In September 2025, we looked at virtual machines on the Macintosh. The demonstration used Parallels (https://parallels.com/) for virtualization, and at one time or another we saw the built-in Unix operating system under macOS, and under Parallels, we saw Windows 10, Windows 11, Ubuntu Linux working under Windows 11, and Ubuntu Linux running by itself on Parallels on the Mac. There was also an extensive Q&A session covering home internet service, recording sound on an iPhone, and several other topics.
About the Question and Answer session: at one point, Lawrence was asked if the new Phone app on macOS 26 is also on the iPad under iPadOS 26. Lawrence said he didn’t know, but didn’t think so. Lawrence was wrong: the Phone app is available on iPadOS 26.
It was a very busy meeting.
Video recording of the September 2025 SMUG meeting
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Transcript of the September 2025 SMUG meeting
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18:33:09 I have turned on recording.
18:33:11 I have a note to do that, and I've turned on closed captioning.
18:33:16 So, with luck, we'll actually have a transcript of…
18:33:19 what we're talking about tonight.
18:33:22 And, um, we're gonna start off with a question and answer about anything except baseball. Well, not anything, but we're not going to talk about baseball anymore.
18:33:32 May I ask a technique question in videoing?
18:33:36 Sure.
18:33:38 How do you stop… what's the best way to block wind noise?
18:33:43 If you're using an iPhone.
18:33:45 The best way to block wind noise is to use an external microphone. There are microphones that are designed to plug into
18:33:52 the, um, iPhone, and you can also get wireless ones.
18:33:56 And those little styrofoam…
18:34:00 black mushroom things that just stick over the…
18:34:03 microphone, that's the best way to block wind noise.
18:34:06 It's inelegant, and it requires extra equipment, but there's really no other way.
18:34:14 Um, every time I…
18:34:16 take a ferry ride, and I'm out taking video of the… of Mount Rainier, or of Victoria, wherever it is we happen to be going.
18:34:25 I jokingly refer to it as the win song.
18:34:30 Because that's the only thing you can actually hear, is the…
18:34:35 when, uh, crossing the boat.
18:34:37 But there's really no other way to
18:34:40 there's really no other way to block it. What it does on an electronic
18:34:46 Electrical level.
18:34:49 It just breaks up the wind, and it creates noise, but it's not the same kind of noise.
18:34:56 So the noise is still there, but it lessens it, and it breaks it up, which is why it works.
18:35:02 It also works if someone's speaking and they have a whole bunch of
18:35:06 plosive sounds, or a bunch of sibilant S's, it helps
18:35:10 with that as well.
18:35:11 Well, when you say external mic…
18:35:15 Uh, I've got a little lavalier mic that's…
18:35:18 You know, you have to charge it, but I… I don't think it would last long enough.
18:35:23 I don't think the charge would last long enough. It would have to last for, like,
18:35:28 8 hours.
18:35:29 8 hours?
18:35:30 Well, the last hike we went on, we left at 7 in the morning, and we didn't get back until 5 in the evening.
18:35:38 Now, I wasn't filming all that time, but I was filming for…
18:35:41 Between 8 and the… between 8 a.m. in the morning and 4 in the afternoon.
18:35:46 Well, there might be somebody that has one that, um…
18:35:50 that you can plug into something like an external battery pack, like you use for…
18:35:55 iPhones or something. I don't really know. My most experience with that is
18:36:00 Doing short little clips
18:36:04 Well, I'm wearing my Noah shirt today.
18:36:06 at NOAA, one of the things we developed was a video kiosk. We called it, uh, what was it called?
18:36:12 Ocean kiosks is what we called it.
18:36:14 And there was a website, and as well as kiosks that at some of our field sites.
18:36:19 Where you could press a button, and it would show you dolphins, or press another one, and it would talk about tides, and so on and so forth.
18:36:27 So we'd film these, like, 3-5 minute…
18:36:30 films, um, at the ocean, and the ocean is noisy, and the way around that was, um, to use the, uh…
18:36:40 Um, uh, I don't remember what they call those little…
18:36:43 Styrofoam mushrooms… they're not Styrofoam, foam mushrooms.
18:36:46 But they fit over the microphone, it cuts down on the wind noise quite a bit.
18:36:50 The other way we did it, which is… requires more work, is we go to the ocean and we do whatever we were doing, and we come back and the sound wasn't good, and we do overdubbing. But then you have to actually time what you're saying
18:37:06 to the film, and if you don't, it looks like you're dubbing in a foreign language, which can be funny,
18:37:13 But it kind of defeated the purpose of what we were doing for education. And these were things that were only 3 to 5 minutes. Believe it or not, for a…
18:37:22 For a science agency to get a 3-5 minute film sometime would take several weeks, and
18:37:27 And a couple dozen people, because the informational Quality Act says it has to be unbiased, complete, accurate, science-based, uh, data-driven, a whole bunch of things.
18:37:40 And so we'd have to have a whole bunch of people who would take our…
18:37:45 video and explain what it was in a way that was accurate, and then…
18:37:50 We also had to follow the Plain Language Act and have it intelligible to normal human beings with
18:37:57 Our standard was an 8th grade education. So…
18:38:00 we couldn't… we sometimes, like, for example, describing GPS,
18:38:06 with… to people with an 8th grade education, I assure you, is a real challenge.
18:38:11 Um, but that's what we did, and that's why sometimes these 3-5 minute films will take 2 weeks to make.
18:38:18 Well, if anybody has any suggestions about what brand of…
18:38:23 you know, microphone and battery pack and so on, because I've…
18:38:26 Part of the problem, if I'm hiking, is that…
18:38:30 You know, if I try to clip a lavalier mic on, a backpack can knock it off, and I wouldn't…
18:38:35 I might not know it, so I'd have to have something that I could secure to…
18:38:40 me, somehow.
18:38:42 would fit in the phone.
18:38:44 What you might… you might do is just…
18:38:48 go out and get crowdsourced opinions, because there are a lot of people who do that sort of thing. They narrate their hikes, or they narrate their fishing trips, or…
18:38:56 Whatever the heck they're doing, and they encounter this, and I… I… I have seen…
18:39:02 Um, YouTube videos on how to do this. I just don't… it's not something I paid attention to,
18:39:08 like, 8 years, um, because it's not something I do anymore.
18:39:12 But, um, there are a lot of people out there doing this sort of stuff.
18:39:16 And, um, there are some…
18:39:21 battery-powered microphones that…
18:39:23 work with Bluetooth. Bluetooth microphones I don't normally recommend because there's too many ways to have interference, but
18:39:31 If you're hiking, that Bluetooth microphone's only going to be a couple feet from
18:39:37 The recording device, so it shouldn't be that bad a problem, but I would just… I would just look around.
18:39:44 Um, B&H Video, uh, which is a company on the East Coast, has a huge line of things like this.
18:39:51 Um, and uh, Amazon… the trouble with Amazon
18:39:55 is that a lot of the stuff you have is no-name brands, and it's hard to tell
18:40:01 what's real. Like, this one, um…
18:40:04 this one brand of… I can't remember what it was I was buying, but it cracked me up. They said that they'd sold hundreds in the past couple weeks, but according to my…
18:40:15 microphone… Amazon's own little, um…
18:40:19 odometer there. They'd sold something like 18,
18:40:23 And, uh, they had, uh, three,
18:40:26 five-star reviews, and that was it. So, um, doesn't expire too much, uh, confidence.
18:40:32 But, um, B&H Video is a good place. There's another one called Sweetwater that does,
18:40:40 electronics that are used by bands, but also by churches, and…
18:40:45 So, uh… they have a…
18:40:50 they have good… both of these have good reputations.
18:40:53 Okay, thank you.
18:40:57 Any other questions?
18:41:01 Yes. But Paul, you need to turn on your microphone.
18:41:09 Good.
18:41:08 You also have to… what does the V stand for?
18:41:11 Victor.
18:41:13 Victor, which is…
18:41:16 kind of my first name, Lawrence, is also…
18:41:20 Laurel.
18:41:20 Yeah, I use that because there's other Paul Hansons around, so I try to distinguish myself from other people.
18:41:27 He's never been to Minnesota, their Hansons all over the place.
18:41:30 Oh my god, yeah, yeah, that's… that's Scandinavian there.
18:41:34 Anyway, my question.
18:41:36 In the morning,
18:41:39 Um, when I…
18:41:41 Log on, uh…
18:41:43 try to check my email and the news and stuff, sort of through the internet.
18:41:48 Oftentimes, the phone is really slow.
18:41:52 And, in fact, sometimes it says, not connected to the internet.
18:41:56 your phone?
18:41:59 Your phone, you said?
18:41:58 Pardon? Yeah, my iPhone.
18:42:02 And, uh,
18:42:04 I've found that sometimes if I turn it off,
18:42:06 And turn them back on again, it seems to work better.
18:42:10 Um… and I'm wondering, is that an issue with the phone, or is it just my imagination, and…
18:42:17 And because their bandwidth here is, you know, I'm with CenturyLink, and it's kind of…
18:42:22 marginal, and they're wondering if there's a lot of people that are using it in the morning, and it just kind of overloads the whole thing.
18:42:29 Um, it's unlikely to be that. I will tell you that, um…
18:42:34 CenturyLink…
18:42:35 I like to make fun of it. My mother had CenturyLink, and I used to tell people that they… they were used to…
18:42:42 telecommunications from the previous century, but they weren't our 21st century link, they were only at 20th century, uh, link.
18:42:50 Um, our church had CenturyLink, we got a maximum throughput on the internet of 70K.
18:42:58 Um, which…
18:43:01 That's dial-up speed, if you remember the days of dial-up modems, so…
18:43:05 Oh my god, yeah.
18:43:06 Um, CenturyLink is… I would put it on dead last of places around here that I'd, uh, went to have, uh…
18:43:13 for internet.
18:43:14 Well, I'm looking to change, but…
18:43:15 But on your phone,
18:43:18 Unless you're using… well, is your phone set up so it will use Wi-Fi instead of cell when you're in your home?
18:43:27 Yeah.
18:43:28 I will tell you that you should experiment with turning that off.
18:43:33 Oh.
18:43:33 quite often, if you're on… if you're on, uh…
18:43:38 a local area network that has poor throughput, and that is kind of CenturyLink's standard.
18:43:46 you'll get better, um… you'll get better response if you just turn it off, and you go direct… talk directly to cell tower. Now, where I am, I have, uh, Verizon on my phone,
18:43:57 And Verizon doesn't work in my home.
18:44:00 So I use the Wi-Fi in order for my phone to work at all.
18:44:04 But if I wander around in town, it's fine.
18:44:07 Okay.
18:44:07 Uh, so I use… but I have, um, wave cable.
18:44:11 at home, and I use that as my…
18:44:15 my phone link when I'm at home. And that works quite well, but if you have terrible Wi-Fi,
18:44:22 You're sometimes better off just turning it on to the cell. The other things to think about, if your phone is old,
18:44:30 Uh, some of the older phones have trouble waking up, so you mentioned that this problem was a problem in the morning.
18:44:38 your phone, when you put it to… when you… I charge my phone at night.
18:44:42 And when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is log in. If you don't log in, it'll stay asleep, and so then when you start to… when you wake it up, it still might be in the process of waking up, especially if it…
18:44:57 Yeah, well…
18:44:54 It's an older phone with an older battery. Because it goes into that deep sleep in order to preserve the battery. But it also means that it wakes up slow.
18:45:04 Okay, it's about a year and a half old, it's a…
18:45:07 Oh, that's not a problem, then. That's not the problem.
18:45:08 Yeah, it's a… it's a…
18:45:11 iPhone 13, I believe, so…
18:45:13 Uh, that's actually about 3 years, or 3 or 4 years old, but be there as it may. That shouldn't be the problem. It's probably your Wi-Fi.
18:45:21 Um, I know that, um, when I'm downtown some places, like out at Carrie Blake,
18:45:28 I'm better off just taking over-the-air cell service than I am…
18:45:32 trying to use anybody's Wi-Fi.
