Tag: Macintosh

We were supposed to look at Time Machine at the April meeting, but (ahem) someone forgot to do that. Instead, in a continuation of a review of Mac utilities from February, we looked at the Emoji and Symbol viewer, Find My, Preview (but only scratched the surface), and had a brief look at the Weather app, newly added to macOS after being introduced on the iPhone and iPad.

Updates: yes, get them!

One question in the Q&A: should you install updates when they are available? The answer is: yes. Operating system updates (and application updates) have two purposes: 1) they often add new features, or fix existing ones, for free, and 2) they patch vulnerabilities. The second one is important: when Apple (and Microsoft, and Linux, and everybody else) issues an update, they list things that were fixed. Hackers use this information to find vulnerabilities, and exploit them, so please, do not second-guess operating system or application updates. Here is Apple’s explanation of how Apple handles a particular kind of update, the “background update,”

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101591

Note that you won’t get these updates unless you turn on Automatic Updates in your System Settings.

Find My

There were a number of questions about Find My, which now works on the iPhone, iPad and Macintosh, and covers finding your computer, iPhone, iPad, some types of AirPods, and, with AirTags, other “things” ranging from wallets to pets to cars. Here is an Apple guide to Find My:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/104978

Emoji and Symbols

If you ever need to type in foreign languages, or want to include a symbol of a chess piece, a mailbox, a pair of scissors, or a dinosaur, you need the Emoji and Symbol finder, and the Keyboard Viewer. Apple documentation on these two utilities can be found here:

Keyboard viewer

Emoji and Symbol finder

You can add a menu item for these two utilities to the top menu in macOS by going to System Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources > Show input menu in menu bar.

Preview

We could probably spend an entire meeting talking about Preview. Preview can do almost everything except fry eggs. We briefly covered the main uses in the meeting, but Apple has an extensive online guide,

https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/welcome/mac

Weather

Apple’s Weather app is not that mysterious: it shows the weather.

https://support.apple.com/guide/weather-mac/view-weather-conditions-apdw93f0ea3e/mac

There are some tricks, such as adding additional locations if you want to see the weather all the time somewhere else. One question I was asked is: where does the information come from? The answer is: lots of places. Hundreds of places. Weather is not at all a simple subject.

Video recording of the March 2025 Meeting

Transcript of the March 2025 Meeting

Note that this is Zoom’s automatic transcription, and sometimes it is overly creative, adds words, drops words, etc.

