I may be in desperate need of sleep, but don't you fear about your weekly smattering of bullets... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Seek Shelter! This squirrel got lucky during a storm...

Adorable. But animals usually are.

   
• NEWSFLASH: Young Wisconsin man dies from asthma attack after price of inhaler skyrocketed nearly $500. BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE WORLD, PEOPLE!

   
• Fuzzy & Buttered! Am I the only one who freaks out over how sage is fuzzy before you cook it? Delicious delicious sage...

Can't beat it on butternut squash with browned butter poured over the top! Except now my home is going to smell like buttered popcorn for the next two days.

   
• Eight! Eight Dollar Foot Long! Subway is advertising their new "Sub Club" where you buy three foot-longs and get the fourth for free. So I go to the app to find out how much they’ve increased the prices to cover this promotion. A Veggie Delight is $10.69 now. With a free fourth sub, the price ends up being $8.00. This is for a veggie sandwich with extra cheese (because their cheese is whisper thin now, and they stopped putting double cheese on veggie subs years ago). A bun, cheese, and veggies is $8.00... but not now... eventually. — Remember $5.00 foot-longs, which you could get with pricey meat options if you wanted? I wonder how much those subs cost now? This kind of "deal" is such bullshit. I’d rather eat at a place that just gives me a fair price at the start rather than holding my money hostage until I buy enough to get a fourth sub. Yeah, I know a lot of places do this to encourage repeat visits, but $10.69? My burger meal card has initial lower prices which earns you a free meal after ten. That seems a smarter deal because you don’t face sticker shock every time you eat there. $10.69... for a cheese sandwich? Really?

   
• Techflation! This bullshit is getting out of hand...

And here it is in action...

I'd like to know how asshole corporations are justifying this. Assuming they feel the need to. It's all monopolies and collusion from here on out. We've got a government that doesn't give a fuck. On the contrary, the government is being paid to look the other way.

   
• Apple Macintosh Hot Take: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. And indeed it is very hard, because it's fucking sloppy. But that's Apple now... fucking sloppy.

   
• Cinematically Real! This is the video that nails it. This is why the Avatar movies work when others abusing technology in film fail...

These movies are pure cinematic spectacle. I cannot wait to see Fire & Ash.

   
And now back to your regularly-scheduled Sunday...

More tech drama. Have I mentioned how much I loathe Apple HomeKit HomeShit?

If I haven't (let's be real, I definitely have) then you should probably know that my hatred is very real, and has now reached such depths as to send me into a rage just thinking about it. As I wrote yesterday I awoke to find that on the first day in this Year of Our Lord, 2026, 3/4 of my "smart" home devices were offline and half my Automations were missing. Now, when this happens I can usually get most of those devices to come back online if I power-cycle all my hubs (nothing can be done to bring back the automations). It's for this reason that I have non-HomeShit power plugs on all my iPod minis and AppleTVs.

And so, before I left on an errand I had to run before work, I sat in my car to power off all the hubs. Then, when I finished my errand and made it to the office, I turned them all back on. Three hours later as I ate lunch, I pulled up Apple's HomeShit app on my iPhone... and... there were stil six devices which hadn't recovered. Which means I'm going to waste time removing them then resetting them so I can re-add them before re-writing the Automations that got trashed somehow.

Easy.

Just time-consuming.

And here's a new wrinkle... the re-written automations do not work!

No idea why. I can test them. They test as expected. But they don't work.

For exmaple... I have it so when one of the lights in the guest bathroom is turned on, the other light turns on too. Turn one off, they both turn off. It's incredibly basic, but important because otherwise it's not light enough in there.

Absolutely no idea what I do now. After dinner I'll delete them all and try re-writing one more time. If that doesn't work, I guess I have to try removing devices and re-adding them. If that doesn't work, then I guess I have to completely reset absolutely everything and start over from scratch.

If that ends up being the case, I can say goodbye to my weekend.

Which brings me to a decision I have to make...

1. Waste two days resetting everything and hope it works.
2. Give up on HomeShit and save my money to replace it with something that actually works.
3. Give up on having a "smart" home completely, and go back to the dark ages of having a dumb home.

I gotta tell you... Option #3 is looking very appealing to me. If I waste two days and the shit is still broken, I'm going to be angry and never get over it. If I trash HomeShit and start over with something else which ends up broken, I'm going to be angry and never get over it. If I just end up giving up completely on having a "smart" home, I'm totally going to be angry.

But I'll get over it.

I just have to go back to remembering where all the light switches are and figure out and possible have to re-think some lighting in a few places. Like the guest bathroom.

