Tag: Apple

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Today is the day

Preorders for iPhones began at 5am.

I’m still deciding if I want to plunk down the cash for a new phone. Indeed I’m wondering if I want to pre-order one instead of seeing it in the store in person. 

I know I want blue. I’m pretty sure I want the smaller of the two phones although the telephoto abilities of the iPhone Pro Max are intriguing. I just don’t think I could get comfortable with the size of the Max. I still like being able to put my phone in my pocket.

Sacrificing that ability for 5x telephoto versus 3x doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff for me given how little I use telephoto in general.

My current phone is 512GB. It’s served me well at that storage level, I do take photos regularly and with the resolution of the new iPhone being 4 times that of the current iPhone I wonder if bumping the phone storage up would be a good idea. Or is that something I can kick down the road a bit? It’s $200 extra. 

That pushes an already expensive phone into the stratosphere. Then again, at these prices? What’s another 200 bucks? It’s improbable that this will be my last iPhone, given that I tend to replace them every 3 years. My estimated remaining lifespan is 10+ years so maybe there’ll be 3 more iPhones in my future. 

My perspective on that kind of thing is changing. The other half made choices that meant he had what was just barely serviceable in the last 5-10 years of his life. I was the one that forced him into buying better things than just “serviceable”. He fought me on his Apple Watch and flat out refused to get an iPhone that used facial recognition.

Because he played harp, his thumbs and fingers were always torn up a little. As it turns out, just enough, that fingerprint scanners in iPhones and iPads more often than not, wouldn’t work.

It wasn’t anything he complained about, but I couldn’t help but notice he made his life more difficult than it had to be. It saddens me that the last few years of his life, he might have been more frustrated by devices and tools meant to make his life easier. When I bought his last iPhone, I should have gotten the one with facial recognition like mine.

Thinking like this has changed my perspective some. I’ve always gone for nice things within some kind of boundaries. Now, I’m looking at things from the perspective of does this make me smile, does it make my life easier or reduce frustration? If it does, then It’s worth it to spend a little extra cash. Especially since I’m aware, the road ahead of me is shorter than the road behind me. Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself?

The computer I’m typing on right now, is a marvel. It’s small, powerful, and has great battery life. In low power mode, the battery life is crazy long. Most of what I do these days is completely unaffected by running in low power mode. So yes, I spent a bloody fortune on this machine, but it meets all the requirement stated above, and probably will not be replaced in the next 5 years and possibly this is the last computer I’ll have.

I’m usually startled at how fast this computer really is when I plug it in. Low power mode turns off when it sees incoming power. Mostly it’s the speed of some applications loading. But when I’m using something like Final Cut, or the Affinity Suite of applications, I really notice. I’m sure I’d notice the speed using Photoshop if I could afford to use Adobe products anymore. $55 a month for access to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and the other Adobe products seems excessive. If I was a student it would be $20 a month, but if I was a business it’s $85 a month. Wow! Must be nice… 

I miss the days of being able to purchase the Adobe Creative Suite outright and deciding if I needed to upgrade year over year.

That being said, Affinity does a great job of replacing Adobe. I just noticed that most of the benchmark tests aren’t referring to Photoshop rendering speed anymore. I hadn’t thought about Adobe for at least a year, maybe two. That’s a pity, I used to use their products all the dang time. I haven’t even looked at the Adobe Font catalog for more than 5 years. I used to always be shopping for some cool unique font. 

Ahhh apparently Adobe is doing subscriptions on fonts too. Guess What? The subscription is obscenely expensive!

I guess Adobe really did cut themselves right out of the general public’s awareness when they got too pricy for individuals to maintain copies of their products. I’ll have to make sure that all of my previously purchased fonts are securely stored somewhere because I won’t be able to replace them going forward.

I’ve found some font houses are still in business. Of course, looking at the various font houses, I discovered two fonts that I really liked. At $200 bucks a piece They may be a bit too rich for my blood, but at least I could buy them without a subscription. 

