Author: Andrew Huey

surprise Anniversary Update

Over the past weekend, I blogged about trying to get a good backup done on my PC, so I could take a shot at installing the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. To make a long story short, I did get a good full image backup done on Sunday.

So my plan was to maybe try to install the update next weekend. I had expected the update to download and install on its own at some point over the last couple of months, but it never did, so I figured I’d have to do it manually, maybe after uninstalling my anti-virus software, or something like that. Well, I turned on my PC tonight, to check something in Quicken, and I got a pop-up saying that Windows would be restarted for software updates soon. It didn’t really say what the updates were, so I figured they were just normal run-of-the-mill updates. But now, seeing how long it’s taking and what kind of messages are appearing, I’m pretty sure it’s trying to install the Anniversary Update.

I wish Windows 10 would be a bit more transparent about this stuff. The pop-up I got didn’t make any mention of the fact that the updates it wanted to install would tie up my PC for… however long this is going to take. It looks like it might be quite a while. And if I hadn’t gotten that backup done, I’d now be installing a major OS update with no backup to fall back on, if something goes wrong. (And I guess I’m not going to get a chance to check on that thing in Quicken tonight either.)

another migraine

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

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

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

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

upgrades and backups and stuff

I decided to spend some time today messing around with my desktop PC and my MacBook. Specifically, I wanted to get full backups done for both of them, then upgrade the MacBook to macOS Sierra, and apply the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on the desktop PC.

I succeeded on the MacBook. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to update an image backup I made a few months ago. I also ran a Time Machine backup. Then, I downloaded and installed Sierra. Downloading it took quite a long time. The update itself was pretty quick. Maybe a bit less than an hour. I’m not seeing anything really new or exciting in Sierra. I didn’t turn on the new iCloud File Sync feature, mostly because I don’t need it, but also because it scares the crap out of me. I really don’t want my OS to randomly start deleting files off my hard drive, thanks. Even just the purgeable storage thing is a bit scary. Please don’t tell me that there’s free space on my hard drive, when it’s not actually free! Anyway, it’s all working fine.

On the PC side, I didn’t get very far. I tried making a new image backup with Macrium Reflect, but it ended in failure twice. I think the external drive I’ve been using for backups may be failing. I started a full chkdsk on it, and that’s been running for hours. Depending on what that reveals, I may run out to Costco tomorrow and pick up a new external drive, or order one from Newegg. The drive in question is probably ten years old, and it’s just a 1 TB drive, so it’s only big enough to hold a single image backup. So replacing it with a 4 TB drive might be a good idea regardless. Oh, and my other external drive, that I’ve been using for Windows File History backups, is also a bit flaky. I keep having to unplug it and plug it back in to get Windows to recognize it. (Other than that it seems to work fine.) So maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to replace that too. Heck, if I get a 4 TB external drive, I can partition it into two volumes, and use one for image backups and the other for File History. Of course, that leaves me with a single point of failure, so maybe that’s not a good idea.

Archbishop Peter L. Gerety Dies at 104

…he had erased a multimillion-dollar deficit in the archdiocese, in part by selling a lavish archbishop’s mansion in a gated community in West Orange and settling instead in a rectory in the North Ward of Newark, a city still scarred by the race riots of the 1960s.

Source: Peter L. Gerety, Oldest Archbishop Who Preached Social Justice, Dies at 104

I kind of remember Archbishop Gerety from back when I was a kid. He probably came to our parish once or twice. I didn’t know much about him then, but, reading his obituary, he sounds like the kind of archbishop the Church can be proud of. (Unlike this guy and his fancy retirement house.)

Not at NYCC

New York Comic Con started today, and there’s already a lot of buzz about it on Twitter and elsewhere. Even The New Yorker is getting in on the action.

I missed out on getting a full four-day pass this year, so I decided to skip the con entirely. (I could probably have gotten a single-day ticket for Sunday, but I wasn’t really that interested.) But right now, I’m thinking it would have been nice to have gotten that four-day ticket, and have taken today and tomorrow off, and have a nice four-day weekend in the city. On the other hand, I’m suffering from some backache and headache issues right now, so it’s probably for the best that I didn’t spend the day trudging around the Javits Center, carrying a backpack full of comics.

There’s a lot of stuff on sale right now at Comixology, related to NYCC, which you can see at this Oktoberfest page. I will likely be spending some money on digital comics this weekend, though I probably shouldn’t. But hey, it’s the best of both worlds, right? Cheap comics, and I don’t have to carry them around with me all day.

Amazon Prime Reading

Amazon seems to be rolling out a bunch of random stuff to Prime members lately. I blogged about Audible Channels last week. Now, they’ve started up something called Amazon Prime Reading. This is a service that lets Prime members read a variety of books, comics, and magazines for free.

This is distinct from the Kindle Owners Lending Library, which is available only to Kindle owners, and doesn’t require Prime membership. And from Kindle Unlimited, which lets you read an unlimited number of books (from a broad but still somewhat limited selection) for $10 per month (including audiobooks). And also from Kindle First, which lets Prime members “buy” one book per month for free from a selection of six or so new releases. It’s all very confusing.

I’ve used the Kindle “lending library” once or twice. It’s not easy to find books that are part of that program, and there’s not really much of a selection. I’ve been getting a book from Kindle First every month since the program launched, but, until recently, had just been letting them pile up. I decided to read a few recently, and I was pleasantly surprised. There are some pretty good books in there. (There’s probably a lot of dreck too, but I haven’t hit any yet.) I’ve never been tempted to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. I already “own” plenty of ebooks that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, so there’s no reason to pay a subscription fee to get access to more.

