Month: February 2016

Day One 2

I’ve mentioned Day One before on this blog. I bought the iOS version in December 2014, when it was on sale. Then, I bought the Mac version in December 2015 (again, when it was on sale). I really didn’t use the iOS version at all in 2015, other than to play around with it a little. But, after buying the Mac version, I’ve started to use it regularly over the last month. I’m not doing anything really amazing with it; just jotting down some random notes and thoughts. I still use Evernote for all my organized note-taking, reminders, and GTD stuff.

Well, of course, now that I’ve paid for iOS and Mac versions, and started using them regularly, they’ve gone and released Day One 2, which is a new app for iOS and Mac, and has no free or paid upgrades from the old version. But they are offering both for 50% off this week: $5 for the iOS app and $20 for the Mac app.

MacStories has a review of the new version. Most of the currently-implemented new features aren’t useful for me: multiple journals, multiple photos in a single journal entry, and stuff like that. But some of the stuff that they’re planning on implementing soon could be interesting, specifically IFTTT support. There are currently a few ways to hook up Day One to IFTTT, but they’re a bit kludgey.

And one slightly alarming new “feature” is that the only supported sync method is Day One’s own sync service. They no longer support storing your journal in Dropbox or iCloud. I completely understand that storing everyone’s journals on their servers is the only way to implement good IFTTT support or (for instance) a web client. But there currently isn’t much information available about how secure their sync service is. (In their blog post, they say “Day One Sync is comparable security-wise with iCloud and Dropbox,” but they don’t elaborate on that at all.) They have private-key encryption on their roadmap, but no target date for it. So about the only thing we know for sure at this point about their security is that there currently isn’t any private-key encryption.

Personally, I haven’t written anything important or incriminating in my Day One journal. Mostly, it’s stuff like “just got my oil changed” or “started reading The Windup Girl today”. But I’m sure a lot of people have private information in there that they’d like to keep secure, and I think Day One needs to make more information public about how they’re storing people’s data.

Having said all that, there’s a fair chance I’ll spend the $25 to get the new version for Mac and iOS both. It’s pretty good software, and I’ve been using the old version pretty consistently over the last few weeks.

old Kindle

When looking back at some old blog posts today, I realized that my Kindle is five years old. I’m still using it regularly, and it’s still working fine. (I just finished reading The City & The City, and just started reading The Windup Girl. Both books are highly recommended.) After five years, you’d think the battery would be dead, but nope, it still holds a charge. (Probably not as much of a charge as when it was new, but still enough to get by.)

Amazon has the Paperwhite on sale today, for $20 off. I’m occasionally tempted to buy one of those, but as long as the old one is working well, I don’t see much point.

 

struggling with Radiohead

Radiohead is one of those bands that I never really got into, but I kept hearing good things about them. Eventually, the “good things” reached a critical mass, where so many intelligent people were so passionate about them that I figured I really needed to give them a try. I think I missed the boat on Radiohead largely because I really dislike “Creep”, their first (and, I guess, only) hit single. But that song isn’t really representative of their work, especially their later work.

So, anyway, I’ve been listening to some of their stuff at random on Slacker lately, and enjoying it. I also realized that I had an MP3 copy of their album “In Rainbows” that I’d never really listened to. So I gave that a listen this week, and liked it a lot.

Today, I bought a set of their first five albums from Amazon. So now I have a big chunk of Radiohead to listen to. I’ll probably copy all of them to my iPhone at some point this weekend, and listen to them at work next week. (Skipping past “Creep”, of course.)

Buying that set from Amazon was a bit of a hassle though. First, it wouldn’t let me use the one-click checkout, for no obvious reason. I had to add them to my cart and go through the multi-step checkout. Then, to download them, Amazon encourages you to first download their Amazon Music software, and download the songs using that. So I installed the Amazon Music program, but (again) for no obvious reason, it couldn’t authenticate my account, and wouldn’t let me download anything. So I had to fall back to downloading them the old-fashioned way, which (luckily) they still support. That gave me a big zip file (almost 500 MB), which I managed to import into iTunes. The metadata for the MP3s grouped them all into one 5-disc album, so I did a little work in iTunes to break them up and rename them, so they appear as five individual albums. Tomorrow, I’ll copy them all from my PC to my Mac, then (at some point) sync them down to my iPhone. So, a bunch of busy work, but the end result is a bunch of new music to listen to.

By the way, I still haven’t bought into the idea that I should give up on buying music and just pay $10 a month to stream anything and everything from Apple Music or Spotify or Slacker. (I do pay Slacker $4 a month for their “Slacker Radio Plus” plan, but that mostly just eliminates ads, and lets you cache stations for offline listening. It doesn’t let you listen to whole albums or anything like that.) I don’t buy a lot of music these days (CDs or MP3s), but I do buy a few albums here and there, and I’d rather do that, and “own” my music than just “rent” it from Apple (or Spotify or whoever).

Also, I mostly agree with this blog post: the Amazon Music iOS app is surprisingly good, while the Apple Music iOS app has gotten worse over the years, and is kind of annoying at this point. (But I still sync music down to my phone with iTunes and listen to it with the Apple app. It isn’t so bad that I won’t use it. I just use it and grumble about it.)

Outlook and Gmvault

My new PC is working reasonably well, though there are still a few things I haven’t bothered to deal with yet. When I first set it up, Outlook wasn’t quite working. I spent a little time on that last night, and I made some progress, but it’s still not working exactly right with my Gmail account. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. I might just give up on using Outlook with Gmail at all, though I like the idea of having a local database of my Gmail messages, as a backup in case of disaster.

I have also, in the past, used Gmvault to back up my Gmail messages. I had a problem with it at some point last year, and gave up on it. But today I installed the newest version on my PC and gave it another try. It worked fine, pulling in all the new messages since I last did a full sync (which was almost exactly a year ago: Feb 2, 2015).

So I can at least say that I’ve got a full Gmail backup now, though it’s not an easily searchable backup. I’ve thought about setting up MailStore Home and creating a nice searchable archive of all my mail. But I never get around to it. I think that’s going to remain a rainy day project for now. (But maybe there will be a nice rainy day at some point this year, and I’ll give it a try.)

Some photos of Patrick

Here are some photos of Patrick that I used to have in a gallery on my old Blogger site, but which got lost when I switched to WordPress. I thought I’d just re-upload them, and put them in a new post.

I honestly don’t remember if I scanned them in myself from prints, but that’s probably what I did. The original post was from 2004, so these predate all the ScanCafe scanning I did a few years back. And I don’t think I had a very good scanner in 2004. I should probably figure out where the originals are for these, and re-scan them.

(Note the awesome “Return of the Jedi” T-shirt he’s wearing in a few of these!)

Patrick

Today is the 12th anniversary of my brother Patrick’s death. Here’s a photo from his birthday party, long ago. I’m not entirely sure which birthday it was. I notice that he (and a couple of other kids) seem to be drinking out of Star Wars glasses, so that’s a clue, but not much of one, since we were all probably drinking out of Star Wars glasses, on and off, from 1977-1985.

Oh, and if it’s not obvious, Pat is the one in the Roselle Park shirt, with the big smile on his face.

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