Month: October 2025

old anime

I finally finished watching the Devil Lady anime series yesterday. I mentioned it in a blog post from July 2024; that’s when I started watching it. I started out watching it on DVD (from a box set I bought in 2005), then switched to watching it on Amazon, when I hit a snag with one of the DVDs. Then, it disappeared from Amazon, and I thought I’d watch the final DVD in the set, but there was a problem with that DVD too, so I found that it was streaming on Pluto, and finished watching it there. Overall, I don’t know if it was worth all the effort. But hey, that’s one more anime DVD set I can cross off my bucket list!

The next item on my list is Excel Saga. I started watching that one not long after I started Devil Lady, but only got through disc one. (Both of those shows are the kind of thing I need to be in a fairly specific mood to watch, so I’m not exactly binging either one. I’ll get in the right mood, watch a few episodes, then give up on it for a few months.)

I’ve been having trouble with DVDs a lot lately, and I’m finding that discs that don’t work on my Xbox work fine on my computer’s DVD drive. So I’ve done some DVD ripping recently (well, Dec 2024, so kinda recently), and I seem to have a workflow figured out for that. I’m using HandBrake to rip, and VLC to watch stuff on my Apple TV.

I’m ripping the Excel Saga DVDs right now. (Seemed like a reasonable thing to do on a Sunday.) Of course, I’ve also realized that all of this stuff is on Crunchyroll, which is only $8/month, so I’m not sure why I don’t just give up on the DVDs and stream this stuff.

I was just listening to an episode of Judge John Hodgman where a married couple were arguing about what to do with the husband’s DVD collection after he dies. I think maybe I should be leaning towards getting rid of my collection, but… I don’t want to.

juggling computers

I had some trouble with the VPN client on my work laptop this week, and (long story short), it turns out that I can’t RDP into my work laptop from my home PC and connect to VPN anymore. That’s the way I’ve been doing WFH since 2020 (and probably earlier): I boot up both my home desktop PC and my laptop, then remote into the laptop from the PC, so I can use my full-size keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

But that doesn’t work anymore, and apparently is also a violation of our AUP. (Oops.) Luckily, I have a 2-port KVM here, which I bought when I got my new Windows 11 PC a few months ago. I’ve been using it recently to switch back and forth between the Win 11 PC and the old Win 10 PC, which is now an Ubuntu PC.

So, for now, I’ve got the Win 11 PC on port 1 and my work laptop on port 2. That’s only slightly less convenient than my old method of connecting, but now I need to think about upgrading to a 4-port KVM, so I can have all three machines hooked up at once.

I can’t say I’m thrilled about that idea, since I only just recently bought the 2-port KVM. And I’m not thrilled about all the extra cords I’ll have dangling all over the place. Maybe I should go back to thinking about discarding the old Win 10 (now Ubuntu) PC. I don’t really have a good use case for it; it was just something to do with the old box, for fun. Maybe I should be looking to simplify things, instead of making them even more complicated.

Kagi search and some AI thoughts

I’ve been experimenting with Kagi since March, and subscribed to it, and set it as my default search engine, in May. I thought I’d written up a blog post about that, but I can’t find one. I’ve mentioned Kagi in passing, but I don’t seem to have written a post specifically about Kagi.

I’m on their $5/month “starter” plan, which gives me 300 searches per month. Since Kagi is blocked at work and I can only use it at home, I thought that would likely be enough. Today, I got a notice that I’ve hit my 300 searches and would have to either upgrade or renew my monthly plan early if I wanted more. I like the idea of renewing early; it gives you an out, if you don’t think you’re ready to upgrade but want to reset your allocation and keep searching.

I checked to see where I was in my billing cycle, and my subscription should renew today anyway, so I’m just going to wait and let that happen. It might not renew until end of day, so I guess I’ll just use Bing or DuckDuckGo today. Overall, I’m finding Kagi to be a really good search engine, and going back to any other search engine is now kind of an annoyance.

Kagi also has AI features, though they’re not pushed on you the way they are with Google or Bing. I had some fun this week asking various AI assistants about the existence of a seahorse emoji, after reading this blog post. Kagi’s was the only one that gave a succinct and correct answer:

There is no seahorse emoji in the Unicode Standard. The belief that one exists is a common misconception, often attributed to the Mandela effect.

Most of the others got confused, to various levels. ChatGPT got the most confused and really went wild. Here’s a link to the chat session for that. If I ask it the same question today, it seems to get just a little confused, then gives me the right answer. I assume the seahorse thing went viral enough that the various LLM chat companies have tweaked things now to prevent freakouts.

For work use, I’m mostly limited to Copilot for AI usage. At home, I’ve experimented with a few, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Poe. And I recently got curious about Perplexity and created an account there. There’s an offer now from PayPal where any PayPal or Venmo user can get a free year of Perplexity Pro. I haven’t decided to sign up for that yet, but I thought I should see if Perplexity was any better/different from the other options.

