Category: software

1Password subscription

I recently decided to give in and switch to a 1Password subscription. I blogged about maybe doing this last year, but decided not to do it then.

I originally bought 1Password (for Windows, Mac and iOS) back when it was sold as plain old software. All things being equal, I’d just as soon continue using it that way, but there are a few advantages to switching to the subscription model. Mostly, I wanted to get access to the latest version of the Windows software, version 6, which is only available to subscribers. The previous Windows version works, but isn’t great. (Version 7 is in beta, and will support non-subscribers, but it will be a paid upgrade, so I figured I’d just skip that and pay for the subscription.) To their credit, they haven’t been aggressively pushing people to switch to subscriptions, though they’ve been gently nudging people in that direction. And I do like their software, in general, so it makes some sense to support them this way.

I have three minor nits to pick with the subscription version:

  1. They’ve eliminated folders, in favor of tags. That’s not too bad, but the standalone version supported both, so it doesn’t seem like it would have been difficult to support both in the subscription version too. I’ve managed to move my folders to tags, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.
  2. The Mac software supported “smart folders” which were basically saved searches. I had a few of those set up, and they were lost when I switched to the subscription. I had hoped that there would be some kind of saved search functionality in the subscription version, but there’s not. (You can still do advanced searches, but you can’t save them.)
  3. The subscription version requires that your master password be at least 10 characters long. My previous master password was only 7 characters, so I had to create a new one. I never have to type it in on my iPhone, since I have Touch ID enabled there, but I do have to type it in a lot on Windows and Mac, so that’s a pain.

As to other advantages of the subscription version, I’m honestly not seeing many, other than the new Windows software. And there’s an advantage in having my passwords available online now, via 1password.com, rather than having them stored in Dropbox. Since my 1Password data was pretty much the only thing I’d been using Dropbox for, I can probably delete the Dropbox client from all of my devices now, if I want. (I’m using OneDrive to keep my files in sync across devices. 1Password only supported DropBox.)

Facebook adjustments

Even after all the Cambridge Analytica stuff and Zuckerberg’s 10 hours of testimony in DC this week, I’m still using Facebook. I’ve known for a long time that a lot of the free stuff on the Internet involves a tradeoff between privacy and convenience, and I’m generally careful of what I share and what I don’t, and which apps and services I use and which ones I avoid.

On the desktop, I use Facebook in Firefox, with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and FB Purity all installed and running. On iOS, until recently, I’ve just been using the regular Facebook app. But I switched to using an app called Friendly recently. It’s pretty good, though it’s got a few rough edges. It does ad blocking (after a $2 in-app purchase), and lets you re-sort your news feed chronologically, and some other little tweaks. I’ve also recently set FB Purity to sort my news feed chronologically, so now I’m seeing stuff that way on both desktop and iOS. It’s funny how different Facebook looks when you’re seeing stuff in simple date/time order, rather than whatever order their algorithm decides to use. I’ve also reviewed and tweaked my privacy settings a bit. This page at iMore has some good advice for that.

I’ve been reading a comic book called The Private Eye recently. It’s a science fiction comic set in a world where there’s been a major internet privacy meltdown, and society has essentially reconfigured itself in a way such that personal privacy is a core value, and is taken to extremes. It’s a really interesting take on the subject of privacy and trust, and it makes me wonder what our world’s going to look like in 100 years.

Ben Thompson has a good overview of the Zuckerberg hearings at his site. A lot of interesting stuff has come out of all this, but I agree with Thompson on the bottom line: “The most likely outcome of Facebook’s current scandal continues to be that nothing will happen.”

Learning Power BI

I’ve recently started trying to learn about Power BI, since it looks like we’ll be using it at my job soon. We first started talking about Power BI in 2016; at that time, I looked into it a bit, decided it probably wasn’t something that was going to work out for us, and didn’t really follow up on it. And my boss didn’t follow up with me on it, so I figured it was dead or on the back-burner. I guess it was the latter, since it’s come up again. This time, it sounds like maybe we’re a bit more serious about it than last time, so I’ve been spending a lot more time trying to figure it out than I did back in 2016.

