Tag: Modern Problems

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Maybe I dodged a bullet with the new iPhone

I haven’t been able to order a new iPhone.

It’s a simple thing, I want a completely unlocked phone right from the start. I don’t want to have to monkey around with unlocking a phone from a carrier or any of the other bullshit contractual obligations that are included in the fine print of a purchase.

T-Mobile, you really need to train your reps in Costco better… Based on my interaction with a blue hair guy? girl? Amorphous fat ass? I’m seriously reconsidering our working relationship.

No, your representative wasn’t rude or whatever. He/she/it/they/them, was simply not listening. I’ve been noticing that more and more with your representatives across the board, since T-Mobile and Sprint merged.

It’s always questionable which corporate culture will survive when two companies merge. This is especially true if one corporation is diseased and shitty as Sprint was, and the other corporation is relatively healthy. 

I think from here on out, I’ll be betting on the shitty corporation infecting the healthy corporation and taking all the services to the lowest, laziest, common denominator. 

The only benefit I received at the T-Mobile Kiosk was that I got to see the new iPhone in person. It’s nice.

I wasn’t going to go through the machinations necessary to order one on the T-Mobile account, then trade in my current phone, then pay off the T-Mobile Payment plan purchase early, then go to T-Mobile to unlock the phone. That’s just a load of annoyance that I don’t want to deal with.

I was tempted…

I’m glad I waited. There have been some interesting articles about the new iPhone Pros getting nice and toasty while in use. 107°F by one article’s account. There have been reports of the phones being blemished or outright damaged right out of the box. 

How disappointing would that be? Your brand new hotness, right out of the box, with a nasty gouge in it as you peel the protective plastic off.

I’ve also seen at least one photo of an iPhone Pro Max that looked like not only did the back glass of the phone shatter easily but the new titanium frame looked like it had cracked too.

Titanium is strong, light and useful for a lot of things, but I seem to recall that it’s kind of crystalline when you see the raw metal. I also seem to recall that if you don’t make it just right, it’s prone to cracking. I’m wondering if that’s not part of what we’re seeing in some of the reports about the phones glass, (front or back) shattering.

In the announcement event, there was some mention of alloying the titanium frame with aluminum structural components within the phone, presumably as a heat sink. Titanium can be alloyed with a number of other metals, but again, that has to be done carefully. 

I wonder if this is another situation where China’s sloppy quality control has created a disaster. Or maybe manufacturing at the scale Apple is attempting is just not yet reliable. Maybe it’s a little from column A, and a little from column B.

Perhaps, I’ll just wait until the iPhone 16 and hope they make it in a color I like.

There’s also been some chatter about Apple’s replacement for leather. Folks are finding that a week or so of use presents them with staining indicative of fabrics, instead of the durability of leather. I’m thinking that my future phone cases will either be silicone from Apple, or I’ll be buying leather from another vendor. Most likely silicone…

Before you get your panties in a twist over my consideration of leather, let me present the following use cases.

I’m using a Franklin leather binder that I’ve had since 2008. It’s in very good shape and I have no intention of replacing it anytime in the near future. I have two TUMI leather briefcases. The smaller one is the one I use most often. That case is 4 -5 years old, the larger one is 15 years old. TUMI will repair a briefcase at a reasonable cost and send it back to you.

So if you talk about sustainability. How is using leather unsustainable? Sure, if you replace leather items every year, then that’s a problem. But if you buy leather, take care of it, and don’t find a need to buy the item over and over I’d bet the sustainability equation tips in favor of leather.

How much energy does it take to make these new fiber cases? How often will consumers replace them and why? Are these new fiber products biodegradable, and how long does that take? 

Honestly, if Apple would stop changing the phone shapes every year so that last years case doesn’t fit this years phone, perhaps sustainability would go up and pollution would go down in amounts equal to their switch from using leather goods.

I haven’t purchased one of Apple’s leather cases since the iPhone 5. I found that their leather case wasn’t grippy enough and I dropped the phone twice, then went third party silicone with nice grippy knurls on either side. No more dropping my phone.

Since I replace my phone every 3-4 years, after the iPhone 5 debacle it’s never seemed reasonable to invest in leather unless, like the MagSafe wallet, it could be used on other iPhones.

Sustainability and being climate responsible isn’t just about companies. It’s also about asking questions of yourself. 

