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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • In my experience, if you want to use smart home stuff you really need a hub of some sort rather than connecting everything directly to your phone.

    Smarthings is popular, or Hubitat for the more tech-savvy. Or just an old PC with HomeAssistant or OpenHAB installed. All have ways to expose their connected devices to HomeKit/Siri.

    If you go the old PC route, just make sure not to buy any ZigBee or zWave devices since they’d need additional antenna dongles (built in to the standalone hubs) to function.



  • Oh and one more thing that trips people up: iCloud is not a backup. If you delete something from your phone it will immediately be deleted from iCloud too. The phone will even sometimes stealthy delete the local copy of music, photos, etc to save space and silently re-fetch them as-needed.

    “iCloud Backup” is a thing. It backs up your configuration and some other things in case you need to factory reset or buy a new phone, but that’s separate from iCloud data storage.

    Speaking of iCloud Backup, if you’re concerned about privacy don’t use it. Sync your phone with a pc instead and choose the encrypted backup option.


  • Some random tips:

    Poke around the Accessibility settings. There’s lots of customization options hidden in there.

    Learn the Shortcuts app. You can use it to create macros and save them on the Home Screen, in the share sheet, or as a voice command.

    Customize the share sheet. Options are limited but there are some useful commands in there that are hidden by default. You may need to repeat customization with each files type (images get a different sheet from text, etc).

    Set your AirDrop to “contacts only” or else you’ll get spam pushed to you when in public.

    If you turn off wifi from the control centre it only disconnects. To turn off the radio completely you need to do it from Settings or switch to airplane mode.

    You probably don’t need a calculator app, but if you do: pCalc.

    Focus modes aren’t limited to “do not disturb”. You can have several with different home screens and different communication restrictions.

    Apps that don’t have filesystem privileges can only access their own subfolder inside the “On My Phone” folder, so you sometimes need to move stuff into there manually. This is rare, but one common example is Minecraft worlds/texture packs.

    If you dismissed the prompt to install Files, you can get it on the app store. Do it. Then install all the other cloud storage apps you use (Dropbox, etc), log in, then delete them from the Home Screen only and forget they exist. They’ll all be accessible in Files.

    You can do a similar thing with the TV app, but personally I prefer separate apps on that front.








  • I’m still on 10 myself so I can’t say for sure. I remember I needed to go into device manager and disable but not uninstall the Microsoft stack, and stop it from automatically updating.

    It’ll break the Bluetooth settings/control panel and you’ll need to re-pair all devices via the new icon in the system tray. It looks basically the same as the old one and both might be present, so I advise hiding the old one.

    I also seem to recall having to change a setting relating to the pairing password. Maybe? Sorry it’s been a while since I got it set up and it’s worked flawlessly ever since so the details are a bit fuzzy.



  • It’s not that ARR is bad, just that Heavensward was such a jump in the quality of both writing and voice acting that it makes ARR look bad in hindsight. And the slog was actually the post-ARR section (ie patch content). It was awful. Largely cleaned up now though. Still long.

    If you ever do play, the biggest mistake you can make is to rush to endgame. You’ll burn out. Take it slow, read the dialog, watch the cutscenes, and you’ll have a much better time. It is Final Fantasy after all.

    You don’t need to make an alt to play a different class. The game encourages multiclassing and there is an ingame server transfer system so need to make one for other servers either. But yeah if you do make an alt you need to go through it all again.