Category: Modern problems

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Apple has a new Pride Watchband. Ughh!

It’s well renown that Apple has always been a company that embraced the LGB community. There’s a reason, that back in the day, going into a gay bar was almost like going into an iPhone store display.

Over the years, I’ve looked with amusement and occasional interest at the Apple “Pride” Wallpapers. When the Apple Watch became available, I took interest in  their watch faces and matching bands. I think I may own one of their so called “Pride” bands.

That being said, there were very few of these bands that I liked.

If the photos do it justice, this year’s offering is abysmal. It really looks like someone just “Phoned it in.” There’s no grace, charm, or elegance.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Apple claims it was based on whatever vomitious iteration of the so called “Pride Flag” is in vogue now. 

Gay flag 2662347892.I’ve come to see the current banner of the LGBTQIA+xyz not as a “Pride Flag” but as a “Shame” flag.

A flag with which, I want no association, and feel no kinship. Today’s flag represents the commandeering of an entire community and the bastardization of what was once something that brightened the fronts of establishments.

The old flag was a simple rainbow, bright happy colors that made folks smile because they echoed the beauty of an actual rainbow. Some religious fundamentalists (primarily those who hated gay people for existing at all,) were offended, but generally, folks could look at a rainbow flag and smile despite their personal beliefs.

The flag of today appears as conflicted as the LGBTQIA+xyz community it represents. There is one mathematical view that the new flag accurately represents the TQIA+xyz agenda. If you look at the black stripe as the mathematical symbol “Greater Than” what you see is

TQIA+xyz > LGB

With each additional group that is added on the left side of the black stripe, more of the original rainbow representing the LGB part of the community is occluded.

3edef965 b1a6 4ecd 8407 99ca1ae8cf52 shutterstock 1106302064 15481563.Fully 1/3 of the rainbow is now occupied by the TQIA+xyz representation. If this progression continues, the rainbow itself will be gone entirely in another few years.

I can’t help but see this when I look as today’s so-called “Pride” flag. I see it as a warning, a “We’re coming for you,” message.

Even the color palette is discordant. Pastels overlaid on primary colors simply don’t look right.

In that, perhaps the new “Pride” flag is honest in its representation of the TQIA+xyz agenda, and what is being done to the community at large. What’s left of the old community, that is.

The other problem with the new flag is how nationalistic it appears. It reminds me of flags which in the past have symbolized oppression. There’s perhaps some truth to that as well, given the manner in which more conservative LGB folks are treated by the vocal “Inclusive” TQIA+xyz elements these days.

MFFP4ref AV1.I’d have hated to be the poor schmuck that was called upon to design Apple’s new watchband and wallpapers. 

Going into it they had to know that if they applied real artistic values, the design would be rejected. Had they used the flag’s color palette to make something interesting and beautiful, they’d probably have been accused of not “Properly” representing all the groups equally.

So I suppose they had no choice but to “Phone it in”. Their design constraints probably demanded equal volume of colors and thereby equal representation.

What they came up with, just looks too “busy” and very distracting.

I am grateful to Apple for trying. I’m also grateful for the reminder that June “Pride” will soon be upon us. For me this means that If I want to have dinner & drinks with any LGB friends in Palm Springs, I’d better do it soon. Otherwise we’ll be into July with the blistering heat pounding down on us. As more moderate, bordering on conservative gay men, we’re tolerated. But during Pride Month in Palm Springs it’s simply not a pleasant place to be.

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I miss wearing my nice automatic watch…

There are a couple of reasons I don’t wear it.

I fought switching to a smart watch. I like my analog self winding watch a lot.

I like the simplicity, not having to charge it, and knowing that when I kick off, my Brother will probably be wearing it at my memorial service and it will serve him well. 

That being said, I finally caved on the smart watch thing, because I became concerned about getting mugged for my watch, after several incidents with people who couldn’t keep their eyes or hands to themselves. 

Once I made the switch, I liked a lot of the features that my Apple Watch put on my wrist. Now, I’m used to the health data being collected and while I have turned off a lot of the intrusive, and incessant messages, I feel like I’m missing something when that data isn’t being collected.

Damn you Apple!

Apple Watch Ultra lifestyle endurance 220907 1108200464.However, after Apple’s nothing event last year regarding the Apple Watch Ultra (Really? A color change, for $799,) and the loss of Blood O2 due to their patent dispute with Massimo, I started reconsidering the smart watch entirely. (Apparently, I’m not alone. Apple Watch sales have declined for 2 consecutive years.)

I’ve hung onto my Apple Watch Ultra series 1 because the Ultra 2 didn’t really move the bar, and Blood O2 was turned off. My Ultra includes the blood O2 monitoring because I purchased it before the Apple / Massimo spat.

The color change last year was a nothing burger. This year’s watch should technically be Generation 4 of the Apple Ultra. They’ll probably call it the 3.

