In response to some interesting reporting from Joanna Stern on how thieves are shoulder-surfing their victims’ iPhone passcodes and get all of the keys to their iCloud kingdom, I posted a silly solution to this problem on Mastodon…and then realized it may not be that silly after all.

🦀🦀🦀Shoulder surfers are powerless against auto-jumbling passcode digits🦀🦀🦀

Some backstory: there's an MMORPG called RuneScape that, to my eye, essentially solved the problem of “shoulder-surfing” passcodes way back in 2005 with how they implement player bank PINs. As you enter your 4-digit bank PIN, the number placement randomizes after each digit (and the digit’s placement on the tile itself shuffles as well) — making quickly determining the sequence of digits just from mouse placement extremely challenging. With just a bit of added friction, Jagex adds a considerable layer of protection on players’ Bandos sets, GP stacks, and party hats from any would-be hackers.

So, too, could Apple protect the photos, credit cards, and iCloud accounts of people entering their iPhone passcode (regardless of length!) by deploying a similar solution to the iPhone lock screen — even just optionally for the most security-conscious. Honestly, I would turn it on immediately if for no other reason than that FaceID almost always works for me…and on the rare occasion when I need to enter my passcode, the benefit this added friction outweighs the annoyance. Sure, Apple needs to resolve other issues pointed out in Stern’s reporting (dear God, why is my passcode sufficient to reset my iCloud password?!) — but any extra layer of protection (even optional) on what is almost certainly one’s most-precious device seems like a no-brainer to me.

Steve Mould just shared a very interesting video explaining how the LED lights on smart watches are able to measure your heart rate (and in some devices, SpO2) through the skin, in human-understandable terms. It's a great sumamry of the complexities involved in quantifying biological data non-invasively with the power of physics.

Worth a watch, go check it out on Mould's channel; though I am a bit sad that my favorite protein in all of the human body — hemoglobin — did not get an explicit shout-out.

As I have spent the last couple weeks warming my hands and roasting marshmallows over the Elon-Twitter Dumpster Fire, the most-riveting campfire stories have primarily been scoops from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer at Platformer. Their summary of today's particularly chaotic happenings over at Twitter HQ is an especially enamoring play-by-play of Elon Musk's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Some key snippets from the excellent piece...

On remote work:

Speaking of the value of in-person work, he said: “If you can physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted.”

On the state of Twitter's remaining employees:

Around that time, someone put a poll into Twitter’s Slack channel: “Is it too early for vodka?” the poll asked. (It was a little after 1PM PT.)

On Twitter's survival:

Depending on the length and severity of the recession, he said, the company could lose several billion dollars next year. He would not speculate how much runway Twitter had left. "Bankruptcy isn't out of the question," he said, as we were also first to report.

On cleaning up the mess he himself had made:

Seventeen minutes later, Musk followed up with a one-sentence email to the team labeled "Top Priority." "Over the next few days," he wrote, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam."

That tidbit just brings to mind this spot-on assessment from Kieran Healy:

[Me standing in the flames of the burning house I don't want but recently had to buy because I signed a piece of paper saying "I promise to buy this house" and which I myself doused in gasoline and set on fire ]: I have done everything I could to appease the activists

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) November 4, 2022

And, the key take-away:

Musk’s whim-based approach to product development, his rapidly depleting executive ranks, and the very real likelihood of hundreds or even thousands of additional departures at the company in coming weeks threaten to leave Twitter a shadow of its former self. And much of the reason for that is Musk himself: the way he treated his employees and the product they built; the sage advice he ignored; the business fundamentals that he misunderstood.

How Casey and Zoë have managed to secure all of the insider details a few weeks ago was at the time extremely impressive to me. Now? Well, based on how they've been treated thus far, I imagine most Twitter employees would relish the opportunity to share a "day in the life" under Elon Musk.

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Now is probably as good a time as any to let anyone reading this know that I am now on Mastodon @mvo@mastodon.social — you can follow me there if you'd like. And, of course, I still maintain Peer Reviewed and write from time to time. There's something to the idea of "owning your own platform", after all.

