The fact that Apple HomeKit can't seem to maintain connections... and has its automations fail for no reason all the time... is only half the reason I hate it so much. A major problem with HomeKit is that the automations are so ridiculously underpowered and limited. If you want to do anything more than the most basic of tasks, you're out of luck.

Homey Pro, on the other hand, is fairly robust. Their automations are called "flows." And you have your pick of how deep you want to go. Their standard flows are very reminiscent of HomeKit. Basically an IF THIS HAPPENS, THEN DO THAT situation. But if you want more than that, you can use Homey Advanced Flows.

Despite the fact that they are indeed more advanced, they are surprisingly easy to use because of the beautiful graphic interface that Homey has come up with. In many ways, I find it easier to use than the basic option...

Here I am building a routine that monitors the brightness of the living room. If it drops to certain level of darkness and it's before 9pm, the lights turn on. If it's after 10pm and there's nobody home to turn the lights off, they turn off automatically...

This isn't terribly complex, yet. I have the option of adding an ELSE to the conditionals. For example, if it's after 10pm and somebody actually is home, I can have an entirely different set of routines be initiated. So many possibilities, and I've not even scratched the surface.

Homey Pro may not rely on the cloud to do what it does (everything on the Pro is processed locally) but it's not entirely isolated. For example... if there's a water leak detected, not only will the Homey Pro light up and glow blue, but a text message will be sent to my iPhone and the Sonos speakers in my living room and bedroom will announce the leak...

One of the many features I'm interested in exploiting is global variables. You can have routines set variables in one place, then have them available to every flow you create, at which point they can be modified. This could end up being very handy in the future when I'm doing far more complex interactions between devices.

If there's one thing about all this that I'm certain of, home automation is addicting. And the seemingly limitless options provided by Homey Pro Advanced Flows are certainly going to suck up a lot of my time. The more I play around, the more I'll learn how to do things better. So I'm sure there'll be loads of tweaking from here on out.

And here's the thing... if "Advanced Flows" are still not capable enough for you, then you can turn to Homey Script, which allows programmable goodness...

I really hope that I never get to the point that I need this.

But anyway...

Despite divorcing myself from HomeKit, I'm still firmly entrenched in the Apple Ecosystem. I still want to use Siri as the trigger for manually starting automations that I build. Fortunately, Homey Pro has Siri Shortcuts integration, so I can just delete my HomeKit Automations, rewrite them as Homey Pro Flows that are named the same, then create a Siri Shortcut to run them. That way I don't have to remember any new naming scheme for what I've already learned. Easy.

And there you have it. After a decade I am done, done, DONE with shitty fucking HomeKit.

I hope.

Yes, I left all my devices in HomeKit just in case, because you never know, but for now I am happy that I finally have a way to move past all the limitations I've been trying to work within since I started with home automation all these years.

Any parting comments?

Yes. Thank God I didn't go 100% Aqara as I planned when Homey Pro fell through the first time. The Zigbee protocol that Aqara uses is utter shit. I bought some water leak sensors because they were the most economical leak sensors I could get (at a time when I was pouring money into water leak repairs). Pairing the sensors to the Aqara M2 Hub was not a big deal. But I could never pair the M2 Hub (via Matter) to Homey Pro because it said devices weren't attached. Which they were. So I had to pair the sensors directly to Homey Pro which was a horrific ordeal. For my first two units it took a minimum of six tries. The third took ELEVEN tries. The fourth took eight. The fifth? Still hasn't paired. This is utter madness. I don't know why the Aqara M2 Hub has no problem pairing with them but the Homey Pro is so utterly hopeless. I may end up replacing all the Aqara sensors with Matter versions if I can find affordable ones next Black Friday.

A full half of my smart devices are from Eve Home. Which meant once I got the routine figured out to get them brought into Homey, it was simple (if time consuming) to power through them all.

But the entire point of Homey (other than getting rid of HomeKit) was bringing the many other devices I have into my smart home. Some of which were never able to be used with HomeKit.

Fortunately, there are apps for that...

The only one I'm having issues with is Google Nest. I'd like to be able to use their motion detection, but haven't figured out how. I'll keep working on it because it's supposed to be possible.

All is not perfect though. There are some devices I own without apps available...

