Category: software

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.

TrustFax and other recurring expenses

Back in 2009, I signed up for a service called TrustFax. For $40/year, you get an account that can be used to send and receive faxes. Nothing fancy. Incoming faxes arrive as PDF files, if I remember correctly. For outgoing faxes, you can send PDF files (and probably other formats).

I signed up for it largely to handle some of the paperwork associated with my parents’ deaths. (It turns out that death-related paperwork exists in this weird time-warp where people still expect you to have a fax number instead of an email account.) I’ve been letting it auto-renew every year since then, even though I haven’t really used it in the last few years. I finally decided to cancel it now, after seeing the yearly charge show up on my last credit card statement.

The cancellation process was predictably inconvenient. There’s a web page where you can supposedly cancel your account, but, once you log in, the page says that a chat box should pop up, and if it doesn’t, to call customer service. The chat box never came up for me, so I called the customer service line. I was connected to someone who sounded like they were on a speakerphone in a windy cave somewhere in the Himalayas. The call took about ten minutes, which I guess isn’t bad, and she only made one attempt to keep me as a customer by offering a better deal, and one attempt to sell me an unrelated product. And she only put me on hold twice. So, by modern standards, an excellent customer service experience!

I try not to sign up for services that auto-renew every month or year, unless I know that I can easily cancel. Services billed through iTunes are good for that, since you can cancel them through Apple, without worrying about the actual vendor. (That’s how I pay for Slacker Radio.)

My Evernote Premium subscription will be up for renewal soon. When I first set it up, I used a code from a gift card, so Evernote doesn’t have my credit card number yet. But I don’t see any way to get a new code to renew the subscription, so I guess I’m going to have to give them my credit card number. (And I also don’t see a way to switch my subscription to iTunes billing. I think you can start a new subscription via the iOS app, but I don’t see a way to extend an existing subscription.) But I’m likely to stick with Evernote for the foreseeable future anyway, so I might as well just give them my credit card.

Similarly, I bought a card from eBay for the first year of my Office 365 subscription. Then, I extended it with a card bought at Costco. I’ll likely extend it next year with another Costco card, assuming they’re still selling them, since it’s cheaper than auto-renewing through Microsoft.

I’m thinking about what services I want to keep in 2016, and what I want to discontinue. Obviously, the fax service was overdue for cancellation. And I’ll definitely be keeping Evernote and Office 365. I’ll likely keep paying for Slacker Radio too. And Amazon Prime is still worth the money.

Netflix is questionable though. I might decide to cancel my account (or put it on hiatus if possible) for a few months at some point, then restart it if they add any interesting new shows, or if I run out of stuff to watch elsewhere.

And my web hosting through 1&1 is something I might want to reevaluate at some point. It’s not terribly expensive, but I’m really only using it for the blog. And I have several domain names with them that I’m renewing annually, but not using for anything. So maybe I could cut down on the domain names and move the blog to WordPress.com to save some money and simplify things.

Black Friday: Fixing Things

I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself today. I had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday at my friend’s house. And I have today off from work. And I’m mostly healed up from my surgery last month. So I considered going into NYC to check out the Jackson Pollock exhibit at MoMA.

But I decided this morning that maybe I should see about getting the speaker on my iPhone fixed. There’s a local store called Batteries + Bulbs that, I recently discovered, does iPhone repair. I don’t know much about them, but they appear to be reputable, so I thought I’d give them a shot. Alas, the repair guy had the day off, so I’ll have to come back tomorrow. But I walked there and back, so I got some exercise at least.

I read an interesting article on Vice this week about iFixit, and about computer repair in general, called How to Fix Everything. I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately, since all of the trouble I had with my MacBook recently, and since I’ve been on the fence about geting a new iPhone vs. repairing the old one.

I almost managed to replace the hard drive cable on my MacBook, but had to give up and let someone else do it. But, if not for those two pesky screws, I would have been able to do it, no problem. For the iPhone, I did check out iFixit’s page on speaker replacement. It looks a little too complicated for me to handle on my own, especially if I can get someone else to do it for a reasonable price. But I appreciate, in general, the idea of repairing existing hardware, and keeping it useful for as long as possible. It does seem like Apple, and other manufacturers, and going out of their way to make end-user and third-party repair and upgrades as difficult as possible. But Apple gear is still a good choice, since it’s so populat that you can always find instructions and parts via sites like iFixit.

I’ve managed to avoid blowing any serious money on Black Friday sales, so far, but I have spent a few bucks here and there. I ordered one of the 7″ Kindle Fire tablets that are currently on sale for $35. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but for $35, I’ll find something semi-useful. And I bought Commander One Pro from the Mac App Store for 99 cents. I’ve been using the free version, since I got my MacBook set up again, and I like it. I had needed to find something to replace Total Finder, which doesn’t really work with El Capitan, and Commander One seems to fit the bill.

