Wednesday, July 16, 2025

New lessons on macOS network home backup: WiFi issues and so many bugs

Recently we had a flurry of home computing issues. They feel typical of our time where multiple bugs interact across multiple environments.

In this case there were 3-4 different bugs and failures that impacted our home network and especially backup. The lessons learned were not in my ai responses so they seem worth sharing. The interacting bugs included:
  1. Apple hardware bugs in the M1 Air that can make the Air WiFi unreliable. (Could be drivers/software but persistence suggests either a very hard problem or hardware with possible software mitigation.)
  2. The odd behavior of Eero wifi
  3. Bugs and limitations in macOS SMB networking and in HPFS mean network share filesystems can be corrupted beyond repair.
  4. A completely unrelated red herring that turned out to be due to CenturyLink's parent org messing up their DNS configuration.
Such is the nature of our times, where complexity and unsustainable share prices combine to decrease reliability of core systems.

At the core was WiFi instability. Our M1 Air WiFi was constantly fluctuating, leading to constant disconnects. I knew there was something wrong as Carbon Copy Cloner would quite often warn that a backup was being transiently disrupted by the network share disappearing. The very frequent write/read failures presumably led to the HPFS hard drive file system corruption. I had to diagnoses and fix the drive connection before focusing on the underlying WiFi issue.

Things I am doing differently now:
  1. Reconfigured physical layout of our Eero base stations so there was a direct "line of sight" short distance between the M1 Air dock location and the Eero base station. The M1 Air needs a much stronger than usual WiFi connection to be stable. The new configuration also offloads some traffic from an overloaded Eero device.
  2. We use a Synology Time Machine server as a secondary (not robust) backup. That backup was also corrupted (happens normally anyway -- because bugs, but WiFi issues sped it up). At least in Sequoia if you remove a Synology TM backup destination and then add it back there's an option to replace the original. This is faster than wiping it from the Synology side.
  3. I used advanced preferences so Carbon Copy Cloner will dismount the network share after a clone/backup is compete. The less that share is open the better because it's hosted from a MacBook Pro that can be disconnected from the network, and macOS/SMB does not handle that disconnect gracefully.
  4. I had configured a user quota for one of our machines that had become too small. Time Machine should have provided guidance about capacity but did not do so in a useful way.
Related

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Bug in iOS 18.5 eSIM removal - you have to let it update your contacts

When Tello failed to transfer my CenturyLink number I canceled their service. I then tried to remove their eSIM from my phone. Apple's instructions worked -- but the line name remained even with a deleted eSIM.

It's a bug.

When Apple asks if you want to update any contacts using the number associated with the removed eSIM you have to say yes -- even if there are none. Looks like a simple logic bug. Then the entry will be removed.

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Create a macOS desktop shortcut (.inetloc) that deep links to a specific note in Notes.app

Writing this up quickly, I might get back to it later.

I want to have a shortcut to a specific macOS Notes.app note that I can put in a folder.

1. In the note I want to link to hit ⌘K. Search on name of the current note.

2. Do NOT use the note title option. Unclick that and provide your own title. Create link in note.

3. A link is created in the note. Click on that that and then drag it to the desktop. An inetloc file with a deep link is created.

This is what the .inetloc shortcut has in it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>URL</key>

<string>applenotes:note/fcbf1ab3-4779-49d5-b12f-ab33e9809113?ownerIdentifier=_5e4c6731f56ce6c061ce7014d9bc1b2a</string>

</dict>

</plist>

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Porting a landline number to a secondary Ting eSIM on iPhone with primary AT&T account

This was much harder than I expected it to be. Below is a simplified account of what eventually succeeded. I actually started out by trying to transfer from CenturyLink to Tello. That port failed. It was impossible to determine why it failed, each company pointed me to the other. I did learn that the porting process is surprisingly manual, there's an actual carrier to carrier voice call involved.  The porting office is kept away from customers to reduce social engineering exploits. Lastly the all important PIN provided by, in this case CenturyLink, is of a form that suggests the carriers don't take it very seriously. Overall I was left with the impression that carriers have fairly successfully sabotaged the landline porting process. I miss having a government that cared about such things.