Overall, Perplexity is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s worth pursuing. They do seem to emphasize integrating search results over having the LLM generate an answer in a vacuum. So I like that. I’m not sure if it’s better than Copilot or Kagi really, though.

I think I’ve decided to focus most of my home AI use, at this point, to Copilot and Kagi Assistant. I’m paying for both, in a sense. My Microsoft 365 subscription gets me higher usage limits for Copilot than if I was a free user. And my paid Kagi subscription includes a certain amount of AI usage. So I want to see if I can focus on using those two tools effectively, vs switching around between the four or five tools I’ve been playing with recently.

Ubuntu and old hardware

I decided to install Ubuntu on my old Windows 10 PC yesterday. My new HP Mini PC has been working fine for a while, and I don’t think I need to keep the old one around “just in case” anymore.

I have a long history of messing around with various Linux distros, but never really sticking with Linux as my main OS, or ever really doing any meaningful work on it. (My Linux tag on this blog has entries back to 2002, and I’ve been using Linux since the 90s, when I first installed Manchester Linux from two floppy disks.)

I’m honestly not sure if I’m going to keep the old machine. It used to be that I could find someone to give my old PCs away to pretty easily, but that’s really not the case anymore. Part of that is maybe not having as many friends and family as I used to, and part of that is PCs being (relatively) cheap and ubiquitous these days. This PC is still “good”, from my perspective, and there’s plenty that could be done with it. But it’s a big tower PC and getting rid of it would allow me to simplify things on my desk a bit, and clean up some of my tangled cables.

Maybe when I’m retired, I’ll become a “tech fairy” like this guy. For now, I guess I’ll just keep the old PC where it is, and boot it up once in a while to play with Linux.

I might as well talk a little bit about the current setup process for Ubuntu and how it compares to my previous experience with Linux distros. First, I should say that it wasn’t hard at all, and I really didn’t hit a single snag. In the past, there’d usually be some issue or another with video drivers or something, but it was all very smooth. I guess that’s the result of years of work smoothing things out with these installers, and maybe also because there’s been some natural convergence over the years, where there are fewer outliers and weird edge cases.

The specific version I installed was Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS. I’m definitely not at a point where I need the “latest and greatest.” I’m better off with the stable version.

The process was pretty smooth. I first downloaded a 6 GB ISO file, which took some time. Then I used Etcher, their recommended tool, to create a bootable USB stick. Then I booted from the stick and followed the prompts. The actual install process took less than 30 minutes.

Today’s Ubuntu desktop doesn’t look terribly different from how I remember it looking the last time I used Ubuntu on a desktop, which was probably 2015. (How time flies!) In terms of the tools that you get out of the box, with the relatively minimal install that I did, it’s mostly just Firefox and a few other random things. Firefox was enough for me to bootstrap the basic stuff that I really need.

I found that the 1Password Firefox extension works in Linux, so that was good. There seems to even be a 1Password desktop app for Linux, but I didn’t get around to trying that.

There’s no Evernote client for Linux. (Or at least not an official one.) There are a couple of unofficial clients, but I didn’t try those. The web client for Evernote works reasonably well in Firefox, so that’s good enough.

The next thing I tried was Visual Studio Code. That was downloadable from the Ubuntu “App Center.” The install was simple and easy. I didn’t really get very far with VS Code though; I just checked it out to make sure it worked.

If I was serious about doing anything meaningful with Ubuntu, I’d have to do a lot more work figuring things out, but it’s nice to know that I’ve made a start with it, and I could go further if I wanted to.

Apple News+ initial impressions

After my last post, I did go ahead and upgrade my Apple One subscription to Premier, so I now have Apple News+. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I have some thoughts. I’m not really sure where to start, so this will be a bit random.

I’ll start with the email newsletters. I subscribed to a few of those. They’re of the “collection of links” variety; there’s nothing to actually read in the newsletter itself. That’s fine, except that they’re links to Apple News stories, which don’t always open in Apple News, depending on where you are and how you open them. On Windows, obviously, they’ll generally get you to the original article on the web, which may or may not be behind a paywall. On Mac, with Firefox as my web browser and the FastMail web client as my mail client, they’ll generally open in Firefox. From there, I can open them in News via the Share menu, but that’s a bit of extra work. If I use Mail.app as my mail client, that’ll cause them to open directly in Apple News.

On the iPhone and iPad, they’ll always open in News. One slight problem on the iPhone: if I look at an Apple News newsletter in the FastMail app, it doesn’t really adjust to the iPhone’s screen size and is not easily readable. It’s better if I open it in Apple’s mail app instead.

So, maybe not a surprise, but the deeper you are in Apple’s ecosystem, the smoother things are with Apple News.

Next, I’ll talk about sharing stuff our from Apple News. I can definitely save an Apple News article to Raindrop.io via the share menu. Depending on the article, that might pull in the text (from the original article on the web), or it might not. It’s the same with Instapaper: if Instapaper can get the article text from the original web page, saving to Instapaper works. If it can’t then it doesn’t work.

