the same set of PVC pipes. I have a rubber mallet, which is comical enough that I should probably have bought it from Acme Hardware, which I use to bang poles into T-fittings. (For the middle uprights, they’re T-s with a third sleeve in the third dimension, which sounds way more complex than it actually is.)

This is fine except for my constant anxiety about wind overcoming the friction that holds the slippery tubes into their slippery connectors. So, every year after I’ve pounded the poles together — and, if you try to visualize the process you’ll see that pounding a tube into one sleeve unpounds it from the sleeve at the other end — I’ve drilled a hole through the sleeve and tube and inserted a weenie nail, just to add some charming shrapnel to the explosion when the wind suddenly tosses it apart like a child knocking down a house made of drinking straws.

So, I did some research and this year built a succah using a remarkable breakthrough in applied physics: threaded connectors. Here’s how.

Our succah is 10′ x 10′. Each side wall consists of two corner uprights, one upright in the middle, and four horizontal poles. The uprights have have fittings with a threaded nut. The horizontals have fittings that screw into the nuts. The fittings are glued on to the poles using PVC glue. You simply screw all the pieces together.

It’s a little more complicated than that, though, because everything is. The threaded fittings are sleeves. But because they’re all designed to connect to lengths of pipe the way you might want to connect one garden hose to another, you can’t use them to connect pipes perpendicularly. But every joint in this construction connects a horizontal to an upright, which means you need 90-degree turns.

So you get yourself some plain old fittings, like the ones I used in the prior version. You attach them to the uprights. But those fittings are sleeves designed to join two pipes. The threaded fittings are also sleeves. How do you join a sleeve to a sleeve? With a pipe! So, for each join, cut a 2″ piece of pipe. Glue one end into the sleeve on the upright. Glue the other end to the threaded end of the threaded joins. Press them in so that they’re flush. Below is an example where the connector was a little too long, so the joins are not flush, purely for illustrative purposes I assure you:

Now assemble the pipes. Our uprights are 7′. The horizontals are 47″ each, which, with the additional lengths imposed by the fittings, worked out to about 10′. But if you need exactness, you should cut them to fit. Just remember to label them so they’ll go together next year. Also, wear eye protection: the pipes cut easily with a circular saw, but it creates a lot of flying plastic jaggies.

Here’s the invoice for the fittings:

You might want to get ourself a spare or two. I’m still amazed that I got away without needing one.

Note that the outer rings tighten counter-clockwise. You have to get the pieces lined up pretty well to be able to screw them together. I suggest that you assemble it from the ground up so that you won’t have to expand magic suspending pieces in mid-air.

The succah worked out well. It seemed pretty robust for a plastic structure made out of pipes not intended for that purpose. It disassembled quite easily. My only concern is how many years we’ll get out of the threaded pieces; they seem rugged but so did I once. (Actually, I didn’t.)

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