Category: software

Pocket acquired by Mozilla

Well, this is interesting. Mozilla has acquired Pocket. I blogged recently about Instapaper, and their acquisition by Pinterest. Now, their one big competitor has been acquired too. That’s a little disappointing, but maybe not unexpected. Though I wouldn’t have guessed that Mozilla would be the one to buy them out.

I’m still using Instapaper. They’ve restored all the data that was lost in their big crash a few weeks ago, and their site has been working fine for me ever since. So I’m hoping that they’re doing OK.

Twitterrific, Overcast, and Ted Leo

Twitterrific is my favorite iOS Twitter client. (But also, honestly, the only one I’ve used other than the official one, so that’s not saying much.) I appreciate the fact that Twitter even still supports third-party clients. Facebook never really did, and Twitter’s support has wavered quite a bit over the years. But anyway, I get a lot of use out of Twitterrific. I bought it back when it actually cost money. (Now, it’s free with ads and various in-app purchases.)

I also used to use their Mac client. But they stopped development on it quite a while ago. I now just use the Twitter web page and occasionally the official Twitter Mac client (which really isn’t bad). But Twitterrific is looking to fix up their Mac client, and have put up a Kickstarter to fund new development. I’ve managed to avoid Kickstarter up until now, despite being tempted by a few things I’ve seen there in the past. But I finally gave in for this, and registered a Kickstarter account and pledged $30. That seems reasonable. The project isn’t fully funded yet, but it’s doing well, so hopefully they’ll actually do it.

And, since I have a Kickstarter account now, I’m tempted to go in on the Kickstarter for Ted Leo’s new album too. He’s one of my favorite artists, and it’s been a while since his last full album. I am worried now about getting sucked into the whole Kickstarter thing and spending money on stuff I don’t really need. There’s no reason that I can’t just wait until Ted Leo’s new album is out, read the reviews, then make an informed decision to buy it or not. And that’s probably what I should do in most cases.

Getting back to the subject of iOS & Mac software that I use a lot, Marco Arment has just released a new version of his podcast player, Overcast. This is another iOS app that I paid for the old-fashioned way at some point, but is now a free app with ads and in-app purchases. The new version is a pretty major redesign. I was pretty happy with the previous design, so I wasn’t really looking forward to this. But it’s a pretty good redesign. I’m getting used to a few things, like swiping left (or is it right?) to get to the episode notes instead of swiping up. Reading through Marco’s blog post on the redesign, it’s clear that he thought about it a lot and put a lot of work into making it as easy to use as possible. So it’s still my favorite podcast player out there. (I kind of wish he’d create a Mac client too, but I can understand why he hasn’t.)

Instapaper Outage

I was a bit preoccupied with the snowstorm yesterday, but I did notice that Instapaper was down. No big deal, really, but I see that they’re still having trouble. And now they’re saying that they won’t have their full archives restored until February 17.

When they went free a few months ago, they mentioned being “better resourced” since their acquisition by Pinterest. The current outage likely has nothing to do with Pinterest or going free. But it’s not a good sign that, not long after they stopped taking my money, they’re having such a major outage.

Instapaper, of course, isn’t really a critical service. If I lost access to GMail for that long, I’d be in a lot of trouble. And, now that I think about it, I have enough stuff in Evernote that losing access to that for a week would be pretty inconvenient too. (I’m assuming that I’d still have access to my local Evernote files on my hard drive if Evernote had an outage. But I’m honestly not sure about that.)

Anyway, earlier this week, I had bookmarked an episode of Canvas that talks about “read later” services. I should listen to that. I don’t plan on switching to Pocket, but it’s worth looking into.

And maybe I should think about ways to back up my Instapaper articles and Evernote notes. (I’m already backing up my GMail account on a semi-regular basis.)

Data Privacy Day

So I’ve been told that today is Data Privacy Day. In honor of that, I… got a haircut and cleaned my bathtub today. Seriously, I’ve had a lot of fairly mundane things to take care of today. But I did also want to do some computer maintenance, so I thought I’d try to continue with my effort to encrypt the hard drives on all my computers.

