Tonight’s listening included In Through The Out Door and Meddle.

I just wanted to start watching a concert video for my wife. I was privileged to change my password twice so that everything started talking.

We are streaming now, but it’s going to be a bit before I can relax after wanting to get destructive for a few moments.

I’m ripping my physical CDs one more time.

Really, twice each. Once ripped to WAV for Plex, a second ripped to lossless for iTunes.

I’m hedging my bets against Apple not letting me serve my collection locally any longer. ITunes continues to be iTunes. I can’t believe how slowly it all runs, aggravated by needing to use external storage—but it works.

With Plex, I have a migration path to an open source OS and commodity hardware. This is assuming Plex remains viable as a project, of course. But with WAV files I sould be able to convert to other formats with ease, and I hope that need won’t arise for years.

Streaming is lovely, but rights being what they are, you can’t stream everything you remember hearing.

Back to iTunes, of course I have made a mess of my library. I have been using iTunes Match, which is a backup of sorts, and a streaming library of sorts, and boy it helped me through a massive file loss (self-inflicted) a few years ago.

What iTunes Match has done, which is pretty cool in a lot of ways, is replace low-bitrate MP3 files with higher bitrate AAC files on my local PC. So, many CDs that I ripped to MP3 (when disk space was more expensive) now have better sounding files on disk than I had in, say, 2003. I started ripping to MP3 circa 1998, so you might imagine.

This did not go perfectly, naturally.

Many of my albums have matched AAC files in addition to some MP3 files. This inflates the number of tracks in an album. Track order is preserved, but there could be two copies of several tracks per album. Further, where re-ripping is concerned, if there is the slightest metadata difference, iTunes will not necessarily replace tracks or albums but add them as net-new.

So. For each “album,” my process has been to find the one I’m replacing, delete the iTunes Match downloads, then I delete the album and the files from my library altogether. Finally, I import the CD, doing a spot check of the tracklist and production year. ITunes has been doing a decent job of finding cover art. I would estimate out of the discs I’ve ripped so far, the art matched 9 times out of 10.

Tonight, though, I noticed an eventuality I hadn’t anticipated. With albums winking out of existence and back in, that is going to mess with the playlists I have been carefully curating since I went all-in on MacOS in 2005.

Remember a post ago I mentioned how I keep inventing new ways to lose information?

So, unless I can figure out how to export playlists from iTunes wholesale, I am going to be recording my playlists here so that I can rebuild them. This a bit like how I take a screenshot of the taskbar on one Windows PC to replicate pinned applications and organization on another.

Re-ripping must pause.

With this project, I’m repairing damage and in doing so I am creating more damage.

The “Smart Playlists” I believe should be self-healing. It’s the ones I have created manually, and OMG there are so many, that are going to break.

The plan is to create a new Playlist category here, then there will be individual titled posts per playlist, and the Archive page will collect them in one place.

Follow along if you like.

**Update

I found a method to export playlists in the online Apple Music User Guide.

This will make my “backup” go faster than I feared.

Ripping is still going to take a month of Sundays.

Saints at bat versus the Stripers

📷

Storybook ending to the game: Saints were down by one at the bottom of the ninth. Bases were loaded after 2 outs. Final hit of the game hit the home run wall. Saints won, 13-9.

Novice that I am, made some DNS changes. Finally sunk in that I only need DNS from registrar, not also from my web host. Therefore I had my host remove DNS service. Added a txt record for an experiment. If I broke something, I assume I may not know for a day or two.

We were going to check out a comedian’s set after seeing a snippet on Tiktok.

Even though the TV audio was set as one of the Apple TV audio outputs, sound from the Apple TV was only playing via a HomePod Mini in a different room. I had to leave the YouTube app and the video I was watching to go into the system settings to set the audio output to the TV speakers only.

But that didn’t fix the problem. The TV showed the volume was responding to the remote control, but there was still no sound.

Switching to Apple Music gave the same result. No audio. No clicks, no pops, just silence.

Back to system settings to restart the Apple TV.

That “worked.” I’m getting system sounds now as I move the focus and make selections.

I relaunched the YouTube app to watch the video I had previously started. YouTube makes no effort to remember what was happaneing previously, not the video nor my place in it. At least the app remembered my search.

Now, the audio is playing correctly, but the HDMI pass-through for volume control isn’t working. This means I have to restart my TV, via a hard power cycle.

