Blog
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
speed
I've been wondering lately if I should upgrade to the faster version of my cable internet service ("Optimum Online Ultra 50") that costs an extra five bucks a month. So I'm posting my current speed here for later reference.
Labels: internet
Saturday, March 23, 2013
no more Backpack
I've been using 37signals' Backpack product for several years now, since February 2007. It turns out that 37signals retired the product back in June 2012, and is no longer accepting new customers for it. It still works fine for me, and they haven't said anything about shutting it down entirely. I don't recall ever seeing a notice on my Backpack page letting me know that they were retiring the product, but maybe I missed it. And, when I go to my account maintenance page now, there's no indication there either; it still shows the same plan upgrade options that it always has. I'm still on the $7/month plan, and happy with that. If they're not actually going to shut down the service for existing users, I might as well stick with it for the time being.
I use Satchel on my iPhone and iPad to access by Backpack account. It also still works, but hasn't been updated since 2010, and likely won't be updated again. In fact, I don't see the full version as available in the App Store anymore, so I guess I need to be careful not to lose the copy in my iTunes library.
Since 37signals is still charging for Backpack, and since it (likely) runs on the same platform as their other services, I imagine they'll keep it running for the foreseeable future. There's no reason for them to shut down a service that's generating revenue, and probably not costing them much money to keep running.
Still, it seems prudent to look into alternatives. 37signals would probably like people to move from Backpack to Basecamp, but that wouldn't make much sense for me. Basecamp starts at $30/month, and isn't really meant to be used as a single-person personal organizer.
Likewise, Papyrs would probably like to grab up some of Backpack's customer base. They actually have a blog post about Backpack's retirement on their site that's interesting and well-written. Papyrus isn't a good fit for me either though. It starts at $49/month and is really meant to be used for small company intranets.
There's a good list of Backpack alternatives at http://alternativeto.net/software/backpack/. The first item on their list is Evernote, which I do use. But I'm not sure I'd like it as a replacement for Backpack. Second on their list is OneNote, which I also use, but also isn't quite what I would want as a Backpack replacement.
From a GTD usage standpoint, I've tried Nozbe, and I'm curious about Asana. Maybe a combination of Evernote and Nozbe would work out for me?
I may write up some more notes on this subject, as it's the kind of thing I enjoy messing around with and writing about, but for now, I've got other stuff to do today...
I use Satchel on my iPhone and iPad to access by Backpack account. It also still works, but hasn't been updated since 2010, and likely won't be updated again. In fact, I don't see the full version as available in the App Store anymore, so I guess I need to be careful not to lose the copy in my iTunes library.
Since 37signals is still charging for Backpack, and since it (likely) runs on the same platform as their other services, I imagine they'll keep it running for the foreseeable future. There's no reason for them to shut down a service that's generating revenue, and probably not costing them much money to keep running.
Still, it seems prudent to look into alternatives. 37signals would probably like people to move from Backpack to Basecamp, but that wouldn't make much sense for me. Basecamp starts at $30/month, and isn't really meant to be used as a single-person personal organizer.
Likewise, Papyrs would probably like to grab up some of Backpack's customer base. They actually have a blog post about Backpack's retirement on their site that's interesting and well-written. Papyrus isn't a good fit for me either though. It starts at $49/month and is really meant to be used for small company intranets.
There's a good list of Backpack alternatives at http://alternativeto.net/software/backpack/. The first item on their list is Evernote, which I do use. But I'm not sure I'd like it as a replacement for Backpack. Second on their list is OneNote, which I also use, but also isn't quite what I would want as a Backpack replacement.
From a GTD usage standpoint, I've tried Nozbe, and I'm curious about Asana. Maybe a combination of Evernote and Nozbe would work out for me?
I may write up some more notes on this subject, as it's the kind of thing I enjoy messing around with and writing about, but for now, I've got other stuff to do today...
Thursday, July 19, 2012
IPredator
I keep thinking that I ought to sign up for a third-party VPN service, so I can put all my traffic through an encrypted tunnel when I'm on public (or quasi-public) wifi. I meant to do something before I went off to San Diego, but I just didn't get around to it. Some of the services I've seen are fairly expensive. These guys, for instance, are $15/month.
I just found one that's reasonably simple and inexpensive: IPredator. It's € 15 for 3 months, which comes out to about $22 US. So, about $7 per month. And it doesn't auto-renew, so if I stop using it, I can just let the account go inactive until I decide to start using it again.
I have it set up on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad now. Setup was easy enough, and the speed seems reasonable. I need to do some more experimenting on that front.
I'm curious to see if it will work on the wifi at my office. We have a SonicWall security device on our network now, and it can be a bit agressive about blocking stuff. I'm not sure if it will let the VPN traffic through or not.
I just found one that's reasonably simple and inexpensive: IPredator. It's € 15 for 3 months, which comes out to about $22 US. So, about $7 per month. And it doesn't auto-renew, so if I stop using it, I can just let the account go inactive until I decide to start using it again.
