Category: Apple Shit

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Just a little Techno-Bitching!

Artificial intelligence robot 0427211.Some of you may be aware that Apple has, over the past few iterations of their IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS, been adding more active predictive text input.

Essentially the various Operating Systems try to guess what you’re about to type based on your usual word choices and learned sentence structures. This can be really cool, and helpful, except when it isn’t.

There are two problems as I see it. The first is that if you’re trying to improve your writing, the automated choices presented tend to make you lazy because it’s easier to choose what’s shown than fight the system. Oh, and the system does tend to get in your face if you change your vocabulary and / or sentence construction.

The second problem is that the embedded dictionaries in these operating systems have gotten sloppy.

For example: If I misspell the word sueing the OS changes the word to seeing, instead of changing the misspelled sueing to suing.

Download Free Oxford English Dictionary.The example above is a fairly common mistake that the internal dictionaries should easily recognize and correct in English. (I recognize that there are other languages in these operating systems and those languages have different rules.)

I however am speaking and writing in English so that’s my personal baseline. In English, there are many instances where the ‘e’ is dropped when adding the ‘ing’, but sometimes that rule doesn’t apply. It’s in those times when the automatic dictionary can be mind bogglingly helpful, or an annoying hinderance.

This is common throughout all the platforms.

It would be easy to dismiss this as nothing, until you stumble over it again and again. If you write a blog, or you’re writing a manuscript it gets annoying fast. We all get bumble fingered if we’re typing fast in a moment of inspiration or if we’re tired and just trying to slog our way to the end of the project or our day.

At these times, when we’re not at our best, the autocorrect systems should be helping us instead of muddying our thoughts by selecting incorrect words based on God only knows what kind of algorithm. 

Microsoft Word induces its own decidedly annoying version of this, with its internal dictionary. I have literally become so confused typing a word in Word that I’ve pulled out a paper dictionary to find the correct spelling. Turns out, the word I was misspelling wasn’t that far off. All I’d done is typed an ‘I’ instead of an ‘e’ and had swapped the ‘I’ position in the word. It should have been the 8th character and I put it in the 9th position.

Word not only couldn’t comprehend what I’d done, Word couldn’t present me with any alternative spelling at all.

Since I know that sometimes I’ll use an ‘I” instead of an ‘e’ I tried both. Word stubbornly refused to show me possible alternative spellings, opting to steadfastly highlight the word as misspelled. 

Even when I erased the word and typed it letter by letter from the dictionary into the document, Word highlighted the now correct word as incorrect, after a few moments Word decided to remove the little red squiggle.

Ahem! 

It’s times like these that I speak harshly to my computer because it’s adding to my confusion seemingly on purpose.

I shouldn’t speak harshly to my computer, I should be yelling at Microsoft! It’s their 1 gigabyte bloated program that can’t seem to get out of its own way.

I remember when Word existed on a single floppy disk and worked pretty reliably. Now, I find that I don’t enjoy working with it as much as I once did. These days, it’s slow and ponderous and while I have a very fast computer, Word sucks up a lot of resources.

I’m tending toward lighter faster programs for text processing and only using Word when absolutely necessary.

I suppose the bottom line here is I expect better.

The next version of IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS is likely to add some kind of AI component running on the devices.

I am not looking forward to this ‘Improvement’. It seems to me, if these software behemoths can’t do simple things like providing useful dictionaries perhaps installing AI software on our devices isn’t a great idea.

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WOW! Apple does it again! Not in a good way!

Apple one icons logo 100857611 largeThe other half and I decided to go with the Apple One subscription back when they first started it. 

Both of us were paying for Apple Music and individual iCloud Storage. We’d purchased Apple TVs for the living and bedrooms, but Apple’s original programming wasn’t anything we were interested in at the time. 

I knew that I was going to be interested in Foundation when Apple released the first season.

When we did the math, we found we were already spending nearly the initially high 29.95 monthly fee for Apple One individually, since we could share the Apple One subscription we went for it.

Honestly we were only interested in the Music and iCloud storage. There was a high probability that Apple TV+ would become interesting to me. Although to date I’ve only watched Foundation and Invasion. There are some Apple produced movies that looked somewhat interesting but not enough to captivate my attention so that I sat down and spent 2 hours of my life watching them. 

I was interested in the Apple Fitness guided training. I’ve used it a few times just to get a feel for it. At first it only worked on the Apple TV so training had to take place in the Living Room or the Bedroom. Honestly, that didn’t really work. Since then Apple has expanded the functionality to iPhone and iPad so it’s a little more portable.

