Author: Andrew Huey

Catching up on some manga

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working my way through a few old manga series that I started reading about ten years ago, but abandoned at some point. This all started with Rurouni Kenshin, back in November. I finished that series right around Christmas, with volume 28. (I’d previously read 1-19.) After that, I picked up on Ai Yori Aoshi. I’d read the first 13 volumes of that more than ten years ago, and finished the last few (14-17) in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Then, I picked up a short 10-volume series called Remote. I’d previously read the first six volumes. Right around New Year, I reread all of those, and then continued through the last four.

So that knocks a few things off my list. I had a lot of fun reading these. I have a few other series sitting around that I’ve either started and abandoned or bought but never started. So I’m thinking about continuing (or starting) those too.

One of the oldest and longest-running series on my list is Oh My Goddess. There are 48 volumes for that one, published in the US by Dark Horse, from 2002 through 2015. I have about half of the volumes between 1 and 20. I picked them up out of discount bins at a couple of conventions, a long time ago, so I was picking up what was available, figuring that maybe I’d fill in the holes at some point. I’ve read three of them. I guess I could just start reading what I have and see if I want to pick up the rest. Forty-eight volumes is a lot though. From what I can remember, it was the kind of series where it’s OK to dip in and out. I don’t think it was one long story. And I remember it being pretty funny.

I also have a fairly random sampling of Battle Royale volumes. That’s a 15 volume series; I have six of them. Again, they all came out of a discount bin at a con long ago. This one, I think, really is one long story, so I’m not sure if just reading six random volumes out of 15 is going to be any good. The series was originally published by Tokyopop before their shutdown, and is currently out of print in the US (as far as I can tell), though it’s not hard to find used copies on Amazon for less than their original cover price. Tokyopop made the interesting choice to bring in Keith Giffen to do an English “adaptation” of this series, so it’s not just a straight translation. I’ve seen mixed opinions on this, but it seems like most fans would have preferred a more direct translation.

There’s one more short series I have part of: Planetes. This was originally published as a five-volume series. I have the first three. (Technically, it was a four-volume series, but the fourth volume was split into two in the US.) The original publisher was Tokyopop; it was re-released by Dark Horse not too long ago, in two large omnibus volumes. I could probably get what I’m missing by picking up the second Dark Horse omnibus. I’ve been really curious about this series, since it’s generally gotten very good reviews. It’s supposed to be a hard SF series, which would be unusual for manga. (Most manga SF falls into the over-the-top space opera sub-genre.)

This has all got me thinking about the long and checkered history of manga publishing in America. I found a good article about this history on Anime News Network. Most of the manga I mentioned above was bought during the big manga boom of the early 2000’s, around 2000-2005. But I remember buying some of earlier stuff that came out of Eclipse/Viz in the late 80s, along with Lone Wolf and Cub from First, and Akira from Marvel.

Speaking of Lone Wolf and Cub, I should really pick up the Dark Horse collections of that, published from 2000-2003. They printed the whole series, whereas First only got through about a third of it. And the Dark Horse volumes are available digitally, so I don’t have to worry about even more manga paperbacks cluttering up my apartment. But maybe I should wait to buy those until after I’ve gotten through the rest of the stuff I already own.

 

FastMail migration follow-up

I started switching from Gmail to FastMail back in May of last year. I’ve been using FastMail as my main personal email account now for about six months, and it’s been working fine. I’ve got no regrets about switching. I was actively working on switching my many online accounts over to using my FastMail address through most of May and June. I hit a few snags, but I’d say that I got about 90% of them switched over by the end of June. After that, I’d switch over a straggler here and there, as they came up, but I was about 90% on FastMail.

To start this year off, I thought I’d go the next step and finally migrate all of my old Gmail messages over into my FastMail account. I did that on New Year’s day, using FastMail’s import tool. It took about 4.5 hours. I had a little over 40,000 emails in my Gmail account. That’s a little over 2 GB. My FastMail account now has about 2.5 GB used, so about 10% of my 25 GB limit. The migration went smoothly, and everything (as far as I can tell) got pulled over cleanly, with no obvious issues. I definitely have some duplicate emails in there, since I had messages with multiple Gmail tags on them, and FastMail sees tags as folders. But I have enough room that I don’t really need to worry about that.

I have also, finally, set Gmail to forward new email to FastMail, so I don’t really need to check my Gmail account at all anymore. At some point, I’m going to go into Gmail and delete all the old mail out of the account, but I’m not in a big hurry to do that. I also haven’t set Gmail to delete new mail after forwarding it, though I might do that eventually.

As long as I was going along this path, I decided to also look into consolidating my other accounts into FastMail. I have way too many email accounts, honestly. I have a POP3 account from my cable internet provider. That used to be my primary email account, years ago, before Gmail even existed. They have no built-in way to forward it to another account, so I have FastMail set up to collect mail from it via POP3, periodically. That works fine. I get very little mail in that account these days.

Then there’s my outlook.com account. I briefly considered switching to Outlook.com Premium rather than FastMail, but decided against it. Premium was a half-baked product when I first evaluated it. It appears to have gotten a little better, but I still wouldn’t recommend it. I went as far as actually setting it up with my own domain (the same one I’m using with FastMail now). That was a mistake, since there was no way to unhook it once it was set up. So, ever since then, outlook.com has assumed it was handling that domain, and that I simply had it misconfigured (rather than having purposely pointed it to FastMail). They have, finally, added the ability to unlink a custom domain, so I did that last week. And I set the account to forward to FastMail and delete forwarded messages. So I can stop worrying about that account now, I think. (I don’t actually want to delete the account, since I’m not sure if I can do that without messing up my Microsoft ID, which I do actually need, for my Office 365 subscription and other stuff.)