18:30:42 Good afternoon, good evening. Today we're going to talk about utilities, but first we're going to have a question and answer session.
18:30:51 And before you ask a question, please check to make sure that your microphone is not muted.
18:30:57 Because… it's really hard to, and I'm not good at at lip reading so We'll just leave it at that.
18:31:06 Anyone have any questions?
18:31:11 Yes. Remember?
18:31:12 Hey, Lars. I was wondering, this is real basic, but I noticed on my software updates, I get automatic updates for my software, but then there was a paragraph that came up kind of like kind of to update my operating system because i'm at
18:31:35 Sonoma. I didn't get the Zoom meeting. 14.7.2. And then it had a description of the The new one.
18:31:47 Which is Sequoia 15.3.2, and then a long description of what it adds, iPhone mirroring and all that.
18:31:57 Is that something I should do?
18:32:02 My recommendation is to always run the latest operating system. And there are two reasons for it.
18:32:08 Okay.
18:32:11 The newer operating systems, and I'll tell you the carrot part.
18:32:15 The new operating systems always add something new, like iPhone mirroring. With iPhone mirroring, if I bring my phone near my Mac, the Mac can detect it and I push a little button in the dock and it'll show up on the screen so i
18:32:31 Have my phone on the screen. Now, why would you do that?
18:32:35 You can do that for teaching purposes. It's great to teach people how to use a phone if you can show it in a session and broadcast it.
18:32:44 But it's also a good way for just making sure that things match.
18:32:51 My spouse had a contact list that didn't match mine. She has five degrees in the sciences and I don't.
18:33:00 So her contracts were very different. And sometimes we'd have different addresses for the same people.
18:33:05 This way I could take her phone, put it up there, look at my contacts, look at her contacts and compare them. So lots of reasons why you might want to have that.
18:33:13 So the carrot is that the new operating systems offer new features.
18:33:19 There's a little… asterisk for that in that the new operating systems may not work on older computers. This one gentleman was telling me that he's trying to upgrade from machine that he bought back in 2016.
18:33:34 Well, that machine that he bought back in 2016 cannot run the latest operating system.
18:33:40 So he probably can't run the latest operating system. Here's the stick part. When Apple releases And it's a standard security. All computer companies do this. When Apple releases a new operating system.
18:33:55 They also list what they fixed. And in the process of listing what they fixed, they also tell hackers that there's a flaw in the old operating system.
18:34:06 You immediately should update to the latest operating system because The hackers are going to start working at how to attack old operating systems.
18:34:17 The only genuine hacks that I have heard Max in recent memory.
18:34:23 Have been with people running older operating systems. And when I say older operating systems, I mean something that Apple no longer supports.
18:34:31 And what they do is that hackers find out that that there's the vulnerability so there's run experiments to see how they can trigger that vulnerability to do something.
18:34:45 The most common one that you see In the Mac world, which is not particularly dangerous, but it is upsetting. And I already had two or three people ask me This week about this is called URL hijacking.
18:35:00 That this one woman said that she was getting this message that was allegedly from one person, but when she clicked on it, took her someplace else.
18:35:09 Well, that could be that somebody just has a message that they sent out that says that it's going to go to Holy Cross Hospital and you click on it and it really sends you to pink panther lounge in Las Vegas.
18:35:25 That's not even a hack. That's just they're hiding where it's really going. But another way to do it is that they will actually run a script so that if you type in amazon on your computer, it would take you to Target or to some competitor.
18:35:40 And that's true malware that somebody downloaded something to your machine. You said it's going to do this. And you said, sure, go ahead and do that.
18:35:49 Without realizing that one of the things that it did was that it was going to intercept where you were going and send you someplace else.
18:35:57 And that's genuine malware. And Apple does a really good job of protecting you from that.
18:36:06 But only if you have automatic updates turned on. If you don't turn on automatic updates.
18:36:11 If somebody finds a little chink in the armor, they can take advantage of it.
18:36:16 Now, we don't really in the Mac world have true viruses like they have in the Windows world.
18:36:21 But there are other things that people can do that will definitely upset you. So my strong recommendation is that You have a Mac OS set so that it automatically does security updates.
18:36:37 And when a new operating system comes up. You do an update to the operating system.
18:36:43 Before you update to a completely new operating system, though, there are some things you should do.
18:36:48 You should get rid of all your junk mail out of your mail. You should get rid of all your trash in your trash can. Get rid of everything.
18:36:56 Because when you get a new operating system, the first thing the operating system does is index everything on your computer.
18:37:02 And it slows it down for a day or two. As it's busy indexing everything.
18:37:08 You don't want it to waste time indexing junk and things you've thrown away.
18:37:17 And the other thing is that a lot of people, they have older machines with smaller hard drives.
18:37:21 And they added this new operating system in order to put the new operating system in place You need to have three times the amount of space that the operating system will require. The operating system say it wants five gigs, it means you need to have at least 15 gigs free.
18:37:38 Because you have the old operating system, you have the new operating system, and then you need a workspace for the two of them.
18:37:42 So if you don't have enough space, you can't really do an upgrade.
18:37:47 So there are some minor gotchas.
18:37:49 Can you say the other yeah can you say that again so I'm writing it down how much space? How do I figure it?
18:37:56 Three times.
18:38:03 Okay.
18:37:56 You want to have at least… three times as much space as the operating system requires. So they say it requires five gigs of free space, you want to have at least 15 free.
18:38:09 Okay. And so if that's the case, then I just go ahead and say upgrade now. And then what happens? How long does it take? Like the computer shuts down and reboots and all that?
18:38:24 It might take quite a while depending upon the speed of your internet. It might take quite a while to download it because if you download Say if the new operating system is 10 gigs.
18:38:34 Because it's a nice even number. And you have a connection that is one gigabyte per second.
18:38:40 One gigabyte per second is going to take a long time to get 10 gigs because 10 gigs is 10,000 megabytes. So it'll take at least 10,000 seconds.
18:38:53 If it runs perfectly. And of course, it won't because things happen So depending upon the speed of your internet, it could take quite a while to download it.
18:39:02 And my recommendation to most people is Answer all little questions it has about updating it. Tell it to update, and then go out to dinner or go to bed or something.
18:39:12 Probably better to go out to dinner because if you go to bed and then wake up in the morning and you go to your machine, you think everything looks different. You forgot that you upgraded and You think something's strange. I've had people call me and say, somebody hacked my machine. It looks so different. No, it just upgraded the operating system.
18:39:29 They went to bed and forgot that's what they were doing.
18:39:33 But it will…
18:39:34 Is it going to look radically different?
18:39:38 Sometimes it does in ways that you don't expect. For example, it might set a new bet in different background screen. Like when Sequoia came out, it had pictures of redwoods.
18:39:47 And I had a person call saying, there's a picture of trees on my screen. I don't understand why. It just changed the background screen.
18:39:55 Okay.
18:39:54 And you can change it back to what you wanted to, but you know that's just how it comes. So it… In terms of the biggest change recently was basically When it went to it.
18:40:11 Mac OS 11. When it went from it went from 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2, blah, blah, blah.
18:40:18 But when it changed to macOS 11, Apple really did make some changes in the operating system that made things look different.
18:40:25 But 11, 12, 13, 14, the changes are incremental. So it's not usually that You're not lost trying to figure out where things are.
18:40:37 But in terms of the added functionality, like for example. With what is the current one?
18:40:46 What is it called? It is called Sequoia. With Sequoia, it adds Apple intelligence and what a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of the stuff You actually have to explicitly turn on. It's not obvious that it's there because it's not supposed to be.
18:41:01 It's in the background doing things. And so you might have to turn things on in order to experience them.
18:41:08 And a lot of people, for example, couldn't understand that the screen, the iPhone mirroring As an example, only works if you have one of the newer Apple Silicon machines. If you have one of the older machines.
18:41:21 It doesn't work because it's not really it's not really possible.
18:41:27 Oh, okay. And a question. I did get an iPhone finally, but it doesn't mean that if my iPhone gets lost, someone can access my laptop.
18:41:41 If you are a hacker, you can set up your phone so that it can access your laptop.
18:41:47 But you have to be a hacker in order to put special software on the phone to do that.
18:41:53 Most mere mortals, no, there's no way you can do that.
18:41:53 Okay. Okay.
18:41:57 So no, they can't get in. However, I will tell you that Mac operating system for quite a while now has had something on it called passwords, which is an application that stores your passwords. And one of the nice things is that it stores your passwords in such a way
18:42:15 That it sinks in between your Mac and your iPhone and your iPad and anything else you have, it'll automatically sync them.
18:42:24 If you tell it to sync through iCloud. That is a huge plus, but it can also be a minus if you lose your phone and you don't have it properly secured.
18:42:36 I used to I used to work for NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
18:42:42 And what I did is kind of hard to explain, but one of my duties was IT security.
18:42:47 And people would come in to a conference room when we'd be talking about IoT security And they put down their phone unlocked.
18:42:55 And anytime they did that, I kind of sneak over and I grab it and I'd set their language settings to Chinese. And then they couldn't get into their phone because they didn't know Chinese.
18:43:06 Now, where everything is located is still the same in Chinese, but they They would just panic and not realize that that was the case.
18:43:15 And how did I do that? I did that because they left their phone unlocked or they never set a password.
18:43:20 You always want to set a password on your phone. And because your phone travels with you.
18:43:26 It is the most vulnerable piece of electronics that you have.
18:43:32 And Apple has even done some things recently to make it less, you might have read stories about because when they're locked up.
18:43:42 It's really difficult to break into an iPhone. So recently.
18:43:48 People have been waiting to tell people leave them on desks and so on and so forth in a restaurant. And then they come by and they grab it while it's unlocked and then run off.
