I’m in over a month now with non-working RCS on my iPhone 15 Pro. Apple blames the carriers, the carriers tell me it’s not them (mostly T-Mobile since I have good contacts there). They tell me they can’t really do anything about iPhones not working on RCS, go back to Apple. This is what it looks like:

In short, it’s probably Apple or Google and there’s zero accountability from Apple. I have AppleCare+ and really hoped they’d actually try to troubleshoot and fix this rather than waste my time working around it (in a stupidly expensive way for me and Apple).

My background

I’m OS agnostic as much as possible, I daily both Android and iOS devices and previously used BlackBerry 10 and Harmattan (Nokia N9’s OS). If Windows Phone was still around I’d probably still be running that as well. If it’s possible to gather information on how all this works under the hood, I can and do. The...

This blog was written without with the use of any LLM or AI. I may utilize them to aid in research or brainstorming, but I will not use generated outputs in these posts. In the past I didn’t even use a spellchecker, so my older blogs may have minor spelling errors. I found them distracting for longer-form writing. Please be assured, I wrote every word.

As this is not generated content, I retain all copyright to anything I’ve written on this blog. Any fair use/commentary using excerpts must credit this as the authoritative location. For usage and licensing inquiries please write me by email at this domain. Furthermore, I do not consent to the usage of this blog’s content for training and have had opt-outs already posted on: http://wt.gd/robots.txt long before this statement was posted.

(this was an unfinished post from April 6th, 2024 I just decided to publish with some minor updates)

It seems the earthquake shook out my writers block. This is a good topic because I live right next to where the earthquake originated from and I have a lot of random knowledge about the exact area. I wrote most of the account of yesterday’s events on the Hacker News thread.

As of the time of this post I have felt the foreshock some weeks ago, the big one (which woke me up that day), and 4 aftershocks (including one of the two the day after, the bigger one I slept through).

Shortly after the main quake I began thinking: ‘Could human activity have influenced this event?’ I don’t mean an oscillator like Nikola Tesla was rumored to have designed and tested in NYC. The only widely known suspected contributor to seismic activity is hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking), which we don’t do in...

I haven’t written in this blog in forever but I wanted to say a few things about things going on.

Overview

My company, Xwaretech, processes credit cards for web hosting and email service. It’s normally pretty boring aside from every once in awhile a customer will get new cards or need to update expiration date. This month all my payments failed. This never happened before since we started accepting cards over a decade ago. The message was ‘generic account status error’

Additionally, when we started to email people about our issues, we never got a response. It was like all my emails were going into the void on everything. It would turn out that while we had the processor issues, we ALSO had a second problem that Google was flagging all of my company’s email as spam. I’ll write about that after addressing the processor issues.

Steps working with Processor

We use a merchant service...

A year? Yeah, I think it’s been a year. (It’s been 3 now) I’ve been stuck not publishing or really writing much because I don’t know where to begin. I do write a lot in chat and 1-in-1 interactions. 1-to-many I’m more uncomfortable with.

Let me be clear: I don’t fear the consequences of what I publish, it’s the not publishing anything that’s killing me. I am a generalist that understands how to constantly shift my perspective to analyze ideas and issues. This makes it incredibly hard to write to write on topics where I do have a specific viewpoint, but I see the other perspectives. I’ve been wrong in my writing before and sometimes to get a good discussion/argument going I’ll just take a position even if I know I’ll abandon it later. Sometimes I have to issue retractions or corrections as new information comes in. Issuing corrections isn’t a big deal, it’s dealing with negative audience...

Background

I wrote this a year or two ago when moonlighting at a small taxi company. It’s based on my experiences with NJ traffic court and my study of the state’s Title 39 law. All research is current as of 2019, but laws change so if you’re reading this later, it might be a good idea to read up on the things I cite. I am not a lawyer (and lawyers wouldn’t sanction a post like this as they’d rather you retain them).

Who is this for?

You or someone you know may have received a ticket for speeding, cellphone use, window obstruction any other common thing covered under Title 39 (the most common traffic laws officers cite from). This short guide will help you minimize your out of pocket expense, points, and you won’t need a lawyer. I do recommend a lawyer if you are facing over $500 in tickets, but really only in that case. This guide is also only for NJ, every state handles this stuff...

I mentioned I went back to mostly using Microsoft stuff on the desktop. It works but I’ve had some big problems that should have simple solutions. Unfortunately nobody wrote about this anywhere else on the web and as is often the case, there’s no easy answers. Let me explain:

What’s Microsoft Office 365 Home About

Years back Microsoft used to ship boxed editions of Office. You paid once, got a license (or 3) and that was that. Microsoft Update, which was built into WIndows, was supposed to cover security updates. A few years back they switched to an annual subscription model, which wouldn’t be a great deal except they include a terabyte of OneDrive storage per user, and each user gets to install Office on as many systems as they want. For around $100 (or less in school) for 5 users it’s a solid deal.

What’s wrong with it? (why I’m writing this post)

So, subscription software kind...

(This post was written a long time ago, I just tidied it up and putting it out now. It was so long ago that I am feeling bad I haven’t had a chance to visit my friend in many months.)

I spent last weekend up in Montreal with my friend. He’s a good friend and we’ve shared interest in technology over the years.

Some background

I guess it dates back to 2002 or 2003 we met when I was troubleshooting Linux issues on IRC. I was introduced to the IRC channel when seeking help compiling a kernel. Most of us there were Gentoo Linux users as this distribution was good to test emerging (pun intended) new software, drivers, and essentially provide early QA.

Anyways, we built up a neat little community and some of us maintained a few Linux kernel patchsets for new features and to work on CPU interactivity patches. The latter I became interested in because I had issues with music skipping on my...

In mid-2018 I began making an effort to expand the number of books I read. Phone and computer screen time I don’t count though I read a substantial amount of documentation and articles. List follows:

(Last updated November 4, 2018)

For 2018

• Mikhail Bulgakov - Master and Margerita
• Andy Weir - The Martian
• Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
• Kiril Yeskov - The Last Ringbearer
• Frank Herbert - Dune
• Dave Eggers - The Circle
• Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

I probably read some more, but what was just what I remembered.