Technology

The Culling Continues: Blowing away iCloud Photos

While this is independent of the rather freaky story on MacRumors about corrupted videos and photos from unknown sources appearing on iCloud for Windows, I have still decided to ultimately turn off iCloud Photos. The biggest downside to this is I’ll no longer have photos taken on my iPhone automatically be made available on other devices, which is an admittedly nice feature.

Turning this off also means I’ll no longer have a backup of my photos on Apple’s servers (which may not be a bad thing if the above story hints to the stability and security of their infrastructure), so I’ll need an alternative. Here’s my plan, because I love a good plan and also lists:

  • Store photos in another cloud service. I have OneDrive, and it’s already automatically uploading photos from my phone to its cloud server, so this part is happening now.
  • Store photos in a NAS (local network storage). I’ve had a Synology NAS for awhile and have now set up the Synology Photos app to backup my photos from the phone. I’ll move the photos over in batches (I have…a few) until they are all in place, then will have the app on the phone set to only upload new photos going forward.

Once I have both of the above in place, I’ll delete the photos I have stored in iCloud and then turn off iCloud Photos. This will also make it easier to drop all Apple services save for Apple Music (I’m still paying for 200 GB of iCloud storage), and make it easier to move to a different phone in the future if I decide to do that.

You may be thinking I am souring on Apple–and you would be right! But that is a rant for another day.

Riding the elephant

Yes, I created a Mastodon account.

No, I don’t really use Twitter all that much and may use Mastodon even less, but I like the idea of being on a decentralized social media platform that isn’t about hate and being clever at the expense of others. We’ll see how it goes.

Here I am. Follow me!

@stanjames@mstdn.social

Two simple things I like about Scrivener and Ulysses

When it comes to writing fiction (and specifically fiction), there are two things I like that both Scrivener and Ulysses offer that, perhaps surprisingly, very few other writing apps do. One is nice to have, the other I consider more essential.

  1. A list of scenes that can be re-ordered. Both programs show a list of scenes to the left of the main writing window, acting as containers for scenes/chapters. You can move them around in any order that you want. I rarely move scenes around, but having them visually laid out next to the main editing window helps me get a visual overview of a novel, a case where technology really does offer something you can’t easily replicate going old school with pen and paper (or typewriter).
  2. Indents on paragraphs. This might seem trivial, but hear me out! When I write blog posts like this one, I hit Enter (or Return, for Mac purists) and a new paragraph begins. This can work in fiction, too, though you’ll never see a book printed this way (it would add many more pages and drive up costs on paper books, for one). In paper books and their digital brethren, the first line of each paragraph is indented to distinguish it from the one before. If you use a typical markdown editor, hitting Enter will only start a new line, it won’t add a blank line (WordPress does not use Markdown and is coded to add the blank line automatically). You need to hit Enter twice for that. In fiction, you can have a lot of short paragraphs, such as when there is a back-and-forth dialog between characters. This means you are constantly having to hit Enter twice to properly separate paragraphs and avoid getting what looks like a wall of text. Ulysses cheats by using a modified version of Markdown that allows indents on the first line of a paragraph. Scrivener avoids this entirely by adopting a Word-like WYSIWYG approach.

I could, for example, use Obsidian, a free Markdown editor I am using for notes, to write a novel. There’s even a community plugin called Longform made just for this purpose. But there’s no support for indents, so I’d be doing the double Enter thing, and in my experience it breaks flow just enough to be consistently annoying. Maybe I’ll try again as an experiment on a short story or something, because there are aspects of both Scrivener and Ulysses I don’t like, so finding an alternative to both would be nice.

And for the extra-curious, here are some of the things I don’t like about each:

Scrivener:

  • Does not handle cloud saves well at all
  • Cumbersome, ugly and unconventional interface (yes, even on the Mac)

Ulysses:

  • No Windows version
  • Requires subscription (I think it’s a great example of how a subscription is great for developers while being a poor value for the user)

Again, both of these things may seem relatively small, but together they add a lot to make the experience of writing fiction a better one for me. And I really can’t think of other writing apps that offer both, which is kind of weird!

