Audiobooks not showing in iOS 8.4 iBooks? That's because they're still like Movies used to be. Also, The Great Courses.

Decades ago I talked about a personal dementia prevention solution. A dementia test application would be hidden in the OS, but about once a year it would randomly launch. Once it appeared I’d have to complete it — or a lethal shock would be administered. Fail the test — get the shock. The shock would look like an accidental short-circuit, so life insurance would pay out.

I like to think ahead.

I’m pleased to report that today we do have a dementia test, though we’re still working on the electric shock. The test, of course, is Apple’s iTunes and related iOS apps. If you can make them behave then you’re still a potentially viable worker; not yet ready for the Soylent factory.

I gotta admit, things are getting a bit worrisome. For example, today’s audiobooks adventure. It started when Emily decided to pick up some lectures from “The Great Courses” (which we once new as the “Teaching Company”, indeed that’s still the corporate name). We started listening to these about 25 years ago, playing cassette tapes while driving our Mazda 323 cross-country and spritzing ourselves with water spray (no air conditioning).

It’s been a year or so since we bought from them — these days I mostly listen to In Our Time Podcasts [1]. We got one of their 80% off flyers [2] though, and it was hard to resist tormenting the kids with automotive education. So we bought a few. The distribution is a bit complex — DVD or CD (for most lectures you really only want audio, but we did DVD for the $40 photography class) or “Windows” / “Mac” files [3] and (usually) supplemental streaming.

What they don’t mention is that many of their lectures can be purchased from iTunes for less than the CD or audio file download costs in iOS friendly Audiobook format. That’s a lot more convenient than their other options, and cheaper too. So I bought two lectures that way, a short history of London (#3 and I are visiting in October) and Daily Life in the Ancient World [4].

That’s when the dementia test showed up. It’s been years since our last audiobook purchase (viz: In Our Time) and everything has changed [7]. It took a couple of Google searches to figure out that Audiobooks were now tucked away in an obscure corner of Apple’s brutally neglected iBooks.app. Some dungeon-chained Apple product manager decided they could be considered a kind of “Collection”. [5]

Okay, but I’d purchased them and they didn’t show up. Why was that? My Movies and Music and book-book purchases show up in iCloud. Why not these audiobooks? Google found me some documentation, the same team that decided an audiobook was a kind of “Collection” introduced an obscure control as an attribute of a particular Collection called “Hide iCloud Books” (even though these aren’t, you know, Books. Do you see a trend here?)

So I turned that Off, so they wouldn’t hide. That’s a double negative I guess.

Except they still didn’t show up.

This began to remind me of the old days, when we’d have one chance to buy music or videos and everything was managed and backed up using iTunes. Yep, it’s just like that, unchanged from 2013. Download to your phone, and it stays on your phone [6]. No iCloud joy, no freedom from iTunes, you need the old beast still.

Just audiobooks mind you. And, of course, it’s not documented.

Apple must be a desperate place to work these days…

- fn -

[1] Still using Apple’s awful Podcasts.app. Podcasts.app and iBooks.app should chasten those who clamor for iTunes to be be divided into separate apps. Be afraid.

[2] Their pricing is a bit nuts — high list prices and large discounts. Do look for discount codes and the like before purchasing, though the iTunes audiobook prices are often quite reasonable

[3] Their audio/video file format recommendations are bit odd, but I didn’t have time to dig into it. Does Windows 10 still prefer wmv?

[4] I’ve chatted on app.net about writing a book that would describe a ‘day in the life’, from pooping to earning money to playing with kids across history and geography. So I’m looking forward to this one.

[5] Collections used to be sort of meaningful in iBooks, but that ended a year ago.

[6] Well, not quite. If you go to your iTunes purchase record, click on problem and say you had trouble downloading, the purchases are added again to the download list. I had my original purchases, but tried that as an experiment.

[7] Very much for the worse. Audiobooks had a large regression with iOS 7. iOS 8.4 is, in some ways, a partial improvement on iOS 7. Which mostly shows how bad iOS 7 was. Tim Cook has failed to rescue Apple’s long ailing software engineering.

[8] It no longer works to manage iPhone content from both iTunes and iOS. It never worked well, but these days it doesn’t work at all. iTunes can’t synchronize device and desktop states. So if you use Audiobooks, and you have any hope of sensible software behavior, you probably need to go all iTunes for media management.

