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Short topics: March 2024

Short topics: March 2024

The March 19, 2024 meeting covered several topics that didn’t require an entire meeitng, so the meeting was given the creative name of Short Topics. Topics covered included:

Special characters you can type on your Mac using the virtual keyboard and special character menu.
Special characters you can type on your Mac using the virtual keyboard and special character menu.

We did manage to touch on all these topics. Some references for specific topics:

Starling Home Hub: this device allows you to use Nest thermostats, security cameras, and other devices, and have them seamlessly integrate into Apple’s HomeKit, so you can ask them questions via Siri and control them with your Mac or iPhone or iPad.

Backblaze Drive Stats: in response to a question about what hard drives are best, I referred to the massive database created by Backblaze. Lots of data on available drives and their durability.

HomeKit compatible hardware: Apple’s software ecosystem for devices is called HomeKit, and Apple maintains a page showing examples of devices that can be controlled by your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Video recording of the March 19, 2024 meeting

Video recording of March 2024 SMUG meeting on Small Topics.

Transcript of the March 2024 meeting

Pro tip: use your browser to search for particular words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.

18:34:17 Okay. Anybody have a question?
18:34:21 I have a question. I wondered if you had had a chance to play with icloud on Windows.
18:34:27 I know that's not really connected to the Mac except it's sort of this tangentially.
18:34:31 I did. I have done it in the past. I did briefly put the software on my Windows laptop, but then I got distracted and didn't do too much with it.
18:34:42 There were some things that I was curious about. Playing with because Kathleen and I have a a large amount of space on our.
18:34:53 I cloud account. And so I wanted to just test easy exchange of information from. Windows laptop to our max and so on and so forth.
18:35:04 But while I that was the original goal, I haven't actually done it. I was a little bit surprised that the, the capabilities.
18:35:15 It's not as extensive as. As icloud for max, which is probably not a surprise, but I don't know how much of that is just a limitation of the Windows technology and how much of that is that it's kind of on the back burner.
18:35:34 What? Apple is doing. But it looked. It looked about 3 or 4 generations back from.
18:35:43 Where you are in the Mac world. They in terms of in terms of the capability though I think it's going to be fairly close.
18:35:52 Apple went through a Massive rebuild of icloud. Several years ago when they wanted to make sure that the web experience was as close as possible.
18:36:04 To what you had using an application. So if you were doing mail on icloud. I am it would look and act a lot like mail on your desktop and the same with pages and and, and numbers and such.
18:36:20 But, again, I didn't, I didn't have as much time to play with it as I thought I would.
18:36:26 Yes, Kathleen just asked if I was recording. And I think I'm recording. I don't, yes, I'm recording.
18:36:33 It said that you were.
18:36:33 I have a little Yeah, I have a little thing here that says. That time I am.
18:36:42 Paul, did you have your hand up?
18:36:44 I do.
18:36:47 I have a couple questions. One question is we've got a couple of old. Old iPhones, iPhone 6.
18:36:54 E in 6 Si think or something. Anyway, and they've got They've got some, voice messages and text messages on them that my wife wants to transfer to the computer.
18:37:13 How do I do that?
18:37:17 Assuming that they can still talk to the cloud. If you turn on icloud. And have it sync.
18:37:28 Yeah.
18:37:31 If you turn on icloud on the Mac and tell it to sync. Messages and notes and all those kinds of things and you turn that on and on the phone and just wait a bit, it should sync those things.
18:37:44 The it gets a little bit tricky because messages in particular on your phone is just messier than messages on your Mac.
18:37:55 On your phone, if I send you a message. To your email address. If I send it to your, you say your icloud address to your Gmail address and to your phone number that actually is 3 different strings.
18:38:15 Yeah, I appreciate that.
18:38:13 3 different clusters. So some of the stuff that's on some of the stuff that's on the phone.
18:38:19 May not transfer to your. Mac, if it was sent directly to the phone. So the same things have to be.
18:38:28 Sinking on the Mac is on the. Phone, but just do it through icloud. There's really There's really no other easy way to do that than just do it through eye cloud.
18:38:39 So make sure that that notes and messages and whatever else you care about. Our saint. For voice mail, voice mail, believe it or not, isn't on icloud.
18:38:51 It's actually on your phone vendor so if you get a new phone the whatever is in voicemail is gonna be there as long as you don't change the number.
18:39:01 Okay.
18:39:02 But that. The only way to get that on your Mac is to email it to yourself. Which you can do.
18:39:08 Oh. Okay, so how do we do that? I just email, we do that all the time.
18:39:16 Yeah. So that will be on the phone. Yeah. So that will be on the phone. I'd be on the computer too if we emailed it.
18:39:23 Yeah.
18:39:22 Yeah, then we could figure Yeah, so that that was The.
18:39:28 Voice mail. Understand their voices I want to keep. That's why I want to be.
18:39:33 Yes.
18:39:36 Okay, well we'll give that a shot and I'm not sure that I've been able to Find Both our phones on icloud.
18:39:46 Now we have a, we have a funny situation here when we bought the new computer. It got sort of set up in Deb's name.
18:39:59 And I think it's got it's got a different ID and everything from the from the the account that's in my name so that I'm not sure.
18:40:10 Yeah.
18:40:08 Yeah, but yeah, but on, on a Mac, just go in and create another account for you.
18:40:16 That way when you're using the computer, it's all you when she's using the computer, it's all her.
18:40:20 So you can have.
18:40:19 Yeah. Oh yeah, we've actually got that. We've got 2 different, got 2 different.
18:40:25 I guess we have 2 different accounts for 2 different IDs, but yeah. Okay, that's, that's something we can work with.
18:40:33 We'll give that a try and see how it goes. Thank you.
18:40:35 Yeah. Any other questions?
18:40:40 I have a request for help. I bought a inexpensive lavalier mic. For the iPhone.
18:40:49 And. The sound while It's much more even. Because when I when I take video with the iPhone I sometimes cover up the microphone and with my hand and so it You know the video is uneven The bloveler, wireless lovelier mic.
18:41:08 Got around that issue, but it sounds to me sort of like I'm talking with a towel over my head and I wondered if If anybody had any recommendations, I mean, it's an inexpensive microphone.
18:41:22 That might be the problem. I wondered if anybody had any recommendations for the proper equipment. So the sound would actually be decent.
18:41:31 Well, with, hmm. It depends upon how much you want to lug around.
18:41:38 I don't know if you've seen some of the pictures that people have of. Is an example of the kind of things you can do with an iPhone.
18:41:47 Apple's last keynote address that they had last fall. Was filmed entirely using iPhones.
18:41:55 They didn't use any regular cameras. They just use iPhones. But having said that they used iPhones.
18:42:02 They still did things like they had these handheld stabilizers that hold the iPhone so that as you move it around it's it's very steady.
18:42:14 The had stabilizers did that and they also had microphones attached. To the iPhones like boom mics and so on so forth.
18:42:21 The boom mics are fairly small. They're like 4 to 6 inches long. But if you go on to Amazon and you look for microphones for iPhones you'll see that there's a huge variety.
18:42:31 And, the especially for things like outdoors it gets a little bit tricky because you want to have a bonnet or or, I don't remember what the proper name of it is.
18:42:48 When in fact
18:42:52 The fuzzy thing.
18:42:49 Well, it's not really a wind suck, but that little phone thing. Yeah, the phone thing or the fuzzy thing that goes over it.
18:42:57 They have they have those because around here particularly with wind blowing all the time you go outside and the wind is you're going to catch the wind blowing all the time.
18:43:05 You'll go outside and the wind is you're gonna catch the wind. The other problem that you that you run into is more mental than anything else.
18:43:12 Your brain automatically does a really good noise cancellation. So if I'm talking to you right now and I can hear Kathleen in the background rustling papers if she's reading a book.
18:43:26 I can filter that out entirely. Your phone won't. It'll, if it can hear it, it'll pick it up and it'll add it.
18:43:33 So, you have to, you have to really think hard about. How the phone works, how the microphone works on a on an iPhone, where it's located physically on the device.
18:43:48 Where it's located physically on the device, a lot of people think it's at the top and it's located physically on the device.
18:43:54 A lot of people think it's at the top and it's actually at the bottom and think about ambient noise that might be involved.
18:43:57 And, you'll see that a lot of people when they're You know, a lot of reporters will do that when they're talking on the iPhone.
18:44:04 They'll hold it out like this in front of them. It looks like they're talking into the end of it.
18:44:08 Well, that's because that's where this speakers are and that's also where the microphone picks pick ups are.
18:44:14 And, when you add a microphone to that, And the microphones on a cable, you obviously have a little bit more leeway in how it works, but.
18:44:25 You're still gonna run into problems with ambient noise and, and wind and all kinds of other things.
18:44:32 And it won't necessarily sound that much better. Apple spent literally billions of dollars making these phones.
18:44:41 And, microphone that you pick up for, you know, 30 bucks on Amazon.
18:44:48 Might be just a $30 phone that you pick a white microphone that you pick up on Amazon.
18:44:55 The people that I that I used to work for at NOAA who've used these, they will get an adapter so that they can plug in to this has a USBC port on it because it's one of the new ones.
18:45:08 They'll get a USBC to a USB a connector and then they'll just get a USB microphone.
18:45:14 This microphone that I'm using right now is a USB microphone. And it just plugs into the adapter and they use those microphones for things like interviews.
18:45:24 So. They'll go with their, the mic and they'll use the iPhone as a camera.
18:45:29 They'll use a different iPhone. And a mic and a large microphone for the something like an interview they go out on ships and in planes and so on and so forth and interview scientists at work.
18:45:40 But it's It's something that does take a bit of experimentation and takes some.
18:45:46 And creativity on your on your part. There's no simple answer. I'm doing sight and sound for my church now.
18:45:57 And even with equipment that's made for sight and made for sound it's not you're not using phones it still gets kind of tricky.
18:46:05 The cameras got an auto focus. But if the minister walks out a little bit too far in front of the lights and it gets dimmer.
18:46:16 The camera loses focus and it gets fuzzy and then people say, why did you fuzz out the camera?
18:46:22 I didn't do that. It just did that automatically because it was trying to find a sharp focus.
18:46:27 So, there's no easy. Answer, but do do look into depending upon what phone you're using, getting a a USB adapter and just use it like a you know, a USB microphone.
18:46:43 And plug it in. Because the, iPhone will probably detect it as a microphone and use it as a microphone.
18:46:51 You don't even have to add anything. It'll probably just say, oh, I know what that is.
18:46:57 The problem for me is I need I need to take these on my hike. So I'm outdoors.
18:47:04 That's why I wanted to wireless, so.
18:47:07 Yeah.
18:47:08 Also I could have somebody else apparently the range is like 30 feet somebody else could have microphone and they'd be recorded even if they weren't right next to me.
18:47:20 Yes.
18:47:23 I suspect though that the The quality of the microphone that I have. As low.
18:47:36 Yeah.
18:47:30 Well, I went through. A number of microphones. Just trying to get one that would work aboard a ship ships are very noisy.
18:47:43 There's an awful lot of ambient noise. And trying to find a way that we get rid of that high, high pitched.
18:47:50 Electrical generator sound that seems to be anywhere aboard a ship. It took us a long time to figure out how to do that.
18:47:56 Hmm.
18:47:57 And, I, it's difficult. It's true and even in Zoom, in Zoom.
18:48:07 Is not set up. Music. So if you use it with anything using music, you have to go into zoom and tell it to use original musician, I don't remember what it's called, original sound for musicians.
18:48:24 Because if you don't, music goes highs and lows. It'll just cut off anything that doesn't match the human voice.
18:48:31 So if somebody's playing a violin, they'll just be your periods of silence where the violins doing fine, but it's cutting it off because it doesn't match what it's looking for.
18:48:42 We are very sensitive to sound. On TV when, when you have low bandwidth, the video might freeze, but they try and get the audio to go through.
18:48:54 Cause if they're doing an interview, you can at least follow along. If the video is frozen, but if the sound goes out, you get really torqued off.
18:49:02 So, sound is. Pard.
18:49:07 Thank you.
18:49:09 Sorry, it's not a better answer, but. Sound is hard.
18:49:17 Yes.
18:49:14 I have a question about my earbuds. They say that they're connected to the computer, but I'm not getting anything through them.
18:49:23 Is there any anything else I could change that would make the sound come through?
18:49:30 Yes. In fact, let me share my screen. Where's share screen? Let's try this one here.
18:49:41 If you go up to your control panel up here. To Bluetooth and turn it on and see if it can see your.
18:49:51 Here buds. If it can see your earbuds, then you just select the ear bud as a sound source and it should be.
18:50:01 Happy. That
18:50:02 Okay, I've already done that and it didn't work.
18:50:05 And it didn't work.
18:50:06 No, it shows it, it shows it is connecting and working, but I'm not getting anything.
18:50:16 Yeah.
18:50:14 You shows it is connected. So where's the sound coming from?
18:50:20 I, you know, it's possible it's my phone, but my phone's not anywhere near here.
18:50:28 It's not coming from your computer.
18:50:31 I'm, I'm listening to you through the computer, but it's not coming from my ear buds.
18:50:41 If it's
18:50:41 Yeah, it's sort of a chronic problem. I've had several Zoom Meetings and I can't, you know, I can't, the your buds won't do anything for me.
18:50:48 Huh. Yeah, you might want to go into Zoom and tell Zoom. There's a audio setting in Zoom.
18:51:01 Go into, let's see, where is that?
18:51:02 Yeah, where would that be?
18:51:04 Go to the zoom menu settings. Audio and it says. Speaker and has a list of possible things that it can use as a speaker and make sure that it's using the air buds.
18:51:21 And that and. Zoom settings is that above below, where would that be?
18:51:30 Oh.
18:51:27 It'll be on the top margin where it says zoom.us. It'll say settings and then audio and then.
18:51:34 Okay, oh there you go.
18:51:36 And it's as far as Zoom is concerned, your earbuds would be a speaker.
18:51:43 Okay, let's see. So what else? Audio.
18:51:51 Okay.
18:51:53 Hmm.
18:51:58 Yeah.
18:51:58 Okay, any other questions? Joanie? Joey had her hand up.
18:52:06 Joey is muted.
18:52:15 Anybody else have a question?
18:52:23 I don't.
18:52:23 Anybody go out and get an Apple Vision Pro yet?
18:52:26 Yeah.
18:52:26 Yeah.
18:52:31 Yes.
18:52:29 I do have a question. Hi, I changed my last time. I, that I talked with you anyway.
18:52:38 I told you about my issues with my MacBook Pro and just having a disconnect. One of my, my scratch disc for Photoshop.
18:52:46 Yes.
18:52:54 APFS.
18:52:47 And I change it, I change the formatting to AF. APFS change that on all my diss.
18:52:57 And it's still doing it. No change whatsoever.
18:53:01 Still disconnecting.
18:53:02 Yep, and it's disconnecting like 3 times. It seems like whenever the screensaver goes on, I think that's a trigger for it.
18:53:11 Sometimes does not happen all the time.
18:53:13 Actually, the screensaver would be a trigger because it's going into low power mode. So that actually makes a certain amount of sense to me.
18:53:26 Yeah.
18:53:23 If you go into your, Let's see. Energy. Into the Systems, energy saver.
18:53:38 You'll see that one of the. Choices has put hard disk to sleep when possible.
18:53:44 And if that is checked, what you probably will be for a MacBook. Then if the screencake saver cuts on, it'll, put the hard disk to sleep.
18:53:54 I thought I fix that. I'm searching for energy saver up here and I'm not getting anything.
18:54:04 Hmm.
18:53:59 You just type in, depending upon if you're using the current operating system, just go into system settings and then the search box at the top type in energy.
18:54:09 And it'll show up in the list.
18:54:09 Yeah. Okay, yeah, battery.
18:54:16 Oh, I'm using the desktop machine, so.
18:54:20 Yeah, okay. I'm using the letter.
18:54:23 I still think energy should work.
18:54:27 But.
18:54:25 Hmm.
18:54:32 Okay.
18:54:32 Here's low power mode. Under battery.
18:54:42 Just good.
18:54:39 And I. Okay.
18:54:41 Okay, well, let's see what a dish, what version I'm on.
18:54:47 I'm on, Sonoma, 14 3 1.
18:54:52 Yeah.
18:54:50 Yeah, that's what you should be on. It might be that on the MacBook is not showing it, but I thought it was pretty much standard that did have energy saver.
18:55:02 But it's different ways to save, power and
18:55:03 Right, right. And that sounds familiar. So I'm almost thinking I Turn that off because I had been through this a number of times, believe me.
18:55:14 It's not, I don't know where I found it.
18:55:17 Yeah, I even clear back on my current machine, which is a Catalina. It has energy saver.
18:55:23 There.
18:55:23 No, doesn't have it on this. Hmm.
18:55:27 Okay, any other questions?
18:55:36 Okay.
18:55:31 Lawrence Jolie is saying she texted Oh, she just got it. I thought I saw it, Julie.
18:55:39 Thank you.
18:55:39 Oh, need sign in sheet. Believe it or not, I actually had that on my
18:55:46 Yes, I did. Thank you. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
18:55:50 Okay. Yeah.
18:55:45 You got it right, Julie. Okay. Yeah, I can. Yeah.
18:55:52 I did wanna make a comment about Marsh's problem and you know we just joined the meeting late so I'm not sure if this.
18:56:00 Potential was considered but I've noticed that with certain of my Bluetooth devices If.
18:56:12 There are some devices that seem to more strongly pair. With my device. In other words, there are some speaker.
18:56:21 Auxiliary speakers that pair more strongly than others. So what I have to do is go into my computer settings.
18:56:25 I can turn the TV on. Okay.
18:56:30 Or whatever device I'm using trying to connect to the blue, you know, to say her earbuds and make sure that nothing else is connected.
18:56:38 Just. Forget this device. I think that's what it asks to do. It was just an idea that might help Marsha who was having trouble getting her earbuds.
18:56:47 To connect to the Zoom Meeting. Make sure that they're the only things that are available to your.
18:56:53 The device that is channeling the Zoom Meeting. Good.
18:56:57 Okay, I did what Lauren said. I went up and went in there and I found the right thing and now my earboats are working.
18:57:05 That's the name.
18:57:05 Okay. I'm gonna mute.
18:57:06 Yeah. I had no idea that I could do that, but so now I know. Okay.
18:57:13 Well, to tell you the truth, I don't see why you should have to if Zoom designed their software like they should have, you should have been able to select that with the Apple preferences that.
18:57:25 So it's, annoying. I ran into it because I edit the videos of our churches services and I could not for the life of me figuring figure out why Zoom sound was doing such strange things until I found out that It's got its own whole separate suite of things for doing sound that Basically, do nothing but irritate me.
18:57:52 So. You shouldn't have had to do that, but Zoom is its own little. Universe.
18:58:01 We have just a time for about one more minute before the, I turn it over to the president.
18:58:07 Any other questions?
18:58:13 I have a question. I don't know. You can see me. I can't see me on my.
18:58:14 Yes. Yes.
18:58:19 Anyway, I'm looking up here at my, zoom. Menu and it doesn't say anything at all about audio.
18:58:27 I've got Zoom US. And then there's meeting, view, edit, window, and help.
18:58:36 Are you looking at on a Mac?
18:58:33 And none of those. Had audio in it other than the one that said mute. Or Yeah!
18:58:40 Yeah, in the upper left hand corner where it's a zoom US, it should right underneath that after it says about zoom it should say settings and settings has got all kinds of things there.
18:58:55 Yes.
18:58:49 Oh, Maybe. Okay, okay, it's in settings. Alright, let's see. About zoom preferences. Is it in preferences?
18:59:02 No. Anyway, okay, if it's in the settings thing, I can find that probably. Yeah.
18:59:06 Okay.
18:59:08 Yes.
18:59:06 Okay, I have one question. Does everybody, has everybody signed in? The link is in the chat.
18:59:12 Oh, no.
18:59:12 Yeah, the link is in the chat.
18:59:17 So we got to open the chat chat.
18:59:25 And I'll paste it there again, just. To make sure that people can see it.
18:59:31 And I ask you a question about wave cable.
18:59:36 Yeah.
18:59:37 Yeah.
18:59:36 We, try to avoid profanities, but you can try.
18:59:40 Okay.
18:59:43 I'm ahead of. Technician come out and replace my 4 year old modem, which I rent from them.
18:59:57 Okay.
18:59:50 Because I was having Wi-Fi dropouts. Where the speed Wi-Fi speed is measured by the measurement lamb on our smug website.
19:00:02 Would drop from 2 50 down to like 2. Which is not enough to do, not enough through put to do.
19:00:10 Yeah.
19:00:08 Sound or video. And he blamed the modem. But it sometimes during the evening, even with a new mode, it'll drop from 2 50 to say 1 50.
19:00:19 And he claims there's no party line sort of set up. I don't know if he knows what he's talking about or not.
19:00:27 But anyway, what might cause that?
19:00:29 The, we. Kathleen and I frequently use bad language when it comes to Zoom.
19:00:38 It comes to, wave. We have wave as well. We do not have any other TV plans.
19:00:43 We're just getting straight bandwidth from them. So while we get TV via Zoom, we're actually using YouTube, not via Wave.
19:00:54 We're using YouTube TV, we're not subscribing to anything that Wave is producing.
19:00:59 So it's just pure bandwidth. And we notice that every night around 6 30 to 7 o'clock for weeks at a time.
19:01:07 We would just lose the news in the middle of the news and we could not figure out why. And they say they're not doing anything but I happen to know that they're desperately trying to put in infrastructure so that they can qualify for some tax.
19:01:23 In S that are part of the. national infrastructure bill. That.
19:01:34 In the past, Verizon and Comcast have sucked up most of that money because they're in urban areas.
19:01:40 Big urban areas and. And Wave is trying to qualify for that. So I know that they're spending some, money on their infrastructure.
19:01:50 I don't really know that they're how effectively they're doing that and And any time they work on their infrastructure, there's also a possibility there screw things up.
19:02:04 Where we are at on the peninsula, we are actually using something called north, North Olympic.
19:02:14 Acts network, which is a broadband. A bulk provider that runs on cable and pretty much everybody comes off of that.
19:02:27 Only PIN comes off of that way comes off of that. Almost everybody comes off of that. And if we have a windstorm and it screws this stuff up that can slow things down.
19:02:37 If anyone's doing work that can slow things down, I'm not too far from the, the interchange in, Squam where they're working on a roundabout.
19:02:49 And I know that they They, cut the line a couple times, in the process of doing that work.
19:02:54 So there are a lot of things that could cause that, but I've noticed the same thing. When I was living in a much more urban area on the East Coast.
19:03:03 I the last 4 or 5 years that I was there, I had maybe 2 or 3. Short, outages.
19:03:11 One of them was caused by a major hurricane. But, it wasn't like what I experience here, but Callum County.
19:03:20 Is larger than Montgomery County in Maryland is the largest county. It's got, 3 million people.
19:03:33 It's smaller than Callum County is with 70,000. So I think a lot of it just has to do with how many people are here and how much, how much, hefty infrastructure they can afford to put here.
19:03:48 So it's not just you, I experience the same thing. And I don't have a.
19:03:54 A good explanation. But one thing I don't do is I do not use way for my Wi-Fi.
19:04:01 We have, it's a terminal box that comes into the. House it does not have Wi-Fi with it.
19:04:11 I plug my Wi-Fi router in it and I use my own Wi-Fi.
19:04:12 And the reason why I use my Wi-Fi rather than, than Wi-Fi.
19:04:19 If you use Wi-Fi, they see all the traffic when you log in to someplace, they see everything.
19:04:24 Whereas if I logged into my Wi-Fi, they see all the traffic. When you log in to someplace, they see everything.
19:04:30 Whereas if I log into my Wi-Fi, everything coming from out of my house is encrypted and wave has no idea what I'm doing.
19:04:32 So I use my own Wi-Fi. Don't use waves.
19:04:37 I don't know that you necessarily want to do that. Just that for me that's a useful.
19:04:43 Thing to do.
19:04:45 Well, I feel.
19:04:45 Hey Lauren, you had anybody at your residence that had Verizon for a cell phone carrier and got good reception where you are.
19:04:57 We, when we first moved here, we were at ATT, cause when Kathleen was in the military, she got a military discount and it just kept on going forever and it was cheap.
19:05:06 But we moved here at 18, T didn't work at all. So my phone right now is using.
19:05:12 Verizon
19:05:13 So do you get the 5G signal on it? Like, the ones over here close to the casino get?
19:05:19 Well, right now I'm getting a one bar. Signal. So the answer is no.
19:05:26 Yeah.
19:05:27 And if I didn't have a Wi-Fi calling turned on in my router I probably wouldn't.
19:05:35 It probably wouldn't work sometimes, but at least it does work. I can wander around the neighborhood and Kathleen calls me and it does work, but like right now it's only one bar.
19:05:44 So it's not great.
19:05:46 Nice. I switched over from. nope, Nicola, system to Verizon and you know, that home package that they sell you and I'm getting like 300 now.
19:06:04 It's awesome.
19:06:06 It's only 45 bucks a month.
19:06:09 Is this the box that sticks in your home and then use that for? Yeah, I.
19:06:13 Yes. Not a little tiny one. This is a big one. I mean, it's like 8 by 8 by 8, I would say.
19:06:22 Yeah, well, considering how much stuff is packed into it, that's Still pretty small.
19:06:29 No, I the single out here just isn't good enough for that to work. You have to have a strong cell signal.
19:06:38 Yep.
19:06:36 For that, trick to work. I have a friend in, and Florida of that time.
19:06:44 He's it was night and day. Because where he lives. There's a swamp between him and the city.
19:06:55 Yeah.
19:06:52 Well, in Florida is a swamp between you and anything, but. they weren't going to make the effort to run cable or fiber optic out there, but with the new.
19:07:04 AT and T, I'm not 18 T with the new Verizon. He's in good shape, but you have to have a good cell signal for that too.
19:07:12 Work so Anyway.
19:07:15 So, Ron, what device did you say you had?
19:07:21 It's
19:07:23 Just had to unmute. Verizon sends you this box when you sign up.
19:07:29 Okay.
19:07:41 Oh.
19:07:31 Then it comes from Verizon and then it's a Verizon account then if you're already a Verizon user for your cell phone then it's like 45 bucks a month if you don't have Verizon user for your cell phone, it's like, 45 bucks a month.
19:07:45 If, you don't have Verizon as your cell phone provider, then it's an extra $10.
19:07:48 Oh, okay. Okay.
19:07:50 It basically is it's a cell based. A digital cell based router for your home. So it's it's wireless coming into your home and and you have access to any place the signal reaches in your house.
19:08:06 Yeah.
19:08:05 It's a it's a nice deal because there are no cables and whatnot. But if you don't have a good cell signal, it won't do any good at all.
19:08:14 Yeah.
19:08:14 And then they'll offer you this thing too, which I haven't hooked up yet, but it's an extender.
19:08:22 Most extenders you look at or tiny and they plug into a plug and that's it. But, they offered this extender to me for free.
19:08:29 So I said, 3 sounds good. So I got it. And I don't even know if I need it.
19:08:32 Yeah.
19:08:33 Okay.
19:08:34 Yeah. Yeah, where with Centurylink and, And so it's a wire only.
19:08:42 Hook up and it's it's Barely, adequate. Yeah.
19:08:47 Century link never bothers to tell you what century they're in though
19:08:51 Yeah.
19:08:52 Yeah. Yeah.
19:08:54 Alright, I have some wave information. I'm not sure it's pertinent to anything we're going to discuss this evening.
19:09:04 Couple weeks ago in the very early morning. I lost my TV signal. Don't ask what time.
19:09:16 It's just it was on. And all of a sudden it wasn't there and I knew I wasn't going to be able to go to sleep.
19:09:22 Until it was back on. And it didn't come back on. It wasn't a momentary.
19:09:27 Even. So I thought, am I gonna call? I stand around.
19:09:35 And go through the whole rigmarole of Nobody else has complained. You're the only one.
19:09:43 How can we schedule? Site visit to figure out what's wrong. And I always say no because it that's never going to solve anything for me.
19:09:52 So I got somebody who wanted me to reboot, to unplug everything, not doing that, not doing that.
19:10:02 And then she attempted rebooting, I think twice. Rebooting the whatever it is, the box.
19:10:14 And finally, it must have been a slow, slow morning where she was. She said, well, let me just check a couple things.
19:10:23 And so she was off for a minute or so checking other things. And when she came back, she said, there's a planned outage.
19:10:32 For 3 h. And it's, she said, do you have internet? Cause it affects everything.
19:10:40 So I said, I don't know and I'm not going to check. I'm just concerned about the TV signal.
19:10:44 Yeah.
19:10:47 And she said, well, here's the information. She said they're moving. It's a planned outage.
19:10:56 Workers are moving the server at and she gave me the street address, which I'm not going to share.
19:11:03 I'm just not gonna share because I don't think she should have done that. Because now I know where they move the server to.
19:11:13 And it's in, The east part is squim. I'll just say that much.
19:11:19 It's not in Sunland and it's not in my neighborhood and it's not down on Riverview or anything.
19:11:27 So. With the 3 HI thought I'm just Gonna be awake a long time. But it turned out only to be 75 min.
19:11:38 And then everything just came back up, all channels were go. So they're they're doing stuff that they're not telling us they're going to do.
19:11:50 There's no heads up. It wasn't this wasn't an emergency this was a planned work event.
19:11:56 So I thought 3 h, that means they're going to take a break right in the middle. But apparently they didn't have to.
19:12:04 That's all.
19:12:06 Yeah, I don't understand why they don't. Bothered to send us a message because you know where their customers they They can tell by my email they can tell by my phone number where I'm located.
19:12:19 Yeah.
19:12:19 So. You'll notice that when it comes to customer service ratings in the United States that down at the bottom, or most of the cable and telecommunications companies because they have the capability to talk to you, but they don't want to.
19:12:39 And what can I say?
19:12:43 Madam President, do you have anything you wish to impart today?
19:12:49 No, just welcome everybody. I don't have any. Any, thing to update.
19:12:58 Oh, but I'd like to know how Kathleen is feeling.
19:13:01 She goes in for treatment on Friday again. She's been okay, but They, The last.
19:13:15 Checkup was kind of ambiguous and in some regards in terms of progress being made. So. But, she's been putting around and been.
19:13:25 Yeah.
19:13:26 Fairly active. So.
19:13:28 Good. That's better. Yeah, that she can still do stuff.
19:13:36 She makes fun of me and reminds me that things like, did you turn on recording? Did you send them?
19:13:42 Okay.
19:13:42 The sign in link, you know, little things like that.
19:13:46 Well, I will turn it over to my mom and she can give you the treasury. Good evening everybody.
19:13:56 Okay.
19:13:55 Not too much to report, but we had a couple of more. Dues that came in and so our total balance right now is $2,418 and 93 cents.
19:14:11 And you still have a bill to send me, Lawrence, right?
19:14:16 Yeah.
19:14:14 Yes, I still have a bill to send you. I will.
19:14:20 Okay, that's sounds good. Oh, Julie, I just wanna let you know real quick.
19:14:26 I sent you a direct message.
19:14:29 That's all. I don't have anything else.
19:14:33 Okay, well, okay, great. Thank you.
19:14:40 Okay.
19:14:32 I, I got it. Okay. I'll send you a direct message back.
19:14:43 Tonight we're gonna have a slightly different program than the past because When I asked for suggestions, I got a number of suggestions.
19:14:51 That could be handled fairly. Quickly and didn't require an entire meeting. So that's why I called the.
19:15:01 Called it's small topics and I'm gonna share my screen and begin.
19:15:10 And first thing you're gonna do is drag something that you can't see out of the way.
19:15:19 First question that somebody had was they wanted to They wanted to know how they could get if they could use their iPhone with 2 different phone numbers.
19:15:31 And there are 2 different ways you can do that. One is if you use, Google Voice and where are applications.
19:15:41 If you go into. Apple's App Store. And you type in Google voice. You'll see that there's a.
19:15:54 It's not listed. Oh, that's because it knows that I'm using. And Mac and it's and Google voice doesn't work on the.
19:16:03 If you go in on your iPhone it'll bring up Google voice. Let's try that with a browser.
19:16:16 I'm using. My, Peter Lyon fake person account. And Peter Lyon because he doesn't really exist.
19:16:26 Doesn't have an I have a phone, so. If I say that I want to use Google Voice, It brings it up here and it says not compatible with my Mac, but if you have an iPhone, it'll pop it up here.
19:16:38 And what this does is an app. That has a phone number attached to it and if you use it for personal.
19:16:46 Use there's no charge to it that you give out the number that's attached to that app.
19:16:54 If people call that number. A little voice, little robot asked them for their name and if they give you the name then it passes the ring on to you and you can answer it using your phone.
19:17:08 The advantage for a lot of things is that because this robot on your phone asks for their name, if they're using some automatic dialer, it will trip it up right there because the automatic dialer doesn't know how to respond to that.
19:17:24 So it's it's great for screening calls and it's I use Google voice. I got this ad from Verizon recently though.
19:17:33 It says you can have 2 numbers on one phone. This applies to the newer iPhones that have 2 electronic SIM cards in it.
19:17:43 Verizon will now sell you for $10 a month a second phone line so that you can give out one for business or one for volunteer activities or whatever you want one phone number and the other one can be used for your family and friends.
19:17:57 So there are 2 different ways to do this depending upon what kind of technology you have. If you don't want to spend any money and you have just a regular iPhone, use Google Voice.
19:18:08 If you have one of the newer ones, you have the option of adding this second SIM card.
19:18:12 And the nice thing about the having the second SIM card, among other things, the audio quality is better than with a Google voice.
19:18:19 But, That was the one of the questions that people had was how do you do that? And the 2 different ways to do that right now.
19:18:29 Another question that someone asked was how do you type special characters? And I'll give you an example of what special characters are.
19:18:39 This thing here looks like one thing is actually a special character and it's designed for engineering.
19:18:47 And how do you type such a strange little thing? How do you, this is a special character that's a, that's a, Atari controllers.
19:18:57 PlayStation, PlayStation controller. This is the symbol that you'll see on the keyboard.
19:19:04 For the control key, command key. This is the option key. This is a shift key. This is the carrot that you use for the control key.
19:19:13 All of these things you can type from the Mac. Well, how do you do that? And these last 3 things.
19:19:19 That's a dragon. That's a different dragon and that's a third dragon. That's the Chinese kept one of the Chinese characters for dragon.
19:19:28 How do you do that? If you go into Settings? And you go to.
19:19:38 Keyboard.
19:19:42 Keyboard and if you spell keyboard correctly
19:19:47 And you're not supposed to see that right now. Keyboard. One of the things you'll see on the side is.
19:19:55 Input sources if you say edit. You can turn on this thing right at the top that says show input menu and menu bar.
19:20:03 And the input. Menu is this really small icon up here that says show keyboard viewer. And here's the keyboard viewer.
19:20:14 And you can also tell it to show emoji and symbols. And it gives you this thing here that shows you emoji.
19:20:22 Can't symbols, but just to show you like this virtual keyboard. If you want to know what happens and you press the shift key, it does this.
19:20:31 And these things up at the top are the function keys on my keyboard. So it's showing you what those function keys do.
19:20:39 And so that's that's with uppercase. That's with lowercase. If you press this command key, you can get slightly different things.
19:20:48 You can if you press the option key and the command key, you can get different things. All kinds of different symbols here.
19:20:54 And this is a way to find out what. Where those keys are. And I use those often enough that I happen to know that Option Y will give me a yen sign.
19:21:03 And option. Dollar sign gives you a sense sign option pound gives you a pound sign a British type pound sign.
19:21:13 All of those are. Things that I've memorized over time, but if you don't know how to do that, this input menu will show you what the keyboard.
19:21:21 Looks like and you can play with the various options to see. How you can generate some. Other keys.
19:21:31 Like for example, This one here is a shift. Shift option. Okay. Makes an apple, an apple type apple.
19:21:42 So if you ever want to know how to get an apple type apple, you can do that directly from the keyboard shift option K.
19:21:49 The character view is a little bit different because here you can do things like type in the word sad and it gives you various emoji that are sad.
19:22:00 And so I can. Click on this and I make a sad emoji. Or this is a chap and he is a Chinese character for sad and all kinds of different things you can do.
19:22:14 And this is, Arabic. Sad. All kinds of different things do. But you can also do things like if you want to know what this symbol is, it's the interest.
19:22:28 It's from Norwegian map symbol. If you go to Norway and you want to know what an interesting site is, you just look for these symbols and that's they'll show you historic monuments and and tassels and whatnot.
19:22:46 I mean, I don't think any too many castles and No way, but you know, nice peaks, nice valleys, on so forth.
19:22:52 But that's what this symbol meant and originally it was a Norwegian symbol for interest. And Apple decided that it was a good symbol to use for getting different functions on the on the keyboard.
19:23:04 So if you just type in the word interest, that's what you get. And you can also do all kinds of things like type and dragon.
19:23:12 And it gives you, as I just showed you. But that's one type of dragon. This is different type of dragon.
19:23:19 This doesn't look like a dragon at all, but this is a mahjong character for dragon.
19:23:25 Mahjong is an ancient Chinese game. So all these kinds of different things you can type.
19:23:33 And if you don't know where the keys are, you can just go and. Tell it to find it or you can actually just go through and search through all of the emoji that it has all the different arrow symbols.
19:23:44 Different bullets, different currency symbols. Different types of Latin characters. There are a lot of linguistic marks that are done with Latin characters, letter like symbols.
19:23:56 Including things like Centigrade and Fahrenheit. Math symbols, lots and lots and lots and lots of mass symbols.
19:24:04 Parentheses, different kinds of parentheses, pictographs. Including these are, dominoes.
19:24:13 These are mahjong tiles. Here we have different kinds of stars, signs of the zodiac.
19:24:20 And then all kinds of strange and unusual punctuation, things like. Spanish. Symbols, there's an upside down question mark.
19:24:30 There it is, yes. Spanish symbols for Spanish punctuation. So just a huge wealth of things that you can type directly from the keyboard.
19:24:38 I don't know if how many you've ever tried to do this on a Windows machine, but I don't know Windows machine, but on a Windows machine, this is pure.
19:24:45 Brutality. That's very difficult to do this. Finally, another way to do find out about this special characters that you have is to look at font book, which is a piece of software that Apple supplies with your Mac.
19:24:59 That most people never play with. But you can do things like go and look at web fonts.
19:25:04 This is something called web dings and all the different characters that it has traditional fonts. Fonts are used in PDFs, modern fonts.
19:25:14 Fixed wind fog. These are so that every character is the same width. Fonts that are in English.
19:25:22 And funds that I use the most and then all the fonts and they're just lots and lots and lots of phones built in.
19:25:30 To your Mac and you can explore them using Font Book.
19:25:36 Any questions about that?
19:25:40 Yes.
19:25:39 Yes. Yes. How about Emojis with gray hair.
19:25:47 Yeah.
19:25:47 Oh yes, that's that's a good question. So we'll go back here to the emojis.
19:25:54 And let's expand it out here so we have some room. If you click on one of these.
19:26:01 Emojis. This is somebody with some kind of hat on it. You can go through and it will show you different variations in terms of skin tone or some of them different variations of people with white hair and different versions of of Dracula, all kinds of things.
