Category: software

PDF software and related rabbit holes

The Pathfinder stuff that I’ve been blogging about so much lately sent me down a couple of rabbit holes related to PDF software, so I thought I’d write that up here, for my own reference, if for no other reason.

First rabbit hole: form-fillable PDFs. The Pathfinder character sheet is a PDF file with fields you can fill in. Then you can save it and/or print it out. My initial attempt to fill it out was on my PC, using the software I’ve been using as my default PDF reader for the last few years, Sumatra PDF. Sumatra is a great lightweight PDF reader, but it doesn’t handle PDF forms. To make a long story short, I gave in and installed Acrobat Reader. I’ve been using it as my default PDF reader on my PC for a few weeks now, and I’m still not a fan. After installing it, I figured out that the PDF reader built into Firefox handles PDF forms reasonably well, so I could have skipped Acrobat Reader and just used Firefox, but I guess I’ll keep Reader installed for now.

I also found out that Reader won’t let me fill in a couple of the fields on the character sheet, but Firefox has no problem with them, so that’s weird, and another reason to give up on Reader, maybe.

On the Mac side, I’ve been using PDF Expert as my default PDF reader for several years. I bought a license for it some years back. But it’s now subscription-based, so my license doesn’t let me use the full feature set of the current version. Specifically, it apparently won’t let me edit the character sheet.

Preview on macOS is actually a pretty full-featured PDF viewer, and includes the ability to fill out forms. So I’m thinking about giving up on PDF Expert, since Preview seems to do everything I need.

On the iOS / iPadOS side of things, I’ve been using GoodReader as my PDF viewer for years, and I’m still sticking with it. I paid for it a long time ago, and it still works fine for me. I’ve experimented with some other options, but GoodReader always seems better.

On a related rabbit hole, I bought an Elfquest Humble Bundle today. I’ve been a fan of Elfquest since the original series was published, back in the 80s. I stopped following it at some point in the 90s, when they were publishing a bunch of stuff that wasn’t actually written/drawn by the original creators, Wendy and Richard Pini. I’m aware that, at some point, Dark Horse got the rights to reprint the older stuff, and that they were printing some new stuff too, but I didn’t pick up any of it. So this Humble Bundle was a chance to get DRM-free copies of all the older stuff, and get the newer stuff too. As with all this Humble stuff, I’m not sure when/if I’ll get around to reading any of it. But I have all the PDFs on my hard drive, for whenever I’m ready.

Humble is sometimes weird about the quality and size of the files they distribute. All of the Elfquest files are PDFs. Some of them are reasonably-sized, but there’s one 4 GB file and one 5 GB file. I’m pretty sure that both could be much smaller, so that sent me off down another rabbit hole, trying to figure out a good way to shrink them. Acrobat Reader won’t let you shrink PDFs without subscribing to Acrobat Pro for $20/month, so I’m not doing that. Ditto for PDF Expert on the Mac side. I’d need a subscription to compress a PDF.

Preview on macOS does allow you to compress PDFs, and I ran it on the 4 GB one and that got it down to 400 MB. But the image qualify went down noticeably. So I’ve been looking around at other options. ACBR Comic Book Reader for Windows lets you convert PDFs to CBR/CBZ files and (probably) compress them. But it choked on the 4 GB PDF and wouldn’t open it.

I thought maybe I’d look at PDFpen for Mac. That’s now owned by Nitro. You can buy it for $130, as a one-time purchase, no subscription. That’s not bad, I guess, but I don’t really know if I need it, or if it would do better at compressing the PDF than Preview did. Maybe I’ll download a trial, if I get bored/curious.

Nitro is also included in SetApp, which is a multi-app subscription for the Mac, for $10/month. I’ve thought about getting SetApp before, but there was never enough in it to entice me. I might be tempted, if there was something in there that could replace Evernote for me. And it looks like there might be, though neither option (NotePlan or Ulysses) has a Windows client. I’ve been thinking about getting off Evernote, since I’m not sure how much I trust their new owner. They just laid off more than 100 people. Anyway, the Evernote thing is yet another rabbit hole, and I probably shouldn’t go too far down that one yet. My Evernote subscription renewed in January, so I don’t need to worry about it again this year, really.

