Author: Andrew Huey

Democracy and Facebook and other depressing news

I’ve mentioned here before that The Interpreter is probably the best email newsletter I get from the NY Times. I’ve been catching up a bit with my “read/review” email folder this morning, and saw a link to their video on democracy, from back in January. The video distills some themes that that have come up in their newsletter/column repeatedly over the last year. It’s all quite worrying.

Following a link on Twitter, I also saw their current article about Facebook use in the developing world, titled Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match. I usually see Facebook from a very first-world perspective, getting annoyed with dumb ads and misleading memes, but those are usually harmless. It’s eye-opening to read about the effect that Facebook can have when it becomes popular in the developing world. I’m not sure how mad I should be at Facebook for this stuff, but they could definitely be doing more to mitigate the worst of it. There’s one quote in the article that states the problem with Facebook more succinctly and poetically than any other statement I’ve seen:

“We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”

Yep.  As I mentioned recently, I use Facebook with a bunch of add-ons that strip out most of the evil stuff. There’s a new tool from Firefox that puts Facebook in a “container,” making it a little harder for them to track you, hopefully. I haven’t tried it, since I’m assuming it would be overkill for me, since I’m already using three add-ons to filter Facebook. There’s still too much good stuff on Facebook for me to consider dropping it, but I definitely don’t feel guilty stripping ads from it and depriving them of a little ad revenue.

How to use a Stopwatch in C# incorrectly

Here’s something I did wrong this week. And, after realizing I’d done it wrong, I remembered that I’d made the same exact mistake in the past. So I’m going to write up a blog post in the hopes that maybe it’ll help me hammer the right way into my head, so I don’t screw up next time.

If you want to do a little quick and dirty performance logging in an application, you can use the Stopwatch class. Just create a new Stopwatch, then stop it when you’re done and check the elapsed time. Easy, right?

Well, here’s what I did wrong: The Elapsed property is a TimeSpan structure, which has a lot of nice properties on it, like Days, Hours, Milliseconds, and so on. For my purposes, I wanted to know how many milliseconds had elapsed. So I showed sw.Elapsed.Milliseconds. Looks good, right? Except that the Milliseconds property is not the whole span in milliseconds. It’s the milliseconds part of the span. If you want total milliseconds, then you need to get sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds.

This is one of those pernicious little bugs that doesn’t cause anything to fail, but instead causes the programmer to make bad decisions. “Hey, it looks like all my web service calls execute in less than a second! Great! I can go home early!” Nope. Turns out some of them were taking more like 20 seconds.

Here’s a little code snippet showing the wrong way and the right way.

Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
TimeSpan elapsed;
Thread.Sleep(1500);
sw.Stop();
elapsed = sw.Elapsed;
Console.WriteLine("Wrong: {0}", elapsed.Milliseconds);
Console.WriteLine("Right: {0}", elapsed.TotalMilliseconds);

Simple enough, but I’ve done this wrong at least twice so far in my life. Here’s hoping I can remember to do it right next time!

Kindle Paperwhite

I finally broke down and bought a Kindle Paperwhite this week. When I bought it, it was on sale for $40 off, for Prime members. (It looks like that deal has ended now.) The “regular” price on the Paperwhite is $120, but it’s frequently on sale for $100 or $90. This was, I think, the first time it’s been marked down to $80. There’s been some talk about whether or not this means that a new version of the Paperwhite is imminent, but the consensus seems to be probably not.

I actually bought the version with free cellular connectivity, which was $150, down from $190. My last two Kindles both had the cellular connectivity option, and it does come in handy often enough that it’s worth a few extra bucks for me.

I bought my last Kindle in 2011, so I was due for a new one. The old one still works, but there are enough new features in the Paperwhite, and it’s cheap enough, that upgrading made sense. I’ve though about getting a Paperwhite a few times in the past, but never quite talked myself into it. I guess the low price is what finally got me to plunk down some money on it.

So far, I like it, though I haven’t done any serious reading on it yet. The obvious feature of the Paperwhite that sets it apart from my old Kindle is the light. (I want to call it a backlight, but it’s not actually a backlight. Here’s an old NY Times graphic that shows how it actually works.) I’ve been using a clip-on light with my old Kindle, and that works, but it’s a little clunky and inconvenient. The light on the Paperwhite should be much better than that, but I won’t really know until I’ve used it for a bit. The general consensus is that it’s very good, and doesn’t mess with your eyes or your ability to fall asleep the way an iPad screen or laptop screen would. (There’s some interesting discussion on this topic at Quora.)

