iphone

The Sun Has Just Set

Icon for iPhone automation app

I was looking around on my iPhone’s Shortcuts app to see if it would do anything fun. The app has three sections, shortcuts, automation and gallery. I’ve been exploring the automation section. My iPhone’s automation controls let me select an event to trigger a sequence of actions when the event happens.

Last year, I created an event to keep low power mode even if the battery is fully charged. The trigger that I identified is “When Low power Mode is turned off.” I made that trigger cause a “Set Low Power Mode” action to toggle it back on.

When the phone charges to 80%, it normally turns low power mode off. That would activate the trigger for my automation. The automation rule would then execute the action and turn low power mode back on. I could see this on the display: the battery would change color indicating full power and then quickly change back to the low power color. (The trigger and action don’t fight with each other; it doesn’t cause flipflopping between the low power/normal power states.)

After a few days, I disabled the rule because I didn’t like some of the effects of low power. For example, not downloading in the background. It was a fun idea, but not very useful for me. However, it was an introduction to the possibilities.

This week, I created a new event using a trigger in the “Time of Day” section. One option is a trigger on Sunrise or Sunset. I selected the option to “run immediately” at the moment of sunset. I could also select a time interval relative to sunset such as 15 minutes before or 2 hours after.

In setting up actions, I picked the “Speak Text” option, setting it to say “The sun has just set.” (How clever!) I decided to have a second action for the music app play a song. I would have picked “The Sunset” from the Moody Blues album “Days of Future Passed” but I don’t have that on my phone. I found “Sunshine” by Matisyahu which was just as good as anything else.

The triggered time doesn’t match what the astronomy data site https://heavens-above.com gives for the time of sunset at my location. It is 5 minutes early. It might be because heavens-above defines sunset as the sun being 0.8° below the horizon to account for the refraction of sunlight in the atmosphere. If the iPhone is using 0°, it could explain the discrepancy. I couldn’t find online the definition of sunset used by the iPhone.

For Ramadan or the Baha’i 19 day fast, it would be nice to have clarity on how sunset is defined. Similar events could help plan daily prayers planned around the sun’s position.

It’s fun to hear the time of sunset announced.

Can’t add account in iPhone Hangouts

I was trying to open Google Hangouts on my iPhone to verify my Google Voice number. The app on my iPhone asked me to log in and then once I gave my password, I got an error message to the effect that it was unable to add the account. The app seemed stuck in a loop so I searched for “Hangouts iphone can’t add account”

This question has a simple answer: Google Hangouts has been replaced by Google Chat and Google Meet. See, for example, “The latest on Google Hangouts and the upgrade to Google Chat” at blog.google and “Google puts an end to Google Hangouts once and for all” from Techcrunch.com.

However, when I searched for information with search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, they have at the top of their results a post on the Apple “Ask Different” Stack Exchange (apple.stackexchange.com StackExchange is a collection of topical question and answer sites that allow members to vote on answers. The name is a play on Stock Exchange and the name of one if its first sites, stackoverflow.com that is targeted for programmers.)

What is surprising and frustrating about this is that the preview text of some of the search engines comes from a downvoted answer from 2014. Answers with a negative rating should generally be ignored because they’re considered wrong or unreliable but that is what the search engines present as the answer. None of the answers are current to the January 2023 Hangouts end date. I learned that the transition was announced years ago but the information is drowned in the search results by a lot of obsolete information.

This is a stark example of a weakness of search engines: Once a piece of information is resolved as the highest ranked answer, it is very difficult for it to be replaced, even if it’s wrong. Search engine autocomplete indices are difficult to update and in this case, the auto-completes for a Hangouts search has been captured by ancient history. Typing “google hangouts” in the search box gives autocompletes that appear to indicate that Hangouts is still available.

Fortunately, in this case, the problem could be resolved with an edit to the Apple Stack Exchange question to include a currently valid answer. (I don’t have the reputation points to edit the question nor Apple expertise to get them.)

My Cookie Monster

city skyline in front of bold sky

An acquaintance on DeviantArt posted a drawing of the dog Perrito offering a platter of cookies. “Want a cookie?” I replied from my phone “Yes, definitely. I’m a Cookie Monster lol”

Just some regular silliness. However, I was surprised that the autocomplete on the iPhone had fully capitalized the name “Cookie Monster” without any intervention. I thought that was pretty cool.

Has your autocomplete done anything surprising recently?

iPhone privacy setting fail

Months ago, I made some adjustments to lock down my phone’s privacy settings. Today I found that I got bit by one of my changes. When I was locking things down, I disabled the microphone and camera for Safari.

Other useful apps, such as the MyChart medical records service, use the browser to do video calling.

My first attempt to repair the problem was to look for a bad settings for MyChart, but it didn’t show up there. Until I did a wider search did I find that I had hobbled Safari to my own detriment.

The reason I was unable to solve it in the past is that the problematic setting wasn’t in the obvious places. Camera settings, Microphone settings, Privacy settings and MyChart settings all looked irrelevant. Instead, it was in Safari settings. I hadn’t realized was so integral to other apps.

When they say that any sufficiently advanced technology is like magic, I thought that I would know the right incantation. I couldn’t find the eye of newt. It was hiding in the back of the produce department near the sign “Beware of the leopard.”