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Siri AI

For the June 16, 2026, meeting, we were originally planning to discuss spaces — virtual spaces, virtual screens, and various hardware and software technologies for putting more information in limited screen space. Various time constraints and health issues have forced a postponement of that topic, possibly to July.

Instead, we focused on Apple Intelligence, which was also the main topic of the keynote at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference 2026 (WWDC26), which concluded last week. After teasing Apple’s plans for artificial intelligence (AI) for over a year, the keynote provided some specifics, and these became the topic of the June meeting.

The slides, posted below, contain a wealth of information about Apple’s forthcoming suite of operating systems for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and other devices, collectively known as OS 27. Coming out this fall, macOS 27 will be known as Golden Gate, replacing Tahoe. iOS 27 for iPhone, iPadOS 27 for iPad, watchOS 27 for Apple Watch, and visionOS 27 will retain their numerical names, without a California place name.

Central to all of these operating systems will be Siri AI, a new version of Siri that will perform as many of its AI functions as possible on the host device. Among other things, Siri AI will rely heavily on Spotlight for interacting with files, and will also be able to draw on information spanning different applications to satisfy user requests. Because these artificial intelligence functions require specific types of processors, OS 27 will be limited to Apple Silicon devices; there will be no update for Intel-based MacBooks and desktop Macs.

Another big change will be a partnership with Google’s Gemini AI agent for items that require resources beyond what your device can do on its own. Apple will use Private Cloud Compute to protect the privacy and security of Apple device users, sending encrypted, anonymous requests to Gemini; Google will not know what you have requested, nor be able to track any of your private information or activity. Apple has published some technical papers on the subject:

Expanding Private Cloud Compute

https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc

Introducing the Third Generation of Apple’s Foundation Models

‘https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-third-generation-of-apple-foundation-models

These new operating systems should be released sometime this fall. Historically, they come out in September or October, but Apple, as usual, declined to be more specific.

Notes for Siri AI meeting

Lots of text. In the listing of OS 27 improvements, the items marked in yellow were ones that I’m particularly looking forward to. These aren’t necessarily the most useful or the most important, just things that I want to see ASAP.

Video of the June 2026 meeting: Siri AI

Video recording of the June 2026 meeting on Siri AI

Click on the YouTube logo in the video if you want to expand the recording.

Transcript of the meeting on: Siri UI

This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom frequently has flights of fancy. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.