18:43:58 Because at that point it is unlocked and it's real easy to get into it.
18:44:03 Well, Apple has recently and recent operating systems made it impossible for them to get rid of the user information.
18:44:09 So if you try to get rid of the user information, you can't, which means they can't sell it.
18:44:15 And certain things like passwords requires a password. So even though they have a phone with them.
18:44:21 And they can look at your contacts and other things. They can't look at your passwords. They can't look at your wallet settings.
18:44:29 There's still built-in protection, even if they grab your unlocked foam.
18:44:33 Keep in mind that your phone has staggering amounts of information on it that's intensely personal to you.
18:44:41 It's got photographs of your family. It's got your home address. It's got the phone numbers of all your relatives and friends.
18:44:48 And if you're in an illicit relationship, it probably has lots of information about that. So there are lots of things that you don't You don't want visible on your phone.
18:44:58 And so that's why you should pay, you should be paranoid.
18:45:01 About your phone because it does it does it does travel with you.
18:45:05 Yes.
18:45:07 If you have a government phone if you have a government computer It should only be used for government purposes.
18:45:13 And I would quite often get some senior managers saying something's not working on my phone, even though I was not the help desk.
18:45:20 And they give me their laptop and they'd open it up and they'd have their income tax return on it.
18:45:25 Your income tax return has your social security number. It's got where you work.
18:45:31 How much you made. It's got all kinds of stuff. That really shouldn't be in somebody else's hands.
18:45:37 And because laptops are mobile. You should be almost as paranoid about laptops as you are about your phone.
18:45:44 If you think about it, you say, well, my laptop is on my desk at home. It never goes anywhere.
18:45:51 Then two things. First, you never should have bought a laptop.
18:45:54 Because an iMac is cheaper than a laptop. And it's got a bigger screen and it's faster and so on and so forth.
18:46:00 So you probably shouldn't have bought a laptop in the first place. But the second thing is it's also easier to steal. So even if though it never leaves your home.
18:46:09 Be paranoid. Make sure that your machines at home. Are set up with password protections.
18:46:16 Just like your phone is. People steal them.
18:46:20 Oh, thank you.
18:46:21 Be paranoid. Yes. Marcia you're your microphones. Okay, good.
18:46:29 Yeah, I think this is relatively simple, but my phone is not… It's not letting me know when I get text messages.
18:46:39 And I recently got an iWatch and I don't know if that makes any difference but So what do I need to do for it to let me know when I have a text message?
18:46:53 When you go into your phone and go into notifications.
18:46:58 Right.
18:46:58 And it has a list of things that you can notify and go to messages and just tell it how you want it to be.
18:47:04 Are notified of a message. On my phone, I have it.
18:47:09 Make a beep sound or kind of it's actually a bird chirp But anyway, it makes a chirping sound on my phone because that's how I have it set up.
18:47:18 On my watch, which I have an apple watch I have my Apple Watch vibrate.
18:47:24 Because I'll notice if it vibrates and I really don't want my watch to make noises.
18:47:29 That's my particular preference, but you can go and set it any way you want to.
18:47:33 You can set it so
18:47:34 Okay. Well, I haven't set for a horn but it's uh You know, I'm not getting any noise.
18:47:42 It could be that you have the volume turned down really low.
18:47:47 Okay, I'll try that.
18:47:49 The other thing is there's also a do not disturb switch on the side and you might have it set to that.
18:47:57 There are a number of ways that you… It's designed so you can silence it for church and so on and so forth. People forget to turn that off and at that point.
18:48:05 People call them or send them text messages and they say, I didn't hear it.
18:48:11 It's it's um There are many ways to control it and that also creates some confusion sometimes.
18:48:19 Okay, I'll try that.
18:48:21 Yeah. Yes.
18:48:22 Lawrence, it's Sidna. I have a question about a male group.
18:48:28 Into a situation where I need to send emails regularly to 35 people And I have them all in a little folder.
18:48:37 You know, near my computer, I mean on my computer But I don't know how to make it so I can just push you know push that that's a little folder and make it So that I don't have to manually
18:48:53 Enter 35. Addresses.
18:48:59 Yeah, male grove. Okay.
18:48:56 You can create mail groups in mail and That's really what you want to do is you want to go into Google and say, how do I create a mail group and Apple Mail? And Apple has a page telling you how to do it.
18:49:13 It's not that difficult but it's it's more than the short little answers that I like for the Q&A.
18:49:22 Okay.
18:49:21 But what you want is a male group. I have one for uh My brothers-in-law, Kathleen, has five brothers And rather than just type in everybody's. I just say james say And it pops up that group and it sends them to the five brothers plus her sister.
18:49:39 So I don't have to. My two brothers are not talking to each other, so I address them separately.
18:49:47 No. So I have another shorter question, easier.
18:49:53 I have a new printer, an Epson printer. And every time I want to print something, it doesn't automatically connect. I have to connect it.
18:50:03 And you know it recognizes that I have a printer that sees it I have to connect every time.
18:50:14 I'm not sure why it would do that. Is it wireless or is it is
18:50:18 It's wireless.
18:50:30 Is she talking about printing from her phone, iPad, or computer?
18:50:36 Computer.
18:50:38 Yeah, that's a good question. I don't. How far away is it?
18:50:44 Oh, maybe 12 feet, 10, 12 feet
18:50:48 Well, that shouldn't be a problem. I can't.
18:50:50 No, it prints when I, you know, when I say choose printer, it'll print, but it's just not automatic like it used to be with my antiquated one.
18:51:00 And the answer is I don't know. That's something I'd actually probably have to look at.
18:51:05 Okay.
18:51:05 A lot of these things I will tell you that i will tell you that I was in IT, I was a senior IT manager at NOAA for 26, 27 years, something And one thing I refuse to do, and I even made up a little sign outside my office saying, I do not answer printer questions.
18:51:25 I refused to change the toner. I refuse to put paper in it. And I also never printed. And in that 25 plus years, I think I printed 10 sheets of paper because i'm vehemently anti And having said that, I will also say that we have two printers in the house basically because Kathleen, one of the printers but
18:51:46 I just really, really, really hate printers. Printers are mechanical.
18:51:52 As well as being digital. And because of that, they've got all kinds of just strange peculiarities.
18:51:59 And sometimes you just have to actually look at it and trying to figure out what it is But I… sort of looking at it, I don't know that I have an answer.
18:52:11 Because it should work. Most printers that are wireless printers, they use Wi-Fi.
18:52:13 Okay.
18:52:16 And the Wi-Fi, the current Wi-Fi has a range of about 150 feet so 12 feet, it should be able to handle that unless you have it wrapped in aluminum foil or something.
18:52:26 No, no. Well, I just connect it and it prints. So it's just not automatic.
18:52:33 There was this is this is this is a C story is My dear spouse was a professor at the University of Maryland and this one chemist was constantly he was in a different building he was constantly complaining about the fact that his printer was not working. In IT would come over and say that it was working perfectly well.
18:52:53 And he didn't understand why it wasn't. Working. So Kathleen went over there and she found out that he was in his office and the lab was just on the other side of the wall.
18:53:04 But he was a chemist, but he had to have the the lab.
18:53:11 Electronically isolated because of some of the things that he was working with, very volatile chemicals.
18:53:14 So essentially, he had put a Faraday cage into his lab. His lab was a Faraday cage Which means that it was impossible for any kind of radio noise to travel from his office through the wall to his printer.
18:53:30 In other words, he had created his own problem. And she said, move it someplace else. And he said, well, I'd like it in there because that way I can't hear it.
18:53:39 Okay, well, you won't hear it because it won't work. But he basically had put it in a cage so that the radio waves wouldn't go into it.
18:53:49 And he didn't realize that that would block his access to the printer.
18:53:54 Some things you just can't fix other than just you know looking at it and seeing what the problem is.
18:54:03 Any other questions?
18:54:08 Somebody sent me a question via email and I don't know that they're on today, but The question was.
18:54:20 He went to this guy got a new laptop and he's trying to move things from his old laptop to his new laptop using migration assistant And it says that he doesn't have enough room. What does he want to do?
18:54:34 Well, I told him and asked the question during the Q&A period because a lot of people run into problems like this.
18:54:41 Anytime you're upgrading to a new machine. Some things that you need to take into consideration is you actually need to have free space And the easiest way to get free space is to Empty out all of everything out of your trash can.
18:54:56 Empty out the trash can and mail, delete all the junk mail. You can free up gigabytes worth of space that way.
18:55:04 But the other thing to do is that if that still doesn't give you enough room.
18:55:09 Then you need to think about offloading some things. And to offload them You can go out and get an external disk drive this is a external disk drives is two terabytes. That's two trillion bytes or 2000 gigabytes and it uses USB-C. So you just plug it into a modern machine and it'll just
18:55:29 Handy dandy little disk drive. This is another, I think this is also two terabyte disk drive You can get these off of Amazon. You can buy them at Costco.
18:55:41 If you don't want to spend that amount of money. This is a USB drive. I'm trying to pull it up in such a way that you're going to see it.
18:55:50 This is 128 gigabyte USB disk drive and Kathleen bought this and I have no idea how much it costs but I was looking on Amazon before the meeting started. You can get a 256 gigabyte disk drive Which is essentially two of these on Amazon for as little as
18:56:14 You can get to Amazon Basics, 256 gigabyte flash drive for $17.99.
18:56:21 And they can be $27, $37, depending upon who you get it from. Pny has a special, you can get three of these For $37.99.
18:56:33 One thing I will tell you about flash drives is that new machines have a USB-C connector and the USB-C connector is this tiny little thing And the older ones are USB-A connectors and they're much larger.
18:56:49 The new machines, you can't plug a usba flash drive into it. So you probably have to get something like a drive dock, which are inexpensive.
18:56:59 But the other thing you can do, this USB-C, this USB drive that I have.
18:57:04 If you push out on one direction, it's USB-A, push out on the other direction, it's USB-C.
18:57:09 So you can go between the old and the new. And that's one way to get around the problem.
18:57:16 And they're inexpensive. They only require power when they're plugged into the drive and the drive that your computer actually powers it. So it's a good way to do it. This kind of transfer.
18:57:28 The other thing that's critically important when you're buying these, make sure that they are USB 3.0 or 3.1.
18:57:37 And that the reason is that anything lower than three they are really really really slow. How slow? They can be up to 100 times slower.
