Poor old RPI

This article from Vice News does a pretty good job of showing how my old alma mater, RPI, has become an almost perfect example of all the things that have gone wrong with college education in America. Overpaid executives, growing tuition, growing student-to-faculty ratios, growing administrator-to-faculty ratios, and so on.

If I was a high school senior today, coming from a fairly modest middle-class background, I really don’t think I would want to even consider RPI. And if I did want to go there, I don’t think I could afford it, without taking on some crippling student debt. Which wouldn’t be worth it, since the quality of the undergraduate education really isn’t good enough to support that kind of high tuition. I’d likely get a better education at Rutgers or NJIT.

Farewell, Dr. Dobb’s

Sad to see that Dr. Dobb’s is getting shut down. I had a subscription to the old print magazine for many years. They had some great, useful, well-written articles and columns, from people like Michael Swaine, Jeff Duntemann, and Al Stevens.

There are a lot of great programming resources out there on the internet, of course, from Q&A sites like Stack Overflow to podcasts like .NET Rocks. But I don’t think there’s anything else out there that’s quite like Dr. Dobb’s was, in its heyday.

WordPress security woes and Jetpack observations

For anyone who might be wondering: nope, I’m not using the plugin that got hacked today.

Also: interesting to see the new stuff in Jetpack 3.3. I only have the one site, so centralized multi-site management doesn’t help me much, but it’s interesting how much stuff they’re building into Jetpack that ties back to WordPress.com. Though I don’t want to give up basic control of my site, I actually like the ability to pick and choose a few things to “offload” to WordPress.com, as long as it’s still possible to disconnect it all without actually losing any content.

Office 365 Home Premium

I’ve been going back and forth for a while now as to whether or not I wanted to sign up for an Office 365 Home subscription. I’ve been using a retail box version of Office 2010 on my desktop PC, and a HUP version of Office 2013 on my ThinkPad, so I’ve got both of those machines adequately covered. And I’ve never bothered with Office on my Mac. But the only office suite I had on the Mac was iWork ’08, which is obviously out of date. I’ve occasionally thought about updating to the new Mac App Store versions of Pages and Numbers, but I couldn’t talk myself into spending $20 each for them.

So instead I bought a key card for Office 365 Home for $60 from a sketchy third-party seller on Amazon. It worked, so now I have Office for Mac for a year, plus I can upgrade my desktop PC from Office 2010 to Office 2013 if I want. (And a bunch of extra space in OneDrive, and some Skype minutes.) I don’t know if I’ll want to renew it next year or not, but it should keep me out of trouble through 2015.

I’ve never actually used Office on the Mac. I’ve always relied on iWork, and before that, AppleWorks. I don’t do much word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac, so that was always good enough. But it’ll be nice to have a “real” install of MS Office on my Mac, for those occasions when I really do need to work with an Excel file or (less likely) a Word or PowerPoint file.

I’m not really tempted to move away from Apple Mail to Outlook for my personal e-mail on the Mac. But I do have my company e-mail set up in Apple Mail too, and that’s an Exchange account, so maybe I should delete that from Apple Mail and use Outlook for that. It would make some sense, and certain things would probably be easier, but then I’d have to check two different mail programs. So I’m probably going to ignore Outlook for now.

I need to think about whether or not I have any use for the copious OneDrive space or the Skype minutes. Right now, I have DropBox and Google Drive installed on all my computers. I’m not sure I want to add the OneDrive client in there too; I don’t think it gives me much that I’m not already getting from Google Drive, except just more space. And I never come anywhere close to using up all the minutes on my Verizon plan, and I don’t need to make any international calls, so I’m not sure what I can do with those Skype minutes.

Take Control ebooks

I just finished reading Yosemite: A Take Control Crash Course. And, prior to that, I read Take Control of Upgrading to Yosemite, both of which I bought just before I upgraded to Yosemite. I thought they might come in handy. I’ve generally found that the Take Control books are well-written and edited, but in this case, I didn’t find much content in either of these that was all that useful for me. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) Which isn’t to say they weren’t worth buying and reading. They were both quick reads, since I skimmed through the stuff I wasn’t interested in, and they didn’t cost much.

I also recently bought Take Control of LaunchBar and Take Control of TextExpander. Both LaunchBar and TextExpander are programs I use all the time, but I don’t think I use them as well as I could. I know both of them have functionality that I’m not using at all, and that would probably be helpful. So I’m hoping these two ebooks help me figure out how I could be using these programs better.

two-factor authentication and other worries

After reading this article earlier today, I panicked a little, since I couldn’t remember ever having seen a “recovery key” associated with my Apple account, nor could I find one in KeePass, 1Password, or Evernote. But, when I got home from work, I checked, and it turns out I’ve never enabled two-factor auth on my Apple account. And I do still know the answer to my security questions, though I’d never copied them over from KeePass to 1Password for some reason. (I’ve done that now.)

