Category: Apple

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Isn’t that an Interesting Trend?

Over the past couple of days I’ve had something going on with my back. So I’ve been sitting in a straight backed chair or lying on the floor.

This has given me time to be both frustrated and happily doing some reading about upcoming computer stuff.

This led me to investigating various applications for my phone, iPad, and Computer. Some of the new apps look interesting, and some of the older recommended apps might be useful even if I have to pay for them.

Before I load, much less buy an app I look at the reviews. Usually on the Apple App Store the best reviews are presented first. It’s the date you have to pay attention to. That best review might actually be 2 years old.

I’ve found that if I sort the reviews by date an interesting bit of information is often revealed.

Many of the apps show a reduction in the number of stars in the reviews and growing customer dissatisfaction. Which is kind of useful, and also very strange. You’d expect the applications to improve over time.

Sure there might be some glitches and transient discontent when new features are added or when the OS changes. But you’d expect those issues to be really minimal. What I’m seeing instead is very consistent death spirals. It’s like a version of an app stumbles and the app never recovers.

Over time, the comments and ratings get worse and worse until no-one is rating or complaining. So the question is, has the app stopped selling? Are people simply not rating it anymore? Or some combination of both?

When I find an app that has no new ratings for a year or more I tend to pass.

What surprises me, is how many apps fit the criteria for me to pass.

Oh, I’ll check other sources too. If I’ve got my eye on something I’ll check other reviews from publications where the journalist is paid to walk through the application as long as they’re not getting any kickbacks for a good review I’ll tend to trust their evaluation.

I wonder why application quality seems to be dropping. I also am glad to find out that it’s not just me that’s seeing it. I know I’m critical and wonder sometimes if I’m too critical.

In this case perhaps I’m not. If other people are walking away from poorly constructed subscription models where the “Benefit” of regular updates degrades rather then improves an application then I’m right there with everyone else.

All this being said, I don’t have a lot of apps on my phone and when something no longer serves me, It’s gone. There’s a journaling app that I’ve been subscribed to for several years. I like it because it’s available on all my devices.

The Apple Journaling app is really very nice, but it’s only available on my phone and I don’t like typing on my phones keyboard. I’d hoped that Apple would bring the app to iPad and then I’d use the iPad keyboard. Had they done that, I’d have cancelled the subscription to the other journaling apps and figured out how to move my journal entries to the Apple native app.

Apple didn’t, but they have extended continuity to a point where I can interact with my phone using my Mac screen and keyboard. Essentially opening a terminal to my phone. This means that I can move all the journal entries into the Apple’s Journalling app on my phone without having to be limited to the little tiny screen and keyboard.

If this works like it appears it will, then I’ll cancel the subscription to the journaling app and move happily on without spending money I don’t need to.

In this case it’s not that the journaling app I pay for had degraded, it’s that it has become redundant. Day One is still quite nice and it’s syncing across devices is well done.

I suppose I was looking at the apps because with the new Apple operating systems being released in the next few months. I was investigating to see what subscriptions I could get rid of and then trying to determine if I wanted to get rid of those subscriptions.

Fantastical for example, is super nice. It unifies todo, and calendar, into a single application. IOS and Mac at one time did this but someone decided that these functions needed to be divided into two apps that both had to be open, in order to go about my day.

Fantastical stepped in and corrected what was clearly a screw up on Apple’s part. With the upcoming OS releases, they are reunifying ToDos and Calendar and Fantastical’s days may be limited on my systems. Honestly Fantastical’s subscription model is pricy. While I like the application itself, I’d prefer to have only one and the Apple Calendar / todo list would serve my needs jut fine.

Fantastical would still be relevant for all the folks who want their work calendar and personal calendars displayed on their all their devices correctly.

I suppose at heart I’m a computer minimalist.

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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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After a year, I still really like my M2 MacBook Pro

There are a lot of things to complain about with technology companies these days. Chief among my complaints is that technology companies seem to think they can and should be arbiters of social and moral standards. For the record, they can’t. 

I wish that technology companies would just do technology. I’d love it if they all just made their products, improved them, and stayed out of politics and / or social justice.

That’s not the world we live in. It’s futile to wish for these technological behemoths to change. 

Even X / Twitter for all it’s fanfare about freedom, has started sending message to people that say things like, “Most authors wouldn’t say this to other people, would you like to edit your post?” The implication being that if you don’t make your post acceptable to their Algorithm your post will be limited in its reach. A.K.A. Censorship. 

