Achievement Unlocked: Apple Lockdown
Way harder than it should be.
Six weeks ago I was a guy with a seven year old iPhone I’d use to tether a ten year old MacAir. The little Intel Air is gone and Apple M1 Pinky & Brain have taken its place, while the iPhone 8 was joined by an iPhone XR. Yesterday I received a tracking code and there’s a 2020 iPad Pro making its way to me. And finally this evening there was an offer of an M1 Mac Mini, which was directed to someone else, as I’ve already got two solid macOS devices.
All I have to say is … wow. Thank you guys SO MUCH for the uplift, you don’t know what a relief it is to not have to decide what bill not to pay in order to cover hardware needs. And being able to direct a piece of equipment to a person who has just started a developers certificate program? WOW.
And after quite a tussle with iCloud, I am down to just Pinky and the XR being connected, and I’ve successfully activated Lockdown Mode.
Pinky …
iPhone XR …
Futures
I managed to pry the iPhone 8 and Brain out of iCloud’s clutches, but it took some doing. Getting them to being bare devices nit associated with any iCloud required me resetting/discarding/exorcising them from “my” iCloud, then fumbling a bit with them during reinstall in order to avoid associating them with something else.
Now I’m pondering precisely what to do next and I’ve got some options.
There’s an Android with a SIM in it that I could shift to the iPhone 8, but it’s got a persona that was involved in some things in Ukraine. That particular job was done a year ago, the ties have grown cold, but I just keeping paying for it, because it works to tether VMs on my desktop. I have preached don’t recycle w/o careful consideration; will I take my own advice here?
There is another international thing I have to do now, it’s low threat - friendly people in friendly countries, I just plan on putting them in a nice safe box. The iPhone 8 meets that spec, once its got a SIM, but I don’t think I want to pair Brain with that job. This is liable to be iPhone + Linux VM.
I keep hitting the mailbox because there’s supposed to be a check and a portion of it is earmarked for a Google Pixel 8. Life has dragged me quite firmly into the Apple mobile camp, do I explain that the need for GrapheneOS has been overtaken by events? I could get a pair of additional iPhone XR for the price of the Pixel, then let the iPhone 8 slip away to some more needy person.
The incoming iPad Pro is a wifi only version, and I have no inspiration on what to do with this, beyond giving my battered Kindle Fire a well deserved rest.
Maybe when I’ve got the Pixel money in hand I should move to a trio of XRs, one for each laptop as its own lockdown, and then one for my low key international fixer gig.
Whatever the case, I think the next thing is a bit of a wallow in Lockdown, thinking about what would happen if one or both devices were lost, seized, or stolen. I spent a lot of years thinking about that in the context of Android and Linux systems. The iPhone/Mac are a change, but so is the nature of my life. I’ve been having some normal adult type stuff, so much so that the completely unknown carrier phone number on the XR actually has … stuff … attached to it. I intensely dislike that, because I’ve not been able to get inside the SIM swap business enough to figure out how to properly back up a SIM. Attempting to walk that path is hazardous - most everybody with those skills learned in the context of some nefarious activity, and I’m about the last guy on Earth to be asking about such things without getting a blowout ZOMG FEDZ RUN!@@!@#!@$@$#@ in response.
Big Picture:
Tories out in the U.K. National Rally thwarted in France. Some gay wolf furries curb stomped Heritage Foundation over Project 2025. Biden may have to sit down, but that begs the question … why is an adjudicated rapist and convicted fraudster suffering from obvious serious cognitive issues still in the race? That won’t change, but it’ll get brought up constantly, which will just further aggravate my already low key furious independent voting brethren.
Maybe we are gonna get through this without Atlanta look like Aleppo and Kansas City looking like Kharkiv. People are so up and down about this, it’s weird to me to see hardened professionals with secure careers admitting that they’re uncertain.
Anyway, that’s enough of that. What’s next?