This is one of those issues, the picture above will make sense towards the end. After upgrading to macOS 11.1 (not 11.0.1!), I was unable to participate in Google Meets calls:

• Upon joining a meeting, all other participants appeared as if they had disabled their camera and microphone
• Despite seeing my own image and the mic indicator clearly picking up me speaking, towards all other participants I appeared as if I had disabled my camera and microphone
• Chat messages within the Google Meets room would go through in all directions, so some communication was at least possible

This was happening in all my browsers (Safari, Firefox, Chrome) and regardless of if I was using my corporate account or my personal account. Some research revealed that I was not alone in having that problem. Some more research revealed… well… I don’t quite know how to put it. Insanity? Madness?

Seriously, go read through that Google support thread. It’s a perfect summary of the technology hellscape we’re living in:

1. No official response whatsoever, even for people who pay for the product.
2. A “Platinum Product Expert” (whatever the heck that is) hits the user with some generic copy&paste “solution” that has nothing to do at all with the described problem
3. The same “Platinum Product Expert” (whatever the heck that is) then again grossly misinterprets the actual problem, and rather assumes that the user is simply too dumb to use and understand the product. (Which tells you a lot about the quality of Google products…)
4. A ton of other people report having the same issue, some of them including different and bizarre workarounds (that only work for some users, of course):
   • Use Firefox
   • Unplug all USB-C devices
   • Disconnect your external monitor
   • Route all your traffic through a VPN
   • Change IPv6 configuration to “Link-local only”

Personally, I got it to work by enabling WiFi and unplugging my ethernet cable from the USB-C network adapter. This was in the last few days before the holidays, not too many meetings afterwards, so I mostly forgot about it.

In the first week of the year, I noticed something peculiar during meetings, though. I looked like shit, and not just because I slept too little. Now take another look back at the image on top. The left version is how my camera feed used to look during meetings. And the right version is how it looked now. It’s zoomed in. And believe me, when I actually sit in that chair it looks much worse. You can open the image and zoom in, you’ll see it’s also quite washed-out on the right. It took me a while before I connected this to the problem from above. First I thought maybe 11.1 updated my webcam drivers and now uses some shitty face detection zoom-in, or Google Hangouts Meets got that feature.

But no – for some reason, Google decides to choose 360p when I’m on WiFi and set quality to “Auto”. Even though my connection is more than capable of handling 720p over WiFi, as proven by dozens of meetings I’ve successfully handled with forcing the quality to 720p.

And apparently this setting not only influences how Google sends your webcam video signal, but also what video signal it requests from the webcam in the first place. In my case, a shitty zoomed-in low-resolution signal.

Before Big Sur, you could drag something to the very edge of the screen where the Trash dock icon is located, release the mouse and the file would get trashed. Now you have to move upwards a few pixels to actually hit the Trash. Seems like Big Sur is all about that sweet pixel-precision.

I wonder how much longer the Apple icon in the menu bar will remain infinitely large.

Thanks Fuchen for the submission!

As the most annoying year in recent history draws to a close, we wanted to look back on it a bit – it was the first full year of us doing this fun little blogging project. A huge shoutout to the grumpy website, which inspired us to start documenting all the annoying things we used to just send each other via instant messengers.

At the beginning of this year we joked that it would be funny if we managed to get to 100 followers on Twitter by the end of the year – as of now we’re way past 250. We’re really happy that so many of you can relate to our grievances, thanks for making our 2020 a bit more fun!

We independently looked through all our (140!) posts of this year, and these are the ones we both chose as our favorites:

• Bluetooth and USB-C at the same time is like whack-a-mole, and this is still happenening on the new M1 Minis. Absolutely ridiculous state of affairs.
• Apple Music UI after the great rewrite. Check out this more thorough video review, too.
• The greatest time selection UI you’ll ever see
• Quick reminder that Apple hates the open web just as much as Google
• The web hates you too, though
• Apple bringing some much needed rest in this trying year
• We almost always try to also file bug reports, but sometimes that’s easier said than done
• This rather wordy post about how confusing one single Mail.app prefpane is. It took many hours before we felt like we really understood how it actually works.
• Calculating sizes is hard
• Not a big problem, but this confusing message feels like a good metaphor for the lack of attention to detail that is plagueing Apple these days.