Apparently calling Shelia Jackson Lee an idiot for saying the moon was made out of gas and the sun might be too hot to live on is a no, no. Even if idiot is exactly the right term.

Meaning for me at least that Twitter is once again losing me. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

Apple is not much better. It’s easy to overlook Apple’s social justice messaging because they’ve always been a closed ecosystem and spent a lot of time breathing the rarified atmosphere of their own farts.

That being said, Apple has generally made products that I liked from a hardware perspective and because of that, I’ve owned multiple generations of Apple products. It doesn’t mean I agree with Apple’s political, ecological, or social justice stance. It means their products work in predicable ways that I understand. For me owning Apple products is not a fashion statement, it’s a practical one.

My current MacBook Pro is about a year old. I find that shocking because usually by the time a machine reaches a year old, there are little things that tell its age. I’m not talking about scratches or stuff like that.

The machine starts to “feel” slow, or the battery doesn’t last long enough, and a ton of little things that individually are nothing but collectively they tell the user the machine is “old”. It’s subtle, but over time, dissatisfaction and boredom set in and you find yourself checking out websites looking for the next new thing.

I’m pleased to say that my MacBook still makes me smile. I run it most of the time in low power mode if I’m on battery. I don’t notice that I’m technically running the processor “slower”. I’m always blow away by how long the battery lasts, even with a combination of teleconferencing, web surfing, and me writing, I have yet to have the battery die before I was done looking at screens for the day.

Running Windows, in VMWare Fusion, either in low power mode or in “normal” mode I’ve noticed a few things. This computer provides buttery smooth operation of Windows, and the fans are either never on, or they’re on at such a low level I don’t hear them. That’s a big difference from my Intel I7 MacBook Pro. On that machine, within a minute of bringing Windows up, the fans were screaming at full power. The battery life isn’t significantly affected, VMWare makes the machine very busy but I think I could still get most of a day out of the battery even running Windows all day long. 

Then there’s the speed at which this machine handles rendering Video and Audio versus my older MacBook Pro. The performance is so high, the first few times I rendered something I thought the render had failed because the computer said it was done so fast.

For the sake of this post I did go look at the new M3 lineup. I hadn’t looked at any of the new machines until today.  Let’s just say I could probably spend $7,000 on a laptop. However, I’m not sure that I would be any happier with that new hotness than I am with the machine currently in front of me. 

That suggests that right now, for my needs, the machine I have will last me quite a while.  Fingers crossed, I might get 5 -7 years out of this machine. Who knows? This machine might last me until I kick the bucket.

I’ve been looking for a job for a while and not having any luck. A friend of mine has just started a job search and is having no better luck than I’ve had over the past 4 years.

I suppose this is part of what led me to appreciating my MacBook. 

We were talking about podcasting, blogging, and various alternative income methods. It was during that conversation, I thought, “My current laptop has more than enough horsepower to do those kinds of things effortlessly.”

I might need a better quality microphone. I could probably use one of the mics Jerry owned, but I can’t find the interface that would allow me to power and connect a standard XLR cabled mic to my computer. I know we have such a device, but I don’t know where Jerry put it, or if he might have been using it at the Church or Temple.

That’s a pity because we have two very nice microphones.

I’ve got more research to do before I start trying to podcast or whatever, so I’m going to keep looking for that interface. Ideally I might not have to purchase anything.

Who knows? Maybe for once in my life, I’ve actually got exactly what I need, when I need it. 

That would be a novel thing to have happen!

Hope your Monday is a good one.

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Alright, I’ll admit I’m intrigued by the Apple vision thing.

I don’t know if I’m 3500.00 intrigued.

There is something interesting about having a completely virtual display and the ability to make that display almost any size you’d like.

When I think about being about to watch movies on as big a screen as I’d like in silence, without disturbing someone else that’s sort of nice. (I don’t think I want larger than life-size porn though.)

One of the use cases Apple shows, is a guy on a plane. That one rang true for me personally.

I was once watching a movie on my phone with headphones on a plane and the lady sitting next to me angrily flipped my phone face down on my tray. When I looked at her and asked WHAT THE FUCK?

Her reply was she was a Christian woman and she didn’t agree with my choice of movie. She apparently couldn’t keep her eyes off my phone’s screen.

Okay I was watching “From Dusk to Dawn” but she didn’t have to be looking at my phone. I asked the flight attendant if I could change seats. 

Unfortunately I couldn’t as the flight was full.

I was in the aisle seat. I decided in the interest of just getting through the flight, I’d switch over to music. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the wired earbuds loud enough to drown out her proselytizing for the next 4 hours.

