No Account Bypass

Nearly every online store wants you to create an online account, so they can have an excuse to email you endless advertising, on top of all the other entities emailing you endless advertising.

I'm inconsistent about creating such accounts.  If I really like the merchant, I might (and then immediately set my account for no extraneous emails).  But I already have so many accounts with so many different passwords, it's become a mind boggling morass.

Today I tried to make a small but necessary purchase at HomeDepot.com.  While in the past I recall being offered to skip the account business and just make a one-time purchase, this time it did not present me that option.  I was only allowed to sign in, or not make the purchase.

I tried for several minutes to log in.  Then, giving up, I asked to get an email to reset my password.

Several minutes later, no email from Home Depot appeared.  I checked my spam folder (and I really, really need to write another critical essay about spam filtering--the whole "spam" business is social destruction through which I often lose contact with friends because of stupid or perhaps deliberately-social-destroying spam filtering).

I tried once again to make the purchase without signing into my account.  Strangely that page seemed to appear, then immediately disappeared, replaced by the one which gives no other option than to log into your account.

The purchase would not have been made today, except that I finally remembered my old password.

Many minutes later, I have received neither my password reset nor my purchase confirmation from Home Depot, and I keep checking my spam folder too.

Shutdown with Impunity

One thing I miss most from Unix systems, in "personal" systems like Mac and PC, are the old hard shutdowns.

When you did shutdown, you could choose to give "other users" a minute or two to shut down, or just  shutdown right now.  On my own systems I just did "now."  Even on systems I managed, as I had already shepherded all users off by that point.

And the systems would come down right now in a second or two, even with cached file systems (though, theoretically those could cause some delay, but usually caches were generally empty by this point).

But now we have microprocessors which are 1000 times more powerful than the original Unix minicomputers, and they struggle for minutes to shut down, frequently giving up because this or that process declined to accept the shutdown order.

Typically, such an application might have modified project work that the user hasn't written out yet.

In nearly all such cases, if I hadn't actually written something out, when I give a shutdown order, I didn't intend to.

I would be fine with going back to hard shutdowns.  But if not, could it be some sort of preferences option?  Or maybe a different kind of shutdown, slow vs fast, for example.

Or maybe somehow get all the things that want this or that state saved, to present all their demands more quickly, or even  in some kind of integrated way, rather than having to wait for minutes for each different program to responde...why are they so slow in doing that?

iPhone 8 Plus temporarily bricked by IOS 13.6 update

I had my phone plugged into Mac to transfer some photos.  iTunes advised me of an update.  This was the second time.  I'd been pretty much lulled into accepting iPhone updates.

Now my phone won't connect to the Sprint cellular network.  Apparently it can do wifi but not cellular.  It just says Searching.

I found an Apple forum page on this which was useless, people complaining about the same kind of problem going back to 2011.  But then I found several very similar help pages, which gave a list of things to try, starting from a restart.

So far I've tried a normal restart, and then a hard restart--didn't seem any different, except one time it sort of froze with the Apple logo appearing for 15 minutes, then I did the hard restart to get try again, which went better the next time.  And then various resets, which didn't seem to do anything, didn't have to re-enter my wifi password even.

I came to the update carrier settings.  It's weird how you get to this, under your name.  But the carrier settings showed the correct version, but didn't alternate to other settings when you clicked on it (as it does when the phone is working correctly).

There were many little issues I needed to face upon doing a "Restore," which is what is recommended after you are unsuccessful trying to "Update Carrier Settings."

After running the Restore for awhile, it put up a little window (which might be easy to ignore) saying the Restore could not be done until I went into the phone settings, into the Cloud settings (which are under your name itself...so central is the cloud supposed to be to your existence) and turned off the Find My iPhone feature.  Somehow, the restore couldn't proceed without that being turned off, and it couldn't turn that off by itself, and if you failed to handle that message, as I apparently did the first time around (because I was busy with my photos and blogging) you would be stuck without your carrier settings getting updated completely.  I sort of know that now as fairly soon after I had handled turning off the "Find My Iphone" (which took some time, as I'll describe below) during the restore, THEN it immediately proceeded to update carrier settings, boom, and there seemed to be no issue with them after that.

Well, that created another issue, because in order to change any of the Cloud settings, including the Find My iPhone feature, you need to enter the password for your Apple ID.  The particular Apple ID that you had previously used when you purchased this phone (or one of it's predecessors).  That ran square into the fact that the Apple ID that the phone demanded that I log in for, is an old email address I haven't used in 10 years and am now totally unable to access, and there is no way to change it to anything else, until you first log in so you can change it to something else.

Fortunately, I ultimately managed to guess my old password.  I'm not sure what I would have done otherwise.  I spent an hour unsuccessfully trying to get it to use my other AppleID first, but it wouldn't do that until I logged in first so I delete the old ones and sign out of the old AppleID account.

