Canon EOS Rebel SL2: switching the paired iOS (or Android?) device (WiFi, bluetooth)

Older Canons cameras had a lovely IR remote. Worked great.

Now they use a Bluetooth remote — or you can use a complex remote app on an iPhone called Canon Connect.app.

It’s awful.

If you do ever get your camera paired to your iPhone you’ll run into trouble when you switch phones. How do delete the old pairing?

I think you don’t - at least, not directly.

Go to Wireless Communication Settings. Then Bluetooth Function (not Wi-Fi).  Their you check/clear connection info and then do Pairing again. The Wi-Fi info will then get set when you use the Cannon Connect.app to connect to the Camera’s built-in hotspot.

The trick is you start with Bluetooth, the Wi-Fi settings are stored thereafter.

Facebook's disappearing Pages feed

I remember when you could get an RSS feed for a Facebook wall. Years after that when away there was an RSS feed for Page posts, but I think that’s gone now.

Up until a year ago there was some obscure way to see the Pages Feed (all Pages) in Facebook Mobile, but I think that’s gone too. 

AFAIK the only way to view a page feed on mobile is to save the URL to the Home Screen. Go to https://www.facebook.com/pages then click on tab feed then save. Safari will sync un/pw via keychain across Safari on devices.

Looks like Facebook only wants Pages to show up in the news feed, and then only for a price.

Spotlight bugs in iOS 11.2: Empty contact on search.

I think the spotlight/contact bug was introduced in 11.1. It’s not fixed in 11.2.

If I search in spotlight for a Contact name, or search on Contacts field of phone app, I get an empty (Null) Contact as a result. It has no content.

Turning Search (spotlight) off then on for Contacts restores search, but only transiently. I have 2,162 Contact Cards, I did find one that was empty and deleted it.

I’ve now removed all Contacts from my phone (iCloud) and restored them. I’ll see if that works.

Google's phishing vigilance and the risk of blog comments

I got a notice from Google yesterday. tech.kateva.org had been quarantined as a phishing vector. Visitors would be warned away. I had a short time to fix the affected page that was listed below …

But there was nothing there. Same thing with a link to a downloadable spreadsheet of issues. That was empty too.

Elsewhere in the message a page was identified. It sure looked benign, the only link was to an Apple support site. It’s a (Google) blogger site and all the widgets were default Blogger. No extra HTML. No comments.

Also, despite Google’s warning, the blog was not quarantined.

A puzzle.

Oh, I left something out. The day before a published spam comment showed up in my comment tracking feed. I get a few spam comments every day or two, but this was the first published one in a while. I went to delete it … but by the time I got to Blogger’s post management menu the comment was gone.

This is what I think happened:

• This blog was set to allow comments without approval from authenticated posters for posts less than two weeks old.
• A bot created an authenticated identity and created a phishing attack comment.
• Google spotted the comment, quarantined the site, and sent the notification email.
• Blogger spam detection identified the comment author as a spammer and deleted all comments by that identity — including the one on my site (why it was gone).
• Google rechecked my site and lifted the quarantine — but couldn’t retrieve the notification email.
• The notification email was partly empty because that it was a query — that returned Null. It had one part that was written at time of email generation and that contained the link to the once contaminated page.

I changed comments on the blog to require authorization at all times — no two week window for authenticated users. Clearly authentication is no longer a sufficient barrier. I don’t want phishing attacks on my blog, and I don’t want to get quarantined.

This reminds me what a strange fish Blogger is. It works fairly well, though there’s a longstanding problem with CR/LF handling that reminds me too much of DOS 2.1. It gets very few, but still some, updates. Google has switched their blogs off Blogger, but they haven’t used their new proprietary RSS/Blog platform to replace Blogger. Blogger is neither dead nor alive, and Google RSS is similarly quantum.

Apple's Apple ID fiasco is getting worse -- declining support for Apple Store ID that is not iCloud ID

Like many veteran geeks I have a different iCloud ID and Apple store ID. This used to be a supported configuration. In my case it was essential because of some complicated history with Apple’s .mac precursor to MobileMe and iCloud. (In an unrelated matter I have another 3-4 Apple IDs that aren’t connected to anything but, depending on the vagaries of Apple’s hacked together legacy databases, sometimes pickup Apple Store hardware purchases.)

This is what Apple’s support document says now (emphases mine) …

Sign in with your Apple ID - Apple Support

… We recommend that you use the same Apple ID for all Apple services on your device—including the iTunes & App Stores and iCloud …

… If you have multiple Apple IDs, you can’t merge them …

I went looking for this document because I think iBooks.app doesn’t work properly with an iCloud ID that’s different from the Apple Store ID that can be used to purchase iBooks. It looks like this will be a trend.

Note what Apple says here. Your Apple Store ID and iCloud ID should be the same. You also can’t merge them [1]. So you either need to abandon all your Apple Store purchases or your iCloud storage purchase.

Anyone remember when Cook promised to fix Apple’s original sin of  botched identity management system? Apparently the problem is harder than building spaceship headquarters.