18:57:50 So if you're trying to make room on your machine. You don't really want to spend a hundred times more time on the task then you have to. And the difference in price between the USB 2 and the USB 3
18:58:06 Is significant but If you can get 256 gigs for 20 bucks that's that may be significantly more than, say, five bucks but it's your time is more valuable than that.
18:58:21 Does it matter what brand or anything?
18:58:20 Just make sure. I am partial to name brands. The ones that I buy tend to be SanDisk, S-A-N-Disk.
18:58:34 Sandisk is owned by, I think, Western Digital. The other one that I use are Lexar.
18:58:39 Alexar big with the photography. I've been using Lexar. Flash drives in my cameras for, I don't know, 20 years So I like those. I don't go for the off-brand. So if it's Joe's Garage or something like that.
18:58:59 I don't know how many of you have ever been to a microcenter.
18:59:03 Micro Center are these huge electronic stores. They're the size Some of them the size of Costco, but they're regionally located.
18:59:12 And near the checkout counter, they have these bins full of flash drives and they're in primary colors, red, green, blue.
18:59:20 And you can get really, really cheap. Usb drives there. They are all USB 1.0, 1.1.
18:59:28 You can die of old age just trying to copy 10 photographs from your phone to one of those. But they're really cheap.
18:59:37 And they're no name brands. It just says…
18:59:52 Okay.
18:59:43 You want to look for a brand that you recognize it, whether it's Samsung or Toshiba or to shiver SanDisk or Lexar, something like that.
18:59:59 So where's the closest microcenter?
19:00:02 I don't know. Maybe Denver. I don't know. I don't know of any in Washington state.
19:00:11 They used to have, what was the name of that? Place.
19:00:15 It was a California store. They used to have one of their super stores.
19:00:20 And… Pardon?
19:00:22 Electronics. Surprise electronics.
19:00:26 Yes, fries. They used to have one of their stores over on the east side In Bothell or someplace, I don't remember what it was.
19:00:37 And when I moved back to Washington State, I thought, oh, good, I can go to a Fry's. They went bankrupt the week before I was going to visit them.
19:00:43 They don't exist anymore and it uh Yeah, I was… I went to Fry's back when they first started in the first 1970s. They would have new and used equipment in the same place. So you have to remember personal computers were brand new. So back then when you went in there, you got these boards that you went and then made your own computer.
19:01:07 And fries also had Coke machines. So if you're a geek, you could just wander around all day and drink Coke and play with electronics.
19:01:15 One time I was in there, they had a Russian cryptographic teletype for sale.
19:01:21 And if I'd had the money.
19:01:26 That was… That was my goal was to buy this. Why? Because the Soviet Union still existed even though I have no idea what I do with it. Just having it is kind of this 400 pound thing over in the corner would just give me great joy but
19:01:48 It was way too much money for me. I was working as a bookstore manager at the time and I think I was making two dollars and two dollars 40 cents an hour or something.
19:02:02 It would have taken me months to… to make the money. Anyway, it's now um time for the formal meeting to start.
19:02:12 And I shall, I shall. President there for a second. Hello, President.
19:02:16 How are you doing? She's unmuting herself.
19:02:26 There you are.
19:02:26 Oh, there. Yeah, you know, when you have your hot corner set and you go to turn audio on and you miss it and then you go to the corner and then you have nothing but a screensaver.
19:02:37 Hello, everybody. Welcome. Do we have anybody new?
19:02:48 Oh, hi, Brian. Brian is new. Yeah, I don't know who that is. I wonder if that's my dad.
19:02:44 I don't know who 858-7299. Is…
19:02:56 858? Doc?
19:02:56 You know? But that's not a real phone number.
19:03:01 858-7299-7538. It's too many digits. It's not the right placement. But I don't see him on here, but I know I set it up for him.
19:03:10 Yeah, I don't see them anyway. Welcome, Brian. Glad to hear about us.
19:03:17 I think it was via email.
19:03:21 You know, nothing to get flustered over than a cuckoo clock behind you that now I can't hear anything.
19:03:29 Oh, wow. My evening is starting out with a bang I'm sorry, how did you hear about us?
19:03:31 It's most.
19:03:36 No problem. I think I got an email from you guys or from somebody else who forwarded me an email.
19:03:43 So I just signed up and i just signed up I'm a geek at heart, so decided to join and see what this is about.
19:03:50 Cool. Well, we welcome you. Yeah, if you have any questions, there's a chat on the side. I try to watch it.
19:03:58 Because Lawrence can't see it when he goes and switches the view for his side of the computer.
19:04:06 Right.
19:04:05 So sometimes I'll try to chime in. Speaking of Lawrence, can you put the sign-in sheet
19:04:11 Yes, I can. How about that? Should have just popped up in the chat window.
19:04:14 Perfect. I think. I see it. Okay, perfect.
19:04:20 So everybody on the right side, when you, well, at the bottom, you click chat and it should pop up on the right side There's… a link there which you just click on. It should open in Safari and you can just put in
19:04:33 I believe name, date, you…
19:04:38 Name, email address, and just check a box saying that you attended.
19:04:44 Yeah, if you guys could do that i would Very much appreciate it. And I will turn it over to the treasurer Anything else we need to discuss?
19:04:57 Don't you have something coming up that you need to pay? Well, I guess you could tell the treasurer that.
19:05:03 I thought… Yeah. Yeah.
19:05:02 Oh, I sent her a bill.
19:05:08 Well, thanks everybody for those that sent in your dues. Very much appreciated.
19:05:14 Yes, we got quite a few of this. Past months and thank you very much to everybody who sent it in it brought our Total balance in the account up to $2,516.63.
19:05:34 So those pills.
19:05:34 Of course, that's before she pays the bill that I sent her but
19:05:42 Yeah, send me in the bills you have, Lawrence. Send me the bills you have.
19:05:44 Pardon? I did. I sent it to you last week or the week before last.
19:05:55 It was 500 and something dollars, so you would have noticed.
19:05:52 Oh, I didn't get any.
19:05:59 Yeah, I didn't see anything. Can you resend it, please? Yeah, that would be great.
19:06:03 Okay. Okay.
19:06:10 We're going to talk about utilities tonight. And last month we talked about last month I don't remember what we talked about.
19:06:20 And we're going to talk about different things tonight. So let me… open something here.
19:06:32 One second.
19:06:35 And I'm going to… share my screen.
19:06:40 Because that's always a nice thing to do. If I can remember how.
19:07:14 Zoom says that it needs to quit in order to share my screen.
19:07:19 Screen. So this is going to be awkward.
19:07:24 Let's try it. Can you see my screen?
19:07:32 Yes, we can.
19:07:34 Yes.
19:07:38 Okay.
19:07:41 Yes.
19:07:41 That your NASA space capsule there.
19:07:44 Okay. When it says that it might not be recording it until I quit. But anyway, I don't want to quit so We're just going to plunge along here.
19:07:55 What we're going to talk about today is… on the wrong screen.
19:08:02 We're going to talk about we had kind of a vote on this. We're going to talk about
19:08:12 Find my Preview.
19:08:18 Emoji and symbol viewer. And there was one other thing that I don't remember what oh possibly weather anyway We're going to start off with emoji and symbol viewer. Emoji and Symbol Viewer I will first show you how to get to it.
19:08:38 If you go into settings Under settings, there's this thing that says press the universals key, which is what this thing is. Let me blow this up a bit.
19:08:53 Press the universal key if you have a keyboard that's got a universal key.
19:08:57 To show emojis and symbols. So if you press that key, it'll pop up the emoji and symbol viewer.
19:09:05 But another way to get to it, which is actually what I prefer.
19:09:09 Is that if you go into your settings, there's this little button that says all input sources. If you press that, it pops up a new screen.
19:09:20 That allows you to add the screens to your menu bar.
19:09:26 Show input menu and menu bar. And so that's what I'm going to show you how to do that.
19:09:34 Go to settings. Type in keyboard because it's easier than trying to figure out where it is.
19:09:42 And here's the thing that says that you double press that key to show a noble.
19:09:48 Symbols, but if you come over here to where is it?
19:09:55 Layouts? Yes. It says show input menu and menu bar.
19:10:00 And so I have up here. In my menu bar.
19:10:06 The emoji and symbol viewers. So I can show emojis or I can show the keyboard.
19:10:12 Viewer. We're going to show emojis first. Because it's kind of cool. Right now, the last thing I was looking at obviously was pictographs this screen is resizable. So it comes up this size, but if you want to make it bigger
19:10:28 You can just drag it out and make it bigger. And these are things that are frequently used. These are various emoji. These are arrows. These are bullets.
19:10:38 Currency signals latin characters with little umlauts and diphthongs and whatnot letter-like symbols, math symbols.
19:10:48 Parentheses, pictographs and punctuation. Now, let me show you something about these things. Let's go to teach text, not teach text, what's it called now? It's called text edit We're going to make a new document.
19:11:09 Is called teach text and then they called it simple text and now it's text edit We're going to open up a new document in TextEdit.
19:11:17 Going to go to show mobigies and symbols, and we're going to go to pictographs and we're going to take this little chess pond, and I'm going to double click on it And it puts a chest pound on the screen. You can't see it because it's really small.
19:11:35 So I'm going to say show fonts And I'm going to go here and I'm going to say make it 288 pixels and we have a pawn.
19:11:43 And double click this and we're going to have a king And we're going to have a rook and we're going to have a knight Actually, that was a queen. Let's add a king just for the heck of it.
19:11:56 These, even though they look like pictures, are actually letters. They are formally defined and formally an extended character set.
19:12:07 So they are letters and it means that among other things, when you write these into documents, they will even work in a text editor like this.
19:12:17 Texted is really designed for for just text. It's not designed for text images at all.
19:12:24 Even though TextEdit can do that sort of thing too. But it means that if you go to You can put these into email to people and you can play chess with them.
19:12:33 Via email, just stick it in your message. Because they're not really pictures and they don't take up as much space as pictures.
19:12:42 Pictures, even small pictures can be fairly large. So that's these letter-like symbols and all these sort of things. All of these things down here are actually letters.
19:12:55 And they're also in different languages. You can set your keyboard preferences to Chinese and Japanese and hindi and lots of other languages and there are a whole other character sets that are internationally defined. And when you send them, they don't go as pictures. They go as
19:13:15 Characters. They're just in different languages. So the keyboard viewer is really, really, really handy if you want to do things to spice up something you're doing You want to send things with french with proper accents or you want to play chess by mail.
19:13:31 I have a friend In Japan, it was very fond of Japanese chess, which is called shogi.
19:13:38 And if I type in Shogi, it brings up the shogi characters and I lost it there.
19:13:47 Because… I don't know why I lost it.
19:13:53 But I did. If I click that, it'll add one of the I need to get this back over here so it knows what I'm talking about. You have to actually have a place where you want the character to go.
