Reset an Apple Homepod WiFi problem

Just did this today. Found a lot of not-quite-complete info online. I am hoping this helps you resolve this if you're having trouble. 

So here's the starting problem: Homepod has somehow lost internet. I don't know what is going on, it is having serious difficulty playing my local music. I think the actual cause of this is that my ISP-supplied router (a Comcast unit) has flaked out on WIFI. Homepod may have been coalmine canary on this.

Eventually, tho, the iphones were having trouble too. Wired connections are ok, but WIFIs are not. The WIFI broadcast is still alive, but broken--this is why the HP is having trouble. I

 had a second WIFI unit turned on already, was doing some test config for other reasons. So we switched phones to use that. All is good again. That was about a week ago. 

Today it occurred to me that maybe the HomePod had gotten lost in the shuffle, since I hadn't even TRIED to use it for a while. Siri said she had lost internet connection, and "Home" App said something similar. Of course the problem was that HP was configured for the old WIFI, which is still ON but not WORKING. 

So I looked online for how to switch WIFIs on a HomePod. Simple answer: you can't actually do this. Well, in theory you can, but NOT in my situation here. How to fix this? Not as easy as you think.

Solution steps:

1. make sure BlueTooth is turned on on your phone.  I had it off, none of this is going to work without it.
   
2. Tell the "Home" App to forget the HP. Completely forget it. 
3. Do a factory reset on the HP. This means pull the power plug out. Wait 10 seconds. Plug power back in. Touch and hold the top of the HP. Siri is going to tell you it is going to reset and to wait for 3 beeps. 
4. make sure your phone is ON and near the HP, and is logged in on the WIFI SSID you want the HP on; i.e., not the broken CC one I still have. The HP uses your phone, via BlueTooth, to grab settings about logins and whatnot. Essentially the HP is configuring itself to be like your phone. 
1. In actuality that isn't quite what I want, but it's how it works. 
5. You are now configuring the HP from scratch, let it do what it did the first time, etc. Nothing complicated here. 
1. Add the HP in the "Home" App on your phone. 
6. In theory you can play from iphone to HomePod, using "Handoff" but that seems to not work for me. OK, no big deal, it was just a test, not what I actually want. 
7. Any Mac device you have ON THE SAME SUBNET as the HP can see the HP in "Settings->Sounds->Output" and use it as such a device. Because I'm using a new WIFI, it's a new local IP space, and my Mac Pro is upstream and can't see it. 

So I got the old laptop out, got it on the new WIFI ok, it could see the HomePod ok, and itunes can play to it. I want my Mac Pro to play to the HP because that's where all my music is (500GB), so I'm going to have to rejigger this whole network again. I need to do that anyway, and since the CC router has flaked out, I'm going to go ahead and make all that changeover. That will result in a whole new WIFI/wired network setup, new devices, etc, but no big deal that's kinda what I "do for a living" now. 

According to some online reading I did, apparently you can much more easily change the HP WIFI connection IF BOTH ARE ALIVE AND WORKING. Of course that was not my situation, as noted above. 

 I think Siri on HP could do a better job of saying "I'm doing this" or "turn on bluetooth on your phone and hold it close to me". Some pieces of this software suite of iphone and HP and whatever else is running in the background feel unfinished, to me. 

What would ALSO be interesting is if the HP operated via POE, although that's hard to imagine as I expect it wants more raw power than POE is going to provide; there are a lot of flavors of POE, so maybe that's not true. I would prefer that HP be on a wire, tho, but I realize that wireless is the way of things. I'll update this if need be when i do the larger network reconfig.

I'd also like to be able to config the HP via a browser page for the factory reset. I can do this with nearly everything else I have to work with, they have what's called "Management WiFi" which turns on for 15 mins when you power-up the device.

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Later: THIS IS WAY NIFTY. Software updates have made it possible to play straight from my iPhone to the HomePod. So I pushed a bunch more music onto the phone.

Am rejiggering my home network

Jazz Music.

Watched Ken Burns Jazz on tv earlier this year. PBS ran it over about 10 weeks.

Interesting stuff. I knew most of the players already, but not all. Had music by a lot of them already.

And now I have about 30 new CDs of them.

The film begins approx 1900 and runs to about 1975. I missed the first episode, so I didn't hear that earliest part.

Weeks later, I couldn't tell you much about the details, but good music.

New Stuff: Basie, Parker, Gillespie, Duke, Miles, Monk...other assortments. Good stuff, should have had some of this before.

COVID and other Vaccinations

I got my shots in March. A bit of an accident at first, but whatever.

Lots of people around the country are not getting the shots, for a variety of reasons that sound mostly stupid to me.

"I don't want to get microchipped" -- as though we can make such a thing small enough to go through a shot needle. Which, btw, are apparently 0.5 millimeters on the inside, bigger than I thought.

"It's made of dead baby parts." That is some sick thinking.