This time I have made sure to turn everything associated with the cloud "off."  Now it appears it won't even let me log into the cloud.  After I refused to allow the cloud to use my location information, it simply hung trying to log into the cloud.  But after I was able to dump that window, everything seemed normal, so I'm not sure if I'll have to face all the music all over again on the next upgrade.

This time, at least, I've written down the passwords for both my old and new AppleID's, so if this issue comes up again I'll be better prepared.

Morals:

1) Make a paper list of all your passwords and copy it frequently
2) Allow for days of debugging time after every iOS update.  Don't do so before vacations or important meetings.
3) Allow the update process, even if running on a computer, to proceed in full view, not to be covered by other windows or distractions.  Do not be in a great hurry to get your phone again, and be prepared to work through every set of update issues thoroughly as they come up.

Design issue:
If an update isn't 100% complete and approved, a reboot should bring back the old version rather than loading a corrupted state.  (It's been the other way so many times, it's hard to even think in such radical terms.  But this is clearly the way things ought to be.)  This ought to be a central consideration in design for frequently auto-updated devices.

Knowing the need to turn Find My iPhone off, the queries involving that should have been at the very beginning of the update process, rather than awaiting downloading and other steps where it might be overlooked.

More generally, questions and issues for a batch process should be present as close to the beginning of that process as possible, following by a predictable reliable conclusion.

Replacing Racially Loaded Terms

I was here 22 years ago.  My office had discussion about replacing the "master/slave" terminology for our compute farm.  The Boss didn't see any problem with the words, saying they had long technical history.

I felt that "slave" was not an accurate description of what our compute servers were actually doing.  But I had trouble making any other word stick.  For quite awhile, hand waving replaced the words rather than better words.  Then we were back to Master/Slave because everyone knew what it meant.

But I'm glad to see Twitter Engineers fixing this, and they have some good word choices.

• Whitelist becomes allowlist.
• Blacklist becomes denylist.
• Master/slave becomes leader/follower, primary/replica or primary/standby.
• Grandfathered becomes legacy status.
• Gendered pronouns (for example "guys") become folks, people, you all, y'all.
• Gendered pronouns (for example "he" or "his") become they or their.
• Man hours becomes person hours or engineer hours.
• Sanity check becomes quick check, confidence check or coherence check.
• Dummy value becomes placeholder value or sample value.

$120 per month cellphone hell

Last month I found I was paying $120 per month for Sprint service with a four year old iPhone.

Does that sound right to you?  It doesn't sound right to me.  It seems my friends are paying less than half that much for newer phones.

This just seemed to creep up on me.  In 2014 I remember originally buying a new phone for $22/mo payments with $60 "unlimited" service, when my previous $50/mo service at AT&T was not unlimited, so I thought that was a better deal than AT&T.  Original payments were indeed about $82 per month, as I had expected.  That didn't seem unreasonable, consider I was also getting a brand new iPhone 6S Plus, the ultimate, with no trade in.  I believed I was also signed up for "iPhone Forever" which would let me get a new trade-ins Every Year.

About 14 months later I went to another Sprint store, asking about my upgrade.  They told me I couldn't actually upgrade to a new phone without paying a few hundred dollars.  They said my plan only permitted "free" upgrades every other year, and I had to pay extra to upgrade Every Year.  So I declined.  I must have had some misunderstanding, maybe I got the cheaper iPhone Forever plan, or maybe they sold me some other kind of lease, these things are so complicated it's hard to know what you have actually signed up for.  In the store, you wait around for an hour or more, and when they do see you it all goes by very quickly and the choices you have are far different from what you might have expected, and then it all comes out in an unintelligible mass of printed receipt and/or email.

Sometime in 2016, I really wanted to get an iPhone 8S Plus.  It was well over 2 years since my original contract, I figured this should be easy.  But it was hard.  I don't recall if I did have iPhone Forever, but I recall not wanting to keep it if I did.  I purchased the old 6S Plus for my electronics collection for what sounded reasonable $200 or so, and thought I would be purchasing my phone over time, which cost a little more than my previous lease.  Since I was somewhat concerned about breakage, I got insurance, which I recall cost about $10.  It all came to $90 something, which sounded OK at the time.

I remember this as an especially unpleasant upgrade experience, not that it took long though.  I had to keep remembering passwords, which I couldn't remember.  To make it worse there seemed to be both a phone passcode, and a carrier passcode.  I could only remember the phone passcode.  Eventually the process was completed, and I hoped not to go through it again.

My payment did go up, but I expected it to because it was purchase instead of glorified lease.  Since I was no longer on iPhone Forever, or at least they seemed to tell me that, I should eventually pay off the phone and own it, or so I thought.  When that had happened to me with my first iPhone on AT&T, after about 2.5 years my payment actually dropped down.