Back to the PDF thing: I still haven’t found a good way to compress those giant Elfquest PDFs, but I’m probably not going to try to read them any time soon, so I don’t necessarily have to worry about it right now. (And the need to compress them at all is based on a guess that GoodReader on my iPad would choke on a 4 GB PDF, but maybe it wouldn’t.)

more on Twitter and Mastodon (sorry)

Twitter continues to shoot itself in the foot. I tried using Twitterrific on my iPad on Friday morning, and found that it wasn’t working. It didn’t work on my iPhone either. I figured it was Elon-related, whatever it was. Turns out that Elon has intentionally shut down third-party Twitter clients. Or at least that’s the rumor. There’s been no “official” announcement from Twitter. There’s a blog post from the Twitterrific developer here. Either way, assuming this doesn’t get reversed, I guess this means I’m pretty much done with Twitter. Twitter is only usable (for me) with a third-party client like Twitterrific.

So I’ve rearranged the home screens on my iPhone and iPad to move Twitterrific off to a sub-folder. And I need to remember to cancel my subscription to the Twitterrific app at some point, though I guess if Twitter doesn’t reverse their shutdown, the app developer will probably shut down the app and it’ll get canceled automatically. I’ll be sad to see it go. I’ve been using it since at least 2017.

I thought about just putting the Mastodon app where the Twitterrific app used to be, but then I thought that maybe I should rearrange things a bit more. So, on my iPhone, I now have the NY Times and Washington Post apps in a more prominent spot, and I’m going to try to click on those more often when I’m mindlessly futzing with my phone.

I recently listened to an Ezra Klein podcast, talking about “deep reading.” I’ve been thinking about attention spans and media consumption and stuff like that again a lot lately. Of course, I’ve been thinking about that stuff since at least 2008. And I’m still struggling with it. I think I have another blog post in my head on that subject, but I’m going to resist writing it right now.

Some software notes

Two weeks in, and we’re still cleaning up after the security incident at work over the July 4th weekend. I’ve gone into the office most days since then, and I think all that extra exposure to other humans has gotten me sick. I’ve been mostly useless since Friday. I’m hoping I can go back to my usual schedule this week (M/W/F at home, Tue/Thu in the office). Or maybe work from home all this week, if I don’t start feeling better by Tuesday.

Anyway, all the security shake-ups over the last two weeks have gotten me thinking about some of my software choices, and I thought I’d write up some notes on that.

LastPass vs 1Password

I’ve been using 1Password for my personal password storage since 2014, and I’m still happy with it. But I just (finally) got added to our company’s corporate LastPass account, so I can use that for work. And that comes with a free personal LastPass Families account, so I went ahead and signed up for one.

Short version: I don’t think I’ll be using it for anything. I think it’s probably fine for casual users who need a simple password management solution, but it’s not nearly as good as 1Password. I guess my biggest gripe with it is that it’s very much oriented towards in-browser use. There’s a native Windows 10 client, but it’s very limited and just not very good at all. Again, I think it’s probably fine for a lot of people, but it’s just not good enough for a power-user like me.

LINQPad

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking about upgrading my LINQPad Pro license. I went ahead and did that, and upgraded to the “Premium” version. The NuGet integration works well.  Access to NuGet is still blocked from my developer VM, so I can’t use it there yet, but I can use it on my desktop PC, where I’ve also installed it. I haven’t tried the debugger yet, but I’m curious to see how well that works.

And the dev VM is still so locked down that I couldn’t actually activate the new license over the internet, but the developer provides a way to get around that, so that was appreciated.

TextExpander vs AutoHotKey

On Windows, I generally use AutoHotKey for my keyboard macros and text expansions. I’ve been using it since 2007. I don’t have the actual AHK product installed on any of my work machines, but I have a compiled script that I do run on my work machines. It was starting to look like that might be an issue last week, due to some new security software they were running on our machines. It now looks like it’s OK, but that got me briefly looking at other solutions that might work, and which I might be able to get whitelisted at work.

So I went back to TextExpander, which I used to use on my Mac, circa 2014–2016. I stopped using TextExpander when they went to a subscription model, since I was having some trouble with it anyway, and it didn’t seem to be worth the money. But that was a while ago, and they now have a Windows client too, so it seemed to be worth looking into it again.

I signed up for a 30-day trial and installed it on my personal desktop PC and MacBook. It works fine, and does some interesting stuff, but it still has some of the same issues with secure input fields that it had when I last used it. That’s not really TextExpander’s fault, but it does limit its usefulness on the Mac. On Windows, it seems to work well, but it’s not nearly as powerful as AutoHotKey. (Or at least it doesn’t seem to be.)

On the Mac side, this has got me thinking again that I should really try Keyboard Maestro. It looks to me like it’s closer to what I want than TextExpander is, and it’s a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Maybe when things have settled down a bit, and I’m feeling better, I’ll finally give it a try.

