Category: internet

Home phone service (for old people)

Last summer, I got a notice that Verizon was going to retire the copper phone lines in my town. And, via my landlord, I’ve been told that our building apparently can’t be upgraded to fiber. So, we won’t really have an option for “traditional” home phone service anymore. I got a follow-up notice from Verizon last month. They still haven’t set a final date for retiring the copper, but it looks like it’ll happen before the end of this year. So I started looking around at alternatives. My cable company has an option for phone service, for $30/month, which is a little less than what I’m paying Verizon now. But I did a little more digging and found that Verizon has a wireless home phone option that’s only $20 a month (assuming you already have Verizon Wireless), plus $30 for the little base station that you need to buy. So that’s not a bad deal.

I know that all the young people have given up on regular home phone service. But I’m an old man, and I’ve had the same home phone number for more than twenty years, and I don’t want to give it up. So I went ahead and signed up for the Verizon wireless home phone service today. I’m hoping that the call quality is reasonable. In theory, it should be about the same as my cell phone, since it’ll be on the same network, but who knows whether the $30 device they give you affects call quality (vs an iPhone) or not.

Good Old Email

I’m a big fan of email. Say what you will, it’s still pretty darn useful. There was news this week about Google wanting to use AMP with email. I ignored this, since I don’t use Gmail anymore, and it didn’t seem like a big thing, on the surface. But there’s a post on the FastMail blog today titled Email is your electronic memory that’s pretty interesting. (FastMail is my current email provider.) They talk about how email should be “immutable.” (Apparently, the AMP thing is more about making email interactive rather than making it faster.) I haven’t thought about it too much, but the immutable nature of email is one of the most useful things about it. The web, in general, is very mutable. Web sites and web pages come and go. URLs change. But, if I’ve got an email in my mailbox, then the text (at least) of that email is fixed. I can search for it and find it and do stuff with it.

I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters. One of the things I notice in these newsletters is whether they contain actual content, or just links to content. In general, newsletters that actually contain content are more useful than those that are just link collections. Warren Ellis’ newsletter is a good example. He includes a lot of text content within the body of the newsletter. He also includes links out to other stuff, which is unavoidable, but the main content of the newsletter is actually in the newsletter, as text. The newsletter for Tor.com goes the other way. It’s mostly just a list of recent articles on the site, with short text summaries and links out to the articles. The annoying thing about that newsletter is that the links expire. They use a link redirection service that, I assume, gives them analytics about how many times the links are clicked and stuff like that. But the links expire after a month or two. And I’m usually a month or two behind in reading those emails. So, if I click any of the links, they just go to an error page. To find the article I wanted to read, I have to search for it. That actually discourages me from reading most of the articles. I have to really want to read it to bother copying and pasting the title into DuckDuckGo or Google.

I also subscribe to a bunch of newsletters from the NY Times. Those are somewhere in between; there’s usually some content right in the newsletter, but also short article summaries and links out to the Times site for the full articles. One of the best newsletters they have is the one for The Interpreter. It generally contains a good well-written article in the body of the email, plus links out to related articles at the Times site and other sites.

And I use an alert service from the Times to get email notifications when new articles are published on certain subjects that I’m interested in. I have alerts set up for articles about comic books, sci-fi books & movies, and a couple of my favorite museums. These are really useful, since they frequently surface articles that I wouldn’t have stumbled across otherwise. But I was disappointed to see today that they have apparently discontinued that service. I haven’t seen an announcement about it, but there’s no longer a link to the alerts page from the account settings, and if you go directly to the alerts page, it’s now a static page that says “The New York Times has discontinued the My Alerts feature.” So that sucks.

Prior to setting up the alerts through the NY Times site itself, I had them set up through IFTTT. They were useful, but sometimes they’d stop working for no discernible reason, and they weren’t nearly as good as the official NY Times alerts at finding relevant articles. But I guess I might have to go back to IFTTT now. We’ll see. There’s probably some other fancy way for me to get alerts about NY Times articles, through a different third-party service, but I haven’t done any research into that yet.

Anyway, this was originally going to be a short post about how I need to catch up with my newsletters and news alerts, since I’m three or four months behind now. I only just read an article about how great the Michelangelo exhibit at the Met is, and it ended two days ago, and I didn’t get a chance to see it. Oh well.

John Perry Barlow, RIP

According to a post on the EFF website, John Perry Barlow has just passed away. I have to admit that I didn’t really know much about him personally, but I admired and respected him for his role in co-founding the EFF.