18:29:45 Okay, it’s.
18:29:48 6:30, so I’m going to start with our usual.
18:29:52 questions and answers, and I realize there are only three of us, but…
18:29:55 of a layer. Now, four of us.
18:29:57 But if anyone has a question, I have an answer, and it might even be a correct one.
18:30:03 Sorry. Anyone have a question?
18:30:11 Nobody has a question?
18:30:12 Are you going to go over the new Siri 2.0?
18:30:18 Yes, in fact, I said I was going to do spaces and talk about.
18:30:25 Siri and Apple Intelligence.
18:30:29 And I lied, I’m going to talk about…
18:30:32 Siri and Apple Intelligence, and not going to talk about spaces at all.
18:30:39 Oh, shut up.
18:30:45 I have a, um…
18:30:47 I have a concussion and been feeling somewhat under-ambitious, so…
18:30:52 I’ll put off spaces for another time.
18:30:59 Um, so yes, I will be talking quite a bit about that.
18:31:02 Even though I might have to…
18:31:07 Siri stomp.
18:31:12 Will that get better in the next version of the OS?
18:31:18 No?
18:31:16 No, and it’s partially it’s own fault, because…
18:31:22 I set it up so that I don’t have the word hey first.
18:31:26 I just have it respond to…
18:31:30 its name, and normally that’s perfectly okay, because I’m the only one here, but.
18:31:35 During smug meetings, it gets…
18:31:37 entertaining sometimes.
18:31:40 Once I did a, it was a joke.
18:31:44 I have, um…
18:31:45 I have an Alexa…
18:31:48 Echo Dot, and I also have a Google Home.
18:31:52 And I pasted together a bunch of…
18:31:56 recordings, they weren’t done…
18:31:58 altogether, but I pasted it together so it sounded like they were arguing amongst themselves.
18:32:04 And I.
18:32:06 posted it on.
18:32:09 My user group site on the East Coast.
18:32:13 And I had people from Apple.
18:32:16 People from Amazon and people from Google all ask,
18:32:22 How did I get them to argue with each other and
18:32:25 It was… I just recorded something.
18:32:27 And then I pasted them together.
18:32:29 So it wasn’t as if they were really arguing, but they were all quite.
18:32:33 Intrigued as to how I managed to get them to argue, because it did sound like they were arguing with each other.
18:32:39 But I wrote out a script in order to make it sound that way.
18:32:45 So I do have fun with them unless they speak up when I’m not.
18:32:51 intending them to.
18:32:54 Hmm.
18:32:56 Anyone have any questions?
18:32:57 I do have a question about
18:33:00 Shared albums.
18:33:03 in…
18:33:03 Yes.
18:33:05 in iMovie, you can make a magic movie,
18:33:09 Which entails you just feeding it a bunch of clips, it’ll add transitions and…
18:33:13 All that sort of thing, but it will…
18:33:15 It will make the clips, it’ll shorten them to whatever…
18:33:18 you know, truncate them, or leave them be, and so on.
18:33:22 Well, I’ve noticed that in sharing an album, if you have video clips,
18:33:27 Uh, it works the same way.
18:33:30 It’ll shorten some of them.
18:33:33 And I… is there some way to…
18:33:36 Disallow that, or to… in iMovie, of course, you can…
18:33:40 The shortened clip can be lengthened.
18:33:43 But I don’t see any way to do that in the shared album business.
18:33:47 Um, okay.
18:33:49 I do a great many videos. I do them for…
18:33:53 smug, I do them for my church.
18:33:56 For the church have done something like…
18:33:59 400 since I moved here, and…
18:34:02 2018. So I do a lot of video.
18:34:06 for things other than straight video, like, for example, the
18:34:11 straight for the straight Macintosh user group video.
18:34:14 I record this using Zoom,
18:34:18 I bring it into iMovie, and then I trim out the parts that I don’t want, such as the
18:34:24 part at the start of the meeting where I’m sitting there trying to get the controls to work, and so on and so forth.
18:34:30 So I use iMovie for that, because it’s just one pure piece of video, and I chop out things like
18:34:36 I mean, I had a power failure chop out that part.
18:34:38 Things like that.
18:34:41 For other things that I do, I don’t use iMovie.
18:34:45 So, for example, to assemble a whole bunch of smaller clips,
18:34:48 Uh, you might recall…
18:34:51 that I had, um…
18:34:53 a short video of a bunch of emojis talking about artificial intelligence.
18:34:59 Um, I did that in Keynote.
18:35:01 I recorded the movie clips independently.
18:35:05 Then I fired up Keynote and put them in the order I wanted,
18:35:08 And I set up the transitions within Keynote, and then I exported it as a video.
18:35:14 And the reason why I did that
18:35:16 is that there are other more powerful tools, such as…
18:35:20 Final Cut Pro.
18:35:22 Which is a real bear to learn.
18:35:26 And there are many other ways of doing it. But the nice thing about.
18:35:32 keynote, Keynote.
18:35:33 Basically, he says, I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this.
18:35:39 You feed it a… you paste in a video that’s…
18:35:42 The length that you want, uh, and it just saves them in order, so…
18:35:47 That’s how I tend to do…
18:35:50 Some of the more complicated things that I’ve done.
18:35:53 There are other ways of doing it, but Keynote, because
18:35:58 within that one slide, if that slide is a 13-minute video,
18:36:05 It’ll be 13 minutes long, and if you don’t want it to be 13 minutes long, you trim it, and then dump it into…
18:36:11 Keynote. You’re not waiting for…
18:36:14 The program, be it
18:36:15 iMovie or Final Cut or whatever.
18:36:17 to dynamically make changes on the fly,
18:36:21 As it’s rendering it, Keynote just saves it as a video.
18:36:25 So and it also allows me to do things that are a little bit complicated. Like, for example,
18:36:32 And iMovie, you can put on titles.
18:36:35 But the titles come in a set format.
18:36:37 And they’re down at the bottom or they’re up at the top, or they fly in all over.
18:36:42 With Keynote, I can make the title anything I want to, because it’s just a slide.
18:36:46 And I can use any font I want to, I’m not.
18:36:48 I’m not subject to the constraints of, uh…
18:36:52 of how iMovie does it, so.
18:36:56 my technique and…
18:36:59 It’s weird, I know, is just to use Keynote, and I lay out
18:37:04 longer videos that are done in pieces in Keynote.
18:37:08 And then after it’s all done the way I want it to,
18:37:11 Then I go to the file menu and I say export, say that I want it as a…
18:37:18 movie, and it renders out the movie.
18:37:22 Again, it’s easier to use than Final Cut. It gives me…
18:37:26 It gives me options that I don’t have in iMovie itself.
18:37:31 So that’s how I do things like that.
18:37:34 How does it paste the clips together?
18:37:38 Well, if I have…
18:37:41 If you recall the…
18:37:44 movie with a bunch of emojis.
18:37:46 I just had a slide.
18:37:48 Paste it in one movie. Another slide, paste it in another movie. I don’t like the order, I just rearrange the slides.
18:37:55 And it rearranges the movies because
18:37:57 There’s one clip per slide.
18:38:00 But will it make it one single movie, or does it…
18:38:03 Yeah, yeah.
18:38:04 It does. It combines all the slides together.
18:38:07 Yeah.
18:38:08 Oh, wow, that is powerful.
18:38:12 I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s what I use because I’m really lazy.
18:38:16 You can do much the same in…
18:38:19 In iMovie, but.
18:38:22 What I will do in iMovie, because it doesn’t have as much control over things like titles.
18:38:28 At the start of the smug postings that I put up on YouTube,
18:38:34 I have a slide that I made in Keynote, I save that as an image,
18:38:38 And then in iMovie, I just import that image and I stick that at the front.
18:38:43 of the video. So that’s why I don’t have a standard iMovie
18:38:47 title in an iMovie end credit.
18:38:49 It’s that custom smug logo.
18:38:53 But that’s because I didn’t do it in iMovie. I did it in Keynote.
18:38:57 Keynote, I use it for a lot of things other than what it was designed.
18:39:03 But can you? Can you do that with
18:39:06 Like, photos that have been videoed,
18:39:09 And in the photo app, I mean, can you take…
18:39:12 Is that what Steve was talking about?
18:39:14 Well, within photos, you can create a…
18:39:19 a video, those custom videos, just export it as a video.
18:39:23 And then you can suck it into…
18:39:25 iMovie, and you can modify it the way you want and stick a title on the front of it.
18:39:30 Or you can take a whole bunch of smaller videos and put them all together.
18:39:36 That… I do that all the time in iMovie as well.
18:39:38 But a lot of the stuff that I do to control things.
18:39:43 Um, I use.
18:39:44 I use Keynote. I use Keynote because I don’t know if you’ve ever used PowerPoint, but PowerPoint.
18:39:50 is one of the most…
18:39:53 horribly designed things on the planet.
18:39:56 When Microsoft bought it, Microsoft did not develop PowerPoint.
18:40:01 It was… it was an outliner. It would just do text outlines, and so you could add things in, and you could indent things, because it was a text outliner.
18:40:11 And Microsoft decided that they were going to do something else with it, because, um.
18:40:16 a company that doesn’t exist anymore, and I can’t remember the name of it.
18:40:20 Adobe bought it, and I can’t remember the name of the company.
18:40:24 Um, anyway, they had…
18:40:26 They had a
18:40:29 a slide presentation piece, a package.
18:40:32 And Microsoft thought they had to compete with that, so they went and took
18:40:37 What was a really nice outlining product and turned it into PowerPoint.
18:40:41 But PowerPoint does all kinds of just incredibly stupid things.
18:40:46 And Keynote has a much cleaner design.
18:40:49 If you put something someplace, it stays there, it doesn’t wander all over.
18:40:54 doesn’t change fonts, it doesn’t…
18:40:57 Let’s change punctuation just because it’s Tuesday.
18:41:00 It does what you want it to.
18:41:03 And…
18:41:02 And I like Keynote because it does latex and you can have like equations or symbols,
18:41:09 And everything in latex and PowerPoint,
18:41:14 You can’t do that. You have to kind of take a picture of it and then plop it in as a pic.
18:41:18 Yes, and by the way, when he says latex, he’s not talking about
18:41:22 latex gloves, latex is a
18:41:24 is a programming language for doing equations and laying it out typographically.
18:41:29 Well, special symbols, Greek letters,
18:41:32 Well, it was originally designed for math formulas, but
18:41:36 Right, right.
18:41:37 Um, but, um…
18:41:38 Yeah, it’s a very powerful tool, and it’s got a very simple interface, but the reason I really like
18:41:44 Keynote is its consistent.
18:41:47 And I cannot get that kind of consistency with.
18:41:51 with PowerPoint.
18:41:53 PowerPoint just does all kinds of stupid things.
18:41:57 The two pieces of Microsoft software that I use all the time that I really like.
18:42:02 Our Microsoft Word, which I’ve been using since 1984.
18:42:05 and Excel. And Excel is what’s one of those things that people don’t really understand.
18:42:10 Excel is a Mac program. It was developed on the Mac.
18:42:14 for the Mac, it was made by Microsoft.
18:42:16 And it was much later introduced into
18:42:19 Windows, but you can do amazing things with.
18:42:23 with Excel, but you can do amazing things with Word as well.
18:42:28 Okay.
18:42:27 I don’t think I can live my life without Excel.
18:42:30 My whole life is organized by itself.
18:42:34 Then Microsoft works is an oxymoron in any way, except for those two programs.
18:42:40 Um…
18:42:38 I agree. Can I ask you a question?
18:42:42 Does anybody else have problems with their iPhone 17?
18:42:47 Not ringing.
18:42:48 And not only not ringing, and you’re missing calls,
18:42:52 But it doesn’t even show that somebody calls.
18:42:55 And so they’re texting you, going,
18:42:57 I’m trying to call you, but it’s going to voicemail.
18:43:02 So I’ve had this problem now for about two and a half weeks.
18:43:07 I’ve been to, um, I’ve done everything, I’ve looked it up, and it’s like, oh!
18:43:11 You’re one of a million people that has this same problem. Do these 12 things.
18:43:15 So, I went over to T-Mobile, they changed the eSIM, they did all kinds of stuff.
18:43:21 We started it several times.
18:43:23 Is anyone else having that problem?
18:43:26 The answer to that is…
18:43:30 a lot of people, it will not ring because they accidentally mute it.
18:43:35 There are all kinds of… well, I’m just saying there are all kinds of different ways to mute it.
18:43:38 Yeah, right.
18:43:40 You can mute it using the side button, which a lot of people may have accidentally done.
18:43:45 You can mute it doing a bunch of other things.
18:43:47 I, for the most part, prefer to not have it ring.
18:43:51 But the other thing that, um, with starting with the iPhone 17 and the latest version of the.
18:43:57 operating system that people sometimes are not aware of.
18:44:00 You have to be very careful about how you screen calls. It’s got a new call screening feature.
18:44:07 Right.
18:44:07 And you have to be really careful about what you screen. As an example,
18:44:12 You don’t necessarily want to screen all you don’t want to ignore all unknown numbers because.
18:44:18 Exactly.
18:44:19 If you have a doctor’s appointment.
18:44:22 Right.
18:44:22 And the doctor sends you a reminder,
18:44:24 That reminder is probably not going to come from a number that’s in your.
18:44:28 Right.
18:44:29 address book, and if you screen out everything,
18:44:32 That’s not in your address book, it won’t ring. And then later on, you’ll wonder why.
18:44:37 So there are a number of different ways in which
18:44:41 Your phone can be operating perfectly well, and you can still manage to miss calls, depending upon
18:44:47 Right.
18:44:48 How you set up screening and whether or not you accidentally
18:44:52 muted. You can mute it using the side buttons, you can mute it by using the
18:44:56 the control center.
18:44:59 What is that? Yeah, I think it’s called Control Center.
18:45:03 Focus is another thing. Yeah, I’ve been through all those things, and I’ve…
18:45:09 become really aware of all those different things.
18:45:12 So just yesterday, I found on Apple Community,
18:45:16 Where people were talking about this problem.
18:45:19 And then they gave a list of of, you know, the 12 or 15 things to try, which I had already tried all of them.
18:45:26 And then the last one was to restart it.
18:45:29 But not just restart it the normal way, which is I just press the thing, and then it says slide to restart.
18:45:35 And I slide it. This was very specifically, you have to do it exactly this way.
18:45:41 You have the up-down buttons, you press the up once quickly, you press the…
18:45:47 down quickly, and then you hold the side button
18:45:50 Until…
18:45:52 it until the apple appears. You don’t slide it off.
18:45:56 And I did that.
18:45:58 I had to really pay attention to how it…
18:46:01 Senate, and after I did that, it started… I started getting calls.
18:46:06 and they started showing. But it was a specific way of restarting
18:46:11 That’s different from any other way that I’ve ever restarted.
18:46:15 I think you’ll find that that’s a reset.
18:46:18 That’s why I was thinking that it was, yeah, but it wasn’t…
18:46:16 Yeah, that’s a reset. Right.
18:46:22 like, reset to factory standards, because all my stuff is still there.
18:46:26 It was some special reset, and so apparently that’s what it needed.
18:46:30 Yeah, I have heard of people having problems, but
18:46:34 It’s difficult with.
18:46:39 so many people tried to have their phone limited. And the reason why people try to have the phone limit
18:46:47 calls, is that
18:46:49 Throughout the history of the phone in general, when people first started having.
18:46:56 phones in their homes, people complain that they got calls all the time, even if it was only one or two a week.
18:47:01 Well, now you can have a call all the time, and since it’s literally with you all the time,
18:47:07 Yeah.
18:47:06 It can be really, really annoying.
18:47:09 So people have figured out different ways to have it screen it, or just
18:47:12 not have the ringer go off, all kinds of things.
18:47:15 So it’s become a problem.
18:47:19 And when a lot of people say that it’s not ringing, it’s not necessarily because of a
18:47:23 Problem with the phone, it’s because there are just a myriad of different ways of
18:47:29 telling it to shut up. And whether you expect it to or not, you.
18:47:34 happened to hit on a way that’s a bit overly quiet.
18:47:38 But yeah, the reset is an option. I would caution you though.
18:47:44 that if you need to reset it more than, like, once every six months.
18:47:49 there might be something wrong with the machine.
18:47:51 Yeah.
18:47:51 Because that’s the, um…
18:47:54 That’s the, uh… that’s an extreme way of solving the problem. Normally, you need to reset your phone.
18:48:00 Turn it off, turn it back on again. I mean, turn it, power it completely down, wait a few minutes, power it completely back up, and that’s more than enough.
18:48:09 Big.
18:48:08 Well, that was happening to me too. I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
18:48:13 And, you know, and on certain calls, it wasn’t ringing, and then I realized I had the setting for screening,
18:48:19 So that if it’s not in my address book, it won’t ring.
18:48:22 Oh, yeah, I did.
18:48:22 But then I found that
18:48:25 I took it off, and all the calls kept coming in,
18:48:27 But it was so annoying, I was getting so many spam calls that I put it back on,
18:48:33 And just check to see…
18:48:35 you know, the missed calls list every so often to make sure
18:48:38 I didn’t miss one that I really wanted. And it turns out, I’ve been doing this for, like, a couple of months now,
18:48:45 Uh, I’m getting less and less spam calls.
18:48:50 It’s, like, almost down to zero.
18:48:50 That’s.
18:48:55 You’re not…
18:48:55 I have… I have a…
18:48:57 I have slightly different problem than the rest of you. Actually, I shouldn’t say that, because I don’t know where you guys are from.
18:49:04 I moved here from Maryland.
18:49:09 And my…
18:49:11 phone number has a Maryland prefix.
18:49:13 Because it has a Maryland free prefix, and because every single lobbying lawyer and lobbying firm.
18:49:19 on the planet is in Washington, D.C., or Baltimore, or somewhere in that area.
18:49:25 I get tens of thousands of calls a year,
18:49:28 From there, asking me to donate money, vote for this candidate, vote against that candidate.
18:49:36 save the whales. Doesn’t make any difference what it is.
18:49:39 All kinds of lobbying. So, I set up call screening, and the call screening now
18:49:46 will make my phone vibrate in the sense it’s in my pocket. I feel it.
18:49:50 And I look at it, and if it’s from 240 or 301 or 703.
18:49:57 or 202, or any of the.
18:49:59 Baltimore, Washington phone numbers,
18:50:01 I don’t answer it.
18:50:03 Could it be the president calling me? Possibly. Could it be someone telling me that the
18:50:10 withholding my social security, I guess I found out I’m actually only 12, might be.
18:50:15 I don’t care if it’s from that area, I don’t want to hear them.
18:50:19 Because I’ve lived here for eight years now.
18:50:21 I don’t really need to hear them anymore.
18:50:25 So that’s my way of screening is also visual. If I get a phone call, I’ll look at it.
18:50:30 And if it’s from the DC area, I just don’t answer.
18:50:36 I’m not recommending that you necessarily do that.
18:50:41 But.
18:50:42 You know, there are different… you have to deal with.
18:50:45 You have to deal with telecommunications.
18:50:48 In your own, um, in your own way.
18:50:53 It’s… it is a problem.
18:50:55 By the way, the FCC
18:51:00 was within 60 days of implementing a rule that required.
18:51:06 The phone companies not to pass through a call unless it was from a valid number.
18:51:11 A lot of these spammers, they use invalid numbers.
18:51:15 You’ll see that the call says it’s from South Dakota. Why? Because there’s a line in South Dakota is not being used. So they say it’s.
18:51:23 from that phone number.
18:51:25 They were within 60 days of making that a rule, because the phone companies have the technology to do this right now, so that
18:51:32 Somebody places a call, they place a text message to you,
18:51:37 The phone company can instantly check to see if it’s from a valid
18:51:40 Phone number. They were within 60 days of doing that,
18:51:45 And the current administration vacated the rule.
18:51:49 So.
18:51:50 Uh, there was relief… there was a technological solution that had nothing to do with your phone.
18:51:56 And, um, they cut it off.
18:52:00 By the time.
18:52:01 It’s… the technology is there.
18:52:04 And in most countries, they don’t allow
18:52:07 companies to do what they do in the United States.
18:52:12 Such is life.
18:52:15 Any other questions?
18:52:17 Now that you’ve heard my rant against…
18:52:19 spam phone calls.
18:52:23 Well, I’m having…
18:52:27 So I have an iPhone 17, and then I’ve got my Mac Mini, which is great.
18:52:33 And then I have an iPad error. They’re all relatively new.
18:52:38 For some reason, my iPad error does not get the emails.
18:52:42 Even though when I go to the iCloud,
18:52:47 Everything appears to be okay.
18:52:49 But I cannot, and I also cannot check emails on my phone.
18:52:54 And I don’t understand why.
18:53:02 And I just used to be so be able to figure this out in the 80s.
18:53:08 with Apple, but now it’s beyond me. I just can’t figure it out.
18:53:11 Uh, but my first question is, what company…
18:53:15 Do you have an iCloud account, or do you have an AOL account or?
18:53:20 I have iCloud, but, you know, I’ve got OliPen for Internet, and I’ve got for my
18:53:27 email, and I’ve got…
18:53:29 T-Mobile for my phone.
18:53:32 Okay, the only pen is for your internet, but it’s… but do you have an email account with OliPen?
18:53:39 Yes.
18:53:41 Okay.
18:53:43 This has nothing against Olipan as a company because I’m actually quite impressed with them.
18:53:50 But OliPen is an email address is not a really great idea.
18:53:54 And the reason is that they are…
18:53:57 a local.
18:53:59 Yeah.
18:53:59 company, which means that if internet access for any reason is cut off from the peninsula.
18:54:05 You don’t get anything.
18:54:06 That’s right.
18:54:08 Apple and Gmail and Microsoft are all global.
18:54:12 Yeah.
18:54:12 In fact, on the space station, they use iCloud.
18:54:16 for email on the space station.
18:54:19 Uh, which isn’t even on this planet.
18:54:22 But, um, Olipan has a limitation because of that.
18:54:25 Other ones that I’m not terribly happy with people using in this day and age are
18:54:30 AOL. AOL dates back to the days, well.
18:54:35 AOL took over email accounts from CompuServe in the 1990s.
18:54:40 And they got really big, and then they got sold, and then got sold again, and they got sold again.
18:54:45 And eventually they acquired by Verizon. Verizon just wanted their customer lists.
18:54:51 And then they sold it to, right now, it’s owned by an Italian.
18:54:54 holding company. They’re spending no money at all on the infrastructure to AOL, so AOL is just.
18:55:02 Not a good choice. Yahoo is not a good choice.
18:55:05 Um, you basically want to… for email, and things where you really do.
18:55:11 when to get your mail. You want to stick with iCloud, you want to stick with…
18:55:16 Microsoft, you want to stick with Google.
18:55:19 And, among other things, they are.
18:55:22 They are global presences, so…
18:55:26 You can be in Spain, you can be in.
18:55:30 forks, and you can get email, assuming that you have internet access.
18:55:35 With Olipen, it’s a little bit rockier.
18:55:38 But in terms of why they’re not showing up on your phone,
18:55:43 and your.
18:55:46 Thank you.
18:55:44 And I think I… I think I know why. I had figured it out, I forgot.
18:55:50 That one of them is an IMAP.
18:55:55 IMAP, and another one is put in as a Pop 3.
18:55:59 And in the addresses in the, you know, email accounts,
18:56:04 And nobody can figure out how to change it.
18:56:08 Well, that’s another reason why I.
18:56:11 recommend Google or Microsoft or Apple because they’re all.
18:56:17 IMAP.
18:56:17 So when you say Google, are you talking about Gmail?
18:56:20 Gmail, yes.
18:56:22 Okay, okay.
18:56:23 And when you say iCloud, because I have an iCloud account,
18:56:29 Yeah.
18:56:29 and then when you say Microsoft, what is that outlook?
18:56:34 Uh, yes, Outlook.
18:56:35 Okay. Okay.
18:56:39 Okay, thank you.
18:56:44 Other questions?
18:56:47 I do not. Hey.
18:56:49 Any other questions?
18:56:51 Does anybody have Starlink?
18:56:55 No?
18:56:57 Yeah, Starlink is…
18:57:02 I know some people who have Starlink that really like it.
18:57:06 But they’re people who…
18:57:08 um, aren’t anywhere near…
18:57:11 Scrim or Port Angeles, they’re out.
18:57:14 on the side of a mountainside someplace, or something like that.
18:57:18 The good news, bad news with Starlink is that.
18:57:22 It’s not a uniform service.
18:57:24 And the other thing is that it’s really good at.
18:57:28 things being broadcast to you, it’s not so great.
18:57:32 about things where you’re doing things interactively.
18:57:36 Um, and part of that is because it’s a satellite service, and the satellite has very little power.
18:57:41 It just doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth.
18:57:44 If you think about it, when Comcast and a bunch of other people got into the
18:57:49 Internet business. They’re very good at delivering things to you.
18:57:54 Uh, like wavetable.
18:57:56 The download speed that you can get from wave cable around here, you can get a gigabyte a second, which is really, really fast.
18:58:04 But the upload going the other direction, is
18:58:07 Just a tiny fraction of that.
18:58:09 Why? It’s because they’re a cable television concern.
18:58:13 They sent identical content out to lots of people.
18:58:17 But email is not identical. Any email you send off is a one-on-one.
18:58:23 And they just don’t have the upload bandwidth going the other direction. Starlink has the same problem.
18:58:29 That unique content going out the other way tends to be quite slow and less reliable.
18:58:36 Um…
18:58:37 And and there’s no easy fix for that.
18:58:41 DISH, for example,
18:58:43 A lot of people have DISH. DISH can send you a TV signal, but when you send something back, it actually goes over phone lines.
18:58:51 So that’s even slower.
18:58:54 It’s just a.
18:58:57 It’s just a… it’s a combination of physics and what you can do with telecommunications.
18:59:03 Would you recommend…
18:59:06 an Internet provider on the peninsula.
18:59:09 I mean, like I said, I have OliPen,
18:59:12 Just for the Internet, but…
18:59:15 Who would you recommend?
18:59:17 If you look at a topographical map of.
18:59:21 of Clallam County, I will tell you that that’s why I can’t recommend anything.
18:59:27 when you’re in Seattle, Seattle might be very lumpy.
18:59:31 But Seattle has over a million people.
18:59:33 And so they have an extensive infrastructure.
18:59:36 Telecommunications infrastructure. We don’t.
18:59:40 Um, if you think about.
18:59:42 How people get here. People come here via 101.
18:59:45 Is there an alternative to 101? Nope.
18:59:51 And our telecommunications are the same way. There’s…
18:59:54 Very limited access in and there’s.
18:59:56 Uh, very limited access going the other way.
18:59:59 And when it comes to telecommunications provider,
19:00:02 If you’re in downtown Sequim, Olypin does a really good job.
19:00:06 But Oli pins completely unavailable where I am.
19:00:10 Hmm.
19:00:10 And there’s even.
19:00:14 the PUD even has fiber optic that they offer.
19:00:17 downtown. High-speed fiber optic.
19:00:20 But if you’re outside of those 8, 10 block area.
19:00:23 They don’t have it. So I can’t really recommend.
19:00:27 I can’t recommend one recommendation.
19:00:31 Okay.
19:00:29 I have a friend out on…
19:00:32 Uh, what’s the name of that?
19:00:36 on Palo Alto.
19:00:38 that.
19:00:40 She uses…
19:00:45 Hughes, which is a satellite.
19:00:48 And the downlink is okay. The uplink is just absolutely atrocious.
19:00:53 She jokingly says that.
19:00:55 It would be easier for her to get in her truck and drive to my place.
19:00:58 to hand me something than to send me an email.
19:01:02 It just depends upon where you live.
19:01:04 Because it’s just not a.
19:01:06 We don’t have a uniform infrastructure here. It’s very…
19:01:11 It’s very broken up.
19:01:13 And I very much like the fact that I can wake up in the morning and eat breakfast and look at.
19:01:21 Doze and fawns and my.
19:01:24 Uh, in my backyard.
19:01:26 But that doesn’t mean I have the same high-speed internet that I was used to when I was in suburban Maryland.
19:01:34 I had a gig up and a gig down.
19:01:38 And I don’t think if there’s any place in the county that has that.
19:01:43 So.
19:01:45 Um… .
19:01:45 There are some areas that are served better, like,
19:01:48 For instance, since we have
19:01:51 Verizon, uh, for our…
19:01:53 Phone service, and we get a fairly good signal here.
19:01:57 Um, we use their service for our internet as well.
19:02:01 I kind of don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, but that’s what we’ve wound up with.
19:02:06 There’s also another one that we used before that. They have fiber optics that ran into the neighborhood,
19:02:13 to one house, and then that house
19:02:16 agreed to put up a, um…
19:02:20 a short radio type of a system that covers our neighborhood, which is
19:02:25 This is somewhat smaller than your neighborhood, I believe, and uh…
19:02:29 But it’s like 50 houses, or 50 lots here, and uh, so it covers all that pretty well, but…
19:02:36 Um, and we were happy with that.
19:02:39 the heck, it’s not… it’s not Nokia with that. It’s, uh…
19:02:43 I’ve been trying to think of the name, but…
19:02:46 It just depends on your particular area, who can service you well.
19:02:52 You might check with your neighbors.
19:02:54 Yeah, unfortunately, that’s the…
19:02:57 That is the answer.
19:02:59 When I moved here, I was on AT&T. Kathleen had a discount because she was in the military and they offered a really good discount.
19:03:07 So we’d had AT&T since we…
19:03:11 First got cell phones, and we moved into this house, and we couldn’t get a signal at all.
19:03:16 And not having to signal on your cell phone in your own home.
19:03:20 really torqued me off, so we switched to Verizon.
19:03:23 Is Verizon better?
19:03:25 Well, where I am, yes, but…
19:03:28 2 miles away, maybe not.
19:03:32 Right.
19:03:32 It’s, um… I can’t give you… I can’t give you a.
19:03:35 uniform answer, because it depends… because our.
19:03:38 Our topology is so…
19:03:40 convoluted.
19:03:42 Well, if I have the OliPen,
19:03:44 But I also have a Gmail account.
19:03:47 So, which I never use,
19:03:49 But if I lost the OliPen because…
19:03:53 Something happened on the peninsula, I could still use my Gmail.
19:03:57 We accept that you’re not thinking about this the way you should.
19:04:01 If you lost your early pin, you don’t have Gmail either, because nobody’s using the Gmail.
19:04:06 That’s right, that’s right, yeah.
19:04:09 We’ll be an island, yeah.
19:04:11 Please.
19:04:11 So, if you went to do something like that, you need to start using it immediately.
19:04:16 Yeah.
19:04:16 And I have a friend who has an AOL account.
19:04:19 And I set up the AOL account so it automatically sends… it forwards everything that comes into the AOL account.
19:04:26 to our Gmail account, because that way when it comes to her,
19:04:30 when she responds, it may have… they may have sent it to AOL, but the response will go to the Gmail, so then the next time they send a message.
19:04:37 It’ll go to their Gmail. So just gradually, over time.
19:04:42 The AOL will be irrelevant.
19:04:44 Okay.
19:04:44 And that’s the same thing you can do with the Olipen. Just set it up to
19:04:48 Okay.
19:04:49 Auto-forward to Gmail.
19:04:50 And then just respond from Gmail, and after a while, people just…
19:04:54 Use your Gmail.
19:04:56 Okay. Thank you.
19:04:58 And it’s after 7. Yes.
19:05:04 Michael said that he’s not our president, but does our non-president have a report to?
19:05:09 Provide the rest of us.
19:05:13 I think
19:05:13 Did you set up the, uh…
19:05:16 the attendance sheet.
19:05:18 Yes, I did, um, but I did not log into my
19:05:23 email to you, give you that address. So, let’s try doing that.
19:05:35 I somehow lost.
19:05:37 My video.
19:05:47 We see you just fine.
19:05:50 Yeah, but I.
19:05:52 I
19:05:56 I was just moving something out of the way.
19:05:59 And Zoom decided… oh, there you are!
19:06:04 Uh, I’m trying to log into my email so that I can.
19:06:19 Get your… the meeting link.
19:06:27 Oh, and I was trying to remember what that other
19:06:31 service that we had was, and it’s, uh…
19:06:34 Uh, Nicola.
19:06:36 Nicole is good if you’re in a specific area covered by them, so you could try that as well.
19:06:50 And I believe the charge was, like, $80 a month for it, and we get our Verizon for…
19:06:56 Uh, 45 a month, so…
19:06:59 It made sense to make the move.
19:07:01 Yeah.
19:07:02 Um, I did set up an attendance link and I can’t reach it because I’m not in my
19:07:07 own account, I’m in my fake user account.
19:07:11 And my fake user doesn’t have access to my…
19:07:14 Vice President accounts, so…
19:07:16 Heck.
19:07:20 That’s my.
19:07:23 summary here, just heck.
19:07:31 Um…
19:07:32 The schedule said that we were going to talk about spaces.
19:07:36 And about…
19:07:40 Apple intelligence and Siri, um…
19:07:44 AI. And we’re not going to do that because…
19:07:48 I’m suffering from a concussion, and…
19:07:51 Just found.
19:07:53 life difficult, but…
19:07:56 I want to at least explain what I’m talking about.
19:07:59 On Mac, if you have a laptop, you have a limited amount of screen space.
19:08:04 And if you went to do something complicated, pretty soon you run out of spaces to tuck things away.
19:08:10 And the Mac operating system has built-in ways of
19:08:14 of handling that, including…
19:08:17 virtual screens that you don’t normally see, but you can flick to those.
19:08:21 other screens to do things.
19:08:24 And you can also have overlapping windows. If any of you have ever used Windows.
19:08:29 Windows, when you bring up an application that occupies the entire window.
19:08:34 And on the Mac, no, you can tile it so you can have multiple things open at once.
19:08:39 Um, and I wanted to talk about that because I’ve seen several people recently.
19:08:43 run into problems because they just couldn’t get everything they wanted to do.
19:08:48 on screen at once.
19:08:50 And I wanted to show different ways of doing that. For example, the, uh…
19:08:55 The current Mac operating system,
19:08:58 If you shove a window up to the top,
19:09:02 menu bar, it’ll actually offer to put that in a different space.
19:09:07 And a lot of you have never done that, or you didn’t know what it was trying to do, so I was going to demonstrate that, but I just.
19:09:14 Uh, I’m not up to that today, so instead I’m talking about
19:09:18 Apple Intelligence.
19:09:20 And about what Apple did at their keynote.
19:09:24 Um… last week?
19:09:26 Last week. Um…
19:09:29 First thing, a couple things about the Worldwide Developer Conference. It’s called WWDC, which people think makes it sound like a…
19:09:37 A rock concert, and to some extent it is.
19:09:40 They broadcast it for free. It used to be that you had to travel down to.
19:09:45 San Francisco and pay to stay there for a week.
19:09:49 But now they broadcast it for free and all the sessions.
19:09:52 You can get online.
19:09:55 It is a software developer conference, and…
19:09:58 Anyone want to venture a guess as to how many software developers work… how many software developers work on Apple.
19:10:06 products.
19:10:10 Like, is it 10,000?
19:10:15 I heard that they had…
19:10:18 a thousand…
19:10:20 Um, um, app…
19:10:23 app.
19:10:28 People turned in a thousand,
19:10:31 apps an hour to them for
19:10:33 You know, trying to get him into the system.
19:10:36 Yeah. They run about 1,000 apps, new apps or revised apps, an hour.
19:10:41 Yeah, that’s…
19:10:42 There are 10 million people
19:10:45 who have a developer accounts, and I happen to be one of them.
19:10:49 Do I actually develop stuff for Apple? No.
19:10:53 I got a developer account because when I worked for the government.
19:10:56 I wanted to make sure that what Apple was doing wouldn’t break things that I was creating.
19:11:02 for the general public. So I would download the latest software, I’d play with it.
19:11:08 figure out what the bugs were, figure out things that I liked, things I didn’t like.
19:11:13 lobby Apple to change the things I didn’t like.
19:11:16 And so that’s how I got involved in this. But do I regularly develop software for?
19:11:22 Apple products, so the answer is no.
19:11:26 Um, but, um…
19:11:27 Anyway, so they now have the worldwide developer conference so they can.
19:11:34 have these seminars that last an entire week to talk about.
19:11:38 What Apple’s going to be doing in the future.
19:11:40 And the focus is mostly on software.
19:11:43 They have, on occasion, introduced new hardware.
19:11:46 Um, this year…
19:11:48 They didn’t introduce any new hardware at all, which is unusual.
19:11:52 There wasn’t any announcement of any kind of new hardware at all.
19:11:56 But the software developer, the keynote,
19:12:01 did talk about something that I’ve mentioned previously when I was talking about.
19:12:04 Apple Intelligence, I said that
19:12:07 I wanted Apple to work on.
19:12:11 making Apple Intelligence more powerful, yes.
19:12:14 But I also didn’t want them to abandon.
19:12:17 the emphasis they have on privacy and security.
19:12:22 If you go into ChatGPT, or you go into Anthemorphic, or you go into…
19:12:28 Cloud, or you go into Fireflyer.
19:12:30 Any of the other AI models out there.
19:12:33 When you submit a question or you give it a paper to look at or whatever you do,
19:12:41 They keep that.
19:12:43 They use that information to train their models.
19:12:48 And I don’t want to do that.
19:12:50 Uh, there are good reasons not to want to do that. For example.
19:12:53 There’s a case right now in South Carolina, North Carolina, I don’t remember exactly where.
19:13:00 of this lawyer who found out that his spouse was going to divorce him.
19:13:05 Because she had uploaded.
19:13:09 a draft of the, uh…
19:13:11 Her divorce decree.
19:13:13 into an AI model, and he had seen it.
19:13:17 and tried to kill her.
19:13:20 Well, I’m not planning on killing anyone, nor do I really want anyone to try and kill me.
19:13:25 But I really don’t want any of my personal information.
19:13:29 to be on Google, to be on.
19:13:33 meta to be any of those places.
19:13:35 And I’m fairly… I have a lot of practice at keeping my.
19:13:39 personal information outside of.
19:13:44 outside of the public domain.
19:13:45 Now, if you go into…
19:13:48 Google, and you type in my name,
19:13:50 If you put my name in quotes, quote, Lawrence Charters quote.
19:13:54 Type it in, press return, you’ll see lots and lots of things about me.
19:13:58 But those are things that I choose to have out there.
19:14:01 I don’t want them to know anything about my personal business.
19:14:05 And so I don’t want them to use that for training.
19:14:09 I did not want Apple…
19:14:12 To expand their AI.
19:14:16 offerings at the expense of.
19:14:19 individuals’ privacy and security.
19:14:22 And I was extremely pleased at what I saw in the keynote.
19:14:27 But I’m going to show you a…
19:14:31 a, um…
19:14:33 a keynote presentation that I did, different than Apple’s keynote.
19:14:37 Uh, in which I talk about
19:14:38 what they talked about at the
19:14:41 At the developers conference, but then I’m going to focus particularly about
19:14:45 how Apple is doing artificial intelligence.
19:14:49 and how it’s doing it in a way that’s actually useful to people.
19:14:53 Artificial intelligence, a lot of people say, I have no use of artificial intelligence.
19:14:59 Which isn’t true at all.
19:15:01 Um, I don’t know if you’ve ever used Microsoft Word and had it correct your grammar.
19:15:05 It’ll go through and it’ll do things that looks like your Christmas tree. It’ll have things red and green and blue.
19:15:11 Saying, you didn’t do this, you didn’t do that, and you can go through, it’s up to you to actually fix those things. It’s not…
19:15:17 rewriting it for you. But it’s up to you to go and fix those things.
19:15:21 And there’s a company out called Grammarly that does the same thing with things that you do.
19:15:26 On the web, works within your web browser,
19:15:28 And as you’re typing in a response to somebody on a website, it’ll sit there and say,
19:15:34 Um, you should put a comma here and
19:15:36 do all kinds of things.
19:15:38 Those are…
19:15:40 Most of the tools that people use, that people would call artificial intelligence.
19:15:45 I would say that the not really, but it’s getting there.
19:15:48 Because most of the artificial intelligence tools.
19:15:51 that we currently have are actually offshoots of that.
19:15:56 They’re offshoots of these.
19:15:58 grammar checkers that, uh…
19:16:00 have been going around. When I have to admit that when, uh…
19:16:04 I wrote my first word processor, the first word processor on a computer that I ever saw.
19:16:09 was one that I wrote. And when a commercial one came out,
19:16:13 A few months later, I told my spouse that I was going to buy it, and she said, why? And I said,
19:16:18 It has a spell checker.
19:16:20 I was an editor of a magazine, I was editor of newspapers. One thing editors know right off the bat
19:16:28 They can’t edit their own stuff.
19:16:30 Because I knew what I was writing.
19:16:32 And so I will go through and I’ll have misspellings all over the place that I don’t notice.
19:16:37 I noticed it in somebody else’s work, but I don’t notice it in mine.
19:16:40 So a spell checker to me was a godsend because it made it sound like I actually knew
19:16:46 how to spell. And that was the first sort of artificial intelligence. Is it really artificial intelligence? No.
19:16:54 Because as an example.
19:16:56 This one guy said that, uh…
19:16:59 His interest was piqued.
19:17:02 when he saw such and such. He spelled peaked, P-E-A-E
19:17:06 K-E-D.
19:17:07 Well, that is a peak, but it’s not the kind that the same as peaked your interest.
19:17:13 And I made fun of this for several weeks before he caught on to the fact that.
19:17:18 I was using three different versions of the word peaked.
19:17:22 to make fun of him, and he didn’t understand why I was doing that.
19:17:27 But he eventually caught on.
19:17:28 So I’m going to show you a presentation.
19:17:31 It’s got a lot of text.
19:17:34 You feel free to stop and ask questions.
19:17:38 But I’m going to show my screen.
19:17:40 As soon as I remember how to do that.
19:17:46 How about this one?
19:17:49 And…
19:17:51 What do you see right now?
19:17:55 Any.
19:17:55 We see a space background with, uh, with, uh…
19:17:59 Um, weather stuff on it.
19:18:01 Okay.
19:18:01 You got the weather, the widget, the weather widget.
19:18:04 Yeah.
19:18:03 the weather widget. Okay, we can shrink that down, because we don’t really…
19:18:09 Although I have to admit, I like the weather.
19:18:11 better today than yesterday.
19:18:14 Yeah.
19:18:14 Yep.
19:18:19 I’m not going to do this full screen, because when I was doing this full screen,
19:18:24 I found out there’s an artifact that I didn’t like, so I’m going to…
19:18:31 You’re going to see my navigation off here on the side.
19:18:35 Um the.
19:18:40 We’re not gonna do spaces, we’ll do that some other time. They introduced a lot of things at the Worldwide Developer Conference.
19:18:48 And I’m going to go through about 100 and some odd of them fairly quickly.
19:18:53 These are things that they improved in OS 27.
19:18:57 One thing they were very consistent about this year.
19:18:59 is they called it OS 27.
19:19:01 Even though the Mac operating system has a new name,
19:19:06 It’s macOS 27.
19:19:08 Golden Gate is the name of the next version of the operating system.
19:19:12 They still referred to things as OS 27, because the changes that they’re making
19:19:16 The improvements tend to be for the
19:19:20 iPhone, the iPad, Mac OS.
19:19:23 Vision OS in all of them, so…
19:19:26 I’ve highlighted some things that I think are intriguing,
19:19:29 In yellow, like, for example, more relevant spotlight searches, but they have just a whole bunch of things.
19:19:36 And here’s one screen.
19:19:37 And here’s another screen.
19:19:40 And here’s another screen, and I’m not going to bother to stomp on all of these because
19:19:45 There are a lot of screens.
19:19:47 But I will put my…
19:19:49 PowerPoint slide up on the…
19:19:54 a straight Mac.
19:19:55 Lawrence, Lawrence.
19:19:57 I just want to say, if you’re…
19:20:01 I don’t know how our… probably everyone else feels the same. If you’re not up to doing this, I mean,
19:20:05 A concussion is a big deal.
19:20:08 You know.
19:20:08 Oh, this is… no, it was doing something…
19:20:14 additional that was a strain. I’m actually doing okay today.
19:20:16 Okay, all right. Just want to make sure.
19:20:20 But anyway, there are just a lot of things, and I’m not going to go through all of them, but uh.
19:20:25 One of them, for example, that I’m really intrigued with is that you can set
19:20:29 Different levels.
19:20:32 audio levels for alarms, so that
19:20:35 For example, in the morning, I like to wake up, I, my
19:20:40 watch. Doesn’t sound an alarm, my watch tickles my wrist, and that’s… that’s fine, because it’s.
19:20:45 wakes me up, but it doesn’t alarm me.
19:20:48 But for other things, like I’m going to go in for a.
19:20:52 a CAT scan on Thursday to check on my concussion.
19:20:57 For that, I want to make sure that I don’t miss that appointment, so I want that alarm to be something that I won’t ignore.
19:21:04 Whereas another one, which is, remember to take out the trash.
19:21:08 Yeah, that’s important, but it’s not time specific, so that can just be a general.
19:21:12 you know, alarm. And you’ll be allowed to change the alarm
19:21:18 volume for different types of alarms, depending upon what it is you want. Not different types, for different alarms.
19:21:23 And so there are lots of different things that you can do.
19:21:26 Another change, one that I even highlighted here was that
19:21:29 A lot of the operating system changes in the past,
19:21:33 have been for Apple’s apps alone.
19:21:37 So that if you were using Safari and they made some security thing, it would apply just to Safari.
19:21:43 Well, with the next version, a lot of the things they’re going to do work with third-party apps as well.
19:21:49 And one, for example, is
19:21:51 Support media sharing from third-party apps.
19:21:55 Well, if somebody sent you something in Google Photos,
19:21:58 And you’d like it to be in Apple Photos, you can get it, but sometimes.
19:22:03 You have to go through several steps in order to have it.
19:22:05 So, I don’t know exactly what this is going to look like when it’s finally delivered, but.
19:22:11 The idea of making it easier to.
19:22:15 share, uh, media between different applications. It sounds like a good idea to me.
19:22:21 Um, and this has, like, 160, or… I don’t remember how many.
19:22:25 And I just… there’s a…
19:22:27 During the keynote, they flashed this up on screen with these… it’s one screen.
19:22:32 that has these boxes of text floating through it.
19:22:37 And somebody captured that and wrote them all out, and I just stuck them into a slide.
19:22:44 What OS set 27 will work on? It’ll work on pretty much anything that’s got an Apple Silicon chip.
19:22:51 It will not work on anything prior to that.
19:22:55 So if you have an Intel-based
19:22:57 iMac, or you have an Intel-based
19:22:59 MacBook, uh, it’s not going to work on that.
19:23:04 And there are some technical reasons for that, but…
19:23:07 That is, this is basically the end of the, um…
19:23:12 Intels. And I have an Intel-based…
19:23:15 iMac Pro that, uh…
19:23:19 Um, that I’m really sorry that I won’t be able to do these things on.
19:23:23 on that machine anymore, but that machine is also 8 years old, so, you know.
19:23:29 It’s stood in good use.
19:23:33 But anyway, anything that’s running Apple Silicon,
19:23:36 OS 27 will work on it.
19:23:40 There are some caveats, which I’ll get to in a second.
19:23:44 Uh, iPads that can use OS 27 are pretty much
19:23:49 Any of the current machines and going back
19:23:53 several generations as well.
19:23:56 Like, for example, my iPad Mini has an A17.
19:24:01 Pro chips, so it can work, but the previous version of it
19:24:04 I will not. But it’s a fairly broad range.
19:24:10 iPhones that can use OS 27. This goes back to iPhone 11, which is something of a surprise.
19:24:17 Because the chip in an iPhone 11 is really quite ancient.
19:24:21 And I think the reason why they did this was that.
19:24:25 Uh, last year, when Apple promised that a lot of stuff was coming out for Apple Intelligence.
19:24:32 they didn’t actually deliver.
19:24:33 So this is kind of a makeup for that. They’re going to.
19:24:36 have it go back farther. But there are going to be some caveats to that.
19:24:41 Which is basically the more powerful of the hardware, probably the more benefits you’re going to get from it.
19:24:47 So an iPhone 11, yeah, it’ll probably run iOS… it’ll probably run OS.
19:24:53 27, but will it be able to do that with all the bells and whistles?
19:24:57 I don’t think so.
19:25:00 There’s a technical summary of…
19:25:03 One way in which Apple is doing this new intelligence model.
19:25:07 And it’s on Apple’s website at this address, which you don’t have to copy down, because I’ll put it on the website.
19:25:13 But it’s basically a quick overview.
19:25:17 of how they go about doing that, but I have some flowcharts for that as well that I’ll…
19:25:22 that you won’t understand, but I’m going to show you anyway.
19:25:27 The 2 things that…
19:25:29 came across most powerfully in the keynote was that
19:25:33 Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.
19:25:36 are going to emphasize privacy and security.
19:25:41 That when you basically…
19:25:43 Ask your phone or your iPad or your Mac to go out and do something, or find something,
19:25:50 Basically, the only people on the planet are gonna know about it are you and your device.
19:25:57 One thing that Apple…
19:25:59 could not do as well as Google.
19:26:02 was Google has a really good artificial intelligence.
19:26:07 technology called Gemini.
19:26:09 It’s had different names, and it’ll probably have new names in the future, but it’s called Gemini.
19:26:16 And.
19:26:18 what I think they spent this last year doing was coming up with a.
19:26:23 Contractual relationship with, uh…
19:26:26 Google that allows
19:26:28 Apple to have Google on the back end,
19:26:32 But only after the stuff has been anonymized. In other words,
19:26:37 You send a request off to your phone saying,
19:26:41 Who was president in 1827? Your phone doesn’t know that. He goes out and asks Apple. Apple may not know who the president was in 1827.
19:26:50 It asks Google, but when it asked Google, it doesn’t say,
19:26:55 who’s asking the question.
19:26:56 And it doesn’t keep the answer.
19:26:59 So Google responds, sends it off to Apple.
19:27:02 Apple sends it back to you, and then Apple gets rid of the fact that that transaction ever took place.
19:27:10 So, yes?
19:27:10 Lawrence, I had a question. What about…
19:27:12 When you’re interacting with Siri,
19:27:16 Um, and you’re having a conversation
19:27:20 Does Siri is going to remember
19:27:23 The first part of the conversation,
19:27:25 to be able to answer maybe a second part, and where’s that information saved so that Siri knows
19:27:32 What you’re saying…
19:27:34 The answer to that is… I don’t know exactly. I heard.
19:27:39 They talked about that a bit.
19:27:41 But there’s a… there are two different parts to…
19:27:44 Apple intelligence, the way that Apple is doing it. And one reason why they came up with Siri AI.
19:27:51 In the past, when you wanted to go to ChatGPT.
19:27:57 You would go into your browser, usually,
19:28:00 And you go to the ChatGPT site and you type in whatever you wanted, and it would come back.
19:28:06 in your browser.
19:28:08 Apple is pushing that more into Siri, so you would ask Siri a question.
19:28:15 Siri, if it knows the answer, would give you the answer.
19:28:18 Like, what is my name? It’ll tell you what your name is.
19:28:22 What day of the week is it? It’ll tell you that. What time is it? Tell you all kinds of things. Where do I live? Knows that.
19:28:28 all kinds of things it knows.
19:28:30 But for things it doesn’t know and has to go out.
19:28:33 That’s when it would talk to Google.
19:28:37 Will it remember the question?
19:28:39 If it was something that…
19:28:41 that Siri knew the answer to already.
19:28:45 And you’re asking a follow-up to that, the answer is probably yes.
19:28:49 If it’s something that it did not know, and
19:28:52 It doesn’t it sent that out someplace else and you ask a follow up question. You might have to repeat part of the follow-up question.
19:29:00 Because it can… it looks like it will have the ability to follow up.
19:29:05 questions that it is in control of.
19:29:07 But if it has to go elsewhere, I’m not sure that that’s going to happen.
19:29:10 But I also heard it was going to…
19:29:14 Uh, know what is currently on your screen,
19:29:17 Yes.
19:29:18 And where is that being stored?
19:29:21 Again, that’s actually taking place on your device.
19:29:25 Your device knows what’s on the screen.
19:29:28 They’ve had that character recognition software for quite some time now, so it can read what’s on your screen.
19:29:33 And if it knows that that’s a picture of your daughter, for example,
19:29:36 And you can say, oh, what is her birthday?
19:29:40 And if it knows that that’s your daughter, because it’s on your machine and it knows that’s your daughter,
19:29:45 It can say, oh, her birthday is, and it looks it up and…
19:29:48 whatever record that it has, again, on your machine.
19:29:51 That’s why it’s important to understand exactly who’s doing the work.
19:29:56 You have a staggering amount of information about yourself,
19:30:00 on your iPhone.
19:30:02 On your Mac, on your iPad.
19:30:05 So, it can do those kind of follow-ups if it’s something, again, that it can see your screen and it knows you’re doing that.
19:30:11 Like, for example, what you can ask the question that you have a picture of, I don’t know that it can actually do this, but as an example.
19:30:18 You have a picture of a pomegranate. What can you do with it? Well, if it was up to me, you could throw it away, because I don’t like pomegranate.
19:30:24 But it might suggest that you…
19:30:27 make something with that pomegranate, because it knows that that’s a picture of a pomegranate, and it’s on your machine.
19:30:32 If it doesn’t recognize it, it can’t tell the difference between a pomegranate and a
19:30:37 Pomeranian, then it might have to actually go out and ask for things like that. It depends upon what it’s.
19:30:45 what its knowledge base,
19:30:48 can encompass.
19:30:50 And so it’s going to…
19:30:52 It’s looking at privacy and security,
19:30:56 And it’s doing as much of that as possible on your device, because that way it doesn’t even have to go outside.
19:31:01 to ask anybody else.
19:31:04 Have you tried it on the beta version of 27?
19:31:06 I cannot answer that question.
19:31:09 Oh, okay.
19:31:13 This is a kind of a flowchart of how it works.
19:31:18 And again, this is going to be in the slide deck that I put up on the site.
19:31:22 But here is your iPhone or your iPad or your Mac.
19:31:27 You ask it questions. If it’s something that it knows how to do,
19:31:31 It’ll process it on the device,
19:31:34 It figures out…
19:31:36 What parts it might be able to do itself, and what parts it can’t do. If it can do it all itself, it’ll talk to you.
19:31:43 Like, you say, where’s my picture of Timmy? And it knows that Timmy is your.
19:31:48 your cousin, and it brings up a picture of Timmy.
19:31:51 So it can do that all on the phone because it knows all that stuff. Assuming that you’ve ever bothered to tell it.
19:31:56 that that weird guy is your cousin Timmy.
19:32:00 If it doesn’t know what it is, it sends it out to the… over the internet, it’s encrypted.
19:32:07 And it sends it out over to Apple’s private cloud compute, and they call it,
19:32:11 Private Cloud Compute, because it’s a.
19:32:14 It’s Apple Intelligence, but it’s not used by anybody else.
19:32:20 in your instance, other than you. You might be
19:32:23 using their private cloud compute along with a million other people at a time.
19:32:27 But in terms of your question, it’s all in its own little.
19:32:31 Enclave, and it’s not being shared with anybody else.
19:32:35 And if it can come up with the answer, it sends it back to you.
19:32:40 And it’s anonymized. So the apple doesn’t know where it’s coming from, and you don’t know where it’s coming from.
19:32:46 And exactly how that encryption works, don’t worry about that.
19:32:49 how it knows how to send it back to you? Well, it’s sending it from one
19:32:54 key token to another key token. Key tokens generated on the fly.
19:32:58 It says it got it from this address, it sends it back, and then it throws away.
19:33:03 the key, so it doesn’t really have any way of talking to it again.
19:33:05 This is for.
19:33:08 talking between you and Apple.
19:33:11 It’s…
19:33:11 Can you ask for the source of this answer?
19:33:14 Um, I don’t… I don’t know that. For some things you can, but for other things, like if it’s a picture of your cousin Timmy.
19:33:21 And it’s in your photos library, I don’t know if it would tell you that or not. Probably just show you Timmy.
19:33:28 And you could say, hey, he’s out of your Apple Photos. I don’t know what it would do.
19:33:32 Haven’t tried something like that.
19:33:36 If it can’t answer it between your device,
19:33:40 And apples private cloud. It gets a little bit more complicated.
19:33:44 So, your question goes out to Apple’s cloud.
19:33:49 out here, and then if Apple doesn’t… if it needs to get more information like.
19:33:58 Who was the first president who wasn’t born in the United States? Believe it or not, our first several presidents
19:34:02 weren’t born in the United States. So who was the first president who was born in the United States?
19:34:08 Apple might know that, but it probably doesn’t, and it would go out and ask Google.
19:34:13 So when it goes to Google,
19:34:14 It sends the key, this key that it created on the fly to accompany the question,
19:34:21 sends it out to Google,
19:34:23 Google looks for it, parses out the question, figures out what it is.
19:34:27 and then sends it back. When it sends it back,
19:34:31 The… Apple has it in what they call these ephemeral VMNs, virtual
19:34:37 machines.
19:34:39 It uses that to process the request that it gets back from Google, sends it back onto you,
19:34:45 And then it destroys that virtual machine. So it just all goes poof.
19:34:49 Apple doesn’t keep a record of the request, it doesn’t keep a record.
19:34:54 Record of the answer. And Google doesn’t have any information.
19:35:00 from you.
19:35:03 All they have is this anonymous request.
19:35:05 Now, if you happen to send a question that you explicitly identify yourself, like,
19:35:11 uh, did, uh, Law Charters attend the.
19:35:14 1989 Macworld conference.
19:35:17 If that was your question,
19:35:19 And Apple doesn’t know the answer, and it goes out to Google, and Google looks it up and finds out that you’re on the.
19:35:26 You were registered at the 1989 Apple Macworld
19:35:31 conference and sends it back to you, it doesn’t know who answered the question, but it does know that somebody asked that about Lawrence Charters.
19:35:39 Because, yeah, it’s… it’s… it had to know at least that much, so it will know that.
19:35:45 But in terms of who asked the question, what they wanted to use it for, what they’re doing with it, has no idea.
19:35:51 So this is basically how it works. And the keys to this are these keys, these secure keys that it…
19:35:59 that Apple creates, and then Apple destroys.
19:36:02 Those are the things that protect.
19:36:04 your data. When it’s going out,
19:36:06 Google gets nothing. When it comes back, they destroy the key.
19:36:10 And without the key, you have no idea what’s going on.
19:36:13 And these virtual machines, again, after it completes a request, it gets rid of the virtual machine.
19:36:20 And a virtual machine is basically just a pocket of memory that’s
19:36:22 that’s being used on their servers.
19:36:25 And it’s being used for that task, and after that task is over, they just get rid of it, and they reallocate the memory for other things.
19:36:32 So this is basically how it works.
19:36:34 And again, I know this is probably looking…
19:36:36 weird, but it’s how it works.
19:36:39 Kind of gives you some examples.
19:36:42 Um, couple days ago, I was using the AP app on my phone,
19:36:46 And it said, Washington, United States. No article available in your area.
19:36:52 Now, this cracked me up because it actually makes me feel good when there’s no national news about the area that I’m in.
19:37:00 There’s no wildfires, there’s no mass shootings.
19:37:02 There’s no ferry boat that went aground. It’s nice that there’s no, uh…
19:37:09 no news about it. Is this an example of artificial intelligence? And the answer is no.
19:37:14 When you go into the AP News app, you get to specify.
19:37:19 What your areas of interest are. My interests are women’s
19:37:24 basketball. I really like women’s basketball. Washington State.
19:37:28 And a few other things. So I go in there and I specify that. If there’s no news about Washington State, it comes back and says.
19:37:35 No article available in your area. Now, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t articles about lots of other things, but just nothing
19:37:41 That particular moment about Washington State, or about women’s basketball, or whatever it is.
19:37:46 And this is not AI, this is basically just a kind of a list processing, and I’m not on that.
19:37:53 Nothing I wanted was in that particular list at that point.
19:37:57 So this doesn’t take AI, this is just basic computer programming.
19:38:01 Here’s an example of something that says it’s officially Beatles’ first album, Please, Please Me.
19:38:06 was released closer to the 1800s than to the present day, and it shows.
19:38:11 The number of dates from the 1800s till today.
19:38:16 And to the Beatles album and then to today.
19:38:20 And you are.
19:38:22 You are… the Beatles were closer to the 1800s than you were to their first album.
19:38:28 Because we’re getting old, and that was a long time ago.
19:38:31 This is not exactly AI either, because a human came up with the question.
19:38:37 A human figured out the answer. Now, he probably used a computer calendar.
19:38:40 But this is not AI.
19:38:42 It’s a… it’s just a…
19:38:45 Clever question and clever answer.
19:38:47 Here is a chart of where you’re likely to get bear attacks.
19:38:52 And it says, Mercury, Venus, approximately no risk of bear attack.
19:38:57 Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
19:38:59 Also, no risk of bear attack.
19:39:01 Is this AI? No, this is a cartoon that somebody drew that is 100% correct.
19:39:06 But it’s not artificial.
19:39:09 It’s not artificial intelligence.
19:39:12 And this is a list of all data centers in Europe in the year 1437.
19:39:17 And as you notice, the map is completely blank, it’s just a map of Europe.
19:39:23 And is that AI? No, it’s just a human came up with a way of telling a joke.
19:39:28 And it’s nothing artificial intelligent.
19:39:33 Um, this is… happened on my phone.
19:39:36 I got a message that says Apple Pay wallet protection auto change.
19:39:40 Charge alert for your Apple ID, $537.40, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
19:39:45 It’s got a bunch of verbiage here.
19:39:48 Apple flagged this as…
19:39:50 possibly fraudulent.
19:39:54 But it was up to me to decide that it was spam,
19:39:57 And up to me to press the little button that says delete and report spam.
19:40:02 So it’s not really AI, it’s just Apple’s programming doing what I asked it to do.
19:40:08 I told it to flag suspicious.
19:40:12 messages, and it thought this was suspicious.
19:40:15 So none of that’s AI.
19:40:18 This is the illustration I was going to use for tonight’s talk that I didn’t deliver.
19:40:24 on spaces. And I typed in to, uh…
19:40:27 Google Gemini said I wanted a photograph.
19:40:31 of a penguin being very…
19:40:33 anxious about trying to keep track of what’s on 10.
19:40:37 uh, computer screens.
19:40:39 So it was a puffin.
19:40:43 that was anxious about trying to read 10.
19:40:46 computer screens. And there are actually 11 computer screens, so, hey, I got a bonus.
19:40:51 Plus, a laptop screen, plus an iPad screen and two phones.
19:40:58 So it gave me more than I asked for.
19:41:00 Uh, so we got a penguin, we have a penguin, we have a puffin.
19:41:05 that’s really upset, and if you could zoom in, there’s actually something in here that, oh, it says this, uh…
19:41:10 This coffee cuff back here is.
19:41:13 Puffin Patrol, some nice little things that I didn’t really ask for, but…
19:41:16 It pleases me greatly.
19:41:20 Google Gemini created this photo for me. Is that artificial intelligence?
19:41:26 I’d still say no.
19:41:29 It’s a tool that I used
19:41:31 To create something, and we call it artificial intelligence, but.
19:41:36 I was the one who created the problem.
19:41:38 I was the one who set the parameters of how I wanted it to be,
19:41:42 displayed, and it generated it using…
19:41:46 generative AI, but is it really artificial intelligence?
19:41:51 No, we’ve had the ability to do this. You know, Apple’s been an Apple.
19:41:55 Industrial light and magic has been doing things like this for quite some time.
19:41:59 It’s not really intelligence, but it is what we currently classify as.
19:42:05 AI. Now, the next thing I’m going to show you…
19:42:07 is a little bit more impressive.
19:42:11 Now, I told…
19:42:15 Gemini.
19:42:16 to create a video for me.
19:42:20 of a puffin trying to use an iPhone, trying to answer.
19:42:24 an iPhone and
19:42:27 I hope that this will play, and you can see it.
19:42:40 And we have a very frustrated puffin, because…
19:42:44 It just… it lacks the equipment to…
19:42:48 To, uh, answer the phone.
19:42:50 Now, is this AI? This is really getting close to AI because I just I typed in maybe.
19:42:55 15 words, and it created that video.
19:42:59 And it’s a photorealistic.
19:43:03 Puffin and that’s an identifiable iPhone.
19:43:07 It’s one of the older ones that’s got a mechanical button.
19:43:10 And you didn’t tell it what kind of background you wanted or anything?
19:43:14 No, it kind of… I think Puffin was kind of a dead giveaway.
19:43:18 Oh, yeah, yeah.
19:43:22 Um, so…
19:43:23 That’s the kind of thing that is what I would consider closer to being.
19:43:28 AI. Now,
19:43:30 some things to think about.
19:43:32 If you…
19:43:33 If I do this today, I happen to have a Google…
19:43:38 one account, I can’t remember if that’s what they call it.
19:43:40 It’s a paid account.
19:43:43 with Google, because I have a whole bunch of email, and I’ve got websites, and a bunch of other stuff.
19:43:49 So I’m paying Google for my account.
19:43:53 And if I ask this, I’m sure that because I have a paid account,
19:43:57 I will get a better level of service than people who are doing this for free.
19:44:03 What a lot of these AI companies do is they give you tokens, and you get so many odd tokens for this.
19:44:08 account, and for this level of account, you get more tokens for higher levels, and so on and so forth.
19:44:14 So, how many tokens did I burn up creating that video? Have no idea.
19:44:20 I suspect that for apples.
19:44:24 AI that talks to Google.
19:44:27 that it’s… there’s going to be probably a very basic level that has very little access.
19:44:33 And if you want more, I think it’s probably going to require that you have a
19:44:37 and iCloud Plus account.
19:44:40 The iCloud Plus accounts cost money.
19:44:44 That’s when you want more.
19:44:46 storage for your iCloud. But if you pay for more storage in iCloud, you’ll automatically get things like
19:44:55 The privacy protection on your browser and a bunch.
19:44:59 other things that come at present.
19:45:02 But I think you also probably would get more access to.
19:45:07 Um, um,
19:45:08 Google AI. Why? Because it’s costing.
19:45:12 Google money to do this, and it’s costing Apple money to support this.
19:45:17 So, I suspect that
19:45:19 If you want to do more with AI, you’re going to have to have.
19:45:24 and iCal out plus. That is not clear. They haven’t made that clear.
19:45:29 And it might be a while before.
19:45:33 That’s I have a clear answer on that.
19:45:38 Apple AI limitations. The more powerful your device, the more it can do.
19:45:43 If you look at the amount of RAM,
19:45:46 That’s on an iPhone 17 Pro Max compared to.
19:45:52 that iPhone 11, the iPhone 17 has a lot more memory.
19:45:55 available to it. It also has more storage available to it.
19:46:02 AI is going to require
19:46:04 both memory and storage to do its work.
19:46:08 Because if you ask it a question like.
19:46:11 Uh, how many would, uh, how many
19:46:15 How much wood could a woodchuck of a woodchuck could chuck wood?
19:46:19 That’s a joke.
19:46:21 It’s easy for you to say.
19:46:22 Yes, well, also, I’m not feeling all great that great, so tongue twisters are a little hard.
19:46:27 I, uh, yeah.
19:46:29 But Apple right now can give you an instant answer for that. Why? Because billions of other people have asked that because it’s an obvious thing to try and
19:46:36 trick Siri. But…
19:46:39 in the… if you’re doing this with AI, and you say,
19:46:43 generate me a photograph of this.
19:46:46 That’s going to take storage both
19:46:49 device first. No, thank you.
19:46:51 That’s going to retake storage to actually parse out the question.
19:46:55 It’s going to take storage on your machine,
19:46:59 to send off a.
19:47:01 query to Apple that might send it off to Google and then come back.
19:47:05 It’s going to take RAM, and it’s going to take storage space.
19:47:09 If you have a phone and you look at the iPhone storage,
19:47:13 setting in your settings.
19:47:15 And you’re almost completely maxed out.
19:47:18 You probably are going to have trouble using.
19:47:22 Apple AI, simply because you don’t have enough space on your device.
19:47:26 to work with. So, the more powerful your device,
19:47:29 The more I can do, the more free RAM and more storage you have, the more you can do.
19:47:34 You can do more if you are more skilled and educated.
19:47:39 Um, and I… I’m not doing this because I’m trying to be an elitist.
19:47:43 It’s just that if you have a word processor,
19:47:46 And you have a degree in English.
19:47:48 You probably will be able to use that word processor.
19:47:52 more fluently than someone who is struggling to get out of junior high.
19:47:58 You can do more if you have more imagination. Now, as you might have noticed, I’ve got a thing for.
19:48:04 Penguins and puffins, so…
19:48:07 I can ask them to do ridiculous things.
19:48:10 If you don’t have that tendency and you’re much more linear.
19:48:14 thinker, then you probably won’t be able to do as much.
19:48:18 So, yeah…
19:48:20 I’m just learning a new graphic design program.
19:48:25 And, uh, I’ve never used AI before, but
19:48:29 There’s AI built into it.
19:48:31 And so I can… I’m starting to learn that
19:48:35 Just what you were saying.
19:48:37 And I do have an English degree. But if I can…
19:48:41 describe to this AI thing and type out
19:48:45 Exactly what I am thinking, like the details, using these brand colors and
19:48:50 And it needs to… this is the date, this is the time, and all that, and…
19:48:54 Uh, you know, in the…
19:48:57 format, it’ll spew out several different versions of whatever this thing is that I’m
19:49:03 trying to create. And it is a matter of being able to say it in a
19:49:10 Very clear way. It’s pretty cool, and it… I’m just learning it now, but…
19:49:15 That I… that way of being able to explain it to AI in a way that it can.
19:49:20 Put it back. It’s pretty cool.
19:49:23 What’s the name of the program?
19:49:24 Canva.
19:49:25 Oh, I’m not familiar with that one.
19:49:27 It’s a graphic design program.
19:49:29 Well, yeah, but I use several of them. I just haven’t heard of that one.
19:49:33 Yeah.
19:49:33 A lot of it has to do if you…
19:49:36 If you forget the fact that it’s got the word compute in it,
19:49:40 We don’t actually use…
19:49:43 computers for computations.
19:49:46 Right.
19:49:46 They perform things by doing computations. We use them as communications tool.
19:49:52 My iPhone is sitting in my pocket is a full-blown Unix computer.
19:49:56 more powerful than any Unix computer in the world in 2000, in the year 2000.
19:50:01 I mean, it’s just unbelievably powerful and it wanders around in my pocket.
19:50:05 and answers spam for me.
19:50:07 But we use them as communications devices and not as computers.
19:50:13 However, when it comes to using computers.
19:50:16 The more you can articulate what it is you’re trying to do,
19:50:21 the better luck you’re going to have at actually getting what you… what you want.
19:50:25 That puffin answering the phone, I was astonished that I got what I wanted on my first try.
19:50:31 Uh, the one with the.
19:50:33 puffin and all those screens. That was actually my…
19:50:37 second try. Um…
19:50:38 The first try was okay, but I just… I wanted to tweak it a bit.
19:50:42 But again, being able to figure out
19:50:45 A lot of people, they say, well, uh…
19:50:49 I’ve got tomato soup and I’ve got cheese in the refrigerator.
19:50:54 What can I make with that for dinner?
19:50:57 Well, the answer is probably not a lot, but if you were to give it a few more ingredients to work with,
19:51:02 You can probably ask Gemini or
19:51:05 Apple Intelligence, or Siri,
19:51:07 to come up with a recipe for something.
19:51:10 But you have to be able to provide it with enough building blocks to get something that’s useful.
19:51:16 I can’t remember the movie that I saw, it was many, many years ago.
19:51:16 Yeah.
19:51:20 This woman who had no money at all went into a.
19:51:24 department store.
19:51:26 When they had soda bars,
19:51:29 And she asked for hot water.
19:51:30 And she asked for a catch up.
19:51:32 And she made herself tomato soup.
19:51:35 If you’re desperate, yes, that’s tomato soup, but.
19:51:38 If you have more ingredients and you can more articulate what you want.
19:51:42 Um, you get better results. In her case.
19:51:45 The hot water was free, and the ketchup was free, so that’s what she had. She had tomato soup.
19:51:51 And again, the other thing that I want to say is I don’t know if it’s going to require iCloud Plus to do this.
19:51:57 But a lot of the stuff that they were talking about in terms of the encryption,
19:52:02 is built into iCloud Plus and does not come
19:52:05 with the vanilla version of iCloud.
19:52:08 that you get for free.
19:52:09 Um, so that remains to be seen.
19:52:15 Um, things that you can do with… actually, I should have this other thing out here first.
19:52:22 I’ll get to that.
19:52:24 Things that you can do with the new Apple AI because it’s built into Siri.
19:52:30 Because it’s built into Siri, and Siri can talk to almost anything, including Apple passwords,
19:52:36 One of the things you will be able to do
19:52:37 is go into the password app,
19:52:40 and say, most of us have, if you use Apple passwords for storing passwords.
19:52:45 Most of us have sites that we’ve been to
19:52:48 that have had compromised passwords.
19:52:50 Uh, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong.
19:52:55 With the forthcoming release of OS 27, you’ll be able to ask passwords
19:53:02 to reissue.
19:53:05 to redo all the compromised passwords. It’ll just go through all of them.
19:53:09 And if it’s a weak password, or it’s been compromised, or if it’s been repeated,
19:53:13 It’ll go through all of those and issue new ones.
19:53:17 It does that by logging into the website, going through the security protocol for that site.
19:53:22 Assuming that the site supports this,
19:53:24 And creating a new password, and then logging off.
19:53:27 If you did this by hand, it could take you 20 minutes for each one of these.
19:53:32 Yeah.
19:53:32 So this is a huge, um,
19:53:35 Huge win for sanity.
19:53:38 Um, I would suggest that for a lot of you.
19:53:41 Before you actually tell your Mac or your iPhone to do this.
19:53:45 that you go through your list of passwords and passwords,
19:53:49 And if you’re not using that anymore,
19:53:52 If you’re not using that anymore,
19:53:55 Just delete your account on that, uh, on that site.
19:53:58 There’s no reason to reset the password if you intend to go back there.
19:54:02 And some of these things don’t even exist anymore.
19:54:06 Uh, I found out.
19:54:08 that.
19:54:10 Passwords has an account of mine for CompuServe.
19:54:13 I’m pretty sure CompuServe doesn’t exist anymore.
19:54:16 And I know the source doesn’t exist. The source
19:54:21 Again, it dates back to the…
19:54:23 1990s, and it doesn’t exist anymore.
19:54:25 So just delete those things, and then…
19:54:29 You won’t spend time trying to…
19:54:32 have it contact sites that don’t exist anymore.
19:54:34 But this is going to be something that comes out with OS 27, and I think it’s a…
19:54:38 Huge boost for security.
19:54:40 Another thing that you can do
19:54:43 And as a photographer, I’m not sure that I’m really wild about this.
19:54:48 Um, I take documentary-style photographs. When I take pictures, I take them to document things.
19:54:54 He was a newspaper editor, magazine editor.
19:54:56 And I don’t want to create things that didn’t exist.
19:55:00 So, I’ll go out and I’ll take a photograph, and if that photograph doesn’t work, or whatever, I’ll take another one until I find one that does.
19:55:09 I went up to.
19:55:12 to Vancouver.
19:55:15 BC to see my…
19:55:17 Daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law.
19:55:18 And I was up there for 10 days, and I took 3,000 photographs.
19:55:23 And of those 3,000 photographs, most of them are never going to see the light of day.
19:55:28 Because I, if I didn’t like something, I’d take another one.
19:55:32 With the new Apple Photos and Apple Intelligence, you can do things that you could not do before. You can
19:55:38 Reframe photographs. So if you took
19:55:41 you’re shooting down on someone.
19:55:43 And you decided it’s better to shoot up,
19:55:46 It’ll allow you to edit in such a way that it looks like you’re shooting upward.
19:55:50 Or if you have…
19:55:52 you’re shooting somebody, and in the background, there’s a palm tree.
19:55:56 And offense, and over on the side, there’s a garage with junk in front of it.
19:56:00 It’ll allow you to extend
19:56:02 The palm trees and other things off to the side to cover up the fact that there’s a
19:56:08 garage there, which is really cool.
19:56:11 I’m not sure that I actually like that because
19:56:14 I like photographs to capture reality rather than to
19:56:19 paper it over with fiction, but…
19:56:21 That’s a cool thing to be able to do.
19:56:24 And it’ll also be able to automatically
19:56:26 Just clean up some things like, uh, over…
19:56:30 exposed spots or underexposed spots.
19:56:35 I haven’t played with this, but it sounds cool.
19:56:38 Even though I have some qualms about it.
19:56:44 going still on photographs with Apple Photos.
19:56:48 When Apple Photos first came out, I didn’t… was not very impressed with it, because I used uh
19:56:53 Lightroom from Adobe, which I think is a much better
19:56:57 package for…
19:56:58 keeping track of photographs.
19:57:01 Photos didn’t impress me, but the new photos.
19:57:05 Uh, over the past several years has gradually gotten to be really quite impressive.
19:57:09 And among other things, with the version coming out this fall.
19:57:14 It’ll allow you to do things like set up… it’ll automatically create a collection
19:57:20 of photographs taken by you.
19:57:21 So it won’t have photographs
19:57:23 that were taken by other people that people have sent to you, or screenshots, or things like that.
19:57:28 It’ll only be things that you took.
19:57:30 And that might be something that you’ll want.
19:57:33 And the other one is you can have identity documents, like,
19:57:37 passports and driver’s licenses and so on and so forth.
19:57:40 things that are, um…
19:57:44 identity documents that you might want to carry with you.
19:57:46 Even if you’re not carrying your wallet, you can still have access to it.
19:57:50 It’ll automatically create a collection of those things.
19:57:53 And all of these collections, by the way, you also can password protect so that if somebody
19:57:58 Grabs your phone, they don’t necessarily have.
19:58:00 Access to this stuff.
19:58:03 So that’s going to be coming out in Photos.
19:58:06 And, um…
19:58:08 Other things you can do that you could not in the pa- that you can’t currently do.
19:58:13 You can ask questions that require data from multiple sources.
19:58:18 I can ask my S…
19:58:22 IRI, to turn on my TV.
19:58:25 And I say SIRI, turn on Dungeness. Dungeness is the name.
19:58:31 of my Apple TV, so it can turn it on.
19:58:34 Once it’s turned on, I can say, launch YouTube TV on Dungeness,
19:58:39 And it launches my list of channels that I have, and so on and so forth.
19:58:45 Well, in the future, you can go beyond that and say, send an alarm for my appointment today at Olympic Medical Center.
19:58:51 Which is using multiple applications at once. It uses your calendar, it uses alarms, uses clock, uses messages.
19:58:58 So it goes through messages to find out what the thing that Olympic Medical Center sent.
19:59:03 It knows it can then examine what time it said,
19:59:06 And it can figure out, okay, I like my alarms 15 minutes in advance, 30 minutes in advance.
19:59:12 And do all of this sort of stuff from multiple different applications at once.
19:59:17 all on your phone or all on your Mac.
19:59:19 Or you can say, notify me when the price drops on the 70 to 300.
19:59:24 zoom lens at Glaser’s camera. Glaser’s camera is a big
19:59:28 camera store in.
19:59:30 in Seattle. And if you…
19:59:32 If you’re a camera person, I highly recommend you never go to Glazers because
19:59:37 You’ll leave poorer than you when you went in. Has just amazing stuff.
19:59:42 But if their website notices a drop in price.
19:59:46 It’ll Safari will check it and say, okay, it had a drop in price and it’ll send me a reminder that there’s a drop in price.
19:59:54 Have I tried this? Have no idea if this is going to actually work the way it’s described.
19:59:58 But I’m intrigued with the possibility.
20:00:01 Show me the photo of Mount Shasta I took last week.
20:00:04 Again, it can do that on your own device without talking anything else.
20:00:08 Assuming it could recognize Mount Shasta,
20:00:12 goes through your photos, looks at Miles Shasta,
20:00:14 And it can bring it up. And Mount Chasta can identify one of two ways. Either you explicitly
20:00:21 stuck a label on it saying, hey, this is Mount Shasta, or it’s looking at the GPS coordinates
20:00:27 on the photo and says, ah,
20:00:29 This is probably Mount Shasta.
20:00:31 But right now, I ask it to do that, and it probably is not going to work.
20:00:36 I can ask photos to do things like…
20:00:38 Show me airplanes. Type in airplanes, shows me a lot of airplanes.
20:00:43 But it will also make mistakes. It’ll give me a picnic table.
20:00:48 Why will I give me a picnic table? It’s got a horizontal surface, it’s got splayed-out legs on it.
20:00:53 Looks like an airplane to Siri.
20:00:57 But I’m assuming that that’s going to get a little bit brighter in the near future.
20:01:03 Being able to articulate questions like that and get useful results.
20:01:09 is something I’m looking forward to.
20:01:13 Another thing that I want to…
20:01:16 that might seem kind of esoteric, but it’s important.
20:01:21 Apple has pretty much…
20:01:23 If you look at the keynote and how they presented this stuff,
20:01:27 Siri is the intelligent assistant that we’ve been using for years.
20:01:31 And Spotlight is the indexing function on the Mac and on your iPhone.
20:01:37 And Apple Intelligence is their cloud name for all of this stuff.
20:01:42 Basically, they’re now collapsing all of these, and the way to do most of this stuff is going to be through Siri.
20:01:49 You want to ask a question, you ask Siri.
20:01:51 And Siri can go out and use Apple Spotlight to find files.
20:01:55 can use Apple Intelligence to.
20:01:57 Ask for information above and beyond what it can find.
20:02:01 But they’re really pushing the fact that Siri’s going to be
20:02:03 The interface for it. Why? It’s because people use Siri all the time.
20:02:10 I use Siri several times a day.
20:02:13 Even on days when I’m not doing that much.
20:02:17 It’s just a… it’s a really…
20:02:21 powerful way of using
20:02:23 a device, especially when you’re busy doing something else. I was washing.
20:02:26 Dishes yesterday, and I had a phone call from a woman who’s.
20:02:31 spouse just died.
20:02:33 And the phone announced that she called, and I told,
20:02:37 Siri, to answer the phone, I could chat with her on the phone while I was washing dishes. Actually, I had to stop washing dishes because
20:02:45 Dishes make an awful lot of noise, you can’t actually talk, but
20:02:47 My hands were still wet.
20:02:50 Okay.
20:02:49 And I could still talk to her.
20:02:52 Didn’t have to touch anything. I could just do that.
20:02:55 with my voice.
20:02:57 Making that the kind of gateway
20:03:00 into doing more things, I think is a huge…
20:03:04 Uh, plus.
20:03:06 Any questions about that? Because I did talk a lot.
20:03:15 Thank you for the graphic thing. That was really very clarifying.
20:03:21 Yes, it was.
20:03:29 The
20:03:31 I will.
20:03:33 post the, um, slides on, uh…
20:03:37 And the
20:03:38 Straight Max site, because again, just the list of…
20:03:42 I don’t know how many pages, 20 pages worth of things that they’re planning on updating.
20:03:48 Those had nothing to do with Apple Intelligence. Those are just things that they are fixing or enhancing.
20:03:55 There are quite a few innovations in women’s health, for example, that they’re adding to.
20:04:01 Um, the iPhone.
20:04:03 into Apple Watch and there are…
20:04:07 just changes to cosmetly.
20:04:09 People have had trouble if they have an iPad,
20:04:12 The iPad now allows you to tile applications on the iPad.
20:04:16 Which was something that they introduced with iPadOS 26.
20:04:20 A lot of people still don’t quite understand how that works.
20:04:24 And they’re making some slight tweaks to the appearance to make it more obvious.
20:04:29 how to do that sort of stuff. Um, and they just…
20:04:33 Literally hundreds of.
20:04:35 changes they’re making to what we have already.
20:04:39 But the big…
20:04:41 message for most of the keynote was that there.
20:04:44 going in with both feet into
20:04:47 intelligence, and they’re doing it in such a way.
20:04:49 that they’re emphasizing privacy and security.
20:04:54 your privacy and your security.
20:04:58 One interesting kind of…
20:05:02 Side effect, though, is that it’s not going to be immediately available in the EU.
20:05:08 Now, the EU, unlike the United States has no privacy laws that apply to corporations.
20:05:13 Nothing. If the corporation
20:05:16 Has your private phone number, they are not required to do anything about it.
20:05:20 They can use it as often as they want.
20:05:22 Because we don’t have any privacy laws.
20:05:24 The EU has very strong privacy laws, so
20:05:27 The EU has strong privacy laws.
20:05:30 Apple’s new operating system is going to emphasize privacy and security. Why is it going to take a while to be in the EU?
20:05:38 It’s because in the EU,
20:05:41 They want
20:05:44 They basically went to…
20:05:47 have access to…
20:05:49 Apple’s security in order to make sure that it’s really secure.
20:05:54 They want Apple to compromise their security.
20:05:56 To prove that their security is secure.
20:05:59 And Apple is saying no.
20:06:08 And, uh, Apple’s probably going to continue to say no until Europe gives up and just…
20:06:15 decides on a different course.
20:06:17 They had a similar thing where the
20:06:20 Uh, the British government wanted Apple to give them.
20:06:25 a security certificate that allowed
20:06:27 the British government to examine all.
20:06:32 iPhone traffic going in and out of Britain.
20:06:35 And Apple said no.
20:06:36 And they… Apple fought with Britain for that for a couple years before.
20:06:41 Britain eventually gave up.
20:06:43 I’m hoping it doesn’t take that long this time.
20:06:47 But.
20:06:49 Um, it.
20:06:50 It was an interesting.
20:06:52 Apple developers can’t.
20:06:55 conference, and I’m greatly looking forward to seeing what happens this fall when they.
20:07:01 bring out the new…
20:07:02 iPhone, iPad, Mac,
20:07:05 Vision OS software.
20:07:08 What will happen when you take your iPhone to visit your daughter in England?
20:07:14 And you’re able to use all this…
20:07:16 Artificial intelligence in the Us.
20:07:19 When you get to England, what happens?
20:07:22 I suspect I won’t be able to use it in.
20:07:24 England
20:07:27 Okay, any idea how they’ll keep that from happening?
20:07:31 Oh, yeah, because the.
20:07:34 Apps are geo-fenced.
20:07:39 Ah.
20:07:39 Geofenced is basically… it knows where you are, and depending upon where you are,
20:07:44 It applies this set of protocols, and if you’re someplace else, it applies that set of protocols.
20:07:50 Um, Apple did it that way because
20:07:53 For example, if you have a phone that you bought in the United States.
20:07:57 And you’re a Belarus citizen.
20:08:01 Belarus really likes to spy on their own people.
20:08:06 They don’t want people going into Belarus.
20:08:09 and evading what the police can do.
20:08:12 So, what happens when that…
20:08:14 phone that was purchased in the United States, you go into Belarus,
20:08:17 It starts following Belarus law.
20:08:20 Apple basically has to do it that way.
20:08:22 Now, there are some cases, though, where the developers screw up.
20:08:27 Um, I was curious about this.
20:08:29 this icon that appeared on my iPad,
20:08:32 It was a yellow icon with a B on it.
20:08:36 And I happen to know that the B is the symbol for Manchester, England.
20:08:41 Manchester adopted the bee as a symbol because it was a city of industry, and they built trains, and
20:08:46 all kinds of other stuff. So, they were all busy little bees.
20:08:51 I suspected it was for the Manchester bus service, so I launched it, and it told me that there were no Manchester buses.
20:08:57 Available anywhere in Scrum, which was a real shock.
20:09:01 I mentioned this to my daughter.
20:09:04 And my daughter said that she got rid of off of her phone,
20:09:07 Because it’s improperly geofenced. She bought her phone in the United States.
20:09:12 And because she bought her phone in the United States.
20:09:16 It’s geofenced, so it doesn’t work in Manchester, so.
20:09:19 It would work for me, but give me no information, or it won’t work for her.
20:09:24 In England.
20:09:25 That’s not geofencing, that’s a programming error.
20:09:30 They screwed up.
20:09:31 Because it should be based upon where the phone is located.
20:09:35 Not where it was purchased.
20:09:37 It should be based upon where the phone is located, and uh…
20:09:41 Um, I thought that was hilariously funny, but it’s not a.
20:09:44 It’s not really an Apple problem, it’s the developer for the.
20:09:48 For the app just screwed up.
20:09:51 But that’s how it… that’s how it knows how to properly…
20:09:57 what the restrictions are that apply.
20:09:58 For example, child pornography rules in Great Britain.
20:10:02 changed as of, uh…
20:10:04 June 1st, and they’re much more draconian.
20:10:08 Pornography is prohibited.
20:10:10 From being displayed to, to, uh…
20:10:13 Children under 18. Just absolutely prohibited.
20:10:16 What’s the restriction in the United States?
20:10:21 There really isn’t any. It changes from…
20:10:24 State to state, city to city, and it’s not enforceable in the United States.
20:10:28 But because the entire country went this way in Great Britain,
20:10:32 If you show up in Great Britain with your US phone, instantly you probably aren’t gonna…
20:10:37 You’re not going to be able to view your favorite porn sites because it doesn’t know how old you are.
20:10:44 Because it’s geofenced. So.
20:10:47 There’s a right way and a wrong way to do almost anything and.
20:10:51 And the Manchester bus system screwed up.
20:10:57 Uh, I was really disappointed that I couldn’t get a bus in.
20:11:00 to Manchester in Squimla.
20:11:06 Probably just as well, the gas bill from here to.
20:11:09 England would be horrific.
20:11:12 Yes.
20:11:11 Lawrence.
20:11:12 Apple intelligence be put into CarPlay in your car?
20:11:18 Um, the answer to that is the.
20:11:21 It will be, for example, you can tell it to optimize a route and so on and so forth, allegedly.
20:11:27 The trouble with CarPlay, because CarPlay
20:11:30 is in an automobile, and automobiles are also covered by.
20:11:34 uh, transportation rules.
20:11:36 It won’t be as full-featured as when you’re sitting there and just talking to your phone.
20:11:40 It’s got to be much more constrained because.
20:11:44 You’re not allowed to create a distraction in the car.
20:11:47 So having it help
20:11:49 Avoid distractions, like…
20:11:51 If you’re going down the road and say, uh,
20:11:54 Uh, take me to the McDonald’s in Silverdale.
20:11:57 Will it do that? Yeah, because it doesn’t…
20:11:59 take you away from what you’re doing, which is driving.
20:12:03 But anything that can interfere with what driving, it’ll probably be constrained.
20:12:07 Carol, did you have a question?
20:12:09 I do.
20:12:11 I want to know about your…
20:12:14 fall, and you’re…
20:12:16 You said you had a concussion?
20:12:19 Uh, yes, I was.
20:12:21 uh, taking some… someone…
20:12:25 To.
20:12:27 to an appointment, and as they started to get out of my car, they started to fall.
20:12:32 And I was intent on keeping them from falling.
20:12:36 And when I stood up, I banged my head into the…
20:12:39 uh, door frame of my, uh, car.
20:12:43 And, uh…
20:12:45 It’s been bothering me now for about 10 days.
20:12:51 So, it’s nothing…
20:12:54 spectacular, it’s just…
20:12:57 Will it take just time to get over it, then?
20:13:00 It took me time to have someone look at it when…
20:13:04 Immediately after this happened, I was taking this person to their appointment,
20:13:10 And I wasn’t able to address it, and then the next day.
20:13:14 I didn’t really feel that bad. It wasn’t until…
20:13:17 A day after that, that I was feeling bad,
20:13:20 I tried to get a steamed appointment by at Olympic Medical.
20:13:24 And they told me the soonest I could get an appointment was July 15th.
20:13:29 Which is kind of far in the future, especially if you have a concussion.
20:13:33 I happen to be in Port Angeles the next day.
20:13:37 I went into the ER, hoping that I could be seen there,
20:13:40 After spending five hours in the ER without even being logged in,
20:13:44 I left.
20:13:49 So it took me…
20:13:50 So what about just like the Squim walk-in clinic.
20:13:53 The Squimoncan clinic I knew from experience that they don’t really like this kind of thing. They’d much prefer.
20:14:00 for a thing that might be a concussion, they much prefer you go.
20:14:03 To the ER. But today I did manage to get the uh.
20:14:10 the primary care clinic to see me.
20:14:13 But I did that because, among other things, my spouse was a nurse,
20:14:17 And I wrote a message to…
20:14:21 The care team.
20:14:23 I explained what the problem was, I explained
20:14:26 I tried A, I tried B, I tried C.
20:14:28 And they put me on a wait list and they had a vacancy today, so I got…
20:14:32 seen instead of July 15th, I got seen on June 6th.
20:14:37 16th. So…
20:14:40 saved almost a month.
20:14:43 Hmm. Wow.
20:14:46 The healthcare system in the United States is under severe strain, and it’s not just here.
20:14:51 Yeah.
20:14:56 Any other questions?
20:15:00 Is Apple Wallet usable in Washington state?
20:15:03 I use Apple Wallet all the time. Are you talking about the.
20:15:07 Apple, the driver’s license ID and wallet?
20:15:10 No.
20:15:12 No.
20:15:09 Yeah. No, I thought you could add your license to the wallet.
20:15:16 Yes, by Washington.
20:15:15 In some states, and it’ll be used, like, at the airport.
20:15:19 Washington is not one of the states.
20:15:21 Oh, okay.
20:15:23 Colorado is Virginia is.
20:15:25 Virginia, which did not give women
20:15:27 the right to own property until 1996.
20:15:31 Virginia allows you to put your ID.
20:15:36 Your driver’s license to Apple Wallet.
20:15:39 Washington State, which has had women politicians since the 1890s,
20:15:43 hasn’t done that, so…
20:15:46 I have no idea why.
20:15:49 But it’s up to the states. It’s not…
20:15:53 What can I say?
20:15:56 There are lots of other things you can do, like, for example,
20:16:00 Bloedell Reserve, which is a garden on Bainbridge.
20:16:02 You can put your membership card for Blodell Reserve into Apple Wallet.
20:16:08 That struck me as really wild that you could do that for a garden, but you can’t.
20:16:14 Stick your your ID.
20:16:16 for the state into Apple Wallet.
20:16:21 Just strange.
20:16:24 I have opinions, but…
20:16:31 So, do you, uh, from a standpoint of artificial intelligence,
20:16:36 There’s…
20:16:39 Two…
20:16:40 uh, levels…
20:16:42 Well, probably multi, but you’re probably gonna… you’re probably already thinking about what I’m gonna ask. I don’t know how to frame it well, but…
20:16:49 But, you know, the futuristic Terminator, where when…
20:16:54 Uh, when… when it was able to…
20:16:56 Uh, start actually thinking on its own, bad things happen.
20:17:01 And that is a belief that that…
20:17:04 will happen…
20:17:06 When it gets that capability that there could be really bad things happening.
20:17:11 Uh, do you think that there are people working on that, or it is working on that now?
20:17:18 Um, okay, that’s a…
20:17:22 No.
20:17:19 That’s not a simple question, but it is a good question.
20:17:24 First of all, I want to back up a bit.
20:17:26 A lot of what we… most of what we hear about artificial intelligence is not artificial intelligence. It’s not independent.
20:17:33 Right.
20:17:34 Problem solving is not independent solution.
20:17:38 When I wanted that picture of a puffin, I came up with the.
20:17:42 problem, I…
20:17:43 outline what I wanted the solution to look like, and then I was the one who decided that it had actually
20:17:49 done what I wanted, so…
20:17:51 It was a tool that I was using.
20:17:53 It wasn’t an artificial intelligence.
20:17:58 Are there artificial… are there things that are good at… that are actually doing things that humans cannot do?
20:18:03 Yes, and one of them is.
20:18:06 The current artificial intelligence engines are large language models, which means they’re really good at grammar.
20:18:14 Well, what is something that is… that involves grammar that really is a problem that humans can’t seem to be able to solve?
20:18:21 And I’ll tell you the answer to that is…
20:18:24 Programming. There are…
20:18:26 trillions of bytes of code out there that in your web browser, on
20:18:32 On websites, all kinds of code out there.
20:18:34 Most of them done by human beings, a lot of them done incompetently by human beings.
20:18:40 Well, uh, several of the large AI.
20:18:44 companies have found out that if you.
20:18:48 take computer code, and you feed it to the large language models,
20:18:52 they can find defects.
20:18:54 Well, that is, A, really great.
20:18:57 Because if they can find the defects, then you know what to fix.
20:19:00 But it’s also really bad because if the good guys can find the defects in the code,
20:19:05 The bad guys can too.
20:19:09 So why do I think the Chinese are doing right now, and the Russians are doing right now?
20:19:13 They’re feeding all the Western language code that they can find.
20:19:16 into AI engines trying to find
20:19:19 defects so that they can exploit them.
20:19:22 Um, so that’s a good news, bad news, but it is something that.
20:19:26 that large language models are really good at. They’re really good at grammar, so…
20:19:32 In most modern programming languages, you end a statement using a semicolon.
20:19:37 And one of the most common ways to have an error is just miss a semicolon.
20:19:44 There’s a computer language called Lisp that was used for artificial intelligence research for a lot.
20:19:49 And LISP actually stands for something, but I can’t ever remember what the real word is, because
20:19:55 What most people who programmed on Lisp used to call it is,
20:20:00 Stands L-I-S-P, stands for lots of irritating, silly parentheses, because Lisp has a whole bunch of parentheses.
20:20:06 And if you miss one, your program fails or does something really ridiculous.
20:20:12 But finding those flaws, that’s something that large language models are really good at.
20:20:17 Is that really artificial intelligence? It’s getting close simply because it’s not something that really we’re very good at.
20:20:23 doing. So it’s getting close.
20:20:28 But are the computers ganging up on us to take over the world?
20:20:33 Now, the largest…
20:20:36 thing that humanity has ever created.
20:20:38 is Google. Google is millions of servers.
20:20:44 Scattered throughout the entire globe.
20:20:47 They go out and index all of these websites, so they basically have all that knowledge. It’s a really, really powerful, powerful
20:20:54 tool, the likes of which it exceeds
20:20:57 It exceeds the atom bomb, it exceeds
20:21:00 A nuclear aircraft carrier, almost any project we’ve ever done.
20:21:03 It vastly exceeds them in terms of
20:21:07 scope and capability.
20:21:08 But it’s not intelligent.
20:21:11 It can’t create its own problems, it can’t solve its own problems, it needs somebody to
20:21:17 to direct it.
20:21:19 There’s a joke that was popular when microcomputers first came out.
20:21:24 it basically was saying,
20:21:26 Never trust a computer you can’t throw out the window.
20:21:29 Well, one of the advantages of microcomputer is that if it was acting stupid, you could pick it up.
20:21:34 Go over to the window and throw it out the window.
20:21:36 And that’s basically one way of also maintaining control. Oh, you’re gonna act up, just toss you out the window.
20:21:44 I use the analogy of what the big flaw was with HAL and Colossus and.
20:21:50 All of these science fiction computers.
20:21:52 they didn’t have an off switch.
20:21:54 All of my computers, and this house has, like, a dozen.
20:21:57 I know where the off switch is for all of them.
20:22:01 So I’m very much in control of the artificial intelligence because.
20:22:06 I know that if the power goes out,
20:22:09 I’m in control.
20:22:12 How do they check…
20:22:12 I might be really sad because my computers aren’t working, but at least I know I’m in control.
20:22:17 What was your question?
20:22:19 How does AI know
20:22:21 that maybe the information they went out and got is wrong.
20:22:26 It doesn’t. That’s one reason why you have so many of the…
20:22:29 Lawyers get in trouble for
20:22:32 Having, um,
20:22:34 citing cases that are actually hallucinations.
20:22:38 Right.
20:22:39 If you have a novel that
20:22:42 references a case, Marbury v. Madison, which is a real case, but it’s Marbury versus Edison.
20:22:50 And it cites that as a case because it was in a novel.
20:22:53 You suck that into…
20:22:56 These AI language models, they can’t tell the difference between that fake case and a real one.
20:23:02 And Giuliani was disbarred.
20:23:05 for using fake cases, and a whole bunch of others are.
20:23:09 There is a whole huge lawsuit, several million, multi-million dollar lawsuit,
20:23:14 In California, no, it wasn’t in California.
20:23:17 I can’t remember where it was, that was thrown out just a couple weeks ago, in which both sets of it was Arizona.
20:23:23 Both sets of lawyers were using AI.
20:23:26 And they were basically throwing…
20:23:28 fake cases at each other.
20:23:30 And the…
20:23:30 Well, how can Apple guarantee security?
20:23:35 from picking up bad data.
20:23:37 Um, it’s, again, it’s being used as a tool. It’s not going to necessarily… if you ask.
20:23:45 Which presidents were born outside the United States? There’s a set list of answers. It can send you that list. It’s like…
20:23:52 8 people.
20:23:53 But if you ask…
20:23:54 But what if somebody put a bad list out there, and it grabs the bad list?
20:23:59 Well, it.
20:24:01 if there’s more than one copy of those lists, that’s the sort of thing that’s being… that’s replicated, like,
20:24:06 What is 2 plus 2? Billions of things out there are going to tell you that it’s 4.
20:24:11 And somebody might have some site that says it’s 3, but the consensus pretty much is going to be.
20:24:17 4. Plus, computers…
20:24:20 Yes.
20:24:18 But does it check the consensus? It doesn’t check the it does.
20:24:22 Yes.
20:24:25 Any type you have an answer, there’s a weighted answer.
20:24:29 And the more people that agree with that,
20:24:31 You come along, how do we pick president? It’s the one that we.
20:24:36 The majority of the people who are bothered to vote,
20:24:39 Pick that person. Is that person right? According to the election law, that person is right.
20:24:44 And that’s basically how these search engines work, and that’s how.
20:24:50 A lot of these things. The problem with the cases that… case law.
20:24:54 that we have is that Giuliani was trying to create new case law.
20:25:00 So he wanted something that had never been done before, there was no precedent.
20:25:05 And so went out and found precedent.
20:25:07 And the precedents came out of Tom Clancy book. Another president came out of a Patterson book.
20:25:13 I can’t remember what Paterson’s name, but he writes these thrillers.
20:25:17 Okay.
20:25:19 Um, as far as the searching was concerned, those must be legitimate cases. It matches the circumstance.
20:25:25 So therefore, it must be the answer.
20:25:28 And Giuliani threw it in his court brief and.
20:25:31 And, uh, it got him disbarred.
20:25:36 Have you tried to use AI to create a website?
20:25:41 Um, I have something that I’m working on.
20:25:44 right now that I’m not ready to show anybody.
20:25:46 It’s not so much an A… it’s not so much creating a website.
20:25:51 I had an AI… I worked with somebody else.
20:25:55 to ingest a website that I’d already made.
20:25:59 that had gigabytes worth of data.
20:26:02 And it created a wiki out of it. A wiki is a knowledge base.
20:26:07 created a wiki out of the stuff that it ingested, so.
20:26:12 It has… it indexed all the articles, it did summaries of what the articles were about.
20:26:18 It could extract the major topics.
20:26:21 Um, and, uh.
20:26:23 I was really… it was a fascinating exercise.
20:26:26 And if and when I get…
20:26:29 a few things fixed. Uh, I’ll show it to people.
20:26:32 But that was done by using cloud, which
20:26:36 Claude, which is C-L-A-U-D-E.
20:26:41 that artificial intelligence agent.
20:26:44 And the person who was working with me is a…
20:26:47 Former professor at George Mason University, professor of computer science.
20:26:51 And it was an interesting thing because I was the editor of that magazine.
20:26:56 So it was sucking up a whole bunch of things that I’d written, and…
20:26:59 stuff that I edited by other people.
20:27:02 And it was a fascinating exercise.
20:27:05 But it didn’t create a website, it created a wiki, which is basically a…
20:27:10 index of this website.
20:27:14 with summaries and speculations.
20:27:16 My spouse had written some things, and among other things.
20:27:20 theorize that Kathleen Charters was the spouse of Lawrence Charters.
20:27:25 Because again, it’s an AI engine. It didn’t know.
20:27:29 So it could theorize that, but it didn’t really know.
20:27:32 And it also theorized that Lawrence Charters and Lawrence I Charters were the same person.
20:27:37 But again, it wasn’t sure, but it theorized that they were.
20:27:41 the same person. So it was an…
20:27:44 It was an interesting exercise.
20:27:45 And that was a big project. I mean, 4.5 gigabytes worth of…
20:27:50 Steph
20:27:53 Last question.
20:27:54 Yeah.
20:27:56 If AI gave you an answer from a Tom Clancy novel,
20:28:00 And you asked that the source of its answer, would it tell you that it was a Tom Clancy novel it got it from?
20:28:06 It depends upon…
20:28:09 How explicit you can make the question. Like, for example,
20:28:13 If you.
20:28:15 Ask for, you know, you have tomatoes and you have a bunch of ingredients and you say.
20:28:21 Give me a recipe for this, and it comes up with a recipe.
20:28:24 And you say, and then you would ask,
20:28:27 Why did you pick Pimentos for this recipe? It may not be able to do that because it’s a collage.
20:28:35 of multiple things. And that’s one of the problems that you can.
20:28:39 You can quiz people about things like that, but it’s very difficult to.
20:28:44 quiz a database about something like that.
20:28:45 But what if you said, what book did you get the recipe from, or what source was the recipe from?
20:28:51 But see, a lot of the recipes that you can get from AI engines are not out of a book.
20:28:57 Oh!
20:28:56 They’re dynamically created based upon the ingredients. It knows that.
20:29:00 that if you have peanuts, and you have
20:29:03 If you have and you have honey, and you have this, and you have that, that you can make sticky things like.
20:29:09 peanut clusters, and so on and so forth.
20:29:11 It doesn’t need a specific recipe.
20:29:13 If you throw in something new, it can say, well, you might be able to do this, simply because the preponderance of the evidence.
20:29:20 says that these things will work together.
20:29:23 Oh.
20:29:23 But did it come out of a specific book? It may not be able to tell you that, because it’s not doing that.
20:29:27 Yeah.
20:29:30 Could Giuliani have prevented us?
20:29:32 Mishap, or I’m going to call it that.
20:29:36 By specifying that…
20:29:38 The precedents have to come out of the state code annotated or the federal code annotated. Could he have done something like that?
20:29:47 Um…
20:29:50 As a lawyer that went and got him off the hook.
20:29:53 Because as a lawyer, you submit
20:29:56 a document to the court,
20:29:57 And you say, this is my work. I stand by this. I did this research.
20:30:03 You are not saying, somebody says this, you are saying,
20:30:07 I am presenting this to you as something factual.
20:30:10 And what’s the way to prevent factual.
20:30:15 Uh, fraud in that, check your work.
20:30:18 Did he do that? He didn’t.
20:30:19 Right. But I’m saying if he had if he had set those kinds of limits,
20:30:23 Then he would have been able to check.
20:30:26 Because, you know, you can check those different code annotated.
20:30:29 Well, yes, you…
20:30:29 I mean, it’ll either be there or not, according, you know…
20:30:34 Yeah.
20:30:33 It’s like saying, this is on page 56 of the…
20:30:36 King James Version of the Bible, something like that.
20:30:40 Well, um
20:30:40 I’m gonna either be there or it won’t.
20:30:42 Depending, do you know how many printings of the King James Bible?
20:30:45 Well, but you know what I’m saying, that the one…
20:30:49 You know what I mean? Because you can specify the…
20:30:50 Yes, I indeed.
20:30:52 Yes.
20:30:52 In other words, you set fairly strict parameters.
20:30:56 I don’t know whether… I mean, it should… it should follow that, right? It should…
20:31:04 There are times where that’s not…
20:31:07 useful. For example,
20:31:08 Washington State annotated code.
20:31:13 is online for the state of Washington and you can actually specify down to the paragraph level.
20:31:18 It’s a website, and so on and so forth.
20:31:22 You can do that for Washington State, for a lot of states, you can’t do that.
20:31:26 Ah.
20:31:28 Plus, I’ve read that if it can’t find something like that,
20:31:32 In some cases will make it up.
20:31:35 Well, yes, but that’s the hallucination part.
20:31:38 The hallucination means that it still found something that it could come up with.
20:31:42 But what it came up with may not have been from a real source. For example,
20:31:47 Hunt for Red October.
20:31:49 Hunt for Red October is a novel by John Clancy about
20:31:53 This Russian submarine defecting to the US.
20:31:57 And it was a great movie, it’s a good… it’s a good novel.
20:32:03 Is that real, or is that invented?
20:32:11 What do you mean, the novel?
20:32:13 The infrared October.
20:32:16 Well, I don’t know, but it might be one of those deals where it’s just based on a real incident, but that’s so broad.
20:32:22 It is based upon a real incident. It’s based upon the capture of U555.
20:32:28 In the Middle Atlantic during World War II,
20:32:31 by Admiral James Gallery.
20:32:34 Admiral James Gallery, without bothering to tell anybody else,
20:32:37 decided he was going to capture a U-boat.
20:32:40 And he captured one. And in the process, he also captured an Ultramachine, which he thought was hot stuff.
20:32:47 Churchill wanted Gallery executed.
20:32:53 Why? Because nobody told Gallery that Ultra existed.
20:32:57 Nobody told Gallery that Enigma machines existed.
20:33:01 So he went out and captured
20:33:04 First wartime capture of an Enigma machine,
20:33:07 And Churchill was afraid that it might give away the war, because the Allies had been using Enigma
20:33:13 captures for months.
20:33:16 And Gallery might have blown the whole thing, so…
20:33:19 Churchill wanted Gallery, an American admiral executed for doing a really great job.
20:33:25 The hunt for Bed October is basically a fictionalized version.
20:33:28 Using the Soviet Union instead of Nazi Germany,
20:33:32 about the capture of U-555.
20:33:35 That’s not the one that’s in the Chicago Museum of Science. Oh, it is.
20:33:38 Yes, yeah, yeah, it’s the one that’s at the field.
20:33:40 I’ve been in it!
20:33:42 Well, it’s something that I’ve wanted to do.
20:33:44 Um, but I haven’t been to the…
20:33:46 I haven’t been there, I want to see the the
20:33:49 I’m a World War II historian. That’s my specialty.
20:33:54 It’s a different ocean, but still.
20:33:56 Yeah.
20:33:56 I would like to see the U-boat.
20:34:00 But that’s based upon a real story.
20:34:03 But is it fictional in terms of the hunt for Red October? Yes.
20:34:07 But is it based upon something that happened? Well, sort of.
20:34:13 It gets complicated. And there are novels that cite Washington state code.
20:34:20 there are novels that cite Washington state code, so you can say,
20:34:24 WSC, whatever, and it’s made up.
20:34:27 Ah.
20:34:28 And how is a poor little robot supposed to know that?
20:34:30 Well, but if you said it’s got to come out of the Washington State code annotated,
20:34:34 You mean the artificial intelligence will see it in the novel and think that it did come out of
20:34:39 Yes.
20:34:40 Washington State, I get it.
20:34:42 Yes.
20:34:42 So it’s not all that intelligent.
20:34:44 No.
20:34:48 That is not intelligent at all. It’s a tool.
20:34:52 Yeah.
20:35:00 Next month.
20:35:02 Um, two things. First of all, I can… I still want to do the presentation on spaces, because I see a lot of people getting.
20:35:09 Kind of trapped in…
20:35:11 They say that the computer’s not capable of doing something that probably is if they…
20:35:16 knew how to do certain things.
20:35:18 That’s one thing. The second one is that.
20:35:22 My church…
20:35:24 Um, maybe putting in new monitors this month.
20:35:28 And if they’re ready next month, and I can find a weekend.
20:35:33 We might have a Saturday meeting at my church.
20:35:36 Where we can do things in person and possibly…
20:35:41 Bring in.
20:35:43 equipment that we don’t want anymore, and…
20:35:45 foisted off on one another.
20:35:48 But again,
20:35:48 Yeah, sounds a great idea.
20:35:50 If you have suggestions of what I could do instead,
20:35:54 Please send them off to me.
20:35:57 Or couldn’t we do it in conjunction with just have the meeting there, but also trade stuff?
20:36:02 Well, that’s what I intend to do, but…
20:36:05 The in-person thing might be on a different topic than…
20:36:10 Our regular monthly.
20:36:11 topic. It depends upon how ambitious I feel.
20:36:15 Okay.
20:36:18 Also, there’s a festival in.
20:36:20 July, so who knows?
20:36:22 Well, are you going to download the beta version of 27 and fiddle around with it?
20:36:28 I cannot confirm or deny.
20:36:30 Okay.
20:36:34 I will tell you that if I do, it’ll probably be on one of my iPads.
20:36:39 I’m pretty interested in that.
20:36:41 How well that, uh…
20:36:44 new passkeys passwords app will work or not.
20:36:48 Um, that might be one of the last things I’d try.
20:36:52 Because I’d rather not screw up…
20:36:55 My passwords.
20:36:56 Well, couldn’t you use Peter Lyon’s password?
20:36:59 That’s a thought.
20:37:02 But then I’d have to set the…
20:37:05 Peter line up with one of my iPads.
20:37:09 I’m kind of jealous of my iPads.
20:37:13 But, uh, yeah, that’s a thought.
20:37:16 Anyway, write to me if you have questions or suggestions or whatnot.
20:37:21 Did you ever put up the the sign-in sheet, or…?
20:37:25 No, because it’s in an account that I can’t…
20:37:28 reach. If I… if I go into that other account, I kill the…
20:37:33 Zoom session.
20:37:33 You put a link on the website.
20:37:36 Uh, I can do that, but I’m afraid I’ll get sign-ins from, you know,
20:37:41 King Kong and whatnot.
20:37:43 Yeah, okay.
20:37:43 Do you want to just take our names down?
20:37:45 I took a screenshot, but, um…
20:37:48 Okay.
20:37:48 Among other things, one person, they signed in, I think,
20:37:52 Uh, might have been you.
20:37:53 is listed as Zoom user.
20:37:56 Which is…
20:37:57 Oh, yes, I see that.
20:37:59 Oh, am I supposed… okay, I guess you can educate me. How do I fix that?
20:38:03 Um, are you using a Mac?
20:38:06 iPad.
20:38:07 The answer is I don’t know how to do that on an iPad.
20:38:11 Okay.
20:38:11 When you first sign into the meeting,
20:38:15 It asks you what name you want to be known as.
20:38:19 Yep.
20:38:18 Really? I’ll watch for that next time, okay?
20:38:19 Ah.
20:38:22 Okay, I had no idea that…
20:38:25 You only knew me as Zoom user.
20:38:30 I’m Sherry, by the way.
20:38:32 The.
20:38:33 Steve knows me, so…
20:38:35 My daughter had a
20:38:40 Apple time capsule.
20:38:41 Which is a combination router, backup device, so on and so forth.
20:38:46 And when she went off to college, because she wanted a firewall between her and.
20:38:50 everybody in your dorm, and we were coming up with names for it.
20:38:55 And I suggested DEL space asterisk period asterisk.
20:39:00 Which she thought was fine, but it freaked out the Windows people, because that’s the command to delete everything on your hard drive.
20:39:07 Oh, my gosh!
20:39:09 So they left her firewall alone, which is kind of what I wanted them to do.
20:39:15 But you can do strange things with names if you’re evil.
20:39:22 Or creative.
20:39:24 Well, that was a little evil, you know.
20:39:27 Well…
20:39:28 Anyway, good night, everyone.
20:39:31 Good night, thank you.
20:39:32 Yeah, good night!
20:39:32 Thank you very much.
20:39:33 Yeah, thanks much.
20:39:34 Appreciate it.