18:45:36 Um…
18:45:36 Okay? So, well, although the, uh, you know, it's got the little, little…
18:45:43 icon thing that shows you how many…
18:45:45 How your Wi-Fi is and how your phone is, and oftentimes, I've got
18:45:49 two or three bars on the Wi-Fi, and only one bar on the phone, so…
18:45:53 Well, here's the… here's the… here's the thing that… think about, though.
18:45:57 The wife… the little bars you get from the Wi-Fi mean that in that house, you can talk to your Wi-Fi.
18:46:03 at good speed, doesn't mean your house is talking to the rest of the world.
18:46:07 Right, that's what I was wondering, yeah.
18:46:08 You'll see a lot of… you'll see a lot of people who say, you know, you can get 10 gigs worth of…
18:46:12 of speed at home. Yeah, but if you got a 70K pipe out to the outside world,
18:46:19 You're only going to get $70K.
18:46:21 Yeah, yeah. Well, so what is the speed that… that…
18:46:24 I should look for? What's a reasonable speed that I should be, uh…
18:46:29 Well,
18:46:28 or anybody should be looking at.
18:46:30 There are some places in swim that have, uh, fiber, and it's gig fiber.
18:46:36 Oh, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, I'm talking…
18:46:38 But that's…
18:46:39 Yeah.
18:46:40 But that's… that's in Scrum. I don't live in SWIM.
18:46:43 Yeah.
18:46:43 Um, the wave that I pay for, it's supposed to be gig down,
18:46:48 But it's only 20 or 30 megs up.
18:46:51 Which, for most people, would be fantastic, but given the kind of things that I do, I find it extremely limiting. When I was living in Maryland, I had gigged down and gig up.
18:47:02 And at work, because I work for NOAA, I had…
18:47:05 Yeah.
18:47:06 100 gigs down and 100 gigs up.
18:47:09 Um, but, um, I work…
18:47:09 Yeah. So, what… what can we expect from…
18:47:14 Or what would be something that I should…
18:47:16 should strive for when I'm looking for other
18:47:19 other sources.
18:47:21 That's really hard to say, because it depends greatly on where you are. My church, for example,
18:47:27 Uh, was on CenturyLink, and they had this…
18:47:31 terrible 70K, and we wanted to see if we could hook it into Wave Cable,
18:47:35 and Wave Cable ended at the street, which was, oh…
18:47:41 a football field away, and they said to patch them into wave, it would cost
18:47:46 $10,000 to dig a trench.
18:47:49 And the church said,
18:47:52 Yeah.
18:47:52 And so we went with, uh, Century… not with CenturyLink, we went with OlePen. And we have a microwave link, not a cable,
18:48:01 A microwave link from our church to this building on the other side of Washington, and that's, um…
18:48:09 100 megabit both way.
18:48:11 link, which was a huge step up. So, you know, the church is happy. But it depends a lot on where you're located, and…
18:48:19 Because we have mountains and trees, and we're nowhere near Seattle or any other big place,
18:48:26 It can vary just within a block in terms of what is available.
18:48:31 Um…
18:48:34 I don't have… I don't have a recommendation.
18:48:38 Wave cable is the biggest provider around here. Some people have, um…
18:48:42 Wi-Fi, uh…
18:48:46 internet, where they buy this box, and the box is about, oh, it's a… oh, it's about the size of a bread box, if you know what a bread box is. It's got an antenna on it.
18:48:54 And it gets a cell signal to your home, and then it provides Wi-Fi for your entire home.
18:49:00 But you have to be really near a tower, and T-Mobile does that, and Verizon does that, and AT&T does that, but
18:49:10 where you are, that could be a complete non-starter. You could just get absolutely nothing at all.
18:49:17 Yeah.
18:49:16 So it depends a lot. It doesn't depend a lot. It depends entirely on where you are.
18:49:22 In Seattle, it's very easy to get fiber almost anywhere.
18:49:26 In Bellevue, it's very easy to get fiber almost anywhere. Um, and fiber's the best because
18:49:31 Of course.
18:49:36 Yeah.
18:49:32 Unlike wireless Wi-Fi, it's also secure. There's no way to tap into it. Uh, with Wi-Fi, people can steal the signal.
18:49:40 Um, and, and basically spy on you. But around here, your choices are very limited.
18:49:48 Um, and I know some people have DISH,
18:49:52 Um, and dish sounds great, you just point this dish up into the sky, and you've got internet.
18:49:58 The trouble is, that's good only for download. When the transmitting upload quite often is over your phone line.
18:50:05 So, the upload speed can be just terrible.
18:50:08 It could take you all day to send a picture of your granddaughter to…
18:50:13 your aunt or something.
18:50:14 Yeah.
18:50:15 Okay?
18:50:15 So it just depends a lot on where you are. There's no…
18:50:18 There's no, um…
18:50:21 I don't have an answer for you.
18:50:23 Yeah, well, you know, there's a thing you can go on, uh…
18:50:28 And it will… it will interrogate your system and tell you how fast it is, going in and out.
18:50:33 I think that's…
18:50:34 Oh, there are lots of… there were lots of things like that.
18:50:36 Yeah. But, so, so what sort of speed do I… do I strive for? You said something about a gig?
18:50:42 Um, well, a gig… you have to remember that I actually build web… I used to build websites for a living, and even though I don't do that anymore,
18:50:49 Um, I'm still kind of addicted to the kind of access I had.
18:50:54 Yeah.
18:50:54 Um, to get a streaming video download,
18:50:58 You need probably at least, uh, 20, 30 megs.
18:51:03 Okay.
18:51:02 to get streaming video up,
18:51:06 You're… you don't really want to go too much below 10.
18:51:10 Okay.
18:51:11 And so I would have that as a ballpark. But again, where you are located, that may not be possible.
18:51:17 Right.
18:51:17 I have a friend who lives out on, uh, off of Palo Alto, and…
18:51:23 Um, she's lucky if she can get text messages.
18:51:28 Um…
18:51:28 Yeah, no, we're… you know, our text works pretty good, and…
18:51:32 All right.
18:51:33 Text messages is the low… is the low-hanging flute.
18:51:35 Yeah, yeah.
18:51:36 You can get text messages even if your phone won't, uh…
18:51:40 allow you to send calls.
18:51:40 Yeah, I know, yeah. We do that in the mountains sometimes, yeah.
18:51:44 Yeah, because it requires the least amount of bandwidth, which is why it was a real rip-off when they charged you 10 cents per message.
18:51:50 Because it's the cheapest thing they do. It was basically, it was free money for them. But, um…
18:51:57 Um, it just depends on your location, and you can be literally a block away from somebody else,
18:52:03 who has fine access, and you can't get it.
18:52:10 Yeah.
18:52:08 Yeah. All right, well, that will give me something to shoot for. Good, thank you.
18:52:13 Carol, you were gonna say something?
18:52:16 I had, uh…
18:52:18 rebars, ordinarily sometimes four.
18:52:21 And I had 2 bars, and I couldn't make a call anywhere.
18:52:26 Yes, that's possible.
18:52:29 I couldn't… it would just…
18:52:32 It may start or ring, and then it would just spin.
18:52:35 Yeah, that's… that's entirely possible.
18:52:38 Um, I was really surprised one day, I was in Silverdale,
18:52:42 And, uh, somebody called me on the phone, I just happened to glance at the connectivity, and instead I had 5G, and I was just so excited,
18:52:51 Ooh!
18:52:52 I have this fast internet in a place that I really don't care, but, um, it still excited me. Yes, you some…
18:53:00 That indication is sort of like…
18:53:03 If you've… if you've updated your… if you've updated your computer and you see that thermometer bar, and it says,
18:53:08 It's 5 minutes less, uh, 5 minutes or less until it's finished. That's highly inaccurate, and so are those little bars.
18:53:19 They're basically reassurance bars, they're not really an accurate measure.
18:53:25 Well, I know we had our…
18:53:28 TV was going out, we have…
18:53:33 Not DISH, we have direct TV.
18:53:36 And they had to move.
18:53:38 the…
18:53:41 the dish, the receiver,
18:53:45 from the east side of the house, because the next-door neighbor's trees…
18:53:50 We're blocking the satellite.
18:53:52 bit to the west side of the house.
18:53:54 And now we have TV.
18:53:56 Yeah, that's not at least been unusual.
18:54:00 The, um… when… one of the things that I learned a lot about at NOAA was GPS.
18:54:07 And GPS without correction at the equator is good… the accuracy is good for about half a kilometer.
18:54:15 Which means that you'll have this circle around you of a half a kilometer, and that's the accuracy. When the farther north you go, or the farther south you go, the farther from the equator, the less accurate it is.
18:54:28 And that's because the GPS satellites circle the equator. They're geostationary.
18:54:33 Huh?
18:54:33 And to get a decent lock, you need to… you have to have at least 3 to 5 satellites that you…
18:54:39 get a signal from, and then it measures the timing from those satellites to figure out where you are.
18:54:44 That's how it works.
18:54:46 In order to improve the accuracy, my agency, National Ocean Service, developed something called the Geospatial Reference Model.
18:54:54 And the geospatial spatial reference model corrected that
18:54:59 So that, at the equator, you could get it down to about a foot accuracy.
18:55:03 And in Maryland, you could get it down to about 7 feet of accuracy, and where we are, it was about, uh, 14 feet of accuracy, which means that as you're going down the road, it actually knew that you were on the road rather than a…
18:55:16 Farm field.
18:55:18 Unfortunately, the team that did all of this, they got fired in March, so the GPS is getting gradually less and less and less accurate, because you have to constantly update it. Our planet is not a perfect globe, it's lumpy.
18:55:33 And it's also in the GPS signals is affected by gravity. Gravity is lowest in the United States in the Florida Keys, and it's highest in the
18:55:45 Um, upper part of Michigan, and I'm not going to explain why.
18:55:50 So it's the shape of the Earth, it's gravity, it's electromagnetic things, every time we have a solar storm, GPS gets less accurate because it interferes with the signals, all of that
18:56:02 causes problems. Also causing problems are, if you don't live in a flat area,
18:56:07 If you have trees, well, guess what? We don't live in a flat area, and we have trees.
18:56:13 Um, so…
18:56:15 It all puts together, it's really hard to get things
18:56:18 from a satellite, whether it's GPS or TV, or anything, to where we are. We just happen to be in a place that's
18:56:27 Very beautiful, but it has…
18:56:31 problems dealing with the modern
18:56:33 world.
18:56:36 So…
18:56:39 I will not bore you anymore about how GPS is done.
18:56:44 But I wrote pages about it, so you can look on the internet and explain it.
18:56:50 Any other questions?
18:56:52 I have, um… when, uh, have you looked at, um, the new,
18:56:58 IOS and MacOS 26s yet?
18:57:00 Yes, I have.
18:57:03 And are you gonna just go into some of the key features?
18:57:07 Um, I… if you have a question, I'll answer the question, but I actually want to talk about those next month, because…
18:57:13 Um, I just put iOS…
18:57:16 and not iOS. I put macOS on the machine that I'm using right this second. I did that at, like, noon today.
18:57:23 So, um…
18:57:25 It's still in the process of figuring out how it wants to do things.
18:57:29 Um, the, uh, and the same thing with, uh, iOS, I did that, uh, yesterday.
18:57:34 And, uh, iOS 26, there's one thing that I really, really like.
18:57:38 I still have a Maryland phone number, because I had it for…
18:57:43 26 years, well…
18:57:46 20 years, something like that. Before I moved down here. So, I kept that.
18:57:51 And because I'm a… it's a Maryland phone number, and because Washington, D.C. is in…
18:57:57 is next door.
18:58:01 And because it's full of politicians, and because it's an election year for Maryland this year, I get tons upon tons of spam from… from all kinds of political groups, from candidates, from just a whole bunch of things.
18:58:16 One of the things with iOS 26 that I was really looking forward to was call screening.
