Author: Andrew Huey

Power Platform and Pathfinder

My head is spinning a lot lately, from all the new stuff I’m trying to get up to speed on. I did a full-day App in a Day workshop last Friday, to refresh my memory on how to build canvas apps and model-driven apps for Microsoft Power Platform. I’ve also been working through a lot of the stuff at Microsoft’s Low-Code February site, including the Cloud Skills Challenge, which I completed.

Meanwhile, I also need to try to learn about Dynamics 365 F&O (which isn’t called F&O anymore, but I’m not sure what else to call it). And I started trying to learn Angular a while back, but I keep putting that to the side. My last post about “being overwhelmed by the amount of random stuff I need to learn” was this one from October. Things still haven’t settled down.

And, on the personal side of things, I’m continuing to try to figure out Pathfinder. At this point, I’ve managed to create a character (a half-elf wizard), but really don’t have him fully fleshed out yet. I’ve been reading both the Core Rulebook and the Strategy Guide. And, for some reason, I decided to pick up a hard copy of the Core Rulebook. It’s the “pocket edition,” and the print is too small for me to read comfortably, so it’s mostly useless for me, but I like picking it up and feeling how heavy it is. (Is that weird?) We still haven’t played yet, but we’ve had one organizing session over Zoom (mentioned here), and a second brief session over Discord. I guess we’re going to use a combination of Discord and Roll2o to run the game.

Comixology updates

Comixology has been in the news lately. There was a lengthy article at The Beat a couple of weeks ago, and one at Popverse a couple of days ago. It looks like a bunch of folks there got laid off, and Amazon is probably looking to finish integrating all the Comixology stuff into their Kindle books ecosystem.

I wrote a few blog posts about Comixology about a year ago, when they shut down the separate comixology.com site, and replaced the old Comixology app with the new one. I was going to say here that I haven’t bought much from Comixology since they made that change, but I checked, and I bought about 30 books in 2022, so I guess that’s not quite true. And I still have more than 200 unread books in my account.

I don’t think that Amazon is going to get out of the digital comics business entirely, so I’m assuming that my current Comixology library is safe. But I am a little worried about whether or not Amazon is really going to continue to support digital comics the way they did when they had a real staff at Comixology, and it was at least semi-independent.

Well, I guess this is the kind of thing that’s not worth worrying too much about, since there’s really nothing I can do to affect it. It’ll be interesting to see what Amazon does with Comixology over the next year, and what else happens in the digital comics market.

 

More Pathfinder

Since my last post on Pathfinder, we’ve had our first session together, though it was just an organizing session. We did it over Zoom, which managed to work out OK, with only minor glitches. I had to bail out early, due to another commitment, so I’m not sure how it ended.

It turns out that we’re going to use the Pathfinder first edition rules. The stuff I got for $5 in the Pathfinder Humble bundle last week, and which I’ve been reading, is all second edition, so that’s a bit of a bummer. It seems like first edition is closer to the old AD&D rules, so I guess that’s good, since AD&D is what I already (kinda) know.

So, now, I’m looking at the first edition rules. Technically, everything I need should be at the Archives of Nethys site. But I’m an old man and I like books, so I went ahead and bought the PDFs for the Core Rulebook and the Strategy Guide. Those were $20 each, so now I’ve spent another $40 on this game. The Core Rulebook is 576 pages, and the Strategy Guide is 162 pages, so I’ve now got a lot to read. I’ve also been watching this YouTube playlist to try to get a head start. (The videos are corny, but useful.) My big task for now is creating a character. I think I ought to be able to do that this week.

I’ve also spent $2 on the Dice by PCalc app for my iPhone, rather than trying to find a set of real dice. I’m trying to avoid spending too much money on this game, but I guess I’ve spent around $50 so far.

Pathfinder

I got a text from my brother, out of the blue, about a week ago, asking if I wanted to participate in a new D&D campaign that he and his wife were putting together. Now, I haven’t played D&D since the early 90s, when I briefly participated in a campaign that a friend put together. It fizzled out after only two sessions, largely because this friend had just welcomed a new baby into his life, and he’d underestimated the amount of time it would take to deal with a newborn baby. Prior to that, I hadn’t played D&D since the early 80s, in middle school (and maybe into high school a bit).

I discovered Dungeons & Dragons at age 11, I think, when I begged my mom to buy me the D&D basic set, which I saw on a shelf in a store, and immediately decided I must have. I remember my mom looking at the box doubtfully, noticing that it said “ages 12 and up” and expressing doubt about whether or not I was old enough for it. But she relented, and bought it for me. From there, it was kind of an obsession for a few years. There’s a long blog post I could write about my history with D&D, but I’ll save that for another day.

