Facebook won't let you use the email '+' extension as a new email address

Gmail, and some other systems, support a very old email standard that needs a name. Gmail will treat myname+123@gmail.com as though it were myname@gmail.com. It’s handy for filtering email lists.

I wondered if it could use it with Facebook accounts.  As I discuss in my book there are many reasons to have Facebook related email for a vulnerable user go to their parent or “Guide”. Facebook doesn’t allow an email address to be associated with more than one account — maybe the + feature would work …

Except it doesn’t. I tried adding a + variant of my personal email to one of the kids accounts and Facebook told me it was in use.

Bummer. Now you know not to try.

Incidentally, iCloud support up to 3 aliases, so you can do this with an iCloud email alias. Alas, regular Gmail does not support true aliases — only the + suffix trick. Google Apps does support aliases, at least if you own a domain, but that’s strictly a geek or business thing.

Getting around Koodo's (Canada) password reset bug - use incognito browser

Americans think Comcast customer service is bad.

It is true that Comcast is not great — though it is better than it was. Compared to Canada’s mobile carriers though, Comcast is bloody Apple.

My sister uses Koodo, a Telus subsidiary. She was unable to pay her bill for a couple of months, attempts to pay by credit card were met with a nonsensical error message. Customer support couldn’t help. Somehow I figured out their security system was balking on an address mismatch between her bank and her Koodo account — and producing a red herring error message. Of course changing her address on the web site didn’t suffice…

Eventually Koodo changed her address. Since her only computer is an iPhone, and since Koodo doesn’t have a mobile solution (but, you say, “they are a mobile service …”) I did the transaction online.

Or rather, I attempted the transaction online. Koodo wouldn’t recognize her password. They’re happy to do resets though, but the reset passwords wouldn’t work. Koodo wouldn’t let me reuse them though — it was storing the password hash correctly (or, knowing them, the password in plaintext).

I kept getting this message:

Something went wrong!

Sorry, the username and password you entered does not match our records. Please try again.

Warning: Five (5) unsuccessful attempts will cause your online access to be locked for one hour. If you can't remember your password, reset your password now before your account is locked.

The fix?

Well, I knew the username and passwords were correct, so I figured the real error was again unrelated to the error message. My bet was on some cookie state.

So I tried with a Chrome incognito window. That worked.

There’s no way Koodo tech support would have figured that out. What a hopeless company.

Take heart America. We may have the worst leader since Andrew Johnson, the greatest threat to civilization since Mao, but Canada has Koodo.

Ok, forget that. We’d rather have Koodo.

After macOS 10.12.6 a lot of apps are doing the "quit unexpectedly"

Scrivener is the 3rd app today to “quit unexpectedly”. It’s been like this since 10.12.6 went in.

Restarts aren’t helping …

How I plan to test my Aperture Library against Sierra

It’s almost time for me to move to macOS Sierra, now that the usual post-release beta testing is drawing to a close.

This is what I am doing to test my Aperture Library on Sierra:

1. Export a small Project as a Library.
2. Open the small Project and delete its contents. Now it’s an empty shell with my settings in it.
3. Import my existing Library into it. So everything is written with the latest version of Aperture.
4. Test with #3.

Apple Discussions have lots of fix and workaround suggestions for early Sierra, but I’m told they are no longer necessary. The things broken in El Capitan and broken in Sierra, but nothing new.

How to delete your iCloud account and Apple ID

First, invent a time machine.

Second, go back in time and force Apple to add account removal.

For now - you can’t.

You can remove your Google account. You can remove your Facebook account. You can’t remove your iCloud account and your Apple ID. They are eternal.

I’ve run into this little oddness before, but I was reminded of it when cleaning up my deceased father’s online presence.

A 2013 Apple forum post says: “Access can be stopped by Apple if they are provided with your Death Certificate.” I bet you have to fly the certificate to Cupertino. Even then it’s not clear if any data is deleted. I wonder if anyone has ever done this.

Apple gets away with a lot.

PS. I did set his email to forward to me.

OS X (macOS) installer sizes - Mountain Lion through Sierra

Sierra is almost ready for release now, so I’m preparing to install.

Interesting to compare installer sizes from the download era:

Release	Size (GB
Mountain Lion	4.46
Mavericks	5.33
Yosemite	5.68
El Capitan	6.21
Sierra	4.97

Sierra isn’t much bigger than Mountain Lion.

Curious.

Apple drives me into Google's arms - using Google Photos with iPhone and Aperture

Apple has broken me. I’ve left iCloud Photo Stream shares for Google Photos.

First I lost the ability to share from Aperture to Facebook. I think that was probably a Facebook change, but of course Aperture isn’t getting updates any more.

That was annoying.

Losing Apple Photo Stream was much worse. Photo stream wasn’t great, but it was simple for my daughter, sister, and other users to subscribe to. For a time I could use iCloud Photo Library on Photos.app alongside iCloud Photo Streams on Aperture [1].

Then Aperture retched and I lost my shared photo streams (but not, happily, the originals). I played around with restoring iLifeAssetManagement from backup but, despite early promise, I couldn’t defeat Apple’s black box sync infrastructure [2].

That’s it. I’m toast. I surrender. Google’s inexplicable aversion to album creation on upload is the lesser evil now.

I’ve installed Google Photos on my iPhone and enabled backup and sync. I’ll use that to cull and play with photos before I transfer them to Aperture.

I’ve freed up 14GB from my Air’s SSD by deleting iLifeAssetManagement and I’ve installed Google Photos Uploader.app. I pointed that to a folder on an external drive, when I want to share from Aperture I export there for upload. I do my post-upload organization and sharing through the web UI.

Since Google nicely migrated images when it closed Picasa Web Albums my new shares are reunited with my old Picasa web albums. I’ve come home again. Though I’m still puzzled by Google’s weird album aversion.

It’s far from ideal, but Apple has burned me yet again. They seem to despise my data.

[1] Though I gave up on iCloud Photo Library when I realized it was more or less incompatible with importing images from iPhone photo roll to Aperture.

[2] Apple is famous for sync that disallows any kind of troubleshooting.

iLifeAssetManagement