From a practical perspective, I’m running a 3 year old smart watch. It will be 4 come September and the battery is starting to show signs of wear.

So, I find myself at a crossroads. Replacement of my smart watch will become necessary in the next year or two at the outside.

If Apple doesn’t significantly improve the Apple Ultra, I’m thinking maybe I’ll find an alternative.

For half the cost of an Ultra, I could go with an Oura 4th generation ring. 7 day battery life, no dings boops or notifications, in fact, no communication features at all.

So that might be a plus! Then I could go back to wearing a simple analog watch again, and still have all the health features.

Alternatively, going without the health features might not be a bad thing either.

I find that I’m looking at simple “real” watches more often. There are a couple of Luminox models that are beautiful. There’s the Omega I’ve been jonesing over for years. Then there are a couple of Bulova watches that are really nice.

Maybe I’m done with the fad of smart watches. Maybe I’m really just heading toward more simplicity in my life. Wearing a ring embedded with sensors is a way for me to have my cake and eat it too.

My Ultra, has pressure sensors, and can be used as a dive computer. The problem with that is, you have to pay for a subscription to Oceanic to use it. I haven’t enabled that function for a couple of reasons. 

1) I’ve had a go around with Oceanic. I had a number of dives that I’d entered on their site. In theory, Those dive records were supposed to be maintained as long as I had just a basic account. Oceanic was purchased by another company and these records were flushed.

2) I’d be willing to purchase their software as a One Time charge, as long as I could upload or download the data from their site, (see point 1). It looks like I can download from their site but that’s pointless if I can’t upload my existing data. I don’t want to have to maintain 2 independent record keeping systems.

I think the Mares or Suunto wrist computers are a better solution for diving computers. Both of them, talk directly to the dive log software I already own, without subscription BS.

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It’s been several weeks since I enabled Apple Advanced Data Protection

Thus far, I’m glad I did.

The encryption is seamless. I’ve noticed no data speed drop. All my devices still access iCloud just as they did before.

The only question is, “Will Apple hold the line against the UK government?”

I find that I’m using “Notes” a bit more. “Notes” is handy for some things like a temporary password or what have you. I always hesitated to put anything of a critical nature in “Notes” mostly because of security concerns. 

If I was hacking into an iCloud account, “Notes” is the first place I’d wander through for interesting information about the person I was hacking.

I’m also more comfortable with some photos being stored in the encrypted iCloud. (Hey, we all have some photos that we don’t necessarily want out on the internet!) There’s no reason for us to be providing free thrills to some hacker. We wouldn’t want to cut into our OnlyFans account revenue now would we???

I also don’t think too much about documents being stored in iCloud as much as I did before. 

That was always a concern to me. The thought of having personal correspondence sitting unencrypted in the cloud was a big risk. That meant that some things I would only do on my computer and any saved documents were always saved locally, or to my network storage only.

But that also means that if the computer was lost, stolen, or destroyed, those documents would be lost as well, if they weren’t stored on my local network storage.

The setup process was remarkably simple. I chose to enable ADP from my computer. No particular reason other than with the larger screen, I didn’t need my glasses. I also knew that the recovery key was going to be a long string of numbers and letters, and wanted to be sure that I stored it in print and digitally somehow. 

What was interesting is that the encryption was pretty much immediate across all devices. There may have been a message saying that it could take some time before everything was available depending on how much information I had stored in iCloud, but if there was a time delay, I didn’t notice it.

I will be curious to see how iCloud handles me transitioning to a new phone, computer, or iPad in the future. But I’m looking at that as a bridge to burn later.

Thus far, the result is ADP is functional and I’m tempted to recommend everyone use it. 

My thinking is, if we’re all using it, then Apple will have more incentive to tell authoritarian governments like the UK to “EMusk” it.

a.k.a. “Go Fuck Yourself”

That interview Elon Musk did was epic! I think telling someone they can EMusk as a euphemism for go fuck yourself should be adopted.

Time to get on with the day…

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Oh goody! Google is at it again!

I knew it was coming. I just didn’t think they’d move this quickly.

According to an email today, and it was confirmed in the news Google is discontinuing support for Gen 1 and Gen 2 Nest Thermostats. 

At first thought, I was like no big deal, then I read further into the email and found that not only are they no longer updating the internal software, they’e also going to be killing remote access to the unit.

Basically, my smart machine is going to get just as dumb as a regular thermostat but will retain scheduling ability. 

This sucks!

No more ability to control the house temperature if I’m away. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s really nice in winter to have the house in the 50s when I’m away, then tell Siri to warm the house up to something comfortable before I actually get there.

If you’ve got a regular schedule that can be programmed. If you don’t have a regular schedule then you come home to a freezing house and crank the thermostat to warm it up quick.

With either the preprogrammed schedule, or the remote commands, the temp is increased in shorter bursts over a longer time. It’s a bit more balanced and efficient.