Some very unpleasant local news (content warning: car crash, loss of life) crossed my feed this morning in what is also the first incidence I've seen of the new iPhone's Crash Detection feature in action. Early Sunday morning in Lincoln, Nebraska (about 45 minutes from where I sit), the Lincoln Police Department report that they were alerted to a car crash via the iPhone 14 (or possibly Apple Watch S8)'s automatic Crash Detection feature. Sadly, this crash was particularly violent and resulted in the loss of six young lives after many hours of emergency crew efforts. From the WOWT story:

Police are still investigating the cause of the crash but said it was reported by an iPhone that detected the impact and called responders automatically when the phone’s owner didn’t respond.

Although in this horrible incident it seems the iPhone 14/Apple Watch S8 Crash Detection feature was not enough to save any lives, it is a remarkable example of the feature in action. Nearby neighbors seem to have been on the scene and immediately attempted to rescue the passengers, and no doubt would have called 9-1-1. I am hopeful, though, how much time was saved by iOS's automatic emergency alerting — and how much of an impact that saved time will have in future crashes.

Today, Relay FM wrapped up their annual fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, with the event raising $706,397.10 for the lifesaving work being done at this magnificent Memphis mainstay. I'm also blown away by the support my sub-campaign received, raising well-over my initial $5,000 goal and ending the month with $7,554.20 contributed to the Relay community's total. Thank you to everyone who donated to my campaign (even if you voted "Save"...), and to anyone and everyone who kicked in to any of the 255 wonderful community fundraisers who joined the effort this year. It always feels good to do good, but there's something special about doing so with such a generous and engaged community of nerds rallying together behind a great cause.

Below (as promised in my campaign rewards) I am going to list the names of folks who requested acknowledgement in my "Thank You post" for their contribution to my campaign, but I want to thank a few people specifically:

First and foremost, thanks to Stephen and Myke for all of the work they've done over the years to make the Podcastathon the momentous annual occasion it has become — you've made a world of difference in the lives of so many patients and families at St. Jude through your efforts. Thank you both also for embracing the shenanigans and chaos that stemmed from enabling community campaigns, and especially for inviting me to join the Closing Ceremonies to smash the Flower Power iMac on stream with you both — it was a blast. (If you missed it, you can find the VOD over on Myke's Twitch channel).

What remains of the Flower Power iMac.

Second, I want to call out The Lovely Developers for the Herculean effort they put forth to entirely remake their Relay FM for St. Jude app — enabling everyone to discover community campaigns and track all of the fundraisers' progress throughout September. I think the fundraiser would not have been the same with out this app surfacing campaigns and generating sharable screenshots of everyone's progress. It seems a small thing, an app that puts a progress bar on one's home screen; but I think it makes a world of difference. I want to especially call out Ben, Tony, Matt C, and Kate (QA lead!) — who really spearheaded the app's re-development this year (a process which Ben wrote about this week on his blog; give it a read).

Finally, to all of the folks who donated to my campaign, thanks you so much for the difference you've made in the lives of children battling cancer, and their family members battling right alongside them. Donors who requested a thank-you are listed below, in random order:

• Jiji
• zmknox
• Matt C
• Stephen Hackett is Sad
• Ryan Petriello
• Grey Patterson
• Justin Hamilton
• Chris
• JamboHarv
• Ray
• JD Burch
• Mr Myke
• Deborah Abel
• Batman
• Adam Sakellarides
• Tony
• Marlies
• Molly
• Dave Brown
• DarthMeowry
• Warren
• Kathy Campbell
• steev
• Kyle Bradbury
• Kevin
• Jamie
• Aaron M
• Joshua
• _IanOfEarth (x3)
• Christeana
• John loves the cube
• moose
• Starling
• Rho
• Neal Pozner
• Sean Harding

See you next year 👀

Every year, Relay FM and its surrounding community raises money to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in their mission to cure childhood cancer all while charging patients and their families zero dollars for their care. This year, Relay and the St. Jude folks have deployed what I refer to as "sub-campaigns" for the overarching Relay/St. Jude fundraiser — individuals can set their own goals, milestones, and incentives all while contributing their funds raised to the amount Relay has collectively raised as a community. You can find out more about creating your own sub-campaign at stjude.org/relay, but first I want to tell you about the chaos I've prepared for my sub-campaign: MVO Woodworks for St. Jude.

