Mastodawn

A few months ago, I upgraded our network to Ubiquity/UniFi. Overall, it’s been brilliant (if expensive). One word of warning: The “Lite” 16-port PoE switch is great compromise of small form-factor and PoE, but the power budget (45W) is so modest that the 8 PoE ports might qualify as false advertising. Adding a 4th PoE AP tripped the device into “power budget” failures. Solved by upgrading to the USW-16-Pro-PoE (admittedly overengineered for my purposes), which works flawlessly.

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Robert Ryan 3d ago

In the interest of full disclosure: after unplugging my AppleTV, a few hours later the associated HomePods suddenly complained: “Trying to play music, but cannot find AppleTV.”

So it appears the HomePods (not on beta) may be the guilty party. We have no “start music” automation, and it doesn’t seem to be Siri, unless Siri has taken to whispering commands to itself into the inky silence of the wee hours.

My aspersions against tvOS beta seem to have been misplaced.

Robert Ryan 4d ago

My AppleTV (tvOS 26.6) randomly starts playing music. After a bunch of diagnostics, I've finally found a fix:

I’ve unplugged it.

Robert Ryan 5d ago

For my first foray into homerow mods, I’m leaning towards GACS…

Robert Ryan 5d ago

I have finally downgraded my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to the Photography subscription (and might even get rid of that eventually). So many of the tools I was using are either irrelevant now or have more cost effective alternatives that are sufficient for my purposes.

Robert Ryan May 14

Any Kinesis Advantage Pro users out there on macOS? I’ve heard that the Bluetooth connectivity has improved, but really how solid is it now?

Robert Ryan May 5

I thought that Arsenal had squandered their Premier League championship chances (going from heavy favorites a few weeks ago to slight underdogs to Man City, as of last week). But Man City drew Everton, putting the Gunners back in the driver’s seat. Fingers crossed. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/48618699/the-earliest-dates-arsenal-man-city-win-premier-league-title

And today Gunners made it into the Champion’s League finals for the first time in 20 years. So there’s that, too. https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/48687101/arsenal-atletico-madrid-champions-league-semifinal-final

Robert Ryan Feb 7

Irrelevant Google ads are now appearing on StackOverflow (and other StackExchange sites) when visiting from my phone.

Robert Ryan May 23, 2025

I’m not a fan of the iPadOS “Smart Activation” feature for focus modes. I prefer to manually control when and if I need different focus modes. However, my iPad keeps prompting me every few days to turn this feature on.

I gather that this is a known issue. I’ve already provided feedback to Apple, but has anyone found a workaround to stop this persistent prompt?

Robert Ryan May 9, 2025

Anyone else seeing tech sites recycling old content? In the span of less than a week, I’ve stumbled across two egregious examples: MacRumors recently had an article about the best text editors and included Atom (sunset in Dec 2022). Medium also had a “recent” article talking about managing dependencies b/w asynchronous work by subclassing `Operation` (state of the art 7-10 years ago). In both cases, they could easily have generated interesting new content, but just recycled outdated content.