Month: November 2022

Post-Thanksgiving notes

It hasn’t been a great Thanksgiving weekend, but of course I know things are better for me than they are for… most people, I guess. I’m getting over a cold, which is pretty normal for me at this time of year, so that limits what I can do a bit.

I had a quiet Thanksgiving at home. I didn’t really do anything special. There was plenty of football on TV, including the Giants vs. Dallas game, so I spent most of my time watching football.

I took Black Friday off from work. I did a bunch of random stuff, including updating my MacBook to Ventura. That was pretty simple and painless. I haven’t had any problems with Ventura at all. I started reading The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross. It’s been quite a while since i read a Laundry Files novel.  I read the previous one in 2017. I’m enjoying this one so far. I watched My Father’s Dragon on Netflix, and finished watching Rings of Power on Amazon. The only big Black Friday purchase I made was Cartoon Saloon’s Irish Folklore Trilogy on Blu-ray.

Yesterday, I did all my usual Saturday chores, then spent the afternoon watching TV, first Enola Holmes 2 on Netflix, then DuckTales season 3 on Disney+. They started in with the Christmas music on Main St. yesterday too. That started around noon and ran until around 7 PM, I think. The main reason I was watching so much TV was because I needed to drown out the music. It seems to be louder this year than it has been in previous years. And it’s definitely setting me on edge, as it usually does. I’m really not capable of listening to Christmas music anymore without getting twitchy.

For today, I spent some time this morning just reading quietly. Now that it’s past noon, and the music has started up again, I guess I’ll spend the rest of the day watching football and/or DuckTales to drown it out.

Then back to work tomorrow. It occurs to me that, since I’m still working from home three days a week, I’ll have to put up with Christmas music on weekdays too now. I guess I did that last year, and lived through it, so I can do it again this year. (That’s assuming they’re playing the Christmas music on both weekdays and weekends. I’ll find out if that’s true tomorrow.)

Overall, I feel like it’s going to be a tricky holiday season for me. I need to make sure I have some reasonable and healthy coping mechanisms in place. (Football and cartoons count as “healthy coping mechanisms,” right? How about brownies?)

Shuffling iPads

It’s Thanksgiving here in the USA, and I have nothing to do, so I’m going to spend some time this morning writing a rambling blog post about iPads.

I have a company-owned iPad, that I got back in 2016. It was originally supposed to be for testing a project that we thought would be accessed on iPads. That project kinda fizzled out. Or at least the iPad idea did. I think they decided to just use Surface laptops for it. Either way, I kept the iPad.

I’ve used it for different stuff over the years. At this point, I’m using it as a quick way to access company email and MS Teams at home, when my laptop is turned off. Teams has kinda turned into a work phone replacement for us now too. Nobody ever uses our internal phone system anymore, since we’re all on hybrid schedules. Everyone just uses Teams audio to call. So it’s convenient for that.

Of course, it’s not really necessary; I can always access email and Teams on my laptop. But I can’t leave my laptop on and connected to VPN 24/7, and it takes so long to boot it up and go through all the connection stuff that I would never check my email or Teams in my off-hours if I had to do it that way. So the iPad is kinda necessary, if I want to be accessible outside my normal work schedule. And it’s really useful for picking up a Teams call even during work hours.

But it’s from 2016, and is too old to be upgraded to iPadOS 16. And that should be fine, since iPadOS 15 is fine, and Apple is still releasing security updates for it. But my company uses Microsoft Intune to manage mobile devices, and I started getting emails recently telling me that I had to update it to 16.1.1. Initially, it looked like they had backed off on that and would support 15.7.1. But then I started getting the email notices from Intune again, and support confirmed that they would only allow iPadOS 16. (As a side note, I suspect that they could probably support both, but just don’t want to…)

So my initial plan here was just to trade in the old iPad for a new company-owned one. My boss approved that, but the mobile support guy told me that the company does not issue iPads, only iPhones. I could have gone down a rabbit hole here, arguing my case, or trying to find a way to get one through our internal Apple sales team. (We resell a lot of Apple devices, so I could have probably wrangled a slightly damaged customer return or something like that.) But I decided that would be an uphill battle, and it would just be easier to buy one myself.

My initial plan was to buy myself a new iPad for personal use, then repurpose my current personal iPad as a work iPad. That seemed like a good idea, but, looking at new iPads, I saw that I’d have to spend around $600 on an iPad that was equivalent or better than the one I have now, and I didn’t really want to do that. I eventually settled on buying a “scratch and dent” 2019 iPad from Woot for $200.

