Fishing fever
It’s been a while since I’ve updated you all on what I’ve been doing, so I figure I would take some time today and get caught up. The last couple months, I’ve mostly been fishing (hard) and working on backing up my family’s and Courtney’s family’s precious memories.
In the past couple months, we’ve went through ~10,000 pictures and digitally scanned them in to my NAS. I started on this project a couple years ago manually scanning them in one by one with a normal scanner but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. Thankfully, I found the Epson FastFoto (which I think has been discontinued at the time of this writing) – which scans things in at lightning speed. It can bulk scan in about 50 photos in ~30 seconds, so it definitely cut down on the massive chore of scanning. However, it still took Courtney and I about one entire week of scanning just to get done with my families pictures.
In addition to pictures, I’ve also been archiving our family videos. For mine, I had to send them away to a service called Legacybox because our movies were on Hi8, making them virtually impossible for me to transfer without about $800 in equipment. Legacybox was not cheap either. They ended up charging me about $250 for less than ten 50-minute tapes. For Courtney’s tapes, her mom had them on DVDs already so they haven’t been near as much trouble thankfully.
For all of the photos and videos, I am backing them up on my 16 TB storage NAS and they are being backed up off-site backup solution at my parents house using Syncthing. I never messed around with it before, but I installed it on my backup server and found it was quite easy and straightforward to get set up.
As for the rest of the summer, I’ve been hard at work fishing. Kyle, Doug, Herman, and I went out fishing at least twice a week for the majority of the summer after we got the boat finished. Heck, even Courtney donned her sea legs and caught some fish on my dad’s new pontoon boat. Most of the time we have been bass fishing, but we’ve caught quite a lot of other fish including bluegills, sunfish, crappies, warmouth bass, smallmouth bass, drum fish, and even a perch. We’ve went to a bunch of lakes and strips of the Tuscarawas river this year on top of fishing out at the my parents pond, the Barrel (shooting fish-in-a-barrel, get it). Some of us fished for a fish that never bit, however. Doug spent a good portion of the summer trying to catch an elusive pike or musky to no avail. Even Kyle spent quite a bit of time trying to catch a smallmouth, which he did one lucky night out at Piedmont Lake.
All-in-all, I think we all had a good summer and made some great memories with each other. We’ve definitely found a couple good lakes to check out around our area and learned a lot about bass fishing in general. Of course, every fish is great to catch, but my best catch of the year is my near two-pound crappie I caught out at my parent’s lake. She was beauty to be sure. Hopefully next year, we even more fishing holes and catch even bigger monsters than what we snagged in this year. Below, you can check out a slideshow of some of our best catches this year.
