Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1345
Sittin' at the airport thinking about iPhone 16 and iOS 18
Oh my god it is so early. 5:12 AM. I hate this. Stupid UN General Assembly, making every flight full and every hotel full. Why they gotta put that thing the week my office lease is up. Or, you know, the week before. Guess the lease is not up for 6 days. I am so tired.
Almost overslept! Set my alarm for 4AM, but set it for 4PM because I am innumerate is there such a thing as male menopause-induced innumeracy? Because that’s me, I have it.
Had this very long dream where I was backstage at the Eras tour, onstage, really, because — and you might not know this — there is an invisible flying saucer hovering above the stage for the VIPs. And whats-her-name, that publicist that Taylor has whose name is known by all the superfans — she got me back there and told me Kate Bush was coming and I was so excited.
Kate did not show up before I woke up, unaided, at 4:14 AM, but… I got pretty close to meeting Kate Bush in my dreams and that’s not nothing.
I would blame my new phone for messing up my alarm — because I haven’t actually made a new alarm in a year, I just reuse the same ten or so already made. Weird the alarms don’t sync via icloud. Though I did manually set up this new phone, because I was seeing online that it took six to eight hours to sync the new phone via the Apple sync tool. That seemed absurd. So instead I did it myself, and it took about nine hours. Not that I am actually done. It is so laborious now to set up a new phone. So many not obvious and difficult things to do: you gotta un-sync your watch from your old phone, then reset it, then sync it to the new phone and totally set it all up again. I still haven’t gotten that part all set yet.
My “Email Me” app — which has a Watch app and that is half the reason I love it — is still not sending me emails from the watch. It is cray cray how much I have come to rely on that note-taking process in under a year. If GMHHAY seems less clever and wide-ranging this week, this is the reason why: my significantly reduced ability to capture every dumb thought. I had some doozies in the last few days and — poof! — lost to the ether.
I did mess around with the new customization features. I made all my icons monochrome black and white, bigger with no labels. I put a cool photo of me and Jane on my wallpaper and arranged the icons around it so you could see the photo. This means that I ruthlessly moved like six icons off of my home screen, so nothing is in the same place. This means that I completely can’t find any apps at all, so, you know, massive productivity boost. What’s the weather like in New York? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, I showed my nifty new customized screen to my wife and was all proud of it and shit and she, a lifelong Android user, just laughed. Of course they’ve had this functionality forever, so long they’ve gotten bored of it, it’s considered gauche, and they’ve all just gone back to icons in color, in a grid on the home screen, like us Apple users will over the course of this next year, and we will slowly forget this feature ever exists, since it’s almost impossible to find anyway. Not in the settings anywhere! Makes sense.
And don’t get me started on the settings app. Apple “fixed” it — by taking about 10 Apple items and all the prefs for 3rd party apps and shunting them into an “apps” submenu. That menu is alphabetized, but not the main menu, still organized according to an absolutely impenetrable logic, grouped into five unlabeled groups, for no reason. Half the settings shunted into a “general” submenu. What is general? Why is CarPlay in General but not Siri? Why is Airplay in general but not GameCenter? Who knows!
And then we have the Notes.App, where after four days of this, 11,253 notes of 11,527 have synced, but not the other 300 or so. And of course, of those unsynced notes is the one I use every day: GMHHAY topics. whyyyyyy.
This means I have much more commentary about the iPhone 16 Pro and iOS 18 but I don’t actually know it cuz the note hasn’t synced.
I have to say, though, the “hide distracting items” functionality in Safari is amazing. It is unclear to me if they sync across devices, but they are persistent, which means if you kill an ad on, say, a Fandom Wiki with 10,000 ads that is completely unreadable on your phone, it will stay hidden for all other pages on that site. This is amazing! I mean, I work in programmatic advertising for god’s sake, and I still love it! Overlays, interstitials, popups, floating anchored messages, kill em all! begone! On WaPo.com I have killed about 30 different modules. I am killing off comment sections, chumboxes, sidebars, subscription boxes, everything! And most of it stays gone. Not all, but most. This, combined with an ad-blocker, makes the internet usable again.
It will be interesting to see if a) this achieves widespread adoption, because it is not immediately obvious where the functionality is, and b) if Google follows suit. Because it is absolutely game-changing technology for the user, and if Google followed suit, and if everyone started using it, it would absolutely revolutionize online advertising in-browser (says the guy who only works in apps, thinking he is safe, oh, they’re coming for you, Rick, they’re coming for you). But of course, how can Google follow suit, they are an advertising company. But of course, the answer is Google would simply make it impossible to hide Google ads. They might even sacrifice DoubleClick on the alter of the antitrust suit, and keep the Google ads in a spiffing new moat.
Actually that makes me realize I have not yet tried to hide the shitty ad box at the top of Google dot com, because I am a saint and do not use Google dot com, because I am so great and wise and virtuous. I use Kagi, which is great, though its browser-bar referrer is slow AF of late and it is kind of annoying to me.
But I digress.
“Hide distracting items” in Safari is amazing. Press the icon in the browser bar to the left of the URL. Zap items away. The little disintegration animation is hella addictive.
And yes, I had this funcionality already, more or less, in StopTheMadness, the amazing web extension that brings privacy and sanity to browsing, A+, would recommend. But Safari is slowly making StopTheMadness unnecessary, yes, but also widespread.
Hrm I think they’re about to board. I should go.
(found that video of Jane and I making the fire pit).
Drone playlist for you cuz that is what was finished. Oh shit! I’m at the wrong gate! Gotta run!
Also I would just like to say that Notes just finished syncing my notes. Timing!
!