19:26:21 So there there are more emojis for faces than you might have originally think they're just all huge number of different emoji and to find out which one is which just click on it and hesitate and it'll give you the options.
19:26:35 But,
19:26:35 How do I, how do I get those into my? Ihone. Verizon.
19:26:47 Okay. Is there any way to? Insert them to select and insert them as choices.
19:26:56 Well, the on the iPhone is a little bit hard to to reproduce this. So what I'll do is I'll find things that I want to use on the iPhone and then I'll just send myself a text message with that in it.
19:27:08 Okay.
19:27:08 So you just bring up the message. Oh, I wouldn't show you how to do something with about that in a second, but.
19:27:16 Say something.
19:27:16 Yeah, yeah, Chris just go in and add the second keyboard for emojis and then.
19:27:22 You have them right there and then you just push them.
19:27:24 Yes, on the iPhone you do but trying to get one with particular hair or skin color on an iPhone is really difficult because it's just not that you do, but trying to get one with particular hair or skin color on an iPhone is really difficult because it's just not that much space, but I'll just send myself.
19:27:37 A message. I'll send it to, I'll send it to Peter, send himself a message.
19:27:42 And Peter is going to send himself a message and I say I want this hand clapping emoji.
19:27:48 So pick that one. And And why is it not? Copy character in for oh different character paste I got the wrong one, but who cares?
19:28:02 That's how I get things up to my phone. I find them on the Mac and then I Just send myself a message that has it and then I can copy it out of one message and paste it into a different one.
19:28:13 I was sending messages to some a friend of mine a state department who didn't know what a flag was for a certain country.
19:28:21 It was much easier to find it on mine. Mac than it was to find it on the iPhone.
19:28:24 Yeah.
19:28:26 So I just. Email them the the flag and he was in the state department didn't know how to do that.
19:28:34 So. I cheap tech support for the State Department. Any other questions?
19:28:45 I wanted to show you something else that, you might have noticed that some of these things disappeared when I tried to open up another window.
19:28:52 And a lot of people don't like that. The. Last couple operating systems have had a way.
19:29:00 Making things to keep your focus, you can make other things go away. And it's set for to turn on by default, it annoys a lot of people.
19:29:10 And if I go to Doc, let's see, where is it? It's called desktop and stage manager.
19:29:17 And if I turn on stage manager. And then I open up something else. And then open this. And then open this.
19:29:28 And it's not doing what I expected it to do. Maybe stage managed not turned on and anyway What would happen is that if you it would make things disappear when people were trying to have 2 documents open side by side and the way to keep it from doing that, which I apparently did a really good job of turning it off because I can't.
19:29:51 Figure out how to turn it back on. And where is Doc? Desktop and dock is with this desktop and stage manager.
19:30:01 Click wallpaper to reveal desktop. I don't want to do that. And I don't have stage manager turned on so I don't want it to do strange things like that.
19:30:10 These things, by the way, over here on the side, these are widgets. You can set widgets.
19:30:17 That. These are different times zones. This is calendar.
19:30:23 This is the battery level of my. Keyboard and map and here's the squim web.
19:30:33 Hello there. Okay.
19:30:40 Is anyone there?
19:30:45 No questions?
19:30:48 Yeah.
19:30:53 One of the questions I had, the people wanted to show was how do you share reminders?
19:30:59 And so I got to share my screen again.
19:31:04 Reminders, couple of things to note about reminders. Is that reminders can be shared amongst your various devices by using icloud.
19:31:17 So if you open up settings, click on your icon at the top. And go into icloud.
19:31:23 It lists all the kinds of things that. You can have turn on and off things with icloud.
19:31:30 So right now messages are shared in icloud. Notes are shared in my cloud. Find my max sharing an icloud.
19:31:37 Contacts. Iclog calendar reminder, safari news, so and so forth. Lots of different things you can do.
19:31:42 And when I say shared that means that If I create a reminder on my Mac, it'll show up on my phone.
19:31:50 Ipad, I don't have to, they're not. Independent. So if you if you type a note or a reminder on your on your iPhone, it'll show up on your desktop and vice versa.
19:32:05 And you do that by making sure that you go into icloud. And making sure that everything you want to talk to one another is turned on.
19:32:13 So that's one way to share things, but say you want to share it with somebody else, that's slightly different, but not much.
19:32:21 So here I have a grocery list and I'd like to share this grocery list with someone.
19:32:27 This little squareish icon with a arrow on it is the share button. If you click on that You say, okay, who you want to share it with?
19:32:37 And we're going to share it with. The straight Mac.
19:32:43 Bye-. It's going to get a copy of the grocery list. So I press send and.
19:32:51 It sends it off and in terms of what this will look like.
19:33:02 I'll send messages. This is what I just sent off. It's this message that says.
19:33:08 Groceries. And when I receive it on my. Straighten rack account, it will show up as this icon.
19:33:18 I click on it and it will ask me if I went to have access to it and I say yes.
19:33:23 And at that point, I'm getting Peter Lyon's grocery list that goes, He can add things to it, remove things from it like he if he bought cat food just click on that means it's purchase it's no longer on the list anymore and it goes down here into just kind of reserve.
19:33:39 And that's a easy way to share notes. Kathleen and I share grocery lists so I can actually be at at QFC and I think I've got all the groceries and she's at home and she's added 3 more things and I find out that I'm not already done.
19:33:55 It just automatically shows up in my grocery list. And the other question is how to share notes.
19:34:00 Notes is pretty much the same way. Notes is. Notes. Why are notes not opening?
19:34:12 Oh, notes was already open because I was using notes. Has my notes for the.
19:34:21 I have a note call. This is a note. No, it's by the way and have more than just text.
19:34:29 Here's a. Symbol, an image and I can just drag that right into notes so you can do all kinds of things with notes.
19:34:39 But if you want to share it again, press this icon. Say who you want to share it with.
19:34:46 I sent it via email, but you can also use messages to send it to somebody. So messages pops up and who do you want to send it to?
19:34:53 I went to send it to,
19:34:58 Straighten back vice president. And it was the message that I'm gonna send is whatever.
19:35:08 It, it can send this. Yeah. That by you can send it here. May I'll buy messages by air drop by all kinds of different ways of doing it.
19:35:18 And it'll just share it with somebody else. And on the other end when they play around with it, they can, it will be updated provided they tell it to update with this large graphic and it really is quite large.
19:35:33 Might take a while, but. It'll, you can share notes. I've done this in the past for, for things like meetings that I was at, I was going to be the presenter and I wanted people to to tell me about things they wanted to made a mentioned and then they would send me in real times things that they that they thought of.
19:36:00 Reminding me about that I didn't know about.
19:36:07 Family sharing. One question was about family sharing. If you look up here under, icloud.
19:36:14 They're all kinds of things that you can do with icloud and you can show more things that you can do with icloud.
19:36:19 But one of the things it offers is It says. Where is it? Family sharing.
19:36:27 If you says you can do with family sharing, okay, so family, what does that mean? You can add a member of your family just by pressing this button and you either.
19:36:38 Invite people so you can invite adults, yeah, of adult members or your family or you can invite.
19:36:45 Children are aware of it you want to do, you can invite them and it just sends them an invitation.
19:36:52 Kathleen and I have a family account. That we share with our daughter in England.
19:36:58 So it makes it, it's a pool of of icloud space that we share with one another.
19:37:06 And we can send notes to each other and shopping list and all kinds of things using. Family plan.
19:37:13 Now the thing about the family plan that you should note is that a family pan can cost money. And where How do I?
19:37:24 And.
19:37:27 I don't want to do that. I went to look at what the price structure is.
19:37:34 And.
19:37:46 Yeah, this is just talking about the fact you can but one of the things you can do is you can have an Apple one account.
19:37:56 With an Apple One account, you can share all kinds of things like I Cloud Plus, Apple TV, Apple Music, so on and so forth, within a family.
19:38:06 And We have that so it allows us to share a lot of information with our daughter who happens to be in England.
19:38:15 And since most of the time we're asleep when she's awake and we're awake and she's asleep.
19:38:20 It's like, it's a nice way to share things. But the other thing that you can do is you can also just bump up the amount of space that you have.
19:38:31 Icloud is telling me right now that I really need to have more storage because I'm using up pretty much all of my free account.
19:38:37 If I say manage it pops up this thing and says, your storage is almost full. Upgrade to icloud plus.
19:38:46 And you click on that and you'll see that. 50 GB you get 5 GB for free but 50 GB is a dollar a month and if you spend $3 a month you can get 200 GB of space which is really a huge amount of cloud storage for not much money.
19:39:05 And And again, because it's sinks across all of your. Devices and with a family plan those syncs.
19:39:12 Even between devices and other countries, it's really is not that expensive. It's a great way of of sharing things with your family and your family is fairly arbitrary.
19:39:23 If you don't happen to have Children, but you have a niece that you like, Apple doesn't check to find out what your relationship is.
19:39:32 They just, I went to sell you the space and offer the service. Any questions about that?
19:39:43 No questions?
19:39:47 Okay, the next topic had to do with taking screenshots. I could probably do. An entire program just on screenshots.
19:39:59 So I'm going to skip over that and do that one last. I went to talk about, had a question about.
19:40:05 Homekit and security devices. Home kit is built into your. Into the Mac.
19:40:13 It's built in the iPhones built into the Mac, build in a bunch of stuff. If you go on to Apple site.
19:40:20 And. If you just type in Apple Home Kit. It'll tell you all about it.
19:40:41 Talks about all the different things that you can stick into Apple Home Kit and Homekit is a protocol for devices talking to other devices.
19:40:50 And that are not necessarily made by Apple. And so if you type in home kit. Security camera.
19:41:00 It brings up this. Page on Apple's site, not the one from Amazon, but the one from Apple.
19:41:08 That shows you. Security devices that work with Homekit. And it's a fairly limited selection.
19:41:17 If you go into Amazon, that Amazon listing is going to show you a great deal more. But you have to kind of read between the lines in Amazon.
19:41:27 These are things that Amazon wants to sell you that people were looking for Homekit and found these. These don't, in most of these don't work with Homekit.
19:41:35 But, with the nice thing about Homekit is that if it works with Homekit, it means that you can.
19:41:41 Talk to you can see what the. Security camera is doing what it sees or you can see what the doorbell is doing.
19:41:52 By just looking at your phone or your iPad or on your. It'll show up on all of them.
19:41:56 And that's kind of neat. Unfortunately for us, we bought a security cameras from a company called Nest.
19:42:05 Before Apple had Homekit. And NAS then got purchased by Google. So now Google wants you to look at Homekit at their security cameras using Google's app and not.
19:42:19 With Apple's app. I didn't like that idea, so I went out and tried to find a solution which I found with this company that's called Starling.
19:42:34 Starling has this little device called Home Hub and it's just a little piece of black plastic.
19:42:41 Thing has got an ethernet board that went in. And that's basically it. And what it does is it acts as a bridge between the nest and google and the apple home hit infrastructure.
19:43:01 So I can now ask. My homepod was what the temperature in the house is. The Homepod talks to the Starling, the Starling talks to my Nest thermostat.
19:43:14 The Nest thermostat reports the temperature back to NAS that reports it to the Starling that then has my home pod tell me what the temperature is.
19:43:21 Sarah, what is the temperature? It's currently 52 degrees. Okay, Seri told me this 52 obviously telling me that the temperature outside is 52 degrees.
19:43:32 Siri, what is the inside temperature?
19:43:36 It's ranging from 70°F to 75°F.
19:43:40 Okay, Siri said that the indoor temperature is ranging from 70°F to 75°F.
19:43:48 Now, what did it take to get this to work? With, my phone and with the home button, everything.
19:43:56 Nothing at all. I plug this in. And it took care of it. Transparently.
19:44:01 So. Neat little device, it's cost 99 bucks. But it allows me to. Control my.
19:44:09 Security cameras and everything. Using Apple's infrastructure. And one reason why this is an issue is that a lot of the companies that make security cameras and such.
19:44:20 And let's go back to what Amazon is showing. A lot of these. Things that.
19:44:27 Amazon. And selling very small companies come up with security cameras and then they sell them to a bunch of people.
19:44:36 A lot of these cameras have terrible, terrible security. And even some of the better ones like, ring which was purchased by Amazon has had all kinds of security problems because of problems with not a properly encrypting things or revealing people's passwords and so on and so forth.
19:44:55 And I like the Nest because it has a very robust infrastructure. And I just didn't like the fact that it wasn't working with homekit.
19:45:02 So I bought this little device to act as a bridge between the 2 of them. So, it's a fairly limited selection of cameras that are specifically built with, with, home kit in mind.
19:45:17 And, sorry, but at least the security on them is quite good. One thing to note, is that, I would never get a, .
19:45:30 No matter who makes it, I would not get a computer. Enabled door lock unless you are disabled in some way.
19:45:40 Computer enabled door locks, they're just too many. Ways to get around them so Doorbell camera, fine.
19:45:48 Security camera, fine, but. I'd probably draw the line and Not get a a door lock.
19:45:58 Another question that somebody had was about, they wanted to manage passwords. And I'm going to show you the hard way to manage passwords.
19:46:07 And then I will show you. An easier way. Traditionally if you wanted to manage passwords the only thing built in your Mac was something called.
19:46:17 Keychain access.
19:46:22 G-chained access.
19:46:28 And. It's the problem with keychain access. You want to get a login information and it gives you this really difficult.
19:46:37 List of things to use and it's not really clear to most people what any of this stuff means.
19:46:46 And this was a traditional way of of managing credentialing on the Mac. And it's still on the Mac.
19:46:54 But Apple and the newest operating system has something. Cooler. If you go into settings, type in passwords.
19:47:03 And you will come to this section. It says passwords are locked. So enter the. Enter your password and this does not mean your icloud password.
19:47:12 This means the password on whatever device you're using.
19:47:15 And because Peter is a made up person, he doesn't have that many things that he has passwords on, but here's a list of things that his Mac has recorded passwords for and up at the top it even has security recommendations.
19:47:31 Okay click on this. It'll say that my web track password. Is.
19:47:41 It's the same password a lot of other people use and too easily to break. So suggest that I change that and then my password that Peter has on the straight Mac.
19:47:52 User group site is also too easy and suggesting you make something more complex, but these are the other ones that I have.
19:48:00 And it, you know, you can click on it and it says, what is your username? What is the password?
19:48:06 It's blanked out until you different permission to show it and anything else that you've done.
19:48:10 Like setup verification codes and so on and so forth. Your Mac is keeping track of this now automatically.
19:48:19 Now, there's a limitation on what this is using, and that is The password function is built into Sonoma.
19:48:28 Only works if you're using Apple software. So if you have a password that's that's Apple Mail is using it'll record that.
19:48:38 If you entered a password on a website with Safari, it'll record that. If you entered a password on a website with Google Chrome, it won't keep track of that.
19:48:48 So it there are some limitations on what this does. Another thing to note is that Safari itself is also keeping track of passwords in the latest versions of Safari.
19:49:00 If you go into settings. And you go to passwords. You will see that. It keeps track of passwords too.
19:49:09 But again, it's only things that Safari itself has used. Someday, we should have a presentation on one password, which is the password manager I use for all of my passwords.
19:49:22 I have Probably a couple 1,000 passwords at this point. But that would take an entire. Meeting.
19:49:30 I did have someone volunteer to do that. Last year, but then they got involved in the local theater and I haven't I heard from him recently, but, One password is a much more robust.
19:49:43 Very user friendly way of keeping track. Of passwords. And now I'm going to go back to the.
19:49:52 One that I said was difficult, which is screenshots. They want to know how you take and annotate screenshots.
19:50:00 Well, the way you do that is that bringing up the my little fake keyboard here. If you hold down.
19:50:10 The shift key and you hold down the command key. And then press. 3, 4, or 5, you can take a screenshot that they take slightly different things.
19:50:22 If I hold on shift command. 3. It takes a screenshot. You can see this screenshot here.
19:50:33 And it's gonna take a second for me waiting for me to do something with it, which I'm not going to.
19:50:38 And then it saves it. But one of the things you'll notice is that It's the screen shot for the entire screen.
19:50:46 It's not very focused at all. And since I have 2 screens on this Mac, it took a picture of the other screen as well.
19:50:54 So. And these things are literally huge. One of them is 20 MB and the other one is 24 MB.
19:51:06 So they're huge. Most of the time when you want to take a screenshot, you don't really want to take a picture of the entire screen.
19:51:12 You want to take a picture of something. Smaller. So let's go to. So far, and we're going to go to the New York Times.
19:51:25 And. We're going to look at the sports section because. They recently screwed up the fourth sports section.
19:51:35 Anyway, a major league baseball and soul series latest Dodgers versus Padres. Well, I want a picture of this.
19:51:42 It's a Japanese baseball player from the Dodgers. Yeah, and, Korea. I can take a screenshot or I can just drag it to the desktop.
19:51:51 Because you can drag things out of. Out of, Safari. So it drugged this picture.
19:52:01 Out and now it's on my desktop. But I can also take a screenshot.
19:52:05 And I do for this case, I would do is command shift. 4, which gives me this little cross here and I just pull it over.
19:52:13 What I want to take a picture of and it takes a screenshot. If I wanted to take a photo of the entire browser window, I could do command ship 4 and instead of moving this thing, I press the space bar and it turns into camera icon and if I click the mouse button It takes a picture of the entire web page or as much of it as fit on the screen.
19:52:36 And then finally, there's an Another type of Screenshots you can take which is command shift 5 With Command Chef 5, it's a little bit different.
19:52:48 You've got all kinds of choices. You can move. These things around to figure out exactly what you want to take a picture of.
19:52:58 But there are things down at the bottom. Capture entire screen, capture selected window. Capture whatever you.
19:53:06 Came up with. But you can also do recordings. So you can record the entire screen or record selective portions of the screen.
19:53:15 You have options on where it's going to save it, when it'll start recording, all kinds of different things that you can do.
19:53:21 With command shift 5. So it's a It's a whole. It's a whole suite of things that you can do.
19:53:28 Of to take screenshots. And there's an actual app. That.
19:53:35 Is doing this. You go into applications. And you go down to
19:53:47 Oh, what's that up here?
19:53:59 Sitting in the utilities folder.
19:54:05 Yes, it's in the agilities folder. So if you go into your applications folder, then going to utilities.
19:54:11 There's this thing called screenshot and you launch it and it does. Exactly what I'm showing you to do.
19:54:17 That You can make a screenshot any old size you want. And.
19:54:32 And yet there's still yet another way of taking a screenshot and that is to. Open up preview.
19:54:40 Say cancel. Move this menu out of the way so I can reach when I want Say file. Take screenshot.
19:54:50 From selection. And, and, what you want to take a screenshot, let go, it takes a screenshot.
19:55:00 So you can do that from. Preview and allow you to save it in different. Types of.
19:55:10 Formats and all kinds of things. So several different ways to take screenshots. Once you have a screenshot.
19:55:18 You might want to annotate it. So. Let's.
19:55:25 Click something that we can annotate. We're gonna take this photograph here.
19:55:34 And. We went to annotate it. There are tools for annotating. So you can do things like you can adjust the size and color and so on and so forth.
19:55:46 But we're going to try and remove the background. And it's not going to let us says the file.
19:55:54 Is of a type that does not support editing. So we're gonna say undo what happened is when I pulled this off the website the website saved it in a form called webp And if you want to remove the background, it really wants to be a PNG.
19:56:09 So one of the things I can do is I can Since we're in preview, we can say export.
19:56:13 And I can say I want it to be exported as a PNG. And we export it as a PNG.
19:56:20 Go find it. And come back here. I can say.
19:56:27 Remove background and remove the background. So now I have. Just a photograph and once we have that there are all kinds of other things you can do.
19:56:36 You can adjust the color which I don't care about or the size or you can come down here to where it says annotate.
19:56:41 And you can have things like write text.
19:56:49 Please. Come to. Chris's. Birthday.
19:57:00 Party. So. We haven't, have a. A caption for this photograph.
19:57:07 If you don't happen to like white text, you can select it. And come up here to.
19:57:15 This thing here and pick. The color, we're gonna have it in red. And you'll notice that it's transparently over the background.
19:57:24 So it's it doesn't blot out the background at all. You can do other things like you can add.
19:57:31 Rectangles if you wanted a rectangle for something if you want to open rectangle Here's this rectangle that is filled come up here and say That is not field and you want to have a bold line around the edges of it.
19:57:46 That is red. And now you've got a rectangle that's. That's Red you can come along and you can say you want an arrow So we have an arrow down here.
19:58:05 Let's point out as Chin. And no particularly good reason. And to make that thicker, just come up here and pick something thicker.
19:58:13 It makes a thick arrow. You don't like a red color. You can pick a different color like.
19:58:19 Teal, I guess. You can also do things like Draw stars and polygons. Exactly why I've never figured out a reason to have a star, but if you wanted a star, you can do that.
19:58:35 We can have a Purple Star. And then once you're done annotating this screenshot, you can save it under a different name.
19:58:46 Save and open to a different name, say export. And make it a JPEG.
19:58:53 And say.
19:58:56 Christy's birthday. My Chris is over right.
19:59:05 And. Then you can.
19:59:12 Mail and off to. Somebody. But that's how you can take a screenshot several different ways to take a screenshot and then you can annotate it.
19:59:23 Afterwards. And That is about all the things I had in my list.
19:59:35 So.
19:59:38 Any questions?
19:59:42 Yes. Jolie. Yes.
19:59:41 Yeah. Are you calling on me? I don't have a question. I just have a, an idea.
19:59:50 When someone earlier was asking about how to create like a little, emoji with grey hair, you know, looking.
19:59:59 There is a feature on my phone. I think I have a, you know what version my phone is?
20:00:07 Is it a port team? I don't even know my own phone version. Anyway, when I go to send a chat.
20:00:14 There's a little plus sign right next to the chat box, the chat, you know, where you start typing your chat.
20:00:22 And if you click on that little plus sign, it gives you access. To a camera and some other things.
20:00:29 And one of the things, that it gives you access to if you scroll down. Is.
20:00:38 It says, emojis. Memojis.
20:00:43 Memo is a little bit different. Memo, G's are ones that you can create. Based upon other things.
20:00:48 Right. Right, but I mean, and I know it's a little bit different, but, and maybe that would just be for texting, not necessarily.
20:00:59 I'm not sure of all the use of those special characters and pictures, but I guess you could Anyway, I just thought I'd mention that because my granddaughter had a blast.
20:01:13 Good year.
20:01:10 She made one that looked like her. And then she made one that looked like me and then she wanted to make one that looked like her grandpa.
20:01:17 And it was kind of, it's kind of fun. To, just play around with that.
20:01:25 And I guess For me, as far as I know, the application is only when you're texting with somebody.
20:01:32 But you can even make funny, you can make a little video with it. And you can give a voice message or something.
20:01:39 And the memoji moves around. Depending on what you're doing because it's actually responding to like if I wink it winks if I smile or whatever it's just kind of fun that's all.
20:01:55 Yeah, and the that only works on some of the iPhones because it requires one that does voice recognition.
20:02:03 And the reason why it requires that is up at the top here in this little. You can't really see it, but there's a little bar at the top.
20:02:11 Oh. Oh.
20:02:08 There are thousands of little light sensors that 3 texture map your face so as you wink and see that you wink and the mammogy will wink.
20:02:21 I'm going to share the screen a second because I want to show you something I did several years ago.
20:02:25 With, This is a YouTube video that's actually on the straight Mac site. And if I run it.
20:02:37 Yeah, I was just on there looking at just kind of looking around why you were talking about some things.
20:02:41 Yeah. 5 is Gary with backbone.com. Let's take a look at some creative uses for Memoji.
20:02:52 And this is not mine. Gary, we back.com. Let's take a look at some.
20:02:59 Presentation.
20:02:56 That's somebody else's. Presentation. Yeah.
20:03:10 I looked under articles or or even the blog. I think under blog there were some little things too.
20:03:18 Yeah, well, I made this one clip. That
20:03:21 Oh, I see it.
20:03:33 And one of the more interesting methods is to use an emoji, which requires an iPhone.
20:03:41 That supports face ID. Anyway, the. The.
20:03:50 The video is just me going through several, to deliver a presentation on how I made the movie.
20:04:00 Oh, fun.
20:04:03 Yeah.
20:04:00 But that's that's how he did it. I also have done things like this for my, granddaughter lives in England.
20:04:08 She thinks her grandfather's very strange, but she does like the She does like the, emojis.
20:04:16 Strange is good.
20:04:17 But anyway, right now it only works with an iPhone because it's the only device out there that can map your face.
20:04:25 I see.
20:04:26 It's, it's, there's an awful lot of technology with the went into that.
20:04:31 I bet. Yeah. Well, thank you. And I appreciate all of the various questions that you were addressing this evening. So thank you.
20:04:39 Just wanted to say that.
20:04:40 Well, thank you. Any question, any other questions or comments?
20:04:47 Very nice.
20:04:50 I'm sorry?
20:04:55 I heard somebody say something about it. I knew what it was.
20:04:59 That was George. He was just saying this was a very nice presentation. He's kind of away from the, from my little, if that's who you think it was.
20:05:09 Yeah.
20:05:06 Oh, okay. This does leave the question though. What are we going to do next month?
20:05:16 Suggestions.
20:05:17 Hmm.
20:05:24 A lot of people are in the process of either upgrading or changing out. And, I don't know if we've discussed before or not what to do with our I guess somewhat obsolete equipment or how to make sure.
20:05:43 Set equipment is clean and ready to either Leave your home to go to another home type thing. So I guess cleaning out or preparing your like your iPhone.
20:06:03 So that you can get another iPhone so that everything is off of it or
20:06:08 Yes, that's actually a good question. And it's something to Apple gets asked quite a bit.
20:06:14 They actually have, the Apple gets asked quite a bit. They actually have, if you type in, preparing your phone to trade or give away.
20:06:20 Praying your iPhone to trader giveaway or preparing your Mac to trade or give away Apple has a pages that have step by step process for that.
20:06:30 But in addition to what Apple has there, there are some other things that you need to consider yourself. And the first one is don't wait till the last moment to replace an obsolete device.
20:06:43 We had a member and I'm not going to mention any names who they knew that their computer was getting long in the truth, so they went and bought a new one.
20:06:53 But then when they got the new one, they decided they didn't want to spend the time to set it up and they used the old one and the old one died.
20:07:00 And because the old one died. It was not in the shape it was that they could transfer things to the new machine.
20:07:08 So you don't want to wait until the old ones dead to replace it. There are things you can do to help guard against that and, Last month's presentation on backups and archives is one way to do it.
20:07:22 If you were constantly backing up your machine with time machine. If your machine dies, what you do is you get your new machine, you launch migration assistant, you pointed at your time capsule, your time machine drive and it just sucks everything off of the backup puts it on the new machine and the new machine looks like the old machine.
20:07:42 So that's, that's a way of doing it, but it's best that you not wait until the last moment.
20:07:48 But Apple has step by step instructions on, how to do that for your iPhone, for your iPad, for your for your Mac.
20:07:58 Yeah.
20:07:58 That's part one how to how to get stuff off the machine. But again, you want to make sure that you transfer everything first.
20:08:08 The second question is, after you've removed everything from the machine, what do you do with the machine?
20:08:13 We have on the straight Mac. Site right now, several devices that are being given away and I'll just bring up the straight Mac site so you show you what I'm talking about.
20:08:35 We have these discussion boards and they're on Mac news and and unfortunately, I I'm not using my regular accounts, so I can't get in here.
20:08:50 Oh, maybe I can. Yes, I can. This discussion board is closed off from the public because I don't want to spend all of my time.
20:09:00 Dealing with, spam from people. But, the, discussion board is several different topics, smug news, Mac, iPad, iPhone, privacy, security in the news, anything you have went to post something.
20:09:16 And any of these, either asking a question or answering a question you can. But down at the bottom, this is buy sell or give away.
20:09:22 And if we scroll down here, you'll see that things to give away. I have an Apple TV to give away.
20:09:28 Apple low plow profile wireless keyboard a dual drive USB 2.0 enclosure dual drive USB drive dock and also a 27 inch I'm a to give away.
20:09:43 So what you do with the old device, one of the things you can do is you can post it to just give away after you've cleaned everything off.
20:09:52 The other thing that if you if it's too old to give away The most important thing about.
20:10:00 An old Mac is to make sure that the hard drive is wiped. And Apple has instructions on that thing about how to prepare your Mac to give away, have instructions on how to delete everything off of your Mac.
20:10:13 But if it's a really old Mac, like you have a 2,014, 2,015.
20:10:19 Macbook that you want to, wipe. It the current instructions won't completely delete everything off of it.
20:10:28 The current technology they have with the newer machines, everything on your machine is encrypted. So to, to trash everything before giving it to a new person is fairly easy.
20:10:41 It just takes away the encryption key and everything turns into garbage and you race the machine and everything's gone.
20:10:47 With the older machines that are trying to get rid of everything on them, it can be difficult. Especially if the old machine dies.
20:10:55 Had someone who had a 2,011 MacBook. And it died. And because it's, you can't get in electronically erase it.
20:11:07 Well, if you just throw it away, somebody can open it up and read what's on the hard drive.
20:11:11 How do you prevent that? You take a hammer and you just pound it flat. You just brutally pound the hard drive.
20:11:20 They're quite robust and heavily made, but if you hit it long enough with a hammer, it they will die.
20:11:28 Yeah.
20:11:31 With an iPhone that iPhones are also fairly tough but they don't really have a hard drive in there.
20:11:36 It's also a solid state. Electronic so it's actually in some respects, easy to destroy the data.
20:11:43 But, the sequence is buy your new machine, transfer all your data. Go to Apple's website and look for how to trade or give away.
20:11:55 How to prepare, your iPhone or Mac, different set of instructions for iPhones and Mac to trade or give away and it just goes through step by step by step.
20:12:05 On what you have to do. But keep in mind that if it's a really old Mac, you're probably going to have to take out the hard drive.
20:12:13 Because until the apple introduced the security chips which was around 2,016 2,017 they just didn't have that way of having everything encrypted which means that stuff can be recovered from hard drives.
20:12:31 I don't know if that was in the least bit helpful, but. Bye.
20:12:38 What?
20:12:41 My primary goal there is to make sure that you don't wait until last minute to. Replace your machine.
20:12:47 Hi.
20:12:47 Another thing you can do if you wanna ease into a new machine is you can get a You can get a.
20:12:54 Mac, or Mac Mini, and you can actually use your old 27 inch screen as the screen for it.
20:13:05 I've been reading online about how to do that so you don't have to buy a screen too so you can pay your 700 or whatever for them.
20:13:12 Mac Mini and get away with your regular monitor for a while until you can invest in the second one or a separate one.
20:13:21 Yeah, the, Mac Mini to give you an idea of what we're talking about.
20:13:27 The Mac Mini, this is a stack of 4 DVDs. A Mac Mini is a but roughly that size.
20:13:34 It's a full blown Mac. But it does not come with keyboard, does not come with a mouse, does not come with a screen, does not come with speakers, does not come with microphone, things that you get with, with, a MacBook you don't get with a Mac Mini, but because it doesn't have all of those things, you also have a lot more freedom in
20:13:54 terms of how you set it up. My Mac Mini that I have. Has a, what is it, 32 inch screen on it on right right now.
20:14:03 And it's cooked up to about 40 TB worth of hard drives. So.
20:14:13 That's a lot.
20:14:13 You're not Yeah, that's a lot and it's got a lot of stuff on it.
20:14:18 You're not with Mac Mini, you can. You can configure it almost any way you want to.
20:14:24 And the new Mac Minis, the M. 3 Mac minis are really, really, M three's are in twos.
20:14:30 Maybe they only have M two's, but anyway, they're blindingly fast. None of the older pre Apple Silicon, machines.
20:14:40 None of them are as fast as the Apple Silicon. Mac Mini. It's a blazing fast machine and it's the least expensive Mac out there.
20:14:50 A lot of people say that I have very little room. So I went to get a laptop. A Mac Mini complete with screen and keyboard takes up about the same, space as, as a laptop and it costs less.
20:15:05 Hello?
20:15:04 So I'm a big fan. Big, big fan of the back, Benny.
20:15:11 Any other ideas for what we should talk about?
20:15:15 Can we just send you ideas in the mail?
20:15:18 You can send it, but I kind of like the consensus approach where we have some idea of what we're going to talk about the Next month in case somebody has an idea that they really don't like.
20:15:30 Somebody wanted me to talk about this really advanced. Movie making program. I would love for somebody to talk about it.
20:15:38 I'm not that person. I'm not, not really in spite of the fact that I'm the video person for my church.
20:15:44 I'm really not a a video person. I use it, but I'm not really an expert on the subject.
20:15:51 So, any suggestions?
20:15:57 Sunday if you have no suggestions I'm just gonna show you how to build a website. Because I have a lot of experience with that.
20:16:07 None of you are asked about the snowflakes on the, on the straight. Mack site when I was showing you that.
20:16:14 Okay.
20:16:17 Yeah, I suppose.
20:16:14 I was wondering about it, but You know.
20:16:19 You, about that last time.
20:16:22 Yeah, the, since it is almost spring, I suppose I can go turn the snow off, but.
20:16:28 It appealed to my sense of humor.
20:16:34 Also, I've gotten a lot of questions from other people. How do you have it snowing on your website?
20:16:39 And I explained that, you know, and it's northern Washington state. It's, it's cold up here.
20:16:45 Okay.
20:16:46 If you show us how to build a website. Would you include, how to use AI to do that?
20:16:54 Probably not because all of the ways that you use AI to build websites, they tend to make really bad websites.
20:17:01 One of the first uses of AI was to build websites. And to this day they do a really bad job.
20:17:13 The thing I'd like to remind people of, Google is blind when you go into Google and say, I want a picture of a B.
20:17:20 17 and it comes up with a picture of B. 17. It's a B.
20:17:24 17 because some human had a picture of B. 17 and wrote a caption that said this is a B.
20:17:29 That's how Google knows it's a B. But if it's a picture of this guy named Fred who flew on a B.
20:17:37 17. Fred used to fly in a B. 17. You're gonna see Fred's picture there too, cause it has B 17 along with a picture and it just assumes that Fred is a B.
20:17:47 Cause a caption sends something about B. 17. And that's the problem that Google has it can't see, it can't hear.
20:17:55 So does it know the difference between Esperanto and Spanish? Nope, some human had to tell them the differences.
20:18:01 And when it comes to having AI build a website, it's again, it's something that's blind and deaf.
20:18:09 And dumb trying to build a website and the results are usually fight for they've been building websites with AI now for about 20 years and They're all fairly terrible.
20:18:23 There are things that AR is good for. But most of the stuff that's currently being hyped about AI on the news, they're really not very good for that.
20:18:32 UN Unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with AI. I'm sorry.
20:18:39 Would that be a topic? That be a topic. Just not that we're going to do it, but you know, it is an interesting topic and I for one don't know very much about it.
20:18:52 I don't know. Probably doesn't matter. Yeah.
20:18:53 I'd have to. Yeah, I'd have to think about it because I like to do demonstrations rather than just.
20:19:01 Yeah, yeah.
20:19:02 Repository lumps. So I'd have to think of something you know that I could.
20:19:07 That I could, that's visual. But I'll consider that. That's probably not a bad idea.
20:19:15 It's not going to leave the news anytime soon. So Might as well talk about it.
20:19:21 That's
20:19:21 Is building a website something you can do on one meeting?
20:19:24 Yes.
20:19:25 Okay, I'm for it.
20:19:27 Okay. And again, as he suggested, you can also just send me suggestions. The The trick with picking a meeting topic is that I want it to be something that basically fits into an hour.
20:19:43 It can be longer, but it shouldn't be too much shorter. And like today, I had a whole bunch of interesting.
20:19:50 Topics, but they were all fairly short. With the exception of screen capture and I really could.
20:19:56 I really could. Have a whole meeting just on how to. Take screenshots and how to annotate things because I did that a lot.
20:20:05 I work for a science agency. And somebody give me, you know, the result of their science experiment.
20:20:11 I have to figure out how to make it visual. And so sometimes I had to make graphs and sometimes I interviewed people and sometimes I took photographs and sometimes I just put a massive tables of numbers.
20:20:24 Just trying to figure out how to present science to the public in a way that was digestible. There was a lot of use of screenshots and annotations and such too.
20:20:35 To do that. So I could bore you with screenshots and annotations. For a long time.
20:20:40 But if we talked about websites, I could do that there. If you have suggestions, just send them in to me.
20:20:47 Any final comments?
20:20:51 I like the idea of the website. And I like the idea of the AI, if you can find out a way to how to present it.
20:20:59 I will think about it and Kathleen will probably also lobbied for the for one of those 2 because she and I have similar thoughts about AI and And, the need to tell people what it really is as opposed to.
20:21:16 What they would like to get headlines. With.
20:21:20 That would be interesting. Yeah.
20:21:22 And maybe we can get Ron to have a presentation on his, 3D printers sometime.
20:21:28 Okay.
20:21:32 Okay.
20:21:32 Yeah.
20:21:27 Doesn't really fall into the category. There's lots to lots to know in it.
20:21:37 Anyway, thank you.
20:21:41 Thank you.

Backups and Archives: February 2024

Backups and Archives: February 2024

For our February 20, 2024 meeting, we talked about backups and archives. It was preparation for World Backup Day.