A few weeks ago, I turned on FileVault on my MacBook. That’s working well. It hasn’t noticeably slowed it down, nor has it gone horribly wrong and destroyed all my data.

So I thought that today, maybe I’d try to enable BitLocker on my ThinkPad. I didn’t get too far with that. Apparently, you need a TPM chip to use BitLocker, and I don’t have one of those. I did a little research, and you can enable it on a computer without TPM, but you need to store an encryption key on a flash drive, and insert it every time you boot up the computer. I don’t think I want to do that. It seems pretty risky and inconvenient. So I guess I’m going to put that idea aside until my next laptop.

I’ve also thought about enabling BitLocker on my desktop PC. That’s new enough that it probably has a TPM chip. But it also has a regular hard drive (not an SSD), and it’s a desktop PC. So there’s not as much risk of the drive being stolen, and there’s more of an issue with performance. So maybe I’ll put that idea aside too, at least until I replace the drive with an SSD (which I’m probably going to do at some point this year).

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about anti-virus software a bit more. Both of my PCs are now running with just Windows Defender. I’m a little uncomfortable with that. It’s still kind of hard for me to accept that I probably don’t need third-party anti-virus software anymore. One thing that’s made it a little easier to accept is this blog post from a former Firefox developer, and some discussion about it on Slashdot and Hacker News. It’s really sounding like the consensus is that the MS anti-virus software is not only “good enough,” but probably better in many ways than the third-party options.

Evernote 8.0 for iOS

Evernote just released a new version of their iOS client, version 8.0. It’s a pretty big redesign. Over the last few years, I’ve generally found that any time a company does a big redesign on their iOS app, I’m disappointed with it. So I was prepared for this update to really annoy me. But it’s not that bad. It is actually a little easier to use than the old one, for some common use cases. And they haven’t taken away any key functionality.

The one thing that does bug me about it is that you can’t change the color scheme any more. The redesign uses a pretty simple black-on-white scheme (with a little green). I’d like it if they at least added a dark theme. But that’s a minor issue.

Reaction to the update has been mixed. The Verge says “Evernote’s redesign is too little, too late.” (The review is positive, regarding the update, but negative, regarding everything else Evernote has done lately.) TNW says “Evernote is still dead to me, but the iOS app looks better than ever.” (So, again, positive about the update and negative about Evernote in general.) Both of those reviewers like Bear as an alternative. If I was at all unhappy with Evernote (and also didn’t need a Windows client) I’d consider Bear.

command line follow-up

As a little follow-up to my recent post about command-line stuff in Windows, here’s an InfoWorld article about the popularity of Microsoft’s Linux Subsystem. I still haven’t really used it much, but I like it a lot. As the article mentions, there are a lot of fixes coming in the next Windows Insider build, so that’s a good sign. I hope it’s something that they’re going to continue to support and eventually move out of beta.

I really wish I could use it at work, but my work PC and laptop are Windows 7, and all my VMs are various slightly-outdated versions of Windows Server.

And as if running bash on Windows wasn’t confusing enough, I could also run PowerShell on my Mac. But, yeah, I think that would be too weird.

 

Snow Day

It snowed yesterday, and it’s been very cold yesterday and today, so I’ve spent most of the weekend at home, where it’s nice and warm. And I got a little bit of computer maintenance done.

On my MacBook, I finally got around to turning on FileVault. I’d never done that before, out of fear that it would slow things down too much and/or cause data corruption issues. But it’s been around for long enough now that it’s likely pretty solid, and I don’t think it’ll slow things down too much. I turned it on this morning, and it’s still encrypting the drive. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, since the time estimate has been jumping around a lot, but I think it’ll be done by tomorrow if I leave it going overnight.

My desktop PC, a Dell XPS 8900, just hit its first anniversary. I bought it a year ago, so the one-year McAfee LiveSafe subscription just expired. I checked the renewal price on it, and it would have been $65, so I said no to that, and uninstalled it. I then turned on the default Windows Defender software. I’m curious as to whether this will speed things up or not. The PC is usually reasonably fast, but it does seem to bog down at times for no discernible reason.

