Strait Macintosh User Group did not discuss virtual screen space at the July 21, 2026, meeting because experimentation showed Zoom didn’t like having the screen resolution changed on the fly, and did not like bouncing around between virtual screens. We will explore this topic at a future in-person meeting.
Instead, we talked about how to update apps on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, how to use iCloud to optimize photos on your iPhone or iPad to make room for updating the operating system, applications and websites that can squish photos to make them smaller for sending through email or Apple Messages, why you should give serious thought to getting a new Mac if you have an Intel-based computer, why you want to check your Apple Silicon machine now to identify Intel-only programs as they won’t be supported on macOS 27, why you should buy a Brother laser printer, and many other topics.
Note: there was a discussion of the height of Roy Rogers, the TV cowboy. Roy Rogers, the TV cowboy, was 5 foot, 10 inches. However, Roy Rogers, the NBA basketball player, was 6 feet, 10 inches. Yes, we talked about the height of TV and movie cowboys, and why Siri sometimes gives a correct answer that is not necessarily the answer we were looking for.
Things mentioned
Strait Macintosh User Group has a new President, Ron Brown. Thank you to our retiring President, Sabrina Davis, who has served since December 2018.
A new electronic book on how to use AirPods from Take Control Books,
https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/airpods
Squoosh, a website that can reduce the size of your image files for sending through email or messages, or simply to take up less room,
And ImageOptim, a Macintosh app that also reduces image sizes, and does it in batches,
As macOS 27 (coming out this fall?) will not support Intel-based applications, how do you identify such applications? Here is Apple’s documentation on the subject:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
What is the best printer I can buy — fastest, least expensive to own — as long as I don’t mind printing in just black and gray? An accurate, and funny, rundown of the one answer:
Video of the July 2026 Meeting: Ask Me (Almost) Anything
Click on the YouTube logo in the video if you want to expand the recording size.
Transcript of the July 2026 Ask Me (Almost) Anything meeting
This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom frequently has flights of fancy. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.
18:37:12 Anyway, I am recording, I think, and I think captioning is on.
18:37:19 So.
18:37:22 We’re good to go. And I’m going to talk about some other things towards the end of the question answer session, but right now it’s just if you have questions about something, I will try and
18:37:36 I can answer.
18:37:37 I do have a question.
18:37:40 In your email that you sent yesterday, and I’m sorry, I don’t know why I don’t have a picture.
18:37:45 I
18:37:46 We don’t know, at any rate, you said that we needed Zoom 7.1.5.
18:37:53 or more, and I don’t even… I looked at my settings and didn’t see anything that told me
18:38:00 what Zoom…
18:38:03 I have.
18:38:03 Okay, are you using a Mac or an iPad?
18:38:06 iPad.
18:38:09 Oh, okay.
18:38:07 That’s the reason why you can’t see it. The iPad, it’s really darn difficult to figure out. However, there is something that you can do if you…
18:38:20 Our iPad there is an app.
18:38:22 There’s an app called Apps, or app, I can’t remember if it’s app or
18:38:27 Yeah, yeah.
18:38:26 App Store. App Store.
18:38:28 Well, I have apps, so…
18:38:28 If you launch the App Store app, you can click on the preferences. It actually has preferences. And one of the preferences is Update All. So it won’t necessarily tell you what version you have, but it’ll just go through everything on your iPad.
18:38:54 Okay.
18:38:45 and update it. It does that automatically, but since iPads spend a lot of their time turned off, it can take a while for things to get updated. But if you launch the App Store app and go into Preferences and say update everything, it’ll just go through and
18:39:03 everything.
18:39:03 Okay.
18:39:05 Does that work on the MacBook Pro?
18:39:08 Um, on a MacBook Pro, I have no idea.
18:39:12 I have an app here.
18:39:15 I don’t think that…
18:39:15 Anya, Lawrence on the iPad, if you don’t want to update everything, you can just use the search function and search for Zoom.
18:39:24 And if you look at the Zoom app, it’ll
18:39:27 I’ll have the little badge instead of saying get, we’ll say update.
18:39:30 Okay.
18:39:33 Um, no, on the Mac, it assumes the Mac is going to be on for a while, and you can go into your preferences or into the App Store.
18:39:44 app itself and preferences and just say automatic update, which is what I recommend for everybody. Again, for people who use their laptop or they use their iPad and then they turn it off and don’t use it for days at a time, it’s possible that you can miss things. So it’s a good idea just every once in a while to
18:40:07 Just fire it up and make sure that everything is being updated. This one woman was convinced that she had the latest version of the, that she had a brand new iPad and she was sure that everything had on it was updated.
18:40:24 And I looked at the brand new iPad and the brand new iPad was 7 years old, and nothing had been updated since the day that she bought it.
18:40:34 Because she used it, and then she’d shut it down, and she wouldn’t use it for several days, then she’d use it, and she wouldn’t necessarily connect it to her home Wi-Fi. If it can’t see the internet, and it’s not turned on, it’s not plugged in, it’s not going to get plugged… it’s not going to get updated.
18:40:49 Um, so… it is a good idea to just periodically go through
18:40:55 .
18:40:56 Make sure it has general house cleaning. The other thing that I noticed that a lot… it had nothing to do with updates, but actually it does have something to do with an update. Somebody was telling me they could not update their iPad. And the reason why they couldn’t update their iPad is there was no room.
18:41:13 They took a lot of photographs, and they told it to save all the photographs they take with their iPhone into the cloud, and because the iPad was logged into the same account, it would download them,
18:41:28 And the iPad was full of photographs and there was no room left for an operating system update. And they said, well, do I have to delete my photos? And the answer is no. There’s this setting in settings on the iPad and also on the iPhone saying optimize photographs.
18:41:46 And assuming you have enough iCloud storage, it’ll optimize it so it only takes what it needs to for thumbnails and so on and so forth, and it stores those on your iPad and your iPhone and everything else is stored full-size up at iCloud.
18:42:02 And if you only have a five gig account, which is what you get for free, you probably are going to run out of space rapidly and it doesn’t cost that much to get a paid account, which gives you more room and also improves your security. If you have a paid account,
18:42:19 At any level, any kind of paid account.
18:42:23 Among other things, all your email that you send back and forth and all of your
18:42:31 messages that you send back and forth, they’re all encrypted. And it also, if you’re going to websites, it’ll anonymize your address so people can’t track where you’re going and all kinds of nice things with having a paid
18:42:45 iCloud account, but the biggest advantage is that you can do things like you can optimize space on your iPhone and your iPad.
18:42:55 and sync passwords across devices and all kinds of neat stuff.
18:43:01 Which is far afield from the original question, but I thought I’d throw that out to you.
18:43:07 Any others?
18:43:07 I have a question about that optimization.
18:43:10 You have done that and so you have the thumbnails or whatever.
18:43:14 Instead of the full res.
18:43:17 your iPad or iPhone and you want to send an email with a photo attached, does it download the full resolution deal or offer you a choice or just some.
18:43:26 Um, it will not send the full resolution, because usually you do not want them. I have an iPhone…
18:43:34 17 Pro Max. The full-size photographs are 45MB. I do not want to send somebody a full-size photograph. So, it’ll send something that’s optimized for email, which means that it’s not full size.
18:43:50 And if it’s too large to go out through email, which it’ll tell you if you’re trying to send something that’s just ridiculously large, your email client will ask you, do you want it to be large, medium, small? Do you want french fries with that? It offers you choices.
18:44:07 But you don’t want to send full-size things. One of the things I was thinking about showing you today was a website that allows you to optimize photographs. The Mac…
18:44:18 The iPhone and iPad, when they take a photograph, they optimize the photograph so it can be edited. So it saves a whole bunch of information that when you’re sending it to somebody, they don’t need.
18:44:32 And this website, you upload photographs to it and it’ll shrink the photograph so that they’re the same size in terms of dimensions, but in terms of the amount of space that they take. They’re much smaller. I have a free app that does the same thing called
18:44:49 Image Optima, which actually does a better job, but if you don’t want to use that, you can use this website, and you just drag a photograph, an image into your browser window, and it shrinks it. Then you can send the smaller one.
18:45:04 always shrink photographs that I send to people via email and especially during messages. A lot of people do not set their messages to expire. And this one woman, for example, was running out of space on her iPhone.
18:45:19 He had 44 gigabytes of stuff in messages. And messages are just tiny because it’s just text. What was actually taking up all those spaces were the PDFs and JPEGs and movie clips and so on and so forth that she was sending to people.
18:45:37 And if you’re not setting the messages to expire, they just accumulate and they’ll take over the entire world.
18:45:45 So knowing how to practice
18:45:49 properly send something that the recipient won’t immediately go, ah, is a skill. And generally speaking, if it’s something that you’re going to send to somebody and you know they’re going to see it on either a Mac screen or a
18:46:03 iPhone or iPad, and they’re not going to print it, usually 1,000 pixels to 1500 pixels is as large as you want to get. Well, the iPhone, when you take a photograph with mine, it’s over 4,000 pixels across. Well, that’s way more than
18:46:28 What?
18:46:20 They really need to see it on their screen and say, oh, isn’t that a cute puppy? Um, it’s overkill for that. You want the high resolution for doing things like editing, you want to do high resolution for doing things like printing.
18:46:34 for just sending somebody a photograph of, I took a picture of a sign that cracked me up in someone’s yard. That was, I shrunk that down to 800 pixels. They don’t need a.
18:46:47 4,000 pixel across photograph of a sign in someone’s yard.
18:46:52 It was a campaign sign, and it had been torn in such a way that it was saying something that…
18:46:58 was not intended in the original. And, uh, I just thought it was funny.
18:47:04 What does optimization do to video clips?
18:47:07 Um, video clips are a little bit harder to do because a video clip.
