What is wrong with Apple?

Apple make easy things very very hard

Sharing photos is easy with google

If I want to share my photos with someone who has a google account, I just name them in the share dialog, and then they can see my photos, via their own google account from any web browser.

Or if they don't have a google account, I can share the "link" to the album so that any one who has the hard-to-guess link can see my photos.

Anyone with a vaguely modern web browser.

That's all that's needed for 21st century communication.

But not with Apple

A family member uses an ipad and wants to share photos with me from her "photo stream".

So they send me an invitation to subscribe to their  photostream.

Luckily I have an icloud account from when I tried to use itunes to buy music (that's another story).

And I click on the link, to be greeted with:

To subscribe to ... photo stream on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Mac, open your invitation in the Mail app and click the Subscribe button in the message.

To subscribe you need to be signed in to iCloud on:

• an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 6 or later or
• a Mac with macOS 10.8.2 or later and iPhoto 9.4 or Aperture 3.4 or later

I actually need to possess an apple device to view some photographs that someone has taken using their apple device!

I get my paws on an apple device

I manage to lay my hands on a MacBook Air. I give it all the updates. It's running Lion, the latest release of MacOS that it can run.

I install iCloud.

Do you want to guess if I can subscribe to the photostream?

I can't -- I need iPhoto 9. Free upgrades to iPhoto 9.4 are available if I have iPhoto 9, but I don't. It has iPhoto 8.

I can't buy iPhoto 9 from the Apple app store because it has been discontinued.

Apple won't let me pay them the money that they are extorting from me because... it isn't enough.

I track down iPhoto 9

I find that I can get iPhoto 9 if I buy a CDROM containing iLife 11. (iLife 11 has also been discontinued from the app store).

iLife 11 typically sells for $50 or £50 on Amazon, but I track down a copy for around £20 on ebay.

I'm not confident, and neither is my wife.

And then I notice, iPhoto 9 could possibly not be enough.

The small print in the email says: with macOS 10.8.2 or later
and I only have macOS 10.6.6 (Lion) and this MacBook Air  won't take a newer version.

So now I'm an apple user (with this MacBook Air I got hold of) and I still can't view the photostream. I need to shell out a few hundred pounds to but a newer macbook or ipad.

But iCloud is available for Windows.

iCloud for Windows

I install iCloud for windows.

It doesn't work.

After logging in (authenticating me successfully against the apple authentication servers) it then declares that I am not connected to the internet. c_a_murphy4 comments:

I hope you receive more professional support than I did. Their senior team took more than a week with this issue and then blamed Microsoft (in a rather backhand way by saying there was nothing more they could do from an Apple standpoint). I called up Microsoft, and they in turn blamed Apple. If you ever do find a solution to this problem, please let me know. Apple and Microsoft just aren't coming through with the goods - at least not for me.

Some people seem to suggest that it is only the windows 10 anniversary edition that has this problem. Well I'm not downgrading.

Windows 7

So I try again on an old windows 7 laptop and get exactly the same problem.

I suppose I can blame Apple that now it's not just windows 10 but apparently no version of windows can run the latest version of their software, and it's not there fault.

Taking advice, I downgrade to the previous version of iCloud for windows.

This time  get the Error occurred during authentication error.

So I try the previous version of iCloud for windows.

Surely one point Apple have managed to produce working software for windows? And it works.

But no photostream

Now iCloud works but isn't any use. The photostream subscription has to be accepted as describe in the sucks-be-to-you message I had when I originally tried to subscribe from an unclean non-apple system:

a Mac with macOS 10.8.2 or later and iPhoto 9.4 or Aperture 3.4 or later

So I lookup virtual mac machines in the cloud. I could pay a few dollars an hour and perhaps get it working. Or pay $20 a month with the first day free and then cancel right away.

Via a friend, I get long distance access to a mac, with all the right software, and the photostream subscription is accepted.

Back to windows

Now the photostream subscription is accepted I can begin to download it on the windows 7 PC and then use google photo uploader to sync that folder to a photo album.

Back to google

And so now I can share the google photo album with other non-apple family members.

But this is normal for Apple

They break your stuff on purpose

If a you sacrifice at the wrong altar and have a non-Apple vendor repair your phone, Apple prevent your phone from working.

If you jailbreak your phone so that you can install software that you didn't pay Apple for, they will brick your phone on the next firmware update.

I showed here how an Apple user with a MacBook Air is prevented from subscribing to the photostream of another Apple user, because they didn't sacrifice recently enough at the Apple altar.

But Apple made a mistake 

Their new much-cursed top-of-the-range laptop that is missing a load of ports -- no HDMI, no USB2, no sdcard, etc

Now some independent developers funded by kickstarter have put together The HyperDrive.

It’s a $100 dongle that slips neatly into both USB Type-C slots to give you a whole lot more connectivity. Not only do you get your two USB Type-C ports back, but you gain a couple of USB 3.1 ports; a microSD and SD slot; and an HDMI video port.

