I Probably Shouldn't Have Bought The AirPods Pro Max

I'm starting to hate my Airpods Pro Max headset.

Most of the time, when I need it, I can't get a good connection.  It's buggy as hell.  I'm so tired of having to reset the headset, only for it to still not get a connection.  I shouldn't have to remove the ear cups from the head harness just to clean the connections EVERY TIME I NEED THEM.

And when I do get a connection, it's like it's a half connection.  When this happens, I can't enable ANC or adjust the volume.

And the ear cushions are a pain in the ass, too.  They need to be cleaned.  A LOT.  If you don't clean them, they start smelling funky.  In fact, I bought a new set, as the smell wouldn't come out of the original cushions.

I've also been seeing a lot of moisture inside the ear cups, under the ear cushions.  I'm not sure if that's causing the connectivity issues, but I've removed the cushions and wiped the insides with a Kleenex and the internals were moist enough to where the Kleenex was soaked.

I'm on the edge of deciding to ask for warranty support (I've not owned them a year yet, and I've AC+).

After they fix it, I think I'm going to sell them and get something nice but non-Apple.

It's a pity, because, when they work, they're outstanding.  WHEN THEY WORK.  They're more broken than used.  So many folks complain on subreddits about the exact same issues.

This is disappointing, because prior to this, I'd bought a set of Beats Studio Pros...they had durability issues - they just started falling apart, but at least they never failed to work.  I still have them, too...last I checked, they were still working.

If you're thinking of buying a Max headset, DON'T DO IT. 

Added Cockpit to Ubuntu 25.10 on the Pi 500+

Today, I wanted to add Cockpit to the Pi 500+ Ubuntu install, but I didn't want to sit at the desk where I'd placed the keyboard.

When I tried to ssh into the Pi, I kept getting connection refusals, which I thought was odd.  I ended up having to spend some time at the Pi keyboard, investigating why I couldn't connect to it on port 22.

I found out that I'd never installed ssh!  I could've sworn I did, but maybe it was the Pi OS install that I installed it.

So, after I installed it, I installed Cockpit (I wanted to try it instead of using WebMin).  I then found that, after the install, when logged into Cockpit, it was only allowing my user limited administrator access.  It gave the option to gain full admin privileges, but when I clicked it, it gave an error that sudo couldn't be leveraged to escalate privileges.  When I googled that error, I found that one of the suggested fixes was to add your user to the wheel group.  My Pi didn't have a wheel group, so I had to create one.  Once I created the wheel group, I had to add my user to that group.  

I then double-checked my research and found a link to a Cockpit bug report of this exact issue back in October 2025.  The issue was that sudo was recently redeveloped in Rust code, and apparently does not support the --askpass flag, which is used by Cockpit.  The fix is to run the following (it's the non-Rust sudo implementation, which is still available):  

# update-alternatives --set sudo /usr/bin/sudo.ws

Now, I've Ubuntu all over the house on various machines, most of them running Cockpit.  I've not seen this issue before, and I've done a bunch of recent installs of Ubuntu 25.10.  In fact, I installed Cockpit on my docker container host, today.  It didn't exhibit this issue/bug.  I'm wondering why I'm only now seeing it.  I'm glad there's a workaround, though.