… not that I went anywhere. I was still here physically. But I couldn’t get into my blog.

I upgraded my site to use https instead of plain-old http. And in doing so, I somehow managed to lock myself out of my wordpress database. Meaning I wasn’t able to post directly. But I finally managed to get myself in, and the remainder of the site converted over to using https instead.

Now if I could just get a stable Internet connection at home. Damn you CenturyLink. Day 3…

Is anyone else with an iPhone who reads this little ol’ blog seeing Siri do this this?

Siri has been draining my battery like my color after hearing the election results. Which weirdly enough is right around the time it started doing it. And it always says “Siri (Audio)” when this happens.

Some Googling has resulted in suggestions, but no one seems to have found a definite cause/correction.

The first was disable “Siri Suggestions”, but I’ve had it off since upgrading months ago:

Yes, I have Siri on, but if I don’t, I can’t voice to text:

Even though Dictation has it’s own option:

Another suggestion was to switch Siri Feedback from “Always On” to one of the other options. But mine has been like this since the upgrade months ago as well:

Both a regular reboot and a hard reboot don’t make a difference either.

The other options are to nuke the phone and reload it, but before I do that, I wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing this.

I’ve been ranking my songs in iTunes and on my iPhone using the star rating system for… ages. Most of my playlists involve the use of the stars to sort what I want to hear.

After upgrading to iOS 10, I couldn’t find the ability to modify the rating anywhere aside from Apple’s new thumbs-up or thumbs-down feature, which is not granular enough… for me.

After a bit of Google-sleuthing, I discovered this feature is no longer available in the iOS Music app, with no way to rate a song as it plays on my iDevice. (It can still be accessed via iTunes… for now.) Thanks for yanking an old feature, Apple.

Luckily, some developer out there has created an app that allows me to still do that, as both a widget and in it’s app. It’s called “Music Rating Widget”, and can be found at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/music-rating-widget/id971955890?mt=8.

Totally worth the $0.99. For me.

I can now still rate the new music I get as I play it, and adjust older ratings as my tastes change.