• BRILLIANT - This one really hurts. I paid a huge amount of money for pricey Brilliant light switches for my Dining Room and Living Room because Eve Home doesn't make a dimmer switch. Brilliant does a brilliant job of dimming if you have Hue lighting, because it will keep the switch live and let you control the Hue bulbs with the switch. The reason I was willing to pay so much money for these switches was because Brilliant promised that they would be updatable to current technologies. A Matter upgrade was promised for 2023. But then Brilliant put itself up for sale. Eventually they were bought, but no mention has been made about an upgrade for Matter. I can, of course, control the lights directly with Homey Pro thanks to the Hue plugin... but I really want to have the switch also be controllable. Hopefully it will happen one day.
• RHEEM - My hot water heater has an app where I can schedule the temperature so I'm not wasting energy heating my water to high temperatures when I'm at work. It would be cool if Rheem was controllable so that when I'm scheduled out of the house, it would never come back up to temperature before/after work.
• SENSE - My energy monitoring device has never worked like it should. It was supposed to figure out the "energy signature" of my various appliances so it could recognize them. It never has for everything. But for a couple of them it kinda has. I'd like to be able to work this on/off data into my smart home to make it more useful, but oh well.
• LITTER-ROBOT - It would be cool to automatically cycle the electrical plug when an error doesn't clear so I'm not obsessively checking to make sure that Jenny has a clean litter box while I'm gone. Because if there's not a clean place for her to do her duty, she might choose somewhere else to do it.
• GOSUND - These are smart electrical plugs I use to control the holiday lights that the HOA hangs up. They're on a timer, so no biggie. But it would have been nice to have them on my control board.
• SUNBEAM - Yes. For my electric blanket. And for no other reason than the Sunbeam app is 100% shit. Every. Fucking. Time. You. Turn. On. Your. Blanket. With. The. App. It. Will. Give. You. The. Same. Fucking. Warning. Telling. You. That. Any. Setting. Above. 5. Will. Drop. To. 5. After. One. Hour. If. You. Don't. Confirm. On. The. Controller. EVERY FUCKING TIME!!! This is fucking shitty on top of shitty and I will NEVER by another Sunbeam product because it's just so damn stupid. ESPECIALLY SINCE I NEVER SET IT ABOVE THE "LOW" SETTING! Why not only display the warning when somebody sets it above 5? Until my blanket stops working, I'd love to be able to control my 'lectrc blankie in a smarter way than this absurdly fucking stupid bullshit.

But anyway... all of the devices I own which can be brought into Homey are now in Homey.

Except one.

I was positive to make sure that the Nanoleaf light strip I bought for under my kitchen cabinets was Matter compatible. Except I cannot get it into anything except HomeKit for some reason. And I tried for over an hour to get it into Homey. This is incredibly frustrating. I don't know if Amazon sent me the wrong version or what, but there's no Matter pairing code anywhere to be found on the device or the documentation. I wrote to Nanoleaf to see if anything can be done but, odds are, I'm fucked and will have to buy new ones. What's really frustrating is that the Nanoleaf app seems to imply that they are Matter compatible...

Other than that, everything has gone as well as I could have hoped.

Tomorrow I'll wrap this up with a look at the amazing automation tools that Homey Pro offers. Or "flows" as Homey calls them. It's not perfect, but they're so easy and powerful to use that they're darn close. Most everything I ever lamented not being able to do with HomeKit is a piece of cake, and for that alone I'm very happy to have made the leap.

Tonight I finally finished upgrading all my Eve devices to Matter. Despite the time involved, it went about as smoothly as you could hope for.

But then it came time for all the other devices, and it's like I've been walking hip-deep in molassas. Devices are taking multiple, multiple tries to get connected. Though once they are connected they seem to be operating just fine. Hopefully they stay that way.

Since it's now past midnight, I think I'm throwing in the towel for the day. Maybe tomorrow night I'll make some headway on the rest.

The Homey Pro smart home hub is an expensive investment. Purchasing the unit on Black Friday saved me $50 (plus I saved $4 on the ethernet adapter I bundled with it), but I still had to pay a whopping $372.36 for the thing. In my humble opinion, this is radically overpriced, even considering its wonderful capabilities, and I would have been much more comfortable if it were in the $250 range. At the very least, ethernet could have been included. And yet... I get it. This is the cost that's what you'll pay for a Home Assistant box, but that requires a lot of your time to get working, and I've never been ambitious enough to try and wrap my head around it. So paying Homey engineers to do the heavy lifting is a fair trade-off.

The thing that I just don't know is if my investment is going to work out long-term. Athom, the company that developed Homey, was bought out by LG. This could be a good thing in that more money will (theoretically) be available to continue developing the project. But just as Samsung has hopelessly screwed up SmartThings, there's a very real possibility that LG will fuck up Homey and I'll be forced to jump to Home Assistant. Which is probably what I should have done from the start, but I just don't have the time to invest in learning how to make it work with all my stuff.

But anyway...

Homey Pro (which I'll be calling "HP" from her on out) has an IR blaster which can (assumably) be used to control my television, so I put it directly under the TV (where it also has an ethernet hub available for a more reliable signal vs. WiFi).

