The August 2026 SMUG meeting focused on simple tasks, such as capturing thoughts, transcribing, taking notes, creating lists and reminders, and syncing across Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. And we did most of that, with some distractions.
Taking notes was shown using Apple’s Notes app (available on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and sort of on Watch), Apple Voice Memos (available on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch), Apple Reminders (available on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch). Reminders and lists were shown in Reminders. Transcribing voice messages was shown using Apple Notes, which were also used to show collecting all kinds of random things, from text to photos to audio files to PDFs.
One thing not shown: special characters. The meeting announcement said we should show how to type special characters like ¥ and ¢ and , but we ran out of time. But we have a short article on the subject:
It is mind-boggling how many special characters are hiding in your Apple devices.
We also demonstrated how to create voice files from text, and played around with the almost infinite calendar hiding in the recesses of your Mac, using Terminal.
Finally, we showed how to strip away personal information when you copy and paste a URL.
Video of the August 2026 Meeting: How to do Simple, Useful Things
Click on the YouTube logo in the video if you want to expand the recording size.
Transcript of the July 2026 How to do Simple, Useful Things meeting
This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and probably has the usual Zoom hallucinations and omissions. Use your browser’s find function to search for a particular word or phrase.
18:33:26 Any questions?
18:33:34 Boy, everybody’s quiet tonight.
18:33:39 Hello, it’s Irma. Can you hear me?
18:33:40 Yes.
18:33:41 Hi. So Lawrence, I have a map that I’m not real proficient on because it’s a Mac Pro. And I was used to Microsoft, you know, a PC. Anyway, and Steve’s helped me a whole lot, but like this morning I was trying to do a Zoom.
18:34:00 On my Mac, and it said, you know, I went to my Zoom app,
18:34:05 And it said, oh, you need to log in.
18:34:10 And then and put it with Gmail, which I use Outlook most of the time. Anyway.
18:34:17 So I put in all the information they wanted and then they wanted to sell me a business. They said I needed to do a business.
18:34:27 membership. Well, I’ve always gotten it free, which is just the regular one, basic. And, um, anyway, long story short, I disconnected because I couldn’t get to work.
18:34:39 And I thought, screw this. So I did. And then all of a sudden,
18:34:44 I got all these tabs.
18:34:48 saying that I was charged at my Apple account $800. I got 12 of them.
18:34:57 $700 and all these. And so I started to get that normal freak out, you know, like, oh my God, I’ve been scammed again. And I, um…
18:35:14 Yeah.
18:35:08 I deleted them all, and I turned off my computer, and then I checked my bank account, and it was all just a scam. So what was that all about? That’s all I have to ask.
18:35:19 It’s what you were, it was a phishing attack. A phishing attack.
18:35:25 Um.
18:35:25 comes up with a prompt for you to do something, and they usually try to make it sound urgent, like, you know, if you don’t take advantage of our business offer in the next five minutes, it’ll go up 500%, so on and so forth. But what they really are looking for is just a response because if you get a response from you of any sort, then they
18:35:46 They send you other kinds of stuff because what they do for a lot of scammers, the scam is not to buy services from them. The scam is to get valid email addresses. So if you respond, then they know that that email address worked.
18:36:02 And if they collect these working email addresses, they sell them to somebody. So that way, it’s not even technically illegal under US law to sell your valid email address. So they sell your valid email addresses, and they’re not making a lot of money.
18:36:21 You can go out and buy 100,000 valid email addresses for 10 bucks. I mean, it’s not because there are several billion people out there with email accounts. So you can go out and buy valid email addresses for
18:36:37 sheep, and then other scammers use those valid email addresses to send you.
18:36:48 Right.
18:36:56 Really?
18:36:43 Things like your iCloud account is full and so on and so forth. So your instincts that you were being scammed was correct. However, you made a mistake in deleting the messages. Instead of deleting the messages, you should have highlighted them,
18:37:00 And then you should have gone up into, if you were in Gmail, go up to Gmail and mark them as spam because marking them as spam.
18:37:14 Wow.
18:37:11 tells Gmail not to send you more of those from that address. Might send you from similar addresses, but it won’t send you any more from that address. And Gmail has a way of marking spam, and Apple Mail has a way of marking spam, and Microsoft Outlook has a way of marking spam. They all have a way of doing it.
18:37:29 And in fact, the consortium that manages this was originally set up by Apple and now is run by Gmail. And Apple, Microsoft, and Google are the partners in this consortium for flagging.
18:37:55 I learned how nice.
18:37:58 Yeah.
18:37:46 spam addresses. If you have an AOL address, or if you have a Yahoo address, you really want to get off of those and onto… I’m just saying, if you did, you’d want to get off of those and you want to move to Apple Mail, Microsoft Mail, or Gmail.
18:38:05 In terms of security, Apple and Google have the best security.
18:38:14 Microsoft is well behind in terms of protecting privacy, Apple is number one, Microsoft is number two and Google is number three. So they each.
18:38:25 Yeah, I knew that. Yeah.
18:38:37 Goodbye.
18:38:27 They have their strengths and weaknesses, but anytime you get something like that and you suspect it’s a scam, don’t delete it. Go up and mark it as spam, because that puts it into the junk mail folder, or spam folder, whatever that particular mail is.
18:38:42 client calls it, but it also notifies the provider that, hey, this is, this is bad stuff.
18:38:49 Now, sometimes you’re going to get stuff that you will mark as spam, and you’re still going to get some more. There are exemptions for nonprofits, don’t ask me why, and there are exemptions for political parties. And in fact, the, um…
18:39:04 The Republican Party right now is suing in court to expand the exemption for political parties so that they can have not only political parties, but their PACs be exempt from spam controls. Really bad idea, but…
18:39:19 That’s what they put forward. And if you mark political spam, if you mark political ads for, you know, give us donations, if you mark them as spam, that won’t necessarily make any difference. However, I always work.
18:39:43 Right, right.
18:39:49 Right.
18:39:35 solicitations for political contributions is spam, because if nothing else, it tells the people sending those that I really don’t want there. I’m not going to donate just $5 to their campaign to be dog catcher or whatever.
18:39:50 I have a sister that got sucked into that all the time, and she gets spammed a lot. Well, so my question is, can I… I tried to retrieve those.
18:40:00 Heated messages and I couldn’t. I couldn’t find, I didn’t know how to find them in my Mac.
18:40:12 I’m next.
18:40:07 Well, if you deleted them, they’re in the… there’s a folder called trash, and they’re going to be in the trash folder. But if…
18:40:14 So could I do anything with those if I have the
18:40:19 Okay.
18:40:17 No, no, if you put them in the trash folder, just leave them there.
18:40:22 And uh… but it depends upon what client, because Apple has their own mail client. Outlook has its own mail client, which I absolutely hate.
18:40:31 Really?
18:40:34 Absolutely, positively can’t stand it.
18:40:35 why… well, I like… I’ve… I don’t like… I mean, I’ve been spammed by Microsoft more than…
18:40:41 I don’t get spammed by… that’s why I was suspect when I saw the Apple thing, because I’ve never been spammed by Apple.
18:40:48 Well, what it can do, you’re… if you use a web browser, your web browser tells whoever… if you’re using a web browser, it tells people on the other end what kind of operating system you have. So Apple’s mail client identifies itself as Apple Mail.
18:41:04 If you’re using Outlook, it identifies itself as Outlook. And the reason why they do that is the servers use the security protocols for that particular client to provide you with better security and so on and so forth. But also, they have different capabilities, like, for example,
18:41:22 in Apple Mail, it’ll display a lot of things that Outlook doesn’t know how to display. And Gmail is actually based upon web technologies, not mail technologies. But as for why I don’t like Outlook, wait.
18:41:36 You have to remember that Apple got an internet domain back in like 1978.
18:41:43 Microsoft didn’t really formally get on the internet until 1993.
18:41:48 Outlook was originally designed for networks.
18:41:52 It wasn’t designed to talk to the internet. That didn’t actually happen until 1995. So there’s a bunch of stuff in Outlook that just makes no sense in the modern world. And I find it very frustrating. And I’d much rather deal with mail using Gmail.
18:42:09 email or Apple Mail. But that’s my particular preference. As for why AOL and Yahoo are bad ideas, AOL and Yahoo don’t exist anymore. They were purchased by at one point they were owned by Verizon. They’ve gone through a whole bunch of, uh,
18:42:27 of owners. And they do a really bad job of providing email service, and they’re really there, basically, as a marketing tool for whoever owns them, and I don’t really remember who owns AOL now, or Yahoo. And what I recommend for people is to get an Apple Mail or a Microsoft Mail, or a Gmail account.
18:42:47 Go into your AOL mill and there’s an AOL and Yahoo both have this. They have a preference there to forward the mail where it’ll automatically forward incoming mail to your new address. So you go in there, you set it up to forward to your new address.
18:43:03 And then you just ignore it. And anything sent to your old mailbox will get automatically forwarded to your new. The good news, bad news. It’s a way of making sure that your old mail works and you don’t actually have to log in to AOL or Yahoo.
