Ryan Mikulovsky’s micro.blog

  • Unearthed and powered up a Raspberry Pi 3. Took a bit of time to remember how I configured it for HomeBridge. Upgrading to Debian Stretch for the heck of it.

  • I’m pleased that MacOS 10.15’s Photos app reconstructs Live Photos from exported .heic and .mov pairs that I uploaded to my NAS via PhotoSync. 📱👍

  • I love Shortcuts. There goes a tedious repetitive task to oblivion!!📱

  • Never fails. This infernal badged Sys Prefs issue is so far the most annoying MacOS Catalina issue I’ve had. What services need iCloud to be logged back in? Why does MacOS forget so easily?

  • To HomePod: “How’s the timer?” HomePod: “The timer is cancelled.” 🙀🤷‍♂️📱

  • Dear iPadOS notes: I’d love a default where a new single Notes window launches when I tap your springboard icon instead of the last split screen I used with 1Writer.

  • Nest Cam vs HomeKit Secure Video

    There’s been some frustration with the current state of HomeKit Secure Video, but coming from a very pricey Nest Cam IQ Outdoor that basically is useless without another subscription (cancelled when they removed camera features), HomeKit Secure Video is a revelation. I’m using a Logitech Circle 2 with HomeKit Secure Video and its non-delayed, non-lagged, over the LAN, live video starts… every… single… time. Compare this behavior with always having to toggle the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor Cam off and on to get past the blue spinning wheel and get a several second delayed live video. So HomeKit Secure Video’s direct over the LAN live video coupled with video clips as a value add with an iCloud storage subscription, HomeKit Secure Video is great. But yes, be careful about those notifications and the sensitivity of people/animal/car detection. I’ve had people detected across the street, which frankly, is more impressive than annoying. And yes, you can only get one live stream at a time with the Circle 2. That’s workable.

  • Sometimes my Sonos goes out of sync with the HomePod. The HomePod appears to then go through a process to resynchronize — maybe 75% successful. They’re within earshot of each other so makes since a HomePod might do some fancy sync.

  • I didn’t end up with even one permission prompt after installing MacOS Catalina & launching various apps. Maybe I accidentally turned off SIP? No… that’s not it. Or it’s not so bad in the current installation version. 👍👍📱

  • So MacOS Catalina’s SideCar feature requires the Mac user and target iPad to be signed in to the same AppleID even if the iPad is connected to USB. 👎👎👎👎👎👎👎📱

  • HomeBrew and SuperDuper! just released MacOS Catalina support so I suppose I will try to upgrade today…

  • Very pleased that HomeKit Secure Video streams live video on the LAN. No more stream to cloud and download, adding many seconds of video delay & failure points. 📱

  • I finally got a HomePod and I’m impressed that it can accurately hear me mumble across the room while it plays music📱

  • Full Random Albums Playlist Shortcut (Apple Music)

    I love listening to full albums. But often I’m not in the right mood to choose them. So a long time ago I created a Shortcut that creates an Apple Music playlist of a variable number of full, track list ordered albums. It allows you to unselect albums that you have a strong opinion to not listen to. The shortcut unfortunately needs at least a 1 second wait between adding albums or it’ll silently fail and the playlist won’t be complete. Note that I mostly did not modify it to iOS 13’s new Shortcut features but hey, I think it is more readable setting specific variables. It did need tweeking from iOS 12. Get Random Full Albums Playlist Shortcut.

  • Pleased that my HomeKit devices still worked from the Home app during a big Comcast (Xfinity) & Verizon internet outage. Pretty sure Alexa and Google alternatives would have been dead.

  • Old iPad Pro 9.7” just got replaced by an iPad Pro 11”. I did not expect to be impressed by the differences but dang that’s nice!

  • I have some anxiety over the iOS 13 Reminders upgrade button. If I upgrade, then my partner has to upgrade, and she lives on reminders. So if the upgrade goes wrong… 😱📱

  • Shared Photo Libraries

    All these years Apple still has no way to share entire photo libraries with family. The shared family album is useful only to temporarily share the week’s photos. So I use PhotoSync iOS App to sync our iPhone photos to the NAS, files prefixed with first names, and then once a week manually import to the two libraries via macOS Photos. Works well enough but Photos has very poor dupe detection. Supposedly iOS detects dupes – I wish they would surface them in an aptly named album. Once imported, I use PhotoSync to mark the new imports on each device all as sync’d and then delete the week’s worth of shared photos from the family shared album. That’s two nearly exact copies of a 50 GB photo library stored in iCloud. We used to use Google Photos but decided they no longer deserved analyzing our lives.

  • iTunes Match to Apple Music

    My new iPhone refused to access old iTunes Match music, perhaps as a result of my unsubscribing from iTunes Match months after subscribing to Apple Music. I did that as Apple Music includes Match. But things broke anyway. No idea why. So I spent yesterday rebuilding my collection using Apple Music. To Apple Music’s credit, their library is massively better for British & twee pop than ~3 years ago. So with exception of Manic Street Preacher’s Know Your Enemy and older Billy Bragg albums, I only had to match really obscure stuff. I think the rebuild solved some perplexing issues such as certain matched songs never playing on Sonos or Apple TV. Also the rebuild got rid of the slight annoyance of my iTunes Match albums existing along side (eventually available) Apple Music albums. Overall, I think it was worth the effort searching for 250 or so albums and adding or matching as necessary. I also got to add many new (or older) albums from artists I like!

  • 🤦‍♂️📱 iPadOS 13.1.3

  • Oh cool. The exercise trigger for iOS 13.1.2 Shortcuts finally started working today.

  • Using iOS 13 shortcuts & iPad home screen widget to set audio output to my airplay capable Sonos speaker and then immediately play music are all I ever needed. Using control center to change audio output is 👎

  • My new favorite watch face, from WatchOS 6, is Solar Dial. I’m often outdoors for work so at a glance view of the sun ephemeris is nice. Apple put a lot of effort on this watch face!

  • The audio sync feature on Apple’s tvOS 13 is 👌 Also, here’s a🌈 🌈

  • HomeKit is great because it doesn’t require internet for day to day operations. Internet goes down, I can still operate or expect automations as normal. The same cannot be said of the other smart home ecosystems. Ecobee goes out of business? HomeKit!

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