When we moved to our new apartment🏠, my husband and I spend a week being paranoid about ghosts 👻(the digital kind). What’s a digital ghost, you ask? Good question!😎

🛏It all started with our bedroom HomePod mini randomly playing some music at 3 am, on high volume🔊. We turned it off, tried to go back to sleep, 2 minutes later it started again. We asked Siri politely to shut up and tried to sleep again. Five minutes later, I had to get out of bed and unplug the damn thing😤. That my friend is the work of digital ghosts. They only occupy the smart devices in your home.

🐱‍💻Our first thoughts were someone being connected to our Wi-Fi since, during the installation of the Videotron router at our new place, there was a brief moment when they had to reset everything and our Wi-Fi network had some default SSID with no password. My husband works in the movie🎥 industry as a digital artist and signs a lot of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), so his paranoia that someone might be trying to steal something from his computer, was somewhat justified. We stayed up the whole night, trying to go through the history of devices connected to our network, matching each IP and MAC address to the devices we know (imagine having 20+ devices). Our network was secure, no culprits were found.

⛔We even disabled the permissions for HomePod for playing music so that only my husband and I should be able the only ones to be able to play music on it, nobody else even if they are connected to our network. The next three days repeated the same cycle so I called Apple Support and asked them how can I access the logs on my HomePod to see which devices are playing music at what times. Their answer, YOU CAN’T!🚫

🤵The case got forwarded to senior managers, took about 3 days, no logs but some resets, firmware updates, and restarts fixed the problem. To this day, I don’t know what caused it, and what solved it. And as much as I like the idea of digital ghosts, I like to know what’s wrong with things, debug them, and solve the problem using ways other than just restarting things.

💭Are we trading our freedom and right to debug and repair the things we own, for brand names and convenience?

Think about it.

❤My Favourite Things

🎬YouTube Video:

This ten-year-old video that’s only 4 minutes and 30 seconds, and has 31M views is probably my favorite video on the internet. It’s called “Make it Count” by Casey Neistat, it’s great, it’s timeless, I watch it every once in a while. Hope you like it too.

📕Book:

Not getting great vibes from “Keep going” by Austin Kleon anymore. Have you been there?

🎶Music:

My favorite this week is from my favorite band.

🔍I’m Learning:

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