Time Machine volume icon as it appears on Mac desktop.

Backups and archives are not the same thing. A backup is a copy of things you are working on, or your boot drive, kept specifically for restoring things in case of a disaster. If your hard drive or flash drive fails, you need a backup to get yourself up and running (most often on a new computer) as rapidly as possible. Using Time Machine to back up to a local hard drive is an example of a backup. Copying photos from your iPhone to your computer is a backup. Syncing things to iCloud or Google Drive is a backup.

An archive, on the other hand, is a collection of information that is important to you (documents, ledgers, photos — whatever is important to you) that is copied to a different device and stored away from your computer. Time Machine, iCloud, and Google Drive are not (necessarily) archives, but copying key documents from your computer to a flash drive and saving them in a safe deposit box: that is an archive.

Video recording of the February 20, 2024 meeting

Video of the February 20, 2024 meeting on backups and archives

Transcript of the February 2024 meeting

Pro tip: use your browser to search for particular words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.

18:31:26 Okay. Today the presentation is going to start at 7 and we're going to talk about backing up your computer and archiving.
18:31:36 And they're not the same thing. But I'll get to that at 7 o'clock.
18:31:43 And in the meantime, Anybody have any questions that they'd like to ask?
18:31:54 Yes.
18:31:47 You can ask. Okay, at Lawrence you might be just probably discussing this at, you know, at 7 at the presentation, but I'm interested in finding out what are the most reliable external hard drives to back up an archive with for a Mac that aren't like overly over the top expensive so I don't know if you'll be suggesting that
18:32:21 Actually, I will be as suggesting that, but I'll tell you. I'll give you a brief answer to that.
18:32:30 The answer is for a backup is not quite the same as your everyday data drive for for an everyday data drive that you're storing things that are important to you, you probably want to have a quality drive.
18:32:42 For a backup drive, the important thing is that you actually have it and you have it turned on and you use it.
18:32:49 But the quality of the drive is not nearly as important because it's a copy. Of what you're working on rather than.
18:32:56 The the original it's it's not it's not it's not the bank fault it's the copy that's being sold in stores.
18:33:07 That's what your backup is. So. For that, basically just go out and buy, a hard drive.
18:33:15 There are some considerations for that. Go out and buy a hard drive that you actually have a port for on your computer.
18:33:22 Most, all the Macs sold today come with USBC connectors. A USBC is I happen to have a USBC connector right now it's this really small thing right here.
18:33:35 And the other one that's common is USBA. And you'll notice that this particular cable has both of them on it.
18:33:43 But every Mac sold today has a USBC and it's a small oval connector on it.
18:33:49 And so if you go out and just buy a dry, an external drive of the USBC connector, plug it into your Mac, your Mac should detect it and say, hey, you want me to back up to this.
18:34:00 The if you have an older machine that has a USB a connector, you want to make sure that it's a particular type of USB.
18:34:10 Which is called USB 3.0 or 3.1. And the reason is that the old original USB standard was quite slow.
18:34:19 And you don't want something that'll take forever to back up. So. Having having a reasonable Speed is is a good thing.
18:34:32 But in terms of what drive they are. I tell people that if you find something at Costco that's That's the right size that you should probably just consider buying it and and taking it home.
18:34:46 You do need to a couple things you need to do is you need to reformat it once you have it and when you're choosing the size You want to figure out how big the hard drive is on your, on your.
18:34:57 Home machine and get something at least twice that size. Even if you don't have your hard drive full.
18:35:04 If you have a 1 TB drive. You want to have at least a 2 TB.
18:35:08 Backup drive and it even if you're one terror right drive is even mostly empty you still want to have a 2 TB backup drive.
18:35:18 But I'll get into that during the the presentation and I'm going to I'm going to show off a variety of storage devices.
18:35:28 During the meeting. So I'll actually have give you some that you can. Look at and and think about.
18:35:33 Great. Thank you.
18:35:36 Any other questions?
18:35:40 I had a particular question. Got some old drives that have been really old. I mean, ancient. Their firew and It's like we have a very old computer and someone said you better get that info off of those drives onto your very old computer that accepts a 400 firewire before they get totally out obsolete and you won't be able to get the info off of them.
18:36:10 I, I agree with that. There's nothing out there right now that supports a firew.
18:36:16 So if your computer were to die. You can't really go someplace and have them pull the stuff off of those drives.
18:36:23 Because nobody has, there aren't any computers sold that support Firewire. So, yes, I would definitely, make that a fairly high priority.
18:36:34 If you have 2 Max, an old one and a new one. They can, you can use the old one to transfer stuff to your new one.
18:36:45 So as long as you have 2 working computers, you can get things off the old one. You can also buy a drive.
18:36:52 Well, actually, if you have fireware, if you have fireware, you're actually in a world of hurt because Most Firewire doesn't support high speed USB.
18:37:00 Which means that It would it could take forever to take the information off the drive. And you might have to resort to other means to get that information off.
18:37:11 But I would, I would say that that's kind of a 3 alarm fire in terms of getting the information off the.
18:37:17 Okay. Thank you.
18:37:19 Machine.
18:37:21 Now, I also have a lot of drives. They've got the old USB 2.0 and I know it's slow but I'm like that's where most they're old Western digital drives that's where all of my info is with you know I mean hundreds and hundreds of photographs that's USB 2 and we've got a what is it a little hub that will take the 2.
18:37:48 And put it into the new I Mac, which is a Ca USBC. So is that, are they going to be problematical as well?
18:37:59 Well, with the USB 2.0 drives, you just plug them into your hub and you just pointed at your new machine or your new backup drive and say, Go for it.
18:38:09 It'll be quite slow. USB 2.0 is 1.2, megabits per second.
18:38:15 And. Bye comparison USBC is It depends upon the type of drive you have. I have one that takes 40 GB.
18:38:27 Gigabits per second. Which is just it's like the difference of going into a completely dark room and going on to a stage with floodlights.
18:38:40 It's it's literally night and day in terms of the speed. With 40 gigabits per second.
18:38:52 Yeah.
18:38:46 I could transfer. 10 feature films in a second. And with your USB. A drive running USB.
18:39:02 Hmm. Okay.
18:38:57 2.0. That could take an hour for one. Video. So it's a quite a dramatic difference, but it doesn't make any difference.
18:39:09 You just, you plug in your old drive, you plug in your new drive, you tell your new computer to transfer from the old to the new drive and if it takes all night who cares.
18:39:19 You, you want to do this on your new computer and not your old computer because your old computer in addition to your old computer because your old computer in addition to having a slow USB connection.
18:39:28 Also has a slower processor and it just will take longer for it to transfer things. Your, your, NUM, IMAC can, it's, just, Loads faster than the old machine.
18:39:41 Yes, and we're afraid of that old imac is going to It's gonna go one of these days.
18:39:48 It's way it's really old. So I think, yeah, okay, we, so we'll transfer and you're right, the fire wire is what I think, yeah, okay, we, so we'll transfer and you're right, the firewire is what I really need to work on before that machine dies.
18:39:59 Yes.
18:39:59 Yes. Yes.
18:40:03 Okay, thank you.
18:40:07 Other questions?
18:40:08 Yes, I haven't. I'm having a lot of performance problems with my MacBook Pro.
18:40:14 I'm using a light room, Adobe Lightroom. To process my pictures and it is just dragging.
18:40:22 That as well as Photoshop. And it's that the MacBook Pro M. One Max.
18:40:30 So I'm trying to I've been on the phone with Apple 2 3 times now and I'm getting this thing as well don't open up anything else while you're running it.
18:40:39 Oh.
18:40:38 I've got 32 gigs of memory in this thing. And it's just, it's just ridiculous.
18:40:43 Any idea?
18:40:43 Okay, so well, I happen to have, I happen to use Light Room all the time. And I'm using on an Apple Silicon machine.
18:40:54 And it's not particularly slow for me. There are some things that are slow. like when it's, when I tell it to rebuild the index, the, lightroom has, it has a, it has, it has indexing function so you can.
18:41:10 Go.
18:41:13 Okay.
18:41:08 Yeah, they optimize. I optimize it every time I shut it down. Practically. So, but I almost have in order for me to, in order for the computer to show me the updates that I have made to a photo.
18:41:22 Sometimes I actually have to close out a light room and go back in. To clear the memory, I guess.
18:41:28 And so I can see what I've actually done to that total.
18:41:30 Okay, if you've closed it up before it was actually done, you might actually have some corruption.
18:41:36 There is a way I don't happen to remember off the top of my head. There is a way to tell Lightroom to go back and rebuild the indexes.
18:41:44 And that's something it will take a while if you have a lot of photos. Do you not happen to know how many photos you have?
18:41:52 Oh, probably 20,000 in that range.
18:41:55 Okay, how much spare room is there on your hard drive?
18:41:59 That I don't know right off hand, but I know I had a plenty last time. I looked.
18:42:05 Well, okay, here's, here's a, here's a rule of thumb.
18:42:14 Okay.
18:42:09 The way that light room and and, photos and I'm a movie and other things that do audio and visual.
18:42:19 If you have say a 2020 GB database. Even if you have 32 GB worth of RAM.
18:42:28 You have to have at least 4 times that amount of free space. So
18:42:34 I have a scratch disc. That I use but again that's only 1 GB though
18:42:41 Oh, well, 1 GB probably is not doing much good. And in fact, that, that if that's what you're using, it's your scratch.
18:42:51 Wow.
18:42:51 Good disk, it might actually be slowing things down. Because it's constantly reading things in and out of the scratch desk.
18:42:56 But you want to have you want to have a lot of free space because what light room in photos and imovie and all the rest of these things do.
18:43:06 They don't have everything in memory at once. They, I movie, for example, takes a, essentially a thumbnail of your movie and as you're doing things with it, it loads it into memory, writes it back out to memory.
18:43:21 And the same with light room and Photoshop. So they're not everything's in memory at one time.
18:43:26 So it's constantly using this space and the more stuff you have the more disk base it uses.
18:43:34 So The couple things that we do is give it more disk space to work with. And the other thing I would do is At some point and I don't remember how to do this off the top of my head launch light room.
18:43:48 Sure.
18:43:50 Pointed at your photo database and say rebuild the index and that will take if you have 20,000 photos that'll take a long time.
18:43:59 Okay.
18:44:04 Yeah.
18:44:00 If you've ever had to quit it because it seemed like it was taking a long time, what you're doing at that point is you're actually damaging the database.
18:44:08 So tell it to to tell it to go and do its thing. Well.
18:44:07 Oh, Oh, just be patient. I really thought I had, but how would I know if I had a virus?
18:44:18 Maybe I'm thinking a virus may have done this because I didn't always have this problem.
18:44:19 Does it? Well, viruses don't normally affect photo applications. Viruses, you'll notice that you have a virus because it screws up your mail or it'll screw up your web browser.
18:44:32 Oh, no.
18:44:37 Yeah
18:44:32 But, it not, Photoshop. Not, Not light room.
18:44:41 Okay.
18:44:40 Okay. Oh. If you have time, another quick question. So this.
18:44:46 A scratch just that I have I used to have plugged in to the one of my USB ports on my MacBook Pro again, left hand side if I plug that in it gets my operating system keeps ejecting it without me knowing it.
18:45:02 I'll come back to my computer. It's you've ejected a disk.
18:45:05 Incorrectly or whatever the heck that message is.
18:45:07 Okay, that's that's probably it depends. Is this a 1 GB disk?
18:45:13 Yes, but here's the thing the previous MacBook Pro I had did the same exact thing
18:45:20 Well, yes, but is it 1 GB 1 TB?
18:45:23 No, 1 TB, I'm sorry, not one, Yeah, Yeah.
18:45:25 Okay, okay. One terabytes, a horse of a different color. It could be, do you happen to know the manufacturer?
18:45:32 Well, Sandys is the one, but it's done it with I know the previous backup pro I had before prior to this actually did this for every different drive I had and I had a number of different manufacturers of Western digital and this and everything else.
18:45:48 And it did this consistently.
18:45:50 Alright, when you got the drive originally. Did you reformat it?
18:45:56 Yes.
18:45:57 And how did you reformat it?
18:46:00 Through the operating system on the map.
18:46:04 Oh, what?
18:46:12 Yeah.
18:46:15 Right.
18:46:20 Okay.
18:46:02 Well, yes, but you see most. Most third party, most third party drives. Come formatted, using, fat, which is the, It's the operating system used by old versions of Windows and to work with with Photoshop and so on and so forth.
18:46:25 They need to be particularly with a MacBook with with an M. One MacBook. They need to be, formatted is APFS.
18:46:33 Okay
18:46:33 Which is Yes, I'm going to, among other things, talk about that when I'm talking about data drives because one of the first things that you do with data drive is reformat them.
18:46:39 Okay. Okay. Alright, I will try that. Thank you.
18:46:45 And well, you have to take everything off because of course if you reformat it will destroy everything.
18:46:47 Exactly. Well, if it's, it's on a scratch, it's not gonna matter.
18:46:52 But the reason, the reason why APFS it works is it's a much more modern.
18:46:57 File structure, it's sort of like if you if you go through and you're going to a a library that still has the old paper card catalog.
18:47:18 Okay. Okay.
18:47:06 That's kind of the. The fat format that Windows used to use. Whereas if you go into a modern library and they have a computer terminal, you're using a computerized database that's the card catalog and the computerized database is much faster and that's basically what APFS is compared to.
18:47:26 Okay, I I will try that see how it goes. Thank you so much
18:47:31 Any other questions?
18:47:31 Hmm.
18:47:32 I have a question. I have an imac that I purchased in 2,019 November 2,019 and I'm having a lot of trouble with it.
18:47:44 It's running slowly. And then when I go in. And put in my password when it's needed and then it doesn't recognize my password.
18:47:53 And then they go and change my password and it's all confirmed. And then I go in and try to get into something where I need my password and it doesn't recognize my password that I just changed.
18:48:05 Pastor.
18:48:05 So I'm wondering if I got hacked or if I have a
18:48:08 No, when you say password, when you, where are you entering the password? What are you doing?
18:48:13 Well, my Apple ID, cause I I decided I would go in and see if I could find some answers to this.
18:48:26 Okay.
18:48:20 It's my. The whole system is running really slowly. I mean, just really slowly. And and and so I went into you know the Apple Care place.
18:48:32 Or not app anyway and you have to give your Apple ID. Which I did and they didn't recognize it.
18:48:39 And it shook and said, you know, no, so. So I did a recovery and with through my phone because they had my phone number and and then I changed it.
18:48:50 And they that it was okay and then the next time I needed to get back in. It didn't recognize it.
18:48:58 So I'm having trouble with. Apple IDs and, IDs that are connected to.
18:49:05 You know, my different mail accounts.
18:49:09 Okay, the first question, what kind of machine is this?
18:49:12 An imac, it was, it's, it has 6 gigahertz.
18:49:18 8, 8 GB. And I'm running on Sonoma, 14 to point 2.1.
18:49:26 Okay. This is not something that you can fix unfortunately. The first thing I'm going to tell you, but I would I would highly recommend that when you buy a Mac today, no matter what kind of Mac, whether it's a desktop machine or laptop or something, that you get 16 gigs of, memory.
18:49:47 Okay.
18:49:47 And the reason is Apple will say that it'll work fine with 8 GB and that's true, but
18:49:54 When it has 8 GB of RAM, it means that it's constantly going to be writing things out to disc.
18:50:01 And reading things off of disk when it runs into memory issues. And so you'll never run out of memory, but it'll be constantly writing and reading and writing and reading when it bumps up against the limit.
18:50:16 And to give you an example of how can run out of memory, if you run Chrome. You can use that 1 GB of memory for one page.
18:50:25 Okay.
18:50:25 So if you have 3 tabs open. You could use up 4 GB worth of memory just for Chrome.
18:50:35 Okay.
18:50:32 And then the Mac needs to do other things as well. So if you had like, 20, or 20 tabs open, you could be using 20 gigs of memory, which means that every time you switch a tab, it has to write stuff out and then read stuff back in for you just to change tabs.
18:50:47 Well.
18:50:48 So Unfortunately, with the Mac you have, you can't really add more memory. Most If 2,019 you're probably have a machine.
18:50:55 I think I'm ready for a new machine and I was considering the Mac Mini that you talked about a couple of weeks or a couple of months ago.
18:51:04 Yes.
18:51:04 And I thought I would just go into an Apple store and. And then with my current imac and have them transfer everything.
18:51:14 Yeah.
18:51:14 And then, and then I have to have a monitor, some kind.
18:51:18 Right. The nice thing about the Mac Mini, my Mac Mini, I have a Mac Mini city next to me.
18:51:30 Oh.
18:51:26 It's got an LG monitor that I bought at Costco. So It you have to be a little bit careful about about the monitors because the monitors can actually slow down your machine if you get, if you get a low performance monitor, but But, no, I went to, I went to Costco and bought this, the monitor I originally was running it with.
18:51:57 Ouch!
18:51:50 I bought in Maybe 2,005. And what I, what I couldn't stand about it was that the color wasn't right.
18:52:01 Okay.
18:52:02 And I'm a photographer. So. It drove me nuts and I complained about it and Kathleen threatened to kill me if I didn't go by a new monitor.
18:52:12 Yeah.
18:52:18 Okay.
18:52:12 Was that the way you phrased it there? Yeah, she agrees. She threatened to kill me because she got tired of me complaining about it.
18:52:22 But in terms of that one issue is you probably have some memory issues but the second not not you personally but the computer these The second issue.
18:52:27 I do. That's true.
18:52:27 Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
18:52:31 Is that. That.
18:52:35 You really shouldn't be asked for your icloud password that much because the iPad, I mean, when you launch when you launch mail it goes out to icloud to get your mail and so on.
18:52:49 So it should know what your password is. If it's if you think it's missing it, then the most problem that people have with passwords is they accidentally turn on caps lock.
18:53:00 Or they do something to. To screw up the passwords of case sensitive. And so they'll do something like that.
18:53:09 I had this one person at work. That they were constantly having problems with their password and I was not working for the help desk and I kept on getting annoyed with them coming and asking me for help but they begged me to come over.
18:53:22 Okay.
18:53:22 Went to another part of our campus to go visit them. And I took one look at their desk and I knew what the problem was.
18:53:28 Their desk was very cluttered. They had paper that was touching the the keyboard and it was doing among other things touching the option key.
18:53:37 So when they thought they were typing in A's, they were actually typing in option A.
18:53:42 And so I, I saw what the problem was and I just made fun of him for 1520 min until they.
18:53:48 Clean the stuff off and then it steadily match, but magically started working. But usually if you have a password problem, it's because the cat of a caps lock issue or something else.
18:54:00 That you're doing. This one person I knew they had a keyboard that was supposed to help them with accessibility.
18:54:07 And it was set up in such a way that they were accidentally resting their palms on the keys when they were typing.
18:54:14 Yeah.
18:54:15 So there are a lot of things that you can do, but it probably has something to do with the.
18:54:21 Taste sensitivity of the of your bra. Of your password is probably not a problem with your account or being hacked or anything.
18:54:29 The other issue that some people might have is that the, the, your, map keeps track of passwords in the browser.
18:54:39 But if you change the password on your phone, your Mac. May not know that the password's been changed because it's storing it on the Mac and your iPhone change the phone.
18:54:52 So it's sort of like someone came along and changed the locks in your house while you weren't home.
18:54:57 So you come home and your key doesn't work in the lock anymore because it was changed behind your back.
18:55:00 So that's that's just that that's just a possibility.
18:55:02 Okay. Well, okay, then if I decide to go ahead and do get the Mac Mini go into an Apple store, as you suggested, then my keyboard, my current keyboard, my little magic keyboard that would still work on my.
18:55:18 My old track pad would work.
18:55:20 Yes, they both would work on the Mac Mini. The only thing that you can do on the new Mac Mini that you can't with your old keyboard is that even though the Mac Mini doesn't have a keyboard that comes with it, you can use your fingerprints to log in to it by using the extended keyboards that they have.
18:55:41 Oh.
18:55:41 Alright, there's this little button right here or my finger is. Is a, is a fingerprint button.
18:55:48 And now that may not mean anything to you, but it is kind of cool when once your password users press your finger there and it does it.
18:55:57 That's very cool.
18:55:57 But other than that, The other than that, the, the keyboard you have and the mouse you have will work with, with the Mac Mini.
18:56:06 Okay, on my track pad.
18:56:07 When, one other thing with the Mac Mini to think about a Mac Mini does not have a camera.
18:56:13 Oh.
18:56:12 You can get you can get webcams that stick on top of it but it doesn't have a camera.
18:56:19 So zooming would be a problem.
18:56:27 Okay.
18:56:19 Zooming well it's you you can go out that you can get web cams for like 70 80 bucks that they just clip on the top of your monitor so they Sit there and do a thing, but then the webcam will want to plug into your Mac.
18:56:41 Okay.
18:56:37 And so that's another one of your ports being used for the camera. I really like the Mac Mini, but I you do have to kind of think through the fact that it doesn't have everything that it I Mac or Mac book has.
18:56:47 Yeah.
18:56:50 Because it's just the computer.
18:56:53 Okay.
18:56:50 Yeah. Right, okay. Yeah. I appreciate that.
18:56:58 Thank you.
18:57:01 Minutes. Okay.
18:56:59 Okay, it's about all we can have one more question before we Start the presentation.
18:57:07 Any other questions?
18:57:11 Okay, I have one. Just is about signing in last time I didn't sign in because I didn't know how to do it.
18:57:11 Why is Okay. I'm gonna have something for you to sign in in a second or 2.
18:57:24 All I have to do is find where I put it. Oh, there it is. I'm going to paste the.
18:57:33 Address in the chat window.
18:57:43 And in the chat window now, there should there's the link that'll take you to the sign in form.
18:57:51 Why is everyone shy and how they're, they're Cameras turned off.
18:57:57 I feel lonely.
18:58:03 Madam President, do you have anything you want to impart to us?
18:58:08 No? You're, you're microns turned off.
18:58:16 I don't have much to say. Just welcome everybody. And don't forget to sign in.
18:58:21 But he'd already said that.
18:58:25 Doing it now.
18:58:28 I'll just turn it over to the treasurer since we have a few. Yearly dues that came in.
18:58:36 Yeah, we actually we have a total right now of 17 members that have paid their dues. And so I will balance right now is 2,300.
18:58:50 Dollars. And 93 cents. But the also received 3 dues from 3 people that are not on our list.
18:59:02 Lawrence. So I don't see them on here, but if anybody knows somebody or any of those 3, we would like to get at least the email address.
18:59:13 So then Lawrence can send him the invitations. Hmm.
18:59:22 Yeah.
18:59:18 Yes, that would be. Quite useful. Also. Also, I wanted to tell you that I have a bill.
18:59:27 To send you. But, it's for like, I don't know, 60 bucks.
18:59:29 Yes.
18:59:32 It's for the discussion board software that we have in the. On the website.
18:59:34 Oh good. Yeah, just. Yeah, just send it to me. So does anybody know a Julia H.
18:59:43 Johnson?
18:59:48 She paid to do but I couldn't find the Any information on the?
18:59:55 Computer. On the database. Okay.
19:00:02 Okay, there. Is a Julia Johnson that showed up someplace.
19:00:12 In my email.
19:00:11 So. I'm
19:00:16 Yeah.
19:00:18 Could you send me a list of those names because they they might have written to me and I just need to go look for them.
19:00:26 Oh, okay. Yeah, I can do that. I'll just send. Then the other name is Jay Hansen and Manson.
19:00:34 Those also sound vaguely familiar.
19:00:37 Okay.
19:00:35 No. Well, I am Peggy Hanson. Real name is Margaret. Is that, so I sent a check.
19:00:45 Oh yeah, that that clears that up. This is for a piggy.
19:00:47 Yeah. James and Margaret? Yeah.
19:00:53 Yeah, but it's, that's her. She's saying. Oh, okay. Oh, okay.
19:00:56 Yeah, I'm Margaret. Yes, yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah.
19:01:03 I'd love to, I'd love to change that, but I can.
19:01:02 No problem. Okay, are you getting the emails? Oh, okay. Then, and that's solved then, okay.
19:01:08 Yes, yes I can. Yeah. Right, thank you.
19:01:15 I'll send you the other one, Lawrence. That I couldn't find.
19:01:18 Okay. Margaret, you said you can't change the name. You mean the name and zoom?
19:01:26 No, I'd like to change my name from Margaret to Peggy. Sorry. Yeah, I know.
19:01:29 Oh, oh, I see. That you have to go to courthouse for that, but.
19:01:36 I'm not, I'm not willing to pay the fee.
19:01:38 Several people are they don't like what zoom calls them like this one woman. She was having trouble with, so she, we had a zoom session and it, the zoom session said that it was iPhone.
19:01:55 Okay.
19:01:54 And she wanted it to actually have her name. And to do that you go into the Zoom preferences and you can.
19:02:00 And you can.
19:02:01 Yes, yes.
19:01:57 You should go. That will.
19:02:04 Anyway, tonight I was going to talk about, backups and archiving. And the reason why I this came up, I asked for suggestions for a topic and one person sent me a dozen suggestions and but at the same time I got several people who were having troubles with their computers.
19:02:28 And they needed to recover information. And one person also needed to recover, photographs. The, I'll talk first about the person with who recovered the photographs.
19:02:39 They had an iPhone that they had never backed up. And they lost the iPhone and it had pictures of their grandchildren and grand nieces and nephews and so on and so forth and they wanted to know how they could get that.
19:02:56 They had a new iPhone on order, but they didn't know how to get the the photos and I asked them if they had a Mac and they did and so I told them to log in to their Mac and launch photos and tell it to sync with icloud and they were astonished that all of their photos appeared on their their computer.
19:03:18 That works if you have less than 5 GB worth of photos because Apple gives you an I call out account for free for up to 5 GB worth of data.
19:03:30 That data can be email, messages, anything you have. If it totals 5 GB or less, you can use the free account.
19:03:38 Anything more than that, you have to pay. For extra storage. Kathleen and I, we have a 2 TB.
19:03:47 Account that's for that Kathleen uses and I uses it and it's a family plan so our daughter also uses it.
19:03:54 Our daughters in England. So you don't even have to be on the same continent, but collectively we can use up to 2 TB worth of storage and I think right now right this very second.
19:04:06 We're using, I don't know. Something like 300 GB. So it's, a nice way of backing stuff up.
19:04:17 That Apple gives you automatically, but most people only use it for their phones and they don't realize that it also works.
19:04:23 For their max and iPads and other thing. So that one was easy. What was more difficult was that a woman had a.
19:04:34 A MacBook Air. And the MacBook Air basically died. She couldn't get it to do anything at all.
19:04:42 She pressed the power button. And nothing would happen. It would just come up with a blinking question mark.
19:04:50 The blinking question mark is usually a bad sign because it means that the computer looked for the disk drive and it couldn't find it.
19:04:59 And if it can't find the disk drive, it says, you know, basically where is it?
19:05:03 And I tried some secret voodoo to get it to find the disk drive and it could not.
19:05:09 In her case, she had a new machine. That she was using, but she hadn't recovered everything off the old machine because while she was setting up the new machine she continued to use the old machine so when it died everything that hadn't been transferred initially was lost.
19:05:27 And this is where I'm having a good backup policy helps. The third instance was somebody who had a Mac Mini to run their route business.
19:05:38 It was an old Mac Mini and it died. And they had a new machine that they were not using for their business.
19:05:45 They had no backup for their old business at all. And when the old Mac Mini died, they lost everything.
19:05:52 And finally there was one other person who had and imac on order. And when they ordered the new imac, I told them, go out and get a hard drive and back up everything off of your old.
19:06:05 I, Mac, and they said, sure, they would do that. They didn't do that.
19:06:08 So when the new imac came they basically had nothing. To put on it. Fortunately for them, They, were able to dismantle.
19:06:21 The imac, which by the way dismantling an imac is a horrendous task.
19:06:27 And then they put the old drive into a case and they were able to suck things off of it.
19:06:35 But in all of these cases, both with the with the iPhone that. Was lost and the various machines that died.
19:06:44 They kind of save a lot of grief with a backup strategy. And I want to talk about different things that you can back up with.
19:06:51 And part of it is going to be a history lesson. When the Mac first came out. It had one.
19:07:00 Floppy disk drive. It was a 3 and a half inch floppy disk. And it's held 400 K.
19:07:06 Of information. By comparison to what that means today. A iPhone if you just take on any old iPhone today the smallest picture you can take is gonna be about 3 or 4 MB.
19:07:21 It means that you'd have to actually have a small stack of these floppy disks just to hold that one photo that your that your iPhone took.
19:07:31 The amount of the amount of storage space that people use today is phenomenal. In the days that they Okay, 400,000 Byte.
19:07:43 Little minis if you wanted to do something else you had to pop out the disk and stick another disk in and you were constantly switching this back and forth on the on the Mac.
19:07:54 But today you don't have to do that because we don't use, 400,000 Byte floppies today.
19:08:00 When I initially started doing backups years ago, I used CD-ROMs and a CD-ROM.
19:08:08 If you format it on a Mac, you can store about 600 MB on a CD ROM.
19:08:15 So in terms of the using that, the iPhone pictures, as a good example, you can put a couple 100 pictures on a CD-ROM.
19:08:25 If you're lucky. But. On my new iPhone that I have.
19:08:33 If I shoot photo raw with this iPhone, 15. The photographs are 40 MB.
19:08:41 So if you think about it, I could get maybe 15 pictures on a CD ROM. Not very many.
19:08:49 We're just overwhelmed by the CD-ROM could do. If you stored it on a Blu-ray disk.
19:08:55 You could get about 12 GB, which you know now we're talking real numbers but the real problem with CD ROMs and blue rays.
19:09:03 Transferring data to those media takes forever. So if you want to write it to the CD or the or the Blu-ray disk takes forever and pulling it back takes forever as well.
19:09:16 So some faster ways to do it. If you have a MacBook. You probably have a small slot in the side that allows you to put in a SD card.
19:09:27 This is an SD card. Actually, it's in a case, but.
19:09:32 This is the SD card. It's really small. It's a little bit bigger than about half your thumb size.
19:09:39 This particular one is 128 GB. And at some point I'm gonna stick it in my machine so you can see.
19:09:46 How much space that that is. And, That's a hundred 28 gigs on this little flat thing.
19:09:54 This is a thumb drive. And this particular thrum dive also holds a hundred 28 gigs.
19:10:02 And if I push it up on one side, it's got a USBC port so it'll fit into a modern Mac.
19:10:09 I push it the other way and it's got a USBA port so it'll fit into an older Mac.
19:10:14 And this is also one way that you can actually transfer information from an old machine to new new. You stick it into your computer.
19:10:22 Copy it from the old machine, stick it into your modern machine using the. Port at the other end and copy it to your new machine.
19:10:30 And I use this basically when I want to do grab things. I'll put things on my church computer.
19:10:36 My church has an IBM. Doesn't have USBC. So I use the USB.
19:10:42 A, this kind of connectors called the USBA connector for the machine at church and I use the USBC for the one at home.
19:10:48 Yeah.
19:10:50 But that's for fairly small task and that's not really good for backup. That's good for transferring information.
19:10:58 You can transfer information. Using SD card, you can transfer information using thumb drives, but it's not really good for backup.
19:11:05 And I'll start with the phone. If you have an iPhone and you take photographs with it, spend the money to purchase a bigger icloud.
19:11:17 Plan. The one that you get for free is it's you get 5 bucks. But the larger ones start at I think it's 99 cents a month.
19:11:27 So for like 12 bucks a year, you can have more storage. And I don't remember exactly how much that is.
19:11:33 But it's not a heck of a lot of money and you get a lot more storage. And if you have an iPhone, the nice thing about it is that you're it'll just automatically store all your photos if you if you tell it to sync it to iclap.
19:11:48 It'll automatically store your photos. An eye cloud. So they're gonna be on your phone but they'll also be on iPhone because they're on icloud it also means you can pull them down and put on your computer or put them onto your iPad or something like that.
19:11:59 The best by far backup plan for an iPhone is to spend $12 a year and get a bigger icloud.
19:12:09 And if that's not enough, then spend, I don't remember what the bigger plans are, but it's not a lot of money to get quite a bit more.
19:12:17 Storage on icloud. The one thing that you absolutely have to have is you have to have decent bandwidth because If you can see this Zoom session, you probably have enough bandwidth to take advantage of icloud.
19:12:32 For your computer though you're going to need an external drive. And I'm going to show you a couple of external drives and then I'm going to show you.
19:12:42 How I use them. This is an external drive. It's made by a company called the C, which is French.
19:12:49 It just means the company. And this is a USBC. 3.1 drive, which means that uses a.
19:12:57 Yeah, USB 3.1. So it's fairly fast. And I just plug it into my Mac.
19:13:05 I don't even need a power cord for it. It uses power for the Mac to power it.
19:13:09 And it'll work on a on a MacBook as well. If you have a MacBook, running in a battery, probably not a good idea, but if the Mac looks plugged in.
19:13:18 Then it'll just be powered from them. From the MacBook. This is one type of drive.
19:13:24 This one.
19:13:24 How much does that cost?
19:13:27 I bought this several years ago and I have no idea. But I'll get to the prices in a second, but this is.
19:13:34 This is a USBC and it's a big. It's a thick thing because it's designed to actually be traveling around with you.
19:13:41 So, you can put it in a backpack or something, our suitcase and take it with you.
19:13:46 This is also a a, USB drive, but this is the USBC only.
19:13:54 And this is, I think, 2 TB. And I think this is 3 TB.
19:13:59 Hmm.
19:13:59 The orange one is 3 TB, but they have bigger and smaller ones. It'll look the same.
19:14:04 And this 2 TB one, again, this one doesn't even have a way for you to plug it into power.
19:14:10 The only way you can power it is by plugging into the machine. And so this is both for data and for.
19:14:17 Power and you can back up to these. And the nice thing about these is that they're small enough that if you have a laptop you can carry it with you.
19:14:25 So that you can back stuff up no matter where you are. For what I have at home, I have a permanently attached, drive.
19:14:36 Hooked onto the computer I'm using right now. Kathleen uses a she backs up over the air.
19:14:43 She has a laptop. She has a MacBook that she backs up over the air to a time capsule.
19:14:49 Apple doesn't make them anymore. But a time capsule is basically a wireless high speed wireless router that among other things has a disk drive and ours has a 3 TB disk drive and her Mac, she turns it on and without even asking it just.
19:15:08 Sees when the lac time is backed up and backs up anything that needs to be backed up. New so she doesn't even pay attention to it.
19:15:15 Kathleen has a PhD in healthcare informatics. On a technical level she knows way more about the computers than I do.
19:15:24 And the reason why she's backing up to the time capsule is that she never bothers to back up.
19:15:30 So I found a way that the computer just backs itself up because that's just not on her.
19:15:38 It's not on her radar is something that she needs to do. So that's those are different kinds of ways to back things up.
19:15:47 Now, how do you back stuff up? I'm going to do a demo at this point and I'll, I'll show you.
19:15:52 And to do that, I need to start sharing my screen.
19:16:02 And you don't want to see that. And you don't want to see that. So I'll make those disappear.
19:16:12 Over here. To the side of my machine. Is, a list of my hard drives.
19:16:19 And I realize there's a picture of. Swans and so on so forth. But this drive right here, time travel is my backup device.
19:16:28 And I use, time machine to back up to it. And if I click on it and say, get info by going to
19:16:39 Going to the. Farm on you and say get info. It'll pop up and it'll say that it's a 4 TB drive.
19:16:50 And it's got 1.4 one terabytes free and it's got 2.5 what's 2.6 TB used and down here oh here right where it says format and I know that you probably can't see this
19:17:05 But take my word for it. It says APFS case sensitive. I wanna show you another drive.
19:17:15 This is a drive that I stored data on. And this one says, Mac OS extended journals.
19:17:22 And my boot drive says.
19:17:30 So I have 3 different filing systems. This is a data drive The one this is, Tanto.
19:17:38 Once this time travel says APF, that's case sensitive and my boot drive on my Mac says it's APFS and APFS stands for Apple file system.
19:17:50 And APS first case sensitive is the one that's weird. And the reason why it's APFS case sensitive is when your Mac is using time.
19:18:02 Capsule, a time machine to back up. It needs the files to be K sensitive. Normally when you go looking for something on your Mac, doesn't care if you is an uppercase A or low case A or anything like that.
19:18:13 But when it's backing stuff up, it wants to back stuff up the same way that you stored it.
19:18:18 And if you stored it with upper and lowercase characters, you want that to be preserved. So before you use a machine, any kind of external ride, the first thing you should do is erase it.
19:18:29 And I'm going to demonstrate that in a second, but I wanted you to just kind of keep in your mind the fact that these are formatted to work with a Mac.
19:18:36 They're not formatted to work with a Windows machine or anything like that. Therefore, manage to work with a Mac.
19:18:42 And now I'm going to plug in. The dry. And let's see if it works this way.
19:19:03 And it showed up. Okay. This thing says, let's see. This is the drive.
19:19:08 It's a it's a 2 TB. I thought it was 3 TB.
19:19:11 It's a 2 TB hard drive. And if I do get info on this to see how it's formatted.
19:19:16 It says that it is. But we're going to need to pretend that it says that it's actually format for Windows or something.
19:19:28 If you go out and buy an external hard drive from Costco or any place else is probably going to be formatted to work with Windows.
19:19:35 Your Mac can work with it, but it's still probably going to be formatted to work with Windows.
19:19:38 So the very first thing you should do is to launch disk utility. And so I'm pressing the command key on my keyboard.
19:19:46 That's the one that looks like a little clover leaf in the space bar and that brings up spotlight and I say disk utility it goes out and finds disk utility and launches it.
19:19:56 And I come down here to L's see. And I have choices up here at the top. It says I can do this first aid which checks the drive to see if the drive is healthy.
19:20:06 And that's what it just did and says, it's fine. Or I can partition it, which means that you break it into multiple pieces, which I never went to do, or I can erase it.
19:20:19 Now if I erase it, it gives me choices. This one that says X fat means MSDS.
19:20:29 Fat means MSDS. And then there's macos extended journal, encrypted, case sensitive.
19:20:33 This case sensitive is the one that it uses for time machine. Believe it or not, I'm not even going to care about that because I'm going to use this for time machine.
19:20:40 You don't even need to launch disk utility. I'm telling you this because the first thing you do if you do buy a drive is you should launched.
19:20:50 Discutility, pointed at the drive and tell it to erase it. So pretend I've already done that.
19:20:56 I've erased the drive. Now I'm going to tell it to I'm going to sell my machine to use disk utility.
19:21:02 I'm 2 years time machine and to do that I have time machine in my menu bar but let's say you don't have that in your menu bar.
19:21:10 Let's go to settings. And, that's not the settings I wanted. I wanted the settings, system settings.
