MacOS Sonoma has a new feature that groups items in grocery lists by aisle, to make navigating the supermarket more efficient. Itʼs an interesting idea that needs a bit of help.
Based on what it put under “Beverages,” I think my computer is trying to kill me.
One thing I really like about the DuckDuckGo browser is its consistency. For example, the way it consistently screws up drawing its own user interface. Almost every day I get an interface element that is black-on-black, or white-on-white.
I look forward to the day I see pomegranate-on-pomegranate.
In order to continue, Apple says I have to update all of my Apple devices. Apple also says that a bunch of my devices cannot be updated.
Why not just tell me that I cannot continue because some of my devices are outdated? Why the passive aggression?
I still use my 2013 iPhone 5🅂 today, as we begin to round the corner into 2024. Right now it's playing music in the library. It still syncs fine with iTunes Apple Music Music Finder.
In March of 2002, I bought a copy of The Prague Post and told myself, “Iʼll read this later.”
Twenty-one years later, I finally got around to it.
The Prague Post stopped publishing when COVID-19 started marching east to west around the globe. Whatʼs left of its web site appears to have been commandeered by search engine spammers. But the February 27–March 5, 2002 print issue is a window into a different era. This was a time of tremendous optimism in certain parts of the world, and especially among certain classes within the Czech Republic.
2002 was a dozenish years after the Velvet Revolution. People who were in their 20ʼs and 30ʼs at that time were by 2002 experiencing the prime of their lives. And a cadre of people who were too young to feel or understand the oppression of life behind the Iron Curtain were coming of age at the start of a new millennium. For the first time in modern history, the Czech Republic had a generation of people who never knew life in the shadow of the hammer and sickle.
What these people saw, what they experienced, and what they desired was to evolve the Czech Republic from a backwater museum piece of a century-dead empire into a modern state, fully European. A peer with Paris or London or even New York; not its grizzled, awkward grand-uncle shuffling nervously in the corner of the world stage.
There are certain times and places in history that become important and transformative. London in the 1850ʼs. New York in the 1920ʼs. San Francisco in the 1960ʼs. Eastern Europe — and especially Prague — in the early 2000ʼs was one of those places. “You had to be there” sounds pithy and dismissive, but as expressions go, it is also oftentimes accurate. No amount of playing dress-up with bad cigarettes, vile absinthe, or frilly gyration can make someone fully understand La Belle Époque. Prague was on the cusp of its own Belle Époque.
The Prague Post documented that era in a newspaper that was a little International Herald Tribune, a little Le Figaro, and a little Village Voice. It simultaneously chronicled the current lives of former despots, vetted the latest pop culture offerings, and published classified ads for cheap sex. The contents are an awkward goulash of past, present and future. Communist, capitalist, and futurist.
In this particular issue, the big stories are:
Whatʼs interesting is that looking back from a couple of decades later, a lot of the pressing issues are just the same today:
While a lot is the same, a lot has changed. There are advertisements for airlines that no longer exist offering flights to nations that no longer exist. Also, in 2002, Dilbert is still published in the mainstream press.
And it is reassuring that a brand new Dell computer feauring a Pentium Ⅲ processor can be had for just 150,000Kč. Thatʼs about $15,000 U.S. dollars in 2023 money.
I take a personal interest in the televison and radio listings because of my history in radio and television. Here are the radio stations available to the average Prague dweller in 2002:
| Frequency | Station | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 87.8 | Rádio Blaník | Top 40 |
| 88.2 | Evropa 2 | Top 40 |
| 89.5 | Country Radio | Country |
| 91.3 | Čzeský rozhlas 2 | Variety |
| 91.9 | Rádio 1 | Alternative rock, techno and jazz |
| 92.6 | Čzeský rozhlas Regina | News and music |
| 93.7 | City 93.7 FM | Top 40 |
| 94.6 | Čzeský rozhlas 1 Radiożurnál | Current affairs |
| 95.3 | Radio Vox | Top 40 |
| 96.6 | Radio Impuls | Top 40 |
| 97.2 | Rádio Zlatá Praha | Top 40 |
| 98.1 | Radio Kiss 98 FM | Top 40 through the ʼ90s |
| 98.8 | Classic FM | Classical |
| 99.3 | Radio France International | French |
| 99.7 | Radio Bonton | Top 40 |
| 101.1 | BBC | BBC news in English, plus local news from Radio Prague |
| 102.5 | Rádio Frekvence 1 | Talk |
| 103.7 | Radio Melody | Country |
| 105.0 | Čzeský rozhlas 3 Vltava | Classical |
In the interest of posterity, here is a list of whatʼs in this issue of The Prague Post. It shows the variety and quantity of news that came out of such a small paper. Iʼve listed the headlines and subheads. In the case of briefing lists, Iʼve included only the first sentence of each brief.
