Easier iPhone 6 Battery Replacement

iPhone 6

You might remember from earlier this year a so-called scandal over Apple throttling CPUs to save battery life in certain models of iPhones, particularly the iPhone 6, leading to a battery replacement program. What you might not know is that there’s a better way to get an iPhone 6 battery replacement than standing in a store.

While claims of nefarious intent are somewhat overblown,1 Apple did agree to replace batteries at a steep discount until the end of 2018. The price before the deal was $79, but for now it’s $29. (After January 1, it’s only going up to $49, which is better than before.)

Unfortunately, everyone forgot until the last minute and Apple Stores, which are always jammed before Christmas, are even more jammed with people looking for appointments to replace their batteries. (Also keep in mind that only Apple is officially doing repairs. You may see other places offering battery replacement deals, but these aren’t part of the official plan and may charge you more.)

Last weekend, during some clean up I found that I still had an iPhone 6 that I’d forgotten about. I recall now that we’d been using it as a glorified iPod for use in the car, but—you guessed it—the battery life was a problem and we’d forgotten about it. So now, I was faced with the question of whether to bother braving the crowds to get in the deal before the end of the year.

But I found that it wasn’t necessary. Apple has a mail-in program for the replacement. I went on their website and filled out a form, they sent me a box and packing materials and instructions overnight to my house, I packed up the phone, and I dropped it off at a Fedex dropbox the same day, and the phone got to Apple’s repair depot the next day. That’s pretty fast!

Now, I don’t know how long it will take to get the phone back. I’m expecting it to take a few days, but that doesn’t bother me as this isn’t my primary phone. But it sure beats going to a mall and fighting the crowds while racing the end of the year clock to get my iPhone 6 battery replacement.

  1. At worst, Apple was guilty of a failure of transparency. Fevered claims of planned obsolescence and manipulation don’t match the facts. All phone manufacturers use forms of throttling to stretch battery life. But Apple should have acknowledged that the iPhone 6 battery did not live up to their expectations for its service life and should have told users that they would experience throttling effects unless they replaced their batteries. And they should have allowed people to turn off the worst throttling if they needed better performance in the short term versus battery life. ↩

Isabella’s New Computer

Yes, we got Bella a new computer and it’s not a Mac. No, I have not apostatized or lost my mind. I am still a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong Apple fanatic and shareholder who always chooses the Apple product. So why a Chromebook?

A couple of simple reasons. First, we’ve been thinking of getting her a computer of some kind for her own. She’s 12 years old now and starting to do work that requires regular access to a computer for writing and other needs. For one thing, her writing ability outstrips her typing ability, meaning her ability to compose something in her mind is far greater than her ability to type it out, so we need voice-to-text typing.

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Uber Deception on the Benefits of Congestion Pricing

An Uber executive writes an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe touting the benefits of congestion pricing to reduce traffic in Boston. Andrew Salzberg, Uber’s head of transportation policy, says that it’s a fact that traffic in Boston is among the worst in the country and that are mass transit systems need new investment. But his argument is based on sleight of hand and misdirection and his claims of Uber’s selflessness are misleading.

Before looking at Salzberg’s claims, I should note that congestion pricing and per-mile tolling have long been part of some politicians’ wish lists. As recently as 2016, the Legislature considered a bill to begin a pilot program to tax drivers based on the number of miles traveled. Earlier, the former state governor Deval Patrick floated the idea of toll gates at every exit on every highway in the state. So, this is not some pie-in-the-sky isolated proposal by Salzberg and Uber.

Now to begin, Salzberg claims that “all vehicles should pay to use the roads,” implying that unless you’re paying a toll you’re driving for free. This is false. We arelady pay for the privilege of driving on Massachusetts roads through a use tax that is the gas tax. In fact, we pay 26.54 cents per gallon in state tax 1, which in 2016 brought in $766 million total, a significant growth from prior years due to both an increase in the tax from 24 cents in 2013 and the rebounding economy. Now, advocates will claim that increasing fuel efficiency of vehicles is lowering the amount of gas consumed (that’s not a bad thing!), but as we can see that is a very long term problem, not a short term one. However, the bottom line is that Massachusetts taxpayers are indeed paying a road fee to the tune of three-quarters of a billion dollars per year in just gas taxes.
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My Backup Strategy in 2018

It’s been six years since I wrote about my strategy for safeguarding my irreplaceable data with good backups, and I think I’m due for an update.

