Author: Andrew Huey

gun control

I don’t usually post anything overtly political on this blog. And I’m still not sure if I want to; I’ve started, and then trashed, several versions of this post.

I watched several of Monday’s late night talk shows on my TiVo last night. They all, as expected, addressed the Orlando shooting. The NY Times has a good overview of the late-night response to the shooting here. One thing I noticed about all of these responses is that there was a bit of a “meta” aspect to them. They all mentioned the awful frequency with which these incidents are happening, and the standard pattern of responses that we all seem to fall into after a shooting. And they all included a call to action, though with varying levels of vagueness.

I’ve always been a proponent of reasonable gun control. And honestly I can’t even understand why anyone wouldn’t be. I can understand some difference of opinion on specifics, but I really don’t understand why anyone would think that it’s a good idea to allow anyone to buy an assault rifle, especially someone with a history of mental problems, or someone with a record of spousal abuse, or someone who has been investigated by the FBI for links to terrorism.

The NY Times has an article titled How They Got Their Guns, which they first posted last year (I think) and have updated to cover more recent shootings. The key takeaway: “At least eight gunmen had criminal histories or documented mental health problems that did not prevent them from obtaining their weapons.”

There’s been a lot of talk on TV about the NRA and about how they’ve blocked any reasonable gun control legislation from being passed over the last couple of decades. But something that occurred to me recently was that there has been very little talk about any particular organization opposing the NRA. So I used my old friend, the internet, to see if there was any actual meaningful and organized opposition to the NRA. And, of course, there is. The two main organizations seem to be the Brady Campaign and Everytown for Gun Safety.

The Brady Campaign is named for James Brady and has been around since 1974 (originally under a different name). Some useful history of the organization can be found on Wikipedia.

Everytown is a much newer organization, founded in 2014, as a combination of Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group with another group. It has some pretty high profile people on its board, including Bloomberg and Warren Buffett. Their Wikipedia page is also a good place to start for background info on them.

Both of these organizations have reasonable, moderate, agendas. I’m not entirely sure how effective they are, or how good they are at managing donations, but they both seem to be on the right path. So I guess all I’m saying here is, if you’re as bothered by all of this as I am, maybe look into supporting groups like these.

OK, that’s it for politics. I promise my next blog post will either be about comics or all the keen new Apple stuff that was announced at WWDC this week.

Mixtapes

I Made You A Mixtape — An interesting article by Federico Viticci about the evolution of the ways in which he acquires and listens to music. This is a subject I also think about a lot (probably too much).

I’ve seen Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist mentioned a few times recently, including in Federico’s article. I’m getting to the point where I’ve almost convinced myself to stop paying for Slacker and switch to Spotify, but I’m not quite there yet.

I miss mix tapes and mix CDs. In particular, I miss Joshua Benton’s old “CD Mix of the Month Club”. There was something about getting a CD in the mail from a complete stranger every month that was pretty cool. (And, likewise, in creating a CD to send off to a complete stranger.)

One of my friends from college used to send out a daily “track of the day” email to a small group. (He’d send out an email with an MP3 file attached.) That was a lot of fun too. He had pretty eclectic taste, and would send out some really interesting stuff.

I’ve been enjoying the Insomnia Radio Daily Dose podcast feed since I decided to subscribe to it a couple of months ago. That’s the closest thing to an old-fashioned mixtape for me right now. Nearly all of the music on the feed is from artists I’ve never heard of, and nearly all of it is good.

Convergence

ConvergenceConvergence by Jeff King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmm, this one definitely has a lot of flaws, but I had fun reading it. It’s a giant multiverse-spanning event comic, where the main heroes are… some folks from the New 52 Earth-Two comic, I think? So maybe you’d really like this if you’d read that comic, and had some emotional investment in those characters. Personally, I had no clue, so I wasn’t as invested in the fate of these characters as I could have been.

One of things that made me curious about this, initially, is that I saw Mike Grell’s Warlord on the cover of one of the issues. It turns out that Warlord (and his supporting characters) play a surprisingly large role in this book. (I’ve really got a soft spot in my heart for Warlord, since I read his comic when I was a D&D-obsessed teenager, and Warlord was the perfect character for a suburban NJ teenage D&D nut.)

The art on this book is good, but very busy. Lots of two-page spreads with dozens of characters hitting each other. But that’s what you expect from a book like this. The book was originally released weekly, so it’s “art by committee.” Good, but in a generic way. (With some Andy Kubert art in one issue that stands out as better than the rest, in my opinion.)

So, if you’re looking for a big, splashy, event book, here it is. It’s fun to read, reasonably well-written, and reasonably well-drawn.

View all my reviews

Private Internet Access VPN

About a year ago, I signed up for a one-year subscription to Private Internet Access VPN. I had previously been using iPredator, but switched for a few reasons.