By the way, we love to hear about the annoying things you encounter. Recently we added a submissions page to answer frequent questions regarding that. (We even got some requests for sponsored posts, can you believe it?! We’re not opposed to it completely, but it has to feel right – and so far it hasn’t.)

Here’s to a less annoying 2021! 🎉

Sorting by date. Some mails look identical, but they are not, sorry for the rather confusing screenshot. Also the topmost email did not actually arrive after the two emails below it, it’s not an email delivery issue. I got the three DPD emails at 17:30. They sat in there until eleven pm, then the two new mails from Twitter came, and this is how they are sorted. Force quitting the app twice (!) solved it.

I don’t understand how the default inbox list view in the default email application on iOS can still be so damn buggy one major release after the big rewrite. I don’t know the details – as far as I understand it, they mostly built a completely new list view that is more performant and much better to use as a developer? That’s great, but if it simply does not work, that’s not really worth it then, is it?

Why can’t I get that kinda bug on my bank account instead? 💯 I’d gladly accept 130% of my next salary transaction! (I had to quit the program to stop the download after I waited for it to reach more than 150%, and I only noticed it in the first place thanks to macOS’ “Low on disk space” warning popup.)

Brief editorial note: Happy holidays, and here’s to all of us having a 130% next year! 2020 hasn’t been the easiest of years – one of the highlights for us was definitely to see with how many of you our woes resonate. Stay safe, everyone!

Adnan Aga (Thanks for the submission!) wonders – if Apple Pay is so great, why can’t it be used to buy AppleCare? I don’t want to overuse this old quote from Tim Cook, but that would seem like such an obvious integration.

I simply clicked the tracking link in the confirmation email I got from DHL. This number (I redacted it via web inspector for the screenshot) comes from you, not from me. Check yourself.

If only 940 MB was more than 807 MB. But obviously that’s not the case in a world where 179 GB is 95,07 GB.

Thanks for the screenshot, CyberMoai!

This seems to be something rather specific to my setup, because I have seen no mention of this anywhere else, but ever since upgrading to Big Sur¹, both Safari and Messages crash a lot. The above is just a fraction from the past few days, going by the crash logs in Console.app it’s been one to two crashes per app and day. It happens at completely random times – sometimes one or both will have crashed during sleep and I’m greeted by the dialog when opening up the laptop again. Sometimes it happens during idle when one of the apps is just open in the background. Most often it happens exactly when I’m switching back to either app, and as far as I can tell, only when I’m using the Dock icon, never with Cmd+Tab.

I’m mentioning this detail because another annoying detail is hiding there. For the first few times I almost didn’t notice these “crashes upon clicking the Dock icon to switch to that app”. Because the crash report takes a pretty long time to even popup, but the app crashes absolutely instantly. During normal usage this makes it seem like my click simply wasn’t going through: I click Messages.app, it crashes within a millisecond of that click. I’m confused as to why Messages.app is not showing after I switched to it by clicking the Dock icon. My mouse cursor is still above the Dock icon, so I click again. Messages.app now restarts, also very quickly, and my end goal is achieved: Messages.app is now the frontmost app. I didn’t even notice that it crashed. I actually only found out how often this was happening when I noticed multiple crash report dialogs being open in the background when using Exposé days later. With Safari it’s more noticable, as all tabs have to reload their content after a crash.

(Submitted as FB8943123.)

It’s always baffling to me that not even companies the size of Twitter have tests in place that check links in their email templates for 404 errors. How is a normal person supposed to have the slightest chance of developing a sense for security and trust online?

By the way, they still haven’t fixed the misplaced dot in their well-intended but pretty wrong “This is totally legit” info box. According to that box this link is trustworthy (except for the missing dot, of course): https://manuelgrabowski.de/totally/legit/super/secure/for/real/twitter.com/trololo/

• starts with https://
• contains twitter.com
• browser displays padlock icon (open it to verify)