Screenshot 2023 09 14 at 10 27 38 AM

From Typography.com, is a very beautiful typeface. As fonts go, it’s not inordinately priced. This is the problem I have with subscription services especially for fonts. It looks like paying one year of Adobe’s subscription price would greatly exceed the cost of purchasing both of the fonts that I’ve just found and liked.

As an individual, I might only need or want 2 fonts. So having subscription access to 1000s of fonts does me no good whatsoever. That being said, I know that I’m an outlier. Most people don’t think about the font they’re using unless it’s hard to read.

Being in the printer and printing industry for as long as I was, I look at fonts very differently. For example, Requiem (above) is elegant, and beautiful. There are features in the font that are very old school having to do with ligatures. I suppose I look at fonts as functional art. Moreover a beautiful font is art that I get to look at and use everyday on my computer.

I digress, I do wonder though if I still have any of the Adobe Type Manager 3.5” disks around that contained my font library. I’ll have to keep an eye out for those as I’m cleaning up.

This is how I lose entire days… One connection leads to another in my head, and then another and another until I realize I’ve learned a lot but haven’t gotten anything done.

I’ve decided that I’m preordering the phone… 

Hmm, apparently not! Something is very odd with the Apple site. Apparently, they’ve got another hit on their hands…

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Ughhh! It figures! Crappy Nights sleep and I really need to be on the ball…

I’ve got an appointment with the accountant today to hopefully finish up the tax crap dealing with the other half and my filing.

I took advantage of the automatic extension afforded us by the disaster declaration caused by the blizzard this year. It’s a darn good thing, because the other half’s filing system and document storage leaves a lot to be desired!

But I spent the night tossing and turning and feel like absolute crap. My brain isn’t working worth a darn but this is one of those things that must get done.

IRS Logo

I had a lot of weird abstract dreams all night. But my computer is fully charged and hopefully the parts of my brain that aren’t working will be augmented by the device. Thankfully the machine fits nicely in my briefcase.

Later this week I’m going to have to pick up the snow blower, it’s in for repair and a tune up after 15 winters of hard use and being put up wet. The repair guy said it had the wrong size belt on it. I told him that was the factory original belt and he was surprised. He said that explained it, the belt was so worn and stretched that’s why the machine was smoking when you tried to use it. 

I didn’t explain any further, the snow blower was the domain of the other half and as has been established the other half was not particularly kind to machines. I’m pleased that the repair didn’t cost too much.

Apple event 1

Today is the annual Apple reveal of new iPhones and other hot desirable items to populate the Christmas wish lists of millions. I usually watch just out of habit these days.

I’ll be watching the event today because I want to see what my options are for a new iPhone. My current phone is getting long in the tooth, It’s to the point of replacing the battery or replacing the phone. My phone is 3 generations old. I’d like an improved camera, and I’d like to have USB-C connections across all my devices. I’d like the satellite SOS ability and crash detection.

All the above features are available on last years model (except the USB-C). I’m curious to see what this year’s model brings. Tim Cook will once again be Captain Obvious with his proclamation, “This is the best most advanced iPhone we’ve ever produced,” uh yeah Tim, that’s the nature of technology… Moving on!

The USB-C connection is a pretty sure bet. Other hardware & software features may be announced that have not been leaked. All of this will influence my decision, “New Phone vs. New Battery”.

I’m also hoping that Craig Federighi does most of the presentation this year. I really don’t enjoy all the “Diversity” players because they’re just not exciting.

Federighi is electric and his playfulness and enthusiasm come through, even if he’s presenting dry specs and figures. He’s a fun presenter and somehow he always makes you hold your breath when he starts a live demo.

I guess I see it because I’ve done my fair share of live demos where it was entirely possible for the thing you’re demonstrating to fail right then and there. He apparently has done his fair share of demos where everything went wrong. He telegraphs that tension and makes it fun, it’s a “We’re gonna have an adventure…” feeling.

I’ve always gotten the impression that if a live demo went to absolute shit… Craig Federighi would somehow find a way to laugh, reset, and try again without missing too many beats. Federighi could almost convince me to upgrade my phone every year. 

