Category: Apple Intelligence

The January 21, 2025, meeting started, as usual, with a Question and Answer (Q&A) session.

Things we talked about in the meeting:

• Brief mention of the lawsuit against Apple over privacy and security in Siri, and comparison with previous lawsuits against Google and Amazon’s Alexa
• How Apple handles security and privacy in iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS
• Apple Intelligence in action: Image Playground (on iPhone, iPad, Mac)
  • Not the same as Apple’s Playgrounds app (a free application for teaching the Swift programming language)
• Comparison to Microsoft, Google, and Adobe AI efforts
• Apple Intelligence in Apple Mail, Apple Messages, Apple Photos, Apple Pages

Video recording of the meeting

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Transcript of the meeting

Use your browser to search for specific words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.

18:33:22 Getting back to what I was talking about earlier.
18:33:28 You were recording in time lapse and the way to fix that is to open up the video in iMovie. And I don't know that you can do this on a phone. You might have to do this on a on a computer, open it up in iMovie and go into
18:33:46 I can't remember where it's located. There's one of the menu options about the video And if you play it, if you tell it to slow down the video it'll stretch it out again.
18:33:59 So that it doesn't you don't you're not showing several minutes worth of stuff in 18 seconds.
18:34:07 Yeah.
18:34:07 But, um. Imovie can both slow down the video as well as speed up a video.
18:34:14 I see. Okay, I'll give that a try. Thank you.
18:34:14 And… And also one other thing is if you're going to share it with her or you're sharing it with anybody.
18:34:24 When you are done modifying the video. Go to the file menu and export it and export it as an MOV file, as an M4V file.
18:34:36 File, not as an infinite. As an MP4 file.
18:34:41 The reason is that MOV files are proprietary to Apple. And while a lot of video things will accept them now.
18:34:52 Your average PC user probably won't be able to read it.
18:34:57 And so if you export it to MP4.
18:35:02 Then at that point, everybody can that can see it.
18:35:07 Oh.
18:35:08 The mov file format has a lot of special things like the slow down, speed up and other things that other movie formats don't support.
18:35:19 So um exported as an MP4.
18:35:24 Before I put our stuff up on the website, which I admittedly haven't done in a while, but I'm going to in the near future.
18:35:31 I exported as an MP4 so that I can upload it to YouTube or send it to somebody MP4 is not as compact.
18:35:42 Is MOV. So the file get larger, but at least people be able to see it. And I'm sorry disappeared there.
18:35:53 Oh, I'll just ask you real quickly, though, if she has Apple products would it work with the mov File.
18:36:04 Okay.
18:36:01 It'll work with the MOV or the MP4. The apples are fairly much format agnostic.
18:36:10 I do all my video editing on a Mac because it's much, much, much more flexible than doing it on a Windows machine, our church We stream our video and we put it up on YouTube, but I do all that work from home.
18:36:27 I see.
18:36:25 I don't do it at the church. It drives you nuts to try and do this on a I don't know, Windows machine.
18:36:35 Well, boy, you know, we just I just want to state our appreciation for you. Both George and I think it's just fabulous that you're that you continually meet together with people who are interested in learning and sharing information.
18:36:53 And the fact that you're even open to some of these questions that come up which may be really, really at the bottom level of understanding. We just appreciate you, Lawrence.
18:37:05 Thank you.
18:37:06 I've been doing this for a long time. Kathleen and I started the South Bay TRS-80 users group.
18:37:18 In 1977. A long time ago. We were both much younger.
18:37:20 Oh my goodness.
18:37:25 Yeah, yeah. You've had a long journey together. Yeah, thank you.
18:37:29 Yep.
18:37:31 Okay, I'm going to go ahead and mute myself and turn the video off, but we're here.
18:37:36 Okay.
18:37:37 Will be listening.
18:37:41 I need to do something, which is what I want to turn that on.
18:37:46 And I want to turn on that. So that I… And… Before someone asked, I forgot to… make a sign-in sheet, I think.
18:38:03 So let me check that quickly, but I don't recall that I did so. I might have surprised myself and done so.
18:38:20 Yeah, I didn't. Oh, hell.
18:38:30 So much for bookkeeping. We're in the middle of the question and answer session after a short brief pause because the internet went out.
18:38:42 Anybody have a question?
18:38:45 Well, go ahead. Go ahead.
18:38:45 Yes. Lawrence, what speed do you get on your computer?
18:38:53 Generally. Yes.
18:38:54 Are you talking about internet speed? I'm paying for one gigabyte download and 30 megabytes upload, which doesn't really have anything to do with reality it's about If I'm lucky, it'll be around 400 megabytes download and 30 megabytes upload.
18:39:17 Quite often less than that. 30 up.
18:39:20 30 up you said.
18:39:24 To reasonably upload a video to somebody you can't really do so with less than about 10 megabits. I shouldn't say megabytes to 10 megabits per second.
18:39:35 Is about is slow as you can go to upload a video without someone dying of old age in the meantime.
18:39:45 It just takes a long time. Megabits per second And you divide that by eight, that's how many megabytes so 10 megabits per second is about one megabyte per second.
18:40:03 1,000 megabits per second, which is what gigabyte is. You divide that by 10 and that's about 100 megabytes per second.
18:40:14 Theoretically. And in practice, there's a lot of stuff that goes on to slow it down.
18:40:22 Kathleen and I noticed that every day between about Oh, six and eight, we will lose the internet for a while.
18:40:33 And that's not unusual. The reason is that everybody starts using the internet.
18:40:39 Around six to eight local time. And most people do not have a path to the internet straight from their computer to the internet, it goes out to a concentrator for an entire neighborhood.
18:40:53 And so that entire neighborhood goes out at once. When we were on the East Coast.
18:40:58 I once, back in the days before they had better security.
18:41:01 I found out that there were 255 people in our neighborhood, which is the maximum number that you can have in a local cluster.
18:41:10 So when they would come home at 5, 36 o'clock. Things just went down to a crawl.
18:41:17 But on the East Coast now you can get fiber link internet, which is a gigabit up and a gigabit down.
18:41:27 I don't expect to have that. On the peninsula before, say.
18:41:38 Right.
18:41:35 No, 2050 or something. One of the things that The new administration wants to do, for example, is to get rid of the subsidy for rural internet.
18:41:49 There's been a subsidy has been available for like 10, 15 years And one of their proposed savings is just to get rid of that.
18:41:57 So I don't think that things will get better anytime soon.
18:42:03 Well, what about the thing that musk has? Is it Starlink or something?
18:42:10 What's funny?
18:42:09 Starlink is, like a lot of things, is downlink um oriented. Dish has satellite downlink But it's down link only.
18:42:21 To in DISH if you go if you want to send something back, you send it over your telephone line.
18:42:27 And over your telephone line, basically you're going at modem speeds from the 1990s.
18:42:33 So, um. In terms of upload with Starlink it's really next to non-existent. If you think about it.
18:42:42 To run and to run a internet peering environment, that's where a whole bunch of cables come in and it sends it out to everybody over the neighborhood.
18:42:52 That's usually done with a router that consume several thousand watts. Satellites You have a powerful satellite, if it's 10 watts They're just very low wattage.
18:43:08 So essentially, the wattage of the of a light bulb.
18:43:14 Is what powers the satellite. So you're sending that very faint signal down with low wattage to the ground Where it's then amplified and distributed.
18:43:24 That's okay going one way, but when you have a whole bunch of signals coming the other way, it can't possibly handle it. So satellite is satellite is is not really a two-way communication. It's basically one way. The weather satellite beams down
18:43:39 Photographs and video of the Earth. But if we tried beaming that stuff up to the satellite, it would just clog it.
18:43:48 That's why for satellite television.
18:43:51 There's one beam coming up and one beam going down. And once it hits the ground and that one beam coming down is distributed.
18:43:59 But there's very limited amount going back up. And even today, most satellite TV really isn't satellite TV. It's coming over.
18:44:08 Ground or suburbs. Oceanic cables or something like that. It's not really It's not really coming from the satellite. The satellites are distribution points.
18:44:20 Gps, for example. In order for GPS to work on your phone, you have to have a minimum, I think, of five satellites that it can reach at one time.
18:44:31 And most often the seven to nine, if you're closer to the equator than we are.
18:44:37 And it's takes those very minuscule amounts of information that's getting from those to figure out where you are. But you're transmitting nothing the other way.
18:44:50 So satellite is basically just one way.
18:44:54 Yeah. Well, they didn't say anything about the ups and downs of it.
18:44:58 You know, I mean, I heard about you know I'm always complaining about speed
18:44:59 Well. If you're sitting… Yeah, but if you're typing a message And then you press return to send a response, that's upside.
18:45:11 Yeah.
18:45:10 It's not going to the satellite. It's going over a modem or if it's going over some cable someplace, it's not going to the satellite.
18:45:16 So Starlink wouldn't do you any good at all. Right?
18:45:20 It's good if you're doing something to receive content. Like, for example, television programs that you dish works fine for that. But in terms of sending signal back. No, it doesn't work.
18:45:33 Right. Right. Well, there are also…
18:45:35 Most people are really happy with it though, aren't they? Sterling.
18:45:38 Which? Yeah, but most people just consume content.
18:45:44 They just, they're not really doing anything they're not replying to anything.
18:45:43 Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah.
18:45:49 Now, you don't happen to have a really good Verizon signal where you are, do you?
18:45:55 I have a good Verizon signal because I have my phone use Wi-Fi.
18:46:02 So when I'm in my own home, I can get a good Verizon signal, but that's not because it's coming over the air.
18:46:08 It's coming over a cable. When we…
18:46:10 Right. Yeah, yeah. So Verizon has a really good that that uh internet package that they offer separate from the phones is Working really good here so man it's cheap, relatively cheap. I have Verizon service from my phone so it costs $45 for a good package
18:46:33 Yeah, a lot of people that I know who live in cities, they also like the T-Mobile.
18:46:33 You know, more speed
18:46:40 Yep.