While I gave up on D&D after a few years, my brother kept playing, and is still playing various role-playing games. Apparently, he’s playing Pathfinder now, which is an offshoot of D&D, from a separate company. Over the years, I’ve slightly kept track of D&D and RPG news, mostly when it overlapped with general comic book / sci-fi / fantasy news. So I was somewhat familiar with the whole licensing thing with D&D, and the OGL. And I was aware that TSR had ceased to exist, and that Wizards of the Coast now owned D&D, and that Hasbro now owned Wizards. And I’d heard a little about the recent brouhaha over Wizards’ proposed changes to the OGL. So I know a bit about the current state of RPGs, but not much.

Anyway, Pathfinder is what my brother is playing, so I’m now trying to figure it out, assuming we actually go forward with his campaign. He sent me a guide for the Skull & Shackles “adventure path,” which seems to be a pirate-themed setting. (I just hope he doesn’t make us all talk like pirates. Though I guess that might be fun…) That guide was around 30 pages, and I finished reading it this morning. It assumes knowledge of the general rules for Pathfinder, though, which I don’t really have. A lot of the terminology is familiar, but a lot of it isn’t.

I noticed a few days ago that Humble is running a So You Wanna Try Out Pathfinder bundle right now, so I dropped $5 on the lowest tier for that bundle, which got me their “beginner box” (which seems similar to that old D&D basic set that I got at age 11), a core rulebook, and a few other things. The Humble purchase gets you a redemption key that you need to use at the Paizo site to unlock a bunch of downloadable watermarked PDFs. So now I have an account at Paizo’s site and am presumably now on their mailing list. (So if I want to go further down this rabbit hole, I’m all set…)

If the local game store here in Somerville hadn’t gone out of business last year, I’d run over there and see if I could pick up a hard-copy book or two, and maybe some dice, but they’re gone and there isn’t another similar store around here, so I’m stuck with just PDFs for now. (Which is probably for the best, since I really don’t need more clutter in my apartment.)

I guess I should now try to read the Hero’s Handbook from the beginner box. That’s a little under 80 pages, and includes a solo adventure that I can play on my own to help me figure out the rules. There’s also the Core Rulebook, but that’s almost 650 pages, so I’m not going to read that one in an afternoon…

There’s also on online Player’s Guide reference, and Core Rulebook reference, so I could probably figure this stuff out even without the PDFs from Humble. Really, though, I’m not the same guy who sat down and devoured the D&D basic set, then all of the AD&D rulebooks, and a bunch of supplemental material, back in my pre-teens and early teens. I’d like to figure out enough of this stuff so that I can have some fun with my brother and his wife. But I’m not that kid who could spend hours poring over all of the ridiculous stuff in the AD&D DM’s guide, and take it all seriously.

We’ll see how all this goes. We have a WhatsApp group chat set up for this, so that’s a start at least. We were supposed to do a Zoom session today to go over some basics, but my brother and his wife are both sick, so that might not happen. I’m not familiar with the tools for actually playing the game online, but I guess something like Foundry Virtual Tabletop can be used to facilitate that. So that might be yet another thing to figure out. I imagine that this whole thing could fizzle out, just like that last campaign I mentioned did. I hope not, since i like the idea of spending some time with my brother, and maybe getting to know his wife a bit. I haven’t seen my brother in years, and still haven’t even met his wife in person. (They got married right at the beginning of the pandemic.)

I’ve always thought that gaming might be a good way for me to get out and socialize a bit more, but I never quite manage to get anything going. Maybe this will actually be the thing that gets me back into tabletop RPGs. (Or it’ll just be one more thing that I get a little obsessed with for a few weeks, then fizzles out.)

Sonos Ray

For my ten year anniversary at SHI, I got 2000 points to spend on a gift for myself. SHI uses a service that has an online catalog of random stuff that you can pick. 2000 points seems to equal somewhere around $300. At first, I thought this system was overly complicated and kind of dumb, but when I thought about it, I guess it’s better than the obvious alternatives. The two other likely options would have been (a) just giving me an extra $300 in my paycheck, or (b) giving me some random corporate gift. For that first option, the money would have just gone into my bank account, and I would have forgotten about it. For the second option, they probably would have given me a nice pen or watch or something that I didn’t want or need. So I guess the “points” thing is actually a pretty good option, since it allows me to pick out something cool that I actually want.