Update 8/13/2015: Audiobooks not being synchronized to iPhone

I thought I was done, but the Audiobooks wouldn’t sync to my iPhone. That turned out to be a side-effect of an iOS/iTunes bug with photo sync from Aperture. The Aperture photo sync bug causes iTunes sync to silently fail (no UI indication) prior to Audiobook transfer. Removing photo sync let the process complete.

 

Aperture misbehaves: images that can't be moved between projects

I have a  set of images in Aperture that cannot be moved between projects. If I try to move them they are copied.

I’ve repaired permissions and done the standard database repair to no effect.

I’ve inspected the images in the Finder by exploring the Package contents and searching on the Aperture provided file names — they appear unremarkable. 

I’m afraid something in my Aperture database is broken, but I’m reluctant to do a full database restoration. I don’t know how much data will be lost. 

I fear multiple backups and a full database rebuild are in my future…

Update 

I researched this a bit, glad that a few old Aperture sites are still around. Two useful references:

• Get help with Aperture 3 - Apple Support: Apple’s cumulative troubleshooting document
• How do I repair or rebuild my Aperture library or permissions? | PhotosApps.Expert

I think I’ll try importing into a new project. I have a 500 GB Library on a 1TB SSD, but I can start the import into a peripheral drive tonight.

Remember when database/file system corruption was a solved problem?

Porting a landline number to a prepaid account with Google Voicemail -- then turning off the phone. Would that work?

As of today we are almost free of CenturyLink, the latest telecomm Titanic. Our final connection is a minimal (no features, no long distance) $17-20/month landline service that should theoretically support our old security system and keep our longstanding home phone number for incoming calls [1].

That’s not as good as it sounds however, since for much of the past 14 days we’ve had no phone service at all; we’ve been forwarding the home number to a cell number while we wait for CenturyLink’s second attempt to restore basic service. Even in the near term CenturyLink landline service is probably not a viable option.

There are 3 obvious alternatives excluding Comcast and simple mobile port. [3]

1. AT&T Home Phone: $20/month add-on to our AT&T family plan, and if anyone can port from CenturyLink it’s AT&T. On the other hand, we may want to leave AT&T for Ting or T-mobile sometime in the next few months.
2. Obihai SIP/VOIP devices with integrated Google Voice. (see also: porting to Obihai/GV by way to AT&T burner)
3. Port to Googe Voice via AT&T burner.

I wonder if there’s a fourth alternative. This would be a prepaid plan that is compatible with Google Voicemail. I know H2O wireless can do this and it’s very cheap, but their service level is fairly spartan. Ting might be good at $9/month with an old GSM iPhone 4, but it’s not clear they support Google Voicemail (maybe on GSM but not CDMA?).

 

With a prepaid plan that had a low monthly minimum fee, we could setup Google Voicemail then power off the phone. All messages would then go to voicemail, but not use any minutes. We’d just be paying for routing to Google Voice, but we’d have the option of powering up the phone.

 

Anyone try that?

 

- fn - 

[1] It is notoriously hard to port a number from CenturyLink. As of 2011 they had a waiver for violating local number portability mandates. I think they are technically obligated to port, but few people seem to succeed.
[2] H2O wireless is even cheaper, at $40/year for a similar level of service. But H2O is a true bottom-feeder — ok for a kid phone but not quality enough for our home number. Porting from H2O, for example, is quite chancy. Other alternatives would be a Sprint or T-Mobile or AT&T burner phone, but their minimal per-month costs are likely higher.
[3] Comcast is our new internet provider. They are also universally hated. We’d prefer to keep them as the dumbest pipe possible and minimize dependencies on them. A simple port to a mobile number is higher cost as AT&T home phone without the AT&T benefits. We don’t want to change our existing mobile numbers and we don’t want to lose the home phone number (yet).

Switching from CenturyLink to Comcast: last rats off the sinking ship

I was on hold with CenturyLink's “retention” service. That’s where support sends customers who request escape. The first 8 minutes of hold sounded like this ...

MMMMMMMMMMMMM (music) MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM (music) RMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM…. (silence) … (music) MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

I heard it on my iPhone because our CenturyLink landline is dead. Again. It’s been dead for about 5 of the past 10 days, despite a technician visit.

