Not receiving SMS two factor authentication codes for Facebook, Instagram, others: remove blocked numbers

A friend was not receiving Facebook SMS two factor authentication codes on his iPhone. I removed all his blocked numbers and he received the code. We assume he accidentally blocked the number Facebook uses to send SMS codes.

You can see blocked numbers in Settings:Phone:Blocked Contacts (it's actually a list of blocked numbers, not a list of blocked Contacts). If iCloud sync is working you see the same list in Messages on macOS.

Google Account without Google email that routes email to a Google Workspace address

My son has an email address of the form tim@familyname.com where familyname.com is a pseudonym for a domain I own with legacy free Google Apps (now Workspace) accounts.

He also has a Google Account with the Google Account ID of tim@familyname.com. I think he created it somehow with YouTube. (He has a cognitive disability which doesn't stop him from doing some weird shit I can't figure out.)

His second Google Account does not have the email address of tim@familyname.com because that belongs to the Google Workspace account. Instead of it has an email of the form: tim%familyname.com@gtempaccount.com. If I send email to that gtempaccount.com address it redirects to tim@familyname.com.

This feels like a security risk waiting to be exploited. It certainly is weird. It reminds me that Google Workspace accounts don't have the same meaning and privileges as full Google @gmail.com accounts.

Rendering ChatGPT output in readable form in a Juypter Notebook

Update: This post is still useful, but there's also a way to enable line wrap in Visual Studio Code's Jupyter extension. You can also use the Python Print function instead of the Display example in my original post. For example:

output = client.completions.create(

    model="gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct",

    prompt="List the days of the week: ",

    max_tokens=100,

    stop = "Saturday", #put this in for fun

)

print(output.choices[0].text)

Note these print parameters are specific to this particular object's structure. (I think JSON but I'm a newbie.)

Original below

--------

This was a bit of a revelation. I don't know Python but I've been working through a ChatGPT / LLM tutorial using Visual Studio Code and a Juypter Notebook on macOS. In a Jupyter cell the output renders below the cell and it looks like this:

Completion(id='cmpl-....', choices=[CompletionChoice(finish_reason='stop', index=0, logprobs=None, text='1...

All in one unreadable line with \n as a paragraph deliver and no line wrap.

I asked ChatGPT 4 to help. Over a series of interactions I tried different things and got various error messages I passed to ChatGPT 4. In turn it analyzed my error message and suggested fixes.

This is what I ended up with in about 15 minutes, here added to a cell that ran a simple prompt query

from IPython.display import display, HTML

output = client.completions.create(

    model="gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct",

    prompt="write me a poem",

    max_tokens=100,

    n=3

)

text_content = output.choices[0].text if output.choices else ""

html_output = text_content.replace('\n', '<br>')

display(HTML(html_output))

This is what the output looks like now (the poetry is greeting card quality and mildly painful):

A poem, a weave of words and rhyme

A tapestry of thoughts and time

A magic spell from the poet's pen

A story of love, of loss, of when

The stars above, they guide my hand

As I write of distant lands

Of fiery sunsets and ocean tides

Of moments we hold and let slip by ...   

[Adolescent poetry truncated] 

This screenshot shows it best ...

We are in a new world.

Photos lethal bug: non-repairable library corruption when click on Shared Album changes for standalone library, "The library could not be opened"

Nobody asks an Apple customer user why they despise Apple. There are so many reasons.

My latest reason to hate Apple is a bug in Ventura 13.6.1 Photos.app.

Click on Shared Album Activity for a standalone non-primary library and Photos crashes immediately.

After that when trying to open Photos.app initiates Library Repair -- but the repair fails with this unhelpful error message:

At this point I have only a dull Apple hatred because Apple's Aperture migration fiasco killed my hate glands.

After doing an option-command launch of the broken library macOS Ventura Photos.app first does a repair then does a full "Recovery". This takes a while but in my case it worked.

Don't click that Activity link.

Caveat: Monterey Photos.app failed to convert my Aperture Library so the conversion was done with Power Photos. So my Library may have some anomalies from that history.