Year: 2019

MoMA reopening

I’m currently several months behind in reading the stuff in my email “read/review” folder. So far behind, in fact, that I just hit two NYT articles about MoMA’s closing, from back in February:

MoMA to Close, Then Open Doors to More Expansive View of Art

MoMA, the New Edition: From Monumental to Experimental

I may or may not have read them (and/or posted them here) when they were published. (February is a long time ago. Also, apparently, the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Sigh.) The first one is a straightforward news article, and the second is a “Critic’s Notebook” piece by Holland Carter.

And here are two more recent articles, now that the reopening is almost here:

The New MoMA Is Here. Get Ready for Change.

With a $450 Million Expansion, MoMA Is Bigger. Is That Better?

The first is a fairly long feature article and the second is a “Critic’s Notebook” piece, by Michael Kimmelman, more about the architecture than the art. It’s a pretty interesting piece that digs into the history of the site, and includes some diagrams showing how the museum’s footprint has grown over the years. I have mixed feelings about the way Manhattan has evolved recently, with so many new “supertall” skyscrapers, like the 53W53 one that’s now tied into MoMA, but I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole today.

The first day for member previews is tomorrow, Sunday. Since I was in NYC last weekend for NYCC, I wasn’t really thinking about going back again this weekend, but I think I probably will. The weather looks pretty reasonable, and I’m feeling mostly recuperated from the con.

 

NYCC 2019 wrap-up

I’m back home from NYCC, so I might as well write one more post about my trip. I didn’t go to the con on Sunday. Instead, I took a walk from my hotel up to the Met. I took a fairly circuitous and leisurely route through Central Park. It was a pretty good day to do that. It was a nice autumn day, and Central Park on a Sunday morning was certainly more quiet and peaceful than NYCC would have been. At the Met, I went into the members preview for The Last Knight exhibit. (The title of the exhibit is quite similar to the title of the new Scott Snyder Batman series, Last Knight on Earth, but they are definitely not related in any way!) I then walked down to the Breuer and saw the two exhibits that are currently running there. The Vija Celmins exhibit was pretty interesting. A lot of her “Night Sky” paintings are cool.

My hotel was just right across the street from MoMA, so it would have been easy to go over there too, but they’re still not open. They will be opening to the public October 21, with member previews next weekend. I’ll probably miss the member preview, since I’m going to have other stuff to do this coming weekend. But maybe I can get in on Sunday. The NY Times has a lengthy article about the reopening that I haven’t had time to read yet. I did peek through the windows at MoMA, and it looks like they’ve enlarged the gift shop, which isn’t a surprise. That was about all I could really see. I’m definitely curious to see what they’ve done to the place.

Back on the subject of NYCC, The Beat published a Sunday wrap-up article that includes links to all (or most) of their NYCC content over the whole con. This includes a write-up of the big Castlevania panel that I missed. It sounds like it wasn’t that different from what I saw of those guys at the Viz panel, just longer and with more of the cast and crew present. And there’s a write-up of the Star Trek panel for Discovery and Picard. That one would have been fun to go to, but I imagine it would have involved waiting in a very long line and was probably quite crowded. I just found a reddit thread talking about the panel and various other NYCC Star Trek items. It turns out that there was also a Star Trek panel as part of PaleyFest during the con. If I’d known about that, I might have gone to that one, since you have to buy tickets in advance for PaleyFest panels, so it wouldn’t have been one of those “wait in line for two hours and hope you get in” things. Oh well. I’ll try to keep a closer eye on Paley Center stuff in the future. I should probably sign up for their mailing list.

Despite being fairly interested in Discovery and Picard, I still haven’t talked myself into paying for a CBS All-Access subscription. Nor have I managed to convince myself to shell out for a DC Universe subscription, despite some interest in a few of the shows on that service. Any time I get too tempted to subscribe to DCU, I remind myself that I just bought a Blu-Ray box set of the complete Batman Adventures, and I should probably just watch that if I’m keen to see some superhero action on my TV. (And I’ve got the new seasons of Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, and Batwoman to look forward to also!)