18:46:39 But do you have to live in a city that actually has a good T-Mobile infrastructure like Chicago.
18:46:46 But… That was one question that somebody wanted me to talk about was what was a good cell phone service and what was a good internet service locally?
18:46:57 And the answer is I can't talk about that because i can't talk about Unlike the East Coast, it's not flat around here.
18:47:04 And what works for me, I live in sunland won't work if you live up on Bell Hill. And if you live up on Bell Hill, it's not what somebody in Carlsberg can do. And if you live in Carlsburg, it won't help you out.
18:47:18 Someplace else. It's just it's extremely episodic. If you go online and you say, what are the best internet providers in swim and you get this list, all of that's paid advertising. It's not based on anything at all.
18:47:35 And some of the people that appear in those listings don't even have service locally.
18:47:40 So the answer is you're pretty much have to try it. Talk to your neighbors and see what they say.
18:47:49 Because there's no way I can give you a way There's no way I can give you a… a good answer.
18:47:58 If you live in Squim, there are certain few blocks downtown. And when I say few, like 20 blocks downtown where you can get high-speed cable from a company Nicola or something like that.
18:48:13 Every time I see the name, it reminds me of the cough drops.
18:48:18 They have good high speed cable. And also, if you live in Squim, Olipin is a good source. It's not cable. What they do is they put a a dish on your dish on your house and you get and you
18:48:32 Basically a microwave link. To wherever their local transmitter is. And depending upon whether or not there are buildings and trees in the way.
18:48:41 Olepen may not be able to do anything for you. Those are two examples that work, but only if you're in Squim.
18:48:50 If you live… someplace else, your best bet is just to talk to your neighbors and see what they say.
18:48:59 We're not going to get good self service on the peninsula. We're not going to get good internet service on the peninsula.
18:49:07 And a lot of that has to do with the fact that, let's put it this way.
18:49:11 Victoria B.C. Has more people just in the town of Victoria than in all of Clallum County.
18:49:19 And Clallam County goes from
18:49:24 I can't remember the name of the little village It goes, anyway, 70 miles from here to the to the Pacific Ocean. And there are 70,000 people we probably have a lot more deer than that.
18:49:36 And deer don't use the internet. You know, we just we're just not a big market.
18:49:44 That's one reason also why. When somebody wants to know how long does it take to get from Seattle over here, I say, well, if the wind's blowing, it could take hours.
18:49:53 Because you've got the fairies to contend with and you might close the bridge and we might have an avalanche or mudslide or You know, we just We're not in a metropolitan area for which I am very grateful But when it comes to
18:50:10 Cell service and internet bandwidth, there's just no
18:50:13 Nothing has passed in Washington. When we moved here because the speed limits were so slow, when we first moved here just coming into the state of Washington, you know, I couldn't in the highway and I could only go 60 and stuff like that. And I said, and then you get here and all the water, like you said, and everything.
18:50:34 Yeah, we're about 35 miles or so from Seattle. However, it takes, you never know.
18:50:47 Yes.
18:50:39 Yes. My mother kept on trying to get me to invent a Star Trek transporter pad because then she could have gone to visit my daughter in england She could have visited my brother Alexandria, Virginia, she thought that was a good idea.
18:51:00 But I wasn't able to quite manage that.
18:51:05 Lawrence?
18:51:08 Yes.
18:51:05 Lawrence, I have a question. I remember quite a while ago, we were talking about copy machines.
18:51:14 And you said instead of dealing with their software you connected them to something on the computer. What did you do and how do I do that?
18:51:26 Oh, um… If you have a printer.
18:51:32 Mm-hmm. Yeah.
18:51:32 Most printers have a copy function. So you just go there you put the whatever it is you want copied down and you go to the copy menu item press it say how many copies you want and copy it.
18:51:47 The um If it has a sheet feeder, you can even give it a stack of things to copy and press copy and it'll copy the entire stack.
18:51:56 So I don't use copy machines at all. The other thing.
18:52:01 Okay, and what i'm trying to do is I'm trying to copy something and download it to my files.
18:52:10 And I'm having trouble doing that. It doesn't it doesn't it will it will scan it But it won't download it.
18:52:21 So I'm wondering if there's some kind of trick or something.
18:52:25 Cindy.
18:52:26 Actually, there is a trick. Maybe. It depends upon how new you're new computer is and how it was cooked up to how it was hooked up to your printer.
18:52:38 I have… two printers. And I did not use the software that came with them.
18:52:46 I used, I just hooked them up. And then I told Mac that Mac software to talk to them. And in the setup, one of the things you can do is you just tell it.
18:52:57 You find the… printer on your network and ask it to install a driver on your computer for that printer.
18:53:09 Dior Mac ships with thousands of print drivers for all kinds of printers. And you find the one that matches or the one that's close.
18:53:18 And you're up and running. If your printer is also a copier, it'll also do scanning And to scan it, you use simple text. Actually, it's called Preview now. Simpletext was an old name.
18:53:31 Preview.
18:53:31 What is it?
18:53:36 Yeah.
18:53:36 Let me show you. Let me find something to print.
18:53:43 First of all.
18:53:59 Okay. Let me… share my desktop.
18:54:09 Yeah, go ahead, let it do that.
18:54:16 First of all, go to settings And in settings If you go down to printers and scanners.
18:54:25 You tell it to add printer or scanner He goes out and looks. Yeah, go ahead.
18:54:31 It goes out and looks on your network to see what it is. You say that you have something that tells you what it thinks it is. You say add it.
18:54:38 Well, they've already added it, so I'm not going to do that.
18:54:47 Mm-hmm.
18:54:41 Instead, I'm going to say that I've already added those I'm going to go down and preview allows you, if you look at a photograph.
18:54:53 It opens in preview. So we're not going to use it for that. We're going to go up here to the file menu and say.
18:54:59 Import from scanner And Rachel is the name of one of my printers.
18:55:06 That I hardly ever use it for printing. I use it for… scanning mostly.
18:55:14 And it's doing an overview scan and it goes and does an overview scan.
18:55:23 And so I go then and I select what I want scanned
18:55:31 I draw a little box around what I want scanned and I say scan And when I'm scanning it, I also have a different things that I can do. In this case, I want to save it as a PDF So I say scan
18:55:47 And it goes and scans it. And then I say save By telling it to.
18:55:56 Save and it's uh Wicked.
18:56:02 Media card.
18:56:07 And then… I go find my scanned item.
18:56:16 And it's hiding behind something that I saved here. Oh, it saved it in documents.
18:56:23 If you don't tell it not to, it'll save it in documents.
18:56:33 Actually, I don't know where I'd saved it. If you don't know where something's saved, you just go through this Same pre-process again say
18:56:47 Actually, I just tell it to go find it.
18:56:59 It didn't work. Why didn't it work?
18:57:02 Could you put this step by step in the newsletter?
18:57:06 If someone reminds me.
18:57:10 Because I'm always wanting to put something in them.
18:57:16 Printer and mail it to somebody you know And…
18:57:26 I spent 20 hours getting it done that I don't know the steps that got me there.
18:57:26 Okay.
18:57:30 So here is my Wikipedia. Friends of Wikipedia card.
18:57:37 Wikimedia is the company behind the nonprofit behind Wikipedia. And I donated money to them. So they sent me a card.
18:57:46 Which they don't normally do. I'm kind of surprised they did this. Probably because they want more money.
18:57:52 But that was a physical object that now I have something I can send out to people.
18:57:56 And when you save it, you can save it also as a JPEG in case if it's If it's a…
18:58:10 If it's a photograph that you want to save as something but if you if you Send me a message. I can see if I can… write out the steps and put them on the on the website. It's it's not all that complicated.
18:58:28 But the first time through, it's less than intuitive, I will admit.
18:58:34 You're looking at, especially since one of the tools that i use preview people normally look at if you click if you click a… photograph for example And… Here's a photograph. It comes up and it opens in preview. Preview is the program that just opened that thing.
18:58:57 Which is something I wanted to talk about today, by the way.
18:59:01 I've got to show my screen so you can see what I'm talking about.
18:59:07 So Lawrence, would she be able to use the zip drive in her printer?
18:59:08 This? Yes.
18:59:13 And then just take it to her. Computer.
18:59:17 A zip drive or maybe if she probably doesn't have a zip drive. Zip drives don't exist anymore.
18:59:22 Oh. Oh.
18:59:23 It might have a CD, I might have a sd card in some printers, but those are actually fairly rare.
18:59:33 I practice.
18:59:33 Image is being shown in preview and preview is if you take a screenshot or something and click on it, that's what it opens up.
18:59:43 And reason, I wanted to show you this cartoon because it's something that you should keep in mind.
18:59:49 A lot of people when they when they say that you are the product and they're talking about Twitter and Facebook and so on and so forth.
18:59:58 What they're saying is that basically is saying Twitter and YouTube and not so much YouTube Twitter and Facebook and so on and so forth.
19:00:09 They make their money by selling your content. And the content that you provide them is your name, your contacts, your friends.
19:00:18 Your purchase history, your advertising preferences and so on and so forth.
19:00:24 This cartoon is saying that you are not, this device is not your device.
19:00:31 You are the products, you are the devices device it owns you, which is somewhat cynical but also somewhat true.
19:00:42 And I just thought I'd share that with you because it cracked me up when I saw that.
19:00:50 We are at the end of our… Q&A questions period but if anyone has one more question, I'll try it.
19:00:57 Yes.
19:00:57 May have one. Are you aware of a problem with CarPlay in the iPhone?
19:01:04 Where if you ask Siri to play a playlist It just plays some random song and ignores your comment.
19:01:13 And that's been going on. I went on the internet And I Googled the problem and it turns out a slew of people have the problem.
19:01:23 And it goes as far back as IOS 17 and a half.
19:01:27 And it's still present today in 18.2.1.
19:01:31 Yeah, the problem with that is that when you
19:01:38 Apple uses car parlay so you can do things like tell it to play Taylor Swift or something like that.
19:01:46 When it comes to When it comes to playlists though, that's much, much, much harder.