In other tech drama, I'm slowly getting all my data transfered from my QNAP NAS to my UGREEN NAS.

This is taking a while because I have a metric shit-ton of photos to copy. I always took a lot of photos when I traveled. Then when the charity closed and I wasn't traveling as much, I ended up with Jake and Jenny and started taking a metric shit-ton of cat photos. You know how it goes.

My problem is (and always has been) that I don't sort through photos after I take them. I snap! snap! snap! snap! take them with the intent of keeping the best images and tossing the rest. Except I never have time to do that. Maybe I'll commit to sorting through 50 photos every morning when I wake up and see if I can whittle down the number of photos in my archive by half. Or, if I get serious about it, whittle down to a quarter of what I'm sitting on. Which should be easy because there's just so many pictures that are practically identical. There's AI software which is supposed to make the task easier, but I've not looked into it. And maybe I should.

In the meanwhile, I guess I save my money for a new pair of hard drives, given the ones I have are all older and probably not very reliable. They will likely be giving up the ghost soon.

Like myself.

Or like my patience with HomeShit, which has now evaporated.

Happy New Year!

Or not.

I woke up this fine New Year only to find that Apple's HomeKit HomeShit had shit the bed... yet again. Most of my devices were non-responsive and half my Automations were missing. I'd say that this is a bad omen of how my 2026 is going to go... but this happens at least twice a year (it happened four times in 2025, I kept count)... which means this is likely just a coincidence. As always, no fucking clue why this happens or how to fix it without resetting everything. And rewriting all my automations, since Apple doesn't bother to back up anything despite these failures being a regular occurrence. Holy fucking shit I wish I hadn't moved to Apple for my smart home. But my previous gear was discontinued, so I did it. And should have gone with something else. Anything else.

In an inexplicable turn of events, a shocking number of fireworks went off last night. An insane number. They started at 7:30pm and ran constantly all night... traumatizing my cats. And I don't get it. We didn't get this many fireworks for the 4th of July. Perhaps people are so sick and tired of 2025 that it seemed appropriate?

Though why they think 2026 is going to be any better is a mystery.

There was no white Christmas where I live this year.

When my mom was a kid, the snow got so deep that they used to jump off the roof of a two-story house into it. When I was a kid, the snow got so deep that we used to tunnel under it from yard to yard. But this year? Nothing. No snow, last night it was just bitter, bitter cold. It was so cold last night that I double-bagged my feet with wool socks. Something I never felt the need to do when I was in Antarctica. I also asked Siri to "make it warmer" in my house, at which point I was told "Your thermostat is already set to 71°, and it may take some time to warm up." Very helpful. Thanks so much. Not a great night to have no working electric blanket.

But maybe I'm getting a white New Year?

As I type this, it's trying to snow. A light, loose powder, but enough to cover my back porch and that's something.

Not enough to stave off drought this Summer, but... something.

Last night I was looking through my photos to send one to a friend who was asking for travel advice. While digging through the archives, I noticed something strange... before 2008, my photos were a lot less personal. Sure, I had photos of me and my friends when we're together, but so many things in my day-to-day life along more casual moments went undocumented.

It took me all of two seconds to figure out why.

The iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. I got one a month later.

Before iPhone, I was usually using a digital SLR as a camera which was (mostly) only taken on trips. I was never hauling it around with me everywhere I went. I also had a pocket camera, of course, but it was just one more thing to carry around, so I mostly didn't. On top of that, a lot of places... like concerts, shows, and such... wouldn't allow you to take a camera in with you anyway. You had to be a professional photographer with a permission card to take photos.

Then iPhone came along, and I had a camera with me wherever I went. And everything changed. It wasn't a great camera, but it was good enough. Far better than the cameras on the phones I owned before (which I never used because they were so bad).

It took a few months before my brain was suitably programmed to remember that I had a camera in my pocket, but by 2008 I was very much in the habit of whipping out my iPhone to snap a photo when something fun or interesting happened.

I didn't have cats yet, but suddenly my iPhone was filled with photos of all the cats I met...

And occasional selfies, which I had never taken before (note I'm off-center because a front-facing camera wouldn't appear until iPhone 4)...

And mundane moments, like the food I was served on a plane...

And of course food in general. I rarely photographed food before... only when it was incredibly special... but now? From 2008 onwards, food photos were everywhere in my camera roll and on my blog...

