Technology

Apple Music: Let me rearrange your music in arbitrary ways for you

When I went jogging today, I opted to listen to the 1991 R.E.M. album Out of Time. I have this album on CD and had ripped it many years ago for my music-listening pleasure.

Apple Music doesn’t care about that on an iPhone, because it installs its own version of the album. Fine, same music, what’s the difference?

Except today when I go to play the album I see this:

Curious! There are two versions listed, mine and a 2016 remaster.

I check mine:

The first track, “Radio Song” is strangely absent. I check the other version of the album (reader, I knew what I was going to see):

Oh, there’s “Radio Song”, all by itself in its own album. Why did this happen? I don’t know. I know it’s happened before and I’ve seen others report similar issues. The thing to note here is that you have no ultimate control over what happens in Apple Music–Apple does, along with the record labels. This wasn’t a licensing issue where the album got pulled, though–and even if it was, I actually own the album outright, anyway.

Instead, Apple Music apparently got “confused” and took a perfectly working album and split the songs between two different versions. How do you then reconcile this?

The fix was to delete both albums, then add the 2016 remaster to my library. The version on my PC is unaffected and works the same way it has for the past million years. Well, at least the past 20.

I ended up listening to Green1I have downloads over cellular disabled (1988), which Apple Music has so far chosen not to mangle. I should probably go check now, though.

The Fediverse in one post

The only social media I use regularly these days is Mastodon, which is part of the Fediverse, a loose collection of sites and services that are federated (connected) but are still independent of each other. Its central feature is probably that it is not centralized. There’s no single server, no giant tech company controlling it and there are no algorithms.

It tends to attract somewhat nerdy people because no one shows up to “go viral” or be showered in likes. And among those nerdy folks are inevitably the “Well, actually…” people who have a need to argue about everything and drive people away. The “I hate to be that guy” guys who delight in being That Guy.

Someone on Mastodon today outlined, in convenient list form, all the wrong ways to interact with others there. It’s a very good bad list.

Remember, you’re on the Fediverse, so your job is to

– Make people feel bad for using other social media
– Guilt-trip anyone who uses AI in any way
– Attack people who don’t include alt text
– Argue with anyone in tech because they must be tech bros
– Oppose anyone with entrepreneurial or for-profit interests
– Shame those who use GitHub or any corporate-owned or American product
– Nitpick even the good things just because you can
– Be morally superior and overly aggressive about supposed data privacy issues in tools that handle public posts

Alright, sarcasm over. Seriously, stop it.— Roni Rolle Laukkarinen (@rolle@mementomori.social)

The phone quest begins again after five years

Free smartphone clipart!

The last smartphone I got was five years ago, in January 2021. I picked up a base iPhone 12 with 128 GB of storage, which was double the default at the time.

The phone has mostly done what I need a phone to do, and my phone use has narrowed down to just a few tasks since I got it. I am old school, so some things people do on their phones I still prefer to do on my PC, with its nice big monitor and full-size, clicky keyboard. Also, no one will ever convince me that typing on a smartphone is fun, or that editing text on the same is anything but a special kind of techno-hell.

But the reason I am writing this now is that while I’m content to use a five-year-old smartphone, my iPhone 12 is getting more, let’s call it eccentric. Most notably, it no longer accepts phone calls, which is an important part of being a phone. Instead, it shunts every call immediately to voicemail. In a way, it’s nice, but it’s gotten increasingly troublesome. I don’t know if switching to a new phone will fix this, but I’d still rather try a new phone than wipe my current phone, set everything up again, find out it fixed nothing and now be stuck with iOS 26 and “liquid glass.” So a new phone it is.

It’s not only my phone use that has changed since 2021, the major tech companies have pretty much given up on the idea of being good or decent and now they just compete on being various levels of awful. This puts me in a quandary, because if I want to jump from the iPhone because Apple is no good, switching to Google-controlled Android is not really better. It’s like someone offering you a dirt pie or mud pie for dinner.

I could get an Android phone and run a third-party OS like Graphene, but my desire to experiment has limits and I have a suspicion that fiddling around getting a phone to do the few tasks I want it to is not an area where I’m interested in exploring those limits.

But I’ve surprised myself before with how far down rabbit holes I’ve been willing to go. I mean, I never tried Linux before and I came close to making my new PC Linux-only. I might still!