I’ve never really done much BI work, though I’ve done plenty of work around the edges of BI, and have dipped my toes into more serious BI from time to time. I’ve done a lot of ETL work, and that seems to be a big aspect of BI.

To get myself up to speed, I first took a look at what was available on Pluralsight. I started with a course called Getting Started with Power BI, which was a pretty good intro course that just zoomed through a lot of stuff quickly. Then, I watched a course called Introduction to Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, which helped me get some background info on the current state of BI and data warehousing. (I was already somewhat familiar with the general idea of cubes, but didn’t really know much about them.)

After that, I decided to dig more deeply into the Power BI Desktop tool. This is a free tool from Microsoft that’s actually pretty good, and could be useful as a standalone tool, even if you’re not plugged into the whole Power BI cloud thing. I’m currently reading a book titled Pro Power BI Desktop. It’s covering the product in a lot of detail. (Maybe too much detail. It feels a little like this book doesn’t really need to be 761 pages long. But it’s a pretty good book, overall.)

There’s also a free course on EdX about Power BI. I might give that a try, if I feel like I need to. The course is part of a Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science that’s all available on EdX, and which looks pretty interesting. I’d love to do it all, if I had a lot more spare time than I currently have, and if I wouldn’t miss the $990 it would cost to officially enroll in it and get the certificate from it. The path I’m on now is more about simple BI rather than fancy data science, but I’m really curious about that stuff. I was listening to an episode of Hanselminutes this morning on machine learning and data science, and it was really interesting. I wish I had the time to figure it all out.

Back on the subject of Power BI itself, I was leery about it back in 2016. Microsoft sometimes introduces products like this that don’t last long, or that are overly complicated or expensive, given what they do. Power BI looks like it might actually be a winner though. The Desktop tool is quite versatile and useful even without the cloud service. I’m still trying to figure out whether or not it’s worth buying into the whole ecosystem though. You can do a lot with it for free, but the cost could get pretty high if we start using it for a lot of enterprise-level stuff.

Spillo for Pinboard

I’ve been using Pinboard to manage my bookmarks since 2010. It replaced del.icio.us, which, humorously, is now owned by the guy who runs Pinboard, and is read-only.

I like Pinboard a lot, but there are a few little annoyances with it. For one, the Firefox bookmarklet for Pinboard still doesn’t work for any page on github.com. (This is due to something called CSP, and also affects other bookmarklets.) I’d also like to have better searching and filtering capabilities. And the Pinboard site isn’t as reliable as I’d like it be; it’s often slow for me, and sometimes inaccessible. (I’m not sure if that’s Pinboard’s fault, or if it has something to with my ISP or VPN or whatever.)

So I’ve been looking at third-party Pinboard clients for macOS. I already use a third-party client for iOS, called Pushpin, and that’s pretty good (though I have a few issues with that too). The best third-party client for macOS seems to be Spillo. It costs $15, and has a 14-day trial. There are a few negative reviews on the Mac App Store, and it hasn’t been updated recently (last update was April 2017), but I decided to give it a try this weekend.

So far, I’m pretty happy with it, though it’s not everything I’d like it to be. I was hoping that the Firefox bookmarklet that comes with it would solve some of my problems with the official Pinboard bookmarklet. But the Spillo bookmarklet hasn’t been updated for Firefox Quantum, so it no longer works at all. (I’m not sure if the author is going to update it or not.)

If is definitely good for organizing and searching through your links, and can do a few things that Pinboard can’t do on its own. (Or at least I haven’t figured out how to do these things with Pinboard.) First, it can scan through all of your bookmarks and find dead links. When I ran it, it found about 1000 dead links (out of my 12,000 bookmarks). I spent some time deleting a bunch of those yesterday, and updating some of them to point to the correct current URL. To some extent, this is just busywork, and doesn’t really accomplish anything useful. Does it really matter if I have a bunch of dead links to old Lotus Notes and PowerBuilder content in my account? No, not really. But it feels good to clean that stuff up, and it does allow me to take a stroll down memory lane, and stumble across some cool defunct bands, for instance, like Omegalord or Hotrod Cadets, both of whom used to have their own web sites, but apparently don’t anymore.

