Thing 1

I scrobble all the music I listen to via Spotify these days. In the olden times the last.fm scrobbler was hooked into iTunes but the streams are what the kids use now. Files? What are they?

Anyway, that scrobbling rube goldburg machine all broke 24 hours ago for 25% of last.fm Spotify users. One of four shards last.fm uses to handle the flood of tracks returned by the Spotify API shat the bed.

So they're churning through the backlog. And hugops to the last.fm OPS team for cranking through all that. I'm still dead in the water, my user is on the newly resurrected shard. The shard so backlogged it can't keep up with anything ever. I get it, I've been in the industry for over two decades. But as a last.fm user of 14 years, I has a bit of a sad.

Thing 2

Out of the blue yesterday Disney+ no longer showed a picture for any content when playing on my TV. I had sound. I could see the Disney+ UI, all the thumbnails, read the preview things etc. But try watching anything? Nope, just the Disney+ logo in the top right, the scrubber at the bottom, but no actual content.

Perplexing stuff. Curious if my Apple TV was to blame I watched some things from other services. All worked; Apple TV+ shows, YouTube etc. So then did the obvious things reboot, uninstall Disney+, reinstall, logout, login all to no avail.

Disney+ live chat support weren't great, but I wasn't expecting much. It was a frustrating go around and all they gave me was a link to some generic help. Everything I'd already tried.

On a whim I just started unplugging HDMI cables and solved the problem. My TV has 3 HDMI ports. Disney+ will not show content while the Apple TV is plugged into HDMI port 1 or 2. But it works in port 3. Because reasons? I mean, it's good that it works now. But, quite frankly, what the fuck?

I don't know man, it's possible my 5 month old TV lost HDMI ports 1 & 2 on the same day? But it's only Disney+ experiencing this behavior. Which makes no sense. I'm at a loss.

The only time I ever use Chrome is for multi-browser testing at $dayjob. For reasons I can only describe as 'never really sat well with me' I've tended to avoid it. Articles such as this one about breaking ad tracking extensions aren't likely to change my mind any time soon.

Or as jwz eloquently puts it.

Sure, run a web browser developed by the world's largest advertising company.

What could go wrong.

I've both played, and watched nephews play, Fortnite. I'm crap at it, but I've played it. And you know, I really don't see what all the fuss is about. But then again I am an old.

There's so much to nod at when reading this article by Mark Wilson at Fast Company. Nicely summed up in the final paragraph.

Technology should always bend to the user, not vice versa. And no human's life is measurably better since Apple had the "courage" to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.

Did you happen to see Google's on-stage demo of Google Assistant making a phone call the other day?

Others I've spoken to thought it was the coolest thing ever. I'm not so sure, I was a little unnerved by it to be honest. Was kinda creepy.

Bridget Carey wrote something a little stronger

I am genuinely bothered and disturbed at how morally wrong it is for the Google Assistant voice to act like a human and deceive other humans on the other line of a phone call, using upspeek and other quirks of language. "Hi um, do you have anything available on uh May 3?"

If Google created a way for a machine to sound so much like a human that now we can't tell what is real and what is fake, we need to have a talk about ethics and when it's right for a human to know when they are speaking to a robot.

In this age of disinformation, where people don't know what's fake news… how do you know what to believe if you can't even trust your ears with now Google Assistant calling businesses and posing as a human? That means any dialogue can be spoofed by a machine and you can't tell.

This might be the future we're heading towards. But I don't really like it. I realize I just became my own Grandad we didn't need computers in my day. But this just doesn't feel right to me. And I'm a software developer and do this for a living.

But then I'm a closet Luddite and still turn on my house lights with a switch. Like some animal.

One of my peeves that you don't care about, is how Spotify 'helpfully' changes the track title on songs.

In my old age there's apparently no limit to my OCD when it comes to my music library. When I did "files in iTunes" like an animal, I carefully curated all the metadata and it was a music library of fucking amazement. My last.fm listening history stats bore that out.

Then I started streaming music like all the kids and it's been mostly fantastic. Trying to explain to Kevin Spencer aged 18 that this little black piece of glass in my hand has access to the entire world's music collection would result in utter disbelief.

But I digress.

So yeah, Spotify like to mostly add things like "Remastered 2014 Version" to song titles. Which I detest. Or as is the case with Tears For Fears' The Hurting album, rename Pale Shelter to "Pale Shelter – 2nd Single Version". Because reasons.

Good lord man, why do you even care?

Any last.fm'er will tell you that because the song title is different, it will be counted as a completely different song. And lo over the course of my streaming life, no end of tracks have been miscounted. And I has a sad. And other last.fm'ers on the forums also have sads about this. We've been teased about "fixes" forthcoming and when I asked again about that plan, got an answer I liked.

last.fm will implement a fix

This will be best fixed with adding new track-level scrobble corrections, once that's implemented later in the year. It looks bad now because we can't make changes the corrections dataset until the new scrobble db is deployed, but once we're able to add new track corrections / redirections to the site, this problem should be greatly reduced.

And I has a happy. I like happy.