After 8 minutes of hum-buzz the line switched to classical music and, at 17 minutes, a woman answered. I told her I was calling to turn off my internet service. She said she couldn’t hear me, and a few seconds later she hung up.

I'm filling out the MN State Attorney General Consumer Complaint form and I’ll see if switching our landline number to a burner phone forces a service kill [1]. Not coincidentally, here’s the past year of CenturyLink share prices compared to S&P and Comcast.

Yeah, they’re dying.

Happily I switched to Comcast for Internet services today. Yes, Satan, but a Satan harried by millions of angry customers. So we have allies. On the other hand, we may be among CenturyLink’s last 10 customers. Not much help there.

For the sake of those still stuck in the DSL era, here’s are the things I didn’t know about switching to Comcast:

• You have to browse Comcast’s site carefully to find the listing of all internet-only services available in your area. We’re in the backwoods of St Paul, our faster sister city of Minneapolis pays about 20% less for faster services. Here we have two choices, and one of them is dying. Comcast ain’t exactly sweating.
• There’s no contract.
• I wanted good upload speeds, so I went for the St Paul 50/10 “boost" option. I was never able to find the upload speed on Comcast’s site, but that’s where it helps to have a geeky customer base. Google found the numbers for me. My speed test is indeed showing 50+ Mbps and 10+ Mbps. It’s listed as $45/m for 12 months plus $5 in taxes/fees, then jumps to $76/month + more tax/fees (unless competition shows up here, which is damned unlikely). Installation is $50 for the minimal install, $40 for a “wall drop”. We went for a very simple closet jack.
• Modem rental is $10/month. I needed the initial setup to work so I went with the rental for now. In 4-6 weeks I’ll order something like the ARRIS SURFboard and bring the rental unit to our local Xfinity store. Be interesting to see if/when the rental fee stops. My DSL modem was a router with NAT services, but the rental unit is a bridge. My AirPort Extreme now has a pingable net facing IP address. Feels a bit naked. 
• I have no access to the rental modem — it’s a black box. I assume Comcast can configure it.
• Don’t try to get any Comcast rep on the phone. It might not be as bad as calling CenturyLink, but it’s still very bad. Chat is likewise awful — they are forced to divert to a sales script and slow to answer real questions.
• The Comcast web site is an antique. It works better on Chrome than Safari, I suspect it’s made for IE 7. Contrary to a misdirecting prompt the 1990s email client does support forwarding. It also supports RSS feeds, which would be a great trivia question answer.
• The process of scheduling an installation is pretty good including multiple reminders. No problem there. The post-install phone satisfaction survey is too long — don’t even start it.
• There were several things that didn’t work on the Comcast registration site. SMS authentication didn’t get through to Google Voice (spam block?) and I couldn’t add a Yahoo address as secondary email. 
• The xfinity Connect app for iOS is probably worthwhile, I didn’t let it access contacts.
• There are WiFi hotspots for Comcast customers but they aren’t very interesting.
• Password (in)security involves 3 painful SecretToYouButNotToHackers questions that can’t be avoided.
• Comcast is supposed to be able to test a modem post install for signal strength. In Saint Paul this can take an hour to work, our installer called after he left to say the signal strength was too high (we have no splitters, new cable, etc) and the modem would disconnect. So he returned and added a filter. I tried Comcast’s SpeedExperience modem test tool but it couldn’t retrieve any modem data. 

That’s it. For today, I’m happy in Satan’s kingdom.

[1] We’d wanted to keep the wired landline because we’re on a cheap home security plan. I think that’s not an option any more...

Update 8/7/2015

• As of August 2015 this is the direct number to change service or close an CenturyLink account: 800-244-1111. My spouse, E, has magical powers honed through years of working with health insurers and schools. She called that number and had us on CenturyLink’s $20/month minimal landline service in under 20 minutes. Pure magic.
• CenturyLink has a customer relations page to use when "you are not satisfied with the resolution of your issue after contacting one of our Customer Service Centers or one of our Customer Experience Centers”.  That page has a link to an "email form”. The link no longer works, instead you go the page for revising feature sets. Shocking :-).

