Adventures with my old iPod Touch

The iPod Touch (4th Gen) in the car could no longer be detected, so we pulled it out of the console to find it in DFU mode.  Yikes.

I had extremely little hope, but I took it and its USB-A to 30-pin dock cable (the only extant cable of this type in my collection) inside, plugged it into a USB-C to USB-A adapter, and plugged it into the Mac.  It… er… worked. Sure, it appeared to open in Finder and not iTunes (rip), but it actually worked (on the second try; the advice for “unknown error 9” is to try again.  What are we doing as a profession.)  I was able to restore iOS 6.1.6 to it, although I did not have the option to keep my data.

But, I never moved my music onto the Mac.  I figured, with a hardware device that is fifteen years old, and back in factory state, surely, Linux should be able to sync to it?

The first problem was even getting it connected, because Amarok threw an error from ifuse.  Copying the command out of the error message and running it in a terminal worked totally fine.  (I didn’t think of this at the time, but… Amarok logs in the systemd journal.  Maybe its permissions have been stripped down too far.)

Once that was up and running, I restarted Amarok a couple of times, before I found out where it had hidden the iPod.  It’s under “Local Collection.”

I then waited a long time for things to sync.  I waited so long that I wandered off and forgot to set “Don’t Sleep”, so the computer suspended.  The iPod made its ancient, discordant glissando when the computer woke up, and then Amarok—and any process trying to stat() the ifuse mount point—froze.  ifuse sat there burning 100% CPU for a couple of minutes, and then I restarted.

(Apparently the sleep interval was fifteen minutes, the longest time that doesn’t make KDE System Settings complain about ’using more energy.'  Well… I paid for it, one way or the other.)

I got it going again.  Amarok carefully loaded gigabytes of tracks onto the iPod Touch, then started complaining about checksum errors for the database.  That’s the part that makes them useful, instead of having the iPod show “No content” and a button for the iTunes Store.  That ended up being the final boss that I couldn’t beat.  The tracks are still there, apparently, showing up as “Other” data on the Mac.

Yeah.

I plugged the backup drive into the Mac, imported everything, and exported it to the iPod Touch.  The double copy was orders of magnitude faster than Amarok’s unidirectional efforts.  I should never have been so lazy.

• Free Software: 0
• Proprietary OS: 2

I don’t know how we got here.

Observations of Liquid Glass

The effect is very nice.  I don’t use it on my personal phone.  Reduce Motion inhibits the glassiness, and having motion on a phone that I actually use a lot is annoying.  I loathe waiting for an animation to finish before I am Permitted to interact with anything.

Clear icons aren’t… bad.  Unless they’re dark.  Then they’re not clear anymore, which makes me wonder if people in Cupertino actually understand their own language.  I don’t use clear icons on my personal phone, because I like the auto-dark mode.  Ironically, between color filters to greyscale (to make the phone less attention-hogging) and Reduce Motion, normal icons are not that far off their clear counterparts.

On the impersonal phone, clear icons and Liquid Glass look pretty nice together, at least on the iOS 26 wallpapers.  I have them set to “always light” due to their lackluster dark variants, but they look fine that way when the rest of the phone is in dark mode.

Opening an app brings up a solid-background splash screen, and app.  There’s so much 💖new💖 look, until it is touched, and then the glass disappears.  A subconscious wrongness suffuses it.  Apple took it halfway.  They Microsoft’ed it.  I can use it, but it keeps me wondering… why?

Update: [2025-11-15] I experimentally turned off Reduce Motion on my personal phone, and sometimes, the motion gets really confused.  This makes everything jittery with the phone held as still as humanly possible, like it’s had three cups of coffee.  It looks like the effect that I saw sometimes with Reduce Motion on, where the line above the dock would flicker, but with everything at once.

I also found out that icon customization is somehow tied to the screen layout or focus.  I made icons clear in Sleep mode, and they remained non-clear outside of Sleep.  I like this result, but the UI doesn’t make it clear where the setting applies.

Sometimes, the Apple apps in my sleep focus screen turn into empty-app indicators.  No reminders, notes, or music for the night!  But third-party apps are fine.  I cannot fathom how the first-party systems could exhibit such poor results.

I can use it, but there are so many rough edges, I keep wondering… why?

Apple Spies on Your Contacts

I have a work-only phone, that is for Teams and Outlook, mainly.

While checking to make sure that fitness/motion/surveillance data was turned off, I pulled an App Privacy Report on a whim, and it said that Health had accessed my Contacts.  What?  It doesn’t sound like something I would do, especially on this phone.