I’ve spent a little time reflecting on whether or not I learned anything from this year’s con, and whether or not I’ll go back for next year’s one. Here are a few takeaways:

  • I surprised myself a bit, in that I made it through four days in NYC carrying around a backpack and getting in 20k+ steps each day, without really much back pain or any major trouble sleeping. Yes, I did bail out on a few things, but I still did quite a lot.
  • After five nights of pretty decent sleep on a hotel mattress, I think I’ve almost convinced myself that I need to buy myself a new mattress. Depending on how I feel tomorrow morning, after my first night back on my own mattress, I might have to start getting serious about that.
  • There might be a few new things that I’m curious about, but I’m not really jumping on any bandwagons right now. I have such a huge backlog of stuff to read and watch that I can’t add anything new unless it’s really great.

So it’s back to the old daily grind tomorrow. I haven’t checked my work email since Wednesday, so there should be a good pile of stuff to go through when I get in tomorrow morning. (Yes, technically I could check it now from home and clean it up a bit, but I really don’t want to!)

NYCC day three, part two

OK, so this post is an end-of-day wrap-up post, which I’m writing in my hotel room on Saturday evening, because I bailed out on the con early. I had a pretty good morning at the con, and went to the DC Year of the Villain panel, and a Mutts panel with Patrick McDonnell. Here’s a write-up on the DC panel. Nothing unusual came out of that one. Just more talk about what’s coming up in the Year of the Villain event.

The Mutts panel was a lot of fun. It was mostly to promote the new Mutts book The Art of Nothing. It looks like a really nice book. McDonnell did a slideshow of various old bits of Mutts and pre-Mutts art and ephemera. I guess I never really knew much about him or his history. I was surprised to learn that he’d once been in a punk band that used to open for The Ramones. I don’t really read any daily comic strips anymore, and I’d kind of forgotten that Mutts was even still running, but now I’m finding myself thinking about picking up this book. (I’m also thinking that maybe binge-reading a bunch of old Mutts strips might be a good antidote to reading about current events, so I’m going to keep that idea in my back pocket for possible future use.)

I fully intended on hanging out all day at the con, and going to the 3:30 Adam Savage panel and the 6:30 Castlevania panel, but it all got to be a bit much and I bailed out around 1 PM. I went off and did some other stuff, skipping the Adam Savage panel, and came back around 5 PM for the Castlevania panel. But again, the con was just a bit too crazy for me and I bailed out again.

So my plan for the rest of the night is to maybe watch some TV then go to bed early again. I feel kind of bad about that, but not too bad. I’m on vacation and trying to relax, and if hanging out watching Supergirl on my iPad is more relaxing than fighting crowds and waiting in lines at Javits, then that’s fine.

I don’t really have much that I want to do at the con tomorrow, so I think I’m going to bail on it entirely and go to The Met instead. I think that will be more my speed. After that, maybe I’ll hit a couple more museums and wander around the city a bit. Then back home on Monday morning and back to reality.

NYCC 2019 day three

I’m sitting in my hotel room on Saturday morning, eating a traditional New York breakfast (bacon egg and cheese on a roll and a coffee, bought from a guy in a street cart), and I have a lot of random thoughts running through my head. (Not enough coffee yet.) I suspect that this breakfast might be a little non-traditional, actually, since I think the guy used turkey bacon. But close enough, I guess.

First, I guess I should write up a run-down on yesterday. I took the subway to Javits. That worked out reasonably well. It was fast and not that crowded. Coming out of the Hudson Yards subway station, they were herding everyone around the block, so we all had to go around the back end of Javits and then come back up. That was kind of a pain, but it’s good crowd control, and really the only way to do it, I guess. When I got in, I spent some time wandering around the show floor, the same as I did on Thursday. I didn’t really stumble upon anything interesting that I hadn’t seen yet. I hadn’t made it down to artist’s alley at all on Thursday, so I went down there and wandered. I bought a pack of Weirdo trading cards from Denis Kitchen, which I will probably give to my brother for his birthday. And I bought a Love and Capes comic from Thom Zahler. He’s a pretty cool guy. He was on Mac Power Users recently.

