Apple.

The saga with my newest HomePod Mini continues. After spending over an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and resetting every device within nearly a half mile of my home office, my HomePod Mini still will not complete its setup.

The Apple support technician promised someone from the next tier up would give me a call, but they missed their appointment time and I am having a hard time regaining interest in the endeavor.

There are many things that Apple does well. I maintain that Apple devices are still the safest and most reliable computing devices available to the average consumer. Unfortunately their prices are above average but what’s even more disappointing is there’s too many things that Apple has let slide to the wayside. Home Automation, or “HomeKit” is one of them.

When my HomePod Mini is stuck on “Configuring…” for hours, after taking nearly a dozen attempts to get the thing connected at all, and the HomePod team can’t figure out the problem, the world’s largest technology company needs to step back and take a look at what the heck their doing.

Luckily, we mostly rely on Alexa for home automation. I’m not super comfortable with this scenario, but at this point I want something that works. And while Alexa may be snooping on us, at least she’s doing it with much more reliability.

Anyone want to buy a HomePod Mini?

So I’ve been plugging along at work on my new Mac mini and it is amazing. As a software developer, a Unix systems administrator, and a guy that needs to attend several meetings a day via various video conferencing platforms, I have to say I’m blown away by this new M1 Mac mini. Blown away.

This new machine never gets warm. Ever. While doing to same workload on my 2015 maxed out MacBook Pro, I’d hear all sorts of fan noises, wheezes, and gasps from that computer. Beach balls would spin everywhere. But this Mac mini, with 8GB RAM, is plugging right along cool as a cucumber. I have run into zero difficulties with software compatibility. The only “workaround” I needed to do was set one of my terminal programs to “run in Rosetta mode”. The Rosetta mode is the compatibility layer to run software not designed for Apple’s new M1 chip. Other than toggling a setting in the applications window, the Rosetta layer has been absolutely transparent. Everything just works.

Hard drive performance in quick, network connectivity has been flawless, and I’ve had zero issues getting my day to day chores done on this new computer.

At $699 it is well worth the money for a desktop computer. I highly recommend this new Mac.

Apple had their “Spring Loaded” event today and as a dutiful Apple Fanboy, I watched with great interest. Like the other Apple events over the past year, this was a virtually attended event with slick video and impressive editing. I’m assuming the entire production was created using Apple products. I say this because one time a Windows event was produced with Apple products and that was somewhat smirk worthy.

I was pleased to see everything that was announced today. The highlights of the event for me included the new AirTags and the new iPad Pro.

AirTags are small devices that attaches to various things you have a habit of misplacing. Luggage. Car keys. Your spouse. AirTags work with the existing Apple “Find My” ecosystem, so you can locate these tagged items using your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. With Apple’s focus on privacy and security, all of this location data is anonymized and encrypted but still available to your iDevices with pinpoint accuracy. You’ll never lose your car keys again. Totally useable in our household.

The new iPad Pro, especially the 12.9″ model (I currently have the 2018 version) is especially impressive. The new iPad Pros will have the same chip as the newest iteration of Macs, the Apple Silicon M1 chip. Up until last year, Macs used the same chip, and “industry standard” Intel chip, to power their Macs. These were the same chips you’d find in any Windows computer on the street. They tend to run hot, require a lot of power, and have other limitations, so Apple designed their own chip. I bought an M1 Mac mini for my work setup last week and it has been fantastic (more on that later this week). Moving to the M1 in the iPad Pro ramps up the already very capable device. I’m certain my next “laptop” will be this iteration of iPad Pro. Someone tell my husband to prime the credit card later this year.

Apple also announced a completely redesigned iMac and, surprise!, they come in an assortment of colors with matching keyboard, mouse, and/or trackpad. The new iMac is incredibly thin and is now powered by the aforementioned M1 chip. This will make the machine absolutely silent, something I really enjoy about any computer.

Side note, today I moved the NAS, or hard drive storage device, out of my office and into another room of the house because it was making too much noise and distracting me from work. While there are times I enjoy some music playing, most the time I try to work in complete silence. And when I want it silent, I want it silent. This was another reason for purchasing the M1 Mac mini last week; my older mid-2015 MacBook Pro fires up the fans a lot, especially during video calls.

Apple also announced a new Apple TV 4K and more importantly, a completely redesigned remote. Bonus feature, the newly designed remote will work with existing Apple TVs. While we already have an Apple TV 4K (the current version), we are both ready for a better designed remote. We’ve had too many instances where we couldn’t figure out which way was up when holding the remote, or hitting the wrong button because we were lost in the navigation, and mistakenly backing completely out of a show we were watching. The new design of the Apple TV remote looks promising and I’m anxious to add one to our collection of iDevices.

Overall I enjoyed the event very much and I just added another notch to the inevitable status as an Apple Fanboy. There are a lot of choices out there these days, I simply believe Apple does consumer tech in the best way available. They’re far from perfect, but when compared with other platforms, it just works.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been Mac and iPad focused with my technological endeavors. I’m trying to get away from editing code with editors designed in the 1970s but I love being able to navigate without using a mouse.

I found a list of the Mac navigation and editing keyboard commands. I hope you find these helpful as well. I am sharing these tips from the results of a Google search, where I landed on Amsys, an Apple Authorised Service Provider in London.