I Hope You're Happy, Stephen

A few weeks ago on an episode of Spotlight (a members-only Q&A show), Stephen Hackett refused to answer which Macintosh in his collection he would choose if forced to destroy one (like he did a IBM PC Junior during last year's Podcastathon). I could not abide this act of cowardice, and so that day I decided to make that choice for him and find out what Macs were available at my local Goodwill for me to smash. And as luck would have it, there was one Mac in stock: a Flower Power iMac G3 in working condition.

The fate of this iMac G3 is in your hands, dear reader. Your donation is your vote — give now!

I decided to acquire that iMac and exact my revenge on Stephen by...raising money for the charity closest to his heart. I've spent the intervening week and a half preparing what I think is a truly chaotic bounty of fundraising milestones, donor incentives, and a campaign-long donation poll to determine the fate of the Flower Power iMac G3. Throughout the month of September, I will be streaming from my garage woodshop at mvo.live doing shop infrastructure projects, making cutting boards, and effecting unspeakable horrors on Apple products spanning decades. I've gathered old tech from my own drawers and from various friends and acquaintances to create a menu of mutilation milestones so troubling that some may wish to avert there eyes:

Milestone	Amount Raised
Turning a 1st Gen Apple Pencil into a 2nd Gen	$500
Mouse Dissection	$1,000
Making a Foldable iPhone SE	$1,500
Adding a Hole Punch Display to an iPhone 7	$2,000
50% Speedrun of Zelda II: Adventures of Link	$2,500
Stream of Adding an SSD to an Old All-in-One	$3,000
Permanently Uninstalling Flappy Bird off iPhone 4	$3,500
Apple M0110A Keyboard 100% > 75% > 67% > 40% mod	$4,000
The Fate of the iMac G3 is Determined	$5,000

Milestones are likely to change or be added throughout the month, and not all of them will involve technological violence. That said, I'm looking forward to destroying some devices on stream for your enjoyment and for the kids (though, if you are aghast at the idea of one of these devices coming to harm, read on to learn about the "Spare n' Save" donor incentive below!).

The items gathered here are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice….for the kids!

Donor "Incentives"

The iMac isn't the only purchase I made for my sub-campaign — I also order 600 stickers featuring the wonderful Justin Hamilton's parody fair-use artist rendition of the cuboid image and likeness of Jony Ive (henceforth referred to as the Jonycube). What am I going to do with 600 of these extremely cursed stickers, you ask? Easy: for every cumulative $10 donated to my sub-campaign, I will be affixing one (1) Jonycube sticker to my jointer — a woodworking tool that exists solely to create exact right angles...or cubes, if you will. Soon, my jointer will look all too similar to Myke Hurley's desk or Stephen Hackett's Kallax shelves. If I hit my goal of $5,000 raised for St. Jude, that will be 500 Jonycubes on my jointer for the rest of its useful life. And the remaining 100 stickers? Well, one of those rectilinear horrors can be yours, dear reader, for a donation of at least $25 to my sub-campaign! That incentive and more are listed below:

• $1 — Your name in a "Thank you" blog post on Peer Reviewed at the end of the campaign
• $25 — One (1) Jonycube sticker, shipped directly to you (or a recipient of your choice) [Limit 100]
• $300 — You may choose one of the items I plan to destroy (Except the iMac!) and it will instead be spared and shipped to you. [Limit subject to change]
• $500 — You will receive one one (1) bespoke MVO Woodworks cutting board in return for your extreme generosity. [Limit five (5)]

Do note that the incentives for my campaign are cumulative; meaning, a $500 donation makes you eligible for all other incentives in my sub-campaign. You can also opt to claim the delightful Relay FM cause incentives instead, but unfortunately you'll need to make two separate donations to get both my incentives and theirs. Make sure you select your desired incentive when you make your donation (and don't forget to vote on the fate of the iMac G3!).

For a donation of only $25, you could have your very own Jonycube sticker.

Sawdust and Chicanery, for the Kids

This September is going to be full of wild and wacky activities hosted both by Relay FM itself and by members of its community — all to raise money for the admirable mission of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I hope you tune in to one of my woodshop streams this month (I don't have a schedule, consider following me on Twitch — I'll be working on a lot of shop infrastructure projects since we only recently moved into this house! Also, please kick in a donation to my sub-campaign and maybe get a delightfully devilish incentive — and make sure to vote with your dollar to determine the fate of the Flower Power iMac G3.