Spillo also allows you create “collections” — basically a saved search that can have a combination of useful conditions. I’ve created one that will show me unread links from the NY Times, so I can catch up on Times articles that I’ve been meaning to read. I’m also going to want to create one for unread Bandcamp links, since I have a ton of those. (At some point, I’m going to go on a Bandcamp spending spree and buy a bunch of random CDs and/or MP3s.) I have a few other things like that in mind.

I’m also hoping Spillo might work as a way to add bookmarks to Pinboard when the Pinboard site itself is slow or down. I think it’s designed to cache stuff locally, then sync to Pinboard in the background, but I’m not sure if it works in practice, if Pinboard is actually unavailable.

So, overall, I’m finding it useful, though it doesn’t solve quite all of my problems. I’ll probably go ahead and buy it before my trial expires.

I last wrote about bookmarking in August, and got pretty philosophical about it, so there’s no point in doing that again here. It was zero degrees out this morning, so I may wind up spending a lot of time today sitting around in my apartment organizing bookmarks and drinking coffee. Maybe not the best use of my time, but not the worst one either. There’s a lot of stuff I want to do that involves going outside, but it’s really not a good day to do any of it.

Slacker Radio changes

I got an email yesterday announcing that the Slacker Radio Plus subscription I have will no longer include offline streaming, as of 12/31/2017. This is a bummer for me, since that’s the main reason I pay $4 per month for Plus. My data plan from Verizon only includes 3 GB per month, and I get pretty close to that most months, so I can’t really stream music over Verizon’s network unless I change my data plan.

To keep the offline streaming feature of Slacker, I’d need to upgrade to their $10/month Premium plan. That’s basically equivalent to Amazon Unlimited, or Apple Music, or Spotify. I’d get full access to their whole catalog, being able to listen to whatever I want whenever I want. (The Plus subscription just lets you listen to streaming radio. You’d can’t pick exactly which songs you want to listen to.)

I started using Slacker back in 2014. Back then, I had a 4 GB data plan, so I could do a little online streaming (though not that much). I’ve been pretty happy with it. I’m currently also using Amazon Prime Music, which is free with my Prime subscription. The iOS app for Amazon Music is pretty good, and it does also include offline streaming. It doesn’t, though, have the same kind of variety in streaming stations that Slacker has, and it has only a limited subset of the music that would be available if I went the next step and signed up for Amazon’s Music Unlimited service, which would cost $8 per month (after a $1 three-month trial).

I could also give Apple Music a try. I thought about that when it was announced in 2015, but it didn’t look like a good idea then. Looking at it again now, it’s still maybe a little iffy. It does have offline capability, but I’d need to check on how easy it is to use. And I’d need to review things to make sure I can set it up without screwing up my iTunes libraries on my Mac and PC.

Spotify still seems to be the 800-pound gorilla of streaming services. I’m considering Spotify simply because so many other people are on it. I often see links to interesting Spotify playlists on Reddit or elsewhere on the Internet. (I never see links to Apple Music playlists, and I’m not even sure if you can share them.) But, last I checked, Spotify’s iOS app isn’t very good for offline streaming. It’s possible, but it apparently doesn’t give you much control.

And as long as I’m looking around, I might as well look at Pandora too. I used to pay for a Plus subscription with them, before I switched to Slacker. Pandora Plus is now $5/month, and includes limited offline capabilities. Probably not enough to justify the cost. Premium is $10/month, and lets you copy anything down for offline listening.

My cheapest option would be to drop Slacker entirely, and rely on Amazon Prime Music for offline listening, along with podcasts and old-fashioned MP3s synced to my phone. That’s probably what I’ll do for now. Maybe at some point I’ll talk myself into being OK with paying $8 or $10 per month for a streaming music service, but not quite yet.

 

Extended Thanksgiving weekend laziness

All this month, I’ve been tossing ideas around in my head about productive things I could do with my four-day Thanksgiving weekend. And now it’s Sunday, and I’ve done very little. I went to a friend’s house on Thanksgiving, and had a very good Thanksgiving dinner. Then I started feeling sick on Friday, and just sat around the house all day reading comics and watching TV. I felt better Saturday, and actually got a few things done in the morning, but then I started feeling bad again in the afternoon and went back to my “TV, comics, and napping” agenda. Today, I almost talked myself into going into NYC to see the new David Hockney exhibit at the Met, but didn’t quite manage it. (It’s not actually open yet, but member previews were this weekend.) There’s still time for me to get some stuff done today, but so far, I’ve only managed to shower, eat breakfast, and read comics, and it’s 10am already.

