PhotoStackr

I use PhotoStackr to access my two Flickr accounts, my 500px account, and my Picasa, as well as sharing through Farcebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. So I figured I’d have a lot of annoying logging-in to do.

Nup. I opened the app, chose to use iCloud, and it went ahead and loaded up all my accounts. All of them. Nothing required from me. It was just as if I’d not done the whole wipe and restore thing.

So mad props to PhotoStackr.

Instapaper

Instapaper is awesome, and I’ve used it for ages (long enough to have too many sites saved for later, sitting unread…). I had it set up to automatically share liked items, and was signed in to my Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr accounts within the app. So once again I figured I’d have an annoying bunch of setup to do. As it happened though, once I logged in to my Instapaper account (obviously a necessary step), everything just went back to just the way it was.

So more mad props to Instapaper.

Oh yes, I haven’t mentioned that: I wiped my iPad.

I chose to do so, as it happens, because once again I fell afoul of Apple’s moronic unresettable restrictions passcode. I had obviously set up a restrictions password to block a few things from the kids, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I used. Not my ATM pin codes; not my old ATM pins; not any combination of my kids’ dates/months/years of birth; not even the LAPD code for criminally insane (5150 – as used often by Eddie Van Halen).

Apple have chosen to prevent users from resetting or recovering restrictions passcodes; in fact even Apple “geniuses”/service/tech departments can’t do it. It actually cannot be done – without jailbreaking one’s device, or engaging some l33t h4x0r skills. I tried the latter (which involves editing the hex of various files within the backup), but the required strings to be edited simply did not exist within my backup. So. Stuffed then.

Self-righteous types on the Apple support forums lend their support to Apple’s approach, attacking people who post looking for solutions to this, framing it up as the person’s failing and stupidity, and a necessary and sensible bit of security so one’s kids or a thief can’t bypass the restrictions passcode.

However…

Anyone who doesn’t care about the data on an iThing (let’s say, just for argument’s sake, the mooted child or thieving villain) *can* easily bypass a restrictions password, by doing what I did today: restoring it as a new device. All the same apps can then be installed; only data stored solely on the iThing is lost.

So it seems to me that the *only* person the unrecoverable, unresettable restrictions passcode causes problems for, is the legitimate owner of the device, who doesn’t want to jeopardise their data.

Slow clap, Apple. Well bloody done.

Put that together with the emerging evidence that poor diet is associated with an increased rate of depression (and is not only secondary to the depression), and that young people who are obese have an elevated risk of adult depression, and the importance of proper healthful eating and physical activity starts to become very clear.

The mind, and its moods, are of course nothing more than functions of the brain, which being just a part of the body, must have evolved with the same basic requirements as the rest of the body. An organism that needs one set of conditions for proper brain function and another for proper cardiovascular function is not going to get far. So it makes sense that the two are this linked.

In fact, it’s not "the two", is it? It’s all one.