viridian5, posts by tag: technology - LiveJournal

Discord on Desktop wasn't opening for me for two days, but then I went to a troubleshooting website, did one of the things, and now I'm back. I Ended Task on all the Discord stuff in Task Manager, which fixed the problem.

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I had a somewhat weird brain thing last night. Macy's decided not to set off the July 4th fireworks near Midtown, so Queens wouldn't get to see any, so I drove a friend around last night with us looking for homegrown, personal, illegal Queens fireworks or trying to get a view of downtown Manhattan where the Macy's fireworks were. We were on a deadline, so I had to figure out places to go in real time while driving instead of stopping and using my phone's map as I sometimes do for routes and live traffic conditions. I could feel my brain tilting and turning my mental road map as I figured out routes and locations while driving. I don't often have to change directions and destinations often enough and fast enough for it to be that noticeable.

My phone may have destroyed my memory for retaining phone numbers, but my map and direction sense (in areas I know) remain keen. (I am not someone who can instinctually know where, say, west is.)

I put up some photos from 2019 I rediscovered. They whole batch looks a bit like a fever dream.... Lighting in window displays isn't always consistent from night to night and sometimes result in a "softer focus" look. You can see them at my Flickr.

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More of the original lights that came attached to my Christmas tree just burned out. Barely any still work, and the tree's not that old! I keep buying lights to apply manually.

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Kind of a PSA resulted from my own experience....

I've upgraded from the iPhone SE to 17, and it's reacting weirdly to me syncing it into iTunes: it won't show recently played songs in iTunes since I started using the 17 and it randomly mixed up all the cover images of the songs on the phone. The images are properly attached in iTunes but not on my phone anymore! Part of me keeps trying to find a pattern in the image switches but so far keeps running into a wall. Is there a way to fix this? I've synced it many times, and these things remain. (iTunes has all its recent updates.) My music is important to me!

An example of some of the hunh:

"Want" through "Bare" is all the same Cure album, Wild Mood Swings, but with four different incorrect cover arts. "Open," "High," and "Apart" are from the Wish remaster.

My chats with Apple Care--Regarding the issue with my iPhone 17 not syncing up properly with iTunes--didn't go great. I spoke to two people via Chat who couldn't help me, the last one asking me to attempt two solutions that might make other things worse. One thing I definitely will not be doing is paying for a monthly Apple Music subscription just to properly access music I already own. So I scheduled a phone call from a Senior Team member for the evening, hoping that person can create a solution we can all get behind.

Apple called me 12 hours earlier than scheduled and using the wrong phone number, even though I gave them the correct number and time during the chats twice, then sent me an e-mail about how they couldn't contact me. Shocker. I replied to both e-mails with the correct stuff. Then they still didn't call at the correct time, so I instigated and Karen-ed myself into getting a call from Apple senior support immediately.

It was illuminating in some bad ways.

There's a known issue with this in the current iOS: 26.2. (That showed up in my 17 but not the SE, which was also running 26.2 when I traded it in, so I'm thinking there may be some setting or programming stuff also involved we can't figure out? More people have 17s and such than SEs, so a lot of people have to be having this issue.) But since it's "just" about music, it's not something Apple will immediately resolve.

My other problem is that I have a lot of music I burned myself from CDs, so Apple Music might get rid of those if I'm not careful. Because it's third party! Legal issues! (I didn't realize until this phone call that apparently lots of record companies and music business people are suing everybody over rights.) Who knows if I should really have this stuff!

So the senior service guy said he would not suggest I delete the library and create a new one in case stuff I own but Apple doesn't approve of goes missing.

He's a DJ, and he says he pirates stuff himself. He was like, "Yeah, we're all turning into pirates. And I work for Apple." Because people will ask for a song while he's working but it might not be in his internet, legally feasible library. Brave new bullshit, enshittified world stuff.

The senior support guy says he has a ton of songs on hard drives that aren't connected to the internet to keep them safe from getting taken away or changed.

It's funny having an Apple employee saying he prefers flip phones.

Since I prefer to listen to the music I already own, even if the images are wrong, over potentially losing swaths of my songs, I'm sitting put.

I have music burned off CDs from local NYC '90s bands that never got a real record deal, stuff from singles CDs in the '90s, rare bands, rare muisc, and Apple wouldn't provide me with that kind of stuff. I still rip music off CDs into Tunes. I did it one night recently to test the sync problem, and saw that even sending over a single new music file screws up the cover album art image on the 17. (I have a disc drive as part of this laptop, not an external drive.) I have thousands of songs, and some of those CDs I don't have any more.

