Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1510
WWDC, Unifi NVR setup, a dude wants to buy one of my Twitter handles, playlist cleanout
Morning, morning. Oh my god, sleeping in RULES. Like, I wake up and think “nah, I don’t want to get up yet,” and then I just go back to sleep. Look. I mean, I always wanted a kid, really, since I was about 24 years old. But this? This is amazing. You no-kid people. You got it going on. You get to do this all the time? Phenomenal.
Been having recurring dreams that all take place in a very large bar in Chicago called Sweet Palace, that is candy themed, has a pink-and-white awning outside, but inside is mostly a dive bar, but on the scale of, like, a 40’s department store. Absolutely immense, labyrinthine. And each different room and nook has people from different parts of my life in it, and I sort of wander from room to room, drinking with different groups of friends, getting caught up in their drama and their lives. I love it. I miss my friends. I am very excited for this friend reunion in Alaska in a couple weeks.
There is a small piece of glass embedded in my right middle finger, just under the skin, and it stings. I should have asked the dermatologist to cut it out that was dumb. I had hoped it was just a cut and would heal, but now I can feel a bump under the skin. If you know what to do in these situations, feel free to offer me some advice because this is kid of annoying.
Some mysterious dude with a dreaded +44 cell phone number wants to buy one of my long-abandoned Twitter handles. I am obviously not a Twitter user anymore, but I have kept all of my handles. They are like the white tree of Gondor, you know? Which came from the white tree of Numenor, which came from the white tree of Eressea, which came from Laurelin or Silpion, I forget which. I hold these relics of a past empire as part of a dream of one day the kingdom being restored. I hate that I give Elmo an active user hit but every couple months I log into my main account to make sure no one can steal it. Also I don’t want that railroad tycoon CEO or soul singer getting the account.
But this isn’t my main account, it’s a tertiary account, a beloved, ultra-rare two-letter handle I snagged back when I knew everyone who worked at Twitter and it was young and idealistic. I just looked in the archives, I have had it for fourteen years. But Elmo locked it down a couple months ago, so I am going through the process to get it released to me. Working on it, along with this mysterious gentleman behind the +44 number who speaks English as a second language but is very polite and helpful. Feels like a scam, but, I mean, I don’t want this thing, this guy wants to give me money, I don’t really care if I get scammed out of it, and I don’t think I’m dumb enough to get scammed beyond that. Though, god. Who knows. These people are smarter than I am.
Maybe I’ll be broke by tomorrow.
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At this very moment, we are listening to the one (fake probably) acoustic, mellow song from the recent JENNIE album — she capitalizes her entire name I guess. It is called “Twin.” It is not that good, but it’s pleasant. It is a single track lingering at the top of my “To Investigate” playlist, which has gotten up to 45 hours and I need to spend some time cleaning out. I’m not gonna lie you are probably getting a “To Investigate Cleanout” playlist today.
Watched the Apple WWDC keynote and it’s geekier stepchild the Developer State of the Union yesterday. Apple really just posting through the Apple Intelligence debacle, huh? Absolutely zero mention of ll the shit they promised last year that’s still not here. Introducing some new, much less ambitious stuff, pretending everything is fine. I mean, I guess that is what we do in 21st century America. We don’t back down, we post through it, we insist we are incapable of mistakes. Just another stupid, suicidal part of our culture, but, then, there are stupid, suicidal parts of our culture everywhere.
(Though I will say that integration of Apple Intelligence into Automator and, by extension, Notes might have some potential).
(and actually, tangent, I have been thinking about this a lot lately, as I do a lot of self-examination about my ability to tolerate the ever-increasing fascism in America. Like, you know, this shit in LA. And, I mean, this isn’t an “america always sucked” observation, though, yeah. But also, like, humanity has always sucked: we do terrible things, we do things constantly that tear the soul and are absolutely horrific, and we have all grown up seeing them constantly and everywhere and the only way any of us have survived is by steeling ourselves against it. So even though things are getting much worse at this particular moment, our default reaction is to be a boiled frog because that’s what we’ve always done in a world so, so far from utopia. We really do need to fight against this.)
I do like Apple’s new liquid glass UX, it works, it’s fine. It is, to be clear, pointless, and part of me thinks I could go my entire life without a new Mac UX redesign. But also please sir can I have some more, thank you for not abandoning the Mac for your sexier kids, so we’ll take your crumbs. They are clearly turning the iPad into a Mac, which is kinda cool, I suppose, but I am scared that the only reason they are doing that is so that eventually there is no Mac, no device without an app store, no device where you can still see .DS_Store and .plist files. But we’re not there yet.
I am not a fan of normalizing all the OS numbers to the year, but I mean, I guess it is inevitable and I recognize the utility of being able to tell if an iOS and tvOS and MacOS are roughly concurrent. I am glad macOS still gets an actual name derived from California geography. I cannot wait for macOS 33 Tenderloin.
Also how come iPadOS gets a capital P but tvOS doesn’t get capitals.
The Call and Text Screening functionality in iOS is AMAZING, and long overdue. Like, I just wrote to Tim Cook a week or two ago saying he needed to make something like this. He must have been very well-chuffed when he read that email. “Well, there’s a thing I have already taken care of,” he probably thought. “I can feel good about that one.” I am SO EXCITED for these features.
I am also excited about the message stuff, the polls and backgrounds and whatnot, but I dread what it’ll do for the single Android user (ahem, my wife) in several of my text groups. But at least Thorin’s Thread can add a picture of Barad Dur into our chat background that is gonna be lit.
And even though I am old and do not have many occasions for its use at the moment, I gotta admit the Karaoke features on tvOS are kind of amazing? And using your phone as a mic? I mean, that is gonna be a hit with the kids. And Jussi.
I broke the internal hard drive bay in my Unifi Dream Machine Pro, I know I did. Their tech support is slowly working its way toward me, but I know its broken, tried three drives, rebooted a bunch. And we are going on a trip soon, and that drive is where all our home security cameras recorded their footage and that’s a thing you want working when you leave home. So I spring $300 for a Unifi Network Video Recorder and got it all set up yesterday. Kinda annoying there is no (obvious) way to migrate all your cameras and doorbells from one device running Unifi Protect (The DMP) to a new one (the NVR) so I had to manually reset them all and re-add them to the new device, tromping all over the property resetting cameras. And we lost all of our notification preferences, so we had to rebuild those. But I think it’s all done now. So, you know, here is a picture of our dock.
Jane had a camp yesterday so today is our first day just hanging out together in the morning. She is behind me on her laptop playing Mini Motorways. She is really good at it. Little budding traffic engineer we have here.
I am a bit worried she is going to freak out and want to join me when I do my 750 words after this. Girl loves 750 words. But we will figure something out.
Also we have been slowly re-introducing walks into our evening routine and it is so nice. For a few years there Jane was too recalcitrant and reluctant to go on walks and it basically just negating the all the relaxation that the walk provided by spending a half hour convincing her to come. We were going to resume in a few months when she turns eight and it is legal to leave her home alone — we don’t leave the neighborhood, we have cameras and audio, and grammy is next door if need be. But she is slowly coming back round to walking, so that is very nice. It’s so nice out in the evening here right now.
But, then, only four more days till we’re off to Alaska so no point developing a new routine just yet.
As promised, here is a playlist cleaning out the top of my “To Investigate” queue so I can keep moving. It is not in any order. But, then, I have been listening to these songs, in this order, for, like, three months now, and it kinda works. So.
OKAY. Righty-o. Let us now turn to work. Love you all.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.