18:58:23 There is a setting that you can sit in iOS 26, where if you get a call and they're not in your address book,
18:58:31 It asks them who you are.
18:58:35 And why you're calling. Now, that seems… that seems simple,
18:58:39 But robots…
18:58:42 can't answer.
18:58:43 And if it doesn't…
18:58:47 if it doesn't get a response from them,
18:58:49 Your phone doesn't even ring.
18:58:53 So, between yesterday and today, I looked at my phone, I've had about 40
18:59:00 Phone calls that never rang.
18:59:02 Because they were by robots.
18:59:05 Oh, wow.
18:59:05 And they didn't bother me.
18:59:08 At all.
18:59:10 Now, you want to be a little bit careful about this, because…
18:59:15 If you're… if you have a prescription at Walgreens and they send you a text message that it's ready,
18:59:22 And you don't have that in your address book, well, actually, text messages, you'll still get the text message, but if they were to send you a recording saying, you know, it's ready, uh, it wouldn't answer.
18:59:34 Um, and if you're… it's your doctor's office remind… sending out an automated reminder to come in.
18:59:40 you're not going to get that. So you have to be a little bit careful about that. Uh, text messages, it's got a way to do filtering of text messages, too, but it was the phone calls that I found the most…
18:59:54 um, irritating.
18:59:55 And now I just don't hear them at all.
18:59:59 Um… and I was also surprised. I got a couple calls that came through, and I thought, you're in my…
19:00:06 contacts, but apparently, yeah,
19:00:08 Some people that were in my contacts.
19:00:11 Uh, sometimes if it's somebody that you've talked to in the past, even though you
19:00:15 haven't explicitly made them a contact, your phone remembers that, oh yeah, you talked to that person before, so they'll still get…
19:00:23 You'll still get through. So, I really like the way that it works.
19:00:27 Uh, my brother and I… my brother is a retired spook.
19:00:32 Uh, meaning he's a retired, uh…
19:00:35 retired spy.
19:00:37 He and I were trying to think about how people would work around it, and the answer is, the way Apple's done it, it…
19:00:45 It's going to take some effort. Right now, you can… if you… I even get spam about this. You'll get offers that you can get these kits,
19:00:55 by these kits that allow you to become a telemarketer.
19:00:59 And the kit only cost, like, $600. Well, that equipment that they sell you costs way less than $600. They make their money from selling you these telemarketer kits, but the…
19:01:10 But the telemarketer kits do is they just dial a whole bunch of…
19:01:15 of phone numbers in a block.
19:01:17 And this machine that they're selling have no way of responding
19:01:22 If it gets a prompt from your phone saying, please say who you are and what it is you want.
19:01:29 It just… it doesn't know how to do that. It just goes into its spiel, which is not what it's supposed to be doing, and so the phone just doesn't pass it through.
19:01:40 It's really…
19:01:40 Which is a good thing, if you're on the end of it.
19:01:44 Well, it doesn't… I don't get interrupted.
19:01:47 Yeah.
19:01:49 Although, is there some way… there must be a way of overriding that, because…
19:01:54 Because from time to time, I get calls from
19:01:57 unrecognizable numbers, and they're people I want to talk to.
19:02:02 So, I…
19:02:03 If… if the person identifies themself…
19:02:06 Okay.
19:02:09 Okay.
19:02:06 Then it'll pass through the call. So, you know, it's… it's… they're trying to get rid of robots talking to you.
19:02:13 Right, yeah.
19:02:14 But if it's a telemarketer, it's a live telemarketer, and he wants to sell you sighting, and he answers the question saying, hey, this is George from
19:02:22 You know, um, Cascade Roofing or something, it'll pass that through.
19:02:27 Oh, okay, yeah.
19:02:28 It's just the… it's just the robocall. So the way that most of… and you can hear, when you… you get a telemarketer, a live telemarketer,
19:02:36 You listen to it, you can hear they're in a room with a whole bunch of other people, quite often.
19:02:40 And what they do is their equipment dials the phone number, waits for someone to say hello,
19:02:47 And then they pick up and talk to you.
19:02:50 Yeah.
19:02:50 Well, your phone's not saying hello, your phone's asking, who the heck are you?
19:02:55 And… robots can't do that. But if that telemarketer says, hey, I'm Joe from Cascade Roofing, yes, that'll go through.
19:03:04 Yeah. Oh, okay, that's cool.
19:03:06 If that goes through,
19:03:08 Do you have a chance to decline the call?
19:03:11 Or just hang up?
19:03:11 Well, see, I haven't actually had that
19:03:16 All of them, and so far, they've been declined, so I don't know
19:03:20 One that's passed through yet. But I do know that people that are in my brother-in-law called me, my brother called me, I've had several real calls, and they… the phone just rang, and I picked it up.
19:03:42 Right.
19:03:32 Because I knew who it was… well, among other things, I have my phone set to tell me who's calling, so it looks on my address book, and it says, oh, this is Ian, oh, oh, this is John, or oh, this is Margaret. So at that point, I already know who it is, but if it's not somebody I don't know,
19:03:48 it'll just ring, and how… what happens at that point, I don't know, because…
19:03:53 Nobody who's not in my address book
19:03:56 and wasn't a robot, has made a phone call yet.
19:04:00 Ah, okay.
19:04:01 I've only had it for, you know, a day and a half, so…
19:04:03 Right, right.
19:04:05 I have thought about going over to some random neighbor's house and using their phone to call me just to see what it says.
19:04:12 Because I don't… I don't even know what it's… I don't even know what it says.
19:04:16 You know…
19:04:18 Um, I also have my… don't ask why… I have my…
19:04:23 series set to a woman with an Australian accent.
19:04:26 And I'm hoping it asks them for this stuff with this woman's voice in a, um…
19:04:33 in an Australian accent, because that would just flummox a lot of people.
19:04:37 But I don't know… I don't actually know what it's doing.
19:04:42 Thank you.
19:04:43 Um, I have also played with another thing, uh, on it. It was one of the first things I tried once my machine rebooted.
19:04:51 There is now a phone app on macOS.
19:04:56 And the phone app, you launch the phone app, and you'll see that it's got people you normally
19:05:02 talk to, and you can make a phone call directly from your computer.
19:05:07 Your phone can be in the next room, it doesn't make any difference, you can make a phone call right from your own computer.
19:05:13 You can also have settings in terms of, like, uh…
19:05:18 this setting that I had to decline phone calls, you can make those changes right on your Mac, because there's now a phone app.
19:05:26 on your Mac.
19:05:27 Have you tried that?
19:05:29 Well, again, I don't know what it… I don't have another phone to call myself to, actually.
19:05:35 Play…
19:05:34 No, I thought it uses your iPhone.
19:05:36 Yeah, it does. Oh, have I made a phone call? Yes.
19:05:40 On the Mac.
19:05:40 Yeah. You…
19:05:41 And it worked okay.
19:05:42 Yeah, you could do that before, but this new phone app has a lot more functionality. You've got your contact list is built into it.
19:05:52 Oh, okay.
19:05:53 It's, um… I might actually… the meeting's supposed to start right now, so I might just bring that up and show you. That's not really what I'm talking about tonight, but it's cool.
19:06:04 Um, our president and treasurer are not with us tonight because they have…
19:06:11 Friends from out of company… out of country coming to visit them,
19:06:14 And so they're off goofing off, so we won't have a report from them.
19:06:19 Um, I did want to…
19:06:21 mention again that I am recording this,
19:06:25 And the crow's captioning as well, so that we'll have a transcript of the meeting. Um, the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to paste into
19:06:34 the, uh, chat window…
19:06:36 The URL to, uh…
19:06:42 sign the attendance form.
19:06:44 So that, uh, I can know who's…
19:06:48 know who's here. Um, tonight Ira's going to talk about virtual machines. A virtual machine…
19:06:54 is a way of setting up
19:06:57 something on your Mac that your Mac pretends either that it's a non-Mac computer,
19:07:04 or it's an older Mac.
19:07:06 And, um…
19:07:09 why you'd want to do that, I'll incorporate that as part of the explanation, but before I do the virtual machine thing, I'll show you the phone app.
19:07:17 Because it's kind of cool.
19:07:20 So I'm gonna share my desktop…
19:07:25 Sure…
19:07:32 And move that up out of the way.
19:07:45 Here's the phone app.
19:07:47 And the phone hap, uh, it has, um, you know, your contacts and all that kind of stuff.
19:07:55 And, um, what it does not show is it doesn't show you all of the… these are
19:08:00 things that people have actually talked to you. It doesn't show you the list of…
19:08:06 calls that didn't work, but this is the phone app, and you can actually make a…
19:08:10 a phone call right here from, uh…
19:08:14 inside of the…
19:08:16 computer, and it's actually making the phone call
19:08:19 with your phone. So, it's really…
19:08:22 Uh, it's really quite cool.
19:08:24 Is there a list of the declined phone calls somewhere?
19:08:27 Not… not here. There is on your phone.
19:08:30 So, on my phone, which, um, I could actually show you, because there's a…
19:08:36 The old phone app.
19:08:43 And it's going to tell me that I need to…
19:08:47 Okay, these are recent phone calls, and the red ones are ones that…
19:08:52 Uh, it declined.
19:08:53 Oh, okay. So it's just like a missed call, basically.
19:08:57 Yes, and if you look at it and you say, oh no, I know that that's actually my, uh, you know, my veterinarian or whatever it is, you can…
19:09:06 column up. Um…
19:09:08 And this is macOS 26, which…
19:09:13 Um, we'll talk about next month about, um, different things.
19:09:17 But if and when you do update, one of the first things you should do
19:09:21 is launch the TIPS app.
19:09:24 Because the TIPS app
19:09:26 Which is on your phone and your iPad, so anytime you want to, you can do this on your phone or iPad and give you different information.
19:09:33 It tells you about the… here's a full user guide to the new operating system,
19:09:37 Or it breaks it down by category of things that are new and different. So it gives you… it's kind of an index of things that, uh,
19:09:47 That, uh, the operating system does. And if you say, see all, you see it's broken down really quite nice.
19:09:54 If you ever do beta testing, that's one way to tell when you've gone out of beta test.
19:09:59 Because during the beta testing,
19:10:02 the TIPS app is empty.
19:10:05 It's one of the last things they do, and the reason why they do that is if they try to have some feature, and they just can't quite get it to work,
19:10:12 They don't incorporate it, and so they don't have tips to it.
19:10:16 In the past, they would have documentation that talked about things that weren't ready, and it frustrated people, so now it's the last thing that they throw in there.
19:10:26 But it's a… it's a… basically, it's a manual on how to use your…
19:10:30 iMac, broken down by topic. Um…
19:10:33 And that's tips, and it's on your iPhone and your iPad, as well as your Mac.
19:10:41 Um, virtual machines. Virtual machines are…
19:10:45 Uh, basically, software-built machines.
19:10:48 The first virtual machine I had on a Mac
19:10:51 was something called, uh…
19:10:57 Insignia? I can't remember what the name it was.
19:11:00 It was back in the days of the 68,000 computers, the Macintoshes of the…
19:11:07 late 1980s, 90s,
19:11:12 They made insignia, and Insignia allowed you to run Windows XP…
19:11:18 Well, first, Windows 3.1 on a Mac.
19:11:21 Now, why would you do this? Well, there was a lot more software for the Windows than there was for the Mac.
19:11:28 And they… there were things like…
19:11:31 Um, somebody would send you an access database. Access is a Windows database.
19:11:38 Which, on anything other than Windows, is just garbage. It doesn't mean any…
19:11:42 it's nothing. You can't do anything with it.
19:11:45 But with Insignia, I could actually run Windows and look at someone's access database.
19:11:52 And, um…
19:11:54 They went the way of the dodo when, uh, a long time ago.
19:11:59 And, um, another company came about called Parallels, which is a, um…
19:12:07 It used to be a… one time it was a Russian company, then it was a Ukrainian company, then they moved to England, and now they're based in the United States, out of Silicon Valley.