I made one more Black Friday purchase yesterday: I broke down and bought a 27-month Quicken subscription via Amazon for $54. Quicken had their own Black Friday sale, marking down a one-year subscription from $45 to $30, but Amazon had a slightly better deal, essentially $27 per year, for two years, with three extra months tacked on. I almost talked myself into trying MoneyWell, since they haven’t changed to subscription pricing, but I’ve been using Quicken for so long that they’d have to do something really horrible for me to switch at this point. I almost bought the sub from Amazon last month, when they were charging almost $90 for it, so I’m glad I waited. So now I should be set through 2018 and 2019, and I don’t need to think about it again until 2020. (Which doesn’t mean I won’t think about it again, just that I don’t have to…)

My comic book reading this weekend has been eclectic. I finished the Sandman: Dream Hunters adaptation that was done by P. Craig Russell about ten years ago. That was really great, as I expected. (Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers, and Russell is one of my very favorite comic book artists. Maybe my all-time favorite.) (That book is only $5 for the Kindle version, right now, by the way.) I read the original illustrated (not comic book) version a few years ago, and that’s also pretty great. (Yoshitaka Amano is a pretty amazing artist, too.) It’s a little weird how a number of Neil Gaiman’s books exist in multiple versions like this: one with prose and illustrations, and one done as a comic book. But I can’t complain. When both versions are so good, I don’t mind buying and reading the same story twice.

I also read volume 2 of Megatokyo, which is a fairly low-key manga-style web comic. I read the first volume some time ago, but wasn’t really into it enough to go straight to the second. But, yesterday, it seemed like a good “lazy day” book. It was good, but I’m not planning on picking up any more of it right away. If I’m in the mood for it again, maybe I’ll try reading it on the web.

Reading Megatokyo has gotten me somewhat interested in reading manga again. I’ve got a lot of manga paperbacks lying around the apartment, but I haven’t really been in a manga mood lately. I thought maybe I’d finally finish reading Rurouni Kenshin. I have all 28 volumes of the manga, but I’ve only read the first 19 or 20. But now I’ve read that Kenshin’s creator has been arrested on child porn charges, so maybe I’m a bit less enthusiastic about that now. (One slightly alarming takeaway from the linked article: possession of child porn wasn’t “completely illegal” in Japan until 2015? Yikes.)

 

High Sierra and other updates

I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 11 some time ago, with no issues. There’s really nothing much in iOS 11 that I’m terribly enthusiastic about, but also nothing that bothers me. I do like the new screenshot stuff, so that’s cool.

And my watch is running watchOS 4 now. I was initially somewhat concerned that it would slow down my “Series 0” watch too much, or have a negative effect on battery life, but it’s not bad at all. I’m not really using any of the new features. I’ve settled on the “modular” watch face with a few useful complications, and I’m happy with that. And I continue to use the activity app to motivate me and keep track of my meager attempts at exercise. (For today, so far: move ring at 45%, exercise ring at 66% and stand ring at 33%. Step count at 4,474. Pretty good for 10:30am on a Saturday.) I was kind of hoping that the “auto-launch audio app” feature would be useful for me, but it’s an annoyance more frequently than it’s a help, so far. It tends to stay up after I’ve already stopped listening to music, and it sometimes appears for no discernible reason at all. Maybe it works better on newer watches.

On the Windows side of things, my desktop PC decided to apply the Fall Creators Update last weekend. I’m still kind of grouchy about the idea that I have little control over when major updates like this happen on Windows 10, and also about the crazy naming shenanigans. The update appears on the PC with an entirely nondescript name that doesn’t really let you know that it’s a major update (just “version 1709,” basically), while most articles about it use the “Fall Creators Update” name. I wish we could go back to the days when we just called these things “SP1,” “SP2,” and so on. Anyway, there’s not much there that’s of interest to me. The update installed with no glitches, and there haven’t been any issues post-install. I’m not really interested in any of the MR, VR, AR, and/or 3D stuff. I should probably look into the new stuff related to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and I am genuinely interested in that, but I don’t have much practical use for it right now.

