Setting aside the fact that I needed to sign up for an account before I was even able to enable Bluetooth on my new Denon speaker, this screen in its app was funny: The Update Later button remained disabled. I waited for several minutes, switched to other apps and back a few times to give it a chance to update (the button state, I mean) but no dice.

Not a big deal because I could just update later by… not updating now. If I had actually needed the app as opposed to just using the speaker as a dumb network audio target, this probably would have been more inconvenient – as there was no other way out of this “modal” dialog.

The two cardinal sins of displaying image attachments on social media or instant messengers – cropping and overlays. Even my most normie friends these days have learned to send a “might be cropped” warning alongside photos or screenshots where important details are not right in the center. Because we’ve all been burned often enough by some smart algorithm that had to shave 20 pixels off, just so the result fits the beauty ideals of some idiotic design instead of being actually useful in the real world.

But that’s just a tangent – this example shows the other crime: Overlays. Just don’t do it. Never. Don’t try to be smart about it, you will not succeed. In this example it was impossible for me to view the full picture in the Mastodon web UI. Tapping the Hide button makes it go away – but also does indeed hide the entire image. The revealed image always has the Hide button on top of the entirety of a speech bubble of a web comic with three or four panels total. That is like 25% of the entire thing. Why can’t the button be below or above the image? Phones are the size of phablets these days anyway, don’t tell me there’s no screen estate.

Call me crazy, but isn’t Siri is kinda… suggesting… that I do in fact have Slack, YouTube and Overcast on my phone? Meaning that those should be search terms that have results? (Search was actually just completely broken until I rebooted – nothing showed any results.)

All three of the files on top have been created/exported/transferred in the exact same way: Exported from the recently discarded (severely underrated, btw) Clips app, then sent (all in one transfer) via AirDrop. How on earth is it possible for them to have different cases on the file extension?!

Ogres Websites are like onions, they have layers!

Thanks for the submission, Private Sender said:

Is this what is meant by the Content Mines? We have to dig through layers of cruft to get to what we’re looking for?

Our corporate IT policy enforced the Tahoe upgrade on my work Macbook – now I’m getting these warnings when I connect it to my screen. I do so via a single USB-C connection for both display and power, and I’ve got half a dozen other devices (a webcam, my keyboard, the tiny amp for my mic, a Litra Glow, a Stream Deck…) connected through the integrated USB hub. Everything works as before, so why bother me with this?

If only there was a way for a cloud service to do background tasks without relying on the user’s browser to stay open.

Really bizarre situation I somehow ended up in a while ago: When switching back from picture-in-picture mode, only the video itself was reset but the overlay remained active and could still be used to control video playback. It came back when trying to dismiss it, so I had to force-quit the app.

I’d love to see the algorithm here. I get that sometimes there’ll be silly edge cases because processing language is always tricky, but replacing a full stop at the end of a sentence with … and Read More genuinely seems like a bug. The bubble even ends up slightly larger in the “truncated” version because the extra line of text for the Read More.

Excuse the Kraut – you can tell via the pictogram used in the tutorial message that this highlight should be on the right-most item instead of… somewhere. Remember 15 years ago, when iOS made fun of Android for having different screen sizes?