That being said, there have been some comments associating his rise to SVP of Apple Engineering to the decade long slip in software quality across IOS, & MacOS. I don’t know if there’s a cause / effect connection or that the level of complexity in the software has caused the problem.

Personally, I believe that the issues have been, if not injected, then exacerbated by the rise of too much automated testing and not enough human eyes on the software until after it’s released. In the back of my mind, there’s a thread that questions if some of the problems aren’t based in diversity quotas.

When you hire someone based on anything other than their ability to build a product, you’re inherently degrading the final product. That’s not racist or sexist… That is simply a mater of fact.

Another of the dirty little secrets the diversity crowd would like to keep hidden and that no body is supposed to think about.

I’m not super thrilled with the expense of a new phone, but if there are sufficient improvements from my model to this one I could be moved to spend the money. Having USB-C is almost enough for me to plunk down the cash, on its own merit.

I’d like having only ONE cable and one charger for all my devices. So long as all my devices are smart enough to limit the charge current so that they don’t damage themselves. There aren’t many things I agree with the Europeans about, but de-cluttering my wall outlets, power strips, and the knot of cabling in my briefcase is one thing I heartily agree with.

Anyway, we’ll see how all this goes. I may be ordering a new phone soon. 

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Hmmm… That’s interesting and perhaps problematic.

Years ago, after our house burned and losing our substantial DVD/BluRay & CD / Vinyl collection we decided that we didn’t want to suffer that kind of loss again. There are still CDs and DVDs that we hadn’t replaced because they’ve been out of print (so to speak) for years.

As an alternative, you could perhaps back up a DVD by making a copy and storing the original someplace else. BUT YOU COULDN’T… The anti piracy encoding made that an imperfect solution.

Oh sure, you could buy programs that would “Crack the encryption” those programs would even mostly work but the image quality they produced was hit or miss. Mostly miss!

Why settle for a crappy dvd copy that was barely 480 with a mono sound track, when you had a 1080p or 4k Television and slamming surround sound?

In other words, the solution didn’t work well enough to be called a solution. Oh and that “Cracker” program you purchased… Money right in the pocket of some shitty hacker who’d then happily sell your name and credit card number to the highest bidder.

You could perhaps move a “bit for bit” disk image to network attached storage, some of the storage devices even had applications specifically for the purpose. That solution was slow and often disrupted by the anti piracy shit built into the DVD. You’d get the whole movie, but if you played it back from the network storage you’d find the chapters were all scrambled.

So our choice was to get high speed internet and we’d stream movies or TV shows from a service like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Hulu. You could “Buy” movies on Apple, Amazon, or UltraViolet. Supposedly, the movies you purchased would be in your personal library forever (OR until the terms and conditions changed…)

UltraViolet was a really terrible service that worked on every device except the 65″ TV in the living room. To use that nice panel, I needed to connect a computer to it, or some other device. Okay, fine for me. The other half had a bit of a problem with complex technology and keeping track of HDMI inputs, and then routing the audio through the sound system or the TV speakers etc, etc, etc.

He could play Flight of the Bumblebee, Mozart’s Requiem Mass, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle, flawlessly on several different instruments, but the remote control for watching a movie or TV show? There were too many buttons to remember.

Go Figure!

I’d come home from work after the house rebuild and find him reading a book in front of a large screen displaying “No Signal”. Sometimes there would be FM static whispering through the surround sound system, because he’d switched to the radio but couldn’t find a station in range.

I felt responsible, terrible, and guilty. I knew that all he wanted to do was watch some opera performance, or listen to a piece of music that I probably wouldn’t like while I wasn’t home. (I hate Opera only slightly less than I hate Rap.) Oh and Shostakovich… Right the hell out of here! If I happened to be a spy captured by Russians during the Cold War… 3 Hours of Shostakovich and I’d have told the Russians our launch codes and given them the President’s Mistress address and phone number!

He knew that. He liked Shostakovich pieces. So he’d enjoy those pieces when I wasn’t around. Much the same as me enjoying Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, and Korn. He enjoyed those groups just as much as I enjoyed Shostakovich. So I listened to those groups on the way to work in the car, or at home when he was off playing church services or a gig.