18:43:21 The bad news is forwarded mail gets a spam score. When you mark something as spam, it gets a spam score. When I send out things to the Straight Mac user group, I always send it as a blind CC because I don’t want to spread everyone’s email addresses all over the place. So I send it as a blind CC.
18:43:41 Well, when you get an incoming message, your mail client says, hey, this was sent as a blind CC. It wasn’t actually sent to you, it was actually sent to Vice President at Straightmac.org, which is my email address. And your sent is a blind CC, so
18:43:56 It ups the spam score. It doesn’t necessarily flag it as spam, but once you read a critical level, it’ll flag it as spam. So there is a chance that if you automatically forward from Yahoo or AOL to something else,
18:44:11 you’ll get an increased spam score, and depending upon the content, like if it really is spam, it’ll be much more spam at that point, because it was forwarded.
18:44:23 Technical details aside, I don’t recommend that
18:44:28 that use AOL or Yahoo and even Olipen. OliPen is a nicely managed company, it local to the peninsula, but the problem is if there’s an internet outage, because they’re on the peninsula, they don’t get any mail.
18:44:43 If there’s an internet outage on the peninsula, your Apple Mail still collects mail. Your Google Mail still collects mail. In fact, the space station, people on the space station have Apple iCloud accounts. You don’t even have to be on this planet.
18:45:08 Let me see it.
18:44:59 But on the peninsula, if there’s a power outage, nothing is going to flow into Olipen. And so that’s a disadvantage. And WAVE, I hope none of you have anybody who works for WAVE. WAVE is just…
18:45:17 Not a great…
18:45:19 place to get email. I have, uh, I have a…
18:45:22 I don’t do that.
18:45:23 My internet comes from Wave, but I do not use their mail because it’s just not.
18:45:30 It’s… it’s not up to what I would consider current standards.
18:45:36 Well, so my question is, okay, I don’t have AOL and I don’t have Yahoo. So if I’m on Outlook and I want to switch to Gmail, do I have to send that message?
18:45:49 transfer my mail there. I mean, I think I get it all there now, but my email address is Outlook.
18:45:56 That’s fine. You can… you can have an Apple mail client can read Outlook when you go into Apple Mail, you see ad account and one of the choices it offers is it either says Outlook or Microsoft or something like that.
18:46:14 Perfect.
18:46:11 That’s a choice that you can add them. And the same thing with Gmail. You can add a Gmail account to Apple, to your Apple Mail client, and you can have an Outlook account and you can read it in the same.
18:46:27 client that’s reading your Gmail account, they really don’t… they know how to talk to each other.
18:46:31 Okay.
18:46:33 Thank you. I don’t want to consume all your time, so thank you so much.
18:46:38 When I was president of the…
18:46:42 Actually, as Vice President of the Washington Apple Pie User Group. At that time, we had 5,000 members.
18:46:50 And I would do a Q&A and one of my rules was I only would answer one email client question, one email question per person.
18:47:05 Yes.
18:47:00 meeting or one printer question per meeting, and that’s because the email questions, they just went one right after the other. I’d get, like, 30.
18:47:10 Yeah, yeah.
18:47:11 And with printers, I just hate printers, so I just don’t want to talk about printers.
18:47:15 So it’s not just me. I hate printers, too. I’ll tell you what. Like, I have a… I got a bill recently from a contractor, and he used a link that I could not copy… I couldn’t copy it, and then I’d sent it to myself,
18:47:31 And thought, well, I can copy it, you know, photocopy it from my email, but it doesn’t work, and it just ticks me off to no end.
18:47:41 Yeah, well.
18:47:41 It’s so frustrating.
18:47:43 There’s.
18:47:54 Yeah.
18:47:45 I don’t know how many of you are fans of popular rock, but Olivia Rodrigo has a song called Vampire” and is about a boyfriend that she’s getting that’s giving her grief.
18:47:59 can do that.
18:47:57 And I tell people that that song’s really about printers because it’s talking about, it just sucks the life out of you. And that’s what printers do.
18:48:09 Great. Do we have…
18:48:08 Okay, thank you so much.
18:48:11 We have other questions.
18:48:12 I’m done.
18:48:15 Let me go off of this.
18:48:20 No other questions?
18:48:21 I actually have two questions.
18:48:23 Okay.
18:48:32 Yes.
18:48:25 Um, one of them is at some session that was discussion about your treasurer and money, and I’m…
18:48:33 I’m not paying any money, so…
18:48:37 Am I supposed to be?
18:48:46 24 perfect.
18:48:51 And okay.
18:48:40 Um, we have a membership fee of $24 a year per family, so if it’s you, it’s $24. If it’s you and your spouse and two children, it’s $24 for the entire group.
18:48:53 And then how do I pay that?
18:48:56 On our website, there’s a link that says join, which is also renew, but it doesn’t say that. And if you click on that join, it’ll have the details. It gives you an address.
18:49:06 So smug has a website.
18:49:08 Yes.
18:49:10 And okay, and join. Okay.
18:49:13 Right.
18:49:13 Got it. And my other question is, since I got my new iPad about a month and a half ago, thank you, Steve.
18:49:22 I’m getting porn.
18:49:24 It goes directly to my junk, but I still.
18:49:28 have to see it just to block it. And of course, every… it’s always different names. Um, they’re becoming less and less, like yesterday, I think there were only maybe 4.
18:49:39 But I think the first day it happened, there were like 20 of them. They all go to junk, granted, but I’m blocking them.
18:49:48 This has never, ever happened before. I can’t… I don’t know what happened. And this is a brand new iPad, it’s not refurbished or anything like that, so.
18:49:57 No, it’s not the… it’s not the iPad. A lot of it has to do with, uh… a lot of it has to do with politics, and also a lot of it has to do with what year this is. This is an election year, and during election years,
18:50:12 political parties go out and buy mailing lists from everybody on the planet. And because they’re buying mailing lists for everybody on the planet, the people who have mailing lists are selling their mailing lists to
18:50:27 more people, and they don’t necessarily screen them well. So, for an example, there was a First Amendment group in Nevada that bought a mailing list with, like, 10 million names on it. It was actually run by a porn site, but they said they were First Amendment, so it looks like they’re a political group.
18:50:45 And they purchased this mailing list of perfectly valid email addresses, and they use it to send out porn. Sending out porn is actually more lucrative than sending out political messages. So, you know, it’s a good business venture. As to what you can do about it, there’s not a heck of a lot.
18:51:03 There was a national…
18:51:07 Secure Infrastructure Group was an IT group that did things on a national level with the federal government and they gave grants and they did research and all kinds of stuff. That was disbanded by the current administration last year.
18:51:22 And it hasn’t been reinstated. So there are fewer people minding the henhouse and because it foreign people know that they can just…
18:51:38 enjoying the flood of stuff flowing into your mailbox, they send out lots of porn. You’re not alone in that. I get porn. I get…
18:51:49 I get, among other things, I have an account, I have two accounts that are in Japanese. Don’t ask, oh, I get porn in those.
18:51:59 And the only difference between that porn and the US porn is that the text is in Japanese. But unfortunately, there’s nothing…
18:52:10 There’s really nothing you can do other than flag them, and you can flag like 30 at once and say, block it.
18:52:21 declare it to be spam. You don’t have to look at each one. You can just go and select them and
18:52:27 And, uh, send them off into junk mail jail.
18:52:31 Well, one huge concern I have is…
18:52:35 Everybody that gets a new iPad, this is going to happen too. What about children?
18:52:42 Well.
18:52:38 No, it has nothing to do with iPads. It has nothing to do with iPads.
18:52:43 It never happened on my old one.
18:52:45 It doesn’t make any difference. It has nothing to do with iPads. It has to do with the year that we are in.
18:52:52 Oh, right, but nevertheless, children are getting new computers, and…
18:52:57 I mean, it’s just horrifying to me.
18:53:04 Ah.
18:53:06 Ah.
18:53:01 With children, you can put controls on them that limit that sort of stuff. You can put controls on your own machine if you want to. The trouble is that the…
18:53:12 The computer controls for, they limit what you can do as an adult. For example,
18:53:25 Oh.
18:53:18 When you go in and you set up an Apple ID account, they won’t issue them to people under a certain age, and I don’t know what that is. But unless they’re set up by a parent and the parent has to declare what their age is. My granddaughter has an iPad.
18:53:33 And I set it up so it’s got parental controls and it knows that she’s eight years old and all that kind of stuff. You can put in those kind of controls. The trouble is if you’re an adult, it’ll limit what you can do. Like, for example, when you go visit a website, it tells the website.
18:53:51 that you’re a minor. So if you’re searching for racy books on Amazon, it just won’t show you the results.
18:53:59 And there are limitations on that. You don’t necessarily want to put children’s controls on your own computer. As a prime example of something that happened several years ago, it was about 15 years ago.
18:54:14 After they put children’s controls on this one major church’s internet domain,
18:54:23 The registered nurses who were doing parish ministry.
18:54:30 could not log into the National Institute of Medicine because the National Institute of Medicine had things, like, things about sex and things about menstruation and things about erectile dysfunction and a bunch of other things, which they did not want exposed to children.
