October 9,

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.

NYCC and MacBook stuff

So I went to NYCC on Thursday, as planned, and it wasn’t too bad. The vaccine check-in was smooth and quick. Getting in to the con itself took a little while, but not too long. I got there around 10:30, so the initial crush of people trying to get in at 10 (assuming there was one) had subsided. It still took a while to get in, due to the usual metal detector, bag search, empty your pockets routine. (I kind of wish they could have skipped that this year, but I guess that kind of thing isn’t going away any time soon.)

I honestly didn’t stay too long, just a few hours. I bought a book from Thom Zahler in artist’s alley, but that’s all I bought. I spent a good bit of time wandering the show floor and browsing. I didn’t make it to any panels. I had intended to go to the Sandman Audible panel. I watched that yesterday, at home, and I don’t feel too bad about missing it. It was a good panel, but it was just a typical COVID-era Zoom panel. And I think it was pre-recorded, so the “live” panel at Javits was apparently just a showing of the Zoom call on a big screen.

I had also thought about going to the William Shatner spotlight. That actually was a live event, with Shatner doing his usual thing, talking about his recent projects and telling some stories. I watched that this morning. That would have been fun to go to, but I’ve seen Shatner live before, so I don’t terribly regret skipping this one either. I’ll probably watch some more of the panels today and tomorrow, from the safety of my own couch.

I started feeling a little sick yesterday, and I’m still feeling it a bit today. Hopefully, this is just my usual post-con malaise, and not COVID or anything serious. I’m fully vaccinated for COVID, of course, and I’ve also had my flu shot this year, so this is probably just the typical “con crud.”

While I was writing this post, my MacBook crashed. It’s been doing that a lot lately over the last few days. I initially thought it might be an issue with the NYCC video player, since it seemed to be happening most when I was watching NYCC videos. Then I thought maybe it was a Firefox issue, since it was only happening when I had Firefox open. (But, honestly, 90% of my MacBook usage is just doing stuff in Firefox.) Anyway, I’ve now run macOS diagnostics, Disk Utility, and Onyx. None of them found any issues. And I’m almost done writing this blog post, and the MacBook hasn’t crashed, so maybe that’s a good sign. I should probably hook up an external drive and run a full Carbon Copy Cloner backup, just in case. (And if it does that without crashing, that’s another good sign…)

NYCC day two

Today was the second day of the virtual NYCC. I spent a lot of time today watching panels. I didn’t really have anything else to do today, and there were a bunch that I was interested in. I might as well just list them out, with some notes:

  • Adam Savage’s Favorite Cosplay Show & Tell – This was a fun little “show & tell” with Adam Savage showing off some random stuff, including a couple of spacesuits. He’s always fun to watch.
  • Ready Player Two – This was a conversation between Ernest Cline and Wil Wheaton, about Cline’s new book, the sequel to Ready Player One.
  • Twenty Years of Harry Dresden – And this one was a conversation between James Marsters and Jim Butcher, about the Dresden Files. (Interesting that both this one and the Cline panel involved a conversation between an author and the actor who does his audiobooks.)
  • Lewis Black’s Rantcast – This was basically an NYCC special episode of Black’s Rantcast podcast. It was funny, of course, but also surprisingly touching. He was reading letters from fans ranting about stuff they missed (and didn’t miss) about the usual in-person NYCC.
  • Batman Beyond Cast – A discussion with Will Friedle, Kevin Conroy, and Andrea Romano.
  • In Conversation with Scott Snyder & James Tynion IV – This was the only actual comic book panel I saw today. Honestly, I didn’t get much out of it, since I’m not currently reading any of the Batman books that Snyder and Tynion are working on. I may eventually pick some of them up, but not until I’ve caught up on my backlog. (Or at least put a dent in my backlog…)
  • SYFY’s Resident Alien – A panel with Alan Tudyk and other folks involved in this new series. They showed the first ten minutes of the first episode, then did a Q&A. I’m a big fan of the comic, and I’m a little concerned with how different the show seems to be, based on what I’ve seen of it so far. I’ll give it a chance, when it airs in January, but I can’t say I like the direction they seemed to be going in, from those first ten minutes. (I think part of what I didn’t like might have been a misdirect, but I’m not sure.)

I won’t bother with links. If you want to watch any of these, you should be able to find them on NYCC’s YouTube page.

Impulse purchases are always part of the con-going experience. Yesterday, the Trek panel got me to run out and buy Picard season one on Blu-ray (though I was going to do that eventually anyway). It did not convince me to sign up for CBS All-Access, but they’re gradually wearing down my resistance on that. Today’s panels pushed me in the direction of a few purchases, none of which I’ve actually pulled the trigger on. I almost ordered some of the Dresden audiobooks, but I held off. Ditto on a Batman Beyond Blu-ray set. (If I could have found that on sale for a bit cheaper, I would have bought it.)

I haven’t reviewed tomorrow’s panel schedule at all. I’m hoping I can find a few comics-oriented panels to watch. So far, the con has been heavy on promotional panels for books, movies, and TV shows. (Actually, not many movies, now that I think of it. Mostly TV shows. The movie industry has pretty much shut down for now, it seems.) I’ll have to do all of my usual Saturday chores tomorrow, so I’ll probably be busy until around lunchtime. But I’ll likely fill the afternoon with random panel watching. And I should be able to relax all day Sunday and enjoy whatever they have going on for that day. Then, it’s back to work and the “real world” on Monday. Sigh.

another migraine

I haven’t had a serious migraine since August, so I was starting to think that maybe the problem had somehow resolved itself. No such luck. I got a doozy today, with an aura and everything. Since my last post on the subject, I’ve been trying to learn about migraines, and I’ve been keeping an eye on certain things, so I could maybe figure out my triggers.