I also have an iCloud account. I’ve had that one since back when it was “.Mac”. (2002 maybe?) I’ve never really used it for anything other than Apple-related email. This is another one I probably can’t rid of, since it’s tied to my Apple ID and all that stuff. But I’ve now set that one to forward to FastMail, and migrated what little mail I had in there to FastMail. (i’d have a lot more mail in there if I hadn’t lost a bunch of it a few years ago, but that’s another story.)

I have a Yahoo mail address too, which is the address I give out when I need to give my address to someone I really don’t want to get email from. (For instance, most retail stores.) So that one just sits there piling up with spam from Foot Locker and other random stores I bought a pair of socks from once. I don’t really want to forward that one to FastMail, so I’ll just leave it as it is.

So now I’m largely in control of my email, with my own domain, under a paid account from a stable provider whose main business is email. (Which was the main idea of this whole thing, though I kind of lost track of that at some point.)

I’ve also added my FastMail account to Outlook 2016 on my PC and the Apple Mail client on my MacBook. I’ve been primarily interacting with FastMail through their web interface (and through their iOS app), but I thought it would be useful to link it to a couple of desktop email programs, as a bit of a backup. Since it’s an IMAP account, though, a desktop email program really doesn’t count as much of a backup. The program is just reflecting what’s on the server, so if a bunch of mail was accidentally deleted, the program would just mirror that when it synced. I’m thinking about various email archive and backup solutions, both for PC and Mac. On the PC side, MailStore Home seems to be the obvious candidate. Or I could just create a .PST archive file in Outlook and copy my old mail to it. I have a few .PST archive files already, from old POP3 accounts (from back in the good old dial-up internet days). On the Mac side, EagleFiler looks interesting, though not exactly what I want. Email Archiver Pro is also a possibility, and maybe a little closer to what I need.

 

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 13: LINQPad

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

I decided to add one more post to this series, so now it’s a baker’s dozen, I guess.

I went through a little exercise about a year ago, looking at various C# REPL options. I played around with a few options, but never really settled on one as being really useful and, for me, any better than just writing a quick console app.

Somehow, in all of that, I’d completely forgotten about LINQPad. I’d first looked at it all the way back in 2007, and was using it pretty regularly for a while. I stopped using it at some point and forgot about it. I probably stopped using it because I’d switched to Snippet Compiler. Snippet Compiler is pretty much dead now, I think. If I’d been paying attention, I would have switched back to LINQPad years ago, like this guy did.

I saw a reference to LINQPad recently, in a reddit post, and took a look at the current web site. It seems to have matured into a really great, full-featured, product. There are both free and paid versions. The free version is probably good enough for me, but the pro version is only $45 and adds some nice features.

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 12: Getting Started

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

OK, so the last day is a weird place for a “getting started” post, but I’m just about out of other stuff, and I remembered a good article on this. The .NET ecosystem is getting pretty complicated, with Visual Studio Pro vs Visual Studio Code and .NET Framework vs .NET Core and a bunch of other decision points along the way. Here’s a good blog post with a flowchart for figuring out which direction you should go in, if you’re starting a new project and you’re kind of clueless.

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 11: HttpClient

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

The standard way to call a REST API in .NET is to use HttpClient. I don’t think HttpClient existed yet when I first needed to interact with REST web services, several years ago. I remember using something called RestSharp, which, I now see, still exists and appears to still be actively maintained, with some fairly recent commits. (Including several on Christmas Eve!)

Here’s a good overview article on how to use HttpClient. And here’s an important blog post on how NOT to use it.

And here’s another interesting blog post, that goes a lot deeper into disposal and finalization with regard to HttpClient. (I have to admin that I’ve only skimmed this post. But I should really read it.)

One surprising thing I discovered while working on my current project is that HttpClient doesn’t have a PatchAsync method. The workaround is pretty easy, and can be found in that linked GitHub issue, and in a number of StackOverflow answers.

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 10: Pluralsight

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

I’ve used Pluralsight a lot over the last few months, to try and learn some of the new stuff I needed to know to get my current project done. I went ahead and renewed my membership recently, so I’m set through 2018. We’ll see how much use I get out of it in 2018.

Here are a few courses I finished recently:

That last one didn’t really have anything to do with my current project, since I used VS 2017 and not VS Code, but I was thinking about using VS Code for it, initially. I like VS Code as a tool, but, given a choice, I’ll stick with the full VS 2017.

And I’ve started this course: Web API v2 Security by Dominick Baier

I actually have a lot to learn about security and authentication/authorization for Web API, but it’s not that important for my current project, since it will only be used internally.

I have a lot of other videos bookmarked in Pluralsight. I’ll probably get around to watching a few of them, but I haven’t really been spending much time on that lately. At work, I’ve been busy programming, and at home, I’ve been busy watching Netflix and reading comic books.

2018 reading goals

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

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

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

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

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

Spillo for Pinboard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twelve Days of .NET: Day 8: Async

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

Since I’d been away from .NET for a while, I hadn’t really had an opportunity to dig into the new (to me) async stuff. Here’s a good article from 2016 that delves into it.

Six Essential Tips for Async on Channel 9 is also really good.