My 2014 AirPort Extreme just died.

I liked the ME918LL/A AirPort Extreme for 17 months. It covered most of our house with a single device and it was pretty reliable. Around 17 months it started to spontaneously power down. I suspect an issue with the power supply, Apple has a long history of wonky power supply problems.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's eventually a recall program. I purchased it with an AMEX card, so I’ll now see how good their extended warranty program is. (It used to be quite good, but AMEX has outsourced the program. If it fails me on this one I’ll deprecate my AMEX card.)

In the meanwhile, sadly, I’ve ordered another Airport Extreme. (Sigh.) I really couldn’t find a better option — Eero is quite expensive, unproven, and it comes from a startup that’s got a 20% chance of surviving. Google's hardware is outsourced and of unproven quality.

Apple’s Airport Express has a great reputation of reliability. If you can make do with the Express I’d recommend it over the Extreme. If you live in a country that mandates 2 year warranties then the Extreme is a good buy. If you live in the US either use an extended warranty credit cards or pay extra for Apple Care. Once you add the Apple Care costs the Extreme is more expensive than Google’s router.

Yes, WiFi services suck. They really shouldn’t. I need an electrical engineer to explain to me why so many of my WiFi solutions last 1-2 years. (I have a 6+ yo Airport Express still running …)

PS. Interesting that Amazon no longer sells the Airport Extreme or the Express. I had to buy direct from Apple.

iCloud Photo Library, Photos.app and my Aperture plan (plus Aperture Exporter)

I recently migrated my daughter to Photos.app and iCloud Photo Library. I ran into some minor issues and one significant bug, but I liked it well enough to pay $1/month for the 50GB tier. It did take hours for her few thousand images to upload. My hope is that she’ll start managing (deleting mostly) her images this way. The full res images are stored in a Photos.app Library in her account on my Air as well as in iCloud; the local Library gets backed up with offsite rotation.

So now I’m trying it for myself. I’ve never liked or used “My Photo Stream”, so I didn’t have to turn that off. I just enabled iCloud Photo Library with an empty Library then added the images from my phone. It’s impressive to see crops and burst select changes made on my phone update my Photos.app Library almost instantly.

Incidentally, turning this feature on disables iTunes photo sync. I didn’t even realize I had 125 orphaned images on my phone from when I used to do iTunes photo sync.

I’m not even dreaming of moving my 350GB Aperture Library to iCloud though. Here’s my current Aperture plan: 

1. Migrate the family Mac to El Capitan after next release and test my Aperture Library against that machine. I assume it will work well enough but I need to do my own testing. I know of a few problems with El Capitan.
2. Once I’m somewhat satisfied I’ll move my Mac to El Cap and stay there for two years unless (unlikely) Aperture runs in OSNext. 
3. Meanwhile I’ll be using Photos.app to work with my iPhone 6 images and perhaps RAW or JPEG images from my dSLR. I’ll “Develop” them there and, when they are “ready”, I’ll move JPEGs (not RAW) into Aperture and delete them from Photos.app on my Mac and my iPhone (replaces importing from iPhone). Yes, this appalls some photographers but I care about archives more than image editing options post initial work. 
4. Somewhere around 2018 I’ll flatten all my keywords (I use Aperture’s inheritance model queries -- which were too advanced for market really) and migrate to Photos.app 2018. Assuming Photos.app is still around in 2018.

Incidentally, while developing this plan I tried out my copy of Aperture Exporter. It didn’t go well. AE creates keywords in Aperture for things like image-album relationships; in my case that resulted in very large numbers of keywords. Probably more than Aperture was ever tested to handle, more than enough to prove the UI doesn’t handle scrolling. If I use AE on the future it will be with a temporary copy of my Library, not the original.

Note/Update: 

At least with Yosemite this seems to work, though it’s stretching the bounds of what Apple allows:

• My Photo Stream: turned off in iOS.Photos, OS X.Photos and Aperture. (It’s a useless feature.)
• iCloud Photo Sharing: turned off in OS X.Photos, on in iOS.Photos and Aperture.
• iCloud Photo Library: on in iOS.Photos and OS X.Photos, not available in Aperture. Download Originals to this Mac in iOS.Photos, Optimize in iOS.Photos.

Aperture Tip: getting from Project in viewing pane to Project entry in the Inspector

It works like this:

1. When viewing Projects in the View/Browser pane, select a Project
2. Look for the little i that appears or tap shift-I (project info).
3. Click that. Windows pops up. Look for the Go To Project button. Click it.
4. Now you are on the left side seeing the project.

I’ve been looking for this for about four years. It’s a kludge.

iPad LTE videoconferencing for a longterm care facility resident?

My 94yo father is a resident of a Canadian longterm care facility (veterans). He’s been surprisingly content there — though funding transitions are likely to make it less agreeable. He’s also retained more cognitive ability than I’d expected; not enough to live without assistance but enough to enjoy family conversations.

I live in Minnesota, and unfortunately none of my siblings live near him. We pay for a friend to visit him weekly, that has worked well. He also gets daily phone calls from my sister, but I have a hard time speaking with him by phone. He doesn’t understand my voice very well. Surprisingly, we do much better on Skype video calls. I think the audio quality is better, and by reading my face he is better able to converse.

