January 6,

2018 reading goals

I’ve been thinking about my habits around book-reading, and reading in general, lately, since it’s the start of a new year. As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I completed my Goodreads challenge last year, reading over 100 books, though most of them were comic book collections. So far this year, I’ve completed 5 books: one audio drama, and four manga volumes. So I’m not patting myself on the back yet. I’m definitely on a manga kick right now, so this year’s reading may be pretty manga-heavy.

I just finished reading an old New Yorker article about a guy who was in prison for ten years, and used the time to read 1046 books. Not to be overly dramatic, but I feel a little like I’m in prison today; it’s so cold out that it’s really not a good idea to go outside for anything that’s not completely necessary. (So far, I’ve only left the apartment to take out my garbage, and that was pretty painful.) It’s a really fun article, one that I bookmarked a couple of years ago and just rediscovered via my attempt to clean up my bookmarks (see previous post), so that effort hasn’t been entirely pointless.

I also recently learned of the 52book subreddit, which is all about the idea of challenging yourself to read a book a week for the year. I can definitely do that, if comic books count. Otherwise, I think I’d have to be in prison or at least unemployed to manage a reasonably-long novel or non-fiction book a week.

I spent a little time organizing my audiobook “library” a bit more this weekend. I have several that I bought from Audible, several from Apple, a bunch from Humble Bundles, and some random ones I bought on CDs and ripped; I haven’t really been doing a great job of keeping track of them all. (In fact, I seem to have two copies of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere: one on CD and one from Audible.) I’d like to get a bit more into audiobooks and audio dramas this year, mostly due to issues with my tired old eyes making it hard for me to read at night.

I’m also trying to start up a meditation habit this year, so let’s see where any of this goes. It may all go out the window if it warms up and I can actually get out and do stuff outside again.

Spillo for Pinboard

I’ve been using Pinboard to manage my bookmarks since 2010. It replaced del.icio.us, which, humorously, is now owned by the guy who runs Pinboard, and is read-only.

I like Pinboard a lot, but there are a few little annoyances with it. For one, the Firefox bookmarklet for Pinboard still doesn’t work for any page on github.com. (This is due to something called CSP, and also affects other bookmarklets.) I’d also like to have better searching and filtering capabilities. And the Pinboard site isn’t as reliable as I’d like it be; it’s often slow for me, and sometimes inaccessible. (I’m not sure if that’s Pinboard’s fault, or if it has something to with my ISP or VPN or whatever.)

So I’ve been looking at third-party Pinboard clients for macOS. I already use a third-party client for iOS, called Pushpin, and that’s pretty good (though I have a few issues with that too). The best third-party client for macOS seems to be Spillo. It costs $15, and has a 14-day trial. There are a few negative reviews on the Mac App Store, and it hasn’t been updated recently (last update was April 2017), but I decided to give it a try this weekend.

So far, I’m pretty happy with it, though it’s not everything I’d like it to be. I was hoping that the Firefox bookmarklet that comes with it would solve some of my problems with the official Pinboard bookmarklet. But the Spillo bookmarklet hasn’t been updated for Firefox Quantum, so it no longer works at all. (I’m not sure if the author is going to update it or not.)

If is definitely good for organizing and searching through your links, and can do a few things that Pinboard can’t do on its own. (Or at least I haven’t figured out how to do these things with Pinboard.) First, it can scan through all of your bookmarks and find dead links. When I ran it, it found about 1000 dead links (out of my 12,000 bookmarks). I spent some time deleting a bunch of those yesterday, and updating some of them to point to the correct current URL. To some extent, this is just busywork, and doesn’t really accomplish anything useful. Does it really matter if I have a bunch of dead links to old Lotus Notes and PowerBuilder content in my account? No, not really. But it feels good to clean that stuff up, and it does allow me to take a stroll down memory lane, and stumble across some cool defunct bands, for instance, like Omegalord or Hotrod Cadets, both of whom used to have their own web sites, but apparently don’t anymore.