"Happy for the rest of you to get it so I don't have to." That can actually work, and someone I know said this to me. Of course, that person is no engineer/scientist, and could not possibly explain to you what the reality of herd immunity is.

"If God wants to me to die, well, that's it" Maybe he wants you to use your brain. Hard to tell.

But separately from all that, since the "refuseniks" aren't going to become convinced by any outside info...

What would the infection rate have to be, and how severe would the consequences have to be, before they would ignore the garbage they choose to hear/believe, and get it anyway? How quickly would it have to be fatal?

I know some people who have gotten it, and gotten over it, or have died. I don't think I know anyone who got it and clearly has long-term issues; not sure about that one.

But, if C19 was low infection rate but absolutely fatal? High infection but the worst you got was permanent Chronic Fatigue?

My suspicion is that there is a "Big Data" opportunity here that hasn't been seen yet, and awaits discovery. Probably needs more longitudinal data collection, which probably awaits the next few waves of infection.

I understand all the data, the models involved with studying this. Somewhere in my software past I've done some similar modeling and numbers work. You can find plenty of visual models online to show roughly how the infection/immunity process behaves; I'm not making yet another one of them :)

So I don't know if 70% is the magic number here for the herd immunity to be the steady-state situation. There are a lot of variables that are relevant. Example: I wasn't personally too worried about how soon the vaccine would get to me, because I have nearly zero interaction with other people over any time-frame you want to use, so my exposure probability was/is close to zero--that's how my life is these days; a few years ago that was simply not the case (I caught the actual flu once ~10 years ago while on the subway).

If we have a mutated next wave that is worse, what will happen? I suspect we can create and distribute faster, now that we have practice, but still: what will be the refusal rate? How long before the refuseniks die off enough that the remainder get the vaccine?

2020 Word of the year

Excoriate.

you can't get away from this word, in 2020. Seems like hardly a day goes by that I don't see it in some piece of brand-new writing that day.

So you can bet on it taking the prize.

I haven't seen it getting mis-used, yet, but it's getting OVER-used.

Oil prices.

Well, they're scary.

Bad scary. Yesterday (April 20) WTI went to zero. ZERO. Think about that. If the price is zero it means NO ONE is buying.

I used to live in TX, where the "awl bidness" drives the economy. You know folks there are freakin out.

I've found this nifty little javascript widget that shows you what WTI is. There's another for Brent. I'm guessing that the negative means futures contracts being cancelled.


WTI stands for West Texas Intermediate, fwiw.

Concerts I've been to

This is a newly created list, so it's incomplete, and incorrect, but covers a bunch of them:


There are of course other things...seen Brave Combo at least a couple more times that didn't involve tickets, so I can't list them properly...once was Lewisville TX, outside at some amphitheater, another time was outside at the Kennedy Center, DC.

At some point soon I will photograph the concert tickets and add them to the shows.
Click here
Later: OK, I'm missing like 3 tickets. There's a concert I've remembered and forgotten, no ticket there, and there were several shows that were free and didn't HAVE tickets. So this is pretty complete.

July 5 2021. And now the viewer is broken. As amazing as the Internet actually is, this sorta shit bugs THE CRAP outta me.

Interesting internet goings on

I own/run an ISP.

We finally reached the situation where I needed some IP addresses of our own, so now I have 16 of them.

Not actually that hard to acquire, interestingly enough. Not trivial, but not hard. And not too expensive. But now they're mine. Mine, I tell you!

Will be putting some things online a little closer to my own control. That's going to be interesting. Will be able to do my own actual web-hosting, as opposed to using someone else's service.

New things to learn, that's for sure.

Books and awards and humor...

This morning I read this in WaPo. Apparently "romance writing" and the "writers association" and its annual awards have somewhat the same "diversity" problem as movies and Oscars.

And this early comment:

"Riff on idea by J Jencks- Romance writer’s convention. Murder most foul. A Scottish vampire (inspired by Nora Roberts comment), and a Chinese woman who is a world famous detective, team up to disaggregate the formulaic romances churned out at an increasingly rapid (and vapid), rate. They discover the great publishing houses of romance writing have harnessed AI robots to gobble all romantic scenarios ever engaged in by humans since they climbed out of the trees; and even before. (Many deaths and injuries there but that’s another tale.) a disgruntled writer, about to disclose, is killed and our two heroes must discover why. Meanwhile, the robots start falling in love with each other. Another subset of romance lit is born. Robot Romance. Future idea: “Like a Machine; When Humans and Robots Cross Over” Wow..."

I'd read that book. Needs a better title than "Murder Most Foul"

But hmm...robot porn? Discrimination against cyborgs?


Chinese detective: Judge DeeDee? Charlene Chan (or Number One Daughter)? Mrs Wong?

--

The Nora Roberts comment is in the article: “Jesus, it’s fine to have a character fall in love with a freaking vampire, but not someone of the same sex?”

(no idea who "J Jencks" is, maybe some other commenter?)