Workaround for Withings and Apple Health not playing nicely together

I recently bought a Withings Body Smart scale, it’s a great device, all the features I was wanting (and then some) and it looks slick too.

I was looking forward to seeing the metrics/measurements from it appear in Apple Health, but found out that this doesn’t “just happen” like I’d hoped and expected, as they don’t integrate well – I think that’s due to Apple restrictions rahter than a lack of effort from Withings, but not 100% sure on that.

It appears you need to open the Withings App and then it will sync your data to the Apple Health app. That’s a PITA and not at all what I was looking for.

The following is a yicky workaround and not a solution – if anyone has or finds a better way, please do let me know!

Until then, my approach is to create an Apple Shortcut that opens the Withings app, waits a second, then opens and switches to Apple Health. After a few seconds the new readings appear in Apple Health – far from ideal, but I prefer this one irritation to opening two apps.

The Shortcut looks like this:

When done, I created a bookmark on the Home Screen that looks like this (the “WiHealth” icon):

I’d love a better solution though… !

Firefox on Mac issue – finally fixed!

This one caused me some grief for the last few weeks, thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else…

Firefox is my prefered browser on Mac, it’s setup with all my passwords, bookmarks, extensions etc and I use Chrome for work, so when it stopped loading and started crashing for no good reason it was VERY annoying. Couldn’t find any cure for it, little mention of issues and nothing more helpful than the usual: update it, restart, disable extensions, clear your profile, reinstall etc etc.

The issue being that Firefox would hang on startup – nothing would load, not even the basic home page, and I had to force-restart the browser on a regular basis until it would eventually decide to work like nomal again…. ARGH!

The solution to my issue was to disable support for HTTP3. That’s very easily done and has completely fixed things on my Mac (in this case it’s an iMac Retina 5k, 27-inch with macOS Monterey).

Here’s how – it takes 5 seconds + a restart.

enter “about:config” in the address bar and then hit the “Accept the Risk and Continue” button…

filter the settings for “http3” via the search bar, click on the bottom right icon seen in this pic to change the value from true to false:

so that it loks like this:

then just restart the browser and if you had the same issue as me, it should now be sorted! Happy surfing.

Update: There is a some more detailed info here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908
incluing reports that disabling all of the data collection features may solve this (without the HTTP3 disabling update). Looks like this has been around for a while but only started affecting me a couple of weeks ago, and was hard to debug as there’s no obvious/searchable error message.

Kodi on Apple TV 4k 2nd Gen

Intro

Notes on installing Kodi on a new Apple TV 4K (2nd generation). This didn’t go smoothly and it needs redone/updated anually when the certificate expires. If the solution I came up with also works for you, please let me know.

The Kodi Wiki HOW-TO here explains the steps in detail

I followed the steps as closely as I could, but it didn’t work for me. Here’s a note of the diagnostic steps I took, and the changes I made to get it installed and working successfully…

Problems & error messages

The process appeared to go well up until the point of installing the newly built and freshly signed ipa on the target device, but after a minute or two the XCode deploy step ended with a generic “Unable to install” followed by the name of the package was I was trying to deploy (and I tried quite a few!).

Example error messages:
Unable to install "kodi-20210422-3a7c0f50-master-tvos"
Unable to install "org.xbmc.kodi-tvos_19.1-0-tvos"

After clicking OK the process ended with no further info, so I went to look for some logs in XCode -> Windows -> Devices & Simulators -> “Open Console“:

then in the Console selected Devices (on the left), then my AppleTV from the list on the left, and narrowed things down by filtering for “Errors & Faults“.

I could then see that each attempted deploy had resulted in an error log entry like this:

Failed to install application at <~~~> : Error Domain=MIInstallerErrorDomain Code=37 "<~~~>" UserInfo={LegacyErrorString=<~~~>, FunctionName=<~~~>, SourceFileLine=652, NSLocalizedDescription=<~~~>}

This is the full original message – I haven’t taken out my details and replaced them with <—> or anything, there was just exactly the above: interesting elements being an installer error, code=37 and reference to line 652 in some source file… not a lot to go on.

There were no good hits from a search on this message at the time, and the few roughly related suggestions were where there was a mismatch between the deployment target version and the built application – e.g. when the app was built for a specific iPad version, but deployed to a later version. No good match and nothing obviously helpful.

What worked for me

I think it took a combination of two things to get this working for me.

The first thing was using an older version of the iOS App Signer application (details and link below) to sign my newly generated ipa file, while I was trying to replicate the steps from other guides as closely as possible.

The other thing I did just before that which seems to have contributed was to deploy the sample example “Hello World” XCode project to my device from XCode first, then was able to deploy the Kodi ipa (signed with the older App Signer), and it then “just worked”, after many failures.

Verification
I have recently deleted Kodi from  my device and tried to add the same singed Kodi ipa again - resulting in "Unable to install". 

After deploying the example app first, I was then able to replace it with the same signed Kodi ipa without issues.
iOS App Signer

Following the guide, I had originally downloaded and used the latest available version – 1.13.1 at the time – with no joy, but getting the older Version 1.7 (r17) worked for me with these settings:

These are the same settings I used when (unsucessfully) trying to sign with the latest version of the app.

Deploy XCode project to Apple TV

While trying to verify connectivity and permissions and rule some things out, I tried to deploy the sample project from XCode to my Apple TV. This was done by selecting my physical device (as opposed to the default emulator) as the deployment target, then building & deploying the “Hello world” project.

This worked and I could see a new application appear on my Apple TV home screen – when clicked in the Apple TV Menu page, it said Hello World, as you’d expect…

I could now see this application on the Installed Apps page for my device in XCode. When I then attempted to deploy the signed Kodi IPA I’d built, signed with the older iOS App Signer, this was replaced with Kodi and it now works as expected.

It would be great to know if both of these steps are required, or if just one of them was all that was needed. If you are hitting the same issue please let me know what works for you – deploying an initial test app then using the latest iOS App Signer, or not deploying the test app and using the older iOS App Signer version, perhaps?

Links

The older version of app signer I used was:

https://github.com/DanTheMan827/ios-app-signer/releases/download/r17/iOS.App.Signer.app.zip

and the deb file I used was org.xbmc.kodi-tvos_19.1-0-tvos.deb from:

https://mirrors.kodi.tv/releases/darwin/tvos/org.xbmc.kodi-tvos_19.1-0-tvos.deb

the end result is a happy Kodi install on my new Applt TV 4k 2nd Gen:

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