Yeah, yeah... the photos I was getting were only ever decent when the lighting was perfect (I took seven photos of that cat trying to find the best angle and position to get the best detail in the fur), but even drab, low-res, blurry shots were cool at the time! Documenting the stuff I did and saw became second nature.

Back then, like now, people were telling me that I was spending too much time taking photos instead of enjoying the moment... but they were (and are) wrong. At least when it comes to me. Unlike traditional photos which required planning and camera choices, iPhone photography was just pressing a button on an object you already had in your hand. It was seconds of your life captured forever.

And I loved that.

Every one of the moments captured in photos above would have been easily forgotten if I didn't have photos. But instead I remember the cat that sat in my chair at a photo shoot I was at in Seattle... I remember everybody wearing cracker crowns at my sister's house for Christmas dinner... I remember how disappointed I was that I was in First Class on a flight and feeling Last Class because all they had was Pepsi instead of Coke... I remember loving Chicago-style veggie dogs so much that I didn't eat anything all morning so I would have room to eat two of them at lunch... I remember the Key Lime pie I got for lunch at Universal Studios Florida right before I rode the Incredible Hulk Coaster three times in a row... and I remember how my life changed when I ordered extra cashews on my cashew-caramel-frozen-custard sundae on a work trip to Wisconsin. Little moments preserved in time that I probably wouldn't have given a second thought if I wasn't able to scroll through them over and over whenever I want.

I'm sure as I get older and memories are more difficult to recall, I'll be very glad to have so many things digitally captured to help me remember the life I lived.

Including that time I had to chisel my car out of a hotel parking lot while working in Maine after an ice storm hit the night before...

Who wouldn't want to vividly remember that?

APPLE NEWS: Apple to use Google's AI model to run new Siri, Bloomberg News reports.

So... when I bought my Apple iPhone with the promise that they would make their stupid-as-shit Siri voice assistant smarter with it... this was a crock of bullshit all along? They NEVER had the ability to fix Siri. I've been waiting OVER A YEAR for something that was never coming.

And now they're going to have Google fix it for them? Why the fuck wouldn't I have just bought an Android phone if that's what I was going to get? That way I would have had a working voice assistant all this time.

Remember when Apple wouldn't talk about something until it was ready to release? Apple doesn't... BECAUSE NOW-A-DAYS THAT'S ALL THEY FUCKING DO! It's all lies. The company has billions of dollars and yet they still have to use OTHER COMPANY'S TECHNOLOGY to get shit done? How fucking embarrassing. I guess Apple's done.

This seems like a situation that's ripe for a lawsuit.

Because this was my morning with my iPod mini as I was going to take a shower...

ME: Hey Siri, play Opalite by Taylor Swift.
SIRI: Playing music by Taylor Swift.
ME: Hey Siri, STOP! — Hey Siri, play Opalite by Taylor Swift.
SIRI: Playing Elizabeth Taylor by Taylor Swift.

And it's not like you can tell Siri that they're a flaming pile of shit that's terrible at their ONE job. They'll just say "I won't reposnd to that" and go back to doing whatever stupid shit they were doing.

Which should be Apple's slogan now-a-days.

Why can't anybody make a browser that doesn't fucking piss me off?

Apple's Safari is hot garbage and has been for years. Can't load Facebook or Instagram pages to save its life. Fails to display content properly all too often. And I'm not talking esoteric, fringe sites... I'm talking about major websites. Which is to say that either Apple doesn't use their own shitty fucking browser. Or they just don't give a crap. Or probably both.

Google's Chrome reminds you that Google Chrome is not your fucking default browser every fucking time you run it. And when you click out of it, then visit a Google service, it feels the need to fucking remind you again. On top of that, there are some sites which refuse to render properly on it or any of its variants.

The Brave browser (also built on Chrome) wants to sell you its VPN, and didn't turn out to be the bastion of privacy it claimed to be.

Microsoft's Edge is better than Chrome. At least was until they killed its code-base and also built it on Chrome. Now it's got their Copilot AI bullshit being built into it, which I have zero desire to be involved with.

And then there's Arc (also built on Chrome) which has some nice ideas, but keeps getting in its own way while trying to use it on top of inheriting Chrome's failings.

Opera is also built on Chrome.

Vivaldi is also built on Chrome.

Maxthon is also built on Chrome.

Mozilla's Firefox is not built on Chrome and was my former browser of choice until it also had problems loading Instagram and some other mainstream sites. Then they came out and said that their top priority for 2025 was AI. And they killed Pocket. I have zero interest investing in their bullshit again.

Tor is built on Firefox but, strangely enough, gave me even more problems with websites that Firefox can actual open properly.