19:12:16 They built a software version of a Windows box.
19:12:21 And when Apple went to the Intel processors in the year 2000,
19:12:27 It was a huge step up for them because they can make windows much faster.
19:12:32 And prior to this, the Macs were running PowerPC chips, and Windows was built for Intel.
19:12:38 So, the… you had to build a software-based
19:12:42 Intel processor to run the…
19:12:48 Windows operating system, and that slowed it down quite a bit. But once they… Max had Intel processors,
19:12:55 Then you had to build a PC emulator, but you didn't also have to emulate
19:13:00 The processor that ran it, the brains of the PC.
19:13:05 Now, we have, uh…
19:13:08 Apple Silicon machines.
19:13:10 And that was kind of a blow to the emulation market, because Apple Silicon is not an Intel processor, so
19:13:19 what do you do about it? Well, as you see, I have Windows 11 Pro here, I have Ubuntu, which is a Linux operating system, and then I have 3 things with little
19:13:29 triangles, and then another Windows operating system. Before I actually start this, I want to explain why I have two
19:13:37 kinds of windows. I really don't like Windows. I've been using Windows since…
19:13:46 Windows first came out, which was, like,
19:13:49 86, 87, 88, I don't remember. I've been using it for a long time, and I've always hated it.
19:13:55 And, uh, there was this joke in the 1970s that…
19:14:00 Uh, people should get microcomputers and get rid of mainframes and minicomputers, because any computer you can't throw out the window
19:14:08 is probably dangerous.
19:14:11 And even though that was meant as a joke, because these early machines were very frustrating to use,
19:14:16 I agree with that. So here's my Windows, um…
19:14:20 computer, which is just this first item here,
19:14:23 And down here is another Windows computer.
19:14:27 I can do something with my virtual Windows machine that I can't do with a real one, and that is before
19:14:33 I do something dangerous, I can come along here and I can say, clone it.
19:14:39 And when I clone it, it makes a copy of it.
19:14:42 And then if I do something that doesn't work, like I do a Windows update and it kills the, uh…
19:14:48 the Windows machine, I can just literally throw it in the trash can.
19:14:52 And you can't really do that with a weirdo Windows machine. The other reason why I like emulating a Windows machine
19:15:00 In order for this Windows machine to work, is working with inside of this emulator, which is working with inside of macOS. Mac OS has much better security than Windows.
19:15:11 It's… when does security has greatly improved, but still, the max security is better. So in order for this vulnerable Windows machine to be attacked,
19:15:22 They have to first get through the Mac to get to it.
19:15:25 So it's kind of… it's a castle inside of a castle.
19:15:29 And that appeals to me. Uh, Ubuntu is Linux, and I'm not going to talk about that in a bit. These ones with, uh…
19:15:37 these, uh, triangles. The triangle means it's not working. And if I click on it, if I double-click on it, it comes up and it says,
19:15:45 Mojave cannot be started because it contains an operating system designed to run on Macs with Intel processors.
19:15:51 Such systems are incompatible with Apple Silicon, blah blah blah blah blah, and it tells you
19:15:55 what to do about that. Um, and, uh…
19:16:00 That's all well and good, but that's not really my issue today, because I have a perfectly good Mac in front of me.
19:16:08 This Windows machine, well, if… doesn't Windows run on Intel processors? Well, I'm gonna launch it, and we'll find out.
19:16:18 I don't know if you've gone to the, um…
19:16:20 computer section that they have in, um… by the way, it does take it a while for it to wake up. Um, I don't know if you've gone to the computer section in Costco, but you can now get a Windows computer in Costco, and some of them will say, now with Snapdragon 7 or something.
19:16:38 But the key is Snapdragon. Snapdragon is an ARM processor, and what…
19:16:46 ARM stands for, you don't really care. The important thing is to note that an ARM processor is not an Intel processor.
19:16:54 They now make Windows machines with
19:16:58 ARM processors.
19:17:00 Apple's processor, Apple's silicon, is also in the classification of processors.
19:17:06 that it's an ARM processor. So the reason why I can run Windows now on my Apple Silicon is now Windows runs on Apple Silicon.
19:17:15 So, instead of trying to emulate
19:17:20 the chip that runs it, it's actually just emulating the PC architecture, and it's much less work for it to do that, but it still takes forever to launch.
19:17:29 And while it's doing that, I'm going to launch Ubuntu here in the background, because I can do both at once.
19:17:36 When this… when Ubuntu starts to launch, notice what it shows on the screen.
19:17:43 We're gonna set this over here on the side so you can see both at once.
19:17:48 Uh, no, I don't want you to do that.
19:17:52 You'll see that when Linux is launching, it
19:17:56 has all this stuff flowing by in the screen.
19:18:00 Believe it or not, so does your Mac.
19:18:02 Because the Mac operating system is built on top of Unix.
19:18:07 And UNIX was developed during the 1960s by Bell Labs,
19:18:11 And the Mac operating system, when they brought it out in 2000, it's actually built on top of
19:18:19 Unix. And you just don't see it because Apple masks it away.
19:18:24 They're very protective about it, in fact. Mask it away.
19:18:28 And this is Windows when it ever decides to talk to me.
19:18:34 There we go.
19:18:39 And… it did not…
19:18:46 And this is not the standard Windows desktop, that's actually a picture I took.
19:18:51 Um… out at the Dungeness Pit Spit.
19:18:59 If you're counting, I'm now running Windows,
19:19:02 And I'm running Linux, and I'm running the Mac operating system all at the same time.
19:19:17 And Windows is still thinking about booting.
19:19:23 Um…
19:19:25 Hey, Lawrence, um,
19:19:26 Yes.
19:19:28 Why would you run Ubuntu if it's Unix, and why doesn't the Mac do everything that the Unix other Unix does, or not?
19:19:37 Oh, the, uh, why would I run Linux, which is a fake version of Unix,
19:19:42 Linux stands for Linus Linux is not Unix. That's the name, that's where Linux got its name. The guy who invented, um, Linux, his name is Linus Torvald,
19:19:55 And most of us think of it, he named it that because it means Linus' eunuchs, but he says…
19:20:01 It means Linux is not Unix, which is…
19:20:04 Silly, but he's like…
19:20:06 Oh, so it's not… Linux is not Unix?
19:20:09 Linux is not Unix. It operates like Unix. Now, the reason most of us think that they did it is that at the time that he designed Linux,
19:20:19 You had to license, um…
19:20:22 Unix. And the license, depending upon if you're a corporation or a university, was very different.
19:20:28 for universities, it was free. For corporations, it cost big bucks.
19:20:33 So, uh, for example, uh, Microsoft licensed, uh,
19:20:39 Unix, and they call that Zenyax. That's Z-E-N, uh…
19:20:44 IX, and
19:20:45 Microsoft sold it for about a decade.
19:20:50 But then the… there was a big copyright suit about Linux because… about Unix because, uh…
19:20:57 Bell Labs, when Bell broke apart. Bell Labs went off to… I don't remember who…
19:21:03 I think, yeah, I don't remember the company that became Bell Labs.
19:21:07 They were trying to get royalties, and then the court said, no, you've been giving away so long, it's now in the public domain. So, it doesn't make any difference, but all this happened before he built Linux.
19:21:17 He wanted to build his own version of
19:21:20 Unix, and he wanted to build it without
19:21:25 having any restrictions on licensing. So you can download Linux for free.
19:21:31 Um, and it runs on all kinds of stuff. There are little computers that are…
19:21:37 I don't know if my screen… if you… the little thumbnail that you see, you can see it.
19:21:42 This is a tiny little Linux computer.
19:21:47 tiny, tiny little Linux computer.
19:21:49 the Linux inside it is very, um…
19:21:53 Uh, truncated, and what it's really doing is it's running a solid-state disk drive. So basically, it's an
19:21:59 intelligent disk drive, and you can't… it's not a full computer. But the part that runs the electronics is a cut-down version of Linux.
19:22:07 And that's what it's being used for today. But anyway, this is…
19:22:11 This is, um, um…
19:22:15 um… Windows 11 Pro.
19:22:19 And I went to show you something that I think is really cool.
19:22:23 Um, that you probably won't care about at all, but…
19:22:26 I… if any of you have a Windows
19:22:28 Um, computer.
19:22:30 You should update it to Windows 11, and if you cannot update your computer to Windows 11, you should get rid of it.
19:22:38 Because the support for Windows 11 ends in about 2 weeks. I mean, for Windows 10.
19:22:45 Uh, ends in about 2 weeks, which means at that point, it's going to become a happy ending grounds for
19:22:50 pirates and such. But this is Windows, and I come over here to privacy and Security, and one of the things that…
19:22:58 is important about, uh…
19:23:01 Windows 11. Um…
19:23:05 Apple, when they built the iPhone, one of the clever things they did is they
19:23:10 included something they called an enclave, which is basically this little fortress inside of the iPhone.
19:23:17 All the, uh, incoming and all the outgoing things going to the phone go through this enclave. It's basically…
19:23:24 It's a security chip. And they first introduced this on the iPhone, then they introduced it on the iPad,
19:23:31 And eventually, they stuck it on the Macs,
19:23:33 And on the Apple Silicon machine, that enclave is now
19:23:37 on the main ship. Everything coming into the computer, everything that goes out from the computer goes through that enclave.
19:23:44 And that allows Apple to sanitize
19:23:47 things to make sure that viruses and terrible things don't happen.
19:23:52 Windows 11 adopted that. So, uh, one of the things that you have now is… where is it? Device encryption.
19:24:02 Uh, that's not what I wanted.
19:24:07 Uh… Windows Security…
19:24:10 Device security.
19:24:12 If we go into device security, it says that my Mac has a security processor.
19:24:19 It says, your security processor called the Trusted Platform Module TPM, is providing additional encryption for your device.
19:24:29 Microsoft started…
19:24:31 asking manufacturers to include a security chip.
19:24:35 And now Windows 11 has… it's supposed to run only on things that have a security chip, but people have found workarounds to that, but…
19:24:45 Um, if it has the security trip, it's basically their security has come much, much, much closer to what Apple is doing.
19:24:53 Because all the input and output goes through that security chip, and it can allow you to block things.
19:24:59 It used to be that on Windows machines, you'd had to use an antivirus program,
19:25:04 And I run Windows now the same way I run my Mac. I don't use an antivirus program.
19:25:10 And that's built into Windows 11, and that's, um…
19:25:15 That's a huge step up, but this is Windows 11, but I wanted to show you something else that you won't care about, but…
19:25:25 I think it's cool.
19:25:28 This is the terminal that's in Windows.
19:25:31 And to get a directory in Windows, you type in DIR,
19:25:36 And it goes and gives you a directory. But I'm going to say…
19:25:41 going to type in Ubuntu,
19:25:45 And we're going to wait a bit while it figures out what it's doing.
19:25:48 Now, I'm running…
19:25:50 Ubuntu Linux inside of Windows, running inside of my Mac.
19:25:59 And why would I do that? Well, because there are things that you can do with, uh… here's how to get a directory in
19:26:08 in, uh, Unix, uh, or in Linux, you'd say ls, and then the AL means list everything.
19:26:15 So this is… this is Ubuntu Linux running inside of Windows
19:26:20 11. And when you come over here…
19:26:26 Ah! And that was the wrong password.
19:26:34 Uh, yeah, go ahead and send them something.
19:26:36 This is, uh, Linux.
19:26:40 In Linux, the commands to do…
19:26:48 The commands to do things in Linux are very similar to what you do in the Unix, uh, on the Mac. So, to get a directory, type in LSAL, it gives you
19:26:58 a directory, and uh… an interesting thing you can do is to find out what kind of operating system you're using, you say uname.
19:27:08 And you name A gives… means give me all the information. It says Linux, Ubuntu, Linux…
19:27:16 220402 Desktop 5.15, generic Ubuntu, blah blah blah blah blah. And it says that it's running on, um…
19:27:25 a 64-bit ARM architecture.