18:54:48 Because this very large church had said, we want everything to be G-rated, they had no access to it, which was an unintended consequence.
18:54:59 But those parental controls have a function, but if you’re an adult, you really need to tell people that you’re at least 21. As a general rule, just say when you ask for your birthday,
18:55:14 Pick 1999, and your year and day, your day and month, and say 1999, because that’s more than 21 years ago when you’ll be an adult and you don’t have to give away your real.
18:55:29 Birthday. My birthday on Facebook, according to Facebook, I was born in 1911.
18:55:38 So, I’m old enough to be an adult, but if anyone tries to steal my identity, that’s going to be a tough
18:55:46 So.
18:55:48 Facebook’s never questioned it. My friends on Facebook make fun of it all the time, but Facebook’s never questioned it.
18:56:00 Any other questions?
18:56:01 I have a question. It’s kind of along the same lines as Sherry. I’ve been a member of smug almost since the very, very beginning when it started at Squim High School, probably close to 40 years ago.
18:56:17 And I…
18:56:18 Stop paying dues when I became responsible for bringing the treats when we were meeting at St. Luke’s.
18:56:27 And then we stopped meeting, I can’t remember if it was due to COVID or whatever reasons, we stopped meeting.
18:56:34 So I never started up again and I have since moved out of state and I have not been coming to the meetings, but tonight’s intrigued me. So I joined.
18:56:46 I like Sherry, I don’t want to be a freeloader, but I want to make sure it’s okay not living in the area to stay a member.
18:56:55 It’s not a problem at all. The only limitation is that we’re going to have an in-person meeting in August, and depending upon where you live, you may not want to come back to SCUM just for that meeting, but…
18:57:08 Yeah, I won’t. I’m out of state.
18:57:10 No, it’s really the more the merrier. The washing apple pie, for example, when I was president of Washington Apple Pie, we had people call in from one guy from a carrier off the coast of Iran. This was, like,
18:57:25 30 years ago, so it wasn’t the current situation, but one guy from a carrier, we had people in Europe, we had people in Japan, they were all over the place. Um, these smugs, since I’ve been in Smug, which was…
18:57:42 2018, I think, is when I was voted vice president. It’s about time for you guys to overthrow me and get somebody new.
18:57:52 We’ve had a guy from Australia, we’ve had several people from Canada, really does make any difference. Particularly with virtual meetings, because if you hadn’t told me you’re not in the area, there’s no way I would know. It really does make any difference.
18:58:07 Another thing I want to mention.
18:58:10 You can also contribute other than money. You can offer to do presentations, you can tell me that I’m wrong and what I just said was wrong and what’s really true is something else. You know, you can contribute in other ways and nobody will know that you’re in a different
18:58:27 state or country or probably on the International Space Station we’d know because they have frequent blackouts as they go from one receiving site to another.
18:58:39 Um.
18:58:40 Um, I actually had…
18:58:42 When I was working for NOAA, I actually had some email from some astronauts on the International Space Station. They had observed something from space, and they looked on the NOAA website.
18:58:57 They noticed that I was the technical manager, and they decided I was the person to talk to. So they sent me some email with some observation from the state from space, which was really cool. And the head of National Ocean Service, which is the part that I worked for, she was a former astronaut, and she just thought that was
18:59:16 Fantastic. Everyone said how great it was. I hadn’t done anything, I just received the email, but they still thought it was cool. You can become famous for, through no effort on your part at all if you really.
18:59:30 One, two. Any other questions?
18:59:38 If not, I have a question for you. A security update came out today for…
18:59:46 iPhones, iPads, and Macs. And all of you update your iPhones, iPads and Macs and if not, you should because it’s an interesting security update.
18:59:59 It’s not something that you’re likely to ever run into because it requires an awful lot of work, but it is a genuine security update and it came out today. So.
19:00:10 Tonight, you can tell your little devices to update themselves. It’s not a particularly
19:00:18 cumbersome update, you just go into systems, update and tell it to do its thing.
19:00:25 Anything else before I start with my presentation?
19:00:34 Okay.
19:00:42 I’m going to…
19:00:46 I don’t know why it did that.
19:00:50 I’m going to share my desktop and I always forget how to do that.
19:00:56 Sure.
19:01:02 Yes, yes, yes.
19:01:08 And I have notes today talking about simple things you can do with
19:01:16 Your, um…
19:01:18 simple charge you can do with your Mac.
19:01:20 And one of the things you can do is you can write yourself notes. And I’m going to show you a variety of different ways of doing notes. The one I’m going to start with is reminders. Reminders is cool for a couple reasons. First of all, it’s on your Mac,
19:01:36 It’s on your iPad, it’s on your iPhone, and they all sync with one another. So if you’re using…
19:01:49 If you’re using a…
19:01:53 if you write the note on one device and you sync it through iCloud, it’ll appear on the other devices automatically. You don’t have to do anything about it. And it automatically saves things. Another way you can write notes is you can use
19:02:08 notes, which is another application for taking notes, obviously, and it also automatically syncs. A third one that I use fairly often that for special purposes is TextEdit.
19:02:25 Next step has actually been around in some form or another since the original Mac. It was originally called…
19:02:32 teach text, but it’s essentially the same application. And it’s really cool. The disadvantage is that it does not automatically save stuff, and it doesn’t sync through iCloud, but it does have some other cool functions. So first one thing I’m going to start off with is Notepad.
19:02:49 is reminders. And the nice thing about reminders is it can do a bunch of stuff, among other things, it can remind you. You can set up a note in reminders that will go off at a particular time to tell you to do something, which is always
19:03:04 nice to do. And
19:03:08 It will also go off if you’re driving when you go near things. One of the things that I have here, for example, I have a grocery list, and on groceries, it says, well, buy note cards and so on and so forth. But here, it reminds me that I’m going to Costco.
19:03:24 you get cat food, and this note was made on May 19th, 2021 and
19:03:32 It’s a good thing I don’t have a cat because that was a long time ago. But why this thing works, this little eye over here in Reminders, if you click on that, you can set it up to go off at a particular time, but you can also have a particular location. You can look up the location.
19:03:49 search it out and if I’m driving by Costco, it’ll buzz at me and tell me that I should get cat food at Costco. So it’s a great way for keeping reminders. It’s a great way for keeping lists.
19:04:05 It’s a great way for telling you to do something when you’re at a particular location. Alarms can go off at particular times. All of that’s quite nice. And if you click on this button, it goes away.
19:04:24 Yeah.
19:04:22 It’ll go away because now it’s done, so it goes down to the bottom.
19:04:26 So you don’t have to see all of your notes. It’ll just put the things that you’ve completed down at the bottom. So it’s a really nice…
19:04:35 way of keeping track of Lisp. A lot of us have lots and lots of lists. I try to have as few lists as possible, and I like to have the lists on both my phone and on my computer and the easiest way to do that.
19:04:50 is to use things like reminders. And it can also, you can have groceries and tell you to do various things. My grocery list says buy note cards and you can tell this is an old list because Office Depot went out of business around here quite some time ago.
19:05:06 So we can make that one go away.
19:05:10 I needed note cards for something but things that are on my list right now root beer cheese toothpaste and and roast chicken. By the way, I am not actually me, I’m logged in as Peter Lyon, which is my…
19:05:26 Um, my alias for, for doing demos. And then there are just reminders for reminders by always, which should be on the grocery list. Show people the sign in list, which sheet, which I haven’t done yet. Turn on the recording, which I did, turn on closed captioning.
19:05:41 I did that too. So you can have multiple lists and once you put it on a list provided it’s set up to sync through iCloud, it will.
19:05:52 Up here on all your other devices. And so how do you sync it through iCloud? If you go into settings
19:05:59 And you go up to your icon at the top, that’s for you, go into iCloud and list the services that you are syncing through iCloud. Right now, Peter Lyon has photos, syncing drives.
19:06:16 documents and so on and so forth, syncing passwords, syncing mail, syncing messages, and syncing note items, plus an ad here to tell you to upgrade because it’s only got a
19:06:27 I get glibbit because this is a free account. But at the top it’ll show you how much of that limit you’re up to using 3.7 out of 5 gigabytes. If you click on Manage, it’ll have this little diagram saying that most of this is photographs.
19:06:43 Quite a bit of this is male.
19:06:46 Some of this is Apple Books and Messages is just a small amount.
19:06:52 So that’s how you get things to sync. And I’m syncing.
19:06:58 reminders, and I’m syncing notes.
19:07:02 Again, those things automatically will save to other devices if you’re syncing them. So it’s important to…
19:07:10 Keep that in mind.
19:07:12 And…
19:07:14 I can’t see the done sign because…
19:07:19 Because, um…
19:07:21 Zoom is in the way. But anyway, you can have multiple lists and all kinds of things like that. So, if you haven’t played with reminders, and I was not a big find fan of reminders, I didn’t pay any attention to it, my late spouse was a huge
19:07:37 user, uh, reminders. And she was the one who got me enthused about using it. She used it constantly. She had several hundred notes and reminders.
