Stupid Siri Won't Read Me Text Messages

In hindsight, this makes a ton of sense. For the last 3–4 months, however, it’s been infuriating.

I have a tendency to have Siri read me my text messages if I’m out walking or driving. It worked forever. In the old days, hold down the button, ask Siri to read the unread text messages, and then you could respond. Since I got my iPhone 6S, it was even easier—if I was in speaking distance, just say “Hey Siri, read me my text message” and she would.

Until a few months ago, when Siri said “I’m sorry, you’ll need to unlock your iPhone for that.”

Say what? Why you gotta be that way?

I googled and binged and duck-ducked for the last few months. I always assumed it was a bug. The only fix I ever saw was a factory reset, which I wasn’t going to do.

When iOS 9.3 came out yesterday and I got a new text message, I figured “Ah, maybe it’s fixed! Let’s give it a shot!”

“Hey, Siri, read me my text messages, please”

“I’m sorry, you’ll need to unlock your iPhone for that.”

Oh, Siri, it’s on.

I kept poking around the settings and turning things off and on to no avail. Finally, I noticed that I had turned off showing text messages on the lock screen (which was a result of a text barrage I was on the end of months ago and was sick of my phone lighting up every 2 seconds).

Hmm … I mean … if I didn’t want messages on my lock screen, it probably makes sense that Siri shouldn’t read them to someone who walks by.

Flip that switch, Siri is back to being my best friend.

So, again, in hindsight, this makes sense. The UI doesn’t make this obvious though. Somewhere in the UI it should say “This will also prevent Siri from reading you text messages on a locked phone”, or when you try to do it, Siri should say “I can’t do that. You can change that setting here.”

Or something.

Anyway, my phone outsmarted me and Siri and I are cool again.

Owning Your Own Social Media Content

I’ve been linking to Manton Reece a good bit lately, as he’s hitting on some topics that I’ve been thinking about. Namely how do you ensure that while you’re putting stuff into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., you ensure that you own the canonical versions of your files (or at least make it so that when one of those businesses pivots, gets bought, whatever, you don’t lose everything).

“I rarely post photos here on my own site. I’ve stuck with using Instagram instead.
I need to change that. I do like the Instagram app, though, so I’m going to keep using it. I’ll just copy the photos over to my site as well, and I’ll use Workflow on iOS to help automate it.”

He made a nice workflow for the Workflow app for iOS. Workflow is really cool, and sometimes you just need a little kickstart to get going.

I loved the idea of making it easy to post photos to this here blog, so I adapted his workflow a bit to make one that’s a bit more generic. You can find that here.

With it, I can take any photo on my phone and post it over to my site in about 10 seconds. You can see an example with this post about the bottle of Pretty Things I opened up the other day (two more bottles of Jack D’Or hanging out in my fridge for a special occasion).

Saved Some Pretty Things for a Special Occasion

Speed Up Time Machine Backups (and General Backupery)

More “make sure I can find this later” blogging.

Keir Thomas posted a tip about speeding up Time Machine backups. Run this command in a terminal window:

“sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0”

and the backups will move a bit faster. I’m giving it a shot now because I’ve added a new backup option to my rotation. I found a good 4TB USB drive on Amazon and added it to my Airport Extreme. This acts as a remote Time Machine disk (awesome), which lets me backup my iMac, my laptop, but also my wife’s Mac, which she never remembers to backup (last time she backed it up was in November).

Everything finished pretty quickly except for my laptop (which I can’t leave just sitting around all day—it’s my work machine), which is finally nearing the last few hours of backup.

I’ve become paranoid about having enough backups, just due to the fragility of disks. Knowing that I’ve got at least four backups of my main machine, and two of everything else, makes me feel at least moderately secure.

(I should say, I’m not seeing much evidence that my backup moves noticeably faster, but I wonder if that’s because it’s a network backup.)

(Via Michael Tsai.)

Stop Spotlight from Indexing Your Time Machine Backup

So that I can find this again some day.

I plugged my Time Machine drive in to backup my laptop today (at work, my offsite backup). I couldn’t eject it once it was done. After a bit of research, seemed like it was stuck with Spotlight indexing the drive, even though I have Spotlight set to ignore the drive.

After some googling, found this on Stack Exchange:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Running that stopped Spotlight, and allowed me to eject my disk. Running

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

started Spotlight back up again normally.

Still not sure why Spotlight ignored me telling it to not index the backup disk, but that’s a different problem.

Best Election Coverage

Josh Marshall and the team at TPM are doing the best election coverage, I think. They certainly lean left, but I think they’ve got an incredible understanding of the political machine and the implication of the various results.

I think today’s coverage has been a good example:

No, There Won’t Be a Contested Convention

Worst Possible Outcome

I think these are the best assessments of the outcomes from Super Tuesday on the Republican side. If you’re not reading TPM this election cycle, you should add it to your list.

Let's Encrypt SSLs

A couple of months back, I went through the process of trying out Let’s Encrypt to setup some SSL certs for my various little sites. Do my sites really need encryption? No. But, at this point, it’s easy enough to setup an SSL cert, and I’d rather my sites pass their data securely, even if no one cares what goes on between my site and your browser. I’m not storing credit cards or capturing info about my visitors (beyond the analytics Google captures), but in a world where the government is increasingly looking for ways to get at the data of citizens, why not do it.

