Logitech Mouse and fallout from Multiple Clicks

All my Logitech mice seem to become unusable after about 2 years because they start making multiple clicks instead of just one.

My newest logitech mouse has started doing this after only 1 year.

This means I sometimes have multiple posts to Twitter.  I usually try to delete one of them right away.  Sometimes Twitter is smart enough to auto-reject a second identical message.  This confused me the first time I saw the special notice "You already posted that."  But sometimes Twitter does not catch this, and I have to delete one of the messages.

Today I ended up ordering 3 relays on ebay to repair one of my amplifiers.  I'm not sure how it happened but I think it was because of the multiple clicks.  I first "deleted" the extra orders but then they came back demanding to be paid anyway.  I then "canceled" the extra order.  Even after cancelling the orders, they still showed up for a few minutes as needing to be paid.  But the second time I tried to cancel it wouldn't let me, telling me I can't cancel something a second time.  Then I noticed I had two cancellation emails from ebay.  The seller has several days to approve.  It had taken me 15 minutes from the original unintended orders to the cancellations so I hope it goes well and doesn't screw up my ebay feedback because I have a lot of items to sell now.

 

Planned Obsolescence

My 12 year old Whirlpool front loading washing machine died last week.  It stopped working with error code E 28 (which means "communication failure").  According to online sources, this could be as simple as a loose connection, but was more likely to require one or two circuit boards, the central controller and the motor controller board.

This washing machine, which I may have even praised earlier in this blog, had never had any issues before.  

Some friends bought a larger model Whirlpool front loader and had many problems, finally giving up after the first expensive repair didn't last very long.  They used the machine for a total of less than 5 years if I remember correctly.  They then bought the cheapest Amana top loader to replace it.  I figured mine was better, possibly, because it was made in Germany (likely the former East Germany where Whirlpool bought a factory).

Well now it doesn't appear that any consumer Whirlpool washers are made in Germany any more.  And Consumer Reports rates Whirlpool 3/5 in reliability, while rating Samsung 4/5 and LG 5/5.  So it appears that LG are now the machines to get, so that's what I'm buying to replace my Whirlpool.

I was also more than a bit miffed that after waiting one week for service from the Whirlpool authorized service in San Antonio, they cancelled my appointment with one day's notice because they hadn't received the "likely" replacement part(s) from Whirlpool.  They suggested I make another appointment another week out, but I suspect there was no guarantee they'd even have the part then.

Finally it bugs me that a washing machine should die from a circuit board problem.  My nearly top-of-the-line washer had many special features including fan, sensing, steam, and sterilize.  It must be chock full of electromechanical parts whose long term performance probably cannot be assured.  But the factors involved in circuit board design are fairly straight forward.  Most electronic components have predictable lifespan of 20-100 years, which is also probably thermally derated.  Just about any circuit can be made to last about 20 years before the most failure prone parts--electrolytic capacitors--would be likely to fail.  UNLESS the thermal properties are not fully accounted for.

So any decent electronic engineer could design a circuit board that would last 20 years, whereas electromechanical parts are not as predictable.  In my mind there's just no excuse for a circuit board failing a complex and expensive system in just 12 years.  (And even less excuse for failing in 5 years.)

Furthermore of course a circuit board will be entirely proprietary (which computer chips and programming nowadays too) and so it will only be obtainable from the factory and as long as the factory chooses to support it.

Now it also seems that the more complex a machine, the more likely it is to fail earlier.   But it often seems that the failures found on the complicated top-of-the-line models are the same as the failures which found on the cheap models.  For example, say you have a fancy car with power door locks, power windows and automatic climate control.  You might think that would lead to reliability problems.  But the power windows and the automation part of the climate control rarely fail on fancy cars.  Instead, it's the usual stuff that fails on all models regardless of how fancy.

When and if we ever create a Sustainable Society, planned obsolescence will not be acceptable.  Stuff should be designed to be easily repairable with generic parts.

Here's an interesting article about washing machine reliability.  Their top recommendation for longevity is the Speed Queen toploader, and they talk a lot about Speed Queen and how top loaders will last longer.  But they also recommend the exact same LG model I have decided to buy as their top front loader recommendation, the WM4000HWA.  The Speed Queen frontloader costs over twice as much and actually seems to have slightly higher service calls, though it might be repairable for longer.  Like me they are infuriated that washing machines should have so many computer module failures when well designed computer modules should last decades.