Oh, and of course: mark your calendars for Friday, September 16th from 11a-7p Central for Relay's annual Podcastathon live stream over on their Twitch channel.

In a piece today in the Wall Street Journal, Joanna Stern lays out a frustration that so many of us have: the entirely intolerable state of iMessage spam — from the article:

Me: So sorry! I totally missed these. They got buried by texts from the pediatrician, the electrician and the dog groomer.

No, those three people didn’t walk into a bar. Instead, they were congregating in my Messages app—along with texts about appointments, 20%-off sales, two-factor codes and the whereabouts of my FedEx packages.

Stern then goes on to list a variety of strategies to mitigate the notification hellscape that iMessage has become, thanks to spam messages and a dozen one-time verifications codes. Perhaps I'm just a bit heated on the subject because I read Stern's piece while actively rebuilding after a fresh Windows install and had to re-sign-in to every website and service I use...meaning I was quickly inundated with about 15 iMessage verification codes! Surely Apple could take the tech that helpfully detects one-time verification codes and auto-populates them on your iOS keyboard for quick entry and use it to delete those same iMessage threads after a fixed duration? Let's say 24 hours, since most of those one-time codes are time-limited in their use anyway. Why leave them sitting around for the user to clean up (or not) when you could tidy up automagically?

Another triage tip, shared helpfully by Matt C in the Relay FM Members Discord: You can manually add all of the phone numbers that send you one-time verification codes to a contact called "Robots" to sequester them in a single iMessage thread. This is a really clever solution to a problem that we shouldn't even have, but alas.

Corralling one-time codes, one robo-text at a time.

In a simultaneously stunning-yet-entirely-expected move, President Biden outlined his plan for student loan forgiveness today — the outline of which POTUS shared on Twitter:

In keeping with my campaign promise, my Administration is announcing a plan to give working and middle class families breathing room as they prepare to resume federal student loan payments in January 2023.

I'll have more details this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/kuZNqoMe4I

— President Biden (@POTUS) August 24, 2022

In summary:

• $10,000 in loan forgiveness for all borrowers — doubled to $20,000 if you received Pell grants
• An income cap of $125,000 for individuals and $250,000 for households
• The COVID interest & payment pause ends on January 1st, 2023
• Big changes to the Income-Based Repayment plan

Now, President Biden's titillating Twitter teaser of his titular tab-clearing tactic leaves many questions unanswered — only a portion of which are covered by the Department of Education's new StudentAid.gov/DebtRelief page (which has been intermittently down throughout the day of the announcement, no doubt due to much debtor demand for details). So, I've taken it upon myself to collect what we know about the final form of Biden's Student Debt Relief Plan plan, what we can guess about it, and some exploration of potential loopholes and "pro-tips" for folks looking to maximize their debt forgiveness. But first, a few disclaimers:

1. Throughout this post, I will be referring exclusively to federal student loans — privately-held student loans do not benefit from Biden's new forgiveness plan, nor do they benefit from the pause resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Nothing I write here should be construed as advice and you should consult a fiduciary before making big financial decisions.
3. There's already speculation about the fate of this plan if it is subject to an exsanguinating examination by our current conservative SCOTUS — please remember your obligatory grains of salt before proceeding further.

The Student Loan Repayment Pause

This is the most straightforward component of Biden's plan: perennially-renewed no more, the pause on student loan monthly payments and interest accumulation will come to an end after December of this year — meaning individuals in repayment will resume their monthly obligations starting in January of 2023. The pause in payments and interest began in March of 2020 in-step with the COVID-19 pandemic, and come December will have resulted in 34 months of deferred payments and null interest charges for over 40 million student loan borrowers across America.