May 2026: Basic Computer Security

The May 19, 2026, SMUG meeting focused on basic computer security. Literally every day, there are news stories about new or “new and improved” techniques used by rogue agencies, hostile nations, or ex-partners to defraud, defame, or otherwise make your life miserable. “Zero-day” flaws in many computer and device operating systems can cause you all kinds of unexpected grief.

Poor befuddled puffins can't figure out how to use a fingerprint to get past the lock screen.
Poor befuddled puffins can’t figure out how to use a fingerprint to get past the lock screen. Note the “Cybersecurity for Birds” book on the right edge of the desk.

Most successful computer attacks rely on one thing: the average person with a smartphone, tablet, or computer gives next to no thought to computer security. The average user often ignores privacy controls, fails to update their devices, and uses the same simple password for everything, assuming they think about passwords at all. They never think to lock their device, and assume that, as an obscure individual, they are not worth the attention of a hacker, a foreign government, or a terrorist. This inattention is precisely why “average computers” are the most common victims of computer crime and privacy breaches.

Among the highlights of the evening: the presenter’s Internet went out in the middle of the Question & Answer session. This resulted in the loss of the entire Q&A session. However, we do have a possible answer to one question. One member said that, when they position various application windows on their desktop, the windows don’t stay where they are put. A member wrote in with an Apple Support video that shows how window tiling works on new Macs:

Apple support video showing how window tiling works on Macs running Sequoia or later.

Apple has an extensive library of support videos on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@applesupport

Notes on Basic Computer Security

There were notes, with lots of text, and you didn’t have to write your own. As promised, here are the notes.

Video of the May 2026 meeting: Basic Computer Security

Video recording of the May 2026 meeting

Click on the YouTube logo in the video if you want to expand the recording.

Transcript of the meeting on: Basic Computer Security

This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom is sometimes (often?) creative. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.