My best guess as to why the port from CenturyLink to Tello failed is that CenturyLink takes too long to process the request and Tello is too impatient. It took CenturyLink 4-5 days to complete the Port that succeeded, longer than Tello's 3 day limit. Tello's disinterest in the port process makes me wonder how much time they have as an MVNO.

After some glitches I was able to delete my Tello account (they had a bad link that I'm sure they will never fix).

Now to what worked with an preface of why we were among the last to do successfully port a number from a landline to a mobile company. 

Why we ported from a landline in 2025

We are among the last in America to have a $43/m voice only family landline. It persisted because our ancient security system relies on two of the standard four copper landline wires, and the switching costs were comparable to our monthly landline fee. The landline was purely a message phone, it didn't ring.

It was on the list of things to replace but lower priority since minimal savings and added hassles.

Then copper wires started to disappeared in our metro area. I think wire theft may have peaked for the moment, but the copper side of Century Link isn't paying what it would take to maybe keep the wires working. When the elderly techs come by they beg us to leave copper so they can finally rest.

We want to keep the legacy number so I looked into the 2025 porting options. The only thing that's changed since I last looked in 2015 or so is the eSIM. Mastodon friends suggested voip.ms, but it was obvious that we're not their business. (These days we think a lot about how things get managed after we die, and we assume that the kids are having to make decisions. They are not techies.) Also, canceling voip.ms service requires tedious interactions with their outsourced retention people. A huge red flag.

You still can't port from landline directly to Google Voice. The cost of a landline port would be prohibitive for what is still a "free" service. The AIs claim you can't port from CenturyLink VOIP to Google Voice either.

CenturyLink (fiber) would sell us a VOIP phone service for about $30/m that I'm sure would not have a porting issues. This is modest savings from the $43 landline, but we felt we could do better. Also, I'm not impressed with legacy CenturyLink service. (Their fiber service has worked well for us, they behave like separate companies.)

We looked at using an old iPhone as our home phone with its Apple Voice Mail (requires data). AT&T is our ($$) current family carrier and we could add a $30+/m line from them. But of course there are cheaper options.  Back in 2012 we used H2O Wireless for the kids phones. It's rock bottom service quality but if you work at it you should be able to use them for under $100 a year (prepay, no contract). They are still around! Also familiar from the old days: Tello, Hello Mobile, and Ting. All of which will provide new phones that could be left in the kitchen. We could even use one of our old iPhones. (Note Apple vmail requires some data support, so data-free won't work).

Happily there are better options than leaving an old iPhone on a charger. In the past few years eSIMs have started to work fairly well on iPhones. Our current phones can all handle at least 2 (I think up to 8?) eSIMs. So rather than hassle with an old iPhone holding the number, we ported it to an eSIM on Emily's personal iPhone.

I asked the AIs which had the better customer service among H2O Wireless, Tello, Ting, and Hello Mobile. Tello and Ting won easily. I tried Tello and my initial impression was good, but as noted above the port failed. With Tello you get a temporary number and eSIM immediately, then switch numbers if the port works.

After the Tello port failed we removed the eSIM from Emily's iPhone and tried Ting's $10/m plan. I actually sent a referral from an older Ting account I had but I'm not sure the referral credit thing worked.

We again called CenturyLink. Emily's name was on the landline account, so we used her name on the Ting account. We had the correct account number. Emily navigated CenturyLink phone puzzle and got a 4 digit Port code. We submitted the port request with Ting.

There's no way to monitor porting progress from the Ting site but after 5 work days Emily got an email notification.

Then as expected, things got a bit wonky. Ting's documentation on the eSIM assignment process is contradictory and didn't match what happened. We got a link to go to, but the link only displayed a blank page. We tried it from both the desktop and from Safari mobile. When I investigated the Ting account however it seemed like her iPhone was activated.