19:01:53 Taylor Swift, if you If you download a Taylor Swift song and it's on your phone, you tell it to play Taylor Swift.
19:02:02 The metadata, the information that tells that what Taylor Swift is, is embedded in the song.
19:02:11 So when you download Taylor Swift to your iPhone. It knows that that's Taylor Swift because Apple's metadata says so.
19:02:20 But if you say, play my Sunday afternoons playlist, it looks through your metadata and it can't find that because it's not really on the device that's in your That's in your own part of the operating system.
19:02:33 Supposedly
19:02:38 There's two parts of the operating system. There's the part that belongs to Apple, and Apple uses it to talk to its stuff.
19:02:45 And there's your stuff. And Apple can't touch your stuff. And the reason is that it's the only way to protect you in case someone seizes your phone.
19:02:58 So if somebody takes your phone They might have the phone, but they can't touch your stuff.
19:03:05 And neither can your car. And this came up because this came up because a security engineer was going down the road one day Security engineer at Apple was going down the road one day And his kid said.
19:03:21 Play such and such. And it played this kid's playlist that he didn't even know was on his phone.
19:03:27 And the security researcher said. That is not a good thing.
19:03:33 Because other people would do things like they knew that they'd steal someone's phone, they wouldn't give them his password.
19:03:40 And they beat him up and he still wouldn't give him the password, but they knew he was girlfriend with Gina. So they call Gina. Anyway, call Gina and say, Gina, I lost, you know, soon I lost my daughter because he's telling me the password to my phone and they give him the phone.
19:03:57 So Apple said, your stuff is completely under your control.
19:04:03 Apple can't touch it. And when you say play Taylor Swift, okay, I can do that.
19:04:11 When you say… Yeah, but if you say play the Sunday playlist, nope, not going to work.
19:04:10 Yeah, that works fine. That works fine.
19:04:17 Yeah, the only problem is the only problem is If you're alone in the car to play a playlist, you have to manually click on one of the songs in the playlist and it'll play the rest of the playlist automatically but
19:04:33 That's not a good thing if you're driving and you want to just have Siri do it and you can't.
19:04:40 Yeah, my solution is not something that Most people will go with because most people will go with because It costs money and that's how I use XM Radio.
19:04:53 And unless I'm on a ferry or in a tunnel or something.
19:04:51 Oh, okay.
19:04:56 Or if I'm going through a Are there tall trees or going through a valley or lots of other exceptions. It works fine.
19:05:04 Right.
19:05:06 It was kind of a shock when I moved back from Japan because in Japan.
19:05:10 All of Japan can be covered by one satellite. One TV satellite, one radio satellite.
19:05:15 Hmm.
19:05:17 So if you go anywhere in Japan, you can listen to the same radio station anywhere in Japan.
19:05:26 Right.
19:05:22 You don't ever have to switch it to the local channel, especially when I was in college going between here and Washington State University. I'd have to switch the radio about a dozen times to get up.
19:05:33 Right. Right.
19:05:33 A decent signal. Well, in Japan, anywhere you go in the entire country one You just leave it on the radio station that you like.
19:05:42 In the UK, where basically BBC, leave it on the same channel.
19:05:48 In the United States, it doesn't work that way. So when XM Radio came out, I was on the East Coast.
19:05:53 I went for that in a heartbeat. But it doesn't provide you the same richness that you can provide with your own playlist on your own phone.
19:06:03 Right.
19:06:05 If they give you that, if they give voice access to that They can get voice access to too much else.
19:06:13 And so Apple said, no. Also, the National Transportation Safety Board said, not a good idea.
19:06:21 Because again, if it's a two-way thing. As you're traveling down the road.
19:06:29 You're the um you're the your phone is also picking up local things from the environment and putting them up on the screen. Like, for example, it'll tell you that the speed limit dropped from 30 to 20 when you're in 10.
19:06:40 Right, right.
19:06:41 You have it on there. So it's getting information from the outside world. And the National Transportation Safety Board doesn't want people to mess with that.
19:06:49 So it very much is limited by the government for safety reasons.
19:06:54 And it's limited by Apple for privacy and security reasons.
19:06:59 Though Apple is never going to fix that issue.
19:07:05 I wouldn't say never, but until they can figure out a really clever way of insulating it in such a way that it can't mess with the car And it can't mess with your privacy and security.
19:07:18 They probably don't consider it broken. There are lots of things that you may think are broken because they don't work the way you want.
19:07:26 Right.
19:07:25 It doesn't necessarily mean that Apple thinks they're broken because As you can tell just by their computer ads.
19:07:32 What they sell a lot of is convenience, but they also stress privacy and security.
19:07:40 Right. Thank you. That explains a lot.
19:07:43 Yeah, probably not what you wanted to hear.
19:07:48 One last thing.
19:07:47 I have another iPhone question. And that is, I recently, I have an iPhone 16 and I recently did the update.
19:07:56 That they suggested was necessary. And I've lost Siri.
19:08:03 I mean, she doesn't answer me anymore. So I wondered if anybody else had that problem.
19:08:08 Um. I haven't had that problem, but I suggest that If you go into the settings and just look for the setting for Siri as well as the setting for Apple intelligence You might want to look at both of those.
19:08:24 Okay. Okay.
19:08:26 Apple intelligence. Works with Siri in 181 a little bit different than it did Prior to that.
19:08:33 Yeah, I did that earlier and I could make her she wouldn't talk out loud. I could access her by pushing the button on the side.
19:08:42 Of my phone and saying hey siri she would be there, but she wouldn't talk.
19:08:47 And I asked, you know, just have asked So.
19:08:50 Is it possible that you might have turned the volume down?
19:08:52 It's… No, but I'm going to do what you said.
19:08:58 Yeah.
19:08:59 I might just go up to Verizon, which is where my carrier and just say Help me, guys.
19:09:06 I will warn you something about the Verizon store. And in fact, all the local phone stores.
19:09:12 They're not actually run by Verizon or AT&T or anybody. They're run by a contract.
19:09:18 A contractor and they only get paid if you do something that they make money from. So if you go up there for general questions. Sometimes they're just not going to be particularly helpful.
19:09:32 Because they don't get reimbursed for that.
19:09:36 Okay. Thank you. Yeah.
19:09:42 Is Apple ever going to learn how to alphabetize Is there a reason they don't?
19:09:47 If you're talking about things like titles. Probably not. I used to work as a librarian book titles are alphabetized by something called the Anglo-American cataloging Rules. So for example, if you're Title is The Great Gatsby. You don't put it under thee you put it under
19:10:12 Great and a man for all seasons is under man not a And you have MC and then MAC was a person's name.
19:10:24 Are both alphabetized as if they're MAC. Makes great sense for books.
19:10:31 Apple doesn't do it that way because And they really can't.
19:10:38 There's a technical way that they could do that sort of thing But it would take forever. The other thing is that in terms of Apple actually does a really good job of alphabetizing for most things quite well, because unlike the American
19:10:58 The ASCII american standard code for information interchanges, which is what computers use for assigning characters.
19:11:08 An uppercase a is a 65, a lowercase a is a 97.
19:11:12 So if you computerize things, if you tell the computer to alphabetize things.
19:11:17 It'll have things that are all uppercase at the top and things that are all lowercase down at the bottom.
19:11:22 Apple doesn't do that. So they're really good at alphabetizing. But when they're coming to things like names and titles.
19:11:31 No, it's… That's a…
19:11:33 Well, when I first got an Apple computer, which was in 2010, and right off the bat like on the internet, you find something and you, oh, I want to keep this article and what do they call that and you could
19:11:46 Throw it in there. Just tap it and it would save it for you. But it wasn't alphabetized.
19:12:01 Oh, actually they can do that kind of appetizing almost instantaneously.
19:11:53 And I thought this was so great for just a little while then I had such a long list. And then I'm having to drag everything and And I've…
19:12:08 Oh.
19:12:08 I shall show you because I need to move on to the demo and I'll I'll do that as the first part of the demo.
19:12:13 Okay.
19:12:20 I need to. You probably can't see these, but I've got these things on the screen that are kind of messing with me.
19:12:28 So… I have to move them out of the way.
19:12:34 I have a folder here called AI Illustrations. Actually, that's not
19:12:42 That's not what I wanted.
19:12:59 Here we got things in alphabetical order. If you click up here, it's alphabetical order by either ascending or descending by name If you go over here, it does it by date modified. Here it does it by kind.
19:13:13 I'll give you a more extreme example.
19:13:28 Here they're oftentimes by name. I click on it again. It doesn't in reverse alphabetical order.
19:13:33 Here it does it by date. Here it does it by size.
19:13:39 Here it does it by kind. And you can even do it by color.
19:13:40 Okay.
19:13:48 Right.
19:13:44 You notice that I have these little green And blue dots, well, that's by tags. I can go through here and I can just make a tag for this particular thing.
19:13:54 I don't want to mess it up because that actually tells me something.
19:13:58 But to change the alphabetizing, just click on the head of the column.
19:14:04 Okay.
19:14:04 And you can do it by any of these things. And if you see something you wanted to advertise by something that's not shown.
19:14:11 You go up here to view, show view options there are things that may not appear. Like these are date modified, but you can have it by date created, date last open, date added.
19:14:24 Version, comments, all kinds of different ways that you can have things
19:14:30 Hey, okay. Awesome.
19:14:33 I did not want to do that. So I won't do that.
19:14:40 And if you find views that you want, go back to this show view options.
19:14:45 If you pick out the ways that you want it to
19:14:52 What those column headings are supposed to be. Push this thing down here to say use as defaults. And that way any new folders will have those same options.
19:15:03 Available to you. Like I want tags always because i use colors to uh colors to to keep track of things.
19:15:10 Uh-huh.
19:15:12 If something's blue, it means I've blacked it up. If it's something else.
19:15:17 May not have backed it up.
19:15:24 Before I do anything else and get on to, I was going to talk about Apple intelligence and security.
19:15:30 I wanted to show you a video.
19:15:38 And this is the video. This is a van called OK Go.
