a little more SDCC news

I haven’t been paying too much attention to SDCC news, but I did spend some time today looking at CBR, Newsarama, and Comics Alliance. In looking at the list of Eisner winners, I see a number of creators and books that I’m familiar with, of course, but I haven’t actually read any of the stuff that was published in the last year. I’m definitely interested in some of them, though. Meanwhile, there’s a live stream of a Doctor Who panel that should be starting up in a few minutes, so I should get ready for that!

Not at SDCC, 2015 edition, day one

I feel like I need to write a short “not at SDCC” post, since today is the first full day of the con. As usual, I’ll keep an eye on news coming out of the con over the next few days. The LA Daily News has a good article listing some of the big panels, mostly TV and movie stuff.

There’s also plenty of actual comic book news coming out already, including the news that Jim Starlin is working on a new Dreadstar mini-series, just to pick something at random.

Automatic car adapter, second gen

I bought an Automatic car adapter back in December. I thought I had written up a blog post about it, but I can’t find it now. So either I didn’t write it, or I spelled “Automatic” wrong in it, or something like that. Either way, it’s a somewhat useful little device that lets you track your car trips, gives you some feedback on your driving habits, and can show you the actual diagnostic codes when your “check engine” light comes on.

It connects to the iPhone via Bluetooth. The adapter I got worked fine for several months, but it started getting finicky lately. It frequently fails to connect to the iPhone. This, apparently, was a pretty common problem with the first-generation adapters. They came out with a second-generation adapter recently, which supposedly uses a more reliable form of Bluetooth, and also has some new features that the old adapter didn’t have. They didn’t offer much of an upgrade deal for existing owners: just the same $20 discount that you can get through any of their advertising deals (see sixcolors.com, for instance, which usually has a link for $20 off). Well, I really didn’t want to spend $80 on a new adapter, but I gave in today and ordered one. I’m hoping it will work reliably.

Hopefully, I can remember to write up a little review after I receive it and have a chance to use it for a while.

iTunes 12.2

I’ve got today off from work, since tomorrow is Independence Day. I really didn’t make any plans, so I’m sitting around at home right now just reading a book and messing around. I wanted to do some stuff in iTunes, but geez, the new version of iTunes is a mess. The audiobook section is messed up (none of the books show up in the “authors” view). And trying to get to the “apps” section locks up iTunes entirely, and I have to force quit it. Other people are reporting really major screw-ups with their music libraries, like having millions of copies of the same song randomly added to a playlist, and stuff like that. (Luckily, my music library seems to be fine, for now.) Here’s hoping they get a fixed version out soon. (And that they maybe learn from this and do a bit more testing next time?)

I guess I should turn off the computer and get back to my book. Or, better yet, go outside!

VPN Services

When I deleted my PayPal account last week, I had thought that I was only using PayPal for an occasional eBay purchase. I had forgotten that I was also using it to pay for my VPN service, from IPredator. (I didn’t have a recurring payment set up. Rather, I was just paying for it manually, every three months.) IPredator is a fairly small VPN provider in Sweden. They don’t accept credit cards directly, so I’d been paying with PayPal. The only other payment method they accept that would work for me is Payza. I’m not too familiar with them; their terms of service seem to be a bit nicer than PayPal’s, but I’m really not that interested in signing up for a new payment service right now.

I’ve been pretty happy with IPredator, even though it’s a fairly limited service, but those limits, plus the payment issues, have finally gotten me to think more seriously about switching to a different VPN provider. (The main issue was that they only have servers in Sweden, so any time I’m connected to the VPN, it looks like I’m in Sweden.) There are a lot of VPN providers out there, and honestly some of them look a bit shady. After looking around at some reviews, I’ve decided to give Private Internet Access a shot. They only cost $40/year, and are well-supported on Mac, PC, and iOS. They’ve gotten good reviews from Tom’s Hardware and PC Mag. And Ars Technica ran an article about them a while back that makes them look pretty good. They’re pretty highly rated on Torrent Freak too.

So today, I decided to sign up for an account and give them a try. Sign up was simple and easy. They assign a user ID and password to the account and email them to you, in plain text. I think that’s a little iffy, but you can then log in and change the password, so I guess that’s OK.

They have their own client software, for PC, Mac, and iOS, but they also work with standard OpenVPN client software. I initially tried their standard software on my Mac, but it didn’t seem to be working right, and it was a bit ugly. So I installed Viscosity instead. Viscosity works fine, and was easy to set up. I imported two profiles, for US-East and London, and both work.

I then moved from my Mac on to my iOS devices. I skipped the PIA app and went with the OpenVPN app instead. Again, it was pretty easy to get this set up, though the interface for the app is a little weird and has some quirks. But it works.