18:47:13 It’s not… it doesn’t have a fixed dimension. You know, if it’s 4,000 pixels cross and it’s 2,000 down, and you make it, and you say you want to reduce it by half, so it’s 2,000 and 1,000, that’s fairly easy to figure out how to do. How do you do that with something that’s…
18:47:30 you know, 10,000 frames long. There’s no easy way to optimize that. Uh, and there are special tools out there for that.
18:47:40 Apple has one called Compressor, that’s part of the…
18:47:45 What’s the name of that?
18:47:49 at Pro Suite.
18:47:49 Final Cut Pro Suite has compressor. It does things like that. There are other apps you can get in the App Store that do image… that do video compression.
18:48:01 Video compression is a lot harder to do.
18:48:08 It’s… it’s definitely something that
18:48:12 that is worth doing, but it’s not a simple process.
18:48:18 Lawrence.
18:48:19 Yes.
18:48:21 Um.
18:48:22 I am having trouble hearing you. The volume is really low, and my earbuds.
18:48:30 Even though it says they’re on, you are not coming through my earbuds.
18:48:37 If I’m not coming through your earbuds, I can’t really do anything about that. That’s…
18:48:41 I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. What?
18:48:44 If I’m not coming through your earbuds, that’s… that’s a problem with the earbuds.
18:48:51 The earbuds have been operating fine all day, and I actually, I had this happen the last time I came on. It’s just this meeting that I have the volume is really low and it’s not coming through my earbuds.
18:49:06 And the earbuds say that they’re on.
18:49:08 So in the new earbuds, so I don’t understand.
18:49:13 Are you connecting via a Mac or an iPad or what?
18:49:17 I’m on a map.
18:49:19 Um, you can… on your keyboard for your Mac, there should be a volume control, and if you just turn…
18:49:24 Yeah, got it turned all the way up.
18:49:29 I.
18:49:29 And actually, even without the earbuds, if I’m just using, you know, just listening, the volume is really low, so I don’t understand why that’s happening.
18:49:40 Okay, there’s also a volume control in Zoom itself. If you go up to the Zoom menu, it says settings, and there’s
18:49:52 One for audio, and you can set the volume there in the Zoom settings. And it could be that just zoom is set low.
18:50:03 Okay, let me try that. Audio.
18:50:09 Shows it turned all the way up.
18:50:12 Um, I don’t, can’t, I don’t know.
18:50:20 Yeah, and it shows my AirPods. It’s connected to the AirPods. but
18:50:25 I’m not getting anything.
18:50:28 Okay.
18:50:32 I’m out of ideas. It’s one of those things that I have to actually take a look to.
18:50:37 Okay, anybody else having that problem?
18:50:41 Anybody else having a volume problem?
18:50:44 No.
18:50:44 I can hear her fine.
18:50:46 Can you hear me fine?
18:50:48 Yes.
18:50:50 Okay.
18:50:58 Okay.
18:50:51 And I can’t, I don’t have any more information. It’s something I’d have to look at.
18:51:02 I’ll try different things, see if I can come up with something.
18:51:06 Yeah, I’m sorry.
18:51:10 Any other questions?
18:51:17 There are a couple things I want to…
18:51:19 It’s cool.
18:51:20 Oh, sorry, I just was scrambling to turn my audio on. It’s Joey Lazaro.
18:51:25 Yes.
18:51:26 I had a question in regards to, I guess Apple, this is Apple thing where they send out memories every once in a while the group photos and they’ll say some trip that you took and they’ll say memories, and then it’ll show a real picture after picture after picture when you click on that.
18:51:42 Yeah.
18:51:42 Yep, sure, period of time. They come through so fast, they’re like a second, and then they’re gone. Is there any way to adjust the speed of those photos that come out when they send that?
18:51:53 Yes, there’s a… depending upon whether you’re looking out on an iPad or a Mac or whatever, there is a way to edit those, so you can actually switch out the pictures, and you can adjust the music it plays, and you can adjust the time that’s on the screen.
18:52:08 It’s all editable. It’s editable within Azure.
18:52:14 Apple Photos.
18:52:14 Okay, on the right hand column, on the right-hand border there, where it says music and sound and all that, where it says how long you put the picture will last.
18:52:32 Okay.
18:52:25 Um, it’s been a while since I’ve done it, but it’s built into Apple Photos, so you can adjust the… you can adjust to pretty much anything you want. Like, for example.
18:52:41 Yes.
18:52:34 Yeah, you hit memories and it starts rolling. It’s picture after picture after picture of a certain period of time, like a trip you took, and then it goes like it’s about a second. All the other stuff I have that I, you know, have a…
18:52:47 video show, if you will, and they’ll have it set for three or four or five seconds, and then it goes on to the next one. That one there, I can’t… I can’t do it, but I’ll… if you open up the memories and then go to that.
18:52:59 The column on the right-hand side of your photos, you can adjust the speed in which they change.
18:53:06 Thank you.
18:53:12 Okay.
18:53:05 You can adjust the speed, the music, the images that are selected. You can switch them out and use something else.
18:53:14 I didn’t try that.
18:53:15 And I will tell you that when it comes to doing those types of things, I tend to actually take all the images that they have, and I dump them into Keynote, and I make one
18:53:28 image per slide, and then I can adjust it on a per image basis, and I can crop them and do a bunch of other things.
18:53:37 Okay. Thanks.
18:53:38 Um, and…
18:53:38 Thank you.
18:53:40 Oh yeah.
18:53:40 Anyway, there are a lot… you can make a lot of adjustments to it. Google does the same sort of thing if you have Google Photos.
18:53:49 sends out similar types of things.
18:53:54 I’m not sure which did it first, Apple or Google.
18:53:59 Uh, before I get on to the other part of the program, which is basically sort of like the Q&A, only you can ask more complicated questions, there are a couple things I wanted to show you. Uh, one, and I’ll send out links to these things so you don’t have to sit and take notes.
18:54:15 But I’m going to show
18:54:18 Share my screen.
18:54:26 And I don’t need you up there.
18:54:32 I was mentioning…
18:54:35 drinking things.
18:54:36 And this is a website called Squish.
18:54:41 and squish, for example, is a great name, but you can do things like you can take an image and you can draw
18:54:51 the image and it gives you the image and it shows you on one side what it’s like before and what it’s like after, and you can say how much you want it to be squished.
18:55:01 And it’s got some controls here on how it’s compressing in things.
18:55:09 And it’ll just sit there and squish it, and what you want the, uh…
18:55:14 The quality to be well like, and if you move this slider, it’ll actually change what the… Now, this particular thing is a real simple image because it’s just text. But you’ll notice if I really shrink it down, it really pixelates it, but you don’t switch it down as much and it’s…
18:55:32 Not as pixelated. Anyway, this thing is a free website. It’s called Squish, and it’s spelled S-Q-U-O-O-S-H.
18:55:43 And that’s exactly what it does. What I use is something called Image Optum, which is not… that’s not Image Optum.
18:55:53 Excuse me.
18:55:56 Image Optum is a…
18:55:59 free little program.
18:56:02 that you can.
18:56:05 grab the, uh…
18:56:07 I need a picture of something. Here’s a picture of me. So
18:56:12 So here’s a picture of me, and I drag it onto Squish, and it’s going to squish it 83%, the original was…
18:56:25 The original was…
18:56:28 And it’s going to squish it down to 83%. So it’ll be much much smaller when it gets done. It can also do it in a variety of different formats. You can turn it into a PNG, a GIF, and so on and so forth. So that’s it.
18:56:42 image optimum, it’s another way of squishing things down so that you can send it through
18:56:49 email and this is something I highly recommend when you’re sending things out through an email because otherwise it drives people bonkers when they have
18:57:01 really large attachments. For example, here is a cartoon that I might want to send to somebody. It’s somebody trying to go through airport security and says, you can now pull up your ticket on your phone using the empty gesture that is our free airport Wi-Fi.
18:57:17 And I thought this was funny, I wanted to send this to my brother, so I squished it down, and the original was, like, $200K, and when I squished it down, it was about 20. So, it’s about, uh…
18:57:32 That’s a massive amount of reduction. And at that point, it’s a reasonable thing to include in email.
18:57:41 This is a more complex cartoon. The original was
18:57:48 500K, and I managed to squish this down to less than 100. But it’s talking about what automation and artificial intelligence will be like in 2030 where your toilet argues with you, your refrigerator argues with you.
18:58:06 Pretty much.
18:58:08 Everything argues with you. And it just appealed to me. He’s been doing experiments with AI, as have I, and there are times when the
18:58:20 The experimentation is funnier than the results you
18:58:24 possibly could have been looking for.
18:58:27 A question I frequently get is, what is the best printer to buy? And before I show you this, I will tell you that I absolutely detest printers. I’ve never bought a printer.
18:58:40 We have some printers, but my late wife purchased them. I didn’t because I hate them.
18:58:47 Best Printer 2025, just buy a brother laser printer. The winner is clear, middle finger in the air. Okay, perhaps a little bit indiscreet, but…
18:58:56 If you want a printer and you just want a printer and you don’t want it to give you grief, the Brother Printer is the best out there. It’s a laser printer. It’s not an inkjet, which means you can get any color you want as long as it’s black or gray.
18:59:13 But it’s…
18:59:15 A laser printer.
18:59:18 By the time you use up the first cartridge,
18:59:23 It will.
18:59:25 You could buy a dozen lasers of printers, and it would still a dozen brother laser printers, and by the time you finished
18:59:36 printing 100,000 pages on an inkjet, that inkjet printer will have cost more than a dozen of these brother laser printers. The difference in cost is… is, uh, ridiculous. A couple years ago, Kathleen wanted a color
18:59:52 laser printer, not a black and white, but a color laser printer. And they had one at sale at Office Depot when we still had an Office Depot in town. And the color printer, the laser printer was on sale for like 300 bucks. And she thought that was…
19:00:08 inexpensive, so she wanted to go, you know, walk out the door with it. And I wanted to know what the refill was for the color toner. The color toner was almost $900.