The Student Loan Forgiveness Plan

This is where the complexities begin, in no small part due to the fact that President Biden hasn't actually signed (or even released!) his Executive Order — which means the fine print hasn't, err, been printed at all yet. All we know about the plan comes from various tweets, a few statements to a handful of news outlets, and two web pages: the aforementioned StudentAid.gov/DebtRelief, and this fact sheet released by the White House — not a lot to go off of when the difference is tens of thousands of dollars! Here's what we know (with links to the respective source):

• $10,000 in forgiveness to all borrowers, doubled to $20,000 if you received a Pell grant (StudentAid.gov/DebtRelief)
• Graduate loans and Parent PLUS loans are also eligible for $10,000 of forgiveness. Pell grants do not impact graduate loan forgiveness (Washington Post)
• Individual income must fall below $125,000 for individuals or $250,000 for married couples/head-of-household (StudentAid.gov/DebtRelief)
• Borrowers will be income-eligible if either their 2020 or 2021 income is below their respective cap (Washington Post)
• Forgiveness will be automatic for eligible individuals if the Department of Education has your income information on file (StudentAid.gov/DebtRelief)
• The application for forgiveness will open prior to loan payments resuming in January (White House Fact Sheet)
• Only loans originated prior to July 1st, 2022 are eligible for forgiveness (Washington Post)
• Any amount of student loan forgiveness you receive is not taxable (White House Fact Sheet)

While the White House — through both its pre-prepared webpages and via comments to various news orgs — has provided a good amount of insight into the plan specifics, there are still a few areas where we have to make assumptions. For example, the income cutoff never really specifies how income is being measured...but I think it is reasonable to assume they will compare your adjusted gross income to the cutoff levels, rather than your top-line gross income. In other words, if your salary is $130,000 you are still likely to qualify for debt forgiveness, since your AGI after the standard deduction would be $117,450 (based on 2021 tax parameters).

Unanswered questions still abound. For instance, how will the debt forgiveness be distributed to borrowers with more than one loan with different interest rates? Borrowers would be highly-motivated to prioritize a loan with a higher interest rate over a lower rate loan of equal principle — but no information is available yet as to how the forgiveness will consider varying interest rates. How this is handled could result in thousands of dollars of difference over the span of years for many borrowers. Also, how exactly will Parent PLUS loans be sorted out? It's been confirmed they are eligible for forgiveness...but does that mean an undergraduate student with, say, $10,000 in Stafford loans + $10,000 in Parent PLUS loans in their parent's name will essentially receive $20,000 in forgiveness? It's hard to say — by my reading of the details, that's how I expect the forgiveness to work; quite the boon to borrowers in this situation! However, the nitty-gritty of the forgiveness application is likely to iron this wrinkle flat. I also have some questions about the July 1st cutoff for loan origination — many students have signed their Master Promissory Note over the last few weeks, and have been therefore entirely excluded from the loan forgiveness portion of Biden's plan. Now, naturally, there needs to be some cutoff so folks don't take on more debt to work the system...but given it was announced on August 24th, I think August 31st may have been a more reasonable date. Serve those students who are just now taking on debt for their education, and still greatly minimize the risk of people taking on debt specifically with forgiveness in mind. We'll see if there is any wiggle-room on that cutoff date as specific Executive Order language emerges.

Changes to Income-Based Repayment Plans

President Biden also included some surprising and substantial revisions to the various Income-Based Repayment options available to most student loan borrowers. First-and-foremost, the maximum monthly payment under these plans has been reduced to 5% of discretionary income (which is less than your AGI, and therefore results in lower monthly payments than 5% of AGI) instead of the 10% maximum on previous income-driven repayment plans. This will effectively cut monthly payments in half for many borrowers — a change the Biden Administration projects will save the average borrower over $1,000 per year. Loans under income-based repayment plans will also be forgiven after 10 years instead of 20 years if their balances are under $12,000 — essentially a second round of student loan forgiveness resulting from this plan. The plan will also increase the floor for $0 monthly payments up to 225% of the federal poverty line — meaning many low-income borrowers can fulfill the requirements of IBR plans with $0 monthly payments. But, perhaps the most significant component of the changes to IBR plans also seems to be the least-mentioned: Borrowers making on-time payments under an income-based repayment plan will have their interest subsidized (read: fully-paid) for the duration of those eligible payments. This, in essence, is what many progressive activists have been campaigning for for years: reducing student loan interest rates to zero. Now, not all borrowers are eligible for income-based repayment...but the Department of Education states that "most" of borrowers are. This portion of the plan many be by-far the most impactful improvement of student loan policy since their inception — 0% interest rates for most borrowers.