Once you've got HP set up via the Homey app, you can visit the HP "App Store" to get free apps for controlling all your stuff. Many are created by the HP community... but a surprising number of them are official apps direct rom the manufacturers themselves.

One of these apps is for Aqara devices. It was my plan to integrate my Aqara stuff via the Aqara hub's Matter upgrade. But when I tried, HP said that my hub didn't have any devices attached? So I used the official Aqara app and paired all the sensors directly to HP. And since you can only pair the devices to one hub at a time, that means my Aqara hub is now useless and got tossed in my electronics box. To be honest, the pairing is not easy. The first sensor took two tries (the second took six?!?). Three more to go. I really hope that's the end of it.

Next up I decided to jump head-first into what I've most been dreading... upgrading my Eve Smart Home light switches to the new Matter Smart Home protocol so that they can be controlled via Homey Pro instead of only horrendously shitty HomeKit.

I started with a single light switch that I rarely use. It went fairly well, but took some time...

1. First you push the Matter upgrade to the light switch via the Eve app (takes about 8 minutes).
2. The Eve app then kindly adds the new Matter-enabled switch back into HomeKit as a Matter device.
3. Then you put the device into "Matter pairing mode" via the HomeKit Home app. Then you copy the code that you're given.
4. Then you input the light switch's code into HP and HP pairs with it via Matter.
5. Lastly you inform HP where the device is and set the icon/description you want for it.

If all goes well, you then have a Matter-enabled light switch which is accessible by Homey Pro, Apple HomeKit, and even other smart home ecosystems which can integrate Matter devices (like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa). If all doesn't go well, then you'll end up having to delete the device from HomeKit, reset the Eve light switch, add it back to HomeKit, then do steps 3-5 again. Fortunately, this only happened once so far.

UPDATE 12/4/2024: Over the course of two evenings, all my Eve light switches, motion sensors, door & window sensors, and smart plugs had been updated to Matter and added. Surprisingly, out of dozens of devices, only two light switches ended up giving me problems. But that was easily solved by resetting and re-pairing.

And now the real fun begins.

The biggest benefit of Homey Pro is that it can control such a wild variety of smart devices. And I have a ton of them. Everything from my Roomba robot vacuum to my security system to my smoke detectors (to name a few). Figuring out how to get all that stuff added so I finally have a cohesive smart home that's actually smart and where everything can work together is going to be my obsession for the rest of the week, I'm sure.

To say that I outright loathe HomeShit HomeKit is a massive understatement. Apple has fucked up their "smart home" protocol since Day One.

When the technology debuted it was so woefully incomplete that I ditched it immediately and went with INSTEON. When INSTEON died years later, I decided to give HomeKit another chance because so many people were saying that it was finally a worthwhile way to control your home and devices. Since I was in a hurry, I went all-in on HomeKit and replaced every light switch and "smart device" in my home (at great expense). But I didn't trust Apple entirely because I made sure to buy devices that would be upgradable to the "Matter" protocol so if HomeKit ended up being awful I could just migrate to Matter and control everything another way.

SPOILER ALERT: HOMEKIT is still most definitely HOMESHIT!

HomeKit in 2024 is still a brain-dead pile of shit that is wildly inflexible and doesn't work consistently. Apple has been working on this for TEN YEARS and yet automations suddenly stop working for no reason and devices won't act as expected. Even worse, all you get to work with is the most basic of basic controls...

IF (door sensor) triggers, THEN turn on (light).

That's pretty much it. That's all you get. It's fucking embarrassing. Apple has always dumbed their stuff down to the lowest common denominator, but this is just beyond fucking useless if you want to have any kind of smarts in your smart home. What I need is something like this...

IF (precipitation) is snowing AND IF (temperature) < 32° THEN turn on (roof heat tapes)

I've tried multiple times to do something this bloody simple and it always fails. Ideally I'd be able to use a WHILE statement so I don't have to create a second IF/THEN loop to turn them off, but at this point I'll take anything I can get.

What I'm really looking for is something like this, where the roof heat tapes only turn on if it's been snowing for a while so I don't have to waste energy on a tiny amount of snowfall that will melt quickly...

IF (precipitation) is snowing THEN start (timer)
IF (timer) > 1 hour THEN IF (precipitation) is snowing
AND IF (temperature) < 32° THEN turn on (roof heat tapes)
ELSE stop (timer) and set (timer)=0

But do you think basic variables or even a rudimentary timer is available in HomeKit? Oh fuck no.

This is all off the top of my head, and I'm sure once I got into the logic of whatever system I end up with, I'll get smarter on how to best approach the automations I'm looking to create. The point is that stuff like this simply isn't possible with HomeKit.

Enter Homey Pro...

