Finished

09:14 Wednesday, 17 September 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 78.13°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 53% Wind: 5.46mph
Words: 528

At the airport hotel, getting ready to check out and check in for our flight home.

Worked our asses off getting everything packed up, cleaned up and sold or given away, but the house is empty now. I left an AppleTV behind to act as a Home hub, but I didn't set it up that way because I thought Home would switch to it automatically. It does not. Fortunately, I can do and monitor everything through the individual apps for all the devices.

I updated to iOS 26 this morning. Not impressed or pleased.

First, my brother and I are "friends" on the News Plus Puzzles feature, and we compete on Quartiles. (He usually beats me, but we tied last night, finding all the words.) Now, the Puzzles feature remains in the News app, but the "friends" part has moved to the Games app, and our "friendship" connection is broken and apparently must be reestablished in the Games app.

Fuckers.

I'm sure this was just a move by the people responsible for Apple Games to boost their "engagement" numbers. Puzzles was put into News Plus to capture the people who played Wordle after the NYTimes bought them, and because puzzles were part of a "news" experience.

But I'm sure the managers of the Game Center or Games app at Apple are looking for their bonuses, so they had the brilliant idea to just make all that "engagement" part of the Games division and not the News division, and fuck the users, because who cares about them? They're not going to get me my bonus!

And then I stepped outside the hotel this morning to try to grab a shot of one of the Florida Air National Guard F-15s burning up their end of the fiscal year fuel allocation, and I pressed the "camera" button on my iPhone 16 and nothing happened. Pressed it again and got a "Welcome to the new Camera app!" message that took two or three presses to dismiss.

Because who wants to use the Camera app to, you know, take a picture? Thanks, Apple.

In regular old MacOS Sequoia, there's an alert in Software Update, so I check it out and it's for SF Symbols. There's a little link that says "More Info." I figured that'd just expand the window a bit with some text about what's changed in SF Symbols. Nope, takes you to Safari and to Apple Support for some generic bullshit about Software Update.

A pop-up window (disabled in Safari, but I guess not for Apple) asked if I wanted to take a little customer survey. You bet I did! None of the answers were relevant to my complaint, so all they know is that my experience was unsatisfactory.

And there's a notification badge in my Messages Dock icon. I change to the "Unread" view in Messages. There are no unread messages!

Some Tim Cook, Corning Glass CEO interview with that clown from CNBC came up in my YouTube recommendations. Listened to it for a bit, and it was just more Trump bootlicking. Cook is a terrible spokesperson for Apple. He should retire.

Anyway, looking forward to getting home.

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