cleaning up my bookmarks

I’m still doing the thing where I’m going through my old unread Pinboard bookmarks, figuring out what to do with them, then updating or deleting them in Raindrop. It’s pointless, but fun, and occasionally interesting.

Today, I stumbled across this link from November 2016. Very weird to look back on that, and how we were all feeling and how it all went. In about a month from now, we’ll all be going through… hopefully not the same thing. But maybe the same thing. Only worse. Well, it’s a nice quiet Sunday morning, so maybe let’s not think about that right now.

Meanwhile, I also found this amazing video from OK Go which I bookmarked almost exactly ten years ago and never watched. (At least I think I never watched it… I have no recollection of it, and it seems like the kind of thing I’d remember. But of course a lot has happened in the last ten years.)

Books

On an unrelated subject, I finished The Gathering Storm yesterday, and Thinking in Systems on Friday. I really enjoyed both of those books.

I’ve got only two more books to read in the Wheel of Time series. And I’m almost caught up to The Wheel Weaves podcast. If I do catch up, I’m not sure what I’ll want to do about that. It would be cool to follow along with the podcast in real time, but, on the other hand, they only read a chapter or two per week, so if I kept current with them, I’d slow myself down a lot. I could take a break and read a few non-WOT books until they’re sufficiently ahead of me. Or I could keep reading at my current pace and let myself get past them. Well, I’m not sure which way I’m going to go yet. Maybe I should take a break and read some comics for the next week or two.

TiVo & YouTube TV

There’s been some talk on Reddit over the last week about Optimum discontinuing CableCARD support. I returned my CableCARD to Optimum in March, and switched to YouTube TV, so this doesn’t affect me. (And I’m not sure if Optimum has really discontinued all CableCARD support, or if this is just support for a specific type of card in a specific service area. You know how these things go on Reddit…)

My yearly TiVo service would normally be renewing this month; I canceled it in August, so I should be good there. But I still haven’t wiped and recycled my TiVo yet. I need to do that… There were a few things on there I wanted to watch, and I did watch some of them, but there’s a point where I’ll need to just give up and admit that I’m not going to go back and watch those last few Svengoolie movies. (Though it’s Halloween this month, so maybe now is a good time to do that…)

Anyway, I guess I’m keeping YouTube TV at least through football season. I’m getting my money’s worth out of it right now, between the NFL and the MLB playoffs.

 

Systems Thinking

Our scrum master at work suggested this week that we look into design thinking and systems thinking. I guess there’s some application of both to scrum, though I haven’t done much work on it yet, so I don’t really know what that is. But I like researching stuff and wasting time on the internet, so I did some reading and found some resources. I’ve found two books on design thinking and two books on systems thinking that are often recommended.

For design thinking:

For systems thinking:

Full disclosure: I got these recommendations from an AI chatbot. But, in looking into them, they do all seem to be popular choices. (And they’re all real books, and not hallucinations, which is more than I can say for the list I got out of a chatbot when I asked it to recommend some books I could give to a friend for his 65th birthday last week. But I digress.)

I also looked at some LinkedIn Learning videos to try to figure out some basics. My initial takeaway is that I’m not really interested in reading about design thinking right now. I might come back to it later, but systems thinking makes more sense to me at present.

So I went ahead and bought the Kindle versions of the two systems thinking books above. I started reading Thinking in Systems today. It might actually be a good book. (Too early to tell, but I’m optimistic.) The author passed away some time ago, but there’s a good website devoted to her work here.

Of course, I’m still in the middle of The Gathering Storm. And I’m enjoying it quite a lot. The series is really ramping up here, with only two more books to go. So I’m going to try and go back and forth between the two books and see how that goes, but I’m probably going to be a lot more interested in the Wheel of Time rather than the Systems Thinking stuff.

Laundry and smoke detectors and other exciting stuff

I think this post is going to be a bunch of little updates on things. I’ve got a lot of thoughts in my head, and a bunch of things I want to blog about. Let’s see how far I get through them before running out of steam!

First, an update on some boring mundane stuff. We got four new washing machines installed in my apartment building, so I was able to do all of my laundry in one fell swoop this morning, in my own building. (See this post for a previous update.) Of course, the new machines cost a little more than the old machines. And one of the new machines is already broken.

