coffeetime69

So, according to the new Battery Health (Beta) feature, it says that my iPhone 6 Plus (bought in late October of '14) is 99% of what it was when I purchased it.  Which is just bunk.  I'm on the list to get a new replacement battery because it can't make it through the day without a recharge.

As I sent to Apple already (but haven’t seen reported), I’m currently on chemo for sarcoma cancer that jumped from my large leg tumor (since surgically removed - the entire leg including tumor) into my lungs.  My first exposure to one of the chemo drugs (Gemcitabine) caused a severe body-wide rash.  I remember waking up early in the morning with the feeling that my heart was beating funny, so I strapped on my Series 4 watch and ran the ECG test, and it came back saying that my heart rate was abnormally high.  I ran it again and it told me I was in A-Fib.  We immediately phoned our on-call nurse, and they said to get down to the ER, which we did.  They confirmed that I was in A-Fib with a high (upper-100) resting heart rate, and gave me drugs through my PowerPort (an implant most chemo patients have to get blood and other chemicals in and out without having to get an IV line each time) to get it under control.  Knowing me, had the watch not warned me, I might not have gone to the ER until symptoms had gotten worse, and it’s speculative to know where that might have led.  It’s funny, because the feature we had bought the Series 4 watches for was “fall detection,” as with an amputated leg, I had already fallen twice, the second time being very lucky that my wife was outside where she could hear me slamming my hand against the window as I lay all tangled up on the floor in my walker with my iPhone on my desk just out of reach.  Instead, it was the ECG feature that saved my bacon!

Next up, the Woz will give us advice on dieting.

So, I updated my iPhone 6 Plus to the new 12.4.2 release, and then I tried to update my Series 4 watch.  No go - it said that I need a newer version of software on my iPhone.  I just got off the phone with Apple Support (what a joke), and they confirmed it.  So, to refresh, if I had an older watch (Series 1 or 2), then I'd be able to upgrade from 5.3.1 to 5.3.2 using my old iPhone 6, but since I have a NEWER Series 4 watch that is capable of running iOS 6, then I can't update it until I buy a newer phone.  Like I told the support person, I've owned Macs since the 128K Macintosh - more than I can remember.  I just think that this pretty much sucks.  My wife and I have perfectly good iPhone 6 phones and newer Series 4 watches, but because we don't have newer phones, our watch OS is stuck in time at 5.3.1.

Sorry, Neil, no technology in the world will make your whiny-a** singing sound good.

I have a Series 4 watch but an iPhone 6, which doesn't support iOS 13.  How will I update my watch?

Really hoping that Amazon gets going on Iain M. Banks' Culture series of SciFi books.  Talk about a universe with "legs" for years and years of movies and TV series.  And Stephen Baxter - that writer's imagination is simply off the charts.  And then there's Alastair Reynolds, with his Revelation Space universe.  There's so much detail to his stories that I've re-read some of his books three times just to get my head around them.  Yet, for some reason, all we get are Star Wars, Star Trek, Terminator and Alien / Predator endless sequels plus the mess that is Marvel, and now this one.

Me: Hey, Siri, tell me about "Barbra Streisand."

Siri: Getting information on "Liberal Idiot."