I actually bought one of these devices last year, but ended up returning it because it wasn't able to control the devices I had (mostly because my light switch manufacturer hadn't gotten out the Matter upgrade as promised). Fast-forward to Black Friday 2024 and miracle-of-miracles, my light switch manufacturer has finally released their Matter upgrade!

And so I am once again giving Homey Pro a try.

Today I received the device. Tonight I'll install it. Tomorrow I'll get started on upgrading all my stuff to Matter and seeing if Homey Pro will work for my needs.

And you, lucky reader, get to come alpong for the ride!

For the life of me I don't understand why "smart home" technology is so fucking brain-dead.

Companies have been working on this shit for years. I started with Apple Homekit. But it was so horrendously fucking shitty that I abandoned it within a week. I then moved on to a piecemeal system where I bought the best parts from each manufacturer, then used a half-dozen apps to control everything. Sure the parts couldn't work very well together, but at least they worked! Eventually I took a leap with INSTEON, and it was pretty great. everything worked together and things happened practically instantaneously (hence the name). It was perfect. Until it was discontinued.

At which point I went back to Apple HomeKit. Even though nothing had changed. Once HomeShit, always HomeShit. Everything was slow. Scenes and actions were glacially slow. After living with INSTEON, this was torture.

But I bought into it because it was promised that eventually HomeKit would transition to the new "Matter" smart home standard, which was a massive initiative by dozens of smart home companies that would guarantee everything would work together. To be sure I could jump onboard, I made doubly-sure that everything I bought was able to be upgraded to Matter when the time came. This meany mostly buying everything from Eve Smart Home.

After waiting and waiting and waiting, Eve made their motion sensors the first device that could be upgraded to Matter. So I grabbed one of the two sensors I owned, did the upgrade, and... fail. It was bricked. Wouldn't work any more. Nothing I tried would bring it back, so I put it in a drawer, said several curse words, and resigned myself to sticking with HomeKit, no matter how fucking shitty it is.

Until last week.

I grabbed that motion sensor out of the drawer and attempted to bring it back to life. And failed again and again. Then I found a comprehensive list of things people did to get their device working again after upgrading to Matter and tried them. Nothing worked. So then I decided to try all the suggestions at the same time.

I shut down all my HomeKit hubs. I made sure my router was able to process IP6 addresses then rebooted it. I rebooted my phone. Then I started my preferred HomeKit hub (my AppleTV). Then I pulled up my Eve Matter ID number for the motion sensor... and... there we go. I was able to add it back to my HomeKit configuration.

I shudder to think how much time I wasted on this stupid bullshit.

And so now I've given up on Matter. It's far, far more trouble than it's worth, so I just don't give a crap any more. HomeKit may be flakey as hell, but it mostly works, and since that's the best I can hope for, I guess I'm done.

Which brings me back to the question of the decade: Why is it so damn difficult to get a smart home system to work and stay working?

Maybe one day a company will finally figure it out. But right now I'd be happy with something that was better than what we've got now.

I've had entirely too much work to do this weekend, but I'm making sure I take a break to blog... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• It's nice to be nice sometimes. As somebody who loves baseball, I was wiping away tears when the story of Trea Turner's miraculous turnaround for the Phillies came out last year. I had no idea that they made a documentary about what happened. It's just 20 minutes long on Netflix, but even if you're not a baseball fan this is worth your valuable time to see what positive reinforcement can do to somebody...

Throwing hate at players for trying their best at a game they love doesn't help anything. More likely it just makes a player going through a rough patch do worse, and a little encouragement goes a long way. A lot longer than trying to break somebody down. If you've got Netflix, it's worth a look.

   
• Feels Right? Do It! There is no contest. The FRDi Show is hands-down my favorite podcast in existence. Especially if you can watch the YouTube videos of the show. Their channel has kinda morphed into the guys playing games and it's must-see entertainment for me. It's such good fun that I live for new episodes. I can just put it on and forget about the world for a while. They were on hiatus for a while, and it was really tough. But they're back now and all is right in the world. This is yet another banger episode...

It can't be all horrific political news all the time. The FRDi Show returning is just what I need right now.

   
• Vend Error! U-S-A-! U-S-A-! U-S-A-! U-S-A-! Once again, we're leading the world!

This just reaffirms my belief that men should be the ones making all decisions as to what a woman can do with her body. I mean, come on, just look how good we're doing with ours!

   
• It's only forever... not long at all. I've been on a huge Bowie kick lately. And I remain shook how much I continue to love his soundtrack for the Jim Henson film, Labyrinth. The songs are just so good. And on the top of that brillint heap of music is As the World Falls Down...

But the other songs aren't lacking by any means...

These could have been throwaway tracks for a silly kids movie. But Bowie elevated them so much that they ended up far better than they had a right to be...