I missed out on the DC Nation panel, since it was apparently full already when I got there. (I’m still a little confused about the process for swiping your badge in the morning to reserve a spot in a main stage panel. I couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to do that. Of course, I didn’t ask anybody either. But I didn’t think a DC panel would fill up the main stage.) There’s a fairly coherent write-up about the panel at The Beat, and a liveblog at Newsarama. A few interesting tidbits came out of the panel. I guess the biggest thing is the new continuity timeline. I remember being somewhat excited back in the 80s when DC was doing Crisis on Infinite Earths, and rebooting their continuity. But they’ve rebooted and revised so many times since then, I don’t think continuity really matters anymore. So I can’t really get excited about this. All I can say is that, if they do another New 52 or Rebirth style wholesale reboot, I’ll probably take that as a good jumping-off point, and stop buying monthly comics again. (I may want to do that anyway, but that’s maybe a subject for a future post.)

I went to a couple of lower-profile panels in the early afternoon, one on Berger Books and a DC Wonder Comics panel. Berger Books has published some pretty cool stuff, but I haven’t bought or read any of it. I’d like to, but there’s just so much good stuff being published these days. Eventually, I’ll get around to it. I have a lot of respect for Karen Berger.

The DC Wonder Comics panel was pretty good, though Bendis isn’t at NYCC, so it was a little weird to have a panel about his imprint without him being there. I’m actually a bit interested in the new Amethyst series, after listening to Amy Reeder talking about it.

The big panel for me was the Viz panel, with Warren Ellis. There was a long line to get into that one, and they filled up the room, but I didn’t have any trouble getting in. The panel was really a general Viz Media promotional panel, so the first half of it was largely a guy from Viz going over their upcoming releases and stuff like that. I’m kind of interested in some of their stuff, but, again, there’s so much stuff coming out these days I just can’t buy and/or read everything I’m interested in. They brought out Ellis and three of the voice actors for the second half of the panel, and did a Q&A with them. (Not an audience Q&A, just a Q&A with the panel moderators.) It was fun, and they all do genuinely seem to be enthusiastic about Castlevania, but there was also a bit of a “we’re doing a contractually-obligated press tour for this Netflix thing and we have to be relentlessly positive about it” vibe. And I can now say that I’ve seen Warren Ellis in person, so that’s cool. There’s a full Castlevania panel on the main stage tonight, and I will probably try to get into that one too, though I don’t think they’ll cover much ground that they didn’t already cover yesterday. (I really wish they could have gotten Ellis to do a general “spotlight” panel, or least participate in one of the DC panels, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get.)

I walked back from the convention to my hotel, which is about a two mile walk. Between that, and a bunch of other walking, I set a new record on my Apple Watch for my “move” ring, burning 957 calories (530 active calories). I also got 137 minutes on my exercise ring, over 23,000 steps, and a total distance walked of 11.8 miles. I actually didn’t get as tired as I did on Thursday though, for some reason, and managed to stay awake until my usual bed time of 10 PM. I’m a little worried that I might hit a wall or crash at some point today or tomorrow, but I seem to be doing ok.

The plan for today, to the extent that there is one, is to take the subway down to Javits again, and probably follow the same circuitous route into the convention center again. I’m not too enthusiastic about that, but it’ll probably be fine. After I get in, I want to go straight to a 10:30 DC “Year of the Villain” panel. Other than that, there’s an Adam Savage panel on the main stage at 3:30 PM and the Castlevania one at 6:30 PM. So I’d like to try to get in for both of those, but I won’t be surprised or (too) disappointed if I can’t.

I was fairly smart about food yesterday. I brought a couple of apples, a couple of Kind bars, a falafel wrap from Pret, and a full bottle of water with me, so I was eating reasonably healthy food and staying hydrated. I want to do the same thing again today, so I’ll run over to the grocery store that’s near my hotel before heading for the con.

And now it’s 8:30 AM and I’ve been working on this blog post for about an hour, so I should really wrap it up and go get some more coffee.