My other big apartment-related issue lately has been my smoke detector. It went off in the middle of the night Sunday night, twice. Not the actual alarm, but the double-beep that normally indicates a low battery. I’d replaced the battery only about a month ago, so I opened a maintenance request with my landlord. The maintenance guy came in on Monday, told me he thought my new battery wasn’t strong enough, and replaced it. Of course, he was wrong, and I got the low battery warning in the middle of the might again, on Tuesday night. So I opened another request, and the maintenance guy came in and replaced the unit. (I was working in the office on that day, so didn’t get to talk to him about it.) I hoped that would be the end of it, but then, the next day, I came home from work and saw that the new unit had come loose and was now hanging from the ceiling by the wires that hook it into the building system. I opened another maintenance request on that, on Thursday, but the maintenance guy didn’t come in on Friday, so now I guess I have to deal with a smoke detector dangling from the ceiling for the whole weekend. At least it’s not beeping.

This is all completely useless information to anyone other than me, of course, but it makes me feel a little better to write it up and get it out of my head.

And this is all background to talk about my general state of mind, which has been influenced by (1) not getting enough sleep on multiple occasions this week, and (2) feeling like everything is an uphill battle that always takes multiple tries, just to get to a semi-stable situation that isn’t any better than the previous semi-stable situation.

On the positive side, I’ve got a nice move streak going on with my Apple Watch right now. I’m at 40 days, which is the longest streak I’ve had, by far. Generally, if I get a move streak going, the watch suggests that I up my move goal, and I do that, and then I can’t meet it every day the next week, and the streak is broken. Or I get sick and rest for a day. So there’s a couple of interesting things going on here. First, that the watch isn’t asking me to up my move goal. And, second, that I’ve gone 40 days without getting sick. Which probably isn’t a lot for most people, but it’s a lot for me. So I’ve got at least one nice stable situation going this month! Plenty of walking!

Watch OS 11 will let you pause a move streak, apparently. I don’t think I’d ever bother doing that. It’s nice to have a streak going, if it motivates you to keep exercising. But I think it’s good to just let it reset once in a while. Or change the goal so you can’t meet it every day.

And here’s a funny video that’s related to the idea of walking for mental health. It’s actually a sneaker ad, of course, but it’s still kind of funny, and I definitely agree with it.

And that’s it for this post. I started writing some more stuff below about another topic, then realized that it didn’t belong in a post about laundry and smoke detectors.

AeroPress

After yesterday’s post about laundry, I thought I should write up something more typical of this blog. So here’s an article about making coffee.

I finally bought an AeroPress. I think I first heard about the AeroPress around 2011, from something Cory Doctorow wrote, probably this. It seemed to be very popular with a certain crowd of tech folks at that time. For instance, here’s a blog post from Macro Arment about it from 2012.

Here’s an article on the history of the AeroPress. It’s interesting, if you haven’t already learned about it.

Anyway, I never got around to buying one, even though it’s not expensive, and seemed like the kind of thing I’d get some use out of. It’s a simple gadget. Of course, like any simple gadget that becomes popular, there are now several variations of it, in several colors, but they’re all basically the same thing. I noticed last week that Woot had a sale on the original version for just $30, and decided to order one, on a whim. Now, $30 is what the original one was priced at when it first came out, so that’s not much of a deal. But the original is now $40 new, and the slightly fancier newer version is $50, so I guess it’s a good deal.

I’ve used it to make my morning coffee yesterday and today. It works well, and makes coffee that tastes quite good. And it’s easier to clean up afterwards than my Moka pot, so that’s nice.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, long term. I’ve fallen into the habit over the last few years of making my weekday morning coffee with my Krups drip coffee maker, and my weekend morning coffee with my Moka pot, and that’s been working well for me. I could see myself alternating between the AeroPress and the Moka pot on the weekends, depending on my mood.

I’m also thinking about bringing it into work and using it to make my afternoon cup of coffee. But I’m not sure I want to become “that guy who uses a weird gadget to make his coffee” though. I’m probably already known as a weirdo, because, well, I am who I am. So I’m not sure if I should double-down on that, or try not to push it too far. Anyway, the whole office coffee situation is a problem, and this blog post will get too long if I get too deeply into that.

