Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Also Apple TV. Watches go to v10.

iPhones are getting a couple of interesting features that I like. One is the ability to share Air Tag tracking, that'll be nice. And a live phone message transcription feature which will allow you to pick up the phone call while the message is being left if you want! Just like the old answering machines used to let you do.

Some other notable updates:
--Maps let you download segments where you know you'll be outside of cell coverage
--iPhone 14 and 15 can tie AAA Roadside Service into the Emergency SOS satellite coverage
--Improved crash detection for the iPhone 14

My Mom never understood how cell phone voice mail worked. She'd leave a message and it was along the lines of "Wayne? Are you there?" Sorry, Mom. Once you were at that stage, no, I wasn't there.

I am a bit nervous that they might yet again screw up how hearing aids work. A previous version of iOS, I think it was 13, was an utter nightmare! It was never fixed, though it was slightly improved over the course of the year. I eventually gave up and went to my iPhone 8 as it had the previous iOS on it. Finally the next version of iOS started playing well with my hearing aids again.

Makes you wonder how well they test these things.

Myself, I'm not updating devices - yet. I'll wait until they get to .1 or .2, I've been burned before and John Scalzi's new book, Starter Villain, dropped last night and I'm not going to lose the chance to continue reading it. I can wait a couple of weeks to download all these.

This link describes what appears to be all the changes:
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/18/apple-releases-ios-17/

MacOS will get a new release very soon.

This capability is new to the 14 and will presumably be continued and improved upon in future generations. In an emergency, with some restrictions, the phone will connect to emergency services via satellite. In this case, the dude was driving across Alaska wilderness in a Snow Machine was stranded when the machine broke down. His iPhone 14 was able to make a connection, transmitting precise GPS coordinates to emergency services and he was rescued!

The satellite SOS becomes a subscription feature after an initial trial period.

I understand a future Google phone will have similar satellite SOS functionality.

I don't have a link to it, but another person was saved with an iPhone. She was at a family gathering, went home, and no one heard from her. The iPhone has a feature called Find My Friend that lets you see the general location of where other people are - they have to send you an invitation and can cancel it.

Family used Find My Friend and got a consistent, non-moving signal off the highway. Turned out she'd rolled her car off an embankment that was not visible from the road. Family were able to find her and call emergency services, though it took some work as the car was inverted in a culvert and she was rescued.

And before people start replying with "I don't want to be tracked!", regardless of whether you use a smart phone or not, your cell company has precise location data on you - it's the only way cell towers can work. If you choose not to further share your location info, that's fine. Me, I'm seriously thinking about upgrading my wife's phone when the contract is up in December to get this satellite SOS feature - a lot of the drive to the observatory has no coverage, and when she hit an elk and totaled her car a few years ago she was was in such a dead zone. Fortunately someone came upon the accident shortly after it happened and took her to a place with signal.

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/01/iphone-14-satellite-sos-in-action/

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/22/12/02/2143226/iphone-14-satellite-feature-saves-stranded-man-in-alaska

A replacement is being sent to me.

The camera is absolutely amazing! I love the size, and I hate the fact that Apple seems intent on forcing everyone to larger phones. I hope that the trend changes when it comes time to replace it in some years. I've got more than enough memory that I doubt I'll ever run low again - and BOY, do have a story about that!

But THIS is not what the lock screen should look like!



Those big white blobs should be graphics for little alarm clocks and stuff.

And the phone does this once or twice a week, ever since I bought it on Christmas Eve.

Today I took the time to contact Apple Support via chat, I described the problem and said I had a screen shot of it and could upload it. I did so. The advisor replied "Oh wow" and when asked, had never seen anything like this before.

And I got a laugh out of the advisor when I texted back: "YAY! I AM UNIQUE! (rofl)"

Anyone who has done extensive work on PCs would probably think it looks like bad memory on a video card, that condition can frequently produce glyphs or artifacts at random locations on the display because what is written is not reliably read. The thing is, while smart phones are computers, they're also rather different. I don't know exactly how the 'video card and memory' paradigm translates to the classic PC architecture world.

But it doesn't matter, Apple is sending me a new phone. Hopefully it ships Monday. I do incur a temporary $900 hit on my credit card until I send them this phone back, I don't mind that. It saves me a 5-6 hour trip driving down to El Paso for this purpose.

Now here's where this might be fixing a two-fer.

My phone has been driving me absolutely CRAZY (yes, very short drive) with my hearing aids!