19:07:48 Another one that is quite useful for notes is the notes function. And notes like reminders, is synced through iCloud, which is nice. And you can have as many notes as you want. My late spouse on her computer had 2,800 notes.
19:08:05 notes and some of them went on for hundreds of pages. So she was a huge user of that. But notes, you can sit there and you can…
19:08:14 Type a note. This is a note and one of the things to note about notes, the first line is also the topic. So this really should be a topic note.
19:08:26 This is an example.
19:08:31 Note.
19:08:31 And one of the things you’ll notice is that among other things, it has spell correction in there, underlines things that are misspelled and all kinds of cute things. Notes can have things other than just text. So for example, if I wanted to put in a
19:08:48 a illustration of something, you can just drag that right and let go.
19:08:52 This is a map, it’s an ideogram of maps of…
19:08:59 of various countries based upon their population. And the larger the population, the more.
19:09:05 more space it takes up on the chart. And as you see,
19:09:10 Asia is more than half the world and the North America is not that…
19:09:17 We went North and South America are not that big and Europe is substantial, but not
19:09:24 as big as it could be. It’s a good way of showing information. And now that you’ve dragged that into notes, it’ll just stay there until you get rid of it. So if you want to add something else, I come and grab another illustration.
19:09:41 And I, ah.
19:09:44 Dragging here, let go.
19:09:46 This is something that I saw in an AP headline. It said 1848, the Seneca Falls convention. The reason why I threw this in here is that it’s completely wrong. The Seneca Falls Convention was in the 1890s, not 1848.
19:10:04 Um, you don’t need to know what it is, but if you’re an historian, I looked at that and thought, ah, you screwed up. And you can drag, get more things in here. In this case, it’s just a meme. I heard the government is putting chips inside people. I hope I get Doritos.
19:10:20 So it doesn’t make any difference what you put in there, but obviously if you give it more structure, you have more useful notes.
19:10:29 And you drag the pictures back out?
19:10:31 Yes, you can drive it back out, and in fact, taking them out helps if you have a small amount of iCloud storage, because obviously, if it gets synced into iCloud, this photograph
19:10:43 takes up more space than a text note. This text nugget up here is going to take about 20 bytes to store, whereas that photo is…
19:10:58 That photo is 243,785 bytes, so it’s a lot
19:11:05 bigger than just pure text. But if you’re trying to assemble a bunch of information, you can put in sound files, you can put in photographs, you can put in text notes, and just make sure they all go with that particular topic.
19:11:20 It’ll sync it to your other devices. And I want to show you an example of just how powerful, uh,
19:11:30 The, um,
19:11:32 note says, I’m going to take a recording.
19:11:36 This is an audio recording. And just to show you what it looks like, I’m going to bring it up here and hope that you can hear it.
19:11:49 Now, anybody know what that sound was, if you can hear it?
19:11:56 Nobody can hear it.
19:12:02 Well.
19:12:01 You hear them?
19:12:03 Pardon?
19:12:04 You could hear a little scratchy noise, but I didn’t have my sound turned up high enough, I don’t think.
19:12:08 Yeah, well…
19:12:10 I thought it sounded like running water.
19:12:12 It’s running water. I accidentally took a voice memo of myself washing dishes.
19:12:19 So, but one of the things you’ll notice is that if I drag this into
19:12:26 Nodes.
19:12:28 It’s in notes now, and I can actually play it within notes.
19:12:34 It’s only 4 seconds, but, you know, it’s there.
19:12:38 That’s the water and it didn’t do anything special. I’m going to show you another thing that I got. This actually was a phone call that I got. You can take, if you have an iPhone, you can actually save voicemail messages as audio files.
19:12:56 And so I take this audio file and I drag it into Notes.
19:13:02 And…
19:13:06 And it’s not doing what I want it to do.
19:13:12 Eh, let’s get rid of this one.
19:13:14 Delete.
19:13:20 That’s because I dragged the wrong thing.
19:13:23 Delete, delete, delete.
19:13:30 Let’s grab the voicemail.
19:13:33 Okay.
19:13:34 Here’s the voicemail. It’s a 52 second piece of voicemail.
19:13:40 And what it has done,
19:13:43 is…
19:13:44 It’s…
19:13:46 The Note application itself using Apple’s technology has gone and created a transcript of the voice on this voicemail.
19:13:55 And I can play the voice.
19:13:58 You can possibly hear it.
19:14:04 And it’s… Hi, this is Barbara from Tax Assistance Center. I hope all is well with you.
19:14:09 Go ahead and give you a call back at 833-
19:14:13 I’m not going to make you listen to all of it. This is a piece of voice spam they’re trying to get me to sign up for tax assistant. By the way, if you almost
19:14:24 99.9% of the emails you get or voicemails you get about tax assistant are useless. If you filed an extension on your own, it doesn’t cost you anything. If you filed an extension through a tax assistance service, it costs you money.
19:14:41 If they say they’re great, they can reduce your tax burden, they can’t reduce it any more than you can. It’s basically a scam.
19:14:50 But
19:14:52 when I just showed you is that if it’s identifiable as a human voice, notes can automatically transcript and drive it into text. And once it’s in text, you can grab it like this.
19:15:05 And you can paste it in as text.
19:15:09 And as I mentioned, text takes up less room. So for example, this, um…
19:15:15 This voicemail message on the phone takes up 116,468 bytes, but the text of it.
19:15:30 takes up 668 bytes. So just a tiny fraction of much space as the…
19:15:39 Um, voice
19:15:41 And I do this fairly often, particularly for things that I think are fraudulent or strange or I just want to pass on to somebody, rather than send them the original voicemail, I’ll send them a transcript and send it via email and said, you sent me this voicemail message about such and such and so and so call me back at such and such.
19:16:02 That way, they have a context for my response because I much prefer to talk to a lot of people via email than I would talking to them on the phone.
19:16:12 Um, cause I’m just not…
19:16:14 that friendly. Anyway, but this is something that you can do with notes. It automatically is transcribing. It’s using your Mac, the power of your Mac, to analyze the words and create the voicemail.
19:16:29 And I’m going to stop sharing my screen for a second if I can find my control.
19:16:36 So I can entertain some questions. Any questions about that?
19:16:46 No questions?
19:16:50 I just showed you, man.
19:16:51 I have a question. Can you search for a note?
19:16:54 Yes, you can. It’ll search for the words that are in the note. So, for example, if I went in there, and right now, if I went up to that.
19:17:05 That box on the side where it lists all the notes, and if I tick them in Tax, it’ll show me every single note that has the word tax. It can’t show you.
19:17:16 I can’t show you, if you have a picture of a potato, but it doesn’t say the word potato anywhere, you computer doesn’t know what that is. But if it’s got text in there, yes, you can search through all the text.
19:17:42 Mm-hmm.
19:17:31 spouse used to take notes on the smug meetings and she was very careful to make sure that all of the smug notes started off right at the top. It said smug note.” And then it had the date. So when I went through her 2,800 notes,
19:17:59 Mm-hmm.
19:17:48 I could just type in smug and all of the smug notes would appear together. So yes, it basically is a very easy thing to search provided it has the text in there. It won’t search on photographs or things like that.
19:18:03 Unless you actually have some kind of…
19:18:09 note in there that says, you know, Picasso or Mona Lisa or…
19:18:14 Eiffel Tower or whatever it is that the photograph is.
19:18:19 Any other questions?
19:18:24 I’m going to… I told you I would have short, useful things. Some of the things I’m going to do seem a little bit on the esoteric side, but just indulge me and go back to sharing my screen.
19:18:42 Um, well…
19:18:43 I mentioned the search box. Here’s the search box up here, so I type in tax, press return, and it says I’ve got that voicemail.
19:18:53 about and it’s search for tax in the text here. It doesn’t actually see it in the audio file.
19:19:01 Um, and also it keeps track of things you’ve deleted, so I’ve deleted a bunch of stuff. It doesn’t share those, but after they’re deleted, they don’t actually disappear until I tell them to disappear.
19:19:15 And that’s notes. And I’m going to go back to reminders because it tells me what I’m doing next to my list.
19:19:25 I’m going to go with Voice Memo. Voice memos is something fairly new. It was introduced originally on the iPhone, but now it’s on the
19:19:35 iPad and it’s on the Mac and you even have a voice memo app on the Apple Watch. I frequently will when I’m driving around town and I want to have a memo about something to do, once I get back home, I’ll tap my watch because I have the icon right in the front face.
19:19:54 And, uh, say,
19:19:59 Chicken cordon bleu, or whatever it is that I want a note about. And voice memos are also synced between your Mac, your iPhone, your iPad, so they can show up universally. But.
19:20:13 memo on the Mac, this is what it looks like. And you just have
19:20:19 A voice memory, and you can…
19:20:21 This one says teepee and bagels and probably doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what it’s about.
19:20:29 Remember to buy more toilet paper and bagels.
19:20:33 And this is one that dates back to 2021, and I still haven’t done anything with. Scheduled trip to Hawaii.
19:20:41 It turns out that Hawaii is a lot farther away than I thought it was.