I have it set up on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad now. Setup was easy enough, and the speed seems reasonable. I need to do some more experimenting on that front.
I'm curious to see if it will work on the wifi at my office. We have a SonicWall security device on our network now, and it can be a bit agressive about blocking stuff. I'm not sure if it will let the VPN traffic through or not.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
done with delicious
Well, I decided not to mess around, and just jumped straight into a different bookmarking service. I set up a new account with Pinboard. They charge a small fee to set up an account, and they have a weird way of calculating that fee -- it rises as more people sign up for accounts. I think a lot of other people were jumping over from Delicious today too: I saw the fee rise from $7.50 to $7.57 over the course of about an hour.
My bookmarks are currently being imported. They have a note up at their import page, saying that it may take a while, due to all the new people signing up today. Imagine that.
I have a separate Delicious account set up on my work computer, since I like keeping work bookmarks at least somewhat separate from home bookmarks. (I use to Delicious "for:" tags to share between the work and home accounts.) I'm not sure if I'll just use the same Pinboard account for everything, set up a new Pinboard account at work, or try a completely different service at work. I might try importing my work account into Google Bookmarks or XMarks and see how that goes.
My bookmarks are currently being imported. They have a note up at their import page, saying that it may take a while, due to all the new people signing up today. Imagine that.
I have a separate Delicious account set up on my work computer, since I like keeping work bookmarks at least somewhat separate from home bookmarks. (I use to Delicious "for:" tags to share between the work and home accounts.) I'm not sure if I'll just use the same Pinboard account for everything, set up a new Pinboard account at work, or try a completely different service at work. I might try importing my work account into Google Bookmarks or XMarks and see how that goes.
Labels: internet
Yahoo is shutting down delicious
...and a few other things. Darn it, I have 3500 bookmarks in delicious. I've been using it since 2003. Warren Ellis covers this eloquently: "Hey, Yahoo? Running del.icio.us cost you pennies, and bought you so much goodwill. Now you’re just another of those scumfucks who acquires great services just to bury them."
Here are links to a couple of articles about possible alternatives:
5 Solid Alternatives to Del.icio.us
10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking
Here are links to a couple of articles about possible alternatives:
5 Solid Alternatives to Del.icio.us
10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking
Labels: internet
Monday, December 29, 2008
bookmarks
I've been using both Spurl.net and delicious.com to save my bookmarks to the web over the last couple of years. Spurl has clearly been on life support for awhile now. It continued to work, but it didn't seem like anyone was doing any maintenance or support work on it. Their site became inaccessible a few days ago, and hasn't come back, so I'm guessing that they're finally dead.
I ran across an article that mentioned ZigTag today. It looks like it might be kind of interesting, but I still wish Spurl was alive and well. Meanwhile, Yahoo doesn't seem to have screwed up Delicious much since they acquired it. It still works well, and it's still fairly simple and fast.
I ran across an article that mentioned ZigTag today. It looks like it might be kind of interesting, but I still wish Spurl was alive and well. Meanwhile, Yahoo doesn't seem to have screwed up Delicious much since they acquired it. It still works well, and it's still fairly simple and fast.
Labels: internet
Friday, February 15, 2008
del.icio.us weirdness
Hmm, my del.icio.us linkroll seems to have turned into a list of my tags instead. I wonder what happened there. A quick search shows that I'm not the only person who has noticed this.
Labels: internet
Sunday, September 02, 2007
blog changes
Not that anyone's going to be that interested in this, but I made a couple of changes to the sidebar on this blog today. First, I removed the Technorati and Spurl widgets. I guess I never really figured out what the point of Technorati was, and the little widget I had on the side didn't seem to serve much of a purpose.
Spurl, on the other hand, is a great web-based bookmark manager. Unfortunately, it appears to be a zombie site at this point; it's still up and running, but at reduced functionality, and, looking at their user forums, it doesn't appear that anyone's minding the shop -- there's nothing but link spam in the forums right now. I'm still using Spurl, but I'm thinking about dropping it, since it's probably going to disappear at some point. (I have a mental image of Spurl running on a server in a closet somewhere that everyone's just forgotten about. At some point, the hard drive will die, or someone will find it and unplug it, and that'll be the end of that.)
I've replaced the Spurl widget with a del.icio.us linkroll. I think that's a little more representative of what I'm bookmarking lately.
And I reformatted the tag list. It used to be a bulleted list. Now it's just the keywords separated by slashes. I just wanted to make it more compact, so you could see it all together easily.
Spurl, on the other hand, is a great web-based bookmark manager. Unfortunately, it appears to be a zombie site at this point; it's still up and running, but at reduced functionality, and, looking at their user forums, it doesn't appear that anyone's minding the shop -- there's nothing but link spam in the forums right now. I'm still using Spurl, but I'm thinking about dropping it, since it's probably going to disappear at some point. (I have a mental image of Spurl running on a server in a closet somewhere that everyone's just forgotten about. At some point, the hard drive will die, or someone will find it and unplug it, and that'll be the end of that.)