Scaling new heights of ERR

I was up at 5 a.m. this morning due to gallstones. Not my gallstones, mind you.

Since I was up, I went about my usual morning routine, which includes the daily weigh-in on my trusty Fitbit Aria scale. There were shenanigans.

It began after the weigh-in, when it failed to sync my weight to the Fitbit Google hivemind. Yesterday I installed a new Wi-Fi hub and because the app for setting it up would not allow spaces in the Wi-Fi network name, it changed slightly, thus forcing us to manually reconnect every device on our Wi-Fi network. Hooray.

Remembering this, I figured I’d have to run the setup for the Aria scale to get it connected to the new space-free Wi-Fi network.

  • I put the scale in setup mode
  • I launch the Fitbit app on my phone
  • The Fitbit app says the Aria scale is no longer supported, set it up through a web browser, chump
  • I follow the link provided
  • I go through the process, which requires treating the Aria as a new device
  • I get to the last step, entering the password for our Wi-Fi
  • I watch as it joins the network
  • I watch as it fails with an ERR message. That’s all, just ERR. Like it is clearing its throat.
  • I start the process over from the beginning, as there is no other way to do just the joining part again
  • I get another ERR
  • I try again, more ERR
  • I get angry
  • I become resigned
  • I decide not to spend more of my time chasing an unspecified error on no-longer-supported hardware
  • I record my weight, because it still actually does that part
  • I think about getting a non-Fitbit scale again

UPDATE: I remembered the Aria connects via Wi-Fi via a USB receiver on the Windows PC. Said PC was not connected to the new Wi-Fi network, so maybe that was the issue? I have fixed this and will try getting the scale working again tomorrow. It’ll be fun.

The Great Culling of 2022 Continues

Yesterday I trimmed down a few more subscriptions. Yes, I am the poster boy for subscription fatigue. Beware, SaaS purveyors!

  • After dropping the Todoist sub, I have now also dropped the TickTick sub. I’ll see how the free version goes, but if it proves too limiting, I’m already running Microsoft’s To Do, and it seems to meet my needs, even if it’s “My Day” feature is a bit weird compared to a more conventional “Today” list (mainly, you have to move stuff to My Day, as it always starts blank).
  • Apple emailed me announcing my already expensive Apple One Premier subscription was going from $33.95 a month to $37.95 a month. Since they made $20 billion in PROFIT just last quarter, I opted to slim down to the Apple One Family package for $24.95 per month. I suspect the company will manage to scrape by. And I’ll save $13 by not getting stuff I don’t need, like:
    • Fitness+: I have literally never used this.
    • Apple News+: An ad-riddled hellscape, even as a paid service.
    • 2TB iCloud storage: I’m using 150 GB and only because of my photos. The new plan gives me 200GB. Since I’m now using OneDrive for photos, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Apple has become a fat, greedy company that seems determined to worsen the customer experience in exchange for squeezing as much revenue out of everyone as they can. I don’t think the company is going to fail or anything, but I think the long, gradual decline has begun. Maybe the ghost of Steve Jobs will visit Tim Cook at Christmas and be all, “WTF you doing, Tim?” and then Tim will retire on the few dollars he has put aside. BUT NOT $48 PER YEAR OF MY FEW DOLLARS. TAKE THAT, TIM.

Anyway, the number of subs I have is much slimmer now than at the start of 2022. My email is no longer full of newsletters I no longer read. I feel much less burdened now. And I like it!