Instead, payments just seemed to go up and up every few months like cable service.  I got some notice about changes in the "insurance "plan that didn't look good at all.  It looked as though if I were to break my phone, I'd only get a discount on a new phone, which maybe wasn't worth that much.  But, generally speaking, I had a full time job and far too many other concerns to bother cancelling a $10 (and later $15) extra monthly charge, and maybe I'd actually use the insurance after all.  So I didn't make any changes, though I thought if I were a penny pincher, I would.

And the monthly charges seemed to rise and rise.  So what at one point was little more than $90, I though, nearly 4 years later not only had my payment not fallen from having paid off the phone, it had shot up by $25 bucks or so, without my having changed anything.

Finally, after over 2 years of wondering why I was being ripped off so badly for cellphone service, but having far more important concerns than saving $30 next month, I finally got around to trying to get my cellphone bill lowered, by purchasing the phone outright, getting a cheaper service plan, and cancelling the "insurance."

It was a 4 hour online and text chat experience worthy of another post. Endlessly frustrating and laced with anxiety that there would be some screwup, and I'd have to start all over again, or I'd have all my phone payments forgotten, end up owing far more, or endless other mishaps.  Except for COVID-19, I would have preferred to go to a store, even though I know those aren't necessarily sweet and easy experiences either.  This time it seemed like my first two "chat" experiences weren't even with a real person, but it seemed my 3rd and successful time was, though there were 10-20 minute pauses between texts when you wouldn't know if anything was going to happen, or end up with a screwed up account.  Ultimately my 3rd and successful series of texts spanned 90 minutes.

It wasn't at all clear the agent was trying to me much money.  It seemed more like they would prefer to sell me a new phone and new contract just like before.

When I insisted on lower payments, they suggested what seemed like only a small change in my service price (which had apparently risen to $70 somehow).  I insisted on removing the insurance and buying the phone.

Actually I had started this process by figuring out how to access my online account again.  That took awhile, but I did finally remember my password and username.  Then I saw numbers like thise:

Monthly Lease: $33/mo  (ok, I can see how that would contributed to a $120 bill)
Purchase: $238

It doesn't take much math to see that the purchase price is far less than the monthly lease for another whole year.  But nobody suggested this change.  I insisted on it over and over and it took another 60 minutes to get the deal done over text, and even then I had to complete the purchase online on my computer, where it wasn't obvious that the $220 charge was the $198 price I had agreed to (with tax and charges).

I clicked on the box which said "purchase phone" and a little box popped up and said I had to use chat to do that.  First tried the online chat, which got nowhere, it said it couldn't do that either.  I then proceeded to do chat from my phone, from the phone Sprint app, which led me to texting with "agents", which took in all about 2.5 hours.

It was bad, though not quite as bad as with the old XM Radio service...

Now I think I've got it changed like I wanted anyway.  I purchased my phone for $200 plus tax and switched to $50 unlimited plan with no insurance.  My new payments are supposed to be just over $50 per month.

We'll see.

Actually, the Sprint website actually advertised a $35 unlimited service, and provide your phone.  But the agent over text told me I could not get that plan.  He said I could get the 55+ plan.  I couldn't get an answer as to whether that was the cheapest unlimited data and text plan I could get.  That's the way it goes, they offer something off the shelf and it's take it or leave it.  And leave it means you'll have to buy another phone, most likely.  (So I may still be paying a $15 idiot tax, at least.  Somebody smart probably wouldn't have paid that.)

The way the industry has structured itself, you don't really have much choice, unless you really just want to keep buying $1200 phones every two years.  If you have a Sprint phone you are locked into Sprint, because their radio system is not the same as with other carriers.  And so on.  You feel like you are trapped in John Steinbeck's novel The Pearl.

Roon Radio Pros and Cons

I like Roon.  After years of floundering, Roon gives me more or less the music playing experience I've always wanted, on my existing Sonos nodes, my mac, and Oppo BDP-205 players.  I now have high resolution recordings, album covers, album notes, and everything right there.  It plays high resolution recordings on everything as best it can be played on them.

When Roon Radio plays music from my own library, it does pretty good too, much better than Sonos "random play."  (Nothing, however, in my experience, created a more pleasant automatic personalized radio than Pandora Premium.)

A problem is that Roon Radio does NOT default to playing on my own library.  It defaults to being open to all my services.  Right now, that's just Tidal.  Tidal has a great selection of the world's recorded music but they are always pushing their own artists and titles.