19:00:21 So essentially, the printer was free,
19:00:24 Because you’re going to pay for the toner. And the brother laser printers, they, like, depending upon how fancy you want to get them, they run between $125 and $150. Um, and…
19:00:39 Even with tariffs on them and whatnot, there’s still much, much cheaper over the long run than any inkjet printer. The ink in an
19:00:49 Inkjet printer costs more per ounce than gold.
19:00:55 What?
19:00:57 Yes, it costs more per ounce than gold.
19:01:01 So.
19:01:04 It’s a good idea to…
19:01:07 If you’re looking for a printer to consider getting a
19:01:12 for other laser printer.
19:01:14 And.
19:01:18 Well.
19:01:14 You use other brands other than the suggested brand from Brothers? Because quite often they’ll say that, hey, you know, you’re using a third party ink and it’ll identify that photo.
19:01:28 Oh.
19:01:25 No, because it’s not ink, it’s a laser jinner, which means it has toner. And no, just buy the toner from Brother, it’s inexpensive. It’s not an issue.
19:01:38 Let’s put it this way. The toner for this printer that you can’t see off to my side, I bought a full set of toner for a small little compact inkjet. The toner was $170.
19:01:52 I can get the Brother Printer and toner for that price.
19:01:57 The whole printer, plus the toner for the price of just the toner.
19:02:02 So it’s the way to go. And they’re durable as heck. I know somebody who bought… I recommended buying he buy a brother laser printer.
19:02:14 In 2016, when I was on the East Coast, so he’s had it 10 years. He’s on his second toner cartridge.
19:02:21 in 10 years.
19:02:23 still churns away.
19:02:26 He said the only… his only regret is the new ones are much faster. But such is life.
19:02:36 And that’s all I really wanted to pass on. Oh, that’s not true. I wanted to also tell you there is a new take control book.
19:02:47 on take control of AirPods. It’s an electronic book that you can buy from take control book on AirPods.
19:02:56 AirPods didn’t strike me as being that complex, but Apple says that they have about
19:03:04 One out of every eight genius Bar.
19:03:08 visits to the Apple Genius bars have something to do with AirPods, so I think the problem is that when you… when you buy a
19:03:17 some AirPods, you get this tiny little box, and no instructions at all, and that’s what baffles people, so this new AirPod book tries
19:03:29 to, uh…
19:03:30 tries to take care of that problem.
19:03:35 And what are you? You are
19:03:36 not supposed to be open.
19:03:40 I accidentally opened up something.
19:03:44 Um,
19:03:45 Two things I wanted to mention before we plunge onward is we need a president, and we need a treasurer. And this is not an optional need because I really can’t run
19:03:58 Uh, straight Mac user group just by myself, among other things. I’m the one who actually consumes money to pay for the website and the Zoom software and so on and so forth. And you don’t really want me writing checks to myself. You want
19:04:12 Other people involved in this process. And literally, we cannot continue unless we have a new president and treasurer. And you can also get rid of me, too, if you want to.
19:04:26 So I really do need volunteers because I…
19:04:31 I would hate to shut it down simply because we don’t have any people helping me.
19:04:40 No volunteers.
19:04:46 Speaking of which, our treasurer is here. She probably agrees with me.
19:04:52 I’ve been here for a little while anyway, but…
19:04:55 I was staring off into space. I’m sorry.
19:04:58 No, don’t worry, it’s okay. I can give you a little report. Our balance in check in the bank right now is 2,125.12.
19:05:14 And I know I need to send in receipts, so…
19:05:19 Yeah, if you have anything, send it, email it and I’ll…
19:05:23 get the money to you.
19:05:24 I’m sorry, I’ve been distracted by other emergencies.
19:05:29 Yeah, it’s okay.
19:05:34 Okay.
19:05:31 Whenever you’re ready, I’m ready to…
19:05:37 I’m really disappointed in a lack of volunteers here.
19:05:43 I mean, I’ll do…
19:05:49 So…
19:05:46 A while longer if nobody else comes, but we do need, we do need the president.
19:05:52 What’s involved? You know, what kind of a commitment is it?
19:05:57 For the president, it’s basically doing things that either I’m busy or…
19:06:05 know what to do. Like, for example, negotiating with the library for a room for meetings or investigating the senior center in Port Angeles has asked if I’d be interested in doing presentations there.
19:06:21 fine. I don’t live in Port Angeles, I don’t know where the senior center is. If somebody checked that out.
19:06:28 It sounded like a good deal, fine with me. But there are things that we need. For example, we need some kind of way of doing a presentation so that everybody doesn’t have to just cram around a laptop screen. So they have to have
19:06:44 a projector and a screen of some sort. But they’re just…
19:06:49 things other than doing the meeting presentations, which is what I’ve been doing since…
19:06:56 2018?
19:07:00 The senior center in Port Angeles is on 7th and Peabody.
19:07:05 I’m just saying that I don’t really want to go and investigate that, or I don’t want to know if there’s a guy who wants me to go check out the — there’s a computer repair place in downtown Squim. Do they do…
19:07:23 Oh, Macintoshes. I have no idea.
19:07:26 There are other things that people can do other than me, because I committed to doing presentations at meetings. I’m willing to do that. Although, if somebody else wants to do a presentation, I’m open to that as well. I’m perfectly capable of listening, as well, of just
19:07:44 talking. So the present, that’s what the president does, is negotiate with other people. And also the president is, if we have an issue about things like
19:07:56 Should a bill be paid, the president can put in their two cents whether or not we paid the bills along with the treasurer. For the treasurer, it’s basically keeping track of our bank account and making sure that
19:08:10 When we spend money, we’re really spending it on things for the group and not for a trip to T1.
19:08:18 or something.
19:08:22 Well, I’ll give the presidency a try for
19:08:29 A month, or a couple months, and see how it goes.
19:08:35 I, uh, do quite a bit of volunteering already, and…
19:08:40 would think that I…
19:08:43 Would have more time than I do, but… but I don’t seem… but… but you’re certainly doing your share, and… and…
19:08:53 Everybody else’s share, too, so other than the treasurer, we thank, uh…
19:08:59 We thank our treasurer for that. But if that’s okay with everybody, if I try it out for a couple months, I’ll give it a go.
19:09:12 Good job.
19:09:13 Yeah.
19:09:13 Thumbs up to run.
19:09:15 Great.
19:09:14 Thanks.
19:09:17 Okay, so now somebody will have to break me in on the on the tasks.
19:09:22 You had to make sure that I properly spell your name on the website.
19:09:28 Ron Brown’s pretty, uh, pretty hard to to miss.
19:09:32 I misspelled Methodist in the YouTube video of my church’s service for last Sunday.
19:09:40 I was very embarrassed when one of my, when one of our parishioners wrote to me and had a screenshot with the spelling circled.
19:09:50 No, actually, she didn’t actually say what was misspelled. I guess she just figured I could figure it out, but you don’t spell method with um
19:10:01 I, and uh…
19:10:03 didn’t notice that my fast typing at midnight Sunday.
19:10:09 I assure you, I can misspell Ron Brown.
19:10:14 It’s within my skill set.
19:10:18 Okay, and I’ll need access, or probably more access to the website than the normal…
19:10:26 Normal access we have now, I suppose.
19:10:28 Um, that’s not required, but I’m more than willing to do that because, among other things,
19:10:32 Oh, if it’s not required, that’s good for me.
19:10:35 Well, yeah, but it wouldn’t be nice to have a backup for the webmaster as well.
19:10:39 Ah, okay.
19:10:41 Okay, well, maybe I’ll stick around after, or one of us can call the other and just get more information away from the meeting.
19:10:59 No.
19:10:51 Okay. I don’t think I’ll do that after the meeting, because after the meeting, I usually am very tired and want to go crawl in a corner, but I’ll be in contact.
19:11:03 Okay, sounds good.
19:11:06 Any treasurer volunteer?
19:11:09 I’ll volunteer to help run in any way possible in Port Angeles since that’s where I live.
19:11:16 Okay.
19:11:18 I have a question.
19:11:20 Michael, is there a reason why your screen says you’re at NBC?
19:11:27 What is that again?
19:11:29 Your screen says NBC, and it’s got a peacock.
19:11:33 Is that right?
19:11:35 Yes.
19:11:35 looking at…
19:11:35 Not what I see.
19:11:37 No, my… I’m looking at my screen that it’s on the Zoom, and it… I don’t see what you’re seeing.
19:11:45 Oh.
19:11:44 In the upper right corner, it says NBC with a peacock.
19:11:48 Upper?
19:11:47 Yeah, I see it too. I see it also.
19:11:49 Oh, yeah, there it is.
19:11:51 Upper right corner.
19:11:52 Yes.
19:11:53 Little tiny.
19:11:53 Above your door.
19:11:55 Oh, above the door. Yeah, I have no idea.
19:12:01 I have none.
19:12:02 I was just wondering if you’re part of the secret media mafia or something.
19:12:06 No, no, I didn’t even… I didn’t even realize that that was happening. I still don’t know what that is. It’s weird.
19:12:15 It might be the virtual screen you’re using has it on it, but uh…
19:12:20 Don’t know.
19:12:20 Anyway.
19:12:21 Yeah, I’m just using Zoom.
19:12:25 Um, I was going to do a presentation on
19:12:31 on screens, which is kind of hard to explain, but it’s something that people ask me a lot of questions about, that they don’t want to get a new iMac because they want an iMac that’s got a 40-inch screen and they don’t make them with 40-inch screens.
19:12:48 Are they thinking about getting a new laptop because the laptop they have right now, the monitor is too small and they can’t open up lots of documents at once. The Mac has technology already built into the operating system to do things like that. If you’ve ever used Windows,
19:13:05 Windows, when you open up an app, by default, it covers the entire window. So if you have a 40-in screen, it fills the whole thing with 40 inches, even if you don’t really want it to. The Mac has never done that. The Mac has…
19:13:21 have layers of windows, so you can have multiple windows open at once, and the Mac has the idea of a desktop. It’s designed to look like a desktop, or you might have multiple sheets of paper, and you have the one in front that you’re paying most attention to, and the one behind it has reference notes.
