Month: May 2016

Memorial Day

I usually wind up writing a blog post on Memorial Day, even if it’s just a short one, since Memorial Day is kind of an enforced holiday for me. The Tour of Somerville route completely encircles my apartment building, so my choices on Memorial Day are limited. I can’t get in my car and go anywhere, so I generally choose to stay home and enjoy the race. (Though sometimes I’ll hop on a train and go into New York or something like that.) For a number of years, I was really into the race, and had a lot of fun with it. For the last few years, though, I’ve been somewhat jaded about it, opting to get out of Somerville more often than I used to.

I’m kind of enthusiastic about it again this year though. I wore my 2001 race t-shirt yesterday, and I’m wearing my 2004 t-shirt today. (I was looking to link the “2001” text to a blog post, but I only started blogging in June 2001, so I guess that t-shirt is older than this blog, which is really saying something.) I haven’t bought a race t-shirt in years, but I’m going to look for one today. I guess part of the reason I haven’t been buying them is that, in recent years, I would have needed an XXL. But I’m now safely back in the XL range, and could probably even fit into a regular L, assuming they haven’t switched to American Apparel shirts or some other weirdly-sized hipster brand.

They canceled the Memorial Day parade this morning, due to the rain, so it’s still really quiet out. But the race is still on, so things should start picking up in an hour or two. Meanwhile, I’m reading Matt Fraction’s Defenders run, which is fun (though I’m not sure I like his take on Doctor Strange).

Spoiler Alert

When I was a kid, the thought that, someday, plot developments in Marvel and DC comics would be discussed in the New York Times would have seemed completely ludicrous. Yet here we are. Not only do we have a Times article discussing two comic books that were released just yesterday, but it’s also giving away major plot points that I’d rather not have known until I had a chance to read the comics in question.

Reddit’s /r/comicbooks is trying not to give anything away to anyone that hasn’t read the books yet. I’m used to being careful on Reddit (and CBR and Newsarama and Bleeding Cool and so on), but do I really need to avoid reading the NY Times right after a big Marvel or DC event comic comes out? (And apparently I need to avoid the WSJ too!)

I wasn’t planning on picking up the new Captain America series anyway, so I’m not really bothered by the spoiler on that one. In fact, it’s made me even less likely to pick it up, so I’m kind of glad about that.

But I was actually planning on picking up Rebirth. I still will, of course. I’m not sure if I’m really in favor of the particular plot development in question, but it’s interesting enough that I’d like to read the book. (Note that I mentioned the plot point here without actually spoiling it…)

Office 365 Home

Some time ago, I broke down and paid for an Office 365 Home subscription. I paid for my first year with a card I bought from eBay, and my second year with a card I bought from Costco. Well, I was in Costco today and saw that they had two-packs of one-year Office 365 subscriptions on sale for $140. So I picked one up, and now my Office 365 subscription is good through December 2018. Overkill, I guess, but at least I don’t have to worry about it for a while now. And $70/year is a good price, since it’s $100/year if you buy it from Microsoft.

The packaging on the thing I got from Costco was a little silly. It’s two shrink-wrapped one-year Office 365 boxes, inside a bigger box, which is itself shrink-wrapped. All for two product keys. Oh well. Now I need to resist the urge to buy any more of these, if I see them on sale again. It’s probably not a good idea to extend one of these subscriptions too far into the future.

too many (digital) comics

I’ve been trying to be careful about buying too many comics from Comixology and via Humble bundles lately, but it hasn’t been easy. At this point, I have enough digital comics that I could really stop buying them altogether and still have enough stuff to read for the next ten years, I think.

But I gave in and bought the Garth Ennis bundle from Humble today. I have mixed feelings about Ennis. Some of his stuff is a bit too violent for me, and honestly The Boys may well fall under that category. But Battlefields looks interesting. The Beat just posted an interesting article about the way Dynamite has been using bundles. They’ve been more active than any other publisher with them, and I guess the economics work out well for them. I’ve bought a few of the past Dynamite bundles; some of their stuff is great, but I think a lot of it is mediocre and/or just not interesting to me. But with the bundle pricing, even if half of it is crap, it’s still a good deal.

Meanwhile, Comixology just introduced a subscription service called Comixology Unlimited. You can read as much as you want for $6/month, but it looks like the selection is somewhat limited. I think I’ll stick to buying single issues from them when they have a good sale. I don’t think the $6/month option would work well for me.

I’ve occasionally thought about signing up for Marvel Unlimited, but at this point I have so many unread comics (both physical and digital) that paying for a monthly subscription service just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf

There’s some truth to this article. But you do really need to understand those algorithms too…

I’ve worked in software for years and, time and again, I’ve seen someone apply the arts to solve a problem of systems. The reason for this is simple. As a practice, software development is far more creative than algorithmic.

