Category: software

catching up with backups

With yesterday being Friday the 13th, I thought this weekend might be a good time to review and catch up on backing up my desktop PC and my MacBook.

I bought my new Dell desktop back in January, but hadn’t gotten around to running any kind of backup on it yet, which is a little embarrassing. So today I installed Macrium Reflect Free and did a full image backup to an external 1 TB drive. I’ve been using Macrium for PC backups for the last few years, and I haven’t ever had any problems with it. I should probably buy a paid license at some point, but the free version has always been enough for me.

On my MacBook, I’ve been using Time Machine to back up to an external drive, ever since I re-did the MacBook after my hard drive crash last year. I’m not doing that as often as I’d like, since I don’t keep the USB drive hooked up to the MacBook, so I need to remember to set it up and let it run once in a while.

I’ve also been meaning to do a full backup with Carbon Copy Cloner, but just never got around to it. So I’m running that now, and I’ve also finally paid for a copy of CCC. (Previously, I’d only ever used trial versions.) Now that I have a real, paid, version of CCC, maybe I can talk myself into running it a bit more often.

I now keep nearly all of my important files in OneDrive, so I don’t feel like I need to make frequent backups, really, but I do like the idea of running some kind of automated backups on a regular basis. My router has a USB port that I can hook up a drive to, and use it as a NAS drive. I used to have a drive hooked up to it, but I never did much with it, and gave up on it at some point. I should try that again, and see about using it for automated key file backups. I’m not sure if it would work with Time Machine, but I could give it a try. (And I’m pretty sure it would work from Macrium on the PC, doing a select file backup rather than a full image. Or even just the free backup program that comes with Windows.)

And I know I should really set up CrashPlan, BackBlaze or Arq at some point, and start doing automated backups to the cloud. I just haven’t quite talked myself into that yet.

Evernote Essentials

I just finished rereading Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials. I first bought it and read it in 2014. He released an updated version recently, so I thought I’d download it and give it a quick reread. It does have some updates since the last version I read, but nothing that I wasn’t already aware of. If you’re new to Evernote, and want to get up to speed quickly, it’s a good book to read. He’s now selling it in three versions; one is just the book, then there are “plus” and “premium” versions with extra content, including video and audio content. I can’t really imagine needing the extra content, though I’m sure it’s good, if you’re really into Evernote, and don’t mind paying for it.

I’m still getting a lot of use out of Evernote. They’ve updated the Mac and Windows clients recently, with some interesting new features. In the recent past, updates to the desktop software were sometimes more annoying than useful. They’d add non-removable buttons for features I don’t use, like “Work Chat”. But lately, they’ve actually been adding useful features and capabilities, such as the new Cmd-J feature on the Mac.

TextExpander revisited

Since my previous post about TextExpander, they’ve revised their plans a bit. They’re going to keep the current (non-subscription) version around for a while, and they’ve changed the upgrade pricing so that, if you switch to a subscription, you get a lifetime 50% discount instead of just a one-year discount. So that’s pretty cool, but, at this point, I’ve set up all of my snippets in LaunchBar, and they’re working out OK, so I’ll probably drop TextExpander anyway.

There is an interesting blog post about TextExpander, and subscription software in general, at MacDrifter, from before the announced change. It’s got a lot of good info and links in it.

One of the reasons why I was thinking about moving away from TextExpander anyway is the way it handles “secure input” fields. Basically, whenever you’re in a secure input field, TextExpander can’t see what you’re typing, so it can’t expand anything. Which makes sense, and isn’t their fault. But they insist on popping up a notification telling you that, every time you’re in a secure input field. So that’s a bit distracting, and sometimes gets in the way of something that’s behind the notification. And there’s no option to turn off these notifications.

With LaunchBar, you’re not really doing general-purpose text expansion; you need to hit the special key combo to bring up LaunchBar any time you want to expand a snippet. So that’s a bit of a limitation, but it’s also an advantage, since that key combo works wherever you are, so there’s no issue with secure input fields. So I’m probably going to stick with LaunchBar for snippet expansion and give up on TextExpander.

TextExpander subscriptions and related software

I just read the news about TextExpander’s new subscription model. I use TextExpander on my Mac and my iOS devices, and I think it’s good software, but I can’t really see spending $5 per month to keep using it. (Technically, $2 per month for the first year, with their upgrade pricing for current users. But only for the first year.) They have said, in a follow-up blog post, that the old version will keep working for a while longer, so I don’t need to be in a hurry to switch to something else, but I’ll need to switch to something else eventually.