19:13:38 behind that has addresses of things that you’re going to send out this stuff to. It’s designed to mimic that, so you can have multiple documents open at once. But you can also have multiple windows open at once, even if you only have one screen.
19:13:53 And a classic way of doing that is through something called Mission Control. And on the Mac, someplace is Mission Control. If you have an old version of the Mac, it’s probably in the dock. If you have the newer Mac operating system, they…
19:14:08 It’s usually not in the dock anymore, but it allows you to take a window and you shove it up to the top margin of the screen. And when you do that, you’ll see these boxes pop up and you can put it into a box to the left of the books or the right, and suddenly that entire window disappears.
19:14:25 This appears into that other virtual window. And if you want to go back to that document, you click on that box and it opens it up again. So you have one screen, but you can have multiple, it’ll show.
19:14:39 information from multiple screens on that one screen. And this is also if you look at it intellectually, it’s using reusable space.
19:14:55 The old-fashioned radio in your car had mechanical buttons and it had a volume control and had a tuner, and then it had maybe six buttons for presets where you could preset a station. And if you want to go to your favorite rock station, you push this button.
19:15:10 You want to go to classical music station, you want to push this button, and then your idiot nephew changes your last button to Country Western and you didn’t know that, and you press that button and almost run off the road. But anyway, you had preset buttons and that’s all they did. One button turns it on.
19:15:27 When adjust the volume, one button does tuning, the other ones go to presets. And it takes up the space, same amount of space all the time for just those limited amount of functions.
19:15:39 The computer was the first thing that had reusable space, so on the screen of the computer, one minute, it can be displaying a picture of the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, and the next minute, it can have a picture… it can have a spreadsheet, and the next minute, you can
19:15:56 be playing a YouTube video, whatever it’s doing, it can change function just by your choice of what you want to be doing. But it’s the same space as occupying the same space. You don’t have to go out there and have
19:16:10 One device for one thing, another device for another thing, you’re using one device for multiple things.
19:16:17 And it can also do multiple things at once by using these virtual spaces, by using overlapping windows. So that’s what I wanted to talk about. And I’m not talking about it tonight because I discovered that Zoom doesn’t like it if you do things, one of the things you can do very easily is you can change the resolution of your monitor.
19:16:35 So if you go into your settings, you’ll see that there’s a big text option at once, at one end, and there’s a lot of space on the screen at another, and you can choose the level of…
19:16:51 of, uh… of
19:16:52 magnification you want on your screen. So it can be big print, or it can be thousands of different objects, it can be whatever you choose to have it.
19:17:03 That’s great, except that Zoom doesn’t like it if you change the resolution. So I decided I couldn’t do that because there was a good chance that about
19:17:15 Five minutes into the demo for unexpected reasons, Zoom would decide to quit. And that didn’t strike me as being a good presentation. So I might do that someday when we do something in person, because being able to manage multiple things at once
19:17:30 is really the big advantages of using a computer. You don’t have to have a dedicated device. I have a photograph that I was going to show today of Kathleen aboard a submarine in…
19:17:45 in Philadelphia. It’s right along the waterfront. There’s a USS Olympia, which was the cruiser that was Commodore Perry’s flagship at the Battle of Manila in 1898. And right next to it is a World War II submarine.
19:18:01 And in the… I took a picture of her in the computer, in the torpedo compartment, and it’s looking aft towards the torpedo tubes, and there are hundreds of levers and gauges.
19:18:16 knobs and buttons, literally hundreds of them. So she’s standing there in this red coat, surrounded by all these brass objects.
19:18:27 But here’s a trivia question. It has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. Why are all the things in a torpedo room made out of brass?
19:18:38 erosion resistance.
19:18:39 That’s not the reason, but it’s a good answer.
19:18:46 Brass.
19:18:46 Live static electricity
19:18:47 Yeah, brass does not spark.
19:18:51 And when you have 2,000 pounds of explosive in a torpedo, you probably don’t want it to spark. So…
19:19:00 Um, but anyway, she’s frowned with all these brass instruments and buttons, and levers, and knobs, and all kinds of stuff. Because each one has a dedicated function.
19:19:12 And you go into a modern submarine and you don’t have that kind of problem. The Apollo astronauts, after the Apollo 1 fire.
19:19:24 The Apollo 1 fire they think came about because of manufacturing issues and bad procedures and so on and so forth. But they took a complete look at what they were doing. And the Apollo capsule, which you’ve seen photographs of it.
19:19:39 It wasn’t very big, had over 700 buttons.
19:19:44 And they were color-coded, but they were not color-coded to any standard. So some buttons would be red, meaning good, or other buttons would be red, meaning bad.
19:19:56 really bad interface design. So when they redid the capsule after that, Apollo 1 fire, one of the things they did is they tried to reduce the number of buttons, and they tried to standardize the controls so that
19:20:10 It was a consistent interface. And that’s basically what Apple has been trying for right now about 40 years on the Macintosh is to make the presentation to the user as obvious as possible so that the user knows where they are, they know what they’re doing, they know what control they’re playing around with. If they have too much information to fit on the screen, they can
19:20:35 still handle all that information by using these other virtual screens. And that’s what I wanted to talk about in Zoom.
19:20:43 did not like that idea at all.
19:20:48 tried a couple test runs, and it crashed repeatedly.
19:20:52 Hey, Lawrence, I work for NASA and I was in an Apollo simulator about 157 hours. And the first time you walk in there, there are buttons and switches and dials all over the place and you think this is awesome. And then there’s a kind of a method there, madness
19:21:10 Because they grouped them. Communications is in one place, you know, electrical someplace else, pneumatics is another place. And so there’s some logic to it, but they’re all over the place. And I was on a lot of the missions, and we told the guys to do something. They’ll say, where is that switch?
19:21:27 Where is it? So look over your right shoulder, it’s the third one over, and some of those switches the guy’s never got a lot of backup, triply backup systems, but they’re loaded, but there was a scheme to how they put it up there, and after you do it for a little while, you kind of get used to it, you know where they are, because they grouped them
19:21:45 Categories
19:21:43 But most of that scheme came after the Apollo 1 fire.
19:21:48 It was, it was right, yeah.
19:21:51 Uh, yeah.
19:21:53 Well, I was going to just say uh
19:21:57 On the MacBook Pro,
19:22:00 If you press the F3 button, it takes you right into Mission Control without leaving what you’re doing on the screen.
19:22:06 So you could then either place.
19:22:10 other, you know, uh, sheets onto the other virtual screens.
19:22:14 Or, and then go back to what you were doing.
19:22:18 Oh, but…
19:22:18 Yes, but actually, I have a button like that on my wireless keyboard, but I discovered that Zoom doesn’t like me to play with things like that.
19:22:30 Oh, but I could hit mine with Zoom on.
19:22:33 And it doesn’t hurt it at all.
19:22:38 It might have been exactly what happened.
19:22:42 Which sequence, what I was doing, I’m not sure, but after the third or fourth crash, I decided to bag it, and we can do that in person sometime, uh, simply because it was too much of a…
19:22:55 hassle. Speaking of which, there’s a possibility that we could do an in-person in…
19:23:01 August, but I think that for a variety of reasons, it might be better to wear.
19:23:08 aim for something like September. My plan right now is that if we do an in-person, it’d be on a Saturday. The reason why is that it doesn’t interfere with church services, it doesn’t interfere with things that people might need to be doing
19:23:25 the weekdays, so that was my that’s my feeling. If you have different thoughts on the subject, be sure and tell me.
19:23:35 All right. Anyway, I’m not doing it on spaces today.
19:23:41 And, sorry?
19:23:44 Um, instead we’re going to do kind of an extended version of the Q&A. Ask me a question and I’ll see if I can come up with an answer. During the normal Q&A, I like quick questions and quick answers, so we can do multiples.
19:22:48 Ah, okay. Okay.
19:23:58 Tonight, you can ask more complicated ones. Although, if you ask me about printers, do be aware that my answer might be pornographic, so…
19:24:10 I had a question, have you.
19:24:11 Can you tell us anything about IOS 27’s version of Siri?
19:24:16 Have you tried it out and does it?
19:24:19 Is it everything that it was.
19:24:22 Advertised to be.
19:24:25 I have an interesting answer. If I had tried it out, I couldn’t tell you, but I haven’t tried it out.
19:24:32 And the reason why is that I have…
19:24:36 a developer’s license, I could try it out, but I live in Clallam County.
19:24:41 There are no payphones in Clallam County. In most of Clallam County, there are no people.
19:24:49 70,000 people in the county and it goes from basically Port Townsend all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Huge expanse of territory. I absolutely, positively need a working phone.
19:25:01 In the beta version of macOS 27 is a beta and beta is the Greek word for means it doesn’t work.
19:25:10 Now, I’m not going to install a beta version of a phone.
19:25:15 Um, on my phone. If I had two phones, I might, but I don’t. I am thinking about it installing a beta version of the iPad operating system.
19:25:26 But I haven’t done that yet. But I can answer your question because I have talked to somebody and we were playing around with his phone. So he’s…
19:25:38 What I do with it is covered by my developer agreement, talking about what somebody else does is not. And pretty much everybody is very impressed with the…
19:25:51 With the artificial intelligence in macOS 27, because among other things, the primary way that’s being designed is through Siri. So right now, earlier…
19:26:04 Earlier today, um…
19:26:07 I can’t remember the name of, oh, I asked because it came up in something I was watching. I asked how tall was Roy Rogers?
19:26:17 And my HomePod came back with the answer of 6’10”. And I was thinking,
19:26:24 That’s NBA basketball size.
19:26:28 height, is that possible?
19:26:31 I never watched Roy Rogers. My family didn’t buy a TV until I was in college, but I did watch Roy Rogers on TV at my grandmother’s house.