19:15:46 And you probably won't be able to hear this because I don't know, maybe you can or not.
19:15:55 I'm going to…
19:16:07 This video is a video rock video that you can get on YouTube.
19:16:13 It's made with 64 iPhones. And at various times they will do things that go between screens.
19:16:23 So for example, this guy can stick out his hand and it goes across to the screen next to him.
19:16:29 And they do all kinds of Funky things.
19:16:41 And I mentioned this to you because if you ever want to do something funky with your phone.
19:16:45 And that's a funky thing that you can do with your phone.
19:16:50 But it was shot on iPhones and it uses iPhones as the As the… catchy technical gimmick.
19:17:04 Another thing that I wanted to just briefly mention. Mr. Lockwood asked me if I knew anything about using a phone with two eSIMs.
19:17:18 And the answer is yes. If you have a phone that accepts two eSIMs, it means you can have a primary and secondary phone line on it. So one phone, two phone numbers means you have to pay for two phone numbers
19:17:35 And you get to describe which one is the primary or secondary. You can also have one as a business and one as a personal.
19:17:43 And if it's a primary, it's going to be a P. A secondary is going to be an S, and if it's obviously business, one's going to be a B and one's going to be a P.
19:17:51 But you can separate it that way. You get two different phone numbers. You have all kinds of different things you can do.
19:17:59 A primary phone number means that if you make a phone call.
19:18:02 That's when it's that's the number it's going to use. But um the things that you can do is you can also say for messages in FaceTime, you could use either. For a default line is going to be one For cellular data, you're only going to use one.
19:18:19 This way you can have a cheapo line for one and the other one on unlimited or whatever you want to do.
19:18:27 In playing around with this, I also found out that you can have different ringtones. So you can assign the ringtone If you call on the secondary line can be different from your primary line.
19:18:38 And I've done that because I now have Both Kathleen's line and my line on one phone.
19:18:46 Because… I want to be able to receive her phone calls.
19:18:53 And that's too small to tell but anyway. It was fairly transparent.
19:19:00 But I would suggest that if you do want to try this that the first thing you do is go online and get some instructions. Apple has to support line explaining how how… how you can use it with two sims and that's not what I want. I want this.
19:19:22 And I also want to talk briefly about security. This is a screenshot I took.
19:19:30 Of something that says chase wants to know if I recognize this charge for $200, $385.
19:19:41 $560. And yes, I recognize that no wrong charge.
19:19:47 I did neither of those. Instead, I went up and I declared this to be spam.
19:19:51 And why did I do none of those? Because I went up to the address line, which is right up here where it says this.
19:19:57 Chase Fraud Protection. And if you hold down your mouse button on it, it shows you what address it really came from.
19:20:05 And this came from Kenneth Duncathan iCloud.com, which is not chase So if you see something suspicious.
19:20:17 To come up here and click on the on the um who it says it's from to find out if it's really from them.
19:20:27 Are they also are they also all at once of just getting tons of ads in my email or very, well, they're not even some of them, I'm sure it's not even legitimate ads but um
19:20:43 The answer is for something like that, just go up and mark them. Make sure you mark them.
19:20:49 As spam. Because if you don't mark them as spam, you'll just get more of them.
19:20:55 Right. Well, I've always, what I've done before I was done before i because i usually say subscribe and subscribe. And I would unsubscribe.
19:21:05 Now that what they're doing, you go there to unsubscribe and they want your email to unsubscribe.
19:21:12 Yes. Don't unsubscribe. Because the reason why you shouldn't unsubscribe is not obvious.
19:21:15 Right.
19:21:19 If you unsubscribe it, it says unsubscribe That's a live one.
19:21:25 Yes.
19:21:25 So you've told them it's not a random number. Now, if you are getting messages from, say, Swains and you don't want to get messages from Swains anymore.
19:21:34 Go ahead and unsubscribe if you're getting them from JCPenney's and you know it's from JCPenney's, go ahead and unsubscribe.
19:21:37 Yes.
19:21:42 By the way, JCPenney still is selling goods. They just don't sell it in stores.
19:21:48 So if it's a legitimate company, you know it's legitimate and you don't want to get their messages anymore, just say unsubscribe.
19:21:54 But otherwise, just go market as spam. And that's true for messages. This past year, you might have noticed that we had an election the state actors, meaning other countries use the excuse of our elections to just fill our mailboxes, our messaging full of spam.
19:22:18 And it was they've done this in the past, but nothing like this time.
19:22:22 I was getting a couple hundred messages a day that were just people trying to find out if I existed.
19:22:31 And what you do is you go up there and you, again, say just that you mark it as a to delete and the Mac will ask you, do you want me to block this? And you say yes, and it'll do so.
19:22:43 The problem is that sometimes you can't really tell. This says the USPS package has arrived at the warehouse and cannot be delivered to you.
19:22:52 Okay, now this sounds like something that you would care about because the United States Postal Service seems legit.
19:22:58 But if you look at the URL, it doesn't end in USPS. There's this hyphen and then it's got this stuff here.
19:23:05 This is who actually sent it. It wasn't sent to you by the US Post Office.
19:23:11 It looks legit, but look at this email address, this URL, and you'll see that it's not the US Post Office.
19:23:19 And this one here, your vehicle has an unpaid pole bill To avoid excessive late fees, go and promptly pay 699 and it gives you this thing.
19:23:31 Easy drive. But this is, again, it's not a legitimate Also, I haven't traveled on a toll road in a long time.
19:23:44 Eva with JobMatch, Lisa here is at info for the UPS position. Click here, blah, blah, blah, for an interview.
19:23:52 I did not. Try out for a UPS position.
19:23:57 So that's not a, this is another one where it says There's a post office.
19:24:04 Address and that's not really a post office. Something that I found that I really liked is this chart Which is what people think
19:24:18 Our problems with illegitimate actors and what is actually the case, reported cyber attack causes In 2024, 7% were beaches.
19:24:32 Based on privilege misuse. 23% were miscellaneous heirs, 26% were social engineering. Social engineering means that somebody got in by pretending to be somebody else.
19:24:44 8% were Well, actually basic web attacks 33% were system intrusion where they actually got into the system.
19:24:57 But this is the incidence that reported the ones that were reported most often were denial of service attacks, which is they didn't get into the system at all they just gunged it up so bad that you couldn't use it.
19:25:10 So you see what actually happened and what most of the attacks were there's a complete misconnect In terms of academia.
19:25:22 In terms of what people are publishing. And what incidents they actually… talk about. You'll notice that you'll notice denial of service attacks gets a lot of attention in academia, but in terms of total problems, it's really not It's outsized compared to the real problem.
19:25:45 News coverage talks about denial of service attacks. If Twitter goes down.
19:25:50 But 66% is lost or stolen assets And again, you can see that what's actually going on and what's actually happening are not the same thing.
19:26:02 And what people look for is not the same thing. So what I want to tell you about is basically what you should be concerned about.
19:26:11 You should be concerned about your password. If you have a simple password and simple means under 15 characters you are vulnerable.
19:26:23 If you reuse a password. You are vulnerable. Not only are you vulnerable, you're extremely vulnerable.
19:26:31 If someone breaks into, you offered a campaign donation to some guy who is running for state representative.
19:26:41 Somebody hacks his site. And they get your credentials. Well, you had never intended to log into his site again. So you use the same password that you use for everything else.
19:26:51 Except that now that person has a legitimate username and a legitimate password that they will then try against banks insurance companies credit unions, anything that involves um something of value to people. So that's why you you want to make sure that you have your password down safe.
19:27:16 You want to make sure that, and safe means 15 characters or more.
19:27:22 And you also don't want to ever reuse a password for anything.
19:27:27 It doesn't make any difference if it's a simple thing or it's a useless thing.
19:27:32 Don't every reuse a password. Because as you can see.
19:27:37 In terms of the amount of stuff that people have that they have control over that lost and stolen assets is mostly your data that was lost.
19:27:49 Breaches in terms of banks and so on and so forth, that's actually fairly rare where people run into problems is lost and stolen assets.
19:27:58 Now, how can you write a a password that's going to be difficult to… to break into? And the answer is.
19:28:09 You make it long but easy for you to remember. So as an example.
19:28:18 You live in Squim. I like the… Lavender.
19:28:33 This has upper and lowercase characters And it has a number and it is.
19:28:40 33 characters long. It's easy to remember.
19:28:44 2024 doesn't necessarily mean you like the Lavender Festival 2024. It means that you set this password in 2024.
19:28:53 So like in 2026, you look at that and you think.
19:28:56 I should change that because it's been up there for two years.
19:29:01 So this is an easy to remember password It's easy to type. When you have something like
19:29:33 If it's hard for you to type, you won't type it that often.
19:29:37 So find something that's easy and fast to type and is long. And more than 15 characters is long.
19:29:44 You will find stupid companies that say that, oh, they don't accept a space as a character So if in that case, you just have to say i
19:29:58 Like the lavender. Let me make that uppercase just for the heck of it.
19:30:09 The dash is a special character that almost everybody allows. But some stupid things, including Microsoft, don't like spaces.
19:30:18 So this has a special character. It's got numbers. It's got upper and lower case.
19:30:23 And it's fairly fast to write. So the simple way to keep yourself safe.
19:30:30 Is to have long passwords and never, ever, ever reuse them. This way, if they break into your account at Bank of America.
19:30:40 They might cause damage, but they won't be able to get into your bank account at sun soundt sound um bank here in swim because you have a different username and password there.
19:30:55 Yes.
19:30:54 Hey, Lawrence. But if you have, say, for instance, 100 passwords and each one of them is a passphrase like that.
19:31:03 Back to the same problem is how do you know which phrase goes with which You know, account.
19:31:09 That's where you use a password manager. And I highly recommend 1Password.
19:31:17 What is the name of the name? I just got this wrong earlier today. Sequoia.
19:31:23 Comes with a password manager. Built in. And the same password manager is built in to Sequoia It's built into the current iPhone and iPad operating systems.
19:31:36 So, and if you tell them to sync to each other via iCloud.