Back in the Apple world, I tried installing High Sierra on my MacBook last weekend, but hit a snag. I got an error related to firmware, the same one described here. It sounds like this is common for people with third-party SSDs. One of the answers in the thread suggested running “diskutil repairdisk disk0” in the rescue mode terminal.  I was a little afraid to try that last weekend, in case things went wrong, so I put it off. I did it this morning, and it fixed everything, and the upgrade ran fine. I wasn’t sure if my disk would be coverted to APFS, since it’s not an official Apple SSD, but it was converted, and it’s working fine so far. I should probably review this document before I try my next Carbon Copy Cloner backup. And maybe I should just remove Disk Warrior, since I don’t really use it anyway.

I guess the last big update I’ll need to do this year is getting the Fall Creators Update on my ThinkPad. That machine is old enough that Windows 10 updates can be a little dicey, but it’s been fine so far.

I used to be a lot more excited about OS updates than I am today. I still remember the thrill of installing the Windows 95 Preview from floppy diskettes. (Raymond Chen says it was 13 disks for the release version. I remember the preview version being more than that, but I could be wrong.) I guess I’m getting old and jaded. I’m just glad everything’s working, I haven’t bricked any machines, lost any data, or set anything on fire.

Quicken switching to subscription model

I guess this was inevitable: Quicken has switched to a subscription model. They’re charging $45/year for Deluxe, which is the version I use. Here’s an article about it, from MacRumors. (Weirdly, I found several articles about the change on Mac web sites, but none on Windows sites. The change applies to both Mac & Windows, and the pricing is pretty much the same for both.) You can currently buy a 2-year subscription from Amazon for $90, which isn’t really saving you any money, but they include an additional three months, so I guess that helps.

Lately, I’ve been upgrading Quicken every year anyway, but I think I’ve usually only paid about $30 for it, getting it from Costco or Amazon. So this change looks like it would make it a bit more expensive for me. (And I’d lose the option of skipping a year, if I didn’t want to upgrade that year.) So that’s something to think about.

I’ve been using Quicken for a long time. The first version I used would have been under MS-DOS, back in the early nineties, I think. Switching to something else would be a big change for me. And there’s not much else out there that compares well to Quicken. Moneydance, maybe. That’s a one-time $50 purchase (though I could probably get a discount on that). I’m not sure how often they release new versions or what their upgrade pricing is, but it would probably work out to being a little cheaper than Quicken.

I’ll probably bite the bullet and buy that 2-year Quicken subscription from Amazon. I’ll wait a bit, though, until I get a chance to run out to Costco and see if they’ve got it cheaper. (I’ve been paying for Office 365 by getting it from Costco, and that’s saved me a few bucks over buying it directly from Microsoft, so maybe they’ll have something for Quicken too.)

iTunes vs Swinsian

My nit-picking complaints about iTunes 12.7 (see here and here) have led me to start experimenting with Swinsian (on my Mac) and MediaMonkey (on my PC). I’ll get to MediaMonkey in a later post, but I thought I’d write up some notes on Swinsian.

As you can see in the screenshots below, Swinsian does fix my current gripe with iTunes: the browser at the top of the window shows a perfectly reasonable number of rows, by default (vs. iTunes: 3 rows). That browser is also very customizable in Swinsian: you can have between 1 and 3 columns, and you have several options as to what you display in them. The screenshot below shows two columns, for artist and album. You can easily change that to show genre, artist, and album, similar to iTunes.

Another thing I appreciate is that Swinsian has a “large text” option. The default text size was a little too small for my tired old eyes, so I turned that on right away.

Pulling in my music from iTunes to Swinsian was easy. It imported everything, including play counts and playlists. There are a few ways you can set things up, but (for now) I’m leaving my music in the iTunes library and folder structure, and letting Swinsian re-scan the library on startup. This allows me to add music in iTunes, which should then show up in Swinsian the next time I start it up. That arrangement probably makes the most sense for someone like me, since I still want to be able to sync music to my phone from iTunes. (Swinsian can sync to older iPods, but not to iOS devices.)

