Riven

In my experience, if you want to use smart home stuff you really need a hub of some sort rather than connecting everything directly to your phone.

Smarthings is popular, or Hubitat for the more tech-savvy. Or just an old PC with HomeAssistant or OpenHAB installed. All have ways to expose their connected devices to HomeKit/Siri.

If you go the old PC route, just make sure not to buy any ZigBee or zWave devices since they’d need additional antenna dongles (built in to the standalone hubs) to function.

Oh and one more thing that trips people up: iCloud is not a backup. If you delete something from your phone it will immediately be deleted from iCloud too. The phone will even sometimes stealthy delete the local copy of music, photos, etc to save space and silently re-fetch them as-needed.

“iCloud Backup” is a thing. It backs up your configuration and some other things in case you need to factory reset or buy a new phone, but that’s separate from iCloud data storage.

Speaking of iCloud Backup, if you’re concerned about privacy don’t use it. Sync your phone with a pc instead and choose the encrypted backup option.

Some random tips:

Poke around the Accessibility settings. There’s lots of customization options hidden in there.

Learn the Shortcuts app. You can use it to create macros and save them on the Home Screen, in the share sheet, or as a voice command.

Customize the share sheet. Options are limited but there are some useful commands in there that are hidden by default. You may need to repeat customization with each files type (images get a different sheet from text, etc).

Set your AirDrop to “contacts only” or else you’ll get spam pushed to you when in public.

If you turn off wifi from the control centre it only disconnects. To turn off the radio completely you need to do it from Settings or switch to airplane mode.

You probably don’t need a calculator app, but if you do: pCalc.

Focus modes aren’t limited to “do not disturb”. You can have several with different home screens and different communication restrictions.

Apps that don’t have filesystem privileges can only access their own subfolder inside the “On My Phone” folder, so you sometimes need to move stuff into there manually. This is rare, but one common example is Minecraft worlds/texture packs.

If you dismissed the prompt to install Files, you can get it on the app store. Do it. Then install all the other cloud storage apps you use (Dropbox, etc), log in, then delete them from the Home Screen only and forget they exist. They’ll all be accessible in Files.

You can do a similar thing with the TV app, but personally I prefer separate apps on that front.

150 Mb FTTH for $90 in Newfoundland

Do you have one of the older iPhones that had “3D Touch”? That did some weird stuff with gestures, like if you swiped with enough pressure it would switch apps.

Most Mac apps don’t have an uninstaller (or installer) you’re meant to just toss the app in the trash. The problem is this leaves in place your preferences files, any “application support” files it may have downloaded, maybe a cache, etc

That said, I’ve been migrating the same Library folder from Mac to Mac since around 2003 and have never used an app cleaner. It really isn’t an issue 99% of the time.

My IKEA bulbs are a few years old now so this might be outdated, but I found their coolest setting to be too warm. Phillips hue bulbs fixed that issue but their minimum brightness is too high. Pick your poison I guess.