I still have some time on the 30-day TextExpander trial, so I’m going to continue messing around with it. Maybe I’ll figure out how to do some fancier stuff with it, and/or how to work around some of its limitations. I really like the idea of having a single macro program that works across Mac and Windows, so that’s a motivation not to give up on it yet.

 

MacBook issues, browsers, and bookmarks

I did a nuke & pave on my MacBook Air a few weeks ago. My main reason for doing that was to see if it would clear up an occasional problem I have where the machine crashes if I’ve been using it for more than an hour or so on battery power. Well, it crashed again yesterday, so clearly the nuke & pave didn’t cure the problem.

One other possibility I’ve considered is that maybe it’s Firefox’s fault. The crash has always happened when I’m watching a video in Firefox. That doesn’t necessarily mean much though, since watching long YouTube videos is about the only thing I’d do on the MacBook that would stress the battery for a good bit of time. Regardless, I decided to try switching my default browser on the Mac to Safari, and see how that works out.

I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since before it was Firefox. And I still like it, and use it as my default browser on both Windows and Mac. It’s been losing market share to Chrome though, and now has only a tiny sliver of the browser market. So maybe it’s time to give something else a try, at least temporarily. Safari is supposed to be very efficient in terms of battery use on the Mac, so maybe, if my underlying problem is the battery, switching to Safari will fix it.

Switching browsers, of course, means that I need to try to replicate my Firefox setup in Safari, to the extent that I can. A few of my Firefox extensions are available for Safari, but some aren’t. The two big ones are probably uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. But there are alternatives, and I’ll play around with some of those.

Getting my Firefox bookmarks into Safari wouldn’t be difficult if I was just switching over entirely, and didn’t care about keeping them up to date in both browsers. But I want to keep using Firefox on my PC, so I really want to keep the bookmarks in sync. The best way I could find to do that was via iCloud for Windows. This article describes the process of setting it up and enabling bookmark sync between iCloud and Firefox. I went ahead and did that, and it seems to work OK. So now I have Firefox Sync keeping my bookmarks in sync between my desktop and laptop PCs, iCloud sync keeping my Safari bookmarks in sync between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and iCloud for Windows bridging Safari and Firefox. I think that, even if I decide to switch back to Firefox on the Mac, I may keep iCloud for Windows running, just so I can have the same bookmarks across iOS, Mac, and Windows. (I’ve always used Safari on iOS, but never really did much with bookmarks there.)

Combining my Safari/iCloud bookmarks with my Firefox bookmarks left me with quite a jumble of duplicates. I had, at some point in the distant past, used Safari as my default Mac browser, and had a bunch of very old bookmarks in there that I’d never cleaned up. And I had a bunch of out-of-date bookmarks in Firefox too, that I’d just been ignoring. So I spent some time this morning trying to clean up my bookmarks. I did that in Firefox on my PC, and hoped it would sync back to iCloud with no problems. So far, it seems to have done that.

Browser bookmarks, in general, aren’t as important as they used to be. But I’m still a weirdo who wants a nice selection of useful bookmarks organized in a sensible hierarchy. I’ll see how my current setup works over time, but I’m also considering some alternatives. On the Mac, I’ve been curious about URL Manager Pro. That might be a good home for my bookmarks. There’s no PC version, but I could just get them over to the PC via iCloud for Windows, I think.

I currently use Pinboard as a place to dump miscellaneous bookmarks, but that’s not a carefully organized collection of stuff that I can traverse easily. I’ve got over 18,000 bookmarks in there right now. So I can’t really use that for my browser bookmarks. There’s a similar service called Raindrop that seems to allow you to apply a bit more organization than Pinboard does. Specifically, it allows you to use both tags (like Pinboard) and something they call “collections”, which can be nested. So that makes it seem like I could combine my carefully organized Firefox/Safari bookmarks and my Pinboard bookmarks into one service. I’d keep the stuff I use regularly in top-level collections, and toss all of the random old Pinboard links into a “miscellaneous” collection or something like that.

Well, anyway, this is mostly just me messing around on a Sunday morning. It’s now almost noon, and I haven’t done much else with the day, other than organize bookmarks. But, hey, it’s relaxing.

MacBook Air nuke and pave

I’d been thinking about doing a “nuke and pave” on my MacBook for a while now. The machine is close to four years old. I bought it in May 2018. I didn’t really want to buy it, but my previous MacBook had died, and I wasn’t quite ready to give up on macOS entirely, so I needed something. It’s served me reasonably well over the last few years, I guess. It’s only got a 250 GB drive, which has been a frequent problem, but I’ve managed.

