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

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

It was a real journey.

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! 💜

Why should you come to my Rails World talk about building an app? Look no further than my latest credential. Hotwire user of THE WHOLE MONTH.*

*Apparently there are actually two of us.

Looks like I'm partly responsible for Rails 7.2's only…

😎

…Breaking Change 🫳🎤

In general, it's great that you can call array and enumerable methods on relations in Active Record, but the way that's implemented (cleverly querying on the relation instead of considering if to_a and doing the operation in memory would be more performant) is maddening at times.

Sure, you've tried essential oils, but once you go quintessential you won't go back.

I've got nothing but respect for this rando Amazon vendor's alpha-sort-hacking game.

I hate when the algorithm nails me.

If you've ever felt distracted and thrown your phone in your bag so you can focus on your Mac, you're going to need a new strategy to achieve self control thanks to macOS Sequoia's new iPhone Mirroring feature.

Saving this for posterity as it seems likely Apple is 90 minutes away from announcing a first-party Calculator app for iPad. Only took 14 years.

If you're the DOJ, this is definitely a sign that they're abusing their market position and stifling competition!

If you're anyone else, you're amazed that Apple let them use an icon so evocative of their own Calculator app on iPhone.

Deeply satisfying that Google automatically sent this e-mail to my spam folder.

I've perhaps had too many idle hours this month riding trains by myself this month, as it's led to silly micro-projects like this: carefully weeding out everything from my iPhone's Home Screen but the most essential apps, each expressed as a monospace link with a name that evokes the styling of my web site's navigation.

Kudos to the Dumbify app for facilitating it and to dumbph.com for the inspiration.

Well, technically, just editing one. (It was actually recorded in a karaoke joint.)

I walked in to give them a piece of my mind, but the elevator button didn't do anything no matter how many times I pressed it.

Incidentally, Becky and I just visited Matsuyama for the first time a bit over a week ago, so I was surprised (and delighted!) when RubyKaigi's head organizer Akira Matsuda announced that next year's event will be held in Matsuyama from April 16-18, 2025.

If you've never been, Matsuyama resides in Ehime prefecture, which is on the island of Shikoku, just southwest of Japan's main island. It has one of the most cherished castles in the country atop a mountain at the center of the city and which is accessible by a continuously running cable car. It's also home to Dōgo onsen, which is considered to be the oldest hot springs bath in the country (and one of several inspirations for Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away). Additionally, it's famous for its massive and varied mikan (Japanese clementine oranges) crop—Becky and I got to sample a smattering of varieties from a store that had dozens of local citrus juices on tap, via cute little faucets.

Getting to Matsuyama isn't so bad either. From Osaka, it's about 3.5 hours by train, and a special rapid "Shiokaze" train service runs to Matsuyama from Okayama, making it an easy transfer from the Sanyo Shinkansen.

If you've ever wanted to visit a hot springs resort, or get a glimpse of daily life in a more remote Japanese city than the most well-known tourist destinations, I hope I'll see you next year!

[Translator's note: yama means mountain]