Month: June 2016

Convergence

ConvergenceConvergence by Jeff King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmm, this one definitely has a lot of flaws, but I had fun reading it. It’s a giant multiverse-spanning event comic, where the main heroes are… some folks from the New 52 Earth-Two comic, I think? So maybe you’d really like this if you’d read that comic, and had some emotional investment in those characters. Personally, I had no clue, so I wasn’t as invested in the fate of these characters as I could have been.

One of things that made me curious about this, initially, is that I saw Mike Grell’s Warlord on the cover of one of the issues. It turns out that Warlord (and his supporting characters) play a surprisingly large role in this book. (I’ve really got a soft spot in my heart for Warlord, since I read his comic when I was a D&D-obsessed teenager, and Warlord was the perfect character for a suburban NJ teenage D&D nut.)

The art on this book is good, but very busy. Lots of two-page spreads with dozens of characters hitting each other. But that’s what you expect from a book like this. The book was originally released weekly, so it’s “art by committee.” Good, but in a generic way. (With some Andy Kubert art in one issue that stands out as better than the rest, in my opinion.)

So, if you’re looking for a big, splashy, event book, here it is. It’s fun to read, reasonably well-written, and reasonably well-drawn.

View all my reviews

Private Internet Access VPN

About a year ago, I signed up for a one-year subscription to Private Internet Access VPN. I had previously been using iPredator, but switched for a few reasons.

I don’t use it often, but it’s always worked fine when I do use it. And it works on my PC, Mac, and my iOS devices. I use the OpenVPN client on Windows and iOS and Viscosity on Mac. PIA has its own client for PC, Mac, and iOS, but I like using a standard third-party client instead. (I might try their iOS client at some point, since OpenVPN on iOS is a little wonky.)

Things have worked out well enough that I wanted to renew the subscription, so I had to enter new credit card details, since I’d used a virtual card number the first time. I almost gave up on that, though, since I couldn’t get their credit card update form to work. I opened a support ticket with them, and they gave me the usual advice to clear cache and cookies, but also to fill in the form by hand. Previously, I’d been using 1Password to fill in my card info and address. Well, it worked after clearing cache and cookies and filling in the form by hand, but it was a pain. When you’ve added so much awful client-side code to a simple form that it won’t work without forcing the user to jump through a bunch of hoops, you’re doing it wrong.

But hey, they were helpful, and now I’m signed up for another year.

NY Times news

Here’s a couple of recent articles about the NY Times:

Can Anyone Save the New York Times from Itself?

New York Times ‘Exploring’ Ad-Free Digital Subscription

I’m still paying for my (digital) NY Times subscription, and still using an ad-blocker on their site. Their site is definitely a mess without ad-blocking. I don’t know if I’d pay extra for an ad-free subscription, but I don’t mind paying in general.

lots of comics

I’ve been reading a lot of comic books lately. (I’ve noticed that I go through phases with my reading; sometimes it’s a lot of comics, sometimes mystery novels, sometimes New Yorker articles, and so on. Right now it’s comics. But I digress.)

Marvel and Comixology ran a promotion a few years ago where they gave away a whole bunch of #1 issues, and I snagged about 200 individual issues from that. I’ve dipped into them occasionally, but recently I’ve been reading a lot of them. (For a while, it was hard to keep track of which of these I’d read and which I hadn’t, but I’m now using the new “archive” feature in Comixology to remove the ones I’ve read from my library.) Most recently, I read quite a few X-Men issues. It’s a weird experience, just reading a bunch of #1 issues from various X-Men series and mini-series, outside of any particular context. My main takeaway from that is that X-Men continuity is so convoluted that there’s really no point in paying attention to it at all. You really need to not think about it, and just take any individual story on its own merits.

This article about Brian Bendis’ All-New X-Men title is a great example of how insane it is to try to make sense of X-Men continuity. This is the series where Bendis brought the original young X-Men from the past into the present, where they (apparently) coexist with their present-day selves. (My head hurts.)

DC isn’t much better, of course. I recently read the new Rebirth Special, and, while it’s pretty well done, I think it would be impenetrable to someone who hasn’t followed DC continuity for years. I also recently read Ambush Bug: Year None, which (though it’s almost a decade old now) works surprisingly well as a companion to the Rebirth Special. (And makes almost as much sense as some of DC’s and Marvel’s recent output…)

I also have a few issues of Convergence in my reading pile, which was one of last year’s big “event” comics from DC. I picked them up on a whim, and they’ve just sat in the pile for the last year. I may move them to the top of the pile, since I seem to be in the right mood for this kind of story right now. If they’re any good, I suppose I’ll pick up the trade so I can read the rest of the story.