19:26:51 You know
19:26:45 I don’t really recall this giant man getting on a short horse, so it’s something I wanted to check out. Well, the… with Siri being able to answer more complex questions,
19:26:59 I would actually have a greater confidence that what it…
19:27:04 Why was giving was accurate. I’d still probably check on that. Haven’t done that yet, but I do know that, um…
19:27:13 One of the misnomers about people with cowboys, people with, you think of cowboys, you think of Clint Eastwood, you think of, what was the guy, Arness, who played Matt Dillon?
19:27:24 James
19:27:24 James Arnest
19:27:28 John Wayne
19:27:25 Okay, well, I remember his last name. All of those guys are tall. They’re well over John Wayne. They’re all 6’3″, 6’4″. The average cowboy was around five foot.
19:27:37 And the reason why the average cowboy was around five foot is that horses didn’t get tired as tired as if they carried small people. Ulysses Grant, the general, was 5’4″, and he was a famed horseman, and he wanted to be in the cavalry, but the…
19:27:55 The U.S. Military Academy opened up cavalry slots to only the top people, and U.S. Grant was in the bottom of his class, so he didn’t
19:28:08 qualified to be a cavalryman, but he was a fantastic horseman, and he was 5’4″, which is about that’s about right for a horseman because the bigger you are, the
19:28:20 The more tired the horse is. And it’s a little bit harder to jump over a fence if you’re 6’5 than it is if you’re 5’4 and can crouch down next to the horse.
19:28:32 So there are lots of things that you can do now with Siri that were impractical. If I asked Siri for certain things now, it says, you can check the phone, you can check your phone for results. Well, I didn’t want a result. My hands are wet because I’m doing dishes.
19:28:48 And all I had was this random thought, and I went, an instant answer from my magical device, and instead it’s telling me to go do something else. And I don’t want to do that.
19:29:00 The short answer is that from my conversation with this person who was running the beta on his phone, I was quite impressed. The other thing that I’m still.
19:29:15 the, um… my job
19:29:18 I haven’t made a judgment on this yet, but I was impressed with what I heard was that the privacy controls are kind of what I wanted them to be. You might have recalled from past meetings that I’ve been very skeptical of the
19:29:33 privacy controls on the AI.
19:29:37 platforms as in all of them and Apple said that they wanted to emphasize privacy and security with their AI implementation and it sounds like that’s what they’re doing.
19:29:51 I don’t know what the text is of the agreement they have with Google, but it sounds like Apple is creating their own huge infrastructure so that when you ask a question and your phone doesn’t know the answer and Apple doesn’t know the answer and it has to ask Google.
19:30:09 When it asks Google, it basically erases any evidence of where that request came from when it sends back a response, which is exactly what I wanted to hear.
19:30:22 Um, so, so far I’ve been impressed with what I’ve, what I’ve heard, but have I tried it? No. By next month, I might have tried it on an iPad, but the last thing I’m going to upgrade is I wait for the release version before I, uh…
19:30:38 on my phone. Because again, the Greek word for not working is beta.
19:30:47 And.
19:30:50 I’m
19:30:51 I’m not willing to trust my phone.
19:30:55 Steve.
19:30:55 Do we know when it’s expected to be out?
19:30:58 Um, Apple always says this fall, traditionally, that’s meant usually September or October.
19:31:05 Right.
19:31:07 Um, technically, fall extends into November, so…
19:31:14 I’m.
19:31:16 I’m more concerned with them getting it right than in getting it done quickly.
19:31:23 And if you look at the other things that they’re proposing to do with iOS 27 and macOS 27 and so on and so forth, in terms of the interface and such, they’re not spending a lot of time on that. Pretty much all of their focus is on bug fixes, security fixes, and Apple Intelligence.
19:31:41 So it’s not going to make your phone float or things like that. That’s going to be…
19:31:51 pretty much not that much different than it is today. But, uh, they’re looking at stability, security, and Apple Intelligence.
19:32:00 Lawrence, do you have any information on connection to satellites? I haven’t kept up with it, but I talk about phones being able to use satellites. Is that something that’s coming or is it here and I don’t know about it or
19:32:12 Um, it’s already here if you have an iPhone, I don’t remember if it came out with the 15 or 16.
19:32:22 15… the 15 Pro series, I think
19:32:24 Yeah, if you trigger the emergency SOS and you’re outside of cell phone range, it will search for a satellite and connect you up to that satellite for text messages. And it’s for text messages only, and it’s for emergency.
19:32:41 The reason why text messages in terms of bytes, it amounts to absolutely nothing. So it’s basically at the noise level. But right now it’s being used for the SOS.
19:32:58 The I can’t remember who it is now. One of the Android phone services has an agreement with Starlink to use satellite internet.
19:33:08 And one of the things that you need to know about that is that the Starlink satellite internet works if there’s a satellite overhead, and it doesn’t work if there’s not one there. So it’s not like using a cell system.
19:33:24 It’s.
19:33:26 You’re at the mercy of physics.
19:33:29 Also keep in mind that where satellites
19:33:35 spend the most time and where they’re easiest to access is at the equator. And if you happen to have a globe and you look at where we are, we’re not really going to be able to take advantage of
19:33:49 Things like that too well. GPS is an example, is an example. At NOAA, I helped run the website that hosted the geospatial reference system. The geospatial reference system, which is a lot of syllables.
19:34:06 is a set of mathematical tweaks to GPS to make it more accurate. The globe is not a perfect globe, it’s got lumps in it, and it’s squished at the poles, and it’s fatter at the equator.
19:34:22 The geospatial reference system uses a whole bunch of, not that many, several hundred monitoring sites around the world where we…
19:34:32 take measurements to help tweak the formula so to make it more accurate. At the equator, GPS on a phone is accurate to within about a foot.
19:34:44 Where we are, it’s about six feet.
19:34:48 If you’re at the South Pole, abandon all hope. You can’t see those satellites.
19:34:56 So we’re not in the greatest place in the world for satellite coverage, but it still works right now with the…
19:35:10 15, 16, 17 phones for the emergency satellite service. It’s not a full-time thing, you can’t use it in place of your cell phone, but as an example, one of the first people who was ever rescued with it was a guy who ran off the road in a Jeep here in Clallam County.
19:35:27 And the, um…
19:35:29 The crash detector triggered SOS. SOS couldn’t get a cell phone service, but it could see the satellite and he was notified. It’s not clear if the driver
19:35:42 ever was aware that this happened because he really had no memory of the incident at all. So whether he triggered it or the phone did it automatically, I don’t know. But that was one of the very first rescues and it took place.
19:35:58 Someplace along the Pacific coast of 101.
19:36:03 Here in Clallam County.
19:36:05 Um, so it’s useful, but it’s not a replacement for self-service. It’s a…
19:36:12 It’s a special case thing. And speaking of which, if you’re someplace where you have terrible signal, and you want to talk to somebody, send them a text message. If you can’t… if voice isn’t working, if FaceTime’s not working, try a text message, because a text message
19:36:28 requires the least amount of energy and requires the least amount of bandwidth.
19:36:36 In my home, if I turn off… if the Wi-Fi goes down, my phone doesn’t work.
19:36:43 Because I need to use the Wi-Fi assist to get a signal in my home. But if the phone goes out, I can still send text messages.
19:36:55 Okay.
19:36:55 Do you have Vonage? Is that what you have, Vonage
19:36:57 No, I have, uh…
19:36:59 That’s an internet phone. So when the internet goes down, your home phone goes down. So you got to have yourself.
19:37:04 No, I have… I have Verizon.
19:37:07 Okay.
19:37:08 There are places in Plalam County that Verizon’s great and there are places that it’s not so great. There are places that AT&T works and places where it doesn’t. There are places where, you know, it’s…
19:37:20 Plowham County’s not flat.
19:37:23 And when
19:37:25 where something works depends upon where you are and what service is being provided in that area. I have a friend out on
19:37:35 Alto Road out to the east of Squim, and she uses DISH.
19:37:42 And she absolutely, positively hates it. I do not recall anybody who
19:37:49 has a dish who doesn’t hate it, but she still uses dish because it’s the only one that provides a service where she is.
19:37:56 That’s interesting. I’m just at Palo Alto a little bit, and Verizon works great here. As a matter of fact, not only do I have it for my cell service, but I also have that the same type cell service for my internet.
19:38:10 So
19:38:15 Yeah.
19:38:10 I’m glad, but as you know, Palo Alto goes along… it goes south forever to the Mexican border, really.
19:38:20 Palo Alto Roads kind of… I don’t know, I’m beginning to understand why it has a Spanish name.
19:38:29 Because that’s how far it goes.
19:38:32 Any other questions?
19:38:37 I have one to sort of follow up what you were saying before about screen resolution.
19:38:43 Yeah.
19:38:46 when you were
19:38:48 If a person’s
19:38:50 laptop
19:38:52 MacBook Pro
19:38:54 Has everything’s magnified
19:38:57 Zoom is not on
19:39:01 Accessibility
19:39:03 Is that because
19:39:06 The screen resolution has been changed by that slider. I can’t remember which
19:39:11 Which place it is in settings, but I know there’s a place where you can alter the screen resolution
19:39:17 And if you
19:39:19 If you do that, it magnifies everything on the screen
19:39:23 Um, well, the accessibility function on the Mac.
19:39:29 Sometimes it’ll magnify things and sometimes it doesn’t because it magnifies a region. So for example, you can be looking at certain documents or you can be looking at something in Safari and press Command and plus and it’ll blow it up if you have accessibility options.
19:39:46 But an other pieces of software, it doesn’t work at all.
19:39:52 So it depends a lot upon what the…
19:39:55 the piece of software is, whether it’s made by Apple, whether it’s following Apple’s guidelines. And in Safari, for example, you’re on a web page and you want to see something. There’s this one website that has these things where you’re supposed to
19:40:13 Say how much you like certain things, and it shows these tiny little thumbnails of people, and I have no idea who they are, so I have to blow them up. And Command Plus will blow up that screen on Safari. If you try that in Word, you just end up typing strange characters.
