Linked List: January 26, 2018

Friday, 26 January 2018

What Can HomePod Play Outside Apple Music? 

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

Whilst HomePod works best with an Apple Music subscription, allowing users to ask Siri to play any of the 40 million tracks in the Apple Music catalog, it does not require a subscription to function. We have learned that the HomePod can play content purchased from iTunes, stream Beats 1, and listen to podcasts without needing a subscription.

If you add music to your home iTunes library that was not acquired through a purchase, HomePod will not be able to access it. It appears HomePod doesn’t have Home Sharing, which would enable that kind of feature.

Shouldn’t it work with iCloud Music Library? I get that it might not be able to access songs that only exist as MP3 files on your Mac, but if you have iCloud Music Library, it seems obvious that HomePod ought to be able to access them, no? It’s one thing if it doesn’t work with third-party streaming services like Spotify. But iCloud Music Library is Apple’s own thing.

What to Do When Apple Photos Is ‘Unable to Upload Items’ to iCloud 

Adam Engst’s aforelinked piece on iCloud Photo Library problems reminded me of this piece I wrote two years ago, that might still be of use to anyone who encounters this bug:

I’ll offer a small personal anecdote. Overall I’ve had great success with iCloud Photo Library. I’ve got over 18,000 photos and almost 400 videos. And I’ve got a slew of devices — iPhones, iPads, and Macs — all using the same iCloud account. And those photos are available from all those devices. Except, a few weeks ago, I noticed that on my primary Mac, in Photos, at the bottom of the main “Photos” view, where it tells you exactly how many photos and videos you have, it said “Unable to Upload 5 Items”. Restarting didn’t fix it. Waiting didn’t fix it. And clicking on it didn’t do anything — I wanted to know which five items couldn’t be uploaded, and why. It seems to me that anybody in this situation would want to know those two things. But damned if Photos would tell me.

Eventually, I found this support thread which suggested a solution: you can create a Smart Group in Photos using “Unable to upload to iCloud Photo Library” as the matching condition. Bingo: five items showed up. (Two of them were videos for which the original files couldn’t be found; three of them were duplicates of photos that were already in my library.)

I haven’t run into this problem again and am now up to 25,000 photos and just under 900 videos.

iCloud Photo Library Re-Uploading 

Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

However, there’s a nasty side effect of turning iCloud off and back on: iCloud Photo Library needs to re-upload all your photos. It does this in order to compare the library’s contents to the synchronization “truth” at iCloud. Fair enough, except that this process can take days, depending on the size of your Photos library and the speed of your Internet connection. Bad Apple! We don’t see that sort of poor performance with Dropbox or Google Drive, and this behavior is both unnecessary and driving people away from iCloud Photo Library. […]

It’s bad enough that Photos wants to upload every photo to iCloud Photo Library again, but here’s the scenario that triggered this article. When I tried to turn iCloud Photo Library on again, I was told that I didn’t have enough space: my 200 GB iCloud storage plan had only 56 GB free, but my Photos library contained 113 GB of photos. All that was true, except for the fact that the reason my iCloud account was so full was because it already held every one of those photos! Every time I clicked Continue to acknowledge that I realized this fact, Photos turned iCloud Photo Library off again.

This is the first of a new column at TidBITS that they’re calling “Bad Apple”, in which they plan to “dive into a particular aspect of something that Apple got wrong”. Dive into being the right term for why this is so good.

iCloud Photo Library is pretty great in most regards — but it’s not good enough. But the ways it’s not good enough are often complicated and take time to describe, which is exactly what Engst has done here.

The 12 Best Bond Watches 

J.D. DiGiovanni, writing for HiConsumption:

So why is it that some slick British spook with a specific taste in cocktails has managed to weather all this change?

In part, it’s because Bond is a kind of cultural chameleon. The character first written by Ian Fleming in his 1953 novel Casino Royale, reflects the tastes and preferences of whatever moment he’s in. One of the best ways to track that change over time? By looking at Bond’s wrist.

Good list.