NYCC 2019 day two

I managed to write a blog post for each day of the con last year. I guess I’m not going to do that this year, since it’s already day two and I haven’t written anything yet. So here’s a few notes on yesterday and maybe a couple of thoughts for today.

It rained all day yesterday, so that put a damper on things, to some extent. I took a cab down to Javits and spent most of the day there, inside. I took the subway back to my hotel at the end of the day, since the Hudson Yards station was actually open this year. (It was closed for most of the con last year, for maintenance work or something.) It should be clear today, so hopefully I can wander around the city a bit more than yesterday.

I went to a few panels yesterday. The first was the Christopher Eccleston panel. I really liked his portrayal of the Doctor, and was sad to see him go after only one season. He mostly kept away from anything to do with the show for years afterwards, but I guess he’s OK with talking about it a bit now. He has a book out now, about his father, and their relationship. The panel was fun and I’m glad I went to it. (It was also the only panel I “won” in the lottery, though it wasn’t crowded and anyone would have been able to walk in.)

I also went to the DC Meet The Publishers panel, with Dan DiDio and Jim Lee. I’d gone to that one last year on Thursday too, and have gone to other Dan & Jim panels at other cons, so I knew what to expect out of that one. Mostly Dan doing his “carnival barker” thing (he described himself that way at one point in the panel), with a bit of Jim Lee’s more laid-back self-deprecating style mixed in. This year, they were pushing the new Joe Hill imprint, which sounds good, if you’re into that kind of thing. (Personally, I’m not, but it does sound kind of cool.)

And I went to a couple of other, smaller panels, one on horror comics (from Dark Horse) and one on women in Jack Kirby’s comics. Both were fairly interesting, though I will admit that I was also just using them as an opportunity to sit down and relax for an hour.

I left the con at around 5 PM, mostly because I was really tired by that time. There were a couple of more panels I wanted to go to, but I decided to give up and go back to my hotel. I got some nice spicy lamb noodles from the Xi’an Famous Foods branch that’s right down the block from my hotel, watched some TV, then went to bed at 8 PM. I had really just intended to take a little nap, then get back up and do a few things, but I gave up on that and decided that I’m old enough to go to bed at 8 PM without shame.

Today, I’m looking forward to the DC Nation panel, maybe the Marvel Cup o’ Joe panel, maybe the Berger Books panel, and definitely the Castlevania panel with Warren Ellis. Ellis posted a photo from New York on his blog last night, so I assume he made it into town in one piece. I’m still a little disappointed that he’s only doing the Castlevania panel. I put my name in the lottery for a signing with him, but I didn’t win that one, and (as far as I can tell) there’s no public signing with him and he’s not on any other panels. He doesn’t really do cons, and he almost never comes to the US anymore, so this it probably my only chance to see him in person. So hopefully that’ll be a cool panel.

Anyway, I got up at 6 AM today, so I’ve got a good ten hours of sleep. Hopefully, that’s enough to get me through the day. I do need to pace myself, since that Castlevania panel isn’t until 5:15, which is dangerously close to my bed time.

almost NYCC

It’s almost time for NYCC! I decided to go all-in on the con this year, so I’ve got a four-day badge and a hotel room from Wednesday night through Monday morning, so I’ll be in NYC all day for all four days of the con. (Last year, I had a hotel for Thursday night through Sunday morning.) I’m going to work a full day tomorrow, then take the train in to NYC after work. I’m not sure how good an idea that is, but hopefully, it’ll work out.

I’ve been looking back over my blog posts from last year. I wrote blog posts on every day of the con:

(These links are mostly for my own reference. I don’t expect anyone else to read them all.) I think this year’s con will be pretty similar to last year’s, though I think there’s a bit less going on this year. (Or at least less stuff that I’m interested in.) And the con seems a little less well-organized than last year. (There was some confusion about the lottery, for instance.)