Laundry Day

OK, fair warning, this post is mostly going to be me whining about dumb stuff. You’ve been warned.

My apartment building has a laundry room with six washers and four dryers. The washers have been breaking, one after the other, and the landlord hasn’t been fixing them. As of this morning, we were down to just one washer. I managed to get two loads of laundry done, then, on the third, that washer stopped working. I was feeding quarters into it, but it kept resetting. So I lost a bunch of quarters and had to give up and go over to the laundromat for my last load.

There’s a laundromat near my apartment, but I’d never been in it. I haven’t used a laundromat in at least thirty years. It turns out to be a pretty nice laundromat. Everything was clean, and I didn’t have any problems. It’s a lot more expensive than our laundry room though. I’d been paying $1.75 for laundry for many years. The machines at the laundromat cost $3.25. (And it’s all still quarters only. That’s a lot of quarters!)

The landlord sent out an email a few weeks ago saying that they’ve ordered new machines for our laundry room, but I don’t know when those are coming in and getting installed. So I guess I’m going to be going to the laundromat for a while.

It’s a small thing, relatively speaking, but it’s annoying that I’m having to change up my usual Saturday routine. Since 2020, I’ve been keeping to a pretty consistent schedule: up at 6, shower, start the laundry, eat breakfast, then move stuff from the washers to the dryers. Then, go over to ShopRite for groceries. Then, when I’m back, get the stuff out of the dryers and fold it up and put it away. I can get that all done by 9 AM, usually. Then I have the rest of the day for whatever.

Today was really inefficient, doing one load at a time for the first two loads, then not being able to do the third. And then having to wait for my stuff to dry before I could take the last load to the laundromat. Next week should be easier, since I can just take everything over to the laundromat and do it all at once.

Though I remember now that I’m supposed to do some testing for work next Saturday. We’re doing some kind of edge router replacement or something, and I have to test a few things after they’re done. That’s not a problem when I’m using the laundry room, but if I’m at the laundromat, I can’t leave my stuff unattended. So I have to get the laundry done either before the testing starts, or after it’s done. (Or I need to take my laptop to the laundromat, and tether it to my phone, and work from there…)

I also might need to get a laundry cart now. The laundromat is a short walk, but I know a full hamper of laundry will be a bit heavy to carry that far.

Oh well, at least the weather is nice today, and I’m done for now. I can have a nice lunch and relax.

Raindrop and the Wheel of Time

Following up on my previous post, I guess I’m sticking with Raindrop.io as my new bookmarking service of choice. At this point, I’ve done so much cleanup work in Raindrop that if I wanted to go back, I’d have to clean out my Pinboard account and import the stuff from Raindrop back into Pinboard.

The main bit of pointless cleanup work I’ve been doing is working through my unread bookmarks in Pinboard. Since the unread status didn’t import to Raindrop, I’ve been going through the 1000 or so unread links in Pinboard and deciding what to do with them. I detailed my process on that in the previous post. I think I’m about halfway through the backlog of unread bookmarks.

I have bookmarks in my collection back to 2001, so I’ve been assuming that that’s when I started using a bookmark service, but I see now that Delicious wasn’t founded until 2003, so I’m not sure where those 2001 and 2002 bookmarks came from. Maybe those were just browser bookmarks. (But I also have a bunch of bookmarks dated 1/1/1970, which I assume were the initial browser bookmarks I started with.) Well, anyway, I’ve been doing this for a long time, which makes the 20,000+ total seem less insane. (Maybe about 1000 per year? So around 2.75 per day average? That’s not too crazy for a working programmer, right?)

On a different topic, I finished reading Knife of Dreams yesterday. This is the last of the solo Robert Jordan WOT books, so it feels like I’ve hit a milestone here. All that remains are the three that were co-written by Brandon Sanderson. I started KoD in mid-July, so it took a little over a month to read, which keeps me on pace to maybe finish the series by the end of this year.

