If you’re the proud owner of a recent MacBook Pro and you have an iPhone with the latest iOS installed, then you’ll be familiar with a prompt on your MacBook screen asking if you want your iPhone to act as a webcam for your MacBook. I do not want that “feature.”

You’d think you could find and put a stop to that continual aggravation in your macOS Settings, but you’d be wrong. Instead it’s on your iPhone, a new feature Apple snuck into an iOS update while you weren’t looking.

If you’re tired of having to bat that damn macOS dialog away every time it appears, then go into your iPhone’s Settings, select General, then select Airplay & Handoff. Third toggle down is Continuity Camera. Mine was enabled be default. Opt out of that crap by sliding it to off.

Note the bottom toggle; the latest iOS allows you to share Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro content on your iPhone. I can’t wait.

It bothered me quite a bit that my last few schematic diagrams were missing the 8×8 LED matrix display. As it turns out, the part number for the 8×8 LED display is printed on the side: 1088AC. When I went looking for any part sheets for it, all I found was a single page with this printed on it

It was a PDF with a copy of a copy of the circuit diagram. I could barely make out the column, row, and physical pin numbers. I then went looking for an open source KiCad part for the 1088AC and found one on GitHub, which I forked and then cloned from my fork. I was able to quickly ascertain that the part was designed for KiCad 6. From there I used KiCad’s part library manager to import the part and then convert to KiCad 7 format. I had to do a bit more work with it before I could use it. For example, all the LED symbols were reversed, pointing up (as common anode) instead of down (common cathode). A little work to select and flip each diode symbol took care of that. I also change all the row pins from input to output, as they were all defined as input.

I am aiming to order a dozen or so MAX7221 parts from e-bay. The MAX7221 has a few additions internally over the MAX7219, one of which is that it support QSPI format data communications. Same price as the MAX2719, same pinout.

What’s interesting about the MAX7219/MAX7221 part sheet, it mentioned on the front page that it was suitable for LED matrix displays, but all the circuit diagram examples only show seven-segment by eight character displays, such as the one on the right above.

More learned with KiCad 7; better control with the schematic diagram, the ability to import parts, and the ability to convert from KiCad 6 to KiCad 7. When I’m finished with the 1088AC KiCad drawing part I’ll update my GitHub version and post a link to it in another post.

Links

My copy with updates and migration to KiCad 7. Note that only the 1088AS part has been updated. — https://github.com/wbeebe/kicad-LED_DotMatrix

I dropped Disney+ when they notified the world how they were going to jack up their monthly fees to view their streaming service. I’d already grown “fatigued” with all the MCU and Star Wars content that was flooding the service, so all I needed to pull the trigger and leave was that cost increase announcement. That was back in August (see link below).

Then in November Hulu and Disney+ announced a dual deal, as well as a cheaper advertising supported tier, so I signed back up, ostensibly to watch all the content on Hulu. And there’s been quite a bit of it. Disney+ came along for an additional $2.99/month, so I wasn’t too annoyed to have them back.

But you’d think that it was Disney+ that was the king of the duo if you look at all the spam advertising they’ve sent me. This latest was from ABC, a legacy TV channel I absolutely loathe. And what are they advertising at the top of the spam advert? An episode from their dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers Golden Bachelor. I will have been married for 40 years come this July. The idea I want to watch some old fart get married is so far from anything I want to watch as to be totally alien. At this point in a human’s life, marriage means absolutely nothing unless there’s money and a pre-nup involved. Otherwise just shack up and be happy in each other’s company. Take all that money you’d spend on a formal wedding and elope to some really nice vacation spot while Earth’s climate still allows for such excesses.

I’ve clicked the link to be removed from all ABC advertising, so hopefully nothing else will come in from ABC. But this isn’t the first such spam advertising email from a Disney “property,” and I don’t think it’ll be the last. I wrote above that I thought $2.99 for Disney+ wasn’t going to be such a big deal. Now I’m not so sure.

Links

shedding sunday — applications and subscriptions

One feature I like to use with my WordPress blog is the minimal control dashboard at the very top of the page, especially when I’m viewing it on my iPhone. That’s the black strip across the very top, pointed to by the big red arrow.

Recently it disappeared. I didn’t notice it was gone until I started to visit other WordPress sites and finally noticed that I could see the dashboard on the top of those sites, but not on mine. For a while I was in a state of confusion as to why the dashboard had “suddenly” stopped appearing on my site until I noticed that my site was going to arcanesciencelab.blog, not radarwitch.com. That’s when the little lightbulb (or LED) turned on an I remembered having set a property on my big WordPress dashboard.

Sure enough, when I looked under Settings | Change your site address, I discovered that I’d set arcanesciencelab.blog as my primary domain. When I set it back to wordpress.com, the black bar reappeared and everything was working normally again.

I’m sure that’s a feature, not a bug, with WordPress’ hosting software. However, in the meantime my primary domain is wordpress.com. If you do enter arcanesciencelab.blog it will properly resolve and you’ll wind up here at my lovely blog.

Up front admission: this is a first-world issue, but still, it’s an annoyance that’s changed how I use my Apple Watch.

Up until the past few days ago I wore my Series 7 Apple Watch nearly 24 hours/day in order to capture as much personal health data as possible. For example, I wore the watch at night to track my sleeping. The Series 7 with the latest WatchOS would track when you were in deep sleep, regular sleep, and REM sleep. It also tracked when you were supposedly awake. The phone also tracked when I was in bed by what time, and for how long, when the iPhone was in its charger.

That worked for nearly a year until late last week when my Apple Watch started to exhibit “optimized charging.” To fully understand why this annoyed me, it was my habit to charge my watch twice/day, once in the morning while eating breakfast, then again in the evening while eating supper. It took about an hour both times to reach 100% charge.

It all worked without a hitch until late last week when I happened to look down on the watch while it was charging one morning and saw the “bent circle” charging indicator showing that it was in optimized charging mode. It didn’t do this in the evening, but in the morning after I’d gotten up and put the watch on the charger. I put up with that for two consecutive mornings, each time tapping the watch’s screen to open up the charging dialog and telling the watch to finish charging now.

But when it happened a third day in a row, that’s when I finally went looking for what was happening. I found out about Apple Watch’s optimized charging on-line, and for once it was up-to-date. According to Apple optimized charging for the Watch has been available since Watch OS 7. For whatever reason it didn’t show up until that point late last week. I still have my Series 3 watch packed away, so I pulled it out, charged it to 100%, and updated the OS on it to version 8.8.2. That last release was a bug-fix release for the Series 3. WatchOS is now up to version 10.1. I purchased the Series 7 back in July 2022 when it was on sale because I felt a perceived  need for a watch that would continue to receive OS updates as well as provide all the latest medical monitoring features that the Series 3 couldn’t provide.

As of today I no longer wear it to bed. I’ve had enough aggravation, and so I’m just parking my watch on its charger and letting it go through the night on its own. If the Series 7 wants to go into optimized charging, it can do so while I’m asleep. I did check the battery life on my Series 7 as well as Series 3, and both are at 100% maximum capacity. That’s remarkable for the Series 3. If I’d not spent the money on the Series 7 I would still be using the Series 3 and just ignored the Watch OS version it was running. The Series 7 is still an enjoyable device to use, but the driving need I felt last year to purchase the Series 7 has dissipated.