So I got a Sonos Ray. I’d been thinking about buying one for a while, but hadn’t previously talked myself into it. I figured it would be a good way to get better sound out of my TV, without too much hassle. Up until now, I’d been using the built-in speakers for everyday use, and switching to my big old-fashioned stereo for movies or anything else where I wanted good sound. Routing through the stereo works well, but it’s a little bit of a pain, since it requires some button-pressing, and since I have no way of adjusting volume without getting up off my couch.

I’m already in the Sonos ecosystem, having bought a Sonos One in 2018, and a second one a bit later, which I have configured as a stereo pair. I use those often to listen to the radio, and sometimes for Apple Music. That works pretty well.

The Ray showed up yesterday, and was quite easy to set up. The Sonos app recognized it on the first try and added it to my system. It’s set up as a separate target from the Sonos One pair. In theory, I can stream music to it, the same as to the Ones, but I think I’m just going to use it for the TV. Setting it up to work with my TV remote was easy too. I can set the volume or mute it easily from my TV remote (or my TiVo or Apple TV remotes).

Overall, I’d say that the sound quality is better than the TV speakers, but not quite as good as my big old stereo speakers. But those are probably overkill for most TV. I’m not sure if I’ll be tempted to switch back to the old stereo speakers for movies or other stuff where I want the best possible sound. If I do, it’ll be a bit of a pain, since I’ll need to reach behind the TV and move the audio cable from the Sonos to the DAC that I use to bridge from the TV’s digital out to the stereo’s analog input. (Maybe I could find a DAC with a digital in, analog out, and digital passthru out. That would work…)

It occurs to me that, if I stop using the stereo for TV sound, then I’ll have pretty much stopped using the stereo entirely. I listen to the radio through the Sonos Ones now, since it’s much easier than trying to pick up over-the-air radio here. And I route Apple Music through the Sonos, because that’s the easiest way to do it. I don’t really listen to CDs anymore, and I don’t really use my little Volumio box anymore either. I don’t plan on getting rid of the stereo, but it’s interesting to think about how my listening habits have changed.

Ten years at SHI

I happened to notice my five year work anniversary post earlier this week, and thought I should write a ten year anniversary post. I hit my ten year anniversary about a week ago. I guess it’s kind of a big deal, since this is only the second job I’ve had that’s lasted this long. The previous one was NMS, where I worked for around 13 years (1996-2009). I probably would have hit 15 years there, if the company hadn’t got out of business.

A lot has changed at SHI since that five-year mark. A lot of those changes happened in 2022. I switched to a new boss, then back to the old boss. There have been a lot of management changes within IT in 2022. And I got promoted to “IT Solutions Manager,” whatever that means. I now have three direct reports, all CRM developers (which is kind of awkward, since I don’t really know our CRM system).

I’m doing less AX 2012 development, and am gradually moving into more Dynamics 365 development. We’re just in the planning stages of moving off of on-prem AX 2012 to Dynamics 365 F&O. And, since the CRM devs have been moved into our group and now report to me, I’m learning about our Dynamics 365 CRM environment. It’s all going pretty slowly, but we’re a big company and there’s a lot going on. (And yes, I know that F&O apparently isn’t called F&O anymore and CRM isn’t called CRM anymore. I can’t keep up with Microsoft’s crazy product naming shenanigans…)

I think there’s a good chance I’ll still be with SHI in five years. (Though I worry that saying that out loud will jinx it…) There have been a lot of layoffs at tech companies recently, but I don’t think SHI is planning any. And it seems like there’s a lot of opportunity there to do interesting work.

I’m realizing now that I’ll be 60 years old in five years, and 65 in ten years. I don’t know if there’s any point in thinking that far ahead, but it seems to me like there’s a real chance I could finish out my working years at SHI.

There’s a lot more I could say about my job right now, but there wouldn’t be much of a point to it. I’m relatively content where I am. There’s a lot of uncertainty, but there’s uncertainty everywhere. I think I have some good coworkers, and I think I’m in a pretty good situation.

Time Marches On

So it’s Sunday morning again, and I’m futzing around on my laptop, aimlessly, as is my wont.

I thought I should mention Twitterrific again, as it now seems to be 100% officially dead. So I guess I should remove it from my iPhone and iPad and give up on Twitter completely now. I’d been holding out some hope that Elon would reverse course and turn the API access back on, but I guess not. Sigh.

