Joe Ross

I'm a lawyer, geek, and writer.

Come say hi on Mastodon, read my blog, or send me some good old fashioned electronic mail. If you're a fellow omg.lol fan, you can find my page at joeross.lol.

Manage on omg.lol
Blue heart

joeross

About to watch the long Bluey episode with the family… will update afterward…

2 days ago Respond
Angry face

joeross

If your iPhone on iOS 17 becomes unresponsive, be warned:

You may lose that day’s photos if you decide to force a reboot before getting them off the phone.

This happened to me today. I lost three photos of my son being cuter than any other son in the world.

1 week ago Respond
Crown

joeross

That feeling when you've been reading The Hobbit to your kids and your four-year-old daughter insists, and I mean INSISTS, that the friend she made recently at dance class, whose name she had trouble remembering until just now, is named Thorin

2 weeks ago Respond
Balance scale

joeross

It is an uncharacteristic misstep, in terms of both litigation strategy and public relations, for Apple to poke the EU bear by terminating Epic’s developer account. Whether Apple is right about Epic's intentions is irrelevant. This move looks petty and, worse, calculated to avoid exactly the kind of competition from exactly the kind of competitor the Digital Markets Act intends to encourage.

1 month ago Respond
Pensive face

joeross

Yahoo is accelerating its enshittification of Engadget, in a move that really surprises absolutely no one because, well, it's Yahoo:

Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the decision. In addition to cutting staff, the editorial team will split into two sections: "news and features" and "reviews and buying advice." The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

This is sad. I have been an Engadget reader since the beginning, and while its glory days have been gone for a while, the writers keeping it alive have done great work.

1 month ago
Comet

joeross

I’m watching this Yaccarino interview very long after it occurred, but time has not dulled the stings of how uninformed and naive she was about Twitter and Musk.

It’s hard to believe a seasoned executive fell so far so fast, but there’s no denying the descent when you’re standing in the crater…

https://youtu.be/hYymRU-bfpQ

3 months ago Respond
Mobile phone

joeross

Someone please tell me which non-leather bifold wallet case to get for an #iPhone 14 Pro, preferably in pink. Extra points for MagSafe compatibility but it's not required.

5 months ago Respond
Robot

joeross

Don’t bother giving your three-year-old a comprehensive 10-minute explanation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early career up to The Terminator, featuring one of the absolute BEST accent performances of your LIFE, because, honestly, they aren’t going to appreciate it at all.

5 months ago Respond
Confused face

joeross

Thanks to Casey Newton mentioning it on the #HardFork podcast and my having no judgment regarding the apps I try, I downloaded an app called bonk. Join the whatever this is and find me at https://bonkbonkbonk.app/friend/joeross

6 months ago Respond
Face with raised eyebrow

joeross

Is it true that despite paying for the special upgrade I can't set the #ChatGPT iOS app to default to 4 instead of 3.5?i

6 months ago Respond
🎮

joeross

Bluey: The Videogame, for real life?!

Yup.

https://youtu.be/S-PYqMxXKKk

7 months ago Respond
Watch

joeross

Audio recordings are an overlooked way of keeping memories with your kids. Mine are both under 4 and, while pointing a phone camera at them often changes their behavior, a surreptitious audio recording is easy to do. I've got some great stuff that I'm almost certain an attempt at photos or video would've prevented. Aside from sleep tracking, this is the most common way I used my Apple Watch.

7 months ago Respond
Balance scale

joeross

Okay maybe I'm just a hopelessly biased defense lawyer but can anyone read this and tell me with a straight face that the plaintiff didn't set this up...

7 months ago Respond
Exclamation question mark

joeross

I’m curious: has anyone else recently seen excessive outgoing #DNS requests on their network from #Wyze cameras? This was a known issue a while ago but I thought they had fixed it.

I've noticed unusual spikes in the past 60 days or so, and when I blocked Wyze and its related domains using NextDNS, logs showed they accounted for more than 40 percent of DNS requests from my network (‼️).

7 months ago Respond
Guitar

joeross

I’ve played an acoustic guitar for and with my two kids since my oldest was born a few years ago, but today I plugged an old electric of mine into an amp for the first time in maybe ten years and the kids loved it, and it reminded me that there’s music-making at the core of me.

7 months ago Respond
Nauseated face

joeross

It's not a great headshot. I look so... unfamiliar with the "Smile!" command. And thanks to a moment of poor judgment, and Gravatar, it'll be all over the internet until I decide to change it again. Which will likely be soon...

(Yes, I know it's not attached. That was intentional...)