I was going to go ahead and enable two-factor authentication on my Apple account tonight, but I couldn’t quite make up my mind as to whether it would be a help or a hindrance. I need to think about it some more.

This also made me think about my Google account, and one particular thing I’d been meaning to do for a long time: make a local backup of my GMail data. About a year ago, I read about a tool called Gmvault, and made a note to install it on my desktop PC and start using it. But I never got around to it. Well, now that I’m on a bit of a GTD kick, I went ahead and made a new note about that and put it in my Evernote ‘inbox’. So now I’ve got gmvault installed on my PC, and I’m letting it run. It was easy enough to set up; it’s a pretty simple command-line tool. It looks like it’ll take a couple of hours to run. After the initial sync, it can apparently do incremental syncs, so if I can manage to remember to run it occasionally, I should be in good shape.

Occasionally, you read horror stories about someone losing access to their Apple account or their Google account for one reason or another, and getting caught up in the bureaucracy at those companies and not being able to get their account back. It’s kind of scary, how much of our data we trust to these guys. I try to keep track of everything I’d ever need to restore my access, if I ever get locked out, and I try to keep important stuff backed up locally, whenever I can. But there’s only so much you can do.

adding a printer under Mac OS X

I just spent some time trying to get my Canon printer set up to work on my MacBook. This was one of the last things on my to-do list for the new clean Yosemite install. Here’s a quick note for anyone else setting up a network printer under Mac OS X: the following bit from this page is key:

A dialog appears listing printers on your local network. It may take a minute or two for your printer to appear.

Yes, if you do like I did and stare at the dialog that’s supposed to list network printers for only 15 or 30 seconds, then give up and close it, you’re going to be going in circles. It would really help if that dialog actually did something to make it obvious that it was still searching the network. Well, hey, I’ve got it working now. I think I wound up installing some unnecessary software along the way, but no big deal.

And it’s nice to see that Canon still supports a five year old printer with drivers that work on the newest version of Mac OS. The printer is a PIXMA MX870, a fairly low-end network multi-function inkjet, but it’s held up really well and works fine under Windows 7, Windows 8, and Mac OS X.

MacBook SSD replacement, part three

The MacBook is up and running, with (pretty much) all my software installed and (probably) all the files I need copied over to the new drive. It’s definitely much faster than before. And it’s a much cleaner install, with a lot less crap in my ~/Library folder and elsewhere.

I left behind a few fairly big items, like VMWare Fusion, and my Windows XP VM, since I wasn’t really using it for anything, and I hadn’t paid to upgrade Fusion to a version that works on Yosemite. I don’t think I’ll bother buying the upgrade, since I really don’t have any need for Windows on the MacBook anymore.

And my MAMP stack is gone. I’ll probably want to get that set up again, but I don’t mind starting from scratch, since parts of my old MAMP stack were fairly out of date. I’ll need to do some research on the easiest way to set that up nowadays. I can probably use a guide like this one to get things going again.

As for the old drive, I just bought a $20 enclosure for it from Newegg. None of the enclosures I have now is USB 3.0, so I figured I should get a new one. I’ll hold on to the drive, as-is, for a while, then, after I’m sure I don’t need anything else off it, I’ll wipe it and start using it as a backup drive. Oh, and if the enclosure I just bought from Newegg is any good, I should probably buy a second one for the old drive from the ThinkPad.

I’m getting to the point now where I should really think about retiring some of the old drives that I have lying around the apartment. I’ve got maybe a half-dozen old drives, all under 200 GB, gathering dust. I guess they’re not doing any harm, but I should really get them together, wipe the oldest/smallest ones, and send them off to a recycler. Well, that’s a project for another day.

MacBook SSD replacement, part two

Yosemite is now installed, and I’m in the process of copying over data from the old drive to the new. That’s going to take some time, probably another couple of hours. Meanwhile, I went out to Home Depot and bought a precision screwdriver set that has the Torx bit that I need.

So now it’s back to the waiting game. Once the copying is done, I have a whole list of applications to install and configure. Then, I also need to decide if I want to use Trim Enabler. I’m pretty sure I do, even with the necessity of jumping through some hoops to use it on Yosemite. I also want to see if there’s an easy way to see if I need to run the performance restoration fix on my SSD. Since I’m pretty sure I have the most recent firmware, I don’t think I need it.