I was also curious about the Goodreads integration, and hopeful that it would be useful. Here’s a write-up from Engadget, from when they first added the Goodreads stuff in 2013, and something from the Goodreads blog from 2016, when they made some changes. I’ve been using Goodreads for the last couple of years, and I’ve got several hundred books in there, all tagged appropriately with both the standard tags (Want to Read, Currently Reading, etc.) and some custom tags (Kindle, library book, ebook, etc). Goodreads lets you view your books with multiple tags applied, so it’s easy for me to pull up a list of, for instance, unread Kindle books.

The Kindle/Goodreads integration is OK, and somewhat helpful, but not all it could be. First, it treats your “Want to Read” tag more like a wishlist than a queue. I only put stuff into Goodreads once I’ve actually bought the book, so my “Want to Read” list is basically my pile of unread books. (Currently at 255 books. Sigh.) Second, it doesn’t always recognize that you already own some Kindle books in your Goodreads account. I guess that’s due to me adding the wrong edition of the book or something like that. Third, it only lets you see (and work with) the standard tags and not your own custom ones. So there are enough little issues with the Goodreads integration to make it less useful than it could be.

Similar to Goodreads tags, you can now create Cloud Collections of your Kindle books, either directly on the device, or on Amazon’s web site. My previous Kindle supported collections, but they didn’t sync at all; they were just on the device. And they were hard enough to create that I didn’t really use them. It looks like the ability to manage collections from the web was added in 2016. I went through and created some collections on the web site last night and it was pretty easy. So now I have a collection of all the Harry Potter books, and one with all my Star Trek novels, and a few others like that. That should be helpful. I’d really like to be able to auto-create collections from my Goodreads tags, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that.

So now I’ve got some organization applied to my extensive list of Kindle ebooks, but not quite as much as I’d like. I think I’m still going to use Goodreads on the web, combined with some notes I keep in Evernote, to keep track of which books I’ve read and which I haven’t, and to figure out what I want to read next. And the Kindle itself will mostly serve as a reading device and not really for organization and discovery of books. (Which is pretty much the same way I use my current Kindle.)

I’m also thinking about how to handle ebooks that I didn’t buy from Amazon. I have a fair number of those, mostly from Humble Bundles, old public domain books, and free books given away by publishers. Some of those show in my cloud library, since I’d previously emailed them to my old Kindle. Those that I loaded onto the old Kindle via USB, though, don’t show up anywhere. So I don’t know if I want to copy them over to the new Kindle or punt on that and just copy them over when and if I decide to read them. (Probably the latter.) I may play around with Calibre a bit, and see if I can use that to organize my miscellaneous DRM-free ebooks, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the trouble.

So this has turned into a pretty long post that’s more about ebook organization than the Kindle itself, so I should probably quit here. After I’ve actually read a book or two on the new Paperwhite, I’ll post some thoughts on its usability as a reading device.

1Password subscription

I recently decided to give in and switch to a 1Password subscription. I blogged about maybe doing this last year, but decided not to do it then.

I originally bought 1Password (for Windows, Mac and iOS) back when it was sold as plain old software. All things being equal, I’d just as soon continue using it that way, but there are a few advantages to switching to the subscription model. Mostly, I wanted to get access to the latest version of the Windows software, version 6, which is only available to subscribers. The previous Windows version works, but isn’t great. (Version 7 is in beta, and will support non-subscribers, but it will be a paid upgrade, so I figured I’d just skip that and pay for the subscription.) To their credit, they haven’t been aggressively pushing people to switch to subscriptions, though they’ve been gently nudging people in that direction. And I do like their software, in general, so it makes some sense to support them this way.

I have three minor nits to pick with the subscription version:

  1. They’ve eliminated folders, in favor of tags. That’s not too bad, but the standalone version supported both, so it doesn’t seem like it would have been difficult to support both in the subscription version too. I’ve managed to move my folders to tags, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.
  2. The Mac software supported “smart folders” which were basically saved searches. I had a few of those set up, and they were lost when I switched to the subscription. I had hoped that there would be some kind of saved search functionality in the subscription version, but there’s not. (You can still do advanced searches, but you can’t save them.)
  3. The subscription version requires that your master password be at least 10 characters long. My previous master password was only 7 characters, so I had to create a new one. I never have to type it in on my iPhone, since I have Touch ID enabled there, but I do have to type it in a lot on Windows and Mac, so that’s a pain.

As to other advantages of the subscription version, I’m honestly not seeing many, other than the new Windows software. And there’s an advantage in having my passwords available online now, via 1password.com, rather than having them stored in Dropbox. Since my 1Password data was pretty much the only thing I’d been using Dropbox for, I can probably delete the Dropbox client from all of my devices now, if I want. (I’m using OneDrive to keep my files in sync across devices. 1Password only supported DropBox.)