Bowie's performance was flawless in every way... in the context of the film he is The Goblin King! And who else could have possibly played the part?

   
• Mayor Pete Stories! I have a complicated opinion of Pete Buttigieg. The guy has some past actions that are problematic. But for quite a while now he's just been such a smart, refreshing, reassuring voice of reason during these insane times in which we live, and I love him for it. I had never heard his coming out story, and it's as good as you'd imagine for him...

@nudeafrica Pete Buttigieg’s coming-out story makes me sob everytime 🥹😭 #lgbt #petebuttigieg ♬ original sound - nudeafrica

It shouldn't be this hard for people to be true to themselves and who they are. And every time I think it's getting better for the LGBTQ+ Community, something happens which makes you wonder if this toxic fucking society will ever just let people be.

   
• More HomeShit! Apple's smart home technology, HomeKit, is one of the absolute worst technologies I have ever used. It's glitchy as fuck. It has a shitty implementation. Things go wrong with it all the fucking time. I had a power outage not so long ago, and two of my automations stopped working. Which is typical. The only thing you can do when this happens is delete the automation and rebuild it. There's no fixing it. Then you cross your fucking fingers, because you may have to do it more than once before the shit works again. Interestingly enough, this morning I finally got a feature working that was promised with iOS/TV OS/HomePod OS version 18.1: Specifying which device you want to use as a primary hub and border router to the outside world. Despite having everything upgraded to the beta 18.1 OS, I was never allowed to choose shit. This morning there as another OS update so I installed it remotely, then I turned off the power to all devices with my remote electrical plugs for an hour, then turned them back on. And then...

And of course I selected the Living Room AppleTV. Why wouldn't I? Not only is it the newest AppleTV, BUT IT'S ALSO PLUGGED DIRECTLY INTO MY FUCKING ROUTER SO IT HAS THE FASTEST, MOST RELIABLE CONNECTION TO THE INTERNET! It drove me fucking insane that until now Apple would regularly select some HomePod mini somewhere that was slow as fuck. Apparently Apple's determination was always which device has the latest OS update, not which device is the best for the job. Typical Apple bullshit. We should have been able to select our preferred hub all along.

   
• NEWSFLASH! Rudy Giuliani is losing everything to the Georgia election workers he defamed. Oh. Oh that's too bad. Say, did y'all know that the "pronghorn" is the second-fastest land animal after the cheetah? It's kinda a goat. It's kinda an antelope. But it's actually not either. It's an entirely separate animal! And it lives right here in the USA! Wyoming is famous for them! Wyomingites are very proud of their pronghorns, as they should be!

   
And now back to your regularly-scheduled Sunday.

Happy WWDC to all who celebrate!

And lo did Apple descend from the heavens to bestow upon all of us the glory that is World Wide Developer Conference 2024! As usual, I will be jotting down my thoughts as the keynote progresses.

UPDATE: Somebody compiled Craig being Craig and it's perfect. Except they didn't show the part with his Daily Hair Journal...

Vision OS

• Cool story, bro. If $3,500 drops in my lap so I can buy one, I'll get excited. I do like that camera manufacturers are bringing 3D lenses to their cameras though.

iOS

• Craig is my favorite Apple spokesperson at these things.
• Control Center has always been useful... it's nice to see that they're adding some important functionality. Being able to get to Home controls so easily is going to save time and frustration.
• Being able to manually arrange my home screen is a plus. But the last thing I want to spend time on is customizing icons and whatnot. Nice it's there for people who want it, and Apple does make it look quick and easy, so maybe?
• App protection is cool beans. Less likely to worry about handing my phone over to somebody if I know that the sensitive information on it is better protected. Not that I hand my phone over to people on the regular, but it does happen. I suspect that people cheating on their spouses will be particularly happy about being able to hide specific apps so they are not immediately visible!
• More formatting options in Messages is nice. Most people I know don't use formatting at all, but I definitely do all the time, so happy birthday to me, I guess. And did Craig just verify that RCS is happening so that Android owners will stop being Big Mad? But it's likely more important to them that they don't get green-bubbled. Though I seriously doubt Apple will go that far. They know what an exclusivity boost blue bubbles are for iPhone users.
• Messages via Satellite is interesting. But do you have to pay to use it? Or is it like SOS which is free for two years after you buy an iPhone? Given that my new carrier, Verizon, is absolute shit for signal, I'd actually have use for this if it were free. Interesting to note that I know somebody personally who has used the SOS feature to get rescued. That's a game-changer right there.
• Trail Maps is cool, but seems as though it's an unnecessary add-on given how the people needing things like this are already using something like All Trails which has additional features beyond maps.
• Tap to Cash is a great idea... assuming that the person you want to pay uses Apple Cash. So few people I know have it because Venmo is easier to set up and use. If Apple wants to make Apple Cash be more pervasive, they really need to take a look at getting it set up with people.
• Photos is such an important app, and yet it's kinda bad if you have a lot of images. Fortunately Apple has shown the app some love so searching is much easier. I love how she said Amazing Intelligence... AI... so it's AI without saying AI. LOL. The app looks great, but until I use it I honestly won't know if it's going to be that big of a help compared to where we were.
• LARGER ICONS ON THE HOME SCREEN?!? It's like they knew I need this after my eye surgery! Thanks, Craig!

