Tag: Apple

It is Wednesday

Today is Wednesday. Know what that means? It means two days until the kids come home for their Thanksgiving break. We only have them for a few days, and one of those days is actually Thanksgiving. Somehow we have to cram all of the Christmas decorating into the rest of the time. That includes a Christmas tree. Home Depot is already selling them, so they are there if we need it. Harry wants to get one at a tree farm. I am 100% out of my element there. Personally, I want to put up the fake one we had last year. We had so many lights on that tree (including the ones that came with it) that you could LITERALLY* see it from space.

What else… I don’t know. I want Santa to bring me a new cellar. Fat chance of that. Maybe a new MacBook Pro instead? hehehe

Okay, going to work. Talk later.

*No, you could not literally see the tree from space. There were a shit load of lights though, and it was super, super bright.

Charge, Please

I really wanted to be asleep about an hour ago. What’s the hold up? My Apple Watch. The battery got pretty low today and I wanted it fully charged before I fell asleep.

Then while I was working on music I accidentally bumped it off of the charger without noticing. Oops.

It’s not 100% yet but I think it’s close enough. G’night, cruel world. Talk to you all tomorrow.

Air Pods Max Weirdness

I worked on some lyrics for three of the November songs tonight. I won’t do car music tomorrow, but whenever I do it I’ll have November stuff to work on.

I had my step son’s Air Pods Max that he loaned to me on when I started and there was weirdness. I had two guitar tracks. One was panned hard left so it only plays out of the left speaker. The other is panned hard right so it only comes out of the right speaker. When I had the Air Pods Max on I was getting stereo output, meaning I had music in both ears, but the right guitar wasn’t there. I switched to wired headphones without changing any of the tracks and the right guitar was there.

Most peculiar.

Steam Fail?

I’m a Mac user, babie. None of that Windows crap for me. Well… except for work… and except for when I want to use something that doesn’t run on a Mac.

Jen has inspired me to try my hand at gaming so I installed World of Warcraft on my Mac. It works fine. Cool. Then there was the game I tried to play the last time I tried to get into gaming… which was something like 2012 or so? Star Wars: The Old Republic. That puppy doesn’t run on Mac.

So what’s a red headed Mac douche to do? Emulate, bitches! I installed Parallels and Windows 11. That works fantastically. Groovy like you’ve read about. Next, I installed Steam. That seems okay except that I always always always lose my password and had to jump through 2000000 hoops to actually get in. Once that mess was clean I downloaded and installed Star Wars. Success! Then I had to go through another 100000 password hoops before finally getting into the game and finding out that it doesn’t work with a track pad. I’m sure it works fine if I had an actual mouse with two buttons, but for the moment?

Fail, apparently. Bummer… for now.

Daylight Savings Had Me for a Minute There

Daylight Savings is over for another year. Back to standard time for our sorry asses. Did everyone remember to turn their clocks back at 2:00am this morning?

I had a moment early today where I realized how spoiled being an Apple user has made me. I woke up to go to the bathroom, like ya do. I looked at my watch, but without my glasses it was kind of a lost cause. It looked like it was 4:00am or so, but I really couldn’t tell. The little clock I bought for Harry’s room next to my bed and it said 5:00am. Okay, that works. The alarm clock next to Jen said 5:00am too, and my CPAP said I’d been using it for five hours. So it’s 5:00am, right?

Dumbass.

As I was getting back to bed again after doing me biz (TMI, right?) I remembered about the whole turning back the clock thing and for a minute or two there I was a confused, 90% asleep red head. How could the CPAP machine say five hours if we turned the clocks back. If the clock said 5:00am, shouldn’t the CPAP have said six hours? I know 100% that I turned it on at about midnight. Weird. That’s when I remembered I’m an idiot and clocks that aren’t connected to the internet the way my Apple Watch and my iPhone are don’t magically turn themselves back.

I said it before, I’ll say it again. Dumbass.

Dumb. Ass.

Jen and I just went through the house and fixed all the non-internet connected clocks. Is this the first time in memory that on daylight savings day all of the clocks are showing the correct time? I mean, all except for the cars. It’ll take years go get those suckers right.

Happy Back to Standard Time, everyone. Enjoy the sunset at 4:29pm today.

Wait, what?

Doofus Moment

Way to go, Apple Fan Boy. Way to miss out on the simplest, yet ridiculously useful function available on your Mac.

There I was, thinking that I could only use the Messenger Application with fellow Apple folks.