I've replaced the Spurl widget with a del.icio.us linkroll. I think that's a little more representative of what I'm bookmarking lately.
And I reformatted the tag list. It used to be a bulleted list. Now it's just the keywords separated by slashes. I just wanted to make it more compact, so you could see it all together easily.
Monday, November 27, 2006
bookmarks
It's been a while since I posted anything about online bookmark managers. I'd pretty much settled on posting bookmarks to Spurl, then letting Spurl post them to del.icio.us. This was working great for a while, but the del.icio.us integration in Spurl stopped working a week or two ago. A few people have posted about it in the forums, but nobody from Spurl has said anything about fixing it.
To get around having to either post everything twice, or give up either Spurl or del.icio.us, I've been looking for another way to post to them both at the same time. I found a site called OnlyWire. It looked legit, but I was initially wary of giving them the passwords to my Spurl and del.icio.us accounts. I gave it a shot, and it works OK. However, it turns out that their terms of service allow them to post sponsor links under your IDs. They say that they'll only do that once, but that's enough to make me want to avoid doing business with them. If you look at the "Hot Spurls" and "Just In" lists on the Spurl homepage, it looks like this service (and possibly others like it) have already polluted the bookmark pool, so to speak, to the extent that useful bookmarks are being pushed down the list in favor of sponsored links.
I'm starting to think now that maybe I can do something with Greasemonkey. I haven't really looked into creating Greasemonkey scripts, though, so I'll need to do some research first.
To get around having to either post everything twice, or give up either Spurl or del.icio.us, I've been looking for another way to post to them both at the same time. I found a site called OnlyWire. It looked legit, but I was initially wary of giving them the passwords to my Spurl and del.icio.us accounts. I gave it a shot, and it works OK. However, it turns out that their terms of service allow them to post sponsor links under your IDs. They say that they'll only do that once, but that's enough to make me want to avoid doing business with them. If you look at the "Hot Spurls" and "Just In" lists on the Spurl homepage, it looks like this service (and possibly others like it) have already polluted the bookmark pool, so to speak, to the extent that useful bookmarks are being pushed down the list in favor of sponsored links.
I'm starting to think now that maybe I can do something with Greasemonkey. I haven't really looked into creating Greasemonkey scripts, though, so I'll need to do some research first.
Labels: internet
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Spurl and del.icio.us
I exported all my Spurl bookmarks to del.icio.us today, and set it up so new Spurls will go to del.icio.us automatically. The bookmarks are at del.icio.us/andyhuey if anyone's curious. I went through and added tags to all the bookmarks in del.icio.us. I'm wondering now if there's any way to pull them back into Spurl.
Labels: internet
Monday, November 21, 2005
bookmark managers
After my last post on bookmark managers, I set up a Spurl account. I uploaded my bookmarks from my Mac and my PC, but they never appeared in the account. Apparently, they were having some problems with the upload process that day. I uploaded the Mac bookmarks again last night, and they did show up today. I spent some time playing around, and I do like the interface. One of the nice things is that you can organize your bookmarks into folders and tag them. (I think most of the other managers just use tags, no folders.)
This guy's blog has some stuff about bookmark managers, too, including a link to one service I hadn't seem before, BlinkList.
This guy's blog has some stuff about bookmark managers, too, including a link to one service I hadn't seem before, BlinkList.
Labels: internet
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Bookmark managers
Since I'm now switching back and forth between IE, Opera, Firefox, and Safari on three computers at home and one at work (one Mac, the rest PCs), I'm starting to think about bookmark management and synchronization. Here are some links:
I think I'm most interested in Spurl right now, but I haven't tried any of these yet.
- This page has a pretty big list of bookmark managers.
- Bookmark Buddy: Windows software. $30. Looks like it'll import and export from IE, Firefox, and Opera. (Not an online service.)
- Sync2It: This one's got Windows and Mac client software, which apparently syncs your bookmarks to their web site. Besides supporting IE, Firefox, and Opera on the PC, it looks like it supports Safari on the Mac, which is nice. The price varies from free to $25/year, depending on what you're doing.
- Powermarks: Windows software. $25. Looks like it suppors IE and Opera, with Firefox support in beta. Online sync.
- del.icio.us: Very popular online "social bookmarking" site. Free. There are some cool things about it, but you have to dig if you want to figure out how to import/export bookmarks from your machine(s). Looks like you could do a lot with the API, and maybe a bit of Python coding.
- Spurl is also a social bookmarking site. It claims to support IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari on Windows and Mac.
- This guy has some stuff to say about the differences between Furl, Spurl, and del.icio.us.
I think I'm most interested in Spurl right now, but I haven't tried any of these yet.
Labels: internet
© 2011 Andrew Huey