19:20:47 This is something for Washington, for Washington, for the smug people.
19:20:53 people what they want to do next month.
19:20:55 And here’s one that just tells me to remind me… You want to please demonstrate to everybody how voice memos work.
19:21:02 Okay, so that’s showing you things that have been recorded, but how do you actually record something? It’s this big red button. You click on that and then you start talking, and as you’re talking, it’ll start recording what it is that you’re saying.
19:21:20 And I need to move this because Zoom is covering up what I need to see. And then you start talking, and as you’re talking, it’ll start recording what it is that you’re saying.
19:21:32 I’m not going to show you this right now. You’re just going to take my word for it. You can drag these voice memos into Notes and it will create a transcript of them. I, for my spouse’s eulogy, I talked for like
19:21:47 15 minutes, and somebody wanted to know what it was I said, I took a voice recording of it and dragged it into Notes, and it created a transcript. So I didn’t have to type anything, I just sent them the text. But that’s what you can do with voice.
19:22:03 memos. It’s really, really handy when you just have a quick thing that you… your hands are busy and you’re driving or something, and you just want to have a quick memo. It’s a great way to do it, and it’s available on your phone, and it’s available on iPads, and it’s available on the Mac, and it’s on the Apple Watch as well.
19:22:23 Can you ask Suri to do it for you?
19:22:25 Um, you can ask, hmm, that’s a good question.
19:22:31 I’ve never tried that.
19:22:35 I’ve asked Siri to send me a message, go along and say, Siri, send me a message asking to buy
19:22:43 chocolate or something like that and Siri will compose a message and then send it to me. Believe it or not, that’s one of the things that I’m going to show tonight.
19:22:53 I just…
19:22:55 I just tried it and it works. It brought up what new invoice memos.
19:22:59 Oh, good.
19:23:03 Siri stop?
19:23:05 I said, I’m unable to perform that task.
19:23:12 Siri is yelling at me.
19:23:15 um, accidentally called her attention and so she did something. Um…
19:23:21 So.
19:23:22 I’ve talked about notes, text edit. I actually haven’t talked about text. I’ll get into the voice memos. To some extent, voicemail. I want to show you something that I don’t think many of you will actually do.
19:23:38 worth noting that your computer can do this. Your Mac actually runs an operating system called Unix. Unix is one of the oldest operating systems. It’s the first show birthday was the 1st of January 1970.
19:23:54 So it’s been around for quite a while. And, um…
19:24:00 Talk to Unix by using the terminal, and the terminals on your Mac, it’s in the utilities folder. It’s just a way to talk to Unix. And if you go up there and you can say uname, it’ll tell you what the name of
19:24:15 The unixes that you use. It’s called Darwin, because that’s the name.
19:24:24 Yeah.
19:24:29 Okay, that’s what I was trying to get the first time.
19:24:31 Darwin is the name of the Unix that Apple has. It’s a fully recognized Unix. It passes all the certifications for Unix, which you probably don’t care about, but it’s important to note.
19:24:44 And the current version of Unix on here is Darwin 25.6.0, was released on July 31st of this year, and it’s an ARM64 release, which means it’s running on Apple Silicon.
19:25:01 And again, most of you will never care about this, but I want to show you something that you can do. I don’t know that you’ll be able to hear it, but
19:25:10 But I hope you can because it’s cool.
19:25:15 That tax assistant memo that I had, I’m going to.
19:25:23 Open that up.
19:25:29 the text.
19:25:30 And I’m going to have the apple.
19:25:33 Built-in voice synthesizer play it.
19:25:37 I say say, I put a quotation mark, I paste in what I want it to say, and when I press the return key, the voice synthesizer on the Mac is going to play this message.
19:25:50 And…
19:25:56 Why didn’t it work?
19:26:02 Oh, it’s because I have two quotes.
19:26:06 Ah.
19:26:12 Yeah, forget it.
19:26:20 All right.
19:26:23 Hi, this is Barbara from Tax Assistance Center. I hope all is well with you. Um, go ahead and give me a call back at 833-333-7518.
19:26:33 Okay, I’m not going to play all of it. Did you hear that?
19:26:39 Yes, no?
19:26:41 Yes.
19:26:42 Okay, some things to note.
19:26:44 Yes.
19:26:45 They played it with a Scottish accent. That’s because I have Siri set up to play with a Scottish woman’s voice and I have no great
19:26:55 explanation for that, aside from the fact that my spouse’s family is from Scotland.
19:27:04 It’s creating a voice version of text. It did it on the fly. You can do this at any time you want to. The trick is, you go up, you say, say, and you type in a quote mark to say anything.
19:27:18 within the quote you can say and say, here we’re going to say the cat is red and
19:27:25 And it doesn’t like rats.
19:27:28 raccoons.
19:27:32 The cache is red and it doesn’t like raccoons. Okay, then that’s kind of a silly thing to say, but what the heck?
19:27:38 I can even get it to create a voice file. I can go up here and I can go to my
19:27:46 My previous statement, this one here, and after it I press O, which says output this, and it’s a spam.
19:27:56 Message.
19:27:58 AIFF. AIFF is a type of audio file. So I press this, you won’t hear anything, but now if I go on to my computer, I go into my user folder.
19:28:11 Peter and here is my spam message as an audio file and I can play it using QuickTime. Same.
19:28:21 Open with QuickTime.
19:28:24 Hi, this is Barbara from Texas. So using nothing more than my
19:28:31 Mac and some text, I created an automated voicemail spam robot.
19:28:39 Why am I showing you this? One reason why you want to be careful with security on a Mac, Macs are extremely secure, but they are also a high-value target because they have Unix underneath it. Unix is an extremely powerful
19:28:57 operating system. And right now when you have an Apple Mail account, you’re using Apple Mail servers, when you have an Outlook account, you’re using Microsoft servers, if you have a Gmail account, you’re using Google servers. Well, guess what?
19:29:13 On your Mac.
19:29:16 is a mail server.
19:29:18 It says that Peter has no particular male, but if you type in man male, it gives you the instructions for how to run the mail server that’s on your Mac.
19:29:30 And it just goes on for pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages.
19:29:41 I don’t know if you…
19:29:41 You know you’re not sharing.
19:29:43 Oh, I’m not sharing?
19:29:45 No.
19:29:45 No.
19:29:50 I was waiting.
19:29:48 Just going to say the same thing. We’re looking at you.
19:29:53 But yeah, it’s just the screen of everybody.
19:29:55 When did it…
19:29:57 It says I’m…
19:29:57 Right after you did the voice memo thing.
19:30:01 Ha!
19:30:02 You’re sharing yourself, but not your desktop.
19:30:06 Yeah.
19:30:05 It says I’m sharing the desktop.
19:30:08 Nope.
19:30:10 Well, it lied.
19:30:13 Oh, I wonder if this is the reason.
19:30:15 I have no idea.
19:30:23 According to my…
19:30:26 What I told it to do, it was sharing the screen, so I don’t know why it’s not doing that.
19:30:33 I saw it all.
19:30:37 But when I was trying to get at, though, was that you have a very powerful machine. It’s even got a full-blown Rail server on it. It’s not configured to do anything, and you would have to be a Unix expert to actually get it to do anything. But it’s an extremely powerful system.
19:30:53 Hackers want to compromise Macs if they can get into them, because among other things, they can use it to send out billions of billions of pieces of mail.
19:31:05 Will that happen to you? No, it’s extremely difficult even if you’re sitting right in front of the machine to do this, trying to have somebody remotely come in and do it is nigh impossible. Nobody’s ever done it, but I’m just pointing out that that’s one reason why Mac.
19:31:21 are a target. It’s an extremely powerful machine. And if I could understand why it wasn’t showing what you were doing, I have something else I want to show you. I’ll give it another go.
19:31:32 So let’s try it.
19:31:37 Yep, there you are. Yep.
19:31:36 Are you seeing my desktop? Okay.
19:31:40 One of the things that you might want to know that’s useful is what day of the week is Christmas on this year?
19:31:50 In Terminal, you can say cal and then type in the year 2026, and it gives you a calendar for 2026. And it tells you that Christmas is on a Friday. Well, what if you want to know why, for whatever reason, what?
19:32:06 day of the week, Christmas was in 1950. Cal…
19:32:12 1950, and you go there and it says in 1950 Christmas was on Monday.
19:32:18 Um, I…
19:32:19 I would like to know what day of the week that
19:32:26 October the 10th was in the year 1911. 1911 was the Chinese Revolution, and it took place on 1010 days, so it was October 10th.
19:32:37 So I say Cal.
19:32:39 1911 and it says that October 10th was a Tuesday.
19:32:46 And that’s nice to know. When was the US Naval Academy founded? It was founded on October 10th, 1848, so I type in Cal.
19:32:57 1845.
19:32:59 1945 and it tells me that that was a Friday. Now, why am I fascinated with October 10th? It’s my birthday, so historical events on October 10th are interesting to me.
19:33:13 How far back does it go? Well, let’s try Cal.
19:33:19 1492.
19:33:22 We celebrate Columbus Day on October the 10th.