I don’t use it often, but it’s always worked fine when I do use it. And it works on my PC, Mac, and my iOS devices. I use the OpenVPN client on Windows and iOS and Viscosity on Mac. PIA has its own client for PC, Mac, and iOS, but I like using a standard third-party client instead. (I might try their iOS client at some point, since OpenVPN on iOS is a little wonky.)

Things have worked out well enough that I wanted to renew the subscription, so I had to enter new credit card details, since I’d used a virtual card number the first time. I almost gave up on that, though, since I couldn’t get their credit card update form to work. I opened a support ticket with them, and they gave me the usual advice to clear cache and cookies, but also to fill in the form by hand. Previously, I’d been using 1Password to fill in my card info and address. Well, it worked after clearing cache and cookies and filling in the form by hand, but it was a pain. When you’ve added so much awful client-side code to a simple form that it won’t work without forcing the user to jump through a bunch of hoops, you’re doing it wrong.

But hey, they were helpful, and now I’m signed up for another year.

NY Times news

Here’s a couple of recent articles about the NY Times:

Can Anyone Save the New York Times from Itself?

New York Times ‘Exploring’ Ad-Free Digital Subscription

I’m still paying for my (digital) NY Times subscription, and still using an ad-blocker on their site. Their site is definitely a mess without ad-blocking. I don’t know if I’d pay extra for an ad-free subscription, but I don’t mind paying in general.

lots of comics

I’ve been reading a lot of comic books lately. (I’ve noticed that I go through phases with my reading; sometimes it’s a lot of comics, sometimes mystery novels, sometimes New Yorker articles, and so on. Right now it’s comics. But I digress.)

Marvel and Comixology ran a promotion a few years ago where they gave away a whole bunch of #1 issues, and I snagged about 200 individual issues from that. I’ve dipped into them occasionally, but recently I’ve been reading a lot of them. (For a while, it was hard to keep track of which of these I’d read and which I hadn’t, but I’m now using the new “archive” feature in Comixology to remove the ones I’ve read from my library.) Most recently, I read quite a few X-Men issues. It’s a weird experience, just reading a bunch of #1 issues from various X-Men series and mini-series, outside of any particular context. My main takeaway from that is that X-Men continuity is so convoluted that there’s really no point in paying attention to it at all. You really need to not think about it, and just take any individual story on its own merits.

This article about Brian Bendis’ All-New X-Men title is a great example of how insane it is to try to make sense of X-Men continuity. This is the series where Bendis brought the original young X-Men from the past into the present, where they (apparently) coexist with their present-day selves. (My head hurts.)

DC isn’t much better, of course. I recently read the new Rebirth Special, and, while it’s pretty well done, I think it would be impenetrable to someone who hasn’t followed DC continuity for years. I also recently read Ambush Bug: Year None, which (though it’s almost a decade old now) works surprisingly well as a companion to the Rebirth Special. (And makes almost as much sense as some of DC’s and Marvel’s recent output…)

I also have a few issues of Convergence in my reading pile, which was one of last year’s big “event” comics from DC. I picked them up on a whim, and they’ve just sat in the pile for the last year. I may move them to the top of the pile, since I seem to be in the right mood for this kind of story right now. If they’re any good, I suppose I’ll pick up the trade so I can read the rest of the story.

And I also intend on reading Grant Morrison’s Multiversity at some point, but I think that one’s going to be a doozy, so I’m not in any hurry to pick that up.

I will also admit to being curious about Civil War II. I picked up issues zero and one at the comics shop, and I’ll probably read them soon. I don’t know if I’ll convince myself to pick up the remaining issues as they come out, but if it’s good, I’ll at least pick up the trade when it’s released.

Whew. I can already see the point, two or three months from now, where I get tired of reading about guys in spandex hitting each other and switch back to reading Agatha Christie novels or something like that.

A Busy Saturday

I bought a new mattress from Macy’s last week, and it was delivered today. My old mattress was about ten years old, so it was time for a new one. And my back has been hurting more than usual lately, so I’m hoping this will help.

After looking at some fancy new internet mattresses, I decided to stick with a traditional mattress from a plain old “bricks and mortar” retailer. I went with a pretty middle-of-the-road mattress; nothing too crazy. I did a fairly ridiculous amount of internet research before finally giving up and just buying something that Macy’s had on sale for Memorial Day, and that wasn’t too expensive, and that felt right when I tried it out.

I also had to go to the dentist this morning to get a filling replaced. (I was originally supposed to get that done last week, but he had an equipment malfunction, so we had to reschedule it.)

So I’ve got my new mattress, a fixed-up tooth, and my laundry is all done. And the novocaine is wearing off now. So I’m going to amuse myself with comic books for a while, then maybe think about doing something else useful, like grocery shopping.