Unhelpful Rejections

Earlier this year I tried to make my second submission of a music album to Routenote, which has a unique and useful "free" streaming submission service.   I worried that my first submission might not meet their standards but it sailed right through, encouraging me to do a second album and possibly meet my longstanding goal of 5 album submissions before the year end.

I had previously released 3 out of 4 of the songs on this otherwise new album on an earlier album I had released on Tunecore ten years ago.  That earlier album had used on my first and last names as artist name.  I have recently decided to include my middle name for uniqueness, so I did that for this new album and every song on it.

I figured I could get away with this change for several reasons.  For one, it's the same name really just with a middle name added.  For another I had only "streamed" the previous album for a few years, from 2006-2009 or so.  It had not been played very much.  I had not paid for distribution since 2009, 13 years ago.  Nobody would remember it now, I figured.

But then after uploading this second album, I discovered that Shazam could identify 2 out of 3 of the tracks from the earlier album.  At this point I suspected the release would probably fail because of the apparent (but not real) copyright violation, since two different artist names were being used (really just my same name but with middle name added).

I waited ever more nervously for 10 days for the official notice from Routenote.  Somehow I missed it and started working on finalizing a third album for the year.  I was almost there when I discovered that Routenote had in fact fairly quickly issued a rejection 3 days after submission.

The rejection gave a long list of potential problems with the release.  The very first on the list was Copyright Violation.  But then it also listed a number of technical and aesthetic issues.

The rejection notice only said the release could have been flagged for any of the following reasons.  But it did not actually say which one(s) were involved.  I emailed Routenote support and they told me they could not give me any more information.  (I suspect much of the process is automated, and the automated system might use AI which is incapable of determining which actual issue(s) were involved.  Well that's what you get for using a free or even low cost service.)

Well this threw a spanner into the works.  There are blog entries on how to deal with artist name changes, but it doesn't look trivial.  I was not in the mood to try to figure out how to deal with the issue.  And in fact I still am not.  Maybe next year.

But what was worse was that the negative feeling this gave me put a stop to my finishing my "third" album, which was almost ready to go.  I simply couldn't work on it anymore, knowing that any one of the long list of technical and aesthetic criteria listed could lead to it being rejected too, just like the second album.  Really the third album was no worse than the first one on technical and artistic grounds, which had sailed right through, so I figured I probably wouldn't have a problem.  But probably wasn't good enough.  I felt hurt and just didn't want to continue any work on it (and still haven't).

So this was a case of being buried under an ambiguous rejection.  Because I don't really know what caused my second album to be rejected (though I think I have a pretty good theory) I'm finding it hard to go on with something else.

For all I know, this is a hidden benefit of the system.  Perhaps I'm not bothering anyone else with hearing how bad my music is, and perhaps that's a benefit to all.  But what about with someone more musical than me?

Now today I've been faced with a different kind of unhelpful rejection.   I tried to post a short and I thought helpful (and not at all abusive) comment to Gilbert Doctorow's blog.  After some work, I submitted it, and got the simple report that my comment was rejected.  "Sorry" was the only explanation.

It could have been (and likely was) that the post in question was already closed for comments.  If so, it would have been more helpful not to allow me to write one.  Or perhaps it took too long to finish the comment (I was doing other things like feeding cats before finally submitting it).

But it means, once again, I don't feel much like posting more comments to Doctorow.  Perhaps, once again, that's actually a benefit for all.

Copying Files on Mac

Since I came to Mac from Unix, I've done large complicated things mostly using the Terminal, which has a traditional Unix (Gnu and BSD) command interface, including the cp command.   Using that with the find command it is possible to do what I'm describing, but it's a bit complicated, enough for me to never bother.  I often write Tcl programs to do tricky things with regards to moving and copying files (and I now have a program intended for release called Collection Assistant which consolidates groups of files in arbitrary ways and eliminates duplicate file contents, when files are different content with same name they are renamed...why is it so hard to do THAT...)

"Moving" rather than "Copying" is assumed in the Mac drag-and-drop interface.  I guess that makes sense.  But how do I make it do copying?  I was not able to find the answer in 10 minutes of googling.  They gave other answers which are more complicated in my view.  I was sure there was something easier.