19:04:15 I do have a request for our new president.
19:04:18 And you, maybe the two of you, since you’re geographically near.
19:04:23 One another could figure out…
19:04:26 how to get that… our, uh…
19:04:28 Discussion boards seem to work properly.
19:04:31 Uh, it is working properly.
19:04:33 Oh, it is.
19:04:33 Yes, um, that was something I should have mentioned.
19:04:37 I could not figure out why it wasn’t working, and I was gone for 10 days when I came back.
19:04:43 I wrote to the people and they said, oh, it’s just this, that, and the other thing.
19:04:48 And I checked all the things they said.
19:04:51 And… that didn’t change anything.
19:04:53 And I went back an hour later to do something else on the website,
19:04:58 And it was working. So, I think they screwed up and they fixed it when…
19:05:03 After I complained.
19:05:06 Well, thank you for doing that. I will check it after our meeting.
19:05:10 I haven’t checked it today, but the last time I looked, it was working.
19:05:14 And…
19:05:16 I cannot…
19:05:18 Figure out how to…
19:05:20 Show my desktop.
19:05:26 Share.
19:05:27 Okay, let’s try this desktop.
19:05:34 And…
19:05:37 Uh, and we’re not going to start with questions, because that’s later on.
19:05:42 The.
19:05:45 Some of the illustrations I’m going to use are taken from
19:05:50 Macs, some of them are taken from Windows, uh, they’re not taken from Windows.
19:05:53 Some are taken from iPads, some are taken from phones.
19:05:57 Because as the Mac.
19:05:59 And iOS and iPad operating systems.
19:06:03 take on more of a similar feel.
19:06:07 In terms of how they look, it doesn’t really make any difference which operating system you’re talking about. It probably looks the same.
19:06:13 And I’m using a variety of sources.
19:06:16 And then Connelly and Basic Computer Security, because
19:06:20 Your iPhone is actually a Unix computer that you carry around in your pocket.
19:06:24 Your iPad is a Unix computer that you carry around.
19:06:28 In your hand, I guess.
19:06:30 and your Mac is whatever you happen to have. If you have a desktop that sits on your desktop,
19:06:35 If you have a laptop, it’s a laptop, but they’re all Unix computers.
19:06:38 The Unix operating system
19:06:40 was developed in the 1970s. It started work in the 19…
19:06:46 60s.
19:06:48 He considers.
19:06:50 January 1st, 1970, to be the.
19:06:54 birth of.
19:06:56 Unix, and that’s because the clock inside of Unix starts at that point.
19:07:00 Most of what you do on a Mac, you’ll never know that the Unix is there, but there’s Unix underneath it.
19:07:06 And Unix is an incredibly powerful operating system.
19:07:10 Most of the internet runs on Unix.
19:07:13 And, uh, this particular illustration that I used on the website and such,
19:07:18 This was done with Google Gemini.
19:07:21 I said I wanted puffins to be befuddled by computer security,
19:07:27 And if you look at the blow-up of the picture,
19:07:30 It’s kind of out of focus in the back here, but it says,
19:07:33 Cybersecurity for birds, and I’m really proud of the fact that it says that, because that.
19:07:39 That just appeals to my sense of humor.
19:07:43 Computer security is a lot like learning how to get potty trained and how to wear clothes in public and so on and so forth. You just learn
19:07:53 That to be out in the world, there are certain expectations.
19:07:56 Uh, you should be washed, you should be dressed.
19:08:00 Uh, you should wear a coat if you need a coach, you should wear a hat.
19:08:04 And when you’re out interacting with the world,
19:08:08 You have to obey traffic laws, you shouldn’t jaywalk, you…
19:08:12 drive on the correct side of the road, you pay traffic rules, use your turn indicators, a whole bunch of things that you
19:08:18 have to do in order to.
19:08:20 be out in the public.
19:08:23 And using a computer is a lot like that because
19:08:26 When you take your…
19:08:28 computer, a phone out in public,
19:08:31 You are…
19:08:34 dealing with dozens of people, or sometimes thousands of people.
19:08:39 If you go into QFC, you might only see 50, 60 people, you might…
19:08:44 See 500 if you go to Walmart. When you take out your phone, even though you’re just doing something that you think is simple.
19:08:52 Thousands of people might be able to see what you’re doing.
19:08:57 And there are ways to prevent that, but you have to be aware
19:09:00 That it’s not just an appliance. It’s not like your refrigerator.
19:09:04 You plug in your refrigerator, and your refrigerator knows how to refrigerate things.
19:09:08 It does not know how to microwave things.
19:09:11 It does not know how to play football.
19:09:14 On TV, it doesn’t know any of those things, it just knows how to refrigerate.
19:09:18 And it doesn’t go anywhere. And unless you’re standing right in front of it, and you open the door,
19:09:22 It has limited interaction with the rest of the planet.
19:09:25 your phone, your computer, that’s not the case at all.
19:09:29 So, you want to be prepared for the fact that you’re dealing
19:09:33 with the entire world.
19:09:36 Um, so, when you’re getting ready to go outside, you get showered, you get dressed, do you.
19:09:43 have breakfast, and do all those things, and you went to do the same things with your…
19:09:48 iPhone, your iPad, or your Mac, because at that point, you’re dealing with a lot more people.
19:09:55 The kinds of threats that you face.
19:09:58 Um, believe it or not, children.
19:10:00 Adult family members, visitors to your home,
19:10:04 All are threats to your computer, to your iPhone, to your iPad, they can accidentally delete things, they can modify things.
19:10:11 They can use your computer when you’re not looking to look at porn. They can do all kinds of things that can cause you all kinds of bad problems.
19:10:19 Most malware, which is bad,
19:10:22 code that does a harmful thing.
19:10:25 Most malware attacks that I’ve seen successful on Macs have been from people
19:10:30 who visit porn sites.
19:10:32 So, if you’re not in the habit of visiting porn sites, you probably have less of an exposure.
19:10:38 than most other people.
19:10:40 On 1 thing that you can do to help.
19:10:44 yourself deal with.
19:10:46 Internal threats from children and family members and such.
19:10:50 is every user of your machine
19:10:53 should either have their own computer, or their own phone, or their own iPad,
19:10:57 Or they should have their own account.
19:10:59 On the Mac, you can set up dozens of accounts on the computer.
19:11:03 So if you’re sharing it with your spouse,
19:11:05 Your spouse should have their own.
19:11:08 Account that they log into.
19:11:10 And that way, they don’t mess with your stuff, and you don’t mess with their stuff.
19:11:15 Your machine was set up to do this out of the box.
19:11:18 It’s a little bit harder to do on an iPad,
19:11:22 And it’s really difficult, it’s impossible to do on a phone. Phones are designed to be used by individuals. They’re not really designed to be used by groups.
19:11:31 You can set up.
19:11:34 multiple accounts on iPads, but it’s usually done so that a parent.
19:11:38 can have control over a child’s account. It’s not really a full
19:11:43 user experience. But, um, that’s one way to get rid of the… to reduce the threats.
19:11:49 If everybody in your house has their own little box on your computer,
19:11:52 They really can’t mess you up that much.
19:11:56 Um, you also have threats from people who come into your house.
19:12:01 Occasionally, like, housekeepers, repair people.
19:12:04 Visitors, they may snoop around on your machines.
19:12:09 Or they may actually cause damage to information on the machines,
19:12:14 Generally speaking,
19:12:15 And I can’t emphasize this enough,
19:12:17 If you are not right in front of your computer or your phone or your iPad,
19:12:23 You should either log out, or you should lock it.
19:12:25 To lock your phone, all you need to do is press the power button that locks it.
19:12:30 To lock your iPad, same thing. Press the power button and it locks it. You don’t have to turn it off.
19:12:34 Just press it and it locks it out.
19:12:37 On your Mac, you can just log out.
19:12:39 And if you do that.
19:12:41 They really can’t get in.
19:12:44 Uh, so that’s something that you should just be in the habit of doing.
19:12:47 At work,
19:12:49 I was evil, and if people in my
19:12:54 Area of responsibility.
19:12:55 did not lock themselves out of their computers. I changed their default language to Chinese.
19:13:02 Because that kind of told them that they.
19:13:05 Should have locked their machine.
19:13:07 There was one person I could not do that because she was Chinese.
19:13:12 And in her case, I changed it to Urdu, which is a
19:13:15 language they use in the Middle East.
19:13:17 But.
19:13:19 It did teach people to lock their machines.
19:13:23 Uh, because again, somebody can sit down.
19:13:25 And if somebody sits down at your machine, and it’s unlocked,
19:13:29 If they send a message, it’ll look like it comes from you, and if they send something that you don’t like,
19:13:34 It can cause you representational harm, or they can delete files that are important to you.
19:13:41 You really want to lock up your devices.
19:13:45 Other threads are banks and stores and vendors, a vendor in this case can be a grocery store, it can be a fruit vendor, it can be a restaurant.
19:13:57 Um, and also websites that you visit. All of these vendors.
19:14:03 and stores and whatnot can be hacked,
19:14:06 and your data can leak.
19:14:07 Your data is leaking and it’s not through anything that you personally did.
19:14:12 You have an account with your bank, your bank,
19:14:16 hires themselves out, hires an outside consultant to come in and do.
19:14:21 assessment of their floors or whatever.
19:14:23 And that outside consultant,
19:14:26 breaches the bank’s security.
19:14:28 You can lose personal information.
19:14:30 through no fault of your own. There is a
19:14:35 A site called Have I Been Pwned, P W.
19:14:38 ND, which is a hacker term meaning you’ve taken over something.
19:14:41 Have I been pawned on that website, I’ve…
19:14:45 I was looking at it a couple weeks ago, https://haveibeenpwned.com
19:14:47 And at that point, I had been pawned
19:14:50 a good 200 times, which are data breaches that
19:14:54 other vendors had had that
19:14:57 potentially exposed my information.
19:15:00 And.
19:15:01 That’s something that you cannot control.
19:15:04 But you can control
19:15:07 Um, the amount of damage they can do by making sure that every email account you have.
19:15:13 Every web account that you have,
19:15:15 has a unique
19:15:17 Uh, either account name and password, or just the password alone.
19:15:21 I tend to use the same account name all the time.
19:15:24 Because when I go on to some place, I don’t really want to remember who the heck I thought I was.
19:15:29 But every account that I have has a unique password.
19:15:32 The reason why unique passwords are important.
19:15:37 is, I’ll give you an example of this woman
19:15:40 who she was… she was a lawyer.
19:15:44 And she had all kinds of accounts, and she got tired of keeping track of them, so…
19:15:49 She started using the default account for things that she did not think were important.
19:15:54 She put herself in for a drawing,
19:15:57 for… it was to raise funds for some charitable cause.
19:16:02 She put herself in for the drawing.
19:16:04 And she used that default account name.
19:16:07 The nonprofit really couldn’t afford really big security, they got hacked.
19:16:12 And once the hackers had her username and account,
19:16:16 They compromised every single thing she had that she used that.
19:16:20 password for every single thing she had. And unfortunately, one of the things that she
19:16:26 had used that password for.
19:16:29 was a bar association in a state that she had.
19:16:32 Credentials in, but she didn’t use that often.
19:16:35 You can be credentialed in multiple states.
19:16:38 Well, this one state, she was credentialed there because of one case. She forgot about it.
19:16:44 They got those, uh… they took control of her account, and they sent out things that caused
19:16:49 Her and her business, reputational Harm, so.
19:16:53 You don’t ever want to reuse a password.
19:16:57 And depending upon what it is, you also might want to use a unique account name.
19:17:02 You will find that a lot of people, they get into the habit of using their email message as their email address,
19:17:09 As their account name.
19:17:12 Two problems with that. One is that if you use your email address as your account name,
19:17:17 Millions of people have your email account, banks and.
19:17:20 And people that are on mailing list, they’ll all have your email account. So they already have one of the two things you need to get into the account.
19:17:27 The other problem with the email address is that if you have an email address with Comcast, for example,
19:17:34 And that works fine in San Diego, but then you move up here, and Comcast is no longer.
19:17:40 Your provider, your email address doesn’t work anymore.
19:17:45 So there are difficulties in using your email address,
19:17:49 as your account name.
19:17:51 But everybody does it, including me.
19:17:54 I’m just saying that you should be aware that the fact that there are problems.
19:17:57 Other threats are disgruntled relatives, business partners, or neighbors actively trying to cause you harm.
19:18:06 Sometimes you can’t really do much about those threats.
19:18:10 You know, if you have a relative who wants to trash your reputation,
19:18:14 You’re kind of stuck.
19:18:16 Um, but what you can do is not say in a public forum.
19:18:21 Anything that you wouldn’t say to someone face-to-face.
19:18:24 An example of that is…
19:18:27 If you send a text message and saying, yeah, Jan.
19:18:30 Jan’s a real pain in the butt, and I wish she’d moved to some other state.
19:18:34 You send that text message to your cousin, your cousin sends it to Jan, and now Jan knows what you said about her.
19:18:41 So you really don’t want to say anything.
19:18:44 that you wouldn’t tell somebody face-to-face.
19:18:46 Text messages, email, video recordings.
19:18:49 Web postings can all be copied and pasted and used against you. And you find this out every time we have a political campaign,
19:18:56 Which now seems to be all the time, where somebody finds some web posting or Twitter thing that somebody posted along,
19:19:04 Time ago, and now they’re using it against them in a campaign.
19:19:08 Um, and that’s a threat that you can control just by
19:19:12 Not being a, uh…
19:19:16 I’m not saying nasty things about people.
19:19:20 Other threats. Something to note in the United States, it’s a little bit different in Europe. Europe under the EU has very different
19:19:28 Federal and state governments in the United States are governed by privacy laws.
19:19:34 Companies are not.
19:19:36 So, when I was a federal government employee,
19:19:39 I had very stringent rules on what I could do with.
19:19:45 personal data. If you, as a member of the public,
19:19:48 wrote to me and asked a question,
19:19:51 I could send you an answer.
19:19:54 But I was not allowed to tell anybody that you’d ask the question without a court order, because that’s a private thing between
19:20:02 The public and the government.
19:20:04 If you’re a corporation and you write to the corporation, the corporation can do anything it wants to with it because there are no privacy laws.
19:20:11 That cover corporations in the United States.
19:20:14 In the EEU, there are very strong privacy laws.
19:20:18 Covering corporations.
19:20:20 And you’ll find that Apple and Microsoft and Google
19:20:24 tend to follow the EU’s policies because it’s too much of a pain.
19:20:29 To have one set of rules for the EU and another for the United States. So they tend to
19:20:36 grandfather us in. Most companies don’t do that.
19:20:41 I will mention one particular bank that twice.
19:20:44 In the past, oh, 15 years.
19:20:47 has been cited by the federal government and fined lots and lots and lots of money, for example.
19:20:52 by taking information that they harvested off the web,
19:20:56 and creating bank accounts for these people without the people even knowing.
19:21:02 That they… that it happened.
19:21:03 That is a violation of your privacy. They couldn’t get them on that because we don’t have any privacy laws covering corporations.
19:21:10 What they did is they went after them for
19:21:12 violating bank policy laws.
19:21:14 And that’s our difference between the United States and the rest of the planet.
19:21:19 But generally speaking,
19:21:20 Don’t put anything of value, either monetary or reputational.
19:21:27 On a site you don’t trust.
19:21:29 So, for example, if you think that this.
19:21:32 If you think, for example, the, uh…
19:21:35 The, uh, Straight Mac user group site,
19:21:37 doesn’t have good security,
19:21:39 Well, probably he shouldn’t tell me anything that might cause you harm.
19:21:44 You just, you want to be.
19:21:47 aware that that is a threat.
19:21:52 Foreign governments, foreign businesses, terrorists, and people who hack others’ websites in somebody’s basement.
19:21:59 Also can be a threat.
19:22:01 Now, you might think that you, as an individual living in Sequim or Port Angeles, or wherever you happen to live,
19:22:08 That you’re not a target, but you are, because if they can get.
19:22:12 $100 from you, that may not break you.
19:22:17 But if they do that to a million other people, that’s a lot of money.
19:22:20 And that’s what most of these scams on the internet are aimed at. They’re not interested in trying to
19:22:27 Empty your bank account of tens of thousands of dollars. That’s good for
19:22:31 And then lying in the local paper.
19:22:33 They’re interested in getting 5, 10, $50, $100.
19:22:36 But from thousands or tens of thousands or millions of people.
19:22:41 So, even though you may not think of yourself as a target, you are.
19:22:49 The most likely threats.
19:22:52 Are ones that you make yourself either.
19:22:55 Things that you don’t do that you should have done, or things that you.
19:23:00 put places that you shouldn’t have,
19:23:02 And they cause problems. So either you or your immediate family make errors that
19:23:08 caused most of the problems. As an example,
19:23:12 If you know that you shouldn’t click
19:23:14 On attachments that you get from unknown…
19:23:18 senders, and you do that,
19:23:20 Basically, you created the threat, because when you accept that
19:23:25 unknown document. You might also be accepting the fact that it has malware with it that can compromise.
19:23:32 your machine. So, yes, they made a threat,
19:23:35 But unless you actually do something to accept it, it’s not going to harm you. If you just delete it, it’s not going to harm you.
19:23:42 So we want to make sure that you…
19:23:46 that you are fairly careful in what you do, and be aware that for people running.
19:23:52 Macs and iPhones and iPads.
19:23:53 Most of the threats are from things that you accepted.
19:23:59 intentionally or unintentionally.
19:24:04 And, um, getting back to my metaphor, before you go anywhere with your Mac, and that includes firing it up and just reading the news.
19:24:12 Make sure that you’ve taken care of it.
19:24:15 That you’ve brushed its teeth and all that sort of stuff.
19:24:18 Um, and the first thing you can do is make sure that you automatically install updates.
19:24:23 I have heard any number of people say, oh, I wait for a new update, so it’s been out for a couple of weeks before I try it.
19:24:31 There’s one woman who told me this.
19:24:34 She said that she always waited a couple weeks. When I checked her machine, her machine was a year and a half out of date.
19:24:40 This guy who is an IT professional said that he usually waits at least a month, and he marks it in his calendar.
19:24:47 So they’ll do the update a month later if he hasn’t heard anything back.
19:24:52 His particular machine was two and a half years out of date.
19:24:56 The easiest way to stay up to date is to.
19:25:00 Turn on automatic updates.
19:25:02 And your Mac and your iPad, this one on the…
19:25:06 On the left, that’s an iPad notification that there’s an update.
19:25:09 And the one on the right is the max saying that there’s an update out there.
19:25:14 It’ll put a little red circle there with the number of messages it has, and usually that message is that
19:25:21 You have an update to the operating system.
19:25:24 And if you set it up so that it automatically does the update,
19:25:29 It will just automatically do the update. A lot of people will say, well, I have it set up to do automatic updates and it never seems to do that.
19:25:36 But a lot of people also turn their machine off if they’re not using it, so they’ll.
19:25:41 have their machine… they’ll have their laptop turned on when they’re using it, and then when they’re done, they’ll close it up.
19:25:47 If it’s not turned on, it can’t do the update.
19:25:52 And so you have to remember to just sometimes, if that’s the way you have it.
19:25:57 Just to remind yourself, when you’ve powered up,
19:25:59 Just check to see if there’s an update.
19:26:02 Um, and it’ll either do it right now, if you ask it to, which is what I usually do.
19:26:07 Or you can have it wait and do it at night. If you wait and have it done at night, you have to make sure
19:26:13 The device, whether it’s a phone or an Apple watch or an iPad, or your Mac,
19:26:19 You have to make sure that it’s on power. It needs to be
19:26:23 powered, and then you can say, update it tonight, and it’ll do it at night time.
19:26:31 Another thing to note about updates.
19:26:33 If you have an Apple Watch, the Apple Watch is essentially a companion to your iPhone,
19:26:40 So, you don’t have to do it this way, but I always update the phone first.
19:26:44 And then I update the watch second.
19:26:47 Because that way the phone knows everything it’s supposed to know before it actually talks to the watch.
19:26:52 Tells it to update it.
19:26:55 This is an update on the iPad, looks pretty much the same as it does on the Mac.
19:27:01 The composition’s different. Oh, you’ll notice on this Mac one, it says, review Apple Account Phone Number.
19:27:07 You can also get notices like that, that it’s been a while since you’ve done whatever you want to check to see if your phone number
19:27:14 is, uh, correct, so that.
19:27:16 You have another way of being contacted if there’s a problem.
19:27:19 But in this case, there’s a software update, and it wants you to look at the phone number.
19:27:24 It’ll do the same thing on the iPad.
19:27:27 And you can tell it to update it and update now or update.
19:27:31 Uh, later on.
19:27:34 In addition to updating your operating system, you should also update your apps.
19:27:39 If you get an app from the App Store, either on your.
19:27:44 Mac or your iPhone or iPad, or watch for that matter.
19:27:48 If you get them from the Apple App Store,
19:27:52 it’ll automatically update those applications if you tell it to. But again,
19:27:57 Just like the Mac, your iPad needs to be turned on, your iPhone needs to be turned on, your Mac needs to be turned on.
19:28:05 For this, uh, thing to work.
19:28:07 Um, and if it is, it’ll just automatically keep those things up to date. And if it’s not, you can go into
19:28:14 The app updates, go into the app.
19:28:18 The app that says apps,
19:28:20 And in the preferences, it’ll be something that says, uh, look for the…
19:28:24 updates, and you can say update now, and it’ll update things.
19:28:27 You’ll notice this one on the left where it’s an iPad. This is an iPad that I hadn’t used.
19:28:33 in a couple weeks, and it was, um, just.
19:28:36 sitting, and I told it to update, and there were 22.
19:28:40 Things that needed to be updated.
19:28:42 And it just cheerfully went and updated them, because I told it to.
19:28:47 Um, some things about…
19:28:50 Lawrence, where do you get to that? How do you…
19:28:52 How do you get to that?
19:28:55 The app, it says apps. It’s a blue icon has got.
19:29:01 compass on it, and it’s the App Store.
19:29:06 application on your Mac, on your iPhone, on your iPad.
19:29:08 Ah, okay.
19:29:09 It has preferences, and if you go in to look at the preferences,
19:29:12 One of them is turn on automatic updates. I think it’s on by default.
19:29:17 But the other thing is, you can tell it if it does have things to.
19:29:20 be updated, you can just press this little
19:29:23 update all in a little update all of those things.
19:29:26 Okay, thanks.
19:29:29 One way to keep track of updates, and I recommend this to a lot of people and.
19:29:34 Hardly anyone ever does it.
19:29:36 Apple has a mailing list called Apple Security Announce,
19:29:40 Every time they have a security,
19:29:45 Announcement and the security announcements just for operating systems, it’s not for applications. https://lists.apple.com/mailman3/lists/security-announce.lists.apple.com/
19:29:50 But every time they have a security update,
19:29:53 They’ll send you an email to tell you that it’s out there. And I highly recommend
19:29:59 that you do this. They don’t come that often.
19:30:03 In a busy month, you might get two emails.
19:30:06 And in many months you won’t get anything at all.
19:30:08 And it doesn’t cost you anything, you just go to that website, you type in your address, and it…
19:30:14 emails you updates. It’s absolutely.
19:30:17 free service, and…
19:30:19 The emails themselves are just text. There’s no graphics, there’s no advertisements. It just says, hey, there’s an update, too.
19:30:26 Such and such, you will get an update for every operating system, so even if you don’t have an Apple Watch, you might get an update saying there’s an update to an Apple Watch, but.
19:30:35 That’s about the only thing that might.
19:30:38 um, bother you.
19:30:41 Um, going back to my
19:30:43 Sing about getting properly dressed.
19:30:46 If you shop only from vetted, reputable vendors, that’s one way to keep yourself safe.
19:30:54 And the App Store, all of the apps on Apple’s App Store for the watch, for the iPhone, for the iPad, for the Mac,
19:31:00 All of those apps have to be from identified direct developers.
19:31:05 They have to actually register with Apple.
19:31:08 They have to have created the app according to Apple’s design principles, which among other things,
19:31:16 They have to be.
19:31:18 They have to follow the sandbox model. A sandbox model
19:31:21 It’s from the old.
19:31:24 adage about, um, stay out of my sandbox.
19:31:27 My sandboxes for me and me alone.
19:31:30 If you create an app and it stays in your sandbox, it can’t interfere with other apps.
19:31:35 That’s the whole point. Data can’t leak from one app to another.
19:31:40 Problems can’t leak from one app to another.
19:31:42 You’ll notice on the Mac that if something ever crashes,
19:31:45 When it crashes, the only thing that usually crashes is that app. It doesn’t take the whole thing down.
19:31:51 Uh, if any of you have ever used Windows, quite often when it crashes, it takes on everything, but…
19:31:55 On the Mac, it just crashes one particular app.
19:31:59 And one of the things that the vetting process does also is if an app crashes a lot, Apple yells at them and says, fix that.
19:32:06 As it’s not supposed to do that.
19:32:10 Um.
19:32:11 So they… Apple validates that the apps are designed the way they’re supposed to be.
19:32:16 That they operate in the sandbox, and that they come from valid
19:32:21 developers. An example that came to mind was that.
19:32:26 Several years ago, when
19:32:29 When security people said, you should have a VPN for your
19:32:33 for your iPhone, you should have any VPN for your iPhone.
19:32:36 A whole bunch of VPNs appeared on the App Store.
19:32:39 And they were allegedly from different vendors. Apple did some research, and they all came from.
19:32:45 Just a few vendors in China.
19:32:48 And those few vendors in China where,
19:32:50 owned by the Chinese army.
19:32:53 And Apple revoked the security certificate.
19:32:55 When Apple revokes the security certificate,
19:32:58 Even if that app is on your phone, it doesn’t work anymore.
19:33:03 So that’s another reason why it’s a good idea to get.
19:33:07 your apps from the Apple Store, because if there’s a problem,
19:33:10 They can prevent it from causing you problems.
19:33:14 Um, if they revoke the certificate,
19:33:18 The program won’t launch. It’s just dead space.
19:33:25 And a lot of this just says things that I just told you about, that they’re sandbox and, uh, that is supposed to be.
19:33:33 are updated rather than tar, but…
19:33:35 TAR is a different word entirely.
19:33:40 Things that you don’t need to worry about. I saw this, um…
19:33:45 meme recently and it tickled my fancy.
19:33:48 I heard the government is putting chips inside of people, and this other woman says, I hope I get Doritos.
19:33:55 You really don’t have to worry about.
19:33:58 The government’s sticking chips into your body.
19:34:01 I don’t remember which… there was one anti-government protester
19:34:05 Who claimed that the.
19:34:07 Federal government injected a chip in his butt.
19:34:12 And exactly why the federal government would do that wasn’t clear, but.
19:34:17 Um, he, um, he killed a bunch of people and.
19:34:21 He is no longer with us.
19:34:23 But, uh, no, the government doesn’t go around putting chips in people, that’s not something you need to worry about.
19:34:28 Another thing that I see people worried about is they’re worried about radiation from their phones and.
19:34:35 You know, that it’s going to do something bad with them.
19:34:38 Something people don’t realize is even cars
19:34:42 radiate.
19:34:44 Cars radiate radio waves.
19:34:46 If you’re old enough to remember the old days when you’re driving down the road and a plane passes over.
19:34:52 And it screws up your car radio.
19:34:54 That’s because the radios back then were not terribly well shielded, and neither were the cars.
19:35:01 The cars, the engine in your car generates radio waves.
19:35:06 the engine. Doesn’t need the radiator, it doesn’t need the radio, it’s just the engine.
19:35:11 It’s electromagnetic radiation,
19:35:13 And it can be generated by the engine alone. So if you drive a car, you’re going to expose yourself
19:35:19 to radio waves. Even if you turn your radio off. So, don’t worry about radio waves coming from your phone,
19:35:26 It’s supposed to… don’t… don’t worry about.
19:35:30 Um, people broadcasting and sending signals into your brain, and
19:35:34 Forcing you to wear an aluminum cap.
19:35:36 Um, especially in the summertime that you will not allow, like the aluminum cap.
19:35:41 And they’re not going to inject you with chips.
19:35:45 There are other things that you don’t need to worry about.
19:35:47 I have seen a lot of computer security things that look like this next slide.
19:35:55 This is a map, and it says most people live outside this circle, more people live outside this circle than inside it.
19:36:04 That statement is 100%.
19:36:06 True. It’s also completely useless.
19:36:10 And a lot of computer security stuff that I see.
19:36:14 posted is true, but useless.
19:36:18 So…
19:36:20 You want to be a little bit skeptical when you see somebody complain about, you know, this could.
19:36:25 pose a threat to this, that, and the other thing.
19:36:28 Another thing that people worry about are robots.
19:36:32 And this slide kind of expresses my feelings about robots.
19:36:36 It’s a fake captcha where it says… it gives you choices.
19:36:40 I’m not a robot. I’m not a robot myself, but I’m not judging those who are.
19:36:45 Defying robot.
19:36:47 I’m not a robot, but I know you are, so this feels a bit hypocritical.
19:36:51 I reject the binary assumptions underlying this statement. I’m not a robot, but I’m willing to convert.
19:36:58 Okay, this is kind of my feeling about the robot apocalypse. I’m not really worried about.
19:37:05 Robots.
19:37:07 If you saw, there’s a robot in China that completed a half-marathon.
19:37:12 Things like that. Okay, they are not going to really affect anything that I do.
19:37:19 That robot in China costs tens of millions of dollars.
19:37:22 to around one half marathon.
19:37:25 And I can go out and find a teenager who can do that for far less than millions of dollars.
19:37:31 I’m not really worried about that.
19:37:33 I am worried about artificial intelligence, but it’s not so much that I think the artificial intelligence is going to take over
19:37:40 things from me, I’m afraid it’s going to put…
19:37:42 perfectly good people out of work for no good reason.
19:37:45 If you look at what they’ve done with artificial intelligence, they’re trying to replace
19:37:51 Receptionists, they’re trying to replace…
19:37:54 Uh, call center operators are trying to replace
19:37:56 customer service people, the kinds of people that when you’re having a problem with a company,
19:38:01 You want some human being to talk to. They’re trying to get rid of those people.
19:38:06 That I do worry about, because.
19:38:09 You know, I don’t really… if you remember when call trees first came out with voice answering machines.
19:38:15 Press 1 to do this, press 2 to do this, and then you go throughout.
19:38:20 89 levels of the…
19:38:22 of the maze, and you’re back where you started with nothing accomplished.
19:38:26 That’s what they’re trying to do with.
19:38:28 With artificial intelligence, and that bothers me a great deal, but…
19:38:33 Robots, I’m not going to worry about robots.
19:38:36 Things that you should worry about.
19:38:39 are bad passwords.
19:38:41 At the top is how…
19:38:43 People tell you to make passwords.
19:38:45 Dollar sign S, lowercase as 1 1
19:38:48 Lowercase age, capital C, 7 star.
19:38:53 lowercase A, C, and a carat.
19:38:56 That’s the kind of thing that people say makes a good password. The trouble is.
19:39:00 It’s hard to remember, and it’s hard to type.
19:39:02 And if it’s hard to remember, and it’s hard to type,
19:39:05 What do people do? They write it on a sticky and they put it on their monitor.
19:39:10 Or, it’s written on a piece of paper on the top of their desk, or they get really frustrated,
19:39:15 And they changed the whole thing, and they just say,
19:39:18 Enter, or something else really simple.
19:39:21 A good password is the one that I have here in red,
19:39:24 And these red triangles are actually, that’s where a space is, so it’s…
19:39:29 Pandas space R, space, pour space politicians, exclamation point.
19:39:35 That is a fantastic password. It’s 28 characters long, really almost impossible,
19:39:42 for anything to break. It’s easy to type,
19:39:46 Which means you’ll actually do it.
19:39:48 And it has special characters, because the space itself is a special character, and so is a…
19:39:54 So that’s a really, really good password.
19:39:57 But the ones that, for years, they’ve been telling you that this one at the top, that’s a good password,
19:40:02 It’s not a good password, you will not remember it, you will not remember to type it correctly,
19:40:07 It’s hard to type and you’ll end up compromising it by either changing it to something way too simple,
19:40:15 Or you’ll put a sticky on your…
19:40:17 on your monitor, and then everybody can see what your password is.
19:40:20 Lawrence?
19:40:21 Those are the things. Pardon?
19:40:23 Canada on an emoji be in a password? Is that acceptable? No.
19:40:27 No, no, no.
19:40:28 So what are those… how did you get those upside-down triangles?
19:40:32 Those are just to tell you where the space is. That’s just a regular space. I’m just saying that that’s.
19:40:38 There’s a space there. That doesn’t mean that they’re…
19:40:41 Oh.
19:40:42 There’s a triangle there, there’s a space there.
19:40:43 It’s a standard way to indicate when you’re doing coding where a space is.
19:40:48 A lot of people think that, uh…
19:40:51 A zero is the same as nothing. To a computer, there’s a character for nothing. It’s called null.
19:40:58 And when you… when I write things with spaces, people tend to just say,
19:41:03 Oh, and they’ll write P-A-N-D-A-S-A-R-E without the space. Nope.
19:41:08 There’s a space there.
19:41:11 So if you write, pandas are poor politicians.
19:41:14 That is a good… with those spaces.
19:41:17 That is a great password. It’s long, it’s easy to type, it’s fast to type,
19:41:22 You’ll probably remember it.
19:41:25 Um, so that’s what you should worry about, is you should worry about.
19:41:30 poor passwords that you have that are too short,
19:41:33 Or they’re too hard to remember, and you keep on forgetting them.
19:41:37 Um, on my bank.
19:41:39 If I type my password in wrong three times, it logs me out. Well, actually, it never logged me in.
19:41:45 But it just says goodbye.
19:41:47 Because it knows that hackers try repeatedly. So, you know,
19:41:51 Come up with something that I can correctly type the first time is a good thing.
19:41:57 Um, the other thing that I just… I think I’ve mentioned this before.
19:42:01 I will not bank with a financial institution
19:42:04 that tells me my password doesn’t have the required characters.
19:42:09 Because a lot of banks, they won’t accept a space as a character.
19:42:14 So if it’s telling me that the space is an illegal character.
19:42:18 That means the bank is reading my password.
19:42:24 That makes it useless as a password if they know what my password is.
19:42:29 Because that password is between me and the bank. It’s not for their use.
19:42:34 I don’t want them reading the password.
19:42:36 So if it tells me that my…
19:42:39 Password has an illegal character, it means they’re reading my password, and I won’t do business with them.
19:42:44 And I can mention names, but I shouldn’t do that.
19:42:48 And something that I’m going to put up on the web, but there’s a bank in town that does that.
19:42:51 And I’m never gonna use that bag.
19:42:56 Another thing that you should watch out for is spam.
19:43:00 And how do you tell spam?
19:43:02 Spam is dangerous because spam means it’s, what’s the name, commercial unsolicited.
19:43:11 email or messaging, or whatever, I can’t remember what.
19:43:14 The definition of spam is, spam is any kind of message that ends up in your instant message on your phone,
19:43:19 or in your email that you didn’t request.
19:43:22 But how can you tell spam from stuff that’s legit? One is,
19:43:28 Who it’s sent to. If you have a message that says.
19:43:32 The IRS wants more information on your tax return.
19:43:36 And you look at who is it addressed to, and you see a whole bunch of addresses,
19:43:41 That’s not for the IRS. First of all,
19:43:43 IRS does not send you email like that. They send you a letter through the post office.
19:43:49 Second, if you get something that’s supposed to be from any government, and it lists a whole bunch of addresses,
19:43:54 It’s obviously not for you. This is a piece of spam that was sent out by some hacker.
19:44:00 who’s trying to hit a whole bunch of people with one email message.
19:44:03 But it’s not from a bank, it’s not from the government, it’s not from
19:44:09 DMV, because they don’t send
19:44:12 mass messages out to lots of people.
19:44:15 Another way to tell it’s spam, if it’s in a language that you don’t normally read.
19:44:21 This is in Cyrillic. I don’t read Cyrillic, so I don’t even have to read the message. I know that.
19:44:27 It’s not for me, and I can mark it as spam.
19:44:33 And I can tell that just by seeing how it’s written.
19:44:37 A trick that you can do if you have a lot of messages and you want to go through them in a hurry,
19:44:42 Make… start your messages in alphabetical order.
19:44:45 Because at the top of the list, you’re going to see here that there are a bunch of people who have things like emojis, like they have
19:44:51 apples and cucumbers and spaceships and so on and so forth, that they stick.
19:44:56 in their subject line.
19:44:57 And at the bottom, you’ll have a whole bunch of foreign languages.
19:45:01 And you can just go through and just mark all those and call them spam.
19:45:05 You don’t even need to read them, because I have yet to see one of those things that.
19:45:11 wasn’t spam. I will tell you something that is embarrassing.
19:45:16 Um, the…
19:45:17 Chief Finance Officer for my agency, once upon a time.
19:45:22 sent out a message to everybody in the agency saying they had to get their budgets in in time.
19:45:28 And they stuck dollar signs.
19:45:31 In the subject line. Well, that’s what spammers do when they’re trying to tell you that you got free money or something like that.
19:45:37 So pretty much everyone just marked the message as spam.
19:45:42 You do want to make sure you don’t kind of sabotage yourself.
19:45:47 And, uh, don’t… don’t write messages that look like spam.
19:45:50 But one way to tell it’s spam is if it’s in a foreign language and you don’t speak that language.
19:45:55 I get a lot of messages in Japanese, but I’m a Japanese historian.
19:45:59 That’s normal, but Russian, nope.
19:46:04 Um, spam also will have things that you just know have nothing to do with you. This is, uh
19:46:10 A instant message that came through.
19:46:12 saying that this is Emily from Glassdoor, and she’s recruiting to my area.
19:46:17 She’s probably not with Glassdoor and one dead giveaway,
19:46:22 is the address that it came from. It doesn’t say it came from Glassdoor. Glassdoor is a recruitment company.
19:46:28 This comes from fully corout dot hair.
19:46:32 Uh, definitely not from Glassdoor. Not to mention the fact
19:46:36 That I’m not looking for a job with them.
19:46:40 Here’s another piece of spam.
19:46:42 This is, it says for the, it’s from Temu. Temu is a
19:46:46 Kind of the Chinese equivalent of Amazon.
19:46:50 And your background and resume have been recommended by multiple recruitment agencies, blah blah blah blah blah.
19:46:55 Well, all of that is junk, but you’ll also notice it was sent with from Jessica
19:47:01 Well, something or other, at iCloud.com.
19:47:04 It didn’t come from Temu.
19:47:06 So, even if I had been interested in the message, this tells me that it’s spam.
19:47:11 And you’ll notice down at the bottom,
19:47:13 That way, if you press this report junk,
19:47:16 Don’t just delete the message, press that button, because if you report junk,
19:47:22 It flags that
19:47:25 account is account that is sending out spam.
19:47:28 And that helps prevent other people from getting spam.
19:47:32 As well as it deletes the message. But don’t just delete the message, it reported as junk first.
19:47:36 And then you can kill it off.
19:47:39 Um, this one says, uh, my team has been trying to reach you regarding the PlayStation 5 you won for our raffle.
19:47:46 If you didn’t participate in a raffle, this is definitely spam.
19:47:50 And also, you’ll notice that it’s coming from loverdelicate.com.
19:47:55 Probably not some place you’ve ever been to or want to.
19:48:00 Um, these pieces of spam, by the way, these are all things that I’ve received at one time or another.
19:48:05 This is Christy, who’s going to give me…
19:48:08 $100,000 because she won the Power Bowl, and she’s sending off…
19:48:11 Message to 200 random, uh…
19:48:14 Individuals. You don’t need to know anything about this at all, you just know it’s spam, so.
19:48:19 This one, this one I’m quite fond of.
19:48:26 My call filter on my phone, this one’s from Verizon.
19:48:29 Said that potential spam detected.
19:48:32 And what cracks me up is a type of spam that tries to infiltrate your organization
19:48:38 It’s called spear phishing.
19:48:41 And this particular phone number… phone call came from Spearfish, South Dakota, which I just thought was
19:48:47 hilariously.
19:48:49 Funny. But yes, that’s bad.
19:48:54 And, uh, this vehicle registration agency, uh, is regarding my overpayment.
19:49:01 But you’re looking, and the address, it’s not a government site, it’s Dorff23.com, so.
19:49:07 That’s not from a government agency, if it has a comm address.
19:49:11 And this one says, uh, Netflix, you need to update your membership with us.
19:49:17 But it’s, again, it’s not from Netflix, it’s from somebody else.
19:49:22 And this is also another one that’s a dead giveaway.
19:49:26 If you get a message and there is no sender and no subject,
19:49:30 You really don’t even need to read any further, because it’s probably just spam.
19:49:36 And this one, it says that my…
19:49:38 Account is expired, well, no.
19:49:41 No company would send out a message like that.
19:49:44 And if they did, they’d probably follow it up with one saying, oops, we screwed up.
19:49:50 One of my favorite ones is this one says I have an outstanding toll.
19:49:55 And I have to go to EasyPassNY.com, not a gov,
19:50:00 In order to pay it, but the area code at the top.
19:50:04 The country code at the top is 63, which is the Philippines.
19:50:07 I really doubt that New York
19:50:10 sends their toll…
19:50:12 summonses through instant messages, and I’m pretty sure that if they did,
19:50:16 It wouldn’t be from the Philippines.
19:50:20 So when you see spam on your
19:50:24 In your email, or in instant messages,
19:50:29 Click, saying that it’s junk.
19:50:32 Because that tells Apple, that tells Google, that tells Microsoft, whoever account you have it with.
19:50:38 It tells them that this is suspicious and you’re flagging it.
19:50:46 And after you’ve said it was.
19:50:49 junk, then you can delete it. Or you can press this handy little thing here that says delete and Report Junk, and it does it all in one
19:50:56 fell swoop. But it’s a two-step process, and you never want to just delete junk, you always want to report it first.
19:51:06 This is not spam.
19:51:09 And… it… this was sent out by, uh…
19:51:13 You might recall that a tanker truck
19:51:17 Overturned on an overpass west of Port Angeles last year.
19:51:22 And it fell into the river.
19:51:26 And someone dictated a message, I’m guessing, in the sheriff’s office,
19:51:31 And it says, this is a message from Clallon County Sheriff’s Office.
19:51:34 Please listen carefully to all instructions,
19:51:37 Thank you, murderer, murderers should use extreme caution.
19:51:41 As has that, workers will be in the area, voluntary water restrictions remain.
19:51:46 In effect for the city of Port Angeles, slaughter utility customer.
19:51:51 Terrible, terrible, terrible message.
19:51:53 That is not spam, though. That was sent out by the Sheriff’s Department.
19:51:58 But they didn’t do a particularly good job of.
19:52:03 Making it look like it wasn’t spam.
19:52:05 And it was just reporting that that tank truck fell in the river, and if you lived in
19:52:09 Port Angeles, you should make sure that.
19:52:14 It was, it threw in some.
19:52:17 toxic information… toxic.
19:52:20 substances in the river, and they had water restrictions.
19:52:23 This is also not spam, is from the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office,
19:52:28 This came after that first one, and it says that…
19:52:32 Um, there is tsunami advisory has been issued. You’ll notice that they learn from their mistake.
19:52:37 And this one looks like it’s from the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office,
19:52:41 And this was after there was an earthquake.
19:52:44 And, uh, there was a tsunami warning for the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
19:52:48 So, this, again, was not spam, and this is how it should have looked.
19:52:52 First time.
19:52:55 Generally, what I’m saying when it comes to things that are sent to you, do not invite bad guys in.
19:53:04 On a PC, you can actually compromise it just by reading a message.
19:53:08 On a Mac, it’s a little bit harder, but you still don’t really want to read
19:53:12 spam messages. If you can tell it’s spam message, just mark it and make it go away.
19:53:18 You do not want to open up attachments that seem suspicious.
19:53:23 One of the few ways that you can actually compromise a Mac is that if you haven’t been doing
19:53:28 Your updates, opening up a PDF can compromise an iPhone or an iMac.
19:53:33 It has to be several versions out of date, but
19:53:37 It can still compromise them, so.
19:53:40 Don’t open up any attachments that you don’t recognize, don’t open up email messages.
19:53:45 from people you don’t know,
19:53:47 If you think it’s spam, just.
19:53:51 Market is spam.
19:53:55 I’m not going to get too much into privacy things, but privacy settings on your Mac and in your iPhone can cover a lot of things. For example,
19:54:05 You can have privacy settings for paired devices, like.
19:54:08 Uh, you can restrict
19:54:11 things like earbuds and mice and other things.
19:54:17 You can restrict speech recognition.
19:54:20 You can restrict your journals so that only your journal talks to you and not to other people.
19:54:25 You can have sensitive content warnings, so…
19:54:29 Um, if you… you can make it so it’s G or PG, it doesn’t use that as a rating symbol, but.
19:54:36 Things like that. You can restrict.
19:54:39 analytic information going back to Apple.
19:54:42 You can restrict Apple’s advertising, they’ll still send you advertising, but it won’t be…
19:54:48 It won’t be targeted directly to you.
19:54:51 In Apple Intelligence, you can either
19:54:53 uh, use ChatGPT or not, it’s up to you, and I recommend that you not.
19:55:00 Uh, wired accessories.
19:55:02 On an iPad, you can actually hook up a mouse to an iPad.
19:55:05 Or you can hook up a keyboard to an iPad.
19:55:08 And on your Mac, you can hook up
19:55:12 I mouse to your Mac,
19:55:13 All of those could carry bad things with them, so.
19:55:18 If you plug something into your machine, you might need to go in and authorize that device
19:55:25 To talk to your machine. Why is this bad? As an example.
19:55:28 There was a company several years ago, probably about 10 years ago, when.
19:55:32 USB devices were just getting
19:55:35 I started… they had a mouse that had…
19:55:38 uh, a 32 K.
19:55:40 It’s not much now, but at the time, it was big, hot stuff.
19:55:44 32K USB memory stick embedded in the mouse.
19:55:47 So when you plug the mouse in, not only did you get the mouse, but you also got this
19:55:52 32K is storage, so you could store whatever the heck you were going to store on it.
19:55:56 This struck to me as a really bad idea.
19:56:00 So I…
19:56:02 wrote a small script just as a test. I wrote a small script that I put on the mouse,
19:56:06 And on a Windows machine, my little script,
19:56:10 Would, as soon as you plugged into the
19:56:11 It would turn the screen black, and it said, you’ve been compromised.
19:56:16 And it took me all of 15 minutes to write that script.
19:56:20 It didn’t do anything harmful, but it scared the crap out of people.
19:56:25 And we had purchased… our agency had purchased, like, dozens of these mice,
19:56:30 And we sent them all back because.
19:56:32 My simple demonstration…
19:56:35 Didn’t cause any harm.
19:56:36 But it’s very, very easy for somebody to have compromise Windows machines. On the Mac, it didn’t do that for a variety of reasons, but…
19:56:45 On Windows, it was definitely scary.
19:56:46 Anyway, all of these privacy things, settings are on your iPhone, your iMac,
19:56:54 Your iPhone, your Mac, your iPad.
19:56:57 And you should pay attention to them.
19:56:59 As an example of things that you should pay attention to.
19:57:03 are things like locations.
19:57:06 Do I have 1 for the location settings.
19:57:09 I was wondering why my iPhone was not giving me elevation. Normally, if you bring up the compass on your iPhone, it’ll give you the elevation.
19:57:17 Well, one day when I was being paranoid, I told the compass that it could not use my location.
19:57:24 And in retrospect, that’s kind of stupid, because
19:57:27 Compasses are all about location.
19:57:29 When I turn back on location, it could tell me the…
19:57:33 Um, my elevation.
19:57:35 Uh, which was really handy when I took this train trip the last couple weeks.
19:57:39 Because I want to know how high we were when going through various parts of Colorado.
19:57:44 So you can turn on things that can track location, and on my.
19:57:48 iPhone, the things that track location are Apple Maps,
19:57:52 Google Maps, and…
19:57:55 A couple other things. One is a scientific tool.
19:57:58 That measures gravity, and you don’t really care about it, but.
19:58:04 Very few things track location.
19:58:07 Things that try to track location include games.
19:58:10 Now, why would you have a gang track location? And the answer is, it’s of no benefit to you, but it’s of great benefit
19:58:18 to advertisers. If the advertisers know that a clump of people in this state
19:58:23 is playing their game.
19:58:25 then they can flag those people to send ads to them, or…
19:58:31 solicitations to buy this new game pack that gives them more.
19:58:37 capability, or whatever.
19:58:39 Games don’t need to know your location.
19:58:42 in the, uh, Zoom…
19:58:45 wants to know, can it use your camera? You actually have to authorize that.
19:58:50 And the answer is yes, you want it to use the camera.
19:58:52 Can it use your microphone? Yes, you want to be able to use the microphone.
19:58:56 Should a game…
19:58:58 use your camera and a microphone? The answer is probably not.
19:59:01 So you went to look at
19:59:04 The location settings, the privacy settings on your phone,
19:59:07 on your iPad, on your Mac,
19:59:09 Because a lot of stuff in there just doesn’t make any sense.
19:59:12 And so like AP News, should AP News tracking your location?
19:59:19 Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Probably mostly no.
19:59:23 But if you do a lot of traveling to the east and west coast,
19:59:26 If you’re on the East Coast, you might want East Coast news, so it sees you’re on the East Coast, it’ll give you East Coast news.
19:59:31 If you’re on the West Coast, it gives you West Coast news.
19:59:34 It just depends upon what it is you’re doing. But a lot of things,
19:59:37 No, you don’t want them to know where you are.
19:59:43 Another thing that it’s a more… it’s more critical for iPads and iPhones, not so much for.
19:59:51 For.
19:59:53 Max.
19:59:56 Track settings. The track settings will try and track all kinds of settings, like…
20:00:02 What language do you have? What equipment do you have? A whole bunch of things will ask you.
20:00:07 Can they track you when you add, uh,
20:00:11 when you launch a.
20:00:13 An application, uh, for the first time on your iPhone or your.
20:00:16 iPad, it’ll say, can we track you? I always say,
20:00:21 No. And sometimes, like Facebook will come up with this little plea. Oh, please let us track you, we can…
20:00:27 We can provide you with a richer experience.
20:00:31 And my answer is that…
20:00:32 My answer is really not printable, but I don’t really want to give, uh, have Facebook give me a richer experience.
20:00:39 So, I just say, no, they can’t track me.
20:00:43 There’s really… I can’t think of anything off the top of.
20:00:48 My head’s where I want them to track me, so.
20:00:50 You can pretty much just say, no.
20:00:55 Accessory settings, I already told you about the mics, mouse that’ll ask you when you plug something in.
20:01:01 Um, can I plug something in?
20:01:04 And now we get to the question part.
20:01:07 As for why, I made this, um…
20:01:10 illustration in Google Gemini.
20:01:13 And I was trying to come up with something I thought was humorous,
20:01:16 And the idea of puffins trying to use a…
20:01:20 A laptop, and trying to get past the fingerprint.
20:01:24 Uh, to log in. I thought that was.
20:01:26 I thought that was sufficiently lardhearted and.
20:01:30 ludicrous that, uh…
20:01:33 Um, it made a good photo.
20:01:34 And if you look in the background, it actually looks sort of like the Orcas Islands off in the distance, but
20:01:40 That was just an accident.
20:01:44 And I’m going to stop sharing my screen.
20:01:47 Any questions?
20:01:49 I had one question.
20:01:51 Yes.
20:01:52 Um, is there any danger in sharing your calendar
20:01:56 with your family members across the devices in your house.
20:02:01 Um, Kathleen and I…
20:02:05 Um…
20:02:07 Kathleen had a complex calendar. She had five degrees,
20:02:12 So, all in different subjects, she had.
20:02:16 associations in the Methodist Church that I didn’t have.
20:02:20 In healthcare that I didn’t have,
20:02:22 In computer science that I didn’t have.
20:02:23 So we ended up each having our own separate calendars.
20:02:27 Because I kept on getting appointments for her,
20:02:31 that were driving me crazy.
20:02:33 So we had a shared calendar,
20:02:36 for things that we both were interested in. Like, if she was going to go on a trip or.
20:02:39 We were going to go out to dinner or something like that.
20:02:42 We had a separate shared calendar. We did that one.
20:02:45 in Google Calendar.
20:02:47 Uh, rather than an Apple Calendar. The Apple Calendar is mine, her Apple Calendar was hers, and we didn’t share them.
20:02:53 Simply because our lives were complex.
20:02:57 If you have a simpler.
20:03:00 family arrangement, um, if it’s on.
20:03:03 If it’s on your phone and your spouse’s phone and your child’s phone, probably not going to be a problem unless they’re just a lot of…
20:03:11 Traffic. At which point you might want to have a separate
20:03:15 calendar that’s a shared calendar.
20:03:18 The shared calendar, we just went in and created a Google account. We both subscribed to that.
20:03:22 calendar on the Google account, we could add things to that shared a calendar, and we could both see it.
20:03:29 And that was only for things that we wanted the other person to know about.
20:03:33 Was there any reason you chose the Google Calendar over the Apple calendar?
20:03:38 Well, with the Apple Calendar, we would have had to create another Apple ID, and your Mac.
20:03:42 Oh, really?
20:03:43 Yes, your Apple ID is tied to your calendar.
20:03:47 Her Apple ID is tied to her calendar.
20:03:49 Yes, we can share the calendars, but then…
20:03:51 Everything got shared. And with the… you can’t have… you can’t be logged into two Apple IDs at the same time.
20:03:59 But it’s real easy to be logged into your Apple Calendar and a Google Calendar at the same time, so that’s why we went that way.
20:04:06 Gotcha. Okay, thank you.
20:04:08 But I would be getting, like,
20:04:10 You know, uh, turn in your first draft of your journal article.
20:04:16 Well, I wasn’t writing a journal article, she was. Or I would have one, uh…
20:04:22 rebuild the sanctuaries website.
20:04:24 She wasn’t rebuilding the sanctuary website. What did she care about that?
20:04:29 So it just, it was driving us both nuts.
20:04:35 I have one, Lawrence.
20:04:36 Yes.
20:04:37 When you were talking about privacy settings, right after restrict Apple ads,
20:04:43 You said something about ChatGPT.
20:04:46 And I missed it.
20:04:47 Oh, the Apple Intelligence.
20:04:50 One of the things that I really like about Apple Intelligence, Apple Intelligence is coming for a bad rap in the.
20:04:56 in the news because they say it’s too limited.
20:04:58 But one of the things that I like about Apple Intelligence is when you’re using Apple’s AI,
20:05:05 As much of the process as possible takes place on your device, takes place on your iPad,
20:05:10 takes place on your phone, takes place on your Mac. It doesn’t go anywhere else. And so nobody else knows about it.
20:05:15 All right.
20:05:17 If it does make a request, like you want to know something that.
20:05:22 That your phone doesn’t know.
20:05:24 And it asks Apple, it sends an encrypted message.
20:05:28 that’s anonymized. It doesn’t… it’s not tagged to you, so it goes out and gets that information, comes back, and uses it.
20:05:35 ChatGPT is a commercial firm,
20:05:38 And you can optionally go into Apple Intelligence and turn it on.
20:05:43 But the danger is, everything you keep, you send to ChatGPT, it keeps.
20:05:49 Everything. And I don’t want them to keep.
20:05:53 I don’t want it to know what I’m doing.
20:05:55 So I, I do not turn that on.
20:05:59 And… but that’s under your control. You can turn it on on your Mac, you can turn it on on your… on your…
20:06:04 iPhone or your iPad, but I personally will turn it off.
20:06:09 A lot of people, though, don’t have that same concern that I do.
20:06:14 And so that’s why it’s listed in the privacy.
20:06:16 Under Apple Intelligence, you can turn it on or off.
20:06:20 Okay, so it’s under the Apple Intelligence.
20:06:23 Part of the privacy settings.
20:06:26 Well, actually, there’s an Apple Intelligence part of the settings panel all by itself.
20:06:32 Right.
20:06:31 But it’s also listed in privacy because it’s the same thing. But if you set it one place or the other,
20:06:37 It’s basically the same thing.
20:06:39 They just list it in two different places.
20:06:42 You have to just turn both off, or just one?
20:06:44 No, no, if you do it in 1 place, that’s enough.
20:06:46 Okay, thank you.
20:06:47 And it’s off, it’s off by default.
20:06:52 Oh.
20:06:51 If you want to use ChatGPT, you actually have to turn it on.
20:06:56 Okay, I’m not aware I turned it on, but I did go there.
20:07:00 Today, and it seemed to work.
20:07:03 On my phone.
20:07:04 With ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence.
20:07:07 Well, I put it into Safari ChatGPT, and it came up in Safari.
20:07:11 Yes, but that means you’re just going to the regular ChatGPT site. It’s not using Apple intelligence.
20:07:17 Okay, got it. Thank you.
20:07:22 Any other questions? I realized I was talking a lot.
20:07:25 Yes.
20:07:26 Privacy, uh, privacy…
20:07:29 Question, uh, you said that, uh, banks had their own
20:07:34 Privacy regulations, rules.
20:07:39 that U.S. corporations are not bound by the same kinds of rules that EU corporations are.
20:07:45 That’s correct.
20:07:46 Okay, so what I’m…
20:07:49 Wondering about is, uh…
20:07:55 organizations like hospitals and
20:07:59 My health, the online…
20:08:03 access to everybody’s…
20:08:05 individual accounts everywhere.
20:08:09 What?
20:08:07 Yes, those are not, those are not covered by privacy law, but they are covered by HIPAA.
20:08:12 Right.
20:08:14 Right.
20:08:13 Which is a health information, privacy protection act.
20:08:18 Right.
20:08:18 Now, it sounds… health insurance privacy protection act.
20:08:24 Okay.
20:08:23 That sounds like it’s a Privacy Act, but it’s really not. It’s really…
20:08:28 a health regulation.
20:08:29 And I mention that because
20:08:33 Under HIPAA.
20:08:35 The various vendors have access to your information simply because you gave access
20:08:40 To the doctor, so for example, if the doctor sends it out for.
20:08:45 lab tests, the… they’re not… they are not required to tell you what lab they send it to.
20:08:52 In Europe, they have to.
20:08:55 Because it’s not really a privacy regulation, it’s a health insurance.
20:09:01 Regulation.
20:09:04 Mm-hmm.
20:09:04 I realize I’m seeming to be picky, but
20:09:08 it’s really not a privacy regulation, in spite of the fact that that’s in the Act.
20:09:15 You can keep information away from your relatives.
20:09:19 You can keep information away. Well, as an example, this couple I know.
20:09:23 They’ve been living together for something like 30 years, and under Washington state law,
20:09:27 That’s considered a common law marriage.
20:09:29 But they could not visit their, um…
20:09:33 Their partner in the hospital because they were not married.
20:09:37 And…
20:09:38 they’re stuck. Now, that was…
20:09:41 A year and a half ago, they’re now married because they’ve decided that that was a stupid.
20:09:47 thing not to do.
20:09:54 What’s your thought on, um…
20:09:57 the app Copilot.
20:09:59 Copilot is Microsoft’s artificial intelligence agent.
20:10:05 I have used… I happen to.
20:10:08 Among other things, have two Windows machines, and please don’t ask why, but…
20:10:13 I use Copilot, but I use it
20:10:16 Mostly for…
20:10:18 Things that it was that Microsoft is doing already.
20:10:22 For things like grammar and checking, I have a tendency to
20:10:25 Not put articles in, I’d be writing something.
20:10:28 And I’d say the…
20:10:29 I’d say something, group went someplace and Copilot will pop up and say,
20:10:36 The group went someplace, but again, it’s under my control.
20:10:39 I use Copilot for that purpose. I’ve used it to make some illustrations.
20:10:45 But I tend to.
20:10:47 I tend to use.
20:10:50 Google Gemini for illustrations, that puffin.
20:10:56 illustration that I had today was done with, uh,
20:11:00 Google Gemini.
20:11:01 Copilot is okay.
20:11:04 But, uh, again.
20:11:05 Everything you feed into Copilot.
20:11:09 Microsoft uses, so…
20:11:10 I don’t give it anything confidential.
20:11:16 Okay, thanks.
20:11:22 question and this is Sidna. I still haven’t figured out how to sign in.
20:11:28 when we attend the meetings.
20:11:31 Oh.
20:11:31 I…
20:11:33 I can actually show my screen, and I’ll show you how to do that.
20:11:38 Okay.
20:11:42 And we will make this go away because we don’t need this right now.
20:11:48 Um…
20:11:49 I sent the link out in the, um…
20:11:53 Chat window, and if you click on that link, you double-click on that link, it comes to this form,
20:11:59 Oh.
20:11:58 And what you do on this form, you just fill in
20:12:03 The.
20:12:05 Yeah.
20:12:04 Your email address.
20:12:07 Your name first and last. The reason why is that sometimes people’s email addresses don’t tell me what their name is.
20:12:13 So, your first and last name, and then you check this little box, which meaning? Now, today, it’s only one meeting, so that’s only one box to check, but.
20:12:22 The, uh, the.
20:12:25 The address for this form is in the chat.
20:12:28 Uh, window and you just double-click on it and it brings up this form in your browser.
20:12:34 And it works… it works on, um…
20:12:34 Oh, okay, okay.
20:12:36 It works on a phone, it works on iPad, it works on your…
20:12:40 On your Mac.
20:12:41 Okay. Thanks. I think I did it.
20:12:45 Okay.
20:12:45 I’m going to do it.
20:12:48 Double click.
20:12:50 Any other questions?
20:12:52 No.
20:12:59 Um, something I went to…
20:13:01 tell you about thinking.
20:13:05 Our church, my church,
20:13:07 is thinking about putting in some larger monitors in our fellowship hall.
20:13:13 And if they do, I’m thinking about either having a meeting sometime this
20:13:19 This.
20:13:20 summer either at my church or at the library. Haven’t really talked to the library yet to see what they have.
20:13:27 Uh, it would probably be on a Saturday, and it’d be in the afternoon, and…
20:13:31 The reason why a Saturday afternoon is that people tend to be freeze on Saturday,
20:13:37 And a lot of people don’t like driving at night, so if we were going to have a meeting, it would be.
20:13:42 Probably in the afternoon.
20:13:44 I was thinking about, in addition to having an in-person meeting,
20:13:47 We also might have a swap meet. I have some equipment that I don’t need.
20:13:53 And I don’t want to sell it or anything like that. I would like to just give it away.
20:13:59 And.
20:14:01 If we had an in-person meeting, that’d be a place where you could bring stuff that you no longer wanted.
20:14:08 The good news, bad news about this, if nobody wants the equipment, then you still have to take it back with you.
20:14:15 You can’t just.
20:14:17 abandoned it at my church or at the library, they wouldn’t like that.
20:14:20 But that’s a thought that I have.
20:14:23 If you have any thoughts on my thought, please.
20:14:28 Write to me. And the other thing is, um, what would you like to do for our next meeting?
20:14:35 I’d like to talk about allergies. I was listening to the recordings because I have to edit them to put them up.
20:14:41 And I sniffle a lot, because I have really bad allergies. So, if any of you have a.
20:14:46 Cure for allergies, I’d appreciate that.
20:14:52 Can we send you suggestions?
20:14:54 Absolutely.
20:14:56 I’m… by the way, you sent me a question asking if I could talk about
20:15:02 passkeys. I’m reluctant to because…
20:15:06 They’re not scary, but explaining why they’re different than passwords.
20:15:11 tends to make people’s mind go poof.
20:15:14 So, if I can if I can come up with a…
20:15:18 A good way of explaining that, uh…
20:15:21 Well, we might talk about passkeys because passkeys are…
20:15:25 Our.
20:15:26 That’s the way to go for the future.
20:15:33 You’re so patient and informative.
20:15:37 Lawrence, and I just thank you so much for what you do.
20:15:41 Well, thank you for the…
20:15:42 Really appreciate you.
20:15:43 Thank you.
20:15:45 We’ll second that.
20:15:48 Keep in mind that I’m really an historian.
20:15:53 I just got employed for
20:15:56 30-some years is computer techie.
20:15:59 Um, one reason why.
20:16:01 I started, I started a career in, in, uh, computers is that
20:16:07 I bought a home computer when they first came out in 1977.
20:16:14 And I started off with.
20:16:19 Programming a mainframe, because my…
20:16:21 My girlfriend, later my spouse, talked me into it.
20:16:24 So I grew up with the history of modern computing.
20:16:28 And I use them as communications tools, and I spend a lot of time explaining to people
20:16:34 how computers work. And that…
20:16:37 Ended up being my job that I got paid for, but, uh.
20:16:42 I really am an historian. If you ever want to talk about war crimes, I know a lot about that.
20:16:48 Oh my gosh.
20:16:49 That’s what I did my master’s on, was the Tokyo war crimes trial in 1946 through 1948.
20:16:56 Yes.
20:16:58 And strangely enough,
20:17:00 Very few people have ever wanted to talk to me about it. I just don’t understand why.
20:17:07 Anything else?
20:17:09 Mm-hmm.
20:17:11 Well, I thank you, and have a pleasant evening, and I’m sorry about the, uh, internet outage.
20:17:18 Thank you, Lawrence. See you next time.
20:17:20 Yeah, good night, Laurence.
20:17:20 Good Lawrence, thank you. Bye.
20:17:21 Thank you. Thank you, Lawrence.
20:17:23 Good night.
20:17:23 It’s great.

April 2026: Artificial Intelligence

April 2026: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic for several years, and this year AI has had widespread effects: AI expansion projects have created a shortage of computer storage (hard drives, flash drives), memory chips, and procssor processor chips. Bulk buys of power to run AI data centers have triggered a sharp rise in energy bills. Adoption of AI technologies has prompted many tech companies to begin mass layoffs of employees that managers believe can be replaced by AI agents. And some futurists have told dark tales of a future AI apocalypse.

We also talked about why the MacBook Neo might be a good upgrade for someone with an older Mac, how Tim Cook’s forthcoming retirement is in no way a demotion, and why watching Apple’s June World Wide Developer Conference keynote address is not only fun but informative.

A few items of interest:

  • In the Question and Answer session, someone asked what the red dot at the top of their iPhone screen means. A red dot on an iPhone indicates a new, unheard voicemail, or that an app is using the microphone. A red dot on an Apple Watch indicates a new notification has come in (a new text message, an app wants attention, etc.)
  • One person asked why Find My does not work on their iPhone or iPad. If Find My is not working, it is because Find My is not allowed to use the device’s location; this can be corrected in Settings > Privacy and Security > Location Services.
  • At one point, mention was made of a book, Sons of the Profits, or There’s No Business Like Grow Business: The Seattle Story, 1851-1901. This is a 1967 book by William “Bill” Speidel about Seattle’s colorful and unconventional early years. It is a fun read.
  • Two graphics showing how AI adoption may affect jobs in the next few years:

Short overview of AI

The following relatively short video (8 minutes, 15 seconds) reviews how we arrived at this point and suggests why you might want to take a skeptical view of both the claims of the wonders of AI and the claims of an AI-created doom.

Artificial Intelligence – A short overview

Click on the YouTube logo if you want to expand the recording.

Video of the April 2026 meeting: Artificial Intelligence

Video recording of the April 2026 meeting on Artificial Intelligence

The meeting video includes a showing of the shorter video shown above. Click on the YouTube logo if you want to expand the recording.

Transcript of meeting: Artificial Intelligence

This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom is sometimes (often?) creative. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.