Apple should bite the bullet and come up with a process to merge Apple IDs. I fear they aren’t going to bother though. I really miss class action lawsuits.

- fn -

[1] There is a possible workaround. You may be able to use your iCloud ID as an Apple Store ID and then make it a family member of the original Apple Store ID. This will run into rules about changing device Store IDs and constraints on family member size as well as issues with the total number of devices that are part of a family (10). It isn’t an official workaround and I suspect it has irreversible problems of its own.

Podcasts.app - sync Stations between iTunes and iPhone via iCloud, not via iTunes sync

Apple removed playlists from iOS 11 podcasts.app. I loved playlists. They were a beautiful user friendly query building tool.

Instead we have Stations, which are more limited. I created some in iTunes and some on my iPhone. They didn’t sync even though I transfer podcasts from iTunes to iPhone via WiFi/Lightning cable.

It turns out Stations do sync — but only via iCloud even though files may travel via local sync.

Once I enabled podcast sync in both iTunes and iOS my stations appeared in both. 

This is good, because one advantage of stations is that podcasts play consecutively. At least I think that’s why mine started playing consecutively instead of stopping after each podcast as they did earlier in iOS 11.

There are lots of weirdnesses in iTunes when it tries to combine sync via iCloud/Store with local file based sync from iTunes. It will be interesting to see if Podcasts does better at this than Movies does.

Apple is clearly heading towards the world where we have all have 2TB iCloud Drives, a 256GB local machine store for frequently used data, and special folders in iCloud for personally owned files that sync separately from Store files (ex: personal images, ringtones, podcasts, PDF, etc). There’s no resisting this one.

Update: It is a mess. Of course. Stations need a setting to only show downloaded episodes. One problem with Stations is that while they can filter out Played stations, they only know a station is Played as long as the file is around. If the file is removed and the show is in the Cloud then it is treated as unPlayed.

Progress of sorts - integrating my simplenote memory extensions with gDrive

Nine years ago I wrote What my blogs are for: memory management and the Google-Gordon geek-mind fusion. It’s hard to believe now, but in those days we did not yet fear Google. Back then, we liked Google. Google was good.

That was a long time ago. Google has since transcended mere human morality (Galactus is a much better name than Alphabet btw). Unfortunately I haven’t transcended my need for artificial extensions to my working memory. To the contrary, that need has grown. Now in addition to my old technical expertise a change in employment means I manage more organizational and political knowledge. Oh, yeah, and I’m back to being a practicing doctor. So now I need to know adult male ambulatory internal medicine. Also, I am old and my brain is crud.

So, yeah, I need those memory extensions. I still use Google’s tools, though the Custom Search Engine I rely on to integrate my blogs with my link share stream and my ancient (hidden) web pages is all but forgotten. Since 2008 though I’ve moved away from the Google dominated web back to files and file systems as a memory store. Carrying a connected computer in my pocket made 1980s style files useful again. I rely in particular on plain text Simplenote to carry around fragments of memory. For regulatory/security reasons I have one Simplenote account for work memory and one for non-work memory — with some notes shared between both using Simplenote’s (simple!) sharing mechanism.

Spotlight indexes simplenote files on my iPhone — sadly only for one account. On my Mac nvAlt syncs to my personal simplenote account — so the text files are indexed by Spotlight there too. Today, guided by a @simplenoteapp tweet I installed Simplenote Electron (which Automattic is abandoning for a future fully native Mac upgrade [1]) and tied that one to my work account. Then I used the improved text export to create a local read-only copy of that memory store — which Spotlight Mac now indexes. So the stores are in one search space at last.

The last twist is that Simplenote local text stores are in a Google Drive folder, so synchronized to gDrive with appropriately stored folders such that appropriate text stores are searchable on both devices. Sadly gDrive does not support “Available offline” at the folder level — so when I don’t have data access I also lose some memory access. (I’m hoping Google will fix this.)

The gDrive integration is important because there are limits to plain text - particularly for medical topics. I have PDFs, Word Docs, Google Sheets and other detritus of decades of notes. I can put all of that in gDrive alongside the text notes and let search figure it out. (This is what Evernote is supposed to be good for but they don’t have a clear exit strategy. It’s trivial to walk away from Simplenote. I need that exit strategy [2].)

It’s all one heck of a kludge, but so is my memory. So kind of fits.

See also:

• What my blogs are for: memory management and the Google-Gordon geek-mind fusion 7/2008
• Snippets Explained (Version 2) 2/1999
• Beyond Simplenote: I still want a graph layer (concept map) overlay for my memory augmentation notes collection 5/2016. Sigh. This would be wonderful.
• Project Memfail: Tackling my search space problem 9/2013. My work space problems got sorted out when the company died. I’m much more cautious now about creating new memory pockets.
• Thinking tools 2014 - holding steady but future unclear 5/2014. RIP App.net.
• Full text search and digital prostheses: new email, new mind 7/2008
• Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog 3/2008. Non-evil Google.

- fn -

[1] It has the same search bug as Simplenote/Mac!

[2] For example - if they don’t fix that damned search bug [1].