heavypound

Don’t block numbers. That does nothing to stop the scourge that is scammers and unsolicited phone calls. Similar to spam e-mails, ignoring or blocking scammers doesn’t cost the caller anything, so they have no incentive to stop.

Sign up for Jolly Roger Telephone if you’re annoyed at scammers calling you. They have robots that will get a real person on the line and waste their time. There’s a TED talk from the guy that started Jolly Roger Telephone. For $6/year, they handle the voicemail on my cell phone and waste the time of any scammer that attempts to call me. With this service, it’s fun to receive scammer calls, not a drag.

I don’t think blocking or screening helps the problem of robocalls. Those responses just pushes the problem onto other people.

Robocalls are popular because they have “no” cost. I use the service from Jolly Roger Telephone to help with this. JR impersonates a real person answering the phone to get a real person on the line on their end. This ties up a real person and makes it actually cost the robocall outfit something because they are paying for a real person at that point. Since signing up for JR, I now relish all the telemarking calls I receive instead of fearing them or getting mad.

A few years ago when the corporate IT department really started locking down and monitoring devices, I made a hard line in the sand between work and personal computing.

- I have two phones, one for work, one for home.
- I have separate Apple IDs for the work/home computers and iPhones
- My work MacBook doesn’t know my main home wi-fi password at my home; it’s relegated to the guest network
- My home iPhone doesn’t even know the guest wi-fi password at the office, strictly using cellular at work

“Forcing” the company to purchase any computing devices you need is easier to do at a large corporation than a small company, but I do agree that even in those situations, the company should provide you the tools you need to do your job.

For people in California, I wonder what the validity of using this app from Virginia is going to be. If you read the README file on the iOS App Store, it says when your test results come back as positive and are sent to the Virginia Department of Health, they will provide you with a PIN to use when you report your results in this app. Without the PIN, you can’t report a positive result in the app, so what’s the point? The PIN is used to reduce the number of false notifications that are sent out from the app.

We’re all anxious to get an app for contact tracing, but if we’re going through the trouble of installing and configuring an app on thousands of phones, let’s make sure it will work. If you get people to install this one, are they going to switch over to a new app that works once it is released. These people will feel they are covered and ignore any more “install this tracing app” messages from their corporate IT or HR groups.

3 months ago, I sent a Series 2 Apple Watch in to repair a cracked screen. I received an empty box (no watch, but all packing materials) back from Apple with the security tape on the outside of the box having been broken. After a little over a week, Apple shipped a replacement watch, so I wasn’t impacted by the theft, other than not having the watch for an extra 2 weeks. I’d bet a rather large amount of money on my watch having been stolen by a (hopefully former) FedEx employee.

Ah, AT&T. Gotta love your FauxG networks. They’re the “best”!

Apple has said that new iPhone purchases get 2 years of satellite service included with the purchase. I haven’t seen pricing for the plans after that 2 year intro period. Have they provided that information and I just missed it so far?

I was still using AFP to mount storage from my Synology NAS. This holds my Time Machine backups, Plex media library, and some other storage archives as well. AFP had historically been more reliable than SMB/CIFS for mounting network storage. Over time, Apple improved the SMB client. In a recent Synology OS update, they put a warning that AFP was going away eventually, so switched all the mounts to SMB without issue.

@Emoeller, AFP is only used for network storage (over Ethernet or Wi-Fi. This deprecation doesn’t have anything to do with a drive that connects to your computer using USB, FireWire, or the ancient SCSI protocol that went out of favor when the original iMac was released in 1998.

When Apple re-releases a macOS build like this (build number changes, but version stays the same), it’s generally only for future installations of the software. Apple has deemed the changes minor enough that people already running 17.6.1 do not need to upgrade to the new version. If you had a device still running 17.6, it would get the new build of 17.6.1.

I suspect this is something to do with the installation process. If your device already got through the installation, no need to patch a one-time process that has already completed.