Category: iPhone

living with less — signing off of major social media

whbeebe2 Comments

Over the last five years, ever since I retired back in January 2020, I have spent very little time on all the major social media platforms. You know what some of them are: Twitter a.k.a X, Facebook, and Instagram being the top three. Others that are social media platforms in disguise include LinkedIn (Microsoft) and YouTube (Alphabet/Google). I know there are plenty of others (Tik Tok being the behemoth), but the ones I’ve listed are the ones I have direct experience with.

I’ve since deleted my account on Twitter (November 2022, one month after Musk finalized his takeover of Twitter), and Facebook in January 2023. I never signed up for Threads, but I still have a very teeny tiny account on Instagram, in part out of nostalgia and in part because there are a few accounts I still follow. My Instagram account is private; I can’t recall the last time I signed on.

What about LinkedIn? I’ve been on LinkedIn for at least a decade, joining back before it was purchased by Microsoft, back when being on it was a way to stay in touch with your business contacts. I’m still on LinkedIn, again out of nostalgia and little more. I don’t go online with LinkedIn very much anymore, averaging about once/month just to see if anything has happened with former workmates. I hate what Microsoft has done with the service, shoving posts and articles onto my timeline that I have no interest in (and never did). It is for all practical purposes Microsoft’s version of Facebook for business hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. I have debated deleting that account as well, and probably will before the year is out.

What about YouTube? Because it’s a major arm of the tentacled Alphabet Internet monster, there’s no way to totally avoid it. For example, many of the technical web sites I visit will post YouTube videos as part of the story. I click on the YouTube video in the story and YouTube/Alphabet has a bit more personal information about me to add to their infinite information stores in the Googleverse. And I will go to YouTube on my own, but not to view any of the political channels, especially after the political disaster known as the 2024 Presidential Election. I’ve learned to avoid any videos with any kind of click-baity words in the titles. If I see anything like that in the YouTube stream I immediately click “Don’t recommend channel.” Sometimes I’ll get tired and click “Not interested” to keep a whole raft of unwanted videos off my feed. And that’s another aggravation of YouTube: select a video, any video, that catches your attention and play it, and the next time you go onto YouTube your feed is filled with similar videos from other channels. I then have to use a combination of don’t recommend and not interested before I can clear them out. And just to show how sneaky YouTube can be, after a period of time measured in a few months YouTube will pop up some of those booted out videos again, as if to ask if you want to see them again. And then I have to play whack-a-mole and get them off. And before someone writes in the comments about all the other “freer”, and thus “better” video platforms, I’m not interested in a repeat of the Og Vorbis fiasco. The world has settled on YouTube as the primary video platform, which means it pulls folks like me along if I want to view what they produce. I do have tools that YouTube provides, however primitive, to curate and control what is presented to me.

That doesn’t mean I’m completely off of social media. Since leaving X and Facebook I’ve signed up to Bluesky and Mastodon. In both cases I follow a handful of accounts, and have at best a handful of followers. I don’t have the time, nor do I wish to make (a.k.a. waste) the time to doom scroll through the posts. I like Bluesky in particular because Bluesky has no algorithm to force “engagement”; I see posts only from who I elect to follow. Bluesky has sophisticated built-in tools to curate and block if necessary who can comment on your posts, as well as instantly blocking anyone (or anything) on the slightest whim. The Mastodon account has a slightly steeper learning curve and is a little rough around the edges, but nothing I can’t handle personally. I can still stop following or blocking anyone, and right now on Mastodon I’m following exactly 12 accounts, the majority of which are also on Bluesky. What’s interesting about those dual accounts (i.e. an account on both platforms) is that many of them post more on Bluesky than on Mastodon.