Anyway, it’s recently developed a problem where it crashes after I’ve been using it on battery power for more than an hour or so. The battery level will still show at around 80%, but the thing will just crash with no warning. I tried some of the standard troubleshooting steps for stuff like this, but didn’t come up with anything that helped. I had AppleCare+ on it, but that’s expired now. I thought about calling Apple about it anyway, and seeing if maybe a battery replacement would fix the issue, or if they had any other ideas. I also thought about just giving up on it and getting a new MacBook.

But, first, I decided to try a clean install of macOS, and see if that would help. I’ve got no particularly good reason to think that it will, but it’s a useful exercise either way, since it forces me to make some backups, and clean some stuff up, which I would have needed to do anyway, if I was going to either send it in for service or replace it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, so I had to do some web searching first. I found a page on the MacPaw site that I used as a guide. (MacPaw has a bunch of how-to guides on their site, which they use mostly to advertise their products, but, unlike other sites that do this, the guides are actually helpful.)

I thought it might be useful to detail some of the stuff I did for this, both for my own reference and for anyone else that might be looking to do the same thing.

I started out by creating a bootable Monterey installer. I didn’t have any USB sticks that were big enough, but I had a 128 GB MicroSDXC card, so I used that. (I’d bought that card in 2018 with the vague idea that I’d stick it in my MacBook and leave it there, and use it as a secondary hard drive. But it sticks out too much, so I gave up on that idea. It’s just been sitting in my desk since then.)

I also did a couple of backups: one final Time Machine backup, and a Carbon Copy Cloner backup. There actually aren’t a lot of files on the MacBook that I need to worry about. Most everything is in iCloud or OneDrive or some other cloud service now. For the files that I knew I was going to want to copy back after the install, I saved them to the SD card.

I then booted from the card, wiped the drive with Disk Utility, then did a clean install. It went smoothly. I then proceeded to reinstall software, copy files over, and so on. I’ve been working on this, on and off, for about a week. The machine is usable now, and I just have a few things left to set up, and some new backups to do.

I’m a little surprised at some of the decisions I made as part of this process. There are a lot of things that I would have done differently in the past. Old-timers like me might find some of this interesting:

  • I gave up on my Music / iTunes library entirely. Now that I’m using Apple Music, it’s all in the cloud. And I have a local copy of all my “owned” music on my desktop PC. So I didn’t bother trying to move any of the local files from my old install over to the new one. That seems to have worked fine, and cleared up a lot of disk space. (I probably still had some TV shows and movies in my library, which really didn’t need to be there, in addition to all the local music files.)
  • I’m using iCloud Photo Library now, so I decided to just start from scratch on that too. This was a bigger deal, since I don’t have that library backed up on my PC. But I trust that it’s all in iCloud. After the macOS install, Photos did pull the library back down from the cloud. I guess the “optimize storage” setting is turned on by default, so it might not have pulled down full resolution copies of all my photos, but it did pull down about 10 GB, and I had to leave it going overnight for it to finish. But it seems to be OK now.
  • The Books app is a bit different, and kind of annoying. I had some DRM-free audiobooks in my library, and there’s no cloud backup for those. I didn’t try to copy them out of the Books library on the Mac though. I know I have copies of them all on my PC and/or in OneDrive, so I’ll just copy them back as I need them. I might be switching from Books to BookPlayer for my DRM-free books, so maybe I don’t even need them in my library.
  • I had my FastMail account syncing down to Mail.app, but I wasn’t really using it. I always use the FastMail web interface. So I gave up on Mail.app, and saved maybe another 3 or 4 GB.
  • I had OneDrive set up on my Mac so that it did not try to keep everything local, but I probably did have a lot of local files taking up space. Microsoft recently made some changes to their OneDrive client that were necessary to move forward, due to changes that Apple has made to macOS. There’s a good blog post on that here. These changes bothered some people, but I’m actually happy about them. So my new macOS install has the new OneDrive client, and is keeping almost nothing local right now. That’ll change over time, but the client should do a good job of managing itself, and freeing up space when needed.
  • For most of my third-party software, I didn’t bother trying to back up settings or preferences or anything. A lot of software is tied to an account, so the preferences are in the cloud. And for those few that aren’t, starting over seemed reasonable.
  • In the past, I’ve had a variety of oddball development software on my MacBook (MySQL, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc). I decided to just give up on all that and start from scratch. I wasn’t actively using any of it. (I’ll probably install XCode at some point. That’s one thing I couldn’t install previously, since I didn’t have enough space.)

