Category: software

LastPass and 1Password

LastPass just recently made their sync feature available in their free product. Previously, it was only available in their $12/year premium product. So, if that was the only thing holding you back from using a good password management program, go ahead and give LastPass a try.

I’m using 1Password, and I’m still quite happy with it. I bought it back when it was sold as a software product rather than a service. So I paid for the Mac, Windows, and iOS apps, and I sync my passwords via DropBox. AgileBits has been good about continuing to support their “legacy” customers, and not trying to force everyone onto a subscription plan. (I think they learned a bit from TextExpander’s stumbles in this area, and have succeeded in not alienating their long-time customers.)

I was thinking recently about what I would miss if I gave up my MacBook and switched entirely to Windows. One of the things at the top of my list was the 1Password Mac application. They do have a Windows application, but it’s not great. Any time I know that I need to do any non-trivial organization of my password database, I always fire up my MacBook. I only do minor edits on the PC. Thinking about that got me curious as to whether or not AgileBits was working on a new Windows app. It turns out that they were, and they’ve released it, but only for their “team” service. It sounds like they’re going to release it for non-subscription customers at some point, but they haven’t committed to a date for it yet. So I’m looking forward to that.

I’m not actually opposed to paying 1Password $3/month for their paid individual plan, though that does seem a little steep to me. (I think LastPass has it right at $12/year. Of course, their apps probably aren’t as good as 1Password.)

By the way, if you happen to be in the market for a paid LastPass subscription, Humble currently has a software bundle running that includes a one-year LastPass Premium subscription (for new customers only).

upgrades and backups and stuff

I decided to spend some time today messing around with my desktop PC and my MacBook. Specifically, I wanted to get full backups done for both of them, then upgrade the MacBook to macOS Sierra, and apply the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on the desktop PC.

I succeeded on the MacBook. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to update an image backup I made a few months ago. I also ran a Time Machine backup. Then, I downloaded and installed Sierra. Downloading it took quite a long time. The update itself was pretty quick. Maybe a bit less than an hour. I’m not seeing anything really new or exciting in Sierra. I didn’t turn on the new iCloud File Sync feature, mostly because I don’t need it, but also because it scares the crap out of me. I really don’t want my OS to randomly start deleting files off my hard drive, thanks. Even just the purgeable storage thing is a bit scary. Please don’t tell me that there’s free space on my hard drive, when it’s not actually free! Anyway, it’s all working fine.

On the PC side, I didn’t get very far. I tried making a new image backup with Macrium Reflect, but it ended in failure twice. I think the external drive I’ve been using for backups may be failing. I started a full chkdsk on it, and that’s been running for hours. Depending on what that reveals, I may run out to Costco tomorrow and pick up a new external drive, or order one from Newegg. The drive in question is probably ten years old, and it’s just a 1 TB drive, so it’s only big enough to hold a single image backup. So replacing it with a 4 TB drive might be a good idea regardless. Oh, and my other external drive, that I’ve been using for Windows File History backups, is also a bit flaky. I keep having to unplug it and plug it back in to get Windows to recognize it. (Other than that it seems to work fine.) So maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to replace that too. Heck, if I get a 4 TB external drive, I can partition it into two volumes, and use one for image backups and the other for File History. Of course, that leaves me with a single point of failure, so maybe that’s not a good idea.

iOS email apps

As I’ve mentioned in a recent post or two, I’ve been messing around a bit with third-party email apps for iOS. I’m not really that picky about email client features. I just want something that can do a good job of letting me read my email, and navigate from message to message easily.

Most third-party clients add on a bunch of bells and whistles designed to make it easier to “manage” your email. I don’t really have the kind of problems that these features are designed to solve. I don’t need a “focused” inbox, or an ability to “snooze” messages, or any of that stuff.

I do want to be able to apply Gmail labels and stars though, which is what I use for organization. Aside from the official Gmail app (and Google’s fancier Inbox app), no third party app fully supports Gmail labels, as far as I can tell. All of the ones I’ve tried support starring an email by flagging it. And they all see Gmail labels as standard folders, so you can move messages, but you can’t apply multiple labels.

The standard Apple Mail app was tweaked a bit in iOS 10, and is mostly a good solid app, but I’m still a little annoyed that they got rid of the next & previous buttons on the iPad version. It just makes it harder to move through messages.

None of the other apps I tried have next/previous buttons either, which is a bit of a disappointment. They all do, however, allow you to move between messages with left & right swipes. This sometimes works well, but it can be a problem if you’re trying to zoom & pan an HTML email that isn’t well-formatted for a mobile screen. (Panning and swiping are a bit too similar.)

Microsoft Outlook is a very nice app, except for the glaring issue I mentioned in my previous post: on the iPad, you can’t hide the message list, so you can’t see an email in full-screen.

Today, I gave Spark a try. It’s a really nice app, and has a lot of features similar to Outlook. It does allow you to view messages in full-screen on both the iPhone and iPad, so that’s nice. About the only thing I was disappointed with was that some HTML emails weren’t rendered as nicely as in Apple’s mail app. This isn’t a big problem, and only seems to affect certain messages. I’m guessing that those are messages that aren’t optimized for mobile, and Apple maybe takes some liberties with them, or perhaps they’re slightly malformed messages and Apple does a better job of “failing gracefully.” I’m not really sure. (I’m also not really sure where iOS email apps stand, in terms of HTML rendering. Are they all using the same rendering engine? I would have thought they were, but then I can’t explain why there are some differences.)

So, anyway, I still haven’t made a decision on which app(s) to stick with, so for now, I’m keeping the Apple app, the Gmail app, Outlook, and Spark all installed, on both my iPhone and iPad. I should really whittle that down though; it can’t be a good idea to have four separate apps all checking my Gmail box all the time.

I think I can rule out Outlook for now, so I should probably get rid of that. And I’m keeping the Gmail client, since it comes in handy when I want to do something tricky with Gmail labels. (Though I could also just use the Gmail web site for that. It works fine in Safari.) I think I’m going to keep Spark around for a while longer and see if I find it easier to use than Apple’s client. I may switch over to Spark as my preferred app at some point, possibly just on the iPad.

 

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.