i survived the ios 18.3 update

whbeebe

I accepted the latest iOS 18.3 update for my iPhone 16 Pro Max. I also accepted the macOS Sequoia 15.3 update on all my active Macs that could still be updated. And you know what happened? Nothing. On every one of my iDevices that could run Apple Intelligence, and where I had disabled the feature, the updates respected those choices. Apple Intelligence remains disabled. This in spite of all the hand-wringing and dire warnings about how Apple was going to “force” users into using Apple Intelligence and the horrible consequences about to descend on Apple users because of it.

It’s fun for Apple’s detractors to hammer away on Apple for a litany of perceived issues, the great majority of which are not real issues to be concerned with. We all know that Apple Intelligence is a work in progress (a polite way of saying a mess), and is labeled as BETA in System Settings. All “AI” is a work in progress, no exceptions. Since Apple is building on top of that, is it any wonder that Apple Intelligence is having problems? Apple Intelligence’s problems don’t detract from the overall usefulness of Apple’s products and services. Trust me, if Apple had decided to reactivate my Apple Intelligence on all of my devices I’d be here screaming like a banshee at Apple’s evil and nefarious ways.

I’m surprisingly happy and productive with Apple’s latest, warts and all.

how to shut up apt’s security pro message

whbeebe

I have Ubuntu 24.04.1 installed on my RPi 5. For the most part I’m quite happy with it. One lone exception is when I run apt to perform any package updates. It’s at that time I used to get the message “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled:”, followed by a list of packages that won’t get the update. I don’t care, and I’m getting ready to remove those applications that require those libraries. In the mean time I wanted a way to turn off the annoying message.

To quiet that output, there is a file in the filesystem at /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/apt-esm/etc/apt/sources.list.d named ubuntu-esm-apps.sources that you can edit with sudo vi (or whatever editor you prefer) to silence the blather. Here’s what the file looks like after the edit.

# Written by ubuntu-pro-client#Types: deb#URIs: https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu#Suites: noble-apps-security noble-apps-updates#Components: main#Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-pro-esm-apps.gpg

Note that every line has a # comment character at the beginning. Excluding line 1, which is a legitimate comment, that’s every line that follows. If I need to re-enable the messages, all I have to do it re-edit the file and remove the comment characters.