So, in the end, there wasn’t really much to worry about, and I freed up a ton of hard drive space. Before all this, I had only about 30 GB free. Now, I’ve got around 180 GB free.

My next task is to get good Time Machine and CCC backups of the new install. I’m doing the Time Machine one now. I’m still using the same old 2 TB drive that I’ve been using since 2015, I think. It still has free space on it, and still works, so I guess I’ll keep using it. It’s pretty slow and pretty big, but I guess it’s OK for now.

For CCC, I’ve been using an old 500 GB laptop drive in an external enclosure. I have two of these drives, one from my old MacBook (before I replaced it with an SSD) and one from my old ThinkPad (before I replaced that one with an SSD). I’ll probably hold on to the one I’ve been using for awhile, and switch to the other one, which has nothing of value on it.

I’ve been thinking about my external drive situation a bit. In addition to the Time Machine drive, and the two 500 GB drives, I also have two 500 GB SSDs lying around. These are the drives I stuck into the old MacBook and ThinkPad, and which I stripped out of them when I got rid of those two machines. I went ahead and ordered a couple of new external enclosures for them today, and I’m going to try to find something to use them for. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to bother, since the enclosures were around $20 each, and a single new 2 TB external drive would be around $60. But I don’t like to let old drives go to waste.

Going back to my original problem, where the Mac was crashing if I used it too long on battery, I haven’t hit that yet, but I haven’t used it for that long in a single stretch yet either. So maybe this weekend I’ll try to watch a long YouTube video or something like that and see what happens. And if it turns out that this didn’t fix my problem, then at least I’ve got a clean install that I can migrate over to a new MacBook Air with a minimum of hassle.

iOS notification issues and MS Authenticator issues

This is going to be a bit of a gripe post, but there might be some useful stuff in it. Or not. But it’s one of those things where writing it up might help me feel better about it, and might also come in handy later if someone has a similar problem. (Or if I have the same problem again and can’t remember some details.)

So this all started, I think, after I spent some time messing around with the new iOS 15 focus modes. I’d played around with them a bit when iOS 15 first came out, but something made me decide to mess around with them some more. To make a long story short, I tried out the “sleep” focus mode for a day or two, then decided that it wasn’t for me and went back to just using the “do not disturb” mode, scheduled to turn on at 10 PM and off at 5 AM every day.

After that, some of my notifications stopped working. I’m not sure that messing with focus is what broke notifications, but I’ve read up on the issue a bit, and it seems like that’s the most likely culprit. It seems like there’s a bug in iOS 15.2 that messes up notifications in some cases, often after you’ve messed with the focus setup. I’m pretty sure these were all notifications that would fall under the “push” category. So I wasn’t getting notifications on new emails from my Fastmail app, which was annoying but not a big deal. But I also wasn’t getting notifications on MS Authenticator, which is kind of a big problem for me.

I have more than a dozen accounts set up in MS Authenticator, mostly for CSP-related accounts. They all require MFA, so when I log into one of those accounts, it sends a push notification to my phone that I need to approve. And that wasn’t working. There’s a fallback, where I can get a six-digit code from the app and type that into the web browser. That’s what I’d been doing for a few days, but I really wanted to fix that.

I’d seen some advice online about fixing the notification issue by removing any app that wasn’t working, and reinstalling it. That worked for the Fastmail app, so I thought I’d try it for the Authenticator app too. Now, the Authenticator app has an option to back up its configuration to iCloud. And I had that turned on, so I thought I would safely be able to pull it back in after reinstalling the app. Well, it turns out that it’s not that simple. I did manage to pull in the backup, but for most accounts, you have to go back and redo the setup on the account anyway. You’re just pulling in a placeholder from iCloud. That was a pain, but not a huge problem, for accounts where I had my cell phone number set up as a backup. But for some of the oldest accounts, I either don’t have a backup, or I have my work desk phone set as the back up. And I’m working from home and don’t have a way to get to my desk phone. So that’s a problem.

Tomorrow, I’m going to try to find someone else with admin rights who can go in to Azure AD and set my cell phone # as my backup auth method so I can finish the setup on these accounts. I’m a little worried that I may have to bug someone at a fairly high level to do this, which could be a little embarrassing. But hey, we all screw up now and then. And this is more Apple and Microsoft’s fault than mine. (Apple’s fault for screwing up notifications in iOS 15.2, and Microsoft’s for not making it clear that the MS Authenticator iCloud backup isn’t really much of a backup.)