I was listening to the Wheel Weaves podcast this morning for the final chapter of the book, and they started it out by reading this letter that Jordan had written to Locus Magazine back in 2006, when he was diagnosed with amyloidosis. Quite a sobering letter. This part really got to me:

I sat down and figured out how long it would take me to write all of the books I currently have in mind, without adding anything new and without trying [to] rush anything. The figure I came up with was thirty years. Now, I’m fifty-seven, so anyone my age hoping for another thirty years is asking for a fair bit, but I don’t care. That is my minimum goal. I am going to finish those books, all of them, and that is that.

This came after a few sentences talking about how long he probably had left: four years. He actually passed away in 2007, so he only had about a year left at that point. But I think his attitude and his goals were admirable.

Coincidentally, I’m 57 now too. I don’t have any immediate health problems, but stuff like this really makes you think about what you’re doing with your life. For me, I don’t have a big pile of books that I want to write. (Or, in my case, maybe a big pile of computer programs.) I do have a “to be read” pile of books and comics (both physical and electronic) that would take me about 30 years to get through, so maybe I should make that my life’s goal. (I’m not going to die until I’ve finally read all 100 Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four issues! And Don Quixote!) Anyway, I seem to be at the point in my life where I’m taking things day by day, setting small goals, and just trying to be a decent person, I guess.

Trying Raindrop.io

After much dithering back and forth, I finally decided to give Raindrop.io a try, over the weekend.

TL;DR: I think I’m going to switch over from Pinboard, and use this as my main bookmark manager from now on.

More detail:

Starting an account was quick and easy. And importing my Pinboard bookmarks was easy too. I have around 20,000 bookmarks in Pinboard. Exporting from Pinboard is easy enough, and I’ve been doing that periodically, as a backup in case Pinboard goes down. Raindrop had no issue handling Pinboard’s JSON export file. It took a little less than ten minutes to complete the import.

The one big missing feature in Raindrop is an “unread” flag. In Pinboard, I had around 1500 unread bookmarks. So that status didn’t transfer. (Raindrop also doesn’t support the “private” flag, but that one wasn’t important to me.)

It occurs to me now that I could have written a little program to go through Pinboard’s JSON file, looking for the “toread:yes” field, then adding an “unread” tag to all of those bookmarks. Oh well. Too late for that now!

What I’m doing instead is putting Pinboard in one browser tab and Raindrop in another, going through the unread Pinboard links, and deciding what to do with them. For those that point to NY Times stories, I’m just adding them to my Times reading list. Ditto for Washington Post articles. For some, they were just quick temporary bookmarks that I never got around to deleting, so I’m deleting them. For music links, I’m trying to add them to MusicBox. And for YouTube links, I’m adding them to Play. For the rest, if I still want to read them, I’m adding an “unread” tag.

I might later change that to an “unread” collection. Collections are an interesting feature in Raindrop, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet.

Raindrop has a pretty good web interface, and a decent browser extension for Firefox. The iOS app is pretty good too. I could probably nitpick a few things about them, and there are definitely a few things that Pinboard does better, but I’m happy with them.

I like very much that Raindrop has a first-party app for iOS. I’ve used a few third-party apps for Pinboard, and there are always issues with them. (No fault of the developers, generally. It’s mostly API issues/limitations, I think.)

Raindrop also has a broken link detector (once you pay for the Pro plan, which I did today). It’s showing me 630 broken links right now, so I’m going through those too, trying to clean them up.

The one thing that kept me away from Raindrop until now is that it’s blocked at work, while Pinboard isn’t. No clue why. Bookmarking isn’t really a security risk, as far as I can tell. So I’m going to need to come up with some kind of workflow for work-related bookmarks. I’m really not sure what I’m going to do there yet.

Anyway, I have spent way too much time over the last couple of days organizing bookmarks. I know that I don’t need to go nuts with that, but I can’t help myself. And I do occasionally stumble across something cool that I’d forgotten about, so there is some reward to it.

 

Brian Eno

I’ve been a fan of Brian Eno for a long time. There’s a new movie out about him, and it looks interesting. It’s a “generative” film: different every time it’s shown. Here’s some explanation for that from the NY Times review:

The word “generative” has become associated with artificial intelligence, but that’s not what’s going on with “Eno.” Instead, the film runs on a code-based decision tree that forks every so often in a new path, created for software named Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno). Brain One, programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run.