So I went back to a more traditional way of finding things out on a computer.  I just tried things.  The Command key didn't work, but guess what, the Option key does!  When you're holding the Option key, a plus symbol (+) appears when you hover over a folder in finder with a selected bunch of files.  I'm sure people have told me this before also, but somehow it never stuck.

It's taken me 25 years using a Mac to discover that all you have to do to copy files rather than moving them is to hold down the Option key.  It's actually very intuitive.

But why is it so hard to find out when googling for it?

I Hate Coupons !!!

 Today I waited in the checkout line for 20 minutes for the checker to scan over 200 coupons in a tall stack for the person in front of me.  The customer was "buying" four boxes of some kind of moisturizer in lipstick like tubes, packed 50 or more to a box.  There was a coupon for each tube of moisturizer, and each one had to be scanned.  The checker was scanning them as fast as she possibly could.  I looked over at the next isle and there was another customer with boxes of moisturizer and coupons.

Meanwhile I had refrigerated and perishable food items which I had hoped to last about 5 days.  I think the prepared meals are probably going to be ok, but the deli turkey slices barely make it to their sell by date even without such additional challenges.

It wasn't the time wasted that bothered me as much as the possibility of my $100 worth of actual food going bad.

I had half a mind to just walk out of the store leaving my stuff on the scanner belt in protest.  I might have except for fears that if I did that, they'd possibly discontinue some of my favorite items next time.  Likewise if I refused to buy the turkey slices, they might well discontinue that variety and replace it with some new variety I can't stand.  That sort of thing seemed to have happened before.  So I never "protest" at the store.  If something goes bad early, I'll just throw it out at home.

Most grocery store coupons are for items you would be better off not buying anyway.  In the few instances where they give me coupons for things I regularly buy, which happens sometimes, I immediately throw them out.  I never remember to bring them to the store anyway, and every time I think about them or try to remember them or find them or go back to get them uses up my time.  I think the whole "coupon" thing is a big waste of time and I don't want to support it in any way.

Problem submitted to Universal Devices forum

This problem has been solved thanks to help from Universal Devices Forum members, and I finally found the correct pages at Java.com.

I needed to obtain the newest "start" program from Universal Devices, which is supposed to create a new Launcher icon.  Which it does, only if you clear your Java cache first, but the launcher icon doesn't work on macOS 10.13 it requires 10.15.  But I can start my ISY console by running the start program every time anyway...no big deal.

I found the Q/A page at Java.com which explains that if the Update dialog in the Java Preferences fails to work, you can simply install the latest version.  It is not necessary to remove the old version first.  Then I found the download page which identifies your OS and allows you to download the latest version by pressing the DOWNLOAD button.

https://www.java.com/en/download/

It wasn't that hard, though I had to wait a few days to get replies and have time to figure everything out.

I still think Java makes life more difficult.  I have programs going back 20 years which still run fine, and I never had to do any special update of anything.

Sadly when I move on past macOS 10.13.16 all the old stuff will be unuseable.  That's the thing I hate the most about OS and computer upgrades.  I will need to retain my current computer, or some replacement, running 10.13.16 just to keep the old programs going, and buy a whole new computer in a few years with the latest everything.  When I have time and desire to deal with it.

*****

On Mac, I had been using the ISY994i Admin Console for years, including a few months ago.  The one I have is dated August 27, 2015.  The ISY994 Dashboard is dated November 25, 2017.  I cannot update the console via the webpage sometimes discussed because that fails too in a similar way (described further below).

Both the console and the dashboard fail with "Unable to Launch Application."  It doesn't help to use "Open" to open the application.  The Details page shows "illegal URL redirect" at top of traceback list.

The Java Preferences do not seem to be useful.  The "About" says I have version 8 Update 331 (1.8.0_331-b09) which is from this year (but current???).  When I go to the Java Update tab, I see a rotating circle that just rotates forever.  Reading about Java on the Java website (never a pleasant experience) it appears that this is the only way to "Update Java. " And it is "stuck" apparently, either that or I do have the latest version, I can't tell.

I went to the page to re-download the ISY Administrative Console.  I click on the link https://isy.universal-devices.com/start.jnlp and it downloads.  I click on the file and it says "start.jnlp cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer".  I tried both clearing the cache and adding https://forum.universal-devices.com to the Java Exception site list and neither helped.

