u/NotRoryWilliams

This happened a couple years ago and I am still stuck on it.

Photography has always been important to me, and in a recent year, I did more of it than usual. I took some trips and by December, found myself in the first world problem of too many good photos to pick just one for a holiday/year in review card. I was never super into holiday cards, but they seem very important to some of my friends and family so once in a while I try to do one, especially when I had a good photo for it. The photos that I had from this particular year of travel had gotten a lot of praise on social media and a few people had even asked me for prints of some. I had given one of these to the person in question here, sending her a canvas print of a particular shot she had praised, after discussing it with her and even her having previously shown me the spot where she would put a hypothetical print from me (the year before).

So anyway at the end of that year I had posted an album of keeper shots to Facebook, asking if anyone would want one if I got calendars made. Calendars cost a lot more than one-page cards, so I wanted to know there was interest before spending on it. There was interest and a bunch of people messaged me with their addresses. But the person that I then considered my best friend seemed to be the lone loud critic. She told me that it was weird and "gross" that I was doing something so self-centered. I said I don't understand, I had made art and the whole point of making art is to share it. She insisted that it was selfish because it was my art and my travel that it documented, that I was essentially demanding that people treat me as a star to put my stuff on display in their homes. Incidentally, I was not myself in any of the proposed calendar photos. Some of my friends were, and my dog was, but mostly they were generic landscape/outdoor photos.

I thought this seemed absurd but it was enough to make me not get the calendars made, and we aren't friends anymore. In fact I haven't really bothered trying to share art again since, now that I know at least some people think it's immoral and bad to want to do so, and worse, won't say so to my face. She's got me living in fear that if I show joy I'll be secretly laughed at, so why bother if anything I think is kind is actually going to be perceived as vile?

What prompts this is that two other friends actually asked for prints recently, and showed gratitude when I provided. And I'm trying to convince myself that their response is real, whereas my other former friend would have me believe that they are lying out of politeness, and secretly everyone resents me for inserting myself into their lives by selfishly demanding that they display my stuff.

I think that I've been gaslit but maybe I really am a jerk for wanting to share what brings me joy. Am I a self-absorbed buttface for wanting to share my art, or was my ex friend gaslighting me and perhaps projecting her own hostility onto everyone else?

I'm about three months in with a Navimow x450. Overall pretty impressed by the machine and its far superior tall cutting ability blew my mind compared to the Husky 435 it replaced. However, within a month it threw its first blade, and has now thrown at least four blades from that spot. I investigated and the cutting disk is defective: it was not molded right, and the brass lug that the blade screw attaches to is "sunken" into the plastic. I've seen this sort of thing before in other plastic products, it's a manufacturing defect that happens and is usually caught in quality control.

Ultimately, Segway agreed to send me a new cutting disk after seeing pictures of this one. I have given up trying to put new blades on this disk and parked the mower. However, I forgot to disable the schedule and it ran again for around an hour this morning. I have no idea how long it has run minus a blade, because the machine itself doesn't seem to detect or alert and I only check when I hear it making noise.

On my Husky, I believe that the frequent dropped blades were the cause of damage to the motor lift mechanism. It looks like the design of the Segway is a lot more intelligent, with the lift mechanism being based on a string, which unlike molded plastic is both resilient to impact and easily replaceable. So maybe I'm worrying for nothing. With six blades per cutting disk, versus three on the Husky, perhaps the degree off-balance is lower. Perhaps I could also just take off two other blades and run the disk with only the upper blades for a few days... it's still been rainy and the grass grows quick.

Is it safe to run this machine with one or more blades missing?

I manage my primary checking account pretty carefully and follow the old "end at zero" model. Past about the 20th of the month, unless a payroll happens to fall in that window, there is generally close to $0 in my account, and that is by design. My mortgage check goes out through bill pay as "deliver by 30th" and the lender, an old guy who doesn't care much, usually deposits it around the end of the following month. Often, the check sits out on my register for 60+ days and they stack up...

Well, no more. Two weeks ago, I got a strange email from USAA Bill Pay that my mortgage payment failed because of inadequate funds. Puzzling, as no funds are needed to print and mail a check. Lots of investigation including reading "revised terms" and a phone call, and "the new bill pay system" no longer prints regular checks against your account? Apparently the "new system" requires that funds be withdrawn from your account before anything is done, and then the funds are with the third party until the bill is eventually paid. It means (to me anyway) that checks no longer work like checks, it's like I suddenly became a poor college kid again and had to go back to living that cash/money order life in which the payment I send out vanishes like cash regardless of whether it's actually received, which is problematic.

So right now I'm sitting at my desk with a paper check book writing out a couple dozen mortgage checks, and I'm just gonna drop it off with the guy who I think does have the cognitive capacity to just deposit one a month. But I've got another bill that gets a check because of archaic systems and another that gets one because of unfair transaction fees. And I need a new way to pay them because I'm not doing "give us the cash to sit on first and we'll get around to delivering it eventually without the simple proof of a cleared check in your name."

I'm curious if anyone else has even noticed this change, since it could be that somehow I'm an edge case user of the service by having checks involved at all. But I would imagine that at least one other person saw the change to how "drafts" are withdrawn as a problem. Am I really alone in this?