19:31:40 If you make a password on your Mac and later on you're using the bank app.
19:31:45 And you want to know what the password is, you can look it up on your iPhone.
19:31:49 Because it syncs to your phone, to your iPad, to your Mac.
19:31:54 All together. And Apple now bundles that into Sequoia to uh iPad, OS 18 and into iOS 18.
19:32:08 So that's the easy way to keep track of it. And if you're not on the current operating system, I highly recommend 1Password.
19:32:20 One password you do have to pay for, and if you use it on both your Mac and your iPhone, you'll have to buy two copies.
19:32:27 One for the Mac and one for your iPhone because the iPhone version is It's got the same name, but it's a different thing. So they charge you twice for it.
19:32:37 But Sequoia would work for both.
19:32:42 If you have the current operating system on your Mac and the current operating system on your iPhone, yes, it'll work for both.
19:32:50 The trick is make sure that you go into your iCloud preferences and sync them.
19:32:56 So that they talk back and forth to each other.
19:33:00 Lawrence, I have a quick question. I use 1Password.
19:33:03 Yes.
19:33:06 I just got a new iMac. And it's got the built-in password program and it keeps popping up and getting in the way of my 1Pass work.
19:33:13 Is there a way for me to turn that off?
19:33:17 I haven't wanted to. So the answer is I don't know.
19:33:22 I don't know.
19:33:21 Okay. It covers up it covers up the 1
19:33:29 Thing that pops up that you click on.
19:33:32 It should disappear if you just click anywhere else.
19:33:38 But I don't know if you can turn it off because I haven't wanted to.
19:33:36 Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
19:33:47 Mm-hmm.
19:33:42 I have both 1Password and I have passwords, which is the Apple application. And I'm going to be switching everything to passwords Because among other things, they don't charge you a subscription fee.
19:33:52 Oh.
19:33:56 So.
19:33:58 How much trouble will that be?
19:34:05 You have to export your passwords from 1Password, which is a pain.
19:34:10 Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
19:34:11 It's not impossible. In fact, 1Password even has a built-in menu that tells you how to do it.
19:34:18 You probably won't be able to figure out how to do that without looking at their documentation.
19:34:22 Yeah.
19:34:22 And passwords itself, Apple's passwords has a page that tells you what format it needs to be in.
19:34:31 And you can do it.
19:34:34 Okay, thank you.
19:34:37 I wanted to… spend what little time we have left because I got sidetracked on other things, talking about apple intelligence One thing that's different, you'll notice that almost everybody wants to have artificial intelligence embedded in something They think that you went to buy.
19:34:55 And most of the things that people went to embed it in, I find horrifying.
19:35:00 If any of you have ever had a Roomba, a Roomba originally said that it had artificial intelligence and then I kind of backed off of it because people have had Roombas know that they're actually pretty stupid.
19:35:12 They've got a good algorithm, though. Roomba goes along until it bumps into something and then it bumps into something and it slowly starts turning in a direction until it can free itself and then it goes off until it bumps into something else.
19:35:25 And some of the more advanced ones. Can actually keep an internal map. It draws a map of where it's vacuum.
19:35:33 So it figures, okay, I went in a straight line here. I should be able to turn around.
19:35:38 180 degrees and go in a straight line back the other way and get the entire floor by doing this.
19:35:45 So that's not really artificial intelligence. They actually built some intelligence into the to the robot. But a lot of the ai stuff Intuit is talking about that they have artificial intelligence in their accounting software I don't know about you, but I would prefer that the only intelligence involved in keeping track of my accounts is mine.
19:36:09 I don't want something to come in from the side and decide, oh, no, you didn't pay enough for that bill. I got to bump it up or drop it down or not count it this month.
19:36:20 I don't want artificial intelligence in. In accounting.
19:36:25 I don't trust it yet in cars. You know, there are things that… I don't want to do.
19:36:31 Apple has their artificial intelligence, which they call apple intelligence And it now exists on the iPad, the iPhone, and in the Mac. And on the Mac.
19:36:43 There's a this menu item that appears in Sequoia says apple intelligence It is turned off by default.
19:36:52 So Apple says, hey, they've added Apple intelligence to Sequoia. Well, I'm not seeing anything different. You have to turn it on.
19:36:58 So here's the menu item on your settings. And then you go through and just turn on the parts that you wanted to pay attention to.
19:37:08 And one of the things that I should have mentioned this earlier, somebody was saying they say, hey, Siri.
19:37:12 You no longer have to say, hey, you can just say, Siri.
19:37:16 And then my HomePod is yelling at me.
19:37:22 My HomePod is upset because I called it. But you don't have to have that hay anymore.
19:37:31 Right. I'm pot is yelling at me.
19:37:34 You have to turn it on. And same thing on your phone. You have to turn it on.
19:37:40 And then you can do some things that are fairly clever, like for example It will… It's useful.
19:37:51 It gives you new ways to look at your mail, for example. It'll summarize things.
19:37:56 If I look at, if I get a mail coming in, it'll give me a summary of the message.
19:38:00 It looks through the content and gives me a summary. What Apple does, though, that's extraordinary is how they've done that.
19:38:10 They don't offer this on all Macs. You have to have one of the last two models of iPhone and you have to have a recent Mac.
19:38:19 Why? Because it takes a considerable amount of horsepower and it takes more memory in order to do these tricks.
19:38:28 And that's because Apple does as much of a processing as possible on your computer.
19:38:34 So if you ask at what time is it? It'll tell you what time it is. It would do that before.
19:38:40 If you ask it how far between here in Seattle, it can actually do that kind of calculation.
19:38:46 On your device, as long as it has an internet connection and ask how far away is Seattle.
19:38:52 It'll come back with an answer. But what the question was, it doesn't pass on.
19:38:57 The Apple intelligence only passes on the necessary information to answer the question.
19:39:03 How far is it from here to Seattle? The only thing it really needs to know is where is Seattle? Because it knows where you are.
19:39:12 And then it does, with the original question why you wanted to know about Seattle.
19:39:16 Doesn't know. Doesn't care because the rest of it's done on your machine.
19:39:21 And the summary, when it's summarizing messages, the messages are already on your machine. It does an analysis of the words in there and says.
19:39:29 Okay, Barbara wants to know if Shishimata water your lawn tomorrow.
19:39:34 Okay it'll give you that summary before you even open the message.
19:39:38 But there are other things it can do. And among the things it can do is a new app that you probably didn't even notice, but you might have.
19:39:49 What is it called? Image Playground.
19:39:54 Image playground exists On the iPhone, the iPad, and on the Mac.
19:40:01 And these are images that I created with Image Playground. But before we get into that, I want to get into that I lost my… folder here. I wanted to show you some things that I did.
19:40:19 I wanted a picture of an Asian water dragon reading a book. Now, something that you need before you look at these photos something you should know Asian dragons do not have wings.
19:40:32 Asian wagons don't have wings because they don't need wings in order to fly.
19:40:37 And as a result, Asian dragons have four limbs. I have four feet.
19:40:43 And you have four limbs, two hands, two feet. European dragons have six limbs.
19:40:50 Four legs plus two wings. Technically, that makes them a bug.
19:40:55 I did not want to bug. I wanted an Asian water dragon. So I went into Adobe Firefly And I said, I want an Asian blue water dragon reading a book.
19:41:06 And it gave me this. And it gave me… Actually, I should just open them all up at once.
19:41:17 Different kinds of variations. The very first one I got was this one down here.
19:41:23 Where it's reading a book, it's reading a book It's reading a book.
19:41:29 It's reading a book. It's reading a book.
19:41:33 Slightly different. Each time. And then this one's a little bit different. That's because I said I wanted a Asian Blue Dragon.
19:41:43 Reading a book in the style of Hiroshige. Hiroshige is a famous Japanese illustrator of the 19th century.
19:41:50 So this one's a little bit more nuanced than that one.
19:41:56 For example. And this is another one.
19:42:01 This is Hiroshige and this one is Hiroshige. You notice that this second time it threw in We got way water is because it's a water dragon. This one's got waves because there's a water dragon, but now it has flowers too because you know hey
19:42:15 It's an Asian dragon.
19:42:19 Did you notice that one of those had a book that had two spines?
19:42:23 Yes, I did notice that. We'll get to that in a second.
19:42:30 I didn't do quite as many with many Microsoft co-pilot.
19:42:35 Simply because I don't like the dragon. It doesn't have… It doesn't have a… any wings, but this one looks to me look an awful lot like a horn toad like I used to see down in Texas.
19:42:49 This one's a little bit more dragon-like. And the nice touch is that it's actually oriental writing here.
19:42:56 And this one's back to being a hoard and toad. So Microsoft does get Microsoft does.
19:43:02 Some points, particularly for this one. And this one also, I said in the style of Hiroshige, so it made it slightly different This they consider photorealistic And this one's more of a woodblock print.
19:43:16 Hiroshige did woodblock prints. Then we come to apple
19:43:27 Apple intelligence. Again, it's a blue water dragon reading a book in a library.
19:43:34 And this is Apple's blue water dragon. This is the photorealistic and this is one that I say was a illustration. So that's not bad.
19:43:44 Except that the first time that I tried this. No matter what i tried I said it was an Asian dragon that I wanted.
19:43:51 I got wings. And instead of reading a book for some reason, it's playing cards.
19:43:57 And I can't really explain it. It's just… Not the Asian dragon that I wanted.
19:44:13 Then I said I wanted to This is an Apple intelligence. This is what it is good at.
19:44:20 I said that I wanted a penguin cheering on its team, its basketball team And you notice that even the basketball team in the back are penguins. So this is a penguin with a basketball so that you know it's a basketball
19:44:35 And the team in the background and those are penguins as well.
19:44:39 So that's not half bad.
19:44:46 And here are different pictures of me. Now, this is the photograph that it started with.
19:44:53 It's a picture of me. Done in Apple portrait mode.
19:44:57 Taken with my iphone. And here's what it came up with.
