Category: Apple

A Busy Day

As previously mentioned, I got my COVID booster shot today. I also picked up my new iPhone 14 from CVS, though I had to make a separate trip for that, since it hadn’t arrived yet when I went for the booster. I guess the phone had gone back to the depot on Friday, then sat there all weekend, then got put on a truck this morning for delivery to CVS. Sigh. Well, I’ve got it now, so all is well.

This booster is my fifth shot, overall. The last shot was in April. I’m hoping I don’t get any side-effects from this one, since I’ve got a pretty busy week at work, and I don’t want to have to take a sick day. (But I will if I need to.)

The iPhone setup was relatively easy. I think the only major thing I still need to do is the MS Authenticator setup, which I’ve previously complained about. I’ll try to do that in the office tomorrow, where I’ll have access to my work desktop PC and my office phone, just in case any of my accounts still have the office phone number as a backup. I’m anticipating that’ll take about an hour.

Meanwhile, I had also ordered a new router this weekend, and that showed up today. I ordered this one, from Amazon. It was $80. I didn’t do a ton of research, bit it seems to be a successor to one that had been recommended by Wirecutter. I also found a good CNET review of it. I don’t have much to say about it yet, since it’s still in the box, and will likely remain there until this weekend.

I bought my current router in 2017, so it was time for a new one. The old one still works, but it doesn’t support some of the more modern features and standards. Honestly, I haven’t kept up with all that stuff, so I couldn’t even tell you which ones are which, at this point, but I know I was time for a new router. So I’ll try to get that set up over the weekend, probably, and I’ll have more to say about it then.

On another subject, there are a lot of changes going on at my job right now, and it looks like one of them may snowball into a pretty big change for me. (Or not. Hard to tell.) Either way, I think I need to learn a lot more about Dynamics 365 and Power Platform and stuff like that. I’ve made some efforts at learning that stuff in the past, but I never wind up actually working on anything real with it, so the knowledge doesn’t stick. And of course everything changes, so the stuff I picked up two or three years ago is different now anyway.

A lot of the changes we made in April are getting, well, changed. I wouldn’t say “rolled back,” but I am back under the boss I had before the big changes in April. But she’s under a different boss. And we seem to be backing off on our enthusiasm for scrum a bit. And, as mentioned above, I guess I’m going to need to learn more about the Dynamics 365 side of things. Which is good, I guess, but right now, my head is spinning.

COVID boosters, iPhones, and NYCC

After dithering back and forth on whether or not I should get another COVID booster shot, I decided today that I should. I read this article in the NY Times this morning, and I guess that’s what convinced me. That, plus reading the replies to this tweet from Tom Tomorrow, where he asked about people’s recent experiences with COVID. Yikes, yeah, I don’t want that. I made an appointment for Monday, at the CVS in Bridgewater.

Meanwhile, my iPhone should have shown up today. The UPS guy came and went and just left a sticky note. I’m pretty sure he didn’t ring the doorbell, though my doorbell is a little iffy so maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. The sticky note says that I can pick it up at… the CVS in Bridgewater! So maybe I can pick up the iPhone and get my booster shot at the same time!

Honestly, if the iPhone is available there tomorrow, I’ll make a special trip and go get it. But I know it might not be available until “next business day,” so that would be Monday.

Monday is about two and a half weeks before NYCC, so that should be a reasonable amount of time for the shot to take effect. So if I decide to go to NYCC, I will at least be as vaxxed as possible.

waiting on my iPhone 14

I went ahead and ordered an iPhone 14 last week. It should be here on Friday. I ordered the 128 GB “PRODUCT(RED)” version. My iPhone XR is also the PRODUCT(RED) version, so I guess I’m a PRODUCT(RED) guy now. I like the shade of red used on the iPhone XR. I saw a photo comparison of the XR and 14 red though, and I’m not sure how i’ll like the 14 red. I guess I’ll find out on Friday. It’s hard to tell from a photo.

I also bought the PRODUCT(RED) silicone case for the phone from Apple. I’ve never bought an Apple case before, since they’re so expensive, and it doesn’t seem like they can really be that much better than the generic cases you can get from Amazon or wherever. But, after spending way too much time looking at cases for a day or two after ordering the phone, I just gave up and decided that the Apple case was the safest bet. Of course, then I had to decide between the clear case and the red one. After spending way too much time thinking about that too, I basically flipped a coin and decided on the red one.