Footnotes, get yer footnotes

I use a WordPress plugin called Modern Footnotes1You can check it here: Modern Footnotes plugin to make pop-up balloons for posts. Yes, not actual footnotes, because this isn’t a Grade 8 Social Studies paper2I still have some of the essays I wrote in high school and college. Toward the end I think I was getting bored, because my focus seemed to be more on wordplay and being funny than extensive research and nuanced arguments, but pop-ups that appear when you click on the footnote number, allowing you to keep your place while reading about funny cats3Cats are funny people, my runs4Officially up to 735!, my weight5Treading water at the moment or my latest excuses for not taking part in National Novel Writing Month6Too many to fit into a footnote or pop-up.

Today I spent some time modifying the CSS of the footnotes and almost have them the way I want them. Almost. They’re more round and bigger and a little sexier.

This concludes my programming FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR.

File Explorer tabs in Windows 11: An early review

File Explorer crashed for the first time in a very long time after I installed the update that added tabs to it. The tabs look nice, they function just as you would expect, like in a web browser. The contents of tabs are also often slow to load, like I’m using Safari on an iPhone and every time you look away from the screen, it reloads everything again. And then the crash.

I am left whelmed. Hopefully there’s some indexing or something going on, and a future update fixes the speed, without introducing a parade of other new bugs and glitches. But this is Windows 11, so my hope is…guarded.

Overall, thumbs sideways, for now.

UPDATE, October 22, 2022: I went a second day without any crashes, woo. But I also only had two tabs open, instead of 6-8.

Oh, Apple: Chapter 98

Yesterday, Apple updated its base iPad and iPad Pro models, along with the Apple TV box, via press release and tweet. Speaking of tweets, here’s one showing how you charge the Apple Pencil on the 10th generation iPad (that’s the one they announced yesterday if you aren’t a hopeless tech geek like me):

I had the 10.5″ iPad Pro from 2017 and it used the first generation Pencil–it charged just like in the Old shot above, though I used the female to female lightning adapter to charge it via cable rather than risk it snapping off while plugged into the iPad in what was an ill-considered charging scheme.

Speaking of ill-considered, the new iPad still only supports the first-gen Pencil, but eliminates the lightning port in favour of USB-C, thus creating a situation where there is no way to charge the Pencil (the 2nd gen Pencil charges via induction by magnetically attaching to a side of the iPad).

Apple’s solution is to now include (another) adapter with the first-gen Pencil that allows it to connect to a USB cable, which then plugs into the iPad. This is also how you pair the Pencil. It’s cumbersome and requires two separate items (the adapter, the cable) in exchange for previously needing none.

It’s silly and dumb and Apple is rightly getting roasted for it.

Some are speculating that Apple did this because they finally moved the front-facing camera to landscape mode and couldn’t figure out a way to also includes the magnets in the same space to allow induction charging. That’s possible. Did Apple make the right choice? Will more people use the front-facing camera than a Pencil? I really don’t know. It seems like six of one, a half dozen of the other to me, but I can’t help thinking Apple either should have found a way to make induction charging work, or not move the front-facing camera until they could. This solution is an awkward, muddled compromise.

And it’s an excellent example of the current state of Apple.

Also note: The iPad Pros announced do not get the landscape camera, because they’re just getting a spec bump. Fair enough, you might say, but people are inevitably going to wonder why the low end model now has a superior camera to the high end, and rightly so. Apple wasn’t forced to spec bump and release the updated iPad Pros at the same time–but they chose to.

This is also an excellent example of the current state of Apple.

(I didn’t even mention the absurd $120 increase in price for the base iPad, which Apple acknowledges by keeping the old $329 model in the line-up. We’re at a point now where it makes more sense to buy older Apple stuff than the latest, because the latest is overpriced, even by Apple’s lofty standards.)

Oh, Apple. Why are you always such an easy, juicy target?

The perpetuation of “Google” meaning “search” and tech writers who should know better

Google is a big company–so big they created a new one called Alphabet to stuff Google into. Since starting their search engine in 1997, Google has come to dominate both web searches (92%) and web browsers (65%), with Google search and Google Chrome, respectively. Google is a company built on advertising and harvesting user data. They are big enough now that they are trying and in some cases succeeding in pushing web standards that suit them, forcing others to follow along.