I’ve been following links to a few other articles related to him.

  • The NY Times also has an obituary.
  • His 25 Principles of Adult Behavior is an interesting list and worth reading.
  • And here’s a bit from This American Life, where he talks about meeting his fiancée Cynthia, and their subsequent relationship. (Warning: it’s heartbreaking.)
  • An obituary on reason.com refers to him as “The Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace,” which sounds a bit hyperbolic to me, but I guess isn’t too far wrong.

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.

 

New SSL certificate

This blog should now have a new, slightly less fancy, SSL certificate. I had been using a $49/year certificate from 1&1, my hosting provider. It was issued via GeoTrust, and worked fine. A while back, 1&1 switched me to a slightly more expensive plan that included a free SSL cert. But of course they didn’t automatically move the paid one over. And there wasn’t an obvious way to do it from the control panel. I meant to call them about it, and didn’t get around to it before the cert renewed in June. So I had planned on doing that at some point next year before it renewed again. But I got an email this week telling me that it would renew this month. I do have an invoice from them saying that I renewed it through June 2018, so I’m not sure why they think it’s expiring now. But that finally motivated me to call them and get the cert moved over to the free one. The call was pretty simple and easy: only a short hold time, and the rep I got spoke English well, fixed things quickly, and didn’t try to sell me on any new services. Looking at the cert in Firefox now, It looks like a perfectly good DigiCert certificate, good through December 2018. Now let’s see if they really canceled the old one, or if they try to bill me for the renewal next month.

Net Neutrality

I put a little net neutrality widget from Battle For The Net on my site this morning. I’m not going to leave it up for long, since it’s kind of annoying, and I’m not sure calling Congress is going to help much at this point anyway, to be honest.

Here’s a piece by Tim Wu from today’s NY TImes. And here’s something from the EFF’s blog from yesterday. I will continue to support the EFF with occasional donations, and hope that things don’t go too far in the wrong direction over the next few years.

Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving! I’m thankful that, for now at least, I can still stream stuff like this Iggy Pop radio show from NTS without worrying about my cable company blocking it or charging me extra for it.

untangling 9000 cables

I’ve been spending some time recently working through a backlog of unread bookmarks on my Pinboard account. I don’t think I ever intended to use Pinboard as a place to stash a giant slush pile of “read it later” links, but at some point, it turned into that.

One of the articles I read today is this one, about CERN’s effort to identify and disconnect 9000 obsolete cables. That seemed somewhat apropos, though I’m not sure if I have quite that many unread links in Pinboard (though it kind of feels that way). I also read an article about Marie Kondo, which also seemed apropos. I feel like she would want me to discard any links in my Pinboard account that don’t bring me joy. (And the Kondo article I read isn’t the NY Times one I linked here, but now I can’t find the one I read…)

I did indeed discard a few links, but not that many. I’ve been thinking about what I can do to clean things up some more and maybe get some good workflows figured out, between Pinboard, Instapaper, and Evernote. I found this article from Diana Kimball interesting:

The Bookmark represents what we wish for. It’s the earliest indicator of intention, and the most vulnerable; by definition, the act of saving something for later means that whatever we hope for hasn’t happened yet. Bookmarks are placeholders for the future. By thumbing through them, we can start to see what might happen next.

That quote above is quite right. Today, I came across bookmarks about learning a new language (Portuguese or Latin?), 52 places to go in 2017 (Botswana!), and a whole bunch of bookmarks on interesting programming languages and libraries (very few of which I’ve actually followed up on). So it’s definitely an indication of intention, though often it’s purely aspirational intention.

She does a pretty good job of figuring out what differentiates services like Pinboard, Instapaper, and Evernote. And here’s another key observation:

But the most important feature of Read Later tools has never been the resulting queue; it’s the peace of mind that comes from knowing that, once you’ve saved the thing you stopped scrolling for, you’re free to move on.

I guess there is some peace of mind, though then there’s always that nagging feeling that I need to get back to the things I’ve “saved for later.” Oh well.

Getting back to the practical stuff, I’m currently using Pushpin on iOS to save bookmarks to Pinboard. It works pretty well, but the app has been neglected for a while. The developer seems to be interested in picking it up again though. A lot of people like Pinner on iOS. I’ve never tried it, but I might give it a spin one of these days. On my Mac, I just use the Pinboard web site, but I’ve been thinking about trying Spillo. It looks like it might help me get those bookmarks a bit more organized.