UPDATE:

Problem was fixed by going to System Preferences, opening up the Security & Privacy page, selecting the General tab, clicking on the lock to open it, entering my password, and THEN running the new "start.jnlp" downloaded from Universal Devices.  Note that I already did have the Allow App Store & Identified Developers box checked, and there is no other box.  But just opening the lock let me run the app once, and after that I can keep running it even when the lock is closed (which happens automatically if I leave the Java Preferences).

So the trick is you can run apps from unidentified developers but only if you click the lock on this page.  I suppose that's not too bad (though I still think it's Securanoia) but why doesn't Apple have any explanation on this page or anywhere else.

You either know the secret handshake or you don't, it appears.  I've been here before I think, but it was about 5 years ago last time, so I forgot.

Seeing how well computer systems without "AI" work, it's easy to imagine that when we do have computer systems with "AI", they'll be even more frustrating, and we'll pull the plug and just go back to using hand tools.

I still don't know how to update my Java since the Java Preferences itself is unable to do that.  I see now that it clearly has expired just a few days ago (it says that in some Java tracebacks).  There was a time you could just go to the Java website and it would identify your system and Java version and tell you what to do.  But they took all that out, apparently, probably because others were spoofing it.  Now you can only update through the update app.  The Java website does not make it clear how to do anything else.

The Endless Treadmill of Java

 I have programs from 15 years ago that still run just fine on my Mac, and never needed any attention.

Meanwhile, keeping any or all of my Java based applications working is an endless treadmill taking hours of work every year, and every time I've always wondered if I was going to be successful at all.

Java itself needs endless Security Updates.  Every time there is a security update, Mac OS decides whether or not to allow Java based applications all over again, and you have to figure out how the latest incarnation of Mac OS does this.

Then the applications which run using Java may themselves need to be updated.  If you update those applications too early, before you have gotten around to updating Java itself, you may have a dead application no longer able to run or revert to previous version.  OTOH, you may also have a dead application if you update the Java and then have not yet updated the application.  You may have to uninstall and re-install the application all over again.  And then you may have to figure out where to download the application all over again, and possibly what credentials are needed to do that, if it's even possible anymore.

The root of all this evil is that Java is supposed to be a magic internet-enabling platform.  It can be used on the server side, the user side, either as internet-connected or not.  This means it has to be able to secure Everything, not just one port or a long established protocol.

It bothers me that Steve Keen's Minsky program has now migrated from Tcl/Tk to Java, a step from solid ground into the abyss IMO.

Tcl/Tk is included in MacOS and it is updated automatically.  Tcl programs are text and you can read exactly what they do.  The programs themselves almost never need to be updated if you do not need newly minted features.  And this is enabled by the very open license BSD-style license Tcl/Tk has, you can do anything with it.  But it is also true for Bash and many related programs as well, though they have the Gnu license, which requires source sharing.  Meanwhile an encyclopedia would have to be written to encompass all the changes and complexities of Java licensing over time, and programs are usually an opaque binary form by design--all written to meet the needs of commerce rather than open computing.

I don't get around to making changes in my home control system often, but when I do I often find myself, as I do right now, in the classic Java quagmire.  This time it appears to have happened by an automatic update, or perhaps one that occurred automatically in installing some other program.  Now I can't access the home control program, though the message suggests it's because Java itself won't run.

How long will it take me to figure out how to access my home control system from my mac so I can change a few things in it?

The ultimate in counter-intuitiveness

Eons ago, some time after I joined a division consisting of about 300 computer programmers, I became aware of the polarization between those programmers who used the native text editor (on Dec Vax or Apollo computers) or emacs or vi.  Later, in the laboratory where I worked for 23 years, the vi people had by far the upper hand, and I was the sole emacs outlier.  There was no hope of ever convincing these people that vi was the very epitome of a counterintuitive program, also one somewhat limited compared with Gnu Emacs anyway.

The intuitive view of a text editor is something like this:

1.  Type lots of text

2.  Save to file and close

So, when you open the text editor, you expect to just start typing.

But no, not with vi anyway.  When you start the text editor you are in "command mode."  To actually start typing, you need to type "A" or "I" to enter append or insert modes.  Then, when you later exit from insert or append modes with Escape, the cursor moves back one, so if you intend to continue typing to the same stream you must remember to use the A option.