I also finally got around to installing bash on my desktop PC. I’d installed it on my ThinkPad some time ago. I still haven’t done much with it though. One of these days I should sit down with my laptop and my PDF of Learning the bash Shell and see if I can brush up on my bash skills, and maybe learn a few new tricks.

CMD.EXE will never die

Microsoft recently decided to make a fairly minor change in Windows 10 that led to some misleading headlines about the impending death of CMD.EXE. Microsoft has now posted a nice blog post explaining clearly that the old command prompt isn’t going anywhere. I still use cmd.exe for some stuff, and PowerShell for other stuff. I’ve never gotten entirely comfortable with PowerShell, and I still find myself needing to search the web to figure out how to get stuff done with it, but it’s definitely quite useful, once you’ve gotten the hang of it.

I’m probably just as proficient with PowerShell as I am with bash. (Which is to say, not nearly as proficient as I’d like to be, but good enough to get by.) It’s kind of funny that bash has been around since 1989 and is still so popular. It’s pretty easy to switch to a different command shell in Linux (or other Unix variants), and it used to be common to see people trying out different shells, but it seems like bash has won out over all the others. And, of course, you can now get a good bash shell in Windows, which is pretty cool.

Long ago, back in the MS-DOS days, I was a big fan of JP Software’s 4DOS, which was a replacement for COMMAND.COM. They’re still around, and their current product is called Take Command. I paid for an upgrade to it about a year ago, and gave it a spin, but I had some issues with it, and gave up on it. I may upgrade to the new version and give it another try; it’s got quite a lot of functionality, though it’s gotten pretty hairy over the years. The best example is probably the TPIPE command, which is very powerful, but not at all elegant.

Evernote privacy, revisited

This is a follow-up to my post from a few days ago about Evernote’s privacy policy changes. They got so much negative feedback about the changes that they’ve decided not to implement them, and to review and revise their policy to “address our customers’ concerns, reinforce that their data remains private by default, and confirm the trust they have placed in Evernote is well founded.” That quote is from their new blog post on the subject. I’m fine with that, and it’s nice to see them reacting quickly to this. I still don’t consider Evernote to be a great place to store seriously confidential information, but I wouldn’t consider most note-taking services to be trustworthy for that.

At lot of people have looked at OneNote as a good alternative to Evernote, but their privacy statement is fairly opaque. There’s nothing terribly alarming in there, but the statement is mostly a bunch of boilerplate legalese.

If I was looking at alternatives, and I didn’t need a Windows client, only macOS and iOS clients, I’d seriously consider Bear. It’s gotten some very good reviews. And it uses CloudKit to sync data, so it’s all encrypted by default.

Another one I’d look at, if I only needed macOS support, is Quiver, which is billed as “a programmer’s notebook.” One of the issues I have with both Evernote and OneNote is that they’re not great for plain text, specifically program source code. But I really need something I can use on iOS and Windows, so a macOS-only program wouldn’t do me much good.

Evernote privacy

There was a bit of a brouhaha earlier this week, when Evernote made some changes to their privacy policy. I’ve always known that my Evernote data isn’t encrypted, and can be seen by Evernote employees and processed by Evernote’s servers, so this doesn’t seem like that big a change (or that big a deal) to me. I generally store more sensitive stuff in 1Password, which is encrypted locally, and would be inaccessible to the folks at AgileBits.

The new wrinkle here is that Evernote is going to be doing some fancy machine learning stuff, so they needed to clarify how that would work. They posted a blog entry on this stuff today, and I’m reasonably satisfied with it, so I’m not going to be jumping ship over this.

Still, I should probably do a quick pass through my Evernote notebooks, and make sure I don’t have anything sensitive in there. If I do, I can move it to 1Password or just encrypt it in-place in Evernote. The encryption feature in Evernote is not great: you need to encrypt single notes, one at a time, and you can only do it on Windows and Mac, not on iOS. I think it would be great if you could designate an entire notebook as encrypted, and just put all your sensitive stuff in that one notebook.