Hmm. If it was anyone else, I’d say it’s a dumb gimmick, but since it’s Brian Eno, I’m curious. I assume some version of it will make it to streaming and/or Blu-ray at some point, but I wonder what they’ll do with that. I imagine they’ll have to create a single standard version of it at that point, but it would be cool if they found a way to keep some randomness in it.

I was listening to the soundtrack from the film yesterday on Apple Music, and I like it, but the version on Apple Music doesn’t have all the tracks. So that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to decide if I should buy the CD or maybe the digital download. You can buy the CD direct from Eno, or from Amazon, or a number of other places. I could only find the digital version here. I wound up buying that.

I think this is the first time I’ve bought a digital album in quite a while. I’ve really just been relying on Apple Music. And if the whole Eno soundtrack was on it, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to search out the MP3 or CD versions. Well, anyway, I’m having a fairly nice Sunday listening to Brian Eno now!

a little more WordPress, and some bookmarking notes

OK, so this is probably my last post on my WordPress issues for a while. The last thing I did with the sites, over the weekend, was to move my databases from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.11, and to switch the sites from PHP 8.1 to 8.2. Both of those things worked out fine, and I haven’t had any trouble. So I guess I’m OK for now, and I’m going to leave the sites alone for a bit.

One related thing: I’ve started looking at WP-CLI again. I first starting using it… exactly ten years ago! Weird coincidence. Anyway, I stopped using it, since I was having some trouble with it on my IONOS account, due to some PHP thing. I could probably have figured it out, but I gave up, and have just done WordPress updates from the admin GUi since then. But I think it might be time to try WP-CLI again.

Next subject: bookmarking services. I’ve stuck with Pinboard for years, and it’s mostly worked fine, and I just take it for granted. Every once in a while, though, there’s an outage of some sort, and that always gets me thinking about maybe switching. And there was an API outage this morning that got me looking at social media to see if there was any info on it, which surfaced some stuff about the Pinboard guy tweeting something kinda anti-trans, related to the Olympics. So of course that’s got me looking at alternatives again.

Raindrop.io seems to be the most popular choice. But they block it at work, for some reason, so I’d only be able to use it at home. There’s a new one I saw a reference to today called Linkwarden, and that looks promising. $3/month, it’s not blocked at work, and it’s got an import function, so I’m assuming I could import my Pinboard data. I might sign up for a trial account this weekend.

Honestly, I don’t know if any of the alternatives to Pinboard are likely to be more reliable than Pinboard. They mostly seem to be side-projects from small developers. (And I don’t really know who’s behind any of them, so I can’t really say if their opinions are more or less acceptable than the Pinboard guy’s opinions.)

WordPress woes, and more San Diego stuff

Since my last post, I’ve continued to have some WordPress issues. I called IONOS support, and they were not super-helpful, but there probably wasn’t much they could do. I did as much clean-up on my sites as I could. I deleted a bunch of unused plugins and templates, and disabled a few plugins that I probably didn’t need. The site went down for about an hour, two days ago, but has been fine since. So maybe I’m OK. It’s frustrating when you’re troubleshooting something like this, and there’s no “aha!” moment, just “eh, maybe that helped?” and a shrug.

This has got me considering moving to a simpler hosting arrangement again. IONOS is pretty cheap for me right now, only $9 per month. (I’m not even sure why it’s that cheap. It used to be $14. There was some confusion with the billing a while back, and it landed at $9 somehow.) IONOS has dedicated WordPress hosting that’s not expensive, and would give me more resources, I think, but a little less flexibility. I’ve also considered moving to WordPress.com. They’re kinda expensive, but they do have an $8/month that would probably work for me.

Back on the topic of San Diego Comic-Con: Here’s an article about all the folks who got COVID at the con. And here’s an article from The Beat about “winners and losers” at the con. I’ve seen a few interesting things coming out of the con. Stuff that makes me think “yeah, that’s cool,” but not “yeah, that’s so cool it would have been worth the grief of cross-country travel, COVID, and the cost of travel and lodging”.

I do need to take a vacation this year, at some point, somehow. And I still haven’t figured out what to do about that. But that’s a topic for another day.