But worse: there are no settings for this. Health is not listed as permitted to access Contacts under Privacy and Security, and conversely, Contacts isn’t an option under Health.

That’s bad enough, but it gets worse.  I looked more closely at the privacy report.  Basically all of Apple’s built-in apps are freely accessing Contacts.  Mail, Music, Podcasts, Photos, and an icon-less “ShortcutsActions” app are all doing it.  (So are Messages and Phone, but that at least is more of a core feature of those apps.)

Again, none of these apps are showing as granted permission to access Contacts through the Privacy and Security screen.  Only Teams is there (and it’s forbidden.)

Apple has apparently given themselves special treatment to break the protections whenever and however they please, then (mostly) lie about it to their users.

Mac Mini (M4/2024) First Impressions

I bought an M4 Mac Mini (2024) to replace my Ivy Bridge (2012) PC.

It was difficult to choose a configuration, because of the need to see a decade into the future, and the cost of upgrades.  It is hard to believe that an additional half terabyte (internal) would cost more than a whole terabyte external drive (with board, USB electronics/port, case, cable, and retail box.)

It feels pretty fast.  Apps open unexpectedly quickly.  Which is to say, on par with native apps on my 12C/16T Alder Lake work laptop.  Apparently, my expectations have been lowered by heavy use of Flatpaks.

It is quiet.  When I ejected the old USB drive I was using for file transfer, it spun down, and that was the noise I had been hearing all along.  The Mac itself is generally too quiet to hear.

It is efficient.  I have a power strip that detects when the main device is on, and powers an extra set of outlets for other devices.  Even with the strip moved from “PC” to “Netbook,” the Mini does not normally draw enough power to keep the other outlets on.  (I put the power strip on the desk and plugged it into the desk power, then turned off the Mac’s wake-on-sleep feature.  Now I can unplug the whole strip when not in use.)

It has been weird getting used to the Mac keyboard shortcuts again.  For two years, I haven’t needed to think about which computer I’m in front of; Windows and Linux share the basic structure for app shortcuts and cursor movement.  I don’t know how many times I have pressed Ctrl+T in Firefox on the Mac and waited a beat for the tab to open, before pressing Cmd+T instead.

It is extremely weird to me that the PC Home/End keys do nothing by default on the Mac.  It’s not like they do something better, or even different; they just don’t do anything. Why?

I also had to search the web to find out why an NTFS external drive couldn’t put things in the trash after I had copied them onto the Mac.  It seems the whole volume is read-only; macOS doesn’t have built-in support for writing to NTFS.  Meanwhile, I didn’t notice anything in the UI to suggest that the volume is read-only; some operations just don’t work (quietly, in the case of keyboard shortcuts.)

There was one time where I tried to wake the Mac up, and it didn't want to talk to the keyboard. I plugged and unplugged the USB (both the keyboard from the C-to-A adapter, and the adapter from the Mac) and tried it with a different keyboard, but to no avail.  I couldn’t find any way to open an on-screen keyboard with the trackpad alone.  I had to hard power off, but it has been fine ever since.

I guess that’s about it!  It doesn’t feel like “coming home” or anything, it just feels like a new computer to be set up.

Downgrading macOS Catalina to High Sierra

According to Apple Support, my old iMac can be used in Target Display Mode if it’s running High Sierra or earlier. However, I had upgraded it to Catalina.  Getting it back down to High Sierra proved to be quite the challenge.

Part 1: Easy-to-find stuff, cataloged for posterity

I was able to find the installers via Internet search, but after downloading it to the iMac, it wouldn’t run. It claimed that Catalina was too old, which seems like a bad error message for a two-sided version check (Catalina is actually too new, but they didn’t expect they would need to say that.)

However, once again, the Internet came to the rescue: I could use the command- line script bundled with the installer to write it to a USB stick.  It seems that Apple has this answer as well; in my case, it was this:

sudo "/Applications/Install macOS High Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia" --volume /Volumes/BIT_BUCKET

(Any new-lines in the above command should be entered as spaces at the Terminal prompt.)

The command took about five minutes, but during one dead-end, I found it takes 30 minutes to copy to a USB 2.0 stick.

Part 2: The other roadblocks

The High Sierra installer acted like it couldn’t handle the Catalina disks, and did not quite know how to error out properly.  The installer would ask for the password twice, then… would not unlock the disk.  Clicking “Unlock…” to attempt to proceed would then do nothing.  Trying to mount the volumes first, using Disk Utility, didn’t improve the situation.

