On AI Pin, Rabbit R1 and Apple Vision Pro.

From what I’m reading and seeing, the AI Pin and Rabbit R1 are terrible devices for potentially great AI use cases, while the Apple Vision Pro is a technology marvel device with weak use cases. The former are probably DOA because they risk lacking funding to keep the show going, while Apple’s massive resources might save the Apple Vision Pro from a complete failure.

Calling for suggestions: I’d like to back up my iCloud Photos Library content locally on my Synology NAS, but I don’t want to use the built-in “Download Originals to this Mac” of Apple Photos. Any utility that does that? Thanks!

You want to know more about all the new features and tweaks introduced on Micro.blog in the last two months? Here’s a video that I made today for you guys. Enjoy. cc @jean @manton

Today I might have hit the max my M1 Mac mini could give me: while exporting my video in ScreenFlow, I was editing a photo in Photomator. The latter couldn’t keep up with me trying different settings on my image.

Security Is Hard for Everyone

This morning, my wife picked up her iPhone and tried to unlock it1. She couldn’t after a few try2. She tried a few times with a slight variation, but the iPhone refused to unlock itself, now showing a 15-minute delay on the lock screen. Her passcode is a complex one as per corporate security rules. She knows it by heart, she told me. She doesn’t know what to do, and she is in deep doubt now. Eventually, she asked me for help, but I told her I cannot do much about it3.

At first, I thought it was the infamous Apple ID being locked out, but it’s not the case. As a reminder: the passcode used to unlock your iPhone has little to do with your Apple ID. But, when using 2FA, the iPhone is required to get access to the Apple ID and must be unlocked for this to work. Maybe this is why people think they are both linked together. It’s not the case.

As I finish writing this up, my wife tried again to unlock her iPhone and it worked. All is good now. But it’s a reminder that, for most people, security is hard. It’s hard to experience. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to get over it.

  1. Face ID requires using the passcode to unlock the device after a period of time. ↩︎

  2. She couldn’t tell me how many times she tried. ↩︎

  3. Eventually, without the passcode, an iPhone needs to be fully erased to be able to use it again. It’s a security measure. It’s by design, in case you didn’t know. ↩︎

It’s been such a long time since Apple redesigned their Magic Mouse. Is this the only solution to an old problem? And this charging port underneath, could they try to fix this nonsense too? Hard to believe Apple can be so slow at fixing the obvious.

Overrated x 1000

Microsoft 365 or Office 365, if you prefer, is so overrated. Microsoft is the master of selling licenses but when it comes down to doing real serious collaborative work with Teams and the rest of the software suite it falls apart really quickly. For example: trying to collaborated on a Word document, creating comments and assigning a task toi someone… nobody knows really where the task is actually saved! And no one seems to get a notification… or nobody cares to look at the activity tab in Teams because it is so overwhelming! Oh and don’t get me started with Microsoft Loop, a pale copycat of Notion. And should we talk about Visio? I prefer not.

I’m so fed up of working in an IT field where everyone is short sighted with Microsoft. I mean, there are so much more powerful collaborative apps out there.

/rantoff

Hey guys, I’m looking for an app that can browser folders containing photos. This app would display photo’s metadata too and allow for adjusting the thumbnails size. Any recommendations for me? I’m looking for an alternative to Adobe Bridge. Thanks.