In case you’re not a connoisseur of technical Minecraft videos like myself – the screenshot above is not showing a mostly blank video. It’s showing a video that should fill the entire screen, but for some bizarre reason is shrunk down to the size of a stamp when rotated into landscape.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that this post actually ties back to the footnote about in-app browsers from a few days ago, because the mobile YouTube website here is of course loaded in one of those. It shouldn’t have, but it did. I don’t know why, or what I could do to make it behave differently. And I wouldn’t even care all that much if it at least almost worked. It’d be okay that it won’t be in my account’s watch history, no big deal. It might be annoying if I wanted to add it to a playlist, but really, I’m not asking for much. Just let me see the video.

I have a Google account. I made a YouTube page, channel, whatever they call it these days, which they forced on you years ago. I even pay for their Premium service. I have the official app installed on my iPhone. I’m doing everything right. I’m a good little customer.

And in theory, YouTube links should open in the app. Often they do. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I’m stuck in the in-app browser instead. Seeing ads despite paying for Premium. Not being able to interact with things using my account. Being forced to this broken experience instead. There’s no pattern as to when it works and when it doesn’t.

And of course it’s not that big of a deal. I can just copy the link, try opening it again with actual Safari. Sometimes that will open the app. Sometimes it won’t, but show the “Open in the app” bar on top, though sometimes it also doesn’t do that. And I’m just so tired. Why can’t things just work. I only want to open a damn resource. What happened that something as benign as this has become such a horror show. I honestly dread interacting with links on mobile these days, because so often it will result in a 30 to 60 second interruption where I’ll have to perform some voodoo dance to make things work.

Love it when some minor iOS update puts a few upselling ads into my settings menu. Remember when we celebrated how Apple finally stopped providers from doing this shit?

So many questions… for example: Why show this instead of restarting automatically, it’s not like I’ve got a choice.

Up until a few years ago, I used to feel good when sharing Twitter links. Compared to the other handful of websites that now make up our entire lives, it was the best option:

• Not a walled garden like Facebook or Instagram where you either don’t see any content at all or are bombarded with “sign up to continue” popups after scrolling down more than ten pixels.
• Not horribly confusing and overwhelming for people that don’t use it regularly like Reddit, be it the old or the bad design.
• Mostly clean and straightforward links.

None of that is true anymore. As a user that isn’t logged in you’re now bombarded with the same engagement nonsense as anywhere else.

Even if logged in, they’re so desperate for increasing engagement that UI clarity suffers, for example when “Related Tweets” will be shown in a way that makes them look like they belong to a thread.

And since a few weeks (for me, seems to be rolled out in stages) there’s some weird, random new tracking parameter when sharing links to tweets. Now I have to make an effort to share clean links, or rely on additional tools that automatically remove tracking garbage from URLs in my clipboard.

As a year-long Twitter user who’s always logged in on all devices, I didn’t really consciously notice how things deteriorated over time. But thanks to the fresh hell that every damn iOS app has its own integrated “browser”¹, even despite already having an account I now often see what Twitter unleashes on people not willing to succumb to their pleas for signing up.

Sometimes the squares are white, yellow, cyan, or magenta, and other times the icons render properly.

Thanks CyberMoai for the submission.

Justus writes: “For months now my 2014 MacBook Pro has been nagging me to upgrade to MacOS Monterey. And I would love to…except my laptop is older than Monterey supports!”

Thanks Justus for the submission!

If you have AirTags in the vicinity of your iPad it drains its battery for no reason.

The past months I’ve been wondering why my iPad Pro always needed to be recharged when I used to use it without charging for weeks.

I’m not the only one:

• https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unusual-find-my-background-battery-drain-after-setting-up-airtag.2294993/
• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253036053
• https://www.iphonetricks.org/how-to-fix-find-my-battery-drain-issue/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/AirTags/comments/nn5q9k/fix_for_find_my_app_battery_drain/

Literally the only helpful piece of information for me here would be the exact starting time in my current local timezone, because depending on when exactly DST starts in each country it might be an hour sooner or later.

While I do have all my devices set to English, I of course also have correctly specified where I live, so this should be about the easiest thing in the world to provide.

Instead, Siri demonstrates that not only is it unable to give that information, apparently it doesn’t even know what timezones are at all. Also it seems like I’m pronouncing “GMT” as badly as “30 minutes”.

I also recorded the attempt of getting any useful information out of my HomePod, and playing back that recording on my iPhone managed to trigger Siri on that same device. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, because things like that were already working quite well years ago. What the heck did they do to make Siri so much worse?

Are you okay, Music.app?

Less is more, or something like that.