Category: software

Mac OS 9

There’s an interesting (and lengthy) article up on Ars Technica today about people who are still using Mac OS 9. I’ll admit that I miss some of the stuff from the classic Mac OS (prior to OS X). And even some stuff that was in earlier versions of OS X, but got changed or removed somewhere along the way.

In particular, I’m still annoyed about what they did to the scroll bars in OS X Lion. I really don’t like the thin scroll bars, with no arrow buttons. (I may have blogged about this recently. Or I may have just thought about blogging about it. I’m not sure…) I wish Apple would allow tools like Kaleidoscope to work in OS X, so people like me could do a bit of UI customization, to suit our peculiar preferences.

I’ve been thinking about stuff like this recently, since they announced the iPhone 7, with no headphone jack. That got me thinking about all the useful stuff that’s been removed from phones and computers recently, mostly by Apple: user-replaceable batteries, user-replaceable hard drives, CD/DVD drives, and so on. (And also thinking about the mostly useless stuff that’s been added, mostly by Microsoft. Basically, all the reasons so many people want to stick with Windows 7 and skip 8 & 10. But that’s a post for another day.)

Neverwinter Nights and Windows 10

I got off to a pretty good start with Neverwinter Nights over the last few days. I got it working reasonably well under Windows 10 on my ThinkPad, played through the tutorial, and got started on the first “chapter.”

I had a little trouble with the ThinkPad last night though, so I decided to do some troubleshooting. Which was probably a bad idea, since it led me down a rat-hole that I’m only just now (mostly) dug out of. I won’t get into too much detail, but I discovered that I hadn’t successfully installed any Windows Updates since April. I eventually figured out that this tip from SuperUser fixed things and allowed me to get back on the update bandwagon again. But then there was so much stuff to update, I had to just leave the laptop running all day. (Which is fine, since I was going to GS Comic Fest anyway.) So, after that was all done, I appear to have an up-to-date Windows 10 install, ready (I hope) for the coming Anniversary Update.

But then I found that Neverwinter Nights didn’t work anymore. So, after a bunch of flailing around with settings on that, I finally gave up and uninstalled it, then reinstalled it. Then, tweaked a bunch of parameters. And now I think I have that working again.

At some point in this process, I also uninstalled Norton Anti-Virus. I don’t think Norton was the cause of any of my problems, but it seemed like a possible culprit, so I removed it. Now, I’m not sure if I want to add it back or not. I only have about a month to go on my current subscription. Recent news indicates that maybe Norton isn’t such a good choice right now, having “multiple critical vulnerabilities” according to a researcher at Google.

My desktop PC is running McAfee, which came pre-installed, and I haven’t (yet) decided to remove it. I can also get a free version of McAfee from my internet provider, so I maybe I should put that on the ThinkPad. But I’ve never been a big fan of McAfee, so I’m not sure about that. Maybe I’ll just stick with Windows Defender for now.

So after all that, I’m ready to jump back into Neverwinter Nights. But, heck, it’s just about dinner time now, and I’m tired of messing around on this laptop. So I guess I’ll shut it all down and grab a bite to eat.

Evernote price changes

I just read about Evernote’s pricing and plan changes. The price of a premium account is going from $50/year to $70/year. My premium account renews in January, so I don’t really need to make any decisions just yet. I could drop back to a Plus plan, which would be $35/year. There’s not much in the premium plan that I’d miss if I dropped down to Plus. And, while $70/year seems a bit expensive, I could certainly afford that.

A lot of people posting in the Evernote subreddit are talking about switching to OneNote or Apple Notes. The latter wouldn’t work for me, since I need Windows support. OneNote is a possibility though. But I really like Evernote more than OneNote, and migrating all my notes at this point would be a hassle. (I currently have over 800 notes.)

Mixtapes

I Made You A Mixtape — An interesting article by Federico Viticci about the evolution of the ways in which he acquires and listens to music. This is a subject I also think about a lot (probably too much).

I’ve seen Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist mentioned a few times recently, including in Federico’s article. I’m getting to the point where I’ve almost convinced myself to stop paying for Slacker and switch to Spotify, but I’m not quite there yet.