He commends me on avoiding subscribing to Apple Music, given the conditions I mentioned. With what this guy told me about Apple policing music, I'm not sure I trust them. I'd say 98% of my music is "third party," which means Apple distrusts them and doesn't guarantee they won't be borked and doesn't care if they are. Sorry, Apple, I'm not going to buy all my music from you just so you approve of what's on my phone.

So I'd have to be careful in my choices of what I do.

~snerf~ Here I am, listening to a Cure song on my phone with a Poe album cover on it, angry at everything.

So. Wish we all had a better solution available now. I have a brand new iPhone 17, as part of my family's plan, so switching away from Apple is unfortunately not an option. I had no idea things were reaching this point until this problem led me to contact Apple Care.


eta 2/14/26: Since LiveJournal will no longer let me post new entries publicly to LJ, I've been exclusively doing entries at my Dreamwidth.

I use Microsoft Edge as my web browser, and whatever else you want to say about it, using it and Bing for years is how I earned the Microsoft points that let me get the Windows 10 Extended Security for one year for free.

Anyway.

During one update, Edge begged me to let its Copilot AI adapt a photo of mine into a cartoon or anime image or whatever, and I was curious, so I gave it a shot. I am mystified by some of the choices the Copilot AI made.

This is a favorite photo of mine, of me and a lot of people I never met before waiting in line for a Sisters of Mercy show in Philadelphia in the mid 1990s. The guy with his head on my shoulder? Never met him before or talked to him again after, but he was a cool dude. They were a fun group of folks, though we were all dying in the summer sun and heat. Then the venue turned out to be even hotter inside and I spent the whole show heatsick and with a massive headache, sometimes lying on the concrete floor to try to get cool.

Here is the photo. ( Collapse )

Here is the Copilot "anime" version. ( Collapse )

It completely changed the lighting, turning what was bright, stark white to golden. Changed some of the poses and hairstyles. Completely disregarded all of the goth makeup choices. Removed one guy's sunglasses. Flattened the image more. Didn't even try to recapture the Siouxsie Sioux image on one shirt (and what did it do to its sleeves?).

My fic site has returned!

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Oh, I don't owe my dentist money! I don't have a balance. Their computer system just sends bills out automatically sometimes and they don't always reflect the correct balance on file!

I'm so glad I tried e-mail first. If I drove all the way to Bayside to talk to them in person about this, since they refuse to discuss billing stuff on the phone, I would've been even more ticked off. Plus, this way I have an e-mail of them saying I don't owe them money.

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So my Gas Guru app is no longer in operation, and I switched to Gas Buddy, which is a massive downgrade. They list so many stations with no pricing. Even if you give me an old price and tell me it's a few days old, like Guru would've, that would be better.

I have supposedly successfully signed up for Extended Security Updates for Windows 10. Wish me luck.

A confirmation e-mail would be nice, but apparently this is Microsoft so no. Damn, I should've done a screen cap of the window saying I did it.


eta: If you go to Settings, then Update & Security, on that screen it should say you're enrolled in Extended Security Updates in the upper right-hand corner.

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Today I got a surprise in the mail. I'm on Medicaid, which should pay for everything on my routine dental work. Every time I've done something with my dentist, I've been assured by them it was covered. If it isn't, I don't do it.

Today I received a dental bill for a total of $324. It looks like it includes routine checkups and x-rays from 2024, which should've been and I was told was covered by Medicaid, and something from 2021(!) that I don't understand at all. Why am I suddenly getting hit with something from 2021? Especially since everything should be covered. What is happening? This isn't right.

Hilariously, when I called them today, I was told this can't be discussed or disputed by phone, only by e-mail or an in-person visit, and since the dentist is a fair distance away in Bayside, I'm trying e-mail first.

Anybody know where I can go for help on this? This little bubble of air(?) on the right side of my car's computer screen has been getting taller over the last week. Is there something I can do to stop or even better reverse it? You can see it near the Bluetooth Audio and Setup boxes. Something seems to be losing screen adhesion. Of course, my 2020 Kia Forte, bought used, is out of warranty, including from the warranty from the dealership I bought it used from.

I tried pressing it downward with my finger but it got taller. As to why this is happening, I haven't got a clue.



And considering how much Huntington Volvo Service sucked every time I did try to do anything through them anyway.... They have an absolute allergy to having someone live talk to you on the phone. Or ever call you back. "Just drive 24 miles, show up for a scheduled appointment made by computer, and hope for the best" doesn't work for me.

The brake light dashboard alert they fixed November 1 is back to flicking on and off at random intervals again, and I absolutely cannot get anyone from Service to talk to me about it.

I'm still writing fic, I'm just not finishing anything. I would love to finish and post something, especially because I have so many WIPs right now....

