Taxi, New York, 1957 © Saul Leiter
Convalescing from a head cold last night I watched 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter. Leiter shot some amazing sort-of-abstract, i don’t know what to call it exactly, photos in NYC from the 1950’s onward. I had never heard of him before (not surprising since I could probably only name a handful of famous photographers). But as soon as I saw his photos I knew he was someone I wanted to learn about.
Man, i spent way too long trying to get my HomePods to work with Apple’s HomeKit automations this AM. I noticed in my Home app that the latest (the really latest that doesn’t brick your HomePod) update had been installed on my stereo pair of HomePods so I was like, sweet, now I can have my early AM playlist fire up at 5:00am at the same time my Phillips lights come on really low.
No such luck. I fiddled and restarted my iPhone and my HomePods and … nothing. I could not get my HomePods to appear as an available accessory in any scene or automation.
Finally I realized that my iPhone needed to be updated to 13.2 (not a painless process as I needed to force restart my iPhone before the update would install).
Once the HomePods were on 13.2.1 and my iPhone on 13.2, everything proceeded apace.
I still can’t get handoff to work correctly, because i suspect the stereo pairing is using the further HomePod that I’m too lazy to walk to to accept the handoff transfers.
Anyway. Apple has strayed pretty far from the ease of the Macintosh, that’s for sure.
With my beloved 13″ MacBook Pro Retina (early-2015) aka THE last good MacBook Pro in the shop, I’ve had to get productive on the iPad Pro I recently picked up. Probably have a whole host of things I’ve learned on making the transition to iPad that are worth sharing but top of mind is getting wordpress blog posts working.
Mostly this is because the only app (so far) from my MacBook that doesn’t have an equivalent on the iPad is MarsEdit. MarsEdit is hands-down the best blog writing software ever made. ANd it doesn’t run on iPad.
So I’m using the iOS WordPress application. Not nearly as nice and getting it up and running was fraught with hoops I had to jump through.
First was updating all sorts of stuff on my Linode box because, well, I’ve been lazy and running all sorts of old versions of php. What was cool here was being able to use the Linode console in safari to upgrade Ubuntu. Truly living in a sci-fi like future when a table can do this:
Anyway, once the housekeeping updates were completed, I was still running into errors posting entries (especially attachments) to this site.
I believe some of the errors were tied to the fact that I have a self-hosted wordpress site but was logged into the iOS wordpress application using my “wordpress.com” account. So I logged out of the wordpress app and instead, I used the credentials from my self-hosted site.
But before I could do that I needed to resolve the “Couldn’t connect. XML-RPC is missing from server” error that I was getting. I don’t think I ever had to install an xml-specific package for earlier versions of PHP but now that I’m running 7.3 I had to run:
sudo apt-get install php-xml
sudo service apache2 restart
That allowed the wordpress iOS application to connect to my self-hosted site and upload images.
Heady times, for sure!
Still looking for a MarsEdit equivalent on iPad. Not hopeful. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to manage documents/writing on this thing. I like the built in Notes app for its syncing but interface wise it’s sort of lame and it means copy/pasting text into the wordpress app. Also lame.
Will update and the workflow process improves.
With an image!
I think my airport card in my MacBook is dying. Making some notes here in case I find a software fix. Wifi problems seem very common with this model laptop especially post-Yosemite but my wifi issues have been very sporadic until now. Now, whenever my CPU spikes my wifi drops.
Stinks.
This, I think is the log:
AirPort: Link Down on en0. Reason 8 (Disassociated because station leaving).
This command seemed to help folks back in the Yosemite days:
sudo ifconfig awdl0 down
update: that did nothing. dropping off at Genius Bar. Fingers crossed it’s just an airport card replacement.
Another update: Genius Bar was less than helpful. Tech told me to login as a different user (which I did) to see if the problem still occurred (which it did) and suggested it would be too expense to replace the display where the antennas are located (which is not the problem). Going to drop my beloved MacBook Pro off at a local repair shop this week. Given that the trackpad stutters, the thunderbolt->Ethernet is wonky and occasionally the mouse locks up, I’m thinking it’s likely an I/O board issue. Fingers crossed.
Spain’s Happy Little Carless City
Pontevedra, once choked with cars, is a laboratory for how smaller cities can implement a few simple tricks to reduce driving dramatically.
Many great points here including:
make streets for walking (get rid of sidewalks)
small, incremental steps
My hope is that one day Red Bank elects the kind of forward-thinking leaders capable of this kind of vision. We are a long way off from that.
Good to know I’m not the only one, but I don’t think the issue that I’m having is widespread which makes me nervous!
The gmail IMAP inbox on my Mac running catalina bears ZERO resemblance to the inbox I see on my iphone or in gmail thorugh the web browser. Frightening. And still AAPL is at an all time high. #freemarketfailure?
Upgrading my MacBook Pro, the Catalina upgrade hung up on “Setting up computer…” but as I had already looked into that issue for a buddy of mine the other day, I know that’a a widespread problem so I just rebooted and it everything came up fine.
Was a bit of a bummer that Scrivener 2 didn’t make the cut for Catalina and as it’s a 32-bit app and I’m not paying to upgrade I went through and exported all of my Scrivener projects as text files before the upgrade. This, part of a larger plan to try to narrow down the number of buckets/apps I use for writing/notes/etc. So exporting ten or so projects was a bit tedious but I discovered that I have written A TON of stuff over the past six years or so. Way more than I thought I had. And that’s not counting journal writing which lives in Day One.
Other than the loss of Scrivener, I’m noting mostly positives since upgrading:
I’ve been seeing references to the latest beta of Spotify on reddit where users report that Siri support now works with Spotify. This will be great if it works well!
I have been loving my stereo homepods but am itching for better automation/shortcuts and Siri integration and have been using my iTunes library to play most of the music but it’ll be great to have access to my Spotify playlists.
Been using this for work lately. Crashes pretty regularly which I could live with if it would only support emacs keybindings like Mail.app does (ctrl-a for start of line, ctrl-e for end of line). Very frustrating!
Check out my album Set It All Down on your favorite streaming service.