Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • Turning It Off And On Again

    Turning It Off And On Again

    Apple’s watchOS 2.0 came out on Monday Sept 21, and I was one of the unlucky ones who had a problem. All of the new ‘native’ apps crashed.

    If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, the original Apple Watch didn’t allow apps to really run on the watch. They ran on the phone and you had to use Bluetooth to connect for data. Now, with watchOS 2, the apps can load locally and use wifi on the Watch itself, making them faster. Exciting times for all. As I explained to my wife, all the Apple default native apps worked fine. The 3rd party ones did not. They all crashed.

    Also my battery life went to shit. So I did what one logically does. I rebooted my Watch. That didn’t help. So I went to Google and Reddit (yes, Reddit) and I dug around and found what everyone else had done to fix it:

    • Unpair and re-pair
    • restore from backup of 2.0
    • Setup as new
    • Let it sit overnight
    • Uninstall apps from phone, reboot phone and watch, reinstall apps on phone, reinstall apps on watch
    • Reinstall from my 1.0.1 backup

    None of that worked for me, so I filed a ticket with Apple support at about 7:15am. They called me back at 7:30 (which was nifty) and we discussed what I’d tried. They walked me through things, I confirmed I’d tried all of that, and detailed what I’d seen happen. Finally the woman apologized, said she didn’t know why it couldn’t work, and asked if I wanted to mail it in to Apple for a replacement.

    I didn’t. I was sure this wasn’t a hardware bug. I asked if I could take it to an Apple Store, and she said yes, making me an appointment at the store for the weekend (the earliest time) but I work .5 miles from a store so I planned to head down after lunch to have a go.

    I ended up not doing that.

    I work in tech. I’m used to troubleshooting. I went over everything I’d done. I checked and double checked that I was sure I did it right. I went back to the Reddit thread and looked to see if anything new had been posted. Sure enough, there was something. A Zen man in the MacRumors forum had an answer:

    • Doing a iphone backup with encryption of data on itunes.
    • Delete content of iphone.
    • Restore from a backup.
    • All native apps are working fine!

    While I couldn’t say that was a ‘great’ idea, I figured I had nothing left to lose. Since I always keep a spare cable for my phone and my watch in my bag, I connected them both and tried.

    And yes. It worked. Immediately I canceled the appointment with the Apple Help Gurus and started a live chat with them to explain how I fixed it. I also contacted the two app companies I’d been chatting with about it and made sure to confirm on Reddit that it worked for me. Because I will never be DenverCoder9.

    The debugging process with the Apple Watch is convoluted. I had a similar headache when I couldn’t get the WiFi working properly. I ended up having to disconnect WiFi from my phone and then re-add it for the Watch to pick it up. It’s not really the best experience, and there’s not a lot of ways to debug things.

    While I do like the Apple Watch, the black-box technology aspect of the iPhone is increased since it’s, literally, impossible to use the watch without a phone. You have to both attempt to fix things on the watch and the phone, without having a way to determine which is the broken one. And a ‘reinstall’ is not really the friendliest thing. Had I not had a handy laptop, I would have had to do an iCloud restore, which would kill my activity history (something I’d already accidentally wiped out).

    The problem comes back to meaningful error messages. All I could say was “The app crashes and kicks me back to the home screen.” Apple faces the same issues we all do with errors. How do we explain things in an informative way that allows people to react to the errors and know what to do next, when there is no way to gauge their skill set? Sadly, Apple’s route is “Take it to a professional.”

    We can’t all do that with our products, and more often than not it leads to frustration and things like ‘Bendgate,’ where people just rant and make a product seem worse when it’s really only a very small percentage of those who are impacted.

    Is there an answer? No. But it’s just one more thing to consider when we discuss elegant failures.

  • An Ad Network You Can’t Use

    An Ad Network You Can’t Use

    Amidst the kerfluffle of Peace being pulled from the App Store after a couple days, there was a mention of how it also blocked the Deck Network ads.

    Most people in tech have seen Deck ads, but few outside the ‘hard core’ geeks know of it, and it’s for good reason. It’s an invite only ad system that makes ads that don’t slow your site down.

    Manually curating ads, they restrict users to show one and only one ad on the site, perhaps not on all pages of a site, but just the one ad.

