I do not understand why I can’t watch regular Netflix when overseas. I am still a US citizen, paying with a US account. It’s not as though I am going to go to a German sports bar and show episodes of Archer (“So you’re saying Germany is the Alabama of Europe?”) on all the screens for money. There is no such thing as a German sports bar, for one thing.
And it’s not as though I magically begin speaking German when I’m in Germany, so why are you showing me all the German titled shows? I can do a bit of French and Spanish, but German is just hopeless.
Then when I come back, Netflix still tends to want to show me German-ish shows. I still don’t speak German…
Show me the damn shows I want to watch. Dammit. I’m jet-lagged and I need distraction.
Once again, the drive back from Utah provokes thoughts about driving and human behavior.
In Utah, with the closest thing to a German autobahn no-speed-limit experience that you’re likely to get in the US (80 mph limits, meaning 90 mph traffic [0]), people are polite, move over, and largely don’t park in the left hand lane. Notable differences – semis still feel the need to pull out and block the fast lane to pass another semi going 2 mph slower than them; autos don’t know how to not be a blocking dick [1]; highway patrol will give you a ticket.
However, the same traffic – exactly the same autos, with exactly the same people driving them, when crossing the border into AZ, then NV, then CA, undergo personality transplants to become the fast-lane-hogging, road-blocking, failure-to-yield road-rage-filled humanity that I’m used to from LA freeways.
When you ask yourself, why do the autobahnen work so well, and why are driver so shitty in the US, a lot of it seems to come down to the speed limits. When the limit is either not there, or close enough to the reality that people are going to drive anyway, then drivers become polite and friendly. When the limits are 20 mph below what a straight-to-the-horizon six-lane freeway [2] will bear, then the very same people become assholes.
[0] To be clear, 90 mph traffic is not exactly autobahn – the default speed limit in Germany is 120 kph – 75 mph. That’s what the limit is if there is no posted limit. Where in the US do you get 75 mph? I hit 160 regularly on the 10 km commute to work – 100 mph. It seems like nothing after a while. I regularly get zoomed by every morning.
[1] I don’t have a pithy name for this – it’s watching traffic flow so that you don’t get trapped behind a semi and either have to slam on the brakes, or pull out in front of a Merc SLC going 200 kph in order not to slam on your brakes. Conversely, it’s the fellow in the Merc SLC going 200 kph flashing his headlights to let you know it’s ok to pull out in front of him to get around the truck, because when you are driving 120 mph, you pay attention to traffic around you, and there’s no need to be an asshole. Fear of flaming high-speed death will do that to you, I suppose.
[2] Every autobahn I’ve been on in Germany is a two-lane road, four-lane highway, with narrow shoulders, and an exit for [P]eeing every 5 km, lest you think that the Germans have no speed limits because they have US-like superhighways. One of the few things I love about Germany is the autobahn and a rest stop every few miles. Driving back the 700 miles from Utah, there were perhaps 4 legal single-purpose rest stops, and 2 of them were closed for repair.
I can’t decide if we’ve either reached peak story, or peak podcast, when I hear the same guy telling the same story that I already heard on TAL, Snap Judgement, the Moth, TED, and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
Are we really out of new stories to tell, and new people to tell them?
Yes, I just spend 10 hours driving. I can’t decide whether it’s a good thing that I can now just turn on the local NPR app and get the live feed for the whole way. No more searching through the airwaves to find something to listen to. It’s good in that it lessens my exposure to right-wing talk radio; it’s bad in that it lessens my occasional exposure to right-wing talk radio*.
* and I am no fan of NPR. It’s just usually better than the alternative, and Pacifica is just too full of BS woo.
Apple implemented a new feature which derives an “album rating” from the ratings that you give individual songs. However, they did this in the most brain dead way possible – if you rate any song with any stars, the whole album gets that rating. Then any playlist based on ratings will have the whole album on it. Because no one in the history of recorded music has ever liked just one song on an album. And one-hit wonders are such not a thing that there’s not even a name for them like “one-hit wonder.”