19:27:30 Now, if I come over to the Mac,
19:27:32 And I go into Terminal,
19:27:34 Which, of course, it's hiding behind my window.
19:27:37 So… I have to move this out of the way so I can get to my window.
19:27:42 And… I can blow this up a bit.
19:27:45 on my Mac,
19:27:48 If I say…
19:27:53 There we go. Um, you name…
19:27:57 A, it'll tell me what version of Unix I'm working on. And it says Darwin Minion, Minion's the name of the machine. Darwin Kernel version 25.0.0, Monday, August 25th.
19:28:09 is when it was, um…
19:28:12 downloaded. Um, and it's on… running on an ARM64.
19:28:17 processor. So, here I'm running…
19:28:21 Unix, on my Mac, running macOS 26,
19:28:25 which is running Linux, which is also running the, uh…
19:28:30 Don't do that. Which is also running, uh, Windows…
19:28:35 11, which is running…
19:28:37 Unix.
19:28:40 Aside from the…
19:28:41 Uh, Lawrence, um,
19:28:44 Isn't Windows 11 and all the Windows, uh, numbers based
19:28:50 on MS-DOS in the terminal?
19:28:53 Um, if you're in terminal, like, say, if I… this… this right now is Ubuntu, and if I say… if I exit from it, because why not? I can exit that.
19:29:03 Um, now I'm back in this, and if you look at it, yes, that's DOS.
19:29:08 There.
19:29:09 Right, yeah.
19:29:11 Um, and I have to…
19:29:11 So they just keep basing everything on DOS.
19:29:16 Yes, and, uh, no.
19:29:20 The… you really can't run DOS as an operating system anymore, so much of it has been pushed out to the visual user interface.
19:29:26 that a lot of the stuff that you can do in DOS before, they just… there's just… you can't get there from here, as they would say in Maine.
19:29:34 But you can do low-level things. For example, you can do things like you can say ping, uh, CNN, COM,
19:29:41 And it'll go out and ping CNN. But this is actually just a straightforward UNIX command that DOS stole.
19:29:49 Um, and it doesn't work the same way. Like, on the Mac, if I tell it to go to ping CNN,
19:29:56 And… I'll stick it over here in the corner.
19:29:59 You'll just see it just keeps… ah.
19:30:02 helps if I spell it correctly.
19:30:06 It'll just keep on pinging.
19:30:08 And ping means it's just sending out packets to CNN, and if CNN.com is up, it sends me a response.
19:30:15 Why am I picking on CNN? Because it's not dangerous and they won't yell at me.
19:30:19 Um, don't ping the FBI unless you have a good reason to.
19:30:27 But yes, there is essentially DOS underneath Windows, but DOS is no longer a standalone
19:30:34 operating system, whereas there's a full-blown Unix in the… underneath the Mac. Um, you can do all kinds of…
19:30:43 tricks. In fact, I'm going to show you in a couple minutes a virtual machine on another machine that I have, um, that I use all the time.
19:30:52 Um, but this is… this is…
19:30:54 This is Unix… this is Linux on Windows,
19:30:59 And then it's Windows 11 itself.
19:31:02 And to shut down Windows 11, I do it the same way I would normally, just come down here and say…
19:31:06 shut down, and it thinks about shutting down, takes a while.
19:31:10 And in the background, I've got Linux, which I'm in the shell, and I say exit, and it exits
19:31:19 It's not paying attention to my keyboard.
19:31:24 Why aren't you paying attention to my keyboard?
19:31:26 So, is the MacOS the only true Unix machine?
19:31:31 Oh, no, no, they still have, uh… oh, there it is.
19:31:36 Um, there's still all… there are all kinds of Unix machines out there, but they tend to be large machines now.
19:31:45 Unix was originally designed to run on minis and mainframes.
19:31:49 And, uh, there's… most of the internet runs on either Linux or Unix.
19:31:57 Um, but, uh, HP and, uh, and Sun and a whole bunch of people still make Unix.
19:32:04 workstations.
19:32:05 That's right, I used to use a Sun Unix workstation.
19:32:09 Yeah, I think sun…
19:32:10 I think the only part left of Sun is just the name. I think it's actually owned by somebody else. It might be owned by Oracle.
19:32:17 But, um, um, if you look
19:32:20 If you were to… you saw when we… when I booted up the Linux that it came up with all the scrolling text.
19:32:26 If you could do that on the Mac, and there is a way to do that, except that the Mac tries to hide it,
19:32:31 When it boots up, it credits UC Berkeley for the Unix that's built inside of the Mac operating system.
19:32:39 The Mac operating system is built
19:32:43 Um, based upon UC Berkeley Unix, which in turn is very similar to SunOS Unix.
19:32:50 Which, in turn, is very similar to Bell Labs' Unix. So it's got a long
19:32:55 pedigree there. And if you look at some of the commands, like, for example,
19:33:00 Now, let's blow this up a little bit more so you can see.
19:33:06 I'm going to show you the command for how to find commands.
19:33:10 Um, here's the… here's the uname command, which I used earlier to tell me what version of Unix this is.
19:33:17 But you can also say, man, you name.
19:33:20 And it'll give me the manual for how to use your name. And it gives you all kinds of things that you don't really care about. But down here at the bottom, you will see that, uh…
19:33:31 The U-Name command appeared in PBX Unix 1.0, however, 4.04 BSD, which stands for Berkeley Standard…
19:33:41 distribution was the first Berkeley release with the UNAME command, and the Mac is based upon
19:33:47 Berkeley Unix.
19:33:49 Uh, so it… the Mac operating system is based upon the Berkeley Sun operating system that came out in, I don't know, like, 1980.
19:33:58 The guy who started Fun Sun Microsystems?
19:34:02 He, um…
19:34:04 he started as a programmer at Berkeley, working on his PhD, so he was using Berkeley Unix
19:34:11 to figure out what he wanted to do in terms of an operating system based upon that.
19:34:18 And, uh, the Sun operating system is famous for its windows. You had
19:34:24 bit Mac, Windows, and so on and so forth. Um, and that was Sun's claim to fame.
19:34:29 And, um, the guy who did this made lots of money, and…
19:34:34 was obnoxious, but, you know, at least…
19:34:37 He had something to be obnoxious about.
19:34:40 Um, but anyway, that's… that's Linux.
19:34:43 And that's Windows.
19:34:45 Uh, and I'm going to shut down Linux right this second.
19:34:50 Power it off…
19:34:54 And you'll see it goes through and shows you all the little things it has to do to power off, and the Mac does the same thing, you just don't see that stuff scrolling by.
19:35:02 Um, and to get out of the terminal, here I just say exit, which tells it to get out of the…
19:35:10 of the terminal shell.
19:35:12 And there is a way, if I… if you read the…
19:35:17 fine print. There is a way to install a Mac operating system on here. It's just that it's… I haven't got around to doing that, because I don't need to, because I have another machine that has all this stuff on it.
19:35:31 And that's what I'm going to show you now.
19:35:35 If I can find my cursor.
19:35:37 This is a machine sitting right over there. Um, it's an iMac, it's an iMac
19:35:45 Pro that I bought in 2017.
19:35:48 I bought it in November or December 2017. I did not take it out of the box.
19:35:53 Because I flew out to see my mother for Christmas in, um, Bremerton.
19:35:59 And a friend invited me up to Scrum, and she talked me into buying a house, and I bought a house.
19:36:06 I had this…
19:36:09 Mac Pro shipped out here, still in the box. I set it up in the box with the security camera,
19:36:14 And it watched my house for, uh, 3 months while we
19:36:17 came across country. Um, so that's this machine.
19:36:21 And my Mac Pro, I really, really like it. It's a wonderful machine.
19:36:26 And it will not, uh… it can't run iOS 26.
19:36:32 So, that sucks. But, it does have Intel on it. So on this Intel…
19:36:39 based Mac, I can do things like run Windows 10. Now, I've told you that Windows 10, you should get rid of it, but my Windows 10 is buried inside of Mac, so it's actually fairly safe thing to play with.
19:36:51 So, I can play with Windows 10.
19:36:54 There are some programs that I use that run only on Windows 10.
19:36:59 Um, and there are some programs that I run that run only on old versions of Mac operating systems.
19:37:07 Which, while this is figuring out what it wants to do, I wanted to talk a little bit about these virtual machines.
19:37:14 If I can find my mouse…
19:37:20 There you are. Up here at the, uh…
19:37:25 top, you'll see there are these little icons in the frame, and I can't blow them up, unfortunately.
19:37:30 And the first one was… here is what kind of keyboard you have, and the next one is
19:37:36 Tells you about the screen, and so on and so forth. But these are all things that you can set.
19:37:40 And another way of looking at it is by pushing this button.
19:37:44 And is it going to let me look at that?
19:38:00 Zoom doesn't like what I'm doing here.
19:38:03 There are different settings you can have for the virtual machine.
19:38:07 And I'm losing…
19:38:09 Control of my mouse.
19:38:11 Because I'm doing this remotely.
19:38:13 Uh, this first one is general settings, and…
19:38:17 then there are, uh…
19:38:21 It's not gonna let me do this because, uh…
19:38:25 Zoom doesn't like the fact that I'm looking at another machine, so I'll just tell you about it.
19:38:30 Um, and I can actually launch this other one, so you can…
19:38:35 C, because it's here, too.
19:38:37 Uh, go away. There are settings you can have for the virtual machine. The general one is, what do you call it, what do you give it a name? I always give them a unique name, and the name includes a date. So this backup I made on…
19:38:51 August 28th of this year, and this backup of Windows was done on… in 2020 in, uh, on June 22nd. I do that so I can tell
19:39:02 that it's a backup of when I made it, and what I might have been doing at that time. But anyway, you can give them names and describe them and so on and so forth. Don't really care about that right this second. I want to go here to the options.
19:39:13 I can say how I want to start it up or shut it down. I say I want it to be shut up, started it up, and…
19:39:20 shut down manually. Can I blow this up?
19:39:25 Nope, it's not gonna let me blow it up.
19:39:28 Uh, take my word, that's what it says.
19:39:31 Am I sharing information with my Mac or not?
19:39:35 what applications do I have, and where are they going to show up? Do I want it full screen, or am I going to move it to the size of the screen I want? Can I have picture-in-a-picture? Picture-in-a-picture means that I can have multiple windows at once.
19:39:48 And so I can be doing several different virtual machines at once. For web and email, what do I do? What kind of maintenance do I want? Travel mode? And it's got a bunch of other options. Next one's the part that's really intriguing.
19:40:03 My Mac here is a Mac Studio, and it has… I don't remember.
19:40:12 Uh…
19:40:13 It's, um, Apple's Mac 4… M4 Pro. I don't remember how many processors it has.
19:40:19 But this is important because I can tell here
19:40:23 How many processors I want it to use. I can have auto, or I can just pick the number of
19:40:28 Processors I want to use. And obviously, the more or less processes you use, the faster your virtual machine runs.
19:40:35 And how much memory I want it to use.
19:40:38 And here I have it set at 12, which is half the memory I have on this machine. It's got 24 gigs of memory.
19:40:45 And so I went 12 gigs to be used by Windows, and what kind of graphics do I want? What kind of keyboard do I want?
19:40:53 The keyboard's a little bit tricky because the Mac keyboard and the Windows keyboard don't look the same.
19:40:59 But you can use the Mac keyword as if it's a Windows keyboard using…
19:41:04 parallels. Um, but it just tells you how to set it up that way.
19:41:08 Do I want to allow Windows to, uh, use a printer? And if so, what printer… what network do I want it on?
19:41:17 There's a software network connection, so everything that Windows does when I'm running it,
19:41:24 passes through the operating system, which all the security controls
19:41:27 on the Mac, actually control what the Windows machine can do.
19:41:32 Which is important from a security standpoint.
19:41:35 Can it use the Mac's camera and sound?
19:41:39 Well, Windows has its own security, so I can say, yes, it can use the Mac sound and speakers and microphone,
19:41:47 and camera. But I also have to tell Windows that it can use the Mac speaker and
19:41:53 And such. What kind of USB devices does it have?