Microsoft’s recent reorganization

Satya Nadella’s email to employees from a couple of a weeks ago generated a lot of press coverage, mostly centering on how he seemed to be de-emphasizing the importance of Windows. GeekWire has one article about Terry Myerson’s departure and another about Scott Guthrie’s new responsibilities. I’ve always liked Guthrie; he seems to be a good guy with a lot of good ideas. From what I understand, ASP.NET MVC was basically his idea. (From a Stephen Walther blog post: “ASP.NET MVC framework was originally created by Scott Guthrie on an airplane trip to Austin, Texas.” Also see Scott Hanselman’s write-up from back in 2007.)

I recently finished reading Nadella’s book Hit Refresh, so this news makes sense in light of the priorities he outlined there. I do think that Nadella has Microsoft on the right track. While they continue to do a lot of things that annoy me, they’re a lot better than they were back in the days when we’d refer to Windows as “Micro$oft Windoze”. They’ve been doing a really good job with their developer tools over the last few years, so that’s good for me. And I’m starting to play with Azure a bit, and they seem to have that on the right track too.

Ben Thompson has a good take on this stuff (as usual). I think his choice of title (“The End of Windows”) is a bit hyperbolic, but he hits on something interesting about Nadella’s leadership style: “Nadella’s most impressive bit of jujitsu was how he killed Windows Phone; while the platform had obviously been dead in the water for years, Nadella didn’t imperiously axe the program. Instead, by isolating Windows, he let the division’s leadership come to that conclusion on their own.”

I’d contrast this with the way Steve Jobs killed the Newton when he took over Apple from Gil Amelio, though maybe that’s not a fair comparison. (Which reminds me that I should probably read the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography some day.)

Twitter too

After posting about Facebook a couple of days ago, I though I’d follow up with a quick post about Twitter. I’ve been using Twitterrific on both my Mac and iOS devices for some time now. Like Facebook, Twitter also has an “algorithmic” feed, by default. Twitterrific uses a straight chronological feed, with no ads or promoted tweets confusing things.

Twitter, unlike Facebook, has allowed third-party clients to access the service via a supported API and present their own interface to the service. (Facebook’s feed can be altered by monkeying with their web page, via browser add-ons and stuff like that, but there’s no way to write an authorized third-party Facebook client, using a supported API.) But Twitter has been slowly backing off on their support for third-party clients over the last few years. The most recent issue is described here. (The description on that page is clear enough that I won’t try to restate it here.) I hope Twitterrific and other third-party apps remain viable and useful for the foreseeable future. I really kind of like Twitter. I follow some interesting people there, and I’ve found a lot of interesting stuff via my Twitter feed.

On a related but more general topic, the Mozilla Internet Health Report for 2018 is interesting. (Though I think they got a little too creative with their page design…)

I’ve also been following a few threads around alternatives to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. One thought is that RSS is ready for a comeback. I’ve mentioned that recently. I haven’t really been able to talk myself into checking my The Old Reader page regularly just yet. I need to clean up and organize my feed list before I’d consider it to be really useful. Maybe the next time we get a rainy day, I’ll look into that. I’m mildly curious about things like micro.blog and mastodon, but I’m not sure either of them has enough momentum to really go anywhere.

Facebook adjustments

Even after all the Cambridge Analytica stuff and Zuckerberg’s 10 hours of testimony in DC this week, I’m still using Facebook. I’ve known for a long time that a lot of the free stuff on the Internet involves a tradeoff between privacy and convenience, and I’m generally careful of what I share and what I don’t, and which apps and services I use and which ones I avoid.

On the desktop, I use Facebook in Firefox, with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and FB Purity all installed and running. On iOS, until recently, I’ve just been using the regular Facebook app. But I switched to using an app called Friendly recently. It’s pretty good, though it’s got a few rough edges. It does ad blocking (after a $2 in-app purchase), and lets you re-sort your news feed chronologically, and some other little tweaks. I’ve also recently set FB Purity to sort my news feed chronologically, so now I’m seeing stuff that way on both desktop and iOS. It’s funny how different Facebook looks when you’re seeing stuff in simple date/time order, rather than whatever order their algorithm decides to use. I’ve also reviewed and tweaked my privacy settings a bit. This page at iMore has some good advice for that.

I’ve been reading a comic book called The Private Eye recently. It’s a science fiction comic set in a world where there’s been a major internet privacy meltdown, and society has essentially reconfigured itself in a way such that personal privacy is a core value, and is taken to extremes. It’s a really interesting take on the subject of privacy and trust, and it makes me wonder what our world’s going to look like in 100 years.

Ben Thompson has a good overview of the Zuckerberg hearings at his site. A lot of interesting stuff has come out of all this, but I agree with Thompson on the bottom line: “The most likely outcome of Facebook’s current scandal continues to be that nothing will happen.”