18:32:47 Getting on to questions. Do we have any questions?
18:32:50 And what would these questions be concentric around? AI?
18:33:05 Um…
18:32:56 I’m going to get into that 7, so no, this is more like, um, I can’t find my mouse pointer on my iPad, and, you know, just, uh… Just questions, because if you don’t have questions, there are things that I was going to talk about, but…
18:33:14 I’d settled for questions right now.
18:33:20 Yes.
18:33:18 I have a question for you. I looked in my garage, I found a monitor in my garage, and the connection on the monitor is… it’s an old… it’s connected to my old computer. It’s a bunch of pins, like a 12-pin connection.
18:33:33 Yes.
18:33:34 And it’s… it was almost brand new. Is there any way that I could hook that up to either a modern-day computer with attachments or adapters or anything, and maybe even to my phone?
18:33:47 Um, the answer is, depending upon what it is, if it’s a VGA monitor, the answer is no.
18:33:55 VGA in terms of the resolution, and that’s because no modern device knows how to talk on a screen that small. If it’s a flat panel display, it’s probably at least, um.
18:34:10 a 1280 pixel across monitor, and there might be a way to get it to work. Um, but the fact is, you’d need a whole bunch of different adapters. You’d need a… you’d need something that was like a USB-C to VGA. I’ve never seen an adapter like that, so it might be a USB to something else to VGA, and you might spend like.
18:34:28 Okay.
18:34:33 $100 on adapters, um, as an alternative, you can get these small screens at Costco now. They’re made by Acer, and they’re, like, $89 or something, and they just plug right into a phone or into.
18:34:56 Oh, yeah.
18:34:48 an iPad or something using a USB-C, and it’s a much better monitor than that monitor in your garage. So, my feeling would be, even if it’s almost brand new, it’s so old that it’s not really brand new.
18:35:05 That’s for sure. Okay, I just wanted it sitting there, and I guess I’ll head out to the dump with that one. It’s not going to fit anything.
18:35:12 Can’t do that.
18:35:16 Well, I’ll take it over to Goodwill.
18:35:12 Um… The, um… Um, yes, you can take it to Goodwill. Goodwill may not have any use for it, but they will accept it.
18:35:24 And, um, almost anything you turn into goodwill, they actually ship off to Tacoma, and Tacoma has a really good electronics recycling facility. We don’t really have one on the peninsula.
18:35:39 You have to remember that their neighborhoods in Tacoma that have more people than all of Clallam County, so we just don’t rate.
18:35:49 I have a question.
18:35:51 Okay, I have an old computer, an old Apple.
18:35:51 Okay, thank you.
18:35:52 Yes.
18:35:55 And I’ve updated to this map.
18:35:58 And I wanted to get rid of it. How do I delete everything off of it before I recycle it? Like, I think Squim just had a, um…
18:36:06 Turn in your old electronic stuff.
18:36:09 um… gathering.
18:36:20 Right. But I want to delete everything off it.
18:36:12 Yeah, the, um… in SWIM, there’s at least a couple churches that, like, once or twice a year, have an electronics recycling event. Um… Yes, um, do you know how old the machine… do you know what model machine it is?
18:36:28 I’d have to get it for you, um…
18:36:31 I’ll go get it, okay?
18:36:34 It’s a laptop. I mean, it’s like a…
18:36:33 No, no, well, is it portable?
18:36:37 It’s like a iPad, a big iPad.
18:36:43 like a Mac.
18:36:42 Um, if it’s… If it’s old enough, if it’s new enough, you should be able to go on to Apple’s site, just type into Google, um, deleting… data prior to resale of, and then, say, MacBook Pro or iPad, or whatever it is.
18:37:03 Okay, okay.
18:37:07 Okay.
18:37:22 Okay.
18:37:05 And Apple has explicit instructions on what you do, step-by-step instructions. If you can’t do that because you can’t get into it or some other things, you can write to me and I’ll see about Plan B. But I really kind of need to know what model it is, but see if there are online instructions.
18:37:26 When they give you the instructions, they’re in alphabet… they’re not in alphabetical, they’re in numerical order. And you want to go through in person, because if you skip some steps, you might leave data.
18:37:37 Yeah.
18:37:37 You might leave data by accidentally removing your access to remove the data. And if you do that, that’s not good.
18:37:47 Okay, thank you.
18:37:51 Other questions?
18:37:55 Oh, Lawrence, have you heard about Tim Cook being fired?
18:38:01 No, he wasn’t fired. Tim Cook designated a replacement. Tim Cook is going to become the executive chairman of the board of Apple, and the Vice President in charge of.
18:38:19 Hard work, hard work.
18:38:29 Oh.
18:38:17 No, the Vice President in charge of hardware is going to be the new chairman, and he’s going to become a member of the board. So, Tim Cook isn’t really going anywhere, but the day-to-day decisions will be made by somebody else. He was not in the least bit fired. When Tim Cook.
18:38:35 took over. Apple was worth about $300 billion, and now they’re worth $4 trillion, so they’re not about to fire him.
18:38:42 Wow. you know.
18:38:45 Are they taxing on my health.
18:38:48 I nominate Michael to be president.
18:38:55 Go ahead, Michael. Say yes.
18:38:57 I wish.
18:39:01 He means president of smug, not of the country.
18:39:04 Right. President’s salary.
18:39:07 you’ll have the same salary I have.
18:39:11 We both have zero.
18:39:20 I have a question, another one.
18:39:18 Um…
18:39:22 So how is it… I don’t understand this.
18:39:23 Uh-huh.
18:39:27 like, I’ll have a conversation with someone,
18:39:31 And my phone’s in the room, but not on. I’m not using it.
18:39:34 And then, about an hour later, that whole subject that I was talking about comes up.
18:39:40 on my phone or my laptop.
18:39:44 It’s like somebody’s spying on me all the time.
18:39:50 But it’s not really that case at all. It’s basically just coincidence. You have to remember that the average person during the course of a day.
18:40:03 will be exposed to something like 3,000 commercials. And you see that the commercials are in things that you read, they’re in things on TV, they’re things over the air, and so on and so forth. And so, with 3,000 commercials, if you happen to be into.
18:40:20 you know, teddy bears, and you’ve looked out for teddy bears or something, and you’re talking to somebody about teddy bears, and then you go to your phone, and it’s got an advertisement for teddy bears, that’s really not because the phone was listening to you, it’s because commercials.
18:40:35 are pervasive and commercials are personalized. So, if that’s something that you’re interested in, you were talking about it to somebody, then it’ll probably… you’ve expressed that interest someplace else, and it’s going to show up in your phone or your computer.
18:40:51 Or even your TV. This one woman in town who, by the way, has… has covered all the electronics in our house with aluminum foil. Um, that’s as far as I’m going to go with that.
18:41:05 She says that the TV is listening to her because it has these things on TV about things that she’s done research on.
18:41:15 Okay. So… Um, but no, your phone’s not listening to you unless you turn it on, tell it to listen to you.
18:41:23 How about Alexa? I mean, I… people… I don’t have that in my house, but…
18:41:28 Alexa does listen to you constantly. And.
18:41:31 Like, I have to protect people if they’re gonna have a personal conversation with their spouse or their family.
18:41:38 They completely turn it all off.
18:41:41 So, listen.
18:41:42 Um, well, even then, because they’re powered by the… there’s no on-off switch, the only way to turn it off is to unplug it. But Alexa does listen to you constantly. It does wait for you to use the word.
18:42:02 That’s…
18:41:57 Alexa, to actually respond, but it is listening constantly. Um, Siri… Um, on my HomePod listens constantly, but the only thing it’s listening for is the words, oh, shut up.
18:42:14 The only thing it’s doing is it’s waiting for that word, and then it actually pays attention to what you’re saying. And most of the stuff that Siri does is local to the device, like my watch, which just said that it wanted me to say what it was I wanted, or your phone or something like that.
18:42:32 All of that transaction takes place on the phone up until the point where you’re doing something that you, um, can’t be answered on the phone. For example, um, the, uh…
18:42:49 Uh, the, um… I wanted to know when… some bridge opened. And so I was talking to somebody, and it wasn’t until I asked my HomePod, hey, when was this bridge open? At that point, that’s something that the HomePod could not answer, so it sent out a message to.
18:43:11 Apple, and it says, hey, when was this bridge open? Came up with an answer, and I had a date. But… All of that takes place on the HomePod, and the only thing that goes out to Apple is the request for information on when the bridge opened. It doesn’t get the rest of the conversation, Apple doesn’t know anything about it. Alexa doesn’t work that way. Alexa has zero intelligence on the device.
18:43:36 It all goes to, um… Amazon. So it’s a very different kind of security, which is something I will talk about later on as well.
18:43:47 Um, because it is…
18:43:48 Irma just says Alexa a little bit ago and my television just turned on behind me.
18:43:55 See, I think it… it’s hard for me to believe that.
18:43:56 You turned on my TV. I’ll tell you kind of funny story. We bought my wife a little speaker, a little Alexa speaker, and we set it up for her, and it was playing music one day, and it was pretty loud, so I went over to it and he says, Alexa, you know, play softer. And it didn’t do that.
18:44:23 Oh.
18:44:12 It just kept playing loud. I said it 3 times, Alexa, play it softer. And she stopped and she said, I don’t know who you are, but you’re on Sandy’s account. She wouldn’t respond to me. So I had to set it up with my voice signature for to make it work.
18:44:29 It’s funny, but I… they’re listening, that’s for sure. My television’s on, I’ll have to turn it off. Well, it’ll come back on if we say, Alexa, yeah.
18:44:33 Yeah.
18:44:43 spooky.
18:44:38 Yeah, the it does get kind of intriguing. I was. I was in someone’s Tesla, and they had.
18:44:49 What was the name of that movie? Fifth Element?
18:44:52 There’s a scene in the movie Fifth Element, which is a fantastic movie, if you haven’t ever seen it. There’s a scene in The Fifth Element where this professor is talking to an assistant, and the assistant is named Aziz, and he says, Aziz, light!
18:45:08 And, um, it gets lighter. And so he had… this guy had he had named the voice in his Tesla as Aziz.
18:45:21 And, um, it was hilarious listening to him converse with his car in his driveway. Um, I wasn’t willing to actually get in the car with him, because I happen to know he’s a terrible driver, but, um… Um, it was interesting to listen to him talk to his car.
18:45:42 his spouse, by the way, said that he talks to his car because that’s the only one who listens to him.
18:45:49 I have a question, and it’s about when you send out the invitation, you say,
18:45:54 Make sure you write… make sure that your Zoom is up to date.
18:46:00 And how do you do that?
18:46:10 Okay.
18:46:00 Yes. If you’re using… if you’re using a iPad or iPhone, Zoom automatically updates, if you have it set to do updates. If you’re using the Mac, you have to go up to the Zoom workplace menu, and there’s a menu choice there that says check for updates, and.
18:46:22 It’ll go out and see if there’s an update.
18:46:25 But on the iPhone and the iPad, assuming that you have automatic updates turned on, it’ll update itself.
18:46:33 Thank you.
18:46:38 Yes.
18:46:37 I have a question, Lawrence. On my iPhone, which I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max. There’s this red dot in the dynamic island, and.
18:46:50 I looked it up on Google, and they said it’s like your screen is being recorded, or your audio is being recorded, so I disabled all the apps from my microphone and camera, and the red dot was still there.
18:47:06 The, um…
18:47:06 And sometimes it goes away by itself, and other times it… comes back up.
18:47:14 Yeah, the, um… There’s been a lot of, um… misunderstanding about that. The it’s if you look at your phone when you’re actually talking on it, if you’re doing something like a video, you’ll notice that it’s not red, it’s green. And green is when it’s paying attention. Red means that it’s.
18:47:35 kind of acting in standby. But it is a good idea to go through your apps and turn them off for everything that’s not appropriate. As an example, there are lots of… I’m going to pick on games, because games are notorious for this. Games like to collect a whole bunch of… Games make more money from collecting information about you than they do from the purchase of the game. And so what they’ll do is, like, I had this game that wanted to know my location. Nope, not giving you that. Turn that off. The game wants to send you updates. Nope, I don’t care about that. No, it’s not updates as an updating the game, it’s updates in terms of.
18:48:11 You are now on the leaderboard and things like that. Nope, I don’t want to talk to my game. So go through and get rid of the things that are going to be listening to you or track your location, or track other things about you.
18:48:27 Sometimes trying to figure out how to do that is difficult.
18:48:31 But…
18:48:31 Well, I have Google Maps and Apple Maps tracking my location. But other than that, that’s the only thing I have looking at my location.
18:48:42 Would that cause the red dot to come up?
18:48:42 Uh, you… No, because they… they’re not recording your speech or your, uh, or your… or your video. So that shouldn’t cause the red dot… I don’t know.
18:48:55 That’s a good question. I don’t actually know the answer. I can’t give you a clear answer on that. But as an example, one other thing that you want to track your location is the compass on your phone. If it’s… if the compass is tracking your location, you can also use the compass.
18:49:10 to calculate altitude. When you bring it up, and it’ll say, hey, north is that way, it’ll also tell you down below you’re at 59 feet above sea level. But if it can’t track the location, it can’t tell you that.
18:49:22 Yeah, I I have that on also the compass.
18:49:25 For location. But would that cause the red dot? And then the other times I’m sitting in the couch and it just disappears completely.
18:49:44 But is it a security issue?
18:49:29 I don’t think so. And the, um, there’s been a lot of misinformation about that, and the answer is I haven’t paid that much attention. I go through… I make sure that… Well, it’s not, it could be a security issue in terms of privacy, but the reason why I go through and turn off things that I don’t want is that it greatly reduces the battery consumption. When I go to bed at night, I put my phone up to charge, because.
18:50:03 Why should I use the phone at night? And it’s rarely even at the halfway mark. And the way to cut down on your battery usage during the day is just make sure that everything that you don’t need turned on is turned off. And so, um… Do you need it to send you messages? If you don’t need it to send you messages, turn that off. If you don’t need it to track your location, turn that off. If you don’t need it to record your voice, turn that off. If you don’t need it to use the camera, turn that off. And if you do… if you are good about turning that stuff off.
18:50:35 It greatly increases the battery life of your iPod or iPad.
18:50:41 I have a question. When you’re using your iPhone a lot, you open up a lot of windows. There’s a ton of them open. And then I guess you can erase them all. Is it a good thing to do that, or does it make any difference? Are you sapping it when you’ve got a bunch of open windows for all kinds of things you’ve been into?
18:50:58 The answer is, if it’s not… if it’s… you can’t see it on the screen, it’s not really doing anything. So it doesn’t really help you. On older phones, when the iPhone first came out, yes, it would use up battery life if it’s stuck in the background.
18:51:15 But as it is now, what it’s doing is just a placeholder to launch that thing more rapidly. So, you can go and close them if you want to, but it’s not going to make any difference.
18:51:25 Okay, good.
18:51:27 So, if you have tons of apps on your, you know, like, I have friends who don’t…
18:51:31 have hardly any apps on their phone.
18:51:34 And you know, when you get a new phone?
18:51:36 They just load up all these apps, or, you know, and so how do you delete them?
18:51:41 Because I don’t want all these on here.
18:51:45 There are a number of different ways to delete them, and the easiest way is if you hold your finger down on it long enough, you see the app, you hold your finger down on it, it’ll start to move.
18:51:57 And there’ll be a minus sign, and if you press that minus sign, it kills it off.
18:52:02 No, I just did that, let’s see.
18:52:05 I guess you got to be careful there, because they all open up in minuses, and if you hit something else.
18:52:09 Yeah, you don’t want to delete everything, but that’s the easiest way. There are other ways to do it, though.
18:52:12 Yeah.
18:52:15 Okay, well, Steve, I’ll…
18:52:18 rely on you to help me with that, okay?
18:52:22 Thank you.
18:52:26 Uh…
18:52:27 And speaking of Steve, can you hear me? Hello?
18:52:34 us.
18:52:32 Yeah, so I can hear you.
18:52:34 Hey, this is Sherry Hamilton. Steve invited me. I haven’t been to this before, so I’m just listening and I’m going to keep on mute because I have two big dogs that bark at anything that is anywhere within.
18:52:51 hearing distance of them, so I will put this back on… on mute as soon as I’m done, but I just wanted you to know that I’m here.
18:52:58 Okay.
18:52:59 Thank you.
18:53:07 Yes.
18:53:02 Let’s see. I have a question. It’s kind of a simple question, I hope. I’m… We have one desktop computer and I use… I end up using my little iPad that has a keyboard for many functions, but I’m thinking about getting a notebook just so that I have.
18:53:26 more access to a computer. I don’t… especially… anyway, my question is, what is it that… there seem to be a lot of Apple notebooks, you know, the laptops available, different prices starting around $750 or so, and I’m just wondering… what they cannot do that only a computer can do. Is that a good question?
18:53:54 Uh, yeah, in fact, it’s something I wanted to bring up myself.
18:54:00 I’m not in the market for a new computer, because last time I checked, I have something like eight. Um… But, um, um, I was curious about the new Apple MacBook Neo.
18:54:15 mute. Right.
18:54:34 Oh.
18:54:16 Um, I went to… Costco to play with one, and I was quite impressed with what it did. The one that Costco was something like $599 and had a half terabyte drive, um… So it’s kind of in the mid-range of the NEO, and for $599, I was extremely impressed with how powerful it was.
18:54:43 The more expensive ones have different capabilities, like the MacBook Neo, as I recall, has two USB ports, so you can plug a mouse into it, and maybe something else, but not a heck of a lot of things. Now, the good news, bad news, is that’s not really a limitation.
18:55:01 You can go out and you can get these things called USB docs that you can plug into a Neo that allows you to attach a scanner and a printer and a bunch of other stuff. So that is not really a limitation. The half terabyte drive.
18:55:17 Could be a limitation if you shoot a lot of video, or you take a lot of photographs, and so on and so forth, because those things take up a lot of space. Now, the good news there is that if you have a dock, you can also take an external drive and plug it into it, and then you have more storage.
18:55:34 For the, um, for the MacBook. Where it really comes into play that you need a more machine… a larger machine is if you want a larger screen. The Neo has, I don’t remember exactly how many pixels it is, but it’s a fairly small screen, because it’s designed to be a.
18:55:51 a computer for students and easy to carry around on commuter train and things like that. So the screen’s not particularly large. If you want a larger screen, you’re going to need a more expensive MacBook.
18:56:06 If you want more storage, I think the biggest it has is a half terabyte drive. I don’t think it has larger than that, although I haven’t really checked.
18:56:17 If you need more than 8 gigabytes of RAM, you can’t add anything more. It comes with 8GB, and that’s it.
18:56:24 And you would need more memory if you do a lot of photography work, if you do a lot of video editing, if you… if you open up a browser with 40-some windows at once. If you’re using the things that suck up a lot of memory, you can’t really add more memory. So the more memory you’re using.
18:56:45 On the Neo, the slower it will get. But for 99% of the people out there, especially if they have an old Mac that can’t be updated, the Neo looks like a really good deal. If you do a lot of video, if you do.
18:57:03 audiovisual content, uh, if you do a lot of photography and you do editing of photography, you might need a more powerful MacBook. And the MacBook, some of the larger MacBooks also have more than just two.
18:57:19 ports so that it’s easier to plug stuff into them. As an example, um… I have a friend who’s got a MacBook that he has 3 displays. It’s got the built-in display plus 2 large monitors, and you can’t do that kind of trick with a MacBook Neo. But, again, for normal people, the MacBook Neo is quite nice.
18:57:38 Mm-hmm.
18:57:42 I have a Mac Mini, and they start at, like, $599, but it does not have a microphone, does not have a camera, does not have speakers, does not really have anything. You just get a box. You have to add your own keyboard, uh, camera, screen, all of that.
18:58:00 Why did I get the MacBook Mini? Because it’s incredibly powerful. It’s many times faster than a Neo, and I do video, so my MacBook Mini has 24 gigs of RAM, it’s got a 2TB drive, it’s got lots and lots and lots of ports.
18:58:19 I’ve hooked it up to two big displays, uh… It’s… it’s a very powerful machine, and it’s really quite small. So that was my choice, but it depends upon what you want to do. The… The Neo, I really took a liking to, but it’s not something that I would buy for myself.
18:58:45 Okay, thank you very much.
18:58:54 I just want to ask you a question. Why did you decide not to… are you not buying it because you just don’t need it, or…
18:59:17 No. Okay.
18:59:01 Oh, I don’t need it. And if I did need it, I’d need something more powerful. Um, I do a lot of video. I do… I have published just… just for… just for the smug, I’ve published something like 40 videos, and for my church, it’s something like 400 videos, so… That’s a… that’s a lot. Plus, I design websites and do all kinds of weird things that most people don’t do.
18:59:28 So, so just in your opinion, would there be any advantage? Generally speaking, I am not doing what you’re talking about that would be limiting… limited with the NEO. Um… I was doing some phone calling for an organization, and I ran… I was doing it on my iPad, and I was… I ran into a technology issue because I wasn’t able to, um, turn one speaker off and allow another one on, and I don’t really understand what that was all about, but I was able to.
19:00:14 If you can do it on the desktop, you can probably do it on the Neo.
19:00:04 accomplish what I was trying to do by using our desktop. And that was an issue that I just… I don’t really know if you could help me with that, if you would know…
19:00:19 I can’t thank you.
19:00:19 Okay, and would there be… I just wonder about getting maybe a more expensive MacBook.
19:00:28 is…
19:00:28 The thing about the difference between a low-level machine and a higher level machine, in addition to the ports and how much memory and so on and so forth it has, the higher-end machines.
19:00:44 Mm-hmm.
19:00:42 have more longevity. As an example, my spouse had one of the last Intel MacBooks, um, before Apple went to their Apple Silicon. But that laptop I still have today. Why? Because it has.
19:01:00 8 i9 processors in it, and the i9 is the most powerful Intel processor that you can get, and it has 8 of those, so it’s a real barn burner of a machine. It’s not as powerful as the most powerful Macs, but there’s still nothing wrong with it. And because it has an Intel processor, it allows… also allows me to run Windows on it.
19:01:24 Right.
19:01:22 which is not something that most Mac people would ever want to do, but it’s something that I do. So a more powerful machine usually means that you’ll have it longer.
19:01:35 Okay.
19:01:35 But the question is, you can go out and get two MacBook Neos for the price of one MacBook Air, so do you really need a more powerful machine? The difference between a Minneo and an Air isn’t that much.
19:01:51 Okay.
19:01:49 So it might be… it might be what you… what you need. What I would suggest is you go into Costco sometime when it’s not too busy, and just play with it for 15-20 minutes, and see if you… see if the keyboard and the screen size are comfortable for.
19:02:02 Mm-hmm.
19:02:06 for you, and there are some things that you probably won’t like. I can’t stand trackpads, but you can plug a mouse into a Neo.
19:02:15 Um, so just… just go and play with it and see what you think. It’s really hard to… It’s really hard to substitute.
19:02:19 Okay.
19:02:23 Somebody talking about a machine with actually sitting down and playing with it.
19:02:33 So, uh, Jolie…
19:02:27 That’s very good guidance. Thank you, Lawrence.
19:02:31 Yes.
19:02:34 This is Irma. I just wanted to comment on your question and Lawrence’s response.
19:02:35 Yes.
19:02:40 I went from a PC, a desktop, which I love, but I don’t like Microsoft for some reason.
19:02:48 Anyway, um, and I went to a MacBook Pro.
19:02:52 And it almost does too much for me. I don’t even… I mean, I have to take lessons on how to use it.
19:02:57 So my advice is go simple, and then go bigger.
19:03:02 That’s all I have to say.
19:03:10 Um, it’s now 7 o’clock, which means it’s now time for me to start the meeting. One of the things I’m going to do is figure out where my chat window is. I’m going to paste in the, um… URL for the, uh…
19:03:27 Uh… for the attendance form, because I would like to know.
19:03:35 attended. And so if you open up the chat window and it’s labeled down at the bottom of.
19:03:43 The screen is chat. The, uh… attendance form. I’ve now posted.
19:03:55 and… I am recording this, and I’ve got closed captioning turned on, and as long as Zoom.
19:04:03 cooperates and actually allows me to save the session, I’ll be able to post the video of the session on YouTube. A couple things I wanted to mention. One is somebody already asked if Tim Cook was fired. No, he’s not fired.
19:04:19 He chose his replacement, and he’s going to be moving to executive, uh… chairman of the… Apple Board of Directors. I wanted to mention the Apple MacBook Neo, and somebody asked about that. I was also going to mention the Worldwide Developer Conference. Apple has this every year. It, uh…
19:04:41 is going to be held in June, and if I can find… Uh… The link to it… I’ll tell you when it’s going to be coming up.
19:05:02 and things are slow.
19:05:08 It’s going to be June 8th through the 12th.
19:05:11 And on the first day of the, um… of the, um… conference they have, um… a, um… keynote address. It’s going to be about 10 o’clock, usually. 10 o’clock.
19:05:33 um… Pacific time, because Apple’s on the Pacific Coast, and in it they talk about their software developments and so on and so forth. The developer conferences for Apple hardware and software developers, and most of it is highly technical.
19:05:48 But the keynote is basically for everybody, and it’s open, and you can link and you can watch it on your Apple TV, you can stream it on your laptop or iPad. I wouldn’t watch it on the iPhone, because that would be brutal.
19:06:04 But, um, it’s free, and it’s always interesting to see what they have coming up.
19:06:14 I also wanted to show a cartoon, but I’ll show that in a second when I get around to the presentation. Most of what I’m going to talk about today is going to be about artificial intelligence in general, and the first thing I’m going to do is show a video that I created.
19:06:31 So, um… The video is about eight minutes, 15 seconds long. It’s not exactly short. You might have questions. I would recommend that you wait until the end and we can talk about it for the rest of the meeting.
19:06:47 But it’s kind of my view on artificial intelligence and where it’s coming from, and things that you need to… be aware of. But the first thing I want to do is to show you a cartoon.
19:07:01 And so I’m going to share my screen. Yes.
19:07:04 Hey Lawrence, it’s Sabrina. I don’t know if I missed it, because I logged on a little bit late, but did you already start the meeting?
19:07:13 Yes.
19:07:25 Yes.
19:07:13 I’m very sorry to come late to the meeting, but… I’m also at work, so I’ve turned off my camera again, and I really need somebody to replace me, because every single night I work, and I will not be… I won’t be around when the meeting starts, or…
19:07:33 very late to coming to the meeting, so I really do… would appreciate it if somebody could step up and take my place. It’s obviously not hard, but if you’re working nights, it is hard to.
19:07:47 log in. So, having said that, I know you mentioned it last meeting, I did watch it later on, and I don’t know if anybody has emailed you.
19:07:57 Specifically or yeah.
19:08:00 Yes, we we we talked about that during the Q&A session.
19:08:05 Oh, okay. Well, I can rewatch it then. Thank you.
19:08:09 Okay. I’m going to share my screen, and I’m trying to decide which screen I’m going to share. Maybe I’ll share that one for a change.
19:08:23 And… There’s probably nothing terribly interesting on that screen right now.
19:08:28 That’s pretty interesting.
19:08:32 Um… This is the cartoon that I was talking about.
19:08:37 That’s a good idea.
19:08:40 Uh, where is that cartoon?
19:08:47 I lost my cartoon. Oh, here it is.
19:08:55 Now, I cannot see my screen of what I’m sharing, so tell me if you see a cartoon.
19:09:00 Let me see one.
19:09:01 Okay. This is meant to be satirical, but it’s also quite accurate.
19:09:09 It’s not really big enough to oh there it’s get better. Okay, never mind.
19:09:09 Um, the…
19:09:15 The, um… the internet was created as a Department of Defense experiment during the late 1960s, and… The Department of Defense, it was done by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. They didn’t really have enough money to create the internet. So what they did is they farmed it out to a bunch of companies. The companies did various things. And for the first.
19:09:41 10 years or so, the internet was basically the Department of Defense, large companies, mostly telecommunications companies, because they already had networks, and universities and some research firms, and that was it.
19:09:57 Then, um… Under… Al Gore, when he was a senator from Tennessee.
19:10:08 Let me use…
19:10:07 I don’t remember what state he’s from. When he was a senator, he was pushing for the commercialization of the internet, and that’s when it really exploded in size. But even after it exploded in size.
19:10:20 The way the internet is designed is really not controlled by anyone, nor is there anyone who’s actually maintaining it. There are a whole bunch of people who write code, that code does something, people think that’s nice, they adopt it, and then it becomes part of the internet.
19:10:37 But there’s nobody overseeing it. And this is basically how it works. Down at the bottom, there are human beings, there’s the electrical grid, there are telephone companies, and then all the rest of it is basically built by volunteers and people who died 20 years ago, and nobody knows what their code does.
19:10:56 That is the internet. So if you went to know sometimes why the internet looks like chaos, it’s because it is.
19:11:06 Uh, it’s… That’s just the way it is. And I wanted to show this to you, because even though this is designed as a parody, it’s also true.
19:11:16 It is basically just a bunch of stuff out there that somebody thought was a good idea. And now I’m going to show the video that I created.
19:11:29 And… make this big enough. for you to see move that out of the way, which you probably can’t even see. But it bothers me.
19:11:41 Tell me if you can… the first few seconds are silent, but then it’s going to have sound.
19:11:46 And if you can’t hear it… Artificial intelligence in science fiction books and films is devoted to machines that can think, problem solve, and act independently of humans. These machines can be in the form of robots or giant computers, or a combination of the two.
19:12:02 Usually, for dramatic reasons, the artificial intelligences decide that humans are obsolete or a threat to the machines, or blight upon nature and try to exterminate them.
19:12:15 Artificial intelligence research has different origins. Over 50 years ago, NTT, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone started work on speech information processing, spoken Japanese is relatively simple with just 46 sounds.
19:12:32 But the Japanese language is most often written in kanji, a set of roughly 17,500 characters.
19:12:41 To graduate from high school, students are expected to know at least 2,100 kanji, as well as hiragana, a syllabic character set of 46 characters for Japanese words, katakana, a syllabic character set of 46 for non-Japanese.
19:12:59 words, and Roman ju, words written in the Roman alphabet.
19:13:04 Mdt wanted to solve 2 problems. One, have humans be able to write something in Japanese without using a typewriter with 17,500 keys? And two, have typed text translated into machine-generated speech?
19:13:20 These two processes are known as speech-to-text synthesis and text-to-speech synthesis.
19:13:35 Meanwhile, in the Us. Ray Kurzweil, while still in high school, created pattern recognition software to analyze classical music, and then synthesize new songs based on these patterns. After graduating from MIT, he founded Kurzweil Computer Products.
19:13:52 and develop pattern recognition software for recognizing printed text. Now called OCR, or Optical Character Recognition.
19:14:02 Kurzweil used these innovations to create machines that allowed the blind to read books by having the machines scan books and then speak at the text aloud, as well as having the blind type messages by speaking into machines that produced.
19:14:17 Printed text. Hey, Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, or an Apple HomePod is an inheritor of the research by NTT at Kurzweil.
19:14:28 You’re going to ask a HomePod to play Taylor Swift’s latest album, or ask your Mac to read aloud an email message.
19:14:36 or dictate a message and send a Memoji avatar to someone using your iPhone.
19:14:42 You can also create a video which animated figures can teach you about artificial intelligence using LiDAR mapping of your face to texture map a robot, a dragon, a panda, a koala, or a cute tiger over your face as you talk.
19:14:58 Is this artificial intelligence? It takes a staggering amount of computer power and is computationally much more demanding than a text message. But while it might be inspired by artificial intelligence, it is basically more of a sophisticated tool or toy than an example of machine thinking or problem solving.
19:15:21 Kurzweil, by the way, also came up with the Kurzweil curve, a chart that mapped the advancement of computer power to various benchmarks, such as the brain power of a mouse, a human, or all humans combined.
19:15:54 Your Matt can also speak using a wide range of voices with a wide range of accents and cultural attributes. For example, here is the word squim using just a fraction of the voices available on your Mac.
19:16:07 With a full list of possibilities displayed as well.
19:16:11 Circling, circling. Sacram. Second.
19:16:39 In this example, Moira, an Irish woman’s voice, reads the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Note that all these voices, Memoji and the video editing, was produced entirely on an iPhone or Mac.
19:16:53 Without assistance from any other source, with one exception.
19:16:58 When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.
19:17:13 A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
19:17:21 Almost all of the current controversies about artificial intelligence concern derivatives of the text-to-speech and speech-to-text work done by NTT and Kurzweil.
19:17:32 Large language models, LLMs, are essentially massive compilations of how human language is constructed and used. The models are based on the texts of millions of books and countless billions of web pages sucked in and indexed over decades.
19:17:49 Most of the LLMs are based on data compiled before 2020 and know little or nothing about the present.
19:17:57 They also can’t tell facts from fiction, and H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds is just as believable to an LLM as William Shire’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
19:18:12 Aside from not distinguishing between fact and fiction, LLMs also pose problems of privacy and security. When you send stuff to an online AI agent, that AI agent retains the information.
19:18:25 which it then uses to answer other people’s questions. You surrender privacy and security to the AI agent.
19:18:34 AI agents are also promoted for their ability to replace people.
19:18:38 While they can’t think and problem solve independently, their facility with language threatens customer service jobs, receptionists, secretaries, computer programmers, and other white collar jobs.
19:18:51 They may not perform these functions well, but they don’t need vacations or salaries or retirement.
19:18:59 Don’t tell an AI agent anything that is private. Don’t mistake a chatbot as a human being.
19:19:08 Be suspicious of online communications, which can include text messages, email, or web pages.
19:19:14 that solicit private or sensitive information or promote unlikely or irrational statements, situations, or forecasts.
19:19:24 Any person you see face to face is usually more trustworthy and worthy of your trust than an artificial intelligence agent.
19:19:33 The one item not produced in this video on a Mac or iPhone was the photo of a puffin using a typewriter with hundreds of keys. That photo was produced by Google Gemini.
19:19:45 It was asked to produce a typewriter with thousands of keys, but stopped at hundreds.
19:20:01 and. I lost my navigation. There it is. Okay, questions?
19:20:13 Yes.
19:20:12 I have one. You mentioned that the AI bot cannot tell fact from fiction.
19:20:20 If you were to ask it what the source of its information is, would it give it to you?
19:20:28 That depends upon the AI bot and having said that, you still can’t necessarily trust it. As an example, um, a, um… lawyer for the current administration, uh, submitted a brief to a court in which it cited a bunch of cases, all of which were made up.
19:20:51 Oh, wow.
19:20:52 When… when they were challenged on this, they asked the AI what was the source, and the source it was giving was made up as well.
19:21:00 Wow. Pretty amazing.
19:21:05 So… well, it’s happened… that was the one that was most famous, because it got blared across a bunch of papers, but it’s happened hundreds of times since then with lawyers citing spurious cases.
19:21:20 And to the point now that a lot of state bars have said that they will sanction lawyers who do things like that.
19:21:28 Isn’t that equivalent to perjury?
19:21:31 No, it’s not equivalent to perjury, it’s equivalent to judicial malpractice, and it’s a violation of their oath. You have to remember that lawyers have to be admitted to the bar, and to be admitted to the bar, that automatically makes you an officer of the court. You’re not paid by the state.
19:21:47 But you’re an officer of the court, and they have rules and regulations and codes of ethics and so on and so forth, and this is considered to be a violation of those. So there have been several lawyers where the sanctions against them were disbarment.
19:22:03 Hmm.
19:22:02 So that sanctions can be fairly heavy, but I’m using that as an example because people think of… of… courts of laws being fact-based. Somebody says something, you have to prove it, you have to give evidence. And, uh, if the evidence is made up, that’s rather difficult to prove. It’s easy to prove that it was made up, but it doesn’t help your case at all.
19:22:25 And as an example, the Secretary of Health and Human Services presented testimony to Congress with a whole bunch of citations for things that were backing up.
19:22:40 his point of view, those were made up as well. They were completely fictitious.
19:22:44 Now that, if it was at a hearing, would be perchery, right?
19:22:58 lying. I’ll just.
19:22:48 It wasn’t a hearing, but the, uh, they didn’t consider it perjury. They considered it to be… Um, I don’t remember what they said, but they didn’t… they didn’t…
19:23:03 his defense apparently was he thought it was real.
19:23:09 Hmm.
19:23:09 But again, I’m not trying to say that AI is evil or you can’t trust it or things like that. I am trying to say that what we currently consider AI, for the most part, is not.
19:23:25 artificial intelligence. It’s a tool that was created to manipulate language.
19:23:33 Hmm.
19:23:34 So if you have a conversation with Siri, Siri was developed by Apple specifically to act as it says, an intelligent assistant. So, if you want to know what time is it, you’ll get an answer. If you want to know what day it is.
19:23:48 Believe it or not, that’s one of the things I’ve asked in the morning, what day is it? Because I’m not working anymore, and one day looks a lot like the other day, so I’ll ask it what day it is, and I get back and answer.
19:24:01 That was designed by Apple for a very specific purpose.
19:24:07 what people are trying to do with AI now, though, has gone way beyond that. For example, Amazon and several other companies have tried to incorporate AI into their customer service. So if you go onto the web and you say, I want to return.
19:24:24 something, the AI bot will ask you, well, why do you want to return it? Do you want a refund? Do you want it in exchange? And so on and so forth. If you go on to the app, if you go onto Amazon’s site, nowhere, if you search through all of their menus, nowhere does it say.
19:24:40 anything about refund. You can return things, but if you want a refund, that’s not given. You have to actually go through this exchange with this bot in order to get a refund. And even then, it depends upon who.
19:24:56 who sold it to you, because a lot of the things sold on Amazon aren’t actually sold by Amazon, they’re sold by a third party. Amazon acts as a marketplace.
19:25:07 Um, and they want to replace the people who used to handle these questions with AI and get rid of those people, because then they don’t have to pay them anymore.
19:25:28 Right?
19:25:18 But it’s designed to be a tool, and what they want to put the tool… what use they want to make of the tool is the problem that a lot of people have. It’s one of the problems that I have with it. I used it to make an illustration. I wanted that puffin with a.
19:25:35 with a typewriter with thousands of keys, I didn’t get it, I only got hundreds, but still, it was a good illustration of why the Japanese don’t use Japanese typewriters, because it’s… it would be impossible. And I’m not an artist, so… Google drew that for me.
19:25:53 But it’s not really artificial intelligence, and it’s really not… problem solving. When I… When I have a problem, usually it’s a problem that I thought up or someone gave me, and then I had to think up an answer. What AI, the currently version of AI does, it goes out there and it looks for previous answers to that question.
19:26:17 And then it offers those, which is not really the kind of problem-solving that I used to get paid to do. Um… And in a lot of places, it doesn’t work. If you have a leaky faucet, AI can’t do anything about it.
19:26:36 there’s good things about AI, like, um, my son, um, travels all over the world hiking and
19:26:43 this and that. And he wanted to… he wanted to minimize his…
19:26:48 uh, packing and all that, so it taught him how to do that.
19:26:51 And then he works for Amazon, and he said… he’s made it through 4 layoffs, which is… he sometimes wishes he could get laid off, because they get 6 months of severance pay.
19:27:03 Plus their benefits for 6 months. But, and he’s sick of working there, but he said,
19:27:10 AI is not going to… he said he predicts that in the next 4 years, or 5 years,
19:27:16 They’ll be rehiring people because
19:27:18 The bots just can’t do what he does.
19:27:22 So, I have hope, but I, um, also am very suspicious about them, and I use AI for book club,
19:27:31 uh, you know, reading books and doing a presentation, or, um…
19:27:36 I look to how do I fix this broken pipe in my house, because I’m alone?
19:27:42 And how do I, um…
19:27:45 you know, you know, fix-it sort of things. They’re real good at that, but…
19:27:50 Otherwise, that’s it.
19:27:54 And I wouldn’t say that AI is helping you fix things. I would actually use the web more for that. The reason for that is that some things offered by AI don’t make any sense. As an example.
19:28:10 Electricity comes in different… there are different ways to measure electricity. You can measure in ohms, which is the voltage that everybody knows about, but you can measure it in amps, which is the pressure of the electricity, and you can also measure it in terms of volts, I meant to say volts.
19:28:28 amps and ohms. Ohms is the resistance. And I was looking at this one explanation of how to fix something, and it did not acknowledge the fact that there’s such a thing as resistance. There’s ohms.
19:28:42 And if you had followed this line of how to fix this piece of electricity electronics, it would have set it on fire because, again, it didn’t know anything about ohms, whereas if you looked it up on the company’s website.
19:28:56 It gave you very detailed instructions on how to fix their piece of equipment. And AI doesn’t necessarily know that.
19:29:05 So what about… is there AI Gemini or something?
19:29:19 Video.
19:29:07 Oh. Gemini basically is an AI front-end on top of Google. Um, and Gemini is what I use to create that… that, uh… uh, drawing. But… When I go into Google and I’m looking for search results, I don’t use Google Gemini because Google Gemini will quite often give you what is the most common answer, which isn’t necessarily the correct answer.
19:29:36 Okay.
19:29:40 Thank you.
19:29:39 Yes, Chris.
19:29:44 Recently, maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago,
19:29:48 I ran into an AI…
19:29:52 assistance, self-identified.
19:29:55 When I tried to call a law enforcement,
19:29:59 A local law enforcement?
19:30:02 Um, entity, and I can’t remember which it was.
19:30:06 But, uh, or why I was calling, even.
19:30:09 But I was very frustrated because…
19:30:13 if you run into it,
19:30:15 as a…
19:30:17 as a blockade for any other kind of…
19:30:23 phone inquiry,
19:30:24 It’s very frustrating because you never get…
19:30:27 You never get any help from it. It’s a barrier to get beyond or try to figure out how to…
19:30:34 get around it.
19:30:36 It’s just there, and it’s no help.
19:30:40 That’s all.
19:30:40 That that is that is one of the complaints about you have to remember the people who decide that they want to replace human beings with with AI. For the most part, they’re not people who are skilled in whatever it is they’re replacing.
19:30:57 They are the financial manager for a company who wants to get more profit so that the stock price goes up, or something like that. It’s not the people actually doing that job. So you’re basically having someone make decisions on what skills they need.
19:31:15 when they themselves are not skilled in the problem that they’re trying to solve.
19:31:20 I don’t know what they don’t know.
19:31:22 Yes, they don’t know what they don’t know. And one of the… one of the complaints about… common complaints about AI, and I’ve had this complaint myself, is AI is a barrier to the solution. If you don’t want 911 to be answered by AI.
19:31:39 Because, you know, your house is on fire. Oh, what kind of fire is it? Well, I don’t care, my house is on fire. Well, you need to tell me what kind of fire it is. It’s a chemical fire, you know, you don’t want to sit there and argue with a robot. You want somebody to show up and put out the fire.
19:31:54 Right.
19:31:55 And companies use… companies are looking to AI as a barrier.
19:32:03 Yeah.
19:32:01 to giving refunds. I can’t remember the name of a movie. It was a, it had… Catherine Hepburn and what’s his name?
19:32:17 Spencer! Spencer!
19:32:15 Tracy, I can’t remember his name. Anyway… sensor tracing. It was a black and white movie about this, um, department store in the 1930s, and people trying to return things after Christmas. Well, stores don’t like people to return things after Christmas because they have to give their money back. So if you have AI.
19:32:36 be the person they have to argue with, the AI can engage in circular reasoning that just frustrates you, and you walk away, and you don’t get your refund.
19:32:47 And companies think that’s a good thing. Now, me as a customer, I don’t think that’s a good thing. So you need to be a little bit skeptical when you’re dealing with AI or with a chat bot or with an automated.
19:33:03 Um, answering system. I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to call up Social Security, but Social Security, trying to get a human being to answer the phone is difficult.
19:33:13 And you don’t want to be stuck in that position. You’d rather a human being answer your question. But for a lot of government agencies, a lot of businesses, they want AI because they… They don’t want to pay people to do those functions.
19:33:29 Right. They don’t want a personal interface.
19:33:34 They don’t want to deal with the salary, the benefits, the retirements, the sick leave, they don’t want to deal with that.
19:33:41 The AI, as long as there’s power, it’ll work.
19:33:44 Which will cost all of us a lot of money.
19:33:47 Uh, yes, speaking of the costs of AI, even if you want to insulate yourself from AI, you can’t. And I’ll give you an example. I have, um… Mike, I have a whole bunch of storage on this computer. It’s like, I don’t know, 30 terabytes, that’s 30 trillion bytes worth of storage.
19:34:09 Well, I have it set up as mirrored storage, so that I take two identical drives, I put them into this box, and when I write something to that box, it writes it on two different disk drives at once, so that if one dies, I’ll still have all the data on the other one. It’s called.
19:34:38 Huh.
19:34:26 Miri. One of my drives is… it’s not… it’s not… it hasn’t stopped working, but I can tell it’s having problems. I wanted to replace it. I cannot buy a hard drive to replace it, because the AI companies have bought up.
19:34:42 The entire future production of hard drives for all of 2026.
19:34:49 And they’ve all… and they’ve bought up most of the memory being produced for 2026. So the price of memory and hard drives has gone up astronomically. This one drive that I paid $200 for last year to replace it today, they went $900.
19:35:06 And I don’t want to spend $900. So the AI is affecting you in different ways.
19:35:13 And isn’t it affecting us environmentally?
19:35:22 Yeah. Right.
19:35:17 It’s infecting us environmentally because it has a huge electronic cost, electrical cost. Washington State, you may or may not know this, we have the lowest electrical prices in the country. We have these big hydroelectric dams that produce.
19:35:32 We’ve got wind farms, we’ve got a little bit of solar, but basically we have the lowest prices in the country. But on the East Coast, they want data centers as well, and on the East Coast, energy is much, much more expensive. The bulk buyers get it at a discount. So what happened is Microsoft and.
19:35:51 Amazon and some others weighing in with these huge bulk buys to buy electricity at a low discount price, and there’s so little left over that the price for average consumers and small businesses has skyrocketed.
19:36:07 This one, I was reading the story in the New York Times about this one family in, um.
19:36:14 West Virginia, the woman has $200 a month as income that she gets from some kind of, uh… public assistance. I don’t exactly… that wasn’t clear in the article. What was clear, that she had a $997.
19:36:31 electrical bill for one month.
19:36:37 And that’s… astounding.
19:36:43 So, yes, it has effects beyond… Um, beyond the individual and it doesn’t make any difference what your attitude is towards AI. It’s expensive. It’s driven up the cost of memory, driven up the cost of hard drives, driven up the cost of electricity, and…
19:37:02 It’s not clear that that many people have actually benefited from it. The cost-benefit ratio for a lot of companies hasn’t shown up yet.
19:37:16 they just… they can’t prove that they’re actually saving money or making money off of it.
19:37:21 Right, right.
19:37:22 So, do you recommend using it? I mean, or what would…
19:37:28 slow all that… that process down.
19:37:35 Right.
19:37:31 Well, what would slow it all down is people being better educated, but that isn’t something that you have much control over. What I… the reason why I did my presentation as a video, I wanted to show you.
19:37:46 What you could do using a Mac and an iPhone without.
19:37:53 resorting to artificial intelligence someplace else. Just on your own phone, on your own computer, I developed that, uh, that, um… that video. In fact, I took a screenshot.
19:38:07 of the, uh… of my, uh… When I was producing that, let’s see, how do I share my screen?
19:38:18 Can you send that to us so we can look at it again, and um…
19:38:22 Oh, I’m gonna post the video, but I want to show you the, uh… Took a screenshot. This is my, uh… iMovie clip. And what I did is I took these little videos.
19:38:36 of texture map video basically pointed my phone at my face. I talked to it, and as my lips moved, it made these little creatures move their lips, and I recorded it on my phone, and then I sent it to myself as a message. And the reason I have.
19:38:52 So many is that there’s a limit as to how long one of these Memoji can be. It’s… I don’t know, 15 seconds or something like that. So when I wrote up my script in advance, I spoke into my phone, I changed the emoji, and then using iMovie, which is on your iPad, it’s on your iPhone.
19:39:14 Couldn’t do it.
19:39:10 Although, you’d have to be real glatton for punishment to edit a movie on your phone. It’s on your Mac, it’s free. I use that to collect the sound clips, which I created on the Mac, and I used, uh… my phone to create the animated talking heads, and that’s how I created the movie. So all this was done on my iPhone and my iPad, and the only part that wasn’t was that photo… that photo of a puffin.
19:39:41 With that huge keyboard. That was done on Gemini, and that’s simply because I’m a terrible artist. But this was all done on my Mac, with the intelligence on the computer.
19:39:56 Hmm.
19:39:55 or on the phone. And that’s… that’s why I did that video. I wanted to show you what you could do without using AI. And another thing to note is that, uh… Uh, when you use Siri.
19:40:09 If Siri can answer your question without talking to the internet, it will.
19:40:14 You can ask Siri what your name is. You can ask Siri what day it is. Siri knows all that stuff. It doesn’t need… it doesn’t need any particular help. If you want to know what the weather is, Siri knows that as well. It doesn’t need to ask the internet.
19:40:29 Why? Because your Mac probably knows that. It can get that from your Mac or your phone. If you have the weather app running, it could figure that out without talking to Apple. When it does talk to Apple, I want it to know when this bridge was built.
19:40:45 There was a story on the news about something, a problem with the bridge, and so I wanted to know how old it was. So I asked, how old was the bridge? Well, Siri inside of my home doesn’t know that, so Siri asked Apple, but it’s important to know how Siri does that.
19:41:02 Siri anonymizes the question. So it doesn’t… Apple doesn’t know that the question came… yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t know — Apple doesn’t know who asked that question.
19:41:17 Apple does a search to find the answer, usually by checking something like Wikipedia or something, and then it sends back the answer. So Apple does not have that information.
19:41:31 Apple has the question, but it doesn’t know who asked it, and it sends me the answer back, and I found out when the bridge was built. So, Apple’s really, really, really invested in making sure that your privacy and security are secured.
19:41:47 When you’re using their automated assistant. Most… well, I can’t think of anybody else who’s doing that. Microsoft is not doing that. Amazon is not doing that, Google is not doing that.
19:42:02 ChatGPT is not doing that. They’re not doing that because they want your answers, they use your questions to incorporate into their knowledge base, and then they feed that back out to other people.
19:42:17 Wow.
19:42:18 Which is why, if you go into Siri on your Mac OS or on your phone, or on your iPad, it’s got a little checkbox that says, do you want to use ChatGPT? And it’s turned off by default. You have to explicitly turn it on.
19:42:37 And at that point, if you want to, then it’ll use ChatGPT, but it’s turned off by default because ChatGPT will not sign up with Apple’s privacy agreement.
19:42:51 There is a rumor. It’s been rumored for some months that Apple is going to partner with Google so that you will have access through Siri to Google Gemini. And Google Gemini.
19:43:06 is like the rest of Google, it’s driven by advertising. They say they anonymize their requests and so on and so forth, but the fact is, if you look at some page on your phone, and then you’re looking at a different page on a different subject on your computer, an ad will come up with whatever you were looking for on the phone, because Google shares that stuff.
19:43:28 I’ll bet you the reason why that’s taking so long is Apple wants to ensure that they anonymize requests made through Siri to.
19:43:38 Google Gemini. Why do they want to do that? Because Apple is invested in security and privacy.
19:43:46 And they probably want to maintain that in any partnership. And Google probably doesn’t like that too much, but on the other hand, Google wants access to the 2.5 billion users of Apple products.
19:44:00 Hmm.
19:44:02 They’re negotiating from a position of strength here. Um, but I’m sure that Google wants to.
19:44:10 See if they can finagle it. But if Apple sends them an anonymous request.
19:44:15 And Google agrees to it, then you’ll have access to Gemini.
19:44:21 But without violating your privacy. Having said that, there are still things you don’t want to do. If you want to write a ransom note saying that you’re holding the neighbor’s German Shepherd hostage unless you get $200,000.
19:44:38 Or 27 Bitcoin or whatever. That’s probably not a good idea to ask for, uh… And artificial intelligence, editing for your ransom note. It’s probably not a good idea. That’s… you don’t want to let the AIs know that you’re committing crimes. For one thing, once it leaves your home and it’s out on the internet.
19:45:04 It’s really easy for somebody to get a search warrant and seize that as evidence, so you don’t want to do that.
19:45:10 If you’re gonna do a ransom note, do it the old-fashioned way. Find a newspaper someplace, cut out all the little letters, glue them, make sure your fingerprints are in the glue, and mail it off.
19:45:25 I could comment on that, but…
19:45:29 Like with Donald Trump.
19:45:29 I think…
19:45:32 I’ve used a… I’ve used it a couple times to write some letters, and it does a great job of writing letters for you by giving it its basic information. It comes out really good. Except the one time when I said, I’d like to write my wife a love letter, so I gave it all the basics and everything, and it came out really good, and I presented it to her, and she said.
19:45:50 Who wrote this? It just wasn’t me.
19:45:56 Bad book.
19:45:56 Man. Speaking of which, that reminds me, I have another demonstration that I was going to show you. And this one is about writing, and I’m going to… share my screen again.
19:46:11 If I can remember where… Oh, there it is.
19:46:16 the stupid… screen sharing, it annoys me because some of the controls in, uh… In, um, Zoom are at the top, and others are at the bottom.
19:46:28 Um, and it’s for the same function. I’m going to bring up.
19:46:35 a really poorly written scientific paper. Can you see the poorly written scientific paper?
19:46:40 Yes.
19:46:41 Okay, you probably can’t actually read it because it’s too small.
19:46:44 Yeah.
19:46:47 Okay, this is on the regression analysis of economic factors influencing immigration rate in Lithuania.
19:46:55 which I know is just hot on the tips of everyone’s tongue is something you want to know about. I’m going to take this opening paragraph.
19:47:03 I’m going to copy it. And I’m going to paste it into pages.
19:47:09 If I can remember where pages is. I can’t remember pages.
19:47:13 Sorry, down here.
19:47:16 pages. Okay.
19:47:22 Yes, open the new version. I should get rid of the old version.
19:47:27 and we don’t want to do that. We’re going to create a new document.
19:47:37 and we’re going to paste in that text.
19:47:44 and I know it’s too small to read, so I’m going to blow it up.
19:47:51 Hmm. I don’t know how to increase the size. Oh, let’s it’s up here.
19:47:58 Let’s make it 200%. Let’s make it 300%.
19:48:04 And here you go.
19:48:07 Okay. Now, this is Apple Pages, and it works the same way in Microsoft, but you can’t do some of the things I’m going to be doing. And it says that this is not a particularly well-written thing suggesting that it becomes a very… it wants an article there, it wants.
19:48:27 It wants to change an article here, it wants to add an article there, um, so on and so forth. But even if you went through and fixed all those problems, it’s still pretty terrible. So I’m going to… highlight it all. Got to come up to this little icon here, which you can’t see very well. It’s called Show Writing Tools Panel. So I bring up Writing Tools, and I say, I want this to be concise.
19:48:53 And I press this, and it thinks about it, and it rewrites it.
19:48:58 more concisely. You see, it’s shorter, but it also reads a little bit better. The paper presents the results, I still need to go through and do some things. Um… to emphasize the immigration rate, reduce the unemployment rate. There’s still things here that I need to do. And the things that it needs to fix are done by… highlights them by underlying them in red, and decrease.
19:49:24 The Gini coefficient, which Gini is a term of Arrington statistics.
19:49:30 This is shorter and it’s easier to read than the original. And this was done in pages.
19:49:36 The important thing to note is that it also took place entirely on the Mac.
19:49:43 Is this artificial intelligence?
19:49:48 I would. I say yes.
19:49:48 Yes, no? This is kind of a borderline, it’s a little bit more artificial intelligence than those texture map on the phone. Speaking of which, I was talking about texture map. If I take out my phone, there’s this little black bar at the top.
19:50:07 That’s got a whole bunch of LEDs that fire off and get the contours of my face, and then when I was talking with a tiger, it painted the tiger over the contours of my face. That’s how I had the tiger top.
19:50:22 using the phone. And if you have a phone that does facial recognition, an iPhone that does facial recognition, you can do the same thing. Send, um, they’re called Memoji.
19:50:33 It’s not a… it’s not a emoji, it’s a memoji.
19:50:37 This is a little bit closer to artificial intelligence, but it’s still using the large language model tools that were developed basically way back in the day by NTT and by Kurzweil. It’s taking what they know about language, and they’re saying, well.
19:50:54 In English, this paper presents the, there really should be an article there. So it flagged that and said, you know, you want to put an article there, and then it suggests to put an article there. But when I told it to do it more concisely, that really is getting.
19:51:11 A little bit up there. It’s something that an editor would do.
19:51:15 Having said that, and having demonstrated, and having… and knowing that this is still.
19:51:20 all on the Mac. Is this artificial intelligence?
19:51:32 Did it independently discover a problem? No, it was built to do this sort of thing.
19:51:40 did it independently solve the problem? No, it actually suggested things, and I had to make the decision.
19:51:48 So it’s not an independent entity that’s going to take over the world and launch nuclear missiles. We still don’t have that. And I’m hoping we don’t.
19:52:02 This is an artificial intelligence tool, but it’s not artificial intelligence. In the classic sense of, can it think on its own? No, it can’t. It’s a tool you still have to do the thinking. And, um… When the gentleman was talking about the love letter to his spouse that his wife challenged and said, uh, who wrote this?
19:52:25 That is the important thing. When you’re using tools like this, you.
19:52:31 The individual still have to make the decision. As an example, a different example.
19:52:39 Um, I can’t, oh, um… There’s a phrase for when you want to rig something up and it’s done in a haphazard fashion. What’s a way to just talk… what kind of phrase do we use for that?
19:52:56 I’m… what I’m looking at is trying to save a way… I want to use the phrase jury rig without saying jury rig. How do you spell jury rig?
19:53:04 Jerry rigged. Jerry-rigged!
19:53:09 J-E-R-R-Y.
19:53:07 How do you spell it?
19:53:12 Not really. It’s spelled J-U-R-Y, as in rigging a jury.
19:53:18 Well,
19:53:19 The Jerry rig is actually a misunderstanding of the original phrase. And it came about during World War II because we were fighting the Jerrys, so jury became jerry rig.
19:53:29 Uh-huh.
19:53:31 I wrote a paper, and it wanted to replace jury rig with jerry rig.
19:53:37 And I said, no. I had to make the decision, no, because I happen to know more about the origin of that phrase than the computer did. But the computer is using these large language models, which a lot of people contributed to, and a lot of people got it wrong.
19:53:56 So what you’re saying is AI could change our language.
19:54:01 Um, I think it already has. I’ll give you my favorite example.
19:54:16 Right.
19:54:08 What city… well, you… I gave you an example when I was showing you that. What city do I live in? I don’t actually live in Scrint, but I live in Squim. How do you pronounce Squim?
19:54:19 CEQA!
19:54:21 Well, that’s the way that it’s written. Um, I have my… I have Siri on my phone is set to use the voice of Moira. Moira was the voice that read the Declaration of Independence to you. Why do I have Moira as my voice on my phone?
19:54:39 I just like that voice, and also, I get a kick out of it every time it mispronounces swim.
19:54:47 Oh, Larry. I had a similar problem with Siri and I told her that she was pronouncing it wrong, that the E was silent. And from then on, she said swim.
19:55:07 Oh, okay. Okay.
19:55:00 Yes, well, in my particular case, I’m using an Irish version of Siri, so I just left it that way because I think it’s funny. But if it is pronouncing it correctly.
19:55:15 if you… if you… there’s a… there’s a… there’s a state right in the middle of the country.
19:55:21 It starts with an M, and the people in the north call it Missouri, and the people in the south call it what?
19:55:28 Missouri.
19:55:28 Missouri. Which… which one is going to win?
19:55:35 Missouri.
19:55:36 I have a theory. People are beginning to pronounce place names.
19:55:43 The way they hear them said in Apple Maps, and the way that they hear them said in Google.
19:55:50 So if you’re using Google Maps, Google will say, turn right on something or other road. Well, there’s this road in Columbia, Maryland. I can’t remember the name of it. It’s named after the developer of Columbia. Columbia was one of the first planned cities in the United States.
19:56:06 And this road is named after that developer. Well, most of the people in town pronounced his name one way, but after Google Maps became prevalent, people started using Google Maps.
19:56:22 After a few years, everybody in town pronounced it the way that Google Maps pronounced it. So… Will AI change the way we look at a lot of things? It already has in terms of pronunciation. We tend to pronounce place names the way that Google Maps and Apple Maps pronounce them. We tend to pronounce a lot of other things the way that the national.
19:56:45 Newscasters pronounce them. The national newscasters are deliberately chosen from the Midwest, for the most part, which is not West, but it is kind of in the middle.
19:56:56 Tom Brokaw was from Texas, but he’s kind of the exception and he even has a Midwestern, more of a Midwestern accent than a Texas accent. We are gradually changing our pronunciation of a lot of things based upon mass media.
19:57:12 In the old days of radio, you heard radio, but you only heard radio for a couple hours a day, and then it was doing something else. With TV, TV’s much more prevalent, and with Siri, and with Google Maps and Apple Maps, it’s in your pocket.
19:57:29 So it’s changing the way. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s changing the way we pronounce.
19:57:38 place names. And I think in time, it’s also going to end up changing the way we do other things as well, because it’s setting a common standard.
19:57:47 By the way, who are the biggest users of.
19:57:53 of, uh… internet tools in the world.
19:57:58 English students.
19:58:00 Chinese. More Chinese people speak English than Americans speak English.
19:58:13 There are about 334 million English speakers in Japan… in China, and there are about 320 in the United States.
19:58:24 That’s… what?
19:58:24 I have. I have a daughter that’s teaching Chinese children over Zoom.
19:58:30 And she’s got about 20 students, and they’re little kids from 7 to 10, 12 years old. And she’s making living. She lives in Bordeaux, France, and she does it into the folk, the little kids in China.
19:58:44 And she’s doing fine, but she, uh, they’re really into learning the English language there.
19:58:49 Right.
19:58:50 Yes, they’re they’re really into their learning the English language, and I have a friend who lives in DC, and she was born and raised in Maryland, so was her husband. Her child, who is now 8, has attended nothing but Chinese school, so… She’s doing that because she wants to make sure that the child is literate, and what language makes sense in her case, she thinks it’s going to be Chinese. So, there are lots of… there are more English speakers in.
19:59:20 China than there are in the United States, and they’re rapidly becoming a lot of Chinese speakers in the United States and other countries, simply because China is China. And I mention this because when you’re talking about changes that come about, cultural change can come about for a lot of different reasons.
19:59:40 And population is one of them. But the way in which, um.
19:59:45 Apple Maps pronounces place names the way in which Google Maps pronounces place names. I think that’s going to gradually become.
19:59:54 more of the standard. And yes, you will run in things like jerry rig and jury rig.
20:00:05 Simply because language changes over time.
20:00:13 I can’t begin to tell you how many people have said, uh, what was it?
20:00:20 Oh, it’s a it’s an idiom that comes up all the time. People mispronounce the idiom, and they don’t really realize that they’re mispronouncing the idiom. They’re dropping a whole word that changes the meaning, and over time, that’s just the way people talk, and they think that’s… it doesn’t make any sense anymore, because they dropped that one word.
20:00:40 Um, but, um… Um… with, uh, with… The tools that Apple is providing you today.
20:00:50 I’m not afraid of Apple’s technology. I understand how it works, and I also understand that I, ultimately, choose how to use it. If it wants to put a comma, and I don’t want to put a comma there, I don’t. Speaking of commas.
20:01:06 And commas are important to me, because I used to be an editor.
20:01:09 There’s something called an Oxford comma, and an Oxford comma says when you have a string of things, you put a comma in there to separate the individual things, so you don’t end up with strange construction.
20:01:24 Quite often, I will put in commas that Microsoft Word or Pages will say, no, there shouldn’t be a comma there, because it doesn’t require an Oxford comma. But there’s a different kind of comma that I use all the time. It’s an aspirational comma.
20:01:41 People think of aspirational being, it inspires you. But in this case, I mean it allows you to take a breath, an aspirational comment, you put that in a place where it breaks the phrase up so that you don’t lose oxygen.
20:01:55 If you read a long sentence with no commas, you will mentally start gasping for air. So if you put a comma in there, it breaks it up and it’s easier for you to digest. And that’s an aspirational comma. And I argue with pages and Microsoft Word about.
20:02:12 Mm-hmm.
20:02:12 Operational comments all the time. And that’s perfectly okay because it’s my choice. It’s my tool.
20:02:22 Right.
20:02:20 I’m not their tool.
20:02:25 I use dot dot dot instead of commas.
20:02:31 Let’s not editorial right.
20:02:30 Yeah, well, I used to do that when I was… Yeah, I used to do that a lot, but when I actually had to edit a newspaper in a magazine, I cured that myself of that time. This one book, it’s called Sons of the Prophets. It’s a history of Seattle. It’s an actual.
20:02:49 History of Seattle called Sons of the Prophets, spelled P-R-O-F-I-T-S, and it talks about the people who founded Seattle, and they founded Seattle because they wanted to get rich. They would go out and they would do things like round up house pets and sell them as a dog team to people who were going to Alaska. So they have.
20:03:08 you know, these little dogs, little dogs, they sell 12 of them to say, yeah, this is a trained dog team. So this guy spends several thousand dollars to take this trained dog team up to Alaska, and harnesses them all, and the dogs just sit there and look at him like he’s an idiot, because.
20:03:27 Okay.
20:03:25 Yes. So Sons of the Prophets. This guy, almost every single paragraph in the book ends in an ellipses, and after a while, I wanted to set it on fire, but it is a really funny book, and I can actually recommend it.
20:03:40 What’s the… who’s the author?
20:03:41 I don’t remember. I read it 50 years ago, but it’s Sons of the Prophets, P-R-O-F-I-T-S.
20:03:48 Interesting. I grew up in Seattle.
20:03:49 And it’s a history… it’s a history of Seattle, and it’s hilarious, except for the ellipses.
20:03:57 Um, any questions?
20:04:00 No, but a comment. You are just great, Lawrence. Honestly, what a great program.
20:04:08 Lawrence?
20:04:11 Uh, just on the subject of…
20:04:08 I don’t know. Yes.
20:04:14 Uh, pronunciation.
20:04:17 Uh, being, being an English major with history of the language,
20:04:22 courses way, way back in my background. I’ve been noticing that
20:04:28 some broadcasters.
20:04:32 on TV channels have adopted
20:04:36 Occasionally pronunciations.
20:04:40 patterned after UK.
20:04:44 pronunciation.
20:04:47 Yes.
20:04:48 instead of Midwestern or… or, God forbid, any regional taint,
20:04:54 In the U.S., it’s UK, and I… I’ve been…
20:04:58 checking… well, you can… you can Google a word, and then…
20:05:04 with the word pronounced,
20:05:07 Right next to it, or pronunciation, and you’ll find…
20:05:10 All kinds of sources that will tell you… that will sound it out for you.
20:05:16 Um, and I’ve just been astonished.
20:05:21 things I’ve found.
20:05:24 Well, the, um… it’s interesting about that, because with the advent of TV, one of the first TV programs we had that was from outside of the United States was BBC was broadcast, like, an hour a day in the 1960s. My family didn’t have a TV until I went to college, so I don’t know this, but I’ve heard.
20:05:41 that they would have these BVC broadcasts, and people started watching them, and then people started using some British syntax simply because they were exposed to it. And I read a lot of English novels, and I would think I’d see things like whilst, and I’d make fun of my daughter, who lives in England, every time she uses Welts.
20:06:02 Um, so yes, that does… that does exist. I actually bought the Oxford American Dictionary for my phone, because you can get either a British or an American pronunciation for some words. Some words.
20:06:18 in British, they just don’t use those… that letter or something, and I think, why is it there? Like, um… Worcester is an example.
20:06:35 Yeah.
20:06:30 If you look at how it’s spelled and how it’s pronounced, they have nothing to do with one another. And there was this when the Fasham, which was a family name that’s actually spelled with, like, 14 letters, most of which they don’t use.
20:06:44 So it does get interesting. The idiom I was telling you about earlier where it’s changed over time, the idiom is couldn’t care less.
20:07:02 Mm-hmm.
20:06:54 That means that you could not care less, but you hear people say all the time now, could care less, which is not the same thing at all.
20:07:06 But that’s an example of language changing over time.
20:07:11 Lawrence, on that note. You may want to watch David Mitchell’s program about the Queen’s English. It’s a YouTube, he’s got a channel on YouTube, he’s a British comic.
20:07:22 The Queen’s English, David Mitchell, YouTube.
20:07:25 Okay. That sounds worthwhile. If nothing else, it’s something I can send to my daughter to torment her.
20:07:32 He covers that very same thing. that particular idiom.
20:07:35 My daughter. My daughter has three degrees and I only have two, so I, uh… I don’t let that stop me when it comes to making fun of her, but when it comes to language, uh, two of her degrees are in linguistics, so, you know, I have to be careful because she’s the expert.
20:07:56 Any comments about what I’ve said. I will give you a quick summation. One, I’m not afraid of AI. Two, the AI that we’re talking about today is not really AI.
20:08:07 Three, be very, very, very skeptical when you use AI. Remember that you’re in control, and if it’s not the tool that you need for the problem at hand, give up on it. And that includes things like chatbots. When they say that they won’t give you a refund.
20:08:24 If you want a refund, find some way around it. And I’m not saying that sometimes it’s not going to be difficult to do, but you should be in control, not this computer sitting under someone’s desk in Ohio.
20:08:40 Um, any questions?
20:08:47 Okay. As you heard from our president when she stopped by briefly, she doesn’t want to be president anymore.
20:08:56 Do we have any volunteers to be present?
20:09:05 Someone suggested Michael, and I’m more than willing to say Michael can be president.
20:09:12 I think all of us should ask Michael to be president.
20:09:16 Yes.
20:09:12 Did Michael?
20:09:17 Where’s Michael?
20:09:19 He might have dropped out because he was running away.
20:09:24 Oh, no, he’s still on. He’s just being silent.
20:09:26 Yeah.
20:09:28 I agree. Michael… Michael should be president.
20:09:33 It’s like…
20:09:30 How did I get volunteered? What does the president do?
20:09:33 I’m voting.
20:09:35 Oh, this is Michael.
20:09:35 I second the nomination. I second denomination.
20:09:42 Oh, we have a quorum.
20:09:38 I don’t think we have a quorum. There’s more people in the… in the smug group than this, right?
20:09:50 As far as I’m concerned, we have a quorum.
20:09:54 Come on, Michael, give back to the group. We all want you.
20:09:57 What is the president do? I’d have to ask.
20:09:57 Yeah, come on, Michael.
20:10:02 You’re gonna have to change hats, but other than that.
20:10:02 Uh, the president basically… Yeah, that’s about it.
20:10:06 What? What? I didn’t hear that.
20:10:10 So you’re gonna have to change hats. But other than that.
20:10:08 I’m doing the you might have to change.
20:10:12 Oh, I could do that.
20:10:19 Okay. What do we want to do next month?
20:10:16 All right. I think it’s settled, Lawrence.
20:10:22 Can we send you suggestions?
20:10:25 Yes, you can send me suggestions. I will point out that actually, I should look at my calendar.
20:10:32 To be on a trip. That’s going to…
20:10:34 By the way, I just read recently that the new library in Squim is open, so is it possible that in the summer we might have a meeting or two in that library?
20:10:45 Uh, either in that library or at my church, which is another possibility.
20:10:51 Uh… let me go to… May 1, 2, 3. Okay. I’m going to be gone the start of the month, but I’m going to be back well in time for… The meeting. Um, I did go to the new library on their opening day because I wanted my late spouse and I have our names on a plaque near the front door, because we donated to the building, so…
20:11:19 I do feel that we should utilize the building, but I haven’t talked to him about that yet. Um, if you haven’t been to it, it’s well worth the visit. It’s just a… It’s just a pretty building. And it’s got spaces for children, and it’s got a little courtyard outside where you can sit around and read in the sun if you want to. It’s just really nicely done.
20:11:46 But the day that I was there was also full of people, because it was the… it was the first day it was open. So I need to go back.
20:11:55 But I would like to have a meeting in person, either there or at my church sometime this summer. Last year, we… or was the year before last? It must have been the year before last. We had a Saturday meeting.
20:12:14 Right.
20:12:11 Which seemed to work because people don’t like driving at night, and uh… During the weekday, people might be having some else to do, so we had a Saturday meeting, and we had a decent turnout. So, um, that might be what we aim for.
20:12:27 Um, for topics for next month, um… Email me suggestions. This artificial intelligence presentation that I did was based on an email suggestion.
20:12:44 It can be on hardware or software. So, just… Send in suggestions.
20:12:54 Do you have any idea of what IOS 27 is going to look like?
20:13:01 Um… If I did, I couldn’t tell you because I signed a developer agreement with Apple.
20:13:08 Oh, okay.
20:13:08 So, um… I will tell you that according to the news sources, it’s going to have more AI in it, but exactly what that means, I don’t know. I’m hoping that the rumored.
20:13:24 partnership with Google comes to fruition, and I’m hoping that if it does come to fruition, it comes with significant security and privacy controls. That’s Apple’s strength right now, and I’d like them to.
20:13:38 keep that. I myself am quite paranoid. If you saw through the… you could probably see from the iPhone literacy sessions that we had that, um.
20:13:51 I’m really big into paranoia. Paranoia is a good thing. I recently discovered someone who had never put… they had never password locked their phone, and I didn’t even think that was possible until I saw their phone, and their phone is really old and on old versions of iPhones.
20:14:07 Yes, it is possible not to password lock them, but paranoia for something that costs… the total cost of a phone, you go out and buy the cheapest iPhone out there, it’s $2,000. You may not think it’s $2,000, but if you took… have the total cost of your contract over two or three years. It’s about $2,000 and it’s got a staggering amount of personal information. So protect it.
20:14:33 Be paranoid. Don’t give it a simple password. Don’t name it after your puppy.
20:14:39 Um, be paranoid.
20:14:40 So maybe more comment… a class on that would be great, on privacy and, um…
20:14:48 Don’t you agree, you guys? I mean…
20:14:51 All right.
20:14:51 those of us who don’t know that.
20:14:54 What about the, um…
20:14:57 The, uh… oh, now I can’t find the word.
20:15:01 We won’t be able to use, uh, our airport capsules.
20:15:06 with iOS 2.7, is that right?
20:15:10 Oh, you… you… if you have a time capsule, which is the, uh.
20:15:16 It’s an airport router, but it also has a disk drive in it, so you can do wireless backups. The time capsules are formatted with HFS+, which… it doesn’t make any difference what that means. It’s an older way of formatting a drive.
20:15:32 And starting with iOS 7 and with macOS iOS 27 and macOS 27, you’ll not be able to back up to an HFS drive anymore. Hfs is quite, quite old.
20:15:48 And it’s very slow, and it’s got lots of problems, and Apple’s just basically discontinuing it. You can still read things from it, but you can’t. You can’t wirelessly back up, which is a problem for me, because that’s how I have my.
20:16:03 uh, laptop backed up. I don’t plug it in, I just… It just automatically backs itself up wirelessly, and I’m going to have to come up with another solution to that. It’s not a big… problem. But yes, that is something that is coming down the pike, and that might be something that Apple talks about in their keynote in June.
20:16:25 Okay. Related.
20:16:27 Related question.
20:16:29 Um, other…
20:16:31 Legacy equipment.
20:16:34 I…
20:16:37 trips across something that, uh, a neighbor thought they were helping me by giving
20:16:43 To me, which is an airport extreme.
20:16:48 And I… it’s just been sitting in a paper bag for, I don’t know, 5 years or something?
20:16:49 Yes.
20:16:54 What should I do with that?
20:16:58 The airport extreme probably will still work as an airport as a Wi-Fi station. The airport Xtreme, unlike most Wi-Fi routers, actually has a firewall built in. The downside is that if it’s been.
20:17:13 If it’s really called an Airport Extreme, it’s using an older version of Wi-Fi that is quite slow compared to the current ones, and the firewall that’s in it hasn’t been updated in five years or more.
20:17:29 also a problem. When it comes to something I should mention when I’m talking about Wi-Fi speed, you can get Wi-Fi now that will run faster than a megabyte a second.
20:17:40 Um, and it’ll run faster than 100 megabytes a second, which is quite fast.
20:17:46 That won’t make your internet any faster. It means the speed from one machine in your house to another machine in your house will be fast. But your interconnection from your home is whatever your internet provider.
20:18:02 has. And if it’s 10 megabits per second, that’s as fast as it’ll go, regardless of the speed of your Wi-Fi router.
20:18:10 Where it’s important, though, is the newer versions of Wi-Fi, in addition to being faster, also have better security. So a device that supports Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 is actually much, much more secure.
20:18:27 than one that has 802.11. G, which is what older ones have.
20:18:35 Can I put this…
20:18:37 this box in the trash, then?
20:18:46 Okay?
20:18:40 You can put it in the trash, or you can give it to Goodwill. Believe it or not, there are people out there who want those old… they have, like, uh… They have older machines that they don’t… they can’t afford to upgrade, but they need a good Wi-Fi router, and then you plug it in and set it up, and it’s up and running.
20:18:58 So what about the security issue with whoever data is on it?
20:19:07 Yeah.
20:19:04 Um, on the router itself, it’s not going to have any personal information other than someone’s account when they originally set it up. So they… No, and Airport Extreme does not have a disk drive.
20:19:11 So it’s not a backup device like, uh, the other… Oh, okay.
20:19:21 Yeah.
20:19:19 The time capsules have a disk drive, and uh… Um, and I’m going to have to give up my time capsules, because… If I can’t back up wirelessly to them, I don’t need them anymore.
20:19:36 It was interesting, when I got the time capsule, uh, Kathleen had just gotten a MacBook, which is why I got the time capsule, and she wanted to know how she was going to back it up, and I said, turn it on. She turns on her Mac, and I pointed at the time capsule, and it starts backing up.
20:19:52 It was that simple. And without the time capsule, it’s going to be a little bit more complicated to back up a laptop.
20:20:04 Other questions?
20:20:06 I I have one specifically, you know, probably other people won’t be interested in it, but my find my app stopped working on my iPad. I cannot get the thing just to work again.
20:20:20 Um, I googled it, said it’s a common problem with iOS 26, but if I put in 26.2, they’ve found a solution for it. I mean, it’s working fine on my phone, and I did put in the latest, uh.
20:20:37 update, which is 26.4, and it still has that problem.
20:20:43 I don’t have an answer, because I haven’t run into that. I’ve heard of people having that problem. What is the device specific model?
20:20:53 It’s an iPad air. iPad Air 5.
20:21:04 It sounds old.
20:21:02 Huh.
20:21:06 Okay, hold on.
20:21:01 I think. No, it’s not. It’s been a couple of years. I’d say less than a year old, I’d say.
20:21:11 Okay.
20:21:12 Have you… have you shut the machine down entirely?
20:21:15 Yes. Nope.
20:21:26 How do you do that? I went to that, and I couldn’t see how… I went to…
20:21:16 And that didn’t do anything. I don’t have an idea. Um, before you log off, if you haven’t signed in, please sign into the sign-in form, which I…
20:21:32 Chat? No?
20:21:33 Yeah, if you go to the chat, just click on the link there that says forms.gle, and then it’s got an address. Click on that, and it’ll open up your browser window, and there’ll be a form that you fill out with your… Um, with your name and phone and email address.
20:21:56 Okay, thank you.
20:21:59 Any other questions?
20:22:01 Can he delete the Find My and reinstall it?
20:22:04 No, it’s… it’s built into the operating system. It’s considered… It’s not part of the operating system, but the operating system doesn’t want you to kill it.
20:22:13 So another thing that was suggested when I googled it was to reinstall the operating system. And I don’t like the sounds of that.
20:22:27 This… yeah, on an iPad, that’s kind of a problem, because the… the way to reinstall it is to basically.
20:22:38 You said it, yeah. As if you were going to sell it.
20:22:37 reset it, and… And yes, and that’s kind of extreme, unless you’ve got it all backed up on the…
20:22:46 Well, it is backed up on the, you know, on, uh, uh, on the… shoot.
20:22:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:22:53 In iCloud? Yeah. It’ll take a little while to put everything back, but it’s still kind of extreme. You can reinstall the operating system on your Mac at almost any time because on the modern Macs, one of the OS 27.
20:23:15 Mm-hmm.
20:23:20 Mm-hmm.
20:23:11 The operating system is held in a different part of the hard drive from all of your data. So if you, say, reinstall the operating system, it just writes it to that part. But in iOS, it’s not segregated. It’s segregated that way, but it’s not… You don’t…
20:23:26 User accessible.
20:23:28 you know, the tools don’t exist for you to just write to that part. It wants to redo everything.
20:23:36 Yeah. No, no, I appreciate the the thoughts anyway.
20:23:36 Sorry about that.
20:23:41 I’ll give it some… if… send me a… send me an email, I’ll look into… Um, because not having Find My turned on is not a good thing, so…
20:23:51 And it’s turned on, and I can find it from my phone, but I can’t… Find my phone on it, or anything else.
20:23:58 Yeah, that’s… that’s not good. So, send me an email, and I’ll… I’ll see if I can come up with a thought or two.
20:24:05 Okay, thank you.
20:24:08 And if there’s nothing else, then I want to say goodnight to everybody.
20:24:13 Thank you, Lawrence.
20:24:12 I have a question. It’s got to do with the connection here. I can see everybody, and I can hear everybody, and I think you can hear me, but I can’t see my photo on here anyway. My picture.
20:24:27 It’s on the list, it says my name and then me.
20:24:23 Um, it should be in the list…
20:24:30 and I can see talking about. I can’t see it on the display of the gallery or anything.
20:24:32 Oh.
20:24:36 It’s a nice palm tree you got going there.
20:24:38 So…
20:24:40 Uh-huh.
20:24:41 Yes, yes.
20:24:39 Can you see that? I can’t even see that. I didn’t even know what I had back there. I used to have…
20:24:45 So there’s a bunch of, at least on mine, there’s a bunch of different icons, not icons, but pictures across top of people, and then there’s an arrow at the end of it that you can click on, and that shifts a whole bunch of new people in, so it’s because you can only display 5 at a time on mine, anyway, with my old system.
20:25:04 Well, I see a lot of people’s names on the bottom with no pictures, just names, and I see, but I see about 5 of us now, several people have left. But I’ve never did see my face, and not that I’m egotistical, but I just never saw it. But I could hear you, and you could see me, I guess.
20:25:21 Yep.
20:25:23 Yeah, I don’t have an explanation that, but Zoom is weird, too.
20:25:27 name.
20:25:27 Yeah, I could see you, Joey, on the bottom of the five. You’re the last one.
20:25:34 Yeah, palm trees in the background.
20:25:35 Yep.
20:25:32 Show palm trees in the background. I think that’s what I… I used to have snowstorms back there, but I didn’t change it.
20:25:33 Yeah. Palm tree beach…
20:25:41 Ring time. Okay, I was just wondered, because I… I enjoy the session very much, and I could see everybody talking, but I’m… I know you heard me, but I couldn’t see myself.
20:25:53 Yeah, before you completely log out, you might want to go and check to see that you have the current version of Zoom, which is… 7.0.0.
20:26:02 7.0 point 0.
20:26:06 Okay. I thought I did that before I signed on, but I’ll get checked for updates.
20:26:11 Anyway, I thank everyone and have a pleasant evening.
20:26:13 Oh.
20:26:17 Yeah, thank you, Lawrence.
20:26:18 Thank you, Lauren.
20:26:19 Yeah, thanks, guys. Bye.
20:26:21 Lauren, you’re just the best.