19:45:05 I said that I want a scholar down reading a scroll in the style of Hiroshi So apparently scholars are glaring a lot so Even though my original photograph didn't have me glaring Because I'm a scholar, I have to be looking sad or glaring or something.
19:45:21 And here I said that I wasn't a scholar. Here I said I wasn't a scholar and it's it created that from based upon that picture.
19:45:35 So how does it do that? Well, let's try something again and something again
19:45:46 Giant toad. Swallowing.
19:45:51 Test. Here's a giant toad in front of a castle. Not quite what I wanted.
19:45:59 Because it's not doing much in the terms of swallowing, although it does look like a giant toad.
19:46:07 And you're going to have space themes So now we have… giant toad and because it's a space theme and now it's got constellations in the background And if you find one that you like, you say done And it makes it larger and then you can just drag it off onto your desktop.
19:46:27 So this is Apple intelligence. It did not go out to the internet.
19:46:33 Except for just a general idea of what a toad looks like and what a castle looks like. But what I was asking for It did not send that out.
19:46:41 So it's an interesting way to create an interesting way illustrations for illustrations for something that you're trying to do.
19:46:49 But there are limitations, definite limitations.
19:47:05 You say politicians screaming at protesters with rifles there's a good chance it won't do that.
19:47:11 Says unable to use that description. So it also kind of censors you.
19:47:19 The reason for this is it doesn't want to be on the front page of the New York Times Saying that people were creating hate speech using ample intelligence.
19:47:29 So it does limit in terms of what it is that you what you can ask for.
19:47:37 But if you want to um
19:47:48 Birthday cake for a girl. Comes up with a birthday cake and it gives you different variations Like if you decide that you want to blue birth day take for a girl. Hopefully it'll change the color Okay, that's kind of a…
19:48:11 Almost a teal, but sure Oh, 315th birthday.
19:48:18 A very old girl.
19:48:24 Anybody have a suggestion if something you want me to try?
19:48:27 I have a quick question right quick, though. Is this just for the Mac or is it on iPhone and iPad
19:48:35 It's on your iPhone, it's on your iPad. You just have to look for Image Playground.
19:48:38 And… Well, I did a search and it doesn't find it.
19:48:43 Okay. I am, yes.
19:48:43 Are you using iOS 18? It's on mine.
19:48:49 I'll take a better look. Thanks.
19:48:50 Oh, a question. Did you… I don't remember if I had to download it or not.
19:48:57 Did you turn on at… Did you turn on Apple intelligence on your iPhone?
19:48:57 You have to turn it on.
19:49:02 I did, yes. I just did.
19:49:04 Yeah, you might have to download it.
19:49:09 Okay. Suggestions, and it's something you want me to try.
19:49:22 I asked it to do SpongeBob SquarePants smoking a reefer and it wouldn't do it.
19:49:27 Yes, it won't, because it recognizes those as either restricted by content being the reefer or restricted by copyright.
19:49:38 Right. So then I asked for a square sponge smoking a cigar It will do that.
19:49:47 Where? Yellow.
19:49:57 Sponge smoking a cigar.
19:50:06 I, uh, uh. Need to get rid of the birthday things.
19:50:14 So…
19:50:14 Okay, that's a little bit weird, but that's a little bit weird
19:50:30 So I went to download Image Playground and there's a charge for it.
19:50:37 But the description of the in-app purchases are all in Japanese, Chinese, whatever.
19:50:43 So I can't read them. Okay, so we want the Apple one.
19:50:45 Then it's not apples.
19:50:50 Yeah.
19:50:50 Okay, great. Thank you.
19:50:54 Okay. I'm going to skip the image playground because you can play around with that if you have uh
19:51:05 If you have the right operating system And I went to go on to something else, which also is with Apple intelligence And I can never find it. Oh, there it is.
19:51:16 I don't use pages that much.
19:51:23 You'll have to forgive me if I don't seem to know what I'm doing.
19:51:39 This is a complex sentence. This sentence has… 206 words and it's one sentence.
19:51:48 And… That alone should tell you just probably too much.
19:51:54 Let's make this a little bit bigger so you can read this.
19:51:59 Fantastic piece of prose.
19:52:05 And we get 200. Ah, we can get to 200. Okay, this is just a terrible piece of prose. It's one sentence so Just trying to read this out loud, you'd kill over in a faint just from lack of breath.
19:52:18 So I'm going to select this, I'm going to go up to the edit menu to writing tools, which is something new.
19:52:25 And I say that I want this to make this friendly.
19:52:35 And it comes up and i copy that.
19:52:40 And I come down here and I paste that And it makes it gnarly.
19:52:46 Friendlier, but also way too big.
19:52:53 You'll see that among other things, it's much, much shorter than the first one.
19:52:59 And also it's more than one sentence. It's at least three sentences that I can see.
19:53:06 Okay, other possibilities are other possibilities are for um for writing tools, I come back I try it again and I say I want it professional
19:53:24 And I copy that. I'm going to paste it in, get giant text again.
19:53:36 Make this 11. There's a possibility that that's may even be longer than the original.
19:53:47 But at least it's now multiple sentences, I think.
19:53:54 Actually, it might be exactly the same thing. Oh, well, so that didn't work out so great.
19:54:02 Possibly because i didn't do them. And we're going to go up to writing tools and we're going to say concise.
19:54:17 And we copy that.
19:54:36 And… So as you can see, it made some fairly made some fairly decent changes here. And I looked at these earlier and they basically say the same thing.
19:54:49 This is an example of Apple intelligence. And it didn't have to reach out across the internet to do that.
19:54:56 It just sees that this is a big huge, ridiculously long sentence If you have a sentence that goes on for more than three lines, it's probably too long.
19:55:05 So the first rule of thumb is break it up into individual sentences.
19:55:09 The second thing is to get rid of repetitive prose. It managed to do that.
19:55:16 Things that are repeatedly used over and over and over again. Got rid And if I really worked at it, I could get a professional one that would actually be shorter than the original.
19:55:28 Possibly, but. It's built into the… It's built into Apple intelligence.
19:55:39 It does the same sort of tricks on your email. You write something. There's a commercial on TV where this guy who's writing this nasty notes to his supervisor and then he asked to rewrite it as something friendly and it comes across and he gets a compliment
19:55:59 From his coworker. That's done with Apple intelligence and it's actually quite good. What it will not do, which is what you see the news stories about.
19:56:10 If you ask it to write the great American novel, it won't.
19:56:14 You actually have to write something and it'll help you rewrite it.
19:56:18 Now, there are other ways to do this. Microsoft has had editing tools built into Word for quite a long long time and you can have add-ons Let me bring up Word.
19:56:33 This is Word. There's this thing called Grammarly, which is a plugin that you can buy or you can use the free version.
19:56:43 That as you're doing things it'll do things make suggestions on how to do it better.
19:56:50 But this little symbol that I have here, because I have a Microsoft account for the entire office suite That little symbol means that Copilot is here. So Copilot will allow me to create a draft using co-pilot. Again, I'm a decent writer. I don't need co-pilot's help.
19:57:08 But for this horrible, horrible sentence, which I did have to deal with.
19:57:12 I did use some AI to figure out how to make it comprehensible. I figured out once this is actually syntactically, it makes sense.
19:57:22 In terms of syntax, it just doesn't make sense in terms of human beings understanding it.
19:57:29 And I'm a firm believer that policies and procedures If they're meant to be followed by individuals, they should be able to be read by individuals.
19:57:38 If you need a lawyer, then it was poorly written. So this is something that's built into pages and numbers and pages and numbers and keynote.
19:57:52 As well as Apple Mail and Messages. On your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
19:58:00 And it's all part of Apple intelligence. But it won't work if you don't turn it on.
19:58:05 Apple Intelligence does not work. With Microsoft. It does not work with with… Chrome does not work with Microsoft Edge, things that aren't made by Apple doesn't work with those.
19:58:24 Yes.
19:58:23 Lawrence, I found it does work. With non-Apple things.
19:58:32 If you go into Word and put that same sentence and you right click.
19:58:38 You'll get the writing tools instead of being in the edit menu like it is on all the Apple products. You just select the paragraph and then right click and you'll see writing tools come up.
19:58:52 Is it Apple's writing tools or Microsoft's?
19:58:55 Apple.
19:58:57 It is possible because Apple let their developer conference did say, if you want to incorporate these tools in your software, do it. But for the most part, right now, it's just Apple stuff. I haven't noticed that with Word, but I'll go and look.
19:59:12 I tried it with Word and PowerPoint. They both work great by just right clicking after you selected it and then it comes up with the editing tools and It's the same as the one you see in pages and numbers.
19:59:26 I have my own best idea on how to improve PowerPoint.
19:59:32 Throw it away and use Keynote. Keynotes much more intelligent.
19:59:40 Keynote will read PowerPoint. So you don't even need PowerPoint. I use Keynote for everything.
19:59:46 When I was working for the government, I used to have to do presentations using PowerPoint.
19:59:52 And people would say, oh, your slides look so great. How'd you do that? I used Keynote.
19:59:58 And then I export it in this PowerPoint and went in used them at work, but PowerPoint i PowerPoint was originally designed as a outlining.
20:00:12 Application just to do outlines. And Microsoft basically destroyed it. The guy who sold PowerPoint to Microsoft.
20:00:22 Is to this day a millionaire, but he really, really resents what they did to his software.
20:00:29 And things like access. Their database they bought the name Access from Tandy Corporation.
20:00:36 And access was a calendar. When it was running on TRS-80s.
20:00:42 Microsoft bought it because it just wanted the name. They threw away the application and created a database.
20:00:49 I could tell you horrible tales about computers. Anyway, any questions about that? I realize that was a short demo, but that's really pretty much all you really need to know.
20:00:58 You need to turn on Apple intelligence on your phone, on your iPad, on your Mac, if you want to use it.
20:01:04 And then it works with keynote and numbers and pages and pages Safari and Messenger and And the image playground Just pick out something you'd like to stick on a card someplace and just go play around with image playground.
20:01:25 It's something to note about it. Apple Intelligence, which I should Bring up and go away.
