Don't Just Press Buttons

I’m an iPhone user and was a Mac user years ago for about a decade. I was tired of building and upgrading and then upgrading some more. The temptation was just too real, so I switched to a Mac to stop the addiction. Same general idea with me and iPhones—I was an Android user and then I rooted my Android and installed GrapheneOS but then realized that I’d have to flash it whenever I needed an update. So I switched to an iPhone to get rid of THAT addiction. Things were great for years because everything just worked. The AppleTVs, the Apple Router, the Mac, the MacBook, the iPhones—they all seamlessly worked together with no hassle.

Then the iMac got old and I could feel it. I really didn’t feel like buying another iMac as I had a kid now and less expendable income, so I found a nice mid-range PowerSpec from MicroCenter and brought that puppy home. Things were great for a few years—Windows 10 wasn’t fun like XP and 2000, but it didn’t get in my way and it generally just worked. I had it dual-booted for a while, but then things broke in Linux land, so I wiped it and just stuck with Windows. Upgraded to Windows 11 and then almost stopped computing because that OS… oh man, that OS… what a piece… It wasn’t terrible at first, but it just got progressively worse.

It was going good with Windows and the iPhone. iTunes worked on Windows, so I could keep my phone backed up without some expensive Apple plan and I could manage my music. Then streaming became really big and I started to buy into it. I imported my music library to the cloud because I was tired of carrying my music library with me—or maybe I did this on the Mac, I could be getting mixed up a bit. I thought I’d be in the Apple ecosystem forever. I kept my eyes on the Mac world because I thought I’d return, but that looks like a no-go. So here comes Copilot…

As soon as I heard about this Recall feature, I knew I had to jump ship before that came into full fruition. So I planned my exit. Thankfully I had a NAS now, so I backup my photos to the NAS, which then gets backed up to an Amazon S3 Glacier bucket, and I wipe Windows.

I jumped around from Fedora to Mint to Pop!_OS and then finally to Debian, where I stayed for several months. Things were working a treat—EVE installed and ran, all of my other games installed and ran, and I was happily running some internet spaceship business out of Amarr and writing code to help me manage it. Then the 1.9.4 launcher version came out and things broke. So I jumped to the forums for help, went to the official Discord, went to other people that I knew ran Linux, and finally someone found a fix and we were all back up and running. During this search though, I ran into CachyOS, and at the time it still suffered from the launcher failing to start, so the same workaround was needed there. However… things worked after the workaround, and there are always updates in Arch, so maybe the problem would work itself out?

Now, I’m saying all of this to give you a feel for how much I wanted my computing freedom. I’m willing to do some crazy things with software to make this operating system bend to my will. And it is because I don’t really ask it to bend all that much :D. I’m fairly easy to please—just work and I’ll adjust to your paradigm… if I like it :P. So, I’m clawing back my data (pictures from the iPhone), I’m clawing back my computing freedom, freedom from ads and promotions and hooks to try to get me to buy some other cloud offering that I really don’t need. So when a video came out talking about iDescriptor and how it lets you manage your iPhone, I was intrigued and I went and downloaded it…

And this is where the title came from :D.

The app lets you do a lot with your iPhone. Most features I’ll be using at a later date after I recover from what happened. So I am poking around the features of the app and I get into the ‘Toolbox’ and I look around for a minute. I scroll down and I for some reason focus on the ‘Enter Recovery Mode’ button. Fully expecting some kind of prompt if it would do something bad to my device, I click it… nothing happened. Then I look at my phone and it’s rebooting… fuck… what did I just do. So I unplug it quick, but then it just shows me a little computer with a cord going to it. I have no idea how I can get out of this mode, so I try rebooting. Try holding power with volume up and then volume down. Nothing—it just keeps showing me that screen.

I do some searching online to figure out how to get out of this. Apple’s docs say I NEED iTunes… dammit… I don’t want to install iTunes… That means I have to install Windows… NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So I do… This took away my LFS partitions. I actually had plans to try LFS Multilib one more time, hoping that I’m just missing some host libraries while compiling the cross-compiling tool chain. Anyways, I get into Windows… after about half an hour of waiting for it to convulse and get into shape. Then I spent what felt like half an hour wading through ads to get into the OS… what a pain. Once I’m in, I get iTunes installed and I get logged in… thankfully I have 2 Apple devices (my watch), otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to two-factor… because Apple in their infinite wisdom lock you into their ecosystem. I don’t know if you can fall back to some other 2-factor method, but I digress… iTunes sorted me out and I get my phone back after about an hour of updating and restoring. I lost nothing of importance and am now backing up the sound recordings I have of my son moments after his birth, his first cooing, his first laughs, one of my dead dog’s ‘blurping,’ and I’ll get those up to the NAS very soon. Getting my data under my own control one way or another.

This all to say… don’t just press buttons…