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.

 

Today’s Apple Complaint

Yesterday’s big announcement about the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X and all that stuff was very impressive, but my main Apple concern right now is, yet again, annoying iTunes changes. (See also here.) Every time Apple changes iTunes, they make it worse.

This version’s main annoyance is the removal of the iOS app store and iOS app management from iTunes. Yep, you can’t buy or browse apps from within iTunes anymore, and you can’t sync app updates down to your iPhone or iPad the old-fashioned way anymore. This bugs me a lot because I’ve recently had to sync app updates to my iPad via iTunes, due to some over-the-air updates getting stuck. So I guess I’ll have to figure out why those updates were getting stuck now, instead of just working around it. Oh well.

As to removing the ability to browse the app store within iTunes, that wouldn’t bother me too much if they replaced it with a decent web-based app store. (But they’re probably not going to do that.) Right now, you can view web pages for iOS apps (like this one), but you can’t really do anything with them. You can’t log in to your iTunes account and buy an app, or write an app review, or manage in-app subscriptions, or anything even vaguely useful.

This other big issue is that, in the “songs” view, the top part, where you can browse by genre, artist, and album, is now sized so it only shows three rows. You can drag it down so it’s a more useful size, but the resizing doesn’t stick, so you have to do it every time you go back into iTunes. (Heck, I just checked, and it doesn’t even stick if you just switch to another view, then back to “songs.”) Really, why would they do that?

So that’s my cranky-old-man complaint for the day. Hope you enjoyed it!

Paul McCartney, one more time

I went to see Paul McCartney last night at the Prudential Center in Newark. This was the fifth time I’ve seen him live (see here for a list of previous concerts). I bailed out early, so I could make the 11pm train back home. I guess there was a time when I would have stayed through the whole thing, taken the 12:30am train, and still made it to work the next day, but that’s not how my body works these days. (In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be in some pain at work today…)

Looking at this set list, I see that I bailed out near the very end of the main set. Staying for the encore would have been cool, but I don’t see anything there that I haven’t heard live before.

The last time I saw McCartney (just last year), I assumed it was probably the last time I’d see him live. So I don’t want to say that this was the last time I’ll see him live. But it probably was. He’s got to stop touring at some point, right? I mean, Sgt Pepper came out fifty years ago! Honestly though, I think I’ll be too old to get out and see him before he’s too old to get on stage and play for three straight hours.

Len Wein RIP

As reported by Mark Evanier, and many others, Len Wein has passed away. I wasn’t going to write a post about this, since I didn’t think I had much to add, but then Kurt Busiek posted a few pages from various Len Wein stories to Facebook, including the one below. It’s from “Never Say Die!”, a 12 page story from Adventure Comics 466. I bought that issue off the newsstand when it came out, in 1979. At that time, DC was publishing Adventure as one of their Dollar Comics. Basically, it was a 64-page anthology title, with stories featuring Flash, Aquaman, Deadman, and the JSA.

I remember enjoying all of the stories in that issue, but the Deadman story really stuck with me. In it, Deadman sees an old man preparing to commit suicide, and intervenes. (There’s a good synopsis of the plot on the wiki page I linked above.) It’s the kind of story that (at the time) probably couldn’t have been published outside of an anthology title. It was a little too weird and a little too dark. (The story can be found in Deadman Book 4, by the way, which includes his other Deadman stories from Adventure Comics.)

I’d forgotten that it was written by Wein, but I never forgot that story. I don’t remember any details about the other stories in that issue, or really in very many other comics that I bought around that time. This was probably one of the first comic book stories I read that broke the mold of the typical Marvel/DC 70s superhero story, which was the only thing I’d been exposed to, up to that point. (In a few years, of course, I’d be reading Cerebus and Love & Rockets, and I’d have a much more expansive view of the kind of stories that could be told in comics. But I digress.)

I’ve never really thought about Len Wein as being one of my favorite writers, but when I look at some of the comics I was reading and enjoying as a kid, some of the best of them were written by him, including this one. His Batman writing was also really good, including the Untold Legend of the Batman mini-series with John Byrne, and other stories that can be found in his Tales of the Batman volume.