The case should show up today, and the phone should show up Friday. Apple generally uses UPS for deliveries, so I’m not sure if I’ll actually get the phone Friday, or if I’ll get one of those UPS sticky notes telling me that I need to pick up the phone at the UPS facility in Bound Brook. If it’s the latter, then I probably won’t have the phone until Monday or Tuesday.

The last time I checked, I still couldn’t sign up for UPS My Choice, since UPS thinks my address is a business and not a residence. If I could do that, then I could probably get some control over what UPS does with my packages, but I wind up having to drive over to Bound Brook to pick up stuff more often than I’d like.

And after typing that last paragraph, I decided to try signing up for My Choice again and… it worked this time! So maybe I will be able to get my iPhone before Monday.

I’ve also started thinking about how much of a pain it will be to move from the old phone to the new one. I think this will be the first time I’ve switched phones since I switched from backing up my phone on my Mac, the old-fashioned way, to backing it up via iCloud. I know that Apple makes the process as easy as they can, but I know there will still be a few pain points.

I’m really not looking forward to redoing my MS Authenticator setup again. I had to do that in January, after removing and reinstalling the app to fix a notification problem. Maybe migrating to a new phone will actually move the setup, and I won’t need to redo it? That’s probably wishful thinking. I think I actually have even more accounts in Authenticator now than I did back in January. I think I’m up to nineteen accounts now.

On a different subject, the Dark Sky app recently started showing a warning that it’s going to stop working at the end of this year. I’ve known that was coming for a long time, but I’m still kind of sad about it. I’ve never found a weather app that I like as much as Dark Sky. I know that most of the features from Dark Sky will be in the iOS Weather app in iOS 16. And, finally, the Weather app will be available on iPad too, with iPadOS 16. So I guess I’ll get used to using the stock weather app.

I’ve also got WeatherBug installed on my phone and iPad, and I like some aspects of that app, but the layout is too busy. I like the clean design of Dark Sky more. And I tried out Hello Weather for a while, and kind of liked it. I may have to give that another try if the iOS/iPadOS 16 weather app isn’t good enough for me.

COVID, and NYCC, and iPhones, and other stuff

It’s been about a month since I’ve last posted here, and I have a backlog of stuff in my head that I’ve been meaning to post about. And a number of things came up today that seem like they might be worth mentioning.

Also, I might be a little jumpy from my afternoon cappuccino, so this post might go all over the place…

NYCC announced their mask policy for this year today. In short, they’re requiring masks, but not vaccination. The con is happening in about a month (October 6-9) and I still haven’t decided if I’m going or not. I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, with regard to whether or not there will be a fall surge, and how bad it might be. I just don’t know… I know they mailed out badges this week, so I’ll have those soon. If I decide not to use them, then that’s OK.

I listened to a bit of Andy Ihnatko’s Material podcast today, and he started it out with a bit of a “sermon” on masking and COVID. He mentioned something in there about his own decision-making regarding an upcoming comic con in his area (Boston?), and his thinking seems to be pretty much the same as mine.

I was sick all of Labor Day weekend. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t COVID, and I’m not sure where I picked up… whatever it was. At work, I’m one of a very few people who are still wearing a mask around the office. I did go to a couple of large in-person meetings recently, so maybe I picked something up in one of those. But I also went out for a beer and a burger with an old friend Friday night, so maybe that’s where it came from. (Though we were sitting outside for that, so there should have been less chance of picking up anything airborne, vs. being indoors.)

I honestly think I’m getting sick more often lately. The prevailing wisdom on that seems to be that spending too much time alone, indoors, has left my immune system unprepared for normal levels of airborne… stuff. Maybe that’s true. Maybe I need to spend more time with other people?

On another matter entirely, I paid some attention to Apple’s iPhone event today, though I was too busy at work to catch everything. My iPhone XR is now over three years old, so it’s probably time to replace it. The iPhone 14 looks… fine. If I stick with the standard iPhone 14, then I don’t think it’ll be that much different from my XR. It’s the same form factor (I think) and still has the notch. It seems to have a much better camera though, which is nice, I guess. The iPhone 14 Pro has some snazzy features, though I don’t think I really need them enough to spend $200 more than for the regular 14. (Yeah, that “Dynamic Island” thing is cute, but I don’t need it.)

