shows several other mailing lists, covering everything from accessibility features, how to write programs in AppleScript, how to configure Macs and Apple devices for use in the federal government, and other even more obscure topics.
But what if I want to know more?
If you want to get very geeky, you can apply for a free Developer account,
which gives you access to Apple programming tools, where you can build applications, write scripts, and do odd things, some even useful.
If you are curious about programming, but aren’t sure if it is for you, know that most Apple software is written in a programming language called Swift. It has nothing to do with a famous singer. You can play with Swift using Swift Playgrounds, available for iPad and for Mac. You can read about that here:
For October 2023, we delved into topics we’ve hinted at over the past several months: macOS Sonoma (macOS 14), iOS 17, and iPadOS 17. These three new operating systems come with new privacy and security improvements, plus tools to help with greater integration between Apple devices.
Shown below, for example, is a series of widgets that you can add to your macOS desktop. They are literally on the desktop: applications run on top of them, so they don’t interfere with whatever you are doing. These particular widgets show, respectively, the weather at a specific location (clicking on the widget brings up a web page with more information), time zones in various places, a tip on how to do something in macOS, some current headlines, and finally a display of battery status for a mouse and keyboard in use on this Mac.
A selection of widgets added to the screen on macOS Sonoma. If you have multiple screens, each can have its own set of widgets.
Widgets first appeared on the iPhone and iPad, and have been expanded on both: you can now add widgets to every desktop, not just the opening one.
Security improvements to the Mac, iPhone, and iPad have also been expanded. Most of these require a security chip, which limits these operating systems to more recent devices.
Video recording of the October 17, 2023 meeting
Transcript of the meeting
Pro tip: use your browser to search for particular words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.
18:33:15 Change the language.
18:33:20 You're not fun.
18:33:24 Kathleen didn't want me to choose Chinese or Arabic or Hebrew.
18:33:28 Yeah.
18:33:32 She's such a spoils part.
18:33:35 Okay. Tonight we're going to talk about, Sonoma and iOS, 17 and so on and so forth.
18:33:46 But first we're gonna have questions and answers. And, and as always, they can be about anything as long as it's.
18:33:53 Related to Apple hardware software. So any questions?
18:33:58 Hmm.
18:34:02 Well.
18:34:01 Lawrence, I have a request.
18:34:04 Yes.
18:34:09 Yes.
18:34:05 A few weeks ago, we talked about our favorite apps. For the Macintosh. Well, I have a favorite app.
18:34:13 That you might want to mention to others. For the iPhone and iPad, it's called Photocard.
18:34:22 Yes.
18:34:20 Made by Bill Atkinson. In the app store since we're coming up on. Howoween Thanksgiving and Christmas.
18:34:29 It's a really nice app for sending. A card, I mean it looked like a postcard.
18:34:37 Via email to a group of people like groups and the context list so You might want to mention that.
18:34:45 Folks night in our regular meeting.
18:34:47 Hey, yeah.
18:34:48 Is that PH or an F?
18:34:51 PH, OTO, photo, card, 2 words.
18:34:57 Bill Atkinson is the Apple, inventor of Quick Draw. Which was the It's the, it's kind of hard to explain what is, but.
18:35:07 In the original Macintosh when it drew things on the screen, it was using Quick Draw, which was a mathematical language.
18:35:14 For rapidly putting up graphical information and it was revolutionary at the time and it allowed the Mac to have a a bit mapped.
18:35:25 Display at the time that everybody else was using basically at dot matrix characters on a TV tube. It was what set the Mac apart from everybody else and in fact it's what made me buy one of the first Macintoshes.
18:35:43 We were living in Japan. At the time and the chief meteorologist for the US Seventh Fleet.
18:35:50 Picked up one in Hong Kong the day they went on sale. In the United States. He picked up one in Hong Kong at a Hong Kong computer store.
18:35:58 I guess it was technically a day later because never mind. He picked up one, he brought it and his daughter Emily had been using it.