I’m a little worried, as I’ve seen a number of other software vendors take tentative steps toward switching to a subscription model. In many cases, a big part of this is switching from using iCloud or Dropbox for syncing, to a proprietary sync model. That, in itself, is a little worrying too. With Dropbox or iCloud, I have local access to my data, and have it automatically backed up to a reliable cloud provider.

Day One 2 switched from using Dropbox or iCloud to using their own sync service. But they haven’t switched to subscription pricing. (The new version required a new purchase, though, on both Mac and iOS.) The nice thing about the new sync service is that they can offer stuff like IFTTT integration and (at some point) a web front-end. I’m using Day One on a semi-regular basis now, but if they switch to a subscription model, I’ll probably just switch over to using Evernote for journaling, since I’m already paying for Evernote. (Speaking of Evernote, I don’t mind paying for that. I’m getting a lot of use out of it.)

1Password has also started moving towards proprietary sync and subscription pricing, introducing a team plan last year, and a family plan this year. I’m still using the regular single-user version on iOS, Mac, and Windows, and I’m fine with that, and hoping that they don’t move to a subscription model. But, if they do, there’s a fair chance I’d pay for it, since it’s such a valuable piece of software.

Getting back to TextExpander, I’ve been looking at alternatives. On Windows, I use AutoHotKey, which is free open-source software. I’ve been using that for a long time, and I’m really happy with it, so I don’t need to make any change there.

On iOS, I do use TextExpander, but I really don’t get much value out of it. iOS doesn’t really allow an app to grab all the keyboard input on the phone, for obvious reasons, so TextExpander on iOS has to rely on two mechanisms: (1) built-in support for it in certain apps, and (2) a custom TextExpander keyboard. The app support is good, but it’s not in enough apps. (Specifically, Evernote and the Apple Mail app don’t have it.) And the custom keyboard is useful, but it’s missing a lot of capabilities of the regular system keyboard, so I don’t want to use it full time, and it’s a bit of an inconvenience to switch back and forth between keyboards. So, really, I think I can drop TextExpander on iOS and just not bother with text expansion, outside of what I can do with the built-in iOS text expansion.

On the Mac, I do get a good bit of use out of TextExpander. But there are a number of alternatives to it. In particular, I’m thinking about switching to LaunchBar snippets. I’ve already paid for LaunchBar, and I know I’m not using more than maybe 20% of its capabilities, so I’m going to look into it.

Also, this blog post from Craig Pearlman goes over some of the same ground I’ve covered here, and mentions Typinator as a possible alternative. I wasn’t familiar with Typinator, but it looks like it might be a good alternative.

Mac ransomware

I panicked a bit when I read about the ransomware that was attached to a recent version of Transmission, a Mac BitTorrent client. Thankfully, I hadn’t updated (or even launched) Transmission on my Mac in a while, so I’m not affected. I only use BitTorrent occasionally, usually to download a Linux ISO or books/comics from a Humble Bundle.

After realizing that I wasn’t affected, and calming down a bit, I started thinking about what I can do to prevent being affected by one of these things, both on my Mac and my PCs. Ransomware is a big problem, and has affected many individuals, companies, and even hospitals. As long as even a handful of people pay up, the bad guys will keep putting this horrible stuff out there.

For this specific Mac issue, there’s really not much I would have been able to do to prevent it. It wouldn’t have been detected by any Mac malware scanner initially, and it was signed by a valid Apple developer key. Transmission is an above-board, well-respected open source program that’s used by many people, so it’s not like I was using some sketchy adware-infested BitTorrent client.

Probably the worst-case scenario here would have been if the ransomware had scrambled all the stuff I had on OneDrive, and then the contents had replicated from my Mac to my two PCs. (And let’s also assume that the ransomware had scrambled my Time Machine backups too.) That could have left me with a lot of lost files. I should probably figure out a good way to make offline backups of my OneDrive files on a regular basis. (I miss the days when I could back up all my key files to a single 100 MB Zip disk.) And this also reminds me that I haven’t done a full backup of my new desktop PC yet.

closer to paperless

I blogged back in December about how I’m taking a few more baby steps towards going paperless. I had switched my Merrill statements over to email, and that’s gone reasonably well. I’m downloading those statements pretty regularly, and I’m also keeping up with the other random statements that were already coming in via email.