I knew Google was going to do this. To their credit they have discounted their newest version of the machine but I’m not interested. Yes It’s a nice machine, expensive, but given how Google is behaving and that they want me to have a full Google account instead of the old Nest account I’m not inclined to get deeper into Google.

What I want is an ecosystem that just talks to HomeKit and does so locally between devices inside the house. I don’t really like even low level stuff like house controls bouncing all over the internet. I was willing to put up with HomeKit, and Google so long as the Thermostat and the Protect smoke were providing what I believe to be a reasonable level of integrated protection.

The night of the fire, the A/C did kick on and distributed the smoke throughout the house. It also fanned the fire. 

But with Google’s recent moves,

I’ve been looking at alternatives.

Regardless of my remaining in this house or not, it’s a good point to disconnect from Google. My Thermostat will get dumb in October. I’ve got until then to make some kind of decision.

Trouble is, most of the smart thermostats want an account, and in some cases they want you to have a paid monthly or yearly subscription. 

That makes me rethink the whole smart thermostat idea. The Nest thermostat saved me money over the years, and while it was under Nest’s control didn’t cost anything beyond the cost of the unit and giving some of my information to Nest via their app.

This new situation may cancel the savings of any potential unit. It might also be a sign that for me, going forward simplicity is the best path.

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Always in the middle of the night!!!!

The second, of three, Nest Protect smoke alarms reached end of life.

I swear, I think smoke detectors in general are more of a pain in the ass than they’re worth. (I say that as someone who had a house burn down!)

I also have come to believe that the damn things are somehow built to sense sundown, then wait 6 hours before starting their bitching about low battery or malfunctions.

That’s only when they’re not going off because someone took a hot shower, or a bit of toast got overdone.

There’s nothing quite like being naked on a stepladder in the middle of the night trying to get one of these nuisance devices off the damn ceiling to shut it the hell up!

The modern machines all seem to have CO detectors in them and it’s the damn CO detector that goes out first. But rather than being able to tell the stupid machine, “Yes I get it, the CO detector is malfunctioning. There is another unit that is still functioning so stop chirping every 60 seconds and let us get some sleep…”

Nope! It’s gotta be taken care of right then. Like you’re going to be able to run out to the local hardware store at 2am and buy a replacement.

The Protects were literally the best of these nuisance machines. I’ve had these for 10 years and they have legitimately reached end of life. I’m not too annoyed, other than now I have to replace them with whatever bullshit machines are on the market today.

That’s thanks to Google’s masterful decision to keep fucking over Nest, (who they purchased a while back and have systematically destroyed.) Trust me, however much you hate Google, (and there are numerous reasons beside what they did to Nest,) it’s not enough.

I’ve hated smoke alarms since at least 1982. I had one in an apartment that pissed me off so much, (again at 3 am), that I leapt off the floor, snatched the damn thing from the ceiling and disemboweled it on the spot.

The Protect units were purchased after, at random, any one, of the three units installed in my house by the builder, started going off at random intervals for absolutely no reason. Always sometime between 1 and 3 am. (Not good if you’ve actually been in a house fire and are perhaps a little twitchy about fire!)

Those stupid machines were so bad we couldn’t use the stove in the kitchen without having the sliding doors and all the windows in the house open. Even then, it was 50/50 that they’d start that horrific screeching, reporting a fire that didn’t exist. This was only slightly more annoying than the smoke detectors in the previous house that burned, never raising a peep, even as they were consumed by fire.

But take too hot a shower… Then once again there you were, naked, throwing doors and windows open to make the damn things shut the hell up!

The Protects, solved most of those problems. I’m not looking forward to going back to the shitty overly sensitive machines.

Last night, at least, I knew what was going on. Even half asleep, I got the malfunctioning Protect off the ceiling. Unplugged it from the AC connection, pulled the backup batteries, and left the mess on the kitchen counter.

I don’t remember pulling the batteries, I was on auto pilot. I don’t even remember going back to bed.

From this you might infer that I’m very grumpy when my sleep is disturbed. That is true to a point.

If the source of the disturbance is the dog wanting out at some ungodly hour because he’s not feeling well. I’m totally fine with it. If it’s a child or even an adult that’s waking me for a legitimate reason, I’m not grumpy at all.

But a machine? (Including alarm clocks,) oh hell no! I loose my damn mind. This is especially true of a machine that’s decided to tell me about a low battery every 60 seconds at 4am.

Now my challenge is to strike a balance between price and minimal false alarms in my replacement smoke detectors. Truthfully, if the originally installed units weren’t wired into the house power, (and therefore there weren’t open holes in the ceiling where they were installed,) I’d be removing the mounting rings, spackling the screw holes over, and calling it a day.

What ever POS devices I choose, I take comfort in the high probability that I will not be living with the decision for long.