I’d have gone to sleep, but this woman had some bladder condition that had her getting up every 20 minutes, and was adamantly opposed to switching seats, after all, she had a captive audience to bring to Jesus. At one point she accused me of trying to drown her, and Jesus’s word, out with the devils music.

I said, “Yes I’m trying to drown you out because you will not shut up. You crawl over me every 20 minutes to go to the bathroom, you might want to get that checked out by a doctor not a faith healer, and you are literally annoying the hell out of me. However, I hardly think Vivaldi is the devils music.” 

At which point I ordered a bourbon from the flight attendant. It was 9 AM and the bourbon was one of the few I freakin hate. This of course started a whole new and unwanted sermon. I kept drinking and wondered when the last time her husband had just fucked the hell out of her, among many other unkind thoughts.

If we’d been on an exit row, I don’t know if I’d have been able to restrain myself from popping the hatch at 35,000 feet, and sending her straight to Jesus.

“Karens” are not a new phenomena, they were just recently emboldened by fear of an imaginary plague. BTW, all those “Karens” that came out of the woodwork… Remember they are the same bitches that would turn you over to the Gestapo in Germany, The HOA’s across America, Or the Inquisition in medieval Europe. There was a reason politicians in various places established phone numbers to turn in non compliant people during COVID. They knew the “Karens” would light those phone lines up.

“Karens” are the killers of Buzz, Fun, and Joy. They’re the “Enforcers” who gossip, and bitch constantly, their way is the only way and they think nothing of leaving “depression suicides” in their wake. They’ll take no responsibility for pushing someone one step too far. “Karens” are simply the adult versions of the “Mean Girls” from high schools.

They’re the ones who get your kids kicked out of school because of a sticker on your car, they’re the cunts that get you thrown out of a store, bar, or restaurant because you’re not wearing a diaper on your face.

They’re the bitches who complain about your motorcycle or the motorcycle of your friend who stays the night once in a while. They’re the ones who call a tow company at 3 am to have your friend’s motorcycle, their sole source of transportation, removed, and they’ll tell whatever LIE they have to, so they can get their way.

They’re the ones who are so busy ignoring their own life and trying to insinuate themselves into your life, that when they realize their children hate them, their husbands left them, and they’re hated everywhere they go…

Then they’ll blame YOU because you took so much time out of their day trying to maintain control over you.

These rancid cunts are not gone, they just crawled back into the woodwork waiting for another “Cause” for which they can become the unasked for ‘Champions’.

I’ve often wondered if misogynists, like racists, aren’t born… They’re built! Step by step, incident by incident, cut by cut, manipulation by manipulation.

I’m not there yet. But upon reflection, especially after the COVID years I’m a lot closer to either “IST” than I’d like, or ever thought I’d be.

I suspect that general feeling is why so many people lose themselves in gaming, VR, and sitting behind computer screens.

It’s way easier to NOT have to engage with shitty people than to have to learn to deal with them.

For me, if I was flying a lot, or if I was living, as my parents want me to, in their spare bedroom.  I’m pretty sure that I’d plunk down the 3500.00 for Apple Vision to avoid having to have screens or whatever.

Living in my parents house though, I know they’d never let me enjoy a movie. They’re like the lady on the plane, they need constant attention.

Listening to music or a podcast at my parents house while they’re watching some TV program that I’m not interested in, is forbidden. My Mother can’t stand the thought of me not hearing the screaming shrews on The View.

“What are you listening to?”

Arctic Monkeys

“I haven’t’ heard of them.”

“Roll it back, what did Sonny Hostin just say?”

Even going into another room requires a ping every 5 minutes.

Perhaps the 3500.00 wouldn’t be a good investment after all, living with the parents.

Disgusting fatass.I don’t fly anymore. I’ll admit it’s because I don’t want to deal with shitty people, or the TSA, or late flights, or the ridiculous price of food and drink inside the airport, or the flights bouncing across the country landing every hour or two so they don’t have to provide in flight food, or the narrow ass seats, or being trapped next to some sweaty fat person who smells like a rotting whale carcass and knowing I’m never going to be able to get out of my seat to take a piss.

I doubt that Apple Vision at  3500.00 could assuage all the reasons I don’t fly anymore.

Hmmm.

I’m not sure I can see a case for me owning an Apple Vision thingy.

Applestore robbery.Maybe, I’ll try one on the next time I’m in an Apple Store. Then again, since Apple stores are getting overrun with shitty people here in California… Maybe Not.

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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.