Update 4/12/2016

• Comcast has worked quite well for us. I’m watching for the expiration of our 1 year pricing and anticipating the negotiation to follow. Amazon is now reselling Comcast services — it provides clear price information for 1 year contracts vs. no contracts. We expect to switch between Comcast and CenturyLink every year or so — while I campaign for Google Fiber every chance I get.

Building and sharing Google bike (and other) route maps using waypoint defined computed routes

I used to do bicycle maps using Google’s Map Creator / “My Maps” tools, but for me it was a frustrating process. I never quite got the hang of the building, and sharing never seemed to work well.

Now I create bike route maps by entering sequential waypoints, and letting Google handle the routing between them. It takes only a few minutes and I can share the results as a short Google URL. I can send the maps to Google Maps.app on my iPhone, put them in a blog, create a document of my routes, save them as bookmarks, etc.

Here’s a sample of the process, with a map that starts at locally famous bike spot - Angry Catfish Bicycle and Coffee Bar. (You should figure out your general route before you do this process).

1. Search for your starting point, then use the “three line” Google menu to turn on Bicycling. (you may need to turn it on more than once)

 

2. Click Directions and put it into bicycle mode. Notice the choose destination field. Click in that field to be sure Google is in the right mode, now click on your next waypoint.

Notice you’ve go two map destinations and that Google has figured out a route using the bike trail.

3. Keep building your route by adding way points. You do have to click back into the ‘choose destination’ field so Google understands the context. Once you click a point then hold (don’t release) you can drag the waypoint and watch Google add your route. Release when you get to a key turning point or point of interest. For example:

4. Here’s the complete loop (1h, 6min). It has a wiggle in the top right I don’t like, I’d rather stay on the trail. I could have redone the route by adding a waypoint on the trail, that would prevent the diversion. Or I could just do a custom route by clicking on handles and moving them as below:

5. It really only takes a few minutes to get to this point. Now tap Google’s 3 bar (hamburger?) menu and choose share. The URL looks like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Angry+Catfish+Bicycle+and+Coffee+Bar,+4208+S+28th+Ave,+Minneapolis,+MN+55406/Minnehaha+Creek/44.9240882,-93.1976693/44.9417637,-93.198409/44.9504289,-93.2486649/44.9318804,-93.2501599/44.9271569,-93.2322561/@44.9285992,-93.2165955,14z/data=!4m24!4m23!1m5!1m1!1s0x87f62844b2ef9ac1:0x238cfef7316e9d8b!2m2!1d-93.2325294!2d44.92653!1m5!1m1!1s0x0:0x2d1439632b6ee239!2m2!1d-93.2247432!2d44.9175766!1m0!1m5!3m4!1m2!1d-93.1994777!2d44.9467264!3s0x87f629dd3802980d:0xad4046ce8178a45c!1m0!1m0!1m0!3e1

but it also offers a short form:

https://goo.gl/maps/9Kwhf

Sure beats using Map Creator. 

Airmail 2, Postbox and Mailbox for OS X access to Gmail -> I'm back to mail.app

I think OS X Mail.app for Yosemite is a pretty good Gmail client. The one big problem is that one must download the entire archive, though there is an option to omit automatic attachment download. That’s fine for my primary machine, but I don’t want to burden my 256GB SSD with 20+ GB of Gmail archive. So I went looking for a Gmail client.

I used Sparrow years ago and liked most of it — except the obligatory threading and conversation views. If an app is going to do that, it has to let me quickly delete all the emails I no longer care about. Sparrow didn’t.

Sparrow’s gone of course. More recently i used Airmail with some success, so I tried Airmail 2. That was … frustrating. I ran into multiple bugs and UI issues when I migrated from Airmail 1, so I tried again with a fresh start. This time while sending an email I got an authentication failure. No problem — I quit and fixed the error (I think). I then went looking for the stalled email and … it was nowhere to be found.

I deleted Airmail 2. (That was money wasted.) I then tried Mailbox.app — forever in beta, mostly abandoned, and you can’t delete individual messages, you can only delete an entire conversation. Deleted Mailbox.app. Next up - Postbox.

Postbox doesn’t support Google OAUTH2. I read the documentation on enabling “Access for less secure apps” and … I deleted Postbox.