In my first post from last year, I noted that I’d been having trouble sleeping, and I’m having trouble again this year. I’ve been having trouble maybe two or three nights a week. Last night was one of those nights, so I’m pretty fried right now. But I’ve got (almost) all of my packing done, so if I can get some sleep tonight, and make it through work tomorrow, then I’ll have four solid days of vacation in New York. I won’t have to get out of bed at 6 every morning, and I’ll (hopefully) have a nice comfortable hotel bed to sleep in. Of course, that’s a bit of a crap shoot, as there are plenty of factors that can interfere with sleep in a Manhattan hotel. But I’m optimistic.

Organizing my DVD collection

This post is a follow up to my like Goodreads, but for movies post from last week. Since then, I’ve managed to scan a little over 100 DVDs (and one Blu-Ray) into my blu-ray.com database. (According to the site, I now have 88 movies and 38 TV seasons in my collection.) This is maybe a third of my collection, I think. Maybe “accumulation” is a better word than collection, since it’s in mostly random order, and I barely know where anything is. But I’m trying to transform it from an accumulation into a collection, and hopefully pare it down a bit.

I’ve mostly been scanning older stuff that I’ve watched already, but I’ve hit a handful of DVDs that I’ve never gotten around to watching, and a few that I might have watched, but I don’t really remember. So I’m trying to get a handle on the watched/unwatched status on everything, in addition to just cataloging it and trying to organize it a bit.

Figuring out what to do with old DVDs can be a challenge, since they don’t have much resale value. There are some that I might be able to sell on eBay, but mostly, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. I have a bunch of DVDs that I got through Peerflix back around 2006-2008, and those aren’t really suitable to resell or even donate, since Peerflix’s model basically required you to send the DVDs in a plain envelope, tossing out the case and the inserts, so I only have the discs. (And they’re usually a bit scratched up too.) I’ve already tossed out a few scratched up Peerflix discs, and I might toss out some more eventually.

I donated some books to my local library book sale last week, and I included a few DVDs in with the books. I’d like to donate more, once I can sort out some stuff that I know I’ve watched, and that I’m pretty sure I won’t want to watch again.

Anyway, back to Blu-ray.com: their mobile app has worked out pretty well. Most of the stuff I’ve scanned is in their database. The stuff it doesn’t have is generally oddball kung-fu movies. (Actually, sorting out and organizing my oddball kung-fu movies is probably worth a whole other blog post.) The site includes a number of useful features, though it’s missing some stuff I’d like to see, and the organization is sometimes a little weird. They have an export function, but it just exports a list of UPC codes (no titles or other info). So I guess that would be good if I wanted to move my collection to a different service that allowed UPC import, but not if I just wanted to export it to a spreadsheet. They do also have a printer-friendly view that could probably be cleaned up a bit and copied into a spreadsheet, so that’s good. And there’s some ability to facilitate trading between members, but I haven’t figured that out yet, and it doesn’t seem to be at all automated, really, so it’s not like Peerflix.

On the subject of stuff that I’ve had sitting around unwatched for way too long: I just started watching an Invader Zim box set that I bought in 2007. This one has apparently gone up in value, since I bought it for $16, and used copies are now going for $84 on Amazon. I don’t know if that’s a realistic price, since there’s a newer version of the set that can be had for $35, though I guess the newer version doesn’t have the commentaries or special features that are on the older version that I have.

Calling a Dynamics AX WCF service from .NET Core

A big part of my job these days is interop between Dynamics AX and various external services/resources. A WCF service hosted in our AX environment is often a key part of that equation. With older .NET Framework applications, it’s easy to add a reference to a WCF web service. And I’ve done that so often that I could probably do it in my sleep. If I need to interface with a new AX service, I’ll generally just go through the “Add Service Reference” procedure, then copy & paste some code from a previous project and adjust it for my curent needs.

I was recently working on a new program that I decided to try to write using .NET Core instead of .NET Framework. It took me quite a while to figure out how to deal with calling an AX web service under .NET Core, so I thought I’d write it up, briefly, with a couple of sample code snippets.