Spillo also allows you create “collections” — basically a saved search that can have a combination of useful conditions. I’ve created one that will show me unread links from the NY Times, so I can catch up on Times articles that I’ve been meaning to read. I’m also going to want to create one for unread Bandcamp links, since I have a ton of those. (At some point, I’m going to go on a Bandcamp spending spree and buy a bunch of random CDs and/or MP3s.) I have a few other things like that in mind.

I’m also hoping Spillo might work as a way to add bookmarks to Pinboard when the Pinboard site itself is slow or down. I think it’s designed to cache stuff locally, then sync to Pinboard in the background, but I’m not sure if it works in practice, if Pinboard is actually unavailable.

So, overall, I’m finding it useful, though it doesn’t solve quite all of my problems. I’ll probably go ahead and buy it before my trial expires.

I last wrote about bookmarking in August, and got pretty philosophical about it, so there’s no point in doing that again here. It was zero degrees out this morning, so I may wind up spending a lot of time today sitting around in my apartment organizing bookmarks and drinking coffee. Maybe not the best use of my time, but not the worst one either. There’s a lot of stuff I want to do that involves going outside, but it’s really not a good day to do any of it.

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 9: Git and TFS

This post is part of my 12 Days of .NET series. This is a (not terribly ambitious) series of posts on .NET topics that came up while I was working on a recent C# Web API project.

At work, we have a TFS 2012 server for version control. We’re pretty much stuck with that, because the TFS integration in AX 2012 can be a little finicky, and we don’t have a really compelling reason to upgrade anyway. I know that recent versions of TFS (starting with 2013 maybe?) support hosting Git repos, but I think I’d be stuck with TFVC anyway, for a variety of reasons.

For my current .NET project, for which I’m using VS 2017, I started out with a local Git repo, intending to kill it and switch to TFVC when it was ready to go into test. I’m liking Git enough, though, that I’ve stuck with it, and have come up with a somewhat kludgey workflow, where I use Beyond Compare to periodically copy changed code files from my “work” project to a copy of the project that’s bound to TFS. So I code and test locally in the Git version of the project, committing often. Then, when I’m ready to deploy to my test server I follow a workflow where I copy to the TFS project, check my changes into TFS, then deploy to our test IIS server. As I said, it’s a bit of a kludge, but it works for me.

I thought about trying to use git-tfs, but I didn’t want to go down any rabbit holes so I stuck with the simple (but ugly) solution. And I’d love it if we could just switch to VSTS, but I don’t think that’s going to happen either.

CMD.EXE will never die

Microsoft recently decided to make a fairly minor change in Windows 10 that led to some misleading headlines about the impending death of CMD.EXE. Microsoft has now posted a nice blog post explaining clearly that the old command prompt isn’t going anywhere. I still use cmd.exe for some stuff, and PowerShell for other stuff. I’ve never gotten entirely comfortable with PowerShell, and I still find myself needing to search the web to figure out how to get stuff done with it, but it’s definitely quite useful, once you’ve gotten the hang of it.

I’m probably just as proficient with PowerShell as I am with bash. (Which is to say, not nearly as proficient as I’d like to be, but good enough to get by.) It’s kind of funny that bash has been around since 1989 and is still so popular. It’s pretty easy to switch to a different command shell in Linux (or other Unix variants), and it used to be common to see people trying out different shells, but it seems like bash has won out over all the others. And, of course, you can now get a good bash shell in Windows, which is pretty cool.

Long ago, back in the MS-DOS days, I was a big fan of JP Software’s 4DOS, which was a replacement for COMMAND.COM. They’re still around, and their current product is called Take Command. I paid for an upgrade to it about a year ago, and gave it a spin, but I had some issues with it, and gave up on it. I may upgrade to the new version and give it another try; it’s got quite a lot of functionality, though it’s gotten pretty hairy over the years. The best example is probably the TPIPE command, which is very powerful, but not at all elegant.

Dell XPS 8900

I’ve been thinking about buying a new desktop PC for quite a while now. I bought the old one in 2010, and it’s really starting to show its age. I managed to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 about a year ago, but I haven’t been able to get it upgraded to Windows 10. It’s been running really slowly, even after doing the Win 8.1 upgrade as a fresh install, and it just seemed like it was time for a new one.

