Month: August 2024

Raindrop and the Wheel of Time

Following up on my previous post, I guess I’m sticking with Raindrop.io as my new bookmarking service of choice. At this point, I’ve done so much cleanup work in Raindrop that if I wanted to go back, I’d have to clean out my Pinboard account and import the stuff from Raindrop back into Pinboard.

The main bit of pointless cleanup work I’ve been doing is working through my unread bookmarks in Pinboard. Since the unread status didn’t import to Raindrop, I’ve been going through the 1000 or so unread links in Pinboard and deciding what to do with them. I detailed my process on that in the previous post. I think I’m about halfway through the backlog of unread bookmarks.

I have bookmarks in my collection back to 2001, so I’ve been assuming that that’s when I started using a bookmark service, but I see now that Delicious wasn’t founded until 2003, so I’m not sure where those 2001 and 2002 bookmarks came from. Maybe those were just browser bookmarks. (But I also have a bunch of bookmarks dated 1/1/1970, which I assume were the initial browser bookmarks I started with.) Well, anyway, I’ve been doing this for a long time, which makes the 20,000+ total seem less insane. (Maybe about 1000 per year? So around 2.75 per day average? That’s not too crazy for a working programmer, right?)

On a different topic, I finished reading Knife of Dreams yesterday. This is the last of the solo Robert Jordan WOT books, so it feels like I’ve hit a milestone here. All that remains are the three that were co-written by Brandon Sanderson. I started KoD in mid-July, so it took a little over a month to read, which keeps me on pace to maybe finish the series by the end of this year.

I was listening to the Wheel Weaves podcast this morning for the final chapter of the book, and they started it out by reading this letter that Jordan had written to Locus Magazine back in 2006, when he was diagnosed with amyloidosis. Quite a sobering letter. This part really got to me:

I sat down and figured out how long it would take me to write all of the books I currently have in mind, without adding anything new and without trying [to] rush anything. The figure I came up with was thirty years. Now, I’m fifty-seven, so anyone my age hoping for another thirty years is asking for a fair bit, but I don’t care. That is my minimum goal. I am going to finish those books, all of them, and that is that.

This came after a few sentences talking about how long he probably had left: four years. He actually passed away in 2007, so he only had about a year left at that point. But I think his attitude and his goals were admirable.

Coincidentally, I’m 57 now too. I don’t have any immediate health problems, but stuff like this really makes you think about what you’re doing with your life. For me, I don’t have a big pile of books that I want to write. (Or, in my case, maybe a big pile of computer programs.) I do have a “to be read” pile of books and comics (both physical and electronic) that would take me about 30 years to get through, so maybe I should make that my life’s goal. (I’m not going to die until I’ve finally read all 100 Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four issues! And Don Quixote!) Anyway, I seem to be at the point in my life where I’m taking things day by day, setting small goals, and just trying to be a decent person, I guess.

Trying Raindrop.io

After much dithering back and forth, I finally decided to give Raindrop.io a try, over the weekend.

TL;DR: I think I’m going to switch over from Pinboard, and use this as my main bookmark manager from now on.

More detail:

Starting an account was quick and easy. And importing my Pinboard bookmarks was easy too. I have around 20,000 bookmarks in Pinboard. Exporting from Pinboard is easy enough, and I’ve been doing that periodically, as a backup in case Pinboard goes down. Raindrop had no issue handling Pinboard’s JSON export file. It took a little less than ten minutes to complete the import.

The one big missing feature in Raindrop is an “unread” flag. In Pinboard, I had around 1500 unread bookmarks. So that status didn’t transfer. (Raindrop also doesn’t support the “private” flag, but that one wasn’t important to me.)

It occurs to me now that I could have written a little program to go through Pinboard’s JSON file, looking for the “toread:yes” field, then adding an “unread” tag to all of those bookmarks. Oh well. Too late for that now!

What I’m doing instead is putting Pinboard in one browser tab and Raindrop in another, going through the unread Pinboard links, and deciding what to do with them. For those that point to NY Times stories, I’m just adding them to my Times reading list. Ditto for Washington Post articles. For some, they were just quick temporary bookmarks that I never got around to deleting, so I’m deleting them. For music links, I’m trying to add them to MusicBox. And for YouTube links, I’m adding them to Play. For the rest, if I still want to read them, I’m adding an “unread” tag.

I might later change that to an “unread” collection. Collections are an interesting feature in Raindrop, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet.

Raindrop has a pretty good web interface, and a decent browser extension for Firefox. The iOS app is pretty good too. I could probably nitpick a few things about them, and there are definitely a few things that Pinboard does better, but I’m happy with them.

I like very much that Raindrop has a first-party app for iOS. I’ve used a few third-party apps for Pinboard, and there are always issues with them. (No fault of the developers, generally. It’s mostly API issues/limitations, I think.)

Raindrop also has a broken link detector (once you pay for the Pro plan, which I did today). It’s showing me 630 broken links right now, so I’m going through those too, trying to clean them up.