Marvel 99 cent sales and other comics stuff

The Beat has a good article up today, trying to explain what’s going on with the Amazon/Comixology 99 cent sales on Marvel books. As a fan, it’s kind of cool to be able to pick up some pretty good books for a buck each, but I feel a little bad for my local comic shop, when these prices are being offered on new release books. I mean, nobody’s going to spend $20 on a book at the store if they can get it for $1 on Comixology. (Well, maybe some people will. But a lot of people won’t.) I’ve bought a few of the 99 cent books over the last few weeks, but they’re all books I would never have paid cover price for anyway.

On a semi-related note, The Beat has a write-up on the Mike Mignola Q&A from MoCCA Fest that I missed last weekend. (Now I’m in the mood to read some Hellboy.)

This weekend, I’m thinking about going to the Big Apple Con. I probably shouldn’t go to comic cons two weekends in a row, but the Big Apple Con is much different from MoCCA Fest. It’s much more of a traditional comic con. There are going to be a few interesting panels at the con, including a Gold & Silver Age panel that could be fun.

MoCCA Arts Festival 2018

I went into New York today for MoCCA Fest. I’d gone to it last year, and enjoyed it, so I went back again this year. Last year, I’d made a full day of it, hitting a couple of museums too. This year, I wasn’t as ambitious and just went to MoCCA Fest. (And I was lazy and took a cab from the train station and back, so I didn’t even get in much walking.)

Last year, I didn’t buy anything at all, nor did I go to any panels. This year, I went to one panel and bought one book, so I did a little better on that front. I bought a copy of March: Book Three, and got it signed by Nate Powell, so that was pretty cool. (I have digital copies of books one and two, though I haven’t read them yet.) Powell was one of their guests of honor, and had some of his art exhibited in the little gallery they set up.

I went to a Q&A panel with Jaime Hernandez, one of my favorite artists. He was there mostly to promote his new book The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He also talked about the new Studio Edition book from Fantagraphics, and about his work in general. I’ll probably pick up the Dragon Slayer book from Amazon; the Studio Edition book looks a little too expensive for me. Love and Rockets has been one my very favorite comics since the early days; I think the first issue I bought was #2, in 1982. I’ve never seen any of the Hernandez brothers in person before today though, so it was really cool to finally see Jaime. I probably should have stuck around long enough to get something signed by him, but I didn’t. I’m way behind in my L&R reading too. I have the whole New Stories series, all eight volumes, from Comixology, but I haven’t read any of them yet. That series ran from 2008 to 2016, so I guess I’m ten years behind. (Geez.)

I would also have liked to stick around for Mike Mignola’s panel, but it wasn’t until 3:30 and I didn’t want to stay in the city too late. I could have gotten something signed by him, too, if I’d wanted. When I first walked into the con, he was at his table, and there wasn’t a line, just a couple of guys chatting with him. But I hadn’t actually brought anything for him to sign. (I probably should have just asked him to sign my program book.) Maybe next time.

Overall, it was a fun little show. Lots of eccentric work on display, and pretty much zero super-hero stuff. A nice change of pace from a typical comic con.

 

TidBITS redesign

I’ve been reading the TidBITS newsletter for years. They’ve been publishing it for 28 years; I’ve been subscribing to it for more than ten. (I’m not sure how long exactly, but at least since 2002.) They just unveiled a new design and back-end after many years under the old design and system. The new system is based on WordPress, which isn’t surprising. Lots of websites (including mine) are running on WordPress these days. The design looks good. I haven’t seen any hiccups with the back-end yet, so hopefully they’ve done a good job with that. TidBITS has always been a good source of Apple news and analysis, better in general than most of the more modern web sites. (I won’t mention specific sites, but I’m thinking of certain sites with a lot of “top ten” listicles, sponsored content, and more space devoted to ads than articles.)

I’m always interested in how sites like TidBITS remain commercially viable. I doubt they make much money from ads these days. They probably get a modest amount of money from their membership program. And they have something called the TidBITS Content Network now too, which is interesting. They used to run Take Control Books also, but they sold that off a while back. I should probably pay them for a one-year membership. I keep meaning to do that, but I never quite get around to it.

I like the newsletter model for this kind of content, and I wish more people would use it. I’d love to find a Windows newsletter that’s as good as TidBITS. Years ago, I used to subscribe to Windows Secrets and that was pretty good for a while. It looks like they’re still around, but as a paid newsletter only, and it appears that none of the original contributors to the site are still involved. I found a recent post on Woody Leonhard’s site that runs through a little of the history of Windows Secrets. It used to have a lot of good content, from people like Woody, and Brian Livingston, and a couple of other good tech writers whose names I can’t remember now.