WordPress backup

Not long after I first moved this blog to WordPress, I installed the UpdraftPlus plugin for site backups. I’ve been using the free version for the last couple of years, and it works fine. I have it configured to simply back up to local storage on my web host, and I hadn’t really thought about it much since I set it up. But of course backing up files to the same place that’s hosting them isn’t a great system. It’ll protect me against some possible issues, but it won’t be much help if something happens with my web host and I lose access to my account, or if someone breaks in to my account and deletes or scrambles all my files.

UpdraftPlus supports copying its backup files to DropBox, Google Drive, or several other possible offsite destinations. I don’t know why I’d never set this up, but I decided that it was past time I did that, so I started messing around. I found that the DropBox support was easy to set up, but just didn’t work for me. It would partially copy the backup to DropBox, then it would get stuck and never finish. This has got to be some kind of configuration issue on my host; Updraft is a pretty mature plugin and it gets updated frequently, so if there was some general issue with Updraft’s DropBox support, they would have fixed it.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the DropBox issue, so I thought I’d just try Google Drive instead. The Google Drive support requires getting an API key from Google. Updraft’s documentation has a good write-up on how to do that, but Google has changed their interface for doing that, so the write-up didn’t quite match the interface. I probably could have stumbled my way through it, but I decided to punt on that too, since there was a good chance that whatever issue was causing the DropBox backup to be so slow would affect Google Drive too.

So I went looking for another alternative. Updraft supports several other services, including OneDrive, which would have been my preferred alternative anyway. But OneDrive support isn’t included in the free version, and I didn’t want to pay for it, only to find out that it had the same problem as DropBox.

In the end, I decided to continue letting Updraft back up only to local storage, and then copy the backups to my Mac with a script that I could run locally. After flailing around a bit with a few options, I settled on using rsync. I’ve always connected to my web host with SSH, and rsync uses SSH to connect, so that worked fine.

One other related thing that I had never gotten around to setting up is key-based auth for SSH. I’d simply been connecting to my host with my user name and password. And, embarrassingly, I’d actually had a pretty simple password on my account until recently. I set a more complex password recently, so getting the public/private key auth working was something I really needed to do too. Well, it turns out that wasn’t nearly as complicated as I (for some reason) thought it would be. I just had to generate a key on my Mac, and then copy it into an authorized_keys file on my host.

I have Updraft configured to send me an email every time it finishes a backup. (I do weekly backups.) So now, every time I get that email, I just need to run a shell script that runs rsync and copies the backup down to my Mac. Easy enough. A fully-automated solution would be better, and maybe someday I’ll talk myself into paying for UpdraftVault or VaultPress, but I should be fine for now.

Memorial Day

I usually wind up writing a blog post on Memorial Day, even if it’s just a short one, since Memorial Day is kind of an enforced holiday for me. The Tour of Somerville route completely encircles my apartment building, so my choices on Memorial Day are limited. I can’t get in my car and go anywhere, so I generally choose to stay home and enjoy the race. (Though sometimes I’ll hop on a train and go into New York or something like that.) For a number of years, I was really into the race, and had a lot of fun with it. For the last few years, though, I’ve been somewhat jaded about it, opting to get out of Somerville more often than I used to.

I’m kind of enthusiastic about it again this year though. I wore my 2001 race t-shirt yesterday, and I’m wearing my 2004 t-shirt today. (I was looking to link the “2001” text to a blog post, but I only started blogging in June 2001, so I guess that t-shirt is older than this blog, which is really saying something.) I haven’t bought a race t-shirt in years, but I’m going to look for one today. I guess part of the reason I haven’t been buying them is that, in recent years, I would have needed an XXL. But I’m now safely back in the XL range, and could probably even fit into a regular L, assuming they haven’t switched to American Apparel shirts or some other weirdly-sized hipster brand.

They canceled the Memorial Day parade this morning, due to the rain, so it’s still really quiet out. But the race is still on, so things should start picking up in an hour or two. Meanwhile, I’m reading Matt Fraction’s Defenders run, which is fun (though I’m not sure I like his take on Doctor Strange).

Spoiler Alert

When I was a kid, the thought that, someday, plot developments in Marvel and DC comics would be discussed in the New York Times would have seemed completely ludicrous. Yet here we are. Not only do we have a Times article discussing two comic books that were released just yesterday, but it’s also giving away major plot points that I’d rather not have known until I had a chance to read the comics in question.

Reddit’s /r/comicbooks is trying not to give anything away to anyone that hasn’t read the books yet. I’m used to being careful on Reddit (and CBR and Newsarama and Bleeding Cool and so on), but do I really need to avoid reading the NY Times right after a big Marvel or DC event comic comes out? (And apparently I need to avoid the WSJ too!)

I wasn’t planning on picking up the new Captain America series anyway, so I’m not really bothered by the spoiler on that one. In fact, it’s made me even less likely to pick it up, so I’m kind of glad about that.

But I was actually planning on picking up Rebirth. I still will, of course. I’m not sure if I’m really in favor of the particular plot development in question, but it’s interesting enough that I’d like to read the book. (Note that I mentioned the plot point here without actually spoiling it…)