The result is that by default Roon Radio ALWAYS plays something totally out of line with what I like.  I may be listening to soft ambient music when it's finished Roon Radio switches me to some loud aggressive Hip Hop, since Hip Hop is a Tidal specialty.   I would guess this is because Tidal rates all of their own music as "10" in category and parameter, so that's what you always going to get.  I absolutely positively HATED TIDAL before I got Roon.  I was planning on cancelling Tidal for years because I could never use it effectively, and did therefore almost never use it, but hoped I would soon figure it out so I could one day enjoy CD quality streaming.  No matter what I looked for on Tidal, I only found the most awful stuff.  Then Roon made it possible, for the first time, to find the things I actually wanted to listen to on Tidal, and I'm happy with the Roon/Tidal combination, though people now tell me I might like QOBUZ better.

And now I get to the little gripe that inspired this post.  Roon Radio has (seemingly deliberately) hidden the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch.  "Roon Radio" reserves a large chunk of the Roon window just for blank space.  (Tufte would be outraged.)  At the bottom of this blank chunk of screen (where, you might have user controls over the Roon Radio of some kind) there is just one control shown.  The Start Roon Radio After Music Ends switch.

The essential Limit Roon Radio to Library is hidden behind 3 dots at the top of the playlist where a bunch of obscure playlist features are.

Now I can see why they would make this switch hard to find.  Obviously Tidal wants everyone to play their stuff (and annoyingly so) so I wonder if there is some money involved.  If Roon is playing Tidal promoted music, do they get a kickback???  Probably not explicitly, but even if there is no explicit kickback, there is often some kind of hidden pressure.  Roon may get better service from Tidal if they make Tidal happy.

Avoidance of such kind of hidden pressure is why Roon is such a great concept in the first place.  Nearly everything online serves the House Interest and has no particular need to Serve the Customer.  Roon breaks the mold by being a User Agent.  At least it ought to be a User Agent considering that we do pay for it, and pretty well.  We are paying for the services, not the music itself.  We pay separately for the music (to some companies that reduce that cost by doing their own self-promotion in the process).

It was maintaining that status of being a User Agent is precisely the reason I chose and continue to choose to pay for my Roon account annually.  I have a great fear that as soon as I plunk down the money for Lifetime Service the company is going to start aggressively seeking other sources of revenue, such as kickbacks from streaming companies...  Meanwhile, Roon was threatening from Day One to give extra services to Lifetime Subscribers only.  I'm hoping that doesn't amount to much.  If Roon stays viable, I will eventually pay far more for Annual Service than Lifetime Service. And if it doesn't, it would be a shame without something better.

I feel that paying every year for service should (hopefully) give me some kind of leverage, to keep the company serving the customer interest.  If not, I might be able to go elsewhere too, with no loss of sunk capital as such.

I learned this horrible lesson many years ago.  For many years I subscribed to Audio Magazine, one of my favorites, annually.  A number of times I forgot to renew and ended up missing issues.  Finally I decided I'd get a 3 year subscription.  The very next year Audio Magazine went straight downhill.  The magazine shrunk to a fraction of it's size.  Finally, it went out of business altogether and my subscription was converted to 2 years of Stereo Review, a magazine I had always (though perhaps wrongly) hated.

WHENEVER anything is given away free (as in free beer) by a commercial enterprise you can assume there is some kind of con going on.  If we really want good service, we have to pay for it.

Now today I was in a panic.  I was intending to turn Roon Radio off but instead turned off the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch.  Once you select that option, it does indeed appear at the bottom of the otherwise wasted side screen of Roon Radio.  But if, perchance, you mistakenly switch it off, the very switch itself disappears.

I panic'd thinking that Roon had summarily decided to remove this switch to keep their Tidal arrangements flowing.  THAT was what the last update was actually about, I wrongly guessed.

Actually, I had merely forgotten that when I enabled the switch the first time, I had gone to the 3 magic dots.  I had read somewhere online you could do that, and I did.  But by the time I mistakenly turned the switch off, a few weeks later, I had forgotten all that.

Another online search and I fixed the problem.  But IMO well designed software shouldn't require you to endlessly go online to get the answers, and the answers aren't always easy to find online for various reasons.  (One of my worst examples of that is the sound program SOX, which has gone through many major revisions, such that any instructions you find online are most likely for a version you don't have.)

Another curious thing.  The Roon Help feature has absolutely nothing to say about Roon Radio.  It almost does really seem like they want to leave you at the mercy of the Music Services on this Radio thing.

An idea to prevent viral pandemics

It's already been established that face masks worn casually by the general public (and not professionals, who do things such as discard after each use using gloves) don't protect well from viruses.

But, what about this.  A tracker to discourage you from touching your face?

Based on the intuitive idea of biofeedback, so, just as you would be reaching up to your face, the tracker detects that immediately and buzzes before you get there, so you are made conscious of this movement.

 Or a mask that's just a very open screen you put over your entire face.

Such a screen could also have anti-viral anti-bacterial properties by materials and electrification.