Tech
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!
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!
Ecobee 3 lite seems nice but had to change its default 0.5°f “Cool Differential Temp” to 1°f. We keep our house pretty warm so its heat saturated mass rapidly causes air temp to rebound. To Nest’s credit, I think it had a non-programmable ~1°f diff. Short-cycling 👎
Bye bye Nest Thermostat Gen 1. Hello ecobee3 lite! I revised the Nest’s fancy screws to avoid drywall anchors — critical as the drywall is backed by 2x4s. Super easy install with the common wire I enabled last weekend.
Can’t wait to replace the 1st gen Nest Thermostat with this Ecobee3 Lite. A Friday project.
Going to be jealous of that iPhone 11’s 📱grown up front camera! About time it has near parity to the rear.
Preparing to move away from Nest (Google) to Ecobee this week. Just used a spare thermostat wire and C terminal on HVAC mainboard to create a common wire. Minimizes fussing with wires at the mainboard and no PEK for me!