One side note: the standard for paperless bills and statements is almost always PDF (which is fine). On my new desktop PC, I’d decided to skip installing Acrobat Reader in favor of Foxit. I thought that was working out OK, but I started having trouble with Foxit crashing randomly, so I had to give up on it and switch back to Acrobat. I’m not that fond of all the bells and whistles that Adobe keeps adding to Acrobat Reader, to try to suck you into their “document cloud” or whatever else they’re pushing at any given time. But at least it doesn’t crash. Maybe I’ll try Sumatra or one of the other third-party PDF readers at some point, but for now I’ll stick with Adobe’s bloatware.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, getting rid of paper. For a number of years, I’ve been paying most of my bills electronically through my bank’s web site. It’s got a reasonably good interface, and has always worked well. Except when I screw up, which I’ve done twice recently. The interface shows an alphabetical list of all the payees you’ve set up, and you just type in the amount you want to pay in a text box next to the payee name. Well, twice recently I’ve accidentally typed into the wrong box, paying a bill for company “A” to company “B” instead. The first time, I caught it in time to cancel the incorrect payment and entered the correct one. But, this month, I paid my cable company instead of my credit card company, and didn’t catch it until the cable bill showed up in the mail with a really big credit on it. So I figured out what I’d done, but maybe a little too late. I paid the credit card bill as soon as I realized what I’d done, but I’m not sure it made it in before the due date, so I might get dinged with a late fee.

So that’s convinced me to try a feature on the bank’s bill payment site that I’ve been ignoring up to now. For several companies, you can request e-bills to be delivered directly via the bank’s web site. So you can just review and pay them right there. I’ve always been a bit leery of this, but it seems like it would be a good way to prevent the problem of accidentally paying the wrong company. And I’ll be able to download the PDF e-bills for multiple companies all through a single web site, instead of a different one for each company.

I signed up for e-bills for my two major credit card accounts. I’ll probably add my other credit card account and my phone bill later, if the first two e-bill setups work out. So pretty soon, I may be down to just one or two paper bills / statements per month, and I can probably get rid of those too.

This is all good, and it will cut down on the amount of useless paper that I have to file away in my file cabinet, then occasionally purge and shred. It’s starting to bother me, though, that I don’t get much mail anymore. So I’m thinking about subscribing to a printed weekly magazine again, like the New Yorker or the Economist, just so I’ll have something showing up in my mailbox regularly. But I know I won’t have time to read either of those. So, maybe TV Guide?

a new owner for Quicken

I’ve been using Quicken since the early nineties, I think, originally using the DOS version. I’ve been tempted to switch to something else quite often, but I keep sticking with Quicken. Intuit announced a while ago that they wanted to sell off Quicken, and they just announced that they’ve found a buyer.

I was expecting the buyer to be an existing software company or financial company, but instead it’s a private equity company I’ve never heard of. I guess that could be a good thing. If it had been bought out by a financial company, they would likely have used it to push their own services and cut back on compatibility with competing financial institutions. And, now that I think of it, there really aren’t any existing software companies where it would have made sense for them to buy Quicken. Maybe Microsoft, but there’s a lot of history there, which eventually resulted in Microsoft giving up on their own MS Money software and exiting that niche, so I could see where they wouldn’t want to dive back into personal finance software.

So I guess I’ll keep using Quicken for the time being, and see what the new owner does with them. I’m not too optimistic, but I’ll give it a chance. (Especially since I only recently upgraded to Quicken 2016.)

Day One 2

I’ve mentioned Day One before on this blog. I bought the iOS version in December 2014, when it was on sale. Then, I bought the Mac version in December 2015 (again, when it was on sale). I really didn’t use the iOS version at all in 2015, other than to play around with it a little. But, after buying the Mac version, I’ve started to use it regularly over the last month. I’m not doing anything really amazing with it; just jotting down some random notes and thoughts. I still use Evernote for all my organized note-taking, reminders, and GTD stuff.

Well, of course, now that I’ve paid for iOS and Mac versions, and started using them regularly, they’ve gone and released Day One 2, which is a new app for iOS and Mac, and has no free or paid upgrades from the old version. But they are offering both for 50% off this week: $5 for the iOS app and $20 for the Mac app.

MacStories has a review of the new version. Most of the currently-implemented new features aren’t useful for me: multiple journals, multiple photos in a single journal entry, and stuff like that. But some of the stuff that they’re planning on implementing soon could be interesting, specifically IFTTT support. There are currently a few ways to hook up Day One to IFTTT, but they’re a bit kludgey.