20:01:34 I don't want to keep you. Yes.
20:01:35 Florence. And passwords, do I have to enter all of my various passwords or does it automatically find any of them from any other programs and automatically bring them in?
20:01:49 Apple passwords will, as you're going to websites and entering your name and password It's keeping track of those.
20:01:56 Apple passwords. And to some extent to some extent 1Password does the same thing.
20:02:06 But if you've been to, if you just downloaded and installed Sequoia this week.
20:02:14 It doesn't know about anything you've done in the past. Oh, actually, that's not true.
20:02:18 Come to think of it, that's not true because even your old passwords. Safari, for example, has been keeping track of them for quite some time. If you go into Safari settings There's a section here on a section here Passwords. It's been there for years.
20:02:37 And the only thing they've done in Sequoia is they've instead of being as part of Safari now, it's now a separate application but Safari has been keeping track of passwords for years.
20:02:50 But it won't know if it won't know if If you go to a website using chrome Edge or Firefox, it doesn't know anything about it.
20:03:03 Yes.
20:03:01 Lawrence, I have a question. With the apple intelligence or any artificial intelligence can you take some sort of a legal jargon or like some sort of insurance jargon that Who in the hell can understand it all and have it simplified in very simple
20:03:24 Things that you can understand.
20:03:25 Yes. The answer is yes.
20:03:30 Okay. And how would one approach that?
20:03:33 You just copy it out of off of their website, for example, is a good place to find the fine print for your insurance contract, just go onto your website and ask for a copy or scrape it off of your PDF.
20:03:46 And then paste it into pages and say, go to the writing tools and it'll simplify it.
20:03:53 Thank you.
20:03:54 One thing I wanted to show you. I told you that Apple doesn't go out and send your entire request. There is an exception. If you want to use chat GPT and you have a chat GPT account.
20:04:07 You can set it up so that it will use chat GPT. I don't want it to use ChatGPT.
20:04:13 Because I don't want it to have that out there. One of the things that happened with ChatGPT, ChatGPT is the AI interface that's been in the news over the past year or so.
20:04:25 They had a data breach. Several months ago.
20:04:30 And if you had a chat GPT account then whatever you had in your account.
20:04:38 Not necessarily has but me personally has be in somebody else's hands.
20:04:42 But if you wanted to use ChatGPT, you can allow Apple intelligence to go out and talk to chat GPT. But I didn't want it to, so I turned that off.
20:04:57 And the reason why the rules are slightly different, you have to be signed into ChatGPT in order to use it.
20:05:05 And so it might stay on your computer if you're doing Apple intelligence. But as soon as you start using chat GPT, it has to send the request to ChatGPT.
20:05:15 So it's no longer just on your computer. Yes.
20:05:16 Lawrence. I don't have a chat GPT account.
20:05:21 But Siri does say that it got some stuff from ChatGPT.
20:05:32 Oh, and I don't need an account then.
20:05:27 That's because it makes a request from ChatGPT. You don't. It depends upon what it is. For example, if you there are some things that you can get from ChatGPT that gives you a limit. I think with a free account, you get limited to
20:05:45 How many requests per day. Once you run up against that barrier, it doesn't work anymore.
20:05:51 Oh, okay. Gotcha. Thank you.
20:05:52 You have to wait until the next day.
20:05:57 So I just wanted to mention the fact that, yes, you can You can talk to chat GPT if you want to, but I have that turned off because I don't want to.
20:06:10 Yes.
20:06:09 Glorious. I read in several places this week that the next iteration of iOS and sequoia should be available next week.
20:06:19 And it will turn on Apple intelligence by default. Instead of having it turned off.
20:06:27 I haven't read that.
20:06:34 Okay, I hope there's a way to turn it off because a lot of people don't want it for a variety of reasons. Like for example.
20:06:40 In schools, you don't want schools students using that if they're using in a writing class and you want them to write complete sentences and paragraphs teacher padded.
20:06:49 Probably there will be a way to turn it off. I'm just saying it'll be And you won't have to turn it on. It'll be on by default.
20:06:58 I haven't read that. I'm not sure what I think of that.
20:07:04 I personally probably would have liked it. I don't know. Maybe they've done enough testing and they think that uh the training wheels can come off. But I do… caution people to be very careful with artificial intelligence.
20:07:18 Because artificial means it's really not real. And it can make mistakes. So for example.
20:07:26 Artificial intelligence and spreadsheet. Not sure what i want it to do.
20:07:30 If I type in two and I wanted to add it to two of that and come up with a four.
20:07:35 I don't want it to be creative. I really want a four.
20:07:40 So just something to just something to wonder about. Also keep in mind that If people are basing their predictions upon beta software.
20:07:51 When it goes out to the beta testers, Apple wants them to beta test them, so it might be turned on by default.
20:07:56 Doesn't mean it's going to be turned on by default for users.
20:08:00 Just they said it's the golden master which was released
20:08:06 I'll believe it when I see it.
20:08:09 I guess we only have to wait a week if that's a week Accurate.
20:08:13 Yeah, well, a lot of things aren't.
20:08:17 Yeah. Adam, thanks.
20:08:18 Lawrence, it's getting kind of late in the session, I know, and this is kind of new stuff.
20:08:25 But maybe next time or sometime in the future, you might share with us what you think might become of the AI that the $500 billion heirs are announcing Sometime over the weekend.
20:08:41 They're going to put into it. I'm just real curious what that buys.
20:08:49 It buys more billionaires. More people will make money from it.
20:08:55 I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing.
20:09:00 I don't think it's going to make you and I think it's any red room.
20:09:04 Well, the only thing that I saw was one of the people in there was talking about cancer research and how it might find cures for cancer, which sounds like a wonderful thing, but I don't I can't for the life of me figure out how this stuff happens.
20:09:20 The answer is they've been saying that for 20 years. The biggest steps in cancer research were done with just old-fashioned computing.
20:09:29 And that was when they mapped the human genome that project. That was a giant step forward. But you see, you have to do the basic science. Artificial intelligence can't really get you through to the basic science.
20:09:44 And they haven't seen anything now with AI that can't be done with traditional computing. For example.
20:09:53 The uh the uh the word tools that I was showing you.
20:09:58 Grammarly has been doing things like that for a decade, Microsoft has been flagging things. I used to tell people when I was teaching.
20:10:07 That if they sent me a paper that looked like a Christmas tree and everything was underlined in red and green.
20:10:12 They couldn't send it to me until they got rid of all the red and green. And that's because Microsoft.
20:10:20 15 years ago was flagging things that were misspelled and red and it was flagging repeated words like saying the the and things like that. It's been doing that for a long time.
20:10:31 That's not artificial intelligence. That's just good programming. What Apple is doing, the part that they've added to it is the security part in terms of the tools themselves.
20:10:44 That's not necessarily new technology. The security part is definitely an Apple innovation.
20:10:53 So finding how cure for cancer, I don't see how that's going to That's a good sales technique.
20:11:01 To tell you that it's important, I don't see that it's going to make a difference.
20:11:07 There's a Adam angst has tidbits this week.
20:11:14 Short article about how to use chat gpt With spreadsheets to get information that he would have had to spend an awful lot of time manually to get and also some of the pitfalls some of when it doesn't, it goes wrong.
20:11:32 Bruce Schneer also has an article on his site about some of the dangers of AI making up stuff.
20:11:40 Ah, yes. That's been a problem for quite some time. When they did the… The current AI models, the large language models, large language, it's called large language models.
20:11:52 Because they fed it billions and billions of words. The large language models that we have today does not know the difference between to whom the bell tolls in Grey's Anatomy.
20:12:08 It doesn't know that one's fiction. It doesn't know what fiction is.
20:12:13 So if in for whom the bell tolls, if the hero manages to patch himself up using a old bandana and it allows them to run 40 miles through the desert and you try to do that, you'll probably die.
20:12:29 Because it's fiction. But the large language models cannot tell the difference between a lie the truth, fiction, and reality.
20:12:41 And those are different things. I don't know the difference.
20:12:43 But doesn't AI, if you ask it, tell you the source of its information or no?
20:12:49 Oh, it doesn't?
20:12:49 No, because no because it's compiled. It's compiled out of billions upon billions of things. And it might tell you the source of something But what it's telling you may not be the part that you focus on. For example, if you want to know
20:13:04 Write me a… a resume to get a job as a programmer.
20:13:09 Okay, write you up a perfectly good resume. And you go in and you turn it in and they laugh at you because they gave you a resume for a cobalt programmer.
20:13:18 And if you don't know that a cobalt was a language from the 1950s.
20:13:21 Obsolete.
20:13:23 You're in sad shape there. It usually doesn't tell you anything at all.
20:13:33 Wow. That's dangerous. That's dangerous.
20:13:35 Yes, it is. And that's why when people say they want to use AI for a doctor's diagnosis, I think No, no.
20:13:47 If he wants to do a doctor's diagnosis on a robot, that's fine.
20:13:45 I don't think so.
20:13:51 Diagnosis on me. No, I. I'd rather have humans do that.
20:13:59 Good luck finding one.
20:14:00 Keep in mind that the movie 2001 were already a couple decades late in making that happen.
20:14:08 So what they could do in 2001, the movie we still can't do in 2024.
20:14:14 True intelligence is hard. And if you don't believe me, if you're the least bit skeptical.
20:14:22 Go into a high school class on any subject And tell me how difficult or how easy it is to teach them anything at all.
20:14:36 There's a reason why, by the way. I was a double major in my undergraduate.
20:14:42 History and education. I did not even bother to apply for the education degree, even though I qualified.
20:14:49 Because after going and teaching and student teaching, I decided, no, I want to teach college.
20:14:56 I wanted people to pay to listen to me. Rather than listen to me just because the bus took them there and they had no choice.
20:15:07 There's a difference of motivation.
20:15:12 Probably right.
20:15:16 Any other questions before we go?
20:15:20 Oh, I need a new computer. And do you know of anything coming down the pike? Should I wait a while? Is there something that I don't know what's out there right now.