Basically, there’s no way to get the text of an Apple News article out of Apple News. I didn’t initially think about this, but the Mac Apple News app has no option for printing articles, so there’s not even a way to save one as a PDF, or print it on paper.

Overall, I don’t really like this decision to make it nearly impossible to get an article out of Apple News. But I won’t spend too much time on that subject right now.

Next subject: the Apple News app itself. We’ll start with the home screen. In theory, it should (over time) learn more about what I like and surface more stuff that’s relevant or interesting to me. Right now, it seems to be pushing some NJ news and a bunch of sports news related to the teams I’ve told it I’m following. So it’s a start, but it’s not doing anything really interesting.

Since it’s difficult/impossible to get stuff out of the app, it’s pretty important that the app is usable and that text is readable there. Overall, it’s simple and easy to use, and the text is readable. You can increase and decrease the text size. You can’t change the font though, and it seems to vary depending on the publication. I haven’t seen a publication yet that uses a really bad font, but I’d much rather have some say in which font I’m getting.

Apple News has a facility for saving stories, but there’s not much to it. You can’t compare it to something like Instapaper. You can’t organize your saved stories at all, with tags or folders or anything. Also, for long stories, I’m not sure if Apple News saves your place. It initially seemed like it didn’t, but then I opened one I’d been reading the previous day, and it seems like it had saved my place. I’m not sure how that works yet. (Maybe it saves your place, but not across devices? I’ll have to experiment.)

Apple News+ also has audio stories. There’s a daily headlines podcast. That’s about 15 minutes long. There are similar podcasts from NPR and the NY Times, and I don’t think the Apple one is particularly better or worse than those. I’ve only listened to it once, and honestly didn’t pay much attention. I should probably listen to it a few more times at least, and get a feel for it. There are also narrated stories. Those are basically magazine stories that are read by a (human) narrator. They seem to do a lot of them, and I think they’re all using human narrators, not AI. I’ve only listened to one so far, but it was well done. (It seems like the audio feature only exists on iPhone, and not on Mac or iPad.)

Overall, I wish there was more ability to customize the app, more ways to get text out of it, and maybe a Windows version of the app (or a way to access it from a web browser instead of the app).

But it does definitely have a lot of content in it. It’s allowing me to access a lot of stuff that would otherwise be behind a paywall, so that’s cool.

I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with it long-term or not. But, for now, I’m going to keep using it.

figuring out how to consume news

Here I am, writing another blog post about media consumption. Well, why not? It’s weird out there, and I’m just trying to keep my head on straight.

I’m still thinking about signing up for Apple News+, which I’d likely do by upgrading from Apple One Individual to Premier. So that’s be an increase from $20/month to $38. I also pay $1/month for extra iCloud storage, so I’d be able to cancel that, so the total increase in cost would be $17.

Apple News+ alone would be $13/month, so if I’m going to do it, I might as well go with Apple One Premier and get the 2 TB of iCloud and Apple Fitness+ too.

I made a list of pros & cons for Apple News+. On the “pro” side, it gets me access to a bunch of news sites all under one subscription. There’s lots of variety, and it includes local news from a few NJ sites.

On the “con” side:

  • It doesn’t work on Windows. (Or directly through a web browser.)
  • It doesn’t seem to work with Instapaper. (I’ve read some mixed reports about how it works with read-it-later services, but it generally doesn’t seem to work.)
  • There’s no way to send an article to my Kindle or Kobo to read on an eInk device.
  • The service has ads, and they’re not easily blocked.

I’ve also been considering a “why not both?” option, where I use Apple News+ for some stuff, but continue subscribing to individual publications, where it makes sense to do so.

On a related topic, I’ve been playing around with my RSS tools recently. Right now, I use The Old Reader as my “back-end” service. For a front-end, on Windows, I generally just use The Old Reader web site. On iPhone and iPad, I use Reeder Classic. On my Mac, I sometimes use Reeder and sometimes the web site.

I’ve been trying out NetNewsWire as a replacement for Reeder. I think I may switch over to it. The design works better for me. It’s a pretty vanilla design, but that’s what I want. It’s black text on a white background, easy to read. Reeder is black on a kind of off-white background, which is harder for me.

On the back-end, I’m kind of interested in looking at stuff that does a bit more with the feeds. I might want to try a product that lets me send email newsletters into it, so I can get those out of my email. I’m not really sure if I need or want that though. I also like the idea of being about to do something interesting with the data, like putting together a custom “front page” for me. I haven’t gotten very far with any of that.

Of course, if I start using Apple News+, I might spend less time with my RSS feeds.

One more topic: Unfortunately, it looks like NJ PBS is shutting down next year. (Here’s an article about it from CBS News.) Hopefully, NJ Spotlight News will continue. (They say they will, but who knows?) The way things are going right now, it feels like a lot of good things are going to disappear in the near future. (And, of course, some already have.)

Well, that’s a downer to go out on. I wanted to find a quick positive thing to put at the end here, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Sigh.