Another aspect is I no longer have a desire or requirements for a flagship phone. I just don’t need the latest, best thing out there, so I’m willing to consider mid-tier phones from brands like Motorola. This is as close to exciting as getting a new phone will be for me.

I will provide further updates once I start perusing various models and brands.

When you earn something you don’t want

I am tickled that Microsoft, one of the leading proponents of this mad push to shove AI (or “AI”) into everything, is now being referred to as Microslop. Normally, I think these names are a bit childish (Micro$oft, anyone?) but this one works for me. It even has a “nice” logo:

I bide my time waiting for the AI bubble to burst, deflate, implode, explode or whatever it is that will cause it to finally come to an end.

I am blue

Or at least the website is, now. I’ve changed up the colour scheme again, going with an icy blue theme to reflect our wintry cold. Mostly, I just wanted a change.

For future reference, it looks like this:

Also, if John Gruber was dead, he’d be spinning in his grave because the header font is Aptos. Yes, Aptos! (I was lazy and just grabbed a font that was handy. I may change it later.)

The next experiment in design might be to go with some kind of dark mode style. I wish WordPress had a built-in way to switch between light and dark themes (you have to use a plugin). It seems like an obvious thing to add, vs. whatever AI nonsense they’re planning to shove in.

Linux Mint is working on my new system, woo

Here’s what I did:

  • Wiped my USB stick
  • Re-installed Ventoy on it
  • Added an ISO for Linux mint 22.2 (along with a few others)
  • Booted from the USB stick
  • Ran the Mint installer
  • Unmounted the drives when prompted
  • Chose the “Something else” option and confirmed by running Disks that it had correctly chosen to use the 2 TB external Samsung SSD.
  • Installed and done!

It seems to be running fairly decently. I’ll tweak a bunch of stuff (I need to disable Secure Boot to get it to recognize refresh rates higher than 120 Hz, for starters) and see how it goes. Before installing Mint, I also had a look at Kubuntu for the first time and I liked what I saw, but I’ll stick to Mint for now and do more distro-hopping somewhere down the line.

(Also, this was posted from Linux Mint.)

The curious case of the Linux Mint non-installation

On my new PC (I’ll have another post soon on what I’ve installed and choices I’ve made/avoided this time around), I have the following drives:

  • A 2 TB Samsung SSD (main drive)
  • A 1 TB WD drive (secondary)
  • A 2 TB Samsung external SSD (no specific purpose yet)
  • An 8 TB HDD (backup/camera photos)
  • A 4 TB NAS (backup, various files I want accessible from multiple devices)

I have Windows 11 Pro set up on the main drive and have been planning on setting up another dual boot system, using Linux Mint again, as I did on my older PC. Somewhat randomly, I chose to use the external SSD for Mint.

I booted from a live Mint USB stick and went through the installation. I let it choose to automatically configure the dual boot after verifying that it would install Mint to the external SSD.

Or so I thought.

The install took a very long time. I was patient, I let it do its thing. At the end, it prompted me to remove the install media (USB stick) and hit ENTER to restart. I did, expecting to see the GRUB menu where I would have 10 seconds (by default) to choose Mint, Windows or enter the BIOS.

Instead, I very briefly saw mention of hitting F2 to get into the BIOS, then it loaded into Windows. A survey of all drives showed none had Linux Mint on them. The USB stick, however, is asking to be formatted in Windows, which leads me to believe that Mint installed on the USB stick.

This would seem like a very silly thing to do, but it would explain the very long install time. Why would it install to the USB stick? I do not know.

What I am contemplating doing, though, is taking the 1 TB SATA SSD in my old PC–which has Mint installed–and putting it in the new one, then running Boot Repair to get the GRUB menu working properly. Maybe.

After several false starts (I haven’t documented earlier attempts), it almost feels like the new PC is trying to reject Linux–or at least Mint. Maybe I can try another distro again.

I will ponder.

At long last, my website is recognized

Along with approximately 1 million other small websites! Here’s the link to the giant mosaic of thumbnails you can pan around and zoom in on:

One million (small web) screenshots

I found this link in one of Andreas’ weekly link dumps here.

That’s me in the middle. That’s me in the…uh…spotlight?

It captured the site on August 25, 2025, when I posted about having 30 apps on my iPhone that needed updating and how I refused to update them.

That number is now 38.