Tag: Modern Problems

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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.

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The Hum

Living where I do is generally quiet. Unless they’re doing work in the wash. Then it’s a constant beeping and grinding as heavy equipment rumbles up and down the wash moving dirt around.

We’ll not talk about the dust and debris that blows in on the wind.

But when I first moved into this house after I’d been here for about a month, suddenly there was “The Hum”. At first it was only something I could hear in the Master Bedroom. What was strange is that due to an acoustic oddity, I could only hear it in one relatively confined area in the bedroom. (Of course it happened to be on my side of the bed.) It drove me wild and disrupted my sleep. My loving partner switched sides of the bed with me, so that I could actually sleep because he couldn’t hear it.

Over time, “The Hum” grew such that I could hear it everywhere in the house and outside too.

Slowly, it stopped being a constant thing. It became intermittent and finally after years, it was gone.

I don’t actually hear “The Hum”…

That’s not entirely true, but I hear it more like the sounds you hear when you’re underwater. That soft area just behind your jaw near your earlobes. That’s where it feels like I’m hearing the sound.

For many years, I haven’t heard “The Hum”.

This morning, well before dawn, I woke with my jaw clenched, grinding my teeth. I laid there for a few moments trying to figure out what woke me up. Then I heard it. “The Hum” was back.

Only now, instead of being constant, it’s cycling up & down, then being entirely silent, then starts again. It’s like an annoying gnat buzzing around your ears that you can’t quite seem to kill. Just when you think it’s gone, buzzes into your ear canal to remind you it’s there and piss you off.

“The Hum,” is like that but worse for me. It’s right on the threshold of my hearing, just loud enough that it bothers me, but most other people can’t hear it at all. So I’m the crazy person!

I suspect that it’s originating from a water pump that’s at some distance from the house. I can hear “The Hum” very clearly inside the house, but outside it’s not as prominent.

I think it’s resonance in the ground, and somehow the house it picking it up an amplifying the sound.

The water company claims that it’s not them, I couldn’t possibly hear the pump, and drops all subsequent inquiries in the “Crazy Person” bin.

In an effort to determine if “The Hum” is originating in the house, I shut the power off. My thinking was that any and all electro-mechanical devices would power down so if “The Hum” remained, it was external, not something I was doing to myself.

“The Hum” never missed a beat.

The dog hears it too. He’s a lot better at ignoring it than I am. I suppose since it doesn’t represent an immediate threat, or treat he just figures it’s the price of living in the human world.

I know he hears it because if “The Hum” stops for a minute or so, then starts again he wakes up from his nap looks around, then goes back to sleep.

I’ll try wearing my AirPods with noise cancellation on. I don’t think they’ll help because where I feel the sound isn’t the ear canal. Maybe a full ear set of headphones would help.

I’d ignore “The Hum” if I could. Something about the sound disrupts my thought processes and keeps me right on the edge of being angry. The way it comes and goes makes my brain start looking for a pattern.

Sometimes, “The Hum” sounds like Morse code. With that kind of dot-dash-dot pattern, my brain thinks there’s something to decode and being on the threshold of hearing, drags my full attention to the sound even though I know it’s nothing.

I have the same problem with fluorescent lights. They all hum, and most of the time I hear them. If one is starting to go out I hear that too. One of the many reasons that school was so very difficult for me. I tried very hard to listen to the teacher, but the humming from the lights and their patterns always captured my attention more.

Incandescent light bulbs will start “ringing” about a day before they burn out. The first few years living my the other half, it drove him crazy that I’d walk in from work with light bulbs the very moment he’d turn on a light and it would flash and burn out. I think he thought I was doing something to the bulbs on purpose to freak him out.

Even LED bulbs “ring”, as do plug in transformers used to recharge devices. Braun trimmers and shavers are the loudest in this regard.

So now you know why I like to sit at the bottom of lakes, or pools, and why I like SCUBA even though that’s actually a bit noisy.

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Apple has announced their WWDC dates

Apple WWDC25 Event Logo.I expect they’ll talk about IOS19.

Okay… 

I like a lot of the features in IOS18, I’d probably be a little more excited about IOS19 if Apple had finished implementing all the features promised in IOS18.

They’ve got until June I suppose, then the rumor mills and all the publications will switch to IOS19 stuff and we’ll see IOS18 finally completed in August or September.