I was also looking around at the “on this day” links on the sidebar of my blog, and noticed this one, originally linking to the website that my brother Pat and his wife Heather set up. Heather gave up the domain name for that, heatherandpatrick.com, a long time ago, after Patrick passed away. But, just for yuks, I decided to see what, if anything was at that domain now. Turns out that another Heather and Patrick are using it as a website for their upcoming wedding! That’s kind of nice. (Certainly better than the domain squatters who had been sitting on it every other time I’ve gotten curious about it over the years.) Anyway, they seem like a lovely couple, and I hope they have a great wedding!

On a completely different subject, I just got a notification that TiVo is turning off their suggestions feature. Kind of sad to see this going away, though I hadn’t used it much since I dropped back to the Broadcast Basic cable plan. This news got me curious about what alternative are out there to watch broadcast TV, rather than cable + TiVo, for me. First, it looks like I would still have no luck with an antenna. AntennaWeb still indicates that I’d need a major-league outdoor antenna to pick up anything from here. So that’s out. And some of the streaming services like Hulu + Live TV include the major broadcast networks, but that costs $70/month, which is way more than Broadcast Basic is costing me. So I guess I’m sticking with minimal cable + TiVo for now, even though TiVo seems to be in a slow death spiral, and my cable provider’s support for CableCARD is probably dicey at this point.

The Giants lost to the Eagles last night, so my interest in football for this year is mostly done, though I might watch the rest of the playoffs and the SuperBowl anyway. I really got interested in football this season, and that was kind of a surprise to me, since I’ve been losing interest gradually for quite some time now. I guess it was mostly the Giants doing well that kept me interested? Maybe also that, this season, football seemed to be just about football. There was almost no talk about politics or racism or COVID or brain injuries or anything. I realize that all those things are still going on, but I could watch a football game and pretend that it wasn’t for a few hours? Or at least not think about any of it? It was a nice escape. (And yes, the Damar Hamlin thing was a sudden jolt of reality, but he seems to be doing reasonably well, so that’s good.)

Speaking of escapism, I started watching Star Trek: Discovery season 4 yesterday. I signed up for Paramount+ a little more than six months ago, largely so I could watch all the new Star Trek shows, and I still haven’t watched a lot of it. I’ve mostly just been using Paramount+ to watch Inside the NFL lately. I need to catch up on both Discovery and Picard. Maybe now that the Giants are out of the playoffs, I can catch up on all my sci-fi TV.

more on Twitter and Mastodon (sorry)

Twitter continues to shoot itself in the foot. I tried using Twitterrific on my iPad on Friday morning, and found that it wasn’t working. It didn’t work on my iPhone either. I figured it was Elon-related, whatever it was. Turns out that Elon has intentionally shut down third-party Twitter clients. Or at least that’s the rumor. There’s been no “official” announcement from Twitter. There’s a blog post from the Twitterrific developer here. Either way, assuming this doesn’t get reversed, I guess this means I’m pretty much done with Twitter. Twitter is only usable (for me) with a third-party client like Twitterrific.

So I’ve rearranged the home screens on my iPhone and iPad to move Twitterrific off to a sub-folder. And I need to remember to cancel my subscription to the Twitterrific app at some point, though I guess if Twitter doesn’t reverse their shutdown, the app developer will probably shut down the app and it’ll get canceled automatically. I’ll be sad to see it go. I’ve been using it since at least 2017.

I thought about just putting the Mastodon app where the Twitterrific app used to be, but then I thought that maybe I should rearrange things a bit more. So, on my iPhone, I now have the NY Times and Washington Post apps in a more prominent spot, and I’m going to try to click on those more often when I’m mindlessly futzing with my phone.

I recently listened to an Ezra Klein podcast, talking about “deep reading.” I’ve been thinking about attention spans and media consumption and stuff like that again a lot lately. Of course, I’ve been thinking about that stuff since at least 2008. And I’m still struggling with it. I think I have another blog post in my head on that subject, but I’m going to resist writing it right now.

more MusicBox

Since my previous post on MusicBox, I’ve been putting a lot more stuff into it. Today’s project was to go through my main Amazon wishlist, and move all of the albums I had in there over to MusicBox. That has resulted in about another 150 albums added, so I now have almost 400 albums in there, total. So I could probably stop looking for new music to listen to, and just work my way through the stuff in MusicBox, and I wouldn’t run out of new stuff for a few years, at least.