So now I have a 2019 7th gen iPad for work, and a 2019 iPad Air for personal use. Hopefully, both of them will keep working for awhile.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time setting up the new work iPad yesterday. The “easy” setup method, where you put the old iPad next to the new iPad, and the setup process tries to copy stuff over via Bluetooth (or whatever) got stuck. I gave it a few hours, and it didn’t time out or give me any errors, but it clearly wasn’t working. I eventually gave up and set it up as a new iPad, and then updated it to iPadOS 16.

I then had to go through the bureaucracy necessary to get it enrolled in Intune. That wasn’t too bad, though I did have to open a support ticket, since it didn’t work the first time I tried. And they haven’t removed the old iPad from Intune, so I’m still getting stern warning emails about updating it to iPadOS 16.

I’m wondering what I should do with the old iPad now, since they told me that they don’t want it back. It’s still in perfect working order, except for not being upgradeable to iPadOS 16. I guess I should just hand it in to Apple for recycling, but maybe I can find someone who wants a free iPad.

Messing with this stuff has also got me thinking again about the semi-permeable membrane between personal stuff and work stuff. It’s funny how that distinction has gotten blurred over the years, with BYOD programs and WFH, but how it’s now getting more distinct, with all the security measures we’ve been putting in place lately. Intune enforces a bunch of requirements now, such that I would never want to enroll my personal-use iPad or iPhone in the company MDM program. I use a separate iCloud account for the company iPad, and I’m really leery about doing anything with a personal account on a company device or vice versa nowadays.

So I guess I’ve succeeded in writing a long and rambling blog post on iPads, and can now get up and go out for a walk. It was a little below freezing when I started writing this, and is now a little above freezing, so I guess it’s warm enough for a walk now.

social media, and comics, and RSS

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about social media and related stuff.

First, I got off the waiting list for Post not long after I wrote yesterday’s blog entry. So I now have an account there. So far, it’s mostly dog and cat photos, and “hello world” posts. So I guess I’ll just keep an eye on that and see if it develops into something interesting or not.

I also signed up for an account on Hive today, after reading an article about how a bunch of comic book creators are moving to Hive. But their email verification system was down today, so I couldn’t complete the account registration. Maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I decided to finally pay $5 to update to the latest version of Reeder for iOS, then also talked myself into paying $10 for Reeder for macOS. And I went through my RSS subscriptions in The Old Reader and organized things a bit and added some more subscriptions. So maybe I can convince myself to spend more time in RSS vs. Facebook and Twitter.

Also meanwhile, GoComics might be back up! It’s not coming up for me right now, but apparently it was for some people, earlier today. So maybe I’ll be able to read Garfield tomorrow morning. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Oh, and one more thing: the unread count on my “read/review” folder in my email is now at an even 6000. So, really, I’m not going to run out of stuff to read on the internet any time soon.

Social media alternatives

I’m still using Twitter, despite all of the Elon Musk nonsense. I access it only via Twitterrific, which makes it much nicer than via the official app or website. (No ads, and a simple reverse-chronological feed.) Still, I’m looking around at alternatives, both in terms of social media platforms, and in terms of “things to do on the internet” in general.

I signed up for an account on CounterSocial, but I don’t see much of a point to that. And I got myself on the waiting list for Post, which sounds interesting, but I can’t do anything there until I get to the top of the waiting list, I guess. I’ve looked at Mastodon,  but I haven’t set up an account there, partially because I’m not sure which server I should use. So I haven’t really hit on anything that “replaces” Twitter.

Meanwhile, I re-subscribed to GoComics recently, and I’ve been reading my daily comic strip email every morning in place of my early-morning Twitter browsing, and that’s been good… until this weekend, when GoComics seems to have gotten hacked or something. There’s not much info out there on the outage, so I have no clue how long it’s going to last or if I should be worrying about my credit card number.

ComicsKingdom is the other big comic strip site. I don’t subscribe to that one, but I’ve been thinking about it. They had a minor outage today, but apparently just a blip. It’s back up again.

So, moving on from comics, I’ve also tried to get back into reading stuff via RSS feeds. I still have an account at The Old Reader, and follow a bunch of news sources and blogs via that account. I use Reeder on iOS/iPadOS to browse the account, and I just use The Old Reader web interface on my Mac and PC. I keep thinking I should switch from The Old Reader to something fancier like Feedly or NewsBlur, but I never get too far with that.

I’ve also been trying to catch up a bit on my backlog of email newsletters. I’m currently on April 2021, so about a year and a half behind. I have them all in a “read/review” folder. Sometimes, I sort it “newest first” and look at some of the new stuff, but usually I sort it “oldest first” and just read through the old ones and discard them as I go. I feel like I should just delete a bunch of the old ones all at once, and maybe “fast forward” a year or so. I’ve thought about doing that a few times, but I can never talk myself into doing it.

So I guess I have plenty of stuff to use to distract myself, outside of Twitter. It’s always fun to spend a little time evaluating sites, sources, and tools, and tweaking things a bit.