I was telling my youngest daughter, “When something like this happens, I can’t rest until I figure it out.”
What was that? At some point in iOS 16, our Apple Family setup stopped sending notifications for “Ask to Buy” purchases from our daughters. I don’t know if this started on the first installation of iOS 16 on my devices or on theirs, but it was plain broken. It’s supposed to send a notification to my wife and I whenever our daughters want to install an app or execute an App Store purchase. We’re pretty liberal about what we approve for our daughters, but it was still nice to have that functionality. But now, it was busted.
Apple provides a long list of privacy-focused features to help you maintain your modern-day sanity. It’s not too often that you get to taste the actual benefit of these features and how they give you control over the flow of information.
For instance — privacy features in Safari are cool, but they’re largely transparent and once you turn them on, it’s not really all that clear how the features are benefitting you. That’s by design. You should just experience peace of mind with those features.
I was one of the lucky few to snag an iPhone 14 Pro Max on launch day. Never mind the fact that I wasn’t around to take the delivery — we were on the road to my cousin’s wedding when UPS tried to deliver it. I rerouted the UPS shipment to a UPS store near our house.
Monday about 12:10pm… I received a notification from UPS that they had dropped my phone off at the UPS Store. The planets had aligned, as I had just finished a meeting and was ready to eat lunch. I bounded off to the UPS Store to pick up the phone. I walked in and the lady seemed confused.
Apple seems to have all kinds of slick tricks up their sleeves. Some day you’ll be futzing around with the trackpad and moving things around, some days you’ll hit the wrong key combination… and some days, something will just happen. It’s like one of those happy little accidents that Bob Ross loved to talk about.
Yesterday while I was trying to shift some tabs around in Safari on macOS Monterey 12.4, I accidentally slid one of the tabs all the way to the right of the tab bar. The tab rolled up into the favicon from the site and pinned there.
It’s time for my version of the WWDC wishlist. WWDC is almost always about the software. Each year they talk about what’s coming in the various *OS plans for the year. They decidedly do not focus on hardware. You can get a prognostication of the hardware they have in the pipe, but it’s fun to see what they have in mind for future iterations of the software.
Last year I was convinced that Apple was going to go full pro with iPadOS after the introduction of the M1 iPad. I think we’ll start to see more “pro” get into iPadOS, but it’ll still be iPadOS. Running macOS on iPad doesn’t make sense. I realize now that I was a little premature. It makes sense, because not every iPad is running on an M1 processor yet. But they have introduced it on the iPad Pro and the iPad Air. There’s very little left for them to do before they introduce more “pro” development and creation features to the iPad. Generally, I think we’ll start to see more of those plans this year.
Many years ago, I embarked on a home automation hobby that has drained my budget. Home automation is a horrifically expensive hobby (like most of them). There’s a lot of trial and error. You’ll almost always buy stuff that doesn’t work or integrate well. It’ll be expensive. You’ll want to replace it because it’s not perfect.
Siri looks like HAL9000, just… more chill.
I started off with the center of my universe on Amazon Alexa (like most people). I am also an Apple-holic, so I often employed hacks to make third-party gadgets work in the HomeKit space. Homebridge has been quite successful at filling in the gaps where necessary — the glue to the Alexa and HomeKit ecosystems. Alexa was my “home’s personality” according to family and visitors and for the most part, that was ok.
In one of those “duh” moments for today… I’ve been wrestling with an oddity in my git repositories with vscode. Sometimes when I open a git repo, it will just suddenly duplicate all of the files in the repo. It seemed to happen most of the time when I was opening a large git repository with vscode. Turns out that iCloud is to blame - something about vscode and iCloud Drive synchronization doesn’t get along. Solution: move your development directory out of ~/Documents or iCloud Drive. All will be well. They didn’t need to be there anyway. Duh.
I’ve noticed that my M1 Max Macbook Pro battery has been getting hammered lately, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. Activity Monitor was confirming some of my greatest fears: Safari was actually using significant energy. I didn’t know why. The lesson? Beware of new features.
This thing is flat-out amazing, and I’m sorry I waited so long to get one.