With emacs, more intuitively, you type right away, but causing special functions whenever needed with Command and Meta keys, or named operations.  Exit and save?  Control-X Control-C, then you have an option to save.  That's all you need to know to use the program most basically.  With other programs, you have to warp your mind with many new concepts just to do anything.

I could never understand why anyone would think vi to be superior.  I long felt it was a sort of political thing.   I think sort of that is why vi was even developed, by the BSD team, so they had an editor free of the Gnu copyleft, so they could use the more corporate friendly BSD license.

But I think really it's what people were raised with.  If you happened to have been raised on vi, you would take it as your life's personal mission to raise your colleagues and successors with vi to be similarly hobbled.

I am thinking there are similar anti-intuitivities in Gimp, the now nearly standard image processing program (because it's free, of course).  Last night I struggled to create a page with text located in the right place.  If I didn't get it in the right place to begin with (which of course I never do) I could absolutely not move it.  I could try to "select" the text all over again, but then instead of moving the text the mouse moved the entire page underneath, a function whose value I still haven't figured out.  Sometimes when I tried to save the image with text in it, I got a box around the text which I had not been intended (I never stroked any such box, I've been finding that function impossible to use also).

Now I discover that part of the magic (but rarely mentioned until after you listen to an hour of complicated re-setup designs on tutorials) is that you must de-select everything after creation, to "release" it down upon the current layer.  Only then does the select box go away.  In every other program I've encountered, de-selection is axiomatic upon clicking anywhere else or doing anything else.  But not in Gimp.  There's a control character for de-select, or you can choose de-select from the Selection menu.

So I've finally worked out that problem after hours of frustration.  How much longer to the creation of a simple page with text blocks and colored circles?

I had these dreams I would use the bucket to fill the entire background with some non-white color.  First of all (using the 2016 version) I couldn't figure out how to select any color at all, I had to bring up another page with a picture and use the color chooser on that.  So finally I've picked up the color I want as the "foreground" color, and I try to paint the background with it.

Nope, without any explanation the bucket refuses to dump any paint color into a background region.  You can tell it's not going to because it has a NO sign on the mouse "pointer" (which is a combination of nearly impossible to interpret symbols regarding which it's not obvious which is the actual "point" that's being pointed to).  But why, and how are you supposed to color the background?

Well now it appears in the complicated dialog in which you create a new image there's also a box for the background color.  So you really need to do that, I guess (or maybe in the above case it was simply a de-selection problem).

This gets to one of my pet peeves in interface designs.  There is one and only one correct way of doing things, and if you try to do things any other way you will be slapped.  Such it was with the Lincoln I rented for a trip in Oregon in 2000 (which was mostly a pretty nice car btw).  But if you tried to lock it with the dongle after already having locked it, for shame for shame, it would beep at you to let you know you should see your doctor about Alzheimer's.  I'd re-lock doors all the time with my Toyotas when I can't remember whether I'd locked them or not, and it would just lock itself as it always did without protest.

So in my view, the User should be considered the final authority.  Do what the user wants.  If it requires changing some damned mode, change the damned mode, don't just beep or show the "naughty" sign.  At worst there should be a helpful dialog respecting what you seem to be trying to do and advising of the correct way to do that, if it's even possible.

But the Make-The-User-Learn-His-Lesson approach is nearly everywhere, now that I think about it.  In many cases it's make-the-user-learn-to-never-make-mistakes, even though that will never happen.  For example, my (otherwise truly wonderful in every way, and so far long lasting at 14 years old) Whirlpool washer will refuse to change ANYTHING after a cycle is started.  Even, say, the Rinse setting which won't start for many minutes.  You can't just pause, you have to stop the washer completely for that.  Then, even if it hasn't filled the basket with water yet, it will pointlessly need to drain all the water (including an impossible to estimate quantity of detergent) before you can change those settings.

Where to learn all these mind warping concepts about Gimp?  It's not clear.  Nobody ever starts with the basic concepts, like a Day -1 lecture in which you learn about things like object-oriented image programs and their selection-concepts.  People start with all the bullshit you already had to solve (such as downloading and installing the program) even before you became aware you going to need a crash seminar just to do the most basic things.

