iPhone | David's Blog

Upgraded from Safari to Orion and couldn’t be happier

Web browsing on my Apple devices has been awful, although pretty much everything else has been excellent. Now that I’ve replaced Safari with the Orion browser by Kagi, I have an excellent web browsing experience.

Why does Safari suck? Advertising.

Internet content paid for by advertising is a terrible business model.

For my home automation experiments, I bought a refurbished iPad. They are quite inexpensive as schools age out the older ones and replace them with new iPads. But a 2018 iPad is still a fine device in 2023, and I wanted something to work with HomeKit. The problem was, I’ve got this iPad just sitting there on my nightstand, and there would be times when I wanted to look something up on the Internet. I would give in to temptation, which was universally a mistake. Every time I used Safari to search the Internet it was a completely awful experience because Safari does not support uBlock Origin by Raymond Hill.

Over time, I developed an aversion to browsing the web on any Apple device. It was always bad.

A week ago, I learned about a web browser for Apple devices that can invoke Firefox extensions: Orion browser by Kagi.

Of course, the first thing I added to it was uBlock Origin.

And now I find that browsing the web on iPhone or iPad is pretty nice.

THANK YOU Kagi!

They also have a version for Mac OS, if that’s your thing. 🙂

Man I hate the Orbit B-Hyve sprinkler controller

A while ago, I reconfigured my network, and I got an email from Orbit that they hadn’t seen my device check in with them in a while. Yes, it was going to need to be reconnected to WiFi. Today, the weather is getting warm, and I need to connect the thing up. It won’t connect.

I vaguely remember that it was super difficult to connect the first time, too.

Later, I wanted to change my email address, and I called their technical support number and talked with a guy: how do I change my email address? You don’t. They don’t have a way to allow someone to change their email address. I could create a new account at the new email address, but then I’d have to re-do the setup all over again.

My experience with Apple is that you can never actually delete an app with old data. They store it in their cloud, and the reinstall always brings back the old data. I had even called Apple technical support, and a very nice lady remembered that once-upon-a-time apps could be deleted from a person’s account in the cloud. She checked with a developer, and sure enough, they removed that ability a couple iOS versions back.

So now I have this fear that if I were to delete the Orbit B-Hyve app, I wouldn’t actually be able to delete it and it’s data. I’d try to reinstall, but it would bring back the bad data Apple has stored in their cloud. Remember kids, Apple app data becomes a part of your permanent record….

I have zero faith that the Orbit people can code up an app that deals with this situation. I mean, they can’t even code up an email address change….

The Orbit device is super frustrating because their stupid instructional video acts as if everything is going to Just Work. It doesn’t, and that’s the end of their knowledge. Of course I went searching on the Internet, and Reddit has some people with similar problems, and

Technical support is stupid and can only ever tell their customers to uninstall and reinstall the app. Anything more than that, and they have to RMA the unit. I’ve had the unit long enough, it’s no longer under warranty.
Apparently, some people got the connection to work by turning on location services on their smartphone. Orbit technical support didn’t know that was something that had to be done. In my case, location services are already turned on, but I don’t see the Orbit B-Hyve app in the list of apps that request location services. I am loathe to delete the app and start over because of the iCloud behavior mentioned above.
The instructions do make clear that the sprinkler controller can only do 802.11b (1999) and 802.11g (2003). Well, that’s a stupid design choice, but should not be a problem for me because the WiFi router I’m hooking it up to is one of those. No good reason to waste an otherwise okay router; it’s not like IoT devices need a lot of bandwidth.

Problem is: I’ve got to connect to the controller with my “modern” iPhone. The iPhone seems to intensely dislike the old WiFi. That may be a reflection on Apple for not playing nice with others.

Still, I’m in a situation where stuff doen’t work. If Orbit hadn’t built a box with ridiculously old technology, -or- built firmware updating into the box, these problems could be solved.

What is so frustrating is that the Orbit instructions say that once the box is in WiFi pairing mode, it will stay there for an hour. Reality is that the SSID shows up for about 15 seconds and then vanishes. It takes a whole system reset (clear CMOS) to get it to go into pairing mode again.

Even when I do get my iPhone to connect to the Orbit SSID, it doesn’t stay connected long enough for the app to see the device.

The iPhone does warn me that the WiFi connection is in plain text / unencrypted. Because the Orbit only powered up a few seconds ago, I’m sure the date is 2015-01-01. I don’t know if the iPhone is okay with that or going to “protect me” from connecting to such a wide open network. The iPhone keeps advancing with updates in security standards; I’m pretty sure the Orbit never will.

All I really know is that my lawn and shrubbery are going to start dying in the heat unless I can get this sprinkler controller connected.

Nothing gives me hope that it will connect easily, if at all.

I should have bought a unit from Hunter or Rachio. Way more expensive though. Who would have thought that you get what you pay for?

Wow OpenSuSE is terrible at iPhone photos

At first, it didn’t work. So I did some searching, and found that I needed to add ifuse musmuxd libplist and libimobiledevice. Okay, did that. It still doesn’t work.

I should mention that when I connected the iPhone, Gwenview would recognize a device had been plugged in, but would spit at me that protocol capture:/ was not recognized – both before and after the addition of these packages. This appears to have been a problem seven years ago.

Eventually I find that perhaps digiKam will do what Gwenview will not. Okay, add that.

DigiKam does see the photographs on the iPhone. Great! I should be able to download them now, right?

😝

All attempts to download (backup) the photos result in the question of “to where?” This is very reasonable.

Since this is a new installation of digiKam, there is no Album defined. The download dialog box has a button “New Album” but it does nothing. Probably in a log file somewhere, some programmer wrote out LOL, dumbass.

In the main digiKam window, the Album menu has all items greyed out (including the “New” album choice with Ctrl-N for the shortcut). LOL, dumbass.

Eventually, I learn to do Settings+Configure digiKam, Collections menu and choose Add Collection. Apparently a collection is the same as an album, or not, but it appears I now have a backup copy of one of the iPhone groups of photos. I’m just kind of amazed it was this hard, and by the way, KDE isn’t telling me anything about the progress of files copies (which in the olden days, it would).

Up in the upper right corner, though, is this really cool looking text, digiKam.org which has each letter in the domain name highlighted, from left to right. That’s cool – it’s like a throbber, but for the help button. Other than the Cancel button being lit up on the Apple Inc. iPhone window, I cannot tell if file transfers are happening or not.

And of course, hooray for random crashes while stuff is doing work.

iPhone fails at phone calls too much

Around April 1st, T-Mobile and Sprint called the merger done. Also around that time, there was an iPhone update. Since then, my iPhone has a bad time receiving phone calls. Not always, but way more than ought to happen.

I think I’ve seen this four times since the beginning of April. The symptoms are that the iPhone rings, to let me know of an incoming call. I see that it is someone I want to talk with, so I hit the button to accept the call. The call stalls in the not-quite-complete starting phase. One time, I could hear a friend on the other end, saying hello and could I hear him.

The iPhone is just completely stuck. The call cannot be ended. The call cannot be removed from the active list by swiping upward. The only thing I can do, is to power down the phone.

I paid way too much money for this telephone to fail at phone calls.

I’d like to also mention that before that (not much before – maybe a month or two), and still today, sometimes iMessage loses it’s brains too. The symptoms are very similar: non-responsive, and closing does nothing. For iMessage, I have to go into airplane mode, then power down, then power up, and then get out airplane mode. Finally, iMessage recognizes that it didn’t actually have a connection before, so it tries again and this time doesn’t fail.

For as much as this device cost, I expect better. If I wanted a bad device, I could have gone with four different bad devices for the price of this one.