    In essence, buying a month on The Deck gives you an exclusive showing on three percent of all the pages viewed for that month across all fifty-two sites and services. And there won’t be Google or other third-party ads diluting your exposure. The Deck ad is the only ad on the page.

    It’s a phenomenal amount of work. And that would be why only fifty-odd sites are in. Peace happens to be on that network. But let’s put aside the whole ethics and morality of ad-blocking for a day.

    The idea behind the Deck Network is everything I want an ad network to be. They pride themselves of relevancy to their network and only show ads relevant to the network. They only show ads they’re okay with seeing. As mentioned before, it’s an incredible amount of work, but it’s exactly what you’d want to see in an ad network. Ads that people would rather be relevant than, nessecarily, make money.

    That’s really kind of the same reason as my I like Project Wonderful so much. With Project Wonderful, though, the quality of the ads is a little crowd sourced. If enough of us report an ad, it will likely get pulled but it will always be reviewed. With The Deck, it’s the other way. Nothing gets in that isn’t vetted first.

    The amount of work that goes into that is exactly why, every time anyone says “I’ll pay you to put my ad on your site” I say “No thanks.” The whole mess of running my own ads, having them expire and rotate and change, is a hassle I don’t want to mess with. I don’t want to spend my time running ads, and I’m a one-woman-show here, folks.

    The balance between making money and having relevant ads is tricky. I think, for the tech world, The Deck gets it right. But I doubt any of us will ever be on it.

  • New Plugin: @Reply Two

    New Plugin: @Reply Two

    This blog has a cool trick in the comments section. The ‘reply’ link in comments will auto-generate your reply starting with “@person: ” and it does that with my plugin @Reply Two.

    The name is a pun because it’s a fork of the plugin @Reply (which has the slug reply-to), but it also has a ‘reply to’ feature (two … to … right?). I strip-mined the original and made sure it worked on the modern versions of WordPress. I made sure it looked good. And then I added in a feature I wanted, which was to allow for a way to see parent comments on the admin dashboard.

    That is, if you go look at a comment on the dashboard, you’ll see a little arrow that says “Show Parent Comment (15 words):” (or however many words). It strips out all HTML, so it’s a pretty accurate count. I wouldn’t want to use it on a site with a lot of really, really long comments where everyone was always replying to each other. It would make the comments page really slow to load.

    Stephen Cronin’s Show Parent Comment does the same thing there. His uses JS, and mine uses html5 with details-shim for fallback. Except for IE8. I hate IE8.

    I forked the plugin almost two years ago but I had it irregularly updated until Jeff posted about his experiences moderating comments on WP Tavern.

    The sad truth is that you can’t automate ‘enough’ of what makes moderating a pain in the ass. You can’t make it faster because it requires a human to read and pay attention to what they’ve read and process what it means. The part of the work that takes all the time is the part of the work that won’t be possible to teach a machine to do until we invent an AI.

    There’s a reason why spam-trapping isn’t perfect. While we have gotten pretty good about it, things will always get caught incorrectly, or let through when it should have been blocked. Why? Well we don’t yet have a way to scan someone for the intent in their heart. Metaphysics aside, we can’t find the answer in the soul of the person beside us.

    What we can do is make it easier for humans to look at a thing and go “Wait a second, that isn’t right!” Humans are generally good at that. We know what we’re ‘used’ to seeing and what we’re not. Hopefully that’s what @Reply Two does. Pun and all.

  • Fetch As Google Failed

    Fetch As Google Failed

    Once upon a time, I got an email from Google recently saying that Fetch as Google was failing for ipstenu.org.

    I eyed them like they had a fifth eye. I was on ipstenu.org. I was on halfelf.org. They were clearly wrong. So I went to Google Webmasters Tools and checked out what was going on. I had a whole page that said “Temporarily unreachable.” I gave it a day. Sometimes that’s just Google being weird. But no.

    Google's error - temporarily unreachable

    After cursing a little while, I turned off all the plugins on the site and switched to the default theme. And the fetch worked. So I turned them on one at a time until it stopped.

    And the moral, ladies and gentlemen, is that even though it’s been ten years of WordPress, when someone asks you to make sure you go through the normal debugging steps, you do it.