Imagine my surprise when I was a single check box click away from having all of my SMS messages show up on my computer.

Ugh… dumb ass.

What was it Brody said? Here is your finger, far from the pulse, shoved straight up your ass? Something like that.*

*That’s a Kevin Smith reference. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel?

Unplanned Road Trip

I may be making an unplanned drive up to Vermont this week. Possibly soon.

Harry’s laptop has suffered a tragic accident and may be on laptop-death’s door. There is a strong possibility that I might have to run a replacement up to him. Not sure yet, but I gave work a heads up I might have to bolt with little to no notice.

If only his school let Freshmen keep a car on campus. He would have already been here and been halfway back by now.

Oh, the webs the universe weaves.

What’s Up for Sunday?

Jen has to get up early for work tomorrow so I should get up early too and do some car music. What do you think? Then when I get home I should put leads on anything I manage to finish during the car music. Sound good? We have something going on in the afternoon that’s going to pull me away from things for an hour or so. That’s cool with you, isn’t it?

After that… Halloween. Covid-19 Halloween. Covid-19 Halloween The Second Coming. Shit. Last year the city canceled it all. This year it’s going off as usual. We won’t be playing along. We’ll be hiding in the back of the house. I’ll probably be mixing something. I think you’ll be okay with it. I hope you will, at least.

So should I install Parallels on my MacBook Pro so that I can play Windows games? I had been playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic a little. I can’t play that on my Mac. If I get Parallels I should be able to play it. I wonder how much the software costs. Would you think less of me if I got it?

The Bruins are playing The Panthers tonight. They kicked our ass the other night but it was overshadowed by something to do with the sexual abuse scandal that came out of Chicago recently. I don’t know the details, I just know that a lot of people got the sack. I really need to learn the details of this story but I am still really furious over the fact that the catholic church overlooked the sexual abuse of children for decades and any time I come across a similar story I just want to fucking vomit all over the people responsible and I do not want to vomit today. You know what I mean, don’t you?

Now I am pissed off. I didn’t want to be pissed off.

To make matters worse, it’s pouring rain out. Shit. I am so sick of rain.

Facebook Fights Dirty

As we enter the fifth week of the Facebook boycott, Facebook starts fighting really dirty. Low blow, bro. Right below the belt.

Last night I got an email telling me I had 102 notifications waiting for me. One Hundred and Two. It’s not the first you-have-notifications email they’ve sent, but the last one was after only a few days away. Those bastards saved them up and threw them at me all at once. Assholes!

Okay. Wednesday is the one month mark of this fun little romp of social media defiance. When I left I didn’t think about it, I just did it. I didn’t leave one of those stupid I’m-taking-a-break posts, I just went away (and bitched about it here, over and over and over and over again). Maybe on Wednesday I’ll log in, clear the notifications, make sure there isn’t anything important, and then leave one of those stupid I’m-taking-a-break posts. Then I’ll go away again. Maybe forever. Who knows.

I’m working a half day today. My mother needs a ride to a doctor’s appointment so I am leaving early to take her. I haven’t been over to see my parents in a couple of weeks so it’s time for a visit as well. I’ll be masking up and hittin’ the road around lunch time.

Our house has been a battle ground for a long time now. Two opposing forces fighting to dominate the terrain.

Alexa

Siri

Both are stationed in strategic places throughout the house. Both are able to control the lights and some other things. Both play tunes. It’s been clear for months now that the house cannot sustain both forces. One needs to eliminate the other. In the end, there can be only one.

We bought an amazon echo before Apple’s Home app was really a thing. After having everything in the house routed through the echo for a while, I got all hot and bothered over Apple HomePod Minis and when we got one for the bedroom Jen set up everything through Home as well.

I have slowly but surely found myself using the echo less and less. I can get to Siri through my watch so when I need something I just hold down the digital crown for a tick and ask for it. The only thing the echo is really doing these days is working as an alarm clock in the bedroom. Siri can do that too, but echo somehow handles it a little better. Also, the echo we have in the bedroom is one that shows the time. The HomePod doesn’t do that. It’s a small edge for the echo but a noteworthy one.

Over the last couple of days Jen has been making a conscious choice to start using Siri instead of Alexa. It is clear that finally the war for control of our house is coming to an end. Siri will be victorious. Long live the winner of the personal digital assistant wars.

Now if we could just get Google to let Apple run our Nest thermonstat.

Okay. Time to go to work. Happy Monday, everyone.

ADDENDUM: I got another Facebook email. It’s 106 notifications now. Ugh.