So the lesson here is that, before wiping out MS Authenticator, go into all of your accounts and make sure you have a good phone # and/or email address set under your backup authentication methods.

Once this is all straightened out, I need to write up a good procedure for transferring my MS Authenticator setup from one phone to another. My current iPhone just hit its three-year anniversary, so it’s time for me to start thinking about a new one. Setting up a new iPhone generally isn’t that hard these days, since you can just restore from an iCloud backup and most of your stuff will work. But there’s always some odd bits, like MS Authenticator, that trip you up. Even with all of my accounts set up correctly with backup auth methods, it’ll still take me an hour to get them all done. For each one, I basically need to open a new private browsing window, log in (using the SMS message backup option), then go to my account profile, delete the old MS Auth setup, add a new one, scan the QR code, wait for it to send a test push notification, approve that, and then finish the setup. That can take five minutes per account. I’m wondering if there’s a better way to handle this. Probably not. Most people don’t have Azure AD accounts in a dozen different domains, all requiring MFA, so my situation is not exactly a common use case that MS would have designed for.

Post-Thanksgiving stuff

I survived Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t a great day. The fire alarm in my apartment building went off on Thanksgiving Eve, at 11 PM. So I had to get out of bed and go stand around outside in the cold for about a half-hour, before being allowed back in. I’d gone to bed at 10, and was pretty well asleep at 11 when the alarm went off. And afterwards, I just couldn’t get back to sleep. So I didn’t have a lot of energy on Thanksgiving. About all I did was re-watch some episodes of Doctor Who and nap. I guess that’s a reasonable Thanksgiving, really.

I tried to get back to something closer to normal yesterday, Black Friday, but that was also a pretty low-energy day. I didn’t read anything on Thanksgiving, and read only one comic on Friday. I’m noticing that my resilience just isn’t what it used to be, physically (and sometimes, mentally). One bad day or night can screw me up for a few days afterward. I’m not sure how much of that is just normal for my age, vs. being something I should worry about.

Anyway, what I wanted to write about was really just some Black Friday stuff. I don’t buy a lot of physical stuff on Black Friday, typically, but I keep my eye on some digital deals on software, subscription services, and stuff like that.

  • Last year, around this time, I signed up for a free one-year subscription to Calm. The deal was for one free year, and a second year at half-price. I’ve been using it pretty consistently this year, so I was ready to let it renew for the second year. But Calm runs a Black Friday deal every year, where you can get a lifetime sub at 60% off. So I went ahead and took advantage of that, and paid $160 for a lifetime sub. That’s a fair amount of money, but I’ve stuck with my meditation habit pretty consistently this year, and I think I’ll keep it up for the foreseeable future. That was my big Black Friday purchase.
  • Another thing I did last year was to sign up for Hulu’s Black Friday deal, which was $2/month for their ad-supported tier, for a year. So that was coming to an end. For that, I decided to pause the subscription for a few months are reevaluate it later. There’s some good stuff on Hulu, but I feel like I’ve got too many streaming services going right now, and too much stuff to watch.
  • I also subscribed to Letterboxd Pro last year, on Black Friday, for $12/year. I’ve been using Letterboxd a lot this year, so I let that renew, and it looks like I’ll continue to get the discounted $12/year rate.
  • It’s also about time for me to do my yearly review as to whether or not Pluralsight is worth renewing. I’m currently on a “legacy” plan, which should renew in January at $179. If I cancel my account, then I won’t be able to get that old rate back. Though it seems like their current Black Friday deal would let me subscribe to their “standard” plan for $179, so maybe there’s a little wiggle room there. I haven’t actually used Pluralsight that much this year, so maybe it’s time to give up on that. I’ll have to decide on that before the end of the year.
  • Meanwhile, my Amazon Prime subscription renews on December 1, for the usual $119. I’m always a little unhappy about supporting Amazon to the extent that I do, but honestly, it’d be kind of hard to live without Amazon at this point, and dropping Amazon Prime would not affect Amazon’s fortunes in the slightest. So I’ll just let that one renew too.
  • I generally think about various hardware upgrades around the end of the year. I don’t really have anything pressing this year though. I looked at the Kindle deals at Amazon. I’m happy enough with my current Kindle, but the new Paperwhite is supposed to be really good. But I just don’t need it. I might want a new iPhone next year, but, again, I don’t really feel like I need one just yet, and there aren’t any really good deals on iPhones. So probably no new hardware this year.