I also have a bunch of work stuff I want to blog about, but I really need to organize that all first. So I guess this will just be an NYCC / COVID / iPhone post.

Some software notes

Two weeks in, and we’re still cleaning up after the security incident at work over the July 4th weekend. I’ve gone into the office most days since then, and I think all that extra exposure to other humans has gotten me sick. I’ve been mostly useless since Friday. I’m hoping I can go back to my usual schedule this week (M/W/F at home, Tue/Thu in the office). Or maybe work from home all this week, if I don’t start feeling better by Tuesday.

Anyway, all the security shake-ups over the last two weeks have gotten me thinking about some of my software choices, and I thought I’d write up some notes on that.

LastPass vs 1Password

I’ve been using 1Password for my personal password storage since 2014, and I’m still happy with it. But I just (finally) got added to our company’s corporate LastPass account, so I can use that for work. And that comes with a free personal LastPass Families account, so I went ahead and signed up for one.

Short version: I don’t think I’ll be using it for anything. I think it’s probably fine for casual users who need a simple password management solution, but it’s not nearly as good as 1Password. I guess my biggest gripe with it is that it’s very much oriented towards in-browser use. There’s a native Windows 10 client, but it’s very limited and just not very good at all. Again, I think it’s probably fine for a lot of people, but it’s just not good enough for a power-user like me.

LINQPad

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking about upgrading my LINQPad Pro license. I went ahead and did that, and upgraded to the “Premium” version. The NuGet integration works well.  Access to NuGet is still blocked from my developer VM, so I can’t use it there yet, but I can use it on my desktop PC, where I’ve also installed it. I haven’t tried the debugger yet, but I’m curious to see how well that works.

And the dev VM is still so locked down that I couldn’t actually activate the new license over the internet, but the developer provides a way to get around that, so that was appreciated.

TextExpander vs AutoHotKey

On Windows, I generally use AutoHotKey for my keyboard macros and text expansions. I’ve been using it since 2007. I don’t have the actual AHK product installed on any of my work machines, but I have a compiled script that I do run on my work machines. It was starting to look like that might be an issue last week, due to some new security software they were running on our machines. It now looks like it’s OK, but that got me briefly looking at other solutions that might work, and which I might be able to get whitelisted at work.

So I went back to TextExpander, which I used to use on my Mac, circa 2014–2016. I stopped using TextExpander when they went to a subscription model, since I was having some trouble with it anyway, and it didn’t seem to be worth the money. But that was a while ago, and they now have a Windows client too, so it seemed to be worth looking into it again.

I signed up for a 30-day trial and installed it on my personal desktop PC and MacBook. It works fine, and does some interesting stuff, but it still has some of the same issues with secure input fields that it had when I last used it. That’s not really TextExpander’s fault, but it does limit its usefulness on the Mac. On Windows, it seems to work well, but it’s not nearly as powerful as AutoHotKey. (Or at least it doesn’t seem to be.)

On the Mac side, this has got me thinking again that I should really try Keyboard Maestro. It looks to me like it’s closer to what I want than TextExpander is, and it’s a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Maybe when things have settled down a bit, and I’m feeling better, I’ll finally give it a try.

I still have some time on the 30-day TextExpander trial, so I’m going to continue messing around with it. Maybe I’ll figure out how to do some fancier stuff with it, and/or how to work around some of its limitations. I really like the idea of having a single macro program that works across Mac and Windows, so that’s a motivation not to give up on it yet.

 

Some Guys

I saw a reference to Jonathan Coulton’s Some Guys album somewhere today, and realized I’d never gotten around to buying it. It came out in 2019, and is apparently his most recent full album. Now that I have Apple Music, I can just pull it up there and listen to it.

It’s pretty good, and kind of what I was in the mood for this afternoon. It’s all straightforward covers of old 70’s soft rock songs. I grew up listening to this stuff, but stopped listening to most of it in the 80’s, when I started listening to hard rock, metal, new wave, and punk. As an angry teenager, I guess I just wasn’t much interested in the Eagles or Dan Fogelberg anymore.

Well, now that I’m in my 50’s, I guess I’m ready for Fogelberg and Gordon Lightfoot and all those old 70’s guys again. I never really had any of this stuff in my record collection; I’m just familiar with it all from good old-fashioned AM radio. So I decided to make an Apple Music playlist of the original versions of all the songs on Some Guys. Here’s a link to it. It should be public.

