Author: Andrew Huey

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.

more about media consumption

I’ve been blogging recently about how I’m watching football this year, and stuff like that. I’m continuing to think about that, plus going beyond that to more about media consumption in general.

Right now, I’m watching NFL RedZone for my Sunday football fix. Later tonight, I’ll watch the Giants game on Sunday Night Football, via Peacock. That’ll actually be the first Giants game I’ve been able to watch on my TV this season. (I did watch a bit of last week’s game on my iPad, which I can do with my NFL+ subscription.) This is all fine for now. I’m getting my fill of football. Depending on how the Giants do, I may get either more interested or less interested in the weeks to come.

I briefly mentioned the Colbert thing a couple of weeks ago. Now we’ve got the Kimmel thing too. I haven’t canceled my Disney+ subscription, though I support anyone who’s doing that. I’ve been thinking about how I should react to this stuff, and have decided that maybe a positive reaction is a better choice for me.

For instance, I’ve been listening to The Bugle for years. It’s a great podcast, with some great political humor. So I went ahead and signed up for a £50/year subscription/donation. I probably should have done that a few years ago.

I’m also looking at revising the way I consume news a bit, and maybe supporting some publications/sites/podcasts that I haven’t been reading/supporting/whatever. Weirdly, I seem to keep coming back to the idea of signing up for Apple News+. A lot of the publications I’m considering supporting are available on News+. I know that giving Apple that money won’t result in very much of it making its way to whichever publication I’m reading, but it would be convenient. On the other hand, it’s not available on Windows, and I’m not sure it would fit well into my usual workflows for reading and bookmarking stuff.

I think maybe the way forward is to support independent media, whether it be news or comedy or whatever. Big business has consistently shown that it’s more interested in being on the government’s “good side” than it is in accuracy, morality, or freedom of expression.

NFL Sunday

So here’s some notes and thoughts about my experience trying to watch football today, the first Sunday of the football season.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t have any “traditional” TV service this year, having discontinued YouTube TV. But I ponied up for NFL+ Premium and the new ESPN Unlimited service.

So, for pregame shows, I was switching between the NFL network pregame show and the ESPN one. Both are reasonably good. One thing I hadn’t considered about this setup is that I no longer have anything resembling a DVR; I can’t pause, fast-forward, or rewind any of this stuff. And it’s harder to switch between “channels”, since I’m now switching between apps.

For the actual games, I decided to try watching NFL RedZone. That was actually pretty cool; I’d never had access to it before. It’s a little too “busy” for me; I’d rather see more of each game and less switching back and forth. But it’s fun and really gives you a lot of coverage of all the games.

There was a lot of grumbling recently about the announcement that they’d have commercials during RedZone this year. What I saw wasn’t really a big deal though; I think there was one very short commercial during the whole first hour of RedZone.

Speaking of commercials: another thing I miss about not having any DVR ability is never being able to fast-forward through commercials. I was watching NFL Matchup on ESPN this morning, and, despite it being a show I was watching on-demand, there were commercials in it and no way to skip them. I may be misremembering, but I think, in previous years, whenever I’d watch NFL Matchup via ESPN+, it would be commercial-free.

The Giants and Jets have, of course, both lost their first game. I don’t think this is going to be a good year for the Giants, but hopefully it’ll be better than last year.

messing around with Firefox and Vivaldi

My usual browser setup, for a while now, has been to use Firefox on desktop and Safari on mobile. (I have my bookmarks syncing between Firefox and Safari with iCloud for Windows.) That’s worked out pretty well, and I really have no complaints. But, of course, I’m a nerd, so I have to mess around with things once in a while, even if they work well.

So my first experiment was to see if I could switch to Firefox on mobile, so I’d be using Firefox everywhere. That’s been working well, though there are some tradeoffs. Apple, of course, puts every browser on iOS except Safari at a disadvantage, in several ways. The most obvious one is content blockers, which only work with Safari. I use 1Blocker on iOS, and that works reasonably well, but not nearly as well as uBlock Origin on desktop. With Firefox on iOS, I guess that their Enhanced Tracking Protection helps a bit, but it would be nice to have real ad blocking.