It’s understood that Apple is a “Woke” company. Okay, that’s fine, I’ve always known Apple was full of blue haired people with so many piercings they can’t get through a TSA metal detector. However, recently I thought I’d get more familiar with Apple Fitness and take advantage of regular workout routines during the Winter. 

Opening the Fitness+ tab on the Apple TV I was a little put off.  It wasn’t that DEI was front and center, it was.

It was that so many of the workouts appeared to be geared for way younger folks than I am. After some digging I was able to find some things geared toward older adults. I’ll try a sampling to see if Apple Fitness+ is for me.

The other half and I also liked being able to share our purchases and subscriptions to many applications.

Neither of us cared about Apple Arcade, we were adults, while I looked at some of the games, none were interesting to me and so that part of the Apple One subscription was never used.

Apple News+ is okay but neither of us were really interested in much of the magazine offerings and I literally locked out of my news feed, the extremist news organizations both left and right. The other half eventually got tired of News+ and stopped using it altogether. I know this because he needed help turning off all the News+ notifications. He generally preferred BBC and NPR until the age of COVID. Then he, like me, found  very few news organizations that passed the reliability test.

At this point I could take or leave Apple News+

All of this has come to mind because of a few things.

1) The other half is dead.
2) Apple One increased its prices from 29.95 which was already expensive to 32.95 back in spring. At the time, I wasn’t capable of making too many decisions and chose to let that go.
3) Apple sent a notice of another rate increase either Friday Night or Saturday morning, (which is kind of chicken shit,  because NONE of the executives will be in over the weekend so the folks answering the phones get to take the brunt of the complaints,) The new rate is 37.95 a month.

At this new rate, we’re starting to approach old Cable TV rates. (Yes I know the Cable TV people charge far more obscene rates these days. That’s why I don’t have Cable.) As a point of interest, that’s also why I’m looking at new places to live where I can receive local TV with a damn antenna. I don’t even care if it’s only one channel as long as it’s in English. (Where I live now, I can receive one channel but it’s in Korean? or Chinese neither of which I speak.)

I know I’m not getting $37.95 value out of the Apple One subscription. I no longer have a family. (I do have a family but they don’t live with me and have their own stuff going on. It’s a big pain in the ass or was, to merge this stuff or unmerge it, if necessary.) The merge / unmerge task is so daunting, my other half is still listed in family sharing on the account. Although in truth, I’m not ready to remove him. It seems so final and I’m not ready for that yet.

The problem is that when I look at what I”m actually using regularly, and try to break out only those items, I come up with a cost that’s about the same as Apple One. Obviously this pricing structure is to keep Apple One subscriptions. 

As an older person, I don’t want to spend any more money than I have to. Well, I never wanted to spend more money than I had to. The problem for me now is that since I”m not employed, and living on retirement, I am far less loose with my money.

I’m sure there are a lot of people in the same boat I am. We’re either retired or nearing retirement and being forced out of our jobs explicitly, or surreptitiously. (Ask one of my friends about his experiences after 25 years or more with the same company. Ageism is real. Oh, and by the way, there’s nothing you can do to fight it! The law may be on your side, but lawyers… You’re lucky to get one of them to return your call or email! Maybe the next time I reach out to an attorney, I’ll say Trump did something to me. Perhaps then I’ll be worth calling back!)

In any case, all of us in this position are re-evaluating where our money goes and trimming the fat. If only we could trim the fat of taxation that gets us very little of use in our daily lives but might just drop a nuke in our backyards…

I digress.

Apple One has become too damn expensive! So effectively older folks or poor people are completely priced out of the Apple One service. DEI my ass!

I’ll evaluate Apple One for the next month or two. Maybe it’s time to cut this shit down to only what I find useful. If we can’t come to an arrangement that works for me, then maybe it’s time for me to stop paying for Apples services entirely.

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Wow! That was more difficult than I thought it would be.

I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of nice bluetooth over the ear headphones.

I’ve got a set of AirPod Pros 2nd Gen and while I like them very much, I don’t like that my ears get annoyed with me if I wear them for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Were it not for that, I’d have them in all the time.

It would be so much easier than listening to the crazy lady screaming about whatever she screams about, or hearing her fella, yelling at the yappy dogs, while grinding away on some piece of metal, driving or “Fixing” a vehicle that’s on it’s last legs.