19:42:00 what the hard drive, you can actually specify a file on your…
19:42:05 Mac as the hard drive. I happen to know that this particular
19:42:09 virtual Windows machine, uh, that I was using. It happens to have a 36 gig hard drive.
19:42:15 Which means that if I… if it was corrupted somehow or something, I just throw that drive in the trash and empty the trash, because it's a 36 gig file.
19:42:24 But you can have a bigger one if you want to.
19:42:27 What does it do with the Mac file format for Mac files?
19:42:31 When I transfer… well…
19:42:34 Um… if I create something on the Windows screen, I can actually drag it out of the Windows screen and drop it onto the Mac desktop.
19:42:42 And if it's something like a Microsoft Word file, Microsoft Word can be read by the Mac,
19:42:47 Pages can read Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word on the Mac can read Microsoft Word.
19:42:52 So, it just depends upon what it is. There are some things that…
19:42:58 Um…
19:42:59 I would have trouble with, like, access databases, there's no Mac…
19:43:03 way to use access, so if I…
19:43:06 One interviews are an access database, I'd have to do it entirely on the Windows machine, and then I'd have to export the data.
19:43:13 But for the most part, it doesn't really make that much difference. If it's… if it's Windows only, I'm going to use it on…
19:43:20 My, uh… while I'm using Windows, and if it's Mac only, I'm going to use it on my Mac.
19:43:24 It's when I'm trying to get things out of one format to another. I'll tell you as an example,
19:43:32 Um, there are some people who will send… they have old versions of Windows,
19:43:37 And they'll send me files, and it's inside of a Windows email container.
19:43:41 Which, on a Mac, just looks like garbage.
19:43:43 Well, I can bring it up on Windows, and I can save the message as a text file, and then I can go off and stick it on my Mac.
19:43:50 Or if they send me a BMP file or a Microsoft Publisher file, or something else that's weird, I can… I can deal with it.
19:43:59 Um, but mostly I use it for things like databases and things that are hard to deal with on a Mac.
19:44:05 Um…
19:44:07 It tells me about the TPM chip,
19:44:11 Obviously, since this is not a real
19:44:13 Windows machine, what about the TPM chip? Well, the, uh…
19:44:18 parallels emulates a TPM chip, because all the security stuff is on the Mac, it just says, okay, what you're looking for is really this.
19:44:26 And it gets happy. Here it says a CD-DVD is disconnected. Why? Because my Mac Mini doesn't have a, uh…
19:44:35 DVD player. But if I were to plug one in, I could then give permission for Windows to use that CD player that's plugged into my Mac.
19:44:44 And, uh, the boot order is kind of important.
19:44:48 Because in Windows, it'll boot off the floppy first if it has a floppy, it'll then boot off the CD-ROM, if you have a CD-ROM in the machine,
19:44:57 And third, it'll boot off the hard drive.
19:45:00 Now, why is it set up that way? It's set up that way so that you can recover from crashes.
19:45:06 Windows has a problem with crashes, and it's nice to be able to bail out.
19:45:10 So, specifying the boot order makes sense here, that it wouldn't necessarily someplace else.
19:45:16 security, I can encrypt the Windows machine, so on and so forth. But basically, this basically says I'm just using the Mac for security.
19:45:24 And backup is intriguing. I can turn on Smart Guard, which is a Windows backup program, but in… you'll notice I haven't turned it on. Why?
19:45:33 Because time machines backing up this machine. Time machines backing up my machine, I don't care.
19:45:38 If I went to restore it, I'd just tell the time machine to put the…
19:45:43 virtual machine back where it is, which is just a file.
19:45:46 And I'll show you that.
19:45:52 Lawrence, question?
19:45:53 Yes?
19:45:53 Um, when I used to use a Windows machine, I think it was Windows 10 a long time ago,
19:46:00 Um, every day I would get, you know, these messages from Microsoft to update the security.
19:46:08 and update, you know, they send, like, 15 files that you had to update, otherwise your machine could be violated. It's like…
19:46:16 Yeah.
19:46:18 Is that still true when you're virtually doing this? They send…
19:46:22 updates to…
19:46:24 you know, to the machine,
19:46:26 Um… today, when I got up, the first thing I did was I updated my Mac
19:46:33 to macOS 26.
19:46:37 And that took…
19:46:39 oh, I don't know, half an hour.
19:46:40 Right? It didn't take that long. And then I spent from about 9 this morning until 3 this afternoon,
19:46:50 Just updating Windows so that I could bring… so I could do a demonstration for you.
19:46:54 Wow, so it still has that issue.
19:46:57 Well, it's… it…
19:46:59 Microsoft going crazy with these updates.
19:47:02 It's not so much that it's going… well, yeah, I would say they are going crazy, but…
19:47:07 Part of it is, is that their updates are layered.
19:47:10 When macOS 26 came out, you downloaded one file, and it installed it.
19:47:15 Right.
19:47:16 With Windows, you have one update, and then after you have that one update, then you're eligible for the next update, and you have to do multiple updates in order to get an update.
19:47:25 Right.
19:47:26 And yes, they still do that.
19:47:30 But…
19:47:30 So even on the virtual machine, you have to do that.
19:47:33 Even on the virtual machine, you have to do that. Uh, and it's a… it's a pain.
19:47:38 And if I can get this to actually…
19:47:41 talk to me. I went, there's something I wanted to show you.
19:47:45 Uh, which is what I actually do with this.
19:47:49 Uh, virtual machine.
19:47:52 And… well, you let me open this.
19:47:56 Open with…
19:48:01 There it is! This is what I do. I have…
19:48:06 on a virtual Mac that I'm using,
19:48:09 And the virtual Mac is using High Sierra.
19:48:12 So it's not a new…
19:48:14 version of the Mac operating system.
19:48:16 Um, I do something that's called, um…
19:48:22 I resolve web blogs.
19:48:25 And now that I've opened them, I'm stuck because I lost my pointer.
19:48:37 it wants me to be sitting at that other machine rather than doing this remotely.
19:48:41 Which is a pain.
19:48:46 But you'll notice that
19:48:49 if you… if we could see this…
19:48:51 Most of these things are numbers, these are log files from a web server. Most of these things are numbers. When your computer… when your computer talks to another computer on the internet,
19:49:01 It doesn't using the numbers. Each…
19:49:03 computer on the internet has a unique number.
19:49:07 Well, if I want to find out where people are coming from, I want them to resolve, so I use a program…
19:49:13 running on high Sierra, which is an old operating system,
19:49:17 to resolve the log files into something that sometimes has something in English. Like, this one tells me
19:49:24 that this is a computer on the domain compute.hwclouds.dns.com.
19:49:32 And this one is an Amazon bot, and this one is a Google bot, and this one is somebody on Verizon, and it resolves them so I can tell where people are coming from.
19:49:44 Why do I do this on High Sierra? Well, I wrote this program to do log resolution,
19:49:51 About 20 years ago, using
19:49:53 A piece of code from a guy from… at MIT,
19:49:57 He released it in the… he released the code.
19:50:01 Um, and I incorporated the code into something I wrote. My problem was that his code
19:50:07 was 16 bits and 32 bits, but it did not support 64.
19:50:12 So there's no way for me to run it on a modern Mac operating system, because the code is too old.
19:50:19 And he wrote this when he's a graduate student 20 years ago. What he's doing today, I don't know.
19:50:25 But I really doubt that he's going to recompile the code so that I can use it in
19:50:30 2025, when he wrote it back in, like, 19… well…
19:50:35 I think he wrote it in 1998.
19:50:38 So, it's… he did this a long time ago,
19:50:41 And, um…
19:50:44 Um, there's no particular reason why he would do that for me today.
19:50:49 So…
19:50:49 So, there are Mac emulators that let you go all the way back to old versions of the operating system?
19:50:56 Um, well…
19:50:58 Um, the emulator that's on my Intel machine will allow me to run High Sierra and Mojave and a bunch of things that…
19:51:06 But not on an M1 silicone.
19:51:08 No, because the M1 silicon does not…
19:51:11 I'm emulating…
19:51:14 An arm structure, so I can emulate Windows on ARM, I can emulate Linux on ARM,
19:51:20 But I can't do Linux, uh…
19:51:24 Intel or Windows on Intel. And his code…
19:51:27 is old, um…
19:51:30 It's old code, it was written in C,
19:51:32 And I… and it came as a compiled library that I can incorporate into my code, but that code…
19:51:40 His part of the code is 32-bit, so even if I were to rewrite my part of the code,
19:51:46 it still would… I couldn't use his library. And I don't know how he did what he did. I'm clever, but I'm…
19:51:53 We don't have the source.
19:51:54 Okay. Well, no, because he didn't release it as a source.
19:51:57 And it's credited… the copyright is his and MIT, so he's co-owner with MIT.
19:52:05 of that code, and I'm not going to track them down, because what I'm doing with that is something that most people don't care about. I do… I do, uh…
19:52:15 It tells me who's visiting a website, which is useful, but I also use it for diagnostics when people attack things. My homeowners association, I run their website, and this past week,
19:52:27 It had…
19:52:30 30-some thousand attacks from the Russian Federation.
19:52:34 Most of them, if you look at the log files, said that they were coming from the United States or Great Britain.
19:52:40 But actually looking through, once I could figure out where it was going, I could trace it back to the Russian Federation.
19:52:46 And I need specialized software to do that that's not… it's not something I can go onto the internet and say,
19:52:52 hey, how do I do thus and so, because…
19:52:56 And that's just… it's…
19:52:59 We're getting into the weeds there, but…
19:53:01 It told thee, uh, where it was coming from, and it told me what I could do to
19:53:06 to frustrate them even more than they are. They've never broken in, but that doesn't mean I'm going to…
19:53:13 stick up a red cape and say, hey, charge me, I'm not gonna do that, I'm going to improve my defenses to make sure that they can't get in.
19:53:23 So, why I'm doing it is not something that most people would care, but yes,
19:53:28 on my Intel-based Mac, I can run operating systems at least as old as High Sierra. I haven't tried anything
19:53:36 older than that, because I don't need to, for what I'm trying to do.
19:53:40 And it will run Windows 10 and…
19:53:43 No, it'll do some stuff. I have some Windows 10 software that I haven't purchased for Windows 11, but it still runs on that, and that machine's nice and secure, so the fact that it's Windows
19:53:55 10 doesn't bother me. But if you personally have a Windows 10 machine, and it cannot be upgraded to Windows 11,
19:54:03 go out and buy a new machine, because, um, they're basically toast.
19:54:10 I got rid of every single computer my compu- my church has that can't be upgraded.
19:54:17 Um, I explained what I was doing, and they… their eyes glazed over, and they said, oh, okay, okay.
19:54:29 Any questions about anything? It doesn't have to be about virtual machines, it can be about anything.
19:54:38 Well, you know, so…
19:54:41 Just to confirm what you said,
19:54:43 Uh, I've got a couple older Macs with software on it that I use from time to time on those machines.
19:54:50 Uh, and they can't, uh,
19:54:52 It can't be run on the virtual system here, because it's… because it's a different processor.
19:54:58 And they're not compatible. That's basically as I understand it. Is that correct?
19:55:02 It depends about how old the machines are. Like, if they're Intel-based machines, you could…
19:55:08 You could get a late model Intel machine that…
19:55:12 could run a reasonably current operating system. You could put parallels on it, and you could emulate those old machines on the new machine. You can even transfer files from those old machines to the new machines.
19:55:25 Um, yes, that is possible, and I've done that. When I set up the High Sierra machine,
19:55:30 I happen to have a HYB CR machine at the time, and I just said… I used Migration Assistance as transfer it from that,
19:55:41 time machine back up to you, and it did, and it was happy. Um…
19:55:46 Because all the tools were already in place. But if you have…
19:55:51 If they're really old machines, well, let's put it this way. I bought that Intel-based, uh…
19:55:58 iMac Pro in 2017.