My next experiment has been to see if I could switch from Firefox to Vivaldi. I haven’t gotten too far with that, and I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it. I have Vivaldi set up on all of my main devices now: Windows desktop, MacBook Air, iPhone, and iPad. Vivaldi does do ad-blocking on iOS, since it’s got built-in ad-blocking. I’m not sure if it’s all that great though. I need to use it some more and get a feel for it.

One issue I’ve been having with Vivaldi is their settings sync. In theory, all of the settings should sync between all the installs of the browser, but that hasn’t worked out perfectly. The ad-blocking exception list doesn’t seem to sync at all. Another one is that my search setup doesn’t sync correctly. There seems to be a workaround, but it’s not perfect.

Speaking of search, I’ve been sticking with Kagi. I first started using it earlier this year, and I’m liking it. Of course, setting it up in a new browser can be a hassle, since you need to be logged in to use it, and since it’s not on the list of default search engines in any major browser.

So, overall: I’m going to continue messing around with Vivaldi a bit, but I might give up on it. If I do, I don’t know if I’ll go back to using Firefox everywhere, or my old system of using Firefox on desktop and Safari on mobile.

 

sports, eyesight, and other stuff

I’ve got a list of stuff I want to blog about. I’m not sure how far I’ll get, but I’m going to try to cover a bunch of stuff.

Sports & streaming

My last post, from two weeks ago, went into a lot of stuff around my plans for watching sports on TV this fall. Not much has changed there, except that I gave in and signed up for another one-year Paramount+ subscription, since they just started a 50% off deal. So now I can watch any of the CBS NFL games on Sunday, though that’ll mostly be the Jets rather than the Giants. And I can also watch the new season of Strange New Worlds.

I’m still not happy with Paramount, after the Colbert thing, and the more recent Bari Weiss thing, and… other stuff. But I guess my protest against them is only going as far as refusing to pay full price for a Paramount+ subscription.

I’m still holding out on Fox though. I haven’t even really been tempted to sign up for a Fox One subscription. That would be a step too far.

My plan for tomorrow, the first Sunday of NFL season, is to try to watch NFL RedZone (via NFL+) and see if I like it. (And, of course, annoyingly, this is the season when they’re going to start running ads on RedZone. Oh well.)

My eyesight

I had a little incident about a week ago, where I got a new floater showing up in my left eye, and that brought on a migraine. I wasn’t sure if this was the return of my migraines from ten years ago, or something else. Long story short, I saw my eye doctor and she sent me to a retina specialist, to see if I needed laser surgery. And that specialist poked and prodded my eye and decided I don’t need surgery. Which is good, I guess, but it also means that I’m stuck with the floater, which hasn’t quite gone away. I don’t notice it most of the time, but it’s somewhat noticeable when I’m working on a computer (and unfortunately, I make my living sitting in front of a computer). So we’ll see how things go. Maybe it’ll go away?

Switching cell phone service providers

I’ve been a Verizon customer since I got my first apartment after college. Back then, it was Bell Atlantic, and it was for a POTS line. And when I got my first cell phone, it was on Bell Atlantic Mobile. That all got smushed together into Verizon at some point. So, basically, I’ve been paying a Verizon bill every month since 1989 or thereabouts.

So there’s a lot of inertia there, and it wasn’t easy for me to talk myself into considering switching to another provider. But there have been some issues that had been pushing me in that direction for a while now.

First, they cut the copper to my apartment building (in 2018) and cut off the POTS service. After that I switched to a home cell service thing, but cancelled that last year, and “parked” my home number with Park My Phone, forwarding it to my cell #.

Then there was the issue we had in the office, starting about a year ago, where Verizon cell service deteriorated to the point of being essentially unusable. (It’s gotten better since, but still isn’t great.)