And one slightly alarming new “feature” is that the only supported sync method is Day One’s own sync service. They no longer support storing your journal in Dropbox or iCloud. I completely understand that storing everyone’s journals on their servers is the only way to implement good IFTTT support or (for instance) a web client. But there currently isn’t much information available about how secure their sync service is. (In their blog post, they say “Day One Sync is comparable security-wise with iCloud and Dropbox,” but they don’t elaborate on that at all.) They have private-key encryption on their roadmap, but no target date for it. So about the only thing we know for sure at this point about their security is that there currently isn’t any private-key encryption.

Personally, I haven’t written anything important or incriminating in my Day One journal. Mostly, it’s stuff like “just got my oil changed” or “started reading The Windup Girl today”. But I’m sure a lot of people have private information in there that they’d like to keep secure, and I think Day One needs to make more information public about how they’re storing people’s data.

Having said all that, there’s a fair chance I’ll spend the $25 to get the new version for Mac and iOS both. It’s pretty good software, and I’ve been using the old version pretty consistently over the last few weeks.

Outlook and Gmvault

My new PC is working reasonably well, though there are still a few things I haven’t bothered to deal with yet. When I first set it up, Outlook wasn’t quite working. I spent a little time on that last night, and I made some progress, but it’s still not working exactly right with my Gmail account. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. I might just give up on using Outlook with Gmail at all, though I like the idea of having a local database of my Gmail messages, as a backup in case of disaster.

I have also, in the past, used Gmvault to back up my Gmail messages. I had a problem with it at some point last year, and gave up on it. But today I installed the newest version on my PC and gave it another try. It worked fine, pulling in all the new messages since I last did a full sync (which was almost exactly a year ago: Feb 2, 2015).

So I can at least say that I’ve got a full Gmail backup now, though it’s not an easily searchable backup. I’ve thought about setting up MailStore Home and creating a nice searchable archive of all my mail. But I never get around to it. I think that’s going to remain a rainy day project for now. (But maybe there will be a nice rainy day at some point this year, and I’ll give it a try.)

random stuff

I noticed in my “On This Day” sidebar that I’ve written a lot of blog posts on January 20th. I’m not sure why, but I feel like I should keep up the trend and write one today too.

But I have nothing in particular to write about, so I’ll just dump some random stuff out of my head. Which will probably be helpful to me, but maybe not to anyone else.

First, I have a cold, I think. And, whatever it is, it’s been hanging in there since Christmas. I keep thinking it’s just about gone, then it comes back. I’m quite frequently sick at this time of the year, so I shouldn’t really be surprised. All this ridiculously cold weather this week isn’t helping either, and we’re getting ready for a possibly major snowstorm this weekend. I’d really like to take off for a week or three and go to Florida, or San Diego, or anyplace warm, really.

After several months of not touching any novels or non-fiction books, and reading only short form stuff and comics, I’m back on a long-form book kick. I’m currently reading Thunderer by Felix Gilman and First Things First by Stephen Covey. I’m enjoying the Gilman book enough that it’s putting me in the mood to read more stuff like it. Maybe some China Miéville or Paolo Bacigalupi. (I honestly don’t know enough about either of those guys to know if it actually makes sense to group them together with Gilman, but for some reason, I think it does.)

On an unrelated subject, I stumbled across a great article on MacDrifter today about Drafts. I’m using Drafts a lot now, much more than I used to, but I’m still not really using it to its full potential. Of course, I don’t really use my iPhone or iPad for writing much; I stick with a “real” computer for that. But Drafts is great for some stuff, including quickly dumping notes into Evernote. It’s just faster and easier than opening up the Evernote client itself, which is a great app, but kind of slow to start. Drafts opens quickly and lets you start typing right away.

I’ve also noticed that Things for Mac is on sale for $25 right now. I own the iOS version, which I bought a while back when it was on sale, and I tried the Mac version, but I couldn’t talk myself into using it regularly. I might go ahead and pay for the Mac version, and give it another try. I’m keeping track of stuff largely in Evernote these days, but it might be a good idea to use something more structured for some stuff.

Tomorrow will be my three-year anniversary at SHI. I don’t have too much to say about that, other than that it’s been a pretty stable job, without a lot of drama or stress, and I seem to be doing well there, based on my performance reviews. I’m occasionally tempted to shake things up and find something new and interesting, but for now, I’m content with what I’ve got.