19:14:10 Right now, the cursor's over here on the second line. So if I type something now.
19:14:15 Like this Chinese character. It'll put it there. So if you… There are another ways to do it, which I will show you that the other ways are not necessarily as great as you think.
19:14:28 I can do a right click and say copy character info And then I say paste. And what it does is it pastes a bunch of stuff that doesn't make any sense to you.
19:14:38 And so I will shrink this down so we can talk about it.
19:14:44 These characters are defined in something called Unicode and Unicode basically is the international definition of how that is stored. It's stored as a number.
19:14:57 And it uses two bytes to store these Unicode characters. And so the character code for this is 68CB.
19:15:07 Which doesn't mean a thing to human beings, but it means something to computers.
19:15:12 And so it stores this as just some numbers that are very compact. You can store them in a computer, sends it off. And on the other side, it says, oh, you want that character.
19:15:22 And it takes it off of your machine where it has the the character drawing and it displays it on your screen And that's how all these things are sent. So you can send all of this stuff in relatively few characters.
19:15:35 If you sent this as a, well, I think the easiest way is I'll just save this.
19:15:40 Save as sample. I'm going to call it sample.
19:15:47 And I'm going to close up some stuff so I can find it.
19:15:51 And if I go away. If I say sample, I say git info.
19:15:58 It says that my tiny little document only uses 86 bytes.
19:16:03 So keep that in mind. It says 86 bytes. I'm going to erase all of this. And now I'm going to show you The other part of this, which is finding emoji.
19:16:14 You went to, say, have a tree And there are several tree emojis. And we're going to pick them all. There's this tree and there's that tree and there's that tree and a house in a tree.
19:16:26 And a different kind of tree and Chinese character for tree So we're going to take these and we're going to show you that They really are trees. We're going to increase the size.
19:16:39 So go back here to format. And increase these up to 288.
19:16:45 You see, there's a Christmas tree, evergreen tree, a palm tree, a house in a tree some kind of tree and the character here.
19:16:56 I'm going to save this and I'm going to call this I'm… I'm going to rename my original one so that I don't override it.
19:17:11 Okay, we're going to call this one. And that may not actually save me.
19:17:18 You might write it right over the top of it. Oh, well. Anyway, we're going to go back and we're going to say get info now.
19:17:26 And it didn't give me a
19:17:34 I do not know. Oh, there it is. And it says that it's now 24 bytes.
19:17:39 Which is not what I was expecting. One of the problems that you run into, these really are pictures.
19:17:46 That their picture is stored on your computer. And you can paste them in and use them as pictures.
19:17:52 The reason why my demonstration didn't go right is I forgot that the Mac is looking it up and it's pulling the pictures off of your computer. But you will notice that The emojis that you have on the Mac or on your iPhone, your iPad.
19:18:05 If you then go into Google and you paste the same things.
19:18:09 So let's bring up Chrome, for example, and see what Chrome does.
19:18:19 And…
19:18:23 If you look at these in Chrome, and you can't actually see it because it's really small.
19:18:27 All of the icons look different. They all are different. That's because Chrome defines them in its picture set.
19:18:37 As different. They look different. So if you go to the StraightMac site, I have i i have little emojis in several places.
19:18:47 If you look at the StraightMax site in Chrome and you look at it with the Safari.
19:18:53 The symbols will look different because the emojis are depending upon Google's set of graphics compared to Mac's set of graphics, but the characters and umlauts and everything are pretty much transparent no matter what machine you're using.
19:19:09 And the emoji viewer and the viewer and the symbol viewer, you really should learn how to use this.
19:19:21 Trying to put an umlaut over a character on a PC is very, very difficult.
19:19:27 Trying to find an arrow in Windows is very, very difficult. But on the Mac, it's really easy.
19:19:34 You say you want an arrow, type in arrow. And they'll go out and find out all kinds of arrows, including these up here showing you basically traffic signs and all kinds of mathematical errors and illustrative arrows.
19:19:50 And you saw what it did for Tree. If you type in the word house.
19:19:54 It'll come up with emojis of house as well as In some cases, we'll come up with some other languages with words that they have for house I think this is… Yes, that's a… I don't know what language that is, but anyway, that's a letter for the word house
19:20:13 And there are different kinds of parentheses and all kinds of things. So the character view is really, really, really handy.
19:20:19 The keyboard viewer is not quite as obvious why this is cool.
19:20:24 But it is. It's essentially reproducing the keyboard that I have.
19:20:31 Below me and I accidentally pressed the universal key twice, which is why I brought that Pick your graph up but If I press the uppercase the shift key shows you the uppercase characters. These are the lowercase characters.
19:20:46 This is the escape key. This will brighten and darken my screen.
19:20:49 And if you don't believe me. You should see it getting a lot brighter and darker.
19:20:56 If I press this, it'll tile windows. I don't have that many windows, but it'll tile them back and forth and turn the microphone on and off and all kinds of stuff. Some of these things won't work unless I have a movie plane or something.
19:21:09 But all that looks fairly cool. If you hold down the option key.
19:21:14 You'll see that you can do other things like, for example, option W is this sigma sign.
19:21:21 And option E is this accent sign. So if I wanted to have an accented key, I can press Option E and then press E.
19:21:30 And it'll give me an accented E. I need to bring up Text edit again.
19:21:41 Text edit, new. And let's increase the size of things.
19:21:56 Where's the font's character? Oh, they ran off the side of the screen.
19:22:02 Move this up to 90 seconds. So I press.
19:22:07 Option EE, and it gives me an accident E. If I press option.
19:22:13 You, you. I didn't work.
19:22:21 Because I'm hitting the wrong key. Gives me an umlaut at you.
19:22:26 It's a way to… write French and German and so on and so forth the way that the French and the Germans write without actually having to know anything at all about a special keyboard. And there are special things built in here like option k
19:22:44 Shows a degree. Option O shows that
19:22:51 Option 8 shows a different kind of degree Shift option 8 shows a degree sign.
19:22:59 What is it? That's what I wanted. Shift option k shift gives you the apple symbol.
19:23:04 This shift option A is not universal. If you stick this into an email message and it shows up on a Windows machine. I have no idea what it's going to display, but it won't show the It won't show the Apple registered
19:23:17 Symbol but if you want to get an Apple symbol, that's a way to do that. That's shift option K.
19:23:23 And you can look at the screen and it'll show you what happens when you press the various characters.
19:23:28 That's the regular keyboard. That's the option keyboard. That's the shift and option keyboard.
19:23:34 And just all kinds of neat things. I'm trying to remember how to get the sign for the… Oh, I remember what it was called.
19:23:48 You might have noticed that the little clover leaf symbol that for the command key, it's nowhere to be found.
19:23:57 Well, you can, using the emoji finder, you say feature
19:24:06 And… Or is it interest?
19:24:13 Interest, that's it. This little symbol that Apple adopted is from Norwegian mac makers when they wanted a point of interest on their maps, they used this symbol.
19:24:27 And the original type designer for Apple Susan. I don't remember her last name right this second.
19:24:34 She thought that was really cool. So she adopted it for the command key.
19:24:40 On the keyboard. And a lot of people since then have wondered, how do you actually come up with that command key? Because they can't find it.
19:24:47 Well, if you type in the word interest into the character viewer it'll show you that little symbol and then if you position your cursor where you want it and double press that it'll pop up on the screen.
19:25:03 So that's how the keyboard and emoji viewers work.
19:25:10 And I'm going to stop that for a second and ask anybody if you have any questions.
19:25:17 You don't? Pretty much all the national flags are in, you can find them in the emoji viewer If you wanted to have a national flag, it doesn't have state flags.
19:25:31 Which is a pity because the Maryland flag is quite pretty, even if the Washington state flag is a little bit boring.
19:25:38 I was born in Washington, so I can say the Washington state flag is boring if I want to.
19:25:44 Any questions? The next thing I want to talk about is find my And find my is a little bit difficult to find my little bit difficult demonstrate and demonstrate on a… something that we're recording because that's something that we're recording
19:26:05 Find my, among other things, could reveal information I don't want to reveal. So instead of showing you a live demonstration I'm going to show you screenshots.
19:26:15 I'll find my… This is Find My on a phone and we're going to start the other directions.
19:26:24 I'm going to start with this one. Find mine can do all kinds of different things. So you can have an air tag and stick it on your bicycle. You can stick it on your dog or whatever you want to have it
19:26:35 Airtag on. It'll show you yes
19:26:38 Lawrence? I'm sorry for interrupting. I just saw somebody did have a question. It's on the side. It says, is there any way to get musical notation such as piano or guitar chords?
19:26:50 Charts.
19:26:52 There is some musical notation, but it's extremely limited And I don't know enough about guitar. I don't read music so I just know that I have stuck little musical symbols. There's a symbol for a triplet and there's a symbol for quarter note and a couple other things, but it's really limited. You can't
19:27:12 You can't use it for creating music. There's specialized software for that.
19:27:17 If you're interested in that sort of thing, the most popular program is something called finale Where you can actually write sheet music on your machine.
19:27:26 I don't know enough about guitar notation to know if it has anything or not.
19:27:31 Because I wouldn't know what I'm looking for. I know it's called you know frets but frets the kind of Freddie Naidu is quite different.
19:27:43 Anyway.
19:27:46 Thank you.
19:27:49 Things that you can do with it. You can find your bicycle if it's got an air tag on it.
19:27:54 You can find… This says Belkin ear book buds but if you have uh apple AirPods, you can now track these as something that'll track.
19:28:09 You can track your phone. All of these things, though, you have to register with Find My. So if you get a new laptop or you Yes?
19:28:16 Sorry, here I am again. Somebody would like to know first what is an AirTag?
19:28:21 Oh, what is an air tag? That's a good question.
19:28:30 I don't happen to have. And AirTag is a small little disk You can buy them in sets of four for a hundred bucks. Amazon sometimes has on sale for 70 bucks for a set of four.
19:28:43 You can also buy them individually and i guess they're 25 bucks. I don't know what they are, but it's a small little thing. It's got a user replaceable battery when the battery dies.
19:28:54 You just unscrew it and put a new battery and It works. You hold the AirTag near your phone to register it and say what you're attaching it to.