    • flushing any caching plugins you might be running, as well as server and/or browser caches.
    • deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin (read “How to deactivate all plugins when you can’t log in to wp-admin” if you need help). Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems. Also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old
    • switching to the Twenty Fourteen theme to rule out any theme-specific problems. If you can’t log in to change themes, you can remove the theme folders via FTP so the only one is `twentyfifteen`. That will force your site to use it.
    • manually upgrading. When all else fails, download a fresh copy of the latest.zip file of WP (top right on this page) to your computer, and use that to copy up. You may need to delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders on your server. Read the Manual Update directions first.

    So yes. Do try it.

  • To Block or Not To Block

    To Block or Not To Block

    Ad blockers. Okay.

    I have ads in this site. I have donation buttons. I make more via the ads, naturally, and I use the money to offset the absolute frivolity it is to run a web server. I also use ad blockers.

    And I also understand the worry of ad blockers on iOS because I see the possible loss of income.

    But.

    My ads are not obtrusive. I hope. I test them a lot on browsers. I don’t display them on smaller ones. I am picky about the ads. I don’t have pop-up/lightbox ads or alerts that congenially prompt people to sign up for a mailing list or try a service. I hate those things. They get between me and the content I’m trying to read. They prevent me from visiting sites. And if you’ve tried to click away an ad like that on your iPhone, you know my pain. Let’s not even get into the accessibility problems.

    No, ethically I chose not to host the ads I hate.

    And I lose money because of that.

    A lot of money. Probably a hundred a month, easy. And I’m personally okay with that, because I can afford this website. I have the money to keep it up, and for what it costs me, it’s cheaper than other hobbies. It’s helped turn a hobby into a career.

    But the same cannot be said of all websites. Many need those ads to survive and flourish.

    So in the balance between content and money, with accessibility and speed on the line, what is the right answer? Who is more important? Where is the right path to earn money while showing ads and not pissing off readers?

    And I’m not the only person who has trouble with this balance. The developers of Peace, an iOS ad blocker, pulled his product after two days, saying it didn’t feel good. He doesn’t like being the person who gets to decide what ads are right and wrong. That said, Marco is still a proponent of blocking for the ethical reasons of knowing who’s tracking you.

    Disclosure time! I use an blocker on my computer. It’s µBlock, which Taylor Swift also uses:

    But the truth is I actually block few things. It’s not that I want a blocker but I want an unobstructor tool. Just like we despised pop-ups, I hate the following things:

    1. Ads that redirect my iPhone to the App Store to buy your stupid game
    2. Ads that cover my entire browser window, forcing me to click away
    3. Ads that autoplay, making me scroll the hell around and figure out what I have to turn off
    4. Ads that popup in the background, making me address them before I can read

    If you can’t see a trend, let me explain it for you. I hate all things that pull me away from your content.

    The New York Times has reported on this: Enabling of Ad Blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 Prompts Backlash

    “When ad blockers became the most downloaded apps in the App Store, it forced publishers and advertisers to rethink the role that advertising plays on the web,” said David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design.

    That illustrates the issue. It’s not that we hate ads. Most of us understand them as a necessary evil. We pay for Netflix to get fewer ads. We pay for cable to get higher quality shows… in theory. We get ads with free TV because it’s free and has to make money. We get ads on newspapers and in magazines because they are surprisingly low cost for what they are. Ditto comic books.

    We know and we understand why ads are there. We rebel because the ads make it impossible to get at the content. The thing we came for.

    I don’t have an answer. I know that, sometimes, I actually do click on ads that interest me. I also know that most of the time people don’t click on ads. I know that many sites need ads to keep going and to keep delivering content. But I know what we’re doing, making ads more and more in your face, is not the right way to win.

    Right now I have no iOS ad blocker. I haven’t found one I like yet. I’m sure that will change.

  • Apple News: Only Our News Fits

    Apple News: Only Our News Fits

    iOS 9 has a new tool, Apple News. This is the replacement for the Newsstand app everyone shoved in that ‘Apple Shit’ folder on their iPhones and muttered about how it took up space on their 16G iPhone they didn’t care about, and damn it, I don’t have an iWatch so why do I care about that app either?

    You know you have that folder.

