Year: 2017

President’s Day

I’ve got today off from work, because it’s President’s Day. (We’re not actually closed, but we get a floating holiday that can be used today.) And it’s a nice day out. So of course I decided to stay in and get my taxes done.

I’ve been using an accountant for the last several years, but I’ve been feeling kind of silly doing that, since my taxes really aren’t that complicated. So I decided to go back to using tax software this year. The last time I did my own taxes was in 2011 (for my 2010 taxes), and I used TurboTax that year. Prior to that, I’d used TaxCut every year from 2001 to 2009. I decided to go back to TaxCut this year, though now it’s just called H&R Block Tax Software. I bought it for $30 from Amazon, with free Federal e-file, and paid another $20 for NJ e-file. I paid my accountant more than $500 last year, so $50 total is a big difference.

The H&R Block software is still quite similar to what I remember from the last time I used it. One new option is the ability to download some tax documents rather than enter them. This option worked with my W-2 and my 1099-DIV, so that was nice. Overall, it was quite easy. I’m likely to stick with the H&R Block software for the next few years at least, assuming there’s no big changes in my life that complicate my tax situation.

WordPress miscellany

Every once in a while, I spend some time messing around with WordPress, evaluating plugins, looking into minor issues, and stuff like that. I’ve got a few little items that might be worth blogging about, so I decided to combine them into a “miscellany” post.

I recently got a puzzling email from Google, telling me that my WordPress install was out of date. My WordPress install, in fact, was completely up–to-date, and it seemed weird for Google to be sending out an email like that anyway, never mind an incorrect one. I thought it might be a phishing attempt or something, but all the links on it seemed genuine, plus it seemed really unlikely that GMail would deliver a fake Google email to my inbox rather than my spam folder. Well, this article at WPTavern clears everything up. So that’s a relief.

I’ve been keeping WordPress and all my plugins up to date, generally speaking. I also noticed at WPTavern that WP Super Cache was just updated to patch some vulnerabilities and fix some bugs. I’ve been using WP Super Cache for a long time, and have never had any trouble with it. Of course, this site has never been hit with enough traffic to really need a cache, but I guess it’s nice to have one, just in case.

I have a test WordPress site, with all the same plugins as my “production” site, and I generally update that one first, then update the real site if everything is OK. I’ve thought about getting rid of the test site recently, since it didn’t seem to be serving much of a purpose. But I recently had an incident where updating a plugin broke the site, so I’m glad I still have that test site. And I’ve been experimenting with some new plugins recently too, so the test site is a good place to do that.

In particular, I’ve been experimenting with syntax highlighting plugins. I think I like WP-Syntax. I haven’t installed it on the production site yet, but I probably will. I’ve also been experimenting with Jetpack’s Markdown support. I really want to embrace Markdown, but I can never quite talk myself into it.

And I’m still on the fence about backup. I’m currently using the free version of UpdraftPlus, with a little script of my own that I run periodically to copy backup files from my host to my local PC. But I’ve been thinking about switching to the paid personal Jetpack plan, for $39/year, that includes daily site backups.

Instapaper Outage

I was a bit preoccupied with the snowstorm yesterday, but I did notice that Instapaper was down. No big deal, really, but I see that they’re still having trouble. And now they’re saying that they won’t have their full archives restored until February 17.

When they went free a few months ago, they mentioned being “better resourced” since their acquisition by Pinterest. The current outage likely has nothing to do with Pinterest or going free. But it’s not a good sign that, not long after they stopped taking my money, they’re having such a major outage.

Instapaper, of course, isn’t really a critical service. If I lost access to GMail for that long, I’d be in a lot of trouble. And, now that I think about it, I have enough stuff in Evernote that losing access to that for a week would be pretty inconvenient too. (I’m assuming that I’d still have access to my local Evernote files on my hard drive if Evernote had an outage. But I’m honestly not sure about that.)

Anyway, earlier this week, I had bookmarked an episode of Canvas that talks about “read later” services. I should listen to that. I don’t plan on switching to Pocket, but it’s worth looking into.

