I can’t tell when exactly this started – initially I thought this is just a temporary fluke, maybe even just my network acting up – but it’s been more than two months now since the #images iMessage extension/app(?) stopped working for me. You have to look pretty closely, but there’s actually an endless spinner in the middle of the screenshot.

It’s not an issue with my region, otherwise it wouldn’t show up at all.¹ I used a couple of different internet connections and networking setups, no difference.² It’s been the case since before 17.5, so there was at least a couple of reboots that didn’t get this unstuck either. I guess I’ll stick with GIFwrapped, which is the better app anyway.

Truly the masters of cross-platform excellence!

For several months now I have been greeted by this error at every other-ish time I boot up my Windows PC. It doesn’t seem to actually affect anything (or fix itself?), there is no issues using 1Password even when ignoring it.
I reported it a couple of times, but there’s no indication where that goes to exactly or what that report contains.

Siri Suggestions for calendar items based on emails or apps are pretty neat. I just don’t understand this mess, though:

• Blue is my personal calendar, yellow the suggestions. For all four flights my Mac showed a suggestion that was 100% identical to existing items on my calendar.
• These items came from accepting the Siri Suggestions on my phone several days before taking this screenshot. I waited to see if this was just a delay in some sync.

Why does it not realize that these are exact duplicates? Why do I even get Found in Apps suggestions on macOS? The app in question here only exists on my phone: I don’t have the Lufthansa app on macOS, I’m pretty sure they don’t even have a Mac app. So the suggestions are synced across platforms – but shouldn’t that make it even easier more possible to detect that I have already accepted them?

At least 1Password delivers a consistent experience across platforms!

As mentioned on the earlier post: This TouchID/FaceID dialog is part of an onboarding wizard that I keep getting presented with over and over again on my devices. I don’t think it’s with every update, but over the past months I’ve seen this far more often than just once per device on which I use 1Password.

Search is hard, eh?

This setting is relevant for updating alternative app stores – which for AltStore seems broken on their latest version. It’s been almost two weeks now since I’ve been getting a daily notification that there’s a new version of it available. Updating in AltStore itself does not work – which the update notes acknowledge. But neither the automatic not the manual approach in the docs linked above seem to work. I’m not the only one affected, apparently.

Look, I’m sorry. I was just trying to find a book I recently read. First I mixed up “everything” and “everybody”. And the whole “Ms.” and “Mrs.” has always tripped me up. So I didn’t search for the correct term, fair enough. But what on earth are those search results!?

If only the maker of Disk Utility and the maker of mds were the same company, maybe they could resolve this conflict.

I tried about 20 times format a damn USB drive, but macOS was unable to do it. I even rebooted halfway through the attempts, but it kept shooting itself in the foot with mds for whatever reason. I ultimately gave up and formatted it on my gaming PC (running Windows 10), where it took about 30 seconds with zero issues. Perfectly read- and usable on macOS now as well now.

1. Why are you showing me this dialog? I have been using TouchID to unlock for many years now – both with this specific account, and on this same machine. Why does 1Password suddenly force me through what feels like new user onboarding after every update?!
2. Which of these two states is supposed to be on and which is off? It’s not exactly the same color, but some pixels in each state actually are of identical color.

For some reason, most of my (ca. 12.000) songs were deleted from my iPhone – not the related meta data, though: Everything was still showing up, but the songs without album art in those screenshots would just be skipped during playback.¹ When connecting the phone, Finder would indeed have transferred almost my entire library over again. That took several days the last time I did it, when setting up the new phone.

Instead, I decided to finally give up – a more final version of Music bankruptcy. I changed the settings to not sync music anymore. It took over 20 minutes for that “sync” to finish removing everything. Afterwards I deleted Music.app from my phone. It’s hard to put into words how cathartic that felt.

I’ll be using Plexamp going forward.

Bonus: This fun bug when sharing via Messages is still around.

Speaking of extremely helpful error messages, recently this error greeted me upon retrieving my phone from my running belt after finishing a run. I guess it’s a… non-modal modal?
It doesn’t allow you to do anything until dismissing it, but it also doesn’t stop anything – notably, it skips the broken track within a millisecond and just continues playback. It happens so quickly that even when actively observing you have no chance of catching the track that actually caused it. In my case it was the zeiDverschwAendung track, but I was only able to figure that out by skipping back in history and checking which upcoming track will actually not be played after all. The screenshots above are both from troubleshooting after the fact, that’s why the “now playing” track and the problematic track are only two apart. When I got this error “in the wild”, the problematic track was at least twenty tracks in the past.

I get that stopping playback in case of such an error isn’t the right choice – during my run I certainly would have been rather annoyed by that. But is it too much to ask to just put the name of the track into the message?

Syncing the iPhone didn’t fix the problematic track, by the way. I had to change from syncing all my music to “only select albums”, select all but the one album with this track, perform a sync to have Music.app delete its tracks from the phone, and then change back to syncing all music and sync again to get it to re-transfer this one broken track.