It’s really nice out today, so, in addition to the walk to Batteries + Bulbs earlier, I also walked to Bridgewater Commons and back. I didn’t buy anything while I was there, but I wandered around and looked at what was on sale. I didn’t see anything I really needed, nor did I see anything I really wanted to buy for anyone else. (I really don’t need to buy many Christmas presents these days anyway.) But all this walking put me over the 7500 step threshold for the first time since the hernia issue arose. So I feel pretty good about that. And I now feel like I can spend the rest of day binge-watching Jessica Jones, if I want to, and not feel guilty about it.

MacBook trouble, OneDrive, and other stuff

My replacement hard drive cable for the MacBook showed up yesterday, which is great, but I had no luck whatsoever extracting the two tiny screws that hold the old cable in place, which is not so great. There are a number of MacGyver moves I could try to get them out, but I’m not feeling really confident about any of them. So I think maybe I’ll be taking the thing into Tekserve next weekend and let them figure it out.

Meanwhile, I wanted to do something useful yesterday, so I decided to move a bunch of my personal files on my desktop PC into OneDrive. Microsoft announced last week that they were dropping unlimited storage in OneDrive, which annoyed a lot of people. But seeing this in the news reminded me that I have a lot of OneDrive space that I’m not using. I have an Office 365 Home subscription that formerly had unlimited storage, but now has 1TB of storage, which is still quite a lot. So I moved most of the files out of my local documents folder into OneDrive. Now I’m using about 3GB in OneDrive, and I have all of those files backed up to the cloud, and available on both my desktop PC and laptop. I also moved some files out of Dropbox and Google Drive into OneDrive. I have a free Dropbox account, so that’s only good for 2GB, and Google Drive is good for 15GB, but that’s shared with Gmail. So, for anything I can keep  in OneDrive, I think I’m going to try to standardize on that as my default cloud storage.

I’ve found that, while Microsoft hasn’t been great with multi-platform support in the past, they’re currently doing really good with that. Their Mac client and iOS client are both quite good. And they have an IFTTT channel, which might come in handy at some point.

I’ve been thinking about how far I can go with moving stuff into OneDrive. A terabyte seems like a lot of storage, but I could use that all up if I tried. If I were to move all my photos into OneDrive, that would be about 15 GB. A lot, but manageable. And if I were to try to move my iTunes library (music, videos, and audio books) in, that would be another 500 GB or so, which would be a bit too much, I think. But if I limited it to just music, it would be about 50 GB, which might be ok, though it would be a bit of a mess. And I have quite a lot of random DRM-free audio books, comic books, ebooks, and videos purchased through various Humble Bundle sales and other places. The total size on all of those is quite large, but, for most of them, I can re-download them if they get lost. Humble and Big Finish, at least, allow you to re-download past purchases easily.

I’ve also been thinking about other ways that I could get more use out of the services included in the Office 365 subscription. One odd thing that’s included is 60 minutes of outgoing calls via Skype each month. This doesn’t really help me much; I have plenty of minutes on my cell phone plan, so there’s no reason to use Skype for outgoing calls on my cell phone. If I could replace my home phone with Skype, though, that might be useful. But I looked into that, and it seems like that wouldn’t be worth the trouble. First, I’d have to sign up for a Skype phone number, so I could receive incoming calls. That would cost $5/month. And I can’t port my existing home phone number into Skype, so I’d have to deal with having a new phone number. Then, I’d have to figure out how to hook up a phone to use with Skype. Stand-alone Skype phones (and adapters to hook regular phones up to Skype) were a thing for a while, but it seems their time has passed. Looking for any of them on Amazon generally shows them all as being discontinued and only available from third-party sellers. So, in a nutshell, those Skype minutes are pretty useless.

OS X El Capitan and third-party software

I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS 9, but I haven’t yet upgraded my MacBook to El Capitan, aka OS X 10.11. I use a few oddball bits of software on my Mac, so I like to make sure everything’s up to date and compatible before doing an OS upgrade.

For El Cap, I’ve found a few items I need to review and make some decisions on. First, Bartender, which is a nice little menu bar organizer, has a new version out, and it’s a paid upgrade. Version 1, which I’m using, is compatible, but it would be better to upgrade to version 2, since v. 1 requires you to jump through some hoops to get it working in El Cap. The upgrade price is only $7.50, so I’ll probably get that.

TotalFinder is a Finder add-on that I’ve used for years. I’ve been using it for so long that I’m not even sure what the regular OS X Finder looks like. But I guess I’m going to have to find out soon, since TotalFinder isn’t quite compatible with El Cap. You can get it running, by turning off System Integrity Protection, but the developer doesn’t recommend that, and he’s not going to keep actively developing TotalFinder anymore. He’s recommending a few alternatives, such as Commander One, which is a separate file manager and doesn’t plug in to Finder. There’s a free version, and a paid “pro” version. I may consider it, after seeing whether or not the plain old OS X Finder is good enough for me. I know Apple has enhanced it a lot since I started using TotalFinder.

I’ve been using a little program called Trim Enabler to enable trim on my SSD, since I replaced the drive in my MacBook a while ago. Why this is necessary is a long story, but now, it can apparently be done with the “trimforce” command at the command line, so Trim Enabler isn’t necessary anymore. But the company that released it now has a utility called Disk Sensei which might be worth buying, though it’s not necessary. I can buy it as an upgrade from Trim Enabler for $10.

