20 Macs for 2020: Now that this is done, I’m bookmarking it so I can come back and read through the full thing. Eventually. Someday. :)
Tag: apple
LG 27UK850-W: An Acceptable 27-inch Display for the Mac: I occasionally toy with the idea of moving to a Mac Mini + monitor setup to replace my current 27″ Retina iMac, but finding a good monitor that’s not too expensive is difficult. This one is a maybe?
This Means Nothing
Pet peeve: The little fake level meter animation that Music shows when a track is playing drives me up the wall. It’s just a looped animation that bears no relation to what’s actually playing. Give me real data or a static icon, but this is useless.
The One Remaining Use of the Word “Macintosh”: “Some weeks ago, I was struck by the thought that Apple had almost entirely managed to scrub its corporate communications of the word ‘Macintosh.’ It’s not surprising, of course, but I was curious if the company had slipped up anywhere.”
Defining the decade: ten years of Apple on one page: “Apple had to graduate through the passing of its founder, juggle relationships with an ever-expanding list of consumer and professional market segments, and adapt to the public attention and scrunity that only comes along as a consequence of being the biggest company in the world.”
My New Year’s Resolutions
My resolutions for this year:
- 5120 x 2880
- 1920 x 1080
- 1668 x 2224
- 1125 x 2436
- 368 x 448
(That’s my retina iMac, its secondary display, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ‘cause it makes me laugh.)
2019 Mac Pro isn’t the most expensive Mac ever. Not even close.: “There has been much handwaving over the $5,999 price tag on the 2019 Mac Pro. It’s often been criticized for being Apple’s expensive computer ever. But it’s not. And it’s not even close, if you factor in inflation. Many of the early Macs cost much more than $6,000 in today’s dollars.”
Seattle QFC debuts first apple ever bred in Washington, despite the state being the highest grower: “The apple variety was developed by Washington State University. Washington growers, who paid for the research, will have the exclusive right to sell it for the first 10 years.”
Linkdump for January 27th through October 30th
Sometime between January 27th and October 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto, or iTunes on macOS Catalina.: Saving this for myself, in case I want or need iTunes when I get around to upgrading to Catalina.
- Inside the sexy Halloween costume industrial complex: Their costumes are often horrible, and oft-derided each year (including by me). But I thought this peek into the “sexy everything company” was an interesting one.
- The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight: "On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures."
- Queen Elizabeth II makes New Zealand woman who fought to decriminalize prostitution a ‘dame’: “Catherine Healy, 62, a founder of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, was instrumental in helping her country become the first to decriminalize prostitution in 2003. After 30 years of activism, the queen recognized her Monday as a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit ‘for services to the rights of sex workers.’”
- Keira Knightley is obviously right: there’s a sexist double standard in how we treat period dramas: “The great irony is that in being dismissed as feminine fluff, the period drama has somewhat avoided the controlling male gaze. Women are allowed complexity and agency. They can be the heroes – not the wives and girlfriends of the heroes. Ignore the negativity, and the corset can actually be quite freeing.”
Me: 1, Apple Support: 0 (So far…)
Today’s morning entertainment: Stumping Apple support.
Long story short (if I can manage that…(spoiler: I can’t)):
Sometime in the early 2000s, I signed up for Apple’s then-new iTools service (later rebranded as .Mac, and then MobileMe), and was issued an @mac.com account and email address.
Over time, that service became what is now AppleID, and while I at some unremembered point stopped using my original @mac.com email address, it carried on as my AppleID account name.
I’ve noticed on and off for quite some time now (as in, years) that I haven’t been getting receipts from iTunes (or the iOS or Mac App Stores), and had a vague idea in my head that it might be because they were getting sent to the old @mac.com address instead of an actual active email address, but it was never important enough for me to be concerned about. Every so often I’d get curious and poke around in the settings on my hardware or the online tools, fail to find a way to fix it, and then get bored or distracted and decide to figure it out “later”.
Well, “later” apparently ended up being this morning (as I’m suspecting that there may be more communications from Apple that I’m not receiving), so I ended up on the phone with an Apple support tech for close to an hour as I explained what I was sure of and what I suspected, and as they dug around in their tools to see what they could figure out. End result: I’m probably right in my guess, but they’re stumped as to why they couldn’t find any way to fix it, or even be entirely sure that that was what was actually going on, in large part because all the @mac.com servers and systems have been offline for years.
So they’re going to write my case notes up, bump them up to the next level and the backend engineering team, and hope to be able to get back to me next week. Best case scenario, they’ll be able to make sure that all communications get sent to an active email address as they should. The more probable (and hopefully worst-case) scenario is that I’ll have to change my AppleID — which they think will fix the issue, because that old @mac.com address won’t be in the system even as an account name anymore, but would be a bit of a shame, since I’ve had that account name for close to two decades now, and it would be kind of a shame to lose it. But still, if it’s breaking things, I’d rather lose that than continue not receiving information I should be getting out of silly nostalgia.
All in all, it’s an entertaining situation, the tech was friendly and competent (and entertainingly confused), and this obviously isn’t a high-priority issue for me, so I’m content to wait to see what information they come up with.
Plus, the way I look at it, I bought my first personal Mac in 1991, and after almost three decades of Mac geeking, if I’m going to get to the point of calling Apple support, it’s going to be for a damn good reason. :)