I only have a few issues with Swinsian, and they’re mostly related to the necessity to keep iTunes going. (If I could abandon iTunes and let Swinsian manage all my music, things would be smoother.) Probably the biggest one right now is that Swinsian doesn’t really distinguish audiobooks as a separate category, the way iTunes does. So all of my audiobooks are intermixed with my music. I’m not sure how to get around that one, or if it’s really that big a deal. If I was fully committing to Swinsian, I’d just leave the audiobooks in iTunes and move the music to Swinsian, and everything would be fine.

I’m also not sure that I like the way it handles “album artists” vs “artists”. It’s got some flexibility on that, but it’s not completely consistent. You can see the issue on the McCartney box set shown in the screenshots below. In iTunes, the track list correctly shows the track artist (sometimes McCartney, sometimes Wings), while in Swinsian, it’s always showing the album artist in the track list (though it does show the correct artist in the detail pane on the right). That’s not really a big deal, but it would be nice if they fixed that.

Going back to my gripe about the top browser view in iTunes, I found a discussion thread related to it on the Apple site today. It kind of sounds like they might recognize it as a bug and fix it in the next release. Here’s hoping!

Equifax, iTunes, and some alternatives

There are a number of links I could post as follow-ups to my post on Equifax, but I’ll stick with just one: You Can’t Protect Yourself from the Equifax Breach, from TidBITS. The headline pretty much sums things up.

And an unrelated article from TidBITS on iTunes 12.7. Everybody is talking about removing support for apps and ringtones, but nobody is talking about the annoying change to the genre/artist/album browser in the “songs” view, which I mentioned in a previous post. Since then, I’ve found that it’s happening in both the Windows and Mac versions of iTunes, so that pretty much confirms that it’s intentional, rather than a bug. (And I guess it doesn’t bother everyone else as much as it bothers me…)

This one little thing is finally pushing me to seriously consider iTunes alternatives. Which got me thinking about what my use case is for iTunes these days anyway, and how I could maybe rethink and rearrange things.

First, I do rely on iTunes on my Mac to sync my iPhone and iPad. It’s still useful to backup those devices, and to sync down a subset of my music library, some audiobooks, and other stuff. So I’ll definitely keep it around for that. I use it occasionally to listen to music or watch videos, but not that often really. I could consider installing a secondary app for playing music and managing my music library, like Swinsian, but it’s not really necessary.

On the PC, I keep what I consider my “master” music library in iTunes. It’s around 67 GB right now. (And the “TV Shows” folder in iTunes is 340 GB, while the Movies folder is 21 GB.) The Windows version of iTunes, for me, is slow to start up and a bit sluggish in general. Aside from using it to keep my music library organized, I also use it to play music (but only occasionally), rip CDs, and burn CDs. I rarely use it to watch video content; I generally use the Apple TV for that.

So I’m thinking about a few things on the PC side. First, I can probably just delete all the TV shows and movies in my iTunes library, if I want to clear up some disk space. In the old days, you needed to have a local copy of a video file to watch it. Now (for iTunes content) you can just stream it from the cloud to your Apple TV, and it’s fine. Second, I could probably remove some of the music from my iTunes library if I wanted to get that down to a more manageable size. I have a bunch of old tracks from these giant SXSW torrents that they used to do (about 3 GB from 2005 and 6 GB from 2009). It’s cool to have all those random tracks in my library, but it does make it a little harder to find the music that I’ve actually bought and paid for. So maybe cleaning up TV, movies, and some old music would help speed up iTunes.

Beyond that, if I want to try a different software program to manage my music on Windows, I could look at MediaMonkey, which comes in free and paid versions. It handles a lot of the stuff I need to do, like ripping and burning CDs, in addition to the main task of organizing and playing music. Or there’s MusicBee, which is free, and handles many of the same things as MediaMonkey (with the exception of CD burning). Or Clementine, which is free and cross-platform (but doesn’t have CD ripping or burning, as far as I can tell).

So MediaMonkey is probably my best bet. From what I’ve read, I can try that out without screwing up my iTunes setup at all, so maybe I’ll do that and see how it goes.