7 months ago Respond
Warning

joeross

So I’m going to do a real blog post about this when I find the time, but today I discovered that my router’s admin panel is accessible via a combination of selecting the right IP and appending a string of numbers to the name of the HTML page that contains the admin panel. The string is the same across a nonzero number of individual routers, some of which can be located with the right Google search…

security #networking #routers

7 months ago Respond
Horse

joeross

Julia Glassman, writing at The Mary Sue (with major #spoilers for the newest batch of episodes):

What makes this show so great is that it isn’t afraid to employ writing that’s savvy enough for adults to enjoy. Bluey navigates real conflicts, while her parents—the delightfully flawed Bandit and Chilli—work through believable, thoughtful issues of their own. This isn’t your average children’s show.

And now, with ten new episodes having dropped on Disney+ earlier this summer (they came out in Australia a whole year ago), the show is getting positively meta.

I dare even people without kids to watch a few random episodes of Bluey without learning something they wish they learned decades ago.

7 months ago
Angry face

joeross

I’m looking at the Be Our Guest dinner as my wife and I finalize our plans for #Disney World and I need someone to tell me why the menu at one of their top restaurant experiences is so vegetarian-hostile.

Pan-roasted zucchini?

Really?

Disappointing.

8 months ago Respond
Balance scale

joeross

From a report at Law Dork by its proprietor, Chris Geidner:

Starr issued an “administrative stay” on Thursday that will last for 30 days while he considers the airline’s request for a stay of the order pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Judge Starr is having a good think about whether he’s willing to endure the near-certain reversal, and the more-likely-than-not searing bench slap that will accompany it…

8 months ago
Expressionless face

joeross

So if one had, hypothetically, selected all of the files in the .txt/.markdown notes folder in their iCloud Files all, and mistaken the “duplicate” button for a “copy” button, is there an app or solution to de-dupe the folder from iOS?

8 months ago Respond
Laptop

joeross

The MacBook Air I'm posting this from is older than I'll admit in polite company, so I've been eyeing the new 15-inch Air, and today Amazon is selling the base configuration - in all colorways - at a $200 discount.

8 months ago Respond
Thumbs up

joeross

Apropos of my earlier post about considering migration to a different Mastodon server: Notes from a Mastodon migration - Erin Kissane's small internet website

8 months ago Respond
Train

joeross

Right now I do ActivityPubs primarily from mastodon.social. But I’m researching migration and reading about other folks’ experiences. I love omg.lol as a whole and social.lol is where I probably belong, but it’s daunting to move. If you decided to migrate here from another server when social.lol launched, let me know if you have any tips or tricks for someone considering the move!

8 months ago Respond
Speech balloon

joeross

So the Gummi Bears show from 1985-1991 was both something I think I saw in its entirety during its original run (I was born in 1983), and something I completely forgot had ever existed.

https://trakt.tv/shows/disney-s-adventures-of-the-gummi-bears

8 months ago
Speech balloon

joeross

💬 Okay, I'm trying again to see if I can set it up so my updates on status.lol are imported to my Micro.blog and syndicated out from there.

9 months ago
Beaming face with smiling eyes

joeross

Hey thanks @jmj@social.lol for the tip on getting my status.lol crossposting to Mastodon working again!

Everyone on social.lol should check out Joanna’s app status.log:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/status-log/id6444921793

9 months ago Respond
Blue circle

joeross

Now I have three Bluesky invites. Let me know if you're interested!

9 months ago
Sun with face

joeross

I have two Bluesky invites if anyone is interested. However, I’m only considering requests from people who will swear never to call posts on Bluesky… what lots of people on Bluesky are calling them. It’s not okay.

10 months ago
Left speech bubble

joeross

Re-installing the twitter app… just for a bit so I can complain to Dropbox about their gross downgrading flow dark patterns…

11 months ago
Blue square

joeross

If you’re on Bluesky, come say hi. I’ve found some cool people, but it’s a … different vibe than my other communities, for sure.

https://bsky.app/profile/joeross.me

(Shout-out to @maique@social.lol for the invite! I don’t have any yet, but I’ll pay it forward when I do.)

11 months ago
Laptop

joeross

Of course I'm putzing around on omg.lol

1 year ago
Mobile phone

joeross

Having fun rebuilding my Drafts app groups and actions from the ground up.

1 year ago
Radio
Beaming face with smiling eyes

joeross

Every time I visit omg.lol or social.lol I find a new fun thing to try. This time it’s status.lol and the neat app status.log by @jmj!

1 year ago