Questions such as:

Do I need a new phone?
Do I need a new leather jacket, phone case, or brief case? The leather jacket bit is funny, because with vintage all the rage people buy “Vintage” looking stuff but don’t have the patience to make it “vintage” by wearing it year after year.
I guess the question really boils down to “Do I Need xyz” or “Do I Want xyz”.

It’s okay to want, but feeling like you need to buy the newest, latest, flashiest every year might be part of the problem.

I’d like a new iPhone because there has been enough change that a new phone is a pretty substantial upgrade to what I have. But… do I need it this year? Not really. My old phone works just fine, (the battery is showing signs of its age,) but I can go another year and avoid what may be an Apple screw up in the iPhone 15 Pro.

Maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll keep reading the articles to see what’s happening.

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Ah Ha! I knew it…

Warning: Geeky Stuff ahead.

Yesterday, I updated to the latest operating system offering from Apple.

IMG 2867

There haven’t been a lot of issues yet.

But there has been one, and this issue is across iPad, iPhone, and the Mac OS. 

Some websites will completely fail to display user credentials stored in Apple’s Password Management System.

After you get over the initial panic that the IOS or OS upgrade has wiped the thousand or so passwords and IDs that you’ve become so dependent on…

Your head will clear and then you’ll go look at passwords. As your heart rate slows, you’ll notice a curious thing. Some websites still work. But other websites act brain dead. Instead of Safari offering to fill in your password and id from Apple’s password management system you’re presented with nothing.

Even typing the first few characters of the user ID will not give you the familiar prompt for face, touch, or master password verification.

Locating the entry containing the user ID and Password and telling your device to open the website, from the password entry itself will open the site BUT WILL NOT autofill the user ID and Password, so you’re on a site, but you’re not logged in.

It’s in Safari, and it’s not technically a bug.

Safari’s security protocols have been updated which is good. But if you log  into web sites that are not using HTTPS with the new versions of Safari, it will look like the upgrade has flushed the login credentials.

The issue is HTTPS versus HTTP. Since the entirety of the internet is supposed to be using HTTPS (For your comfort, safety, and protection,) Apple apparently decided that it’s unsafe to allow the password management system to serve up a user ID and Password to a lowly HTTP site.

On the one hand I can see it. On the other hand there are corporations where their internal HTML pages may require a user ID and Password, BUT where they are not using HTTPS inside the corporate defense ring. This may or may not be good security, but that’s not the issue. The issue is the confusion caused by the way Apple has implemented this change.

Since there’s absolutely NOTHING, no message, no reaction, no indication, no clue, whatsoever about what is going on, it could leave customers badmouthing Apple, and the new OS. 

Not because what’s been done is wrong, but because it’s inconvenient! Apple already has trouble in corporate environments due to IT departments inherent Pro Windows bias. They needn’t add any fuel to that fire.

I haven’t found the setting to turn this feature off yet. Instead, I just enabled HTTPS on my site. If I find more sites that give me issues, I’ll go digging around to see if there is a setting.

I’d been holding off because I DONT WANT TO PAY FOR THE SECURITY CREDENTIAL!

Oh yeah, it costs… which leads me to begin contemplation about continuing to maintain my own hosting site. Or should I park the unused domains and transfer the live domains to another hosting service.

Truthfully, I’m becoming less and less pleased with my current hosting provider. I’ll take a look at the contract and decide if I want to continue doing business with them.

They’re pretty inexpensive if you select longer contract terms, but their quality of service is becoming questionable. Talking to them and solving problems is getting to be just like every other business. You end up talking to someone outside the country who doesn’t really understand what your issue or question is.

For the moment this HTTP/HTTPS issue is solved. I’m sure there will be other interesting issues popping up soon enough.

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I broke a rule today.

It is one of my internal rules.

I updated the OS of my Mac on the first day of the new OS being available.  I haven’t done something like this for years… There’s always something that screws up!

But while I’m sure I’ll be annoyed in the coming weeks, I thought, “Why Not? I’m bored and If I do it now, then I don’t have to worry about it later, especially if there’s something that demands me & my computer being up to date.”

Something insane like a job… for example. At this point if I were to get a job I’d probably have a heart attack and keel over from the shock.