19:56:01 That means that…
19:56:03 it really is 8 years old.
19:56:06 The average age of a microcomputer in the Windows world
19:56:12 is about 9 months.
19:56:15 In the Mac world, it's about 5 years, so…
19:56:18 I got my money's worth out of it.
19:56:22 And it's still going to be supported by Apple for a while.
19:56:27 But, yeah, it's at the end of its life.
19:56:31 Yeah.
19:56:31 Um, Lawrence? I was looking at YouTube one day, and they were talking about
19:56:37 being able to run, like, Sequoia on a 2015 Intel Mac.
19:56:44 Pro… MacBook Pro.
19:56:46 Is that really something that could be done?
19:56:49 No. What they have to do… here's…
19:56:52 Why do you have a Mac? You have a Mac for the ease of use, you have a Mac for the… for the power, you have a Mac for security and privacy. In order to run Sequoia,
19:57:03 On a Mac that old…
19:57:06 What are they doing?
19:57:08 Uh, they have a thing called OCLP, or something to that nature.
19:57:14 it destroys the security
19:57:16 on the operating system.
19:57:21 They're basically destroying the security on the operating system to allow it to be installed.
19:57:26 So, why would you want to do that?
19:57:31 Um, but would you be able to use security updates from…
19:57:34 Nope. Nope.
19:57:36 Oh, you couldn't.
19:57:37 Okay.
19:57:36 Nope. It's… it's… you're installing a dead end, and you're doing it in an insecure fashion. So you're basically hosed. Also, that 2015 machine doesn't have the power to run Sequoia.
19:57:49 So it's going to be just…
19:57:51 painfully slow.
19:57:53 Oh, okay.
19:57:54 You know, it's nice that clever people can figure out how to do things, but, um…
19:58:00 When… when…
19:58:03 When, um…
19:58:06 Nobel invented dynamite.
19:58:09 people were figuring out all kinds of things you could do now that you had this really powerful
19:58:15 compact explosives. One of the things that someone did, uh…
19:58:20 dentist someplace in Europe, he found out that if you use minute quantities, you could explode cavities.
19:58:29 Okay, it's nice that he figured it out.
19:58:31 Would I visit that dentist?
19:58:37 You know, there is such a thing as too clever. I've been too clever. I've figured out really clever ways to do things.
19:58:43 that then I rapidly had to undo because, oh, no, no, that was just too… that was…
19:58:48 That was clever to the point of stupidity, and I need to back off. Uh, and…
19:58:55 running a modern operating system on a machine that's not designed for it is not a good idea.
19:59:00 The new… well, let's take a 2015 Mac. It does not have a security chip.
19:59:06 No.
19:59:07 doesn't work. So, you… you completely destroy the security and privacy controls
19:59:15 to cripple Sequoia so you can run it really slowly and insecurely on this old machine.
19:59:22 Okay, that's… that's a clever piece of engineering, but it's not a useful one.
19:59:30 Okay, thank you.
19:59:32 Um, another one, a clever piece of engineering that I thought was really, uh…
19:59:38 a fun thing. A couple weeks ago, the, um…
19:59:43 Chinese government was showing people this… this high-speed train that uses magnetic levitation.
19:59:50 And it can go, like, 300 miles an hour.
19:59:52 Um,
19:59:55 And people were… people were watching it go through the… off to the platform and zip down and so on, but there were nobody trying to actually ride on it.
20:00:03 Well, somebody snuck aboard it for one of them, and the reason why they didn't have any passengers on it,
20:00:09 is they can't figure out how to stabilize it. So this guy snuck on board it, and he destroyed this
20:00:17 $500 million project, because it went out of control and killed him and destroyed the train.
20:00:23 Oh, jeez.
20:00:22 So, yeah, it's a clever piece of engineering, but it's not.
20:00:28 useful. And by the way, this was kind of a gotcha on the part of the Japanese government.
20:00:34 The Japanese government has a high-speed
20:00:38 Maglev train that they put in service, and it actually takes passengers, and they opened it last week.
20:00:43 which was a month early, but why did they do that? It's because in the Japanese newspapers, they had this…
20:00:49 The story about this terrible accident in China, and they thought, huh,
20:00:53 It sounds like a good time for us to put our train in action, which can take passengers.
20:00:58 So there's… there's clever engineering, and then there's too clever.
20:01:05 And the other thing to keep in mind,
20:01:08 I bought a Mac 2…
20:01:10 And when I came back from Japan,
20:01:13 And it cost…
20:01:17 $5,000, that's not including the video card, the keyboard, or the monitor.
20:01:23 Which brought it up to about $7,500.
20:01:26 That's…
20:01:28 in… what was that? 19…
20:01:33 $90.
20:01:35 Do you know what you can buy now for $7,500?
20:01:40 You can buy a whole bunch of Macs.
20:01:43 There's just no reason to invest that amount of money
20:01:48 in a, um, in a machine that's, um…
20:01:51 10 years old.
20:01:52 Well, that would be probably equivalent to
20:01:55 15,000 now.
20:01:57 Oh, to either be in closer to 17,000 now, but yes.
20:02:01 Okay, well, you know, in that ballpark, yeah.
20:02:03 But you could just go… you could go out and, uh, for a fraction of that, you can go out and get a
20:02:08 Yeah. Yeah.
20:02:08 a Mac Mini like I have, that literally thousands of times more powerful.
20:02:16 Yeah.
20:02:16 We used to measure computer speed
20:02:19 In MHz. An Apple II had a 2MHz processor, which means it did 2 million things a second.
20:02:29 And with it, it was powerful enough that if you turned it into a… you had a word processor on it, nobody could out-type it. So, you know, that's with 2MHz.
20:02:39 This thing does things
20:02:42 trillions of times a second. Do you know how many extra zeros that is than 2 MHz?
20:02:50 And this has multiple processors. One of the problems that they ran into
20:02:54 is the difference between single-threaded and multi-threaded CPUs.
20:02:59 A single-threaded CPU is, um, you outline a task. You have the little… you have a little robot, and you want to get the little robot out of its charging dock, go down a hallway, turn a corner,
20:03:12 And turn another corner, and stop in front of a window. The programming for that is actually fairly difficult, because you have to know exactly how far it's going to go, you have to have multiple steps,
20:03:25 So you figure out how to move forward, you repeat that enough times to get it to go forward, then you have to tell it how to turn, and repeat that enough times to get a 90 degree angle, and so on and so forth. So getting that robot from…
20:03:37 From out of his charging docks into this next room facing a window.
20:03:41 is actually a fairly difficult thing to do.
20:03:44 And most computers used to be single-threaded, which means that while it was doing that, it really couldn't do anything else.
20:03:52 If you get up out of your chair and walk into the next room to go look at the window,
20:03:57 Are you single-threaded or multi-threaded?
20:04:01 Oh, you're multi-threaded, yeah.
20:04:03 Why do you think so?
20:04:06 Because you're doing a whole bunch of stuff at once, yeah.
20:04:07 Yeah, your breathing, you're seeing, you would not believe how much brain power seeing takes, by the way.
20:04:14 You're breathing, you're seeing, you're hearing, uh, your feet are moving, your hands are moving to balance you, and you're not even paying any attention to that. You're daydreaming about this, uh…
20:04:25 conversation you had with the postal
20:04:27 clerk at the post office earlier today, as you're walking towards a window. You're multi-threaded.
20:04:33 Well, guess what?
20:04:36 This machine…
20:04:38 has processors that do things a trillion times a second, and it doesn't have one.
20:04:43 It's got over a dozen.
20:04:47 So there's a huge amount of power, and the power not only does single-threaded things, but it can do multi-threaded things really, really, really fast.
20:04:57 And most of that speed
20:04:59 is useless for you, because how fast can you take a picture and answer the phone, or so on and so forth? Most of that power is to make this easy to use.
20:05:06 So it makes it easy to use, so I can look at my phone and it logs me in. That, looking at your phone, logging you in,
20:05:13 takes a staggering amount of horsepower. We did not have the technology to do that.
20:05:19 10 years ago, even with a mainframe, we didn't have that kind of technology. And now, they sold me this in the store, just walk in and buy it, and you don't need a… you don't need a DoD license or anything. You can just walk in and buy it.
20:05:34 Yeah. It's just absolutely…
20:05:37 Amazing. You know, the technology leaps that they've made, yeah.
20:05:41 Well, it's also important to remember what it is that we use that for. We use those technological leaps
20:05:47 To make things easier to use, and to give us capability. Like, I have…
20:05:53 Since moving to, uh,
20:05:55 Even though I ran a…
20:05:57 a crew that, among other things, made these science videos.
20:06:00 I didn't really edit video until I came here, and I've edited over 500 videos.
20:06:06 for my church, and probably, I don't know,
20:06:09 50 or so for the users group.
20:06:12 Am I a video editor? Not really, but on the Mac, it's not easy… it's not hard to do.
20:06:18 It's not something I ever planned on doing. I take photographs, but I never planned on doing video, and I hardly ever use the video camera on my
20:06:28 on my phone, but I have used it, and for stupid stuff, like there was a phone in my backyard, it's a yearling buck, and he's got little nubbies, and apparently they're itching, so he was just ripping the shreds out of this
20:06:43 rhododendron rubbing his habit up against it. So I took a video of it and sent it off to my granddaughter in England. Why? Because I could.
20:06:51 And it was easy to do.
20:06:53 Yeah, it's a fun thing, yeah.
20:06:55 Uh, Lawrence? Is there any sort of physical limit
20:07:00 to the chips, uh, because right now they're coming out with a new numbered chip every year, like M12345.
20:07:08 Is there gonna be an M10 in another 5 years?
20:07:13 There… there might be. You have to remember that, um…
20:07:16 Um, huh.
20:07:19 When Seymour Cray made the Cray XMP supercomputer, uh, Seymour Cray's famous computer science made the XMP supercomputer.
20:07:29 He is… one of his primary engineering requirements is that none of the cables inside of it be longer than 6 feet.
20:07:36 Now, that seems like a fairly arbitrary thing, but he did it because he was interested in the speed.
20:07:43 His limitation was the speed of light. Speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, which sounds really fast, but it still takes 3 seconds to…
20:07:52 For life to go from here to the moon and back. It does take time.
20:07:56 This thing does millions of things, trillions of things per second.
20:08:01 And one reason why it does that is because it's really tiny. The entire… the… the…
20:08:08 CPU, the memory, the graphics processing, the storage on my phone is all one chip.
20:08:15 And because it's so small…
20:08:17 It can do things really fast. If it had to go 6 feet out and then 6 feet back.
20:08:23 to do a process, it would be thousands of times slower.
20:08:30 Think about it. It would still be really fast, but it'd be thousands of times slower.
20:08:35 So, making them small allows you to make them fast. Well, one of the things that they're doing is that they've… Apple was the first personal computing company that had chips
20:08:46 that had 8 nanos, uh, um…
20:08:49 nanometer, um…
20:08:53 uh… gates, the little different… the discrete parts of the… of the processor were 8 nanometers apart, which is really, really, really small.
20:09:03 And then the refers to have 5 monopedia, or now 4 nanometer. The iPad 7… what is it, 17 is the one that just came out?
20:09:15 Whatever it is.
20:09:15 Yeah, 17 just came out.
20:09:17 Um, that has 3 nanometer parts.
20:09:23 By making the CPUs smaller and smaller and smaller, and then adding more CPUs to it, they can make them faster. And the limitation is that the plants to do these cost billions of dollars.
20:09:35 Intel decided in 2018 that they were going to build a plant in, uh, in, uh,
20:09:42 Arizona, to make ARM processors. Intel, they kind of reached a plateau with their standard Intel-compatible processors, so now they're going to go with ARM processors.
20:09:55 Because Microsoft is now allowing…
20:09:59 computers to be made with Snapdragon chips, which means that Intel's not making money, so they're gonna start making ARM processors.
20:10:05 They've spent over $10 billion, and the factory's not done.