My hearing aids connect directly to the phone via Bluetooth and they have a control program from their maker, Widex. There is the problem that Widex has not updated their program in over a year, so they're behind the curve when it comes to OS improvements, I can't do anything about that. But man, it was bad! You see, Widex has the ability to create sound profiles, or equalization curves, to improve the sound quality in your day to day life. I have one that I named HissZap. It's only a three band equalizer that I'm dealing with, which is kind of poor, but you work with what you have. Basically it turns the bass and midrange all the way down and the treble all the way up. And all of the hiss is gone! And that includes the constant noise of the air movers at the library!

And the air movers run ALL. THE. TIME. Libraries try to stay cool/cold and keep the air moving to retard mold growth and insects because of all those lovely paper pages. And it's a miserable experience if you wear hearing aids and have to keep them cranked up all the way and all the time because of working with young women with soft voices.

Well, my iPhone would reset my sound profile to the default after I did almost anything with it. Both the sound curves AND THE VOLUME! It is so bad that pretty much every time someone comes up me my right hand goes up to my ear and I have to check that my hearing aids are at max volume!

I had the idea of creating a new sound profile just for the library that gives me the same equalization curve, but defaults the volume to max - but every time I try to save it, the program glitches and bounces me back before I can enter a name! Now I don't know if it's because the program is a year old and has an incompatibility with the OS, or is it because the phone is glitchy! It closes the Save screen so fast that I can't even save it as a one-letter profile name!

*sigh*

It's been a very frustrating time since I got it. But a new one is on the way, and I have some cautious optimism that whatever is glitching the display is also responsible for my hearing aid problem. Regardless, my trouble ticket with Apple has the hearing aid problem added to it, so after I get the new phone, I will be reporting back to them!!!

But it was an absolutely amazing support experience. I must say, it was perhaps the best support experience that I've ever had.

Amazing stuff. The Bahrain gov't bought a hack that allows them to send a text message to an iPhone owned by a journalist, anti-government protester, cheating mistress, whoever, and the phone is compromised. You don't have to click on a link, open a document, play a video. No interaction whatsoever. Receive the message, and your phone is rooted.

They probably paid a few million bucks for it, but they're the Bahrain government - what do they care for such a tool?

Apple has been fighting these zero-click attacks and instituted a good defense, but this latest one blasts right through it. The problem is that "we" (not me) want emojis, embedded videos, photos, etc. and that requires access deeper into the phone's infrastructure, and that all by definition makes things more vulnerable. If the app only allowed messages without any frills to be sent back and forth, and you had to use emails to attach the fun stuff, then the Messages app could be completely secure. But where would be the fun in that?!

So Apple gets to play an on-going game of whack-a-mole.

They're releasing a new version of IOS, 15, probably in October, which should increase security, but that security will certainly be broken at some point and the whack-a-mole will resume.

Myself, Apple occasionally ticks me off with changes to IOS. For example, I think it was when 11 was released, they broke their podcast player, and I foolishly updated my phone literally the day I was to drive to Phoenix, a nice long 500 mile drive. The break? Let's say you want to listen to four or five Wait Wait Don't Tell Me episode. You play the oldest and the next one automatically starts. Except the program broke and it wouldn't start the next, so you're zipping down the interstate at 75 MPH and have to fumble with your phone to start it. How the hell did this not turn up in testing?

So on occasion I think about buying a flip phone that has a 4G hotspot, plus an iPod Touch to hold all my apps, music and podcasts, and data stores and go back to something resembling the late '90s.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-imessage-zero-click-hacks/

Apple doesn't make 5G iPhones yet. AT&T doesn't have a widespread 5G network yet. In December I wrote about AT&T fake labeling their phones to appear on a 5G network even though it's just an upgraded 4G network.

But with a forthcoming iPhone update, some iPhones will display that they're connecting to a 5G network even though the phones are electronically/physically incapable of connecting to 5G because they don't have the internal guts.

*sigh*

Apple and AT&T did the exact same thing in 2012 with 4G and LTE, so it's a familiar ruse between them.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/4/18211044/apple-att-5g-e-network-icon-iphones-misleading-ios-software-update-beta

It's called Lenstag, and I don't know if there's an Android Store version. Basically it lets you inventory your equipment in your system so your serial numbers are logged in case of theft. In addition to this, it maintains new and used prices! For example, it's saying that my Lumix DMC-LX7 is worth $280 used! I'm quite happy with that price, I'm hoping to buy a replacement while in Phoenix next week and sell this one to offset the cost of the new one, and knowing that price will help move the LX7.