So I picked up a Dell XPS 8900 from Costco tonight. It’s got a Core i7, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive. I like buying stuff like this from Costco, since they have their concierge service, which gives you tech support through Costco, and a 2nd year on the warranty. And Costco has a pretty good return policy. So it’s just safer to buy from Costco than most other places.

I haven’t done anything with it yet, other than taking it out of the box and looking at it. The process of getting it set up and getting all of my data from the old PC to the new one is going to take some time, and I’m not sure how I’m going to approach it yet. Apparently, Microsoft’s old “Easy Transfer” tool for this has been discontinued, and they now just point you to Laplink’s PCMover Express. So maybe I’ll give that a try. Or maybe I’ll skip that and just copy data over the old-fashioned way.

Asus Not-So-Splendid

My Asus video card has a feature called “Splendid” which is supposed to enhance video quality. Well, some time recently, I lost the ability to watch most videos in Windows Media Player. It took me awhile to figure it out, but the culprit is apparently Splendid. I disabled it, and all is well now. For the record, I found out how to disable it here.

Here’s the instructions:
– Right click on your desktop and select “Properties” to bring up your display properties;
– Select the “Settings” tab and click on “Advanced” on the bottom right;
– Select the “ASUS” tab on the top right and then the “ASUS Splendid” tab;
– Unselect the check box next to “Enable ASUS Splendid”.

I’m not sure if this is a problem in the most recent driver set that’s going to be corrected at some point. Either way, I never noticed “Splendid” really doing much for me anyway.

MyComicsPage

A couple of years back, I spent a little time looking into the comic strip subscription services that are available online. I blogged about it here, and what I wrote then is still mostly correct. At the time, I kind of lost interest in the subject, but I started thinking about it again this year. My local paper recently cut back their Sunday comics section from six pages to four, dropping some strips and shrinking others. It’s kind of depressing to read, knowing how much better the section could be, just by adding those two pages back, and changing the mix of strips a bit. The Sunday NY Daily News still has a good comics section, but I don’t get around to picking it up every week.

After reviewing what was available again, I decided to start up a subscription to MyComicsPage.com. They’ve got a couple of my favorite strips, namely Doonesbury and Foxtrot. Now, I know that there are plenty of ways to get those two strips for free, but it’s nice to be able to get those, plus a bunch more, consolidated into one nice page, and also to know that I’m contributing at least a little money toward keeping comic strip artists in business.

MyComicsPage.com has a pretty nice interface for putting together your preferred page of strips. You can reorder strips on the page, though you can only move strips up or down one position at a time, and the page does a postback every time you do that; someone really needs to add some Ajax to the interface there, and get current with the whole Web 2.0 thing. Also, the list of available strips is somewhat misleading, since they include a bunch of discontinued strips that are available in the archives, but are not really available for your daily page. They list Spanish language strips in a separate section; I really think they should put the discontinued strips into their own section too, just to make it more obvious which strips are still alive. One nice thing they have is a “collection” feature, where you can store links to specific strips you like. (I started a collection of anti-cat cartoons; that should be fun to maintain.) I should also mention that they have a number of good editorial cartoonists, too, including Tom Toles, my all-time favorite.

New computer guts

I went ahead and ordered a bunch of new parts for my computer from Newegg today. I’m getting a new motherboard, processor, video card, DVD burner, power supply, memory, and hard drive. Hopefully, good enough to hold me for the next three years. (The last time I did this was in late 2002.) I should be OK for Vista, too, whenever that comes out. (I checked the compatibility list for video cards, and I’ve got one that should work with all the new fancy Vista graphics stuff.) Let’s hope all the parts play well with each other, and I don’t break anything trying to put it all together.

ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook

I made my way through chapter 2 of ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook today. I’ve really been putting off learning .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005, but I’m starting to get motivated now. Partially, I guess it’s the whole “New Year’s resolution” thing. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Dot Net Rocks lately, so that’s helping out on the motivation front. After I get through this book, I’ve got another ASP.NET 2.0 book, a SQL Server 2005 book, Expert C# Business Objects, and a couple of other random programming books to read.