19:21:19 And trying to find time machine is probably difficult. You can look in there and. But if you just type it in up here.
19:21:27 It'll go find it for you. So I type in time, it goes to time machine. And then you have some preferences here.
19:21:35 One of the options is. How do you how often you want to be backed up? By default.
19:21:41 A time machine backs up every hour. Would advise you not to ever change this, have it back up every hour.
19:21:49 And then the other thing you can do is tell it where you want it to back up. I'm already using Time Machine to back up to this.
19:21:57 Disk drive that I named time travel But now I'm going to add a second one. You can have multiple ones.
19:22:03 I pointed at, let's see, Petite meaning is a small company. Say setup disc and it says that I can encrypt it.
19:22:13 I don't want to encrypt it. You can if you want. Disk usage, don't care about limits.
19:22:19 I just say done. And I tell it to go do its thing. And among other things, you'll notice that the icon used to be yellow.
19:22:28 And now the icon. Is green. Because it's showing that it's a disc. That it's a time machine.
19:22:37 Disc instead of a data desk. And if I do get info on it. To look at the formatting.
19:22:46 It now says APFS case sensitive. So the first thing you should know when you're using time machine is that just stick an external drive in there.
19:22:55 You reformat it when it comes from the store just to make sure that it doesn't have anything on it that you don't care about.
19:23:00 And then you tell time machine to use that drive and it'll reformat it again. And when it does, it makes it case sensitive so that it can back stuff up.
19:23:09 Now, a couple things that people, some people tried to do, they try to get really cheap and they say, oh, I'm going to use it to store data because if you look at my Time Machine Drive.
19:23:23 It's got stuff on it, but it's also got 1.4 one terabytes free.
19:23:31 So should I store data on it? No, that's sort of like using your parachute.
19:23:33 Jumping out of the airplane using a parachute and on the way down you to decide you're also going to use it as a wedding dress.
19:23:41 You know, it's going to be a parachute. Maybe when you're not using it anymore, you can use it for something else.
19:23:45 But while it's being a parachute, just Leave it for that. It shouldn't do anything else.
19:23:49 The other problem with using your backup drive to store just regular data is that if the drive dies, you not only use the backup, but you lose the, originals all at once with just one loss.
19:24:04 So I took a perfectly good drive and I've now turned it into a time machine drive and it will back up to that.
19:24:11 Every hour. Now, how do you know whether or not, Time machines actually doing this job.
19:24:18 Well, one of the things you can do in this options is you can, hmm.
19:24:24 Why doesn't it? Oh, cause they have it in a different place now. I want I want the time machine menu in my.
19:24:34 In my. A menu bar and there's an there's a there's a way to stick it up there and I don't remember exactly how to do that.
19:24:43 Because it's already up there so it's probably not giving me that as an option. But I wanted up there because you can go and then ask it.
19:24:50 Browse time machine backups. And you get this.
19:24:58 Funky display and I'm glad the I really couldn't show it to you because, mine is Sheen disappeared because it was trying to It was trying to show you the time machine but It'll show you the time machine backup so you can go and grab stuff that you've accidentally deleted all kinds of nice stuff.
19:25:17 But the other thing you can do is if you haven't backed up in a while, it'll tell you just do go and back up.
19:25:24 As an example because my spouses uses a laptop it's not plugged in all the time it's not necessarily connected all time and when she launches it might say I haven't been backed up in 4 days.
19:25:35 And if you go up to the time machine in the menu bar, you can just say. Back up and it'll start backing up.
19:25:42 A couple of things about the backup. The very first time you used my time machine to back up.
19:25:48 It could take quite a while. Depending on the amount of data that you have and how fast the drive is.
19:25:55 This is why you want to get at least a USB. 3.0 or faster drive. It could take a day or 2 to back up the first drive.
19:26:05 But after that, when it backs up every hour, it only backs up what has changed since the last backup.
19:26:12 So for some cases, like right now, it's backing up to my regular backup drive.
19:26:18 And it's telling you that it's doing a backup and you're gonna see it's gonna get over fairly quickly because not much has happened.
19:26:27 People are afraid that if they start backing up while they're doing something, they'll slow the machine down.
19:26:32 No, because from unnowder to the next you probably haven't made that many changes so just let it do its thing.
19:26:39 You don't have to look at it. You don't have to mind it. Several people have something found that they're utilities out there, allow them to look at the backup.
19:26:48 I recommend that you not use it because you can also damage the backup. My strong recommendation is everybody should back up and when you're backing it up, just tell time machine to do its thing and then ignore it.
19:27:01 And that's the best thing you can do for backup. In terms of backup devices somebody wanted to know what to What's a, a, A good drive for backing up.
19:27:18 And the, I will show you, cause I actually have a link here. I was show you what I use for my backup.
19:27:29 Hi, bought it off at Amazon. It's this drive. It's a Toshiba Drive and it doesn't that I'll tell you why this one I like it.
19:27:41 It's a little about at the time that I bought it was on sale for $99 and now it's a hundred 15 but It's a 4 TB drive.
19:27:49 It uses USBC. So it plugs right into my. Mac. And at 4 TB.
19:27:57 It's, twice the size of my. Boot drive actually my boot drive is only 1 TB.
19:28:05 So it's several times the size of my boot drive. But it's 4 times the size of my boot drive.
19:28:10 And I just set it up to be the time machine drive and I ignored it. And in terms of the brand is a brand important?
19:28:19 No. What is important? How fast is the interface and how, what is the fastest interface you can have on your machine.
19:28:28 If you have a modern Mac, you're going to have a USBC connector and it should be 3 USB 3.0 or faster or it might even be thunderbolt or faster.
19:28:39 That's good, cause it'll back stuff up all the time and it'll back it up quickly and you'll never even notice that if you have an older machine you might need to look at USB 3.
19:28:49 Drives because the USBC is not available. USBC is faster, but you want it to be fast enough so that if you ever have a disaster, it doesn't take forever for it to get everything back.
19:29:04 And, and this particular drive is, is what I have, but you can go on to Amazon and you can say, 4 TB type TB for terabyte external hard drive.
19:29:18 And it comes up with. Including the one that I had this, L's see, it's $134 for a 4 TB version.
19:29:27 The one I have is 2. So this is actually less money than I paid for mine several years ago.
19:29:33 But there are lots and lots and lots and lots of them. Or you can just go into Costco and you can see that they got a 2 or 3 or 4 or 8 GB, terabyte drive and they're selling it for whatever and just take it home and they only important thing is the first thing you do is reformat it because it's probably set up for Windows.
19:29:54 The woman who was asking the question about the light room being so slow. There's a good chance that the drive she has is formatted for Windows and once it gets formatted for the Mac.
19:30:05 Things will magically start. Working faster. But the other reason why you want to reformat drives is you don't know what they put on them.
19:30:14 Several companies and I'm not naming names right now to make people feel bad but Western digital a couple of years ago had a security issue.
19:30:24 They were manufacturing drives that came pre-installed with viruses. So anybody who had a Windows machine and they plug it in it would affect their machine automatically.
19:30:35 As they were coming out of the factory with a pre-installed virus. That wasn't intentional, but it's still a good reason to when you get the drive from Costco or someplace, first thing you do is reformat it.
19:30:46 And with a Mac format. But in terms of the cost, the cost is you can you can find if you if you actually tell it to sort load a high you might even be able to find a drive big enough for what you want that's that's Like, $99 for this 4 TB drive.
19:31:07 Buffalo is not really a great. Manufacturer, but I don't really care because it's back up.
19:31:14 Now, why do I not care about the manufacturer for backup drive? That's not your primary storage drive.
19:31:20 That is your backup. And it's sort of like having airbags in your car.
19:31:25 Do you need leather airbags? Nope. Just the ones that the manufacturer puts in the car as long as they haven't been recalled.
19:31:32 They're fine. You don't need fancy airbags. It's a safety feature.
19:31:37 So if you're if your backup drive dies what's what do you do? You go out and buy another backup drive.
19:31:44 It's you haven't lost your original data. It's the backup. So just go out and find something that you're comfortable with.
19:31:52 And reformat it and tell time machine to do its thing and then ignore it.
19:31:58 And that was an awful lot of. Verbiage in a small amount of time. Any questions?
19:32:07 Yes, so what what should I use if I'm, working on my, I'm storing my pictures on something else other than my laptop.
19:32:15 And I'm working on those pictures with Lightroom, they're stored on that disc. So maybe that's why things are so slow.
19:32:22 Yeah, the I mentioned that. Spormat it with disk utility. So launch disk utility pointed at.
19:32:30 Right.
19:32:31 Like this drive right now. I come along and I say erase and the important thing is that if you have a modern Mac that supports it, you want to use APFS, not APFS encrypted, not APFS case sensitive, just APFS, say, erase.
19:32:49 And it'll erase the dry.
19:32:48 Right. Okay, so I'm using, Toshiba disk for, for my photos that I'm working on daily.
19:32:57 So I should be using something better than that or.
19:33:01 Okay, just so I format it the right way. Yeah.
19:32:59 Oh no no, Tishiva is fine, but I would I would make sure that it's Right, it should be formatted the right way.
19:33:06 Okay.
19:33:06 The machine that I use for my backup is a Toshiva. I have no I have no complaints about Toshiba.
19:33:11 Okay, I was just concerned that it might be good for backup but not for something that I'm really relying on this to store my pictures.
19:33:19 Now it's Sheba's. I have I have opinions about hard drive manufacturers, but I had to have no particular problems with Toshiba.
19:33:31 And you.
19:33:28 Okay. And I'm using back plays, with the web to back up, so. I think I'm
19:33:36 Oh yes, well I was gonna get to that. That's, that's my next step that I was gonna talk about.
19:33:40 Okay. Okay.
19:33:41 But, Actually, we can talk about it right now. In terms of machines in your home.
19:33:51 You want to have a time capsule, you went went to either have a time capsule or an external drive that you use time machine on to back up things.
19:34:01 That's within your home. If we're backing it up someplace else, there are lots of choices.
19:34:07 I cloud is ideal because it's actually designed for the Mac and it's designed for iPads and it's designed for iPhones and it's not really that expensive.
19:34:18 For what you get. But another possibility is Amazon, is not Amazon, is Google. The trouble with Google is that you only get
19:34:30 You only get 15 GB for free.
19:34:35 But you can store all kinds of stuff on Google. Happen to have a hundred gigabyte plan because I share it with Kathleen and my daughter and we have it half full.
19:34:44 Some good news, bad news about Google. It's great for storing stuff, but you have to do all of it.
19:34:50 Manually. So all of the stuff that I have on Google, I've actually put there. And some of the things that I do are kind of weird like, This thing is to duplicate or backups.
19:35:03 These are backups of my website, my website every day at 3 in the morning, not every day, once a week at 3 in the morning backs itself up.
19:35:11 And it backs it up to Google. And this way it doesn't involve my my machines at home at all.
19:35:18 We could have a storm and they can knock out the internet here and my website will still be backed up.
19:35:25 So what I do with Google is probably not something that most of the rest of you want to do, but Google is a place where you can store stuff.
19:35:32 More interesting for most people especially where we
19:35:37 Is backblaze. Backblaze is an online backup. There hope that's their whole business.
19:35:47 They do online backup. And when we were moving out here from Maryland, I needed to.
19:35:53 I needed to.
19:35:57 Make sure that everything that we had on the East Coast showed up on the OS Coast and I was shipping among other things.
19:36:04 My computer, my computer went with, the movers. And if the movers had a problem or they lost the computer or was stolen or something, I'd be out on my data.
19:36:16 So several months before we moved, I bought a subscription to Backblaze and Back Blaze. If I can find the Icon here.
19:36:26 And. Backlays. Backways has a, it, it's a program, but it actually lives on your menu bar so you can keep track of it.
19:36:38 It'll back up your computer. And yes, yes, yes, I know that. I don't care.
19:36:44 Because I don't want to pay for it. But, It's backing up and I say what I went to back up and I give it a list of the drives that I wanted to back up and it backs up continuously.
19:36:55 It doesn't say that actually it says right here continuously and my last backup was at 7 10 . M.
19:37:04 This afternoon and right now I have 2024 TB worth of, of stuff on backblaze and it's in the process of backing up another 24 MB today.
19:37:19 So I have a staggering amount of stuff on back place and back blaze you pay. A yearly.
19:37:26 Backup and I don't actually remember products. Computer backup.
19:37:35 It is. Apparently you have to tell them what you want to do before they Oh, the pricing and pricing is here.
19:37:49 9 bucks a month or $99 a year. And it doesn't make any difference how much you store.
19:37:56 There's no limit. So in my case, it's 24 TB for if you were scattering, you know, like 500 GB for if you were scattering, you know, like 500 GB, it's still and 9 bucks in the month or $99 a year.
19:38:09 And I really like back place because again, just backs it up. And I, and I forget about it.
19:38:16 And if we have an internet outage, then it just keeps track of what needs to be backed up.
19:38:22 The next time, get, a, to talk to the internet will do its thing.
19:38:26 Most of the time, most most of the backup is taken to place between like 3 and 5 in the morning.
19:38:32 So I don't, I really have never noticed when backplace is doing something. If I'm doing something with my computer, it stops backing up.
19:38:40 So it doesn't, it doesn't argue with me, but I really like back place.
19:38:46 There is a referral program. So if I actually refer to everybody and you all. Join Black Place, I actually get a discount, but that's not why I'm doing that.
19:38:54 Yeah.
19:38:56 I just really like the service because again, I don't have to service because again, I don't have to pay attention.
19:39:00 The big thing with time machine, you set it up, you ignore it, it works. Back place, you set it up, you ignore it, it works.
19:39:08 Huge difference though is that time machine is a local backup. Where in back blaze is a remote backup and the difference there is if you want something it can take a long time to get it back down from back place.
19:39:23 Okay.
19:39:24 If you do, if you back up 24 TB and then you try to restore it.
19:39:28 It could take weeks. They have a service where if you want to, if you have a disaster, you want it restored, you can pay them and they'll put your backup on hard drives that they send to you and you pulled the stuff off.
19:39:41 And send the hardware drives back to them. But that costs more money. The nice thing about time machine, it's local, you want something restored, you just tell your Mac to restore it.
19:39:52 Another thing about a time machine that if you buy a new machine and you have a current backup, you can use something on your Mac called Migration Assistant.
19:40:03 And it's called.
19:40:06 Migration assistant, you tell it to do its thing and it continues and it wants access to Mike computer and I give it access to, I don't want to do that so I'm going to cancel that.
19:40:18 Go back. But I forgot it did that. One of the things migration this system does is it disconnects you from everything.
19:40:25 But one of the things that it does is that you if you have a new machine you launch migration assistant and you tell migration assistant to grow, grab your stuff off of the time machine, external drive.
19:40:39 And put it on your new machine. And then you go out to lunch and you come back and your new machine has everything that your old machine had on it.
19:40:46 As assuming that was backed up currently. That's a huge advantage of using time machine. It's free.
19:40:54 It's on your machine. It's reliable. It doesn't bother anything that you're doing.
19:40:59 The only requirement is that you have a machine that's properly formatted and that's available and you tell it to back up.
19:41:10 Any other questions?
19:41:14 Hmm. How are we doing on time?
19:41:18 We got another 15 min.
19:41:22 And since I'm here, I want to, I went to show you a couple things. I'm going to take my, I'm gonna stop the machine guys so I can show you.
19:41:34 What I'm doing, gonna take my USB card. And my USB drive, you'll notice that in terms of size, There, they both hold 128 GB, but they're the drive takes up quite a bit more space.
19:41:53 About these SD cards, SD cards, the Navy has the, I can't remember the US Navy audio visual.
19:42:03 Command or something there in Washington DC. They store all of the material on USB on these SD cards and they put them in these little Manila envelopes that you use for storing keys and such.
19:42:19 And they label it with a date and that's the material that they collected on news stories and press releases and everything that they're sending out and this is their archive system.
19:42:33 No.
19:42:36 Hmm.
19:42:30 They're stored on these SD cards and they got thousands of these SD cards. I think that's kind of peculiar, but it is a way of doing it that it doesn't use any electricity to store it and if they want something they just do what I'm going to do and I stick it in the machine.
19:42:46 And I've got to stick this in my machine. I'm gonna stick this in my machine.
19:42:50 I'm gonna copy some things to it. So you have a idea of. How it works.
19:42:57 And again, these things, if you have us, if you have a small slot about the size of a quarter on the side of your MacBook or behind your imac that's what these cards are that's what they go into.
19:43:11 Yep, that's what they're for.
19:43:17 Oh.
19:43:18 Hmm.
19:43:13 There usually is for storing, photographs. So I stick this into my machine.
19:43:24 And it'll show up on my desktop. Like right here. So this is my SD card.
19:43:33 Says it has a 128 GB worth of Storage on it and it just so happens that I have a Hey, a folder.
19:43:40 That I'm going to it's called test 3 and you don't care what's in it.
19:43:44 I'm going to drag it over here. And it's going to copy it and that just copied.
19:43:52 10, megabytes worth of stuff in about a second. So it and it made it an area dent in the capacity of the cart, but it's just a tiny little sliver, it's kind of a large fingernails the size of the SD card.
19:44:12 And my. Usbc card. I'm going to plug in.
19:44:25 So I noticed she pulled out over to the trash to extract it rather than just pull it out of the back.
19:44:31 Of the machine.
19:44:32 Yeah, if you pull it out of the back of the machine, you'll get a, I'll show you.
19:44:37 If I pull it out, I'll pull this one out so you can see what I'm talking about.
19:44:43 But I gotta drag something over here and I'll grab this folder and drag it there. And again, it's going to be pretty much instantaneous.
19:44:54 But if I pull it out of the machine, you'll see that you get an error message.
19:44:57 Hmm.
19:44:59 And. Where's the error message? Usually there's an error message that says that you dismounted to drive without unmounting it.
19:45:10 Oh, that reminds me that the woman who I had the drive that would disappear every once in a while.
19:45:15 If she's never formatted it for the Mac, it might think it's hooked up to a Windows machine and it's disappearing because the drive's going to sleep.
19:45:24 It doesn't know that it's actually being used. So. Do you have an external drive that disappears?
19:45:27 Hmm.
19:45:29 Oh, there's the message. This man can't can owner can't connect to an icloud.
19:45:36 Okay.
19:45:34 Never mind. That's a different problem. But, there should have been an error message someplace saying that I pulled a drive out and I wasn't supposed to.
19:45:42 Details.
19:45:43 Lord, so are you saying that if we're talking about archiving important files like I have a lot of fine art files, digital files that I'm not using, but as far as storage, long term storage, Are these reliable or like basically a morning a desktop?
19:46:10 It doesn't have to be a compact or anything because it's at home. What would you suggest is a most reliable brands?
19:46:17 Okay.
19:46:20 Archiving is different than backup. So far I've just been talking about archiving, but that part of the topic for tonight was, was, I've just been talking about backup, but part of the topic for tonight was archiving.
19:46:34 A backup is something that you use to recover from a disaster. So it's like an insurance policy.
19:46:39 Okay.
19:46:41 So you keep a copy of the work that you're working on constantly being backed up to a drive using time machine.
19:46:48 That's a backup. If I take my little SD card and I put all of my writings I've written about 2,000 published articles.
19:46:59 If I wanted to preserve these, or I wanted to send a copy of these to my daughter. I could put a 2,000 writings will fit on one of these cards with lots and lots of room because text doesn't take up that much room.
19:47:13 But what an archive is is a copy of what you're doing stored someplace else. And if you only store it next to your machine and someone comes and steals your machine, flush your time machine drive.
19:47:27 You they've taken everything. If you store it an icloud, icloud is not really an archive but because it's not at home you can recover it from icloud.
19:47:38 You can recover it from back place. But again, those are not arch archives. If I take this card and I put my writings and my photographs on it and then I put it in my safe deposit box.
19:47:50 It's an archive. It can't change. You, it doesn't get automatically updated.
19:47:56 So it's not a backup. But it is an archive of something that's important.
19:47:59 We have a safe deposit box downtown. And on it in that sake deposit box instead of having one of these, I actually have an 8 TB hard drive.
19:48:10 That. That I. Put everything on that hard drive. It's got copies of our married certificate and all, insurance policies as well as photographs and a whole bunch of other stuff.
19:48:26 Tons of stuff. That's on this drive in the safe deposit box. That is an archive because it's not with the machine.
19:48:36 Yes. Good.
19:48:36 It's separate. From the machine. And to have an archive, you can do that a number of different ways.
19:48:43 This little thumb drive holds a hundred 28 GB. That's a lot of stuff.
19:48:48 And if you take this thumb drive and put it in your safe deposit box, now it's an archive.
19:48:53 If you put the same information on this SD card, now this is an archive if you store it someplace else.
19:49:00 So the difference between a backup A backup gets constantly updated with your activities as you're doing them, whereas an archive is really important stuff that's stored someplace else.
19:49:11 Our marriage certificates not going to change. Our insurance policies aren't going to change. The baby photos of our daughter is not that they're not going to change.
19:49:20 So those are the archive that we keep in the states and the safe deposit box. An archive is a different thing.
19:49:27 And in terms of what to stick on an archive, just for SD cards, go out and get a name brand SD card.
19:49:35 This is made by Samsung. Samsung is what is one of the biggest companies when it comes to making flash memory.
19:49:42 Okay.
19:49:42 The other ones that I have are made for the most part by either sand disc or, or Sony.
19:49:49 Sand disc is owned by Western Digital and Sony is Sony. Sony invented this stuff, by the way.
19:49:55 The camera on an iPhone is actually made by Sony. You use a lot of Sony stuff that you probably don't even know about.
19:50:04 But for the archival stuff, yes, I go out and I get some Dame Brand SD cards with thumb drives or something and you can store them someplace else.
19:50:16 In my case with my terabyte drive, the terabyte drive, it happens to be made by Toshiba.
19:50:19 Because I want I want to be able to actually grab that archive and restore stuff. I have a need.
19:50:27 A an archive is not keeping an extra copy on your phone. It's not keeping an extra copy on your iPad.
19:50:35 Why? If you have a photograph on your phone, and it's also an icloud. If you delete it from your phone, icloud says, oh, I'm gonna delete it everywhere else too.
19:50:48 So that's kind of, you know, can be distressing if you don't know what it is.
19:50:52 Yeah, great.
19:50:56 Okay.
19:51:01 Any other questions?
19:51:08 I went to ask again for those. Who haven't. Signed in to.
19:51:19 Sign in to the form.
19:51:23 And I'd also, it, I stuck it in the chat again. The other thing is what would we like want to do?
19:51:32 Next week.
19:51:38 That's not.
19:51:36 And next next week, next month. In terms of topic. Next week I probably want to do something else.
19:51:45 Yeah.
19:51:45 And while you're, while you're thinking about that, I want to tell you about one of my big projects.
19:51:50 I've told you about archiving and backups and so on and so forth. In my case, I have 600 CD ROMs that I used for backup starting years and years and years ago.
19:52:04 One of my next big projects is to take an external drive. And.
19:52:11 Let's see.
19:52:11 You Seems to
19:52:21 This is an external. Cd-rom and Blu-ray dry that I plug into the Mac.
19:52:28 I'm going to stick this on my machine and copy the contents of all those CD ROMs.
19:52:41 Okay. Yeah.
19:52:35 And store it on either flash drives or something and then throw my CD ROMs away. And this is going to take a long time because on average it takes 15 to 20 min to empty a CD room.
19:52:50 And there's 640 MB in size and you saw how I could basically move 10 MB.
19:53:00 Instantaneously to a flash drive. So it's going to take a long, long time to empty all those CD ROMs.
19:53:08 But the recently where I need to do that. CD-ROMs have a life expectancy of between 5 and 10 years.
19:53:15 And I have some CD ROMs that are 15 to 20 years old. So I need to just.
19:53:22 Break down and decide I'm gonna spend the time to just stick them in there, copy everything off.
19:53:30 Okay.
19:53:31 Good project.
19:53:28 Take him out, throw it in the trash can. Yes. But I'm mentioning this because archiving.
19:53:34 Hmm.
19:53:37 Technology changes. All the CD-ROMs that I have. Can fit on 2 of these.
19:53:46 Nice.
19:53:46 And right now they fill up an entire closet.
19:53:46 You see. I don't feel good to throw him away.
19:53:51 The process of throwing them away though is not fun.
19:53:56 Oh no.
19:53:59 I, explained to my 6 year old, grandchild when she was here in, November?
19:54:07 October? October. I explained to her the process of what I was going to do and asked if I could get her to do it.
19:54:16 Okay.
19:54:14 And she thought about it for about 5 s to make sure she really understood what I was talking about and she realized that her grandfather was trying to scam her and she said no and walk away.
19:54:25 Yeah.
19:54:26 Yeah.
19:54:26 No.
19:54:27 Which is a reasonable, it's a reasonable response.
19:54:31 Yeah. No, it's thank you for all this info. And we wanted to know, have you had recently discussions about cybersecurity and malware and all that because we would like to know more with our with our max as to what kind of protection is necessary, etc.
19:54:53 Would that would topic.
19:54:55 Yeah, that was it. We actually had an in person presentation on that last. September? I did, we did a presentation.
19:55:02 Okay.
19:55:06 Was held at Trinity United Methodist Church. Cybersecurity for seniors is basically what I talked about.
19:55:11 Wow, no.
19:55:12 We talked about cybersecurity and privacy because they're both intimately tied. To one another.
19:55:19 But that's something that probably should be done at least once a year anyway. Because the the threats change a bit.
19:55:29 I don't know how many of you have seen the advertisements for Apple Vision Pro. Which is the virtual reality headsets you have.
19:55:36 On day one, several privacy people said that the way that the software worked, we presented a privacy risk.
19:55:44 Because the way you can share information. If you think about it. I'm recording this meeting and I'm gonna put it up on the website so the people who didn't come today can see what it is we talked about.
19:55:57 But in the process of doing this, I'm also recording bits and pieces of your homes and your face and so on and so forth.
19:56:05 We had a woman, member a couple of years ago. Who always turned a camera off and I met her in person at a time the in person meeting she said the reason why she did this is her ex-husband was trying to track her down.
19:56:22 So she was trying to be as mysterious as possible and she didn't want to photograph on here and then in the and the name that she gave was a prior name.
19:56:32 So it was hired for the trap down. All of us have reasons to keep some things secret and private.
19:56:39 And those things have have value to marketers. For example, if you have a thyroid problem. That's not necessarily something you want to go and tell everybody about, but if somebody knows that and they give that information to a drug company, you'll get start, you need getting spanned by drug companies.
19:57:00 And you can accidentally disclose this just by looking for drug. drugs on Google. What does this thing do?
19:57:11 And you asked that on Google. Google sells that information to drug companies and then even though they don't know your name or where you live, you can get spammed with ads for drugs for thyroid problems.
19:57:24 Hmm.
19:57:24 So. Security and privacy are intimately linked. And a lot of people think they have a virus or they think they've been hacked when they haven't.
19:57:35 But a lot of people give away private information all the time. Without being aware of it. So security in Iraq is actually pretty good.
19:57:46 Your ability to keep your your interest private though, you, I would say that most people are not very good at that.
19:57:54 So I remove cookies from when I after I go online, I go into Safari and go into settings and I.
19:58:01 Manage the companies. It's amazing all these websites that I didn't go to there.
19:58:08 Present in this list. You know, where they've left cookies and I take them away.
19:58:15 Okay.
19:58:14 Believe it or not, I used to do that. I don't do that anymore. I do that if like, for example, I did that with Google recently with with Google Chrome recently.
19:58:24 Because at that particular point it had about a 30 GB cache of data and I wanted to just get rid of it.
19:58:35 And I wanted to just get rid of it because it was slowing Google down. Most of the stuff that Google and and Safari and other things keep on you is done to make the browser run faster If you go to the, straight Macintosh user group.
19:58:49 Page for example, and you come in at the home page, the banner at the top doesn't really change that much that still has the same choices.
19:58:56 When you go from screen to screen to screen to screen, you don't wanna have it send all that stuff that's already sent you and that's what the cash does.
19:59:05 The cash keeps that stuff so it doesn't have to remember you from every page. If you log in to the a straight Mac site.
19:59:14 And you log in so you can ask a question on the forums. You want it to keep information about you because you log in, you ask your question, you press return, you don't want it to log you out.
19:59:27 Okay.
19:59:26 You want to go and look at the other things. So it has to keep a certain amount of information.
19:59:34 Okay.
19:59:32 Cookies are really not the issue. The issue is things that you are deliberately sharing with people that you don't realize have an implications.
19:59:43 I know government employees who got fired for email messages. They sent a private email message from one government person to another government person.
19:59:53 But that second government person was alarmed at what they said showed it to a supervisor and they got fired.
19:59:59 And that's because the email message was suggesting that somebody do something illegal. In my case, they wanted to kill the supervisor.
20:00:06 Another case, somebody wanted to know if they wanted some drugs, but in both cases it was bad for their career.
20:00:12 Yeah.
20:00:12 Okay.
20:00:12 So your your privacy is not entirely under your control. Other people have access to private information. As an example, I'll give you an example with my daughter.
20:00:24 My daughter has posted. Dozens, well probably hundreds of photographs of her daughter of my granddaughter on Facebook.
20:00:32 None of them show my daughters my granddaughter's face their photographs taken from behind their photographs taken in in the dark.
20:00:42 This, she's coming through the tunnel once and you just see her profile. Why does she do that?
20:00:46 My daughter who grew up in the internet age, we, we gave our daughter a computer at age 6.
20:00:54 Okay.
20:00:52 Now going to go into the story as to why, but she wanted one because she saw a movie and thought it was cool so she wanted a computer.
20:00:58 My daughter thinks that her daughter is too young to know what privacy and security mean. So she's going to preserve her privacy insecurity until she's old enough to make those choices herself.
20:01:13 So in spite of all these hundreds of photographs that she has on on Twitter and on and on Facebook and other things, none of them show my granddaughter's face.
20:01:24 Okay, good. That's good.
20:01:25 And I'm just giving you as an example of the most of the security threats you should be worried about.
20:01:32 Are things that you share that you probably shouldn't. And yes, that is a topic, sometimes probably a good idea because it's the sort of thing that needs to be repeated all the time.
20:01:44 Any other ideas?
20:01:49 Yes.
20:01:44 One more question, one more question about the for sale and give away the Mac things. How do we get to it?
20:01:52 I mean, because when I clicked on it from your email. It said I wasn't, I couldn't.
20:01:58 Anyway, I wasn't, didn't said something I couldn't get to it. So.
20:02:00 Okay. Yeah, well, if you if you go to the discussion board, you need to set up an account and when you click on it, it'll say that you don't have an account.
20:02:12 Do If you if you register it comes to me and I have to validate it. And I validated if you're a paid member of the user group, I will validate it and let you in.
20:02:21 And the reason why the pain thing is what I'm sending to the treasure is the $60 bill for that piece of software.
20:02:29 So we. It would be nice if we had people who are paying for the software actually a cup of cats.
20:02:31 Okay. Okay. So even though I'm a member, then I have to do something else to see the.
20:02:38 If you've paid, then is she indicates that in the list and if you paid then I'll let you in.
20:02:44 Well, I think I'm a member in good standing, I think. But she'd send me a bill if it was time to renew.
20:02:51 No.
20:02:51 Right?
20:02:56 Oh.
20:02:51 Oh no, she doesn't send bills. We talked about that a couple years ago and she she's willing to be, she's listening to us right now, but she said she was willing to be treasury, but she wasn't really comfortable and nagging about people.
20:03:04 So.
20:03:02 Oh, well, so I have to go find my check and see when I wrote it, I guess.
20:03:12 Okay.
20:03:08 Well, actually I can probably look that up. Because she stores this information on the website so I'm not on the website on our.
20:03:18 Okay, and something I can't see.
20:03:21 Yes. What is your last name?
20:03:24 Baker.
20:03:26 Baker. Baker. You're green, so she says that's good. So yes, I.
20:03:35 So then I, so to get to it, I just.
20:03:39 There's a there's a there's a place on the side in the right hand column that says discussion board and you click on that and it says it asks you for your name and password and if you don't have that you give you instructions on how to set it up.
20:03:51 Okay.
20:03:52 I don't remember what it says because I run it so I don't see that.
20:03:56 I do have a question.
20:03:56 Yeah.
20:03:55 Okay, alright, I'll try to figure it. I do affect if they wanna figure it out.
20:04:01 Okay, but I will.
20:04:03 I think.
20:04:06 I will. I can do that.
20:04:01 Okay. Yeah, if you get stuck, send me a message. And I'll Yeah.
20:04:10 Any other questions or ideas for next month?
20:04:14 There are other months.
20:04:15 Lawrence, I just had a quick note when we're new here, but we went to the website and I don't know if this is on purpose and I don't know if this is on purpose but there's like all these I don't know if this is on purpose but there's like all these I don't know if it's flickering kind of sir going real quickly on the looks like almost like confetti it's very distracting it was that
20:04:34 on purpose or is something wrong with that
20:04:37 Oh. I see. It's snow. Okay.
20:04:35 That's on that's on purpose. It's winter time. I added snow. It's now.
20:04:43 It looked a little metallic, so it was alarming. Well, I thought he had a virus or something.
20:04:47 It's like, oh no.
20:04:47 Hmm.
20:04:44 Now they're No, no, they're little white asterisk that are floating down.
20:04:52 Oh.
20:04:50 Okay, no alarm bells.
20:04:54 Yeah, sorry about that. I wasn't trying to alarm people. I just thought it was, you know, it's it's wintertime.
20:05:02 I'll slow down the snowflakes.
20:04:58 Great. Yeah.
20:05:04 One quick question. Do you use it? Do you have a boot disc? Awesome.
20:05:12 Hmm.
20:05:11 And if so, what do you use? For that.
20:05:13 The book this from my machine right now is the, SSD drive that the machine came with.
20:05:20 And I store my data, all of my data is stored separately on 2 rates. I'll show you my desktop, the easiest way to show you this.
20:05:32 Oh, this is a terrible background for this sort of thing. I'm gonna change it to something that's not quite as distracting.
20:05:43 Let's change it to that. At the top here is the boot drive. This is a SSD drive that's built in SSD means, the state disk.
20:05:56 Built into the computers. The rest of these are raids. A raid is a box that's full of hard drives.
20:06:03 And I have a lot of video and a lot of a lot of photographs which is why I have all these this but so this is a raid.
20:06:19 That's got bunch of stuff on it and Let's see. This rate is. 16 tb and it's, it's mostly empty because I was in the process of doing something with it.
20:06:35 But my boot drive, the only thing it has is the operating system. And my, programs and it's I've got a hundred 82 gigs free.
20:06:46 However, as I mentioned, because they do video and photographs as I'm doing stuff that actually a lot of that gets chewed up by the by the video.
20:06:57 So my, My. Boot drive is used just for building the computer and all my data is stored someplace else.
20:07:07 And then in addition to it being stored someplace else, it also gets backed up to the. To the cloud and then it gets back to by time machine.
20:07:13 I'm very paranoid.
20:07:16 Well, I don't blame you.
20:07:16 So I think so my question about the archiving, cause I have a lot of photographs. So you use a raid and are they, I've read like a solid state drive and are they I've read like a solid state drive and I just don't quite understand but for reliability what would you suggest for a lot of photographs that you want to keep?
20:07:36 Well, in my case, I've got hundreds of thousands of photographs and I have That probably.
20:07:45 Oh, I don't know. Terabytes of video. So for my raids, they have regular rotating discs inside, but they're each like that this this one that I showed you that said is 16 TB.
20:08:00 That is 2 terror, 16 TB drives that are mirrored. So the drives themselves are automatically backing themselves up when I write to those through that raid it writes to 2 drives simultaneously.
20:08:15 So if one drive fails, the other one still has the data. When I said it paranoid, I'm really paranoid.
20:08:17 Hmm. Yeah.
20:08:20 And there are 4 drives in each one of these raids so that there are 8 drives total. But they only show up as 4 drives on the desktop because they're mirrored.
20:08:31 And I use, I use a conventional hard drives because they're cheaper. A 16 TB raid.
20:08:39 Is expensive but 16 TB of solid state disk drive would be just It'd be 10 times more.
20:08:50 What? Like. Yeah.
20:08:47 So. I use regular hard drives. Brand? The ones that I use are mostly Toshiba and, something called HGS.
20:09:00 Which was recently bought by Western Digital. But HGST. Is the company that IBM invented the hard drive.
20:09:11 And when IBM got out of the computer business, they sold it to this company called HGST and I use their drives.
20:09:20 Basically Toshibas and HDST. The the place I was talking about earlier back blaze They buy thousands of drives every year and they have a drive reliability report.
20:09:35 If you go to their website and look for drive reliability report, there's a report of all the drives that they've used during the year and how reliable they are.
20:09:47 Okay.
20:09:43 And I use that as kind of my guide for for buying drives. If If I was buying a raid today and I had the money, I would go with solid state drives because they use less power, they're faster, but the problem is they're much, much, much more expensive when you start talking about.
20:10:01 Terabytes of data.
20:10:03 Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you.
20:10:08 Anything else?
20:10:12 If you have suggestions for, next month aside from, computer security, I do have this list of 10 other topics as somebody.
20:10:22 Suggested, but if you have something that you think is important, please write to me and tell me what it is.
20:10:29 Okay.
20:10:28 Okay, thank you. Thank you.
20:10:32 And good night, everyone.

Keep your Apple software current

Apple has a page that lists all current Apple operating systems. At the moment, it shows:

  • iOS 17.3.1 for iPhone
  • iPadOS 17.3.1 for iPad
  • macOS 14.3.1 for Macintosh
  • tvOS 17.3 for Apple TV
  • watchOS 10.3.1 for Apple Watch
  • visionOS 1.0.2 for Apple Vision Pro

I strongly recommend that you bookmark this page:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

as Apple updates it when new versions are released.