Could be very handy if you went to insure your gear: if you registered everything, you'd have a list of all your equipment with serial numbers and new prices in one place.

The program also lets you transfer ownership of equipment when you sell items, which is cool. And you can report items as stolen! And apparently, it will inspect metadata on posted photos and watch for serial numbers of your equipment turning up, presumably in conjunction with things reported as stolen. It didn't list any photos as having been taken with my equipment, but none of it has been reported stolen, so I'm not sure about that feature.

I bring this up as I just received an email from the creator, who has added a new feature: online camera manuals! Not available for all equipment, only most: my LX7 is not there, it's still a cool feature.

The program is free, there's also a Pro version that has instant registration of your equipment for a $20 annual fee.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lenstag/id759999902?mt=8

They broke the podcast player. Now it will play one podcast episode, regardless of how many episodes are under that title, and then stop. NOT good when you're solo driving 500 miles. And a day or two ago they released the first patch as they badly broke email for MS Exchange users, but they didn't fix the podcast app.

I worked out a partial alternative of using my iPad Mini, which is still running iOS 10.x, but it's not really practical as it only has 16 gig of memory and has LOTS of programs and books, and there's only so many things that I can easily delete.

For me, iOS 11 has otherwise been OK and I haven't otherwise experienced any trouble.

Then I had a thought. Why not hit a pawn shop and see about getting a used iPod Touch?

So I did. And they had one. Except it wasn't an iPod Touch: it was an iPhone 3GS. With 16 gig of memory. For $20!

It suits my needs perfectly, even if it is limited to iOS 6.x. It plays podcasts correctly. I turned off the cellular, I'd leave it in airplane mode except it needs Bluetooth on to properly connect to my car. It doesn't need any programs or data, so I don't bother linking it to my iCloud account, thus it has pretty much the full 16 gig of memory available for podcasts. I'll have my iPhone 6S for music for my trip home Friday, and I'll have my (sort of) new iPhone 3GS for listening to podcasts for the drive.

And for $20!

When I get home, I hope to do a restore to get my iPhone 6S back to iOS 10, but it's possible that Apple has already deleted the encryption keys and I'm stuck. They do that a couple of weeks after a new iOS is released. We'll find out Friday night.

The dangerous thing is the pawn shop has a 64 gig iPad 3 with T-Mobile cellular for $125! I've been thinking about getting a full-size iPad for some time now, mainly to get more memory: I'll freely admit that it's pretty stupid getting an iOS device with only 16 gig of memory, the OS just takes too much of it for it to be useful. I'm VERY torn on whether or not to get it. I shouldn't, but the odds of me finding another deal like that are very low.

And it now occurs to me that I could return the 3GS, which would drop the price on the iPad to $105, restore my Mini to the new iPad and go back to using my Mini as a podcast player until Apple gets around to fixing the podcast app....

Maybe that was midnight Cupertino time, I don't know. Regardless, both of our iPads are too old, as is my wife's iPhone 4S. That leaves my iPhone 6 as the only device that can run it, and since I'm about to head for Phoenix and I won't have my iMac with me for a system restore should something glitch, I think I'll hold off a bit. For that matter, the new MacOS is supposed to drop in a couple of days, and I won't be upgrading to that until I get back from Phoenix, so I'll probably just do a device upgrade frenzy when I get back.

Some of the features in iOS 11 are pretty cool. I like the 'press the power key 5 times to disable the fingerprint reader', definitely cool. It doesn't materially affect me as I don't use the fingerprint reader to unlock my phone, but that's OK. And they've apparently made the reverse video mode more intelligent for not reversing images, which is good. I really wish they had an override for web pages and such so you could force white letters on black background, for example. That's what I love about Ars Technica and hate about most others, I find white on black to be much easier on my eyes.

But I DO NOT like updating my phone apps over WiFi (as I wrote about last week), I thought loading apps through iTunes was easy and one-stop syncing. They've just increased the hassle and it's likely to increase the time between me doing updates from daily to weekly or monthly or whenever. Which increases potential security vulnerabilities, which ticks me off. iTunes should be a framework that supports plug-ins, then all they'd have to do is write a plug-in that reads the app store for just iPhone/iPad/Watch apps, and re-casts them in to the iTunes framework. It's still just one app store, it just looks like two.

Twits.

GET OFF MY LAWN! Kids these days.

