I suppose I am the only person who wishes the MacBook Pro had a pre-heat feature for those really cold mornings of lap usage 🥶
Based on my time at Best Buy today, having them fix their battery replacement on my iPhone X, AirPods are a huge success as gifts. I saw a ton of people picking them up from the pre-purchase desk. Apple Watches were a distant second. Don’t think I saw 2 of anything else.
Updated: Analysis of Best Buy vs Apple for in warranty iPhone repair 📱
Now that the nearest Apple Store is 1.5 hours away, round trip, I decided to try Best Buy’s authorized service to do an in-warranty replacement of my iPhone X battery. The Best Buy is about 5 minutes away so it would save a ton of drive time.
It took the guy that waited on me 45 minutes from the time he started until he finished checking in my phone for the repair. This doesn’t include any time in line. Other staff seemed more competent.
The good news is they completed the repair in the estimated time window of 3 hours. The bad news is that I noticed after getting home the case and screen aren’t fitted together properly. The bottom left corner of the screen is elevated above the case. I imagine this means the water resistance is non-existent now.
I really don’t want to give up my phone for another half day but I don’t think I have any choice but to return and hope they can get it right on the second try. If so I will still probably have saved on drive time but at the cost of heightened annoyance. I don’t think I’d trust them with a phone again.
Update: I returned to the store today and of course the same guy that faced so much trouble checking me in was at the counter. But by luck and much more competent woman became available. She got me checked in immediately, walked the phone to the back, and returned to tell me they would have it fixed in about 15 minutes. True to their word they did and the phone is back to normal. I had been afarid I’d have to leave it again so I was quite relieved to be in and out in under 30 minutes.
The battery in my iPhone X has entered the “degraded” stage and needs to be replaced. Since the nearest Apple stores are fairly distant I’m going to try using Best Buy (arranged by Apple). Hopefully I won’t regret this - but a battery replacement seems easy enough. 📱
This is great news for home automation, and something I did not expect to see. These 3 companies rarely cooperate.
Google, Amazon and Apple (plus others) have created Connected Home Over IP, a new working group managed by the Zigbee Alliance
Over the past few days I setup a S3 Glacier bucket as an offsite backup for our Mac and Windows machines. It was quite easy to do with the Arq app. A digital insurance policy.
Lovely sky while out exercising today. ☀️ ⛅️ 📷
Lazy Dog.
Missing Someone
Haven’t posted a photo from this local indie coffee shop in a long time. ☕️ 📷
Duino Coffee.
I ran into a weird problem on our 6+ year old iMac. I got through to an Apple Support agent with no waiting and she spent almost 2 hours trying fixes but ultimately had to escalate. Getting this kind of free support on a way-out-of-warranty device warms my heart. 🖥
I’m thinking about setting up iDrive of Arq+S3 Glacier to provide a “last resort” offsite backup of my files.
N.B. I have multiple backups.
I’ve been lifting a lot of fairly heavy items for the past week. Tonight my aging back is strongly suggesting I cease-and-desist for awhile.
Today’s achievement: successfully renewing my driver’s license which had to be done in person this time. Stood in a line outside the office, waiting to get in, for an hour and then waited inside for another hour and a half. At least the weather was good.
First thing I did on our new Sony was not enable networking
Beyond the risk that your TV manufacturer and app developers may be listening and watching you, that television can also be a gateway for hackers to come into your home,” The FBI warns.
On the plus side we were able to remove our 52” LCD from it’s wall mount (80 pounds!) and install a 65” LCD. A bit of a trick because we only have 1” to spare on all 4 sides of the new TV. The bad news is our 6 year old A/V gear can’t handle 4K HDR. Time for a new receiver. 📺
Today’s word, integrate, brought to mind the Micro.blog community and the efforts to be welcoming and provide equality of voice. Diversity must increase but I think the opportunity is here and I appreciate the efforts to date. #mbnov
Into the woods
Black Friday’s meaning for our family is tripping the light fantastic by breaking out all the Christmas decorations. It’s a fair amount of work but we have a month to enjoy the fruit of our labors. #mbnov 🎄
I love this property of our kids’ personalities: when we asked about what they were thankful for over the end of our Thanksgiving dinner they both said “everything” - they said they couldn’t think of anything this year not to be grateful for (11 & 15 y/o). 🙏🏻
The day before Thanksgiving is a quiet one for us. Our shopping is done. Most meal prep is done on Tuesday because the items are improved by letting the seasonings ‘rest’ a day and because we brine our Turkey for 36 hours. Nothing rich about our meal but all naturally delicious.
When I setup Mb for my blog I did the simplest approach of pointing all DNS at Mb’s servers. Today I stopped procrastinating and modified DNS so only the blog went to Mb allowing me to set up subdomains. I also set it so ProtonMail can send using my custom domain w/SPF and DKIM.
We picked up our (modest) load of firewood for winter today. We got fairly well seasoned oak with a mix or sizes. Now we just need weather that’s much colder than the current 70F so we can put it to good use. #mbnov
We’re planning to replace our 12 year old TV with a larger 4K HDR model in December. I’ll need to mount it in our cabinet (custom made) so I’ve started researching an articulating mount that would keep it secure. 📺
I had my 10 year old son for company on my walk today. The clouds were unusual and the overall tone of the sky was as well. The photo is not retouched. #mbnov 📷 ⛅️
