Technology is not evenly distributed, even in the US. Every time I use Apple Pay on my watch here in my ancestral home, which is not often because I don’t go waving my arm at cashiers like a maniac, but still, even at things like a coffee shop, or a McDonald’s drive through — a McDonald’s! — every time, the person says something close to “whoa, you can pay with your watch?”, and I cannot possibly be the first person here to do this.

This is the one day a year I immerse myself in Apple news. A buddy and I have a decade long tradition of watching the WWDC keynote together. Then I’ll go back to mostly ignoring the hype for another 364 days.

The new Apple News daily Sudoku results page is sloppy. As screenshotted on an iPhone 15 Pro, you have to scroll down about 1/8” to see the whole Leaderboard button.

I will not lose sleep over this, but it’s still sloppy.

cormiertyshawn895/PixelPerfect:

Pixel Perfect lets you increase the text size of iPhone and iPad apps on Mac. Say goodbye to small and blurry text, and enjoy pixel-perfect graphics, all rendered at 100% native resolution.

I just learned about this nifty little MIT-licensed tool that makes iPhone apps running on Macs render text at the correct size. It makes those apps so much more pleasant!

France Fines Apple €150 Million Over iOS Data Consent Rules - Bloomberg

Things like this are why it’s hard for me to take EU regulation seriously. (In before “but what about the US…” Yeah, I know.)

It’s purely good that Apple makes apps get your approval before allowing them to track your actions. France claims this is hard for the poor companies like Facebook that want to collect every move you make. Yes. It’s supposed to be. That’s the point. I want it to be.

Will macOS 15.3 be the minor version where Safari (but not Chrome or Firefox) regularly stops hanging until I reboot? Crossing my fingers!

After Apple broke my Apple Card yesterday, I thought I’d found the correct, undocumented, undiscoverable way to update the App Store to use my new card information. Nope. Apple is still declining transactions from their own card after they unilaterally decided to change it.

I’m anticipating the moment they tell me they’ve canceled my account for nonpayment. What an unnecessary mess.

I got an email this weekend that Apple was updating my Apple Card’s expiration date. The old date would work for purchases through the end of the year.

Today Apple Music said I can’t play songs until I update my payment info. I clicked the offered button and got an unworking form with unlabeled, required fields.

When I guessed the right value for the unlabeled field (which wasn’t asking for my name; it didn’t allow me to type a space character), it told me it already had that card information on file. I closed that and went into System Settings > me > Payment & Shipping. There was no way to update the payment information there. A quick trip to Kagi said I have to update that through the App Store app instead.

So I went into that app and clicked Manage Payments. It prompted me to enter my credit card info there. That didn’t work, once again because that card was already on file. I clicked the Back button on that form and it took me to a different screen I hadn’t seen before that listed my payment methods. The form on the new screen wouldn’t let me edit my Apple Card, but it did allow me to delete that card altogether and add it right back. That seems to have been the right combination of incantations. I can listen to music again.

To recap:

• Apple made changes to my Apple Card.
• They didn’t apply those changes to their own internal system.
• The prompt for me to do it myself didn’t work.
• Neither did the second place I tried.
• Neither did the third.
• …until a random button click took me to the hidden screen I needed in the first place.

Does anyone at Apple use this themselves? I’m doubtful.

I have a 32" monitor and a 27" monitor on my desk. Don’t ask. But although they’re different sizes, they both have the same native 3840x2160 resolutions. The 27" just has smaller pixels.

This is fine 99% of the time. When I’m working away with different windows open on each screen, all is peachy. It’s only slightly annoying that the menu bar on one screen is a tiny bit larger than on the other, but I’m tough. I can live with that.

What I can’t tolerate is that it’s impossible to exactly line up graphics across the 2 monitors. If I flick my mouse cursor from one to the other at the top of the screen – I have the physical screen tops aligned at the exact same height – it flies smoothly over the gap. If I try the experiment near the bottom, the cursor jumps in altitude as it crosses the border because “2000 pixels down from the top” is a farther distance in inches on a 32" monitor than on a 27" screen. And if I dare drag a window from one screen to the other, its position and size change as it crosses over. This will not do.

A friend recently nudged me to look at BetterDisplay Pro, and my life is better for it. It has exactly one feature I care about: the ability to enter a custom screen resolution, which I can then select from the normal Displays system setting. I did these things in order:

• Installed BetterDisplay Pro.
• Looked up my monitors’ specs. One has pixels .1554mm square. The other’s are .1810mm square.
• Computed a new resolution for the smaller monitor. I was running the larger monitor at a virtual resolution of 2560x1440 because at full res I’d need a telescope to read this text. I multiplied those numbers by .1554/.1810 to get a new resolution of 2196x1236.
• Added that to BetterDisplay Pro as a custom scaled resolution.
• Opened Displays and selected the new resolution.
• Dragged windows back and forth between the 2 in unadulterated joy as they’re now the same physical size on both monitors, and both the tops and bottoms of windows exactly line up as they cross over.

Wow, wow, wow. After many long months of mortal anguish, that annoyance is completely gone. My monitors play nicely together as I always wished they would.

Note: Yes, now there’s a slightly different nit, in that it slightly irks me that my resolution has a very strange non-integer scaling factor of 180:103. I don’t care. I can live with it. macOS still sends a 3840x2160 signal to the displays, and the pixels are so tiny that I can’t visibly tell it’s not running at native resolution. Of course, that non-integer scaling might slow the display down very slightly, but this is on an M1 Max system and why pay for the TFLOPS if you’re not going to use them? It’s totally worth the tradeoff.

Never doubt that Apple is the master of packaging. My replacement credit card came in the mail today in this unnecessarily beautiful wrapper.

The envelope itself has an NFC chip. You touch your phone to it to activate the card inside.

For Science™ I read the NFC with my Flipper Zero. It didn’t seem to contain any personal information. My guess is it’s a code that the phone interprets as “open the Wallet app and activate that credit card we told you was on the way”.