In the main, much of what I wrote hasn’t changed much. I still do multiple backups, onsite and offsite, to ensure that my data always exists in at least three places, but some of the details have changed. Some of that is because of the introduction of new cloud services and some because my own situation has changed.

I still run a Time Machine backup of my primary computer, which is now an iMac. I also do daily clones of this computer to an external hard drive, although I do not daily do two daily clones1. Because I work from home, there’s no offsite location for the second clone to reside. I do a weekly backup of the second hard drive in my MacBook Pro2, but because I keep all my important data in Dropbox, that all gets backed up when I back up my iMac. Likewise, I still do a Backblaze offsite backup of all my data from my iMac.

Additions to my backup scheme include iCloud Photo Library and iCloud backups for my iPhone and iPad. I pay for the iCloud 2TB storage tier, which may be a bit of overkill, but I’m also backing up Melanie’s iPhone and my Mom’s iPhone and some hand-me-down iPads that the kids use and that puts us over the 200GB of the next lowest plan.3 The iCloud Photo Library ensures that my photos are not only backed up from my iMac (where I have set the preference to “Download Originals to this Mac”) on my clones and to Backblaze, but also in Apple’s cloud.4
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We warned them back in 2002, but no one listened

I’m perplexed, too, but not for the same reason. The Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday published a joint expose on all the US bishops who have failed to respond adequately to sexual misconduct in their dioceses and they say they’re perplexed. Meanwhile, Cardinal Seán is also perplexed too.

More than 130 bishops – almost one-third of all living bishops – have been accused during their careers of failing to adequately respond to sexual misconduct in their dioceses, according to an examination of thousands of court records, media reports, and interviews with church officials, victims, and attorneys.

“I’m shocked by that number,’’ O’Malley said in an interview at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross, responding to the two organizations’ report. “It raises a lot of questions in my mind.’’

As I said, I’m perplexed, but not that 130 of the living bishops (note: that includes retired bishops) have themselves failed to respond adequately. It’s that this is news to anyone.

Because back in 2002 when the Dallas charter was first advanced in the midst of the explosion of the Scandal, both Phil Lawler and I were pointing out that while the charter focused on the tiny percentage of all priests who ever abused a child, the bishops at the time (and ever since) failed to act against the bishops who shuffled them about and ignored the complaints of victims and hushed up lawsuits and paid off families under secrecy shields and all the rest.

In fact, if anything the problem is much less worse because at the time it wasn’t one-third of living bishops who were culpable, but two-thirds of bishops. But time and the Holy Spirit have winnowed that number down through the ultimate means of having them die off.
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Why the SmugMug Flickr cap is bad for the whole Net

When SmugMug bought Flickr from Yahoo earlier this year, many people suspected another shoe was going to drop and now it has: Smug Mug is dropping Flickr’s free tier from 1TB of storage to just 1,000 photos. In addition to being an inconvenience for active users, it has larger implications.

For instance, Melanie​ has long used Flickr to embed photos in her blog posts rather than take up our own previous server space. But once Flickr starts actively killing off any older photos above her 1,000 limit, those embedded photo links will all break. So will we have to start paying $50/year as another expense to keep her blog going?

But there are even wider implications for the web. One of the largest sources of Creative Commons photos online has been Flickr, but many, many of those photos are sitting on old accounts. The internet community is about to lose access to a lot of visual content. Many of the photos you see on Wikipedia, for example, are Flickr photos. The same with many of those public domain stock photos.

Another example is the Archdiocese of Boston’s Flickr page. George Martell and I set that up back in 2009 and it has over 31,000 photos. It is a valuable historical record of the past decade of the Church in Boston. In fact, there are many Catholic sites that rely on Church’s Creative Commons-licensed photos, like Aleteia. They’re going to lose this and I don’t think the folks who are running it at the Archdiocese of Boston now realize what’s about to happen to it.

It’s a shame when invaluable internet resources like this are so dependent on one commercial entity and doubly a shame when they shut down or radically pare back. This is going to be bad for the internet for sure.