When you read a post that begins with a "let me just say that I'm a lifelong Star Wars fan…" it usually means that what comes next isn't necessarily complimentary. So I'll get that out of the way now. Let me just say I'm a lifelong Star Wars fan, I have toys in my office, t-shirts, books, you name it.

What J. J. Abrams did with The Force Awakens proved a good Star Wars movie could be made this century. I was so worried it was going to be a let down but came out of the theater grinning from ear to ear. I literally wanted to shake his hand for making a movie that tickled my Star Wars brain. When Rogue One came out I was blown away by the possibilities for movies with new characters set in the Star Wars universe. It was like a Star Wars renaissance.

In the years since The Force Awakens I had unknowingly set myself up for disappointment. I started making episode 8 in my own head. Abrams had setup a lot in TFA and I just couldn't help myself play those things out in my mind. I don't think its wrong to have done that. But where I went astray is how I went into the movie.

Expectations, they're a thing.

So, right off the bat, let me just say that I thought some of the decisions Rian Johnson made were bold and admirable. I didn't mind the throwing away of a light side and dark side of the force. Burn down the Jedi. Ok, I dig it, let's do that. Anyone can be force sensitive. Sure, I'm in. I didn't mind that angle at all. I just don't think Johnson ticks my boxes for making a Star Wars film like Abrams did. And here's where my conflict begins.

Because there were beautiful moments. Some of the individual scenes were utterly amazing. I could watch the Snoke throne room scene 100 times a day. Lovely stuff. And seeing Luke and Yoda on screen together once again, my inner 10 year old was squealing. But a rambling plot with clumsy writing made the whole thing feel disjointed to me. It's like Johnson had a glimpse of a vision of where he wanted it to go, but wasn't very successful in getting it there.

There was an awful lot going on in this movie. With a lot of characters. It's unreasonable to think that we could have enough time with all of them. And yet I did. I expected much more Luke/Rey time than we got. I expected more Snoke time. More Phasma time. Honestly why even introduce them at all if you're going to do nothing with them? In the case of Phasma, what an opportunity to have a female baddie play a big part. But no, a couple lines and she's out.

The casino sub plot interspersed with the space chase really took me out of the moment. There's so many of the Finn/Rose scenes that should have ended on the cutting room floor. Why spend time on that plot when other character arcs got so little time? The sole redeeming thing about the space chase was the lightspeed kamikaze run. But the back and forth between casino & fleet scenes just didn't sit well with me. Oh and awkwardly shot Mary Poppins flying Leia scene was a thing.

I didn't like how Johnson handled Luke either. Not the jaded cynicism, I get that. But muddled writing. He came to the island to die. But totally made a map for others to find him? And the guy who crossed the galaxy to find good in the evil Darth Vader wanted to murder Ben Solo? After Abrams' epic shot of Rey handing the lightsaber to him at the end of TFA, Johnson decides on a sitcom toss over the shoulder. But Hamill was excellent and gave Luke a decent send off. Raising the X-Wing and flying to the base to actually fight might have been more interesting than remotely using the force to death?

Friends have suggested I watch the movie again without expectations. It's telling that I almost don't want to. What Abrams now does with episode 9 will be interesting. Two bookends either side of an awkward middle perhaps?

Remember Apple's "courage" when the headphone jack was removed in the iPhone 7? Such an old legacy port had no business being in such a new piece of technology we were told. The future lies with the lightning port. And if you have expensive headphones already, a dongle. Which you'll never lose nor forget to bring with you.

Fast forward slightly.

The new Macbook Pro came out. And it had …wait for it… a headphone jack.

Fast forward slightly.

The new iMac Pro became available on Apple's website. And it has …wait for it… a headphone jack.

So I'm not sure where "courage" really fits in here. Is it "courage" by having inconsistent support across devices and thinking that's ok? Or is it "courage" to bet the farm on users buying additional dongles?

The ability to add phone call support to your Mac, if you owned an iPhone, landed in Yosemite a few years ago. I don't recall which OS upgrade flipped the bit that starting making my Mac actually notify me by ringing every time my phone does? I swear it hasn't done it since Yosemite has it? Well after the 7th phone call today and hearing it all in perfect stereo I decided to do something about it.

So, where do you think you go to turn all that off? If you said 'System Preferences', you made a smart guess, but you would be wrong. And that's pretty much 10 minutes of my life I'm never getting back.

Instead you have to know that on a Mac what you're actually doing is handling a Facetime Audio call. Obviously. And you can't get at Facetime preferences from within System Preferences. You have to open the Facetime app itself and then go do Preferences => 'Calls from iPhone' and uncheck that.

So I guess file this under things you should already know unless you don't know them?

Twitter rolled out support for 280 characters to everyone yesterday. Well, to be fair, they added it to their web interface. Their official Mac app hasn't had any love since May so only 140 characters available there still. Of any improvement they could have possibly made, doubling the length of posts not something that gets me excited.

Twitter: What do you want?
Users: Ban nazis.
Twitter: 280 characters it is!

I don't want Twitter to become a blogging platform. Part of its charm and success has been those 140 characters. It forces brevity, posts are easy and fun to write, and even easier to consume. My brain is starting to gloss over the longer tweets now. Thankfully 90% of my timeline respects a more civilized time.

And what's with that circle countdown thinger in the 280 character UI?