Back in the olden days, there would be an O'Reilly textbook on whatever counter-intuitive but powerful Unix command you needed to know about (such as Awk for example) and it would be Pretty Good at introducing the basic ideas in the first section or so.  Nowadays it's unclear where to go, there seem to be hundreds of books about Gimp and tens of thousands of tutorials, a veritable industry.

Gimp itself changed in many at least superficial ways back in 2018, and many of the books were written with the older version in mind.  (Things have been far far worse with Sox, the sound processing program, in which the entire command structure seems to have changed about a dozen times, so if you web search for any answer you are almost certain to get something not relevant for your version.)

Actually, way back around 1995 I bought my first copy of Photoshop, and I struggled through the first chapter or so in the tutorial book, I could sort of use it.  I can't remember if I ever used it, because by the time I really needed to use it, I was not longer using the computer that I had installed Adobe Photoshop on.

That's the way it has seemed for many commercial programs.  By the time I learn how to use them, they are gone forever, replaced by something new and completely different that I have to learn, if not pay for, all over again.

I remember the giddy days when the Mac was introduced.  Everything was going to be intuitive, simple, and you'd never have to learn anything else.  That feeling lasted about a month maybe, at least for anyone else who hadn't become an instant devoted fan.

By then it had become clear to me (and seemingly nobody else) that the new Graphical Interfaces were ways of hiding, not exposing, the actual functionality.  I got into arguments with the Manager of the User Interface Group of the company I worked for in 1985.  He insisted that Graphical Interfaces with Dialogs were the only truly unlimited form of interfaces.  They could do everything, whereas nothing else could.

Well that might be fine, but with the actual interfaces here on earth that we used, the options were ridiculously simple and non-useful compared with old Unix ways of doing things.  And then when things like Adobe Photoshop appeared, the ridiculously simple became ridiculously complicated.  Sure you could search for help...if you even knew what to start looking for.

Nowadays it's well understood that GUI's don't necessarily mean intuitive or easy to use.  They are just considered necessary for the things non-technical people need to use.  Only programmers and similarly technical people are expected and sometimes required to use command line interfaces.

I spent much of my career developing and enhancing such interfaces.  It really seems to do anything serious technically you have to get into text in some way, though in theory you could do all your programming in some all-encompassing graphical development environment.  But often it seems that real GUI systems leave out a few things that you can only control with text commands in one form or another (such as in configuration files).  It sometimes seems they might do this deliberately to keep most people away from the inner workings, except for those who have to work on such things.

I think the basic problem is that graphical systems are simply too complex to do everything.  But for the Users we take the trouble to wrap things up nicely in graphical metaphors.  For the people down in the computer room, we more often use text interfaces, which we generally prefer anyway, and they are far and away by orders of magnitude easier to program too.

This article is not intended to be a full on critique of GUI and defense of CLI simply because I don't have time for that today.  CLI's have many advantages including transparency (you can most often look at a succinct "history" of every previous command, and repeat and/or modify any of them) and power.  I would put it like this: GUI is fine when you are not going to be getting fairly deep into things or doing things that are fundamentally graphic in the first place.  In every other case, you are going to need some commands somewhere, such as for repeating common operations.  It has been my feeling for some time that OSX has a pretty nice combination of BSD unix derived shell and tools and underlying system with snazzy GUI.  But a good Unix/X combination would be fairly good too, if they could make a fairly nice one without a steep learning curve.

It was to my horror that in the glamorous roll out of Windows 95 that Microsoft marketeers were promoting the idea "and you'll never have to use this again" while dismissing the (relatively brain dead) MSDOS CLI.  Now even Microsoft has upgraded shells (and you can run many of the others on Windows too).

But the fundamental problems in intuitive interface design I have always felt to be somewhat independent of whether the interface is GUI or CLI.  It has more to do with intuitive underlying object models and how they are expressed.

Shopping Services

 My worst problem with shopping services has been their tendency to substitute what I've ordered with things that are absolutely worthless to me.  THEN what am I supposed to do???  Often the shopper gives you a chance to refuse, but if you somehow miss warning and don't respond within a minute or so (which is easy to do, since it may only occur within the app, if you have the correct page selected, and your phone may have timed out before it appears) the shopper will often go ahead and make the substitution anyway.