Midori is also built on Firefox.

   
And so...

I mostly use Safari unless it's for Facebook, Instagram, or a handful of other sites which are unusable with it.

And that's pretty much all you can do because Apple and Google own every fucking thing. And since most browsers are actually Google Chrome in disguise, Google can basically do whatever the hell they want to break standards while Apple stubbornly refuses to be compatible with what they choose to break.

At this point I'm contemplating giving up on the web and moving to a cabin in the woods.

Apple's World Wide Developer Conference is an event unto itself every year. Today I woke up at 4:30am so I could catch up on work and watch the event live so I could add the commentary you've all been dying for. If you want to watch it while reading this, you can find the entire thing on YouTube here.

Craig Federighi once again makes everybody fall in love with him due to his filmed-intro, screaming around the top of the Apple Park building in an F1 car to promote their new movie F1 (original title!) with Brad Pitt. And heeeeere's Tim Cook... to introduce more Craig!

To read all the gory details of Apple's keynote and my random thoughts about what they announced, you can find it in an extended entry, because it's rather long (I type fast and think a lot of things!)...

It's incredibly frustrating to have a company I once loved... nay, worshipped... fall so far from grace.

There are days that I roundly despise Apple for their fucking bullshit, which is something inconceivable to the me from a decade ago. But every time some bug rears its ugly head despite it being reported years ago... every time an Apple technology I bought into keeps failing year after year... every time I have to endure klutzy interface elements that haven't been updated in years and make for a horrible user experience... every time there's yet another broken promise... well... I'm cursing Apple more and more lately.

And then I read this article: Retreating to Safety, which mentions that Apple will not be doing a live interview at their World Wide Developer's Conference this year. After a decade of doing just that.

And it's like... is it any wonder?

Apple sold everybody new iPhones with the promise of fantastic new AI capabilities... then never released all the new AI capabilities they promised (and still haven't). Plus there's all that bullshit I mentioned at the top. Apple has gone from a golden boy doing everything right to just another shitty fucking company that doesn't give a fuck about their users because they have profit margins to meet.

So now we sit and wait for The New Apple to come along so we can chuck them in the bin just like we have so many other companies which went down this road.

So I received an email reply which was "Thanks, David!"

And the Apple "Intelligence" short summary in my mail window was "Gratitude was expressed." I mean, holy shit... THE AI SHORT SUMMARY WAS LONGER THAN THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE!!! How is this AI bullshit in any way helpful? So many times the AI summaries I get out of Apple are stupid as shit. Is anybody testing this crap? Anybody at all?

I am beyond sick of companies just shitting AI on top of everything whether it's made better by it or not.

Because, spoiler alert, most of the time it just makes everything worse.

All these tech demos being unleashed where AI is actually useful and helpful... yet when it comes to actual Raal Life? Not so much.

And so I downloaded Microsoft Outlook today.

Apple Mail has been a useless pile of garbage from the beginning yet Apple does not give a single shit. It's tied to absolutely everything else in MacOS, so you pretty much have to use it, but Apple doesn't care if it sucks.

But it gets so much worse the more you use it.

Searching for a word? Fine. Here's a list of emails that word appears in. But then you have to search within the search results to find out where the word actually occurs.

But it gets so much worse than just that.

The thing that sent me into a rage this morning that made me go running to download Microsoft Outlook? Something so outrageously stupid that I cannot wrap my head around it... SEARCH RESULTS IN APPLE MAIL ARE FUCKING CASE SENSITIVE?!? Jesus. Who the fuck does that? This is absolute insanity. Especially for names which have multiple capitalization options, meaning you have to search 3 or 4 times before you get anywhere. Madness. Absolute fucking madness.

But it gets so much worse than just that.

Most of the time when trying to actually get results out of Apple Mail search... the app crashes. MacOS gives you a full-on crash report and everything!

But anyway...

I know that other email programs make search much, much easier. For one thing, they don't immediately crash. For another, search results are only case-sensitive if you want them to be. For yet another, you search once for a word or phrase and the word or phrase is highlighted in all the emails where the app found results. You don't have to re-search or scroll forever (since re-searches crash the app).

And, yep, sure enough... Microsoft Outlook is a frickin' dream to use. Not just for search but for everything. It's not as integrated into MacOS X as I'd like, but it's so much easier to use and so much more capable that I just don't give a shit. I'll start up Apple Mail if it turns out I have to.

Way to go, Apple.

How long is it before I give up on MacOS X and Mac and start using Windows PCs? No idea, but it will be all your fault if it happens.