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I still haven't gotten myself together to write to New York Consumer Services or the Better Business Bureau about my Elantra. Part of that is mental fatigue over everything, part of it is needing information I don't have, part of it is being more tired since the Daylight Savings Time change and shorter daylight and getting sick...

...and part of it is needing to do research to choose a new Medicare (Part D) prescription drug plan since my current Humana plan raised its premium from $3.50 a month this year to $36.50 a month next year, while Medicare.gov is a laborious pain in the ass. You used to be able to do a lot of Medicare stuff by phone, but now a lot of the phone people don't know dick and tell you to figure it out yourself at the website. ( Collapse )

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Despite having a protective phone case that does a good job, Saturday my phone fell out of my pocket and hit the concrete at an unlucky angle that put a long crack in the screen glass that also went through the protective sticker layer over the glass. It's subtle enough that I often can't see the crack depending on the angle viewed at and whether the background is dark or light, but my finger feels it and hurts a little when it goes over it. Since I can't always see it, it's more difficult to avoid it as much as possible. I'm not drawing blood with it though. With all my bills and Christmas coming, I don't want to have to also pay for new glass from Apple and paying for them to install it, since I don't know for sure if they're still not letting non-Apple repair places have the glass that lets the true colors show, so I'm pondering if buying and applying a new protective glass sticker would be a good enough fix that would protect my fingers: it's not a deep crack so maybe it wouldn't cut through a new one?

After the recent update in which Windows asked me once again to "upgrade" to 11 and I refused, they did something horrible to their Photos program. Something is different about it every time I open it, and it's worse every time.

Windows' Photos is even more broken today than it was yesterday. It tells me it sent a notification to my phone to ask permission, then doesn't. If I hit retry often enough it loads some of them up, but it won't let me import anything! What did they do? It won't link to my photo folders to display all my photos it used to display even when I try to make it. Has Windows made it so the new version of Photos is useless unless you also "upgrade" to 11? (Or is it just as borked on 11?) By the way, this is yet another reason not to trust an "upgrade" to 11 and why I'm sticking with 10.

I downloaded Photos Legacy but that's not working correctly for me either, though it has a bit more functionality than Photos. When I try to open up a photo in the program to look at the larger size instead of the thumbnail of the photos I uploaded tonight, it won't work and I get a box that says "Something went wrong." I switched over to something else in Legacy to try to link things up, then when I returned to Collection the newly uploaded photos were no longer showing. Or not there? Who knows. The photo collection shows up if I've freshly uploaded new photos, but if I close the program and then reopen it it just shows the screen with the app's symbol, no photos at all and no menu.

Does anybody have suggestions on a photo program that would let me import my iPhone photos to a Windows laptop computer and look through them?

I should've known. Microsoft is trying to entice me to get Clipchamp, saying it's free, but then it turns out there's a crap free edition and then a paid edition? Though I'm getting some conflicting reviews about how decent the free version is.

One way to supposedly actually get the Really Good version for free is having a Microsoft 365 subscription, which I don't have because I paid one lump fee for my Microsoft software package years ago because the thought of paying monthly for years was a turnoff. I'm not a fan of subscriptions and prefer to own stuff instead of basically renting it and paying endlessly for it.

I also haven't "upgraded" my laptop to Microsoft 11 because I heard it sucks.

It took me trying to watch episodes of Yuri!!! On Ice to find out that Crunchyroll has ended the option of being able to watch episodes of things free but with commercials and now demands you apply for a free trial of their paid account, while not saying how long this free trial is before they start billing you $10 a month, to see anything other than a short preview. I refuse.

I caught a bit of the series on YouTube... and was bored by most of the ice skating. I am enthralled when it's done by real people, but with animated people not even getting to hear their interior monologues kept my interest.

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While I was cleaning my keyboard with the laptop still on I somehow managed to disable my mouse and lose my cursor! After freaking out a lot and struggling to restart my computer as opposed to just putting it into a sleep mode (since I couldn't use a mouse), I found a webpage on my cellphone that gave me possible solutions and thankfully one option worked in getting it back. I thought I might have to take it to a shop and pay to fix it.

I had no idea how to disable my mouseboard--still don't--or that it apparently didn't take many steps to totally fuck things up for myself. I didn't know it was possible! And, like, why is it that easy to do so?

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Through skygiants I learned the tale of now-departed LGBTQ icon, New Zealand's Thomas the bisexual goose. (Also, I didn't know that swans and geese could mate or that their offspring is called a "swoose.")

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It’s a weird atmosphere, this running at 3 a.m. at night in midtown Manhattan, an area with no people in it at the time, while it’s 84 °F/29 °C.