Of course, there are caveats and questions circling this provision as well: first, there are a variety of income-driven repayment plans with a similar variety of eligibility criteria, eligible loans, and eligibility date cutoffs — I won't be breaking all of those down here, but naturally these criteria will be meaningful to many borrowers. And a related question remains unanswered: do these changes apply to all of the income-based repayment options? Some of them? Just the helpfully-named "Income Based Repayment Plan", a specific plan among "income-based repayment plans"? It's hard to say — it's possible the eligible borrowers is reduced greatly via restriction of these changes to a single type of IBR plan...but again, we'll only know for sure when the specifics of the Executive Order (as well as Department of Education policy) is released.

Voluntary COVID-Times Payments

One other wrinkle of this plan is the matter of voluntary payments made during the pause on payments and interest due to the COVID-19. When people hear about "loan forgiveness" and think of the payments they made that otherwise might have been forgiven, there's not much to do (other than be happy for the people who will be benefited by the plan). But voluntary payments made during the COVID pause may pose an opportunity for a select group of borrowers to recoup their now-needless contributions. The Associated Press summarizes nicely:

WHAT IF I’VE ALREADY PAID OFF MY STUDENT LOANS — WILL I SEE RELIEF?

The debt forgiveness is expected to apply only to those currently holding student debt. But if you’ve voluntarily made payments since March 2020, when payments were paused, you can request a refund for those payments, according to the Federal Office of Student Aid. Contact your loan servicer to request a refund.

In short: borrowers may (not "will", may) benefit from requesting a refund of their voluntary payments during the COVID pause if they meet the following criteria:

• Their loans are eligible for forgiveness under the plan, and the current balance is < $10,000
• They made voluntary payments toward their between March 13th, 2020 and now
• (Speculation) They have not fully paid off their loan during the COVID pause

If these criteria are met, you can request a refund of a specified amount from your servicer...bringing your loan total back to $10,000 (or $20,000 if you are a Pell grant recipient!)...which will then theoretically be forgiven under President Biden's plan. Essentially, you're converting your voluntary payments during COVID into forgiven debt instead. So if you made $3,000 in payments during COVID towards your $10,000 loan balance (bringing it down to $7,000), you could request a refund now that you know with reasonable certainty that your $10,000 loan will be forgiven — and use that $3,000 for something else! Of course, my final bullet point labeled "Speculation" may be crucial for some folks: if you've fully paid off your loan during COVID times, requesting a refund may result in the origination of a new loan...after the July 1st cutoff for forgiveness! Consult with your servicer very carefully if you fall into this bucket, because loans originated after July 1st will not be eligible for forgiveness!

In Summary

If you couldn't tell from my constant couching throughout this post, there is much to dissect about what we know — even this post is not fully-comprehensive! — and much we don't know at all yet about this debt forgiveness plan. Hopefully we get to see more of the fine print over the coming weeks, and the political bellwether continues to discourage any blockage resulting from conservative consternation. I'll end by summarizing this entire post as succinctly as I can:

• Up to $10k ($20k for Pell grantees) knocked off your loan balance
• $125k ($250k if married) income cap, likely the lower of 2020/2021 AGI
• Application will be open before EOY
• Cutoff date for forgivable loans is July 1st, 2022
• Loan payment pause ends in Dec 2022, payments resume Jan 2023
• Forgiveness is non-taxable
• Income-based repayment plan monthly payments cut in half (5% of discretionary income)
• On-time income-based repayments = 0% interest for eligible loans (!!)
• 10 years of IBR payments results in forgiveness (reduced from 20 years)
• Certain borrowers may benefit from asking for a refund of voluntary COVID-times loan payments

About four months ago my wife and I finally won a bid on a house in this horrendous market, and one of the first things to do in a new house is change the locks. It just so happens that the first deadbolt to support iOS 15's home key feature hit the market right around when we were set to close — the Schlage Encode Plus Smart Wifi Deadbolt. So, being the intrepid early adopter that I am, I ordered a few Encodes Plus to install in our new house and see if unlocking doors with just the tap of an iPhone or Apple Watch is as convenient as it sounds.