March 2026: iPhone Literacy, Part 3

We started the iPhone Literacy series to address a common observation: an iPhone is a powerful tool, but most people are using it for nothing more than phone calls, text messages, and photos. An iPhone, particularly when running iOS 26, can do so much more.

With the rain of iPhone features and capabilities, where do you start?
With the rain of iPhone features and capabilities, where do you start?

This appears to be a problem in two parts: first, users are aware that the iPhone can do more, but they don’t fully understand what “more” might entail. You know your iPhone can display directions on the screen in your new car, but just looking at the phone doesn’t tell you how to do it. The second part is one of wealth and change: there is a wealth of things you can do with your phone — even without adding additional apps — but the wealth is not a constant: whatever you think the iPhone can do today, it probably can do more tomorrow.

In March, we looked at health and safety things, for the most part. We talked about how to turn on crash detection, how to use fall detection in concert with an Apple Watch, how to use the Check In feature with Apple Messages, how to get emergency alerts, how to trigger an SOS call to 911, how to block contacts, how to get a privacy report on which apps were tracking your location or use, how to set up and use the Medical ID function using Apple Health, how to set up stolen device protection, how to record a phone call, and some simple things, such as how to take an iPhone (and Apple Watch) screen shot, an excellent way to record funny memes, strange messages, and notes on things you saw or did.

Video of the meeting: iPhone Literacy, Part 3

Click on the YouTube logo if you want to expand the recording.

Transcript of iPhone Literacy, Part 3

This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom is sometimes (often?) creative. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.