The one thing that kept me away from Raindrop until now is that it’s blocked at work, while Pinboard isn’t. No clue why. Bookmarking isn’t really a security risk, as far as I can tell. So I’m going to need to come up with some kind of workflow for work-related bookmarks. I’m really not sure what I’m going to do there yet.

Anyway, I have spent way too much time over the last couple of days organizing bookmarks. I know that I don’t need to go nuts with that, but I can’t help myself. And I do occasionally stumble across something cool that I’d forgotten about, so there is some reward to it.

 

Brian Eno

I’ve been a fan of Brian Eno for a long time. There’s a new movie out about him, and it looks interesting. It’s a “generative” film: different every time it’s shown. Here’s some explanation for that from the NY Times review:

The word “generative” has become associated with artificial intelligence, but that’s not what’s going on with “Eno.” Instead, the film runs on a code-based decision tree that forks every so often in a new path, created for software named Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno). Brain One, programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run.

Hmm. If it was anyone else, I’d say it’s a dumb gimmick, but since it’s Brian Eno, I’m curious. I assume some version of it will make it to streaming and/or Blu-ray at some point, but I wonder what they’ll do with that. I imagine they’ll have to create a single standard version of it at that point, but it would be cool if they found a way to keep some randomness in it.

I was listening to the soundtrack from the film yesterday on Apple Music, and I like it, but the version on Apple Music doesn’t have all the tracks. So that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to decide if I should buy the CD or maybe the digital download. You can buy the CD direct from Eno, or from Amazon, or a number of other places. I could only find the digital version here. I wound up buying that.

I think this is the first time I’ve bought a digital album in quite a while. I’ve really just been relying on Apple Music. And if the whole Eno soundtrack was on it, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to search out the MP3 or CD versions. Well, anyway, I’m having a fairly nice Sunday listening to Brian Eno now!

a little more WordPress, and some bookmarking notes

OK, so this is probably my last post on my WordPress issues for a while. The last thing I did with the sites, over the weekend, was to move my databases from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.11, and to switch the sites from PHP 8.1 to 8.2. Both of those things worked out fine, and I haven’t had any trouble. So I guess I’m OK for now, and I’m going to leave the sites alone for a bit.

One related thing: I’ve started looking at WP-CLI again. I first starting using it… exactly ten years ago! Weird coincidence. Anyway, I stopped using it, since I was having some trouble with it on my IONOS account, due to some PHP thing. I could probably have figured it out, but I gave up, and have just done WordPress updates from the admin GUi since then. But I think it might be time to try WP-CLI again.

Next subject: bookmarking services. I’ve stuck with Pinboard for years, and it’s mostly worked fine, and I just take it for granted. Every once in a while, though, there’s an outage of some sort, and that always gets me thinking about maybe switching. And there was an API outage this morning that got me looking at social media to see if there was any info on it, which surfaced some stuff about the Pinboard guy tweeting something kinda anti-trans, related to the Olympics. So of course that’s got me looking at alternatives again.

Raindrop.io seems to be the most popular choice. But they block it at work, for some reason, so I’d only be able to use it at home. There’s a new one I saw a reference to today called Linkwarden, and that looks promising. $3/month, it’s not blocked at work, and it’s got an import function, so I’m assuming I could import my Pinboard data. I might sign up for a trial account this weekend.

Honestly, I don’t know if any of the alternatives to Pinboard are likely to be more reliable than Pinboard. They mostly seem to be side-projects from small developers. (And I don’t really know who’s behind any of them, so I can’t really say if their opinions are more or less acceptable than the Pinboard guy’s opinions.)

WordPress woes, and more San Diego stuff

Since my last post, I’ve continued to have some WordPress issues. I called IONOS support, and they were not super-helpful, but there probably wasn’t much they could do. I did as much clean-up on my sites as I could. I deleted a bunch of unused plugins and templates, and disabled a few plugins that I probably didn’t need. The site went down for about an hour, two days ago, but has been fine since. So maybe I’m OK. It’s frustrating when you’re troubleshooting something like this, and there’s no “aha!” moment, just “eh, maybe that helped?” and a shrug.

This has got me considering moving to a simpler hosting arrangement again. IONOS is pretty cheap for me right now, only $9 per month. (I’m not even sure why it’s that cheap. It used to be $14. There was some confusion with the billing a while back, and it landed at $9 somehow.) IONOS has dedicated WordPress hosting that’s not expensive, and would give me more resources, I think, but a little less flexibility. I’ve also considered moving to WordPress.com. They’re kinda expensive, but they do have an $8/month that would probably work for me.

Back on the topic of San Diego Comic-Con: Here’s an article about all the folks who got COVID at the con. And here’s an article from The Beat about “winners and losers” at the con. I’ve seen a few interesting things coming out of the con. Stuff that makes me think “yeah, that’s cool,” but not “yeah, that’s so cool it would have been worth the grief of cross-country travel, COVID, and the cost of travel and lodging”.

I do need to take a vacation this year, at some point, somehow. And I still haven’t figured out what to do about that. But that’s a topic for another day.