iPods

• Okay... the head shakes to answer Siri in your headphones is glorious. That's smart thinking! But the noise isolation is going to be the real party trick. I hope it's as good as they make it out to be.

TV OS

• InSight... very handy and clever. I am definitely one of those people who is constantly wondering "Where have I seen this actor before?" so I feel seen.
• Audio improvements are always welcome.
• FUCK!! ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING IMPROVEMENT FOR THE HORRENDOUSLY SHITTY APPLE TV USER INTERFACE?!? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, APPLE?!?

Watch OS

• The Vitals app goes beyond the sleep app I am currently using, so I am fully onboard for this. I have to say, it's so nice to see that Apple is really invested to helping people being more proactive about staying healthy like this.

iPad OS

• Look, all these new bells and whistles are nice and all (the handwriting Smart Script feature is incredible), but it is categorically absurd that they have done absolutely nothing to address the stupid shortcoming when it comes to file-handling, lack of background tasks, and multitasking. My God. Again, if Apple is going to intentionally nerf the iPad because they don't want it cutting into MacBook sales, they should just shut down iPad and move on. This is fucking ridiculous. Fully configured iPads cost more than a MacBook!

MacOS Sequoia

• Craig going all PARKOUR! PARKOUR! is why everybody loves Craig.
• The new iPhone Mirroring control of your iPhone on MacOS X is fantastic. So incredibly handy. Not having to constantly grab my iPhone for stuff when working on my Mac is going to be so nice.
• No need for a 3rd party app to control screen positioning is handy. But not for the developers of those apps.
• Safari is such a mixed blessing. When it works as intended, it's my favorite browser. But constantly running across incompatibilities is really fucking annoying. I really wish that Apple would pause the "improvements" and focus on compatibility for a minute!
• I, for one, welcome our new Safari Password overlords. That's something that should be built into Safari. Ever since 1Password went the subscription model, I don't care whether it lives or dies, and this is pretty much signing off on its death warrant.
• Gaming is such a hard sell for the Mac, so it's understandable that Apple would want to keep improving tools to port new games to their platforms. But until there's a cheap television console available for advanced gaming, I think that many developers are going to continue to skip out. You'd think it's a no-brainer for Apple to do this. A Mac mini retool would be so easy. Not sure why this hasn't been a priority.

A.I. Apple Intelligence

And here we go. The thing that everybody has been waiting for...