RIP Jerry Pournelle

I just noticed the news that Jerry Pournelle has passed away. I was a big fan of his old BYTE column. Since BYTE went away, I’ve been an occasional reader of his blog, where he continued the same kind of writing that he did for BYTE. (Plus a lot of random stuff that wouldn’t have made sense in BYTE, much of which was interesting.) I haven’t read too much of his SF, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read, and I’ve always meant to read more of it.

The kind of writing I do here on my blog, when I’m writing about computing, has definitely been influenced by the way Pournelle wrote, both in his BYTE column and his blog. (Just to be clear, while my writing style might be influenced by Pournelle’s, I’m not nearly as good a writer, of course.) I often write from what I might call the “power-user” point of view, writing about my own experiences using a particular software package or piece of hardware. I’m not writing a review or anything even vaguely formal. I’m just writing an account of my own experience, with the benefit of applying some useful perspective, hopefully, and an informed opinion, honed over many years of messing with computers.

I don’t see too much of that kind of writing on the web anymore. (And I don’t see it in magazines, since there aren’t any magazines left covering general computing the way BYTE did.) There are SF authors with great blogs, like John Scalzi and Charles Stross, and of course plenty of hardware/software/gadget blogs, but nobody quite like Jerry Pournelle.

Equifax breach

This week’s Equifax breach is big news, with a few “SMH” moments (as the kids say).

The first SMH moment is the execs who sold a bunch of stock just before the company disclosed the breach: “Three Equifax executives sold a combined $1.8 million in stock just days after the company discovered a major breach of its data system, but well before it disclosed the hack publicly.” — from an AP story in the NYT. Supposedly, these guys weren’t aware of the breach at the time, but it’s still pretty darn fishy.

The second SMH issue is the web site that Equifax has set up to supposedly let people know if they’ve been affected by the breach. As multiple people have figured out, it’s pretty sketchy. At first, it kind of looked like maybe they were completely ignoring the user input and giving everyone the same opaque response. Now, that’s a little less clear, but I’m not sure if they’re actually giving useful responses or just randomizing them.

The third SMH data point is the free year of credit monitoring they’re offering. It looks like you’ll need to enter a credit card number to sign up for it, and it will convert to a paid credit monitoring plan after the first year, unless you proactively cancel before the end of the year. So they’ll likely end up making money off this breach (though not until a year from now, when all those free accounts quietly bill for year two).

The NY Times has some advice, which is all probably good, and similar to advice I’ve seen elsewhere. First is to put a “permanent” credit freeze on your info at all three credit bureaus. That can cost a few bucks, but you can leave it in place for however long you want. Then, you can also put a “fraud alert” on your info, which is free but only lasts for 90 days. (And supposedly you only need to do that with one credit bureau, and it will apply to all three.) And you should also check your credit report at www.annualcreditreport.com. (But you were already doing that, right?)

If you’re looking to read up on this, there are a lot of places to do so. Consumerist has a good, clear, general write-up. If you want a deeper dive, Brian Krebs has a good blog post about it. And if you just want to wade into the muck, there’s a mega-thread at the personal finance sub-reddit that’s everything a reddit mega-thread tends to be: a fair amount of useful information, mixed with a lot of nonsense. (But it’s fun to read.)

What am I personally going to do? Well, I already check my credit report on a fairly regular basis. I last checked it in December 2016, so I’ll try to remember to check it again at the end of this year. If there’s any short-term fallout from the breach, it’ll probably be visible on the reports by year-end. And I know I should do that credit freeze thing, but honestly I’m probably not going to. I’ll see if I can talk myself into it.

And I was initially going to sign up for the free year of credit monitoring through Equifax, but now that I’m thinking about the auto-renew thing, I think I should skip that. I’m betting that Equifax will make the process of canceling before the auto-renew fairly annoying and onerous. And I’ll probably forget to do it anyway. I can get free credit monitoring through my AAA membership, so maybe I should sign up for that. (They appear to be using Experian’s service.)

Batman: The Animated Series

The one random thing I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post is the 25th anniversary of Batman: The Animated Series. I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about it, many of which are pretty pointless, but here are a few good ones.

B:TAS is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, and one of my favorite takes on Batman (and his supporting characters). This all reminds me that I only ever bought the first season on DVD. I should really buy (and watch) the rest. Or I could just re-watch them all on Amazon Prime.