Thus far the OS seems to be smooth and working as expected. I’m using my big monitor right now. I gotta admit, much as I like having the small light laptop, I really do like using the big monitor, especially with the color depth this thing is capable of.

This monitor could also be used as a gaming monitor, it’s a bit small but serviceable. So the monitor goes in the box of Tech that moves with me into whatever temporary housing situation I find myself in, moving forward. That’s actually funny this is a 27” and I can remember when that was a big monitor. 

I’ve seen some computer/gaming monitors 36” and above. I’d have to have a large desk to have something that big in proportion. I guess you could hang it on the wall of your cubicle or cubby.

The last place I worked at, they gave us dual 15” monitors which was really more annoying than helpful given the amount of data and application windows we were supposed to be juggling. The Windows desktops were under powered, in terms of CPU, memory, and hard drive space, to be pushing that amount of data but as is typical of Corporate America, if the computer crashed, it was the employees fault. 

I’ll take my 27” here at home with a computer that could drive two 30” 4K monitors (I think) and not worry about crashing. Come to think of it, I don’t think this computer has crashed on me since I got it. Either I’ve lost my touch, or this machine has more than enough horsepower to do whatever I ask. 

Let’s just hope it doesn’t become sentient! That could be a real problem…

I’ll continue playing with this new OS. There are some new features, but none I’m likely to be using immediately.  But I’ll poke around to see what the new stuff is all about.

BTW this qualifies as interesting and entertaining for me.

I hope your day is as amusing.

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Isn’t that interesting ?

As I’ve mentioned over the past 6 months or so, SPAM in my email had become a major problem. 

Spam email

At one point I was getting over 100 SPAM emails per hour. That was at the height of the SPAM blast and it was very annoying.

I’d given up. No filtering that I could apply stopped the onslaught. It had gotten to the point that I didn’t even open email because my email account had been reduced to complete uselessness. 

I’d got to bed with zero SPAM email in my junkman folder and by morning there’d be 1000 and more coming in. 

I finally started just emptying the junk folders blindly. I wouldn’t even look, I’d highlight everything and hit delete.

Now, over the last few days, the SPAM email count has dropped off precipitously. I have no idea why. As I said I’d given up trying to set up filters because nothing I could do would stop more than a handful of the ever changing addresses. 

I still believe that I should be able to select specific countries to literally lock out. Pretty much every country has a specific set of IP addresses. Why shouldn’t I be able to say, “I don’t want ANY email or communications from country X, Y, or Z?” If I don’t know anyone there, am I going to be interested in email from strangers? Probably not!

The thing that annoyed more about all of this is the cost in battery, CPU time, and my time to deal with bullshit emails saying I’d won this or that, or I was eligible for a legal settlement or asking if I’d like to see some whore’s pussy or prolapsed anus.

Every one of these emails imposed a penalty on my computer, phone, and iPad performance and battery life. Not to mention sucking up cellular data if I happened to be carrying my phone outside my WiFi range. I think I should be compensated for those costs.

I’m not holding my breath, mind you, but this stuff has a real cost and consequence associated with it. Which is one reason that I think all SPAMMERS when caught should be castrated with a dull spoon.

Now suddenly, this major annoyance has pretty much dried to a trickle. In fact it’s back to the level of SPAM that I was getting before the FTC blasted my email address to fucking PayPal who then sold my information to SPAMMERS. All for a lousy $10 settlement against LifeLock.

I think the FTC and PayPal should cough up $10,000 for the inconvenience they caused me.  Again, I’m not holding my breath.

It is nonetheless interesting that as quickly as this began, it’s over. I ask the question(s) Why? & How?

Did someone just realize that their servers were wide open and insecure? Or do the SPAM lists get old enough that they’re retired?

I know it sounds like I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m curious. Did the Russians or Ukrainians blow up a server farm???

Has China given up trying to extort me over my porn habits? They can threaten me all they want, If you get pictures of my naked ass, and like ‘em please send $2.00. Thank you!

Oh God!!!

Maybe the folks trying to extort me have decided I’m too old and not hot enough.  That would totally suck!

I’m not sure how I’d feel discovering that I was too old and gross for SPAMMERs or Hackers to try to extort money from me by threatening to post captures of me jerkin it in front of my web cam…🤣

In any case, I’m glad to not be buried in SPAM anymore. I just hope this lasts.

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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!