So I guess it’s a good thing that there are more and more ways to get access to free reading material. But I’ve got plenty to read, regardless. Looking at Goodreads, I see that I’ve got 179 books currently tagged as “to read.” That ought to be enough to keep me busy for quite a while.

Post 2001

I have nothing much to say here, just that I noticed that yesterday’s post was #2000. So this is #2001. I started blogging in the year 2001, and (for some reason) never stopped. So here we are. Post #1000 happened in September 2007. At that point, I was still using Blogger. I switched to WordPress in 2014, and I’ve been happy with that decision, though I never had any big problem with Blogger.

I’m not in the mood for a lot of self-reflection this morning; I just wanted to make note of the milestone. I do have a lot of things I want to blog about though, so I’m going to get on with that.

Cable TV

A few days after blogging about how I was likely to keep paying for TiVo and cable TV, I got a letter in the mail from my cable company. I’ve been on an old, discontinued, plan for years. They’re finally dropping that plan and forcing me to change to a new one. To start off, they’re giving me a slightly better plan at a slightly lower cost, with Starz thrown in for free, so that’s good. But after a year, that offer ends, and I’d presumably have to start paying the regular price for that plan, and I’d lose Starz. So I’m not sure what I’ll do a year from now. Next October may be finally time to drop cable entirely.

In the meantime, though, my new plan includes BBC America and Disney XD, which weren’t on my old plan. This means that I can watch stuff like Doctor Who, Dirk Gently, and Orphan Black on BBCA. And I can catch Star Wars Rebels and maybe the new Milo Murphy’s Law (with Weird Al!) on Disney XD. So that’s pretty cool.

Audible Channels

I’ve never had a subscription to Audible, but I have a few books in my Audible account that I’ve gotten for free over the years. I saw that the audiobook for Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts was on sale for $3.95 yesterday, and it looked interesting, so I went ahead and bought it. I’ve read and enjoyed other stuff by Mike Carey, and this book seems to be well-reviewed, so I’m hoping it will be good. I usually try to buy audiobooks only if I can get them in DRM-free format, either on CD or as MP3s, but I’ll buy a DRM’d audiobook if it’s cheap enough.

After buying it, I opened up the Audible app on my iPhone, with the idea that maybe I’d go ahead and download it. It wasn’t logged in to my account, and I get the feeling that I hadn’t actually launched Audible since getting my iPhone SE earlier this year. That’s not surprising, since I haven’t been listening to any audiobooks lately.

After I logged in, I got a popup screen, letting me know about Audible Channels for Prime, a free service from Audible that lets Amazon Prime members stream and download a bunch of podcast-like material. There are some original series on there that look interesting (including stuff from Jon Ronson and Eugene Mirman), along with some stuff that’s already available elsewhere (including most of the podcasts from WNYC). I don’t think I’d want to use the Audible app to listen to podcasts that I can get elsewhere; as an app, it’s not going to be nearly as good as Overcast. But the original content looks like it’ll be worth delving into.

They’re also making a limited number of audiobooks free for Prime members, but they’re streaming-only and can’t be downloaded. There’s not much there, but there are a few interesting books that I wouldn’t mind listening to.

Poking around in my Audible account reminded me that I never finished listening to Metatropolis, which I got for free from Audible back in 2010. I remember that I’d listened to the first two of the five stories in that book, so I started in on the third last night.

I may start listening to more audiobooks and audio dramas again. It’s a good change of pace from reading regular books (both print and ebooks), and it’s much easier on the eyes.

TiVo Bolt, second year

Evernote just reminded me that my free year of TiVo service is just about up, so I need to decide if I want to pay $150 for a second year, or trade in my TiVo Bolt for something else.

I bought the Bolt about a year ago. The first year’s service was free. After that, it’s $150 per year. That seems a little steep, considering it’s mostly just paying for the TV guide service. After a year with the Bolt, though, I don’t think I’d ever want to go back to the cable company DVR. It’s just so much better.

I might also consider ditching the Bolt in favor of the Bolt+, which is a pretty nice upgrade, but totally unnecessary for me. It’s got a larger hard drive, but I’ve never run out of room on the Bolt’s drive. And it’s got six tuners instead of four, but I’ve never needed to use more than two or three tuners at a time.

I’m not particularly worried about TiVo getting bought out by Rovi. That happened almost six months ago, and there have been no issues with the service since then. It looks to me like that went smoothly and TiVo is continuing to function as always. So I’ll stick with the Bolt and let them charge me $150 for a second year.

I’ve also thought about ditching cable TV entirely, of course, but there’s still enough interesting on to make it worthwhile. I am, though, thinking about dropping Netflix. They raised prices last year for new members, but held the price down for existing members for a year. I just got the notice that my year is up, and my price will go up to $10 per month. With the new TV season starting up, I probably don’t need Netflix right now anyway, though I was looking forward to Luke Cage. There is also some other good stuff coming to Netflix this month, but I don’t think I really need it. I heard someone on a podcast mention recently that they subscribe to Netflix only during the summer months, and cancel it in the fall. That might not be a bad plan. Cancel Netflix, then resubscribe when Agents of SHIELD, The Flash, and Supergirl go into reruns. (Speaking of which, I need to remember to check my TiVo OnePass for Supergirl and see if it’s still valid, since the show has switched networks!)