Note: these also work on an iPad with an external keyboard.

General 

ctrl + d  – forward delete
ctrl + k  – deletes everything to the right of the insertion point to the next new line.
command + delete – like ctrl+k, but reverse.
command + ctrl + d – look up the word under the mouse position in the dictionary.
command-f – Find dialog
command-t – Font dialog
command-g – Go to dialog
command-e – Align Center
command-j – Align Justified
command-l – Align Left
command-r – Align Right

Text Selection

Shift + option (alt) + ⬅ – Select up to beginning of word the insertion-point currently is
Shift + command + ⬅ – Select up to beginning of line the insertion-point currently is
Shift + option (alt) + ➡ – Select up to end of word the insertion-point currently is
Shift + command + ➡ – Select up to end of line the insertion-point currently is
Shift + command + ⬆ – Select up to beginning of document from insertion-point currently is
Shift + command + ⬇ – Select up to end of document from insertion-point currently is
option (alt) – changes the cursor to a + , and you can now select columns of text!

Navigation

ctrl + a – Go to the beginning of the line the insertion-point is on.
ctrl + e – Go to the end of the line the insertion-point is on.
option (alt) + ⬅ – Go to beginning of word
option (alt) + ➡ – Go to end of word
command + ⬅ – Go to beginning of the line
command + ➡ – Go to end of the line
command + ⬆ – Go to beginning of document
command + ⬇ – Go to end of document

This morning, CEO Tim Cook tweeted about Apple’s efforts to address climate change.

As far as I’m concerned, anything on social media that contains positive action towards combatting Climate Change is a great thing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: as I’m most likely in the second half of my life, I’m sure that I’ll be gone before the planet becomes completely uninhabitable. However, it’s going to get really bad before I live out my natural lifespan and honestly I don’t want to have a front row seat as witness to the extinction of life on Earth. It’s just not my jam.

Apple talks about Climate Change quite a bit. The company goes above and beyond others with using clean energy sources, has developed robots to dismantle old tech to recycle as much as possible to build new tech, and is working towards developing sources of needed materials without doing any more mining. Is Apple perfect? Far from it, but they’re bringing awareness to the conversation, pushing progress in the right direction, and are doing a heck of a lot more than many other companies on the planet.

Yet, too many folks on social media, most likely typing with their elbows, screech about the evils of Apple, how much they hate the company, and their suspicions that the only reason Apple is doing this is to make more money.

First of all, the United States economy is based on capitalism. Making money is what corporations do in the United States. Apple is particularly good at making money.

Do I believe this tweet from Tim Cook is first and foremost a PR stunt to bring brighter lights onto the company? I really think that is not the primary driver for this. By several accounts, Tim Cook can demanding, short, and intense. That’s part of being CEO of one of the biggest and richest companies on the planet. But I believe Tim also has a heart and he’s passionate about leaving the world better than the way he found it when he got here. Yes, Apple’s clean energy efforts bring in good PR, but the PR is a result of doing the right thing when it comes to Climate Change.

So, I’ll go on skipping over the cynical “blargh blargh blargity blargh blargh” comments to all things Apple. I just wish I didn’t have to go through the eye roll/mouse scroll effort.

At the end of last year Apple introduced “privacy information labels” on all their apps in the apps store. I talked about this back in December and listed the contents of the Facebook app privacy disclosure on iOS. If you take a peek at that blog entry, you’ll be horrified at the amount of information Facebook tries to scrape from your iPhone.

The “Data Not Collected” image you see above is the same type of disclosure for my Twitter client of choice, Twitterrific. Twitter allows third party apps to access the Twitter platform, so you can use the app of your choice to Tweet. Unfortunately, Twitter also limits what the third party applications can do, so I don’t get the full Twitter experience by using Twitterrific.

And I am perfectly fine with that.

If I need to see my Twitter follower counts or report a tweet for bad behavior by the account owner, I can easily go to the official Twitter website to take care of business. Otherwise, Twitterrific lets me safely and easily tweet, reply to tweets, and read tweets in chronological order. I love it and highly recommend it.

Best part? Twitterrific scrapes absolutely ZERO information from my iPhone. Highly recommended.

When you’re looking at new apps, please take a moment to look at how the app handles the data and what information it pulls from your device. A television does not scan the viewer to tailor ads specifically for your TV and seems to do just fine at shilling products through commercials. There’s no reason for an Internet ad company to scrape all of your information just to personalize ads for you.

You’re better than that.

Take a gander at the information disclosures in the App Store. Make smart choices and give your privacy the respect it deserves.

I was messing around with my iPhone X the other night and took this shot around 9:00 PM. This was taken in portrait mode from the user facing camera using the timer. I should have used the better camera on the back of the iPhone. Balancing the phone on the floor of the balcony against the window ledge was a bit of a balancing act; I’m lucky the phone stayed where it was for the 10 second countdown.

Because everyone loves attention, I posted this photo on my Instagram account and it garnered quite a few likes, at least by the standards of my non-influential account.

My iPhone X is going on three years old but it’s still running along just fine. This is the longest I’ve had any type of mobile phone. I’ll probably upgrade sometime in 2021 if the battery starts to fail or something. Otherwise, as along as it does what I want it to do, I’m happy.