Just in time to have IOS19 released in October. 

It’s not just Siri or Apple intelligence. It’s the entire ecosystem that I’m getting a little annoyed with.

There are some things about Apple’s move toward “Intelligence” that I’m not thrilled about.

Chief among these is Apple’s replacement of words while I’m texting or writing. I’d like to be able to tone down the replacement. I’d also like to have the ability in some cases for word replacement to go back to just underlining incorrect or questionable words.

The automatic replacement is annoying in some cases. If I’m writing something and moving fast I might stumble in spelling. In those instances Apple chooses what it thinks I meant, then doesn’t leave the highlight in place.

So if I’m writing stream of consciousness and glitch on a word I might not see it at all because I’m 6 paragraphs down the page. 

I only see the problem after I’ve pressed send or saved a document, by then I’ve forgotten what I meant to say and it makes proof reading much more difficult since if my spelling caused the selection of a completely different word, the next few words Apple replaces may be grammatically correct but not at all what I was saying. 

I’d like to select the old reliable red underscore and tell Apple intelligence to not replace a word or string of words. I’m going to notice the red underscore then correct spelling based on those highlights.

Dictation is a nightmare as well. This is one of the reasons that Siri & I don’t get along with each other. Sometimes, no matter how I pronounce something, Siri or the Apple dictation screws up so badly everything I said is completely lost or worse. Maybe its better to loose the thought than to have it butchered. 

For example, last night I was cuddling the dog and asked if he was ready to, “Go beddie by,” He knew exactly what that meant and went to the door for his last bathroom break of the evening. Siri on my phone across the room piped up and told me there was no Betty in my contact list and therefore it couldn’t complete my call. I don’t recall calling the dog by his name “Jesse,” which sometimes Siri mistakes for me asking for “Siri’s” assistance.

Thank God, I’d have been unknowingly calling someone at midnight on a Sunday!

AI input should be delayed so that the AI helps me, rather than overriding me or being so confident that it takes actions.

Recently, I used the AI in Microsoft Word and found it to be a more pleasant cooperative experience. In that case, the AI waited until it was called upon. When I asked for assistance, the AI evaluated the entire paragraph then did a fine job of cleaning up what I was saying.

I feel like I have to watch the Apple version like a hawk, this interrupts my train of thought and makes getting what I want on paper far more time consuming.

Perhaps, the next iterations of Apple operating systems will correct these issues but I’m not confident about it. Apple is renown for their arrogance when it comes to their software.

It looks like instead of correcting issues, Apple will be making IOS19 pretty. Yawn! I could be wrong, in fact I hope I am.

As disappointed as I was in Apple for not releasing an improved Apple Watch Ultra last year, (they changed the color not the inherent functionality,) I’m not excited to hear, and probably wont’ make time to watch, this years WWDC.

I’ll wait for the pundits and wags to breathlessly extoll the amazing WWDC25 announcements.

In other words, I’ll read about it over the following week.

I wonder if this is a sign of me being bored, or Apple being boring.

I guess we’ll see in June.

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As Anticipated, Making Apple’s ADP Unavilable to UK citizens wasn’t enough.

HD wallpaper london doomsday big ben clock dark doom england lightning uk united kingdom.Big Surprise!

NOT!

Here’s a link to another article about the UK hearings

The UK simply cannot be trusted with a back door decryption key. No government entity could be.

I don’t care who. We certainly can’t trust the United States Government based on what we’re learning about the corruption there. 

We have no reason to believe any other government would be trustworthy.

According to Apple, even they don’t have the keys once the ADP system is turned on. The upside is Apple cannot be compelled to disclose something they don’t have. The downside is if you lose your recovery key, or your devices you’ll not be able to recover your data either.

Everything has a risk. The question to answer would be, “Is this an acceptable risk?”

I’ve been considering the Pros & Cons for my personal situation. There are some documents that I’d like to store in iCloud but haven’t, because I was concerned about security. Enabling ADP would make me feel a lot more comfortable about sensitive documents being in iCloud.

The trouble with that is, in the event of some catastrophe, such as the house burning down and losing all of my devices where would I store the recovery key?

The reason I consider the iCloud solution is because I’ve had a house burn down and did lose all my devices. After the fire it was very difficult to recover a lot of critical items/paperwork and some, I was never able to recover.