Today’s migraine is making me toss out a few of my ideas. All my previous migraines have happened on weekdays, on sunny days, where I’d done a fair bit of walking. Today is Sunday, it was raining for most of the day, and I engaged in very little physical activity today. So it doesn’t really fit the pattern.

I took an Imitrex right after the aura hit. This was my first time trying it. I’m really not sure if it helped at all. The aura went away after about 20 minutes, which is, I think, fairly typical. And the post-aura headache was probably a bit milder that my previous ones, but that may just be because I was at home, and could just lay down for an hour.

The really annoying thing about this migraine is that it happened as I was reading through the first several issues of the recent Detective Comics relaunch. Specifically, I was just getting ready to read Detective 939. So I had to stop for a couple of hours until my eyes and brain started working well enough to read comics again. (I have now finished that story, and I enjoyed it a lot!)

MacBook crash

The hard drive on my MacBook got messed up last night, somehow. It’s pretty much unusable at this point. Disk Repair won’t fix it, and I haven’t had any luck copying files off of it. I don’t have a recent backup, just the old drive from when I replaced the original drive with an SSD, back in December. I can boot from that drive, and see the files on the SSD, but I can’t do much with them.

I’m not sure what caused the problem, but I have a feeling that it might have something to do with removing Trim Enabler, and running “trimforce enable” on the drive, which I did a few days ago. The drive has been running reliably with TRIM enabled via Trim Enabler since December, and I don’t see why enabling TRIM with an OS command vs a third-party utility would be an issue, but maybe it is.

I’m a little embarrassed and mad at myself for not having a more recent backup. But, the way I work now, it’s actually not that big a deal. Most of the stuff I need from the Mac is in Evernote or Dropbox. I really don’t create any irreplaceable files that don’t wind up in the cloud one way or another. So I’ve been thinking through things, and I’m going to have to reinstall a bunch of applications, and re-download a bunch of Doctor Who audio files, but there’s really nothing that’s going to have been irrevocably lost. Still, I’ve had “backup my MacBook” on my to-do list since January, and I just never got around to doing it.

Sony Reader

I was wandering around Costco today, and saw that they had the Sony Reader PRS-500 on sale for $250. I almost picked one up, but thought better of it. I’m glad I did, since a little research reveals that the new model, the PRS-505 came out last week. It’s available for $300 direct from Sony. I’ve been mighty tempted to pick one of these things up since they were first announced about a year ago, but I figured I should wait for the second gen, at least, assuming there would be one. Well, I guess now there is.

It’s still not altogether that compelling. It does 8 shades of grey (vs. 4 on the old one). Supposedly the screen refresh is faster. The interface seems to have been improved a bit. It appears that it still doesn’t support full-text search within a book, though. I really think that a decent search interface, along with the availability of a large number of technical reference books, would make this a killler device for programmers and other tech folks. And a partnership with Safari would be great too. Imagine being able to sync all the books on your Safari bookshelf down to this device. Safari’s nice, but you can’t really just sit back in a recliner and read a book off the Safari web site; it’s basically just good for reference. (I guess you *could* read a book off Safari, but I’m not comfortable doing it, even with my iBook. Notebook screens just aren’t good enough for extended reading sessions. At least for my tired old eyes.)

It’s still an interesting device, even if it’s only good for stuff that you’re going to read in a linear fashion — novels, mostly, and maybe some non-fiction. I like the idea of carrying a nice small device around, rather than carrying, say, the 1250-page Essential Ellison. Of course, they don’t have much Ellison available at the Sony ebook store. Heck, they don’t have any Tolkien, or any of the Harry Potter books either.

Maybe I’ll wait for the third generation!

Ray Noorda

I just found out that Ray Noorda died today. The linked article calls him the “father of network computing,” and I guess that’s accurate. I used NetWare for years, starting with version 2.15c, I think, in the early nineties. I earned my CNE certification when NetWare 3 was big. I switched allegiance from NetWare to Windows NT grudgingly, in the late nineties, and by that time, Noorda was gone from Novell.

The obituary on the Canopy site says “In lieu of flowers, the family requests that each one of us put in a little extra effort today to enable someone to reach their fullest potential in their work — that’s what Ray would have done.” I’ll try.

MacTheRipper and MPlayer

I’m spending some time today looking around at various shareware and freeware Mac apps that might be useful on my new iBook. MacTheRipper is a DVD ripper for the Mac. This could be useful if I ever decide I want to rip a couple of DVDs to watch while I’m on vacation or something. Then, I could watch them with MPlayer.

Notetaking applications for the Mac

  • NoteTaker from Aquaminds — nice look and some interesting features.
  • StickyBrain from Chronos — lots of features. Can sync with iPod and Palm.
  • NoteBook from Circus Ponies — big on outlining and general note-taking. Very colorful.
  • MacJournal from Mariner — oriented towards keeping a personal journal and blogging.
  • Formation from Radical Breeze — almost like a database program. Custom fields/forms, stuff like that.
  • Hog Bay Notebook — appears to be a fairly simple notebook app. Nice-looking, though.

All of these are pretty interesting. Meanwhile, I’m still using iOrganize, which isn’t as flashy as any of these, but does the job.