Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

A friend of mine does that with Telegram, it's incredibly annoying. You write something, it takes a day or so until he opens up the app and actually receives the message, and then you have about a 10 second window to actually have a conversation before he's closed it again. Some apps (or at least some features) should plain not work without background data enabled, and inform the user correspondingly.
Yeah, @MWF, stop that!
 
I'm playing a game that's ad ridden so I engage flight mode while playing to stop the ads.
 
Or just not play a game that annoys their players with too many ads. No matter how much I like a game, if there's too many unskippable ads in it, and turning off ads is either not possible or too expensive in relation to the amount of fun I get from the game, I just stop playing it. If the option to buy off ads is reasonable, I just spend some money to support the devs of a game I enjoy.
 
I'm planning to pay for the game this weekend after I get paid. It's actually really good.
 
YES!

I cut myself the other day and had a Band Aid on my left ring fingertip - kept catching the CAPS LOCK button for the next two days at work. So freaking annoying.
 
There are other ways we could get the same effect.

I fat finger it all the time.
 
So, lately I've been contemplating what'd be the best option for me to get a computer for uni work, and out of curisoity, I went to an authorised Apple reseller asking whether they offered a back-to-school discount on 27" iMacs.

I bought a 27" iMac back in 2011, I think. Base model plus the 256GB BTO SSD. Paid through the nose for it, but it was the best computer I've ever had. It was on my desk and powered on 24/7 from the moment I unboxed it until I sold it, except for an hour when I opened it in 2017 or so to clean the fans. I sold it when it became apparent that Apple would drop support for it in the new macOS. I would probably still be using it, but I like being able to run the newest software.

I know some people like to tell you that Apple stuff is overpriced but you can usually get some if not most of the price difference back when you sell your device years later. The best deal I ever did was when I sold my 13" MacBook Air. It had a tired battery and a damaged charging cable, and someone still paid €400 for it. And yes, I disclosed all of that in the ad. The buyer didn't haggle. New 13" Airs with the same storage and ram were on sale for €799 at the time. :D That's what I replaced it with and that's my backup computer these days. It too has worked flawlessly from new.


On the topic of Apples: I'm going to Germany over a weekend soon and my car will sit on a hotel parking lot in Helsinki during the trip. I have a spare iPhone I'm going to hide somewhere in the car hooked up to a big power bank, and I was going to simply track its location via Find My. Does anyone know of an app that'll, for example, let me set a geofence around the car and alert me if the phone moves outside of it? I'd rather not test all of the ones that I'm assuming are available on the app store. :p
 
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Recently moved over to Spotify from Apple Music, partly because it's free for a few months but it may also become more important further down the line.

All is good with the playback but I've had strange issues with playlist ordering. If I listen to a playlist on the PC with the tracks sorted in Artist order, they don't run in the correct order. They skip about a bit and it's odd. I loaded up the app on my phone and with the remote control function I was able to load up the same playlist and skip the tracks, which on the phone go in the correct order.

There was a pending update on the PC app that has now installed and it's the opposite, they go in the correct order on the PC app but not on the phone. How odd.
 
I'm not sure if I should be pleased or annoyed. I like to keep my important photos on iCloud in albums, and for some time I've wanted to sort these albums by name. The iCloud website doesn't allow re-ordering of albums and while I can do this on my phone it doesn't sync back. It is, however, possible to organise them on a Mac. Problem: I don't own a Mac.

So I set up a MacOS VM, linked it to my iCloud account and it works, so I'm happy, but it's a lot of hassle for a simple feature that's missing...
 
Would anyone here know why amazon music app on iOS doesn’t see my play history when I view the app on CarPlay? If I look on my phone the play history and recent searches are there but for whatever reason won’t translate to CarPlay. It’s weird.
 
Apple continues to make stuff that makes me want to spend money.

Dude that iPhone 11 Pro Max had me reaching for my wallet until I rememebered my employer will just hand me the team's Xs Max once the contract is done (and it will have at least 3 more years of support then) and even if they don't my 6S is good for another year.
 
Dude that iPhone 11 Pro Max had me reaching for my wallet until I rememebered my employer will just hand me the team's Xs Max once the contract is done (and it will have at least 3 more years of support then) and even if they don't my 6S is good for another year.
I have the Xs so much less tempted by the 11 than you, however seeing as how I commute by train and spend that time either watching shows or listening to podcasts good comfortable headphones are very much a must.
 
Last Black Friday I bought a 65” 4K Philips Android TV. Over summer it developed an issue where it would turn on and play stuff (you got sound and you could see the ambilight doing its thing) but no picture. Turning it off and on once or twice usually fixed it. Eventually those once or twice became 50 times or so.

There’s a single company in Finland that handles repairs for essentially all consumer electronics devices that aren’t Apple, so they don’t have to care and they know it. The repair took a month. At first I didn’t hear anything from them for two weeks, so I contacted them and apparently, the package just showed up. Two weeks in transit? Yeah, no. Then another week to diagnose and another week to order parts, etc.

About a week or two after I finally got it back, it developed the same issue again. God effing damnit.

Ten points to the reseller for buying it back at a really good price. I ordered a more or less equivalent spec LG to replace it, and I’m paying around €150 after I get the refund for the old tv.

Bummer, though. I liked Ambilight and I even liked android (being an Apple guy) because it’s a supported and widely used OS unlike whatever the other guys use. LG uses WebOS. Let’s see if it’s any good and how long the tv will get updates.
 
If it turns out that WebOS sucks, Nvidia just released a new Shield TV for €149. The old Shield TV was the fastest, best-supported Android TV device out there, and I see no reason for the new one to be any different.
 
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