I’ve been supporting technology for a long time, and I understand everything that can go wrong. On good days I’m grateful that everything works as well as it does as often as it does. But we aren’t doing ourselves any favors with the complexity.

I have to reset both the Apple TV and the TV itself to get everything back to nominal operation. I’m not doing anything unsupported, but the electronics and the software fail with alarming and disappointing regularity.

It’s no wonder people hate technology. This is so stupid.

Also broken? The iPhone QR scanning functionality. Because I wanted to sign into the YouTube app without booting my laptop. The YouTube app on the Apple TV and on my iPhone are allegedly supposed to be able to detect one-another to validate my sign-in. Naturally this detection failed, even after several tries. Method two is to scan a QR code. Allegedly, the QR Scanner function from the iPhone Control Center opens links in Safari, but God help you if you have to switch away for a Multi-Factor Authentication code in a different iPhone app. Because whatever you were doing just disappeared and you have to start again. While you’re doing so, your authenticator code times out, so that is a wholly broken system and that verification method necessarily failed. There’s also no sharing the shortcut from the QR code to open in an instance of Safari—because apparently you’re already there, in a way that is ephemeral beyond belief. You can leave any time you like but you can never come back.

Fortunately I could get a code via SMS and Apple did thoughtfully allow me to easily paste that code from the clipboard into the authenticaton screen without having to switch to the messaging app or the code generator app.

I get it. It’s not necessarily the Apple TV on its own, it’s not the TV on its own. But isn’t it? Are these devices designed to a spec or aren’t they?

I don’t know. It works unless it doesn’t. It seems so dumb that everything suddenly requires a full reset to return to normal operation.

Thank you for reading my rant. It’s my frustration at doing what seems to be all of the right things but still having consequences I can’t control or remediate.

I’m sure the engineers who design these things can tell me why I’m being unreasonable.

I’ve waffled on Twitter. Disabled, re-enabled, and again just diabled cross-posting. Before the edict on barring Mastodon links in profiles, I had used Debirdify to learn that about 106 of the accounts I follow had federated accounts elsewhere. That’s less than 10 percent of the total number of accounts I follow there. The news escaping the Twitter bubble about the owner and his policies and his actions don’t really give me hope.

The interesting thing right this minute is dipping into the full federated Mastodon feed to see things I would otherwise have no idea how to find. The no-algorithm thing is cool in that sense.

I do think that things like boosting and likes will lead to much of the same “interaction-seeking” behavior from Twitter that can be leveraged in manipulative ways. I already see accounts whose output is primarily boosted toots, or broadcasting memes. My fear is that it’s just a matter of time until accounts are stolen and instances get weaponized as long as there is a financial or political incentive.

I worry about a commercial platform hosting speech and owning access to it, when the owner talks both about free speech and lawful speech. My sense is that culturally we will be now also facing battles over what is lawful speech, and protecting a specific point of view as lawful and anything other as not.

Nevertheless, I do see more and more accounts coming over into non-Twitter spaces. I find that interesting and exciting. I think there is value in having more than one path to information. And I fully support an individual’s right to own their words and their art.

I’m about half way through @manton’s Indie Microblogging book. I see the wisdom of using the web itself and protocols we already have as the social network. Weird, right? Using the interconnected network we already use, itself, as the social network?

In the end, I’m seeing aggregation sites (networks) as a single point of failure, and I’m seeing diaspora as the best hope for preservation and posterity.

It takes more work to run my own ship, but I like that I can head to the ports of my own choosing with hosting, email, DNS, RSS, blogging, and Mastodon instance. Further, I’m happy to pay the people in those ports that are helping me and providing value.

Just learned who is supplying wood for my home remodel. Via certified letter. Nothing like “We are proud to supply this for you” or “Thanks for being a customer and we look forward to working with your team” or “Thank you for supporting our business.” Only, the wood costs this much. If your contractor doesn’t pay, we will put a lein on your property until payment is received.

I don’t care who you are used to working with or what you have been through, that is a fucked up way to start a relationship. But? We see you. We understand who we are dealing with and will respond accordingly. And then? Never again.

Setting up iCloud on one Windows laptop actually went smoothly. Every tool did exactly what it was supposed to do. This, even though I have combined my vanity email domain with iCloud.