Of course as soon as I created the playlist, I realized that I probably wasn’t the first person to have this idea. And, indeed, there are three or four other shared playlists out there exactly like mine. Oh well. It wasn’t much work to create, so it’s not like it was a ton of wasted effort.

And here it is embedded, for whatever that’s worth:

COVID exposure

I got a notification from the NJ COVID app that I was exposed to COVID recently. I’ve had the app on my phone since October 2020, and this is the first time it’s actually notified me of anything. The exposure was more than a week ago. Not sure why it took so long to get to me.

I’d pretty much forgotten that the app even existed. When I first installed it, I was “checking in” on the app on a semi-regular basis. These apps were a pretty big deal when they first came out. But they’ve really faded to the point where it doesn’t seem like anyone bothers using them anymore. But I guess some people still do, otherwise I’d never had gotten that notification.

At this point, I guess it’s a pretty useless notification though. If I was exposed more than a week ago, I’ve had plenty of time to spread it around. I went out to dinner with a friend Saturday, and to lunch on Sunday. That’s unusual for me, and I wouldn’t have done it if I thought I might have COVID.

The date shown is May 16, which was a Monday. Looking at my Day One entry for that day, I barely left the apartment, so I’m not sure how I could have been exposed on that day. It does say that it’s “estimated” though, so maybe it happened the next day, at work, in the office? (I work from home Mon, Wed, and Fri, and in the office Tue and Thu.)

Oh well. I did an at-home COVID test this morning, just in case. It came back negative. At this point, I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to report a “near miss” to work or not.

new MacBook Air

I finally gave in and bought a new MacBook Air today, so this is my obligatory “I bought a new computer” post. The old MacBook Air was crashing a lot, and nothing I tried helped. I could have sent it in to Apple for service, but my AppleCare had expired and it seemed like maybe it would be better to just get a new one. So I got the current MacBook Air with a 512 GB drive and 8 GB of RAM. My old one only had a 256 GB drive, and that was always a problem, so it’s nice to get back to a reasonably sized drive. As for the RAM, that’s the same as the old one. The big difference between old and new is the M1 chip, I guess. The old one was an Intel i5. So far, I haven’t noticed any speed improvement, but I don’t do anything really CPU-intensive, so it probably won’t make much of a difference.

The old MacBook lasted for almost four years. I bought it in May 2018. I guess that’s a good run for a modern laptop, but I wish I could have kept it going for another year. The new one cost me $1250, bought directly from Apple. With AppleCare, a USB to USB-C adapter, a USB-C to Lightning cable, and sales tax, the total was a bit over $1500. And I arranged to trade in the old one for $270, assuming they accept it and decide it’s in good enough shape.

Migration from old to new was pretty easy, using the Migration Assistant. At first, it looked like it was going to take a long time, but then I moved the laptops closer to each other, and it sped up considerably. I think it might have switched from using my wifi network to a peer-to-peer connection, maybe using Bluetooth, when I did that. I’m not really sure how that works. Migration was much simpler than the nuke & pave that I did on the old one a while back. (Though I think that doing that clean install probably helped this migration run more smoothly.)

One thing I figured out after the migration is that I had a few Intel-only apps, so they required Rosetta 2 to run. Evernote was one of them, which I thought was a little weird. It turns out that there is a Universal version of it, though, and I just had to delete it and reinstall it from the App Store to get the Universal version. I tried doing the same with OneDrive, but apparently the Universal version of that still isn’t in the App Store.

I guess the next Apple item up for replacement is going to be my iPhone XR, which I bought in January 2019, and is starting to show its age. Then maybe my iPad Air, which I bought in April 2019. I think the iPhone is going to need to be replaced relatively soon, but maybe I can hold off on the iPad until next year. I wish these things would last longer, but I’m resigned to having to replace them all every few years now, I guess.

MacBook follow-up

My experiment with switching from Firefox to Safari on my MacBook has been interesting. But the MacBook crashed again yesterday, while using Safari, in the same way it had been crashing while using Firefox. So that pretty much rules out Firefox as the reason for the crashes. That’s both good and bad news. On the good side, it means I can go back to Firefox. On the bad side, it means I’ve just about exhausted software-related reasons for the crashing, which means I’ve probably got a hardware issue.

Apple might announce a new MacBook Pro at their event next week. If they do, it might be time to replace this MacBook Air. (Even if they don’t, it might still be a good time to replace it, likely with the current iteration of the Air.)

