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A sysdiagnose is not a scary thing. More developers should feel comfortable diving in.

Two weeks ago I got a new iPhone 18 Pro. It’s the first iPhone I’ve ever bought at full price, because I started at Apple before the iPhone was invented. It didn’t hurt so much to pay full price. I still think Apple makes the best hardware and it’s worth it to have a cutting-edge camera always with me.

What did hurt is leaving Apple caused a revocation of some sort of certificate, causing iCloud to break in a way that was not user-serviceable. How do I know? The sysdiagnose!

I’ve swam in my share of system_logs.logarchive oceans. Usually I know something about what process or subsystem I’m looking for, so I turned to claude code to get the appropriate log show predicate filters. And then to save a few hours, I also let claude see the resulting log.

Unfortunately, it made some poor recommendations. It cautioned that entering the correct password (which ultimately failed with “Something went wrong”, because of this issue) ten times would get me locked out. But it did pinpoint the ServerErrorDescription=.resultGraphNotReachableNoSingleTrustComponent error at the root of it. This was server-side, not something I was doing wrong. It also found the RPD Probation: Can show RPD option: 91384.346990 >= 1209600.000000 = NO which prevented reset. It didn’t help me fix the issue, but gave me hope that if I sit on my thumbs for 2 weeks, I would eventually get out of it. Apple Support verified that just entering the password would not lock me out, and in fact suggested this should be a way to circumvent the two week probation. It did not. So I waited.

Yesterday the server-side probation timer ran out (verified by taking more sysdiagnose with the AuthKit profile installed at various points throughout the weeks) and I was able to exhaust all the tries for each device and get my iCloud encryption keys reset. This is a big hassle for resetting something with very little downside—all my passwords and photos and messages and data re-sync’d from working devices after I re-added them to my iCloud. In fact the only thing I lost were some Shortcut automations I had added to my home screen. It would have been much better to have an escape hatch sooner. But oh well. I filed this Feedback: FB24942548

I didn’t expect I’d spend semi-retirement dredging through a sysdiagnose, but it’s rewarding to have that skill.

Google shared calendars don’t show up on iOS by default. I look through all the settings on iOS or Google Calendar.app to enable it, but there’s no sign of the missing calendar. I trawl the internet to find a Reddit shaman to reveal the incantation, getting increasingly desperate as I miss appointments. I wonder what blasphemy lowered me in the sight of the tech gods?

The secret handshake is this: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/syncselect

You can tell it’s lost lore because the soft gradient screams Google circa 2010. You even have to hit “Save”, like a Neanderthal.

I won’t speculate whether this rift is technical, political, or simple negligence. With luck I’ll remember this little blogmark when I hit the problem again.

Today is WWDC, my self-imposed milestone for “finding my voice”. Working at Apple is anonymous. I constantly found myself holding opinions to myself because of the social media policy. I knew I wanted to be a more public person, but what exactly does that look like? I have some goals, and a story to tell, but I still don’t really know how it fits together.

So I have a blog. And I published the “hello world” fluff piece that’s been sitting in draft for over a month. I didn’t find my voice these past few weeks, but hopefully I cleared my throat. It’s not the high quality pontification on design, or a nitty-gritty tutorial about using lldb in Xcode, or hiking photography that I thought it would be. It’s a start. I have an audience of zero right now, so really, what reader am I worried about loosing?

Hello world! Every blog needs a first post. If you reached this one, turn around and find something newer to read.