You should also note that, further down the page, it documents when Apple security updates were released, and what machines they covered.

If you want to be informed, via email, of security updates, go to this page,

https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/security-announce

fill in the blanks, and Apple will send you an email every time a security update is released.

This page,

https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo

shows several other mailing lists, covering everything from accessibility features, how to write programs in AppleScript, how to configure Macs and Apple devices for use in the federal government, and other even more obscure topics.

But what if I want to know more?

If you want to get very geeky, you can apply for a free Developer account,

https://developer.apple.com

which gives you access to Apple programming tools, where you can build applications, write scripts, and do odd things, some even useful.

If you are curious about programming, but aren’t sure if it is for you, know that most Apple software is written in a programming language called Swift. It has nothing to do with a famous singer. You can play with Swift using Swift Playgrounds, available for iPad and for Mac. You can read about that here:

https://developer.apple.com/swift-playgrounds

Swift Playgrounds can be downloaded, for free, from the Mac app store and the iOS app store.

November 21, 2023: Web Browsers, fast computers

In November, we talked about web browsers, the World Wide Web, and new, fast computers from Apple.

The first non-Unix web browser was MacWWW (also called Samba), released in December 1992. Mosaic was the first widely used web browser, appearing on Unix X-Window in February 1993 and on the Macintosh in May 1993. Macs soon had more choices: Lynx (a text-only web browser mostly used in science applications, 1993), Netscape Navigator (1994), Opera (the first commercially produced web browser, 1994), Mozilla and MacWeb (1994), OmniWeb (1995), Cyberdog (1996)… One week, a dozen new browsers were announced in a week.

Today, things are both simpler and more complex. Everything has a web interface — computers, phones, tablets, printers, cars, thermostats, refrigerators, watches, doorbells… And on November 21, we will look at some of them. Not all of these, but some:

Waterfox, Puffin, Maxthon, Firefox, Chrome, Safari
Waterfox, Puffin, Maxthon, Firefox, Chrome, Safari
iCab, DuckDuckGo, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, Tor, Arc
iCab, DuckDuckGo, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, Tor, Arc

We also talked about Apple’s new M3-powered laptops and iMacs, and the new macOS Sonoma operating system, as well as new iPhone and iPad operating systems.

Apple Silicon M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max processors
M3 Apple Silicon processors come in fast, very fast, and very very fast. All of them use significantly less power than similar processors.

We also discussed the joys of visiting the Apple Store at University Village in Seattle, where you can find all available Apple products on display, ready for you to play with them, as well as talk to Apple technicians at the Genius Bar, and get free tutorials on all things Apple. Plus, there is a live tree growing through the ceiling.

Apple Store, University Village, Seattle
Apple Store University Village, Seattle. Photo by Lawrence I. Charters

Video recording of the November 21, 2023 meeting

Video of November 21, 2023 meeting on the web and Macintosh web browsers

Transcript of the November 2023 meeting

Pro tip: use your browser to search for particular words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.