So that’s about it. Nothing much exciting, but it kept me out of trouble for an hour. I need to try to get back in the swing of things today and tomorrow, so I can go back to work Monday and have a good productive day. I know there’s going to be a lot of work waiting for me on the first day back from vacation.

Playing with Postman

Postman is a tool that I’ve been meaning to learn for years. I’m not sure when I first heard of it, but I’m pretty sure it was back when it was just a Chrome extension. So it might have been almost ten years ago. I didn’t really get serious about it until 2019, at which point I was doing enough REST API work that it seemed like I should take some time and see what all the fuss was about. At that time, I would have primarily been using Fiddler for API testing. Fiddler’s Composer tab is pretty good for basic API testing, but you can do a lot more with Postman.

Alas, when I tried setting up Postman on my development VM in 2019, I couldn’t get it to work. It would just hang every time I launched it. I went back and forth with support for a while, and tried a number of things, but I just couldn’t get it working. So I gave up and went back to Fiddler.

But I switched to a new VM a while back, so I thought I’d give Postman another try. I successfully installed it on my VM at some point last year, and poked around a bit, but never had time to actually learn it. So last week I had a bit of free time and decided to spend some of it figuring out Postman.

I started with this Postman 101 for Developers video on YouTube. The Postman YouTube channel has a bunch of useful videos. After that, I moved on to a couple of LinkedIn Learning videos:

  • Introducing Postman – This video is from Dave Fancher, and was created in 2019, so it’s a little out of date, but still useful. It’s about 90 minutes.
  • Postman Essential Training – This one is by Kristin Jackvony, and is from 2020, so it’s a little closer to up-to-date. It’s also about 90 minutes. It covers some more advanced testing stuff, like the collection runner and Newman.

Then, I moved on to a Pluralsight video: Postman Fundamentals, by Nate Taylor. That one is about 2.5 hours long, and gets a bit deeper into what you can do with JavaScript for testing API calls. I found it to be very useful for the kind of stuff I’m likely to be doing.

All three of these courses are old enough that they predate the new v8 Postman user interface, so it can occasionally be a little challenging to figure out where something is in the current version vs. where it was in 2019 or 2020. But it’s not too bad.

So I think I now have a pretty good grounding in the basics. Of course, now I’ve gotten busy again, and haven’t gotten back to Postman in the last few days. But I did at least set up a collection/workspace for one of the APIs that I work on, by importing the Swagger JSON for it. I need to clean it up a bit, but I can certainly use it for ad-hoc testing now.

Next, I need to find the time to maybe write some test scripts. My current “smoke tests” for the API are in C#. I have a number of console programs that exercise different aspects of the API, to test out different stuff. An I have a C# script that I run in LINQPad after every deployment that just does some quick non-destructive tests, to make sure the deployment didn’t break anything obvious. But I’d really like to have some more structured and exhaustive tests that I can run. I’m not 100% sure that I want to commit to Postman for that, since it does add some complexity. But it might be worth it. It was worth spending several hours learning about it, either way, and I think I’ll be using it for a lot of my ad-hoc testing now.

paying for Pinboard

I’ve been using Pinboard as my primary bookmarking service since 2010. When the service first started up, the creator (Maciej Ceglowski) charged a one-time fee to open an account. Since then, he’s switched over to a yearly subscription model, but all of the old-timers (like me) have been grandfathered in. And we still are, but Maciej sent out an email recently politely asking us old-timers to consider switching over to the subscription model. So I went ahead and did that today, paying $51 for 3 years.

Pinboard has been a pretty good low-key service over the last ten years, but I’ve had some frustration with it. It’s really just run by Maciej, on his own, so he can only do so much. There’s no official iOS client (or Mac or Windows client), just the bare bones web site. And the API that third-party developers can use has been pretty iffy of late. I briefly considered switching to raindrop.io instead, and I might still experiment with that, but Pinboard is good enough for me, for now.

Even before I got the email about switching to a subscription, I’d been meaning to write a blog post about Pinboard. I’ve made some changes in the way I’m using it, and I thought it would be a good idea to write some stuff about that.

First, the Pinboard bookmarklet stopped working in Firefox a couple of weeks ago. (The developer is aware of the issue.) That was kind of annoying, but it got me looking at Firefox extensions for Pinboard. The last time I’d done that, I didn’t find any that seemed to be worth using (vs the bookmarklet). But I have now found a pretty good one and have started using it. It doesn’t really offer much beyond what the bookmarklet would do, but it works fine.