The Nuts and (Dead) Bolts

Like any high-end consumer deadbolt, the Schlage Encode Plus arrived well-packaged and complete with all the necessary finish hardware for a variety of door situations (though since it’s just a deadbolt, you’ll have to purchase a matching door knob/handle separately). We went with “Century” trim in the satin nickel finish, which looks pretty much like stainless steel. The exterior face of the lock is an aesthetically pleasing rectangle with the capacitive backlit keypad on the top half and a standard Schlage cylinder lock on the bottom half. The motor mechanism and all of the “smarts” of this smart lock (as well as the requisite 3x AA batteries) are situated within the inside-facing portion of the lock in a somewhat-attractive (if somewhat large) housing which also features a manual locking lever. Given that this is a high-end lock from a respected lock-making company, the stainless steel backplates, extra-long strike plate screws, internal storage of the tamper-vulnerable components, and a standard (read: “swappable”) 5-pin Schlage core all indicate that the lock will actually secure an entryway, regardless of your means of unlocking it...but I’ll leave it to the LockPickingLawyer to give a more thorough review of the lock’s physical security.

Installing the Encode Plus was a breeze — though I’ve replaced a few door handles and locks before.

The installation instructions were clear, and essentially follow the same steps as any run-of-the-mill deadbolt — just with an extra wire to route from the exterior-facing keypad through the steel backplate to the brains of the device ensconced in the internal housing. Interestingly, one of the wrinkles of installing a typical deadbolt is actually removed by the Encode Plus: depending on which side of the door your existing lock is on, most deadbolts require an “inversion” step so you don’t have to mount the housing upside down on left-opening or right-opening doors. I was flummoxed when I couldn’t figure out how to “flip” the lock for my opposite-facing door…until I discovered that this is all handled in the locks start-up procedure, which simply ‌detects what direction it’s facing and adjusts the internal mechanism accordingly. This may be a common feature in all smart locks, but since this is the first one I’ve ever installed I was nonetheless delighted by the cleverness. As for setting the lock up via HomeKit, Schlage made it easy by placing the typical HomeKit QR code/NFC scanner inside of the internal housing for easy (authorized) access.

The internal housing of the Schlage Encode Plus…

…and the external capacitive keypad (which illuminates on first-touch).

A Lock Picked for HomeKit

The Schlage Encode Plus can be unlocked by entering user-designated access codes into the 10-digit keypad (up to 100 access codes can be active at a time), via a tap of a button in the Home app or through any number of HomeKit automations, by tapping the NFC chip in your iPhone or Apple Watch against the face of the lock, or by using an actual physical key. I'm of the opinion that the variety of access options is the biggest selling feature of the Encode Plus — the last thing I want is an entirely-electronic deadbolt's mechanism or batteries to fail on me when I'm trying to get into my house. Other brands have solutions for this of course, like Yale's 9V battery contact pads to provide temporary emergency power to its Assure series of locks...but honestly, having an actual key on my keychain seems far more reassuring to me. And of course, the inclusion of a numeric keypad allows the homeowner to set up temporary or permanent access codes to non-keyholders like extended family members, children, or anyone else you want to provide access to your home. All of the Encode Plus’s features, from access codes to automations, can be managed either in the Schlage Home app or entirely via HomeKit. I opted for the latter, as running this Thread-enabled deadbolt exclusively via HomeKit extends the device's battery life to a full year, according to Schlage. As I write this, even after over three months of extensive use of multiple Encodes Plus they are all sitting at 94% battery life — if that trajectory keeps up they might last four years instead of the one year advertised by Schlage.

I was initially worried about the use of standard AA batteries, but sitting at 94% after four months of use is quite impressive.