Has anyone found a viable alternative check-mailing service? I get that there is a cost involved, but it sucks to rely on a service for years and years and have it suddenly change in a way that amounts to being taken away.

iCloud Photo Library doesn't work for me on a phone for a couple of reasons. I don't really want to get into those reasons but if you need to know more I can get into it in a comment reply.

I take a lot of pictures and I travel a lot. I want to be able to carry at least a handful of "old" pictures, but I cannot find a good way to do that. While theoretically Apple allows for "syncing" of a photo library with a wire, in practice it doesn't actually work: the photos "synced" in this way do not integrate with the iPhone's camera roll, and they come over as reduced resolution essentially thumbnails. For some reason, the photos synced from a Mac to an iPhone through Finder come through as basically the same reduced-resolution unusable image samples that I get with iCloud Photo Library when offline. They are not adequate resolution for printing or sharing. I can't even zoom in on them on the screen to any useful degree, and worse, they don't integrate with my photo library at all, they are segregated as "from my Mac" in the Photos app, and I can't edit or even add or remove them from favorites. Similarly, when I sync photos from my iPhone to my Mac, I lose all manually added metadata such as album affiliations, favorite tags, even some edits.

What I need is a way to synchronize a library between a Mac and an iPhone, and be able to perform work (such as culling a large set for keepers) on the synced library... and I need it to work offline.

In essence, I am trying to find a way to do in 2026 what I was able to do seamlessly with Aperture in 2012.

I am open to third party software, as long as it is not cloud based. I need it to be able to work offline relative to the internet. I have all of the relevant devices with me in proximity to each other, and periodically have access to the internet to upload copies to a particular remote server. I can't use iCloud for any of this because, well, it just doesn't do that. I tried doing this with iCloud Photo Library and to say it failed would be a bit of an understatement, after two weeks offline all three of my devices altogether stopped working because the accumulating cache files crashed out the OS. Recovering from it - in the Yukon no less - was a logistical nightmare.

But after disabling iCPL, I simply can't find a way at all to perform photo library tasks on my iPhone. The *libraries* do not sync whatsoever over the local network, all I can do is transfer full resolution photos (without favorites, albums, or any other added metadata) to my Mac, and then what I can transfer back is 1) duplicate files and 2) unusable resolutions

The main task I need to be able to perform on the phone is sorting. Call it culling or curating, whatever, but what I need to do is go through 200 photos and identify the "keepers" and sort them all into relevant albums. I need to do this on the phone because I have downtime that is otherwise idle when I can use the phone but not the laptop. And I need the results - the full resolution, printable final files - to also return to my iPhone because that is the hardware that is with me when I need to share the photos via airdrop etc in person.

What tool exists to do this in 2026, since Aperture no longer works? I did actually try just using Aperture on a dedicated older machine but it can't deposit albums to a modern iPhone at all.

This seems to have been getting worse for years but now it seems like mail search doesn't work at all. Pretty much any keyword or name I type in just brings up New York Times digest emails. Typing in the actual name of a contact doesn't even matter, I still only get search results from spam, basically.

This has been gradually getting worse for years and I understand that the mechanism is primarily that the program downloads less and less data locally, and presumably any kind of server latency issue manifests as no results. I have a handful of mailboxes that are on different protocols, specifically my main ones are iCloud, Exchange, and Gmail. Search essentially doesn't work at all in "all mailboxes" and if I narrow it to Gmail I get somewhat better results, but that's like looking for your keys under the street lamp instead of where you dropped them. It appears that the ability to search my .mac and exchange emails is just gone.

I understand that I can't fix Apple's programming choices. Is there an alternative way for me to restore this key feature I have relied on in my Apple devices since 2005? Is there another program I could download that IS capable of searching inboxes? Doesn't even need to go far back, just the ability to find an email from two weeks ago again would be a huge improvement.

This is on a 16 Pro running 26.4.2. I am also observing the exact same problem on my Mac Studio and MacBook Pro, all running the latest Tahoe update. Everything seems to have completely lost the ability to search mailboxes other than Gmail in the last two or three months, I suspect with 26.3 or so. So it's on the desktop side as well that I need to come up with a new reliable method for searching inboxes. I also have access to other hardware if I need to build something to perform this task.

Idk why finding an email from "Phil" two weeks ago has become impossible but it's irrelevant, I still need the ability to do it.

I bought a Segway Navimow (x430) because my Husqvarna Automower's habit of glitching out the second I crossed the state line on the way out of town was getting really old. apparently my mistake was in not unplugging the old one first, because clearly they talked and the Segway has picked up the habit. while it's a lot more reliable than the Husky, it still has managed to find spots to get stuck and require manual intervention, and without fail it finds these about an hour after I leave the house, and then because there's no way to remotely power it off, I get home to 65 pounds of inert object demanding to be carried up the hill to the base.

that last bit is not sustainable.

and it generally only takes about 12-18 hours to run the battery close enough to zero that it can't drive uphill in "I refuse to move but I also refuse to power off" mode.

I had already looked into the same thing for the same reason on the Husky, and in both cases Google yields nada. The question is simple though: what's the best way to rig a portable charger, or at least a charger that weighs a lot less than the 65 pounds of this beast? Has anyone made such a product?

basically all I need to build one is a replica of the charge station connector, and then the right count of cells to connect to it. I suspect it's in the 20-24v range, in which case either a pair of UPS batteries or a Kobalt drill battery would do the trick.

Any ideas, or help locating a blog post from someone who actually did it?