18:36:08 And during the demo, he wanted to do something and it spit out the disk that it had because it only had one floppy disk drive and it asked for to Emily's disc.
18:36:17 And Kathleen and I saw that and we were instantly sold on it because prior to that time if you had a computer that had only one floppy drive and it wanted another one you put it in there it just assumed it was the right disc and if you told it to write over the top of something it would.
18:36:34 But this one. Spit the disc out because it said it wasn't Emily's disc and it refused to do anything until it got Emily's desk and we just thought that was that alone was brilliant plus the bitmap graphics even though they were only black back and white.
18:36:48 So we were extremely impressed with it. And, we bought a, I bought a Macintosh downtown, Tokyo, Nakiabara.
18:37:01 They had one on display. You came into the top floor of this building down. Actually, it wasn't, it was on the gains that wasn't Top floor they had cut off all the lights and they had a pillar in the center with a light coming down on it and I said I want to buy that and they said well that's our display and I said I don't care and I want to buy
18:37:22 it so. I got the first one sold in Japan. But, Bill Atkinson was the one who develop this way of rapidly displaying things on screen.
18:37:38 With great great precision we do not really use it today on mac OS 10 because macro attends based on Unix and a bunch of other things.
18:37:50 And they used a new type of system called quartz. You might, if occasionally see in technical documentations references to courts, but courts uses a bunch of, of vectors to draw things on the screen very rapidly.
18:38:08 And it requires staggering amounts of computer horsepower that they didn't have back in the day.
18:38:12 The original Mac is I recare all had a 4 megahertz. 68,000 processor, which is we now have.
18:38:23 We now have processes that are literally millions of times faster. But, photo card was designed by Bill Atkinson.
18:38:34 Cause he, made a lot of money and he decided he didn't want to be a programmer his entire life so he went into photography he's got a big website talking about photography.
18:38:43 And this photo card is free. You just. You can download it and you take a picture with your, iPhone and you can format it as a postcard and send it off to somebody.
18:38:55 Without leaving your phone it's really quite cool. And you can't beat the price.
18:39:02 There are other ones that do this not as well that cost money. So if you want to do that, you can, but.
18:39:11 I'm quite. Impressed with, photo card.
18:39:16 Anything else? Yes.
18:39:18 I have a quick question. Lauren. And I'll say in about the last month or so.
18:39:24 I've been getting these strange junk mails to my icloud email account. And I generally don't use that account and I rarely get an email on it.
18:39:36 And I just wonder if anyone else has that happening. They have titles, but there's symbols mixed in with the title so it's a dead giveaway they look like really weird So I just right click and I send him to junk, but is there anything else I can do to stop that?
18:39:54 Okay.
18:39:54 I can give you some general things to do with what junk mail is, but let me back up to it for a second.
18:40:01 It's not that your icloud account is hacked. I use my icloud account as my principal account.
18:40:09 I have lots of other accounts. The one for straight Macintosh user group is separate from the rest of them the one for my church is separate and so on so forth but most of them the rest of my stuff goes through my.
18:40:25 Hmm.
18:40:21 Cloud account and the reason is the security is much better. And when I say much better on a factor of one to 10 is about 10 times better than anybody else out there.
18:40:31 Having said that, sometimes you can think that you're, your address was compromised when it really wasn't.
18:40:40 I, had a Yahoo account because once upon a time Yahoo had a a photo sharing site.
18:40:51 I can't remember the name of what it was off offhand, but it was owned by Yahoo.
18:40:54 And so I set up an account with Yahoo so I could post photos and it wanted a backup account and for a backup account, a backup account is if you lose your password, what's your backup account so you can log in?
18:41:07 And I thought, well, I don't want to lose track of my photos. I gave it a backup account, which was my dot Mac account.
18:41:11 Well, Yahoo has been hacked 3 times and the first time they got a billion addresses, email addresses, the second time they got a billion and a half, the last one they got like 2.4 billion.