And maybe I should think about ways to back up my Instapaper articles and Evernote notes. (I’m already backing up my GMail account on a semi-regular basis.)

Art and Literature for Troubled Times

OK, that post title might be a little pretentious. But I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff on the internet over the last month about art and literature, with relation to “our current political/cultural situation,” and enough of it is interesting to me that I thought I’d toss together a post.

I’ve previously mentioned Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” And of course 1984 has gotten a lot of attention. (And, speaking of Orwell, a school in Connecticut has removed Animal Farm from their curriculum, right when we need it the most.)

WNYC this week has been asking people to post about their current reading & watching habits on Twitter, using the hashtag #CulturePack. That’s gotten some interesting responses, in the areas of relevant non-fiction, relevant fiction, and pure escapism. (One popular answer is Harry Potter books and movies, which I think falls into both the relevant and escapism categories, if you think about it.)

The New Yorker just published an article called The Books We’re Turning to Now, which I haven’t read yet, but should be interesting.

Going a little further down the road of dystopian fiction, William Gibson’s The Peripheral has been mentioned a lot lately. Gibson himself has compared the current administration to the concept of the klept from his book. The Peripheral is actually the only Gibson novel I haven’t read yet. (I should fix that soon.)

And to work a little black humor into all of this, here’s a comic strip about how 2017 is looking a lot like a 1990’s cyberpunk dystopia. Speaking as someone who read a fair amount of cyberpunk in the 90s, this is pretty accurate.

Meanwhile, on the art front, MoMA is hanging some works by Muslim artists to protest Trump’s entry ban. This seems like a pretty minor thing to do, but it’s important, in a way, and it’s appropriate, for a museum. MoMA’s exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter is relevant too, but just closed. Maybe they should have kept that going for a few more months.

As for me, I’ve been reading The New York Times and The New Yorker a lot lately. Though I’m not just reading the “current events” stuff: I’ve also been reading long-form stuff, digging into older articles on art, literature, and what-not. (And, yeah, I know that makes me sound like a typical East Coast liberal. Guilty as charged, I guess.)

For escapism, I’m still reading a lot of the DC Rebirth comics. I keep trying to talk myself into dropping one or more of the ones I’m buying regularly, but I haven’t managed to do that yet. They’re all still pretty good and worth reading.

SharePoint: plain text, rich text, AutoHyperlinking, and Markdown

I’m just about finished with the SharePoint project that I’ve been working on for the last few months. One requirement for the project was to allow arbitrary “comments” on the main documents for the project. There are some built-in ways to accommodate comments in SharePoint, but I gave up on those after experimenting a bit. Instead, I created a new list that would act as a child table to my main list, in a simple one-to-many relationship. And I decided to use plain text (rather than rich text) for the comment field itself.

I’ve had problems with SharePoint rich text fields in the past, and I wanted to put some constraints on the users, so they wouldn’t go nuts with the vast array of bad things rich text fields in SharePoint let you do. And I didn’t see any reason why plain text wouldn’t be “good enough” for this particular case. However, for this application, a lot of URLs and email addresses are going to get posted in comments, and I wanted to be able to “linkify” them. I almost wrote my own code for that, but then found the SPUtility.AutoHyperlinking method. It works pretty well, and also translates quotes, angle brackets, and other possibly confusing characters into their corresponding HTML entity codes.

I also got a little interested in the idea of supporting some limited formatting (like bold, italic, etc.) without going full-on rich text. My first thought on that was to look into the SharePoint wiki functionality. I was hoping for a function like SPUtility.AutoHyperlinking, but which would convert some simple wiki markup into HTML. But SharePoint’s wiki capabilities are limited, and really only support links.

So I then gave Markdown some thought. There’s obviously no built-in support for Markdown in SharePoint, but I figured that I could find a .NET library that would let me handle the MD to HTML conversion on the back-end. There are, indeed, several libraries available for Markdown conversion. I found two that stood out as probably the best, for my use:

  • CommonMark.NET is a pretty popular one that’s been around for a while.
  • Markdig looks like it’s probably newer and slightly less popular than CommonMark.NET, but it has some interesting extensions, including an auto-linking extension that would have been useful for me.

