Tag: Apple

My First Apple Watch Issue

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but I just stumbled upon my first Apple Watch issue. Last night I noticed that none of the third party apps I’ve installed were working. I got a prompt to unlock my iphone, even when my iphone wasn’t locked. Odd.

I tried again today and got the same error. I googled the error message and found an Apple Forum post that told me I needed to unpair my phone and watch, and then re-pair them. The unpairing process includes a back up, so I wasn’t going to lose any data.

The unpairing worked as expected. No issues. When I tried to re-pair them though it acted a little strange. First, the watch rebooted and then went through a pretty slow process that looked as though it was un-synching. None of the how to’s on the Apple Forum mentioned that. After a few minutes I was prompted to pair the watch to a phone and I was off and running. The phone gave me the option to restore from a back up and most everything worked. The only thing I’ve noticed is that the MLB app seems to have gone missing. Not a big deal though as it only showed info from games played by the team I have marked as my favorite on the iPhone App and that team’s season is over.

Everything is back to normal now, but having to unpair the watch and the iphone still counts as my first largish Apple Watch issue. Hopefully it is also the last.

To show that third party apps now work, here is a pic of my ceiling, taken with ProCam:


Originally published at robj2112.wordpress.com on October 8, 2015.

One Day Behind

I feel so out of touch. There was an Apple Event yesterday and I was not able to follow along with any live blogs or anything. I missed almost all of the new gadget revelations.

I know there’s a new iPad that I want.
I know there’s a new WatchOS.
I know there’s a new iPhone.

I know these things, but I know nothing about them.

My step kids’ father loaded a release candidate of the new iOS onto their phones. Last night my step son loaded a release candidate of the new WatchOS onto his watch. I’m not going to do either of those things. When it comes to software releases, I prefer to play it safe(er) and wait for the actual release. Still… they have stuff on their devices that I don’t have! I am so far behind the curve right now. I have actual gadget envy over gadgets that I actually have!

Touch Screen

I had a new experience as a computer user today.  I had to use my laptop to connect to work.  I have an HP lappie running Windows 8.1 that has a touch screen.  The built in mouse pad is god awful so I keep a USB mouse with me.  Unfortunately, the battery died today.  I started using the mouse pad but it is practically useless so I started using the touch screen.

It was not an enjoyable experience.  I use an iPad all the time and I love love love it, but the same interface on a laptop was just painful.  I think it might have been an ergonomic thing.  I hold the iPad close to my body, where the laptop had to be held further away, on a desk.  Something about having to reach for the screen to tap something made it almost unbearable.  Fortunately for me I was able to snag some batteries.

It just makes me wonder.  If I were using an Apple laptop with a touch screen, would the form factors have been different somehow?  Apple is all about design.  I don’t get that vibe off of HP.  HP seems to be all about getting cheaper machines onto the street.  I just can’t imagine how Apple would have done anything different.

Needless to say, my MacBook Pro comes with me tomorrow instead of the HP.

Time Machine

Apple’s disc backup system is the best.  Really.

I’d been using a nice iMac for quite a while.  I had a big external hard drive plugged into it that I used for Time Machine backups.  Once and hour or so it would back up my entire machine.  Totally awesome.  Last night I took over use of my wife’s Mac Pro which she tried to sell on ebay twice without getting any bids (ebay can kiss my pasty white ass).  She really had to twist my arm on this deal.  I mean, can you see how fast the type is getting into the window?  Can you?  No, actually you can’t.  But let’s just take it as written that the Mac Pro is freakin’ fast.

As I’ve done every time I’ve set up a new Apple computer I plugged in that trusty Time Machine drive, hit command-R when the new computer booted up, and went to restore from a back up.  This time it didn’t work.  The hard drive on my iMac is actually bigger than the hard drive on this Mac Pro.  So over to the Migration Assistant I go!  I restored all of my preferences and settings and all of my applications, but none of my data and documents.  That fit easily.  I may go back again and see if I can cherry pic specific folders of data to bring in as well, but for now I have my former system back, just on a significantly swankier machine.

All thanks to Time Machine.

Time Machine rules.

Fanboy Stress

A couple of hours ago there was an issue with one of the computers in our house. It was an old iMac that one of the kids uses and it needed assistance. My wife and I snuck over to the Apple store to get a piece of hardware to help. While we were there we got to touch an Apple Watch.

Yeah… oh babie. We got to fiddle with the watch. Just a little bit. We couldn’t try it on because we didn’t have an appointment, but we got to futz around with the screen a little.

You know, it’s bad enough that my step son and his father have already ordered watches for themselves. I already knew that once the man started coming home with an Apple Watch on his wrist that I would be overwhelmed with temptation. Unfortunately for me I didn’t even last that long. I’m already in fully tempted mode!

This is awful! How is a ridiculous fanboy like me going to say no now?

I don’t want one.
But I want one.
But I don’t want one.
But I want one.
But I don’t want one!
But I want one!

Oh the horror. The horror.

Battery Killer

This is just a quick observation about how you should pay attention to warning messages.

I was in between meetings at work today. I had my MacBook Pro with me so I opened it up to check my mail. One email needed a quick response but I had to use one of our applications to look up a relevant piece of data. The app doesn’t run on Mac so I opened up Parallels to run it in Windows. As it loaded I got a warning saying that I was running on battery, blah blah blah. I ignored it.

20 minutes later I was shutting down and I noticed the battery percentage had dropped 20%. TWENTY PERCENT! Holy cow, Parallels was right to warn me! Sheesh! I should pay more attention to stuff like that.