19:40:28 on your screen, because Word doesn’t do that. Word’s got a slider down at the bottom to blow up Word and Pages again has a slider rather than using the accessibility magnify version.
19:40:44 It depends upon… Apple gave it some thought in terms of what it would be useful to people for people. And if you’re using a word processor, that kind of all over Zoom is not the way to do it, so they have things like sliders and…
19:41:00 in Word and Excel, it’s got a slider. It’s not…
19:41:06 It makes less sense to people who are well cited than to people who are blind. People who are blind it makes perfect sense to them as to how that function works, but they’re also the people who use it the most, and they’re the people it was designed for.
19:41:21 But the excess, I do have that function turned on in accessibility on my Mac, because I frequently want to blow things up just to see what it is that I’m looking at. And the other thing that surprises a lot of people is that it won’t necessarily blow everything up.
19:41:38 If you’re blowing up a photograph and it’s got the caption down below, it won’t necessarily blow up the caption. It might just leave that as text because it’s not really the image, it’s really a text object.
19:41:52 So it’s, uh…
19:42:00 What was
19:41:54 Sometimes you have to sit there and wonder why it did one thing and not something else. Did I answer your question or just confuse you?
19:42:01 What was the slider that you were using when you were showing us that AirPods text
19:42:07 From the take control book
19:42:15 Oh, okay.
19:42:10 Oh, that was a slider inside of the Smush application, which is a web page. And it was designed so that as you’re scrunching things down, you can see how much distortion you’re causing, if you actually wanted that much magnification. The more magnification,
19:42:26 The more… the more
19:42:27 Or you can press it, the more chance that you’re going to introduce noise. So that slider is basically showing you what happens if you compress the heck out of it. For some things,
19:42:40 And you can really, I have images that I’ve taken where the original image was 50 megabytes and I’ve got it down to a screen readable 20K.
19:42:54 So 20,000 bytes compared to 50 megabytes is a staggering amount of reduction. But it wasn’t a particularly complicated photograph. Text is easy to compress, but if you had somebody with Hawaiian shirt.
19:43:10 And you take a photograph of that, no matter how much you compress it, it’s…
19:43:15 The more you can even have it have a little bit of compression and it’s going to start to fall apart simply because it’s a complicated photograph. Michael’s NBC.
19:43:27 background can’t be that well compressed because there’s not that many solid pieces of color. There’s a complex map or overhead photograph or something, and books and whatnot, and it just won’t compress very well.
19:43:44 So it depends upon what it is.
19:43:49 And the Zoom function works…
19:43:52 The way it’s designed by Apple is to help people with vision impairment see things better, but it also works for people who can see perfectly well.
19:44:03 I want to blow things up in a hurry and don’t want to use a special app.
19:44:09 Thank you.
19:44:13 I’m going to paste into the chat window.
19:44:18 the…
19:44:19 Sign up sheet.
19:44:21 So, if you…
19:44:23 at the chat window, there’s a link to the sign-up sheet.
19:44:29 Which is…
19:44:30 Always a nice thing for me to have so I can.
19:44:34 Tell who’s here.
19:44:38 Any other questions?
19:44:51 I’m not finding the signup sheet
19:44:54 Um, in the chat window.
19:44:58 It should be the…
19:44:59 Got it, thank you.
19:44:59 Okay.
19:45:02 If you click on it, it’ll take you to a format
19:45:06 And just fill in the blanks.
19:45:09 Um, something I did, I was going to mention earlier when somebody asked me about iOS 27 and macOS 27.
19:45:21 The, uh…
19:45:23 Something that has startled me is how many apps I have that won’t work with macOS 28.
19:45:31 And that’s because I have some apps that I use all the time that have Intel code.
19:45:40 in them they were designed for the Intel-based operating systems and they were never updated to work with Apple silicon and Apple has a piece of
19:45:53 software.
19:45:54 In iOS 25, iOS.
19:45:58 Going back several years, called Rosetta that translates Intel code into something that macOS, that Apple Silicon machines can use.
19:46:11 Rosetta is being sunsetted, which means that it’s not going to be in macOS 27. It’s going to macOS 26 is as far as it gets. And the kinds of things that I found are including things that I use all the time.
19:46:27 I spent a lot of time using Apple’s terminal program, and if you’re trying to get…
19:46:33 you’re trying to look into a directory using terminal, you can’t use a GUI interface to get there. You have to type in a command, a path to that particular directory. And it’s a pain, and there’s a program out there that’s called
19:46:51 I don’t remember what it’s called, but it allows me to hit an icon in my terminals
19:46:59 address bar up at the top, and it instantly takes me to that, to the folder that I have open on the screen and That really convenient because otherwise I have to spend a lot of typing and make a lot of typos and say a lot of bad words.
19:47:15 that…
19:47:16 That particular program will not be updated for, uh…
19:47:20 macOS 27. I contacted the developer and they said that the security controls that are in macOS 27 are going to prevent them from releasing a version. And this makes me very sad, because I use that.
19:47:34 50 times a day. It’s very specialized, but that’s still something A is about 50 times a day. If you want to know what you have that may not work starting macOS 27, you can go into your
19:47:51 Settings on your Mac and go down to Applications, and list them by the type. And if it says Universal, it means that application has Intel code in it and it has Apple Silicon. And if you’re running it on an Apple Silicon machine, it’ll just work. If you run it on an Intel machine, it’ll just work.
19:48:10 If it says that it’s, um… I don’t remember what the other option is, it might say Apple Silicon, it’ll obviously work on the newer machines. If it says Intel, and only Intel, it means it will not work.
19:48:25 forthcoming operating system.
19:48:28 Similarly, if you have an Intel-based Mac, no matter when you purchased it, all Intel-based Macs are going to be locked out of macOS 27. It’s Apple Silicon only. So rather than be surprised in September, October, whenever it comes out.
19:48:46 Um, I suggest you go into Settings. I’ll show you how to do it.
19:48:53 Because why not?
19:48:55 and share my screen.
19:49:06 go into settings…
19:49:09 We go to
19:49:13 What is it that I want?
19:49:19 It’s been a while since I’ve done this.
19:49:22 General.
19:49:29 Nope, that’s not it.
19:49:37 About
19:49:38 Yes, that’s what I want.
19:49:41 We’re going to
19:49:44 Yeah.
19:49:41 I go to to about and it’s underneath there at the bottom, so system report
19:49:45 Yeah, general about system report.
19:49:49 And then down at the bottom here, it’s got applications, and you click on that and it lists all your applications. And it’s going to…
19:49:59 take a while for it to think about it.
19:50:05 It’s still thinking about it.
19:50:09 Still thinking about it.
19:50:13 Still thinking about it.
19:50:16 Gave it a lot of thought. This line, by the way, you can move it, so if you pull it down, you can see.
19:50:24 things that’ll tell you, here’s the application name, here’s the version number, obtain from, and it tells you whether you got it from the App Store, if you download it from the developer.
19:50:38 If you downloaded it from an unknown developer, or if the developer just didn’t bother to.
19:50:44 identify themselves. But the last column is the one we’re interested in, which is kind.
19:50:49 And here it says that these things that are unsupported, these are mostly projects that I had in the past that I still.
19:50:58 I still have them on my machine. It’s not actually a program that I have, but it’s done with developer code, so it’s still got it in. And it says that’s unsupported because it’s unsupported, but I don’t care, because I’m interested more in the code.
19:51:12 And things like civilization VII is Apple Silicon, Microsoft Edge is Apple Silicon.
19:51:25 There are some things that are iOS. This Wordflex program is an iOS program that I can run on my Apple Silicon Mac. It does work. So you can run some iOS stuff, and if its iOS, then it’s by definition
19:51:41 Apple Silicon, there are some things that are called other. Most of these things probably won’t work. And universal means that it has both Apple Silicon and Intel code. So those will work.
19:51:57 And…
19:52:01 The ones that are going to give you the problems are the ones that say other, and the ones that say Intel.
19:52:08 Those will not work. And if it happens to be something that’s important to you that a good thing like this Windows 1064 is
19:52:19 Intel runs under Parallels, which is a virtual machine.
19:52:25 I mean
19:52:26 program, and that Windows is not going to work anymore. And FileMaker Pro Advanced, which is extremely expensive, the version I have is quite a while away, and it’s not going to work, and I either have to spend hundreds of dollars, or I have to come up with a replacement.
19:52:43 Amazon Photos is an app that was provided by Amazon, and it’s not going to work because its Intel. Amazon Photos will still work on the web, but the little application to launch it won’t. So a lot of these things will not work. And the good news is that I can delete all these things and save space.
19:53:01 Okay.
19:53:00 The bad news is that if they’re important, I’m going to need to come up with a
19:53:08 replacement. But what happens is that it doesn’t, they won’t necessarily tell you unless you try and use it. What I noticed was the last time I looked at Backblaze, which is a program that automatically backs things up over the internet.
19:53:26 They came up with a warning saying it wasn’t going to work with macOS 27 and to download their new version. So I immediately downloaded the new version because I need BlackBlaze. It just sits there in the background and backs up everything up into the cloud, and I really like that.
19:53:42 But they have an update for a lot of these things, there is no update. And I won’t be able to use those. So you either have to keep an old Mac around to run those on, or you have to find a replacement.
19:53:55 But I would advise you to use your time between now and September, October to look into these decisions.
19:54:03 If you have an older machine, like an Intel machine, what does this mean? It means that basically you should be out there shopping for a new machine, because Apple’s going to, if it discontinues support for Intel programs, it also means it’s going to discontinue
19:54:20 Things like parts. By law, they have to keep parts for seven years. It’s been more than seven years since Apple made an Intel-based machine. So you should look into.
19:54:33 a new machine.
19:54:35 And if you’re not aware where’s going on in terms of what is available for Apple, they have pretty much everything that Apple has on sale at Costco. So you can go there and shop around at Costco.