19:29:04 And I have my camera bags have air tags When I go traveling overseas, my luggage has an air tag. Things that I might leave some place. I put an air tag in it.
19:29:19 As an example, when I'm traveling with my camera. In my car to go take pictures out at the Dungeness Restoration Center or something like that.
19:29:28 And then I go to Costco. When I get inside of Costco, my phone will beep and it'll say that that I've left my camera behind.
19:29:37 Okay, that's nice to know. Except that I really don't need to know at that point. But at other places, it's nice to know that you left your camera behind, but it'll just tell you where that air tag is located. And you can name them so you can say that
19:29:52 You know, this air tag, call it camera one or whatever you want to call it or, you know.
19:29:58 If you've got a dog named Bowser, call it Bowser. Whatever it is that you're tagging, you give it a name and you register it with your phone just by bringing it near the phone.
19:30:09 It says, oh, you've got an ear tag. What do you want it to do and where is it located and what's it going to be doing?
19:30:15 And the batteries last roughly a year. And there have been lots of stories in the newspapers about people finding their luggage in airports and And people finding their car after it had been stolen because it had an air tag on something inside of it.
19:30:30 They're really very quite useful. That's for AirTags, but they will also, you can use Find My to tell your computer to tell where it is.
19:30:41 Why would you do this for your desktop computer? Because it's going to be on your desk. Well, if somebody steals it.
19:30:48 Once somebody connects it to the internet, it'll tell people, hey, I'm located here.
19:30:52 And you'll be able to actually see where it's located. It's good for things like laptops as well as desktops and whatnot.
19:30:59 And you should also turn on Find My for your phone.
19:31:03 That way, if you lose your phone, you leave it someplace, you can find it.
19:31:08 As an example, my dear spouse had her phone in a shopping bag.
19:31:15 And along with some other things because she was doing a bunch of things and she just didn't have any pockets.
19:31:20 So she slid off the phone in the shopping bag. A woman came into church, saw the shopping bag, thought it was hers, took it home.
19:31:26 Kathleen said, I don't have my phone. I don't know where it is.
19:31:30 And we used the find my to go to this woman's house and ask.
19:31:34 Did you by any chance take a blue shopping bag from church? And she says, oh, yeah. But it was mine. I said, could you bring it to us?
19:31:41 She brought it to us and said, this doesn't look like my stuff at all. No, it wasn't.
19:31:45 Hers, it was Kathleen's. It was also useful to me for finding out where Kathleen was.
19:31:54 If I wanted to call her, but I was afraid she was in a meeting or something, I could look on Find My and see that, oh, she's here or she's there.
19:32:01 Yes, it's okay to call or no, I shouldn't call. My daughter lives in England. I have Find My Set on her phone.
19:32:09 And by the way, my daughter has to choose to share that information with me and I have to choose to share my information with It doesn't happen automatically.
19:32:18 It's under your control. But if my daughter's home, I know that I can probably call her.
19:32:24 Because she's not at work as long as it's the time zone difference.
19:32:29 If it's 8 in the evening, I can call her. Obviously, if it's three in the morning, that's probably not a good idea.
19:32:35 But it's a good way just finding out whether or not you can interrupt your loved ones.
19:32:42 When Kathleen got very sick in 2023.
19:32:47 I was at the hospital having a ultrasound. And I wanted to, before I came back to Squam, I wanted to know If I should get something in Port Angeles.
19:33:01 And I was going to call her, but first I looked to see where she was.
19:33:05 And according to Feinmai, she was in the hospital. Well, she'd driven herself into the hospital because she was bleeding And she spent two weeks in the hospital.
19:33:16 And then… things went downhill and then went downhill She died in January.
19:33:22 It's a way of keeping track of people and things and objects And it's built into your iPhone. It's built into your Mac, but it's an application that is on your
19:33:40 It's on your Mac, it's on your iPad, it's on your iPhone.
19:33:44 And AirTags come with it and the newest AirPods have the capability built into the case
19:33:52 I've been digging around and I found one of my air tags if uh That's what it looks like.
19:33:59 Yeah, it's about the size of quarter. They're not terribly large.
19:34:06 And as you go around looking around them with your phone, it'll even point you in the right direction.
19:34:12 You can set it so it'll show you the distance and feet rather than meters.
19:34:19 But it's um It's a useful thing. And if you have to be some distance away, it'll bring up a map showing you where it is and how to get there.
19:34:28 And give you directions. You can press that little button. It'll draw a map.
19:34:32 On how to find your your device, but you don't need an air tag for your phone or your computer because the capabilities built into them.
19:34:45 If they connect to the internet, it'll be active. The regular air tags they don't have to be, you don't have to do anything you just have to registering them with your machine and They work until the battery dies.
19:35:00 You might wonder, well, how do people find them? On an air tag because the range that it uses, it's using something called Bluetooth. The range is actually fairly limited.
19:35:10 And so if somebody is living out on a farmhouse. How will it find it if it's on that farmhouse and it's surrounded by farm fields?
19:35:18 The way that the location services work is really very ingenious.
19:35:26 Apple uses other Apple devices to kind of relay the signal.
19:35:32 So it's basically creating this huge invisible map of air tags.
19:35:37 And only your AirTags are presented to you, but it uses all other Apple devices within range to help you find it. So you don't The person, they don't have to have a Mac or anything. They don't have to be connected to the internet. You still might be able to find it.
19:35:52 It's very clever technology. Apple has a whole bunch of security built into it to make sure that it's under your control. You don't share your location with anyone else unless you want to.
19:36:09 Um and the only um The only thing that I would caution people about is… Personal relationships. If you were in a personal relationship with somebody and then you decide you want to end that personal relationship.
19:36:25 You should go and deregister. That person from sharing your location.
19:36:31 Because there have been some incidents where boyfriends or girlfriends would stalk each other After breaking a relationship but Aside from that, it's a really robust and robust and useful technology that people should people should be using.
19:36:54 Any questions on that?
19:37:00 No questions. The next one that I want to talk about is preview.
19:37:09 And preview is… a utility, if you do something like you have a picture on your screen and you want to look at it and you click on it When it opens, what is opening it is preview. Preview is a utility on your Mac. That's what it does
19:37:27 It was originally designed for previewing. Photos. So if you have a photo, just click on it and it'll open it up.
19:37:34 It has some other interesting features, though, that a lot of people don't know about. This is a TIFF image. And unfortunately, I need to change my background because nobody can see anything because the backgrounds So cluttered.
19:37:51 Desktop. That's not what I want. I want wallpaper.
19:37:59 Let's pick that. Okay.
19:38:04 If you find something that you don't know if it'll open or not, if you right click on it, say open with, and it'll list everything that you've got on your machine that can open this thing.
19:38:14 And if preview is one of the options. And… I don't see. Oh, it's right up here at the top. If preview is one of usually the safest things you can use to open something Because it's not judgmental.
19:38:30 A lot of things when you open up Photoshop, it asks, you know, are you registered and How did you vote in the last election? So on and so forth. But preview doesn't care. It'll just open it.
19:38:41 So I tell it to open this This looks like an odd little document.
19:38:46 This is the rental agreement for the house that we had in Taiwan in 1957.
19:38:53 It's written in Chinese and no, I can't read it except for this part down here that's got my father's name.
19:38:59 In English. But this is the rental agreement. And… Well, there's something about it that you should know.
19:39:10 I scan this on a scanner. And this document is 392 megabytes in size.
19:39:21 In other words, it's so large that it would take three of these little USB drives in order to hold it.
19:39:28 And then, of course, it wouldn't work because it'd be scattered across three USB drives.
19:39:33 However, with using preview. I could save it in different formats and I could save it as a PNG, which is a different visual format. And in PNG, it's still pretty huge. It's 211.3 megabytes Or I could save it in PDF.
19:39:54 And it would be… 252.6 megabytes. Still pretty big.
19:40:01 Or I could save it as a JPEG. And as a jpeg.
19:40:06 It's 26 megabytes. So think about this. Is originally almost 400 megabytes and now it's 26 megabytes I could save it in.
19:40:18 Apple's high efficiency image format And it's 13 megabytes. It's the same file.
19:40:24 And if I open them up. This is the original.
19:40:34 And this is Apple's high efficiency one that's just a fraction of the size.
19:40:39 They look the same. If you look at the size of the the dimensions of the document The original is the original 9,784 pixels by 13,000 360 pixels and so is the Apple high efficiency Document.
19:41:02 They're both the same dimensions and they look the same. So how do you perform this magic?
19:41:10 Well, you perform this magic by using preview. And here's an example of something.
19:41:19 This is… some punts on the punts on the Thames River in Oxford.
19:41:28 The students like to wander around pushing these. You run a punt by using a long pole and you push yourself along.
19:41:35 This is what the original photo look like?
19:41:39 And this is what I created. This is a mosaic. And to show you kind of the magic, I'm going to increase the size of this.
19:41:47 As I blow it up, you will that this one image is actually made up of 5,000 images that I took throughout England.
19:41:58 As you wander around through the wander around photograph, you'll see that it's made up of thousands upon thousands of photos.
19:42:07 And it makes a mosaic. Depends and it kind of looks Very art.
19:42:15 Impressionistic. But anyway, it's huge it is how big is it?
19:42:24 I've covered it up, so I don't know.
19:42:31 It is… 134 megabytes in size.
19:42:37 So I have this 134 megabyte file and somebody wants to get a copy of it. How do they get it?
19:42:43 I go to file, I say export And it pops up with this, you know, where I went to have it located. And that's nice to know.
19:42:51 But here's the important part down here. I can save it as a high efficiency file. I can save it as a JPEG, a JPEG 2000, Don't ever say things that way. Open EXR. Don't ever save things that way.
19:43:03 I can save it as a PDF, a PNG, or a TIFF.
19:43:06 Well, it's a TIF already. We know the TIFF's too large.
19:43:09 So let's save it as high efficiency file. And I just leave the settings alone, I'm not going to change anything. And I say save And it saves it.
19:43:25 And now I open up this one and it went from 134 megabytes to If I press the right button.
19:43:36 2.12 at 12.8 megabytes so it's just a tiny fraction of the original file.
19:43:45 And I did that with preview. Some things to note, though, is that you can get a little bit different. This original JPEG that I saved over here. This is the original file that I created the image from.