Did you notice? "slips neatly into both USB Type-C slots"

Because of a stupid Apple oversight in providing standard USB-C ports users have overcome Apple! How are they going to stop that?

Of course the most annoying thing is that there will have been room inside the case to fit this dongle.

Afraid of perfection

Did you ever know a company so afraid of perfection that they spent so much time and effort deliberately lousing things up for their customers?

Or a bunch of captive customers so suffering from Stockholm Syndrome that they keep paying over much money for such rubbish?

Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon first described in 1973 in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.

And we are not seeing that much lack of abuse.

The FBI's Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly eight percent of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.

And yet Apple market share is quite a bit more than 8%, around 12%.

I wonder, what is the excuse of the other 4%?

Google Photos Tips

To view photos by upload date( thanks O.g.r.:
https://photos.google.com/search/_tra_

To see picasa album view (thanks geo.osm):
https://picasaweb.google.com

The End

The time is past

  the bell has rung

The deeds to do

  that have been done

    are gathered up

      into the store

The rest: undone,

  for ever more

(C) Sam Liddicott 2016

Calibri and Cambria on Linux

I'm no font fanatic. I can't tell the difference between Calibri and Carlito but I can tell the a busted document layout.

Fortunately, Carlito has the same front metrics as Calibiri (and Caladea has the same metrics as Cambria).

The font-substitution table in LibreOffice then allows me to work on documents using these fonts while getting a layout the same as my colleagues on Microsoft Office.

Quoting from the Debian Wiki:

LibreOffice font substitution

To install them, issue these commands as root in a shell:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install fonts-crosextra-carlito fonts-crosextra-caladea

In LibreOffice, you exchange Calibri and Cambria with Carlito and Caladea this way:

• Open the "Extras" menu
• Go to "Options"
• Choose "LibreOffice"
• Choose "Fonts"
• Define a substitution for each of the two fonts (Calibri -> Carlito, Cambria -> Caladea).
• Remember to check "Always" in the substitution lines.

Once the program is restarted, documents sent from MS Office look almost the same on your screen and printouts.

async promises - just in time to be late for the node.js show

I'm late to the node.js show; and that's a good thing.

It means I don't have to worry about CPS callback hell

do_something(..., function(err, result) {
   something_else(result);
});

I means I don't even have to do much overt promising

do_something(...).then( (r) => {
  something_else(result);
}).catch( (e) => {
  ...
});

I can just use async/await with automatic exception propagation.

return await do_something(...);

I'm not averse to the odd promise for the interface between an old-style CPS function; after all only an async function can call await. But an async function is also a promise. So I can convert this:

function expressHandler(req, res, next) {
  do_something(..., function(err, result) {
    if (err) return next(err); // return avoids else
  ...
    next();
  });
} 
...
function do_something(..., callback) {
  try {
  ...
  return callback(undefined, result);
} catch (e) {
  return callback(e);
}

into

function expressHandler(req, res, next) {
  do_something(...).then((r) => {
    ...
    next();
  }).catch(next);
}
...
async function do_something(...) {
  return await something_else(...);
}

do_something is called as a promise and can be an async function that can await on other async functions or on promises. Async functions all the way up; callbacks all the way down (where I can't see).

Windows 10 DNS Suffixes

To fix the problem of domain suffixes being applied to well-dotted fqdn:

http://superuser.com/a/680359/638934
combined with

The group policy reg keys for the searchlist are:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\DNSClient\"SearchList"="domain1,domain2,domain3"
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\DNSClient\"SearchList"="domain1,domain2,domain3"

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/76d07f31-62d6-4648-a3e2-7e6e16791363/append-these-dns-suffixes-not-available?forum=w7itpronetworking

Use these tricks to prefix: .,
(dot comma) to the front of the search list.

Thus each name will be tried in it's current form without any other domain suffixes first.

And so a well-dotted fqdn will resolve.

Defining bash functions in a Makefile

As I answered here; a makefile recipe may depend on bash functions rather than bash scripts.

Because of bash's export -f function-name feature to export a bash function definition into the environment where it will be picked up by sub-child invocations of bash, we can define a bash variable in the environment in the same form in the Makefile.

If we define bash functions in the Makefile using the same format bash does, and export them into the environment, and set SHELL=bash then we can use these bash functions in the make recipe.

Let's see how bash formats functions exported in the environment:

$ # define the function
$ something() { echo do something here ; }
$ export -f something

$ # the Makefile
$ cat > Makefile <<END
SHELL=bash
all: ; something
END
$

Try it out

$ make
something
do something here
$

How does this look in the environment?

$ env | grep something
BASH_FUNC_something%%=() { echo do something here

The pattern is (currently):
  BASH_FUNC_function-name%%=() { function-body }

So we do this in the Makefile:

SHELL=bash
define BASH_FUNC_something-else%%
() {
  echo something else
}
endef
export BASH_FUNC_something-else%%

all: ; something-else

and try it:

$ make
something-else
something else

It's a bit ugly in the Makefile but presents no ugliness for make -n