And I also intend on reading Grant Morrison’s Multiversity at some point, but I think that one’s going to be a doozy, so I’m not in any hurry to pick that up.

I will also admit to being curious about Civil War II. I picked up issues zero and one at the comics shop, and I’ll probably read them soon. I don’t know if I’ll convince myself to pick up the remaining issues as they come out, but if it’s good, I’ll at least pick up the trade when it’s released.

Whew. I can already see the point, two or three months from now, where I get tired of reading about guys in spandex hitting each other and switch back to reading Agatha Christie novels or something like that.

A Busy Saturday

I bought a new mattress from Macy’s last week, and it was delivered today. My old mattress was about ten years old, so it was time for a new one. And my back has been hurting more than usual lately, so I’m hoping this will help.

After looking at some fancy new internet mattresses, I decided to stick with a traditional mattress from a plain old “bricks and mortar” retailer. I went with a pretty middle-of-the-road mattress; nothing too crazy. I did a fairly ridiculous amount of internet research before finally giving up and just buying something that Macy’s had on sale for Memorial Day, and that wasn’t too expensive, and that felt right when I tried it out.

I also had to go to the dentist this morning to get a filling replaced. (I was originally supposed to get that done last week, but he had an equipment malfunction, so we had to reschedule it.)

So I’ve got my new mattress, a fixed-up tooth, and my laundry is all done. And the novocaine is wearing off now. So I’m going to amuse myself with comic books for a while, then maybe think about doing something else useful, like grocery shopping.

WordPress backup

Not long after I first moved this blog to WordPress, I installed the UpdraftPlus plugin for site backups. I’ve been using the free version for the last couple of years, and it works fine. I have it configured to simply back up to local storage on my web host, and I hadn’t really thought about it much since I set it up. But of course backing up files to the same place that’s hosting them isn’t a great system. It’ll protect me against some possible issues, but it won’t be much help if something happens with my web host and I lose access to my account, or if someone breaks in to my account and deletes or scrambles all my files.

UpdraftPlus supports copying its backup files to DropBox, Google Drive, or several other possible offsite destinations. I don’t know why I’d never set this up, but I decided that it was past time I did that, so I started messing around. I found that the DropBox support was easy to set up, but just didn’t work for me. It would partially copy the backup to DropBox, then it would get stuck and never finish. This has got to be some kind of configuration issue on my host; Updraft is a pretty mature plugin and it gets updated frequently, so if there was some general issue with Updraft’s DropBox support, they would have fixed it.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the DropBox issue, so I thought I’d just try Google Drive instead. The Google Drive support requires getting an API key from Google. Updraft’s documentation has a good write-up on how to do that, but Google has changed their interface for doing that, so the write-up didn’t quite match the interface. I probably could have stumbled my way through it, but I decided to punt on that too, since there was a good chance that whatever issue was causing the DropBox backup to be so slow would affect Google Drive too.

So I went looking for another alternative. Updraft supports several other services, including OneDrive, which would have been my preferred alternative anyway. But OneDrive support isn’t included in the free version, and I didn’t want to pay for it, only to find out that it had the same problem as DropBox.

In the end, I decided to continue letting Updraft back up only to local storage, and then copy the backups to my Mac with a script that I could run locally. After flailing around a bit with a few options, I settled on using rsync. I’ve always connected to my web host with SSH, and rsync uses SSH to connect, so that worked fine.

One other related thing that I had never gotten around to setting up is key-based auth for SSH. I’d simply been connecting to my host with my user name and password. And, embarrassingly, I’d actually had a pretty simple password on my account until recently. I set a more complex password recently, so getting the public/private key auth working was something I really needed to do too. Well, it turns out that wasn’t nearly as complicated as I (for some reason) thought it would be. I just had to generate a key on my Mac, and then copy it into an authorized_keys file on my host.

I have Updraft configured to send me an email every time it finishes a backup. (I do weekly backups.) So now, every time I get that email, I just need to run a shell script that runs rsync and copies the backup down to my Mac. Easy enough. A fully-automated solution would be better, and maybe someday I’ll talk myself into paying for UpdraftVault or VaultPress, but I should be fine for now.