In fact it appears that Ting was using Apple's eSIM Carrier Activation. Under some conditions, presumably including a port, the eSIM can be pushed directly from the carrier to the target device. No customer interaction needed -- despite Ting's reference to QR codes and the like. (Bit unnerving really.)

After confirming the eSIM was on her phone we configured it. There are several options to look at,  We configured her Vmail response and tested texting and calling. Everything seemed to be in order.

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Move your existing Greenlight account to the free US Bank option: you can't do it on macOS desktop

If you have a GreenLight family debit card and are a US Bank checking customer, you can, in theory, link the GreenLight account to the US Bank checking account and save $72 a year. If you do this you lose some Greenlight features (investing, maybe some others) I don't care about, and after the migration some functions move to the US Bank app:

  1. Sending money to "kids" and viewing balance is through the US Bank app.
  2. Greenlight app for setting spending limits, managing chores, pay allowance, etc.

I got an email about this from US Bank, very thoughtfully clicked the macOS Mail.app email link, clicked Approve on the form ... and nothing happened. Even with popups enabled:

I was able to workaround the bug. There are two things I did but I think the big one is the first.
  1. I had to click the link in the US Bank mail I received on mobile, not on desktop. I don't think this works on desktop at all! There's no GreenLight desktop access (mobile only), and since the mobile process invokes the GreenLight app I don't see how it would work on desktop even if there wasn't a bug with this form. US Bank contractors coded the page for use on mobile but didn't consider that somebody might click an email link from a desktop app.
  2. I thought at first there was a problem because my funding source was already my US Bank checking account. So I switched to using my US Bank debit card and remove the checking account. After I migrated I reversed this. I don't think this was necessary however.
So, basically, I think the GreenLight to US Bank migration is actually mobile only, even though clicking an email link from macOS will initiate the migration in a browser. If I'm right the web page needs to check that it's running on mobile, and display the appropriate error message.

Thursday, May 08, 2025

Word Services in macOS Sequoia: reenabling after migration

When I migrated from Mojave to Sequoia (with a pause at Monterey I think) I lost the word services I liked. Today I finally investigated and figured out they came from DevonThink's free WordService "app". During the migration they were disabled, so I had to relearn how they work (macOS needs AI for searches of system settings -- because obviously Apple will never do the obvious fixes):

Now go into System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services > Text and you’ll see several services prefixed with WordService. Enable the ones you’re interested in, e.g., WordService: All Caps. If it’s a command you think you’d use often, you may want to assign a hotkey. Double-click the shortcut field to the right and enter a shortcut for the desired service.

I had to reenable my preferred services. Some of them don't seem to work now but most do. They are big timesavers for me. Reformat is particularly appreciated. From the help file:

A combination of Trim Lines, Remove Line Endings, Remove Multiple Spaces and Remove Quotes preserving paragraphs.

Devon Technologies has several free and valued utilities. I use EasyFind and WordService.

Monday, April 21, 2025

Managing the incredibly annoying Apple Wallet notifications on Sequoia

I loathe Apple's notifications center on macOS. The notifications constantly get in the way of my work, and the most unstoppable ones are related to Daily Cash and Apple Wallet transactions.

The UI to manage these are obscure.  I'll update this post as a I learn more. (I wouldn't mind macOS Notifications if I could see them only when I clicked on something, the current overlay behavior is infuriating.)
  1. On macOS Sequoia: 
    • go to Notifications:Wallet and turn off "allow Notifications"
    • Notifications:Notification Center: turn off "Allow notifications from iPhone" (I turned everything off)
  2. On iOS (iPhone)
    • For each card in Wallet tap on ellipsis and turn off Notifications
    • Notifications:Notification Center: Change Display to "Count" (I made the all the Notification options as restricted as possible).
    • Notifications:Wallet: turn off "Show on Mac".
I'm hoping the above will finally kill Notification Center pop-up notifications on macOS (a typically incompetent Apple UI fail) and the endless Cash/Wallet notifications. Once I get this under control (if that's possible) I will carefully liberalize some of the restrictions starting on the iPhone.

Apple is such a fail whale now.