First, there is a facility for adding a WCF service reference in a .NET Core 2 project in VS 2017. (I think this might have been missing in earlier versions of VS and/or earlier versions of .NET Core.) It’s pretty similar to the tool that works with .NET Framework projects, but there are a few key differences in the generated code. The biggest difference is that it doesn’t add anything to app.config/web.config, and in fact isn’t set up to read any configuration info from the config files at all. So you need to do the config in your code. (Of course, you can write your own code to read from your config file.) Anyway, it took a lot of trial and error before I figured out what I needed to do. There’s not as much documentation on this as there could be. So here’s a simple example, showing a bit of code (and config) from a .NET Framework project, and the equivalent code from a .NET Core project.

(I’m embedding it below as a Gist, since I can’t get WordPress to play nice with the XML config sample right now.)


// old way:
public async Task RunAsync()
{
CallContext context = new CallContext();
context.Company = "axcompany";
string pingResp = string.Empty;
var client = new XYZPurchInfoServiceClient();
var rv = await client.wsPingAsync(context);
pingResp = rv.response;
Console.WriteLine("Ping response: {0}", pingResp);
}
/* app.config:
<system.serviceModel>
<bindings>
<netTcpBinding>
<binding name="NetTcpBinding_XYZPurchInfoService" />
</netTcpBinding>
</bindings>
<client>
<endpoint address="net.tcp://myserver:8201/DynamicsAx/Services/XYZPurchInfoServices"
binding="netTcpBinding" bindingConfiguration="NetTcpBinding_XYZPurchInfoService"
contract="XYZPurchInfoSvcRef.XYZPurchInfoService" name="NetTcpBinding_XYZPurchInfoService">
<identity>
<userPrincipalName value="myservice@corp.local" />
</identity>
</endpoint>
</client>
</system.serviceModel>
*/
// new way:
CallContext context = new CallContext();
context.Company = "axcompany";
string pingResp = string.Empty;
var client = new XYZPurchInfoServiceClient(GetBinding(), GetEndpointAddr());
var rv = await client.wsPingAsync(context);
pingResp = rv.response;
Console.WriteLine("Ping response: {0}", pingResp);
private NetTcpBinding GetBinding()
{
var netTcpBinding = new NetTcpBinding();
netTcpBinding.Name = "NetTcpBinding_XYZPurchInfoService";
netTcpBinding.MaxBufferSize = int.MaxValue;
netTcpBinding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = int.MaxValue;
return netTcpBinding;
}
private EndpointAddress GetEndpointAddr()
{
string url = "net.tcp://myserver:8201/DynamicsAx/Services/XYZPurchInfoServices";
string user = "myservice@corp.local";
var uri = new Uri(url);
var epid = new UpnEndpointIdentity(user);
var addrHdrs = new AddressHeader[0];
var endpointAddr = new EndpointAddress(uri, epid, addrHdrs);
return endpointAddr;
}

view raw

wcf-example.cs

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This example obviously isn’t applicable in all use cases. But I think it could point you in the right direction, if you’re trying to do this and you’re as befuddled as I was when I started this. I should also mention that reading the auto-generated code produced by the tool is somewhat useful, though the code is about as messy as most auto-generated code tends to be.

Some useful resources:

 

like Goodreads, but for movies

It’s common (even clichéd) to describe a web service or app as “like X, but for Y.” It’s especially clichéd in cases where X=”Netflix” or “Uber.” But it’s the best way to describe what I’m looking for right now: “like Goodreads, but for movies.” I get a lot of use out of Goodreads, and, at this point, track pretty much every book I read and/or buy on it. The mild discomfort I get from sharing my entire reading history with Amazon is offset by the incredible usefulness of the service. (Which, now that I think about it, describes quite a lot of free, but troubling, web services. But that’s a subject for a different blog post.)

I have quite a collection of DVDs and Blu-ray discs. And I have digital movies in iTunes and other services. (Now all, thankfully, centralized in Movies Anywhere.) And I, of course, watch movies in movie theaters, and rent them occasionally, and watch them on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and so on and so forth. And I’ve really lost track of what I’ve watched and what I haven’t. I’ve started keeping track of some of this stuff in Evernote, but not in a really systematic way. And I try to add a note to Day One every time I watch a movie. But I’d really like something like Goodreads to get all of this information together in an organized fashion. (And I’d really like something that lets me scan the UPC codes off all my DVDs and Blu-rays, because I really don’t want to enter them by hand.)