Part of the perpetuation of Google as the dominant player comes from writers using “Google” as a generic verb. You don’t search, you “Google.” This is bad because it entrenches Google needlessly, reinforcing in people’s minds that there is only one way to search on the internet, and that is by going to google.com.

Google’s dominance has led us to a point where it regularly steers search results toward SEO garbage that benefits the company (and those it does business with), but not necessarily the users. They have promised moves to improve searching, even as they work to cripple most ad blockers.

Here’s the thing, though.

Look at this screenshot from an article published today on engadget about finding a good productivity mouse:

I am honestly perplexed why any editorial staff on these sites would allow writers to do this. I wonder if the author of the piece had written “Bing around” (yes, I know, it is funny to say that out loud), would an editor have run a red line through it and suggested something else. What would they have suggested?

This may seem like a nitpick, but it bugs me because:

  • It is sloppy and lazy writing
  • It perpetuates a commercial product (Google search) as the “proper” way to do or use something

In conclusion, use DuckDuckGo. Or even Bing. Or one of the boutique search engines in closed beta that think people will pay for a “good” search experience (it’s possible!). But mostly, stop using “Google” to mean “search.”

Tech lust, September 2022 edition

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 meaning “I will sell vital organs to get this now”, based on recently released tech gizmos:

Apple stuff

It’s fair to say I did not find their September event particularly “far out.”

  • iPhone 14: 2 (I don’t need to spend $1,000 on an incremental upgrade)
  • iPhone 14 Plus: 1 (see above, but bigger)
  • iPhone 14 Pro: 3 (mildly interesting, mainly due to the camera improvements)
  • iPhone 14 Pro Max Super Ultra Deluxe Who Approves These Names Anyway: 2 (put in pocket of shorts, act casual as weight of phone pulls shorts down to knees)
  • Watch Series 8: 5 (I probably need a new watch, but this is just so boring as an upgrade)
  • Watch SE 2: 1 (no better than what I have now, really)
  • Watch Ultra: 3 (some mild intrigue, but $1099 for a watch? lol no)
  • AirPods Pro 2: 3 (I’d probably go for a deal on the original Pros first)

Other:

  • Steam Deck: 2 (I know it would end up sitting in a drawer)
  • Wacom Cintiq Pro 27: 8 (this would be awesome for drawing, but at $3,500 U.S. I would actually need to sell vital organs to get one)
  • Amazon Echo Show 8″ or 10″: 7 (I kind of want one to sit on my desk, but it pretty much defines “inessential”)
  • Garmin Forerunner 255: 9 (I will almost certainly get one of these, due to a combination of frustration with my increasingly flaky Apple Watch, tech lust and a desire to get more/better stats on my running and other activities. Also, being able to use the watch during a run in the rain would be novel).

I feel like I’ve missed some other recent stuff, so I may update this list later. Or not. I can be all unpredictable like that.

Speaking of buggy software: Everything Apple produces

When you speak to old Mac geezers (OMGs), they will often wax poetic about Snow Leopard as being the best version of OS X (and remind you it’s the Roman numeral 10, not the letter X), not because it came with a boatload of new features, but because it didn’t. Apple advertised it as having “0 new features” because it focused on improving existing features and fixing bugs found in Leopard, the previous version of OS X.

Back then (roughly the first decade of the 2000s) Apple released its updates on a “when they are ready” schedule, which meant you could go almost two years between updates. That changed in 2012 when Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) came out a year after Lion. Henceforth, all Mac OS updates would come out on a yearly basis, ready or not.

Ready or not.

iOS updates and the rest of Apple’s lowercase-Uppercase OS releases followed suit, and now yearly releases are the norm.

And they are a bad idea, bad for the industry, bad for users, and Tim Cook should feel bad.

Why? One word: Bugs.