Second, the iOS app I use to save stuff to Pinboard, Pushpin, has been acting up lately. Trying to refresh my bookmarks almost always results in a timeout. I’d stumbled across a new app, called Pins, and decided to try that out. Initially, that didn’t seem to work at all, but it turns out that Maciej was just having trouble with the API that weekend. Once the API started working again, Pins started working fine. I’ve since paid the $10 to unlock the full version of Pins. I still have Pushpin on my iPhone & iPad too, but I think I’ll try to start using Pins instead now, and see how well it holds up.

On my Mac, I’ve been using an app called Spillo to help organize my Pinboard bookmarks. Spillo hasn’t been updated since 2017, I think, but it still works. And the new Pins app also has a Mac version, so I’ve installed that too, though I haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet.

I’m the kind of weirdo who spends way too much time organizing and maintaining my bookmark collection. I have a little over 17,500 bookmarks in Pinboard, and really there’s no good reason for that. Of those, 1700 are still marked “unread”. The general idea of the unread status is that I stumbled across something that I’ll want to read later, but I’ve clearly just let it turn into a link graveyard. And, for the “read” ones, the purpose of bookmarking them is usually that they contain something that I think I might want to reference later. Most of the time, that never happens. I bookmark a page and never return to it. But having all this stuff bookmarked does come in handy sometimes.

There’s a second tier for Pinboard accounts, where Pinboard attempts to archive the actual content of all the pages that you bookmark, so you can do full-text search on your collection, and so you can access content that might have disappeared from the web. When I switched to a paying subscription today, I didn’t bother going for that extra functionality, though I did think about it. I do have a lot of dead links in my Pinboard account, but honestly, that’s fine. (One of my pointless rainy day tasks is to identify dead links in Pinboard and delete them. This doesn’t really serve any useful purpose, but I guess it keeps me out of trouble for a little while. Spillo can identify dead links, so that’s what I’ve been using for that task.)

burning data DVDs in Windows 10

I’ve never had a problem with burning data CDs or DVDs in Windows 10, as far as I can remember. I’ve generally used the built-in burning function in Windows Explorer. Well, today, I bought a bunch of comics via this Humble Bundle, downloaded all the comics in it, and then wanted to burn them to disc as a backup. I’ve done that plenty of times before, but I couldn’t get it to work today.

After going through a bunch of troubleshooting steps, I finally gave up and downloaded CDBurnerXP. That worked fine. I’m pretty sure I’ve used CDBurnerXP in the past. (I had an entry for it in my Pinboard account from 2009, so I was at least aware of it.)

I briefly considered going back to Nero, which used to be my go-to program for CD/DVD burning, as far back as 2004. But I’m not sure about Nero anymore. They do still sell their “Nero Burning ROM” program, but there doesn’t seem to be a freeware “light” version anymore, nor is there an obvious way to get a 30-day trial of their full product, so I didn’t want to spend money on that, not knowing if it would work or not.

And there’s still a Roxio product for burning CDs and DVDs, but again there doesn’t seem to be a freeware version or a trial version available.

All of which leads me into a rant about trying to find legitimate freeware/shareware Windows software these days. I’ve found that the best way to find something is to go back through my own Pinboard bookmarks and/or blog entries, and try to find something familiar that I’d used in the past. There used to be good semi-trustworthy sites for finding freeware/shareware, like Tucows (which surprisingly was still around until about a month ago.) There were a few others, but at this point, I can’t ever remember their names.

Nowadays, we’ve got the Windows Store, which should be good and trustworthy, but there’s a lot of questionable stuff in there. Is MajorGeeks.com good/trustworthy? Maybe? Their burning tools page looks pretty good. And this Best Free Software of 2020 article from PC Mag has some good stuff in it (including CDBurnerXP). I guess PC Mag is still reputable.

I get worried about downloading freeware programs that may contain malware. The Windows Store should take care of that, I guess, but it still seems like there’s a bunch of crap in the Windows Store, and a bunch of the more useful freeware utilities don’t ever make it into the store.

I wound up tweaking some security settings as part of my troubleshooting today, and I just noticed that Windows has flagged the installer for an old version of ImgBurn from 2010 as a risk. I let it delete that. (A more recent installer, from 2016, didn’t raise any alarms.) Makes me wonder if that was a false positive or not. Did I download a hacked version of ImgBurn in 2010? I guess it doesn’t matter at this point, since I wasn’t going to install a ten-year-old version of ImgBurn anyway.

Oh well. This is just another blog post from a cranky old man who wanted to spend five minutes burning a DVD backup today and wound up spending an hour or two troubleshooting and working around annoying Windows problems.