So I did some internet searching and found a bunch of possibilities. First, it occurred to me that, since I like Goodreads so much, maybe Amazon owned something similar for movies. Amazon does own IMBD, and that seemed like a good place to start. IMDB allows you to create an account, and you can add movies to a watchlist, but it doesn’t have anything at all like the capabilities you get from Goodreads. So that’s one down.

And it also occurred to me that this might be something that Rotten Tomatoes would be in a good position to do. But, as far as I can tell, they don’t really do that either. So that’s another one down.

At some point, I might have had some of my DVDs cataloged in Delicious Library on my Mac. I stopped using that a long time ago, but apparently it still exists. But I don’t think it’s really a good candidate for what I’m trying to do either.

Searching for like Goodreads but for movies in DuckDuckGo led me to a number of semi-useful Quora questions, reddit discussions, and random blog posts. But a lot of them were pretty old and out of date. Sifting through recommendations, I found a few possible candidates that were still in business.

First, there was iCheckMovies. It allows you to create lists, and track what you have and haven’t watched, but there’s not much more to it, as far as I can tell. There’s no iOS app to scan discs.

Next up was Letterboxd. I liked this one enough to create an account and play around with it a bit. The web site looks really good, and there’s an iOS app too. But the iOS app doesn’t allow barcode scanning. Other than that, it’s a really nice service. You can easily track which movies you’ve watched and haven’t watched yet. And you can create your own lists to track things in other ways. There’s a CSV importer, but I don’t have my movies cataloged at all right now, so that’s of limited usefulness to me. There’s also a Pro tier for $19/year that gives you a few extra features. I’d be all-in on this one, I think, if only there was a way to scan barcodes.

The last thing I tried, which I only really stumbled across when searching for something else, was Blu-ray.com. I’d gone to the site in the past to read news and reviews, and I was aware that they had a forum, but I didn’t know that they had built up a system for tracking Blu-ray collections. Well, they have, and it’s pretty good. They have an iOS app with barcode scanning, so that’s my one big feature need checked off. I used it to scan about a dozen DVDs, and that worked pretty well. Two or three of them weren’t in their database, but most of them were. And, since they’re disc-oriented rather than film-oriented, I’m not just tracking that I’ve seen (for instance) The Matrix, but that I own a copy on DVD or Blu-ray or whatever. So that’s helpful. They have certain standard categories, like “owned,” “rented,” and “wishlist,” but you can also add your own. The organizational features aren’t quite up there with Goodreads, but they’re ok.

So I guess that, for now, I’m going to try to get a bunch of my discs scanned into Blu-ray.com and go from there. I’m not sure how far I’ll go with it, but it’s better than anything else I’ve tried.

(I have a few related topics I want to write up at some point, but I probably shouldn’t try to shoehorn them into this post. One topic relates to a recent attempt to rip a DVD on my PC. Another has to do with my attempt to whittle down my DVD collection a bit. And yet another could cover my related attempt to actually watch some DVDs that I’ve had sitting on the shelf for 10+ years. But I’ll get to all that eventually. Maybe.)

iOS scanning apps

I have a bunch of stuff in my head that I’ve been meaning to organize and turn into blog posts, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. So I’m going to take a little time today, on a Sunday morning, to try to get a few of them out. So I may post three or four items today. Or I may post just one, then the schedule the rest to go out over the next few days. Or I may get halfway through this one, and get distracted by something, and post nothing. So you’ve been warned.

Anyway, my first item is going to be on iOS scanning software. By this, I mean apps that make it easy to take a photo of a document, then clean it up a bit and store it somewhere. I think that the first app like this that I ever used was something called CamScanner. I first found out about it when a client at work sent me a printout that he’d “scanned” with a free version of CamScanner that put a watermark on the scan. (At the time, there was a free version that watermarked the scans and a paid version that didn’t. This was probably ten years ago.) I thought it was kind of a funny way of sending me the information I needed. The “right” way (in my mind) would of course be to have printed it to PDF and sent me the PDF. (Or to take a screenshot and send me a JPG or BMP or whatever.) Printing it on paper, then taking a photo of the paper with a cell phone struck me as a deeply weird workflow. (Printing it, then scanning it with a traditional desktop scanner would also have seemed weird, but a little less so.)