Bett for Ham

When the Broadway musical Hamilton started becoming all the rage about three years ago, Melanie was immediately hooked on it and started listening to the soundtrack constantly. I resisted at first (“I don’t like hip/hop or rap!”) but I couldn’t help hearing it and the discussing it with Melanie and then before I knew it, I didn’t just enjoy it, I was dissecting the lyrics and exclaiming the musical and playwriting genius of Lin Manuel Miranda.

Soon enough our dream was to be able to somehow go to New York and get the priceless, impossible tickets and see Hamilton with the original Broadway cast. Of course, it was never going to happen. But we consumed all things Hamilton: We watched the #Ham4Ham YouTube videos, read blog posts and articles about it, watched every news special about it, Melanie read the biography that inspired it and then bought the book that accompanies it. We even watched the bootleg YouTube videos of the play itself before they got taken down. In short, we were hooked.

Eventually, as we knew it would, the announcement came that the show was going national. Permanent performances would go to Chicago and San Francisco, too far for us. But the national touring company was going to come through Boston! I immediately got on the mailing list for the local Broadway show promoters. At some point last year, they announced that initial ticket sales would be done by lottery and so I signed up and waited… for months.

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To Kentucky and Back Again: Week 2

This is part 2 of my blog post about our big road trip in September 2018. For part 1, click here.

We headed out from the AirBnB in Nashville right on time, just a few minutes before our check-out time of 10am. It was a bit of a mad rush to pack and clean up, but we got it all done and were on the road heading east. We made good time and had good sunny weather along the way, listening to the beginning of Swallowdale. Again, the countryside we drove through was beautiful and sometimes breathtaking. I can’t how often on the whole trip one of us would just point out the window and say, “Wow, look at that.” It was helped by the fact that apart from the rain on the first day and clouds on the last day, we had amazing weather the entire trip, sunny and warm.


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To Kentucky and Back Again: Week 1

When Melanie told me months ago that her dad’s family was planning a family reunion in Kentucky this fall, my initial reaction was that we wouldn’t be able to manage such a trip with all our kids. But as we talked about it, the idea became more plausible.

We left our home on Tuesday, September 11 at about 4:45am. Our first stop would be Pittsburgh, where our friends Chris and Emily Chapman had graciously offered to host us for a night, but in order to make it in time for dinner, we had to leave extra early, so it was up at 3am for me to finish the load up and then out the door in pouring rain, which followed us west in Connecticut, letting up to gray skies in New York and Pennsylvania. Once everyone was awake, we continued listening to The Hobbit on audiobook (which we would finish a few days later in Kentucky). We stopped somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania to switch driving because I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, which left Melanie in the driver’s seat going through Pittsburgh.

Unfortunately, because of all the rain they’ve been getting, there were many streets flooded out and so Waze took us through the terrible rush hour traffic through the South Side, up and down the Heights, into the West End, and finally around and through to their house. (I cannot emphasize how many twists and turns.)

Finally, we were at Chris and Emily Chapman’s home, which was as beautiful as we saw in the photos and they were very welcoming. Even though they have a newborn baby, just hosted 150 people for a baptism, and Emily was going in for surgery the next day, they welcomed us in as houseguests for the night. They also ordered a ton of food to feed us dinner, which was so generous.
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Desperately Seeking Bishops

It’s no surprise we have a crisis in leadership in the Catholic Church. Apart from the Scandal that took off in the public consciousness in 2002, the past few months have re-emphasized for us that we lack effective leadership at all levels of the Church, from top to bottom. Wherever you look are men who are often, at best, personally faithful but lacking in other necessary skills.

If we were to start fresh today, what would we need in a Catholic bishop? If we were to look at our seminaries, what should we cultivate in the our future priests and bishops?

First and foremost, they should be faith-filled and holy with a zeal for Christ. That should be a given and really ought to be the minimum we expect from our priests. And in their holiness and zeal, they would strive to follow Christ in the Church’s laws, doctrines, and disciplines.

Second, our bishops need to be leaders, not managers. We need men who will have the ability to lead their priests and laity, to energize them, to marshal them, to impassion them. We don’t need managers, fundraisers, or bureaucrats. We don’t need glad-handers or movers and shakers. We need men who are charismatic and impassioned, who have backbone, and who have clear vision and focus on a singular mission and priority: the salvation of souls. Everything else must serve that goal.

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