19:44:00 No, that's too small. Anyway, I don't care. We're going to experiment here.
19:44:06 I'm going to say… export and I'm going to say save it JPEG.
19:44:14 And since I already have something, oh, yeah, no, I can save it. Fine.
19:44:17 I say to save it And I've saved it as a JPEG and it's going to be
19:44:28 It says it's going to be 21 megabytes. So it's not as good a format as the Apple's high efficiency, which is 12 megabytes.
19:44:36 But here's a problem with Apple's high efficiency. Even though it's an open standard, most people in the Windows world can't see it. So if you're going to send somebody something in the Windows world.
19:44:48 You're better off always sending it as a JPEG. But say you happen to know that they don't have much storage on their device and you want to save it so I would just save it for them?
19:45:00 We go up here and we say export And we're going to save it as a JPEG. If you crank this down here to about one-third you'll see that it decreases the size.
19:45:15 Quite a bit. So at the default for this, it's going to be 20 megabytes and down here it's going to be less it's going to be like Oh, 5.1.
19:45:25 So we're going to call this punce And say save.
19:45:32 And I'm going to open up this one and I'm going to open up prints two.
19:45:38 And it's going to be really hard to tell the difference between the two of them.
19:45:47 On most images, you can save about Oh, two thirds of the space simply by cranking it down.
19:45:56 Lower. And that's uh That's nice to know.
19:46:02 Because you can save a lot of space. The other thing that you can do, and I'll use my original punts photo for this.
19:46:10 This photo was 1.6 megabytes in size.
19:46:17 And it's 2000 by 3,000. Most people, when they view things in email, they don't really want something terribly big.
19:46:26 So not only can you… save it as a compressed format, but you can also make it just smaller.
19:46:33 I can adjust the size. The average size of a screen running across on a laptop is about 800 to 900 pixels. So I'm going to type in 900 pixels. I'm going to change the resolution to 72. It said it was at 300.
19:46:51 And that looks much smaller. But if I say view actual size, you'll actually see it as much larger than it really is.
19:46:57 Then I come along here and I say export I go to my JPEG thing and I crank it down here to about a third and say.
19:47:09 We're going to call this Oxford. To save.
19:47:18 This is the original. And this is the one that I just created.
19:47:23 That is much, much smaller. The original was 1.6 megabytes. And this one is… 125k.
19:47:34 So it's less than a tenth the size. But to the person you're sending it to, they look identical.
19:47:41 Just that one's 10 times bigger.
19:47:49 And… Unfortunately, for my next example, I don't actually have no revert changes, I don't care.
19:47:57 I need a picture that's got text on it.
19:48:01 You'll just have to take my word for it. If you're running one of the modern Mac operating systems. The other nice thing that you can do with preview is you can use it for scraping text off of things.
19:48:13 I like to go into when I'm going to parks and such, and it tells me that this is the painted desert and this part of the painted desert is such and such.
19:48:21 I like to take a picture of the sign So I remember what it is that I'm looking at. Well, later on when I'm making captions, I don't necessarily want to copy everything off of that sign by retyping it.
19:48:34 The Merck now has tech recognition built into preview if you're using one of the more recent operating systems.
19:48:41 You just run your cursor across the text on the picture, it'll turn it into text that you can then paste into something as a caption. And you don't have to due to any particular, you don't have to re-tape anything
19:48:56 If there are typos in the original, you'll have just the same typos.
19:49:00 It's really quite magical. There's a… If you've been to the Squim post office, if you go, as you're going through the front door, if you go over to the extreme left There's a driveway there. The gates are always shut and it's got a whole bunch of collections of signs that are just not very friendly.
19:49:19 U.s. Government property, keep out, no admittance. Just a whole collection. I think it's quite hilarious because it's also quite redundant.
19:49:29 You can go take a picture of the fence there, of the gate.
19:49:33 And then just scrape the text off of it and just you have a nice collection of ominous sounding signs and you can make your own.
19:49:42 You know, you don't have to do anything necessarily useful with this technology, but sometimes it can be fun.
19:49:48 Any questions on preview?
19:49:54 Unfortunately, the iPad doesn't have anything like preview, which is a shame.
19:49:58 I wish it did. I've tried to do some of this stuff on… the iPad and on the iPad, sometimes you have to work harder.
19:50:09 Um… I said that if I had time, I was also going to cover something else, but I don't remember what I said I was going to do.
19:50:18 So what did I say I was going to do?
19:50:24 Oh, font book screenshot and weather. I was going to talk about weather.
19:50:32 Since Noah has actually been in the news, I'm going to talk about weather.
19:50:36 For a second. And I got to show my screen again.
19:50:41 And bring up weather.
19:50:48 The weather app. You can customize it. It's got this sidebar. Normally, it'll just show you the weather wherever you happen to be.
19:50:56 And it tells you that the Weather now and it shows you into the future. So it's cloudy now. You're going to be able to see the moon around eight o'clock Then it's going to get cloudy again and sunrise is going to be at 716.
19:51:13 And then you can press this little bar and it'll show you into next.
19:51:18 The next day and it's going to rain in the afternoon and all that sort of stuff.
19:51:22 And you can click on this. It'll give you Wednesday's forecast.
19:51:26 And you can go through the day and it'll show you what's going on at the temperature.
19:51:30 And you can change this right now it's showing
19:51:36 Temperature down here is precipitation and precipitation total and all kinds of things that you can look at.
19:51:45 But the sidebar, which you can customize, you can add other places.
19:51:49 So if you go into settings you can say If you want it in Celsius or you can have it in Fahrenheit Or just use whatever your computer's already using.
19:52:00 You have it miles per hour or kilometers, inches or millimeters or whatever it is you want to know.
19:52:07 And you can say whether you want to get alerts for severe weather.
19:52:11 But you can also add where you went to different places I went to weather in swim i went to weather in Seattle, which is not necessarily the same.
19:52:25 I went rather in Salford. This is in England because that's where my daughter lives.
19:52:30 Yokosuka, which is where she was born. And because it's daylight over there, you notice it changed the screen. It's dark here, but it's daylight in Yokosuka. Alexandria, Virginia, my brother lives there.
19:52:43 Silverdale, because I go to Silverdale quite often. And then when I want to feel good about the weather, I also have Antarctica and Prudhoe Bay.
19:52:51 You'll notice that Prudho Bay is minus 11 right now and Antarctica is much colder.
19:52:56 So you can add these things to the sidebar. And… Just… learn a lot. One of the things that people have been, a lot of conspiracy theories asking where does the data come from?
19:53:13 Almost all this data comes from NOAA. But quite often he gets massaged by other places. And if you Go to the About menu in weather and click on weather. It comes up with where all kinds of information about the weather thing and
19:53:28 Severe storms forecasts and air quality and all kinds of stuff tells you that.
19:53:33 But if you click this one, the data button, it shows you the same thing.
19:53:38 It's not what I wanted for. The map data. These are all the different places that it gets map data for.
19:53:46 It's a huge, huge, huge, huge list. Because it's not getting not only from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it's also getting it from British Met and Environment Canada whoever happens to be the local weather outlet.
19:54:04 So weather is really quite cool. Weathers originally appeared on the iPhone and then they added it to the iPad and it's a recent addition to the Mac.
19:54:14 And with the new operating system, you can actually customize your desktop I have a second screen over here that the weather's on there all the time.
19:54:25 So I can just click on it to get weather. Any questions on that?
19:54:35 And I've got just a couple more minutes.
19:54:39 So I want to talk about a question that I get a lot.
19:54:44 Which is how to take a screenshot. And for that i should Go.
19:54:55 Find some documents someplace.
19:55:00 Okay. Actually, that's a good idea. I'm going to bring up messages.
19:55:06 Because there's a piece of spam. Yes.
19:55:07 Lawrence, here's a question. It says, where is the monitoring place for the swim weather?
19:55:15 That's a good question. The answer is Squim does not have a… I want to look at people.
19:55:23 Scrum does not have a National Ocean Service weather station. Weather Service Office is located at SeaTac, and it covers a very wide area.
19:55:36 They do have instruments all over the place. They've got them at the UW. They've got them at Mount Baker. They got them at Mount Rainier. They got them all over the place. They don't have one in Squim.
19:55:46 What they do is they build these huge mathematical models.
19:55:53 That model the currents and they derive data between one point and another point.
19:55:59 So if it's this temperature at one monitoring gene station and it's this temperature at another one and it's an this temperature at a third one and the wind is blowing this way they factor that in for deriving that based upon the elevation and so on and so forth, it's probably going to be
19:56:15 This temperature at your place. And you might have noticed that there were actually two different entries for Squim because there's Squim where I'm located.
19:56:23 And there's squirm as in the city of Squim. So it always, when you first set it up, it's going to say where I'm located and it's going to give you a a reading for that. And then if you add Squim as a town it's going to add it for the city of Squim.
19:56:38 And the city of Swim is always going to have different weather than I am. Why? Because I'm a mile from the straight and the squam is about three or four miles or something like that.
19:56:49 If you live up on Bell Hill, Bell Hill is 600 to 700 feet high in some places.
19:56:53 It's going to have different weather and it knows that and it's built into the weather model.
19:56:58 And the weather model derives it for the missing pieces. The US Weather Service has the United States divided up into 140,000 regions.
19:57:09 And they give a forecast for every region every 15 minutes 24 hours a day.
19:57:16 Every day of the year. That's an awful lot of forecasts.
19:57:20 The Weather Service doesn't have that many people. It's only got 5,000 people.
19:57:23 So how does it do that? Well, a lot of those weather forecasts for the indeterminate parts are done by model.
19:57:31 And then they go through and they verify how accurate the model was. So if there's a discrepancy.
19:57:38 It was down a degree or up a degree or it had more rain or whatever. They factored that into them.
19:57:43 Model, it's automatically collected and the forecasters get a scorecard on how close they were.
19:57:51 It's It's rather complicated.
19:57:55 For SWIM, they don't have a weather station here and it's mathematically derived.
19:58:00 But it's the the math medical model is quite, quite good. The accuracy in the 1960s was they had about a 60% accuracy rate And the accuracy rate today is over 95%.
