Rant 😤

Working on my taxes this afternoon and wanted to double-check there were no documents for an old retirement account. It’s nice to know some things never change: Empower Retirement is still an awful company with awful tech. 🤣

Is it just me or is advertising in podcasts just getting…awful? I just listened to five minutes of “sales stuff” and…yuck (it was he same commercial, repeated three times). I’m all for paying for podcasts but some of them, there just isn’t a way to avoid the advertising.

You know it’s bad when the representative from the Insurance company tells you to try GoodRX instead of using your own bloody insurance. Ah, healthcare in America. 😱🤬

(The generic version is out of stock and back-ordered everywhere in the City and the name-brand has a 110% markup.)

Can’t get a 90 day supply of mediation filled b/c of an unspecified error in the computer system my mail-order pharmacy uses (they wouldn’t confirm if the big cyber-hack was the cause), so I have to use a local one but they don’t do 90 day supplies. 😱😡 #HealthcareInAmerica #FirstWorldProblem

It’s the very definition of a first world problem but I’m unable to rent / reserve skis for an upcoming vacation because someone didn’t check to see if the latest deploy didn’t contain breaking javascript changes on the site. 🤣😱😭 #ScreamsIntoTheVoid

🔗 HP CEO evokes James Bond-style hack via ink cartridges

It's clear that HP's tactics are meant to coax HP printer owners into committing to HP ink, which helps the company drive recurring revenue and makes up for money lost when the printers are sold.

This is why I will never again buy an HP printer; claiming you're _"protecting"_ consumers from viruses when in reality, you're protecting your bottom line...at least have the fortitude to own up to your financial priorities greed.

Kinda amazed and dismayed at Nintendo right now: lately, every time I try to sign into their store to buy a game, the login process crashes / fails. Do they not want my money…?! 🎮

Tried out the Copilot app but this isn’t going to work for me. I want to love it (it’s so pretty) but it’s missing fundamental features I’ve seen / used in other app (bulk-import, transaction renaming rules, the ability to import Apple Savings transactions). 😭

I always find it ridiculous companies (in this case a gym) make it so easy to sign up for services but if you want to cancel your membership, you have to go do it in person. 🤯 (The backstory: I want to move to a cheaper gym.)

Dear Apple
I’m pretty darn sure you know that I keep marking emails with “Payment Completed” as spam, esp when they contain image attachments and ask me to contact the support team (with a very odd URL) if I have concerns. Perhaps you could just block them moving forward?

Thank you,
Unhappy Geek

Follow-Up (Part 2): I was trying to listen to some Holiday music this morning, only to realize none of my Sonos speakers worked with AirPlay. After digging online, it turns out the only way to get a Sonos speaker back into HomeKit after the home is deleted is to factory reset the Sonos. 😱😅

Follow-Up: I think my HomeKit set up is mostly back to normal. I was a little stupid and didn’t take backups / exports…so I lost some historical data (mostly temperature / humidity / air quality) but at least my Holiday automations are working again. 🎄😅

My HomeKit set up has been rock-solid for years but the minute I added a Matter plug (the “Meross Matter Smart Plug Mini”), everything breaks…and as it’s Apple land, where everything works perfectly until it doesn’t, fixing it is going to be…unpleasant. 😱😭

Follow-Up: The IKEA Sonos speaker is working perfectly (which is more than I could ever say of the HomePod Mini stereo set up) this morning; holiday music is flooding the room whilst I’m debugging some legacy Java code. 🤓🎄 (Yes, I had a spare speaker lying around… 🤣) 📷

I give up, it’s time to throw in the towel on the HomePod set up in my house and just go get cheap Sonos speakers from IKEA. 😮‍💨 It’s hilarious Sonos does a better job at implementing AirPlay than Apple, I’ve had so many issues trying to play to multiple speakers over the past two years. 😱