Beyond the battery life boost, I feel like this lock is specifically designed to work best when used exclusively with HomeKit — after all, its defining feature is support for Apple’s new Home Key functionality, which requires HomeKit integration to use. The Schlage Encode Plus is essentially a premium deadbolt designed specifically for people deeply-entrenched in The Apple Ecosystem™️, and the more entrenched you are the better your experience with this lock will be. Do you just have an iPhone and want to be able to lock your door from afar with the press of a button? Easily accomplished, though certainly not unique to the Encode Plus. Want to configure automations in HomeKit to lock your doors when everyone leaves the house? Piece of cake, and a pretty nice quality of life improvement. But the real magic of the Encode Plus is using an iPhone — and especially an Apple Watch — to unlock your doors via NFC. Once you’ve configured your phone or watch in HomeKit with a home key in your Apple Wallet — and enabled “Express Mode” to allow your phone to automatically authenticate, no FaceID required — you simply tap the top of your phone (or the face of an NFC-enabled Apple Watch) to the NFC reader on the Encode Plus…and it unlocks. Fast — like really fast. Honestly, the NFC unlock process finishes significantly faster than even unlocking the door via a button in Home Kit or asking Siri — let alone the true baseline comparison of rummaging in my pockets for keys, finding the right key, inserting and turning the core. I'm shocked at how effectively the Encode Plus (combined with lots of work-from-home) has essentially eliminated the very concept of keys from my life — a weight on my mind I did not notice until I was relieved of it.

Unlocking the Encode Plus with an NFC-enabled Apple Watch is simple and snappy — though some collision with door jams is inevitable.

Locked-In and Loving It

The Schlage Encode Plus has quickly become my absolute-favorite smart home accessory — thanks in large part to how little I have to think about it. Honestly, my belated review of a product I’ve had and used for four months is just indicative to me of its excellence — it has never failed me or annoyed me or bothered me in any way that would bring it to the forefront of my attention (or my writing priorities). It has seamlessly integrated into our lives, entirely eliminated a daily source of annoyance (the very concept of keys), and did so in a subtle and understated way so as to cause no friction whatsoever. My collection of Wemo outlets need a reboot from time to time, my HomePods mini and Siri itself still regularly fumble requests, but these locks have not had so much as a single blip. No annoying on-boarding process, no teaching the less tech-savvy member of my household complicated Siri incantations, and not a single hiccup or drop-out — just “Wrist-bend and Enter”.

That said, the convenience comes at a cost: The Encode Plus retails for $299 (again, without a door knob/handle — just the deadbolt), which is pretty steep compared to a standard deadbolt, but fairly in-line with what other smart locks from reputable retailers are going for. Given the many added niceties of the Encode Plus vs say the Yale Assure Deadbolt ($289, and no Home Key!), I think folks already shopping for a high-end home lock shouldn't balk at the price — after all, I bought three and they've been worth every penny.

The Encode Plus has been out-of-stock since it soft-launched in March, but rumor has it that a restock is on the horizon for the next week or so — your best bet to snag one is to sign up for alerts at the various retailers that sell it via Schlage's product page. At time of writing, this is the only Home Key-compatible lock on the market in the United States (Aquara has the only other Home Key lock for sale, but only for international buyers), so if you're like me and want the best smart lock experience available in the Apple ecosystem, jump on the next restock as quickly as you can.

My brother accidentally discovered a handy Siri trick this week while dealing with car insurance in the aftermath of a hail storm. When it came time for him to call 1-800-PROGRESSIVE and figure out his claim, for whatever reason he decide to say "Hey Siri, call 1-800-PROGRESSIVE" instead of dialing by hand...and it worked like a charm.*

Turns out, Siri can natively convert vanity phone numbers (or "phonewords") into their appropriate digits and make the phone call with no need to dust off your T9 texting talent. Need to call 1-800-FLOWERS or 1-800-CONTACTS, but can’t see those tiny letters without your contacts? Siri has you covered. And to be sure that it wasn't just Siri pulling the web results for notable brands, I asked Siri to call a few random 7-digit 1-800 numbers (like 1-800-ACTUARY and 1-800-SUNFISH) with each one working just as well as any major company's vanity digits.

Naturally, Siri still manages to drop the call ball in certain edge-cases; when I asked to call 877-CASH-NOW, Siri instead dialed 877-2274...immediately. Similarly, 877-KARS4KIDS failed to go through — this time throwing up an unhelpful "Sorry, you'll need to open the Phone app" alert. I assume that the interstitial 4 throws off whatever word recognition is going on here. Even so (like so many of Siri’s uses), the 70% success rate is still pretty handy when you need it.

* Attentive readers will note that "1-800-PROGRESSIVE" does not map neatly onto Progressive's customer service number of 1-800-776-4737, being well over seven digits. It turns out, the phone system natively truncates numbers in excess of 11 digits (including the +1 country code), ignoring any characters entered afterwards — neat!