19:54:52 Should you buy something with Costco? Costco has good prices, but they’re good prices for the entry-level
19:55:01 versions. So the iPads that you get there don’t have a lot of storage, the Macs don’t have a lot of storage, the MacBooks don’t have a lot of storage. If you want something with more storage, you’re going to have to get it from Apple or someplace else.
19:55:15 Costco doesn’t do the faster, more storage, more memory type stuff.
19:55:24 But in terms of going there and playing with them, I didn’t really know what I thought of the Apple Neo and I went in and spent
19:55:34 45 minutes playing with it and answered questions from a lot of shoppers, even though I don’t work for them. I was very impressed with it.
19:55:44 Um, it’s not the kind of machine that I would use because it’s too low in, but in terms of what it was capable of, it’s one of the best Mac laptops I’ve seen in terms of… it doesn’t outclass the current
19:56:01 book Silicon Machines, but anything from before 2020, it easily toasts it. They’re really a really
19:56:13 a nice…
19:56:14 machine. It’s got a small screen but that’s about it. And it doesn’t have any expansion ports, so basically what you see is what you get. You can’t plug 8 million devices into it, but you can go to the…
19:56:29 Costco and just look around, you can get… there’s a, uh, the nearest full Apple store is one at Alderwood Mall. If you go north, and there’s an Apple store at Tacoma Mall, if you head south.
19:56:43 You went to talk to the genius people or what.
19:56:47 I would stop shop… I would start shopping now, rather than put it off until the last moment. Um When the Apple silicon machines first came out in 2020?
19:57:02 20… I think it was 2020. A friend of mine here in town had an I had
19:57:10 IMAC that was on its last legs and they knew it.
19:57:13 But they were going to wait for a larger screen.
19:57:19 iMac, and when the Apple Silicon ones came out, they came out with, I think it was
19:57:25 I don’t remember how big it was. And they said that was too small. And then having rejected Apple’s silicon machine, their iMac promptly died.
19:57:35 And they spent months.
19:57:39 taking the hard drive out of the old machine, finding a way to package it so that they can transfer stuff over to the, uh, their brand new Apple Silicon iMac.
19:57:52 If their machine hadn’t died, and they…
19:57:56 purchased a new machine when I suggested it, they could have made the transition in a couple hours.
19:58:02 So that’s why you went to shop early. I was at an Apple dealership, not an Apple dealership. I was at a car dealership in.
19:58:17 Port Angeles a couple months ago, and a neighbor came by and they said, are you car shopping? And I said, always. And they said, is something wrong with your car? No, there’s nothing wrong with my car at all. Well, why are you car shopping?
19:58:31 Is somebody running rear ends my car, I might need a new car, and I’d rather make that choice in advance than be rushed into it at the last moment.
19:58:42 You’re always one rear-ending or one T-boning, or one whatever away from getting a new car. Shop in advance. Don’t wait until the last second. So you don’t rushed into something. And that’s what I’m recommending now, that
19:58:56 If you have an Intel-based machine, your machine is obsolete.
19:59:01 Wait until it dies to get a replacement, because if it dies, it’s a real pain to get stuff off of it and onto another machine, assuming you can even do it.
19:59:15 So.
19:59:21 Yes.
19:59:16 You know, a story on that, I saw you had Macintex on your computer. The reason I bought this new computer is because the Macintax program wouldn’t run on an old computer. So I had to buy a new computer just to run my taxes and I had to go back years because you depreciate something
19:59:35 It has to carry across, you know, to the current years. So I called up and I said, they won’t your back and tax program won’t work on my old system says, yeah, you’re going to have to buy a new computer
19:59:47 And that’s like on my new computer, because I had to do my taxes, I was trapped
19:59:54 Yes.
19:59:56 Um, I spend a lot of time working with Windows machines, and for ever and anon, the only way I would run Windows was I ran it under Parallels on my Mac because it’s a virtual machine that way.
20:00:11 Windows traditionally has really bad security, but if you’re running Windows on a Mac, it has to get through the Mac security and get through the virtual operating system that the Windows is running on in order to attack Windows. So it’s actually a very
20:00:27 safe ways to run Windows.
20:00:30 My spouse worked for the Department of Defense, so we ended up buying a Windows laptop because Department of Defense is
20:00:38 a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft.
20:00:41 And so we had this Windows machine and she would say, how do I do this?” And I’d say, I don’t know. And she would say, you were a senior IT Administrator for NOAA. You know how to do this.
20:00:56 And I kind of, you know, look.
20:00:59 aggrieved and say, well, yeah, I do, but it’s hard.
20:01:04 That kind of thing. But that was the only reason why I bought a Windows machine is Kathleen needed one for work.
20:01:11 I could avoid the complication simply by not having one.
20:01:15 But you don’t want to be in the situation that Joey was in of having to upgrade right now because of an immediate need.
20:01:26 want to know what you’re going to do
20:01:28 for your next car, your next computer. And Costco’s a good place to go.
20:01:34 window shopping. You don’t have to buy it there, but at least it’ll tell you you know how you like the keyboard or how you like the screen or whatever it is that, uh…
20:01:45 is, um…
20:01:47 A major consideration for you. Also, the number of ports. I used to have a Mac Pro when the Mac Pros first came out, and you could put multiple hard drives into it and had
20:01:59 of ports so you could plug everything on the planet. The MacBooks.
20:02:06 The low-end MacBook and the low end iMac, there’s not many things you can plug into it. You’d have to plug in a hub or something if you had a bunch of
20:02:23 Yeah.
20:02:18 of peripherals. So you want to, yes, like that one that Ron is holding up. Those things are inexpensive, but it
20:02:26 doesn’t help you if you’re not planning for it and you don’t know that you need that. So look at it, look for it in advance. The hub that I have is a little bit more complicated because it also supports video and Thunderbolt and so on and so forth, but…
20:02:41 I gave it some thought before I
20:02:45 had to upgrade.
20:02:48 And I encourage the rest of you to do that too. Any questions?
20:02:53 Yes, I have one
20:02:57 Apple changing
20:02:59 They hide my mail domain
20:03:02 Which I’ve read about
20:03:04 Have you heard anything about that
20:03:05 Uh, as far as I can tell, there’s a non-issue. It upset some people because some third-party developers were…
20:03:17 Where uh
20:03:18 They had some software that required things to be named a particular way, and when Apple changed the domain, it broke them. But in terms of how it works for you, it doesn’t make any difference.
20:03:33 As far as I can see, it was a tempest of the teapot. I read a couple of the popular news stories, but then I talked to developers and they said…
20:03:43 That.
20:03:44 It was kind of a…
20:03:46 It was like a lot of the arguments… I don’t know if you watched the World Cup, where a guy claimed that he was clipped by another player who was actually 6 feet away from him, and that’s a big controversy about whether or not something happened. That… it was that kind of controversy.
20:04:02 It doesn’t amount to anything that I can see.
20:04:07 Okay.
20:04:10 I had one, um…
20:04:12 Lawrence, do you have any idea?
20:04:15 of what iPhone 18 will be relative to iPhone 17.
20:04:22 Would be better, or how would it be better, or what’s it going to?
20:04:26 Have that iPhone 17 doesn’t have.
20:04:30 I keep on joking that the next version of the iPhone will float because, you know, they make all these features, so what else can it do? I would imagine that there are lots of things, like they’ve talked about it folding.
20:04:46 They might have a version that folds. Is that of interest to me? Now, I have… I don’t think it is. They might have a larger screen. Well, the iPhone 17 that’s in my pocket has a larger screen.
20:05:03 The phone itself is physically slightly smaller than the iPhone 16 Pro Max. So the iPhone 17, how does it have this larger screen? It’s because the screen goes all the way out to the edge.
20:05:15 But in terms of the physical size, it’s actually slightly smaller. So I’ve heard all kinds of different kinds of rumors.
20:05:24 And…
20:05:26 What Apple is doing with their camera, I’m intrigued with, but Apple doesn’t make the camera. The camera is actually made by Sony. And Sony has done some interesting things. When you have a telephoto, in order to get a telephoto.
20:05:41 You need to have length. And in order to have length, you need to have something bigger. While the iPhone 17 has telephotos.
20:05:51 8x telephoto. How did they do this? Because it’s not any thicker than it was before, and they did it the way they do with telescopes. With telescopes, how do you make it larger? You bounce the light back and forth inside to increase the effective length
20:06:06 And to make the image larger. And that’s what they’re doing with what Sony has done with the camera that’s in the iPhone 17. It actually bounces around inside to make it physically, to make sure the light…
20:06:21 travels farther so you can magnify it. That’s very clever. Are they going to do more of that in the 18? I don’t know.
20:06:30 I just haven’t heard that much. I do know that Apple is spending a lot of time making sure that machines
20:06:38 All of their devices, be they laptops or desktops or the phones, have more RAM. You might have noticed that you can’t buy, with the exception of the Apple Neo, you can’t buy a Mac that has less than 16 gig.
20:06:54 gigs of RAM now. Apple Neo only has eight. The rest of them have at least 16. Is that important? Yes, because the Apple Intelligence is going to use more memory. It’ll try to answer questions as much as it can
20:07:09 on the device without talking to Apple, without talking to Google, it’ll try to answer it on the phone. And in order to do that, it’s going to take up more memory. And so they’re putting more memory into the machines. And I imagine that the 18, if it comes out with
20:07:25 with a new chip, that the chip will have more memory to do processing for AI. It also means that if you have a phone right now, an older phone that doesn’t have a lot of memory in it, and some of the older phones won’t,
20:07:41 Uh, don’t, you might be able to upgrade to iOS 27, because your phone’s capable of it, but without that extra memory that you have in the newer phones, the Apple Intelligence might be quite limited.
20:07:56 Because it just takes more memory. It takes more memory, it takes more disk space, and so on and so forth. So if you’re running short of storage on your iPad or iPhone or Mac, and you’re running short of memory,
20:08:13 then you probably will not need to upgrade in order to take advantage of those things. I’ll give you an example of memory usage that people don’t really think about.