(In a totally unrelated incident, I got "Sir'd" last week! I was sitting in a barber shop waiting for my guy to finish with his current client, and the other guys started talking about horror movies. I'm not a big horror movie fan, so I didn't participate until later. Now, this barber shop is an actual barber shop, not a hair salon, run by 30-somethings with tattoos up to their necks and possibly beyond, smoking their e-cigs and playing that reissued Nintendo Classic that came out last year when they're slow. I don't really care. So what if they're young. I piped up about some movie, I don't remember what, throwing in my $0.002 worth, and this one barber later comes over and apologizes, saying that he didn't know that he had an older gentleman in the shop and they wouldn't have been talking like that if they'd known! Yes, dude, I'm 55, and some day you'll be there, too, if you're lucky. Maybe I'm moving towards the far side of middle-age, but trust me, though I am growing older I definitely have not remotely grown up. In my headspace I'm still a 30-something, though my body constantly reminds me that I am not. I laughed at him, reassured him that I was not offended, then told them a pretty grizzly story about a quietly spectacular suicide that happened while I was working for the police department. The crime lab was in the basement as was computer services, and the car that this guy offed himself in was so pungent that finally I told my boss that I'm taking off for the day. The fire department later used that car as burn practice.

I'll go in to no further details, unless people want it, in which case I'll put it in a new post under a cut.)

It's probably true of any smartphone, but I've never worked with an Android so I don't know about them.

We got home at 2:30 this morning from nine days in Phoenix. Originally we were coming home Wednesday, but it snowed 5" Tuesday night and I had my summer tires mounted last week. The daytime temperatures Wednesday and Thursday were high enough that the snow would be almost entirely gone by the time we arrived, so we stayed another day.

While I'm away from home, I don't do phone updates. My iPhone is synced through my iMac, which doesn't travel with me. I'll sometimes download podcasts directly on my phone when I'm away, but that's the only updates that I'll do. So I get home and power up my computer this morning, and there's a ton of application updates. Not surprising, Apple just did OS updates on their Mac and tablet devices, so presumably app developers are also updating their apps.

What did surprise me was when I went to sync my phone, it loaded 150+ apps that were not normally on to my phone. I had five or six pages of apps that were not previously there. They were things that I had previously downloaded, tried, and decided that I didn't want that app. It might be a temporary removal, it might be permanent. But I don't want it on my phone right now.

Well, it took a LOT of time to sync my phone and for all those apps to transfer over, then it took time for me to delete those apps and re-sync my phone. But now all seems well. Fortunately I didn't have to delete them from the phone itself: the iTunes page for my phone lets me delete stuff there, which was very fast.

Still, quite annoying. This had better not become a recurring nightmare!

One thing that I find a little interesting is how people arrange things on their smartphones, I had the same interest in how they arranged menus and desktop icons on their computers. It always seemed to me that it was rather haphazard and usually without a goal in mind.

In my case, on both my Macs I really don't use the desktop. I know what I want to work on, I know the apps I need, and I know where the data is located. My desktop isn't bare, but there's not a lot on it. It's used more for scratch storage for stuff that I just don't bother placing somewhere more appropriate.

I got an iPhone 4S, my first smartphone, two years ago come this November. At that time, you needed to sync it through iTunes to back it up. I did that every morning since my breakfast is reading web comics and news while eating. Now they've advanced the OS to the point that your contacts, calendar, and notes are automatically backed up via iCloud, and you have no choice in the matter: it's the only way to back them up. It was a PITB before I got everything working correctly, but it is convenient to make a change to one of those data repositories from my iMac, Air, or phone and have it reflected a few seconds later on the others.

Basically now the only time I need to sync is if I need to add new podcasts or music or remove played podcasts. Their podcast app, IMHO, sucks and I refuse to use it if I can avoid it. The fact that if you have it installed, you can no longer play podcasts through the music app, really ticks me off. So if I'm on a road trip I might install the app to download something, then I'll delete it.

I expect I'll be screwed out of that option with the next iOS version.

But I have eliminated one nagging bit of OCD: updating programs.

I've always been conscious of that little red 1 or 2 on my home screen that showed me that I had updates. I usually wouldn't update until the next AM when I was once again going through my morning rituals. This was especially apparent over the last month that I was in Phoenix on a biohazard exile. It then occurred to me that there's no reason why the app store app, which is where you not only download apps but update them, that it should be on the start page.

So I moved it to a group on the last page of apps on my phone, so I no longer see it if an update is needed. It doesn't nag me, the apps get updated usually within a day, and one small source of irritation is removed from my day.