I tried to erase the volumes using the installer’s Disk Utility, but it hung on “deleting volume.”  Going to choose a startup disk when the volume was hypothetically deleted didn’t show it, but rebooting would prove that the volume was there.  Incidentally, quitting the startup disk selection would remove the menu bar and leave a featureless gray screen.  Oops.

I ran First Aid, turned off FileVault, and even reinstalled Catalina along the way, but none of that seemed to do anything.

What ended up working was to boot into Catalina’s recovery environment, select “show all devices” in its Disk Utility, then erase the entire APFS container and replace it with a “macOS Extended (Journaled)” disk.  After that point, booting the iMac would bring it into a new menu that looked like “choose startup disk” with no disks.

I had to unplug and re-plug the USB stick for it to show up, and then I could boot from it and install High Sierra in the usual manner.  Success!

Part 3: The cable failure

(Section added 2022-09-03.)

I missed the information that Target Display Mode specifically requires a Thunderbolt 2 cable. The Thunderbolt 3 to mini DisplayPort cable I actually bought fits physically, but does not function.

Moreover, the standard was completely revamped for version 3, so it requires an active adapter for Thunderbolt 2, and a specific Thunderbolt 2 cable. Between them, the current price is about $140, while a new monitor can be had for $200.

I have decided to declare the experiment a failure, and abandon the effort to have an external display for the laptop.

The future may eventually hold a 5K display, shared between the work laptop and my personal desktop, once that requires an upgrade.  My current CPU (the third PCIe GPU died years ago, so I quit putting them in) is rated for 2K output over a port that the motherboard doesn't have, or 1920x1200 otherwise.

Bonus chatter

My USB stick was named BIT_BUCKET because, once in a while, the stick would occasionally forget it had data, or even a filesystem.  But, it managed to survive long enough to get the macOS installer running.

Fake Speed with Bitmaps

It seems that Apple has been working very hard on “hiding latency” by showing a picture of an app’s last state while the app reloads. Apps may have to opt-in to this behavior, but it seems fairly prevalent on iOS and now OS X. Specifically, I’ve noticed it on iOS in some password-locked apps, in Music Studio, and on OS X, in the App Store.

After a firmware update, logging in again “re-opens” the App Store in precisely the state it was left after reboot. Even the update being installed is still shown as available, with its “RESTART” button grayed out. That perfectly represents how the app looked… before rebooting. But it rather quickly reverts to “Cannot contact the App Store; an Internet connection is required” since the wireless isn’t up yet.

Why it needs to talk to the App Store when it could have cached the data less than five minutes ago is beyond me, but never mind that.

The point is, while OS X is busy displaying a stale screenshot, any UI interaction will be lost. Because it’s not a UI at all, it’s a highly accurate view of what it could look like. OS X remains awfully confident about the number of updates it has, even though it can’t connect to the Internet and isn’t even loaded.

This is especially noticeable on iOS where the screen doesn’t visibly change state between the picture being shown and the real UI replacing it. I have a password-protected app that always looks like an “Enter your password” screen, complete with buttons in pixel-perfect position, but if I interact with it immediately after switching to it, my touches are dropped. Instead of 1234, it only registers 234 (or even 34). Then I wait for it to check the PIN and do the unlock animation, then realize that it won’t, and finally delete each digit by mashing Delete before entering the PIN for a second time.

1234 is not my real PIN, of course; that’s the PIN an idiot would have on his luggage. Or, you know, every Bluetooth device ever with a baked-in PIN code. (sigh)

It’s also really annoying when an app takes a while to (re)load because it’s legitimately large, like Music Studio and its collection of instruments for the active tracks. The UI is completely unresponsive for several seconds, until suddenly everything happens at once, badly. The Keyboard screen often gets key stuck down, making me tap it again to get it to release. Or knowing that, I avoid touching it for a while and have to guess at when it will be responsive, not knowing how much time I’ve wasted in over-shooting that point.

In the end, using static pictures of an app for latency hiding seems like a poor user interface—because the end of the latency period is also hidden, it encourages users to try interacting early, when the result is guaranteed not to work. But instead of showing the user that, it silently fails. I’d much prefer the older “rough outlines” splash screens than the literal screenshots of late; the “ready” transition is obvious with those, when the real UI shows up.

It actually surprises me that Apple would even release UI like this, because it’s kind of frustrating to clearly have an app on-screen that’s not reacting to me. Then again, with the train wreck that was QuickTime 4.0 Player, perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised. (Yes, that was 15 years ago or something. No, the internet will never forget.)