Getting back to the experiment with Safari: I think I’ve decided that I could use Safari as my default browser on the Mac, if I needed to, but I’m still more comfortable with Firefox. I’ve been using 1Blocker for ad-blocking in Safari, and that works OK, though not as good as uBlock Origin in Firefox. And I haven’t found any other Safari extensions that really give Safari an advantage over Firefox in any way. The other big thing for me is 1Password integration, and that works just as well in Firefox as it does in Safari.

MacBook issues, browsers, and bookmarks

I did a nuke & pave on my MacBook Air a few weeks ago. My main reason for doing that was to see if it would clear up an occasional problem I have where the machine crashes if I’ve been using it for more than an hour or so on battery power. Well, it crashed again yesterday, so clearly the nuke & pave didn’t cure the problem.

One other possibility I’ve considered is that maybe it’s Firefox’s fault. The crash has always happened when I’m watching a video in Firefox. That doesn’t necessarily mean much though, since watching long YouTube videos is about the only thing I’d do on the MacBook that would stress the battery for a good bit of time. Regardless, I decided to try switching my default browser on the Mac to Safari, and see how that works out.

I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since before it was Firefox. And I still like it, and use it as my default browser on both Windows and Mac. It’s been losing market share to Chrome though, and now has only a tiny sliver of the browser market. So maybe it’s time to give something else a try, at least temporarily. Safari is supposed to be very efficient in terms of battery use on the Mac, so maybe, if my underlying problem is the battery, switching to Safari will fix it.

Switching browsers, of course, means that I need to try to replicate my Firefox setup in Safari, to the extent that I can. A few of my Firefox extensions are available for Safari, but some aren’t. The two big ones are probably uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. But there are alternatives, and I’ll play around with some of those.

Getting my Firefox bookmarks into Safari wouldn’t be difficult if I was just switching over entirely, and didn’t care about keeping them up to date in both browsers. But I want to keep using Firefox on my PC, so I really want to keep the bookmarks in sync. The best way I could find to do that was via iCloud for Windows. This article describes the process of setting it up and enabling bookmark sync between iCloud and Firefox. I went ahead and did that, and it seems to work OK. So now I have Firefox Sync keeping my bookmarks in sync between my desktop and laptop PCs, iCloud sync keeping my Safari bookmarks in sync between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and iCloud for Windows bridging Safari and Firefox. I think that, even if I decide to switch back to Firefox on the Mac, I may keep iCloud for Windows running, just so I can have the same bookmarks across iOS, Mac, and Windows. (I’ve always used Safari on iOS, but never really did much with bookmarks there.)

Combining my Safari/iCloud bookmarks with my Firefox bookmarks left me with quite a jumble of duplicates. I had, at some point in the distant past, used Safari as my default Mac browser, and had a bunch of very old bookmarks in there that I’d never cleaned up. And I had a bunch of out-of-date bookmarks in Firefox too, that I’d just been ignoring. So I spent some time this morning trying to clean up my bookmarks. I did that in Firefox on my PC, and hoped it would sync back to iCloud with no problems. So far, it seems to have done that.

Browser bookmarks, in general, aren’t as important as they used to be. But I’m still a weirdo who wants a nice selection of useful bookmarks organized in a sensible hierarchy. I’ll see how my current setup works over time, but I’m also considering some alternatives. On the Mac, I’ve been curious about URL Manager Pro. That might be a good home for my bookmarks. There’s no PC version, but I could just get them over to the PC via iCloud for Windows, I think.

I currently use Pinboard as a place to dump miscellaneous bookmarks, but that’s not a carefully organized collection of stuff that I can traverse easily. I’ve got over 18,000 bookmarks in there right now. So I can’t really use that for my browser bookmarks. There’s a similar service called Raindrop that seems to allow you to apply a bit more organization than Pinboard does. Specifically, it allows you to use both tags (like Pinboard) and something they call “collections”, which can be nested. So that makes it seem like I could combine my carefully organized Firefox/Safari bookmarks and my Pinboard bookmarks into one service. I’d keep the stuff I use regularly in top-level collections, and toss all of the random old Pinboard links into a “miscellaneous” collection or something like that.

Well, anyway, this is mostly just me messing around on a Sunday morning. It’s now almost noon, and I haven’t done much else with the day, other than organize bookmarks. But, hey, it’s relaxing.