20:15:35 Apple's definitely going to come up with something in 2025. I have no idea what.
20:15:39 I will tell you that I will tell you that If you want a laptop.
20:15:44 All of the Apple laptops right now, the only thing I would suggest that you pay attention to is the hard drive size.
20:15:53 If you buy any Apple laptop, any Apple desktop, they've doubled the amount of memory.
20:15:58 So now you get A minimum of 16 gigs and that's because they needed more memory for the AI stuff. But that means that every single model of everything they have has enough memory.
20:16:12 What people tend to try and save money on our disk drive space.
20:16:18 You will use more disk drive space than you know what you're doing.
20:16:22 I'll give you an example. If you have an iPhone and you use messages as an iPhone.
20:16:29 You should go into your settings and see how much room messages is using. It's probably using in the gigabytes Because nobody ever bothers to delete old messages, which means that every time somebody sent you a photograph or sent you a PDF or sent you a movie, it's still in messages.
20:16:47 And the same thing happens with your computer. Get at least a terabyte of disk drive space And any of the apples out there will be sufficient for your needs.
20:17:02 Everything Apple is producing right now this very second has more power than you can use.
20:17:11 I recently bought a new machine. I'm sorry?
20:17:12 I don't use a lot of space anyway. I don't use a lot of space anyway.
20:17:18 You might not think so, but once you start taking photographs and people, they tend to be very careful when they photograph things.
20:17:27 Go and photograph everything. I would go to the grocery store and Kathleen would send me a photograph Saying, I want this brand of this brand of oil. And I want this brand of soy sauce And so on and so forth. There are lots of things that people use cameras for that you don't think about.
20:17:45 I was talking to my daughter, she was here in late December.
20:17:51 And I was talking to her and I said. I have a list on my phone. I'll send it to you. And she came over and used her phone to take a picture of my screen.
20:18:00 And I said, what did you just do? And she says, it's faster.
20:18:06 So now she has a picture of the screen showing my list of things that I wanted to show her. People use photographs for everything and they just, they take up space.
20:18:17 So don't shy away from having a terabyte of this space. You'll end up using it for something.
20:18:25 Even if…
20:18:25 I don't use, let's see, I'm going there right now Let's see, what do you find that under? Go to the bottom.
20:18:34 Just click on the image of your disk drive If you don't see the image of your disk drive.
20:18:41 If you don't see an image of the disk drive, it's actually hard to find out.
20:18:46 Well, isn't that under the black apple? How much spice you're using?
20:18:52 No, it's buried. It's there, but it's buried.
20:18:59 And everybody's
20:18:59 But anyway. Everything that Apple produces today, I would recommend.
20:19:05 Just make sure you have enough disk space. The question that Mr. Lockwood asked me earlier, and I sent it back, the response was.
20:19:13 He has a friend who wants to move from a uh from a PC to a Mac and he's already got a screen, he's already got a mouse, and he's already got a keyboard.
20:19:23 Does he need a new one to work with a Mac Mini? And the answer is no.
20:19:29 It doesn't come with any of those things. And you can plug a… PC, keyboard, mouse and screen into it. The question is if you that you really need to think about is Is the keyboard any good? Is the mouse any good? And is the screen any good? A lot of PCs come with really
20:19:51 Terrible screens. And Apple makes a point of having really good strains.
20:19:56 You can get not the one from the manufacturer, but you can go into Costco and you can get a really nice LG monitor for not much money.
20:20:05 That's better than the screen that comes with any PC that I'm aware of out there right now.
20:20:13 So, uh. But yeah, you can go out and get a Mac Mini and reuse the PC screen and mouse and keyboard.
20:20:23 Cheap.
20:20:28 It says… 40.84 gigabytes.
20:20:20 But you might end up buying a new one later on anyway, simply because you don't like the the quality
20:20:32 Of 256 GB 25.
20:20:36 Okay, that's not much. Which means, among other things, that you're not saving any movies or or photographs to your hard drive.
20:20:47 And you really should.
20:20:50 Yeah. Well, and I… I guess that was in the newsletter about what the other gentleman just talked about uh I learned because I just learned about the messages and call it attachments or whatever with it it doesn't delete.
20:21:10 And… Why don't they fix a delete that means delete? Anyway.
20:21:17 So how do you… go in and get rid of those.
20:21:21 Like you just said.
20:21:28 Yeah. Right.
20:21:23 If you click on a message, you can delete the message You can do that on the Mac. You can do that on your your iPhone. That'll get rid of the message. But if it's a long string of messages, it gets rid of the whole thing.
20:21:38 It gets rid of like if you have a string of 200 messages If you delete it, it gets rid of all of them.
20:21:44 There is a way to delete the individual photographs and movies and so on and so forth but I'd probably have to show you how to do that.
20:21:55 At some meetings.
20:21:55 Well, I don't save messages. I don't have reason to. Or if it's saved, it's just till the appointment comes or whatever.
20:22:03 But I thought it said something about if in those messages there were pictures sent or something like that.
20:22:12 That the pictures don't get deleted.
20:22:17 Until you delete the message, the pictures don't get deleted. There is a way to delete individual attachments in a message string, but I'd have to show you, I can do that at some meeting sometime it's
20:22:31 If you if you delete the message
20:22:35 Then it deletes all the attachments.
20:22:38 Okay. Well… Okay. How is it stacking up for those people that are having a problem then?
20:22:45 Most people don't delete messages. No.
20:22:48 They don't delete them.
20:22:51 None of us work on it.
20:22:54 You can set your machine to delete them automatically after 30 days.
20:22:54 That's…
20:22:55 Oh, excuse me.
20:22:58 Yeah, you can also set it up so they'll delete it automatically after 30 days.
20:23:02 But here's an example of why you might need more space.
20:23:07 My niece lost her phone.
20:23:12 And it wasn't an iPhone. It was an Android phone. She lost her phone.
20:23:16 And with it, she lost the baby pictures for her eldest son.
20:23:20 Her eldest son was 12. She had never backed up any of the photographs.
20:23:28 So when she lost her phone. She lost 12 years of photographs.
20:23:34 Uh-huh.
20:23:39 Yeah.
20:23:34 All of them permanently. So that's why you should, among other things save photographs and such.
20:23:45 To your computer because it's got the room for it.
20:23:48 Thank you, Scott. In photos, I think we got five or six thousand photos in there all europe all over the world And… Does that take up a lot of space?
20:24:04 Yeah, it should be more than your 40 gigs. 5,000 or 6,000 photographs should be a fair amount of space.
20:24:12 No movies.
20:24:15 It should still be a fair amount of space, but… I have probably 300,000 photos so i'm a special case.
20:24:22 I'm looking at the 24-inch iMac desktop And… I know you said you recommend a terabyte and everybody's ever looked at my computer as always says.
20:24:46 You bet you could.
20:24:38 Good grief. You're not using anything you know And… So… And I thought, do I need to pay that extra money just for something I don't use?
20:24:56 I consider disk drive space sort of be like closet space. Most people don't have any extra room in their closet.
20:25:03 So if you use the closet like most people do. You'll fill it.
20:25:03 Yeah.
20:25:08 Unless you have a really big closet. So get a big closet.
20:25:12 I've been… using a long time but okay I must speak.
20:25:17 We can also just get an extra external hard drive.
20:25:21 You can get an external hard drive, but a lot of people don't know how to save things other than to the internal drive.
20:25:29 Apple, if you install a new piece of software, it puts it on the internal drive.
20:25:33 If you save a document, it puts it by default on the internal drive.
20:25:37 So the external drive for most people doesn't really help them that much.
20:25:43 It's um it's it's easier if there's just more space there to begin with.
20:25:48 I will also tell you that Since moving to Squim I've helped half a dozen people who had their Macs stop working in all half dozen cases because it filled up the hard drive.
20:26:01 If you'll fill up the hard drive, your Mac stops working.
20:26:06 Well, how do I tell how full it is? Just look up there. It tells you.
20:26:12 Click on the red apple. Tell you. The red black apple. Black apple.
20:26:18 Like this right here.
20:26:18 Anyway, I don't know of anything about that apple that will tell you how much space you're using.
20:26:26 Because it doesn't.
20:26:26 No. Lawrence, this has been really interesting, but I need to leave.
20:26:30 Sure.
20:26:33 Yes, and I do too.
20:26:34 Um can Can I, I haven't signed in and I never figured out how to do that.
20:26:42 That's all right. I forgot to make the sign-in sheet so uh What can I say? I… I am. I am.
20:26:49 Messed up, but… If you have ideas on what we should do in February, please send me an email.
20:27:00 Message my message. Addresses on the website or just send it to Straight MAC period vice president Straight Mac.
20:27:13 Is that right?
20:27:15 Well, again, thank you so much. I mean… Okay.
20:27:24 Oh, like, okay. Okay.
20:27:18 Send it to my email address. Just go look in your received emails and just reply with what we should do next month okay
20:27:27 Hey, Lawrence. Lawrence, this is Darcy. Real quick, are we paying dues this year?
20:27:32 Yes, we decided we'd pay them once a year in January.
20:27:39 In January.
20:27:39 And do we send them to the president
20:27:45 No, there's an address on our website. It's under the join menu. It's got the address.
20:27:53 I have the address. It says… Would you like me to read the address?
20:27:50 To send it to. It's a post office box downtown.
20:27:55 Okay. No, I can look it up. Thanks.
20:27:55 Okay, great.
20:28:00 Okay.
20:28:02 One other thing about memory that he was asking about and If you go up to the Apple icon in the corner, it does tell you about it. Go to About This Mac and then there's a selection of storage and it'll tell you exactly how much you've used.
20:28:17 Oh, it's gone. No.
20:28:19 Right. Thank you. I'm signing off.
20:28:19 That's easy.
20:28:23 Good night. Thank you, Lawrence.
20:28:24 Oh, that's, it's been forever since I used that. I forgot about it then.
20:28:31 Yeah, Indy. Hey, thank you, Lawrence.
20:28:33 Okay. See you next month. Bye-bye.