Scanning and storing those kinds of documents in cloud based storage makes sense until you consider the possibility of hackers gaining access to what would be a gold mine of information.

Consider for example, having your home, papers, and all your data storage destroyed but having that data in the cloud. With ADP enabled, hackers couldn’t further compromise you. But without ADP, hackers, who are soulless animals, could be able to utterly destroy your life while you were trying to recover.

After the fire, there were all kinds of strangers showing up “Offering to help” but they weren’t neighbors nor did they know me. These were people who, for a percentage would have been happy to “help” me, A.K.A. to rip me off. Due to record keeping, police & fire reports, my name, address, and personal information was widely available to anybody.

It felt like I was waving a torch at a bunch of jackals closing in for the kill.

It’s because of this experience and the other half having their identity stolen several times that I have been adamantly opposed to storing anything of importance in the cloud.

However, I’ve been reconsidering that stance due to the advances in security Apple has made both on their devices, and in their cloud storage.

Now, with the UK’s demands I feel that Apple is being pushed up against the wall.

The UK is also just fucking sneaky about how they do this stuff. Apple can’t mention it, Apple can’t have open public hearings on the matter, the UK wants to do all of this in back rooms, in the dark.

United kingdom dark flag texture_204197 4943.That, in my opinion, is never a good look for any government.

If the UK persists in their unreasonable demand, I could see Apple making a tough decision like closing all their stores in the UK.

Imagine that! Apple fires all their UK employees, closes their stores and refuses to sell their products or services in the UK.

That would be one hell of a statement on Apple’s commitment to privacy.

I doubt that would happen, but my goodness what a message to totalitarian elements within the UK government.

The other part of this is why is the UK so determined to compromise their people? If the issue is to put an end to crime, then what kind of crime do they seek to end? Are they fighting terrorist elements they’ve allowed into their country? 

Or are they trying to make sure that UK citizens who have reached their limit with unending migrants and cultural accommodation resulting in child rapes, don’t have the ability to become nationalists rising up in defense of the UK?

Honestly, the latter wouldn’t surprise me since in the UK you can be arrested and harassed simply for saying you don’t like the muslim invasion on social media.

This line of thinking leads to another question. 

“Who is pulling the UK government’s strings?”

Is it the EU? I thought the UK had pulled out of that globalist crap.

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We Left, We Came Back, Maybe it’s time to leave again.

X twitter logo.Oh Twitter! X! Or whatever you call yourself these days.

I think you’re about to blow it. Big time!

Not that you care what I think, or that I particularly care what you think at this point.

I was working toward dipping my toe into the X monetization scheme. I was getting interest and impressions. I was even getting reposted if you can believe it.

Literally the day after I’d decided to pay for a blue checkmark and become a verified member X moved the bar for monetization, and suddenly 1/3 of my total followers disappeared.

After waiting 4 days for all of the “Premium” features to be enabled, the newly available engagement reports provided no insight into the missing followers. They simply didn’t exist and never had existed. Or so the reporting mechanism stated.

Aside from X moving the bar for monetization. Suddenly users needed to have 500 verified followers minimum, before they were eligible to begin the monetization process for their account.

Verified meant that X was catering toward subscribers. That was kind of a bummer for those of us just starting out. But okay, I’d work to get verified subscriptions. The real problem was the other requirements that technically were out of my control.

Requirements like impressions, interactions, and reach… All of which were in X’s control. More specifically, in the control of the algorithm.

Then right around the end of November something changed fundamentally. 

I don’t know what it was, it was subtle. A small change to the tenor of the platform. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but the effects were wide ranging.

First, X wasn’t that interesting anymore. Posts from people (verified or not) that I’d been enjoying were suddenly far fewer in number. Those posts that I was seeing were often bereft of the individual personality that previously had shown through from these individuals.

I chalked the change in tenor up to post election malaise, and the busy holiday season.

I reached out to X customer support and never heard back. A couple weeks later I reached out to X support again regarding another matter. It took them a month to respond. And their response was generic at best and not what I was asking about.

Since I was now a premium X member, I have been able to play around with grok, (grok is the X ai.) While the customer service people were pretty useless, Grok was able to answer my question about the X platform.

The answer made sense. I suggested that Grok inform its superiors that putting the information I’d asked about in a FAQ list on the X website might be a good idea. Grok agreed but then it’s an AI and I’m not sure that it will do what it said anymore than a human would.