How has all of this account deletion and drastic platform control effected me? I’m a lot calmer these days. In just one example, I can point to how all this work has contributed to it lowering my blood pressure (along with diet and exercise and not driving in rush hour traffic every day). My mental state is a lot calmer. I’m spending less time on my phone, although my wife will strongly disagree with me. She feels I need to cut back even more, and I’m sure she’s right. I find phone use a time waster and attention trap. My time and my attention are my most precious treasures. Once used I can never get my time back, having missed more important opportunities to spend that time and attention.

what is wrong with apple?

whbeebe2 Comments

This is a story about the old vs the new. In my case, it was about an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 vs an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Let me explain…

I’ve been going around and cleaning out old items around my home, especially unmarked boxes that for whatever reason got stuffed into various corners, where they remained for many a year. When I say many, I’m talking about going back to when I was still fully employed. One day while going through one of those mystery boxes I found an Amazon Echo Dot generation 2 unopened in its box. I have no idea when I purchased it, although it had to be after October 2016 when this model was released. I do have an idea how it was placed into the box I found it in. Back then I was traveling a bit and and was very busy in my job, so we reached out to a cleaning company to get someone into our house to help my wife keep the place clean. One of the cleaning people had a bad habit of “temporarily” placing items into boxes in order to clear an area to clean. That cleaning person had a very bad habit of not telling us she’d done that, and it was but one reason she was eventually sent on her way. I thought I’d found everything she’d stashed away, but I was wrong with this particular item in that box.

We already have a number of Alexa/Amazon items in the house, although we barely use them except to play the occasional tune or to verbally ask Alexa to turn off the lights in one room of our house. We have three advanced models that can display the time, so I have those scattered around as heavily over-engineered digital clocks (and we’ll occasionally set a wakeup alarm with them). I decided to plug in this old/new stock Echo Dot and get it integrated our home network. That’s when my problems stated.

I have the latest Alexa app installed on my iPhone, and have had it on all my iPhones going back at least to Christmas 2016, which is when I believe I purchased this one. I use the Alexa app to bring these Echo devices up and integrated into our home network. Usually when I get a new Echo Dot it gets almost immediately powered on and set up, but apparently not this time. Now I was faced with using the latest iPhone with the latest Alexa app trying to integrate an Echo Dot from late 2016, nearly nine long years ago. A lot of technical advancement happens in a nine year period. And that might have been my problem.

With Alexa up and running on my iPhone and this Echo Dot up and waiting for integration, I found I couldn’t add it to my Alexa network using my iPhone 16, no matter how many times I tried. The iPhone with Alexa would not detect this Echo Dot. I wasted a week of evenings trying one solution after another, discovering yet again during this process that the Internet is full of useless advice. I gave up with the iPhone and was seriously considering tearing the Echo Dot open just to see if I could repurpose the electronics.

And then I reached into my collection of old Pixel Android phones and pulled out a Pixel 4a. I purchased a Pixel 2, a Pixel 3x, and two Pixel 4as back in 2020 for a project because they’d been heavily discounted by Amazon of all places. I’m talking half price or less. I picked the 4a because I like its small compact design. It was running Android 13, which is where Google stopped updating the device (which I can thank my luck stars). I could still install from Google Play so I installed the same version of Alexa on the Pixel 4a as I had on my iPhone 16. I then sat down and tried to bring the Echo Dot up using that Pixel 4a. Low and behold it worked the first time. That Echo Dot is now fully integrated in with the rest of my Amazon Echo devices.

So here’s the question. How is that that an “obsolete” Pixel 4a running Android 13 but the same version of Alexa that my latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max, running the latest and greatest iOS version, and with the same version of Alexa as found on Google Play, can properly communicate with the Echo Dot generation 2 when my iPhone 16 can’t?

I have never regretted an Apple device purchase until now. I still wish I had my old iPhone 11 Pro Max, and I would still have it except the 11’s mobile radio was beginning to fail with dropped calls and an inability to be cleared unless the handset was power cycled. I couldn’t have that. The 16’s mobile radio is reliable (so far), so I should be thankful for that. But there have been enough aggravating quirks while operating the 16 that I wish I could trade it in for something completely different. But then I read the horror stories of Android handset problems, especially after an Android software update, and I just have to shake my head. I think it’s all been enshitified now. I need to start looking for much older Pixel handsets, such as perhaps the Pixel 5, or maybe the Pixel 6. Something old but reliable, like the 4as.

Today’s handsets and mobile operating systems are a classic Hobson’s choice.