In the end, I decided that it was pretty unlikely that the user base for this project would embrace anything as nerdy as Markdown, so I didn’t bother adding it to the project. But I had some fun messing around with it.

And I should mention that I figured out, at some point, that SharePoint 2013 supports two levels of rich-text: one that is the “full” rich text mode, allowing pretty much anything and everything, and one that is limited to a pretty reasonable subset (bold, italic, text alignment, links, and stuff like that). In retrospect, I probably should have gone with the limited rich-text, though even that might have caused unexpected issues. (I have learned to trust SharePoint only as far as I can throw the server on which it’s running…)

Data Privacy Day

So I’ve been told that today is Data Privacy Day. In honor of that, I… got a haircut and cleaned my bathtub today. Seriously, I’ve had a lot of fairly mundane things to take care of today. But I did also want to do some computer maintenance, so I thought I’d try to continue with my effort to encrypt the hard drives on all my computers.

A few weeks ago, I turned on FileVault on my MacBook. That’s working well. It hasn’t noticeably slowed it down, nor has it gone horribly wrong and destroyed all my data.

So I thought that today, maybe I’d try to enable BitLocker on my ThinkPad. I didn’t get too far with that. Apparently, you need a TPM chip to use BitLocker, and I don’t have one of those. I did a little research, and you can enable it on a computer without TPM, but you need to store an encryption key on a flash drive, and insert it every time you boot up the computer. I don’t think I want to do that. It seems pretty risky and inconvenient. So I guess I’m going to put that idea aside until my next laptop.

I’ve also thought about enabling BitLocker on my desktop PC. That’s new enough that it probably has a TPM chip. But it also has a regular hard drive (not an SSD), and it’s a desktop PC. So there’s not as much risk of the drive being stolen, and there’s more of an issue with performance. So maybe I’ll put that idea aside too, at least until I replace the drive with an SSD (which I’m probably going to do at some point this year).

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about anti-virus software a bit more. Both of my PCs are now running with just Windows Defender. I’m a little uncomfortable with that. It’s still kind of hard for me to accept that I probably don’t need third-party anti-virus software anymore. One thing that’s made it a little easier to accept is this blog post from a former Firefox developer, and some discussion about it on Slashdot and Hacker News. It’s really sounding like the consensus is that the MS anti-virus software is not only “good enough,” but probably better in many ways than the third-party options.

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

This is an interesting article, though the title may be a bit overblown.

I need to do more to maintain my relationships, both for my own sake and for the sake of those around me. That second part is easy to forget; it’s easy to get wrapped up in your own bubble and forget that other people around you need help and support.

A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.

Source: How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

Philip Roth on Trump

Coincidentally, after reading a fairly old New Yorker article about Philip Roth over the weekend, and blogging about it, I saw today that the New Yorker reached out to Roth for comment on Trump, and any similarity between the Trump administration and the fictional Lindbergh administration from his novel “The Plot Against America.” He has a few interesting things to say, though nothing particularly unexpected.

I’m still curious about “The Plot Against America.” I’m going to have to pick it up and read it at some point.

Almost Enough Art

I was reading this article about Philip Roth this morning, and a couple of lines jumped out at me.

First, this one from a letter from Saul Bellow:

There’s almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though. There are always gaps.

And the other, from Roth’s character Zuckerman, in his novel Exit Ghost:

It’s a flexible instrument that we’ve inherited. It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.

(I found this line also quoted in a short essay by Greil Marcus from 2007, which is a good read today, for perspective.)

I’m presenting these lines without much context, but hopefully, you get the idea. (And not the wrong idea. I’m not currently experiencing any “deadly griefs.”) Anyway, It occurs to me that I should really give Philip Roth a try. I’ve never quite gotten up the energy to choose one of his novels over, say, a nice Star Trek novel or Batman comic. Maybe I should start with something like The Plot Against America. I do generally like alternate history novels, though I’d imagine there’s going to be some difference between Harry Turtledove and Philip Roth.