And also, I’ve found out that the Verizon discount I get through work is limited to my old “legacy” plan and doesn’t apply if I switch to a new plan, with a higher data cap (or unlimited data).

So, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally decided to switch to Consumer Cellular. They’re an MVNO for AT&T, and I knew from coworkers that AT&T service in our building is fine, so that was one selling point. (I have, in fact, found out that it’s not just “fine”, but significantly faster than even my home internet service.) And it’s a lot cheaper, even with a bigger data plan. With Verizon, I was paying about $65/month for 5 GB. With Consumer Cellular, I’m paying $35/month for 10 GB. There doesn’t seem to be any downside, as far as I can tell.

Well, that’s about half of the stuff I wanted to blog about. Maybe I’ll write more tomorrow, if the football is boring, and if my left eye isn’t bothering me too much.

more nonsense about sports and streaming

This is the third post I’ve written about sports and streaming this month. (See here and here for the previous ones.) Sorry. I guess I’ve been retreating into watching (and reading about) sports because the “serious” news is too stressful right now.

I mentioned the new ESPN streaming thing in one of my previous posts. I gave in and signed up for it yesterday. My previous Disney+ bundle was the “legacy” one that included ad-free Disney+ and ad-supported Hulu. That was $22/month. There’s no equivalent bundle with the new ESPN service. The bundle with ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu is $30/month. The bundle with ad-free Disney+ and Hulu is $39/month. So I went ahead and signed up for that. It’s probably too expensive, and I don’t know if I’ll stick with it. And that $39/month rate is a promo; after a year, it goes to $45/month.

It just seems like all of this stuff is getting too expensive and too complicated. I’m still pretty happy with my MLB.TV subscription, which lets me watch most of the Phillies games. (I wish I could watch all of them, but I guess it’s good enough.)

I’m still not sure if I’m going to be happy with my NFL situation this season. I’m still planning on watching RedZone on Sundays (via NFL+) and hoping that’ll scratch my football itch. And I can watch Thursday Night Football on Amazon, Sunday Night Football on Peacock, and Monday Night Football via my new ESPN subscription. So that should be enough.

I’m also trying to see if I can get into Premier League Soccer. I was randomly clicking around in the Peacock app last Saturday, and happened to notice that it was week one of their season. And Peacock has a whip-around show (similar to RedZone I guess) called Goal Rush, so I can watch that for a couple of hours on Saturday and see bits and pieces of a few different games. So now it’s week two, and I’ve watched a bit of this stuff, and it’s kind of fun, though I’m mostly treating it as background noise. I haven’t developed any real interest in it yet.

And I briefly thought about giving up on the NFL and following the CFL instead. That thought came from the storyline that ran in the Crankshaft comic strip recently, where the main character went to Winnipeg to see a Blue Bombers game. It turns out that streaming rights for the CFL in the US aren’t terribly complicated, but they’re not terribly convenient for me either. Some games run on CBS Sports Network, which I’d probably have if I still had YouTube TV, and which might be included with Paramount+, though I’m not sure. The rest of the games can be watched on CFL+, which is a free streaming service. So that sounds good! It’s free! But there’s no Apple TV app. I’d have to pull up the website on my laptop and then AirPlay it to the Apple TV. That’s too much work.

So overall, my plan for distracting myself with sports for the next few months is approximately as follows:

  • Phillies games on weeknights, via MLB.TV.
  • Some other random baseball games on ESPN and Apple TV+.
  • NFL games on Sunday via RedZone on NFL+.
  • Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night football via Amazon, Peacock, and ESPN.
  • Maybe Premier League soccer on Peacock on Saturdays.

This will probably all fall apart at some point. If the Giants are as bad as they were last year, I may lose interest in the NFL. Or, conversely, if they do well, I might get frustrated about not being able to watch all of the games.

And I don’t even want to think about how complicated watching the MLB and NFL playoffs will be. Well, that’s a problem for another day.