What he needs to do, is stay out from under the hoods of the various vehicles he’s destroyed (5? I think at last count,) and leave it to a professional. His version of a properly running engine is very different from mine! 3 of 8 cylinders firing, punctuated by 5 consecutive backfires is not proper operation! There’s also the thrilling sound of him running a chain saw at 10 PM. I’m not kidding, I’ll turn the lights off and he’ll start the chainsaw. That motor is also on it’s last legs! One can only hope that when It dies we’ll be spared the restful sounds of him cutting whatever he’s cutting.

Don’t ask…

All I can say is this used to be a quiet neighborhood. This is what happens when you let riff raff move into nice places!

I’ve been in hollers in Tennessee, and Kentucky where folks were dirt poor, and not school educated but they weren’t this kind of white gutter trash.

It’s funny in a way, California can’t even do white trash or rednecks right.

You can see why I might be looking for noise cancelling headphones, that are comfortable in the long term.

There are literally times when I can’t watch TV in my living room due to the noise coming from that white trash. I like having the windows open this time of year, I like the fresh mountain air (even when it is full of pollen).

So I’m faced with, turning up the volume to unbearable levels, closing the windows, not bothering to try to live my life and watch a movie or TV show in my house, or a set of headphones.

I know there are those of you saying, “Why don’t you call the police?”

Hahahahahaha! Where the hell have you people been living? Police? Helpful? Responding to a noise complaint? The police can’t even arrest and hold her for more than 8 hours after she assaults someone. Which she’s done 3 more times since she assaulted me last year.

BTW, if I lived in one of those “Fly Over” redneck places… Let’s just say this whole thing wouldn’t be a problem. Folks go missing in hollers all the time…

I digress, I was considering the Apple AirPods Max. They’re expensive! But I can also buy them from Costco and save $70. I saved $50 on my AirPod Pros at Costco. My concern there is that the Max is generation one and come fall Apple may be releasing a replacement version.

This led me down a rabbit hole of reviews and firmware versions for both the AirPod Max and my AirPod Pros. That’s when I discovered something interesting and strange. I did a search for “Latest AirPod Pro Gen 2 Firmware” then I got articles from last year through this year. I told the browser to limit the results to only this year. You’d think that would narrow your search but oddly it didn’t by much.

I was still seeing articles listing last years firmware as current and it was clear from context, the article had been written last year but the date was today’s date. I looked at several similar articles thinking perhaps there was a current update but there wasn’t.

There was however a shit ton (Technical Term) of ads.

Then it dawned on me, these outdated articles are monkeying with the dates to appear current so they can serve these shitty ads.

This reduces the usefulness of the internet and honestly makes me discount the validity or accuracy of publications MacWorld and 9 to 5 Mac I’m looking right at you!

It occurs to me that because of folks doing stuff like this to keep serving the same 5 ads over and over again, overall the internet is becoming less useful all the time. If the filtering doesn’t work, then the user is faced with a wave of outdated and current information with no ability to determine what is real, and what is useless.

Imagine writing an article about Trump when he was President, packing that article with shitty ads, then updating the date.

A query like “Who is President of the United States” could return Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush. How would someone know? If they had to turn on the TV to figure out who the president is, then the internet would be kind of useless.

All this ad crap and targeted marketing was a bad idea to begin with, and it’s only gotten worse.

I come again to a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past few years.

“Is the internet’s usefulness eclipsed by having to filter through all the crap to get valid information?”

I’m really wondering. I guess I’ll know when I see an article saying, “Australian farmers pig has piglets with wings, Farmer Stunned!” I’d bet that at least 25% of folks on the internet would read the article, and a lot of them would believe it.

I fell for one the other night, some bullshit about a mystery in some dudes backyard. It was written like some reality show script. A paragraph that said essentially nothing, then a commercial, and another paragraph then commercial. It went on and on, but it was putting ads in front of everyone that was curious late at night.

Spoiler Alert: The guy bought a house built in the late 50s, the “Mystery” was that someone who owned the house had put in a fallout shelter. Over time, other owners had added soil and landscaping that buried the hatch. Then the shelter had gotten forgotten about except as a dim rumor. The guy found the original blueprints at the county records office and decided to investigate. The shelter was in pretty good shape so the guy renovated the space. It was pretty cool. The article could have covered everything in maybe 4 well written paragraphs with photos. Instead they took almost 100 paragraphs all of which were poorly written.

I finally went to Apple for the answer. I’d not gone to them in the first place because often asking a simple question in Apple’s support section, does not provide a single Byte of data. You’re still going to have to sort through a ton data that’s not relevant.

By the way, as of 6/28/2023 the current AirPod Pro Gen 2 firmware is 5E135.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to drop the hammer on headphones…

This is how I lose entire days…