I’ve also been playing with LaunchBar a bit lately, trying to learn how to use some of its more esoteric features. I think that figuring out Pinboard integration might be worthwhile. There’s no built-in support for Pinboard, but there are some extensions available that add it in.

And now getting back to the more general topic, I’m starting to figure out some general workflows that I’m trying to stick with. One of them is to cut down on the number of places in which I bookmark stuff. For a while, I was bookmarking NY Times articles with the “save for later” capability built into the NY Times website and apps. But now I’m trying to stick with saving them directly to Pinboard or Instapaper. And, for stuff in Pinboard, if it’s simply a link to a book I might want to read, I usually try to find it in Amazon and add it to my Amazon wishlist, then delete the Pinboard entry. That does cause me to lose some context as to where I first stumbled across the book, and maybe why I was interested in it, but I can generally get that back if I need to.

My Amazon wishlist, of course, is also a gigantic graveyard of intentions. But I’ve found that there’s a lot of power in adding something to it. It really does clear my mind of the thing, and frees me to go on to the next thing. And any time I want to find something new to read, I can just browse though my wishlist and find something. And it’s much better than just buying a bunch of books that I’m not going to get around to reading. (I’ve got more than enough of those already.)

I also frequently do something similar with music, converting Pinboard bookmarks into Amazon wishlist entries for CDs, but I’m hitting a bit of trouble with that now, since I’ve been finding a whole lot of stuff on Bandcamp that I’m interested in, and that’s not on Amazon. So I might need to find some way to lasso a bunch of those Bandcamp bookmarks and do something with them, to get them out of the way. (Convert them into a list in Evernote maybe?) Really, if I were to purchase all the music I’ve bookmarked in Bandcamp over the last couple of years, I’d be spending hundreds of dollars and downloading more music than I could ever listen to.

One more wrinkle in all of this that I’m thinking about pursuing: maybe using IFTTT to tie some of my bookmarking into Day One somehow. Or at least find some way to get a bit more insight into my bookmarks, from a chronological standpoint. I’m not sure how much value there is in that, but I think it might be interesting to know stuff like “a year ago on this day, you bookmarked three articles on JavaScript via Pinboard and read an interview with Neil Gaiman on Instapaper.” Or maybe that would be pointless noise. I don’t know. I’m getting exhausted thinking about all this stuff now. I wrote this post to try to get some of this stuff out of my head, but it’s still all rattling around up there!

more cable TV and internet shenanigans

I got a phone call from my cable company recently; the person who called started rattling out a prepared script about some good news: they were upgrading my internet speed. I got suspicious pretty quickly, and, at some point in the script, she mentioned some additional fees. I assumed the call was a sneaky way of getting me to agree to upgrade my account, and cut her off to tell her that I was happy with my current service and didn’t want to upgrade. Then I hung up.

Afterward, I started to get a feeling that maybe I should have listened all the way through or at least tried to engage her in conversation and get some questions answered. Maybe it wasn’t a sneaky attempt to get me to agree to a service upgrade, but instead a sneaky way to try to brand a price increase as a service upgrade.

A few days later, I got an email from them, again with the “good news” that they were increasing my internet speed, to 60 Mbps. I read the fine print carefully, but there was no explicit mention of a price increase or any additional fees.

So I did some internet research, and I found a thread at DSL Reports that seemed to confirm that there would, indeed, be additional fees. So I then went and checked my most recent bill, and found the details in the fine print there. It looks like they’re going to start charging a $5/month modem rental fee, starting next month. And they’re signing me up for their “service protection plan,” for free until the end of the year, after which it’s probably $7/month. (I think I can drop that when the free period is up, at least.)

The most frustrating thing about all this is how they can’t just come out and tell you that they’re raising prices. It’s always a bunch of double-speak and shenanigans. The “service protection plan” is (of course) nonsense.  And the modem rental fee is also pretty ridiculous. (And they try to make it sound like they’re doing you a favor on it, by discounting it from the usual $10/month fee.) I might be able to dodge the modem rental fee by buying my own modem, but it’s not clear if they’d let you do that, or how much grief it would be to set up. (And I’m not really in a mood for a bunch of extra grief right now, so I’ll probably suck it up and pay the fee.)