18:30:40 As usual, we're going to talk about web browsers today, but we're going to start off with questions and answers.
18:30:52 Anyone have any questions?
18:30:53 I wondered if anybody there is used. Vimine or Zimine or It's some sort of a program that claims to use AI to clean up.
18:31:03 That is sharpen the focus of. All black and white photos or any other photos.
18:31:12 Rimini maybe with an R.
18:31:12 I have. I haven't used that. I've tried others and I'm not.
18:31:22 I probably have tried a hundred different others. And I'm not terribly impressed with them, but the way in which I evaluate something that says it's going to sharpened it, I take the photograph at screen resolution.
18:31:36 I apply whatever touches it says it's going to do. And then I blow it up till it's 72 dots per inch, which.
18:31:44 Most of most photographs are 600 to 800 dots per inch you're blown up at 72 dot springs you get a real good view of what the what's actually there.
18:31:53 And I noticed an awful lot of artifacting. It looks like snow around the edges of where It does the enhancements.
18:32:01 And I have yet to find one that does a really good job of that. If you spend a lot of time painstakingly retouching it.
18:32:09 You can do a better job, but when I say ping, this one photograph of my mother that was taken.
18:32:16 The 19 thirties I probably spent 4 or 5 h on that one photo. So it's not something I really want to do unless I have a good reason.
18:32:27 The. The, a lot of them say that they do all kinds of wonderful things, but there are usually side effects.
18:32:36 For example, the program I use the most for photographs is, light room. Adobe Lightroom, Classic.
18:32:44 And it's got this thing called the spot remover where you click on a spot where say you had dirt on the lens or something like that.
18:32:52 And it goes out onto the, onto the photograph and tries to find something that has the same color intensity and then overlays that over your spot.
18:33:02 And to the naked eye, it looks quite good. But if you then turn on. If you change the, histogram of the photograph.
18:33:15 You can easily see where you did that. Kind of touch. Now that's not really an issue for me because nobody's going to look at my photographs with a histogram.
18:33:25 They need the original photo and all that. But when you're trying to do, when you're trying to recover an old print, you run into that kind of thing all the time.
18:33:33 For example, looking at you on the monitor right now. There's a sharp line around your skull because the ceilings, blurred out.
18:33:44 It's focused on you and not on what's behind you. Well if it was trying to improve that if you looked at it real closely you see a whole line of snow right around the edges of where your head is.
18:33:56 And I've yet to find one that really does a good job. Of doing that. There's a professor at University of California San Diego.
18:34:06 Who who's been doing retouching of old. NASA photographs back in the, 1960, s where this film is falling apart.
18:34:15 And he's come up with a really good technique that takes only 5 or 6 h. Per photo.
18:34:23 And using the supercomputer and That's nice to know and we've talked a lot about what he's doing.
18:34:31 I know him because he was in a computer science class I taught many many many years ago. But I haven't found one yet that doesn't have that artifacting.
18:34:43 And it might be fine for your purposes. Photoshop does sharpening, a lot of things do sharpening and that's basically what it's trying to do when it's doing that.
18:34:52 It's called sharpening where you take something that's fuzzy and make it sharper.
18:34:56 But it usually enters, it usually adds quite a bit of artifacting. So I just, I haven't seen anything that I really like yet.
18:35:04 There are some online programs where you upload the photograph and you do that. And I don't like that for 2 reasons.
18:35:13 First of all, they now have a copy of a photograph. And the second is again the, The.
18:35:22 The quality just isn't what I would like it to be. To give you a really clear concrete metric.
18:35:30 This one photograph that I uploaded was 9 and a half megabytes. 19 and a half megabytes.
18:35:38 And when I downloaded this sharpened image, it was 3 MB. So, no.
18:35:42 Yeah. Yeah.
18:35:46 Lots of smoke and mirrors was taking place, but it wasn't really improving the. Photograph.
18:35:53 Thanks.
18:35:54 Lauren, I have a question.
18:35:54 I'm not saying don't look for them. It's just that I haven't found one.
18:35:58 Yes.
18:36:00 Yesterday my wife was opening something in her iPad and something popped up that said it was from system measures dot life.
18:36:09 And then 3 tabs open. One said security error. One said scanning your device in one said bonus.
18:36:18 You ever heard of such a thing?
18:36:20 No, but it's a scam.
18:36:21 I figured it was. Should she just ignore it or?
18:36:27 It, what was she doing at the time?
18:36:31 I was opening a sports. She was opening some ESPN sports thing. And these just popped up as tabs and I immediately.
18:36:44 I couldn't hear all of that, but.
18:36:41 Oh, got out of them. Hansel. She they popped up when she was opening something for ESPN and when they popped up she immediately kind of exited out of them.
18:36:54 Okay, and this was on a on a web browser. IPad.
18:36:56 I pay. It was on in Chrome.
18:37:05 Okay.
18:37:01 Okay, the first thing you should do is just quit the browser. When you quit, when you get a browser on a Mac, when you quit a browser, it pretty much puts everything.
18:37:11 On an iPad's a little bit sneaky because we will quit the browser, but the browser is actually open.
18:37:17 You have there's a trick to actually close something on a on an iPad, but basically the first thing you do is just quit it.
18:37:23 And then the second thing you do is that since it's an iPad, I would immediately open up Chrome and go someplace that you know is safe like.
18:37:31 CNN or the straight Mac user group website or something that you know is safe because that causes it to rewrite its cache.
18:37:41 Okay.
18:37:41 So basically it overwrites junk that it has in it. The most common way to hijack a Mac today There are not I am not aware of any successful exploits with.
18:37:55 With web browsers per se, but you can hijack a Mac, you can hijack older.
18:38:03 M, older Macs, older iPads, older phones with PDFs. That's one reason why it's really not a good idea to be running around with mac OS 10.5 and things like that because they're just They have an ant security updates in years.
18:38:18 And a PDF is actually a it's it's a programming language it's not just a document it's a programming language that you can embed all kinds of instructions in it.
18:38:30 So you can get a PDF form from the IRS that tells you to enable your social security number and if you enter the wrong number of digits, it'll actually come back and say, no, that's not right.
18:38:41 So there's actually programming built into a PDF. And that's one reason why they can be used for taking things over.
18:38:48 With a PDF if you accidentally launch PDF that you don't know. You don't quite know how you manage to get that PDF.
18:38:56 To lunch immediately quit out of it. Because that is a that is a viable vector with a with a web browser on an imac or an iPhone.
18:39:06 Just quit it, but don't worry too much about it because. I'm not aware of any, unless you have a really old iPhone or iPad, not aware of any.
18:39:15 Anything that can actually threaten it through the web browser. If you there is, Apple security list, which I mentioned in past meetings.
18:39:24 That you can subscribe to that. Would that emails you when Apple has security patches out and you'll see if you read through the messages which are I admit a very quick date.
18:39:35 The most commonly thing that's patched is something called Webkit. And I'm going to talk about Webkit tonight because we're talking about browsers.
18:39:44 Webkit is the package of code that Apple uses to build web browsers. Webkit, they've actually published it, so it's now an open source project and you can make your own webcit browser.
18:40:00 But it's also used for drawing things on the screen, a lot of things on the, on the screen.
18:40:07 That are drawn on the screen are actually done with CSS, which is called cascading style sheets, or it's done with HTML.
18:40:15 Graphics. So a lot of stuff that you see on your Mac is actually drawn using HTML.
18:40:22 And because of that, it frequently gets updated because people try and go in through the cracks and see if they can use it compromise machine.
18:40:31 But on older iPads, older Macs, older iPhones, that's not. That's not updated.
18:40:38 And right now, if you have anything that's older than an iPhone 10 or iPhone X as a lot of people think of It's insecure.
18:40:46 It's just insecure and you should have update it. So. But, if it's, if it's web browser, I would just credit because it that's probably all you need to do.
18:41:00 Thank you.
18:40:59 I have a question is probably really quick for you. So I'm doing work on my, I have the Mac Mini and I've 27 inch screen and so I'll have several things open like safari.
18:41:16 Something on safari and then I'll have maybe quicken on and Excel. And then something happens and I don't know what it is that I do but Everything goes wipes off the screen except one of them.
18:41:29 And so then, you know, like say there's only Excel left over and I wanted to see them all at the same time.
18:41:37 Well, then if I go and click on you know, the word or X or Safari, then everything else goes and it goes back and forth.
18:41:46 And I don't know how to.
18:41:45 Are you are you using Sonoma?
18:41:48 Then, no, no. Ventura.
18:41:56 Ventura. I think they might, that might have been into Ventura too. I can't remember what they call it.
18:42:05 Let me go check.
18:42:08 Hmm.
18:42:08 It happens and it and it's so frustrating because it's usually when I'm doing some work balancing some sort of thing.
18:42:15 And then, you know.
18:42:17 Okay, there's there's a thing in. It might have been in Ventura, it's definitely in Sonoma called Stage Manager.
18:42:26 That allows you to have one thing in front and then when you switch to something else, it makes everything else go away.
18:42:34 And so you have another thing in front. And it was designed to help people with their concentration. And to turn that off.
18:42:41 You go into your system preferences. Desktop and dock and uncheck. Stage manager or in my case I say only do certain things in Stage Manager because it's it's designed to help people a lot of people they get lost.
18:42:58 In having a bunch of applications open and it was Apple's attempt to help them. Concentrate, but I like.
18:43:03 Okay, stage managers off. I checked that. And it is off and it has been off. And so.
18:43:11 I don't think that's it.
18:43:13 Well, that was my best guess.
18:43:17 Lawrence, there's been something in the macos for several iterations. That does exactly what she's describing.
18:43:28 I like a clutter desktop.
18:43:25 It's a way to unclutter your desktop. So you can focus. Well, I'm just saying it's there on purpose.
18:43:31 Yeah.
18:43:34 Oh, that.
18:43:32 And I can't remember what it's called, but it's you know, you invoke it and it that does exactly what she's describing.
18:43:39 And if you.
18:43:39 Yeah, if you accidentally push. And the application all the way up to the top of the screen.
18:43:46 The Mac will kind of rearrange your desktop.
18:43:51 That's probably what it is, cause it's usually when I'm moving. Yeah
18:43:55 Yeah, but if you if you just take the if you take the top bar of it and just run all the way to the top of the screen quite often.
18:44:05 It'll create little miniatures of windows and you only see one thing at a time and you're thinking what the heck am I doing but that's actually a feature not a bug.
18:44:12 It
18:44:12 Okay, so it's the top of screen that activates that. I bet you that's what it is.
18:44:17 Thank you.
18:44:16 Yeah. I. Somebody had a question last time and I don't remember who it was and I don't even know if they're on right now.
18:44:27 But their question was, and I didn't notice because it was in the chat and they didn't.
18:44:30 Say it out loud, but. The question was that. They were getting male and they were answering their mail.
18:44:37 And it was being answered from their icloud account and they wanted it to be answered from there. Gmail account and they wanted to know how to stop that.
18:44:47 And the answer is Apple Mail. Has where it says to from. And then down below that and it'll say there's things called account.
18:44:55 If you click on that, if you have multiple accounts, if you click on that, you can pick a different account that the reply will be sent from.
18:45:03 And if you always wanted to be sent from a different account, it normally defaults to the icloud account, but if you go into males preferences, you can select a different account.
18:45:13 To be your default account for replies. And again, I don't remember who asked that, but it was something I didn't even notice until I was looking at the chat transcript that somebody had asked that last time and I didn't answer that.
18:45:27 I frequently will do that because I'm an officer in a homeowners association and people write to my person account for homework issues.
18:45:36 I don't want to reply for my personal account and I want to apply for the Call Winters account.
18:45:39 I'm a church officer and people will. Send me things to my personal account. I really want it to be in the church account.
18:45:46 So I do, I use that fairly often. Somebody will send it to my personal account and I'll either.
18:45:51 Forward it to my other account or I'll just. Pick that other account to send a reply. It happens all the time.
18:46:02 And the reason why I have, I probably have 20 email accounts. The reason for having multiple email accounts is just to kind of tame the madness.
18:46:09 That a whole bunch of people went to contact you for a whole bunch of different things. And you want to have your personal email accounts to use for your family and that's about it and you want to have another one that you use for a business account or for a nonprofit that you work or something like that.
18:46:29 Like as an example, if you were to send me a Mac question to my personal account, I wouldn't reply to it.
18:46:34 Simply because no I just don't do things like that and in fact I want to talk about questions that are sent to the vice president account.
18:46:44 But, again, you can, pick which account it, that you send a reply from and down below it says, what is it?
18:46:54 From 2 subject and then down below that there's a button. It doesn't look like a button.
18:47:00 You click on that, but all of your accounts that you have will pop up and you can say which account will send back the response.
18:47:08 For that. Query and it's just a way to make life easier on on everyone.
18:47:16 About questions. People have been sending email messages to the Strait Mac account. And I'm going to stop answering questions sent to the Strait Mac account.
18:47:30 Unless it's about, you know, when's the next meeting and things like that. And the reason is that I'm getting overwhelmed.
18:47:36 And I, when I, when I talked to you as a group, somebody can ask a question and I'm presenting an answer to multiple people at once.
18:47:43 So that's a good use of my time. If you use the bulletin board, there's a discussion session on the bulletin board.
18:47:51 If you write a question there, I can send and reply and multiple people will see it. But if you send it to my email account, I'm I'm basically answering one person.
18:48:01 One on one. And it's taking up too much of my time. So I'm going to stop doing that.
18:48:06 If you don't have an account on the bulletin board, there are only 2 requirements. One is that you be a paid smug member.
18:48:14 And send and, your your Membership fee and the second one is you have to apply for an account if you don't have already.
18:48:26 You have to go in there. There's a process that says do this and you Do that and do that and I get a message and saying should this person have an account and I say yes and then you have an account.
18:48:37 There's a whole section for our discussion board on the. On the website and it's set up topically for Macs and iOS and privacy and general questions.
18:48:49 It's a, it's a better use of my time to write out of Esperance there than it is to send responses to individuals.
18:48:58 And I'm sorry I have to do that, but I'm not going to go into details, but Kathleen's been quite ill.
18:49:05 And I just am short of time. So, that's, that's how I'd like to proceed.
18:49:12 And if that's unacceptable, you can overthrow me and elect a new leader and Yeah.
18:49:19 Any other questions?
18:49:22 Lawrence? I have one. Okay.
18:49:25 Okay, I'll hit you at a second, Marcy. Yes, go ahead.
18:49:34 I have a problem with
18:49:38 Like when I'm, go to email and choose a new email. And then I'll start to enter a person's name and how to fill in their address, right?
18:49:53 And This today I did did that to a friend that's really in a hurry and slam band my Senate tour.
18:50:02 And it comes back undeliverable. Because every email that they've ever had is in that little drop-down window when you select a new email and,
18:50:19 In my address book, you know, I only have the one address. And is there a way to get rid of those?
18:50:28 Because if it's someone I don't know and 3 or 4 of these come up what I because when you choose it something will be highlighted well it was really fast and I didn't notice it was the wrong one.
18:50:41 But I can't memorize my whole address book of which address isn't. Their current one and proper one.
18:50:48 Is there a way to eliminate those that there any good anymore.
18:50:56 Is this with Apple Mail?
18:50:59 Yes, yes. Okay.
18:51:07 Okay.
18:51:01 Okay, let me. Let me share my screen and see. If I'm, if we're talking about the same thing.
18:51:11 And I don't need you to be here. You can go away. I don't need you to be here.
18:51:21 That's go to mail.
18:51:26 Okay.
18:51:25 Mail has this thing over here called Previous recipients. And if you go here like I used to work for NOAA.
18:51:35 Okay.
18:51:34 So I can type in noah.gov and it'll list.
18:51:39 Or just Noah and then it'll list who's These are people who have a NOAA email address or something.
18:51:48 And if I don't want to talk to that person anymore, I can click on them like Matt Kendall.
18:51:55 Huh.
18:51:52 Partly you don't need him. Remove him from list. So that's how you get rid of those old cached addresses.
18:52:00 Okay, which
18:51:59 You're just going to mail to Windows. Previous recipients.
18:52:05 Okay, so. Just, like I click this little die, right? Oh, you can't see my corner, I guess.
18:52:15 You know, the letter with the check mark in it. When you choose a new. Email when you're in in email.
18:52:23 Letter with a check mark in it.
18:52:27 This little guy, new message, the new message when you click this.
18:52:31 Oh, this, yeah, okay, that's actually a PIN. That's not a check marks.
18:52:32 And yeah. Okay, all right, when when you bring that up and then I can just, you know, I'm sorry because we said emails all the time and I put it our first name and then it comes up with these suggestions.
18:52:47 And I just sent it very quickly and I didn't notice because the 2, she has 2 or 3, 3 from the past and they're very similar.
18:52:56 Yeah, the, and that's, how you go. You're good.
18:52:56 And. Any the only times I have ever had. Something unsenable has been because of that reason.
18:53:06 Yeah.
18:53:06 And I just didn't know how to get rid of all those that were. You know not in use anymore.
18:53:14 So Windows. Previous recipients and what I would I go in there and and like check the new message.
18:53:23 And when it drops down, delete them from there.
18:53:30 Oh.
18:53:27 No, this has nothing to do with the new message. This has to do with with these are stored messages.
18:53:36 Oh. Right.
18:53:34 I don't even know how many there are, but these are stored addresses from people and you just search for the person's name like.
18:53:42 Aaron, Aaron's a guy who works for Apple. I don't want to talk to him anymore.
18:53:47 So I click on that and I say remove from list. But if you have it's I don't want to get rid of Aaron so I'm not going to do that but you have something like I used to live in an area that had Comcast.
18:54:01 And it doesn't show Comcast. I guess it's, I guess it's not doing that.
18:54:10 Okay.
18:54:06 It's doing the person's name. Hmm. Well, anyway. You just, you type in person's name and they should be in alphabetical order.
18:54:15 And you can search them all bytes also by the email address. Maybe that's what I need.
18:54:20 Yes, that's what you do. It depends upon which column you're hitting. But, you, when you delete this and then when you go in to type someone's name, it won't use one of those previous recipients that you've deleted.
18:54:34 But otherwise it just keeps them because a lot of people don't bother. I know a lot of people who don't have an address book at all.
18:54:43 Yeah.
18:54:42 What they do is they're just constantly. Going to old messages and replying to them, which is a terrible way to do things, but.
18:54:49 Yes.
18:54:51 But getting rid of the old, addresses, that's how you do it. You're going to previous recipients.
18:54:55 Google has a way to do that as well in Gmail. Little bit, little bit. Puzzling to figure out how to do it.
18:55:04 But My Homeowners Association, for example, we switched offices with people. So I'm in a position.
18:55:13 I used to be the vice president, I'm the secretary. And since you're sending it to Secretary at, sanction drugs.
18:55:19 It was putting the old person's name there. So I had to get rid of the preview.
18:55:23 I had to get rid of my own secretary account in previous recipients. Current address there, otherwise we kept on saying it was coming from this other guy and he's not, he's not me.
18:55:34 So, but that's way to do it. You go in and get rid of previous recipients.
18:55:39 It's a common question. It's just that a lot of people A lot of people can articulate it as well as you did.
18:55:46 So that's why when you when you started down that path I said, oh yes, I've heard this before.
18:55:51 Okay.
18:55:51 Washington Apple Pie, which is a huge user group, on, on the West on the East Coast that I still am an officer of.
18:55:58 And at Sandy, your user group, at their peak, yeah, each of them had over 5,000 members.
18:56:04 And I would do the question to answer. And I, I, I created a rule. That people were not allowed to ask email questions until the last 3 min.
18:56:15 Because otherwise if somebody started with an email question, every single question. That for that whole Q&A was about email.
18:56:22 So. Email puzzles, puzzles a lot of people.
18:56:25 Thank you. For asking that question though, that's a very good reminder because I keep forgetting how to do that.
18:56:33 I don't know what time it is.
18:56:36 It is. Okay, we got 4 more minutes for questions. Anybody have a question? Oh, Marcia, you had a question.
18:56:42 Your microphone's off.
18:56:46 Last, last month I, told you I was having trouble with Gmail.
18:56:52 And you said that they had, they were having some problems. Well, I'm still having problems with Gmail and it's Interesting that I, I send something and it looks like it goes off.
18:57:06 And then it reappears. And, then when I try to log out. I wind up with the stack.
18:57:22 Okay.
18:57:15 Of emails that have not gone anywhere. And so I'm trying to deal with them. And if they won't go Gmail, I'll try with one of the other options and it looks like they go.
18:57:28 But they don't. They keep reappearing the same emails keep reappearing. And I might say that I don't have this problem on my phone.
18:57:38 I just have it on my desktop.
18:57:41 Okay, on your desktop, how are you sending the Gmail messages?
18:57:46 I just push send, you know, I
18:57:48 No, I'm in. Are you using Apple Mail or are you using a browser or what?
18:57:53 Oh, Safari.
18:57:55 Okay, what you need to do is go into the sent mail folder. In Gmail.
18:58:04 Right. Right.
18:58:04 It'll it's one of those folders on the left-hand margin. And see if it's in the sent mail.
18:58:12 If it's sent mail, then it really was sent. And it's not there, then go into the draft.
18:58:18 Folder and see if it's in draft. Sometimes the only way to sometimes you might create a.
18:58:24 And voluntary QAQ means things are in a line. You're at a stop light and you can't go into the car in front of you goes and so on so forth.
18:58:34 And if one of them stuck, you're all of you are stuck. I have this happened to me on the ferry.
18:58:38 Last week one of the cars the driver didn't come back when the when the ferry arrived so everybody in that line was stuck for a while.
18:58:45 And you might have to just go through your Drass folder and find which one is stuck and delete it.
18:58:53 And if you need that message so that you can try again, copy the contents of the message, but then delete the message out of draft.
18:59:00 And that might get rid of the clog. But, quite often if it's. If it's if it's stuck, it'll just it'll just back up everything behind it.
18:59:10 But check also in your sent mail when you think you've sent it. Go into sent mail because it won't be in sentimental unless.
18:59:16 Gmail really, really, really did send it. I had a. Somebody who sent me like 2 dozen copies of the same email, I kept on saying, and they was getting increasingly frantic.
18:59:27 I keep on sending you this email and it's not going anywhere. Oh wait didn't work again.
18:59:34 Oh there's this long chain. It was all one message and they were all coming to me. Why he didn't think they were going? I don't know.
18:59:38 But the way to check is to look in the sent mail folder.
18:59:40 Okay.
18:59:40 Maybe she's got her own email address in the CC and maybe it's actually a copy coming back to her.
18:59:48 Sometimes Gmail will get, get it stuck because it doesn't like the validation format.
18:59:54 Because there's something wrong and the domain name or or the moons in the wrong place or whatever.
19:00:01 Okay.
19:00:02 Most of the time Gmail has a really good reason for not sending it, but sometimes it is.
19:00:05 It is puzzling. Like I had one in which I was replying all and one of the message, one of the addresses was invalid, so it was stuck in draft.
19:00:13 Because hey, this second email address that you're in this reply all is invalid. So it was stuck there until I went and got rid of it.
19:00:23 Okay, well, it's not in sent and it's not in drafts. So, yeah.
19:00:30 I'm just incredibly frustrated having sent the same email thing. At least 20 times.
19:00:38 Is it to the same address?
19:00:39 Yeah, to my husband, you know, I kind of know his address, so I know it's okay.
19:00:48 Okay.
19:00:48 Yeah, yeah, I'd like to blame it on him.
19:00:45 I don't know, he could be doing something really weird. Yeah, that was my best guess.
19:00:56 Sorry.
19:00:58 Okay.
19:01:00 I went to, oh yes, there's our president. Your microphone is, is, muted.
19:01:08 Hello there.
19:01:08 Hello there, how are you?
19:01:11 I personally not doing all that great, but you know, details.
19:01:18 It's not me, it's Kathleen.
19:01:15 Oh, well I'm sorry about that. I hope you feel better. Okay. Oh, that's too bad.
19:01:24 Sorry about that.
19:01:26 Yeah.
19:01:26 Did you have a nice time at the Apple store? I know you went to the favorite one. Based on your
19:01:31 I was there for only like 5 min and I'm gonna show 2 pictures that I took there.
19:01:39 One of is going to be the tree, yes.
19:01:41 Yeah.
19:01:36 I'm sure it's the tree, right? Thank you. Well, welcome everybody. I don't see any new names.
19:01:50 So I just welcome everybody back. I have nothing really. New to say.
19:01:59 I'll just hand it over to the treasurer and she can go over them. The money that has I guess some stuff came in.
19:02:07 Well, we have 2 checks that came in in the last couple of months. For. And, still with those 2 checks.
19:02:20 Well, thank you very much for those who send them in. And the balance right now is $2,000 $32,032 and 66 cents.
19:02:31 And I'm going to spend some of that. So.
19:02:34 Okay. Let me know how much.
19:02:35 I just keep on forgetting to. I forget to keep on forgetting to send you the invoice, but.
19:02:41 Okay.
19:02:43 Any other business we want to attend to?
19:02:48 One thing that, We should think about is elections because We really should have elections every year.
19:02:58 Yeah.
19:02:59 Just, to, you know, promote democracy and all that. And the second thing I want you to think about right the second is are we going to have a meeting in December and if so, what are we going to talk about?
19:03:10 So. Unless we have other things that that I want to get on with my presentation.
19:03:18 My mom and I had actually talked about that and we both thought that it might be nice to not have it in December since it's so close to Christmas.
19:03:28 Yeah, I was thinking something similar, but. I leave it up to the collective wisdom. We don't have to have a decision now.
19:03:36 Just something I want you to think about. Okay. I'm going to share my screen so that I can talk about.
19:03:43 . 19
19:03:44 Some other things first before we get to browsers but Gonna share my screen here.
19:03:52 And.
19:03:58 Oh, that's not what I want. This is what I want to do.
19:04:09 Apple introduced some new. Computers that started the month. Oh, at the end of last month, and they called it scary fast.
19:04:18 And the reason I called it scary fast. Is the new computers have a new chip. The M one chip was the first Apple silicon stick chip and that was followed by the M 2 and now we have the M 3.
19:04:31 No.
19:04:27 And this first graph, which I actually think is interesting. Shows the power of the M 3 the relative performance of the power of the F 3 compared to a 12 PC, core PC laptop.
19:04:41 And you see that it exceeds the power of this 12 core PC laptop. But the important thing is it's using only one quarter the power.
19:04:49 And Apple kept on. Emphasizing this because by use by having more power but using less electricity The battery runs longer and their new, depending upon the model that you get, some of their new MacBooks have a 20 h.
19:05:08 Battery life which means by the end of the day you're going to be really really really tired before your laptop gives gives up.
19:05:16 But they were 3 different models. M 3 and M 3 pro and an M 3 max the M 3 is the base model, the M 3 pro has more.
19:05:26 Stop and the m 3 max is on the high end They came out with new versions of the Mac or Book Pro and.
19:05:35 And I don't remember which size they. 14 and 16, I don't remember the details.
19:05:41 You can see it on the Apple side. And they also came up with a new versions of the imac, 24 inch.
19:05:49 And that's something I wanted to talk about because I played with both of these very briefly at the Apple Store at.
19:05:56 A university village. Last week, week before last. And I was impressed with the speed of them, but.
19:06:05 What was I have been saying for some time that people say I'm I'm waiting until I come up with another 24 inch imac.
19:06:13 I am convinced that Apple is not going to come up with a 24 inch imac. Because they don't need to.
19:06:20 If you really want a 24 and by the way Town for pound, the imac is a better deal than a MacBook.
19:06:26 Thank you.
19:06:28 It has it has more power because it's got more room for stuff in it. And it's less money.
19:06:36 The the MacBooks because they're compressing everything into a tiny space cost more money than a desktop machine.
19:06:42 And the the IMAX are really a bargain, giving them out. Of course, If you get the the IMAX coming 2 basic versions one has 2 ports in the back and one has 4 ports in the back.
19:06:59 If you get the one with 4 ports in the back. And you get it with 16 gigs of of RAM and a terabyte drive.
19:07:08 You will blow away any 24 inch, twenty-seven-inch imac that was ever made.
19:07:14 And if you don't, if you think the screen is too small, even though it shows more pixels than that 27 inch screen.
19:07:25 Dead. If you think you still need more space, you you plug into one of those 4 ports in the back and you set up another monitor.
19:07:32 It will support multiple monitors. You just plug another monitor into it. It's a little bit tricky because it only has USBC ports in the back, but it's not that difficult to get a monitor.
19:07:43 To plug back into the back of the I. And if you don't want to go that route, the other route is to go get a Mac Mini the M 2 Mac minis are very very very powerful.
19:07:57 And Just go out and get any monitor you want and get your own keyboard mouse plug it into the Mac Mini and you have something that's more powerful than any 27 inch imac.
19:08:11 Ever was. So that's my little spiel on why you should pay attention to these new Macs.
19:08:16 I'm really.
19:08:21 You really shouldn't be waiting forever to upgrade an old Mac. You, the, the security, the convenience, so on so forth of the new max is just.
19:08:30 It's not really comparable. And this is where I was when I was playing around with it.
19:08:37 This is the, University Village Apple Store in Seattle. It's about I don't know, a mile from the Champus.
19:08:48 It's on there. It's about across some ball fields and so on and so forth.
19:08:54 There's Lake Washington and then there's the university village. And you can sit on these little cube things here and watch this giant screen.
19:09:02 I only have part of it here. When they installed this screen, it was the largest LCD screen in the state of Washington.
19:09:10 I'm sure that somebody come up 1 one. Bigger than for now, but. They'll do demos and run commercials and teach classes and you sit on these stools and and it is projected on the screen.
19:09:28 The other thing that I like about the store and it's very nice clean layout. This was a Tuesday or Wednesday?
19:09:36 And there were a lot of people in the store. It wasn't a holiday or anything in particular.
19:09:43 They were just a lot of people in store. And I was in there for Just a few minutes and 3 different people.
19:09:49 All men came up. Wanted a one of the new 16 inch the larger Mac books. With the space black.
19:09:58 Finish and bought it on the spot didn't even test drive it they just came in blocked down their credit card walked out with a machine.
19:10:06 Which cracked me up. I think I think most women shoppers would have at least tried it before.
19:10:13 Walking down the store with one. But I did test them in the store. I have a standard test that I do where I take the photo library that they have on the demo machine and I export it and see I see how many seconds that takes.
19:10:26 Yeah.
19:10:25 And it doesn't take that v. These things are blinding that fast. And then I render a couple movies.
19:10:34 And, They're really, really fast. The other thing that I like about the store is this tree.
19:10:41 This tree is growing up through the center of the store and it was raining so if I blow this up you can actually see the raindrops on the on the leaves of the tree.
19:10:51 It's just this glass box open die at the top. And the tree has grown up through the roof.
19:10:57 And it just, it, It gives me great joy to go in and talk to the train.
19:11:06 So I'm I'm a bit strange.
19:11:06 Yeah.
19:11:11 The topic tonight is web browsers. And the first thing I want to talk about is the.
19:11:19 This is not the one I wanted.
19:11:24 This is the one I want. So we'll make you go away for a second. This is a cartoon by one woman named Julia Evans.
19:11:34 Who does cartoons for the. For Linux users and It doesn't make any difference that time.
19:11:42 That it's not she's a Linux user because this is applies to all of them. A lot of the things, lot of our cartoons also apply to Mac because the underlying operating system and the Mac is Unix.
19:11:53 In a URL this first part she calls it a scheme but it's really a protocol. The protocol tells you what kind of protocol it is.
19:12:02 A web browser could have something called FTP, which is file transfer protocol to talk to a file server or a bunch of other protocols.
19:12:11 HTTPS means it's talking to an encrypted web server. So that part there is the protocol.
19:12:17 This part here where it talks about the port. Is another way of just talking about the protocol. HTTPS means encrypted and port 4 43 is the port reserved for encrypted websites.
19:12:29 If this was HTTP without the S, the port would be port 80. And you don't need to remember this.
19:12:36 It's just that HTTP. With no S means that it's unencrypted, anything you're sending, anybody on the planet can read that.
19:12:45 HTTPS, it creates an encrypted tunnel. It's not really a tunnel.
19:12:50 It's an encrypted conversation between you and that website. So that's that first part is a protocol.
19:12:56 The second part is the domain. The domain is. The name of the service and then the type of the service.
19:13:03 Dot com means commercial doesn't have to be, but that's the. That's the.
19:13:10 That's the tradition.com means commercial. And example cat is the name of the that particular server there.
19:13:20 And then the paths part. Is something I want to talk about. The path, this is the path.
19:13:27 To something. So the there's this one has cats and then this query string is a telling the database that you're looking for light gray.
19:13:38 Banana shaped cats, I guess. But the thing after the query string, thing after this question mark is the query string.
19:13:47 And I mentioned this because I want to show you a couple things. And we're gonna push this down out of the way for a second.
19:13:54 And.
19:14:01 I thought I had set one aside. I don't see it right this second.
19:14:15 Yeah, I can't find it.
19:14:18 So why don't you go back over there?
19:14:26 We're going to go to the straight Mac.
19:14:33 Youtube page. And straight back.
19:14:41 Straight Mac has a YouTube page. And click here, take it to our YouTube page. And we're going to click on this is last month's.
19:14:51 Meeting and we're gonna Stop it right there and we're going to say share this. Yeah So here's the URL that it's going to copy.
19:15:00 I'm going to copy this and I'm going to paste it into Word. Because I want to blow it up.
19:15:07 Yes, yes.
19:15:13 Here is the string. That leads you to that. Video. Gonna blow it up a little bit bigger so you can say says HTTPS means it S means it's encrypted.
19:15:27 U 2.be. PE is the known domain name for Belgium, but you don't really need to know that.
19:15:37 YouTube, and then here is the address. Well, I'm going to take this address. And I'm gonna paste it into the browser.
19:15:49 And it's gonna go to that same video. Well, I'm going to now get rid of everything after this question mark.
19:16:02 And. Paste that into the browser.
19:16:12 And it goes to the same video without all that stuff afterwards. So my question to you. Is what is all that stuff?
19:16:21 . After
19:16:26 What is all that stuff that's out here?
19:16:32 Anybody want to speculate?
19:16:39 Yeah.
19:16:38 Specific file where it's kept or something.
19:16:42 Well, it depends upon who they are in the case of YouTube, I could actually play, I could move to someplace in this.
19:16:52 Video. And say I want to grab it from that point and I say share and it's going to give me a different URL.
19:17:02 And then if I send that to someone, you notice that it's after the craze constraints change.
19:17:09 If you paste this into my browser, it'll go to that portion of the movie. It'll get the other parts and it'll go to the other parts and it'll go to that portion at 59 min into the video.
19:17:19 So that's what the in this case, that's what it's doing. It's saying that I want you to go to the video that's at this location.
19:17:28 But I want you to go to this point in the video. And for this first one, the the point it happens to be the start.
19:17:38 But so that's what this query string is. It's sending an additional information to the to the server to tell it something.
19:17:46 However, quite often everything after that question mark is used to tag you. It's called a hashtag and it helped helps identify.
19:17:57 So if you've if you've been on the Washington Post site and you click on an ad the when it takes you to the page, it takes you to the server that is advertising like.
19:18:07 Every time I go to Washington Post, I'm almost always offered a a a video of buying a jet fighter plane.
19:18:16 And so for the heck of it, I always go to them because you know, I want to know what the latest in jet fighters that Locky wants to sell me.
19:18:23 But when it does that, everything after this question mark is telling Lockheed that This guy who's looking at jet fighters came from the Washington Post.
19:18:34 So it's tanking me and it's telling them about me. And that's why you kind of want to be a little bit careful about the parts that are after this question.
19:18:43 Mark, if you want to maintain your privacy. Go through and delete that stuff before you send that on to somebody.
19:18:51 Like you have a. I had a friend who works for the National Institutes of Health and she was talking to someone about sexual abuse and she went to the site that had articles about sexual abuse but she was very careful to strip off that stuff because As a government employee, she couldn't be recommending this.
19:19:10 Non-government site. So she was stripping that off so the witness say they was coming from a government employee.
19:19:16 So there you want to pay a little bit of attention to the things that appear after that. Question mark.
19:19:22 And for some things such as newspaper articles, The newspaper article may not work if you strip off. The.
19:19:32 Oh, go away.
19:19:35 Delete. The URL may not work if you strip off that hashtag because that hashtag might actually take you to a place in the database of the of the newspaper site.
19:19:46 So it doesn't always help, but you want to be a little bit suspicious about the when you see a URL it's got a question mark.
19:19:52 I had, there's a site called Space Technology or something like that. That every time I go there and I see a page I like and I copy it and send it to somebody.
19:20:06 The real URL is less than a line long, but it sends about 8 or 10 lines worth of code.
19:20:10 And that's because this space technology site, that's how they get their revenues for advertising. So they want people to know that you went to their site and I was looking at this particular page that had this company's advertisement on it even though I'm not interested in the advertisement.
19:20:26 So you want to be a little bit careful about that. And that's why I was telling you about the about what those parts of the
19:20:35 Of the URL. So. This is the protocol and that is the name of the server and this part here.
19:20:44 Before the question, Mark, that's the path where that stuff is stored on the on the website.
19:20:53 Okay.
19:20:50 And to give you some examples, we'll go to the. Straightenax site.
19:20:57 And can we blow this up a bit? If I.
19:21:20 Okay.
19:21:12 If I look at home, you'll notice that home out here at the where the URL is there's nothing after that but if I click on blog It changes this and now it the path says blog and if I say useful things.
19:21:26 It says useful things and so on and so forth. So depending upon what I. Click on, it actually changes the path there.
19:21:34 And on useful things, if I take, I click on actually, I don't want that.
19:21:43 I'm gonna go to articles. Here's an article on troubleshooting windows. I am as by by what?
19:21:54 Chat G PT does if it was Chaucer and it says Straight Mac.
19:21:59 Dot org slash article slash troubleshooting windows in the style of Chaucer. That's the That's the path to this article.
19:22:06 So that's and then mentioning that because a lot of people use the web all the time and they never really think about.
19:22:11 What it is that they're doing. So I wanted to, I went in to mention that.