19:33:27 Traditionally, in October the 10th in 1492 was a Wednesday.
19:33:34 Now, that was.
19:33:36 That’s completely incorrect because that was a Gregorian calendar back then, rather than that was not the Gregorian calendar. That was the Julian calendar. So October the 10th was actually some other time completely.
19:33:49 If you want to know something about this, you can say man manual, cal, spell it correctly, and it tells you about…
19:33:57 all the different things you can do with Calendar and including strange things. And let’s see.
19:34:07 If I can find what I want.
19:34:20 I’m trying to remember the year something happened.
19:34:26 because
19:34:38 Just a second while I look something up.
19:34:51 Okay.
19:34:54 Tao.
19:34:58 1582.
19:35:02 Nope, that’s not what I wanted.
19:35:13 Cal.
19:35:15 1752.
19:35:19 Yes.
19:35:20 Calendar for 1752.
19:35:23 If let’s take a look at September.
19:35:27 Notice anything interesting about September?
19:35:36 All the days aren’t there.
19:35:38 Yeah.
19:35:40 The calendar, the Gregorian calendar that we use today was adopted in Britain in 1752. And because it was so terrible,
19:35:51 out of sync with the Julian calendar that had been used up to that time. They just had to get rid of some dates, and they got rid of them in September. And there were people who were crying about the fact that they would not
19:36:06 have a birthday that year, because a birthday had religious significance. People didn’t get presents back then, but when you went to church on your birthday, it was a special day, and they couldn’t have a birthday, so they had no birthdays at all, and they were very sad.
19:36:22 And it caused a fair amount of social unrest.
19:36:27 in Britain, because people didn’t have birthdays.
19:36:31 The calendar in on your Mac that you don’t actually see is actually quite powerful and in some cases kind of amusing. If you ask for the cal for the year one, you can get it, but it’s kind of pointless because again,
19:36:47 the calendar in the year one was actually Julian calendar, and it’s putting everything into Graph.
19:36:54 Gregorian dates, so it doesn’t actually match anything, but you know it there if you want to play with it.
19:37:01 booking
19:37:00 I think I got lost somewhere. Where was this that you got to this to get this information?
19:37:06 Oh, this is the terminal. The terminal is a program that allows you to talk to Unix, and the Unix program on your Mac has a built-in calendar called Cal. And if you just type in Cal, it gives you whatever the current month calendar is and even highlights the date.
19:37:22 If you type in cal, and then you give it a date like
19:37:28 1861 when the Civil War started, it comes up and you can get calendars for dates almost anywhere in the past or even in the future.
19:37:42 2099.
19:37:45 Um, I’m
19:37:45 But how did you get to terminal?
19:37:47 Terminals on your Mac, if you go to your applications folder, if you go down to the directory called utilities, which is down here, and you open that up.
19:38:00 terminal is in your utilities folder. These things in utilities, a utility is something that you use to do something on the computer, but doesn’t produce anything for you. If you use a word processor, you can produce a document.
19:38:16 If you use iMovie, you can make a movie, but utilities are doing things with the computer to do various things. They don’t necessarily produce a product. So all of those things are stuck into the utilities folder and terminal is one of them.
19:38:32 I’m not suggesting that a lot of you want to actually play with utilities, but it’s there. And a lot of the things you can do with it are quite clever. There are some things that you can do with Terminal that are incredibly dangerous too, but…
19:38:48 Um.
19:38:49 Fortunately, you have to learn a lot before you can do the dangerous things. So I wanted to show that to you.
19:38:58 One of the things, yes?
19:39:01 Will Kell lets you type in two dates, and it’ll tell me how many days it is between them?
19:39:06 No, but there are websites to do that. You can…
19:39:09 Yeah.
19:39:09 You can go in there and say days till or days from, or whatever, and there are calendars that’ll do that for you. Calendar itself doesn’t do calendar math.
19:39:19 Which is, it’s an idea. I’m sure that somebody’s written a utility for that, but it’s not built in. Another way that I usually, that I often take
19:39:33 care of quick notes and such is to use messages. I’ll send messages to myself.
19:39:40 And you might think that’s kind of silly, but why would you do that? Well, this was a coastal flood warning that came out sometime ago and it cracked me up because it was a mistake. This was actually…
19:39:55 I had my Mac.
19:39:58 still thought it was in Maryland, and it was giving me a Maryland flood warning. And so I had to go back and tell my mag, no, you’re not in Maryland anymore.
19:40:07 This is one of those messages that I see all the time. Here’s the PayPal security code number, don’t share your code.
19:40:16 How dangerous is it to share your security code that you get sent?
19:40:23 goes away right away, doesn’t it?
19:40:27 Yeah.
19:40:25 Yeah, they expire. You can share it all you want.
19:40:29 I go into places all the time and the waitress or the clerk or something, they’ll ask, “Anything else you’d like?” And I said, “Oh, yes, I like a winning lotto ticket.
19:40:40 And they always say, haha, I can’t do that. But actually, there’s no harm at all in someone giving you a winning lotto ticket, because they’ve probably already cashed it in. So is it technically a winning lotto ticket? Yes. Is it worth anything to you? No.
19:40:55 And these security codes are much the same thing. They’re time sensitive. You type that in, and five minutes later, 10 minutes later, it goes away.
19:41:05 So I thought that was funny. This was a photograph of a snake in a neighbor’s driveway. This is a cartoon that caught my attention. It was talking about, I used to work for NOAA and our budget’s been slashed and this is how we are going to be doing forecasting the future, just throwing darts at a board.
19:41:24 Um.
19:41:25 And I showed you that country. And here’s a joke about spiders. I used to design websites. So spiders are the only web developers in the world that enjoy finding bugs.
19:41:38 Anyway, when I get these, I’ll send them to myself as messages, because usually I’m doing something else.
19:41:46 easy to do, it doesn’t cost anything, and why not do it that way. One downside though is that these take up a lot of room and you can send fairly large things through doing it this way.
19:42:01 Believe it or not, Britain has a national Peaky Bits Day. I don’t know why.
19:42:09 My daughter lives in Britain. She explained it to me and it still makes no sense to me. My daughter also sent me this box.
19:42:19 Which tells you a lot about my daughter. But anyway, I find these things, I send them to myself.
19:42:27 Is there a downside? Yes, these things take up space. So because these are photographs and these are sound files and all kinds of other things. So when you have these things, once you’ve done whatever you’re going to do with them, you can go and delete them. And a lot of people don’t know how to do that.
19:42:45 go up to Peter.
19:42:46 up to the name and I click on this,
19:42:49 Among other things, it’ll tell me documents that I’ve got in… well, it doesn’t tell me any documents, but it tells me photographs and so on and so forth, info, and it’s not showing me what I want.
19:43:01 If you have a lot of photographs, I guess it just hasn’t synced them yet. There’ll be something up here for photographs and you can select them all at once and then you can delete them. If it’s not doing that and it’s not cooperating, you can go through and you can just…
19:43:16 Click on this and say delete and it’s going to get rid of that snake and it’s going to get rid of that cartoon and it’s going to get rid of that.
19:43:29 chart. And you notice it says it’s going to delete it from all devices. Why do you want to do that? Because if you don’t…
19:43:36 Then you go into your…
19:43:39 iCloud settings.
19:43:42 And you look at what the space that you’re using up in iCloud, I have seen people… here it says 5.9 megabytes of messages are used. I’ve seen people who will have 44 gigabytes worth of stuff.
19:43:56 in messages because they’ve…
19:43:59 Don’t set the messages to expire, and they don’t delete them. Why is this a problem? They run out of space in their phone. They say, hey, I just bought this phone a year ago, and it says it’s out of space. It can’t be out of space because, you know, I get rid of all this stuff. No, they don’t get things out of messages.
19:44:16 Messages, you have two ways of getting rid of things. One is you go through and delete things that you don’t want, and the other thing you can do is you go up to Messages, Settings, and you can say… right now, it keeps messages forever, but you can say,
19:44:31 it for 30 days.
19:44:33 or keep it for a year.
19:44:35 And then anything over that length of time, it’ll just get rid of them.
19:44:41 So that’s a useful thing to do. Some other things to note about messages. You can specify what can send you messages. So click on this and you can get messages from PeterLyon@iCloud, PeterLyon@gmail,
19:44:57 If Peter Lyon had a phone, and I have not willing to buy my fictitious person a phone, you could put in the phone number and then Peter Lang could get messages at that phone number.
19:45:10 And things that you can share from, you can share news stories to messages, books, all kinds of stuff that you can pick on what it is that you want to share things with, messages.
19:45:25 can filter out spam messages. You can specify the text size that you want for the messages, all kinds of things that you probably never played with. But it’s worth investigating that. It’s a good way to send yourself notes.
19:45:39 Here we have it, this is a piece of spam that was sent to me today. And this was, it’s not exactly porn, but it would have linked to a porn site if I would have clicked the link.
19:45:51 This jade, by the way, this is all computer generated.
19:45:55 Jackson.
19:45:54 Yeah, look at that arm.