18:41:24 Addresses. And originally it was thought that they only got the addresses themselves, not the passwords and so on and so forth.
18:41:31 It later turned out that they did get the passwords. But I didn't care because I changed the passwords as soon as I found out it was hacked.
18:41:37 So that they didn't get my password. However, they did get the backup email account.
18:41:44 So even though you wouldn't use your icloud account for anything. At some point you might have used it for a bank or for credit card or for grocery store or something else and if they got hacked then your account is available to hackers to spam you.
18:42:01 Not to break into your machine, but to spam you. Or to trick you into giving up some information about yourself.
18:42:09 The other way that people can get that account is that somebody you know could have a machine that got compromised.
18:42:18 99% of the compromise machines in the world are Windows machines. And most of your friends probably have Windows machines.
18:42:25 So if one of them gets hacked and they at some point exchanged email with you. Now the hackers have your email account.
18:42:33 So that's probably why you're, that's probably why it's getting those email messages.
18:42:38 In terms of dealing with. Spam a couple things that I do is that every now and then I will go through and sort my mail by who is sent from.
18:42:52 And if you sort it by who it sent from, quite often a lot of the hackers will use the same thing over and over and over again.
18:42:59 Right now I'm getting something from Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo in case you had noticed has also been hacked.
18:43:08 Okay.
18:43:06 So I might get like 60 A message is from Wells Fargo. I don't have an account at Wells Fargo.
18:43:13 I just delete them all and I can do it all at once because they're sorted by who sent it.
18:43:17 The other thing to note is as you noted, they have these strange symbols at the top. If you sort your, empty, if you're search your emails addresses alphabetically, at the very start you're going to have things like emoji.
18:43:30 Because of just how the Mac sorts things, how computers sort things. The very start you're going to have things that have emojis at the start of this of the subject line.
18:43:41 And so they'll all be there together and you just kill them off because Most human beings don't start an email with an emoji.
18:43:49 Great.
18:43:50 The reason why hackers started with an emoji is because if you sort things alphabetically, they'll be right at the top when you go to look at your email.
18:43:59 So take advantage of the fact that they think you're sorting your messages by alphabetically, sort them by subject, besotting by the subject line, when all of those appear at the top, just get rid of them.
18:44:09 The other thing that I do is that Most people only get email in English and if you get emails in Japanese or Farsi or something else, they'll most often be clustered either at the very start or at the very end.
18:44:27 So if you get a bunch, if you sort them again by by the subject. Then you'll have a whole bunch of foreign languages at the start and whole bunch of at the end and you can just kill off sometimes hundreds of messages.
18:44:39 At once just by sorting in that way. I also would urge you to All the time go into your your spam mail and your junk mail and just delete it.
18:44:51 A lot of people, they put it in junk mail, but they don't delete it or they don't empty the trash.
18:44:57 This one woman, she had a map, she had an iPhone that had the standard 5 GB I cloud account and she was running out of space and she said I don't have anything in my iPhone on my iPhone.
18:45:08 Yeah, but she never deleted any of her junk mail. She never deleted any of her trash.
18:45:13 I deleted both and she had, there was half, it was half the space on her iPhone was just Messages that she wasn't looking at anymore, but they're still there until you delete them.
18:45:22 Right. Hmm.
18:45:22 So Start your email to get rid of a lot of the spam and then delete your spam and your Trash to free up space.
18:45:34 I haven't.
18:45:33 Okay, I only get like one a day. But they all kind of have a similarity and somewhere in the address it says Pop.
18:45:43 Which seems odd and then it has like these asterisks or hyphens or things between the letters.
18:45:50 Quite often.
18:45:50 But I can get a lot of them. It just seemed strange. I've never gotten ones that look like that before.
18:45:56 Right often, spammers will try to get around things like, for example, right now.