 

Stuff I wanted to mention

There are a number of things I kind of wanted to mention on this blog, but that I probably don’t have enough to say about to warrant a full post. And they’re piling up in my brain, so I want to jot them all down, then maybe I can relax a bit.

First, today is the 80th birthday of Sergio Aragonés. I’m having a hard time accepting that he’s 80. I know he’s older than me, but the last time I saw him, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was over 60 yet, and that wasn’t that long ago. (OK, maybe it was five or ten years ago, but still…) Anyway, I have a bunch of his comics in my “to be read” pile right now, including a Groo mini-series, some of the Sergio Aragonés Funnies series, and a few issues of Bat Lash. I should really read some of those.

Next, I have started getting into Pere Ubu again for some reason. Probably because they have a new studio album coming out, so I must have seem something about that, which triggered me to start thinking about them again. I spent a little time tonight digging up my old Pere Ubu CDs are ripping them to MP3. I have five of their CDs, which is a decent sample of their output, but not nearly everything. (They’ve been around since the 70s.) Their web site is a lot of fun to browse through. It’s mostly text, not the usual graphics-heavy band site. The organization is somewhat idiosyncratic, but there’s a lot there.

And a couple of recent deaths: First, John Ashbery. I first read him back in college, as assigned reading for a creative writing class (I think). He’s one of the few poets I’ve read who has stuck with me. I’ve been thinking that I should read more poetry. And there’s certainly a lot of Ashbery poems out there that I haven’t read yet, so maybe I should start with some of those.

Second, Holger Czukay. I’m not sure where I first learned about him, but it was probably in a Matt Howarth comic book. I don’t actually own much (or any?) of his recorded output, as part of Can or elsewhere. I should fix that.

Labor Day

Things I did this weekend:

  1. Watched four bad movies, with RiffTrax commentary.
  2. Finished reading a very nerdy Star Trek novel.
  3. Read a few random comic books.
  4. Backed up my desktop PC with Macrium and my Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner.

And that’s really about it. I didn’t go anywhere, or do anything particularly productive or useful. I’d been running a number of vaguely interesting and variously ambitious plans through my head over the last few weeks, ranging from NYC museum visits to flying to Atlanta for Dragon Con, but I decided to punt and just relax. I made one half-hearted stab at watching a Pluralsight video, but I couldn’t get into it. I feel a little guilty about that, but at least I didn’t just give up completely and binge-watch NCIS all weekend. (That has happened. But not recently…) And I did manage to hit my Apple Watch activity goals every day, I think, so there’s that.

NYCC badge activation

I got my badges for NYCC in the mail this week. These things are getting very complicated. They sent me two badges, one for Thursday and one for Friday, and they needed to be activated online, similar to what you need to do with a new credit card. They’re RFID badges, and you need to tap them against… something… as you go in and out of the con. I guess I’ll figure it out when I get there. I had to give them my mobile phone number as part of the activation, and I’m hoping they don’t abuse that. (I think I probably gave that to them already for the “fan verification” thing you need to do to buy tickets, so I guess it’s fine.)

I guess the days of having a simple paper badge are long gone. The badges do look pretty nice, and they have photos of people from The Walking Dead TV show on them, so I’d probably think that was cool, if I actually watched The Walking Dead. (I’d much rather have, say, people from the Flash and Supergirl TV shows on them, but oh well.)

I do have a list of grievances about badge activation. I should probably just keep that to myself, but what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t use it to post a list of grievances?

  1. The activation number is printed on the badge in pale yellow on a white background.
  2. Each badge needs to be activated separately.
  3. There is no option at the end of the badge activation process to activate another badge under the same name. You have to start over again from scratch.
  4. There is no option to log in to your NYCC account and just pick up your name, email, and phone # from that. You have to type them in.
  5. There’s a sticker on each badge telling you to activate it. The sticker does not use the easy-to-remove adhesive that’s typically used for these things. I had to use a razor blade and rubbing alcohol to get the stickers off.
  6. Seriously, why do I have to activate these at all? They were bought online, under an account that’s already associated with my ID.

So that’s my list of grievances. I feel slightly better having written them down. (Insert old man yells at cloud image here.)