I had stuff in that wishlist going back to 2005. Lots of albums I’d run across at some point, and thought “I should buy that,” and then never did. (Which is fine. The purpose of my Amazon wishlist, over time, has largely been to keep me from making impulse purchases that I don’t really need…)

A pleasant surprise during this exercise was finding that ‎I Advance Masked by Andy Summers & Robert Fripp is now available on Apple Music. This is an album that I bought on vinyl when it first came out, in 1982. And it has, for some reason, gone out of print and hasn’t been available on CD or digitally. So I haven’t heard it in quite a while. I had the CD version on my wish list, but I didn’t want to pay the inflated prices it was fetching. Well, now it seems to have finally gotten released digitally. So I’m going to have to listen to that soon, and see if it’s as good as I remember.

I spent around two hours today working on this, with the Bills game on in the background. This was a pretty good activity for me right now, since my brain is acting a little funny. I’ve had a bad cold for several days. I’m mostly over it now, I think, but I was having a bunch of trouble with nasal congestion last night and this morning. So I took a pseudoephedrine, which tends to make me a bit jumpy. So I’d be too fidgety if I tried to sit still and just watch the game. But if I tried anything more mentally taxing than this exercise in copying & pasting, I’d probably screw it up. I’m hoping I’ll be back to “normal” tomorrow, so I can actually be somewhat productive at work.

MusicBox for Apple Music

It’s the day after New Year’s Day, and an official holiday, since yesterday was Sunday. This is the best kind of holiday, since there’s really no expectations that go along with that. (All that stuff happened yesterday.)

So I had some grand (but vague) plans around spending the day in front of the TV watching movies. But that didn’t happen. I spent some time this morning reviewing my finances from 2022 and making plans for 2023. I ran some reports out of Quicken, set up some reminders in Evernote. That kind of thing. So that was useful, and necessary.

But then I got the idea that I should look into organizing my Apple Music stuff. Now that’s a pointless rabbit hole, and I know that. But I found this article about the app MusicBox, on MacStories, and decided that I was going to buy it, and then use it to clean up all of my “listen later” notes. And, well, now it’s 4 PM, and I have 200 albums saved to MusicBox.

I started out by going through my Pinboard account, looking for Apple Music and Bandcamp links that were marked as unread. I found about 100 of them, and added them to MusicBox. For Apple Music links, it was easy. You can just copy the link into MusicBox, and it’ll add it. For Bandcamp links, it was a little harder. I think MusicBox is supposed to work with Bandcamp links, but I wanted to have them in there as Apple Music links, so I would search for the album in question in Apple Music, then share the URL into MusicBox. That all took about an hour.

Next, I went through my list of “interesting music” in Evernote. That was just basically a bulleted list. For some of the albums, I had the Apple Music URL there; for some, just the artist and album name. For the ones with URLs, I copied them all into a text editor, cleaned them up a bit, then imported them into MusicBox all at once. For the others, I searched for them in Apple Music, then used the share button to get them into MusicBox. That also resulted in about 100 albums added, and took about an hour.

I also have a habit of finding something interesting on my iPhone and just taking a screenshot of it. So, finally, I went through all of my screenshots and found another 15 or 20 albums to add to MusicBox. For those, of course, I had to search for the albums in Apple Music and then add them with the share button.

So I’ve got a total of 216 albums in there now. (Mostly albums; a few singles too.) I’m not sure what kind of workflow I’ll use to listen to them and determine what to do with them. MusicBox supports tags, so I should probably create an “added” tag for stuff I’ve added to my library. And maybe a “meh” tag for stuff I listened to, but didn’t like that much? (By the way, I was using the macOS client for all of this organizational work, not the iOS client.)

I feel pretty good about having cleaned up the mess I had in Pinboard, Evernote, and my photo library. But I’m not sure if MusicBox is really going to turn out to be much better. I think it will.

I’m a little worried about the fact that MusicBox doesn’t seem to have an export function. If I decide I want to ditch it and try something else, it’ll be a pain to move it all.

And it’s a bit inconvenient that it doesn’t have either a web interface or a Windows client. It only works on iOS and macOS. So it’s not going to be terribly useful when I’m sitting at my PC. I guess I can continue to use Pinboard as an intermediate place to store links, if I come across them on my PC.

Overall, I think MusicBox is going to be a good organizational tool for me. Maybe I need to loosen up a bit on looking at music as a to-do list, but I think I’m just wired that way. I’ve got my “want to read” shelf in Goodreads, and my Kindle wishlist in my Amazon account, and my Netflix queue, and so on and so forth. I don’t think I’m going to change into a happy-go-lucky guy who just picks stuff at random to watch/read/listen to.