18:46:01 Almost everybody on plan is getting a spam email about your McCaffy account has expired. McCaffy.
18:46:10 Is, antivirus software that most manufacturers, Windows manufacturers, include a ninety-day account when they sell you a new machine.
18:46:20 They say comes with the cafe. They don't tell you that it's only for 90 days and then you have to buy it.
18:46:24 So most PCs come with. McCaffy and they know that most people won't renew it but it'll still come up and flag them.
18:46:45 Okay.
18:46:37 So in order to make it look like it's from a cafe they will send out spam email that says it's from a cafe and we received your order for $468 to renew your Kit McCaffy account which is way more this than it costs.
18:46:49 Hoping that you'll panic and logging on there and tell them something that allows them to charge you real money.
18:46:55 In order to get around the fact that people are now very suspicious of McCaffy, people will go through their mail and they'll sort and they'll say search for everything that has McCaffy and clump them all together so I can get rid of them all at once.
18:47:12 Yeah.
18:47:07 One way around that is to put spaces in the word macaffe. So without MC space, AFF, A, FEE, so that it still says McCaffy, but.
18:47:18 But it'll it'll get rid of that. It'll bypass that screening process and they'll stick in.
18:47:24 Little apostrophes or hyphens or other things to space it out so that they're still sending you the same spam, but they're hoping that it gets past your anti-spam.
18:47:34 Controls. So that's why you see a lot of that. When you see something about pop quite often It could be referring to an older, protocol used in, for email called pop which stands for post office protocol most of the most people today they should be using something called IMAP.
18:47:55 Hmm.
18:47:53 Which is much faster and convenient and so on and so forth. I'm maps the modern way of doing it and pop is the older way of doing it.
18:48:01 Hmm.
18:48:01 And it's possible that. That at some point it was passing through a pop account. Oh, so that might have something to do, why pops there?
18:48:08 Huh. Yeah. Thank you.
18:48:13 I see.
18:48:15 Yeah, I don't know whether you're gonna be able to help me with this or not.
18:48:21 I get the New York Times. I have Safari and I have Gmail. And when I try to send an article from the New York Times to somebody else.
18:48:33 I used to Do it without any problem at all. Now I get this message that says I can't connect.
18:48:40 To the Gmail account and then it has my, and it asks for the password.
18:48:48 So I tried to put in the password that I had and it doesn't like that of course.
18:48:54 So I went into Gmail, changed my password. Still didn't like it. So I thought, well, maybe it's the New York Times problem.
18:49:04 So I went to the New York Times and changed my password there. Doesn't have any effect at all.
18:49:12 So do you have any idea what the problem is?
18:49:16 I've been having problems with, authentication with, Gmail myself and as much as I know my password is correct and so on and so forth but quite often I'll get an error if I try to send through things through.
18:49:30 Gmail. And part of that has to do with that Gmail is not really an email.
18:49:36 System. Gmail is really just a whole bunch of web pages when you when you get your email in in Gmail, it's accepting email, but it's being stored in Google as web pages because Google's all about web.
18:49:52 So all of your email, you can go out, you can go look at your Gmail with a web browser and it's actually more full-featured than if you try to use a web, try to use an email client for it because it's web pages and I think that Gmail recently has has some kind of issue with their authentication.
18:50:12 So your passwords probably just fine, but the handoff between the New York Times and Gmail isn't working right.
18:50:19 And I've had the same problem and. They're just sometimes I just don't do it that way and I do it some other way.
18:50:26 But it's not you. I've had the same problem with New York Times. My daughter has an icloud account and she has a Gmail account and I was sending it to her Gmail.
18:50:38 I was sending things that I wanted her to read to her Gmail account because she shares it with her husband.
18:50:43 It's both of their names at Gmail. But it was stopped working, so I'm just plaguing her with it.
18:50:50 But I don't have a solution. I just have seen the same thing. That's all I can tell you.
18:50:55 Okay, what I've been doing is copying the, routing thing and putting it in an email to send.