I can mostly understand a date picker that opens up beyond the boundaries of its containing window, if itʼs on a web page. But Reminders is a native macOS program that Apple includes with the operating system. It shouldnʼt open a date picker off the edge of the screen.
You cannot be in a hurry to reset an iTunes password. Itʼs simply not an option.
Two-factor authentication is so last Thursday. The new hotness in account security is leveraging temporal annoyance.
When you try to reset an iTunes password, not only do you have to wait an unknown amount of time to complete the process, you have to wait an entire extra day first to find out how long the process will take.
In my case, 24 hours after I got this message, I received an e-mail stating that it would take seven days before I would be allowed to reset my password. So eight days in total in order to regain access to all of my music from iTunes Japan.
It makes sense that scammers arenʼt going to be that patient. Their business model relies on the ability to flip and abuse an account nearly instantly, before the owner even knows something is happening. Eight days isnʼt going to fly on the dark web.
And to be fair, thereʼs no song in my iTunes Japan account that is so urgently needed that I have to listen to it right at this very moment, so I find all of this slow-motion hoop-jumping to be a curiosity. I expect there are other people who consider it an outrage.
But, true to its word, exactly seven days after I received the e-mail from Apple telling me Iʼd have to wait a week to change my password, another e-mail arrived with a link allowing me to do so. It took 192 hours, but at least the process just worked.™
One Finder window says I have 54GB available. Another Finder window says I have 168GB available.
Itʼs no wonder that Finder has been reviled by Macintosh users since the 1980ʼs.
Appleʼs iTunes software has a habit of upgrading the music in a person's computer every once in a while, without telling them.
But if you're the sort of person who occasionally looks through one's file system, you see it in action, because anomalies arise when automation is allowed to make changes to something as arbitrary as music.
In the screenshot above, you can see the directory that stores a copy of the Tori Amos album American Doll Posse.
Of note is the song “Fat Slut,” which has been upgraded to “Fat S__t.”
The music isn't different. Mrs. Amos still shrieks, “Fat Slut!” into the microphone. But Apple has thoughtfully sanitized the song's file name to protect the sensitive circuits in its modern computers that might become offended by the term.
Nobody tell Fat Agnus.
I donʼt know that Iʼve ever allowed a bit of placeholder text leak into production, but we all make mistakes.
Still, youʼd think that Apple Pay would have a regex or something somewhere to prevent this sort of thing.
I only clicked on the link to Wrikeʼs silly onboarding video because it promised it would only be one minute long. It was even in bold, so it must be true.
But like campaign promises and frequent flyer miles, this turned out to be a lie. The video is actually almost four minutes long.
I guess I should have expected this from the same company that only recently stopped sending out alerts with text randomly changing from Pacific Daylight to Pacific Standard time, and bogarts the web browserʼs ⇧⌘N shortcut for its own purposes.
Going to the deli makes me sad. It reminds me that I used to always bring home a slab of turkey as a special treat for Henri. He knew when I came through the door with grocery bags that it was special treat time, and heʼd hop up on the kitchen counter and dig through the bags looking for it. He was never a patient creature.
Rest in peace, little friend.
It took me a while, but I finally managed to buy each of the original cartridges released with the Atari 2600 in 1977.
The sticking point was Star Ship. It took almost a year for one to show up on fleaBay for under $50.00. My budget was $5.00. So when one finally appeared, I was all over that Buy It Now button.
To mark the occasion, I put them in a stack on the dining room table, and took photos which I then turned into i-device wallpapers. They look pretty good on my iPhone. I haven't tried them on an iPad yet, but I made them with plenty of space around so that they'll work in both portrait and landscape on an iPad.
You may notice that the screenshot with the cartridges arranged in a helix has squiggles where the time should be. This is because on weekends, I don't want to know what time it is, and iOS doesn't allow one to remove the clock, so changing it to a language I can't read is almost as good.
It's also not possible to remove the date bar, but I can replace it with the weather, which is less awful than seeing the cold, bony hand of time scratching across the top of the screen.
The original wallpaper files I created are here:
So, if I set up an iCloud e-mail address, all of the e-mail that everyone around the world sends without an address will come to me? That doesnʼt sound like fun at all.
