Before the release of iOS 13, Joy and I used a shared Apple Reminders list called “Grocery” to keep our grocery list in. I’ve found the Reminders app to be completely broken for me now in iOS 13. I can’t get my phone, ipad, and icloud.com to agree on which lists I have. Apple has explicitly stated sharing a list is broken in iOS 13: Sharing a Reminders list using the Add People function does not work currently in iOS 13.

Complications work much better with WatchOS 2 (I’m on 2.2). No more rebooting the watch to get the sunset time. But Apps are still slow. WatchOS 2 brought color to the complications on the Utility face. Most complications look nice with color, but the Sunrise, Stopwatch, and Timer are a hideous orange, which forces me to set the second hand to match. So instead of using my favorite yellow second hand:

After five weeks with apple watch, here are some thoughts on the various faces. Note: when I refer to a half complication, below, I’m talking about the one which will only show the date, the day of the week and the date, or nothing. Chronograph The chronograph face allows four-and-a-half complications and is one of my favorite faces, thanks to discretely small hour-indicator numbers, beautiful hands and layout, and one-tap access to start the chronograph (which is mission-critical on my wrist!

I’m looking forward to the day when apple allows all iOS apps to show information in their icons, like the apple calendar and clock apps do. Just a number badge is so boring in our modern world!

I’ve had trouble with one of my macs not syncing to iCloud. Specifically, if I update a document on my second mac, it goes to iCloud just fine (I can see the updates on iCloud.com, my iPhone, and my iPad) but I don’t get the update on my first mac. The best workaround I’ve found is to make sure both macs are awake and online when a document is modified. it seems if a mac is offline and misses the new data push from iCloud, the mac never requests new data from iCloud.

I’ve now turned off background app refresh for all apps. I didn’t realize, at first, that background app refresh could be disabled. It can, though, on a per-app or global basis. so I turned it off completely.

I noticed my phone having shorter battery life and staying warm when I wasn’t using it. In Settings > Privacy > Location Services I disallowed the Facebook app from being able to use my location. Problem seems to be solved. My iphone now stays at room temperature when I’m not using it. How did I decide to turn off location services for Facebook? iOS 7 added a feature allowing apps to occasionally update in the background.

With the 7.1 update, I’m much more comfortable with iOS 7. I no longer miss iOS 6. The updated lock screen and phone apps are the best touches. I especially like the new effects when waking up or turning off the screen: a subtle, super-fast zoom in on wake and zoom out on sleep. Making the transition animations shorter is also nice, everything feels snappier because of it. The new calendar app looks nice but is still clunky from a usability perspective.

I’ve been quite thrilled with the new 15” macbook pro I got at work, with one hitch … it often goes to sleep randomly when running on battery. Even while I’m typing. I finally figured out why. My new money clip wallet has an inordinately strong magnet in it.

I set up mail.app on Mountain Lion with all my accounts, including the Apple ID I used with MobileMe. The result was nearly every operation in mail.app resulted in a minute or two of the spinning beach ball. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I noticed errors in the Console.app referring to my MobileMe’s apple id, so I deleted that account completely from Mail.app and now it all works great!

MacVim now supports OS X’s full screen mode! Awesome.

Did you get the iPhoto app for iPhone and iPad yet? I did, and was disappointed at first. Until I read this iPhoto review. Now I love to use iPhoto to winnow my multiple shots of the same scene down to one and only one photo. I favorite the winner, then delete all of them from camera roll. iPhoto saves its own copy of any photo you favorite or edit.

Apple maintains a table mapping your Apple ID to your iOS devices (probably by serial number but possibly by SIM card). When you sell an iOS device, you should first turn off iMessage before restoring the software. If you forget, though, or your iOS device is stolen, an alternative way to disable iMessages on the device is to go to apple’s support page, log in with your Apple id, and you’ll see all the devices apple has associated with that Apple ID.

A coworker’s mac just suffered a hard drive failure, causing me to urgently want to plug in all my Time Machine backup drives again. I recently plugged a new external drive into my mac mini, to store movies on to be streamed through the apple tv. the mac mini only has two usb ports, and the other port was in use for the keyboard and mouse. so I unplugged the keyboard and mouse and plugged in the time machine drive.

long story short, replacing just the screen wasn’t sufficient. the home key was still activating spuriously. I went back to the apple store and they finally gave me a new phone. I had only 22 days left on the warranty!

I got another appointment at a genius bar. after telling the long story, and heading him off at the pass when he started to tell me to reset it to factory defaults and not restore, he replaced the screen. I think the phantom home key presses are gone, but it might have happened during a phone call once, last night. we’ll see.

I dropped my iPhone on a sidewalk in December, shattering the screen. Apple sold me a new one for $200. After I restored my backup to the new phone, within a couple weeks the iPhone started pressing the home button by itself. That is, it would jump out of whatever app I was in, then jump back and forth between the first page of the home screen and the search page.

My experience with the iPad was surprising. Some of the things I expected to not care about turned out to be impressive, and some features I was excited about wound up as letdowns. Enough generalities, let me get down to details. First, I was prepared for heft after reading many comments castigating the mass of the iPad. I found the iPad to be just right! For its size, I think its weight speaks of solidity and perhaps even quality.

oh, I almost forgot something fairly important… my mercurial I installed in my home directory still works, and X11 apps I installed via fink (like gnucash and gnumeric) still work in Snow Leopard without having to recompile them. I suspect as long as the binaries you have were compiled with an x86 target at all, it will probably still run without recompiling, just in 32-bit mode.

I updated my macbook to Snow Leopard tonight. I went to run my little C-type sizeof program, and found out that I hadn’t recompiled it since I was running on a PPC. rosetta doesn’t install by default in Snow Leopard. so I went to re-compile it only to find out gcc had gone missing. all I had to do was install the new XCode on the Snow Leopard DVD, and then download the iphone SDK 3.

I’m running Mac OS X version 10.5 (leopard), and I’ve install xcode 3.1. I need gnumeric and gnucash, which I use to track my finances. The current stable rsync version of fink contains gnumeric 1.8.1-3 and gnucash 2.2.5-52, both of which are close enough to the versions I have in Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Intrepid Ibex to be useable. gnumeric and its dependencies compiled and installed fine. the gnucash2 package, however, failed building some dependent library.