19:45:56 Well, the arm is supposed to be looking the distortion because it looks like they’re taking a selfie, but it’s still computer generated. It’s not a real person.
19:46:07 You can also store some fairly significant things in messages. This is an owner’s manual for a Toyota BZ, which is an electric.
19:46:20 Toyota. And I had some questions about it. I found their manual and grabbed it.
19:46:28 So there are lots of things you can do, but once you’re done with doing whatever you want to do, go around and delete them.
19:46:39 On an iPhone or an iPad, you can delete multiple things at once on the Mac. It doesn’t have that option, and I don’t know why. It irritates me.
19:46:52 But it frees up.
19:46:56 It frees up space.
19:46:58 Another thing that you have for that you can use for taking notes and doing simple things is TextEdit, which I mentioned has been here forever, but I want to show you a feature of TextEdit that you might not have thought about. I’m going to go to a website.
19:47:16 And…
19:47:20 Let’s go to the Straight Mac site.
19:47:26 If I go and I grab
19:47:29 This…
19:47:32 And I put it into pages.
19:47:37 Where Awareness pages? There you are.
19:47:42 Continue.
19:47:45 Continue.
19:47:46 Yes, we’re going to have a blank page here.
19:47:49 If I paste it in,
19:47:52 paste it in with the original formatting, and it has the
19:47:58 photograph and so on and so forth. I didn’t want all that, I just wanted the text. So how do you… what’s a quick way to strip that out? Quick way to strip that out is to paste it into TextEdit.
19:48:09 Because text debt, well, that’s interesting. TextEdit didn’t used to have the ability to have images. So much for my…
19:48:17 My demo failed.
19:48:23 I texted it as just TXT instead of RTFD.
19:48:26 Yeah, that’s… yeah, when I save it as text, it’ll throw that away.
19:48:34 And we’re going, oh.
19:48:40 TXT will it? Yeah, maybe not. Maybe I have to.
19:48:42 There’s a drop-down there, right where you were, that lets you choose other things rather than rich text.
19:48:50 Yeah.
19:48:50 Yeah, but it wants to do it because of the binary.
19:48:52 Oh, let’s see. Yep, that didn’t help.
19:48:55 Yeah.
19:48:56 And I can export it as a PDF. Well, so much for that. I have a commercial application that I use for this sort of stuff called BBEdit, but…
19:49:06 to be able that you can just strip all that stuff out using text edit delete.
19:49:11 And… go away. But I’ll show you the commercial application. BBEdit is a programmer’s editor and does all kinds of strange things, but if I grab this…
19:49:21 And I paste it into this. It just keeps the text. It gets rid of all the formatting. And I find this very, very useful, particularly when somebody else’s tab.
19:49:35 Uh, they…
19:49:36 sent me something, we’re supposed to be jointly writing a script for a play or taking notes or something like that, and they have formatting all over the place, and it just annoys me, so I dump it into BBEdit, throws out all the, um…
19:49:51 Formatting, and keeps just the text, I edit the text, and then I paste it into something like Word and put the formatting that I want. This saves a huge amount of time. Trying to correct formatting that somebody else did
19:50:06 Uh, in Word or in, uh,
19:50:09 pages just takes forever because people do strange kind of things. This one woman sent me some minutes that she had taken of a meeting, four pages of minutes. She changed the margin over 30 times.
19:50:24 And
19:50:26 That was really annoying. So I just dumped it in here, stripped all that stuff out, and then I could reformat it the way that I wanted. And text used to be able to let me do that quickly, which is…
19:50:40 They should have tested that, and I just assumed it worked the way that it did before.
19:50:44 So much for that. Oh.
19:50:47 Another thing I wanted to show people,
19:50:50 That is something that’s simple to do, but somebody has to show you how to do it.
19:50:58 Come on, open up.
19:51:11 It’s go to the straight max side again.
19:51:22 If you look at the
19:51:28 Oh, actually, it’s not there. It’s in the
19:51:31 email.
19:51:36 In my email invitation for the meeting, I had a…
19:51:42 example of terrible, uh,
19:51:45 URL.
19:51:47 This URL, if I click on it, it’s going to bring it up. I typed into…
19:51:54 Amazon, random piece of junk, and it came up with this page.
19:51:59 So if we look at my email that I sent you, the URL has a whole bunch of stuff in there. And if you look down here at the bottom, you’ll see even that random piece of junk is here.
19:52:11 in the URL that it sent back.
19:52:15 So what is all the rest of this stuff? The rest of this stuff is metadata that
19:52:24 Amazon keeps because it tells them who is requesting something, it basically gives your address and your name if they know what your name is, what you were looking for, what time you asked for it. It keeps all of that stuff because it uses it for marketing.
19:52:40 Well, if you want to send somebody this, but you don’t want to tell them that you were looking for a random piece of junk,
19:52:46 I will show you how to fix that. And the way you fix that is you come up to your URL in Amazon. So this is the search in Amazon. Up here is the Amazon URL. You go from left to right and you look for a question mark. And right here.
19:53:04 is a question mark.
19:53:06 Everything after that question mark is metadata.
19:53:10 So if we get rid of all of that stuff,
19:53:13 I just deleted that, I come in here, make a new tab, I paste that in.
19:53:20 And it goes to the same thing again, but no longer does it tell you that it’s a random piece of junk was what I was searching for. It doesn’t have any information, any metadata on me. And the trick again is go through that URL.
19:53:36 You originally had.
19:53:40 and look for that question mark, because everything after the question mark is unnecessary.
19:53:47 And necessary for you. It’s necessary for Amazon to spam you, but it’s not necessary for you.
19:53:54 So.
19:53:59 I’m going to…
19:54:02 Stop sharing machine because I want to actually ask if you understood what I just did.
19:54:09 Does that make sense?
19:54:11 Mm-hmm.
19:54:11 Yes?
19:54:12 I would recommend, anytime you send somebody else a URL.
19:54:18 Whether it’s from The Washington Post or New York Times or Amazon or whatever, you look through the URL you’re going to send.
19:54:26 And look for that question mark and delete the question mark and everything behind it to the end of the URL. And then send them that bare URL. Why? Because the person you’re sending it to, like, you’re sending it to your lawyer because
19:54:42 lawyer backed into your car and you’re suing your lawyer, you don’t really want to tell your lawyer anything that anything unnecessary. So you don’t tell them that you looked up shysters at law. You don’t want to do things like that.
19:54:57 So get rid of everything past that. The question mark and everything after that, because it protects your identity. Well, it doesn’t protect your identity. It protects…
19:55:07 things about you. For example, you get some we were talking earlier about political spam that people send you. If you respond
19:55:16 If they send you an email and you respond by clicking the link, when you respond back to them, they
19:55:23 have a database that says, oh, you are responding to this mailing that we sent out at this time from this list that we bought from this vendor, and you are giving us $5.
19:55:35 And they put that into a database. And then two weeks later, they’ll send you a new message saying, we’re so generous in giving us five bucks two weeks ago, but we’re really desperate. Could you give us 15 or 50 here?
19:55:51 Whatever.
19:55:51 They keep that information and they use that to market it to you. So if you get rid of that information,
19:55:59 They won’t have it. If I’m going to donate money to any nonprofit, be it the Red Cross or anybody, I don’t respond to email requests. I go to their website and I do it directly.
19:56:13 Why? Because it tells them nothing about how I found out about them.
19:56:23 My spouse was, uh, she was an officer in the Navy, she was an officer at the Public Health Service, she was an officer in American Nurses Association, she was an officer in HIMSS, which is health informatics. I don’t remember what it stands for. She was an officer of many things.
19:56:41 I showed her how to do that and the amount of spam she had just plummeted.
19:56:46 Because if she responds to the corporate email sent out by these organizations, then they say, ah, you’re responding to something that we sent out on X or Y or Z. And so they try and send more.
19:57:00 As an example, I’m a fan of the women’s basketball team for the University of Maryland. My daughter went to the University of Maryland. I’m really fond of their basketball team.
19:57:11 I bought a shirt.
19:57:14 from their online store.
19:57:17 But I got rid of all of that stuff after the question mark, and I just bought the shirt. And so I got this polo shirt from them.
19:57:25 Kathleen responded to the email within the next 45
19:57:30 Day by day, she had 90 email messages from the store.
19:57:35 So that’s why you want to track down that question mark and get rid of it. It takes a little practice finding it and then getting rid of it, but it’s well worth the…
19:57:49 well worth the effort.
19:57:50 And…
19:57:51 I have lost track of something. Oh, one more thing I’m going to show you.
19:57:58 And this was supposed to be useful, simple things. This is a simple thing, how useful it is, I don’t know, but it’s really cool.
19:58:08 And that is where…
19:58:11 Here is my…
19:58:13 There you are.
19:58:18 We’re going to bring
19:58:20 up the weather here. Here’s the squirm weather and if you look at the squim weather, it tells you all kinds of things, including the air quality index, which is really cool because we’ve had terrible air quality, but right now it’s good. One of the things you have, though, is
19:58:35 is the moon, the phases of the moon and it tells you the illumination is 41% because it’s a partial moon. Moon set tonight is at 2224. The next full moon is in nine days. If you click on this, you’ll come down to this thing.