Anyway, Cablevision/Altice just keeps getting worse, but I don’t really have any alternatives. I also found out recently that Verizon is retiring their old copper lines in my area, and that they probably wouldn’t be running new fiber into my apartment building. So I may lose the option of getting POTS from Verizon soon. (I know all the “young people” think that having a landline phone is an anachronism, but I kind of like having one.) So I might have to drop home phone service entirely, or switch to Optimum Voice, giving Altice yet another way to drain money out of my wallet. (Also, I had always assumed that Verizon FiOS was an option for me, for internet service, but from what I’m hearing, apparently it never was, since my apartment building isn’t wired for it. So I’m stuck with Altice for TV, Internet, and maybe phone service.)

Oh well. (Yes, I know that this was a pointless rant, but if I can’t rant on my own blog, where can I rant?)

Gmail Privacy

Well, this is typical. Right after I switch from Gmail to FastMail, Google announces that they’re no longer going to read your email. Privacy concerns weren’t the only reason I switched, of course. I also wanted to use my own domain, and do some other stuff that I couldn’t do with the free version of Gmail. But, really, if they announced this a few months ago, I might not have talked myself into giving up Gmail.

On a semi-related note, I’ve had to switch from DuckDuckGo back to Google at work, because we have, for some reason, blocked DuckDuckGo. I switched to DDG at home and work some time ago, partially for privacy reasons, and also because of all the crazy distracting logo graphics that Google uses. Today’s one, celebrating Oskar Fischinger, is nice, but these things are so distracting I get sucked into them and forget what I was going to search for in the first place.

online account management hall of shame

Since I’ve been changing my email address on so many different online accounts over the past few weeks, I’ve developed some strong feelings about best practices and worst practices for how companies handle this stuff.

It’s generally a good practice to send out notifications to both old and new email addresses, preferably with a confirmation link in the email sent to the new address. And it’s a good practice to avoid including any key details in the email sent to the old address, in case the user is changing the address because the old account has been compromised. That’s the way most services handle things, but I’ve seen some that send no confirmations at all, which is a little alarming, from a security standpoint.

The weirdest thing I’ve seen so far in that area is from one of my credit cards, which has sent me a daily notice that I’ve changed my email address every day for the last four days, to both addresses. I’m hoping that’ll stop eventually, but I think maybe they’re caught in a loop, and I’m going to get a notice every day for the rest of my life.

Another bad practice that a lot of companies seem to do relates to email newsletters. Changing your email address for an online account should really change over any newsletter subscriptions that are related to that account. What I’ve seen instead is usually one of the following:

  1. The systems are entirely separate, and changing the account address has no affect on newsletter subscriptions.
  2. The change automatically subscribes you to newsletters at the new address, but doesn’t stop the newsletters going to the old address.
  3. The change automatically subscribes you to newsletters at the new address, even if you’ve previously unsubscribed from newsletters at the old address.

And, also, most newsletter management systems don’t provide any way to change your email address. So you need to unsubscribe from the old address and resubscribe with the new one.

I found that the NY Times did a good job in this area, smoothly migrating over all of my newsletter subscriptions when I changed my email address on my account. The New Yorker, on the other hand, required me to unsubscribe and resubscribe to everything. And their subscription management system somehow subscribed me to all of their newsletters at my new address, so I’ve had to unsubscribe from a bunch of them.

Another bad practice is related to handling “plus alias” email addresses. These are supported in both Gmail and FastMail, and I often use them when subscribing to newsletters to make filtering a little easier. But I’ve found that a lot of online systems don’t recognize a plus sign as valid within an email address. (At this point, I could go down a rat hole, complaining about bad practices around email regex validations, but I’ll restrain myself.) It’s not so bad when the address is rejected on the front-end, but I’ve gotten into some situations where the email address is accepted initially, but then causes some problem later on down the line.

FastMail also supports something they call “subdomain addressing”, which allows you to get around the “plus sign” issue, but I didn’t want to start using that, since I didn’t want to set up a lot of stuff that would make it too hard to switch my domain from FastMail to a different provider. (Plus aliases are supported by multiple providers, including Google and ProtonMail, but I don’t think subdomain addressing is.)

Also, I just read the FastMail support doc that I linked above and noticed this statement:

If the part after the “+” matches the name of one of your folders (see below for how the matching works), the message will automatically be delivered there instead of your Inbox. You don’t even need to create an explicit rule!

That’s really cool, but I’m kind of annoyed that I didn’t know about it until now, after I’ve already set up a bunch of rules. Oh well. I’ll keep it in mind for new stuff.

Speaking of rules, I now have about sixty of them set up in FastMail. I could probably cut that down a bit by getting a little creative with them, but that’s not a ludicrous number, I think.