Month: June 2015

VPN Services

When I deleted my PayPal account last week, I had thought that I was only using PayPal for an occasional eBay purchase. I had forgotten that I was also using it to pay for my VPN service, from IPredator. (I didn’t have a recurring payment set up. Rather, I was just paying for it manually, every three months.) IPredator is a fairly small VPN provider in Sweden. They don’t accept credit cards directly, so I’d been paying with PayPal. The only other payment method they accept that would work for me is Payza. I’m not too familiar with them; their terms of service seem to be a bit nicer than PayPal’s, but I’m really not that interested in signing up for a new payment service right now.

I’ve been pretty happy with IPredator, even though it’s a fairly limited service, but those limits, plus the payment issues, have finally gotten me to think more seriously about switching to a different VPN provider. (The main issue was that they only have servers in Sweden, so any time I’m connected to the VPN, it looks like I’m in Sweden.) There are a lot of VPN providers out there, and honestly some of them look a bit shady. After looking around at some reviews, I’ve decided to give Private Internet Access a shot. They only cost $40/year, and are well-supported on Mac, PC, and iOS. They’ve gotten good reviews from Tom’s Hardware and PC Mag. And Ars Technica ran an article about them a while back that makes them look pretty good. They’re pretty highly rated on Torrent Freak too.

So today, I decided to sign up for an account and give them a try. Sign up was simple and easy. They assign a user ID and password to the account and email them to you, in plain text. I think that’s a little iffy, but you can then log in and change the password, so I guess that’s OK.

They have their own client software, for PC, Mac, and iOS, but they also work with standard OpenVPN client software. I initially tried their standard software on my Mac, but it didn’t seem to be working right, and it was a bit ugly. So I installed Viscosity instead. Viscosity works fine, and was easy to set up. I imported two profiles, for US-East and London, and both work.

I then moved from my Mac on to my iOS devices. I skipped the PIA app and went with the OpenVPN app instead. Again, it was pretty easy to get this set up, though the interface for the app is a little weird and has some quirks. But it works.

For my PC, I went with the standard OpenVPN software. The Windows OpenVPN program isn’t quite as simple to use as the iOS app, but it’s easy enough to deal with. You have to manually copy the VPN files into a config folder, and you need to do a little text file editing if you want to save your user name and password, but none of that was a problem for me.

(I should also mention that, at some point, I of course figured out that I could have paid for iPredator through PayPal with a credit card directly, and that I didn’t really need an account. PayPal makes this less than obvious, but the option is there. But by that point I was well on my way to switching to PIA.)

I haven’t used PIA enough yet to comment on their reliability, but I’ll do that at some point after I’ve been using them a while.

memories of comics past

This morning, I was looking at some books on Comixology, and noticed that there was a (relatively) recent X-Factor series that was written by Peter David. I enjoyed his X-Factor run back in the 90s, and again in 2005. It looks like this one didn’t last too long, though I guess 20 issues isn’t bad these days.

This led me to checking Peter’s web site, which I hadn’t looked at recently. I remembered that he had some health problems a while ago, but I honestly just hadn’t thought much about him lately. I see that he’s updating the site fairly regularly, and I don’t see any mention of his health in recent posts, so I’m hoping that means he’s doing well. This also reminded me that I have his two Pulling Up Stakes books on my Kindle. I should read those!

And, while browsing his site, I noticed his “friends” list in the sidebar. I don’t think he’s updated that list lately, as a number of the links are dead. But one that wasn’t took me to Bob Greenberger’s site, where I found his recent posts reminiscing about the old New York DC offices. Those were a lot of fun to read. I remember his run as editor on DC’s Star Trek titles fondly. There were some great stories published in those books, and his letter columns were always fun too.

All this reminiscing led me to pick up the April 2008 issue of CBG, which has been at the top of my pile of unread CBG issues for quite some time now. I’ve got another dozen issues or so in that pile. Every once in a while, I’ll dive in and read a few articles, and maybe polish off an issue, but I haven’t really done that recently. At the rate I’m going, I’ll deplete the pile in 2032, I think. Which is fine. CBG was canceled several years ago, so it’s not like I’m falling further behind. Their old web site, by the way, is frozen in amber at the time of the cancellation, in early 2013.

Apple’s big music announcement

There were some interesting things in this week’s WWDC keynote, including multi-tasking on the iPad, open-sourcing Swift, and transit directions in Apple Maps. But the Apple Music announcement probably got the most attention in the general-interest press.

The announcement prompted a few interesting articles, including this one from the Washington Post on how it stacks up against other streaming services, and this one from Mashable comparing it to iTunes Match.

I’m currently using Slacker Radio for most of my streaming, which isn’t mentioned in the Washington Post article. I have their lower-end $4/month subscription, which is similar to Pandora’s $5/month plan and includes ad-free streaming, with unlimited track skips, but no ability to listen to full albums or otherwise select precisely what tracks you want to listen to.