So I’m back to Mail.app. I disabled automatic download of attachments in preferences, but I guess I’ll just sacrifice the disk storage. I considered enabling Google’s IMAP folder message visibility limits, but of course that would apply to my server too. I think in past Mail.app had some control over message downloads, but that’s gone now.

The bright side is I don’t mind Mail.app. Just hate the lose the storage...

Update 7/18/15: With ‘automatically download attachments’ off, selecting Inbox and choosing Account Info from the Context menu tells me that 80,309 messages are using 4.35GB. I can live with that.

So you want to actually restore from that Time Capsule backup? Do you feel lucky punk?

Yeah, I know he actually said “Do I feel lucky?”. But you get the point.

By now even the most hard core Apple apologist must have moments of existential doubt. Waking at 3am thinking, if only for a moment, that maybe Tim Cook really is the antichrist. 

The rest of us are moodily throwing darts at Apple stickers, wondering if Atari [3] might reconsider the personal computer market.

Time Capsule is typical of the 2015 Mac. The problems have been around for years, hope has all but vanished, and it’s possible things are even getting worse. On the other hand, there aren’t a lot of great choices for network Mac backup. Retrospect, which I loved in the days of DAT tapes and SCSI drives [1], effectively died years ago [2]. The best alternative may be Code 42’s Crashplan cloud backup, but that requires serious bandwidth (up and down) and a lot of confidence in a remote corporation. Also … java (ugh).

So I use Time Capsule for most of the machines in the house, but keep data on a server that’s also Carbon Copy Cloner cloned nightly [4]. 

This is what I do when I need to actually restore from Time Capsule [5]. If I don’t follow these steps restores will often hang and fail.

1. Shut down every machine on my network.
2. Power cycle my Time Capsule.
3. Gbit ethernet connect the target machine to the Time Capsule and restart that machine.
4. Log into my Admin account and start Time Machine.
5. Choose a date/time as needed. Set an 5 minute time and walk away. (Trying to interact immediately will be immensely frustrating.)
6. Navigate as desired until UI stops responding. Set an 8 minute timer and walk away.
7. Return, select a file, and complete the Restore.

Yeah, Time Capsule has a scaling problem — restore times seem to have a non-linear relationship to the number of files on the source machine and the number of backup versions.

It’s good to have a way to proceed though. Just in case Carbon Copy Cloner isn’t enough.

Update 7/19/2015

app.net@martinsteiger writes: “Time Capsule NAS is slow and unreliable, it shouldn't be used for backup. With a NAS up to par, even with a 2-drive model from Synology like the DS21n+ models, Time Machine works fairly well.” Installing and configuring a Synology NAS isn’t terribly hard, but it’s definitely geek-realm. I agree that whatever scaling and reliability issues Time Machine has, the root problem here is mostly likely that Time Capsule is grossly underpowered for its primary function.

Update 10/20/2015

My Time Capsule’s WiFi function died, so I took the opportunity to buy a Synology and I’m testing Time Machine backup. There I read that enabling Synology’s native encryption will dramatically reduce performance. I have been using Time Machine’s native encryption for the backup of my 2009 iMac — a machine that probably lacks dedicated encryption hardware. I wonder if the awful restore performance is encryption related...

- fn -

[1] Ok, so SCSI is a good reminder that the golden age had nightmares too.

[2] I tried Retrospect again a few months ago. Wasn’t pleased. My guess is that it’s architecturally a poor fit to OS X.

[3] Atari died in 1983. They were an early competitor to the Mac and Amiga, pre-Windows.

[4] With CCC versions are archived separately. A pain to recover but it can be done. CCC can backup to a network image, but OS X Mavericks and beyond use SMB2, and SMB2 doesn’t support sparsebundle mounts. You have go through some gyrations to do an AFP mount instead. I am trying this out. I rotate my CCC backups off site across 4 encrypted drives, so I always have at least 5 backups of my data using two different technologies.

Actually, I also do Aperture backups to a local high capacity drive using Aperture’s build in backup tech. So for Aperture images I have 6 backups using three different technologies. And I know that won’t be enough ...

[5] I’ve never had to use Time Capsule for a real emergency. I’ve always been able to use my CCC clone, but I periodically test Time Capsule to see if I can make it work.