Honestly… I think the problem was complexity added by the the sound system. When you added the TV, and a connection device to the internal network. Then having to choose which service you wanted to stream from, the Network Storage, or the internet, and which TV you wanted to watch the video on, did you want stereo, or surround sound? On and On, just to play a show or movie.

Writing it just now, and I knew it then, it was a lot of work. It’s a hell of a lot easier to plunk a DVD in a tray or slot and press “play”.

Although as I wrote that, I couldn’t help but think of trying to find a specific item on the internet these days. You’ll get a page or two of loosely related items but not the item, then when you click on the item that most closely approximates what you were looking for, you’ll get annoying cookie notification shit, (Weren’t cookies going away????) Then at least one full screen pop up asking for your email address in exchange for some “Special” discount, then another pop up asking if you need help from a chatbot and all the while, you still haven’t been able to see if the item is what you wanted, or read its description or price.

It’s like the damn gas pumps! No, I don’t want a car wash. No, I don’t want to join your club. Yes, I want a receipt. No, I don’t want a discount on beef jerky inside. Please! I just want fucking GAS!

The ONE question aside from wanting a receipt I’m going to answer “Yes” to, is “Do you want me to turn off the screaming advertising screen?”

Unfortunately, that question is never asked. I suppose that’s why my blood pressure is so dang low when I”m driving across country. I take a lot of back roads, and in those little country towns… A Gas Pump is just a Gas Pump…

Apparently my other half wasn’t the only person who had trouble. Most modern surround systems, and TVs are smart enough that with the right cables, all you have to turn on is the actual device you want to use. The system if properly configured, will see an HDMI input and make certain assumptions about it. Video Game – Connect TV and surround system turn on TV. CD player – Sound system only.

The cool thing is that you don’t have to fiddle with 5 different remote controls (All of which work differently. Some of which have volume controls that do nothing). All you have to do is turn on one device.

I’d been planning to update our equipment to the new standards. I was going to make it a Christmas present to us both this year. I don’t think I’ll be doing that now. He’s gone and I can reconfigure what I have to work until I decide what’s next in my life. But there is a temptation to update everything anyway… It all can be put in moving boxes, right?

In an effort to make things as simple as possible, over the years, I’d made a couple of decisions. Those decisions may come back to haunt me now.

We settled on a single streaming device. We went with the Apple TV in part because this is an Apple household. No, not in the religious sense.

For decades Apple devices, while expensive, worked as advertised, and had long term support. Non Apple devices… Not so much. “Blackberry? Paging Blackberry… Blackberry?” ZUME? PalmPilot? Compaq iPaq? Compaq Computers? The list goes on and is quite long!

This is not to say that Apple didn’t lay some eggs in their time, but Apple supported these devices for a time after they stopped selling them. My Newton Messagepad was a nifty device, ahead of its time, and woefully misunderstood by the blockheads in the media who sealed its demise with horrific articles damning something they didn’t understand, in favor of the Palm Pilot.

Apple though, is getting long in the tooth. They’re beginning to take on the lassie faire attitude that defined Non Apple corporations for years.

That attitude is, “The customer will buy it even if “it” doesn’t quite work.” We’re seeing this in Apple Software, and to some extent, in their hardware. The butterfly keyboard issue is only the latest example of Apple failing to pay attention to quality indicators.

With the Apple TV, the other half could turn on one device, and then have a menu that allowed him to pick what he wanted to see or hear. When we added the HomePod speakers things got a lot simpler One button, one remote. Then it was just a matter of making sure that all the music was available in the cloud. The same was true of Television shows and Movies.

Soon our collection of movies and music was all in iTunes. If the other half had a problem with the system, I could often walk him through corrective steps or just log on to the iCloud account to figure out what was wrong. Simplicity reigned, and I no longer came home to a screen displaying “No Signal”

In hindsight, our collection being completely in iTunes may not have been the best idea. We have a lot of movies. We also tended to buy TV series that we liked. The number of movies would be a problem if they had to be physically stored. They might even be a problem if I were to download each one to the network storage. I could always increase the network storage size, or add bookshelves.