18:51:02 So that's how I'm working around it, but you think that eventually they'll solve the problem?
18:51:07 I don't know. I don't know. Gene, Google and Apple and Microsoft.
18:51:15 All working to try to ween us away from passwords entirely and used pass keys. We should probably at some point talk about pass keys because Apple's pushing them really hard.
18:51:30 Microsoft pushing them really hard and Google is pushing them really hard. And where the past key is is just basically a piece of code that you have on your computer.
18:51:41 That identifies that yes, you really are who you say you are. So you don't want to have to type in a password when you go to to type in a password when you go to to a website.
18:51:52 Quite often people steal websites by setting up fake websites that look like what you think is a real site and you type in your real password and at that point they have your real account name and real password to the real site and then they use that for bad nefarious things.
18:52:07 And so Apple and Microsoft and Google are trying to get us to use task keys. But the way in which Microsoft is doing it is different from the way Apple's doing it and it's different the way Gmail is doing it.
18:52:22 It's kind of interesting because Apple was the first one with the idea, but Microsoft and Google didn't want to do it the way that Apple did.
18:52:32 They wanted to do it a slightly different way. And they wanted to do it a slightly different way. And it could be just they're trying to work through the hoops to have a different way.
18:52:41 And it could be just they're trying to work through the hoops to have a unified way of doing this.
18:52:41 But once you once you have a pass key set up for an account, it should be transparent between the 3 of them.
18:52:47 But if you If you just step back a second, you'll realize that your pass key for the New York Times and your pass key for Google, Gmail, and your PASS key for your password and Chrome for the New York Times could be 3 different things.
18:53:07 Hmm.
18:53:08 So it's a little bit complicated.
18:53:12 Okay, thank you.
18:53:14 I have another question about. Email. And the 3 devices I have an iPad, an imac, and an iPhone.
18:53:24 And the mail comes in to all the accounts. But if I delete it, On my imac.
18:53:30 And then remember to do the trash, that's fine, but then those messages are still on the iPhone and still on the Mac.
18:53:39 And you know, that's very laborious on. Especially the iPad to just. You know, you have to move them and put them in.
18:53:51 Yes.
18:53:49 The trash and I don't know what setting I need to change in order to have it be when I delete it if I delete it from my phone it should be gone from the computer and from the iPad, but it's not.
18:54:02 Yeah. The.
18:54:12 The answer is that if you're talking about messages as in Apple messages. The one of the things that you should do is to make sure that you're messages are synced via icloud.
18:54:27 Icloud is where Apple stores, photos, I, where they stored documents where they store passwords, where they store messages, email, everything.
18:54:37 Go through icloud. If you sync your accounts through icloud, then your map knows that the message account that you're using If you delete it from your Mac, it should delete it from the other ones as well.
18:54:52 However, that
18:54:52 Okay, well. Well, yeah, I don't know how to do that, so I'll have to find.
18:54:58 Okay.
18:54:59 You, easiest ways to show you. Share screen.
18:55:09 If we come up here to.
18:55:17 Up at the top of your preferences, system settings. You can actually let me show you this on a I phone, cause I wanna make sure that I got this set up front properly anyway.
18:55:34 Good.
18:55:40 I saw this earlier. There you are.
18:55:45 Okay.
18:55:50 And. If I come up into settings. Up at the top and your iPhone and it also works a mac OS.
18:56:01 If you click up at the top where it's got your picture and your eye account, a cloud account and everything where it says icloud.
18:56:09 It says what do you want to go on there and if you turn on photos, icloud, icloud mail, passwords, all this sort of stuff.
18:56:17 You turn those on, it will sync them. So that what appears on your iPhone is the same as of what appears in your iPad is the same as what appears on your Mac.
18:56:27 And the the good news bad news is you got to be a little bit careful with photos because it can easily overwhelm your account.