00:21:34.989 --> 00:21:39.989
On top of this program that I had waited 3 months to be shipped from the
United States,
00:21:40.597 --> 00:21:42.597
And I destroyed it. And I was thinking,
00:21:42.598 --> 00:21:45.116
If I'd had a Mac, that wouldn't have happened.
00:21:45.943 --> 00:21:51.943
Um, so that was what convinced me to buy Mac, and I went down to Akihabara
in Tokyo,
00:21:52.893 --> 00:22:00.893
Um, the day… they… they released him in Japan, and I bought one. I bought
the model that they had set up,
00:22:01.608 --> 00:22:14.608
for a display, because they were going to do a live TV broadcast. And
since that was the one that was set up, I bought it, and they were very sad,
and I didn't realize why until after they handed me the box. They said,
well, we'd set it up for a commercial.
00:22:15.187 --> 00:22:19.187
Oh, well. I've got a noun, so I went back to, uh…
00:22:19.678 --> 00:22:23.678
Back home with this Mac, but I bought the very first Mac sold in Japan.
00:22:25.997 --> 00:22:27.997
Completely by accident.
00:22:29.241 --> 00:22:33.241
Well, no. I went there to see it, so it wasn't too much of an accident,
but…
00:22:33.648 --> 00:22:39.648
Um, and that was long before I saw the commercial, but the commercial,
it illustrated
00:22:40.239 --> 00:22:43.239
Um, apples idea that…
00:22:43.965 --> 00:22:54.965
that computers, if they're just calculating devices, and you have to know
a whole bunch of… you have to memorize a whole bunch of commands, we're
not good devices, and so…
00:22:56.130 --> 00:23:03.130
Steve Jobs said that the Macintosh was not a computer, it was an appliance
for the mind.
00:23:04.023 --> 00:23:09.023
And in the original packaging, they talked about it being a mind appliance,
which…
00:23:09.100 --> 00:23:11.100
Uh, today would…
00:23:11.112 --> 00:23:15.112
probably creep people out, but at the time, it seemed like a good idea.
00:23:15.555 --> 00:23:17.555
Anybody have any questions?
00:23:18.240 --> 00:23:24.240
Um, I have one. Um, there was just, um, an update from Apple called
00:23:25.352 --> 00:23:27.352
23.1…
00:23:27.460 --> 00:23:35.460
23.3.1A, and do you know what that was about? They said some kind of
security emergency?
00:23:36.018 --> 00:23:39.018
Uh… when did you see that?
00:23:39.796 --> 00:23:41.796
Uh, today, uh, about…
00:23:42.040 --> 00:23:44.040
30 minutes ago.
00:23:44.509 --> 00:23:46.509
Uh…
00:23:46.509 --> 00:23:48.812
And it was in the… it was called Background Improvement.
00:23:48.977 --> 00:23:54.977
security. And you had to find this. It wasn't on general software update.
00:23:55.118 --> 00:24:00.118
It was, uh, in the privacy and security section,
00:24:00.811 --> 00:24:05.811
and you scroll down to background improvement, and there was the update
to install.
00:24:05.727 --> 00:24:10.727
And then it was called 23.3.1
00:24:10.737 --> 00:24:12.737
A.
00:24:12.738 --> 00:24:15.841
I do not see that. What device was this on?
00:24:15.839 --> 00:24:20.839
The, um, IOS and MACOS,
00:24:21.836 --> 00:24:29.836
And iPadOS, all three, not TV, but the iPad, the iPhone, and your laptop
MacOS.
00:24:29.876 --> 00:24:31.876
I…
00:24:31.876 --> 00:24:33.765
And they said, install it immediately, because there was some…
00:24:34.613 --> 00:24:36.613
uh, security issue.
00:24:36.613 --> 00:24:43.800
I would probably not do that, because the software update's not showing
that, and that's the only place that you should see that.
00:24:44.000 --> 00:24:47.000
kind of update, so I'm suspicious.
00:24:48.451 --> 00:24:51.451
I… I might be incorrectly suspicious, but…
00:24:51.452 --> 00:24:54.017
Well, no, it was in… it was in my security.
00:24:54.660 --> 00:24:58.660
When I looked in privacy and security, there was the update, and it said
install.
00:24:59.909 --> 00:25:03.909
And, well, except that it shouldn't be in privacy and security, it should
be just under…
00:25:03.909 --> 00:25:06.689
Yeah, I know, that was a very weird place for it to show up.
00:25:06.740 --> 00:25:08.740
Yeah, I'm…
00:25:08.740 --> 00:25:14.222
But on both the iPad and my iPhone and my laptop, all three,
00:25:14.938 --> 00:25:19.938
And, uh, I'm now running 23 point… 26.3.1A.
00:25:20.283 --> 00:25:22.283
Yeah…
00:25:22.283 --> 00:25:25.115
And if you look on your… if you look on your privacy security, you'll
see it.
00:25:27.284 --> 00:25:30.284
Well, I'm looking at privacy and security on my…
00:25:31.588 --> 00:25:33.588
right this second, and I do not see anything.
00:25:33.589 --> 00:25:38.215
No, scroll down to Background Improvements, all the way to the bottom,
towards the bottom.
00:25:39.324 --> 00:25:41.324
Background improvements.
00:25:42.137 --> 00:25:44.137
Alright, and then select that, and then you'll see
00:25:44.007 --> 00:25:46.007
Ah! Okay.
00:25:46.007 --> 00:25:46.773
23.3…
00:25:47.711 --> 00:25:49.711
26.3.1A.
00:25:49.804 --> 00:25:51.804
I…
00:25:51.805 --> 00:25:52.056
And it says, install immediately.
00:25:52.115 --> 00:25:54.115
Yeah, well, I would still…
00:25:55.878 --> 00:25:57.878
I'm still gonna hold off on this until I know more.
00:25:58.871 --> 00:26:00.871
Um,
00:26:00.872 --> 00:26:02.559
You know, I was wondering what that was all about. I was…
00:26:03.288 --> 00:26:07.288
Well, I'm just… I'm just by nature, I'm very paranoid, and sometimes
00:26:07.883 --> 00:26:09.883
paranoia means, um…
00:26:10.612 --> 00:26:14.612
don't follow, I mean, the rules. I know my rule was…
00:26:14.942 --> 00:26:19.942
install updates, but my up… the update process you're supposed to go
through is through the…
00:26:20.846 --> 00:26:25.846
security update process, and it's not there, so I'm going to investigate
this. The, um…
00:26:26.766 --> 00:26:30.766
is an example of something that happened once upon a time. The, um…
00:26:31.647 --> 00:26:34.647
Um, federal government ordered
00:26:34.742 --> 00:26:39.742
The entire government to install a Windows update on every machine that
the Windows
00:26:39.760 --> 00:26:41.760
that the government had.
00:26:42.085 --> 00:26:48.085
And I was ordered to install it on all the machines I was responsible for,
which were 700 Macs.
00:26:49.023 --> 00:26:52.023
And I said, I could not install a Windows update on Macs,
00:26:53.014 --> 00:26:57.014
And I was told in no uncertain terms by the CIO, who
00:26:57.745 --> 00:27:02.745
really was an idiot, that I had to. So what I did is that I followed the
rule,
00:27:03.321 --> 00:27:08.321
I created this file, and I told everybody to put this on your
00:27:08.803 --> 00:27:10.803
Uh, Mac. It won't do anything.
00:27:11.730 --> 00:27:14.730
But I can say that they… everybody… it was distributed to everybody.
00:27:14.731 --> 00:27:22.968
And so they… we had this, like, this software updates back then were small.
It was, like, 3 gigs. Not 3 gigs, it was about 3 megabytes.
00:27:23.453 --> 00:27:31.453
So, every single Mac that I had had this 3MB file on it, and it just sat
there for about 3 days,
00:27:31.454 --> 00:27:35.037
He came back with a very sheepish, oh, never mind, and…
00:27:35.747 --> 00:27:37.747
We threw it away, but um…
00:27:37.839 --> 00:27:39.839
I tend to…
00:27:41.599 --> 00:27:43.599
I tend to make sure that it's through, um…
00:27:46.059 --> 00:27:48.059
Well, let's…
00:27:48.059 --> 00:27:50.304
the standard process, so I will… I'll make… I'll look at the… I'll look
at that after the meeting, because I…
00:27:49.717 --> 00:27:51.717
Um,
00:27:51.718 --> 00:27:52.541
curious about this.
00:27:52.541 --> 00:27:54.774
I have one thing on my wife's iPhone,
00:27:55.090 --> 00:27:57.090
I had not updated it.
00:27:57.744 --> 00:28:01.744
to 26.3.1, it only had 26.3.
00:28:02.510 --> 00:28:07.510
But when I looked at the normal place for general software update,
00:28:07.511 --> 00:28:17.458
It said, update 23… 26.3.1A, and that was through the general software
update. But that's because I had not used
00:28:17.943 --> 00:28:22.943
23 point… 26.3.1 on her phone. Only 26.
00:28:22.944 --> 00:28:23.417
Yeah.
00:28:23.986 --> 00:28:25.986
Well,
00:28:25.986 --> 00:28:27.503
3. And so, but when I did it on her phone, it went through the normal…
00:28:27.503 --> 00:28:33.981
the normal channel, but on mine and mine, I had 23… 26.3.1 already,
00:28:34.236 --> 00:28:38.236
And to do the A, you had to go through the background improvement.
00:28:46.072 --> 00:28:48.072
Oh, okay.
00:28:48.072 --> 00:28:50.592
Okay, I, um, I will… I'll take that under your eyes, but I'm just not
going to do a software update before the meeting, so… but that is… that
is very unusual, and…
00:28:50.592 --> 00:28:56.923
Yeah, it is. It's very unusual. And to have it as an A, a letter,
instead of a number.
00:28:57.181 --> 00:28:59.181
Was we…
00:28:59.181 --> 00:29:00.270
Yeah… that is…
00:29:00.303 --> 00:29:02.303
strange.
00:29:01.763 --> 00:29:08.763
But when I look at my, uh, my Mac, it says updated to 26.3.1A, and
the A is in
00:29:08.762 --> 00:29:10.762
parentheses.
00:29:10.762 --> 00:29:12.298
Okay, well, again…
00:29:13.126 --> 00:29:17.126
That's the new, uh, that's the new thing they just implemented for…
00:29:18.107 --> 00:29:20.107
background security updates.
00:29:20.107 --> 00:29:20.396
Background improvement.
00:29:20.146 --> 00:29:22.146
Yeah, yeah.
00:29:22.146 --> 00:29:22.399
Right.
00:29:22.400 --> 00:29:22.621
Yeah. Yeah.
00:29:22.621 --> 00:29:24.647
Well,
00:29:24.647 --> 00:29:25.031
That's… I mean, the A thing.
00:29:25.078 --> 00:29:27.078
You know, the 8. Right.
00:29:27.079 --> 00:29:27.119
That's what that is.
00:29:27.260 --> 00:29:29.260
Yeah, I did it on mine.
00:29:29.745 --> 00:29:32.745
I will, um, look at that after the meeting.
00:29:33.768 --> 00:29:37.768
Um, and I'll also probably write to them and say, what the heck are
you guys doing?
00:29:37.769 --> 00:29:38.920
Yeah.
00:29:40.382 --> 00:29:42.382
Um, I know several of these.
00:29:43.366 --> 00:29:47.366
security people at Apple, and I give them a bad time. I still have a
machine…
00:29:48.343 --> 00:29:50.343
that, um, that, um…
00:29:51.764 --> 00:29:56.764
Um, is not doing a security thing the way I want it to. But, uh…
00:29:57.295 --> 00:30:02.295
their, uh… the lame excuse they gave me is, oh, that's an old Intel
machine.
00:30:02.427 --> 00:30:07.427
Yeah, well, too bad, it's still not doing what I want it to do, so…
00:30:09.562 --> 00:30:11.562
Such as life. Any other questions?
00:30:12.827 --> 00:30:17.827
Mr. Lockwood, you sent me a question which I've completely forgotten
about. So, what was the question?
00:30:18.843 --> 00:30:21.843
Uh, it had to do with the iPhone, and…
00:30:22.590 --> 00:30:25.590
with maximizing storage,
00:30:25.760 --> 00:30:27.760
Oh, yes.
00:30:27.761 --> 00:30:29.447
Where you can store… yeah, and I… my question was,
00:30:30.247 --> 00:30:32.247
If you turn that on, and then the… the…
00:30:33.127 --> 00:30:35.127
If you have space, apparently, it only…
00:30:35.722 --> 00:30:38.722
It's got some… it doesn't automatically…
00:30:38.996 --> 00:30:43.996
If I'm reading Apple's description right, it doesn't automatically
store everything,
00:30:45.008 --> 00:30:49.008
Uh, at low resolution on your machine, but it could.
00:30:49.670 --> 00:30:55.670
My question was, if that's turned on and you want to email a full
resolution version of a photo to somebody,
00:30:55.861 --> 00:30:57.861
How do you do that?
00:30:57.861 --> 00:31:04.751
Okay, um, to give you some background, um, that may seem not… may not
seem relevant, but it's actually…
00:31:04.890 --> 00:31:11.890
has a lot to do with this. I had a friend who bought an iPhone,
and they were going on a trip to, uh…
00:31:12.160 --> 00:31:21.160
Europe, and they bought one that didn't have a heck of a lot of storage
on it. It was back in the days when they were selling them, looked like.
00:31:22.125 --> 00:31:25.125
32 gigs, or 64 gigs, or something like that.
00:31:26.126 --> 00:31:33.126
And so what she did, she set it at the lowest possible resolution so
that every time she took a picture, it was at low resolution.
00:31:33.496 --> 00:31:44.496
When she came back from Europe after spending, I don't know how long
there, uh, she came out with all these photographs that, by our standards
today, were about the size of postage stamps. They were about…
00:31:45.184 --> 00:31:47.184
Uh, 800 pixels across.
00:31:47.211 --> 00:31:53.211
And by comparison, the iPhone today will shoot one at 4,000 pixels… 40…
00:31:53.726 --> 00:31:58.726
More than 4,000 pixels across. And larger depending upon the model.
00:31:59.997 --> 00:32:05.997
And, um, she wanted to know how she could get them larger, and I said,
well, she couldn't because she'd set it at a small…
00:32:06.586 --> 00:32:14.586
resolution, because she didn't want to use up a lot of space. So
she came back with a lot of space and a lot of really small photographs.
00:32:14.587 --> 00:32:23.217
I recommend that people shoot things at the highest possible resolution,
and I have an article up on the…
00:32:24.103 --> 00:32:26.103
smug site saying how to do that.
00:32:26.741 --> 00:32:28.741
with the new iPhone 17, which…
00:32:28.990 --> 00:32:31.990
It applies to older ones as well, but…
00:32:32.105 --> 00:32:38.105
Um, set it at the highest possible resolution. Because when it comes
to taking photographs and movies,
00:32:38.490 --> 00:32:42.490
You can throw away pixels by shrinking the photograph.
00:32:42.490 --> 00:32:45.258
But you really can't add them. If you add…
00:32:45.581 --> 00:32:50.581
pixels to a small resolution thing, what you're doing is just making
a larger image that's grainy.
00:32:51.782 --> 00:32:55.782
Because it's… it's just repeating the same thing over and over again.
00:32:56.247 --> 00:33:01.247
So, if you don't want grainy, shoo it at the highest possible resolution.
Well, the question is,
00:33:02.230 --> 00:33:04.230
How do you store that on a machine?
00:33:04.175 --> 00:33:15.175
Um, that may not have that much space. It requires a couple things
to do. First of all, have an iCloud plan that's not set at the basic
level.
00:33:15.812 --> 00:33:19.812
The free one gives you 5GB of space. Well, my new…
00:33:20.228 --> 00:33:24.228
iPhone 17 Pro Max, or whatever the heck it is.
00:33:25.383 --> 00:33:28.383
Each individual photograph is about ten.
00:33:28.873 --> 00:33:30.873
Um…
00:33:33.791 --> 00:33:42.791
100 megs, I mean, they're… they're large, because I shoot them not only
at the highest resolution, but I also shoot them as what's called raw.
And with RAW,
00:33:43.294 --> 00:33:48.294
It's hard to explain exactly why, but raw is a good thing when it's
shooting, uh, images because
00:33:48.683 --> 00:33:52.683
If the color is off, I can change the color without destroying the image.
00:33:52.911 --> 00:33:57.911
And the other thing is, when you're editing it, it leaves the raw image
alone, and you're editing
00:33:58.838 --> 00:34:06.838
basically a virtual copy, so you never mess with the original. So
I always shoot it raw, and so these things are over 100 megabytes.
00:34:06.985 --> 00:34:12.985
per photograph. Well, that takes up a lot of space, but I bought a
lot of space. But say you didn't have a lot,
00:34:13.186 --> 00:34:18.186
If you have a non-free account, when that you're actually paying for,
00:34:18.338 --> 00:34:27.338
You'll get… I don't remember what the smallest measure is. You can get
50 gigs, 100 gigs, 200 gigs, terabytes, you can get a huge amount of
space.
00:34:27.583 --> 00:34:31.583
So, say if you have 500 megs, or even…
00:34:31.728 --> 00:34:38.728
Um, 100 gigs of space. If you say you want to minimize space on your
00:34:39.261 --> 00:34:48.261
phone, your phone checks with iCloud, says, okay, I can send all the
high-resolution stuffs up to iCloud, and what I will do
00:34:48.343 --> 00:34:50.343
Locally, is have a…
00:34:50.647 --> 00:34:53.647
high resolution, but not full resolution,
00:34:53.731 --> 00:34:55.731
copy on the phone.
00:34:55.768 --> 00:35:03.768
And then, if somebody… if you want to look at your phone, your phone's
only a couple thousand pixels across. It's not as if you can have this
massive thing
00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:14.000
on that tiny little screen, it'll still look good on your phone, and
if you want to download the high-resolution onto your desktop machine,
which you
00:35:14.344 --> 00:35:16.344
should, you can do so.
00:35:16.567 --> 00:35:20.567
If you tell it to sync up to iCloud, and iCloud will…
00:35:20.567 --> 00:35:22.828
Pull down your…
00:35:23.773 --> 00:35:30.773
computer will pull down from iCloud the full resolution versions,
and you can have them on your machine, and you can edit them and do
whatever you want to.
00:35:31.526 --> 00:35:37.526
Well, his question is, if somebody… if you want to send a full resolution
copy to someone, what does it do?
00:35:38.382 --> 00:35:43.382
Well, there are a couple things to think about. One is, if you've got
a pick… if you've got a
00:35:43.797 --> 00:35:46.797
full resolution, even if it's a JPEG and it's not.
00:35:47.399 --> 00:35:49.399
a, uh, a raw image.
00:35:49.743 --> 00:35:52.743
The JPEG might be too big for email.
00:35:54.770 --> 00:36:00.770
It's very possible a lot of people have small email accounts. For example,
if you are with Verizon,
00:36:01.442 --> 00:36:07.442
The standard size of an attachment, if it's over a megabyte in size,
over a megabyte, which isn't very big,
00:36:07.884 --> 00:36:10.884
Grayson will scold you and say, hey, that's kind of big.
00:36:11.698 --> 00:36:25.698
Um, and I… depending upon what kind of plan you have, it might go up
to 10 megs, but it's still possible to send a picture larger than what
Verizon will accept. So that's one limitation. So what do you do?
You can send the thing anyway,
00:36:26.745 --> 00:36:30.745
And it's like, at that point, it's a… it's a, um…
00:36:31.228 --> 00:36:36.228
match between what you have on iCloud and what the other people can accept.
00:36:36.783 --> 00:36:38.783
And if they can accept a full resolution,
00:36:39.140 --> 00:36:41.140
photograph, it'll download it.
00:36:41.142 --> 00:36:43.142
from iCloud.
00:36:43.166 --> 00:36:45.166
If they can't,
00:36:46.133 --> 00:36:48.133
they'll get a smaller version.
00:36:49.296 --> 00:36:51.296
Because that's all that their system will allow.
00:36:51.524 --> 00:36:56.524
So, when you're sending it, keep in mind that if it's synced up to iCloud,
00:36:56.524 --> 00:37:00.141
It doesn't necessarily have to come from your
00:37:00.665 --> 00:37:06.665
Computer, from your phone. It can come from iCloud. And you'll actually
see that. Sometimes it'll say, um,
00:37:07.063 --> 00:37:20.063
Give them a photo drop or something, I can't remember what the
phraseology is. But what they're basically saying is, yeah, go ahead
and send it to this. It's not really going to come from your computer,
it's really going to come from iCloud, and that's where… and I shouldn't
do that.
00:37:20.446 --> 00:37:22.446
And that's where the full copy is.
00:37:23.422 --> 00:37:28.422
I had surgery on my shoulder, and this glove is on my hand to remind me
not to raise my hand.
00:37:29.160 --> 00:37:33.160
And I forgot. And my shoulder told me about that. Um…
00:37:33.463 --> 00:37:36.463
But anyway, that's… the answer is, if you have…
00:37:36.464 --> 00:37:39.748
a paid, uh, version of iCloud.
00:37:40.682 --> 00:37:50.682
It can store the full resolution up there, and you really don't have
to worry about not having full access on your phone. Because really,
on your phone, the limitation is the size of the screen.
00:37:50.889 --> 00:37:59.889
And the photographs are always going to be larger than the screen anyway,
so don't worry about that. If you want to send somebody a full resolution,
it's going to come from iCloud, it doesn't have to come off your phone.
00:38:01.264 --> 00:38:06.264
I realized that was a complicated answer, but I don't want you to get
into the habit of this
00:38:07.133 --> 00:38:12.133
poor friend of mine who was shooting low-resolution pictures in Europe
because she was trying to save space.
00:38:12.222 --> 00:38:14.222
That's not the right answer.
00:38:15.388 --> 00:38:17.388
Thank you.
00:38:18.783 --> 00:38:20.783
Any other questions?
00:38:23.530 --> 00:38:26.530
It is after 7. Um…
00:38:29.516 --> 00:38:35.516
Um, our, uh, president, Sabrina, wanted to say that she won't be here
because she is, um…
00:38:35.517 --> 00:38:38.505
Working today, uh, tonight.
00:38:38.506 --> 00:38:40.852
And our treasurer,
00:38:40.906 --> 00:38:45.906
Annalise says that basically she wants to…
00:38:46.929 --> 00:38:55.929
Um, somebody else take over the job of treasurer. And, uh, Sabrina
would like to do… somebody else to take over the job of president.
The current…
00:38:56.507 --> 00:38:59.507
straight Macintosh user group started back in…
00:39:00.397 --> 00:39:02.397
Uh, 2018.
00:39:02.789 --> 00:39:05.789
When Kathleen and Sabrina…
00:39:06.169 --> 00:39:14.169
And Annalise and I went to a meeting, and the current leadership
said that they were tired of running the user group,
00:39:15.225 --> 00:39:23.225
And they wanted to shut it down, and we asked the members that were
there, uh, if they really wanted to shut it down, and most of them said
no, they did not.
00:39:23.335 --> 00:39:33.335
And I… Sabrina was elected president, I was elected vice president,
Annalise was elected treasurer, and Kathleen was elected, um…
00:39:34.349 --> 00:39:38.349
Uh, secretary, and that was in 2018.
00:39:38.495 --> 00:39:44.495
And, uh, my spouse has since died, and Annalise and…
00:39:45.875 --> 00:39:47.875
Um, Sabrina would like to…
00:39:48.384 --> 00:39:53.384
not be officers anymore, because they've been officers for a long time.
So…
00:39:53.569 --> 00:39:58.569
Please give some thought, because I don't want to run the entire
group just by myself.
00:39:59.517 --> 00:40:04.517
Um, I would like some assistance. So please give that some thought.
00:40:04.609 --> 00:40:09.609
Um, between now and, um, when we meet in, uh, April.
00:40:10.169 --> 00:40:13.169
Um, the other thing is that, um…
00:40:13.582 --> 00:40:15.582
I'm going to be out of town for a while,
00:40:15.583 --> 00:40:19.969
But as long as we don't have it particularly complicated, um,
00:40:20.997 --> 00:40:25.997
program in April, um, I should be back in time to put something
together, so…
00:40:26.331 --> 00:40:32.331
give some thought as to what you want in April. I would suggest that
we talk about something else other than an iPhone,
00:40:32.604 --> 00:40:34.604
Uh, for at least for, you know,
00:40:35.531 --> 00:40:40.531
meeting or two, because, um, we've gone through a lot of iPhone stuff
in the…
00:40:41.657 --> 00:40:44.657
And now, this is the third month in a row we've talked about the iPhone.
00:40:45.066 --> 00:40:47.066
Um, anything else before I start?
00:40:49.989 --> 00:40:54.989
Okay, I'm going to share my screen. I am recording, and I do have, uh…
00:40:56.132 --> 00:40:59.132
closed-circuit, uh, not closed circuit, closed captioning running,
00:40:59.463 --> 00:41:01.463
It just reminded me, uh…
00:41:01.464 --> 00:41:04.565
that I should send you the attendance form.
00:41:04.566 --> 00:41:06.868
Because that would be nice to have.
00:41:07.612 --> 00:41:10.612
Uh, it'll be… I'm gonna post the, uh…
00:41:10.784 --> 00:41:12.784
link in the chat window.
00:41:13.429 --> 00:41:15.429
And, uh, chat window…
00:41:17.848 --> 00:41:19.848
It's posted now. Um…
00:41:20.707 --> 00:41:22.707
So, if you could fill out that, it would be useful.
00:41:22.725 --> 00:41:24.725
And now I'm going to…
00:41:24.729 --> 00:41:26.729
share my screen.
00:41:27.636 --> 00:41:29.636
And we're gonna share…
00:41:29.574 --> 00:41:31.574
fat screen.
00:41:37.648 --> 00:41:39.648
And… I'm going to…
00:41:42.608 --> 00:41:44.608
move this out of the way…
00:41:50.646 --> 00:41:52.646
Okay, can you…
00:41:53.323 --> 00:41:55.323
See this screen now?
00:41:57.482 --> 00:41:59.482
Are you there?
00:42:03.696 --> 00:42:05.696
Yeah, we can see it.
00:42:05.696 --> 00:42:06.987
Okay.
00:42:06.988 --> 00:42:08.145
Lawrence, before you go on the…
00:42:08.927 --> 00:42:10.927
the form says February 17th.
00:42:11.347 --> 00:42:13.347
Uh, it does?
00:42:13.604 --> 00:42:15.604
Well, shame on that.
00:42:21.275 --> 00:42:23.275
I sent mine in anyway.
00:42:23.456 --> 00:42:25.456
Uh, yeah, well…
00:42:26.292 --> 00:42:29.292
Anyway, maybe I made a typo.
00:42:35.790 --> 00:42:38.790
Uh, turn on recording, turn on closed captioning…
00:42:38.930 --> 00:42:40.930
Remember to sign out, sounds good.
00:42:41.656 --> 00:42:49.656
Um, I'm gonna repeat these references that I've mentioned before. If you
ever need help with your iPad, your Mac, or your, uh…
00:42:50.112 --> 00:42:54.112
iPhone, there is a TIPS application on your device,
00:42:54.031 --> 00:42:59.031
And you can use the search bar within it to find out what it is you
don't know.
00:42:59.188 --> 00:43:02.188
Uh, there are also these books from, uh…
00:43:02.667 --> 00:43:04.667
from Take Control Books,
00:43:04.668 --> 00:43:10.790
Uh, that are, because they're electronic, they're easily searchable,
and you can find out what you need from them.
00:43:10.997 --> 00:43:15.997
And this is a new book, it's not specific to the iPhone, just came out.
00:43:16.303 --> 00:43:18.303
It's supposed to come out on April 1st.
00:43:18.815 --> 00:43:28.815
called Apple, The First 50 Years. It's 600-plus pages long. Uh, it's
illustrated in color, it's available in hardback, paperback, or as
an e-book.
00:43:29.613 --> 00:43:32.613
And this is a screenshot from my Kindle.
00:43:32.610 --> 00:43:34.610
of, uh, what is it?
00:43:34.852 --> 00:43:36.852
page… something.
00:43:38.253 --> 00:43:43.253
But, um, it's basically a history of Apple, but it talks about a lot
about the design.
00:43:43.695 --> 00:43:49.695
and has a lot of interesting tidbits, and this is a screenshot from
the Super Bowl commercial that, uh…
00:43:49.909 --> 00:43:51.909
I was talking about.
00:43:52.666 --> 00:44:01.666
things you can do with them, uh, iPhone. You can take strange pictures.
This is an advertisement for Vistaprint, and if you look at the cup,
00:44:01.666 --> 00:44:03.724
It's shows just a…
00:44:05.091 --> 00:44:09.091
tremendous amount of care and craftsmanship, and makes you really want
to go out and buy
00:44:09.107 --> 00:44:11.107
something from Vistaprint.
00:44:12.895 --> 00:44:16.895
And I took this photo today, and I sent it to one of my relatives,
00:44:17.549 --> 00:44:19.549
And they made the joke that, uh…
00:44:19.549 --> 00:44:25.574
Actually, that's the second one. They said that the house was tilted
and I should straighten it out, so I straightened it out.
00:44:25.574 --> 00:44:28.151
And, uh, sent them back this.
00:44:28.746 --> 00:44:31.746
that's not particularly useful, but it did amuse me.
00:44:32.981 --> 00:44:39.981
You can make fun of AI, such as this particular cartoon that's talking
about an AI that…
00:44:39.971 --> 00:44:41.971
All you have to do is feed it, uh…
00:44:42.387 --> 00:44:44.387
10 baby giraffes a day,
00:44:44.413 --> 00:44:50.413
And they said, does it answer the questions correctly? And, oh, no,
it doesn't do that. But, you know…
00:44:50.891 --> 00:44:52.891
Small price to pay for AI.
00:44:54.217 --> 00:44:59.217
And you can see things like this. This is an actual National Park Service
tweet.
00:44:59.707 --> 00:45:02.707
Saying that trails often look flatter on the map, which is…
00:45:03.651 --> 00:45:06.651
Uh, not only good advice, but also quite funny.
00:45:08.093 --> 00:45:15.093
And here we have a VIN diagram showing the intersection between cats
and printers.
00:45:15.424 --> 00:45:25.424
And they have a lot in common. They're moody, unreliable, spend lots
of time self-cleaning, demand feeding when container is full, ignores
requests.
00:45:27.928 --> 00:45:29.928
Other things you can do that are more useful.
00:45:30.932 --> 00:45:34.932
The iPhone and the Apple Watch have, uh, the…
00:45:35.406 --> 00:45:37.406
more recent ones, have
00:45:38.478 --> 00:45:44.478
crash alerts. If they detect that you've been in a serious car crash,
it will wait
00:45:44.478 --> 00:45:52.577
Uh, it'll sound an alarm for 10 seconds, and if you can aim… if you're
able to, you can turn off the alert,
00:45:52.577 --> 00:45:56.290
If you don't, it'll send a, uh…
00:45:57.538 --> 00:46:03.538
Um, a 911 call with your location after a 30-second countdown. So you
do have
00:46:04.678 --> 00:46:10.678
an opportunity to stop the alert, but if you're in a crash, this is
a really nice thing to happen.
00:46:11.576 --> 00:46:14.576
have, because it happens automatically, it doesn't require that you
00:46:15.549 --> 00:46:19.549
Uh, you don't even have to be conscious. It'll, it'll send a notice
of a crash.
00:46:19.550 --> 00:46:25.898
The first time this technology was used was in a crash in Washington State.
00:46:26.649 --> 00:46:28.649
Um, they found a guy who'd, uh…
00:46:28.887 --> 00:46:30.887
His car had gone down a ravine,
00:46:31.812 --> 00:46:34.812
And, um, he was unconscious, but his phone…
00:46:34.933 --> 00:46:36.933
alerted the State Patrol.
00:46:37.665 --> 00:46:39.665
Is that the same as the fall detector?
00:46:40.325 --> 00:46:50.325
No, this fall detectors second. The fall detectors with the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch, and even though the Apple Watch is not an iPhone,
00:46:50.993 --> 00:46:58.993
You actually set this up on your iPhone, and it works with your iPhone,
and so on and so forth. The Apple Watch has a fall detector, which if you
are
00:47:00.048 --> 00:47:10.048
Older than about 50, it's a good idea to have something like this. The
fall detector, if you fall, it'll come up with an… again, it'll come up
with an alert, it'll give you a chance to…
00:47:11.011 --> 00:47:15.011
cancel the alert if you are not able to cancel the alert, it'll also send.
00:47:15.891 --> 00:47:18.891
a message to the 911 operator.
00:47:19.931 --> 00:47:31.931
And again, the first time this happened was put to use was in Washington
State. A guy was going through the Cascades, and he fell down a hillside
off of a trail,
00:47:32.330 --> 00:47:34.330
And his watch alerted the, uh…
00:47:35.249 --> 00:47:39.249
911. In his case, because it wasn't a car,
00:47:39.333 --> 00:47:41.333
He was a little bit harder to see,
00:47:41.713 --> 00:47:43.713
And it took them a couple hours, but again,
00:47:44.416 --> 00:47:46.416
He… this completely without his help.
00:47:47.091 --> 00:47:49.091
So, it's a really nice thing to have.
00:47:49.191 --> 00:47:51.191
Other things you can do…
00:47:52.266 --> 00:47:54.266
In messages, you have the ability…
00:47:54.675 --> 00:47:56.675
to, uh, send…
00:47:57.135 --> 00:48:03.135
uh, check-in messages when you reach a particular point, and you do this
with messages down where that little…
00:48:03.763 --> 00:48:10.763
plus symbol is, you can add a bunch of stuff to your messages, and
one of them is a check-in, and in the check-in, you can specify if
you're driving,
00:48:11.036 --> 00:48:18.036
If you're in transit, if you're walking, it gives an estimated time of
when you're going to get there and say when you arrive, it'll…
00:48:18.788 --> 00:48:27.788
check in. Now, why this is useful, it's useful if you're trying to
meet someone. It tells you if they're in a crowded venue, it'll say,
hey, I'm here someplace.
00:48:28.427 --> 00:48:32.427
The other thing that it's useful for is if you're not certain about
00:48:33.291 --> 00:48:36.291
your trip, and you want somebody to be looking for you.
00:48:37.165 --> 00:48:45.165
Um, so it's a very useful thing to have. Uh, one limitation with this,
it really works only if you and the recipient
00:48:45.571 --> 00:48:49.571
have an iPhone. If they have an Android phone, I'm not sure how, um…
00:48:50.155 --> 00:48:54.155
reliable this is. Um, other things you can do…
00:48:55.154 --> 00:49:00.154
are emergency notifications. I have all the notifications turned on
in my phone.
00:49:00.624 --> 00:49:11.624
I have it turned on for Amber Alerts, emergency alerts, public safety
alerts, test alerts, um, and if you look under, uh, there's a section
here, it's called Enhanced Safety Alerts,
00:49:11.625 --> 00:49:18.534
If you look at that, you can see you can turn on earthquake alerts,
not a good… not a bad thing for us to have around here.
00:49:18.551 --> 00:49:22.551
An imminent threat alerts. Um, so…
00:49:22.551 --> 00:49:30.326
it's all kinds of things that your phone, without any intervention on
your part, can tell you what's happening around you.
00:49:30.832 --> 00:49:35.832
And, uh, alert you to it. Uh, the only time this ever really bothered me
is that…
00:49:35.934 --> 00:49:41.934
I had an Amber Alert for something that took place at Moses Lake,
and it came in at
00:49:41.952 --> 00:49:44.952
2 in the morning, and that kind of torqued me off, but…
00:49:45.819 --> 00:49:49.819
The, uh… I complained to the Washington State Patrol, and they said,
lots of people had complained,
00:49:50.517 --> 00:49:53.517
And they've, uh, they've refined their system since then.
00:49:54.711 --> 00:50:01.711
You can also send it in an SOS. Now, this is something that you trigger.
It's not something that happens automatically.
00:50:02.844 --> 00:50:09.844
But if you push the volume up button and the power button on the opposite
side, and you hold it for a bit, and then release it,
00:50:10.258 --> 00:50:15.258
It will trigger an SOS, which again sends something to 9-11.
00:50:16.156 --> 00:50:23.156
Um, why does it do this? It's doing this if you think you're being
carjacked, or hijacked, or threatened, or something.
00:50:23.208 --> 00:50:26.208
it'll just send this, and it doesn't require…
00:50:26.406 --> 00:50:31.406
Um, anything on your… else on your side. It…
00:50:31.882 --> 00:50:37.882
Also, we'll… this is another way to turn it on on a watch, because
you can do the same thing from a watch.
00:50:38.207 --> 00:50:47.207
Uh, with the watch, you push the two buttons that it has, rather than
just one, and it'll also turn on the severe crash alert,
00:50:47.652 --> 00:50:52.652
fall detection alerts. So this is another way of contacting 911.
But this is one that you
00:50:53.453 --> 00:50:57.453
you trigger on demand as you feel necessary.
00:50:58.251 --> 00:51:00.251
And, uh, in…
00:51:00.494 --> 00:51:05.494
Squim is probably not as necessary as in some places of the world,
but um…
00:51:05.495 --> 00:51:07.982
It's still a nice thing to know that it can do that.
00:51:10.001 --> 00:51:22.001
There are some things, because your iPhone does so much, it's nice
to know that there are things that you can keep it from doing. And you…
a lot of this you find under privacy and security.
00:51:22.009 --> 00:51:26.009
This is a screenshot from my phone, and you'll notice that it says,
00:51:26.029 --> 00:51:28.029
that there are…
00:51:28.697 --> 00:51:30.697
two applications I have,
00:51:30.697 --> 00:51:33.191
that are always showing location,
00:51:33.449 --> 00:51:35.449
And anyone that only use it
00:51:36.153 --> 00:51:39.153
When, um, I'm using the app in question,
00:51:39.714 --> 00:51:46.714
And there's one that allows tracking. So what exactly does this mean?
A lot of games, as an example,
00:51:46.804 --> 00:51:48.804
Want to know your location.
00:51:49.538 --> 00:51:54.538
Well, if you're playing a game, you probably don't want anybody to know
where you are. It's not really necessary to play the game.
00:51:54.539 --> 00:52:00.019
And they'll do the same thing with tracking. They try tracking your
activity, what are you looking at, uh,
00:52:00.936 --> 00:52:06.936
If you stop using the app and did something else, a lot of tracking
activity. You'll notice I only have tracking on one.
00:52:07.197 --> 00:52:09.197
thing. That one thing…
00:52:09.254 --> 00:52:12.254
is a speed test that I use on the internet.
00:52:13.120 --> 00:52:23.120
And the reason why I use… I turn on tracking for that is that if you're
doing an internet speed test, it really does kind of need to know what
it is you're doing. So I turn on tracking for the speed test,
00:52:23.245 --> 00:52:32.245
The two that I allow out location services always are Apple Maps
and Google Maps, and that's because when I turn on Maps and I want to
00:52:32.988 --> 00:52:36.988
get direction for someplace I'm going. I don't want to have to remember
to turn on
00:52:37.312 --> 00:52:41.312
Location services. I just want it to always be on, so…
00:52:42.249 --> 00:52:52.249
That's how I have it set up. But this… this privacy and security pane
will allow you to go through all your apps and turn everything off or
everything on, or customize it to your…
00:52:52.791 --> 00:52:55.791
Um, to your desires.
00:52:56.673 --> 00:53:01.673
If you scroll down a bit, you can come to the section where it tells
you about block contacts.
00:53:02.253 --> 00:53:06.253
If I get spam from particular numbers, I block them.
00:53:06.372 --> 00:53:13.372
And so, I block unknowns, I block things that are known. I don't
remember what 304 is, but it's some…
00:53:13.752 --> 00:53:18.752
company that, uh, I just don't want to ever hear from them again.
00:53:18.756 --> 00:53:23.756
And if you scroll down again in privacy, you'll come to the safety check.
00:53:23.813 --> 00:53:29.813
Which will allow you to do kind of blanket management of a whole bunch
of things at once. You'll notice that…
00:53:30.125 --> 00:53:35.125
One is emergency reset, which resets the access for everything, and…
00:53:35.255 --> 00:53:38.255
You would do that if you think your machine… your… your…
00:53:38.633 --> 00:53:43.633
phone is compromised, or if it was out of your control for a while,
you left it in a…
00:53:43.714 --> 00:53:48.714
restaurant and came back a day later, and you just want to make sure
that nobody was messing with it.
00:53:49.738 --> 00:53:51.738
Um, so it's got that safety check feature.
00:53:51.795 --> 00:53:56.795
If you scroll down in privacy and Security, you'll also see that you
can get a privacy report.
00:53:57.547 --> 00:53:59.547
And the privacy report will
00:53:59.547 --> 00:54:04.596
give you a report on what everything is doing. In this case, this is
a screen done from my…
00:54:04.596 --> 00:54:12.782
phone, it says that I use the weather app 50 seconds ago, and 56
seconds ago, a message came in. In 56 seconds ago…
00:54:13.045 --> 00:54:28.045
My photos synced in 57 seconds ago, it talked USA Drive Safe, uh,
USAA is an insurance company, and if I run this app on my phone, and it finds out that I'm using my phone while I'm driving,
00:54:28.222 --> 00:54:33.222
Um, I don't get a discount, so I run it, because I want the discount.
00:54:33.273 --> 00:54:39.273
And I used Fab Maps 4 minutes ago, and so on and so forth. And it also
tells you the times that
00:54:39.998 --> 00:54:41.998
You've been using things, and you see that I…
00:54:42.412 --> 00:54:44.412
look at the AP news fairly often,
00:54:45.061 --> 00:54:49.061
And, uh, Google Home, I use for…
00:54:50.250 --> 00:54:52.250
cameras and…
00:54:52.752 --> 00:54:55.752
um… smoke detectors and things in my house.
00:54:57.666 --> 00:55:10.666
things that you should do if you have an Apple iPhone, and if you haven't
set it up, you should set up the medical ID, and you do that using the
medical app, which is the one that's shaped like a heart.
00:55:10.667 --> 00:55:18.725
And you go in there, and you tell it your name, and it's your real name,
your real age, your real weight, so on and so forth.
00:55:18.725 --> 00:55:29.440
And it keeps track of a lot of things that you do, like the number of
steps you do a day, and, um, your heart rate if you have something like
an Apple Watch that can detect that.
00:55:29.921 --> 00:55:33.921
does all kinds of things. You can also sync it to your medical record,
00:55:34.683 --> 00:55:40.683
And I've done that, and the reason why I do that is I go to, uh,
Olympic medical physicians,
00:55:40.683 --> 00:55:49.199
And I have a MyChart account, and the MyCharts, quite often, especially
things like blood tests, it comes back with a bunch of stuff, and it
says,
00:55:49.300 --> 00:55:53.300
Uh, this is this, and this is that, and I have no idea what it means.
00:55:53.215 --> 00:55:58.215
the raw data on MyChart doesn't really tell me.
00:55:58.273 --> 00:56:01.273
But within the Apple Health app,
00:56:02.131 --> 00:56:05.131
it'll actually give an explanation and give you graphs of
00:56:05.217 --> 00:56:07.217
changes over time, and it tells you
00:56:07.515 --> 00:56:11.515
what that particular test is looking for. So it's really, really…
00:56:12.124 --> 00:56:16.124
handy. It's also where you set up the medical ID stuff.
00:56:16.406 --> 00:56:22.406
The medical ID, once know the name of your spouse, wants to know…
and if you're a child, your mother and your father,
00:56:22.672 --> 00:56:25.672
bunch of emergency contacts, and…
00:56:25.936 --> 00:56:31.936
Um, I'll show you in a second the, um, something else that it does
that's handy, but…
00:56:32.900 --> 00:56:36.900
It's… the medical ID is good for just your own tracking your own health,
00:56:37.296 --> 00:56:39.296
But it's also good if you are injured.
00:56:39.811 --> 00:56:41.811
And I will show you that in a second.
00:56:42.614 --> 00:56:44.614
When… if there is an emergency,
00:56:45.256 --> 00:56:50.256
These… you see on the left, the iPhone, you see on the right, the
Apple Watch.
00:56:50.928 --> 00:56:52.928
These are things that will appear
00:56:53.601 --> 00:56:55.601
on, uh, those devices,
00:56:55.602 --> 00:56:59.339
If, uh, you're unconscious in a healthcare…
00:56:59.778 --> 00:57:04.778
Our emergency services person comes and triggers it on your iPhone, and…
00:57:04.967 --> 00:57:07.967
I'm going to unshare my screen for a second.
00:57:08.414 --> 00:57:10.414
So I can show you what that looks like.
00:57:15.207 --> 00:57:17.207
And all I need is the…
00:57:19.039 --> 00:57:21.039
Right?
00:57:23.875 --> 00:57:25.875
Gonna share the screen again…
00:57:29.874 --> 00:57:31.874
If I can figure out…
00:57:34.112 --> 00:57:36.112
Can you see that on the screen?
00:57:39.774 --> 00:57:48.774
Uh, this is what happens. If the medical personnel come along, they press
the side buttons on the machine, it pops up this thing for medical ID.
00:57:49.476 --> 00:57:53.476
And it starts scrolling from the bottom. I cut it off there because I
don't want you to show
00:57:53.476 --> 00:57:56.576
all that. I don't want you to see all that stuff, but…
00:57:57.517 --> 00:58:00.517
Uh, I don't want you to know about, uh…
00:58:01.819 --> 00:58:07.819
all my various problems, but it's, um, it's… they don't have to… they're
not getting into the phone
00:58:08.832 --> 00:58:15.832
The only thing they can see is that medical ID. It's sort of like the
little wristbands that people used to carry around on their wrists,
and this…
00:58:15.766 --> 00:58:19.766
gives them a lot more information than those wristbands did.
00:58:19.880 --> 00:58:21.880
So…
00:58:27.419 --> 00:58:32.419
Well, other things you can do is you can set up stolen device, uh,
protection.
00:58:32.765 --> 00:58:39.765
And I'll let you play with this and figure out how to… what it does.
It says that it adds an extra layer of…
00:58:40.579 --> 00:58:44.579
Uh, security when your phone's something other than where it's normally at.
00:58:44.580 --> 00:58:47.535
And you can find this under the Privacy section.
00:58:47.535 --> 00:58:50.413
Um, something else you can do…
00:58:50.841 --> 00:58:55.841
And you can do this now with the iPhone. You don't need to…
00:58:55.998 --> 00:59:00.998
purchase any extra app. You can record a phone call.
00:59:01.973 --> 00:59:04.973
And to do that, if you look on the…
00:59:05.437 --> 00:59:07.437
Uh, right-hand, um…
00:59:07.638 --> 00:59:09.638
Um…
00:59:10.364 --> 00:59:16.364
display. There's, um, there's, right, there's a couple As that says AA,
and then right next to it are some
00:59:16.894 --> 00:59:18.894
concentric circles that look sort of like a target.
00:59:19.601 --> 00:59:21.601
That is the record call button.
00:59:21.602 --> 00:59:29.450
And these are available from Control Center, so you can be any… you
can be doing anything on the phone, go up to the upper left… oh, upper right,
00:59:29.819 --> 00:59:33.819
pull it down and start recording a phone call.
00:59:34.715 --> 00:59:39.715
Um, well, actually, that records the screen, that does not record the
phone calls, so never mind.
00:59:39.711 --> 00:59:41.711
That records the, uh…
00:59:42.453 --> 00:59:47.453
screen, but I'm going to show you what that, uh, looks like.
00:59:49.035 --> 00:59:51.035
If you're recording a call.
00:59:51.396 --> 00:59:53.396
And as I recall…
00:59:54.436 --> 00:59:56.436
It's not going to, uh…
00:59:58.553 --> 01:00:00.553
create any noise, which is, um…
01:00:01.502 --> 01:00:08.502
a problem. So this, this thing that looks like a target down here, that
is the record call… that is the record screen.
01:00:08.503 --> 01:00:14.515
So, I tell it it's going to say, record the screen. I'm going to use
Siri to make the phone call.
01:00:14.516 --> 01:00:17.795
And I do that by pressing the side button,
01:00:17.975 --> 01:00:22.975
And it triggers Siri, and what I'm saying to Siri is,
01:00:22.984 --> 01:00:31.984
I'm telling it to call the U.S. Naval Observatory. The U.S. Naval
Observatory is in my phone book, otherwise it wouldn't work,
01:00:32.458 --> 01:00:37.458
Uh, it'll call the U.S. Naval Observatory, and I'll get a… they'll
answer the phone,
01:00:37.459 --> 01:00:43.589
After they answered the phone, I can then start recording the call.
You'll notice that
01:00:44.297 --> 01:00:49.297
it doesn't… you won't hear anything for quite a while, but eventually
you hear what it's saying.
01:00:49.475 --> 01:00:54.475
And that's because when it says it's recording the call, the very first
thing it does…
01:00:54.476 --> 01:00:56.995
is it says out loud,
01:00:57.647 --> 01:01:01.647
Uh, this call is being recorded so that the other party can hear it.
01:01:01.648 --> 01:01:05.644
And then after it makes that announcement, then it starts recording
the call.
01:01:05.644 --> 01:01:10.379
You'll also hear why I'm calling the U.S. Naval Observatory when you do this.
01:01:10.798 --> 01:01:12.798
Or at least I hope you figure it out.
01:01:15.184 --> 01:01:18.184
Here, I'm asking Siri to call the U.S. Naval Observatory,
01:01:18.318 --> 01:01:21.318
And it says, calling the U.S. Naval Observatory,
01:01:21.765 --> 01:01:23.765
And the U.S. Naval Observatory comes up,
01:01:23.765 --> 01:01:26.740
I set it on speaker so I can hear it,
01:01:27.539 --> 01:01:30.539
Then I go down to this button down below that says More,
01:01:30.955 --> 01:01:32.955
And…
01:01:33.632 --> 01:01:37.632
Eventually, it'll show you that I'm pressing the more button.
01:01:38.997 --> 01:01:40.997
And…
01:01:41.996 --> 01:01:43.996
I say, call recording,
01:01:45.194 --> 01:01:49.194
And… this call will be recorded, it's actually saying that.
01:01:49.578 --> 01:01:52.578
And… now it's recording the call.
01:01:53.738 --> 01:01:55.738
And you're not hearing anything,
01:01:55.803 --> 01:02:00.803
Because it's recording it, and it's putting it into my Notes application.
01:02:01.143 --> 01:02:06.143
Why does it put it into notes? Notes, among other things, can, uh…
01:02:06.432 --> 01:02:08.432
transcribe, um…
01:02:09.002 --> 01:02:15.002
audio recordings. So, it'll do voice transcriptions if you dump an
audio file into it.
01:02:15.376 --> 01:02:18.376
Now, this is what it sounds like.
01:02:18.934 --> 01:02:20.934
And I hope you'll be able to hear it.
01:02:22.857 --> 01:02:24.857
As soon as I can find out where it is.
01:02:26.592 --> 01:02:31.592
U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock at the Tone, Eastern Daylight Time.
01:02:31.592 --> 01:02:34.278
13 hours, 34 minutes, exactly.
01:02:36.098 --> 01:02:39.098
Universal Time, 17 hours, 34 minutes, 5 seconds.
01:02:40.480 --> 01:02:42.480
Now…
01:02:43.857 --> 01:02:45.857
Any idea why I called the Master Clock?
01:02:49.739 --> 01:02:54.739
I called the master clock because I knew it wouldn't refuse my call
if I was going to record it.
01:02:55.292 --> 01:03:02.292
So, I didn't require… it didn't require another human being, but I got
to talk to something, I got to talk to this recorded voice,
01:03:02.380 --> 01:03:06.380
The U.S. Naval Observatory is in Washington, D.C.,
01:03:06.939 --> 01:03:11.939
And it's an atomic clock that, among other things, your computer and
your iPhone
01:03:12.199 --> 01:03:15.199
And everything else on the planet syncs up to.
01:03:15.867 --> 01:03:17.867
And it does it in universal time,
01:03:18.359 --> 01:03:20.359
Which is, uh, Greenwich Mean Time.
01:03:20.762 --> 01:03:26.762
And it then just adds or subtracts hours depending upon where you are.
01:03:26.908 --> 01:03:33.908
on the planet. So, that's why I call the Master of Clock. It's because
I didn't have to argue with it if I did it.
01:03:35.903 --> 01:03:37.903
So…
01:03:41.770 --> 01:03:48.770
You… I did… took a lot of screenshots to make this presentation. This is
how you take a screenshot on an iPhone.
01:03:49.238 --> 01:03:56.238
You press the volume up button in the side button at the same time,
and you release them. Don't hold them forever.
01:03:56.261 --> 01:03:58.261
Um, but just, uh…
01:03:58.878 --> 01:04:00.878
quickly press them, and it takes a screenshot.
01:04:01.662 --> 01:04:03.662
And you can do the same thing on the watch.
01:04:03.663 --> 01:04:08.723
If you press both buttons, there's a crown button, and then there's
a side button. If you press them both,
01:04:09.475 --> 01:04:11.475
At the same time, it'll take a screenshot of what's on the…
01:04:12.160 --> 01:04:16.160
watch. And these are two screenshots that I shot of the watch.
01:04:16.861 --> 01:04:18.861
the watch being a watch, and the other one showing the…
01:04:19.337 --> 01:04:22.337
Tides at Squim Bay. I have an app on my
01:04:22.671 --> 01:04:28.671
watch that shows me, on the watch, what the tides are at Squim Bay,
because I like to take
01:04:28.671 --> 01:04:33.539
photographs of the bay, when it's got water in it, and not when it's
just mud flats.
01:04:35.604 --> 01:04:37.604
And that was the wrong button to press.
01:04:43.437 --> 01:04:45.437
Why is it doing that?
01:04:55.741 --> 01:04:58.741
Oh. It's doing that because that's the last slide.
01:04:59.435 --> 01:05:01.435
Okay, that's a good reason for it to do that.
01:05:02.600 --> 01:05:04.600
And I've only used half an hour.
01:05:06.095 --> 01:05:08.095
So…
01:05:10.936 --> 01:05:12.936
Stop doing that.
01:05:16.393 --> 01:05:18.393
I went through that a lot faster than I thought I was going to.
01:05:20.513 --> 01:05:22.513
Any questions?
01:05:27.335 --> 01:05:29.335
A question you should have.
01:05:30.581 --> 01:05:34.581
is… how do I make a call on this using Siri?
01:05:34.883 --> 01:05:36.883
There are a couple requirements.
01:05:37.618 --> 01:05:41.618
You can only make a recall using Siri if that person is in your address
book.
01:05:43.400 --> 01:05:45.400
So if they're not in your address book, you can't call them.
01:05:46.495 --> 01:05:48.495
The other question you should have is,
01:05:48.496 --> 01:05:50.615
What if you have
01:05:51.636 --> 01:05:53.636
Uh, my spouse's name was Kathleen.
01:05:54.867 --> 01:05:59.867
There are Cathy's, Kathleen's, Catherine's, all kinds of different
variations of
01:05:59.969 --> 01:06:01.969
of, uh…
01:06:02.978 --> 01:06:04.978
of, uh, Kathleen out there.
01:06:05.117 --> 01:06:08.117
In order for me to be specific,
01:06:09.220 --> 01:06:15.220
There are two things you can do. One is if you put that person in your
favorites lists, um, then…
01:06:15.685 --> 01:06:18.685
It'll appear, if you look at the address book,
01:06:19.378 --> 01:06:23.378
for the phone, uh, your favorites are the people that you call all
the time.
01:06:23.399 --> 01:06:26.399
And it's not the same as your contacts, which are
01:06:26.976 --> 01:06:29.976
everybody else on the planet. If they're in your favorites,
01:06:31.322 --> 01:06:34.322
Kathleen's address and favorites was Kathleen, so I say,
01:06:34.960 --> 01:06:37.960
If I said, call Kathleen, it would call Kathleen.
01:06:38.570 --> 01:06:43.570
If Kathleen has two numbers, and at one point Kathleen had 5,
01:06:43.570 --> 01:06:49.525
Because she was that kind of person. I also have to say which phone I
wanted to call.
01:06:49.526 --> 01:06:56.000
So, if I said, call Kathleen iPhone, I don't have to specify anything
other than
01:06:56.604 --> 01:06:59.604
Make sure that her contact says iPhone.
01:06:59.606 --> 01:07:06.743
rather than just mobile phone, or cell phone, or desk phone, or work
phone, has to say iPhone, which is one of the choices.
01:07:07.458 --> 01:07:10.458
They say, call Kathleen iPhone, it would call her iPhone.
01:07:10.459 --> 01:07:13.878
If it was somebody else, somebody named Rick,
01:07:14.690 --> 01:07:19.690
And I had 3 ricks, then I have to have the last name as well, and again,
if they have multiple phone numbers,
01:07:19.690 --> 01:07:24.598
It'll ask me which one to call, and I mention this because…
01:07:24.599 --> 01:07:29.378
If you can use your phone with your car in CarPlay,
01:07:30.229 --> 01:07:37.229
It's a really easy way to call people with your hands on the wheel,
and you're not distracted, you just say,
01:07:37.422 --> 01:07:39.422
Um…
01:07:39.983 --> 01:07:42.983
you tell a certain robotic voice to…
01:07:43.561 --> 01:07:49.561
call Kathleen, and it'll call Kathleen. It's a… it's a… it's… you
have to kind of think through in advance
01:07:50.355 --> 01:07:53.355
what Siri will ask in order to avoid…
01:07:54.396 --> 01:07:56.396
a bunch of back and forth.
01:07:57.018 --> 01:07:59.018
But it works extremely well.
01:07:59.110 --> 01:08:04.110
With CarPlay, it also works with directions, so you can say, uh,
direct…
01:08:04.111 --> 01:08:05.187
Can you ask?
01:08:05.807 --> 01:08:07.807
It…
01:08:07.875 --> 01:08:09.875
you can say,
01:08:10.441 --> 01:08:12.441
I think… hmm.
01:08:13.158 --> 01:08:15.158
Uh, you can say directions to…
01:08:15.884 --> 01:08:21.884
a hospital in Port Angeles. If you're distinctive enough, you can say
Olympic Medical,
01:08:23.142 --> 01:08:28.142
Um, I don't remember what the… Olympic Medical Hospital, Port Angeles.
It'll give you directions there.
01:08:29.223 --> 01:08:36.223
But if you say, directions to Chipotle, it'll say, do you want
Poulsbo? Do you want Port Angeles? Do you want Victoria?
01:08:36.997 --> 01:08:39.997
And you don't want to get into that argument with your…
01:08:40.771 --> 01:08:44.771
computer while you're going down the highway at 50 miles an hour, so…
01:08:45.400 --> 01:08:48.400
just kind of think through in advance what it is you want to do,
01:08:48.414 --> 01:08:50.414
And it's fairly smooth.
01:08:50.444 --> 01:08:52.444
Um…
01:08:53.183 --> 01:08:55.183
And if you've never used… if you have a…
01:08:55.500 --> 01:09:01.500
a, um, car that's capable of using CarPlay, I highly recommend that you
give it a shot.
01:09:01.501 --> 01:09:05.264
CarPlay comes in two versions, depending upon
01:09:06.023 --> 01:09:11.023
How old your car is. My car came with CarPlay, but it was wired CarPlay.
01:09:12.063 --> 01:09:27.063
So you have to plug the phone in every time. And I found out I didn't
like that because, uh, several times I would plug the phone into the
car in order to use it in the car, and I'd forget it was plugged into
in the car, and I go into the bank, and the bank says, uh,
01:09:27.602 --> 01:09:32.602
Could you give me your blah blah blah? And I looked for my phone,
and it's, I can't do that because it's in the car.
01:09:33.500 --> 01:09:36.500
So what I did is I got a dongle off of, uh…
01:09:36.500 --> 01:09:41.149
Amazon that plugs in, and it sets up a Bluetooth connection,
01:09:41.220 --> 01:09:43.220
between the car,
01:09:43.531 --> 01:09:49.531
And the, um, phone, so that the car can be sitting in my pocket and
still work with
01:09:49.531 --> 01:09:55.489
CarPlay. The dongles run around 50, 60 bucks, and…
01:09:55.490 --> 01:10:00.258
In my case, it was well worth it. The other advantage is that if you…
01:10:01.283 --> 01:10:04.283
If you had the Carplay… if you had your phone plugged into the…
01:10:04.871 --> 01:10:10.871
car, and you got out of the car, some people would come along, see that
there was an iPhone in the car,
01:10:11.068 --> 01:10:22.068
break into the car. It wouldn't do them any good, because mine's
password protected, and they could never use it, but I'd still be stuck
with a several hundred dollar bill because of the damage they did to
the car, so…
01:10:22.513 --> 01:10:26.513
Not having it visible in the car because it's in my pocket.
01:10:26.513 --> 01:10:28.426
was a good thing.
01:10:30.125 --> 01:10:32.125
Any questions?
01:10:35.980 --> 01:10:38.980
Is there anything you wanted to do with your phone that I didn't cover
in the past?
01:10:39.580 --> 01:10:41.580
3 months?
01:10:50.341 --> 01:10:52.341
Apparently…
01:10:52.561 --> 01:10:56.561
If you have the Gemini app, you can't use it with the…
01:10:56.561 --> 01:10:58.564
CarPlay.
01:10:59.684 --> 01:11:04.684
It, um… it won't put directions up on the map or anything like that.
01:11:06.443 --> 01:11:10.443
Um, CarPlay does work with Google Maps, with…
01:11:10.444 --> 01:11:12.340
Yeah, oh yeah, but not Gemini.
01:11:13.219 --> 01:11:15.219
the app… there's an app called Gemini.
01:11:15.220 --> 01:11:20.708
Yeah, but I think that Apple is waiting for their release of
01:11:21.322 --> 01:11:25.322
26.45. Apple apparently has an agreement
01:11:26.243 --> 01:11:30.243
it's been rumored, I don't really know, that they have an agreement with,
uh…
01:11:30.458 --> 01:11:32.458
with, uh, Google to have
01:11:32.777 --> 01:11:39.777
Google be the back end for some of… some of the things that Siri does.
I suspect that…
01:11:40.065 --> 01:11:50.065
they're having a painful negotiation. On the one hand, Google wants
access to Apple's 2 billion customers, but on the other hand,
01:11:50.791 --> 01:11:57.791
Apple doesn't want to give up their reputation for privacy and security.
So Apple wants to send
01:11:57.920 --> 01:11:59.920
Google tokens, which
01:12:00.100 --> 01:12:02.100
which don't tell them who's reusing
01:12:02.725 --> 01:12:08.725
the app, and Google probably wants more information, so they're probably
arguing about that.
01:12:09.943 --> 01:12:11.943
But once they've figured that out,
01:12:12.237 --> 01:12:19.237
Apple will probably just incorporate it into Siri, so you won't… you
wouldn't use the Gemini app, you'd probably just talk to Siri.
01:12:20.412 --> 01:12:24.412
Will that be 26.4, 26.5, or 27?
01:12:25.262 --> 01:12:29.262
I do not know. There is…
01:12:30.367 --> 01:12:39.367
There is, um, a lot of pressure for Apple to improve Apple intelligence,
and one way to do that is if it has Gemini in the back end, that's
one way to do it.
01:12:40.329 --> 01:12:44.329
And there's an awful lot of angst in Google's camp.
01:12:44.281 --> 01:12:50.281
Because they want access to more customers. There's a big AI war going
on right now.
01:12:50.661 --> 01:12:54.661
And of the ones that I played with, the ones that I'm happiest with,
01:12:55.351 --> 01:12:58.351
Adobe, uh, Firefly,
01:12:58.550 --> 01:13:04.550
And you have to be an Adobe customer to really use them, um, usefully.
01:13:04.551 --> 01:13:06.558
And the other one is Gemini.
01:13:06.708 --> 01:13:16.708
Uh, but with Gemini, what I don't like is the fact that Gemini keeps the
information that you type into it. With… if they have this
01:13:18.104 --> 01:13:23.104
agreement with Apple, and Apple anonymizes the information, then…
01:13:23.729 --> 01:13:28.729
I'd be much more comfortable playing with it. But in terms of Google,
I've done some clever things.
01:13:29.226 --> 01:13:34.226
The illustrations that I've used for these three… last three, uh, um…
01:13:35.385 --> 01:13:39.385
presentations that I've stuck up on the website. Those were done with, um…
01:13:40.121 --> 01:13:44.121
Google Gemini. I described what I wanted, and then it drew the picture.
01:13:44.390 --> 01:13:49.390
So, the old man trying to eat an iPhone, and the princess with the umbrella,
01:13:49.605 --> 01:13:52.605
And the iPhone's raining down on top of our… those were done with Gemini.
01:13:53.702 --> 01:13:55.702
Does it do better than the playground?
01:13:56.685 --> 01:13:58.685
Yes, it does, because it's, um…
01:13:58.685 --> 01:14:03.245
The playground is… gives you a fairly restrictive, uh…
01:14:04.222 --> 01:14:08.222
set of parameters, because it's trying to make sure you don't give it
anything
01:14:09.135 --> 01:14:15.135
confidential. So, for example, I did a… I'm not going to show it to
you, because my…
01:14:15.988 --> 01:14:23.988
Daughter would kill me. But I have a picture of my granddaughter that
I turned her into a Japanese princess. And my…
01:14:24.914 --> 01:14:29.914
granddaughter, uh, her father's English, her mother's an American,
she doesn't look the least bit…
01:14:30.185 --> 01:14:35.185
Japanese, but, um, playground turned into a Japanese, uh, princess.
01:14:36.199 --> 01:14:38.199
And it did a really, really good job.
01:14:39.142 --> 01:14:42.142
But all of the computing for that was done
01:14:42.866 --> 01:14:44.866
on Playground. It never went to Apple.
01:14:47.520 --> 01:14:49.520
with… with Gemini,
01:14:51.331 --> 01:14:53.331
Gemini is capable of doing things that…
01:14:54.047 --> 01:15:00.047
it's not limited to just with your iPad or iPhone or Mac can do. And…
01:15:00.141 --> 01:15:02.141
Apple has it.
01:15:02.142 --> 01:15:04.472
So did it look… did it look more like a Photoshop of…
01:15:04.963 --> 01:15:06.963
of the photo, or…?
01:15:06.963 --> 01:15:17.794
It looked like a computer-generated image, a high-quality computer.
I mean, it had shading and everything, but it looked like my
granddaughter.
01:15:17.932 --> 01:15:24.932
Um, as a Japanese princess. I even specified I wanted a blue, uh, kimono,
and I gave her a blue kimono.
01:15:26.273 --> 01:15:30.273
Um, so, you know, it was really quite well done.
01:15:31.307 --> 01:15:37.307
That's not to say that I disprove of what Playground is doing, but uh…
01:15:37.708 --> 01:15:40.708
That playground is trying as much as possible
01:15:40.709 --> 01:15:43.545
to do 100% of the work
01:15:43.546 --> 01:15:46.943
on your phone, or on your iPad, or on your…
01:15:47.027 --> 01:15:54.027
Mac. And because of that, it has access to your photos. So you say,
01:15:54.545 --> 01:15:58.545
use this photo, and it'll use that photo and turn it into something else,
01:15:58.546 --> 01:16:05.673
But it doesn't go beyond your computer. It's not… it's not sending it
up to Apple, so Apple never has a copy of that photo.
01:16:05.920 --> 01:16:07.920
Uh, with Gemini, I think…
01:16:08.344 --> 01:16:13.344
Apple wants those same kind of controls, but they also want you to be
able to
01:16:14.102 --> 01:16:20.102
send anonymized data up there. So, for example, if you had a… if you had
a plot to…
01:16:20.908 --> 01:16:25.908
defraud, uh, Bank of America of $100 billion. I suggest that you not
01:16:26.801 --> 01:16:28.801
tell Gemini that.
01:16:29.470 --> 01:16:33.470
And even if Apple anonymizes it, probably not a good idea, because
01:16:33.471 --> 01:16:39.369
Apple might not say where it came from, but Google's still going to
retain that information.
01:16:40.302 --> 01:16:42.302
So you have to be a little bit careful, but uh…
01:16:42.859 --> 01:16:44.859
The way Apple is doing their computer
01:16:45.342 --> 01:16:50.342
security and privacy is very impressive. And in fact,
01:16:51.102 --> 01:16:54.102
you… if you… I don't know if any of you have a Windows machine,
01:16:54.550 --> 01:16:59.550
But Microsoft is coming closer and closer to Apple's point of view.
01:16:59.550 --> 01:17:09.257
Because the, uh, they've realized that Apple's reputation is built on
being trustworthy, and people don't really trust Microsoft, so…
01:17:10.058 --> 01:17:12.058
The only way to change that is to…
01:17:12.366 --> 01:17:16.366
change how they approach privacy and security. And…
01:17:16.367 --> 01:17:17.612
Yeah, Hewlett Packard…
01:17:17.612 --> 01:17:23.126
is now selling their laptops with Linux in it instead of Windows.
01:17:23.472 --> 01:17:27.472
Linux is actually more insecure than Windows.
01:17:27.704 --> 01:17:29.704
Really?
01:17:29.704 --> 01:17:32.427
The reason why it's more ins… well, yes, because it requires a higher
degree of, uh,
01:17:33.788 --> 01:17:41.788
understanding of systems, uh, engineering and system security in order
for you to secure it. Linux is basically just a…
01:17:42.248 --> 01:17:47.248
It's a box of tinker toys, and you put it together. And most people
don't know
01:17:47.204 --> 01:17:50.204
how to build things with Tinker toys.
01:17:49.824 --> 01:17:54.824
So, which True Unix workstation that requires an IT security manager.
01:17:54.824 --> 01:17:59.284
Well, it's not really Unix, but it's Unix-like, yes. And if you don't
know…
01:17:59.803 --> 01:18:02.803
If you don't know Unix, then you're not gonna…
01:18:03.606 --> 01:18:05.606
get very far. Most, um…
01:18:05.607 --> 01:18:06.441
Right.
01:18:07.403 --> 01:18:09.403
you just can't get very far.
01:18:09.662 --> 01:18:11.662
Right.
01:18:11.663 --> 01:18:14.976
the way in which I see that people use it a lot on laptops.
01:18:14.888 --> 01:18:21.888
is they use it with a shell over the top of it, so the… the shell looks
like it's a GUI interface.
01:18:22.426 --> 01:18:26.426
And they push buttons, and they don't necessarily have to know commands,
but…
01:18:26.878 --> 01:18:34.878
If they don't know how to update it, then they're going to be just
constantly falling, uh, behind, and Linux doesn
01:18:35.188 --> 01:18:37.188
Oh, it doesn't.
01:18:37.189 --> 01:18:38.244
No.
01:18:39.961 --> 01:18:41.961
You can build something that'll do that, but…
01:18:42.860 --> 01:18:44.860
Now, it doesn't do automatic updates.
01:18:45.546 --> 01:18:50.546
Um, so… but Windows 11, as an example, adopted…
01:18:50.957 --> 01:18:59.957
Apple's idea of having a security chip, so there's a security chip in
Windows 11 laptops and desktops, and um…
01:19:01.126 --> 01:19:06.126
you can… you can screw with Windows 11 so that it doesn't require it,
but that's kind of…
01:19:07.172 --> 01:19:12.172
stupid. Uh, it's better not just buy a Windows machine and make sure it's
got a laptop.
01:19:13.273 --> 01:19:18.273
Uh, it's got this chip inside. So a lot of things that Apple has done
over the years, um,
01:19:19.159 --> 01:19:22.159
Microsoft has come around to thinking that maybe it's a good idea.
01:19:23.323 --> 01:19:25.323
And, um…
01:19:26.087 --> 01:19:30.087
that's what I think they're trying to do with their partnership with, uh…
01:19:30.804 --> 01:19:35.804
Google. But so far, all I've read is… all I know are rumors. I haven't
even talked to anyone
01:19:35.824 --> 01:19:37.824
high-up level, who might…
01:19:38.334 --> 01:19:42.334
Know more than I'd have. I just know what I read in the, uh…
01:19:43.025 --> 01:19:45.025
industry publications.
01:19:46.922 --> 01:19:49.922
And it's a… it's a complicated thing, because I've seen…
01:19:49.942 --> 01:19:51.942
As an example, um…
01:19:52.424 --> 01:19:54.424
This woman in, um…
01:19:55.857 --> 01:19:57.857
Oklahoma. Um…
01:19:58.801 --> 01:20:01.801
uploaded a bunch of documentation on her…
01:20:02.175 --> 01:20:05.175
divorce that she was contemplating.
01:20:05.925 --> 01:20:07.925
into one of the AIs.
01:20:08.134 --> 01:20:16.134
And her husband, who was afraid that his wife was cheating on him,
uploaded a bunch of stuff about it, too, and came back with references.
01:20:16.423 --> 01:20:18.423
To her divorce, um…
01:20:19.758 --> 01:20:25.758
application, and that was not something she'd told him about, because he
was, uh…
01:20:27.025 --> 01:20:32.025
rather abusive, and that's one of the problems that you have with the
current AIs, that they…
01:20:33.343 --> 01:20:36.343
Um, they cannot tell the truth from a falsehood.
01:20:37.343 --> 01:20:39.343
If you upload War of the Worlds,
01:20:39.963 --> 01:20:41.963
which was written in the…
01:20:43.003 --> 01:20:45.003
1910, something like that.
01:20:45.194 --> 01:20:47.194
It'll take it as gospel truth.
01:20:49.204 --> 01:20:51.204
So…
01:20:52.642 --> 01:20:55.642
Telling it the difference between what is real and what isn't real.
01:20:55.727 --> 01:21:00.727
Um, is sometimes difficult. What is private and what is not private?
01:21:01.484 --> 01:21:06.484
It has no sense… AIs have no concept of privacy at all.
01:21:07.578 --> 01:21:11.578
And the AI that we currently have isn't really even truly AI.
01:21:11.578 --> 01:21:17.706
It's… it's called Generative AI, which means you're using a computer to
help you generate stuff.
01:21:18.109 --> 01:21:21.109
But it's not autonomous AI.
01:21:21.087 --> 01:21:23.087
It can't think and…
01:21:23.830 --> 01:21:25.830
problem-solve and find new problems on your own.
01:21:26.552 --> 01:21:29.552
people, we think of problems to solve.
01:21:29.553 --> 01:21:33.586
That's why, when we're sitting in a doctor's office, we'll sit and play
solitaire.
01:21:33.587 --> 01:21:41.910
Why? Because we're bored stiff, and so we find a problem that we can
play with, even if it's solitaire or crossword puzzles and so on and
so forth.
01:21:42.006 --> 01:21:44.006
AI cannot currently do that.
01:21:44.163 --> 01:21:46.163
So it's… it's basically just…
01:21:46.585 --> 01:21:48.585
regurgitating things that we already know.
01:21:48.586 --> 01:21:54.433
And it can do a good job at, uh, if there's a service called Grammarly,
01:21:54.784 --> 01:21:59.784
that it's a free and a paid service. With Grammarly, it'll check your
spelling
01:22:00.203 --> 01:22:03.203
Uh, if you're typing a message in a web browser.
01:22:04.166 --> 01:22:09.166
They'll check your spelling and check your grammar, and say, that's
the wrong tense, and you need a comma there.
01:22:09.630 --> 01:22:11.630
does a really good job of that.
01:22:12.444 --> 01:22:16.444
Pages does that, Microsoft Word does that, a lot of things do that.
01:22:17.247 --> 01:22:19.247
That is not really…
01:22:20.528 --> 01:22:25.528
AI, and that's what most of the AI engines do today. They basically
parse language.
01:22:25.529 --> 01:22:27.612
They really can't have a, uh…
01:22:27.613 --> 01:22:34.316
a new thought. On the other hand, you can go into ChatGPT and tell it to
write a limerick. Say,
01:22:35.068 --> 01:22:38.068
Write me a limerick about leprechauns and…
01:22:38.446 --> 01:22:40.446
toadstools, and it'll do it.
01:22:41.344 --> 01:22:46.344
And… because it's just manipulating language, and it knows the rules for
language.
01:22:47.284 --> 01:22:56.284
And when it comes to rules for language, that's actually fairly clever.
The Japanese were the ones who worked on this the longest, because the
Japanese, to graduate from high school,
01:22:56.606 --> 01:22:59.606
You have to know 17,500
01:22:59.924 --> 01:23:01.924
Chinese characters.
01:23:02.506 --> 01:23:04.506
Plus, you have to know Romanji,
01:23:04.506 --> 01:23:06.530
And, uh…
01:23:06.530 --> 01:23:12.115
Hiragana and Katagana, which are two different syllabaries written in
Japanese characters.
01:23:12.047 --> 01:23:17.047
And you have to know Romanji. Romanji is Japanese in Roman characters.
01:23:17.850 --> 01:23:23.850
And reading a newspaper article, you'll see Chinese characters, hiragana,
katakana, and Romanji.
01:23:25.147 --> 01:23:30.147
This places a huge burden on graduating from school in Japan.
01:23:30.835 --> 01:23:37.835
But it almost is impossible when it comes to computers and typewriters.
If you go see a Japanese printing press,
01:23:38.126 --> 01:23:42.126
They were all manual, because there were so many different character
combinations.
01:23:43.065 --> 01:23:45.065
So, Japan Telegraph and Telephone
01:23:45.550 --> 01:23:49.550
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, NTT.
01:23:49.551 --> 01:23:54.634
Started working on natural language processing, where you could talk to
01:23:54.634 --> 01:24:02.168
machines, and it would transcribe them. They started doing work on this
in the 70s, and when I was living in Japan in the 1980s, they gave some
01:24:03.114 --> 01:24:08.114
demonstrations, and I was very impressed with them. And the reason why it
was so important to the Japanese
01:24:08.993 --> 01:24:12.993
is that they didn't want to create a keyboard that had 20,000
01:24:13.560 --> 01:24:17.560
keys on it. So, if you could just talk to the computer, and it could
turn it into
01:24:17.561 --> 01:24:19.726
written Japanese, that's a huge…
01:24:19.749 --> 01:24:25.749
benefit for them. So they really pressed hard for this. In the United
States, it was done by…
01:24:26.917 --> 01:24:33.917
Um… trying to remember the name of the company [Kurzwil]. It was a
gentleman who wanted to create, um…
01:24:33.849 --> 01:24:39.849
Systems for the blind, so that the blind could use telephones, and the
blind could write.
01:24:41.587 --> 01:24:44.587
Um, they could send things to fax machines and so on and so forth.
01:24:44.587 --> 01:24:53.620
And so he started doing natural language processing in English, so that
the blind could communicate with the outside world and get jobs and
so on and so forth.
01:24:53.620 --> 01:25:02.014
And that was the big push in the United States. So what we're seeing
today with what they call AI, it's really just a step above
01:25:02.637 --> 01:25:08.637
what they were doing in the 70s and 80s, because it's mostly with
language processing.
01:25:08.638 --> 01:25:18.017
In my case, you'll notice what I've used it for are illustrations.
Why? Because I'm a terrible artist. If I can describe it, and it can
make a picture, that's great.
01:25:18.798 --> 01:25:25.798
But that's still… I'm the one who's coming up with the problem, and I'm
the one who's judging whether or not it's solved. It's not the computer.
01:25:26.515 --> 01:25:29.515
So, it's not really intelligence. It's a… it's a tool.
01:25:31.147 --> 01:25:33.147
End of my editorial here.
01:25:37.274 --> 01:25:40.274
So, so with that, I have a suggestion for next month.
01:25:43.778 --> 01:25:48.778
Um, about a conversation about AI and how to get started in it. Some of us
have
01:25:48.777 --> 01:25:53.777
No clue, um, and I really would like to learn a bit about it, but…
01:25:54.730 --> 01:25:57.730
But I don't know even how to get started, so I've…
01:25:57.731 --> 01:26:02.957
I messed around with GPT, or ChatGPT a tiny bit, and…
01:26:03.458 --> 01:26:08.458
perplexity, or something like that. I've messed around with that a little
bit, but I don't know what I'm doing.
01:26:09.002 --> 01:26:14.002
Well, I can… I'll give a… I'll give that some thought. Um…
01:26:14.513 --> 01:26:20.513
I'll give that some thought, but as some suggestions, um, if you're running macOS, uh,
01:26:21.392 --> 01:26:28.392
26, or iOS 26, or iPad 26, there is something on your machine somewhere
called Playground.
01:26:28.738 --> 01:26:33.738
And Playground is the image playground that Apple has, uh, set up.
01:26:34.542 --> 01:26:43.542
And just play around with that. All it can do is draw pictures. It comes
up with some ideas on general things you can do, and you can then type
in descriptions and
01:26:44.833 --> 01:26:51.833
Play with that a bit. The other thing to try, because it's reasonably safe, as long as you don't tell it… don't give it…
01:26:52.398 --> 01:26:57.398
personal information, is use Google's Gemini, and to get access to that,
01:26:58.233 --> 01:27:03.233
Just go into Google, into the search bar, and say, Google Gemini, and
they'll take you to a page
01:27:03.345 --> 01:27:05.345
And you can sit there and then…
01:27:05.370 --> 01:27:07.370
Uh, and type out
01:27:07.618 --> 01:27:13.618
questions that you want it answered, but the real fun comes when you…
when you want it to draw something.
01:27:13.619 --> 01:27:15.845
And to do that, you say,
01:27:15.870 --> 01:27:20.870
draw me a photo of a dragon eating a banana.
01:27:21.757 --> 01:27:30.757
And just sit back, and it'll give you different choices. How about
this one? How about this one? How about this one? And you pick the
one you want, and next thing you know, you have a picture of a…
01:27:30.814 --> 01:27:35.814
dragon eating a banana. And the reason why I suggest Gemini is that
01:27:35.984 --> 01:27:39.984
it can handle text, which is nice, and it can also handle…
01:27:40.530 --> 01:27:44.530
um, things like, it'll make short video clips, and it can do…
01:27:44.531 --> 01:27:47.046
photographs. Speaking of which,
01:27:47.192 --> 01:27:52.192
Pages is also hooked into Apple Intelligence. So, if you…
01:27:52.660 --> 01:27:59.660
If you wrote a letter to somebody, and you think, well, that's kind
of redundant, and so on and so forth, you can ask, um…
01:27:59.661 --> 01:28:05.830
Apple Pages to go through and summarize it, or make it more concise,
and it'll do that.
01:28:07.028 --> 01:28:20.028
If you're… if you're running a Mac OS 26 right now, you can set it up
so that when it's… before it shows you the message, it'll give you a
little alert that's a summary of that message. And that's done with
Apple Intelligence.
01:28:20.127 --> 01:28:24.127
And that's happening right now, if you just set it up that way.
01:28:24.733 --> 01:28:30.733
Um, if in settings, there's a whole section there for Apple Intelligence.
It's its own little…
01:28:31.421 --> 01:28:38.421
menu entry, and you just go flip what other switches you want, and
it works with pages, it works with numbers,
01:28:38.326 --> 01:28:40.326
It works with, uh…
01:28:41.071 --> 01:28:48.071
Image Playground, uh, it works with Siri, um, it works with a lot of stuff
right now.
01:28:49.099 --> 01:28:55.099
Uh, it's just… it's really good on the text part. It's not so great on the
other parts.
01:28:57.011 --> 01:28:59.011
Oh, look…
01:28:59.012 --> 01:29:04.141
Very good. So that helps. I mean, uh, one of the things I've tried to do
is there's some apps associated with, uh,
01:29:04.948 --> 01:29:15.948
3D printing that I want to be able to describe something and have it
develop a model for me. And that does work, but say, for instance, you
tell it you want it to
01:29:16.356 --> 01:29:18.356
draw, um, a tugboat
01:29:19.359 --> 01:29:24.359
with heavy armament, you know, like rockets and missiles and that sort
of thing, it will.
01:29:24.603 --> 01:29:30.603
And it'll actually make a model out of it for you. But I haven't been
able to figure out how to
01:29:30.604 --> 01:29:40.842
Um, make the instructions more concise. In other words, you know, after
you tell it you want rockets and guns and things, and it's got an idea
there,
01:29:42.164 --> 01:29:45.164
You know, I want to specify I want 4 rockets, you know?
01:29:45.281 --> 01:29:48.281
How do I add that on to what I've already done?
01:29:48.836 --> 01:29:57.836
Yeah, the best way to do that with most of the AIs right now is just
repeat what you said before, but you add in more adjectives and adverbs
to say,
01:29:58.254 --> 01:30:04.254
a red tugboat, like with my… with my daughter. It's a photograph of my
daughter.
01:30:04.500 --> 01:30:10.500
And I said I wanted to be a Japanese princess, and it did something.
I said, well, I wanted to have a crown.
01:30:10.500 --> 01:30:15.747
Japanese princesses don't come with crowns, but if she was going to be
a princess, my English
01:30:16.452 --> 01:30:19.452
granddaughters gonna think she's gonna need a crown. So, uh…
01:30:19.736 --> 01:30:24.736
She has a crown, and one of the down that she was wearing to be
01:30:25.621 --> 01:30:27.621
blue, so I specified blue. So I just…
01:30:31.238 --> 01:30:33.238
Yeah.
01:30:33.239 --> 01:30:39.619
kept on refining my instructions until I got something that I liked.
And that's basically… that's how it works with all of these right now.
You just ask for the same thing, but just getting more and more descriptive.
And sometimes…
01:30:39.619 --> 01:30:44.487
You'll ask for something, and you say, that's terrible, and you just start
over again.
01:30:44.487 --> 01:30:47.560
Because, again, it… it's just a…
01:30:48.208 --> 01:30:50.208
It's just a program someplace, and…
01:30:50.810 --> 01:30:53.810
They can be remarkably stupid.
01:30:53.833 --> 01:30:55.833
Um…
01:30:55.995 --> 01:30:57.995
We had, um…
01:30:58.095 --> 01:31:06.095
a, um, thermostat. It was a thermostat for a building in Silver Spring,
Maryland, that I worked in.
01:31:06.782 --> 01:31:15.782
Uh, we didn't like the fact that the… you could be in different parts
of the building, you could, uh, roast in one part and freeze in another,
so they came up with a new
01:31:16.710 --> 01:31:19.710
thermostat system that was going to, um…
01:31:20.109 --> 01:31:23.109
treat the entire building properly, and so on and so forth.
01:31:24.084 --> 01:31:35.084
One slight problem. It was made in Europe by a major… by a major German
company, which you can probably guess just because it was a thermostat.
And it was set for centigrade.
01:31:35.929 --> 01:31:39.929
And so the first thing they did is, we want everything at 72 degrees.
01:31:39.926 --> 01:31:41.926
That was not a
01:31:42.611 --> 01:31:47.611
pleasant experience. Your three-quarters of the way to boiling at that
point.
01:31:48.339 --> 01:31:51.339
Um, and we didn't quite get to boiling, but um…
01:31:51.347 --> 01:31:54.347
It took them quite a while to figure out what was wrong.
01:31:55.036 --> 01:32:04.036
And it was hilarious, because I worked at a science agency. Everything
we did was run in Celsius. But the building engineer was not a scientist.
01:32:04.570 --> 01:32:06.570
So, uh, um…
01:32:07.822 --> 01:32:12.822
You know, they're just machines, and they do what you tell them to do,
even if it's stupid.
01:32:14.436 --> 01:32:19.436
Yeah, everything having to do with 3D printing is… I mean, you can convert
it to, uh…
01:32:19.639 --> 01:32:25.639
non-metric, but everything initially is done in metrics, so…
01:32:25.639 --> 01:32:30.727
I mean, I even have whole sets of metric screws and nuts and all that
stuff just
01:32:31.538 --> 01:32:34.538
for that stuff, so I don't have to convert and all that, so…
01:32:34.539 --> 01:32:40.612
Well, there are 8 billion people on the planet, and only 300 million
of them use English, so…
01:32:40.613 --> 01:32:42.437
Yeah, yeah.
01:32:42.437 --> 01:32:44.074
We're outvoted by humanity.
01:32:44.272 --> 01:32:46.272
Yep.
01:32:47.624 --> 01:32:49.624
Any other questions, comments?
01:32:50.706 --> 01:32:52.706
I have a question about the iPhone.
01:32:52.707 --> 01:32:54.608
Yes.
01:32:54.609 --> 01:32:59.527
I know that you can, without an Apple Watch, you can use the iPhone when
you go out to walk.
01:33:00.807 --> 01:33:02.807
It'll count your steps and all that sort of thing.
01:33:03.686 --> 01:33:05.686
Does it also generate a map
01:33:06.094 --> 01:33:08.094
My wife has a, uh,
01:33:08.205 --> 01:33:11.205
Apple Watch with her iPhone,
01:33:11.398 --> 01:33:13.398
And she can walk…
01:33:13.726 --> 01:33:16.726
or ride a bike, or do whatever, without the iPhone.
01:33:17.385 --> 01:33:20.385
And the watch will generate a map of where she went.
01:33:21.282 --> 01:33:26.282
Uh, it… it's probably not the watch that's generating the map, it's
probably an app, like Strava.
01:33:26.935 --> 01:33:28.935
can do that. It's…
01:33:28.935 --> 01:33:30.729
Nope, no apps like this, just Apple stuff.
01:33:32.229 --> 01:33:35.229
I don't know of anything that Apple has that'll generate a map.
01:33:35.985 --> 01:33:37.985
Well, I'm telling you that hers does.
01:33:37.985 --> 01:33:39.985
Okay, I'll have to…
01:33:39.986 --> 01:33:41.906
It's just… it's just part of the information that it has, you know.
01:33:42.068 --> 01:33:46.068
How many steps you took, how far you went, and all that, and then it has
a map.
01:33:46.575 --> 01:33:48.575
The traces where you went.
01:33:48.834 --> 01:33:50.834
Yeah, cuz…
01:33:50.834 --> 01:33:52.407
And you can… you can blow it up, and, you know, it'll show you…
01:33:53.769 --> 01:33:56.769
what streets you were on and all that, or what trails you were on, and
so forth.
01:33:57.076 --> 01:34:02.076
I just wondered if the… if the iPhone without an Apple Watch did that.
01:34:09.664 --> 01:34:11.664
Okay.
01:34:11.665 --> 01:34:12.886
Um, I don't believe that the watch itself has that capability, but I
will investigate. I do know that the app Strava…
01:34:13.550 --> 01:34:16.550
Um, which is spelled… how is it spelled?
01:34:18.649 --> 01:34:20.649
It's T-R-B-V-A.
01:34:20.650 --> 01:34:20.750
S-T-R-A-V-A. Um…
01:34:20.751 --> 01:34:21.945
Yes.
01:34:21.946 --> 01:34:23.907
It can track whether you're walking,
01:34:24.329 --> 01:34:27.329
riding a bike, riding an e-bike, running,
01:34:27.841 --> 01:34:32.841
skiing, all kinds of different activity, and it all… it does draw a map.
01:34:33.057 --> 01:34:42.057
Uh, that's what Strava does, and it'll do that whether you have it
as a phone in your pocket, or you're using an Apple Watch. Um, but I'm
not…
01:34:42.331 --> 01:34:46.331
aware of anything inherent to the watch that'll create a map.
01:34:47.251 --> 01:34:50.251
But like I said, I will… I will do some investigation.
01:34:50.252 --> 01:34:52.844
No, I don't… I don't know if it's the watch or the phone, but it
01:34:52.969 --> 01:34:55.969
But wherever the… wherever she goes with the watch,
01:34:56.288 --> 01:35:00.288
Without the phone, it's still… there's a map associated with it when you
look at
01:35:00.676 --> 01:35:02.676
Well…
01:35:02.677 --> 01:35:03.506
You know, when you look at what she did for the workout.
01:35:03.507 --> 01:35:13.940
Yeah, well, if you have Strava on your watch, which I do, and I don't
have my phone with me, sure enough, it'll track what I'm doing very
accurately and give me a map
01:35:14.653 --> 01:35:19.653
And also tell me the elevation, whether I went up 200 feet, all kinds
of stuff.
01:35:19.654 --> 01:35:19.963
Right, right.
01:35:20.718 --> 01:35:23.718
Um, but that's… that's Strava doing that work. It's not, uh…
01:35:24.069 --> 01:35:26.069
It's not the Apple Watch by itself.
01:35:26.702 --> 01:35:28.702
Well, like I said, I don't know…
01:35:29.086 --> 01:35:31.086
I don't know whether it's the…
01:35:33.485 --> 01:35:35.485
Yeah, it doesn't…
01:35:35.486 --> 01:35:36.274
She doesn't have the phone with her, so the watch is recording all that
stuff, but then
01:35:35.890 --> 01:35:39.890
The watch is recording it because it has an app on there doing that work.
01:35:39.890 --> 01:35:40.948
Yeah, but then you look in the Apple…
01:35:41.104 --> 01:35:43.104
you know, the little Apple health thing with the
01:35:43.829 --> 01:35:47.829
circles the rings. You look in there for the summary,
01:35:48.064 --> 01:35:50.064
And there's a map…
01:35:50.908 --> 01:35:54.908
As part of whatever the activity was, whether it was riding a bike or…
01:35:55.595 --> 01:35:57.595
running or walking, or canoeing, or…
01:35:58.036 --> 01:36:00.036
Huh.
01:36:00.036 --> 01:36:01.345
But especially, you know, especially walking or hiking,
01:36:01.906 --> 01:36:03.906
It has the… it shows the map.
01:36:06.089 --> 01:36:09.089
Well, I haven't seen that, but I will look.
01:36:09.313 --> 01:36:11.313
Because if…
01:36:11.735 --> 01:36:15.735
If it'll do that without using Strava, that's fine with me.
01:36:17.887 --> 01:36:19.887
I will… I will investigate.
01:36:19.721 --> 01:36:21.721
Okay, thank you.
01:36:21.722 --> 01:36:23.608
Does Strava have a monthly thing?
01:36:23.770 --> 01:36:27.770
They have… you can get a free account, but it's really a trial account.
01:36:27.996 --> 01:36:33.996
Uh, then it doesn't cost you anything, but it really wants you… yes,
they really try really hard to…
01:36:35.069 --> 01:36:37.069
have you spend money. It depends upon…
01:36:37.662 --> 01:36:41.662
If you think about it, if you had a gym membership, it'd be a lot more
than Strava, so…
01:36:42.459 --> 01:36:48.459
It's not a bad deal, because it'll tell you a lot more than the guy that
you see at the gym.
01:36:54.855 --> 01:36:56.855
Where on the Apple Watch do you access
01:36:57.060 --> 01:37:01.060
you know, that information that your wife gets, which is the little icon
that you would tap.
01:37:01.901 --> 01:37:06.901
Listen, it's not… you don't… well, I don't know if you can access it on
the Apple Watch or not.
01:37:07.555 --> 01:37:09.555
Somehow I've lost the…
01:37:10.576 --> 01:37:12.576
But when she comes back,
01:37:13.418 --> 01:37:15.418
I can… I usually take the phone line
01:37:16.137 --> 01:37:20.137
hiking while she's going somewhere else with only her watch.
01:37:20.855 --> 01:37:22.855
On the phone, you look at that…
01:37:24.668 --> 01:37:28.668
I don't know if it's called the Health app, but it's the one with the
three circles, like…
01:37:28.668 --> 01:37:30.674
You know, the activity rings.
01:37:30.675 --> 01:37:30.812
That's activity.
01:37:31.238 --> 01:37:33.238
Yeah, and it'll give a summary of…
01:37:33.896 --> 01:37:35.896
what… how many steps she took, and…
01:37:36.902 --> 01:37:39.902
and have them, you know, what her heart rate was, all that kind of stuff.
But also, there's a map.
01:37:41.153 --> 01:37:46.153
Uh, I've been using the activity for years, and I've never seen a map.
01:37:46.897 --> 01:37:48.897
It's there.
01:37:48.897 --> 01:37:49.546
But again, I will…
01:37:49.546 --> 01:37:55.795
I agree with him, because I've left my phone behind a couple times when
I went biking or walking,
01:37:55.766 --> 01:37:57.766
And I use the workout
01:37:58.127 --> 01:38:00.127
A little workout button on my watch.
01:38:00.433 --> 01:38:05.433
And it does make a map, and when you come back and look at your phone,
there's the map and the whole detail of…
01:38:05.547 --> 01:38:08.547
your heart rate, your pace, all that stuff.
01:38:08.547 --> 01:38:10.591
And it has a map. Hmm.
01:38:10.591 --> 01:38:10.695
Yeah.
01:38:10.696 --> 01:38:12.280
Yep.
01:38:12.949 --> 01:38:17.949
Yeah, and she uses that workout thing where, you know, it counts down
3, 2, 1, and…
01:38:17.963 --> 01:38:19.963
Right.
01:38:19.963 --> 01:38:20.197
starts to work out on that, yeah.
01:38:20.027 --> 01:38:22.027
Yeah.
01:38:22.027 --> 01:38:23.894
Well, I will investigate.
01:38:23.830 --> 01:38:25.830
I wonder if this is the, um…
01:38:26.252 --> 01:38:28.252
activity plus…
01:38:29.019 --> 01:38:32.019
Um, instead of just the regular activity.
01:38:33.272 --> 01:38:35.272
Anyway, I will… I will investigate, because this is…
01:38:35.931 --> 01:38:38.931
a worthwhile question to investigate.
01:38:39.675 --> 01:38:41.675
Okay.
01:38:41.675 --> 01:38:42.825
Anything else?
01:38:43.799 --> 01:38:47.799
So should we send… are we gonna send you suggestions for next month, or
are we gonna do a…
01:38:48.656 --> 01:38:51.656
The rendering images in AI.
01:38:51.657 --> 01:39:00.662
Why don't you send me suggestions anyway? Because, again, I'm going on a
trip between now and then, and I don't really know how much
01:39:01.070 --> 01:39:03.070
time I'll have to prepare.
01:39:03.435 --> 01:39:05.435
Okay.
01:39:05.435 --> 01:39:06.352
Um, and I'll probably go with whatever's easy.
01:39:07.276 --> 01:39:10.276
Plus, we need a president, and we need a treasurer.
01:39:11.450 --> 01:39:13.450
So, think about volunteering.
01:39:16.157 --> 01:39:18.157
And with that, thank you.
01:39:18.157 --> 01:39:19.324
I had… I had one question.
01:39:18.934 --> 01:39:20.934
Yeah.
01:39:20.934 --> 01:39:21.486
Uh, real quick, maybe, uh…
01:39:21.487 --> 01:39:26.952
When you do a Google search using Mac OS26 or iOS26,
01:39:26.985 --> 01:39:31.985
Does it actually use Gemini to give you the answer?
01:39:32.435 --> 01:39:37.435
It has… the Gemini can give a summary at the top, unless you go through
01:39:37.829 --> 01:39:42.829
and tell it, Gemini, that you don't want it to do that. It'll give you a
Gemini summary of
01:39:43.556 --> 01:39:45.556
What it found. But that's not…
01:39:45.556 --> 01:39:49.304
that's not really the search. The search results are below that.
01:39:49.751 --> 01:39:52.751
But it does kind of give you a Gemini summary.
01:39:52.752 --> 01:40:02.380
Yes, and I'm a little… I always ignore that, because a lot of times, the
Gemini picks up what it has heard, which is not necessarily…
01:40:02.971 --> 01:40:04.971
accurate. But it's been…
01:40:05.355 --> 01:40:09.355
widely reported as an example, um, they, uh…
01:40:10.668 --> 01:40:13.668
Uh, there was a news story earlier this week about the, um…
01:40:13.668 --> 01:40:22.659
USS Gerald Ford got hit by a missile and caught on fire. The USS Gerald
Ford was not hit by a missile. It did catch on fire. The fire was in the
laundry room.
01:40:23.370 --> 01:40:26.370
So, part of that was true, but…
01:40:27.425 --> 01:40:36.425
All of the initial reporting said that the fire was by missile, so for a
short period of time, Gemini was telling people that there was a fire
aboard the, uh…
01:40:37.198 --> 01:40:45.198
that was caused by a missile strike. And it took a while for it… for Gemini
to decide that that was not true.
01:40:45.813 --> 01:40:48.813
But it was widely reported. And again,
01:40:50.015 --> 01:40:54.015
Google is basically a search engine. It reports.
01:40:54.190 --> 01:40:56.190
what people say.
01:40:57.132 --> 01:41:03.132
I won't give you the details, but there was a senator from Pennsylvania
who had a very…
01:41:03.671 --> 01:41:07.671
Uh, he had a history of saying really nasty things about…
01:41:07.672 --> 01:41:13.355
Uh, homosexuals. And so, a group of people got together and associated…
01:41:13.640 --> 01:41:17.640
His last name with an obscene act.
01:41:17.641 --> 01:41:23.817
And Google started reporting that, oh yeah, that means, and it was this
obscene act.
01:41:24.672 --> 01:41:26.672
So it's kind of crowdsourced…
01:41:27.894 --> 01:41:32.894
revenge, I guess? Uh, because a Google doesn
01:41:33.556 --> 01:41:35.556
amasses it and says, okay,
01:41:35.556 --> 01:41:39.399
based upon the wealth of data I have, this must be…
01:41:39.754 --> 01:41:42.754
the answer. As an example.
01:41:43.533 --> 01:41:46.533
going to Google, asking for pictures of an airplane.
01:41:46.534 --> 01:41:48.616
And it'll give you lots of pictures of an airplane.
01:41:48.617 --> 01:41:52.369
Google is absolutely, positively blind.
01:41:53.740 --> 01:42:00.740
Why is it coming back with those pictures of airplanes? It's because
somebody took a photograph and said, this is, and describes the plane.
01:42:01.736 --> 01:42:07.736
And that's what the metadata on websites has done. It says, you know,
this is a picture of this, uh,
01:42:07.731 --> 01:42:09.731
RC15…
01:42:10.544 --> 01:42:18.544
stage for looking at pressure in a boiler. And so you look up the RC15,
and there's a picture of it. Did Google know that? No.
01:42:18.545 --> 01:42:26.458
They described the picture, and Google read the description and says, oh,
this is attached to that photo, so that must be what it looks like.
01:42:27.880 --> 01:42:32.880
Google doesn't know what airplanes look like. Google doesn't know what
whales look like. Google doesn't know what you look like.
01:42:33.182 --> 01:42:39.182
But you can go into Google, probably type in your name, and it'll come
back with a photograph, because somebody took a photograph of you,
01:42:39.835 --> 01:42:42.835
and put it up on the web, Google search that page and said, ah,
01:42:42.930 --> 01:42:44.930
That's what he looks like.
01:42:46.055 --> 01:42:49.055
If you type in my name in Google,
01:42:49.330 --> 01:42:53.330
You'll get my photo, but you'll also get a lot of other photos.
01:42:53.369 --> 01:42:56.369
a lot of those other photos were photos that I took.
01:42:57.208 --> 01:43:02.208
Because I'd be on a magazine editor and a newspaper editor, taken lots
of photos, had my byline.
01:43:02.675 --> 01:43:04.675
So, it comes back and says, oh, yeah!
01:43:04.675 --> 01:43:07.875
This photograph of a bookshelf is Lawrence Charters.
01:43:08.748 --> 01:43:10.748
Because Lawrence Charters took that photo.
01:43:12.404 --> 01:43:14.404
Gotcha.
01:43:14.404 --> 01:43:15.873
So, that's… that's how it works.
01:43:19.473 --> 01:43:22.473
Anyway, have a nice night.
01:43:23.042 --> 01:43:25.042
Yep, thank you.
01:43:25.042 --> 01:43:25.906
Yeah, thank you, Lawrence. Thank you.
01:43:25.907 --> 01:43:27.156
Thank you.
01:43:27.157 --> 01:43:28.526
Thank you.