The Apple Movies all have encryption. They can be played from network storage with a computer as long as the computer can verify with the internet that you have the rights to play the video. The Apple TV flat out refuses to see the movies exist on local network storage. Since the purpose was to have the movies on the big screen I haven’t kept up with downloading them since the AppleTV wouldn’t play them from downloads anyway.

One concern I have is that movies are being changed to accommodate the Woke overly sensitive crowd. There’s a bigger problem with some of the TV series I’ve purchased over the years. A current example is the series Archer.

This morning I happened to be looking at purchasing the season pass for season 14 of the show. I noticed with some surprise that seasons 1-8 were available for purchase, as was season 14. What happened to seasons 9 through 13?

I immediately checked my library and found that seasons 9-13 were still available because I’d already purchased them. This begs the question, why is there a gap at all? Seasons 3-5 of The Boys from Amazon are not available on iTunes. I purchased Seasons 1 & 2, on iTunes thinking that I’d be able to complete the series in time.

That seems questionable now. The Expanse is a series that I own except the last two seasons. I suppose I should purchase those before they’re unavailable. I also just checked on “Strike Back” and found that ONLY the two seasons I own are available, the remaining 5 or 6 seasons are completely missing. Just a few months ago all the seasons were available, they were expensive, but available. I suspect I could get a boxed set at Best Buy come Christmas time.

This makes me wonder if digital collections are worth it. If I can’t have a guarantee that I’ll be able to purchase all of a series or have the option to purchase a digital un-woke version of Gone with the Wind, or Looney Tunes then perhaps I need to go back to physical copies.

I still can’t purchase Young Frankenstein on iTunes. But I was able to get a copy of Blazing Saddles.

Then there’s the issue of some of the albums that I’ve had in my collection disappearing and not being available for re-download. Thankfully I have a friend that has a massive collection of music and If I really need to have one of those albums, I have no issues asking him for a high quality copy.

My attitude about this is simple. If I paid for the damn album in digital format and lost the copy of that album due to a drive failure I should be able to redownload it. If you’re not going to let me do that, then my other option is to “Pirate” a copy for my own use.

I have no desire to start selling pirated copies of my music or videos, I just want to the able to play them hassle free.

Unfortunately, I think that ability is going to require buying physical copies of everything again. I don’t look forward to repurchasing DVDs or CDs to recreate my library again. To my way of thinking I shouldn’t have to. Then again, I don’t think like everyone else.

If I were to commit to going all physical copies of everything again… It would be a great excuse to do a complete sound system/entertainment system refresh. That would give a friend and I a great shopping day in the audiophile stores he haunts. I might even go so far as to buy a turntable and get back to vinyl.

I’m not sure I want to go with tubes in an amp. I know my friend will strongly suggest that I do. I think I’d rather put the bulk of cash in really fine speakers.

We’ll see…

In the mean time, I’m going to experiment with some DRM removal software to see if I can download and save my collection to my Network Storage and avoid replacement altogether.

It’s interesting, I think we’re all going to be looking at doing things the “Old Way” because the “New Way” has become so corrupted. I can think of a couple of recordings of live shows from comedians I owned. Those shows / recordings would never pass the censorship the “Woke” crowd seeks to impose.

The Newest Call of Duty game is going to be live censoring any trash talking between players. That’s half the fun! When I played COD with my coworkers, we called each other names all the time over the communication channels. Where else do you get to call your boss a “dumb ass” to his face and have everyone laugh? But along comes the WOKE, they’re going to use an AI to censor “Hate or hurtful speech” in online gaming, and the AI will flush your sorry ass from the game if it doesn’t like what you say.

I’m not sure I’m willing to pony up $70 to have an AI tell me I can’t trash talk my friends during a game. I really enjoyed the creative swearing and trash talk directed at me when I screwed up. Then again, I was playing with retired guys from the Navy, Army, and Marines.

