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.
Looking toward Saint John Mountain from near Fouts Springs, CA. Chaparral plants.
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.
Visited some tree frogs in the forest today. Pseudacris sierra.
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… 😱📱
The Prisoner, episode 10, “Hammer into Anvil” — soo good.
Today’s sourdough with a side of Annie Cat stare.
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.
Tree says “It's not fall, but spring!”, Other Tree says “FALL!”
The Lapins Cherry has some confused or mutated buds. It’s probably nothing to worry about. The dormant appearing plum tree, however, did not look well so I checked if it was alive. There’s still some green in a cutting so… I suppose it’s still alive. I needed to prune that branch anyway.
A very good lake. 🥾
Also in bloom! Eriogonum fasciculatum (California buckwheat).
Front yard native plants currently in bloom: Epilobium canum (California Fuchsia; red flowers adored by hummingbirds) and Baccharis pilularis (Coyote Bush; small, pleasantly scented white flowers loved by small pollinators).
Only those with broken circadian rhythms get an hour extra of sleep going to standard time.
We’re starting to get some color on our Mandarins. These should be perfectly sweet by end of December 🌳
In the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness on the Mendocino National Forest via the Ides Cove trail: A landslide-related fissure and then a view.
19 trick-or-treater’s. Half last year. Fortunately, we’re stuck with good candy and not the milk duds with taffy (where milk duds taste like strawberry taffy). Happy Halloween 🎃
Yesterday: Mount Shasta from near Mount Linn. 🥾
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!