BWare

After a week of driving and sleeping in Europe, I noticed that I only heard one super-loud obnoxious car [1] or motorcyle, and I never once was blinded by too-bright headlights, not even coming up over a rise and catching the lower part of their beam. And of course didn’t get bright-lighted even once [2].

So it can be done. We just choose not to, because free-dumb isn’t free.

 
 
[1] An American Mustang GT of course
[2] Don’t even get me started on pickups and the possibility of rolling-coal

Apple’s idea of human interface design c. 2022:

8 point gray text on a white background, apple-plus doesn’t increase the size, and Music is still a POS app that screws up all my smart playlists by not distinguishing between the rating I give a song, and the unchangeable automatic album rating that gives every song on the album five stars if I give one song five stars. No one at Apple eats their own dog food. Or it’s all streaming to them now, and the terabytes of ripped CDs, many of which are completely unavailable anywhere, just don’t matter.

Don’t get me started on album artwork, either the complete inability of them to get the right album artwork, or even worse, that they overwrite or lose the album artwork that I curated carefully onto those terabytes of music.

Surely someone makes an independent iTunes Music replacement that’s actually good… But I haven’t found it.

I still can’t change the volume on airpods without reaching into my pocket for the phone, which isn’t possible at 20 mph on a bike, and not that convenient all the rest of the time. It’s gonna be a sad day when my two iPod shuffles give up the ghost. I already have to save an old MBP with OS X 10.9 to update those, as they are completely unsupported with newer versions of Music (the name of which by the way makes any solution to any of these problems completely unsearchable).

I have also come to the sad realization that we would be lucky to have President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho. This is a politician who identified the greatest problem affecting his nation, found the most qualified person to solve it, and risked his reputation and position defending and enacting his findings despite opposition from the public and large corporate interests.

–Fallen13 someplace on Twitter

I had to buy the new $60 AppleTV remote, because Logitech has stopped supporting their Harmony remotes [1], and the volume and mute button no longer work, and HBOMax has adopted the (former) Netflix strategy of being as obnoxious as fuck. Of course I want to hear the tag music from whatever show they’re pushing this week that I scrolled past because I didn’t want to watch and am searching through the Criterion Channel to find something good to watch!

Of course it was stupid that the first AppleTV remote, which was otherwise fine, didn’t have a mute button. It’s also stupid that the AppleTV, which claims it can learn a different remote, actually can’t.

 
 
[1] Seriously, fuck Logitech, and their horrible Apple support.