I miss mix tapes and mix CDs. In particular, I miss Joshua Benton’s old “CD Mix of the Month Club”. There was something about getting a CD in the mail from a complete stranger every month that was pretty cool. (And, likewise, in creating a CD to send off to a complete stranger.)

One of my friends from college used to send out a daily “track of the day” email to a small group. (He’d send out an email with an MP3 file attached.) That was a lot of fun too. He had pretty eclectic taste, and would send out some really interesting stuff.

I’ve been enjoying the Insomnia Radio Daily Dose podcast feed since I decided to subscribe to it a couple of months ago. That’s the closest thing to an old-fashioned mixtape for me right now. Nearly all of the music on the feed is from artists I’ve never heard of, and nearly all of it is good.

Private Internet Access VPN

About a year ago, I signed up for a one-year subscription to Private Internet Access VPN. I had previously been using iPredator, but switched for a few reasons.

I don’t use it often, but it’s always worked fine when I do use it. And it works on my PC, Mac, and my iOS devices. I use the OpenVPN client on Windows and iOS and Viscosity on Mac. PIA has its own client for PC, Mac, and iOS, but I like using a standard third-party client instead. (I might try their iOS client at some point, since OpenVPN on iOS is a little wonky.)

Things have worked out well enough that I wanted to renew the subscription, so I had to enter new credit card details, since I’d used a virtual card number the first time. I almost gave up on that, though, since I couldn’t get their credit card update form to work. I opened a support ticket with them, and they gave me the usual advice to clear cache and cookies, but also to fill in the form by hand. Previously, I’d been using 1Password to fill in my card info and address. Well, it worked after clearing cache and cookies and filling in the form by hand, but it was a pain. When you’ve added so much awful client-side code to a simple form that it won’t work without forcing the user to jump through a bunch of hoops, you’re doing it wrong.

But hey, they were helpful, and now I’m signed up for another year.

Office 365 Home

Some time ago, I broke down and paid for an Office 365 Home subscription. I paid for my first year with a card I bought from eBay, and my second year with a card I bought from Costco. Well, I was in Costco today and saw that they had two-packs of one-year Office 365 subscriptions on sale for $140. So I picked one up, and now my Office 365 subscription is good through December 2018. Overkill, I guess, but at least I don’t have to worry about it for a while now. And $70/year is a good price, since it’s $100/year if you buy it from Microsoft.

The packaging on the thing I got from Costco was a little silly. It’s two shrink-wrapped one-year Office 365 boxes, inside a bigger box, which is itself shrink-wrapped. All for two product keys. Oh well. Now I need to resist the urge to buy any more of these, if I see them on sale again. It’s probably not a good idea to extend one of these subscriptions too far into the future.

File History on Windows and photos in OneDrive

In addition to the backups I did last weekend, I also turned on File History on my desktop PC. This is kind of like Time Machine for Windows. I’m using a separate external drive for this, so now I have one external drive with my Macrium image backup, and one being used for File History.

I also decided to move all my photos into OneDrive. Previously, I had a big folder of old photos on my desktop PC, containing digital photos from my pre-iPhone days, and scanned photos from ScanCafe. That folder had about 12 GB of stuff in it. Most of that space is used up by the full-resolution ScanCafe photos. I just moved that folder so it’s now under the OneDrive hierarchy. It took a while to upload, but it’s all in OneDrive now.

On the Mac, all my iPhone photos are in the Apple Photos app. I don’t want to try to move that library into OneDrive, since it’s not a normal folder. (And, by the way, it would be so much more convenient if it was a normal folder, but that’s a rant for another day.) Instead, I copied the photos from ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters into OneDrive, which should be all the original full-resolution photos from my iPhone. That’s about 2 GB worth of photos. I’ll need to remember to do that occasionally to keep the copy in OneDrive up to date. I should probably write a script for that.

So now I have all of my photos in the cloud, which is probably something I should have done quite some time ago. And I think I’ve got myself covered pretty well on backups, on both the Mac and PC.

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.