The Skype calls require facility support that is likely to fade, so I’m now thinking of iPad LTE FaceTime calls. At the end of his life, in a weird twist of fate for a working class man, he has more money than he needs. He can pay for the device and the mobile fees.

I’m thinking of an iPad 2/3 (full size) with a wall or desk mount support and a lock, setup so he’s not backlit. When not in use for videoconferencing it can play a family photo slideshow (it’s dismally hard to find good products for slideshows). I don’t think he’d be able to initiate or receive a call — FaceTime’s UI is far too awkward, but I’d schedule times around a helper visit.

Anyone aware of similar projects? Leave comments here or email jgordon@kateva.org (or app.net @johngordon).

If I do the project I’ll publish on our experience.

Bug: iOS Message.app treats redirected me.com and icloud.com synonyms as different conversations

It took me ages to figure out what was going wrong.

My iMessage conversations with the kids were split into two threads, even though Contacts.app only knew of one person.

Turns out the problem was the old me.com and iCloud.com split.

Years ago Apple migrated its cloud services from an email of me.com to one of iCloud.com. They implemented a redirect, but I’ve come to suspect that the “real” address is still me.com. Or rather that on some Apple backends it’s me.com and some it’s iCloud.com. Turns out the same messiness applies to Message.app and iMessage.

iMessage/Message.app doesn’t know about this redirection. It doesn’t know iCloud.com and me.com are synonyms. So a thread that references daughter@icloud.com is separate from one that references daughter@me.com.

The workaround is to put both the me.com and iCloud.com addresses into the contact. It’s a pain of course, you don’t want to do this for every person you know. I’m doing it now for the kids.

I suspect this is a very hard bug to fix.

Facebook won't use iPhone settings account? A fix.

After a Facebook password change, especially if it forces logout from other devices, you may find that Facebook.app on iOS no longer reads authentication information gfrom the iOS Settings:Facebook configuration.

You can always enter your username and password in Facebook.app, but that’s not very elegant.

Here’s how to get Facebook.app to use the account you defined in Settings:Facebook.

1. Ensure Facebook.app is installed but not running.
2. In Settings:Facebook completely delete existing account. It doesn’t work to enter the new password there, Facebook still won’t “see” the authentication information.
3. Recreate accounts in Settings:Facebook.
4. Launch Facebook.app. it should show the name of the account in Settings:Facebook and you can use that.

iCloud calendar invitations have been broken since 2011 and nobody has noticed

I’m not sure what’s more amazing — that this has been broken for five years, or that someone once thought this was a clever idea, or that almost no-one understands what’s wrong…

Warning: iCloud Calendar invitations have unpre... | Apple Support Communities

I suspect few people use iCloud Calendar invitations — or else we'd all know about this. It's not a new behavior, it was first documented in 2011. It's still true.

It's important to know about this.

When you send an event invitation to an email address iCloud will look up the person associated with that email address (possibly using Contacts). If that person has an iCloud email address then the invitation will go to their iCloud calendar. No email will be generated. If they don't actually use that iCloud calendar they will never see the invitation.

If the invited person does not have an iCloud address in contacts then an email will be generated.

So if you invite with a gmail address, and iCloud finds an iCloud address associated with the gmail address Contact (see update for correction), no email will be sent to Google Calendar. Instead an iCloud Calendar event will be created.

There is such a thing as being too clever.

Some details are here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27449/icloud-calendar-not-sending-invit es/29970

I discovered this while doing research for a book on using smartphones to support independent living for special needs teens and adults. Using my sister’s iCloud calendar I invited myself using my gmail address. I didn’t get an email, and her iCloud account didn’t show a sent message. Google found the 2011 StackExchange comment so I checked my unused iCloud calendar. There was the event, waiting acceptance.

A wonderful example of how being clever can be stupid.

Update 1/22/2016

A family member tells me her iCloud invitations appear to recipients with a name that is only associated with the Apple ID she uses for iTunes purposes — because it’s on her credit card.

This suggests the AppleID lookup is based on the email address associated with one’s Apple ID, not on anything in Contacts.app. I visited the AppleID associated with the iCloud calendar that my test invitation appeared on, and it is associated with two non-Apple email addresses. One of them is the gmail address I used in the test invitation.

Note that many people have multiple Apple IDs. I have four. More, Apple now allows one to have an Apple ID with a non-iCloud email address. Note also that it’s been four years since Cook promised Apple would find a way to merge Apple IDs.

This is my new “Apple FUBAR” example.

Update 11/30/2016

Apple has introduced a new Advanced preference setting to iCloud Calendar (web only) that may have been created to fix this problem. They recommend receiving event invitations by email — “if your primary calendar is not iCloud”. Yes, it’s bizarre that this refers to how an iCloud calendar receives invitations, but I think it turns off Apple’s obscure redirect mechanism.

Update 6/16/2023

I think this is still broken. On reviewing the original Stack Exchange post I saw a reference to a bug with invitations that had locations set. I don't know if that was ever fixed.