Plus, it’s free.

It’s a little bit of a challenge to get setup if you’re not already used to mucking around with server management. The newer versions (as of this moment, 0.5.0) make things much easier, but you’re still going to need to be at least familiar with git, python, and sudo.

Once you’ve gotten certs and gotten your servers configured, you just need to remember that these certs expire every 3 months, unlike yearly (or longer) for more traditional certs. Currently, you’re on your own to renew them, but it sounds like they’ll be building out renewal scripts to make it easy.

SSL certs are already reasonably inexpensive (providers like Comodo often sell them for less than the cost of your annual domain renewal), but the ability to get certs for any number of subdomains for free is pretty compelling. Once the automation is in place, they’ll be almost no reason to run a server without https.

(Of course, Let’s Encrypt could be a big government ploy to get everyone to install free certs that they have the key to, and they’ll be able to eavesdrop on all of us with ease.)

Microblogging

Manton Reece has been working on an app/business/service that I think is really in the “own your own Twitter” space. Basically, why not own your own work, rather than just pushing it into Twitter.

It’s something I’ve thought about in the past. If I could post to Twitter and push those to my blog at the same time, it’d give me a full accounting for most of what I do on line (suck in Instagram, and you probably get the totality of it).

I’m interested to see what he comes up with. I think, often, that my Tweets only make sense in the context of the moment. A Celtics game or a concert, or whatever is happening on TV. Some are of the moment in a world sense, and make more sense standing alone.

For example,

My @serial experience so far…
Pre Ayn Rand reference: I completely get it. He seems well intentioned.

Post Rand reference: Fuck that guy

— Ryan Toohil (@ryant) February 19, 2016

Serial is pretty popular, so that stands up on its own alright (and, for fun, go search Bergdahl and Rand on Twitter. It’s amazing.)

This tweet, however,

That’s the sort of game a contender wins.

— Ryan Toohil (@ryant) February 11, 2016

only makes sense when you realize I was at the Celtics/Clippers game before the All Star break, that the Cs pulled out in overtime.

If you push your tweets/microposts to your blog, even if it’s within the context of your other tweets/posts, can you maintain that context of the moment? I’m not sure.

It’d be amazing if, whether via an app or later inside of your blogging applicaiton, you could add that context. If I could post from an app, that knows my location, and can determine I’m at the Celtics game, and add enough meta-data to that tweet to put it in the context of “Posted from the TD Garden during the Celtics victory over the Clippers”, that’d be pretty amazing.

And it’s not really out of reach today. That tweet could have had geo-data, which would put me at the Garden, during the time the game was going on. I mentioned “game”, which likely narrows the context down even further. If an app/web service could even let me go through my tweets later, tag them with context, and have that flow to my site, that would be a pretty amazingly wonderful service.

AirSonos on the Raspberry Pi

I just posted about my little Raspberry Pi server.

The other thing I’m running on it currently is AirSonos. We love our Sonos Playbar sitting beneath our TV. We use it all the time.

But it doesn’t support Airplay, and sometimes you want to use Airplay. I’ll get home from work listening to a podcast on Overcast. I walk in and want to play it on the Sonos while I clean or cook dinner. I can use headphones. I can turn on the TV and Apple TV, and Airplay it to the Apple TV to listen to it through the Sonos.

Or, using the little raspi home server running AirSonos, I can now Airplay it directly to the Sonos. It’s pretty awesome. There’s a little lag when you start it up, but once it gets going, it works swimmingly.

The little raspi is turning into a wonderful addition to our home. I find new uses for it every day (maybe this is next).

My Raspberry Pi Home Server

A month or two ago, I saw a link to Nick Farina’s awesome little node service Homebridge. Homebridge allows things in your house that don’t work with Apple’s HomeKit, say a Nest thermostat, to work with HomeKit. HomeKit enables you to do fun stuff like “Siri, set the temperature downstairs to 66 degrees.”

You know, really important stuff.

I’ve been trying to reign in our power use. We have laptops and iPads and iPhones and a couple of TVs and a WiiU and XBox and DVR etc. That’s a lot of juice. I’ve replaced all (well, most) of our lights with LEDs. I’ve played with power settings and anything else I can find to try to reduce our overall power usage.

The last thing I needed was to run my iMac full time as a home server.

Enter the CanaKit Raspberry Pi.

I’d been looking to muck around with a Raspberry Pi (from here on out, a raspi) for a bit, but never had a good reason to. Here’s a perfect use: a super low power, tiny, always on home server.

I got it last week and spent a few hours getting it configured. Then I setup Homebridge.

(After mucking with my network and nearly breaking everything … ) It all worked.

Homebridge has a bunch of plugins. Our Nest thermostats were added, but I also added our Sonos. And, eventually, I’ll add other devices (I have a Twine in our basement keeping an eye on the temperature – I may work out a way to scrape it’s data and push it to Homebridge).

It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but there’s something nice about being able to tell Siri to turn the temperature down. If I get a smart plug, I could tell Siri that I’m going to bed, and have it turn off the living room lamp, turn the temp down, and (with a little bit of work), maybe even have it turn off the TV.

That’d be pretty cool. And it all runs off a server the size of a couple of packs of cards that makes no noise and probably costs < $10/year to run.

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