19:58:51 distance to the moon, the distance to the moon right now is 247,468 miles, which is cool, the kind of thing to know. Well, what’s the distance to the moon on Friday? It’s 251,221.
19:59:08 Is this useful? I don’t have any idea, unless possibly, if you’re an astrologer, but I think that is just super cool, and you probably didn’t know you could do that. You’ll probably wonder why I think it’s cool, but you can do that now.
19:59:24 Find out how far away the moon is. I used to do strange things.
19:59:29 .
19:59:30 I used to work for National Ocean Service. National Ocean Service is a mapping service, among other things that make nautical charts for the United States. They used to have this, every year they used to have this geographic Olympics where they would take contestants and they’d ask them questions and you’d come up with answers, and the person who gave the right answers won.
19:59:50 After winning 5 years in a row, they banned me from further competition because I didn’t work for the division of NOAA that made the maps. I worked for headquarters and I made websites, but I’m an historian, and historians are really fond of maps.
20:00:07 And I knew all kinds of interesting geologic geographic trivia. For example,
20:00:15 How much further west?
20:00:18 is San Diego, California from Reno, Nevada.
20:00:26 100 miles?
20:00:26 It’s East.
20:00:28 San Diego is east of Reno, Nevada.
20:00:33 That’s not obvious to a lot of people, but if you look at a map, Reno is quite a bit farther, well, not that much farther, but further east than San Diego, California. And so people think of, you know, San Diego’s on the coast, so it’s got to be farther west. Nope.
20:00:49 Reno is farther west than San Diego. And
20:00:55 I had somebody who strenuously objected to this, and I bet him a bagel and he ended up getting me a
20:01:04 bagel. I don’t bet, but, you know…
20:01:10 Yeah.
20:01:08 I wanted a bagel.
20:01:14 Any questions?
20:01:16 Yeah.
20:01:17 I do have a question totally off the subject that we’re discussing.
20:01:23 Yes.
20:01:23 I have a new MacBook, and I would like to download Chrome.
20:01:29 I cannot get just Chrome every time I try to download it, it wants to give me a whole suite of things.
20:01:39 Uh, if you go to… if you just if you go into Google and just type download Chrome, it takes you to a page on Google.
20:01:50 Google site and all you do is you download Chrome. That’s nothing else. I don’t.
20:02:00 Um, when you hit Chrome and you have a Google account, you’ll have this little.
20:02:07 menu up in the upper right corner, it’s a series of nine
20:02:13 Squares, and those are different applications, but they’re all just part of Google. When you use Gmail, when you use Google, when you use Google Maps, all of those are part of Google.
20:02:26 Google itself is the world’s largest application. So the search engine and all of that, it’s all one application, it’s all one piece of software. It’s the largest and most complex thing man has ever made.
20:02:41 And it runs on millions of servers. That’s what powers it. So it’s quite complex. But if you want just Chrome, that’s all you get. The other applications are just online parts of Google website.
20:03:00 Any other simple things that people went to do that they’d like to know how to do?
20:03:09 Did any of you want to do any of the things that I showed you?
20:03:14 That’s right.
20:03:15 I like that Amazon one.
20:03:15 I love reminders.
20:03:20 Mm-hmm.
20:03:19 My favorite thing on reminders is I don’t use it anymore because I’m retired, but when I was working and I needed to stop and get milk at the store, I would tell it when I leave work, remind me. When I leave this location, remind me to get.
20:03:35 milk.
20:03:36 I have it so that when I come near QFC, it buzzes my phone and reminds me, “Oh, yes, I should go look and see my list. My dear spouse used to complain that I was a terrible shopper because…
20:03:51 She did what she called grazing, where she’d go into the store and she’d see things and she’d grab them because she needed them. She’d give me a list of five things and I come back with five things and she just, that infuriated her. You wasted a trip. Wow.
20:04:07 What do I know?
20:04:14 Yeah.
20:04:10 We just come back with what you told me to get. And I fail at shopping, apparently.
20:04:18 I think you’re typical to most of us guys. Because I do the same thing. You know, when I want to go shopping, I don’t want to browse through, you know,
20:04:29 clothes and stuff, I want to get that pair of shoes that I came here for.
20:04:33 Yeah.
20:04:33 I’ve been ridiculed by the people at Costco, because I’ll go into Costco and I won’t get a cart.
20:04:41 And they just think that’s hilarious. And more than once I’ve regretted that and had to go get a cart.
20:04:49 I usually go into Costco and I want to get one thing and I can carry it out. But they think it’s hilarious, people who go into Costco and don’t get a card. This one woman, she said, you came for the hot dog, didn’t you?” Well, no, but that was a good guess.
20:05:09 Any questions?
20:05:12 I have something I’d like to bring up.
20:05:13 it was very interesting. Thank you.
20:05:19 Okay.
20:05:18 I’d like to bring up about the about the meeting we’re going to have on the 29th.
20:05:26 Yes.
20:05:27 Looking for a couple of volunteers to help bring people in, show more, show them where the restrooms are and that sort of thing.
20:05:35 Yes, the meeting on the 29th is at Trinity United Methodist Church, which is on.
20:05:45 I don’t remember what road is on. Blake, it’s on Blake. It’s going to be in the fellowship hall and we need some volunteers basically so that when they come through the door, they say, Fellowship Hall is that way, and the restrooms are down there.
20:06:00 And also sign in because I don’t have an electronic sign-in. Speaking of which, I forgot to give you…
20:06:08 .
20:06:10 The URL for the sign-in sheet.
20:06:13 And…
20:06:23 I will paste it into the chat room.
20:06:31 After the August one, do you plan on having Zoom again?
20:06:34 Ah, yes, the, um…
20:06:37 Okay.
20:06:38 Most of the, uh…
20:06:42 meetings are going to be via Zoom. If you have the chat window open, the URL for the sign-in sheet is there. And I use that just among other things, just to keep track of who did what.
20:06:58 We used to have in-person meetings all the time. That disappeared during
20:07:06 Um,
20:07:08 We couldn’t have them, so we’d had virtual machine meetings.
20:07:21 Yeah.
20:07:23 Right.
20:07:12 One advantage of virtual machines is that you’re sitting in front of a computer. So when I’m telling you to look under the Apple menu or something, you can go up and look under the Apple menu. It’s convenient in that regard. But there are some things I can’t do.
20:07:27 Zoom, particularly things that require reboot or that change the resolution of screens or just there are a lot of things that Zoom doesn’t like. So if I switch users, for example, which is something I frequently do, Zoom killed just dies because it
20:07:49 Okay.
20:07:44 I was logged in under one Zoom user, and if you log out, then Zoom goes away. So that’s the kind of thing that I’m going to be doing at the meeting at the end of the month, or just things that I can’t do.
20:07:56 over Zoom. And among other some things, just some basic diagnostic stuff, like your machine’s not working the way you want, what can you do without consulting an expert to influence your computer and get it back on the straight and narrow?
20:08:14 It’s not necessarily difficult, but it’s impossible over Zoom, because if I reboot Zoom, you all go away, and that kind of ends the meeting right there.
20:08:25 We’ve had virtual meetings that have ended because of power failures, because of internet failures, and because I did something that accidentally rebooted the machine.
20:08:37 I’m trying to avoid that.
20:08:41 Thank you.
20:08:41 For September.
20:08:44 There is a possibility that I will be showing something with OS 27. And I say a possibility because I don’t know what Apple’s release schedule is.
20:08:56 I have developer status with Apple, and one of the things that I have to do is it’s a confidentiality agreement limiting what I can talk about. And I don’t sign those confidentiality agreements.
20:09:11 But I don’t want to be in violation of them, so I just put it off until it’s actually released. But if it’s close to the release date in September, we might be showing OS 27.
20:09:24 verse 27 is the general name and it’s going to be on the iPad, the iPhone, and the Mac. And they went with that terminology because if you’ve noticed over the years, they’ve become much closer together in terms of
20:09:39 they function and how they look. There are still things you can do on a Mac that you can’t do on an iPad or an iPhone and there are things you can do on an iPhone and iPad that you can’t do on a Mac. One of them that I was thinking about talking about tonight, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do it.
20:09:56 how to make a memoji. A Memoji is basically a talking head. That’s your voice and your inflections, but
20:10:04 From the point of view, it looks like you’re talking to a zebra or something. And it’s a cool thing to do, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that virtually. But I might do that on the 29th. Any questions?
20:10:24 On that day, on the 29th, if anybody you know if you want to help out with showing people around, just show up a few minutes early and we’ll
20:10:35 Yeah.
20:10:35 So, yeah, where things are so you can, and
20:10:39 Yeah, it’s not a huge lift. You just basically fellowship hall is down there, restrooms are on the left. Then, you know, it’s not a huge burden.
20:10:53 Okay, I will see some or all of you on the 29th, and the rest of you, uh, maybe in September.
20:11:01 Night?
20:11:02 Thank you.
20:11:02 Thank you.
20:11:03 Thank you
20:11:03 Thank you