Source: To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf

Warby Parker

Interesting story in the NY Times on Warby Parker vs. two of the older eyewear stores in Manhattan, Moscot and Cohen’s. I bought a pair of Warby Parkers about a year ago, but I stopped wearing them after a couple of weeks and just use them as a back-up pair now. The Safilo frames that I bought more than ten years ago at Rowden here in Somerville are still in great shape, and much more comfortable that the Warby Parker frames.

I’m not sure that I care much about the “narrative” of the stores in which I shop, and I think this article stretches its point a bit too far. As an unfashionable 40-something guy from New Jersey, I didn’t feel particularly “excluded” at Warby Parker. If I do ever need a new pair of glasses, though, I’m going to go back to my local optician.

On a related topic, though, I think it might be time to make a return visit to that neighborhood in New York and check out the Whitney and the High Line again. Maybe not today though; it looks like it’s going to rain.

File History on Windows and photos in OneDrive

In addition to the backups I did last weekend, I also turned on File History on my desktop PC. This is kind of like Time Machine for Windows. I’m using a separate external drive for this, so now I have one external drive with my Macrium image backup, and one being used for File History.

I also decided to move all my photos into OneDrive. Previously, I had a big folder of old photos on my desktop PC, containing digital photos from my pre-iPhone days, and scanned photos from ScanCafe. That folder had about 12 GB of stuff in it. Most of that space is used up by the full-resolution ScanCafe photos. I just moved that folder so it’s now under the OneDrive hierarchy. It took a while to upload, but it’s all in OneDrive now.

On the Mac, all my iPhone photos are in the Apple Photos app. I don’t want to try to move that library into OneDrive, since it’s not a normal folder. (And, by the way, it would be so much more convenient if it was a normal folder, but that’s a rant for another day.) Instead, I copied the photos from ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters into OneDrive, which should be all the original full-resolution photos from my iPhone. That’s about 2 GB worth of photos. I’ll need to remember to do that occasionally to keep the copy in OneDrive up to date. I should probably write a script for that.

So now I have all of my photos in the cloud, which is probably something I should have done quite some time ago. And I think I’ve got myself covered pretty well on backups, on both the Mac and PC.

Darwyn Cooke

I’m definitely going to miss Darwyn Cooke. His New Frontier series was just great. I have his Parker books in Comixology, but haven’t read them yet. Ditto for his Catwoman issues. Maybe it’s time to read those. Or reread New Frontier.

I saw him at conventions a few times, on panels. He always seemed like a friendly and thoughtful guy. He left behind some great work, but I sure wish there was more of it, and more to come.

catching up with backups

With yesterday being Friday the 13th, I thought this weekend might be a good time to review and catch up on backing up my desktop PC and my MacBook.

I bought my new Dell desktop back in January, but hadn’t gotten around to running any kind of backup on it yet, which is a little embarrassing. So today I installed Macrium Reflect Free and did a full image backup to an external 1 TB drive. I’ve been using Macrium for PC backups for the last few years, and I haven’t ever had any problems with it. I should probably buy a paid license at some point, but the free version has always been enough for me.

On my MacBook, I’ve been using Time Machine to back up to an external drive, ever since I re-did the MacBook after my hard drive crash last year. I’m not doing that as often as I’d like, since I don’t keep the USB drive hooked up to the MacBook, so I need to remember to set it up and let it run once in a while.

I’ve also been meaning to do a full backup with Carbon Copy Cloner, but just never got around to it. So I’m running that now, and I’ve also finally paid for a copy of CCC. (Previously, I’d only ever used trial versions.) Now that I have a real, paid, version of CCC, maybe I can talk myself into running it a bit more often.

I now keep nearly all of my important files in OneDrive, so I don’t feel like I need to make frequent backups, really, but I do like the idea of running some kind of automated backups on a regular basis. My router has a USB port that I can hook up a drive to, and use it as a NAS drive. I used to have a drive hooked up to it, but I never did much with it, and gave up on it at some point. I should try that again, and see about using it for automated key file backups. I’m not sure if it would work with Time Machine, but I could give it a try. (And I’m pretty sure it would work from Macrium on the PC, doing a select file backup rather than a full image. Or even just the free backup program that comes with Windows.)

And I know I should really set up CrashPlan, BackBlaze or Arq at some point, and start doing automated backups to the cloud. I just haven’t quite talked myself into that yet.

scary iTunes bugs

This week, I’ve been following the unfolding saga of the guy who says that iTunes ate his music. There was a lot of FUD being tossed around after his initial blog post. Then there was a good follow-up on iMore, and a second follow-up that probably nailed the issue on the head. I’m still pretty leery of Apple Music, and I’m careful about backing up my iTunes library. (Maybe not as careful as I should be, though.)

For streaming music, I’m a big fan of Slacker Radio, and I subscribe to their $4/month “plus” plan, which allows me to listen offline, with no commercials. Slacker doesn’t seem to get much attention in the media, with most coverage concentrating on Spotify, Apple Music, and maybe Pandora and Tidal. But I don’t think there’s any service as good as Slacker for the price.