I have been playing a lot of Animal Crossing

City of St. Paul: We’re going to spend 4 days replowing snow from the city streets

Everyone: It’s about time!

2 Days Later

City of St. Paul: There’s snow coming so we are going to stop the plowing plan

Everyone: …

Snow Arrives

City of St. Paul: Okay, we declared a Snow Emergency so we’re going to plow all of the streets, except faster

Everyone: Here we go.

I’ve learned more about the former owner of the company I work for in 10 minutes of reading newspaper articles than in the 10 years I’ve worked at his company.

Finally seeing the Mac Mini offered with the amount of internal storage to properly manage a large iTunes (Apple Music, Apple TV) library.

While the cloud is getting better and better, I still like the idea that I can play media without approaching data caps.

When someone posts a collection of music they think is good and then you spend money on music: Rare Shoegaze Gems From All Eras Unearthed

It contained exactly none of the bands I expected. And the world just got a little larger.

When you pour yourself a delicious coffee in a tumbler and then leave the tumbler behind. Monday.

I’ve entertained several times the idea of a private Wordpress instance to archive all the blog things from ever. Wordpress will import a lot, but significant gaps are Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This is me regretting giving my words to the care of corporations.

I did get my Twitter data. Tweets aren’t particularly portable at this point. I’m not interested in self-hosted Worpress to see if maybe someone else’s script might import them correctly. Not finding any service that will simply ingest them automagically. So that is on pause.

True to form: Vikings make the playoffs on a wildcard and choke in the first round.

Thinking hard about advice I received from @isucceed@mastodon.online, to abandon services that can be controlled by an oligarch.

Wondering how soon I might get an archive of my data from Twitter? I’d guess they aren’t going to be in a hurry. My intent is to merge those posts into Micro.blog and then to ghost Twitter.

My latest thinking on the API blocking on the Billionaire Social Club is that the API’s will be turned on when the developers agree to pay for the privilege. Or pay more. Not sure what it takes to get an API key, to begin with.

Maybe a strategy to kill an albatross of an investment is to make so many offensive decisions that it is litigated out of existence. Genius!

Fascinating perspective on 1970s stagflation: The Forgotten History of the 1970s

Spent six hours today in a situation room because Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Defender are both in use at my organization. Please know that Microsoft Threat Protection can be leveraged to modify the contents of your PC and your user account can do nothing to prevent it.

Is anyone else really fatigued with the sensational adjectives in sound bites and headlines? I feel like everything is click-bait or attention-bait. I’m trying really hard to opt out of it but it is feeling more difficult to escape.

Sorry about the double post in the timeline. Not sure how I did that. Posts only shows the one.

Do not love wearing a mask. But Doc says “Do.” #CheckUp

I’ve decided that it’s okay to suspend a social media service for violations of my community standards.

“Snuck” into my house today, just to peek at the state of the remodel. I miss my home. Still months to go.

Today, I was reminded that I am in fact a Vikings fan. And tonight’s loss affected my mood in a way that I’m not proud of.

Gateful for Saturdays with no plans and nothing urgent. Grateful for cold brew coffee and half-and-half. Grateful for warm snuggly dogs.

The end of an era: Common Roots is closed.

They were a really integral part of making my wedding day amazing.

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.

Elon Musk was never a liberal, and his plans for Twitter were never benevolent - Thomas Zimmer - The Guardian

It’s not just me.