It really goes south when you do something like download the completely free and legal torrent of collections of demo songs from bands playing at SXSW. Which are released every year. It’s a good way to find new music. I have literally gigabytes of music from the SXSW torrents. However, now, if I like even one of those songs, all the songs from that year, all 1300 of them, now show up in the Rated playlist, because Apple’s stupid Album Rating algorithm treats a stupidly derived automatic rating the same as a rating that you actually gave to the song because you liked it enough to click on it.
Just try to fix it, also. Can’t be done. If you try to erase the Album Rating, or change it to “none”, the algorithm immediately changes it right back, with lots of spinning beach ball of death, because it’s trying to do it on 1300 songs at once.
Fucking idiots. Thanks for fucking up my carefully curated playlists. It’s like no one at Apple has ever used a playlist based on ratings. Oh wait, I’m pretty sure they invented them. Maybe they’re all using Zunes.
Tagged apple, iTunes, rant
Once again, changing passwords frequently is a bad idea.
Another lousy IT policy enshrined in policy. They might tell you that we do science, but there’s just as much belief in magic spirits there as anywhere else.
Steve Jobs would never let this happen
As a huge Apple fanboi, I’ll be ordering a new MBP as soon as they are available from my workplace (they have to go through their stupid “verification” process first, even though it’s the same OS as currently available, and it’s not like they’re going to say no to the 2500 of us who have been overdue for replens for the last year). Though the one I’m typing this on at home is fine, and will likely last another four years (although see below – foreshadowing!).
My not-so-hot-take after reading all the threads:
The Touch Bar looks promising. Less weight on my back is fucking great. One unipolar port to rule them all is a Really Good Idea. Touch ID has been wonderful on the iPhone and will be fucking great on the laptop. Space Gray is neat. A better screen is always welcome. We’ll see about the keyboard and bigger trackpad but I’m not as big a keyboard nazi as some.
Are we going to see an external Touch Bar keyboard? That’d be pretty great. An Apple USB-C hub?
It is stupid that I can’t plug a new iPhone 7 into a new MBP without buying dongles that didn’t come with either. I don’t know about anything else, but I’m pretty sure Steve wouldn’t have let that happen. At least the new 256GB iPhone is USB3 so it didn’t take two days to copy over music. Finally. iTunes still sucks. This computer stays on 10.10.2 so I can use iPhoto and Aperture.
This update is missing the built-in LTE radio. I travel a lot, and mobile devices have gotten to the point where I don’t worry about having a connection, or data usage. I’ve had a reasonably good LTE data connection on all my devices everywhere I’ve been overseas in the last couple of years (10+ countries). Work pays for AT&T, and with TMO, I just don’t have to worry about it. So a built-in LTE connection in addition to the Wifi would be awesome for those times when I’m in places without.
What I really think all this says – lack of new processors, lack of efficient fast memory, long times between refreshes – is that we’re about to see Apple go to ARM processors in Macs. The same thing is happening with Intel that happened with PowerPC. Steve Job’s Apple would not be held hostage by Intel’s lack of ability to produce processors. Will Apple do this with the Mac Pro and Mini? One can only hope that’s why there hasn’t been an update on these lines, rather than just giving up.
Was there any chance I was going to change? Get real. I have to use Linux and Windows laptops (and desktops) at work. I just spent the better part of two days setting up a new Windows computer so that it can be cloned properly. No one else has ever even gotten close to making something as good as an MBP trackpad, let along palm rejection while typing. Linux can’t even get a basic bog-standard terminal window to be as good as the MacOS Terminal, much less as good as iTerm. A one-pixel width to grab to change the window size? That alone would kill that idea dead dead dead. We won’t talk about Windows 10, Ubuntu, connecting to WiFi, or sleep.
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