TextExpander is compatible with El Cap, as far as I can tell. I paid for the upgrade to TE 5 recently, so I should be fine there. LaunchBar should be fine too. I installed the latest update for that last night. My preferred VPN client, Viscosity, is up to date also, and is probably compatible with El Cap.

And I think that about covers the oddball apps that do weird system-level stuff that’s likely to break with an OS update. I’m sure Firefox, Evernote, 1Password, and Microsoft Office are all going to be fine. They’re all actively maintained and up to date.

So I’ll probably try to clean up the issues noted above this weekend, then maybe do the El Capitan upgrade next week at some point. I should probably back up my hard drive too. Which reminds me that I need to update Carbon Copy Cloner too!

TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, BitLocker, and so on

I still don’t use any disk encryption on my (personal) laptops, but I try to keep up with news about this stuff, and I came across this article about a couple of flaws in TrueCrypt. I hadn’t really been keeping up with the fallout from TrueCrypt’s meltdown a while back, but I knew that there were some forks of it out there.

It looks like VeraCrypt is probably a good fork to choose, if you’re looking for one, as they have already patched these flaws.

I don’t see any mention of this flaw on Steve Gibson’s TrueCrypt page yet. At one point, he was advising that people continue using TrueCrypt, and that there wasn’t any good reason to abandon it. (And that was certainly true at the time.) But now there definitely is a good reason to switch to something else.

Since I have SSD drives in my ThinkPad and MacBook now, I could probably enable BitLocker on the ThinkPad and FileVault on my Mac, without too much of a performance hit. But honestly, there’s not really anything on either of those machines worth stealing, and I’m still nervous about scrambling all the bits on my drives.

Fun with the Raspberry Pi

I ordered a Raspberry Pi kit earlier this week, and it showed up in the mail yesterday. I ordered this kit from Amazon. It’s a nicely-packaged kit, with the Pi, a case, a power supply, a wifi dongle, an SD card, and a few other things.

The SD card comes with the standard NOOBS image on it already. My intention was to wipe that out and install Volumio, but I thought I’d give the standard setup a try, just to see how it worked. To do that, I had to hook the Pi up to a USB keyboard and mouse, and an HDMI monitor. My normal computer monitor doesn’t have HDMI, so I had to use my TV instead. That was a little awkward, since I don’t have a good surface for the mouse close enough to the TV, but I managed. The standard setup is quite easy, and doesn’t require an internet connection. Basically, it just allows you to set a few parameters, then it installs Raspbian Linux onto the SD card. From there, you can use the command line or start a GUI shell. I messed around with that for a while, then unhooked everything, so I could get Volumio installed.

To do that, I had to download the Volumio install image, and write it to the MicroSD card. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do that, since I don’t have a MicroSD slot on my PC, but I managed to find a MicroSD to SD adapter in my pile of random memory cards, and used that to get the MicroSD card into my PC. From there, I followed the simple instructions on Volumio’s site, cross-referencing this useful blog post. You can set up Volumio without hooking up a monitor or keyboard. You just need to plug the Pi into a wired Ethernet connection to get the initial setup done. So I did that, and got it set up through the browser interface at volumio.local. I set up my wifi card, then unplugged the Ethernet cable, rebooted, and all was well. To test it, I copied a Paul McCartney album to a USB thumb drive and plugged it in. I also plugged headphones into the audio out jack. Volumio had no trouble seeing the USB drive, and the audio played through the headphones, no problem. The audio quality coming out of the standard output jack isn’t great though. (I also plugged it in to my receiver, to try that out, and it sounds OK there, but still not great.)

So I ordered a DAC with RCA output jacks from HiFiBerry this morning. And a new case from them too, since the one from CanaKit isn’t going to work with the DAC on top of the Pi. I’m hopeful that this will give me acceptable sound quality. Between the kit from CanaKit, and the stuff from HiFiBerry, I’ve now spent more than $100 on this project, so I’m going to feel a little stupid if it doesn’t sound at least as good as a $100 CD player.

The next part of the project is going to be figuring out how I want to get my music collection hooked up to the Pi. The USB thumb drive I used for testing was formatted as FAT, so I’m glad to see that I don’t have to use an EXT4 formatted drive, or jump through any hoops to get the Pi to recognize a FAT drive. I had bookmarked a good writeup on dealing with different file systems on the Pi, but I don’t think I’ll need to worry about it. So I should be able to use either a USB thumb drive, or a USB hard drive for my music. The thumb drive would be easier, since I won’t have to worry about power. I have a 32GB thumb drive that I’m not using, but that’s not quite big enough for everything. A 64GB drive would only cost about $20 and would be big enough to fit my main MP3 collection. I also have several USB hard drives gathering dust in my apartment, including a small 120GB drive that would probably be perfect for this. I’m not sure if the Pi would provide enough power for it though, so that could be an issue. So I guess the next part of this project, while I’m waiting for the DAC to get here, will be to experiment with hard drives and thumb drives.