• LOL. Leave it to Apple to address the things that the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 promised but didn't deliver, i.e. integrating AI with a personal context that's already defined within the Apple ecosystem. No having to add a bunch of data to get useful AI is why platforms like Apple and Google will succeed where others will struggle. Plus... no need to carry around a second device? Sign me up!
• Privacy is a big Apple flex, and the fact that they have been working on hardware which allows localized AI processing (AKA "Neural Engine") for years just proves that they have been working on AI for quite a while. For external AI needs, the anonymized "Private Cloud Compute" seems like an ideal situation. That Apple allows the code to be inspected by 3rd parties to verify privacy is how it should work.
• Siri has been a pile of stupid almost since its inception. And Apple hasn't done a damn thing to improve it, favoring instead to add features that don't address the base problem while Google Assistant eats their lunch. And now? Finally... finally... Apple has actually added smarts to actually have a smart assistant.
• BWAH HA HA HAAAA! Type to Siri is shots fired to Humane's AI Pin. But, seriously, I still don't understand how people could rationally believe that voice instructions should be the only way to interact with a device. If you're in a meeting, that's almost impossible. Humane AI Pin was doomed from the start, and the fact that there are people surprised at this (mostly at Humane, I'm betting) just blows my mind.
• Apple's demos of the new Siri is exactly what everybody has been wanting since Star Trek debuted. True voice control and interaction with a smart device has been a pipe dream until recently, when it's becoming reality.
• Apple kept reiterating the privacy controls, because it can be genuinely scary to think about Siri having such intimate knowledge of who you are and everything you do. I still don't know if I should be excited or worried. But I have to say I'm less worried with Apple's assurances of on-device processing, privacy, and 3rd party inspection of the code which makes it all work.
• I never, ever use Siri on Mac. It's just so fucking useless. But apparently that's a thing of the past, which actually is exciting.
• More demos. Rewrite being able to adjust the tone of your emails is something that will be very interesting to see. I always think that things like this will present people not as who they are, but who they want to be. Is this a good thing? I really don't think so. I'd rather interact with people exactly for who they are... warts and all... rather than have everybody I know sound like a machine.
• Smart Reply in email is lovely. Being able to write out replies to inane emails without having to actually write anything is something I will very much be happy to have.
• Apple Intelligence just making all the little everyday things easier and less work is where AI is really going to be felt. That's the promise of AI fulfilled. Until AI takes over the earth and eradicates all humans, of course.
• Genmoji is hysterical. But looks oddly useful. But will things like this make us more effective at communicating ourselves... or less? Is our future not words but strings of emojis? Maybe. And I, for one, will not be decrying the death of language if accommodations can be made for cultural differences which could result in a serious, serious problem. Different peoples of the world attach different meaning to visual cues. I imagine this will be an ever-evolving transition of expression. The way that the "high-five" emoji has evolved to be "praying hands" emoji which is often used to express gratitude in many places on earth.
• Image Playground is cute. Being able to create an AI image to convey a feeling or situation is nice. Especially if you can't draw well. Though I hope that Apple's implementation is compensating those artists whose work has been used to train it. We may never know.
• Image Wand interprets rough drawings and photos to allow redrawing and touchup with zero effort. This is a mixed blessing. Bringing tools once only used by professionals to everybody... but at the cost of jobs by those professionals? If I were still in that line of work, I know I'd be worried. Will companies even bother with artists now that Generative AI can steal their art to reimagine it as whatever they want? God I hope not. But here we are.
• Then Craig says and that's not all! and promises that these few examples are just the beginning of "AI for The Rest of Us." And I believe it. By allowing integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT services, which are at the forefront of AI development, Apple doesn't have to worry about falling behind. It's genius, I suppose. Though I'd imagine it's going to cost Apple a metric fuckton of money to make it happen. Good thing that money is the one thing Apple doesn't have to worry about.

So... out of my Top Five Most Needed Things to Come Out of WWDC 2024, Apple managed to check one of them. My #2 ask. Oh well. That's so very Apple that I wouldn't imagine it having gone any other way.

Overall I'm excited to see how AI being integrated to seamlessly into our lives is going to change the world. For better? For worse? Time will tell. At which point it will be too late to do anything about it one way or the other.

UPDATE: There's buzz out of WWDC that we will finally be able to specify which device we want to use as a "Home Hub." Color me fucking shocked. Of course I'm going to specify my hardwired via Ethernet AppleTV that's connected to my main television. Since Apple's shitty fucking software can't figure out that's the best bet on its own. So damn embarrassing. So, yeah, I guess I'm giving Apple a half-point for that (doesn't seem like there's any other much-needed improvements happening, but maybe?).

It may be getting cold enough that I'm contemplating turning on the heat, but it's always warm on my blog... because an all new Very Special Video Edition of Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Kookaburra! Now, granted, I would not want this outside my window (and I remember them very well from my trip to Australia), but it's sure nice to admire them from afar...

So cute. Are there any baby creatures that are not adorable?

   
• Andor! Diego Luna is precious and life-affirming. This entire video is fantastic...

On top of that? He's a remarkably gifted actor. I am dying for the second season of Andor to arrive.

   
• ¡Yo Quiero! "It's the same thing in a different thing." — HE'S FIGURED IT OUT! HE'S DISCOVERED THE TACO BELL FORMULA!

LOL. These foreign takes on quintessentially American things never gets old!

   
• Does Whatever a Spider Can! Video games have reached the point where you're basically playing a feature film. This looks incredible...

This was a Spider-Man game when I first started playing...

Insanity. And soon we'll have much, much better VR experiences, which could take it to an even more immersive level.

   
• Unreal! If you want a look into the absolutely fascinating world of 3D computer graphics, this is an amazing behind-the-scenes look at how photogrammetry works...

Now, I've written about the Unity gaming engine a couple times before. The stuff people are doing with it is breathtaking (including companies like Lucasfilm and Marvel using it for producing their projects). It is an amazing, amazing tool. Unfortunately, they've just unveiled a hugely controversial licensing model, which is gouging game developers in a terrible way. It's easy to say "Just switch to a different gaming engine if you don't like the cost!" Except video games take years to develop. Even for large studios with hundreds of employees. So if you've been working on a game for two or three years... how can you afford to switch to a different engine? This is a major deal. So major that some game projects are being canceled... and some developers are going to switch engines despite the additional time needed...