Apple has tacitly admitted it can’t keep up with yearly releases, because it now regularly leaves out major features until “later”. Just this year they delayed iPadOS 16 altogether from September to October just to get things working properly. Yearly releases are not sustainable, they’re dumb, and serve no one when they come with incomplete or missing features and copious glitches. Apple is the 800 pound gorilla in consumer electronics, so if they change course, the industry is likely to follow. And they should!

And the thing is, if Apple switched to updates every two years or “when they’re ready” people would still buy tens of millions of iPhones, plus oodles of iPads, Macs and AirPods, not to mention staying subbed to the cash cows that their services have become. But Apple is not only gigantic, they are incredibly conservative and unlikely to change course unless forced by circumstance or the law (but mostly the law).

Why do I think this? Why am I posting now?

Because watchOS 9 is a bug-riddled mess and since I use my watch for my running workouts, the glitches affect me on a regular, ongoing basis. None of these issues happened before watchOS 9 was released (Apple eventually forces updates, so you can’t even just stay put, eventually you’ll need to upgrade).

Among the bugs I’ve encountered:

  • Stuttery or missing animations (not a big thing, but annoying)
  • Unreliable heart rate monitoring, especially at the start of a run (this is a big thing)
  • Music playback on the watch being permanently muffled when interrupted by a notification. It happened today (again) and even closing the music app did not fix it. I restarted the app and tried three albums before the music finally popped back to regular volume.
  • Pausing music playing from the watch via the AirPods (clicking the touch control on one of the earbuds), then unpausing, and the playback switches to whatever you were previously listening to on the iPhone. It’s like having someone come into your living room, quietly pick up the remote, change the channel from whatever you were watching, then just as quietly leaving the room.

I suppose I should be happy most things are still working. But bleah, the yearly updates are clearly not going to improve, so I really wish Apple and the whole industry would move away from them.

There’s not an app for that: The impending end of SwiftKey on iOS

UPDATE, August 2, 2023: Microsoft changed its mind, and has continued to support SwiftKey with both bug fixes and new features. The reversal happened before the app would have been delisted.

I have had some kind of iOS device going back to the iPhone 4 in 2010. How has it already been 12 years? Time is crazy.

The default keyboard the iPhone uses has never felt right to me, and so early on I looked for alternatives when Apple allowed for third-party keyboards. I found one in SwiftKey, which looked nice, was usually good with autocorrect, rather than aggressively awful (why is it I had not seen the term “auto-corrupt” before today?) and didn’t require you to swap to a different keyboard screen for something as simple as using a question mark.

Microsoft bought SwiftKey in 2016, but this didn’t seem to affect the app itself, so I continued on my merry way with it.

Today Microsoft announced it was ending support for the iOS version of SwiftKey on October 5, 2022, and it would be delisted, meaning it will work on current devices, but when you get your shiny new iPhone 18 Pro Max Ultra, SwiftKey will be nowhere to be found, purged completely from iOS.

Microsoft didn’t say why they are killing off only the iOS version, but it probably has to do with data collection and the limits Apple has in place for third-party keyboards.

I am sad.

For now, I’ll keep using it, as I don’t expect to get a new iPhone or iPad any time soon and the app will work fine in the meantime. After that, if I do get a new Apple iSomething, I’ll have to consider other options:

  • Default keyboard. It’s better now, but it still has a weird floaty feel I don’t like, and the keys seem a bit too small, even for my tiny, doll-like hands.
  • Gboard. Decent, but I’m trying to get away from Google, not run into its data-harvesting arms.
  • Grammarly. I guess they make a keyboard? Does it prompt you to get the Grammarly app if you make too many typos?
  • Others? Microsoft also owns Nuance, which itself owned Swype, so…who knows?

Meh. Meh, I say! This also reminds me that the utterly addictive iOS game Dungeon Raid got abandoned years ago. I played the heck out of that thing, then it stopped getting updated and is now gone forever (it was a paid app, not “freemium”). Given how much I played, I probably shouldn’t lament its disappearance.