Is it just me or has Alexa become garbage?

For a while Alexa hasn’t worked as well for me as my wife, but lately things have gotten so much worse.

We have 4 Alexa devices in our house, and we use it mostly to play music, set alarms and cooking timers and activate devices with voice control. My wife also makes shopping lists, though they aren’t compatible with shopping list program I use so I don’t it for that.

My issue is how much Alexa actively ignores me, like when a reminder comes on and it just won’t stop (unless I mark it done on my phone).

And even with music attached to my Apple Music account it often can’t find songs, but lately it won’t play songs, or they take a while to start and then only play half way through and stop. This seems to happen about 60% of the time of late. Maybe it is the Apple Music thing, but I don’t pay for Amazon music above my Prime membership.

And Apple music doesn’t explain why I will be talking to one Alexa and ask it to play music and it will play music in another room about 25% of the time. And it isn’t like it can heard me from the other room. I can’t seem to get it to do this with commands myself and it just makes zero sense. Why would it play in another room and not the Alexa that is responding to me?

And I use it to control the light in the Baby’s and I would say that is about 33% successful. It works less than it doesn’t, and I am repeating myself. It is great when it works, but is super frustrating when carrying a screaming baby to get a diaper change.

And then there are the creepy ads that show up all over social media when my wife and I talk about things around Alexa. I fucking hate targeted advertising!

And now they are talking about making a paid tier of Alexa to make it better. Really? Fix what exists first!

Honestly if I could get a bunch of Apple HomePods for cheap enough I would love to replace our Alexa’s! At least Apple places some value on privacy, though I am sure there will have to be new models to deal with Apple Intelligence when that comes out and those will cost more!

Intuit Turbotax is a joke on Mac

I always thought it was awful software and ran so slow, but this year on my Mac Studio with M2 Ultra, it is barely functional. It literally takes 30 minutes or more every time I enter anything or try and save, in fact it might be more like an hour between clicks, WTF. I have barely got past the very first few steps, it just beachballs constantly. And looking at the App it is of course an Intel App (Intuit hasn’t bothered to update the app to work on Apple Silicon even this many years into the Apple Silicon transition).

Now I see other people having problems online, but none as severe, but I bet it is m2 Ultra that is throwing a wrench in the works since Intuit can’t be bothered to make an Apple Silicon version of software and still release Intel only software when there isn’t a single Intel Mac in existence.

I tried contacting customer support, but got no help, so I bought H&R Block since it is Apple Silicon as of this year, and it even imported my tax file from Intuit.

So goodbye Turbtotax. I have always thought you were a joke and barely functional on Mac, but you finally went too far.

Display Maid for Mac allows you to save and restore window locations

Since moving to my new Mac Studio I have had one annoying problem. I run a 2 monitor setup and my Apple silicon mac will not sleep or put it display to sleep if the computer is running something I told it to do. For me that would be batch video conversions or the like which I set to run overnight. On my intel mac, I could set the render and then put my mac to sleep and the monitors would at least turn off, but on my Apple Silicon Mac, it won’t sleep, put on the screen saver, or turn off the displays while the render is going, and since my Mac is in my house that means it is bright and I can see the light from my bedroom. So to let me sleep I turn the monitors off, but when I do this everything from both monitors gets scattered all over my first display and nothing is on my second display, and I have to re-arange my windows.

I tried googling this and tried a few free options off github, but nothing worke, so I tried Display Maid from Funk-iSoft.

It is a very simple app that adds an item to your menu bar, though it doesn’t automatically launch on it’s own (I added it to login items) and you can save a state then turn off your monitors and restore when you turn them back on.

Though the restore on an external display is added or removed doesn’t seem to work for me, but the menu does.

You save all Window Positions and then restore all window positions. it is not elegant, but it works. I just Apple would remember where my damn windows were!