    News, though, is actually pretty damn cool! It’s actually a news reader app I like and want to use. Except for two big issues.

    You see, I have an Apple Watch and I like how it alerts me to things. I get a wrist buzz, I look down, I know things. A text message, a direct message from Twitter (since few people can do that), an email in a certain box (not yet, but as soon as I figure that out…). What I want with News is for my watch to buzz when there’s a new article about a specific thing.

    The first thing I did was set up News to search for topics I wanted. Like you do. And I put in ‘Jorja Fox’ because I’m still running that website.

    Apple News search for 'Jorja Fox' shows me 'Jordan' and two other people with the name Jordan, but no Jorja

    Interesting, right? No Jorja. I clicked on ‘Show more topics’ but even after scrolling and scrolling, I couldn’t find her. The same thing happened with ‘George Eads’ and ‘Rachel Ray’ but not ‘Bobby Flay.’ Looking for ‘Jennifer Tilly’ brought up ‘Jennifer Lopez’ (close!) but weirdly enough I was able to find ‘Sara Sidle’ (the character Jorja played on CSI).

    News Favorites: ADI, CSI, Sara Sidle

    I ended up managing to make my favorites (Animal Defenders Intl, CSI, and Sara Sidle), but I couldn’t find the movie ‘Lion Ark’ or ‘Extinction Soup.’ Actually, finding the ADI was incredibly hard.

    The search function doesn’t seem to trigger for exact matches as much as it should.

    If you want to add a website, it’s not at all logical. You have to add an RSS feed if the news site isn’t located there and even that isn’t logical. Go to Safari, find the RSS feed, click it, and your iOS device will ask you if you want to open in News. Say yes! There you go.

    Except… How do I add an arbitrary search? You don’t. You can’t. If you want to have a ‘Cat Cora’ channel, or a ‘Jorja Fox’ channel, you’re out of luck. If the name doesn’t show up it doesn’t show up, and yes, I scrolled and scrolled. Then I got a little smarter and got the Google RSS link:

    https://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&q=Jorja+Fox&output=rss

    I opened that on iOS and added it. And it didn’t work. Oh it added something, but it wouldn’t open within News.

    Then I tried Bing:

    https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=jorja+fox&go=Submit&qs=n&form=NWBQBN&pq=jorja+fox&sc=8-9&sp=-1&sk=&format=RSS

    And Apple News said it couldn’t add Bing to News. Bias much? After iOS 9.0.2 dropped (literally that night), I was able to add Bing, but only if I went to that URL and viewed as desktop (if you didn’t know, there’s “Request Desktop Site” button in Mobile Safari).

    Added news.google.com and all I get is a spinning circle

    Now sometimes there’s a button in the ‘Share’ setting in Safari that lets me add to News. And sometimes there is not. Way to go, Apple. In all cases, I get the spinning circle of doom after I add something to News.

    Naturally I went to look for help on Apple News and found none.

    In the midst of all this, I realized a horrible thing. You don’t get alerts on your Watch from News. You do from a variety of other news apps. You can’t from News. So they’ve made a great new tool that doesn’t let you add arbitrary searches, doesn’t alert you to new news about the searches you can make on your Apple Watch. And while I do have notifications on, it doesn’t seem to notify me about anything.

    In contrast, I added Google News & Weather to my iPhone and, once I logged in with my Google account, it remembered I had a saved search and showed that. Except it also showed me general news and weather. I can’t dismiss those. I have to show them, above my custom news, all the time. Plus the alerts I get are for world news, not my personal searches, which is funny since Google can email me when my custom search has new articles, so I know it can do this.

    Here’s what I want: A ‘News Reader’ that lets me get alerts on what I want to get alerts on. If a site it scans publishes something with my keywords, it pings me. When I read the app, it would sort by date (hiding duplicates by default), and let me thumbs-up or thumbs-down the article to help train it as to what was relevant.

    One of the apps I tried, while looking for that, was Nuzzel. Cute hedgehog aside, the idea that I can get the news from people I follow (and one presumes I trust) is nice. But that only shows me what people know about. News360 suffered the same problem as Apple News, that adding certain arbitrary topics proved impossible. It could find some of my terms but not all. At least they had a way for me to file a bug report, though.