Of course the people behind Unity deserve to get paid for their hard work. But to kill developers to get there seems like a horrifically bad business model. Hopefully they will re-evaluate what they're doing and come up with something more reasonable.

   
• SCIENCE! Despite an inexplicable (and highly selective) anti-science movement by fucking idiots, science marches on. And this is fascinating...

Fascinating and scary. Plants screaming? But in brighter news... research into Alzheimer's just keeps advancing. Very promising that one day we might have a cure.

   
• HomeShit! For anybody saying that I am exaggerating about just how fucking shitty Apple's HomeKit is, this guy is a total expert and even he can't solve the problems he's been having. He finally ended up resetting and rebuilding his entire HomeKit setup...

If I get this desperate, I'm just going to bail on HomeShit altogether and go with Matter and some kind of smarter home hub (like Homey Pro). In the meanwhile, I am just applying Band-Aids to try to solve the massive fucking problems I'm having. As an example, I just installed a light and motion sensor in my garage as a backup to automatically turn the light on when the doors open since HomeShit automations keep dying on my door sensor for some reason (even though the light switch and sensor itself is operating perfectly).

   
And on that happy note... enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

Recovering from being deathly sick has never been more fun... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Toast! Awww... my little Toast nightlight arrived!

It's a nightlight that I put in the dark corner of my kitchen next to my toaster. Get it?

   
• Buses? These captchas are getting frickin' stupid ridiculous...

So what? Now we're just supposed to be clicking on every fucking square on these idiotic things?

   
• Good Omens 2! This looks even better than the first one. The casting was note-perfect for these characters, and seeing more of them is something I am very much looking forward to...

It's weird how flawless the casting was for these.

   
• Schlage Rage! It went something like this...
ME: "I hate my Schlage Sense smart lock SO much. Flames... flames... on the side of my face... Which lock should I get to replace it? Preferably one with HomeKey."
HOMEKIT FORUM MEMBER: "Definitely the Schlage Encode Plus."
ME: "IS THIS SOME KIND OF JOKE?!? I hate hate HATE the Schlage I have now!"
HOMEKIT FORUM MEMBER: "I understand. I agree. But know that all the bad things on the Sense have been improved one thousand percent on the Encode Plus. And be sure to get the Plus if you want HomeKey."
OTHER HOMEKIT FORUM MEMBERS: "Hard agree!"
ME: "Just so you know, if I hate this lock I am coming back to haunt all of you."

And... they were absolutely right. No more stupid battery pack cable. No more stupid setup fails. No more stupid "lock not found." No more stupid random lock resets. No more stupid random lock cycling. No more stupid HomeKit disconnects. It's an entirely new product. So good on Schlage for listening and improving, I guess. Doesn't change the fact that they unleashed a shitty product that I've been suffering with for seven years though.

   
• Hilarious! Zuckerberg on Apple Pro Vision: "Our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want." This is the stupidest fucking thing I've heard this week. How many times have a GROUP OF PEOPLE all put on their Facebook Quest VR goggles and sat around interacting in the same room? Nah, buddy. They're sitting alone on the couch! How is the Facebook headset more "social" when you're wandering around as a cartoon floating torso that's always gripping hand controllers? Apple at least went with uncanny valley avatars that attempt to look like you and leave your hands free...

Apple's take will cost HUGE MONEY... to start... but it will get cheaper over time. Facebook, who has lost millions (billions?) trying to do VR... and ultimately failing... shows Zuck's statement for what it is... fear. And bullshit. I'm not sure ANY of this is the "future I want." But I'd take Apple's vision over Facebook any day.

   
• Crossing the Street in Vietnam! Not a lie. Which would have been fine... except I had my mom with me, and most intersections are far busier than this one! I'll never forget the first time we went to cross a street. The intersection actually had a crosswalk signal (many don't). But it was totally ignored. We had the light but it made no difference at all... you're just expected to cross like this...

@travelwithpat Crossing the street in Vietnam is something you need to prepare to do #travel #vietnam #tiktoktravel ♬ Super Mario Bros Main Theme

But still... it's s country like no other and worth a visit. As is this guy's TikTok.

   
• Church & State? Okay, government funded Christian schools are a thing now... so are they going to also fund Muslim schools? Buddhist schools? Hindu schools? So much FOR FUCKING SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE!! This is a big slap in the face to all Americans, even if they consider themselves "Christian." Absolutely outrageous. Can't wait until the government is forced to sponsor Church of Satan schools because they're so fucking stupid that they don't have the fist clue about the can of worms they are opening. Jesus. OR NOT. THAT'S *YOUR* FUCKING CHOICE IN THIS COUNTRY!!!

   
And now I guess I had better make my bed, take a shower, and try and get some sleep .