How else would I know Christmas is almost here if not for Jólaöl og Appelsín?

“I have an alien balloon. When it pops it will be a piece of rubber. That’s what happens to balloons.“

That’s what happens to all of us my love. I love you so much tiny girl. You’re growing up so fast. I hope I can help you to fly and soar and enjoy every second of it.

I’ve tried restarting everything and using different devices to do the continuity camera and it still stutters like crazy as of tvOS 17.0 on the newest generation of AppleTV 4k. The person on the other end of the call gets relatively clear and smooth video but on the AppleTV the video will stutter like crazy.

My AppleTV is currently not wired so overloading of the WiFi may be the culprit but somehow I don’t feel like this should be the case when the WiFi is providing roughly 1.8gbps currently with very little jitter or latency.

tvOS 17 brought some new features but it also made my volume buttons stop working on my AppleTV remote.

I exhausted all of the things I knew how to do to fix this, and then after a quick google search apparently this just requires a remote restart. That process is documented here.

tl;dr:

Press and hold the TV/Control Center button and the Volume Down button at the same time. Hold the buttons down for about 5 seconds, or until the status light on your Apple TV turns off and on again.

Release the buttons. Then wait 10-15 seconds for a Remote Disconnected notification to appear on your TV screen.

Today is the sad last day of Iceland’s only vegan grocery store, Vegan Búðin.

When we first came here in 2018 we made sure to visit and spent a silly amount of money on chocolates and various other snacks we ate for our trip. Amazingly, even a few snacks made it home with us. Every trip since has included a stop here as well, so today’s final trip for my family is a sad trip.

Bless Vegan Búðin.

I had incorrectly assumed that software updates in Kia vehicles would be just as awful as they’ve historically been in most other major vehicle manufacturers.

With my move to Iceland, I’ve purchased a couple of electric cars, one being a Kia Soul EV. This was the first car we purchased due to availability and I just so happened to find one with all of the features I wanted.

When I drove it I was somewhat disappointed that the head unit software looked about ten years older than the Soul EV I had previously rented here during one of my trips to sort out immigration paperwork and details about my move. The dated look of the infotainment software had me reaching to switch to Apple CarPlay mode 100% of the time.

In the spirit of the ol’ “turns out” style articles – Kia offers free software updates that are labeled as being “navigation” updates but actually update the entire infotainment stack. There’s even a mac app, so you don’t have to mess around with a Windows VM:

My car immediately feels more modern and while the update took absolutely forever to flash onto a USB drive and then the car, the car was actually still drivable throughout the update process.

Post MY22 Kia EVs all support incremental OTA updates so the pains of this USB-driven process are probably lessened but in reality the USB process is probably still faster (even though it took ages still).