I wonder how the gaming community will respond? If no-one buys the new game, and only plays the old non-AI enhanced versions do you think they’ll get the message?

That’s fantasy! The young kids will keep the games alive and they’ll accept censorship in all its forms because they don’t know any better. Stalin said something about educating the children… I can’t remember offhand the exact saying.

I’m heading to Best Buy later today, maybe I’ll check out the selection of physical copies of music and games.

Have a great one!

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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…

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It’s the Apple WWDC!

I’m not quite as interested as I’ve been in years past. But I’ve got laundry running and vinegar in the drain traps, (I prefer that to caustic chemicals due to the septic system,) so I’ve got a while before I can go anywhere.

I should probably make a grocery/dog treat run but neither are critical so It’s not going to matter if I put it off a day.

I’ll turn on the WWDC in the background. I’m curious about the new features coming in the latest versions of Apple operating systems. Since my iPad, watch, and computer are all less than a year old there will be some relevance to me.

I’d have upgraded my phone but I really like the blue color and the Purple from last year was not attractive. For some reason I don’t want to go back to space gray on my phone. It’s shouldn’t matter since my phone is usually in a case, but when I’m around the house it’s not unusual for my phone to be naked. (Okay so my phone is a slut! Who cares?) perhaps I’ll upgrade my phone in the fall or maybe I’ll wait another generation. By that time the phone will be 3 – 4 generations old, the battery will be on its last legs and maybe Apple will move everything to USB C so I can toss all the Lightning cables.

I liked the additions to the various OSs. I can see using some of the newer features frequently and how they’ll make my life easier. I really liked the improvements to the Hiking app on the watch. I also like the idea of having the health app available on the iPad. That should make evaluating the data a bit easier with a bigger screen.

The larger MacBook Air is interesting too. Especially since it’s got the M2 chip, the ability to have a ton of memory and storage, and an 18 hour battery life. That makes that particular machine probably the hot ticket coming this fall.

I have to admit that I’ve been interested in the Mac Studio since it’s debut. I didn’t go that way because I like having a laptop.

However, the power of the new iPad Pro with an M2 chip is astonishing and I could see using the iPad as my only portable computer, then having something like the Mac Studio if you needed a real powerhouse when you got back home.

This is especially true since Apple Logic Pro and Final Cut run on iPad now. There are a lot of other “standard” office applications that run just fine on iPad but it you needed video or audio you had to go outside the Apple ecosystem. Those barriers are gone and honestly my M2 iPad Pro is about as functional for my needs as my laptop. I could see the iPad / Studio blend now.

I wasn’t all that interested in the AR thing that’s been rumored for such a long time. Now that I’ve seen it, it’s as expected, very expensive.

That being said, I can see the potential. I can even say I’m interested enough that I’d like to see it live and in action.

If it worked well enough, I could see it replacing TV screens for those folks that live alone. I’ve considered that possibility with just my iPad and Mac. Then again, I don’t watch cable, or broadcast TV so I might be an outlier case.

Come to think of it, I haven’t to my knowledge watched any TV using the “new” (10 years old now) digital channels that are coming from broadcast stations these days.

I literally have no clue how that works. I’ve not lived anywhere that digital channels received via an antenna were available. Even the Escondido apartment was in a “Signal Hole”. It didn’t matter too much since the cost of internet only was higher than the cost of internet and cable TV combined. Talk about desperate to keep TV subscribers! I honestly don’t recall watching anything on TV for three years. I’d watch something on a streaming channel or a movie on DVD.

That was probably due more to my weird schedule, than the quality of TV. I got home from work about 2PM and was in bed by 7 or 8 PM. So any TV I could watch was talk shows or soap operas. Other more interesting dramas were on way past my bedtime. I didn’t pony up the cash to rent the DVR feature on the cable box.

I gotta say, having a virtual screen that you could make a big as you wanted without needing a sound system for surround sound might be a slick way to really enjoy some movies.

The price tag of 3500+ might be off putting.

I did like the use case Apple showed where the lady was on a full flight and tuned out the plane and other passengers entirely.

Hell that could make flying bearable again!