I’m not sure why Slacker doesn’t get more attention. Their $4/month subscription compares well to Pandora’s $5/month subscription, and their $10/month subscription compares well to Spotify’s paid service. They have some interesting “curated” playlists, plus content from ESPN and ABC News, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The other service I’m using is Google Play’s service that scans and uploads your music library, then allows you to stream it through the Google Play app. It’s similar to iTunes Match, but free, and has a higher limit on the total number of songs you can upload (50k vs. 25k). There are a few downsides to Google’s service, though. First, the program that scans your music library and uploads it doesn’t have much intelligence built into it. In addition to all my songs, it’s also uploaded a bunch of my audiobooks, and occasionally decides to stick a chapter or two into an auto-generated playlist. Second, I’ve found that the Google Play iOS app isn’t quite as nice about bandwidth usage (and battery usage) as Slacker is, so I’m careful about using it when I’m not on wi-fi.

I’m also occasionally using Amazon’s streaming music service that’s free with an Amazon Prime subscription. Their service, honestly, isn’t that compelling, but it’s free, and it allows me to stream full albums, so it comes in handy once in a while. Their selection isn’t as good as Slacker or Spotify, but there is some good stuff on there.

I don’t think I’m likely to sign up for Apple Music, given that I’m already getting enough music through Slacker, Google, and Amazon Prime, but it’s interesting to see what they’re doing.

inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard

I kinda love this tweet from Max Howell, and many of the replies it generated. I’ve never interviewed with Google (and I doubt they’d be interested in me) but I have gone on interviews where I was asked this kind of question. A question I could have answered, straight out of college, but that I’d be pretty fuzzy on, 20+ years later.

Of course, I’ve never written anything as cool or popular as Homebrew, so I do expect to have to prove myself a bit more than Mr Howell should have to. Which is one of the reasons why I occasionally work on Project Euler problems, or take an Algorithms course on Coursera.

Big Comixology DC sale, week 2

I managed to get through the first week of DC’s big Comixology sale without spending too much money. I bought the rest of Grant Morrison’s Action Comics run, and a few Justice League issues. The second week of the sale just started, and again I’m tempted to spend a bunch of money.

I’ll probably buy the Grant Morrison Batman Incorporated issues. I recently bought a hardcover collection of some of the pre-New-52 run, and it looks interesting.

I’m curious about the Peter Tomasi Batman and Robin run. I’m not too fond of Damian as a character, but I’ve heard good things about this run. (Specifically, that it’s a bit less gruesome than the main Batman book, and maybe a bit more cerebral.)

I’m also thinking about picking up the entire run of Future’s End, but I’m wavering on that one. It sounds like it might be fun, but it’s gotten mixed reviews, and I’m not sure I want to commit to reading another DC 52-issue series.

done with PayPal

I’ve had a PayPal account since the year 2000, but I gave up and closed it yesterday after reading about their new terms of service, which basically say that they can robocall you and send SMS messages to you whenever they want, for any reason. They seem to be backpedaling on it a bit now, but not nearly enough. For the last few years, I’ve only been using PayPal to pay for eBay auctions. Now that PayPal and eBay are splitting up, I’m hoping eBay will make it easier to pay for stuff through alternate means.

I’ve noticed that a lot of sites that take PayPal now also accept payments through Amazon, which is something I’m much more comfortable with.

DC comics digital sale

DC is going to have a bunch of comics (mostly “New 52” ones) on sale at Comixology over the next few weeks. I stopped buying comics regularly before the New 52 was launched, and I haven’t really jumped back in, to any extent. I did buy the first few issues of a few titles during a previous sale, but I haven’t gotten around to reading any of them. So I have the beginnings of Action Comics, Batman, Aquaman, and Justice League. I haven’t been following comics news really closely either, but I’ve heard a bit here and there about this stuff, enough to know that, for instance, Scott Snyder’s Batman run is pretty popular and well-respected.

I’ve spent some time this week trying to figure out if it’s worth picking up some more of the New 52 titles while they’re on sale. The first thing that came to mind was maybe picking up the complete Grant Morrison run on Action Comics. I like almost everything Morrison does, so I figured that would be a no-brainer. I found this review of his run on The Beat. It’s a mixed review, but it really does sound like I’d enjoy it. So I went ahead and bought the remainder of his 18-issue run last night. Now I can add that to my Grant Morrison reading pile.

I also decided to think about buying some more of Scott Snyder’s Batman run. I’d never read any of his work before, so I thought I should at least start reading the first few issues that I already had in Comixology. I’m working my way through the “Court of Owls” story pretty quickly, and enjoying it (for the most part). I still can’t quite decide how far I want to go into the Snyder/Capullo run though. As this review points out, there are a lot of things to like about it. But, as it also points out, it can get a bit gory, and I’m not a huge fan of that. So I think I’ll keep reading and decide whether or not to buy some more of Snyder’s run over the weekend.

There’s a good article on the New 52 as a whole over at Bleeding Cool that  matches up with my own sensibilities, for the most part. About halfway in, the author mentions something that happens in Snyder’s Batman run that sounds like it goes a bit too far for me. (And I too have fond memories of the Batman from Batman and the Outsiders, and JLI!) So maybe most of the New 52 isn’t for me. And maybe Snyder’s Batman isn’t for me either (past the first couple of stories). That’s ok. I’m old, and there are plenty of other good comics out there!