To be fair, I actually send email from my personal account only slightly more often than I phone people from my personal number, which is close to (but not quite) never.

On a desktop, this did not happen. Even with Office365 installed, the iCloud tool only synced calendars and contacts. The Apple installer told me if I need iCloud email, to set up an address online.

I also could not use my primary email address, which matches my AppleID, to set up my mailbox in Outlook. I had to use the original icloud.com email address, and set up an application password through my AppleID, in order to set up the service.

Possibly related, in the past I have used Google to host my vanity domain. Whenever the Outlook email setup wizard walked me through account setup, it wanted me to authenticate to Google. I don’t know if that is residual in Microsoft365, or if there is something in DNS that is making Microsoft go there. I really thought I had cleaned house at my provider.

In the end, I can monitor my mailbox from a second Windows PC. That is what I needed. But the process took the better part of 2 hours of experimentation, including waiting several times on a “We’re getting things ready” message from Outlook while nothing happenned in the GUI.

None of the Apple machines ever have trouble, and I was aware that doing iCloud on Windows could present challenges. But when things actually behaved well on one Windows 11 machine, I had hope it might go equally well on another.

All of this to avoid the security hoops signing into iCloud through a web browser, or simply checking email on my phone. I want to avoid transcribing password reset links or login links. Even NVidia nags for a login for video drivers, holding some software functions hostage to it.

As in all things technological, some days it’s deeply challenging to make software do the thing it is meant to do. I blame both companies for making me use wizards, and not giving me the option to set things manually. Even with the mailbox established, I cannot dig into Outlook to see what settings the software is using to connect (server names, ports, security protocols)

So, if you can’t set up your iCloud mailbox in Outlook via the iCloud application, use the original icloud.com email address (me.com didn’t work for me) to set up an IMAP account. Use an application password that you will generate at appleid.apple.com for the password. Nothing I found online says it exactly that way, especially for those of us who have the vanity email domain.

Lastly? You will be sending as your iCloud address, or via your default account in Outlook. I can theoretically use a reply-to address, but I think that looks sketchy.

Passwords are a bear—I have to change every 90 days at work. Mandatory password change yesterday afternoon left me stumped this morning. In the process of recovery, I came back to what my password is. It helps me to use a phrase that sets intent. Because of intent, I got it back.

Purple Rain tour concert film on PBS just started. I’m in.

I just got a markdown-native writing app, which I’m excited about. Particularly the Apple-native synchronization to iCloud and between devices. However, a new blank document is still a new blank document.

I’m not proud of Apple if the union-busting activity is real

I had the privilege of attending a diversity, equity and inclusion presentation today. The good news is that I’m not oblivious. The other good news, I suppose, is that I have many opportunities to improve understanding and empathy. Wow.

Loved the reference to The Big Lebowski in Family Guy, tonight

Asking honestly: is there like a group of people who are super sick and tired of all the shadiness done by people with power but who are still working to and honestly desire to make the world a better place? There is no red pill. There is no blue pill. There is just us.

Starting the day with puppies in my lap, coffee, Nintendo and Princess Bride.

When, out of habit, you walk down the stairs of the atrium in your employer’s building, from the third to the first floor, to head back to your desk—and then realize the thing you need to do next is on the third floor

So wierd journalists are shocked that Apple continues to support a production product (like an operating system) well into the development cycle of the replacement version. It’s like people actively refuse to understand how they work. Cynical me remembers: headlines drive clicks.

Turned a MacBook Pro into a slab book—I removed the non-functional display. It’s 2013 model and a replacement display is still $600. And it’s mostly my iTunes library and doesn’t move around the house.

Unintended consequences? Yes. The bluetooth and WiFi antennæ are in the display module and that matters. I’m wired into my LAN, but using the built-in keyboard and trackpad as intended because bluetooth is a no go.

I realize I’m an edge case, but I wish you could put longer beards on Memojis.

That thing where I have remote starting for my car but do not remember to use it to my benefit

Wanted to watch the Olympics but got talking heads. Moving on.

Can I say, as an IT person, I’m really tired of running updates. So little control over what is happening. No way to know before starting if this computer will take the update after some unknown interval of time, or not. All I can do is wait and pick up the pieces.

Used all the caffeines to power through a long work weekend. Today, I started my day early and my usual large amount is insufficient. My brain wants MOAR.