Hidden Interfaces

I fly around my world with lots of keyboard shortcuts.  The hot-corner UI stuff in Windows 8 doesn't really bother me, except for that part where it's hard to hit in a windowed virtual machine... but they provided some new shortcuts like Win+C to get there, or I can run it full screen.


But there's something interesting about this: my parents have a much worse time using Windows 8.x than I do, and the gap is greater than it was in the XP/7 days.  And it occurs to me that I use a lot of 'secret' interfaces that are invisible to them.

Smart TV and Split Attention

I don't want to waste much effort on trivialities, but regarding Gruber's semi-recent post:

Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

This is not actually a universal good for viewers.  They'll probably like it and want it, but if there's one thing I have learned about myself, it is simply:

Splitting my attention between things means I don't remember either thing.

Worse, the things that a smart channel offers me in Gruber's vision—the things actually related to the show I'm watching—are useless trivialities.  If I had smart TV and lacked the discipline to avoid these side quests, then I wouldn't gain anything out of my screen time.  I'd forget the answers to the fleeting distractions, and also not be able to remember what I was watching in the first place.

I can say all this because I already know what the price of distraction is.  I refuse to pick up my iPod while watching things, no matter how interesting it seems at the time, because I'd rather focus on the show or movie.

What makes me happy?  It's not the Internet; it's not TV; it's not apps; it won't be all three of them rolled together into smart TV.  However, a smart TV done well will still be a success in the market.  We'll find out sooner or later whether Apple did it well.  It's almost certain that they'll try.

Steve Jobs

I'm getting old: if I were to pass on at the same age Jobs did, my life would be more than half over already.

What separates me from Jobs?  There's the matter of leverage, where he could take his vision and coordinate the prototyping and development of it, into the iPod, the iPhone, the Macbook Air, the iPad.  There's also the matter of having vision.

In 2006 or so, I beheld my first iPod in real life, an old (FireWire based) model with a physical click-wheel.  In 2008 I picked up a different, small MP3 player and for the first time, immediately noticed the limitations of digital control.  Without having handled the iPod and getting a feel for the analog response of the wheel, I probably wouldn't have given the buttons a second thought.  Do you want to scroll on the generic?  Click-click-click-click.  Or click-and-hold, guess at how long you need to go (since the screen is slow enough to be unreadable at this scrolling speed, and they don't slow updates to compensate), and release.

The point here is, Jobs saw humans as inherently analog, and adapted all of his machines to analog control.  It's a simple thing, but Jobs was apparently devoted to HCI.  The "vision" simply falls out of that.

It's not like the limitations of digital control weren't apparent in the 1980s.  Compare Rad Racer to a real car's steering wheel.  Anyone focused on "how it feels" could have been Jobs back then, inventing 2010 in the 16-bit era instead of carrying 8-bit paradigms through the 1990s.

In contrast, I seem to lack vision because I'm busy implementing arbitrarily complex business rules at work, and staying away from the bleeding edge of gadgetry.  I'm not in the consumer space; I'm not taking any research toward the consumer space; and I'm not thinking about what's next for it, either (at least, not beyond what turns out to actually be the next thing*.)  But, I'm also having little impact on the wider world, writing code that never leaves the house.  It's important, but after I am gone, will these be the best years of my life?  Will I think college was the best time of my life, forever?

I think it's time to put my free time to better use and do something instead of watching the world slowly develop towards Jobs' vision on its own.


* I have a dead draft which discusses the crazy idea of "having a set-top box inside the remote" in 2006 or so.  It then points out that h.264-over-wifi ought to handle the bandwidth to do exactly that from your iPhone now.  It starts fleshing out what would be necessary to make it happen, then abruptly ends with a note: "Two days after I started writing this, Apple announced AirPlay."

Perception

They say you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, but that depends on who you are.  Apple seems to have managed a couple of major architecture transitions and their own Vista without too much ill will, yet Microsoft was practically crucified for Vista with no architecture transitions.

Fair warning: many links in this post lead to tvtropes.

Dealing with Ambiguity

Apple and their fans tend to view their products as the top of the market, with price and attitude to match (and this is helped by their competitors trying to undercut them with unrefined but cheap ripoffs).  Yet they clearly market heavily, which suggests according to the Advertising Curve that there's room above Apple for a better product, for even more money.

Which naturally leads to the question: considering an Apple product like the iPod Touch, what would be better, and in particular, enough better that you could actually sell them?