For my PC, I went with the standard OpenVPN software. The Windows OpenVPN program isn’t quite as simple to use as the iOS app, but it’s easy enough to deal with. You have to manually copy the VPN files into a config folder, and you need to do a little text file editing if you want to save your user name and password, but none of that was a problem for me.

(I should also mention that, at some point, I of course figured out that I could have paid for iPredator through PayPal with a credit card directly, and that I didn’t really need an account. PayPal makes this less than obvious, but the option is there. But by that point I was well on my way to switching to PIA.)

I haven’t used PIA enough yet to comment on their reliability, but I’ll do that at some point after I’ve been using them a while.

memories of comics past

This morning, I was looking at some books on Comixology, and noticed that there was a (relatively) recent X-Factor series that was written by Peter David. I enjoyed his X-Factor run back in the 90s, and again in 2005. It looks like this one didn’t last too long, though I guess 20 issues isn’t bad these days.

This led me to checking Peter’s web site, which I hadn’t looked at recently. I remembered that he had some health problems a while ago, but I honestly just hadn’t thought much about him lately. I see that he’s updating the site fairly regularly, and I don’t see any mention of his health in recent posts, so I’m hoping that means he’s doing well. This also reminded me that I have his two Pulling Up Stakes books on my Kindle. I should read those!

And, while browsing his site, I noticed his “friends” list in the sidebar. I don’t think he’s updated that list lately, as a number of the links are dead. But one that wasn’t took me to Bob Greenberger’s site, where I found his recent posts reminiscing about the old New York DC offices. Those were a lot of fun to read. I remember his run as editor on DC’s Star Trek titles fondly. There were some great stories published in those books, and his letter columns were always fun too.

All this reminiscing led me to pick up the April 2008 issue of CBG, which has been at the top of my pile of unread CBG issues for quite some time now. I’ve got another dozen issues or so in that pile. Every once in a while, I’ll dive in and read a few articles, and maybe polish off an issue, but I haven’t really done that recently. At the rate I’m going, I’ll deplete the pile in 2032, I think. Which is fine. CBG was canceled several years ago, so it’s not like I’m falling further behind. Their old web site, by the way, is frozen in amber at the time of the cancellation, in early 2013.

Apple’s big music announcement

There were some interesting things in this week’s WWDC keynote, including multi-tasking on the iPad, open-sourcing Swift, and transit directions in Apple Maps. But the Apple Music announcement probably got the most attention in the general-interest press.

The announcement prompted a few interesting articles, including this one from the Washington Post on how it stacks up against other streaming services, and this one from Mashable comparing it to iTunes Match.

I’m currently using Slacker Radio for most of my streaming, which isn’t mentioned in the Washington Post article. I have their lower-end $4/month subscription, which is similar to Pandora’s $5/month plan and includes ad-free streaming, with unlimited track skips, but no ability to listen to full albums or otherwise select precisely what tracks you want to listen to.

I’m not sure why Slacker doesn’t get more attention. Their $4/month subscription compares well to Pandora’s $5/month subscription, and their $10/month subscription compares well to Spotify’s paid service. They have some interesting “curated” playlists, plus content from ESPN and ABC News, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The other service I’m using is Google Play’s service that scans and uploads your music library, then allows you to stream it through the Google Play app. It’s similar to iTunes Match, but free, and has a higher limit on the total number of songs you can upload (50k vs. 25k). There are a few downsides to Google’s service, though. First, the program that scans your music library and uploads it doesn’t have much intelligence built into it. In addition to all my songs, it’s also uploaded a bunch of my audiobooks, and occasionally decides to stick a chapter or two into an auto-generated playlist. Second, I’ve found that the Google Play iOS app isn’t quite as nice about bandwidth usage (and battery usage) as Slacker is, so I’m careful about using it when I’m not on wi-fi.

I’m also occasionally using Amazon’s streaming music service that’s free with an Amazon Prime subscription. Their service, honestly, isn’t that compelling, but it’s free, and it allows me to stream full albums, so it comes in handy once in a while. Their selection isn’t as good as Slacker or Spotify, but there is some good stuff on there.

I don’t think I’m likely to sign up for Apple Music, given that I’m already getting enough music through Slacker, Google, and Amazon Prime, but it’s interesting to see what they’re doing.

inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard

I kinda love this tweet from Max Howell, and many of the replies it generated. I’ve never interviewed with Google (and I doubt they’d be interested in me) but I have gone on interviews where I was asked this kind of question. A question I could have answered, straight out of college, but that I’d be pretty fuzzy on, 20+ years later.

Of course, I’ve never written anything as cool or popular as Homebrew, so I do expect to have to prove myself a bit more than Mr Howell should have to. Which is one of the reasons why I occasionally work on Project Euler problems, or take an Algorithms course on Coursera.