justin․searls․co

Whenever I remark positively to something out of a sense of obligation, I lower the opacity of the text before hitting send.

Not a lot of people know this, but that's actually where the phrase, "damning with faint praise," came from.

3.9k likes · October 3, 2024 at 7:19 PM UTC

Help me fill this out

Starting from scratch with my RSS subscriptions.

Only rules for each feed:

  1. Is interesting
  2. Is published by an individual

Anything you'd recommend? Let me have it: justin@searls.co

Hey, I know that speaker

Extremely proud of… how much my posture has apparently improved since I started speaking.

It was a real journey.

How to Reset People & Pets in iCloud Photos

If you're experiencing persistent issues caused by the People & Pets metadata in iCloud Photos, there is a hidden way to reset it across all devices associated with your account.

The most common reasons you might want to do this:

  • You accidentally merged multiple people and can't train your way out of detangling them
  • You accidentally removed people and can't get iCloud Photos to recognize them as people again
  • The People Collection in the iOS Photo Shuffle lock screen and the updated watchOS 11 Photos watch face configurators is missing someone important, and you hope that by resetting everything, your spouse or kid or whoever will start appearing (this is the issue I've had for a couple years now)

The reset function is not currently available from any settings screen, and is only triggered by selecting and removing all people and pets in a single remove operation. I only tested this on a Mac (under macOS 15.0 Sequoia), but it may also work on iPhone and iPad. Since it will trigger a full re-scan of your photo library, it made the most sense to trigger the reset on a Mac that has the full library downloaded locally.

Steps, in a nutshell:

  1. Select all the people (not the groups) in the "People & Pets" tab of the Photos app (you can do this by selecting one and pressing Command-A or by clicking the first and then shift-clicking the last)
  2. Press the delete key
  3. If absolutely every item is selected a special dialog will appear prompting you to "Reset People & Pets Album". Click it, if you dare
  4. Don't touch anything. Over the next several days while Photos is "finding people", anyone you name or any people you attempt to merge may (will?) disappear entirely

Subsequently, an indeterminate progress bar was displayed for five minutes or so in my case (I have about 160,000 photos and 50,000 videos). Following that, you should see the "Finding People…" status view appear on the People & Pets tab of each of your devices.

Hopefully this fixes whatever ails you! 💜

The Empowered Programmer citations

Update: As promised, the talk is now up! Go check it out if you want.

I meant to be more on top of it than this, but thanks to some day-of turbulence, I failed to do two things before my Rails World talk on Thursday:

  1. Post this promised post of links to my blog so people could see all the various tools and advice I'd referenced
  2. Redirect Becky's old site (buildwithbecky.com) to the new one (betterwithbecky.com)

Whoops!

Anyway, better late than never. Here are the things I mentioned in the talk:

Of course, most of you reading this weren't in the audience in Toronto and haven't seen the talk. Sit tight, I'm told that Rails World's turnaround time for getting the video online won't be too long. 🤞

There are a bunch of other things about the app's design and architecture that I had to cut for time and which I hope to share in the future, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at how I put together the presentation. Stay tuned!

Had a dream last night that Apple (finally) announced a lightweight 12" MacBook Pro with M4 next month and I was so mad when I woke up and remembered they'll never actually do this.

2.7k likes · September 23, 2024 at 2:51 PM UTC

Inflation is the top economic issue in this election:

2020 iPhone 12 Pro: $999
2021 iPhone 13 Pro: $999
2022 iPhone 14 Pro: $999
2023 iPhone 15 Pro: $999
2024 IPhone 16 Pro: $999

836 likes · September 20, 2024 at 3:27 PM UTC

Drive-by Active Storage advice

This post is also available in Japanese, care of Shozo Hatta

I'm working on a conference talk and there won't be time for me to detail each and every piece of advice I've accrued for each technical topic, so I'm going to dump some of them here and link back to them from the slides.

Today's topic is Active Storage, the Ruby on Rails feature that makes it easy to store user-generated assets like photos and videos in the cloud without clogging up your application or database servers.

Before you do anything, read this absolutely stellar post describing how to get the most out of the feature and avoid its most dangerous foot-guns.

Here goes.

And then what happened?…

Breaking Change artwork

v20 - Mandatory Stealth

Breaking Change

There have now been 20 major versions since the initial release of Breaking Change, but this is one of the less bad ones. It was substantially improved by friend of the show, Eric Doggett, who helped out with mixing!

If you have strong feelings about anything you hear, you know where to stuff those feelings (other than "deep, deep down"): podcast@searls.co.

Spicier-than-usual show notes follow:

Show those show notes…

Extremely interested to know how the Apple Watch Series 10 loses 1.1 grams of weight when you add a cellular modem to it

36.4 grams (aluminum, GPS)
35.3 grams (aluminum, GPS + Cellular)
41.7 grams (titanium)

2.7k likes · September 10, 2024 at 3:44 PM UTC
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