19:22:18 And. Another thing I wanted to mention about a lot of people I know store their passwords in their web browser.
19:22:28 And so I wanted to show you this cartoon. Which I I really like this cartoon.
19:22:39 Okay.
19:22:44 Yeah.
19:22:49 And having said that, let us get out of here and go into. A browser window and do I store passwords in my browser.
19:23:02 And the answer is yes, there's a whole section here. I type passwords if I enter to my my password to my machine here, it would list all kinds of sites that I stored the password in my browser.
19:23:17 However, having said that I do that, I'm very careful about what I do. I do not store bank passwords.
19:23:25 I do not store buying anything having to do with money. Bill Paine, I do not store those kind of passwords.
19:23:32 So what kind of passwords do I have? I have subscription to the Washington Post and went to the New York Times.
19:23:36 I don't like typing the password in every time. So I store that in the browser.
19:23:43 I go to the New York Times and it just lets me in. It tells them, hey, this is Lawrence Charters and let's be in there.
19:23:47 And for things like, things that I don't spend money on. That are convenient.
19:23:53 Washing amplify user group, my password is stored in my browser so I can log into this without doing anything.
19:24:02 But anything that involves money. You should not store it in the browser, you should store it in a password manager.
19:24:08 And the one that I recommend is one called One Password. So, just kind of mentioning some of these things along the way.
19:24:18 And I want now talk about browsers and the browsers I'm going to talk about are I have a list here that I made.
19:24:29 I got to do them very quickly. Because there are a number of them. First one is Safari.
19:24:37 Oh, here's where I had that. I know I started someplace. This is Safari.
19:24:43 This is the latest version of Safari that comes with Sonoma. And with the new safari, you can have profiles.
19:24:51 This is a profile of. For me when I'm looking at things that I went to look at.
19:24:55 But I can also have a profile. For smug when I switch to the smug profile These are things that I went to look at when I'm.
19:25:06 Doing. Smug meetings. Or if I went to Look at news. This one has a bunch of news sites.
19:25:17 Or if I want to, this one by the way is provided by Apple. I didn't do anything like that.
19:25:21 And then I have one for. Trinity, the church that I have. And it shouldn't be blank.
19:25:31 Oh, I see. It's blank because it's trying to do the wrong thing. There's Trinity's, YouTube account.
19:25:37 And. Trinity website. So there are different profiles for doing things.
19:25:47 And why do I have different profiles? If you are doing monthly bills, You probably want to have, you'll probably only want to see things that have to do with your monthly bills.
19:25:56 You don't want to. See things that. Aren't associated with monthly bills.
19:26:01 And if you are if you are still working, you might have go in every morning and you open up the same web pages every time.
19:26:09 So that's really nice to, that's really nice to have all those things that once you just store them in a profile and profiles and I should have showed you how to do that.
19:26:16 And I
19:26:17 You come into Safari, you go to settings. And you go to. Profiles and you can set up.
19:26:25 Profiles. So add a new profile, click this button. And you can give it a symbol and.
19:26:33 Okay.
19:26:31 All kinds of different, give it a particular color if you want to. And then start creating profiles.
19:26:37 In that way that set of tabs will be unique to that. Functions and you don't have to.
19:26:44 Create that you don't have to open up those tabs every time or you don't have to open up those tabs when you want to do something else entirely.
19:26:51 And Safari is the default browser on the Mac as well as on the iPhone and and the, iPad.
19:26:59 And the underlying technology that is used in, in. Safari is called Webkit. And I mentioned this.
19:27:10 Because I have a site that tells me something about the underlying technologies. Browsers and the next browser I'm going to look at.
19:27:20 Is Chrome.
19:27:24 And years ago, I set up. A page on the Washington Apple Pi site. With a with a.
19:27:36 I called it the paranoia page because people were concerned about cookies. So I click on the paranoia page and it tells me.
19:27:42 Okay.
19:27:42 What my browser is telling the website that is dealing with and in this case it says this browser says it's Mozilla.
19:27:54 Mozilla is the code name for the original Netscape browser. Mozilla 5.
19:27:59 Macintosh Intel. I'm running this on an Apple Studio, which does not have an Intel chip in it.
19:28:05 Intel, Mac OS 1010.15 point 7 so it's actually a fairly old profile here.
19:28:13 Apple Webkit 5.3 for 37.3 6 which is old. KHTM L which is a type of encoder like gecko.
19:28:24 Gecko is the deciding thing here. Gecko is the technology. That Chrome uses for rendering web pages.
19:28:33 But you'll notice the first thing that listed was Apple Webkit. Now, when Chrome first came out, it was built using Apple's Webkit.
19:28:43 So it was using Apple's code to create the Chrome browser. Now they use Gecko.
19:28:45 But it's still backward compatible with Webkit. And then it tells you that it's Chrome.
19:28:51 So, and this Safari 5.3 7, that just. Again, it's just saying, hey, I'm like Safari.
19:28:59 But it's not Safari, it's actually Chrome. Then, oh, Chrome was the first one, by the way, that had profiles.
19:29:07 If I look at This is what happens when I bring up Chrome. It tells me various different, profiles that I can use.
19:29:14 So if I click on, so if I click on straight Mac, it only does straight back things. Trinity is only my church things.
19:29:19 It's, They came up to profiles before Apple did. I like the way that Apple did it though.
19:29:28 Firefox The next one I want to show you and Firefox takes forever to load. And then it comes up with a wonderful commercial saying that I'm covered in the privacy and so on and so on.
19:29:41 If I go to Firefox to that page, again, it tells me the same kind of things.
19:29:47 Mozilla, Macintosh, Intel. DECKO Firefox is now using
19:29:58 That you the gecko engine is is is actually Mozilla's, engine. Sorry, I said to Chrome, but it's actually.
19:30:07 Mozellas and saying I'm using my own rendering in engine for Firefox. I rarely use Firefox.
19:30:15 Firefox at 1 point was one of the, it was the leading web browser out there, but right now it's something like 1.8%.
19:30:23 They got into some political wars and said that we're not going to support these technologies because they're run by bandits and so on and so forth.
19:30:31 And one of the things that we did not have for a long time, they were not supporting JPEG.
19:30:36 So your camera phone takes pictures in JPEG. You could not display it in Firefox because Firefox said it was evil.
19:30:43 So they kind of knocked themselves out of the. Of the running but I still use Firefox because there's sometimes I just want to see if Firefox works.
19:30:54 Then I'm going to start getting into things that you probably haven't played with. Microsoft Edge.
19:30:58 Microsoft Edge is the browser that app that, that Microsoft ships with Windows and they have a version for the Mac.
19:31:08 They also have a version for the iPad. So you can run. You can run, Microsoft Edge on, on your iPad if you wanted to.
19:31:17 Okay.
19:31:18 Again, if I go to this page, again, it says Bozilla, Macintosh, Intel, Apple Webkit, KTML, like Gecko, which again is Mozilla.
19:31:27 And like Chrome and it mentioned Safari. So what is edge done in edge was originally done in Webkit as well.
19:31:37 Most recently they started using chromium, which is a version of of Google Chrome. Given the choice between using Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, if you want to be very secure, Microsoft Edge actually has the edge.
19:31:53 In security over Google Chrome. And that's because Google Chrome has built in a lot of things to allow them to capture information about the user.
19:32:03 And so just. Google Chrome's not quite as secure as Microsoft edges. Just as an FYI.
19:32:13 The next one I want to talk about is Duck Duck Go. And that Duck Go comes with demonstration.
19:32:20 I'm going to search for information about me.
19:32:25 Gotta type in Lawrence I Charters.
19:32:30 2 things to note. I'm typing this in quotation marks. When you type it in quotation marks you're telling the search engine search for this and, and it's not going to work because I miss both charges.
19:32:44 It'll look for exactly what you're telling it to. So I'm typing it in quotation marks so it won't look for Lawrence and separately look for charters.
19:32:54 It'll look for Lawrence I charters and if it doesn't contain all of those things it won't show it.
19:32:58 And I'm typing this in duck. Go. And I'm. Come back and I say images.
19:33:07 And it says these are all images that have something to do. With Lawrence Charters. Now you'll notice there are a lot of sailboats and honest truth about some football player, Scrabble games, all kinds of things.
19:33:23 I'm going to push this off to the side and then going to launch safari. And I'm going to tell it the same thing.
19:33:31 Search for Lawrence. I forgot the quotation mark.
19:33:44 Yeah, yeah, we know. Yeah, yeah, I know.
19:33:52 You'll see that you have a very different set of images. This is about Lawrence Charters.
19:34:00 This is about Lawrence Charters. These most of these have nothing to do with me. But.
19:34:11 This and I can even say see more and it's got just pages and pages and pages pictures almost all of these are either I took the photograph or it's about me or it's a picture of me.
19:34:24 So this was much, much more accurate. And that's one of my leading, that's one of my 2 big complaints about duck. Go.
19:34:32 A lot of people like Duck Go because they if you've seen the advertisements on TV they protect your privacy and so on so forth.
19:34:39 All of what they say is true, but what they don't tell you is that they also gives you very inaccurate results.
19:34:45 Because it's very incomplete. You get much more accurate. And faster results. Using almost any other browser.
19:34:55 So I, people, you know, there, I'm really afraid that they're going to steal everything about me.
19:35:01 And my first question to somebody who's trying to protect their privacy is, do you use the same password for everything?
19:35:07 99% of the people use the same password for everything and yet they're paranoid about Google stealing they're stealing them blind.
19:35:15 Thank you.
19:35:15 The security issue is the fact that they don't have unique passwords for everything. Every single website I use.
19:35:22 I use a different password for that website. Every single one, even the ones I don't care about.
19:35:27 And if that's that's a good security measure, but if you think duck duck go can spare you from.
19:35:34 From somebody stealing your identity, no, it really can't. That has to do with your habits.
19:35:40 So I'm not, Duck, Duck goes slow, it's incompatible with a lot of things and it's just not very accurate.
19:35:47 So, they'll probably sue me for saying all that, but. I'm not a big fan of duck.
19:35:58 Hmm.
19:35:56 Another one that's getting a lot of attention right now and if you guys sign up for it you'll get a lot of attention too because they send me at least one or 2 emails a week.
19:36:06 Is something called arc. And arc is nice because it's got these nice little tabs and you can do write notes into it.
19:36:14 It'll give you tutorials on how to use it and all kinds of things It's nice you can customize it in all kinds of different ways.
19:36:26 I give it new backgrounds and It's got a movie built into it that tells you how to use the different features.
19:36:32 All kinds of cool things. It's not particularly fast. And sometimes it crashes. I hardly ever see any other browser crash.
19:36:44 But I have to admit that I'm intrigued with what they did. And arc is a brand new browser came out in 2023 so this is hot new stuff.
19:36:55 Oh, I want to tell you about the ages of these. Safari dates back to 2,003.
19:36:59 Chrome was created in 2,008. Firefox goes back to 2,004 Microsoft edges from 2,015 Duck, go the browser is 2022.
19:37:13 So. Is a new one and it's just interesting enough that I'm going going to be paying more attention to it.
19:37:24 Another one is icab. Now you'll notice the first thing that Icab comes up is there's a A shareware please tells you to please purchase a license.
19:37:33 And that's about as far as I'm going to get. Because I haven't purchased a license.
19:37:37 But Icab is has a couple things going for it. It's the oldest browser out there.
19:37:44 It's been around since 1,999. It's older than Safari and any of the rest of them.
19:37:49 The other nice thing about Icab is if you have really old Mac floating around and you want a currently supported browser.
19:37:57 Pay the shareware fee and use Icab because it's for some of these older machines it might be the only thing that can safely run on them.
19:38:10 Another one. Relatively new one. Actually, no it's not. It's a relatively new to the Mac.
19:38:15 Okay.
19:38:18 And
19:38:21 If I can get it to come up. This is called maxthon. It's created by a developer out of Singapore.
19:38:32 It's been around since 2,002. And. I told you this safari is built upon Webcred.
19:38:41 Chrome used to be built on Web. Now it's built on something called Firefox uses gecko.
19:38:49 Mozilla, Microsoft Edge uses Webkit and Chromium. Duck. Go uses Webkit. It's kind of interesting.
19:38:58 It's built upon Apple's technology. Arc is using Blink and Web Tit. And I tab is using I tab there, kind of unique and building to their own.
19:39:08 And Max Laun from 2,002 uses Blink, which is another version of Chromium and Webkit.
19:39:14 And it's, it's, it's not a bad looking browser. The, my big objection is that it doesn't do anything.
19:39:26 Not opposed to it, but it doesn't do anything. Nice for me. This next one I really like the browser not because I've ever used it because I refuse to sign up for your account.
19:39:38 You have to have a preferring count in order to use Puffin. But I happen to really like puffins.
19:39:41 I don't know if you are aware of it, but, Protection Island in the middle of Swim Bay.
19:39:47 As one of the few nesting grounds for puffins in the continental United States. So, is probably a wonderful browser, but I refuse to give them any credentialing information.
19:39:57 So. That's as far as I got with that. But it's their, Their claim to fame is that it's a very secure browser and it's paranoid about.
19:40:07 Going to different places. And.
19:40:12 Max line uses Blinken and Webkit. Water Fox as the name might suggest. Based upon Firefox.
19:40:21 It's a just kind of a different. Somebody rolled their own version of.
19:40:29 Of Firefox. And it's not a bad browser, but there's nothing particularly, again, it's nothing particularly.
19:40:37 Interesting about it. So. It does tell you that you asked you to confirm before you close things, which is not kind of nice.
19:40:47 Brave is another one that's gotten quite a bit oppressed because it's supposed to be secure.
19:40:54 What I don't like things I don't like. BREAVE is actually fairly slow and since Ray sometimes complains about the wrong things that it says pages are insecure when they're not.
19:41:04 But again, brave, they're claim to fame is that they say that it's, protects your privacy and security, but It's not that.
19:41:14 It's not that fast and it might be secure, but it's, relatively slow.
19:41:23 Vivaldi. Is kind of an interesting thing. Vivaldi came out in 2,015 making it.
19:41:31 Fairly old in terms of browsers but it has all kinds of neat features. For things like you can write notes on it and a bunch of other things.
19:41:42 It's really a nice browser. The, you can use it for, for a message reader and all kinds of things.
19:41:49 What I don't like about it is that I really would prefer not to have all of these things in one red browser.
19:41:55 I would prefer to have a separate note taking app and and whatnot. Another one I want to show you by not showing you anything at all is the Tor browser.
19:42:03 This is the Tor browser. The Tor browser is funded in part by the Bye the, US Department of State.
19:42:12 And it's very secure because when it when you talk to Tor you don't really talk to Tor directly.
19:42:18 You don't really talk to a website directly. You talk to. You talk to.
19:42:27 It's not the way just fell straight back. That's not gonna work.
19:42:36 Yeah.
19:42:36 Yeah, it's a wrong one.
19:42:43 One thing I don't like about Tor is that it's really, really, really slow because when you launch tour, it immediately goes out to this Tor cloud and then when you have a request the request goes to the Tor cloud from the Tor cloud to whatever you're requesting back to the Tor cloud and then to you.
19:43:00 So it's very slow. The advantage that Tor has, it's very popular in countries with repressive governments.
19:43:07 Because they can't tell what it is you're looking at. Because it never directly associates.
19:43:14 It can't be traced back to you. And that's one reason why the federal government.
19:43:20 Subsidizes it. And the last one is one of the oldest browsers out there.
19:43:26 Which is opera, which dates back to 1995. And opera is a. From a Norwegian term.
19:43:37 And it's a it's a nice browser, but it's also has some compatibility issues when people are building websites.
19:43:45 They tend to build them for Chrome and. And Safari and that's basically it.
19:43:53 Used to be it was Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome and now it's basically Safari and Chrome.
19:44:02 So having gone through a whole bunch of website, whole bunch of browsers in very little time telling you very little about them.
19:44:09 What should I think you should pay attention to? I think you should pay attention to Safari because it comes on your machine.
19:44:14 I think you should pay attention to Chrome. Because depending upon who's statistics you look at, it is the most popular.
19:44:23 Browser in the world. But when they're talking about that, they're basically looking at desktop users.
19:44:30 And I think you should play attention to Microsoft Edge. You'll notice that I didn't say Firefox.
19:44:36 But Microsoft Edge. Microsoft Edge, in spite of the fact that it's done by Microsoft, is really well, well done, it's very stable.
19:44:46 They keep it up to date. Really have no particular. Issues with it.
19:44:52 It's it's well done. It also allows you to if you want to click on these little things you can launch other Microsoft applications.
19:45:00 If you don't have other Microsoft applications, you probably don't care. But it's it's not a bad browser at all.
19:45:06 Chrome I like but I want to tell you the dangers of Chrome. Kathleen has a laptop with 16 GB of memory.
19:45:16 It's a, M 2 laptop. Yeah, it's an M 2 Apple laptop with 16 gigs of memory.
19:45:26 She has run out of space. I've run out of memory on the machine. It won't actually stop doing what it's doing.
19:45:32 It just gets slow. Because of Chrome. Every time you open up a tab in Chrome, it's about a gigabyte.
19:45:39 Memory is used. So if you have 16 times open you're using 16 GB worth of memory.
19:45:46 And it just it just uses up a staggering amount of memory. The other thing, the good news, bad news, you see these little icons across the top here.
19:45:56 Those icons are extensions. And the extensions allow you to do things like I can click this one and it will tell me the IP address of the, of my own IP.
19:46:09 And it's telling me that's my IP and all kinds of things like that. You may not ever need this, but I use these like this one is this thing here is giving me a source code listing of the page that I was just on.
19:46:23 And this one here tells me the. Technologies of various things. So I click on this and it tells me there's no deductible technologies.
19:46:34 If I go to. This one of a click on that technologies that lists all the different kind of technologies that go into creating this.
19:46:42 Website. This is useful for me because I build websites but the problem with a lot of these plugins is they make the browser slower.
19:46:52 So Chrome is actually faster if I got rid of all these. But since I use problem basically when I'm building websites, I kind of like them.
19:47:00 I just keep in mind that Chrome has some disadvantages in terms of. Of the memory usage and there are some.
19:47:11 Kind of iffy things about some of their privacy. They just got to find I don't remember how much money by the european union several 1 billion dollars for privacy settings in Chrome.
19:47:25 So I would suggest that you stick with Safari. Chrome if you have a need for it and try out Microsoft Edge you might like it.
19:47:35 Firefox. Even though they're no longer having their religious wars. If you just notice it, it takes quite a while for it to load and it just doesn't have any particularly redeeming features anymore.
19:47:48 And that was mostly me talking for. Some period of time. So let me stop talking and let me stop sharing and ask if there are any questions.
19:48:02 You want to know the record, the record number of browsers I've had at any one time is 56.
19:48:08 Wow.
19:48:08 But I was, I was being paid to. Do websites for the government at the time. So I had a I had a need.
19:48:16 I didn't even show you. There's a built in browser in, in terminal.
19:48:20 You can actually use terminal to go and and grab web pages. It's not really a web browser.
19:48:25 It's a it's a web It'll grab web pages, but it's not really a browser.
19:48:31 Any questions?
19:48:35 Okay, we're doing a quiz here. Is it safe to store passwords in your browser?
19:48:43 In the browser.
19:48:44 Yes, like you're at a website and in the browser says, do you want me to save your website, your password for this site?
19:48:51 And you say, yes or no? Is that safe?
19:49:01 Yes.
19:48:52 Well, I'm thinking that it's not saving it in the browser saving it in in my key chain And okay, so, so then it is safe, I would say.
19:49:05 No, it's not. It's not. For financial institutions. If you have a bank, type your password in every single time.
19:49:15 If you have, if you have a mutual fund, type your password in every single time.
19:49:21 2 things. One, I have a I have a retirement fund that's done by this, see, I in Florida, they changed their security system and didn't tell anyone.
19:49:37 And I found out about it because I went in there and typed in my password and it didn't work.
19:49:40 So I called up the head just helped us. I said, oh, didn't you get a message that we were changing our security system?
19:49:48 Yeah.
19:49:46 No, I didn't, But if my web browser had saved it, it just wouldn't have worked and I wouldn't have known why.
19:49:54 So there are good reasons to always type your password in to find financial institutions and not save them in your keychain.
19:50:01 The safety in your keychain and your housekeeper come in and you're vacuuming the floor and you left your computer on, your browser windows open, they can go to your bank and empty it.
19:50:09 Because it's built into the it's your browser kept it. So it's not good for anything that you spend money on so your PUD bill.
19:50:20 Save that you wanna save your PUD, password in the browser. Well, there.
19:50:26 They're not storing your money. You're giving them money. So PUD, maybe you can do that, but, anything that you're gonna spend money on generally or anything is saving money, don't start your password.
19:50:37 No.
19:50:38 But save it for things like the Washington Post, New York Times, the Ladies Home Journal, if I don't even know if they still exist, but anything that is that you have to have a password in order to to use their service but you're not having a financial transaction.
19:50:55 Yeah, you can save it in your in your key chain if you want to.
19:50:59 Okay, so what about if you're using your iPhone or your iPad and it's either facial RS recognition or fingerprint.
19:51:07 Is that okay?
19:51:11 Yeah.
19:51:09 Now that gets a little bit tricky. I'll give you an example that,
19:51:17 When they first came up with the, facial recognition. This, Apple engineer. I may have told this story already, this Apple engineer with had this game on his phone that is, that is four-year-old like to play five-year-old like to play.
19:51:32 And one morning he went to. Play the game but his father was still asleep. So kid came, grabs the phone.
19:51:40 Hold it for his father's face to wake up the phone and plays the game.
19:51:45 Smart kid.
19:51:48 If you have to type the password in, they can't do that. They can't take your finger and put it on the fingerprint bed.
19:51:56 They can't hold your phone up and unlock the phone. So the answer is, yeah, I'd still probably type it in.
19:52:03 Even on your phone.
19:52:08 Good to know.
19:52:11 Julie, are you asking something? Cause your, microphones off.
19:52:18 So, you did suggest using one password for money, accounts.
19:52:24 Actually, I put all my passwords in even ones that I don't care about well even ones that aren't dangerous like the New York Times is in my one password.
19:52:33 Why? Because I might be using a new browser and I can't remember the name of the of the New York Times.
19:52:38 Account so it'll It's in one password. I use it for everything.
19:52:43 So then if you're on, if you have your money password stored in one password and you go to your bank and you go into the user.
19:52:52 Can you just like click on it and it will come up? With one password or do you have to?
19:52:59 You, you, It's a little bit complicated, but yes, you can have one password enter the your password for you.
19:53:07 For certain types of things. It'll it'll use Safari to enter a password.
19:53:12 So you if you go to the bank then when password will open the account. And you don't actually have to look at it.
19:53:15 Okay.
19:53:18 Even though I still, as I mentioned, I prefer typing it in because if I type it in and it doesn't work, then that tells me that there's something wrong.
19:53:27 Whereas if it's unlocked by key chain or if it's unlocked by one password, it won't tell me what's wrong.
19:53:33 It's just, it's not working, but I don't know that the passwords the issue.
19:53:37 So I still for financial accounts. Even though one password has that as a service, I don't use that.
19:53:45 I always type it in. And you have to remember that I. I'm a professionally paranoid.
19:53:51 I not only created websites, but I also kept hackers out and. 25 years. Nobody got into my, websites and some of them got millions of hits an hour.
19:54:03 So, you know. Lot of exposure but they didn't get in because I'm paranoid.
19:54:08 Maybe sometime you could have a class on thinking up good passwords that you can remember.
19:54:15 Okay.
19:54:15 I will tell you it's very simple. Don't use passwords. Use pass phrases.
19:54:20 My passwords are When we move to the United, when we move back to Washington state, we're both from Washington state.
19:54:30 We move back here. Why do I listed the criteria that of things that I wanted? Where we moved, had to have volcanoes, had to have ocean, had to have ferry boats.
19:54:40 And so Kathleen promptly suggested New Zealand, which was a good suggestion because we both like New Zealand.
19:54:49 But, And. Volcano space, ferry, space. Ocean space. April is a good password.
19:55:01 It tells you. That you, you created in April, which means by next April you should probably change it.
19:55:08 And it's a lot of letters. And some of those have an uppercase long volcano.
19:55:14 It probably has a capital V and others a lowercase. What makes a password secure is 2 things.
19:55:21 First of all, it's your user name. And your password. If you think about it, if you have the right username, the wrong password, you can't get in.
19:55:29 But if you have the right password and you're using the wrong username you can't get in.
19:55:31 It takes both. So when you send this off, it sends off this really big number to the site saying, here's my really big number.
19:55:39 Does it patch, does it match the really big number that you have? And if it matches, then they let you in.
19:55:44 But it requires both the username and the password. So my username is not I don't have a username on anything that's just Lawrence.
19:55:54 It's something more complicated. It can be your first initial last name. It can be your first name in your last name.
19:55:59 It could be something, but it shouldn't be. It's it's not just Lawrence, it's something more than that.
19:56:05 And all of my past words are something more than that. And all of my past words are not past words or past phrases.
19:56:09 Okay.
19:56:10 This one guy who kept on forgetting his password at work I had it's a it's the name of Robert Frost.
19:56:18 His password because he kept on forgetting it, I made it stopping by woods on a snowy evening.
19:56:28 Okay.
19:56:25 Which is you might know was the poem that Robert Frost had at Kennedy's inauguration.
19:56:31 And he had to every day type that in. And he remembered it. In spite of the fact that it is quite long, but it was very secure and it was long.
19:56:40 Okay.
19:56:40 And length is what is important. You will, if you work for the government, say, has to have an upper case has to have a lowercase, has to have a special character, has to have a number, and so then you use a blank as a special character.
19:56:52 You say, nope, you can't use a blank. Yeah, you shouldn't put limitations on it.
19:56:55 Yeah.
19:56:58 And you can a lot of government passwords are insecure simply because they put so many restrictions on how to make the password, they're actually making it less secure.
19:57:07 But the length is not nearly as the complexity of the password is not nearly as is important as the length.
19:57:17 If you, I know a lot of people, they have a Google password than they have. 0, glee.
19:57:27 So they're typing Google but with zeros. They think they're so clever. No, that can be broken in a second.
19:57:31 A fraction of a second. But if they said, Google is run by billionaires. A great password.
19:57:37 It's long and it's complex.
19:57:41 Okay, thank you.
19:57:44 So don't worry about. Something that you can't remember, just worry about length.
19:57:51 Any other questions?
19:57:57 No other questions?
19:58:01 Oh. Yeah.
19:58:02 But, what was going to be?
19:58:05 So.
19:58:06 I, I wanna tell you something about why I think browsers in particular are important. The last month I worked for the government and I admittedly I used I made websites for a living.
19:58:19 The last month that I was at NOAA. I used my browser. 99% of the time that I was using the machine.
19:58:29 1% of the time I was using Excel. 99% I was using. A browser.
19:58:36 I didn't use word processor, sir, at all. When I did word processing, I actually did it in Google using my browser.
19:58:45 I didn't use, I used the spreadsheet because there's some things that might that Excel just does really well.
19:58:52 So I did use 1% of the time on Excel. The database I did using a browser, it's a cloud based database.
19:58:59 Browsers are incredibly important and powerful. And Don't. Don't discount when a lot of people say when I'm getting a new computer.
19:59:14 I don't need that much because all I do is web browsing. I just explained earlier that Google with 16 tabs open can use all of your memory in a 16 GB machine.
19:59:23 Their complex programs. Just web browsing is not is not an indication of not doing much. That's actually an indication of doing a lot.
19:59:32 You just personally aren't doing all the work the web browser is. So don't discount, web browsers and web browsing.
19:59:48 Google.
19:59:47 I have a question. Oh, go ahead.
19:59:51 Google is pretty invasive, isn't it? I mean like they've they're coming into my Apple calendar.
19:59:40 It's Very complex, very, very powerful and also potentially. Bye,
20:00:01 Now, I can't, you know. And things like that. I want to keep it as clean as I can.
20:00:08 There's. I have mixed feelings about Google. I use Google extensively.
20:00:15 I use their indexing services. I use their search engines. So on so forth. Am I afraid about if they're my privacy security with Google?
20:00:27 Okay.
20:00:25 No, because I'm also fairly paranoid about it. If Google is trying to put things in your calendar, it's probably because you're using a doctors service or something and it says can I add this appointment to your calendar and you say yes so it tries to stick a Google appointment into your calendar and sometimes it's entirely accidental or you just click on a link and it think oh you want to save that in your
20:00:50 calendar so that's not necessarily invasive so much as that is Google doing what it's designed to do.
20:00:56 It's designed, they have a calendar and
20:01:02 Yeah.
20:00:58 When I count, you know, you have Mike Allen and all these names and calendars and there's Google is in there.
20:01:06 Yes. But again, it's doing what it's, doing what it's supposed to be doing and Sometimes it, It might seem, but it's really doing what it's supposed to be doing.
20:01:19 Google mostly gets in trouble because of their advertising. If I am using I will go into. Amazon and I'll look up USB drives.
20:01:29 And then I'll go into Washington Post and there'll be an advertisement for USP drives for me on the Washington Post.
20:01:36 Why? It's because Amazon subscribes to a advertising service run by Google. And so when I was looking for USB drives on Amazon, Google says, oh, this guy wants USB drives.
20:01:49 I go into the Washington Post shows me USB prize. And yes, that is that is an issue, but I don't have to click on those ads.
20:01:59 Doesn't doesn't hurt me the fact that they're ignoring that they're there.
20:02:03 Kathleen will tell you I'm really good at agreeing advertising. There was this one commercial on TV.
20:02:07 So.
20:02:09 For this woman it was she was it was a body wash and about 98% of the woman's body at one time or another was exposed and she was demonstrating this body wash.
20:02:21 And Kathleen says that that's the only advertisement that she ever recalls me paying any attention to on TV.
20:02:26 Okay.
20:02:27 Because we're pretty immune to. To advertising. So you can just ignore the ads. That's not really what's invasive.
20:02:37 What's invasive? Are people using simple passwords and getting broken in and then saying oh they hacked my icloud account.
20:02:46 Now they didn't hack your account. You put something up so that the allowed somebody to guess what your password was.
20:02:51 Oh.
20:02:51 Or they they hack my Google account that they probably didn't hack your Google account that you probably put something up that allowed somebody guess what the password was.
20:03:00 Most alleged hacking accounts is the the user themselves was a little bit careless. So.
20:03:09 I'm hacking. I, I guess it's through notifications, so where that little window comes up there in your right.
20:03:17 Yes.
20:03:16 Upper corner. I am being hacked. You're, I clouded. Town is being hacked and all these it just as coming up every minute or so.
20:03:30 Oh, we've been sitting here. It's come, comes that. And And I go to notifications, of course nothing is in there, but it what how can I get this stopped?
20:03:40 This has been going on for a long.
20:03:40 If you're getting, you're getting no vacations like that, you probably have a JavaScript, you probably accepted a piece of JavaScript that's creating those on your machine.
20:03:49 So you're not being externally attacked, attacked. You're actually running the small program that's putting those up.
20:03:55 And they're trying to respond, right?
20:04:00 And I.
20:03:58 Yes, they're trying to get your respond. And the there is a way to have you fix that but you won't like it.
20:04:05 Okay.
20:04:05 And the way to do that is to go into your browser cache and completely empty the cache.
20:04:10 Why you won't like that is most people even though they say they don't save their passwords in their browser they really do and if you empty the cache it'll log you out of all those sites.
20:04:23 Okay.
20:04:22 And you'll have to remember what your password is and log back in again.
20:04:28 But it's probably something.
20:04:28 Of all the all the passwords you have on keychain, you would have to.
20:04:34 Not, it's not a key chain. When you log in to a site in, in Safari and it's saved in keychain, that's one thing, but it also remembers the next time you go there that you were logged in.
20:04:49 And so it just logs you and it back in again. But if you delete the cash, you'll have to log in fresh.
20:04:56 It doesn't erase it out of keychain, but you just have to type in your name and password.
20:05:01 Fresh again into everything.
20:05:01 One little, chain box will come up that's easy to do, right? Like click click.
20:05:08 Okay.
20:05:06 Yes, yes, but a lot of people never remember their password and they can't remember how to get back in.
20:05:12 Even if they've saved the password, they say, oh, I don't remember where my password is.
20:05:15 And most of the time I can look at somebody's machine long enough and I'll figure it out.
20:05:19 This one woman, she said she locked logged herself out of it. She she couldn't get back in her bang because she deleted the cash because she was afraid she was being hacked and she came back into her bank account.
20:05:31 So I went over and looked at her machine and in about 5 min I was back in again because yes she did save a record on your machine.
20:05:39 She just didn't know where to look to find it. And besides, if it push comes to shop, go down to the bank and they'll.
20:05:44 Tell you how to get back in.
20:05:48 Okay, we bought.
20:05:48 Banks really don't want you. Pardon?
20:05:53 We bought new iPhones about and they arrived about 3 weeks ago and they're still sitting here in the boxes because we don't know how to set them up.
20:06:02 And if there are new iPhones, you just the instructions, you just put them next to the old iPhone, make sure they're both turned on and they'll sit there and pass messages back and forth and ask you to do things.
20:06:13 And depending upon the speed of your internet, after a couple of hours it'll have taken everything up the old one.
20:06:19 Well, it's his way. You should know.
20:06:24 Yeah, I know.
20:06:28 But.
20:06:27 Is there anything we can do about that? I, my computer is so slow. And, and it's, it's old, I need a new one, I guess, but.
20:06:38 And you're talking about all these wonderful things and all this speed and everything, we have the sound.
20:06:44 You like Walter Matthew and that his movie and he had this The fancy. Sports car and he never could and shows them in miles and miles of New York traffic all the time.
20:06:57 Yeah. Yeah.
20:06:58 He's going in all the time to get the Because they were in the car and I feel that way with our computers.
20:07:06 Yeah.
20:07:06 And I, I don't know if it's our computer or it's a.
20:07:11 Probably a combination of both. This is my new iPhone. And I set it next to my old iPhone.
20:07:19 They asked me to do various things upon between the 2 of them and it took about 4 h to to transfer 130 GB worth of data from the old one to the new one.
20:07:29 Okay.
20:07:29 So I just sat there and let it do its thing overnight and it was happy.
20:07:34 Well.
20:07:34 Doing it like Bluetooth or is it doing it over Wi-Fi?
20:07:37 That does it over Wi-Fi.
20:07:40 I have a couple of questions.
20:07:42 Yes.
20:07:42 What can I do? . Yes
20:07:44 Yeah, did you want us to sign in? That's one. And.
20:07:47 I forgot to make, I forgot to make a sign in pad. So yes, that would have been a good idea, but I forgot to make one.
20:07:55 Thank you.
20:08:01 Yes, no, are we meeting in December is the question.
20:07:54 Okay, then who for sure we're not gonna meet. In December. Right. I say no.
20:08:07 I think the nose have it.
20:08:13 No.
20:08:13 You know.
20:08:07 Oh, all in favor of not meeting. Say no. No. Yeah.
20:08:14 Okay, that seems to cover it.
20:08:20 I have we got the
20:08:20 And I, I want, I wanna. And I wanna thank you Lawrence for covering opera.
20:08:32 Okay.
20:08:29 I use that whenever that was decades ago, 2 decades ago. And really enjoyed it. Was mollified when it didn't take off.
20:08:34 Did you put Oh, I see it.
20:08:41 Cause I was so tired of, I think we were still using Netscape.
20:08:43 There another one that's right.
20:08:47 At your dinner.
20:08:43 Yes. They were the first big competitor to Netscape. And it's still a nice, it's still a nice browser.
20:08:53 It's just not really necessary. Yes.
20:08:57 Yeah, and Lawrence. I need to run because I need to get to Costco before they close in 20 min.
20:09:05 Yeah.
20:09:05 Okay.
20:09:06 . That there anything we wanted to talk about elections or before I I'd like to log off
20:09:14 Now go ahead, log off. We can do this via email.
20:09:17 And we do it. We'll see everybody in January. Okay. Okay.
20:09:21 Yeah, think about what you want to do in January. By the way, straight Mac does not do, driveway plowing.
20:09:30 So if it snows.
20:09:31 Yeah.
20:09:32 Wait don't do that.
20:09:34 Okay, well I wish everybody Merry Christmas happy Thanksgiving. Until we see each other in January.
20:09:40 Okay. Happy New Year.
20:09:43 Yeah, I had to help you. Okay, everybody have a good one.
20:09:48 Any questions for we longer?
20:09:48 Bye. Hmm.
20:09:50 Yes.
20:09:48 Thanks. Where do you want us to post or send suggestions for? Meeting topics.
20:09:56 I'll send them to the. Vice president account straight back vice president account yes.
20:10:04 Go ahead with your question.
20:10:05 Okay.
20:10:07 The phones that we bought is the, the 15 pro max. And our old phones are 6 plus.
20:10:11 Yes.
20:10:14 Ex s plus
20:10:16 Oh!
20:10:21 Well, that is. I'm more of a challenge. Okay.
20:10:27 Okay.
20:10:27 We switch from 8 to 15 pro maxes and No problem whatsoever, so I'm guessing the sixes will be the same.
20:10:37 It did just like yours, as you put them inside each other. They look at that pattern that they make and and then they just do their thing.
20:10:44 Well, except that if it's a 6 and not a 6 E, there was a, there was a, there was a Nex, R 6 S, the 6, I don't know if it can do.
20:10:52 6 plus.
20:10:54 6 plus. Okay, that might work. So just do what he suggested. Get just if you turn it on, it'll give you instructions on.
20:11:04 Well, first thing to do is make sure they're plugged in. And they have power so they can do this sort of stuff but.
20:11:07 Yep.
20:11:10 Just turn on the.
20:11:10 Make sure she does a current backup.
20:11:17 Yay. Yeah, that's a good idea.
20:11:20 Maybe 6.
20:11:25 Perfect backup. What does that mean?
20:11:25 Yeah. Back it up to icloud, make sure that everything on the phone is backed up to icloud.
20:11:33 And if your icloud account doesn't have enough room, then Well, add more stuff to your icloud account.
20:11:42 It's easier to restore from icloud that it is to try and transfer it direct from one phone to another.
20:11:50 So it's
20:11:50 Okay, have a quick question. How am I gonna talk? This, There's no card.
20:12:02 Yes.
20:12:05 Okay.
20:12:03 So I have to go to my. The yeah, Consumer cellular to see if they Well, let me use the.
20:12:16 For the phone connection.
20:12:19 They should. Because what the ESM does, the only thing it does is gets rid of the mechanical.
20:12:30 Okay.
20:12:25 The physical SIM is still works electronically the same way. So, but I have no experience with consumer cellular.
20:12:34 I just know that from an engineering standpoint should make a difference.
20:12:38 Okay, thank you.
20:12:42 Anyway. With that, then I wish you all a good night.
20:12:48 Thank you. Thank you very much.
20:12:49 Okay.
20:12:49 Thank you.

macOS Sonoma, iOS 17, iPadOS 17

For October 2023, we delved into topics we’ve hinted at over the past several months: macOS Sonoma (macOS 14), iOS 17, and iPadOS 17. These three new operating systems come with new privacy and security improvements, plus tools to help with greater integration between Apple devices.