Not in a single case has a substitution been acceptable.  It's often very hard to find the things I want in the first place, even things which are regularly carried somehow are hard to find on Instacart.

For example, Walgreens has a nice self-branded package of 25 "Gauze Pads" which are used for cleaning.  There may be only one thing in the entire store with the exact name "Gauze Pads."  But if you type in "Gauze Pads" into the search window, you will scan through hundreds of items (such as Band-Aids, etc) without coming to Walgreen's "Gauze Pads."

Strangely, if you just type in Gauze, a series of suggestions appears, in which the actual "Gauze Pads" are at the very top.  BUT if you click on that suggestion, you get almost the same useless list as when you type in "Gauze Pads."

If you just type in Gauze the Gauze Pads will appear in about the second page.

I once ordered 3 bars of expensive Shea Moisture soap, the green kind I've had before and loved.  But instead I got 3 bars of Shea Moisture soap in the "Coconut" white variety.  At first I thought "no big deal."  But it turns out the "Coconut" variety has small pieces of coconut in it as an abrasive.  The result is a soap with abrasive qualities like "Lava with Pumice."  This is useless to me, as I have very sensitive skin.  So now I have 3 bars of this soap which cost me over $5 apiece.  I don't feel like donating them either because the poor sap who gets them may well find them as useless as me.

More Apple crap

In my imagination, there would be a simple smartphone interface that would not get in your way.

In reality, what we have is endless diversions and crap somehow intended to sell more stuff.

I did finally so far resolve my multiple Apple ID problem, a story too long to recount here.  Now that I am logged into the same Apple ID on my mac's iTunes, and on my phone, stuff generally works rather than generally not working.

But because I had "changed" the ID on my phone, it would no longer update.  Finally, it bricked.  It took hours of work to get it all going again, with endless (and thankfully with the number always changing) "uknown error" messages.   And nobody tells you that as long as the error number keeps changing you should keep on trying to update or restore, except in exhausing online searches.

I've seen this phenomenon on Microsoft also.  Not just one attempt to update is required if you haven't been keeping up.  Often it requires hours of updates.  Except on Microsoft it could be many days of updates.   I think I counted Eleven updates before I had a working iphone again.  All except the last ending in an unhelpful "unknown error" number that suggests it's all over--get a new phone.  You can't just start from some new update level, it seems, but go through many of the intervening updates.  Or perhaps you can't pile all the ice cream on the cone at once.

You might think with all the crap they put into these smart phones, they could spend the extra 10 cents for actual helpful error messages.  But of course, that is not the plan.  The plan is to sell more stuff, including new phones.

One key thing it seems I always had to turn off was "Find My iPhone."  I could not update or restore my phone without doing that.  But since my phone wouldn't boot, I couldn't do it, and when I tried to do it in iTunes it didn't stick, at first.

I've turned off "Find My iPhone" dozens of times, but when it counts it seems Apple somehow turns it back on again.  Now the first thing I do, as soon as I am able, is turn off "Find My iPhone" before it can cause some failure or another.

Another thing to immediately turn off is Screen Time, which gives nanny notifications every so often about how much time the screen has been on.  Shit!  Who makes up the "requirements" for these things, and decides a reasonable idea is to default it in the ON position?

Before my update, restore, and correction I was endless getting notification bells.  I don't want any notifications except for texts from my best friend.  I turned off notifications in Every Single App (which took over an hour).  There seemed to be no way to do this for everything, of course.  Now because I have an all new system, created from scratch With No "Backup" file, I will have to do that all over again.

Quite often those notification bells would show nothing on the screen, or in the notifications center either (which doesn't seem to have all notifications, but a lot of crap which isn't notifications).

Oh, yes, and turn off all "Holidays."  I don't want bells ringing because today is some sort of holiday or another.  I already know if it's a "Holiday" important to me.

At least for now, the fingerprint sensor is finally working ok.  Last time I just completely disabled "security" so I didn't have to punch in my number every time I picked up the phone because the finger print sensing program was not working very well.  Disabling security possibly itself probably caused other problems like failures to update.  I'd be fine with no "security" at all except for credit operations, but that's not the assumption.  The assumption is that you're deeply paranoid, like a spy or crook or something.  And our information warring society drums it into everyone that we must be.  I'm sure it's because utterly criminal corporations and government don't want us to know what they're doing.