19:58:17 It may not be exactly the right temperature. You might get more rain than they expected. But if they say there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow and there's no rain at all.
19:58:27 That would be a major heads would roll. That would be unusual.
19:58:34 But they don't have a station here in Squim simply because There are 330 million Americans and 5,000 people can't give little micro forecast for everything.
19:58:48 There are micro forecasts for special events, the Super Bowl presidential inauguration.
19:58:53 For major events, the Weather Service will have a special forecast just for a special smaller region.
19:59:02 But normally it's just one of their 140,000, 120,000. Regions. And you have to remember that those regions can cover things like mountaintops and open ocean and large portions of Alaska that are nothing there but caribou so when i say
19:59:19 120,000 regions. Keep in mind that those are fairly large.
19:59:23 And the average weather reporting function in the United States. It's not by zip code. It's not by population center. It's mostly by counties.
19:59:34 So the forecast will be for the county of clallum. It'll be for the county of Howard County, where we were in maryland You could put about 60 of them inside of Clallam County.
19:59:46 Clallam County is actually really huge. There are states smaller than Powhatton County.
19:59:55 In San Bernardino County. Is the largest county in the United States and it's just massive And it goes from the Pacific ocean to Nevada. So it's got a staggering range of of climate variability.
20:00:13 San Bernardino has about six or eight forecasts. Kong gets one.
20:00:20 But then it derives it for smaller places in between. So when you go to the National Weather Service.
20:00:27 Website and you type in clallum county and you say it probably knows that you're in swim, but if it doesn't say you're in swim, you'll notice that it'll draw an area around there and the forecast is for the stuff in that area and that's done mathematically.
20:00:43 It knows what's above you, what's below you, which way the wind's blowing, what the temperature is, what the humidity is. And from that, it comes up with that.
20:00:50 Forecast. Was that a too complicated answer to… what might have been a simple question.
20:00:55 Good.
20:00:59 That's good. Thank you.
20:01:02 Other questions? I know way too much about the weather.
20:01:09 I work for National Ocean Service, which doesn't do weather forecasts.
20:01:13 But about 60% of the mathematical model for the world comes from ocean data so had a lot to do with it, even if it really wasn't really my job.
20:01:26 Bye-bye.
20:01:27 I was going to say there's a lot of interest in the ambient leather network that is local people who have their own little weather stations And if you go to that, it's an app.
20:01:52 Yes.
20:01:42 On the phone, you can see what other people's temperatures are in your most immediate region. And it's amazing how many people are signed for that and are doing some reporting. I don't believe that it's it's very powerful in terms of
20:01:58 But in terms of the temperature at the moment or what's happening at the moment.
20:02:04 It seems to be fairly accurate.
20:02:09 Something about the… the crowdsourced weather you should know.
20:02:15 Is that that's It's only as good as its data. And I'll give you an example. The Weather Channel or I don't remember who it was.
20:02:24 They used to sell these kits called Weather Bug. And they sold them to schools and the the weather bug reporting network would they would collect this information and they would distribute it so if you wanted to know what the weather was in your area, it would find the locus
20:02:40 Closest place that had a weather bug. And when my daughter was in elementary school and she's now in her late 30s, so this was a while ago She wanted to know what the weather was right outside.
20:02:54 And I said, well, I don't know. We'll look at what weather bugs said and so typed in to weather bug and it found my local station and it said the outside temperature was 192 degrees.
20:03:07 Which now the East Coast does get really hot and even with humidity, it might felt like it's 192, but that did seem a little high.
20:03:14 And so I just thought it was some screw up. But then the next day in the Washington Post.
20:03:20 I was reading this article about this fire at an elementary school. Somebody had set fire to the weather bug the rack.
20:03:29 It was outside of the science room and somebody had set fire to it. So it was an accurate temperature because at that particular point.
20:03:36 Before it melted down and completely stopped functioning, it did reach 192 and then it just froze forever because that was the last anyone ever heard of it.
20:03:45 And that's one of the problems with a lot of the crowdsourced weather.
20:03:51 There was a… Another example where a university said that that they had their own little independent. A lot of the weathering stations are automatic, even with the weather service Weather Service has this thing called AWIPS, which stands for Automated Weather Forecasting Information
20:04:12 Processing system. I don't remember what it stands for. Something like that. And an AWIP station is they take an acre and they fence it off and it's got this little robot in the dead center that's not near anybody, not near any trees. And it collects rainfall and
20:04:27 Do and temperature and so on and so forth. Well, this university, they decided they were going to do it cheaper than the Weather Service. Instead of having an acre, they just stuck it in this courtyard.
20:04:38 And they had it set up there. And during the night, it said that they'd had four and a half feet of rain.
20:04:45 Which seemed excessive because it had rained a lot, but not four and a half feet.
20:04:49 During the night, one of the gutters came off of one of the buildings landed on top of this and it was pouring all the water off of the roof onto the top of their weather monitoring station. So they ended up with four and a half feet of water.
20:05:04 The Weather Service checks their data for things like that, but the crowdsource places They don't have that.
20:05:13 The means to do that. I'm not bad-mouthing the crowdsourced data because it is useful, but That's not what the Weather Service uses for their forecasts.
20:05:26 And for their reporting. One more C story about this.
20:05:33 The… Down at the bottom when you're watching the weather, they used to have these things called a crayon. A cron is that running text that runs across the bottom.
20:05:44 And the… TV stations bought this technology from this company that would read the weather service stuff off of the Weather Service website and they translated and then process it as crions for local weather stations.
20:05:59 Local weather station would have this weather stuff that was scrolling across the bottom and nobody at the station actually had to do anything.
20:06:06 The Weather Service changed the formatting of their website and people were on their TV stations We're broadcasting things that like say tomorrow it's going to be minus 17 And Oklahoma in the summertime, which it wasn't And that's because the Weather Service had changed their site
20:06:26 Format and the cryon reader didn't realize that it was just sending garbage data out.
20:06:33 It was inventing towns and all kinds of strange things and strange things and the weather stations yelled at the weather service. It had nothing to do with that. It had to do with this box that the TV stations bot that was trying to read the website and turn it into data.
20:06:50 And that's not a good practice. But I do remember all kinds of interesting discussions of that.
20:07:01 Any other questions?
20:07:08 Why don't you think about what you want to do for April and send me an email.
20:07:15 There's still other utilities that we could talk about for example talking about there was suggested font book and taking screenshots and Things like that. Screenshots are definitely something that a lot of people want to know about.
20:07:32 And font book, it's definitely nice to know how that works and why you why you should care. But if you have other suggestions please send them.
20:07:42 Lawrence, I have a quick question. I had a phone call.
20:07:45 Yes.
20:07:47 And so I'm not sure if I missed it or not, but when you were showing the different sizes of files that could be open with or that was like a JPEG or with a PDF or what have you. So when you scan that document originally through the scanner.
20:08:04 Did you tell it what kind of a file you wanted it to be to save to the desktop or how did you make the different
20:08:15 I originally scanned it as a TIFF image because the scanner that I had, that's the only way that it saved things.
20:08:23 And it was a fragile piece of rice paper. And so I wasn't going to take it anywhere else. I was going to use this scanner that I had. And when it scanned it, it scanned as a TIFF image and a tiff image
20:08:35 Is an uncompressed video image and I could explain what that means, but not right now.
20:08:41 But anyway, that was the only choice I had. My original document was the TIF image, and that's because that's the only thing the scanner supported at that point. More modern scanners have They can scan things in a variety of different formats.
20:08:57 If I was scanning that today on my printer, it would have been a considerably smaller document, but this was, I don't know, 10 years ago.
20:09:09 And TIFF was the original format for scanning things.
20:09:16 I don't know if that answered the question.
20:09:19 Well, I'm just not sure how you got it as a PDF or as a JPEG or as a PG.
20:09:30 Oh, I see. Oh, okay.
20:09:26 Png. I use preview and I exported it. I loaded up the TIFF image and then I exported it as one thing, then another thing, then another thing.
20:09:37 It's the missing link. Okay, it was all through preview.
20:09:36 So I can show you the difference.
20:09:41 It's all through preview. Preview is really, really, really clever and well worth understanding.
20:09:42 Got it.
20:09:49 Okay, sounds good. Well. Then we will send you in our Questions, sure.
20:09:55 Suggestions.
20:09:58 I have a question that might be quick, might not. If it's quick, maybe you could answer it. If it isn't, then maybe not.
20:10:06 But I'm wondering about file association. On Windows, that's an easy thing to do.
20:10:13 On Mac, it doesn't seem so easy to do. I mean, you can say open width and then it'll go up and it'll open that particular file. There even is a checkbox that you can say always open with.
20:10:27 But it appears to be only that one document and it doesn't do that with all the same file extenders.
20:10:37 Actually, that's how I set up preview to open up TIFF.
20:10:37 I like it.
20:10:42 Because the Mac If you install Photoshop in your machine.
20:10:49 Photoshop will assume that it wants to open up every TIFF image.
20:10:58 Right.
20:10:52 And I did not want to open up Photoshop, which takes forever to load Every time I clicked on a TIFF image. So I went through and I did a get info on a TIFF image and I said, set as default to preview.
20:11:06 And that's how it opens now. If I click on a TIFF image, it's going to open in preview.
20:11:11 That's how you set it and it should work. I will tell you, though.
20:11:17 A lot of people on the mac at our last meeting, someone said that they changed an HEIC file to a JPEG just by going and changing the extension.
20:11:30 That's not what changes the format. And I have seen people who've done that and they think they were setting it to a default to open a particular file.
20:11:39 But no, they were setting it to a file that had been mangled in some way. And in that case it won't it won't do that trick. But as far as I know.
20:11:49 Setting it to be the default application should say from that point on, if you click on it.
20:11:55 It'll open with that application. Ancient work.
20:11:59 Very good. I'll give that a go.
20:12:02 Yeah. Any other quick questions?
20:12:08 If not, then good night.
20:12:11 Good night. Thank you.
20:12:11 Thank you very much.