20:08:24 In Google Chrome,
20:08:26 If you open a tab,
20:08:28 It uses about a gigabyte of memory just to open a tab.
20:08:33 If the site that you’re talking to is actually fairly complex, Google has this thing called Google Earth. You can go into Google Earth, you have a globe of the world, you can spin it around, you can zoom in on things, you can look at, follow tributaries.
20:08:48 mountaintops, all kinds. Really wonderful thing. Use a staggering amounts of memory. If you have two tabs of Google Earth open.
20:08:57 You could use 32 gigs of RAM.
20:09:00 Now, if you have a 16 gigabyte machine,
20:09:04 How does it use 32 gigabytes of RAM?
20:09:09 It doesn
20:09:10 So why does it work?
20:09:13 Well, it uses as much as it can, but when it can’t… when you run out of RAM, as I understand it, it then uses space on your
20:09:23 Solid state drive
20:09:22 Yes, it pages… it’s called paging. Pages stuff out to your hard drive. Two problems with this. First of all, you measure…
20:09:33 Memory ran in nanoseconds, billionths of a second. You measure disk drive speed in milliseconds.
20:09:41 That’s at least a thousand times slower than a nanosecond.
20:09:47 It could be 10,000 times slower, depending upon the hard drive and whatnot. So using disk space for memory is not a great idea.
20:09:58 Well, AI will use the disk space, but it only doesn’t have to push everything there. It just pushes portions of it. But again, going back to my Google Chrome, if you have…
20:10:09 You have 16 gigs of RAM and you open up two tabs
20:10:14 in Google Earth, you’re using 32 gigs of RAM, it uses at least 16 gigs worth of your disk space. If you don’t have 16 gigs of disk space, what happens?
20:10:29 Things get very, very…
20:10:33 Slow.
20:10:37 So in order to do certain things right now on your Mac, depending upon what you’re doing, you have to make sure you have free disk space. Regardless of how much memory you have.
20:10:47 You have to have free disk space. And if you’re doing complex things, it can use up goblins of huge amounts of memory, huge amounts of disk space at once. When I’m rendering certain types of video, I can use 50 gigabytes of disk space.
20:11:03 And that may not be a strain for me, but for a lot of people, they don’t have 50 gigabytes worth of disk space free. So you want to be thinking about this because the immediate future of the world is going to use more memory and is going to use more disk space.
20:11:20 And, uh, and it’s also going to require an Apple silicon processor.
20:11:33 Yes, sir.
20:11:25 So the things that we talk about at SMUG next year may be beyond the capability of the machine that’s sitting in front of you right now.
20:11:37 I’m not trying to scare you or be a salesperson for Apple, I’m just saying that, you know, there’s a cost to fancy technology. You can’t do the same thing in a Model 1920.
20:11:55 forward as you can in a 2026 Ford just they’re not they’re not the same thing at all.
20:12:07 In fact, most of you probably wouldn’t be able to figure out how to start a 1924 Ford.
20:12:15 The technology is so different today.
20:12:19 That one that has the button on the floorboard
20:12:23 Uh, the one that has a button on the floorboard and the crank in the front of the engine
20:12:29 block and you know it’s a and a choke.
20:12:33 I was explaining to my daughter how a choke worked.
20:12:38 She finally just said, Dad, you’re making this up and walked away.
20:12:43 She could not believe that you were adjusting chemistry on the side using this.
20:12:49 coal rod on the dashboard. She found that impossible to believe.
20:12:55 Any questions?
20:13:00 Um, I heard, uh…
20:13:02 A rumor from YouTube that said.
20:13:04 That apple might skip iPhone 19.
20:13:09 and jump to iPhone 20.
20:13:11 For their 20th anniversary.
20:13:16 Audition.
20:13:17 And have you heard anything like that or?
20:13:20 Um, they’re, they’re probably basing that rumor on stuff that they just invented, but Apple did come up with a 20th century Mac.
20:13:29 that I thought was really quite cute it was, uh…
20:13:33 One of their first machines that had a flat panel display built in and it was really quite an elegant piece of
20:13:42 Uh, technology, and I was fascinated with the way they built it, and they sold almost none of them.
20:13:48 Um, so, and they’ve also been burned with their, uh.
20:13:52 The iPhone XP or whatever it was, the ultra-thin one that they came out with last fall, the sales on that have been very, very poor.
20:14:02 I don’t really see those as a lot of people say they were failures, but…
20:14:07 Apple does that sort of thing because they’re also testing the technology. How thin can they make an iPhone? Well, they know how thin they can make it now because they made this super thin one. And how small can they make a Mac? Well, they know because they made the
20:14:23 20th century Mac. They use these as testbeds for new technology.
20:14:31 If you just go back to the floppy disk, which probably a lot of you have never actually used. The original floppy disk was an 8-inch plastic square.
20:14:43 And the original microcomputers that use floppy disks use these 8-inch ones. And then they came up with smaller ones that were five and a quarter.
20:14:53 HP decided they were going to come up with this 3.5 inch desk, so they were the first company to use 3.5. It was a technology invented by Sony.
20:15:03 HP was the first company to use them. The second company to use them was Apple.
20:15:09 And the number of users of 3.5-inch disks went from hundreds of people to tens of thousands of people almost overnight because of the Macintosh.
20:15:20 So they tend to look for technologies that they can use, and then they use their size to create markets that didn’t exist before.
20:15:32 If there was a 20th anniversary iPhone, it would
20:15:39 be one of those things where they were testing technology. But I suspect right now that that’s actually just somebody was smoking pot and they dreamed it up.
20:15:53 Also, the Apple’s going to have a new CEO, and exactly what he does, I don’t know. Tim Cook is a logistics engineer. That’s why Apple hired him in the first place. He revolutionized the way in which they
20:16:08 produce things, and they source things that used to be that, um, there was this company called… I can’t remember the name of it.
20:16:18 Noah bought several of these companies computers, all the same model. You open them up, and each one had a different motherboard, because what they would do is they didn’t want to have a large inventory on hand, so they’d order small batches of circuit boards, and
20:16:37 One company would do the circuit board one way and another do it the other way. So they were different. The connections on the back were standardized, but that was about the only thing that was. Apple doesn’t do things that way. The reason why these other people would do it, because they didn’t want to be
20:16:52 stuck with parts that they couldn’t use. Apple had a very different philosophy under Tim Cook. He’d buy massive amounts of resources, and he’d standardize them in terms of how they fit into future designs, not just currents.
20:17:07 But future designs. And that was his claim to fame. And that’s why Apple turned into the first trillion dollar company. Well, the first $100 billion company and then $200 billion. They’re not at the trillion dollar level yet.
20:17:24 The new guy, he’s a, um, he’s a production engineer, which is not the same as a logistical specialist. What he wants to do, how he’s going to.
20:17:38 prioritize what strikes his fancy in terms of flash and dazzle don’t know.
20:17:46 I don’t foresee any major changes for the next several years, but long term,
20:17:51 I don’t… I don’t know.
20:17:54 But what you’re talking about with that 20th century iPhone, that’s a flash and dazzle project.
20:18:01 So that might just be…
20:18:05 A pot-smoking reporter, or they might actually do something. Don’t know.
20:18:13 Other questions?
20:18:18 Did we send you suggestions for the next meeting?
20:18:20 Yes, you send me suggestions for the next meeting, um, I will look into possible in-person meeting for August, but probably more likely September. Um And that will be
20:18:34 Probably in addition to our regular meeting rather than instead of, because I can… my in-person topics are going to be quite different then.
20:18:46 the virtual ones. The virtual meetings are really handy because I can explain something, you can play there with your computer at the same time and try it out. That’s hard to do in person.
20:18:59 But the in-person ones, I can do things like show you how to use spaces and not worry about crashing Zoom, because I don’t need to use Zoom.
20:19:06 and show you how to do a startup diagnostic which is built into your machine and you’ve probably never played with it.
20:19:16 But that’s kind of hard to do because it requires that you reboot the machine. So there are things that I can do in person that I just can’t do via Zoom.
20:19:25 But send me suggestions.
20:19:29 And I will send Ron a
20:19:34 um…
20:19:35 3D page summary of his duties as president.
20:19:40 Like the roommate contract
20:19:45 Sheldon and Leonard.
20:19:48 I’ve never seen that program, but I have heard.
20:19:52 Oh, man.
20:19:55 And there’s an offshoot to that. It’s young Sheldon is really smart. I mean, he’s smart, but he’s dumb too in a
20:20:04 juvenile sort of way.
20:20:06 practically. Anyway, and so now there’s an offshoot and there has been for several years called Young Sheldon. And that starts him off as a little kid and he’s in college at 11 or 9 or something, I don’t know. But that’s really good too
20:20:20 My daughter found out in fifth grade, she… we were talked by the state of Maryland and Johns Hopkins into having her take the SAT. So she took the SAT when she was in fifth grade, and she was burst into tears when she found out she didn’t get a perfect score, and we told her that was still good enough to get into college.
20:20:40 And she immediately wanted to skip middle school and high school, and…
20:20:45 mad at us for years because we made her plod through middle school and high school. But while I have a very bright daughter.
20:20:54 She was still, you know, in terms of age.
20:20:59 young, and she needed to learn, among other things, how to exist with normal people. She
20:21:07 And that’s one of Sheldon’s problems.
20:21:08 Well, she hated group projects, and I told her once, life is a group project.
20:21:16 Whether you like it or not, it’s a group project, so you have to learn to deal with that.
20:21:23 She’s over it, I don’t think she hates me about that anymore.
20:21:27 Anyway, have a nice night.
20:21:31 Yep, thank you. And thank you, Ron.
20:21:33 Very much
20:21:33 Yeah.
20:21:32 Yeah, thank you, Laurence and Ron.
20:21:37 Night, night.
20:21:37 Thank you. Good night.
20:21:39 Good night
20:21:39 Good night.