February 2026: iPhone Literacy, Part 2

Our February 17, 2026, meeting was titled “iPhone Literacy Part 2.” The goal was to show many (definitely not “all”) the things you could do with an iPhone, right out of the box, besides making or receiving phone calls. There were lots of short video demonstrations, and plenty of commentary.

English gentleman attempting to consume everything there is to know about an iPhone.
English gentleman attempting to consume everything there is to know about an iPhone.

Immediately after the February meeting ended, and the host closed the Zoom meeting, Zoom informed me that it could not convert the Zoom file to video because the file was “corrupted.” No transcript of the closed captioning was available, either.

This was not an auspicious ending. But there were still all those individual demo videos, and they are shown below.

In March, we will continue with iPhone Literacy Part 3. We may even show how to make a phone call, but no promises.

Slide Presentation on iPhone Literacy, Part 2

These are the slides from the February 2026 meeting. They were done in Keynote, but not on an iPhone.

Videos from the February 2026 meeting

All videos were recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro Max using the Screen Recording function in Control Center. Most of them do not have any sound, and since they are screen recordings, you can’t see a finger pressing, sliding, stroking, or flicking something. You do, however, see how various apps appear and, with luck, why you’d want to use that app. All of the apps are bundled with iOS 26, except Classical, Apple’s classical music app, which is a free download.

These are presented in the order shown during the meeting. Note that, in most cases, the iPhone search function is used to find and launch the app, rather than flipping back and forth through multiple screens to find the app. This is a hint: use the search function; it saves time.

iOS 26 Control Center

Control Center (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-and-customize-control-center-iph59095ec58/ios) is not really an app but an overlay that you can call up at any time by swiping down from the right top edge of the iPhone screen. It brings up a list of controls for doing things like turning on Airport Mode, increasing screen brightness, or turning on Do Not Disturb, or any of a number of other functions. It is customizable by the user, and you can add or remove functions according to taste. Along the right margin of the screen are five small buttons that go to functions by group — favorites, functions, music, home automation, and networking.

iOS 26 Measure app

The Measure app can be used for measuring things, both large (walls, doors, oversized TVs) and small (a very small atomic bomb). Additionally, if you click the menu in the upper left, an overlay will appear showing you the measurement in both English (inches, feet) and metric (millimeters, centimeters, meters).

iOS 26 Measure app, used as a level

The Measure app can also be used as a bubble level, showing how many degrees off from level something might be, or indicating that something is flat with a fully green screen. No bubbles are harmed with this app.

iOS 26 Calculator app

The iPhone Calculator can be used to convert weights, temperatures, currencies, and other things, as well as act as a basic calculator and a scientific calculator. It also has a virtual “paper tape,” keeping track of calculations and conversions.

iOS 26 Calendar app

If you sync your Calendar via iCloud, anniversaries, reminders, and appointments are shared among your devices. You can also go back in time to mark birthdays and anniversaries, or see what day of the week the Declaration of Independence was declared (Thursday, July 4, 1776), though that is a lot of scrolling, or Chinese independence from the Manchu dynasty (Tuesday, October 10, 1911), which is less scrolling.

iOS 26 Clock app

The Clock app is not only a clock, but a World Clock, and also does alarms, timers, and has a stopwatch function.

iOS 26 Weather app

You can set the Weather app to not only display local weather but also the weather in other parts of the world. Click on an individual day, and a pop-up menu allows you to see the UV index, wind speed, precipitation, humidity, visibility, and air pressure throughout the day.

iOS 26 Voice Memo app

The Voice Memo is a quick way to take a quick voice memo, and also a quick way to record odd sounds, such as a damaged fan blade or the thunder noise made when the garbage truck collects cans. If you have an Apple Watch, you can also trigger a voice memo from your watch.

iOS 26 Find My app

Find My can find your iPhone, your MacBook, or things with an attached Apple AirTag. The video shows a search for a TV remote hidden under some papers. Though you can’t hear it, you can see when the button is pushed to trigger a sound from the AirTag.

iOS 26 Maps app

Apple Maps can give you detailed driving directions, which is handy. But you can also use it to find Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, complete with a 3D model of the building.

iOS 26 News app

Apple’s News app is a “news aggregator,” collecting recent stories from a variety of publications, according to your preferences.

iOS 26 Notes app

The Notes app can be used to store handwritten notes (which it can optionally convert to text), typed notes, voice notes, and can also hold images, sounds, and lots of other things. The collective notes are searchable, and you have the option of password-protecting individual notes.

iOS 26 Reminders app

Reminders are a great way to create a shopping list, and you can optionally add a location. With a location attached, your phone can alert you the next time you drive near Costco to stop in and get raccoon stuffing, or something more useful.

iOS 26 Apple TV app

Apple TV is a streaming video service with movies and TV-style series presentations. And yes, you can watch them on your iPhone.

iOS 26 Apple TV remote control panel

Confusingly, Apple TV is also a small device that you can use to control your TV. The iPhone comes with a Control Center control to turn on and off the Apple TV, mute it, control the volume, change channels, pause, fast forward, etc.

iOS 26 Classical music app

While you have to download Classical from the iPhone App Store, it is made by Apple, and is free. It is a music app focused just on classical music.

iCloud on Windows application

This is not an iPhone app but an application for Microsoft Windows. It allows you to sync things from your phone directly to your Windows computer via iCloud. The application is made by Apple, and is free.

iOS 26 Tips app and iOS Books app

Two apps are in this video: Tips, which is a searchable encyclopedia of what you can do with your iPhone (and, if you have one, Apple Watch), and Books. An iPhone is just slightly smaller, and about the same weight, as a paperback book, but with Books, you can carry thousands of books with you — on your phone.

We will explore more of what your iPhone can do on March 17, 2026, in iPhone Literacy, Part 3.