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Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Like many others, I find this both more awful and less surprising than his victory in 2016. It still feels like it’s a bit early to prognosticate about what it means but my best case scenario is that this ushers in an equally free world but one that is less dependent on the United States as the guarantor of that freedom. That’s my ‘best case’ scenario, though, not my ‘most likely’ scenario and I don’t have a great deal of hope for it to actually come to pass.
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The equally momentous news is that I moved my primary Apple Account from the U.S. to Japan. I’d resisted this for ages because I knew it meant that I’d lose access to the library of movies I built up in the early 2010s. The thing of course is that that period was around 15 years ago and I almost never watch movies this way any more. In contrast, I am frequently frustrated by the fact that apps from Japanese developers are often restricted to the Japanese App Store and so can’t be downloaded easily (I can switch accounts to a separate Japanese App Store account that I maintain but it’s a pain). This affects not only me but Eri, Emma, John and Rowan, all of whom have their own accounts that are registered in the U.S. so we can be in the same family group. We’re now switched over and it’s been… fine.
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The actual process of doing the move was complicated. Because I was in a family group with child accounts, I had to have Eri leave the family group, move her account to Japan, create a new family group, transfer the children to her account, then transfer my account, then join the new family group. Even this wasn’t all. I had an Apple One subscription and you can’t move with that active so I had to cancel it and then, rather than wait until the end of the billing period (when it would finally stop being active), I called Apple Support and had them process the cancellation as a refund which caused the cancellation to occur at that point.
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I got fed up with the scrolling on my Microsoft mouse. I don’t remember which version of macOS this occurred in but a few versions back, Apple changed the behaviour of the scroll wheel to have ‘momentum’. This is fine on the Apple Magic Mouse (which has a touch surface you can use for scrolling) but extremely frustrating for mice with traditional scroll wheels. I had a brief look around and ended up going with Mac Mouse Fix. So far, so good. I feel silly for not having done this years ago.
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Two t-shirts I ordered from Threadless arrived but were too big. Fortunately, the very kind support person posted me two smaller ones free of charge (and postage!). They didn’t even need me to send back the shirts I don’t want.
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I’ve always thought it seemed odd that people would address former government officials with the title of their office when they no longer hold that office (e.g. ‘President Obama’, ‘Secretary Rice’, ‘Governor Walz’). Apparently, this is technically incorrect, at least when addressing these people formally.
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On Bluesky, Micah Lee posted about Smiling Mind, a free (and Australian!) alternative to the popular meditation app, Headspace. I was curious about the claim that they were a non-profit and was pleasantly surprised to see how much you can find out from the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission about charities registered with the ACNC. For example, the listing for Smiling Mind tells you their revenues and expenses (!).
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Apple Music recommended the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s iTunes Session EP from 2006 and I’ve spent a good chunk of the last week listening to the acoustic version of ‘Gold Lion’ (Apple Music).