Anyway, using your phone as a scanner has become a much more accepted workflow over the years, and there are now a bunch of apps that you can use for that. And the ability to scan a document is built into a bunch of other apps. I’ve continued to use CamScanner myself on and off over the years, and paid for the “pro” version (or whatever they called it) quite a while ago. But, at some point, the design of the app changed and they started adding a bunch of ads and popups and cruft to it, and it started to seem a little scammy (for lack of a better word). I would still use it once in a while, and it still worked well enough. But, recently, the Android version of the app was found to have some malware in it. The malware was coming in from their advertising library, and was not built into the app itself. (And it only affected the Android version and not the iOS version.) Still, it’s not a good thing. So I decided to delete it from my phone and look at alternatives.

The Evernote app has had the ability to take and add photos to your notebooks for a long time, of course, and they can treat the photos as documents, and straighten them out and OCR them and all that stuff. So I’ve been using Evernote for that a lot anyway. Evernote also has a standalone scanning app called Scannable. I’m honestly not sure why you’d want to use that rather than just directly using the Evernote app, but maybe it’s worth looking into.

There are a number of other apps that have document scanning built into them, generally with the idea that you’d scan a document in, and store it in the service associated with the app.

  • The built-in iOS Notes app has a document scanner. It was added in 2017 and is apparently really good. I don’t use Notes though, so it’s not the best option for me. (I know I can get the scans out of Notes via the share sheet, but it’s still not a great workflow for me.)
  • Google Drive has a document scanner built-in on Android, but not on iOS. The iOS app does allow you to take photos and add them to Google Drive, but it doesn’t have any of the usual document scanning extra features.
  • Adobe has a scanner app that looks pretty good, but I honestly don’t even want to try it, since I don’t want to have to get into the whole Abode ecosystem if I can avoid it.
  • The Dropbox app has built-in document scanning, but I’ve been trying to move away from Dropbox.
  • The Microsoft OneDrive app can scan documents and store them in (of course) your OneDrive account. I use OneDrive, so I tried that, and it works OK, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the workflow. (And I often want to scan something to my camera roll, not to OneDrive.)
  • Microsoft also has a standalone app called Office Lens that does a pretty good job of document scanning and can easily save the scan to your camera roll (or OneDrive or OneNote or a few other places). That works well enough for me that I’ve decided to use that as my CamScanner replacement (for now).

There are a handful of dedicated scanning apps that might be worth looking into. I’ve bookmarked a few, but haven’t actually tried any of them out.

  • Genius Scan looks kind of interesting. There’s a free version, an $8 “plus” version and a subscription version that costs $3/month.
  • Scanner Pro is a scanning app from Readdle. I’ve never used any of their apps, but (last I checked) they have a good reputation. It seems to be oriented mostly towards scanning to PDF and doing OCR. It got a good review on MacStories a few years ago. It currently costs $4.
  • Scanbot is another app that’s been around a while and seems to have a good reputation. The Sweet Setup lists it as their best scanning app for iOS. The pricing is a little confusing. There’s a free Scanbot app in the app store, with an in-app purchase of $7 to unlock the “pro” version. But there’s also a separate “pro” version, priced at $70. So that’s weird. And when I dug into it a bit more, it looks like they’re going to a subscription model. If there’s any information about the subscription pricing on their blog, I couldn’t find it, but I found a blog post from a user that indicates that it’ll be $22.50/year. (I guess this was announced just recently.) So I guess I don’t want to get mixed up in that right now.

In a nutshell, I’ll likely be using a combination of Evernote and Office Lens for my scanning needs, for now. I’ll use Evernote for stuff I want to store in Evernote, and Office Lens for stuff I want to save to my camera roll or OneDrive. I might give Readdle’s Scanner Pro a try at some point, or maybe play around with the scanner in the iOS Notes app, but I guess I’m OK for now.