Shown below, for example, is a series of widgets that you can add to your macOS desktop. They are literally on the desktop: applications run on top of them, so they don’t interfere with whatever you are doing. These particular widgets show, respectively, the weather at a specific location (clicking on the widget brings up a web page with more information), time zones in various places, a tip on how to do something in macOS, some current headlines, and finally a display of battery status for a mouse and keyboard in use on this Mac.

A selection of widgets added to the screen on macOS Sonoma. If you have multiple screens, each can have its own set of widgets.
A selection of widgets added to the screen on macOS Sonoma. If you have multiple screens, each can have its own set of widgets.

Widgets first appeared on the iPhone and iPad, and have been expanded on both: you can now add widgets to every desktop, not just the opening one.

Security improvements to the Mac, iPhone, and iPad have also been expanded. Most of these require a security chip, which limits these operating systems to more recent devices.

Video recording of the October 17, 2023 meeting

Transcript of the meeting

Pro tip: use your browser to search for particular words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.

18:33:15 Change the language.
18:33:20 You're not fun.
18:33:24 Kathleen didn't want me to choose Chinese or Arabic or Hebrew.
18:33:28 Yeah.
18:33:32 She's such a spoils part.
18:33:35 Okay. Tonight we're going to talk about, Sonoma and iOS, 17 and so on and so forth.
18:33:46 But first we're gonna have questions and answers. And, and as always, they can be about anything as long as it's.
18:33:53 Related to Apple hardware software. So any questions?
18:33:58 Hmm.
18:34:02 Well.
18:34:01 Lawrence, I have a request.
18:34:04 Yes.
18:34:09 Yes.
18:34:05 A few weeks ago, we talked about our favorite apps. For the Macintosh. Well, I have a favorite app.
18:34:13 That you might want to mention to others. For the iPhone and iPad, it's called Photocard.
18:34:22 Yes.
18:34:20 Made by Bill Atkinson. In the app store since we're coming up on. Howoween Thanksgiving and Christmas.
18:34:29 It's a really nice app for sending. A card, I mean it looked like a postcard.
18:34:37 Via email to a group of people like groups and the context list so You might want to mention that.
18:34:45 Folks night in our regular meeting.
18:34:47 Hey, yeah.
18:34:48 Is that PH or an F?
18:34:51 PH, OTO, photo, card, 2 words.
18:34:57 Bill Atkinson is the Apple, inventor of Quick Draw. Which was the It's the, it's kind of hard to explain what is, but.
18:35:07 In the original Macintosh when it drew things on the screen, it was using Quick Draw, which was a mathematical language.
18:35:14 For rapidly putting up graphical information and it was revolutionary at the time and it allowed the Mac to have a a bit mapped.
18:35:25 Display at the time that everybody else was using basically at dot matrix characters on a TV tube. It was what set the Mac apart from everybody else and in fact it's what made me buy one of the first Macintoshes.
18:35:43 We were living in Japan. At the time and the chief meteorologist for the US Seventh Fleet.
18:35:50 Picked up one in Hong Kong the day they went on sale. In the United States. He picked up one in Hong Kong at a Hong Kong computer store.
18:35:58 I guess it was technically a day later because never mind. He picked up one, he brought it and his daughter Emily had been using it.
18:36:08 And during the demo, he wanted to do something and it spit out the disk that it had because it only had one floppy disk drive and it asked for to Emily's disc.
18:36:17 And Kathleen and I saw that and we were instantly sold on it because prior to that time if you had a computer that had only one floppy drive and it wanted another one you put it in there it just assumed it was the right disc and if you told it to write over the top of something it would.
18:36:34 But this one. Spit the disc out because it said it wasn't Emily's disc and it refused to do anything until it got Emily's desk and we just thought that was that alone was brilliant plus the bitmap graphics even though they were only black back and white.
18:36:48 So we were extremely impressed with it. And, we bought a, I bought a Macintosh downtown, Tokyo, Nakiabara.
18:37:01 They had one on display. You came into the top floor of this building down. Actually, it wasn't, it was on the gains that wasn't Top floor they had cut off all the lights and they had a pillar in the center with a light coming down on it and I said I want to buy that and they said well that's our display and I said I don't care and I want to buy
18:37:22 it so. I got the first one sold in Japan. But, Bill Atkinson was the one who develop this way of rapidly displaying things on screen.
18:37:38 With great great precision we do not really use it today on mac OS 10 because macro attends based on Unix and a bunch of other things.
18:37:50 And they used a new type of system called quartz. You might, if occasionally see in technical documentations references to courts, but courts uses a bunch of, of vectors to draw things on the screen very rapidly.
18:38:08 And it requires staggering amounts of computer horsepower that they didn't have back in the day.
18:38:12 The original Mac is I recare all had a 4 megahertz. 68,000 processor, which is we now have.
18:38:23 We now have processes that are literally millions of times faster. But, photo card was designed by Bill Atkinson.
18:38:34 Cause he, made a lot of money and he decided he didn't want to be a programmer his entire life so he went into photography he's got a big website talking about photography.
18:38:43 And this photo card is free. You just. You can download it and you take a picture with your, iPhone and you can format it as a postcard and send it off to somebody.
18:38:55 Without leaving your phone it's really quite cool. And you can't beat the price.
18:39:02 There are other ones that do this not as well that cost money. So if you want to do that, you can, but.
18:39:11 I'm quite. Impressed with, photo card.
18:39:16 Anything else? Yes.
18:39:18 I have a quick question. Lauren. And I'll say in about the last month or so.
18:39:24 I've been getting these strange junk mails to my icloud email account. And I generally don't use that account and I rarely get an email on it.
18:39:36 And I just wonder if anyone else has that happening. They have titles, but there's symbols mixed in with the title so it's a dead giveaway they look like really weird So I just right click and I send him to junk, but is there anything else I can do to stop that?
18:39:54 Okay.
18:39:54 I can give you some general things to do with what junk mail is, but let me back up to it for a second.
18:40:01 It's not that your icloud account is hacked. I use my icloud account as my principal account.
18:40:09 I have lots of other accounts. The one for straight Macintosh user group is separate from the rest of them the one for my church is separate and so on so forth but most of them the rest of my stuff goes through my.
18:40:25 Hmm.
18:40:21 Cloud account and the reason is the security is much better. And when I say much better on a factor of one to 10 is about 10 times better than anybody else out there.
18:40:31 Having said that, sometimes you can think that you're, your address was compromised when it really wasn't.
18:40:40 I, had a Yahoo account because once upon a time Yahoo had a a photo sharing site.
18:40:51 I can't remember the name of what it was off offhand, but it was owned by Yahoo.
18:40:54 And so I set up an account with Yahoo so I could post photos and it wanted a backup account and for a backup account, a backup account is if you lose your password, what's your backup account so you can log in?
18:41:07 And I thought, well, I don't want to lose track of my photos. I gave it a backup account, which was my dot Mac account.
18:41:11 Well, Yahoo has been hacked 3 times and the first time they got a billion addresses, email addresses, the second time they got a billion and a half, the last one they got like 2.4 billion.
18:41:24 Addresses. And originally it was thought that they only got the addresses themselves, not the passwords and so on and so forth.
18:41:31 It later turned out that they did get the passwords. But I didn't care because I changed the passwords as soon as I found out it was hacked.
18:41:37 So that they didn't get my password. However, they did get the backup email account.
18:41:44 So even though you wouldn't use your icloud account for anything. At some point you might have used it for a bank or for credit card or for grocery store or something else and if they got hacked then your account is available to hackers to spam you.
18:42:01 Not to break into your machine, but to spam you. Or to trick you into giving up some information about yourself.
18:42:09 The other way that people can get that account is that somebody you know could have a machine that got compromised.
18:42:18 99% of the compromise machines in the world are Windows machines. And most of your friends probably have Windows machines.
18:42:25 So if one of them gets hacked and they at some point exchanged email with you. Now the hackers have your email account.
18:42:33 So that's probably why you're, that's probably why it's getting those email messages.
18:42:38 In terms of dealing with. Spam a couple things that I do is that every now and then I will go through and sort my mail by who is sent from.
18:42:52 And if you sort it by who it sent from, quite often a lot of the hackers will use the same thing over and over and over again.
18:42:59 Right now I'm getting something from Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo in case you had noticed has also been hacked.
18:43:08 Okay.
18:43:06 So I might get like 60 A message is from Wells Fargo. I don't have an account at Wells Fargo.
18:43:13 I just delete them all and I can do it all at once because they're sorted by who sent it.
18:43:17 The other thing to note is as you noted, they have these strange symbols at the top. If you sort your, empty, if you're search your emails addresses alphabetically, at the very start you're going to have things like emoji.
18:43:30 Because of just how the Mac sorts things, how computers sort things. The very start you're going to have things that have emojis at the start of this of the subject line.
18:43:41 And so they'll all be there together and you just kill them off because Most human beings don't start an email with an emoji.
18:43:49 Great.
18:43:50 The reason why hackers started with an emoji is because if you sort things alphabetically, they'll be right at the top when you go to look at your email.
18:43:59 So take advantage of the fact that they think you're sorting your messages by alphabetically, sort them by subject, besotting by the subject line, when all of those appear at the top, just get rid of them.
18:44:09 The other thing that I do is that Most people only get email in English and if you get emails in Japanese or Farsi or something else, they'll most often be clustered either at the very start or at the very end.
18:44:27 So if you get a bunch, if you sort them again by by the subject. Then you'll have a whole bunch of foreign languages at the start and whole bunch of at the end and you can just kill off sometimes hundreds of messages.
18:44:39 At once just by sorting in that way. I also would urge you to All the time go into your your spam mail and your junk mail and just delete it.
18:44:51 A lot of people, they put it in junk mail, but they don't delete it or they don't empty the trash.
18:44:57 This one woman, she had a map, she had an iPhone that had the standard 5 GB I cloud account and she was running out of space and she said I don't have anything in my iPhone on my iPhone.
18:45:08 Yeah, but she never deleted any of her junk mail. She never deleted any of her trash.
18:45:13 I deleted both and she had, there was half, it was half the space on her iPhone was just Messages that she wasn't looking at anymore, but they're still there until you delete them.
18:45:22 Right. Hmm.
18:45:22 So Start your email to get rid of a lot of the spam and then delete your spam and your Trash to free up space.
18:45:34 I haven't.
18:45:33 Okay, I only get like one a day. But they all kind of have a similarity and somewhere in the address it says Pop.
18:45:43 Which seems odd and then it has like these asterisks or hyphens or things between the letters.
18:45:50 Quite often.
18:45:50 But I can get a lot of them. It just seemed strange. I've never gotten ones that look like that before.
18:45:56 Right often, spammers will try to get around things like, for example, right now.
18:46:01 Almost everybody on plan is getting a spam email about your McCaffy account has expired. McCaffy.
18:46:10 Is, antivirus software that most manufacturers, Windows manufacturers, include a ninety-day account when they sell you a new machine.
18:46:20 They say comes with the cafe. They don't tell you that it's only for 90 days and then you have to buy it.
18:46:24 So most PCs come with. McCaffy and they know that most people won't renew it but it'll still come up and flag them.
18:46:45 Okay.
18:46:37 So in order to make it look like it's from a cafe they will send out spam email that says it's from a cafe and we received your order for $468 to renew your Kit McCaffy account which is way more this than it costs.
18:46:49 Hoping that you'll panic and logging on there and tell them something that allows them to charge you real money.
18:46:55 In order to get around the fact that people are now very suspicious of McCaffy, people will go through their mail and they'll sort and they'll say search for everything that has McCaffy and clump them all together so I can get rid of them all at once.
18:47:12 Yeah.
18:47:07 One way around that is to put spaces in the word macaffe. So without MC space, AFF, A, FEE, so that it still says McCaffy, but.
18:47:18 But it'll it'll get rid of that. It'll bypass that screening process and they'll stick in.
18:47:24 Little apostrophes or hyphens or other things to space it out so that they're still sending you the same spam, but they're hoping that it gets past your anti-spam.
18:47:34 Controls. So that's why you see a lot of that. When you see something about pop quite often It could be referring to an older, protocol used in, for email called pop which stands for post office protocol most of the most people today they should be using something called IMAP.
18:47:55 Hmm.
18:47:53 Which is much faster and convenient and so on and so forth. I'm maps the modern way of doing it and pop is the older way of doing it.
18:48:01 Hmm.
18:48:01 And it's possible that. That at some point it was passing through a pop account. Oh, so that might have something to do, why pops there?
18:48:08 Huh. Yeah. Thank you.
18:48:13 I see.
18:48:15 Yeah, I don't know whether you're gonna be able to help me with this or not.
18:48:21 I get the New York Times. I have Safari and I have Gmail. And when I try to send an article from the New York Times to somebody else.
18:48:33 I used to Do it without any problem at all. Now I get this message that says I can't connect.
18:48:40 To the Gmail account and then it has my, and it asks for the password.
18:48:48 So I tried to put in the password that I had and it doesn't like that of course.
18:48:54 So I went into Gmail, changed my password. Still didn't like it. So I thought, well, maybe it's the New York Times problem.
18:49:04 So I went to the New York Times and changed my password there. Doesn't have any effect at all.
18:49:12 So do you have any idea what the problem is?
18:49:16 I've been having problems with, authentication with, Gmail myself and as much as I know my password is correct and so on and so forth but quite often I'll get an error if I try to send through things through.
18:49:30 Gmail. And part of that has to do with that Gmail is not really an email.
18:49:36 System. Gmail is really just a whole bunch of web pages when you when you get your email in in Gmail, it's accepting email, but it's being stored in Google as web pages because Google's all about web.
18:49:52 So all of your email, you can go out, you can go look at your Gmail with a web browser and it's actually more full-featured than if you try to use a web, try to use an email client for it because it's web pages and I think that Gmail recently has has some kind of issue with their authentication.
18:50:12 So your passwords probably just fine, but the handoff between the New York Times and Gmail isn't working right.
18:50:19 And I've had the same problem and. They're just sometimes I just don't do it that way and I do it some other way.
18:50:26 But it's not you. I've had the same problem with New York Times. My daughter has an icloud account and she has a Gmail account and I was sending it to her Gmail.
18:50:38 I was sending things that I wanted her to read to her Gmail account because she shares it with her husband.
18:50:43 It's both of their names at Gmail. But it was stopped working, so I'm just plaguing her with it.
18:50:50 But I don't have a solution. I just have seen the same thing. That's all I can tell you.
18:50:55 Okay, what I've been doing is copying the, routing thing and putting it in an email to send.
18:51:02 So that's how I'm working around it, but you think that eventually they'll solve the problem?
18:51:07 I don't know. I don't know. Gene, Google and Apple and Microsoft.
18:51:15 All working to try to ween us away from passwords entirely and used pass keys. We should probably at some point talk about pass keys because Apple's pushing them really hard.
18:51:30 Microsoft pushing them really hard and Google is pushing them really hard. And where the past key is is just basically a piece of code that you have on your computer.
18:51:41 That identifies that yes, you really are who you say you are. So you don't want to have to type in a password when you go to to type in a password when you go to to a website.
18:51:52 Quite often people steal websites by setting up fake websites that look like what you think is a real site and you type in your real password and at that point they have your real account name and real password to the real site and then they use that for bad nefarious things.
18:52:07 And so Apple and Microsoft and Google are trying to get us to use task keys. But the way in which Microsoft is doing it is different from the way Apple's doing it and it's different the way Gmail is doing it.
18:52:22 It's kind of interesting because Apple was the first one with the idea, but Microsoft and Google didn't want to do it the way that Apple did.
18:52:32 They wanted to do it a slightly different way. And they wanted to do it a slightly different way. And it could be just they're trying to work through the hoops to have a different way.
18:52:41 And it could be just they're trying to work through the hoops to have a unified way of doing this.
18:52:41 But once you once you have a pass key set up for an account, it should be transparent between the 3 of them.
18:52:47 But if you If you just step back a second, you'll realize that your pass key for the New York Times and your pass key for Google, Gmail, and your PASS key for your password and Chrome for the New York Times could be 3 different things.
18:53:07 Hmm.
18:53:08 So it's a little bit complicated.
18:53:12 Okay, thank you.
18:53:14 I have another question about. Email. And the 3 devices I have an iPad, an imac, and an iPhone.
18:53:24 And the mail comes in to all the accounts. But if I delete it, On my imac.
18:53:30 And then remember to do the trash, that's fine, but then those messages are still on the iPhone and still on the Mac.
18:53:39 And you know, that's very laborious on. Especially the iPad to just. You know, you have to move them and put them in.
18:53:51 Yes.
18:53:49 The trash and I don't know what setting I need to change in order to have it be when I delete it if I delete it from my phone it should be gone from the computer and from the iPad, but it's not.
18:54:02 Yeah. The.
18:54:12 The answer is that if you're talking about messages as in Apple messages. The one of the things that you should do is to make sure that you're messages are synced via icloud.
18:54:27 Icloud is where Apple stores, photos, I, where they stored documents where they store passwords, where they store messages, email, everything.
18:54:37 Go through icloud. If you sync your accounts through icloud, then your map knows that the message account that you're using If you delete it from your Mac, it should delete it from the other ones as well.
18:54:52 However, that
18:54:52 Okay, well. Well, yeah, I don't know how to do that, so I'll have to find.
18:54:58 Okay.
18:54:59 You, easiest ways to show you. Share screen.
18:55:09 If we come up here to.
18:55:17 Up at the top of your preferences, system settings. You can actually let me show you this on a I phone, cause I wanna make sure that I got this set up front properly anyway.
18:55:34 Good.
18:55:40 I saw this earlier. There you are.
18:55:45 Okay.
18:55:50 And. If I come up into settings. Up at the top and your iPhone and it also works a mac OS.
18:56:01 If you click up at the top where it's got your picture and your eye account, a cloud account and everything where it says icloud.
18:56:09 It says what do you want to go on there and if you turn on photos, icloud, icloud mail, passwords, all this sort of stuff.
18:56:17 You turn those on, it will sync them. So that what appears on your iPhone is the same as of what appears in your iPad is the same as what appears on your Mac.
18:56:27 And the the good news bad news is you got to be a little bit careful with photos because it can easily overwhelm your account.
18:56:34 Kathleen and I, we share a 200 GB account so we're not too worried about that but for a lot of other people could overwhelm your account.
18:56:42 And if you do this, then you have a better chance that. The, the,
18:56:52 The messages will get. Deleted. Having said that, there are some, there are some problems with this.
18:57:02 And the biggest one is that I ran into this all the time. You can have, you can have multiple messy strings talking to the same person.
18:57:12 My daughter, I have one message string that goes to her and Kathleen. My daughter's name is like Cara.
18:57:18 So if I send it to like her and Kathleen, that might be one message string in messages.
18:57:24 But if I send it to Kathleen and like her, even though they're the same 2 people, it'll create a separate string.
18:57:30 Yes.
18:57:30 And because it's a phone if I. Send it to my daughter's. Phone number.
18:57:37 It'll be a separate thread than if I send it to her email account. So if you just think about Kathleen's email account.
18:57:44 My daughter's email account. And then switching the names back and forth, you could come up with dozens of different combinations for the same 2 people.
18:57:55 And That gets a little bit complicated if you try to delete the message on your Mac because your Mac doesn't have a phone number.
18:58:03 Your Mac is only going to get those messages that they go to the email account. If they go to the phone number, your Mac's not going to see it.
18:58:09 Unless you set up your Mac to respond to the phone numbers, which you can do. You can say, it goes to this phone numbers, put it on the Mac anyway.
18:58:17 But Just for the sake of argument, they're just they're dozens of different combinations and Apple can't fix that problem.
18:58:27 Cool.
18:58:25 Because the protocol that Messages uses is something called SMS. And SMS was invented long before Apple came along.
18:58:35 SMS was, stands for simple mail system. It was invented by the phone company's when they had pagers, even though those old little pagers used to have 128 character messages.
18:58:47 That's where messages comes from. It was used by pagers. Nobody has a pager anymore.
18:58:51 Every single pager company in the United States has gone out of business, but that protocol is still used for messages.
18:58:57 So yes, you can delete it, but you're going to be frustrated as I am and there's really nothing Apple can do or you can do to fix that.
18:59:06 Okay, well.
18:59:06 Unless you're just really disciplined and how you send messages, which nobody is. You do it on the spur of the moment.
18:59:13 If something occurs to you, and if I send it to Kathleen and Lai Car and then I respond to like her and Kathleen I've now got 2 threads going and if I use their phone numbers I could have a dozen threads going.
18:59:26 For the same conversation.
18:59:29 So I.
18:59:29 Well, I generally use my iPhone for messages and I don't message from my computer, so.
18:59:35 Yeah, I'm just I'm just explaining why it's difficult to kill them off because each device interprets that slightly differently.
18:59:43 And if all you have to do is just change recipients, what use the phone number instead of the email or the email instead of the phone number, or if you're sending it to multiple people at once, just list them in different orders and you create new threads.
18:59:56 Yeah.
18:59:56 And because it's a really, really old protocol and it doesn't, it's, it's, it's really.
19:00:04 Stupid. The big advantage of using messages for for sending messages, Apple messages for sending messages. Is that it goes as data.
19:00:16 If you send it to the phone number, it always goes as a message and the phone companies count it.
19:00:23 So if you somebody has has a very limited account that only allows a hundred messages a day. They'll get charged for those like 10 cents, 15 cents a message.
19:00:32 But if you send it as data, it's invisible to the phone company, the phone company doesn't see it.
19:00:37 And yet the people on the other end still get it. So message is a really quite powerful and it really, really, really torqued off Verizon and AT and T and everybody went Apple came up with it.
19:00:49 It's still using that old protocol in order to make it compatible. And that makes it difficult.
19:01:02 Yeah.
19:00:56 If you notice that you get messages and some are in blue and some are in green. If you get a message from somebody and it's green, it means that they have an Android phone.
19:01:12 Yeah.
19:01:08 If it's in blue, it means I have an iPhone. And that's really convenient because it means that for things like you want to send a emoji or you want to send lots of things to somebody's got a blue messages, they'll get it.
19:01:26 There's a good chance if you send it somebody's got the green messages they won't get it because the message.
19:01:30 Client on on Android is not that sophisticated.
19:01:34 One thing I do like about the iPhone and messages is that when you send it to another person with an IVR and it says delivered, you know it's gotten there.
19:01:44 Yes.
19:01:45 With the other kind of phone, you don't know.
19:01:47 No, no, and Google has actually tried suing Apple to make, to get Apple to help them make their client better.
19:01:57 And they went to a judge with that as the basis of a suit and the judge laugh literally laughed at them and threw it out.
19:02:06 Because no, Not a research and development agency for Google. So that didn't work. Good track.
19:02:15 My daughter, my daughter and son in law live in Australia and I can my daughter has a iPhone and my son-in-law.
19:02:24 It's apples, so he has an Android. So I can text back and forth with my daughter.
19:02:29 With no problem, it's, you know, it's free and all that stuff, but for my son a lot, I'd have to add on international to my Verizon plan and to be able to text back and forth.
19:02:41 So we use that. Messenger in in Facebook to communicate back and forth that's what we came up with.
19:02:50 Yeah, I I cannot begin to tell you how much contempt I have for Facebook. Messenger. I refuse.
19:02:59 I'm with you, I hate it.
19:03:01 Yeah. I refuse to answer Facebook messages except for one relative. But anybody else sends me a Facebook message I'm not ever gonna reply.
19:03:14 Yep, yep.
19:03:16 Any other questions?
19:03:18 I had one name, a quick question. I'm using Sonoma on my new MacBook Pro M 2 max.
19:03:27 And a strange quirk seems to crop up when I'm using either the track pad or my mouse.
19:03:38 On a, in Safari. I, when I'm just moving the mouse along the screen.
19:03:48 It just changes web pages on them for some instantaneous thing. And goes back to my homepage if I'm on some other website Yeah, all of a sudden it just blinks to the other to back to the homepage.
19:04:04 And luckily there's history so I can go back to where I was. But, so I checked on the internet and several other people said they had this problem and no one knew how to knows how to solve it.
19:04:16 The, some people said, okay, change your track pads speed and don't use tap to click.
19:04:26 I try that. It still doesn't. Yeah. And so I don't know what's going on there.
19:04:32 I don't know if you've ever heard of that.
19:04:33 If this is on your track pad or track ball or what?
19:04:41 Huh.
19:04:37 I haven't, no, the laptop MacBook Pro trackpad. And I have a wireless mouse as well.
19:04:47 And it doesn't matter which one I use if I just move the cursor. Trying to click on something on a webpage, all of a sudden it just jumps.
19:04:55 Now it doesn't jump back to my homepage and It doesn't happen all the time.
19:05:01 It's like intermittent. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. But it's really annoying and I so a lot of people had the same problem but no one knows why it happens or it's just on Sonoma and it's never happened in Monterey.
19:05:16 I don't have an explanation for that. I do know you can run into problems with the trackpad spontaneously doing strange things, but that's caused by the fact that If you get have any kind of static charge on your body.
19:05:32 When you come near the track pad it responds as if you're touching it and so you can have goose movements.
19:05:38 Oh, do you? That could be it. That could be it.
19:05:51 Yeah.
19:05:40 Well, if you normally see that in the wintertime when it starts getting cooler. It hasn't been that cold though, but if you turned on the heat in your house, it could be you could be just the static chart.
19:05:58 I will tell you something that I did and I did this long ago because I was I have 2 degrees in the history, but I was a computer professional.
19:06:05 I only wear cotton and before I sit down at a computer I always wash my hands. There are 2 reasons for watching.
19:06:13 Well, wearing the cotton, if you're wearing cotton, you can't build up a, you, it's harder to build up a static charge.
19:06:18 But the washing your hands does 2 things. It gets the oils off of your hand. But the other thing does, touching the faucet.
19:06:25 The faucet in your home is grounded. And touching the faucet ground you and washing your hands washes off the oils and static.
19:06:33 So it's a I've been religious about that and I cracked me up because the last 10 days my granddaughter was here from England.
19:06:44 She's 6. And she wanted to use her mother's iPad and before she did anything she went into bathroom washed her hands and I thought she is trained well.
19:06:56 Of course my daughter That was first thing I ever, she started using a computer when she was around 6 and I said, now wash your hands.
19:07:03 So apparently my daughter has passed that on to her. To her daughter.
19:07:06 Well, thank you. I think I'll give that a shot. It does sound like the symptom, though.
19:07:11 And the reason is that the way the track pad works is through induction and you can create that a similar, a similar type of.
19:07:20 Field just with your hands if there's a static charge on it.
19:07:22 Right. Okay, thank you.
19:07:25 Can you disable the trackpad or? Oh, you can, okay.
19:07:31 No, not really.
19:07:37 Right, right.
19:07:29 No. Now, when you're, when your, when your MacBook turns on, it knows there's an iPad and there's and you really don't want to be able.
19:07:41 To do that, yeah. Yeah.
19:07:42 The mess with that. Anyway, it's 7 o'clock and now I believe so we will start the program.
19:07:53 I don't have the president or vice president so we'll just skip reports from, president or treasurer, so we'll skip reports from them.
19:08:04 Apple in case you had notice the pattern. In the spring they have major announcements for hardware and the start of June they usually have their Apple developers conference which they talk about new operating systems that they're coming up with and then in the fall they released the operating systems and they in September.
19:08:29 They released a new version of operating systems for watches, iPads, iPhones, home pod.
19:08:39 Most people don't know that it gets updated because it happens kind of invisibly. All kinds of stuff, including the Mac.
19:08:44 And this year was no exception. The a lot of people if if you read some of the commentary sites they say well they didn't really do much of it all just cosmetic and that's not true at all.
19:08:58 The, the Apple made a whole bunch of security and privacy. Changes they made several changes in terms of the functioning of the operating system and then they made some cosmetic ones.
19:09:12 For obvious reasons because I'm gonna do a demo we're gonna focus mostly on the cosmetic ones because those are the ones that I can actually show you.
19:09:21 But as an example of the kind of things that they have behind the scenes. They greatly cracked down on privacy restrictions.
19:09:28 You will see this sometimes when you've launched Safari and you try to go to a site that you've never gone to before.
19:09:34 And it just takes your browser a little while. And that's because the safari is trying to create a secure tunnel between your machine.
19:09:43 And what you're talking to. And if the other, if the other site isn't set up properly, it'll take a while and try, it'll try A, it'll try B, it'll try to see and eventually it might just give up and say, I can't get there.
19:09:57 And yet if you launched some other browser, it might work. And the reason because it for that is that Apple is getting really really picky about security for websites.
19:10:08 It's when you when you launch when you launch the fire and try to go to the site it checks it against a black list that Apple automatically updates on your machine every time you turn on your machine.
19:10:20 Checks that against a black list of compromise sites and just really bad sites. It checks the security certificate on your site.
19:10:30 And, certificate on the site that you're going to, it checks to see that your machine is actually properly configured.
19:10:39 And if you ever have your machine stolen, one of the things that it does is that when, when the thief launches, assuming they can break into the machine and right now it's kind of hard to break into the machine if they don't have your a username and password, but assuming that the thief can break into the machine and you've reported it stolen when the thief goes to that
19:11:01 website, Apple looks up a list of stolen machines and tracks their location and then notifies people, hey, this dollar machine is at this address.
19:11:12 And it's using GPS location for with IP to tell people where the Shell machine is.
19:11:19 So it's doing a lot of It's a doing a lot of stuff to protect you that you don't actually see.
19:11:25 The other thing they're doing in terms of just, on the security front and privacy front.
19:11:31 Is they are greatly cracking down on how you can share things. You want to share photos, you want to say share video, you want to share a lot of things.
19:11:41 Apple's very picky about checking the security of the people you're sending it to. So if you are sending it to, you know, Mike Johnson and it thinks you picked the right, and wrong, might argue with you about that.
19:11:58 And where it does a lot of the processing now, particularly if you have an Apple silicon machine, I can ask Siri for the time and Siri will give me the time.
19:12:09 In the past it used to ask Cupertino, okay, this guy is located in Washington State, New West and my Syrian another room is giving me the time.
19:12:19 Okay.
19:12:23 I could ask, I could ask for the time and it would have to ask Cupertino, he's based here, what's the time there?
19:12:29 And they'll come back and give me the time. Now, if you have an Apple Silicon machine, all of that processing goes on on the machine.
19:12:36 It'll give you the time. It'll give you weather in which Siri asked for the weather instead of asking it for you.
19:12:43 And so it'll just give you back the weather. A lot of things that can process on the machine.
19:12:48 Now if you ask for, I can't remember what it was. Kathleen and I were wondering when a movie came out.
19:12:55 And so I asked theory. Last night when this movie came out and Siri came up with an answer It can't do that kind of processing on on your computer because it doesn't know that.
19:13:07 So it had to go out and ask but came back instantly with the with the answer. So it's doing a lot of that on on your machine in order to protect your privacy.
19:13:16 Google recently was sued by the, European Union for violations of Oh, stop it. My phone's trying to answer all these questions that I just asked.
19:13:32 Good was recently, suited by the European Union for, Google has this thing called the Ign, incognito mode.
19:13:41 Where if you fire up Google Chrome and you go to incognito, you have a private tunnel.
19:13:48 And it doesn't share your name or your gender or anything about that. However, it still collects that information, so it doesn't know your name doesn't know your gender, but it knows that this person on this machine at this IP address looked up dockers and it looked up support hose and it looked up.
19:14:11 Penny liners or what it doesn't make any difference what it is you're looking up.
19:14:15 It knows that that person was looking for those kind of things and it keeps track and it creates an electronic profile that they sell to advertisers.
19:14:22 So on one hand, they said they're protecting your privacy, but on the other hand, they were not protecting your privacy.
19:14:28 And, and the European Union is charged, I can't remember, it was 6 8 billion dollar.
19:14:32 Fine for this and they're they're protesting this. But Apple, when you, When you ask for things from Siri, even if it has to go to Cupertino.
19:14:42 Apple doesn't give that stuff away. Doesn't tell anybody about it. Doesn't keep it.
19:14:47 They get rid of it. So they're doing a lot to protect your privacy and it's in it's invisible.
19:14:55 So I can't really demonstrate that. I can just tell you that that happens. But there are some things that I can demonstrate.
19:15:01 So I'm going to start off with the iPhone because the iPhone is the hardest thing for me to demonstrate.
19:15:11 But it so happens that I have the means. So I'll do it anyway.
19:15:23 And I did it wrong.
19:15:47 I'm not going to do it that way because .
19:15:53 I screen shared earlier and then I killed it. And in a way that I can't share it again.
19:16:00 Drat.
19:16:02 There's a little tiny icon at the top of your screen in blue that just I think that's new maybe that has something to do with it.
19:16:09 Oh, here it is. I found it.
19:16:11 Okay.
19:16:13 Alright.
19:16:18 One of the things that you should note is that as somebody mentioned, there's this little tiny icon up here.
19:16:24 This icon means that I am sharing my screen with something. Unfortunately, I managed to kill it so Kathleen can't see it anymore, but that icon means that I am sharing my screen.
19:16:35 With something I can share it with my computer or in What I was trying to do is also share it with my TV, but I managed to kill that off.
19:16:44 So that's new. This part up here is called Do you remember what that's called, Kathleen?
19:16:53 Dynamic Island.
19:16:51 Since I can't see it's hard. Dining Eric Island. And I managed to.
19:17:01 Kill it off again.
19:17:07 Hold on a second, I need to. Turn on Meringue, so Kathleen can see what I'm doing.
19:17:18 Speaking, Rich, I'll show you how to turn on nearing. I killed the TV, so I have to turn the TV on.
19:17:34 And I turned the TV completely off. Oh well. Yes.
19:17:43 Oh yes, I can do it that way. Sarah, turn on TV.
19:17:49 Didn't want to. Well, so much for that part of the. 24 7 and we have a lot of support.
19:18:05 New video tonight. Okay.
19:18:11 Back to my not terribly well done. Yeah.
19:18:20 Well, Fooi. I can either mirror it to the TV or I can mirror it to you, but I can't do both.
19:18:28 So. I'm just going to tell you what it can do. The, they've added more control panels to the iPhone that allow you to do all kinds of things including screen marrying and adaptive listening if you have a hearing aid and a bunch of other stuff.
19:18:50 And I was gonna show you some of that, but I guess I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to talk about some other things that it did.
19:18:57 I took some photos. And I went to show you kind of some different things you can do with. The photos.
19:19:07 These photos were taken on a new iPhone 15. And if you look at the sizes of them.
19:19:15 There this one here is 2.3 MB. This one's 3.2 8 MB.
19:19:24 This one is 6 MB. This one's 3.3 4 5 MB.
19:19:27 So. This one that 6 seems a little bit different, but the other ones aren't that odd.
19:19:33 Then you look at the dimensions. The first one is 4,032 by 3,024 pixels.
19:19:41 The next one is 4,032 by 3,024. This one is 5,712 by 4,284 pixels.
19:19:50 This one's 4,000 324,032 by. 3,024.
19:19:57 If you are really good at math, you'll realize that Most of these are.
19:20:06 12 megapixel, but. One of them is 24 pit megapixels.
19:20:12 And, but they all seem, you know, not that big, but if you export them as JPEGs, you'll see that there's a dramatic difference in size.
19:20:21 The H. A HEIC and I don't remember what it stands for, it's high efficiency, something rather.
19:20:29 Is Apple's format for cramming an awful lot of information. Into very little space and when you export them as JPEGs you'll see that they're actually much larger.
19:20:39 So this one that's 4,032 by 3,024 is actually 5 MB this one is 3.9 8 5 MB this one's 4.6 9 MB but the one that was 5,712 pixels across is actually a 10 MB picture picture.
19:21:03 So the, the, if you have this new phone, it can take really, really, really. High resolution pictures but only with the standard camera.
19:21:15 And there's a reason for that. And if I look at these. Photos. Open them up.
19:21:27 This one is taken with the wide angle lens. And it's it uses the standard camera, but it's just a wide angle mode.
19:21:37 This is the standard camera in standard mode. And if I blow this up, you'll see that it's really, really, really.
19:21:45 Detailed even if I blow it up because it's a lot more pixels there so very, very, very detailed picture of this.
19:21:55 Maple. This one is at 2 X and this is at 5 X. And the way in which Apple did this is actually quite clever.
19:22:06 If you look at professional cameras. A lot of them have what's a Pentax lens.
19:22:15 Pentax is the name of company, but it's also the type of box that has where the light balances around off of mirrors on the inside of the camera to increase the focal length without having a huge camera.
19:22:26 And Apple did the same thing only in this very, very thin. Iphone it's the same basically same size as regular iPhones, but it does at either 6 or 7 times it bounces the light around using mirrors inside of the camera.
19:22:42 To get of it a longer focal length. Though the farther it is from the lens to where it's recorded.
19:22:48 The larger something can be at a distance. So. That's what they did is they stuck a bunch of mirrors in here to increase the focal length without increasing the size of the camera.
19:22:59 That was one trick. The other thing is that it's image stabilized. So it bounces around with the motion to stabilize the motion.
19:23:07 So you can take a You can take a telephoto picture with this new camera and it's still image stabilized or you can take a video and it's image stabilized because it's got a bunch of little sensors in there that move it around.
19:23:21 As your body moves around. You can't do a huge amount of moving, but you can. You can bounce around quite well and it's also very good in low light.
19:23:30 I took these photos. Today at, at 4 o'clock. And as you see, It was very, very dark and rainy.
19:23:39 It was pouring rain when I took this. And yet that photo looks. Really, really nice and rich.
19:23:45 The exposure on it's just fine very very wet but nice rich photo in dim light. And that's the the new photo that they, new camera that have and the new iPhone.
19:23:59 But I lot of the other things that are on iOS 17 will work on any. Camera produced since the iPhone XS.
19:24:10 Camera. It's backward compatible. But some of the features won't work unless you have the newer hardware.
19:24:18 But in terms of most of the things it'll do. As an example, on the front you can have.
19:24:26 An image and I'm going to hold this up. That is a custom, image on the front of the camera that I added.
19:24:33 And I can, I added the. The fonts at the top where it displays the time, that's all custom.
19:24:43 It has an interface that allows you to to change that sort of stuff and you also have custom cards for some of your contacts.
19:24:51 So Kathleen calls me. Let's see if I can show her card.
19:25:07 If Kathleen calls me, I get a full screen of that. Of that photo.
19:25:15 It fills the entire front of the camera. So there's I can just tell that a glance that Kathleen's calling me.
19:25:19 And you can set that up for any of your contacts that you feel like. So a lot of a lot of nice things that they did with it in addition to the privacy and security issues.
19:25:35 So I'm quite, quite impressed with the new operating system. And if you have an iPhone, They can run IS iOS 17.
19:25:46 I highly recommend that you install it without hesitation because among other things is much more secure than prior operating systems.
19:25:55 Oh, the other thing I wanted to show you. Is that Apple has these widgets up here in this corner you'll see a widget that has a world clock.
19:26:05 And the world clock. It shows time zones for here for, Tokyo, for,
19:26:16 Alexandria, Virginia and for London because I have various relatives in those places. But it used to be that you could only have an image on the front.
19:26:27 On the front page, but if you move internally, you can now have as many widgets on any page that you want.
19:26:33 So, and. As many widgets as you want. And what a widget is is just a larger.
19:26:40 You kind of preview of what that app would do if you were running that app as a whole.
19:26:47 So the world clock if you run the world pocket looks like this. But the widget. Doesn't take up nearly as much space and it's just in that upper corner.
19:26:57 So, lots of different things have done with, with widgets and customization. And on the iPad, the iPad.
19:27:08 Has added widgets. Again, you can have one widget before and now you can have a widget on every screen.
19:27:16 And the iPad also has one of the things that I really like is that has the health data. In the past, There's a health app on the iPhone.
19:27:26 But. It can have an awful lot of information. But it's on a fairly small screen.
19:27:34 And. On the iPad, you have a much larger presentation so they can have a lot more detailed data.
19:27:42 And the health app on the iPhone will allow you to hook into things like a Olympic medical systems health record.
19:27:53 So their patient portal, you can suck all that stuff into Apple health and have it all in one place.
19:27:58 You can get. How far you walk that day you can get how many breaths per minute were recorded by your watch as well as gift your lab results from.
19:28:08 Going to the clinic and having your blood drawn all in one place. So. Lots of Very good changes large and small.
19:28:19 On the iPad as well. On the Mac. This first slide doesn't really tell you much.
19:28:29 Just tells you the Apple says it runs on all these platforms, which big deal. Here they were really happy with the fact that the especially on the Apple silicon machines they can get really fast.
19:28:40 Games running which I'm not a big game player so didn't really care too much about that but this is, this particular one shows profiles where this individual has a profile for home and a profile for school in Safari and I'm going to demonstrate that in a second.
19:29:01 But it, I, they've had profiles in. And for safari before but they were kind of clutsy and I didn't use them.
19:29:10 I used profiles on and chrome all the time so that if I'm doing something for my church it's different than for the user group and it's different for me and so on and so forth.
19:29:21 And now they've got profiles in Safari that actually work quite well. The other thing that you have are widgets.
19:29:28 So. There's a time widget here and weather widget and this is a photo widget and reminders and all kinds of things with widgets.
19:29:38 And I can't show you this because this is trying to show you a new feature in Facetime.
19:29:44 In Facetime. If you are doing Facetime presentation with say 5 or 6 people, you can now insert yourself into the image and your screen will appear behind you.
19:29:56 So it looks like you're standing in front of a blackboard, but this gentleman's actually got a computer in front of him and Facetime is fake projecting the screen behind him and he's just kind of seenlessly in front of it.
19:30:10 So it looks like he's got a big whiteboard behind it. But that only works with Face Time.
19:30:16 So I can show you that. However, they have some things that you can do with Zoom and I'm going to stop screen sharing to show you that because this is all also part of their presentation.
19:30:31 And that is they've implemented something called gestures. Some of these gestures I find difficult, like for example they have gestures where I can have a heart.
19:30:40 And I can. Rarely get this to work. But if it works right, it you should see parts bubbling out of my hands and I don't happen to see anything.
19:30:50 The other one they have is that you can have a thumbs up and it'll create a thumbs up gesture.
19:30:55 Does everyone see that? Okay, and if you have you can have a thumbs down and it'll give you a big Thumbs down.
19:31:04 But if you have 2 thumbs up.
19:31:07 You get fireworks. And if you have 2 thumbs down, you can pretend that it's Washington.
19:31:13 Any time of the year, any time at all, just starts raining. And you can have, let's see.
19:31:20 Bubbles if you do this And if you like Star Wars, you can do.
19:31:28 Well, that's a wrong one. That's an interest. I can't remember. There's a way to do lasers, but I don't remember how to do it.
19:31:36 Yeah, I don't remember. Anyway, there's a way to do lasers as well.
19:31:42 These are called gestures. They work in Facetime and for they'll also work in Google Meet and in Zoom obviously and other things as well.
19:31:52 So the next time you're Facetime with someone, if you want to give them a thrill, you can use gestures.
19:31:58 And I'll post these speaking which I should post something else, but I'll do that when I go back to my showing my desktop.
19:32:07 Yeah.
19:32:06 To do those work on the iPhone and the iPad with iOS 17
19:32:16 Yeah.
19:32:12 I know they work in the iPhone. I don't know if they work in the iPad because I haven't tried it but and some of the things that I'm talking about may only work if you have an Apple silicon machine.
19:32:23 The iPad and iPhone have Apple Silicon, but some of these things may require newer machines, then I don't happen to know.
19:32:34 It may require an Apple silicon machine. For some things, but I want to get back to my desktop.
19:32:44 And what was I gonna show you on the desktop? Oh, widgets.
19:32:52 This is a widget. That I have and you don't see it on my screen because I have 2 screens and this is on my other screen showing the when I snapped this this was several days ago.
19:33:06 This is the weather in Squim and it's showing you the weather. Here's the various times zones.
19:33:11 These are one thing that a lot of people don't realize there's a little tip thing built into the Mac that'll tell you how to use new features and it also exists on the iPhone.
19:33:23 There's an application called tips. There's an application called tips on the iPad. Just launch it and go through it because you'll learn things that you probably didn't know.
19:33:31 Here we have some news headlines and here's the battery level of my keyboard in my wireless mouse.
19:33:38 I have widgets for these plus some other things but those are the widgets and they you can have them all clustered together or you can have different widgets on different screens.
19:33:50 So just go to town with widgets. Another thing that I've talked about, I told you this was true, but I never actually showed and I'm not sure that it will work, but I got to try it.
19:34:00 Is that you can Now if you have an Apple silicon machine, you can now get a lot of the apps for iPhones.
19:34:11 On your on your Mac and one of the things that I like to play is mahjong which is a ancient Chinese game and most of the Mahjong games on the Mac have commercials and I couldn't stand the commercials.
19:34:28 Well, this mahjong game is for the iPhone and it doesn't have commercials.
19:34:34 So I immediately glommed onto that so that I can play mahjong. When I'm on hold, I will quite often play mjong or solitaire or something just because I'm stuck on hold and I don't want to be on hold.
19:34:47 One thing you will notice with these games that were reported from the iPhone is they have very simple interfaces.
19:34:53 If you go up under the menu, there's really nothing there. But, this will take you home.
19:34:59 And you can play a new game and it's set up. Very very simply because It's basically from an iPhone.
19:35:09 App and there's Not that much you can do with it, so. Let's go here and exit to point out of it or I could have gone up to the quit menu.
19:35:22 But that was basically unchanged from an iPhone app to work on a Mac and on the Mac it's got a bigger screen so it takes up more space but it's a fairly limited set of interface because there's not much you can do with it but on the other hand from mahjong i don't really need a heck of a lot So that's kind of cool.
19:35:46 And I thought I'd just show you that. Something that a lot of people don't know why you would ever subscribe to Apple Arcade.
19:35:56 I will tell you one reason to subscribe to Apple arcade. The arcade games have no advertisements.
19:36:01 So if it's if you like playing games and you can't stand the advertisements, you can subscribe to Apple Arcade and they don't have advertisements.
19:36:10 And now I want to show you Safari. This is Safari and when it came up. You'll notice that there's something new up here.
19:36:20 It says Lawrence. This is my basically the my standard. How I want Safari to come up when I'm working for me.
19:36:29 This is showing my website. This website has lists of my publications and there are quite a few of them.
19:36:39 Publications. And that's this is where I put them and I've only got like a third of them up, but.
19:36:46 I put them up on this one site. So. When I launched the far, I'd like to make sure that the site is actually up.
19:36:53 So that's my startup screen. And then I have things that I use all the time. The news sites and personal things having to do with like going to Olympic medical and church and whatnot and tools that I use quite often.
19:37:09 That's for me. But say I'm doing something for straight Macintosh user group. I can change who I am by coming up here and saying I want a smug window.
19:37:20 And I close this. So the smug window comes up and it's got the. Smug.
19:37:26 Website, but then it has things today that I want to talk about. So I've already pre-populated this.
19:37:33 So one of the things I wanted to make was the gestures that you, oh, this, this overlay that you can use in, and Facebook.
19:37:41 That's one of the things I wanted to show people. And then the, they call it reactions.
19:37:45 Those gestures. So you can have hearts will come pouring out in a nice little. Thing thumbs up we'll give you a thumbs up icon thumbs down balloons rain confetti and oh that's how you do it.
19:38:01 Lasers. There we got the lasers going there. And, and fireworks.
19:38:10 So. You can do that with these gestures. And the other thing I wanted to talk about was the attendance form.
19:38:20 I'm going to talk about that in a second. And what does Sonoma work run on? If you go all the way back, this is the Apple Sonoma page.
19:38:29 You go to all the way down almost to the very bottom. It comes up and with this box here and it says.
19:38:35 IMAX from 2,019 and later. I, Mac Pro from 2,019 and later I'm at pro 2,017.
19:38:43 Max Studio, MacBooker, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro. It has these here.
19:38:51 So if you want. A machine that runs the new Sonoma, and needs to have one of these.
19:39:01 I will tell you, looking at this list, it kind of gave me a dead giveaway. All of these machines either have a T one or T 2 security chip.
19:39:07 Or they have a powerful graphics card. And so that's. But they need for a lot of the features that they're using.
19:39:18 The T one, T 2 security chip is what allows. So, to accept a serial request for the time and give it back to you without actually tailing.
19:39:27 Telling anybody else, asking Apple about it. That's done with the security chip. It sanitizes those things and send you back.
19:39:37 Information and it won't. It won't accept some. Types of requests because it knows those are bad things to do.
19:39:46 So iPad similarly down towards the bottom, it's got a list of the machines that it runs on.
19:39:55 Here basically iPad Pro, 12.9. Inch second generation later, iPad Pro, 10.5 inch, so on so forth, list of the machines it runs on.
19:40:07 And iOS 17 down at the bottom of the page. Yeah.
19:40:16 Has a list of machines that it runs on as well. I forgot to tell you about one thing. I don't know if I can actually display it.
19:40:24 If. If the iPhone is turned on its side. And it will give you.
19:40:32 In a night time mode where it gives you the time and shows anything that might have popped up. While you were sleeping so you can use it as a Don't go out there.
19:40:44 It'll, you can use it as kind of a night time. Clock. And I like this so much that I got a stand to sit beside the bed so I can.
19:40:55 Refer to it at night in case I wake up at 3 30 in the morning and want to know exactly what time it is.
19:41:00 Oh yes, if if the lights are off it turns red so it doesn't ruin your your night vision.
19:41:07 Laura.
19:41:06 I haven't any, work like that on the side. It just wants to be in portrait mode.
19:41:14 I mean, it's so when I turn it sideways, the text is, you know, still, it's not right.
19:41:21 But it shows it shows the clock and everything.
19:41:24 Yeah, it shows the clock and it stays on all night, whether it's plugged in or not.
19:41:30 But it doesn't. It doesn't turn sideways. And I know it's supposed to.
19:41:36 How, when it turns sideways, is it, is it? If it's if it's to if it's not it's got to be fairly vertical in order for that to work.
19:41:46 So if it's at too much of a slant, it won't. Huh. How old is your phone?
19:41:53 Yeah. It's brand new. It's a 15, pro.
19:41:59 Well, see, that's a problem.
19:42:01 Yeah, I went from an 8.
19:42:05 I know it works on an iPhone, 11, a 12, a 13, a 14 because when my daughter and son-in-law were here while we were playing around with these And I know it works with those, so I'm not sure.
19:42:21 Do you have the, Phone set up to auto rotate.
19:42:25 Well, now maybe, maybe not. It does so on music videos, but I don't know about, Not otherwise.
19:42:33 Yeah.
19:42:34 I'm like, I can look into and see.
19:42:37 Anyway, I'm going to put the links for these pages that I, was showing I'm gonna.
19:42:46 Put these in the chat window. So that. You can see what it is I'm talking about.
19:42:54 So, this presenter mode for. Hey, time.
19:43:03 It's going to be here. Oh, that's terrible. I will clean that up.
19:43:16 And. So, You notice that, on that, You are that I posted this one up here that I chopped off some stuff at the end of it.
19:43:34 I'm going to explain that in a second.
19:43:41 This is the requirements for Sonoma. Requirements for iPad OS.
19:43:51 And. The requirements for iOS. 17.
19:44:03 I am gonna go back to. What was it? This first one that had the Ridiculous.
19:44:10 You're When you get these really long, and you want to send them off to someone, what you want to do is Look for.
19:44:23 Well, let me see. First of all, let's see if this works. Yes, it does.
19:44:29 A lot of these things are tagging information and trying to find out. Wow. What kind of machine you're using because it'll give you different kinds of information.
19:44:40 Depending upon what machine you're using. But also sometimes it is like who you are and where you are.
19:44:46 And Apple doesn't do that with their URLs, but a lot of places do. So you'll go to someplace.
19:44:52 And generally speaking, what you want to do is get rid of anything past the question mark. And I will show you what I mean by that by going to the New York Times.
19:45:12 You go to the New York Times.
19:45:26 I. And I know I did that.
19:45:37 New York Times. Continue. And you want to get this. Article.
19:45:43 So I went to Share this article with somebody. I don't care. I'm gonna share this article with somebody and our this was actually fairly It doesn't have a bunch of stuff after it.
19:45:56 But, what happens is that, When I first went to the New York Times from Google.
19:46:15 And I clicked on the New York Times.
19:46:20 Well, now it's not going to do that because I, it's cash, but. If you end up with these really long URLs, look for a question mark.
19:46:30 A question mark is not a legal character in a URL. And so what people do is they use anything after the question mark to send tagging information about you to whoever it's going to so that they New York Times will know that I came to the New York Times from Google.
19:46:46 And it's a way of getting ad revenue. Well, I don't want. To tell people where people came from.
19:46:53 So I will go through and just chop off everything after the question mark in the URL. Anything after that question mark.
19:47:00 Is not necessary. So just Go through and just get rid of everything after the question mark and it'll still work.
19:47:09 And this first one here had a bunch of strangeness in it. And it was Apple trying to find out was I.
19:47:17 Talking to Apple. From a. From a Mac or from something else.
19:47:23 So it, it, added a bunch of stuff to the URL that it really didn't need.
19:47:30 But the other thing I wanted to show you since I mentioned this is this is for this. User group meeting is that I can also stick things in that I frequently forget such as the October sign-in sheet.
19:47:43 So I. Tap the sign in sheet and I'm going to grab the URL. And paste it in down here and ask you that you.
19:47:53 Please go and sign in. Cause it helps me keep track of what we're doing.
19:48:05 But you can have as many profiles as you want. And I want to show you how to set them up.
19:48:10 It's really just super difficult. You go to Safari, go to settings. Go to this thing called profiles.
19:48:20 Say plus and say. News and here you can Use it for doing news or something. And you can pick an icon to show what it is and.
19:48:33 I don't know what color we call news. Since the, New York Times is supposed to be the grey lady.
19:48:42 We'll call it gray. And create profiles. So now we have. Hey, I guess that's not great.
19:48:48 That's brown. Okay, I don't care. So my personal ones got an icon of a person, the smug because I teach things.
19:48:58 It's got a picture of a graduates hat and the news is a briefcase. But now that I have this I can add bookmarks to this.
19:49:07 So.
19:49:12 Washington Post, I say. Add bookmark. And it adds me where I want the bookmark and I say that I want it under news.
19:49:25 And, and now when I go back to that. News profile it'll say
19:49:37 When it's got one tab and the one tab is the Washington Post. And if I go to bookmarks.
19:49:42 News has the Washington Post. So that's part of that profile. The smug profile has other things.
19:49:49 The my favorites which is what I have at home has lots and lots and lots of bookmarks.
19:49:55 But I can separate them depending upon what it is that I'm doing. And it's some.
19:50:01 If you're working, which I'm not doing, it's a great way to separate your work from what you're doing.
19:50:09 But since I do work for my church and I work for various other things, it allows me to segregate that.
19:50:15 Stuff so that I went in doing looking at church stuff. I'm only looking at church stuff and nothing else So it's really quite convenient.
19:50:23 Way to do things and Apple finally did it right. The first Couple tries that they did at this one.
19:50:30 It was not pretty, but this is this is pretty well done.
19:50:34 And do I have any questions about anything that I've talked about?
19:50:42 Lawrence, could you say again how you? Get your iPhone to be like a night.
19:50:50 Clock. I didn't catch that.
19:50:50 Oh. You plug it in and you turn it. Sideways.
19:50:59 Okay.
19:51:00 You turn it sideways. And it will eventually. Change to night mode. I think is what they call it.
19:51:08 And it's not doing that because I keep on moving it. But you just hold it sideways.
19:51:18 Okay.
19:51:14 I leave it plugged in because I don't. I charge my iPhone at night. And so I leave it plugged in and it recharges and it acts as a as a nightstand clock.
19:51:25 Does it have to be clubbed in?
19:51:28 Okay.
19:51:25 But it does not have to be plugged in. I didn't know that, but Mr. Brown says it doesn't, so it doesn't.
19:51:33 I'll take that.
19:51:32 Hmm. I have I have a special little, charger for my. Apple Watch. And that sits there and if you touch it, it tells you what time it is.
19:51:44 The the reason why I like this and reason why I keep it plugged in is that that way I don't have to touch it.
19:51:53 Okay.
19:51:51 I can just look at it and it tells me what time it is. It's it's I'm a light sleeper.
19:52:00 So if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'd like to know. Am I rested now or am I not?
19:52:03 Yeah.
19:52:04 So it's a good way to do it. And in the morning, sometimes when I'm feeling lazy and a call comes up, when it's in this nightstand, but mode, it shows who's calling me.
19:52:17 Oh.
19:52:20 Great.
19:52:22 Yeah.
19:52:18 And I can decide whether or not I want to ignore them. Something that Something that you may not know, you can, when you're sending up your Apple Watch.
19:52:28 You went to pair it with your phone. It's almost impossible not to. It's part of the process.
19:52:34 If you get a phone call and you know you don't want to answer the phone, if you cover your watch, just put your hand over the watch.
19:52:42 It silences the call.
19:52:44 Huh. Great.
19:52:46 You don't have to answer the call and hang up on them or anything. Just put your hand over the watch and it silences the call.
19:52:53 I know. Just.
19:52:52 And if I'm lying down in bread and I don't want to answer the phone, just put my hand over my watch.
19:52:59 Shuts it down. I am very lazy.
19:53:03 Okay.
19:53:04 Just a little update on on the night time clock thing. I plugged it in and it works sideways like it's supposed to.
19:53:13 Oh, okay.
19:53:16 Okay.
19:53:15 So is that with just the new operating system?
19:53:19 Yes, it's part of iOS 17.
19:53:21 Okay. Thank you. And we need to sign in, but we don't know how.
19:53:28 Oh, I stuck the URL in the, chat on the side and if you look at the last one I posted which says docs google calm if you just click on it it brings up this form that's on front of me and you just fill in the, add your email.
19:53:45 Your first and last name. And the reason why I say first and last name is that I've had several people just say Mike or.
19:53:53 Or Susan and that doesn't tell me who you are. So put in your first and last name and then check the box.
19:54:01 Meeting this is.
19:54:03 Okay, so, but that's your. What's your computer we're looking at?
19:54:08 That's my computer, but if you click on this URL over here. It'll bring it up on your computer.
19:54:16 Where is that URL?
19:54:16 Okay. It's in the chat window.
19:54:20 In the chat window.
19:54:21 Yes, down at the bottom of the.
19:54:23 I see it. Okay, then it just says to everyone.
19:54:27 We say yes, but I posted it earlier and it might be that I need to post it again for you because they scroll off.
19:54:33 So.
19:54:33 Okay.
19:54:39 Well, I can write you a message.
19:54:39 Okay. No, it should be there now.
19:54:49 Okay.
19:54:49 And you just click on it and it'll pop up the form.
19:54:54 Hmm.
19:54:54 Any other questions? I covered a lot of different things. So. I may not know the answer, but I'll make something up.
19:55:04 Okay. I have a question. I put something in the chat earlier, but it doesn't seem it didn't trigger a Red dot on my chat window and it didn't seem to go through to any of you.
19:55:18 So I'm not sure why.
19:55:19 No, I'm not seeing the form either.
19:55:23 Do you have this chat window open?
19:55:26 I have it open, yes.
19:55:25 I can see yours. Okay, you went to okay chat. And then I just see to everyone.
19:55:32 So if you scroll.
19:55:34 You click on document Google, you don't pull it up.
19:55:38 Okay.
19:55:38 There should be a message about the chat saying to everyone is at the bottom and above that should be the message that I just sent, which is.
19:55:47 A URL and it should open this window. In this form.
19:55:50 No. No.
19:55:57 Oh, well, okay.
19:55:55 I got it just fine.
19:56:01 Thank you.
19:56:05 Okay, I've totally lost the meeting.
19:56:09 You lost the meeting. I can hear you.
19:56:11 Yeah, I know, but I can't see.
19:56:15 Oh, look under chat.
19:56:18 It's gone. Alright, I'm the person, no, okay.
19:56:27 Click on your Zoom icon on your, that should bring it up, I would think.
19:56:30 I think, yeah, I think she might have lost the zoom window.
19:56:35 Yeah, she lost the zoom window.
19:56:25 Hmm. Okay. I'm launch meeting so I don't wanna do that.
19:56:39 Yeah.
19:56:40 Yeah, click on zoom on the zoom.
19:56:45 Yeah, down in your, your, Launch bar down at the bottom of the screen if you just click on zoom it should bring it up
19:56:52 Okay. Got it. But am I still looking at your window?
19:56:56 You should be.
19:56:58 Okay. So, okay, I see to everyone. I can still see the. The one that you posted.
19:57:11 It's and it just says to everyone.
19:57:15 Yeah, and it should say. It should say below it says HTTPS docs google.com blah blah blah and if you click on that that should bring up a browser.
19:57:26 Window and this page.
19:57:28 Facetime video effects. I don't think I want to do that.
19:57:31 Now those are earlier up.
19:57:33 Yeah.
19:57:37 Okay.
19:57:37 I posted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Links.
19:57:44 Okay. Docs Google. Okay.
19:57:55 No, went to Apple Sonoma. Okay. That's right.
19:58:03 It should appear at the bottom of the list.
19:58:06 Oh, new message, okay.
19:58:11 There we go. Got it. Thank you. Sorry, that took so long.
19:58:13 Okay. What do we want to do next time?
19:58:22 Something I would like to do at some point is browsers. Because there are lots of different browsers out there and they have their strengths and weaknesses.
19:58:31 One of the good news bad news about browsers in order to demonstrate browsers I have to use bandwidth.
19:58:37 And I'm using the bandwidth to actually send the Zoom video out to you. Which means that it may not work particularly well, but.
19:58:45 At some point I would like to talk about browsers and I would like someday to show people how I created the smug website.
19:58:56 It's a piece of software called WordPress which is available to anybody. It's web-based, so you go to a particular website and you can create a website.
19:59:08 Of your own. So yes.
19:59:11 Hey, Lawrence. You mentioned earlier that you might want to do, A, a little talk on pass keys.
19:59:21 Yes. Yes.
19:59:24 That might be a good top, but I don't know how you can demonstrate past keys.
19:59:29 Well, I can use my fake user to demonstrate the past keys. My problem is that I'm having difficulty coming up with.
19:59:37 A something that I can really demonstrate because a lot of this is invisible if you're using pass keys.
19:59:45 So it works and as far as you looking at it and a view session session, you just say, okay, so you want someplace.
19:59:53 And it wouldn't tell you. It wouldn't explain how the magic actually happens. So this is one of those cases where the musician wants to hide the magic.
20:00:04 I went to show how the magic happens and and trying to
19:59:59 Yeah. Well, with my new M 2 laptop. Macwood Pro. It has a thumb print button in the power button.
20:00:25 Yes.
20:00:18 And a lot of times it'll say, Just touch your thumb or put in your password and it's much easier to touch my thumb and type in a password.
20:00:31 Is that a pass key or?
20:00:29 That's, that's true. But again, No, no, that's an encrypted.
20:00:36 That's an encrypted credential. A pass key is a is a little bit, different.
20:00:43 Essentially it's a pass key to your computer, but it's not a pass key.
20:00:50 Hmm.
20:00:47 To something else that's actually something else. When you when you press your thumb. And the thumb sends a pass key to a website.
20:00:57 It's not sending your fingerprint. It's it's sending a piece of code that says yes you really are who you are.
20:01:10 Okay.
20:01:05 So trying to explain how something that people can't see works. there's, some cognitive issues I need to overcome here.
20:01:16 I haven't quite figured out how to do it.
20:01:18 Unless you took a movie of Cat Kathleen doing it.
20:01:25 No.
20:01:25 It's something I need to think through. Because I've tried I thought of several things and they say no that's not gonna work it's it has to be something that
20:01:39 Right.
20:01:36 That you can see a cause and effect. I used to teach, I used to teach computer, security to people in the government.
20:01:44 And that was one of the hardest things to do this. Even when I was talking to IT professionals.
20:01:50 To show them how something was working when there was no when there was nothing visible to them that it was a computer talking to another computer.
20:02:02 It was a, it was a challenge. And, and even when that the day before I retired.
20:02:10 This woman asked me to come over to her computer. And because you said something wasn't working in and they said, what do you want me to do?
20:02:22 Yeah.
20:02:18 And she says, just stand there, it'll work when you're beside me. So she worked for a science agency, but she believed in sympathetic magic that if I was there, just the magic alone would happen.
20:02:31 And she tried to do it. Had she failed that a dozen times and it and it worked. And was I responsible?
20:02:47 Right.
20:02:38 No, I wasn't. But. Trying to Trying to show what was really happening was it's it's it's a challenge which is one reason why people insist on having stupid, you know, 8 letter passwords that they reuse for everything.
20:02:54 They say, oh, this is just too hard. And that's why. The United States is responsible for 99% of the credit card fraud in the entire world.
20:03:08 Wow.
20:03:08 Because we are still the only country in the world where you hand somebody a credit card and they accept it.
20:03:16 Anywhere in Europe you hand him a credit card and you also have to provide a PIN. There has to be that secondary authentication.
20:03:25 In the United States, nope, steal somebody's credit card, go into go into Starbucks and you can buy yourself copy.
20:03:31 There's no verification that you're who you say you are. The only place in town that verifies who you are, aside from the banks, is Costco.
20:03:41 And that's because you're picture is on the back of the credit card. Not that they look at it, but if they wanted to, they could verify.
20:03:55 So.
20:03:49 So it's Trying to explain computer security is is a challenge. I'm not saying I'm opposed, I just haven't figured out out.
20:04:03 Yes.
20:03:59 The book about, the next operating system, Sonoma, is that a book and book form or is it a download?
20:04:08 It's a downloadable book, but you can print it, but, there's no printed books on it because, and there may not be.
20:04:20 I wanted to tell you the dirty secret about a lot of printed books. Well, let me, before I do that, since I happen to be showing my screen, I want to show you something.
20:04:28 I'm going to, if I can see the icon, here it is. This is my
20:04:39 Apple Books and I'm going to move this thing out of the way. And, search for.
20:04:48 So, There we go. This is the Apple ebook on Seduma through, from, take control press.
20:04:58 And it's got a nice table of contents and You've got an index in the back and it shows you.
20:05:07 After there's some plimity things telling you how it works tells you how to check what operating system you have and what it runs on and all that kind of stuff.
20:05:16 And then it takes you through step by step how to upgrade and a bunch of other stuff. And at the back of it, it's even got an index.
20:05:23 The nice thing about this about these electronic books is that by the way I have 7 or 8,000 electronic books.
20:05:34 . So It helps if I spell correctly.
20:05:42 Control books and we go here. And you. Find what you want to know.
20:05:52 You went this book on Sonoma.
20:05:55 And takes you here. Click on this, it tells you what the book is for. It comes in 2 different flavors.
20:06:04 You can, you can download a sample if you want, but comes in 2 different flavors. If you buy it, you have a choice of either a PDF.
20:06:11 Or, a, EPUB. EPUB is what Apple Books uses.
20:06:19 All the all Apple books are an EPUB format and the nice thing about Apple Books is that, well, never mind.
20:06:26 The Apple books are much better than PDFs. But if you decide that you want to book, you say you add it to the cart.
20:06:34 And then you go and pay for it. And go to your card. And pay for it and then it downloads immediately to you.
20:06:48 So you can go shopping for the book. You can read the table contents and all the stuff you would in a book to store and then download the book and start reading immediately.
20:06:57 You don't have to wait for Amazon to show it to you. Now, why don't they?
20:07:01 Print computer books. If you go to Amazon right now.
20:07:12 And you type in.
20:07:17 Mac OS Sonoma. And look at all the books that they have, you'll see that.
20:07:24 This one here is 30 bucks, which is a lot more. It's terrible book. Mac OS, Sonoma for seniors, terrible book.
20:07:33 This one here. Is, you notice when it was produced, it says it was produced on October 12.
20:07:41 This is something that. That Amazon has, we can make instant, books. Out but these people they're really not very good books at all.
20:07:51 And the ones that I really hate are these for Dummies books. You should never think that you can't do something on a computer because you're a dummy.
20:07:59 And so why Wiley ever came up with this for Demi series, I really cannot stand their books.
20:08:06 Because they start insulting the user right off the start. But you can you can find the book you want on take control notebooks, download it immediately.
20:08:15 Don't have to wait for Amazon to deliver it and you're up and running and it runs.
20:08:18 Right out of. Out of ibooks on your on your Mac so you can read the book while you're doing things at the same time.
20:08:27 Works and the and these books work on the iPhone and the iPad just as well as they do on the Mac.
20:08:35 So you can actually read it off your phone and play with it on your computer at the same time. Really, really prefer these 2.
20:08:45 There's usually the. Very good. Oh, I was just. You go ahead.
20:08:42 Physical books for computer books. When when Yeah, go ahead. When? When I left when, at when Mac when Apple went app when Microsoft came up with a new version of office about 10 years ago.
20:09:06 I distributed electronically to everybody and then people said, oh, you can come and take the documentation away.
20:09:12 We had 1,200 copies of Microsoft Office that we bought. When I went and collected the documentation, the documentation came in a box that was a foot and a half long.
20:09:24 And wait a time. Of the 1,200 sets that I collected, 1,150 were still in the shrink rat.
20:09:33 Oh.
20:09:34 No, nobody read them. The nice thing about an electronic book is you can use the search function to go to the part that you're interested in.
20:09:44 You don't have to flip through all these pages trying to find what you want. So For computer documentation, they're much, much better than paper.
20:09:52 If you want to read a novel, novels on paper are still good, but Computer documentation electron electronically is much, much better.
20:10:01 Okay.
20:10:02 And we still haven't decided what we're doing next month. And half the people have run away.
20:10:08 So ideas.
20:10:08 Well, I have a question. It's a kind of personal for you. Are you going to upgrade to the new phone?
20:10:13 I mean, we spent a lot of time happily about the new. System for the iPhone, the new.
20:10:21 Yes.
20:10:22 Yeah, and I'm wondering if you're going to get the 15.
20:10:31 Oh, okay.
20:10:28 This is an iPhone. 15 pro max. I'm not going to reveal any secrets, but Kathleen insisted I get it and it arrived just before my birthday earlier this week.
20:10:42 Okay. Alright.
20:10:46 I take a lot of pictures and I I can't begin to tell you that the the difference between the 2 X.
20:10:55 Magnification that I have a telephoto that I had with my old iPhone and this Fivex is startling.
20:11:02 It's not like the, you know, 200 that I have on my professional camera, but.
20:11:07 For just I was taking photographs of my granddaughter riding a horse. And I could take a picture of my granddaughter.
20:11:16 And the entire horse and I could take a picture of just her face and I didn't even have to move.
20:11:22 I could take it. With the same phone just by flipping through the the, telephoto settings.
20:11:28 And it was, it was glorious. Plus it was raining heavily. And the phone didn't care, whereas my professional phone I would I really don't wanna take it out in the ring.
20:11:41 And my daughter's from Britain. My granddaughter's from Britain, so the fact that it was raining didn't slow down at all.
20:11:48 And she decided she really likes horses. We started our out on a pony and then we moved her to this full size horse.
20:11:56 And later on they were saying, do you like the pony? No, the pony was trash.
20:12:01 That's not really what she said, but when she when she felt the full size horse she thought that was way better than the pony.
20:12:08 I don't know why because I'm not 6 but She had a blast. And this is the new phone and it's really quite cool.
20:12:18 One thing that's amazing is the size of the screen is the same as the as the size of the screen on the 13 in terms of physical size, but the phone itself is smaller.
20:12:31 Really quite because they eat the screen goes much closer to the edge. It's, it's really.
20:12:37 Bye, quite spiffy.
20:12:42 What are we doing next week? Next month.
20:12:46 I vote for browsers like you mentioned.
20:12:50 Second, the vote.
20:12:52 That sounds good.
20:12:54 Okay. Alright, we'll give that a shot.
20:12:54 All third fourth it. Okay.
20:12:59 Okay.
20:13:00 Maybe the difference between a browser and what a search engine is like duck. Go. I don't know if that's a browser or if it's just a search engine.
20:13:08 It's both.
20:13:09 Yeah, I heard it's a new browser. That's available in the Apple Store.
20:13:11 Yeah. Yeah, it's both. I will warn you that I know a great deal about browsers because I built.
20:13:21 Roughly 500 websites. So. I know a lot about browsers, but. If you're willing to put up with me, I'm willing to cover it.
20:13:30 Okay, alright, thank you.
20:13:34 And anything else before we go?
20:13:38 Thank you.
20:13:39 Yeah, have a good night Lawrence. Thank you again.
20:13:42 Yep, thank you.
20:13:41 Thank you. Alright, good night.