20:10:11 It's extremely expensive to build the factories,
20:10:15 The technology itself, um, it's basically…
20:10:19 It's really… it's really difficult, and it's really expensive. Um…
20:10:24 to build these factories. So, yes, the state of the art is improving, but there's a huge cost to that.
20:10:32 And yes, there probably will be an M10, um, in several years, and will it be faster than what you have today? Yes.
20:10:41 it's… to some extent, that's really not an issue. Um…
20:10:46 The, uh…
20:10:48 This Mac Mini, it's going to be a long time before I max out.
20:10:52 No matter what kind of weird thing I'm doing, it's gonna be a long time before I peg it out.
20:10:58 Um, so I'm not really terribly concerned about that. I'm much more interested…
20:11:04 in, and I know that I say this every…
20:11:06 month. I'm much more interested in privacy and security.
20:11:11 Because locking down your personal information, locking down information about you,
20:11:17 is becoming increasingly difficult. Um, I've had… I've been involved in, like, 30 data breaches over the past decade.
20:11:25 None of them, because of anything I did. I was a federal government employee. When they hacked OPM, Office of Personnel Management, they released… they ended up compromising
20:11:38 30 million people.
20:11:39 And then they found out later on, oh, well, no, it also includes the military, and so it's closer to 70
20:11:46 million people. Well, out of 330 million Americans, that's a good portion of everybody.
20:11:51 And uh… and it's not… you're not usually going to be compromised by somebody at the restaurant
20:12:00 the waiter at the restaurant taking your card and charging something with it. That's not usually where the problem is.
20:12:06 The problem comes from you're using your card at the restaurant,
20:12:12 The restaurant sends it off to the bank, and the bank has a middleman
20:12:17 that does credit card transactions, and they're compromised.
20:12:21 One of the leading Visa card, uh…
20:12:24 company, Middleman, was compromised a year and a half ago.
20:12:27 And it affected hundreds of millions of people.
20:12:30 And, um, some of the security firms that do security
20:12:36 they had a laptop stolen out of their vehicle, and when they were doing the security,
20:12:41 They had, you know,
20:12:44 millions of personal files on it. So it's not anything that you personally will… will, uh, cause you to be, uh,
20:12:52 compromise. It's these other things.
20:12:54 However,
20:12:57 It's really common, simply because of demographics, for you to be targeted, and you're targeted through scams, particularly. So somebody sends you a PDF that's got a virus attached to it that tries to
20:13:12 steal all of your contacts out of your contacts and things like that. So, how do you protect yourself from that? Because that's just… that's a mom-and-pop thing. That doesn't…
20:13:20 that doesn't take a big…
20:13:22 massive enterprise to do that. That's just done by somebody sitting in a basement someplace, or in a coffee shop.
20:13:29 They will target you for that kind of information, because if they steal $500 from you, but then they also do that
20:13:35 from a thousand other people, that's quite a profit, and it's very difficult to prove.
20:13:40 How do you protect yourself from that? You make sure that your machine is locked up tight.
20:13:44 And if you're reusing an old Mac or an old Windows machine, you can't do that.
20:13:50 They just can't lock the door.
20:13:54 Um, this woman…
20:13:58 talked her into getting a new machine. She had a Windows machine.
20:14:02 She was having problems when she booted up the machine, she'd get these pop-up ads.
20:14:07 Immediately. She wasn't doing anything that she could pop up nodes. Hadn't even opened a browser. It was saying to update her…
20:14:14 I heard Norton to update her, uh, McAfee, um, and she…
20:14:20 wanted to get rid of them, because they were popping up so much that she couldn't use the machine.
20:14:24 So I went over and I did a scan of her machine. She had over a hundred.
20:14:29 pieces of malware on her machine.
20:14:32 And she went in to know what she could do about it. And I said, unplug your machine and go out and buy a new one.
20:14:38 And it took her a couple weeks for her to decide that that's what she had to do.
20:14:43 And then I went over and helped her.
20:14:45 move some stuff over, but… but the process of…
20:14:49 of cleaning out the machine… cleaning out the stuff so that when it wouldn't compromise your new machine, it was extremely tedious. Now,
20:14:59 what would have been the cheaper, less harmful, less stressful thing to do?
20:15:06 is to upgrade the machine when I asked her to do so several years ago.
20:15:14 Which reminds me, if you have an old Mac, and you…
20:15:18 can't update to Windows… to macOS 26. If you have a machine that cannot be updated, go out and buy yourself a new machine.
20:15:26 And if you say, well, my old one's still working,
20:15:30 What happens when your old one stops working?
20:15:33 It's much easier to migrate all your data from a working machine to a working machine
20:15:40 than it is from a dead machine to a new machine.
20:15:43 So, if you have something that can't be upgraded, buy a new one.
20:15:48 It's much cheaper than trying to recover things from a dead machine.
20:15:56 I have a question, Lawrence.
20:15:58 Yeah.
20:16:00 I get a… we probably all do, get a lot of stuff
20:16:04 Uh, text messages.
20:16:05 With nothing more than a… than a number,
20:16:09 And they… and they claim to be all sorts of people, you know. Usually, they're… they're…
20:16:14 political things wanting money, or…
20:16:16 Talking about stuff.
20:16:18 Um…
20:16:21 And they ask you to click on them. Now,
20:16:23 Can you infect yourself by clicking on a
20:16:26 text message?
20:16:27 Yes.
20:16:29 Uh-huh. So if… so I'd been… if I don't recognize it, I don't mess with it. I just…
20:16:34 Leave it.
20:16:34 Um, you can actually go into messages and tell it to filter things.
20:16:39 That is from an unknown sender, it just puts them in a separate category. So,
20:16:43 Okay, yeah, of course.
20:16:44 Your own senders are the ones you see in the unknown ones. It puts them in a separate category, so you don't see it.
20:16:49 And every once in a while, I'll go through the unknown senders, and I'll find out that, like, my dentist, they send out text messages reminding me to get… to come in for my dental checkup.
20:17:00 Right.
20:17:00 Well, that's not in my known list, but when I look at it, I say, oh yeah, that's the dentist, and so I then identify that that's the dentist, and then it shows up in the known ones.
20:17:10 Um, but, um, that's already… you have… you have tools to take care of that.
20:17:17 The problem with clicking on a link…
20:17:21 Text can't be infected, but when you click on a link, it opens up your browser, and your browser can be infected.
20:17:29 Hmm.
20:17:29 So, that's… that's the part that you want to avoid doing.
20:17:33 Um, a couple years ago,
20:17:35 Well, maybe it was, like, 10 years ago.
20:17:37 Somebody came up with a really interesting virus in the Windows world,
20:17:41 that if you just received the message, you didn't even have to open the email. Just, if you received it, it would infect your machine.
20:17:49 Oh, jeez.
20:17:50 Yeah, that's… that was not cool.
20:17:52 But the way the Mac's set up, that's virtually impossible to happen.
20:17:56 with, um, you might have read about Khashoggi, um, the Saudi journalist who was murdered by the…
20:18:03 The Saudi regime.
20:18:05 Yeah.
20:18:06 He had a… he had a iPhone.
20:18:09 So, how did they get into his iPhone? Well…
20:18:12 The Saudi government spent
20:18:15 roughly $50 million.
20:18:18 creating a project to compromise his iPhone.
20:18:23 So, if you're not a target of some country, it's probably not going to happen to you.
20:18:28 And even then, if he hadn't made one little mistake, he wouldn't… they wouldn't have been able to get in, but he did make one little mistake.
20:18:36 Uh, he had a message that he thought was from a contact, and he clicked on it, and um…
20:18:42 They hadn't… it really was from a contact, but they had compromised the contact, so what he was sent was something that…
20:18:49 allowed them in.
20:18:51 Huh, okay.
20:18:52 I have some on my…
20:18:56 I can't… you're distorted, I can't hear you.
20:18:59 Um, can you hear me now?
20:19:01 Well, I can hear you, but it's distorted.
20:19:04 Well, I have something on my Mac that says,
20:19:08 Zoom in a meeting.
20:19:11 Sign in to see profile.
20:19:14 Definitely get rid of that. Just delete it. Actually, you shouldn't just delete these.
20:19:19 You can go in and tell that messages are… you can… when you delete it, it'll say, is this spam, or do you want to block it, and it'll block it.
20:19:28 And when an email, don't…
20:19:31 I found somebody recently who was dragging messages into the junk
20:19:35 folder. Don't drag it. Go up to the menu and declare it junk.
20:19:39 Because that sends a message back to Apple saying, hey, this is junk, so if other people get that message,
20:19:46 As well, after it gets enough of these, then Apple just won't send them out anymore. It'll know that it's junk.
20:19:53 Apple will never send it to you if it knows it's junk.
20:19:56 So, if you get junk mail, declare it junk,
20:20:00 Uh, don't delete it, just declare it junk and it'll disappear.
20:20:04 If you get a message, go in and delete it, and when you delete it, you'll get a message pop up, say,
20:20:11 Um, that, that, that, uh, yes, if you tell us it's junk.
20:20:16 It not only says that it's junk and tells Apple,
20:20:19 or the phone company in this case, but it'll also block that number.
20:20:24 Um, and the controls in iOS 26 or even more.
20:20:29 um, extensive for that.
20:20:31 Plus, I can now screen calls on my phone, too.
20:20:34 So, that's… that's nifty.
20:20:36 And I can screen calls on my Mac because of the new Mac app, uh, the new Mac phone app.
20:20:43 So, they're giving you all kinds of tools to do this, but
20:20:46 You have to explicitly tell
20:20:49 your Mac or your phone, that things are bad.
20:20:52 Because that tells Apple, and that tells the phone company not to send those things to you.
20:20:59 Now, if you accidentally block your…
20:21:03 doctor, that's…
20:21:04 You'll have to do something about that, but um… for the most part, it's a really good tool.
20:21:09 Just to keep that stuff from happening to you.
20:21:16 Any other questions?
20:21:18 Did all of you sign the, uh…
20:21:20 Registration thing?
20:21:20 Oh,
20:21:26 Uh…
20:21:27 Let's see, how do we do that? That's chat.
20:21:30 Put them in the chat.
20:21:33 Yeah, I'll post it again in case it's scrolled off.
20:21:40 Um, next month, I'm going to talk about macOS…
20:21:44 And iOS, definitely, and I actually, definitely iPadOS, too.
20:21:50 iPad is the most dramatic change.
20:21:53 Um, in my opinion.
20:21:55 But the thing that, so far, that I like the most is the screen.
20:22:01 call screening on my phone, which is…
20:22:04 Lovely. I haven't had a…
20:22:06 single junk mail call.
20:22:08 That's actually rung the phone in 2 days, which is, uh…
20:22:12 a record.
20:22:13 Is there a phone app on the iPad?
20:22:17 I haven't looked…
20:22:19 Um, there is in the Mac, which is cool,
20:22:23 Um… but I haven't looked on the iPad. Probably not.
20:22:32 I'd have to think… it's a good thing. I'll go and look, but I don't know.
20:22:36 But I don't think so.
20:22:39 Apple tries to distinguish between what is an iPhone and what is a Mac, but they know that since you're sitting at a Mac a lot of the time, having a phone app to control your phone, which is in another room, is a good idea, so…
20:22:51 The programmers probably developed that because it made sense to them. There are a lot of things in the computer world that were developed by
20:22:59 programmers, because they were…
20:23:02 19, 20, 21, and they thought, oh, wouldn't this be cool?
20:23:05 And, um, it's just by accident that it was cool to other people as well.
20:23:14 the, um… you should look in… go onto the internet and look at the history of emoji.
20:23:20 It's a funny story about a guy who…
20:23:23 Who wanted a date.
20:23:26 Japanese guy who wanted to date.
20:23:29 So he created Emoji.
20:23:35 Any questions?
20:23:38 Okay, next month we'll talk about the new operating systems.
20:23:42 Good night.
20:23:43 Okay, good night, Lawrence. Thank you.
20:23:45 Thank you.
20:23:46 Thank you.