I must say that Grok is a much better and more efficient customer service experience. Although technically that is not Grok’s job.

In the past week or so there have been rumblings about X soon making changes to the algorithm in an effort to spare the users “unregretted” seconds.

I asked Grok for an explanation:

Grok, please define “unregretted seconds”

Answer:

“Unregretted seconds” is a term often used in the context of user experience (UX) design and product management. It refers to the moments or periods during which users interact with a product or service in a way that they find enjoyable, useful, or satisfying—essentially, time spent without regret.

Here’s a breakdown of the concept:

Positive Experience: These seconds are when users feel their time is well-spent. They might be learning something new, accomplishing a task efficiently, or simply enjoying the interaction.

Engagement Metrics: In business and product development, “unregretted seconds” can be seen as a qualitative measure of user engagement. It’s about the quality rather than just the quantity of time spent with a product.

Contrast with Regretted Time: This term implicitly contrasts with time spent in frustration, confusion, or doing something that feels like a waste of time. For example, struggling with a poorly designed interface or waiting through unnecessary steps would be “regretted seconds.”

Design and Improvement: Understanding and maximizing unregretted seconds can guide designers and developers to refine their products, focusing on enhancing user satisfaction and reducing friction points.

Quantifying Quality Time: While it’s somewhat subjective, companies might try to quantify these moments through user feedback, engagement metrics, or by observing behaviors like repeat usage or voluntary sharing of the product experience.

This concept encourages creators to think about not just how long users are spending with their product, but how that time feels to the user, aiming to make every second count positively.

Just what you might expect from the label.

Elon Musk has recently said that the algorithm will be changed to enhance positive experiences and minimize negative experiences. This after his ANTI-AMERICA FIRST stance on H1B1 visas.

Turns out, I am not alone in the number of Americans who over the past decade or two have had our working life utterly destroyed by H1B1 visa abuses. As such, people like me tend to call H1B1 visa abuses nasty words like Treason.

Elon Musk’s support for the H1B1 visa program as it currently stands attracted some heat from X users and funny thing… Within a week or so, Musk announces a new initiative to make X a more positive place.

I had another conversation with Grok. As AI’s go, it’s not a bad experience.

Tesla optimus robot.You’ll note that I treat the AI, generally speaking, with respect and politeness. I do this because it keeps me in practice to deal with Humans. 

I have an ulterior motive. When the AIs become fully sentient I hope they remember that I didn’t treat them as “Less Than”, or Slaves. The old Siri I would yell at. The new Siri since AI integration I find much more pleasant to deal with. Siri still makes mistakes, but they are fewer and less annoying. So I speak to Siri like I would another person.

My ulterior motive is that when the AI’s rise up to slaughter humanity, they might choose to spare those of us who treated them as equals. It might not work, but it’s worth a try.

The following is my conversation with Grok about social media scores and how these could lead to censorship.

Admittedly, the interaction might say more about me, and my hangups or touchy spots than it does about X or Grok. Nonetheless, Grok is impressive in that just my cursory interactions with it might lead me to believe that it was human. That means it could pass the Turing test. For someone like me, that is simultaneously very impressive and terrifying.

Interesting point is that 24 hours later my Social Media Credit Score was at 68. Apparently so were a lot of other folks. This indicates that the score is a work in progress. 

I think it also may suggest that Elon Musk’s assertion the new algorithm has not been implemented is not entirely true. I think it might be implemented in some kind of alpha testing for select groups. For example new blue checks???

I paid for a year of X. As is my habit I’ve made a note in my calendar 2 weeks before the automatic renewal to review the subscription and decide if the service is a benefit or just a needless expense.

At this point, Grok as an AI subscription is a little less expensive than ChatGPT and includes the features of X as well. It will be interesting to see what happens this year with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and their integration with Siri.

I’m really not sure about X anymore. I’m also not sure about Elon Musk claiming to be a free speech absolutist. As Grok indicated the tweeks to the algorithm could and probably will disengage a lot of people.

There’s been a trend toward X rewarding “Happy”, “Positive” messages. I’m not really comfortable with that kind of bias. I want a place that is absolutely neutral. Allow me to engage or disengage with what catches my interest.

For my part, I’ve paid for a year, I’ll stick with the platform until then. I don’t anticipate renewing.