18:56:34 Kathleen and I, we share a 200 GB account so we're not too worried about that but for a lot of other people could overwhelm your account.
18:56:42 And if you do this, then you have a better chance that. The, the,
18:56:52 The messages will get. Deleted. Having said that, there are some, there are some problems with this.
18:57:02 And the biggest one is that I ran into this all the time. You can have, you can have multiple messy strings talking to the same person.
18:57:12 My daughter, I have one message string that goes to her and Kathleen. My daughter's name is like Cara.
18:57:18 So if I send it to like her and Kathleen, that might be one message string in messages.
18:57:24 But if I send it to Kathleen and like her, even though they're the same 2 people, it'll create a separate string.
18:57:30 Yes.
18:57:30 And because it's a phone if I. Send it to my daughter's. Phone number.
18:57:37 It'll be a separate thread than if I send it to her email account. So if you just think about Kathleen's email account.
18:57:44 My daughter's email account. And then switching the names back and forth, you could come up with dozens of different combinations for the same 2 people.
18:57:55 And That gets a little bit complicated if you try to delete the message on your Mac because your Mac doesn't have a phone number.
18:58:03 Your Mac is only going to get those messages that they go to the email account. If they go to the phone number, your Mac's not going to see it.
18:58:09 Unless you set up your Mac to respond to the phone numbers, which you can do. You can say, it goes to this phone numbers, put it on the Mac anyway.
18:58:17 But Just for the sake of argument, they're just they're dozens of different combinations and Apple can't fix that problem.
18:58:27 Cool.
18:58:25 Because the protocol that Messages uses is something called SMS. And SMS was invented long before Apple came along.
18:58:35 SMS was, stands for simple mail system. It was invented by the phone company's when they had pagers, even though those old little pagers used to have 128 character messages.
18:58:47 That's where messages comes from. It was used by pagers. Nobody has a pager anymore.
18:58:51 Every single pager company in the United States has gone out of business, but that protocol is still used for messages.
18:58:57 So yes, you can delete it, but you're going to be frustrated as I am and there's really nothing Apple can do or you can do to fix that.
18:59:06 Okay, well.
18:59:06 Unless you're just really disciplined and how you send messages, which nobody is. You do it on the spur of the moment.
18:59:13 If something occurs to you, and if I send it to Kathleen and Lai Car and then I respond to like her and Kathleen I've now got 2 threads going and if I use their phone numbers I could have a dozen threads going.
18:59:26 For the same conversation.
18:59:29 So I.
18:59:29 Well, I generally use my iPhone for messages and I don't message from my computer, so.
18:59:35 Yeah, I'm just I'm just explaining why it's difficult to kill them off because each device interprets that slightly differently.
18:59:43 And if all you have to do is just change recipients, what use the phone number instead of the email or the email instead of the phone number, or if you're sending it to multiple people at once, just list them in different orders and you create new threads.
18:59:56 Yeah.
18:59:56 And because it's a really, really old protocol and it doesn't, it's, it's, it's really.
19:00:04 Stupid. The big advantage of using messages for for sending messages, Apple messages for sending messages. Is that it goes as data.
19:00:16 If you send it to the phone number, it always goes as a message and the phone companies count it.
19:00:23 So if you somebody has has a very limited account that only allows a hundred messages a day. They'll get charged for those like 10 cents, 15 cents a message.
19:00:32 But if you send it as data, it's invisible to the phone company, the phone company doesn't see it.
19:00:37 And yet the people on the other end still get it. So message is a really quite powerful and it really, really, really torqued off Verizon and AT and T and everybody went Apple came up with it.
19:00:49 It's still using that old protocol in order to make it compatible. And that makes it difficult.
19:01:02 Yeah.
19:00:56 If you notice that you get messages and some are in blue and some are in green. If you get a message from somebody and it's green, it means that they have an Android phone.
19:01:12 Yeah.
19:01:08 If it's in blue, it means I have an iPhone. And that's really convenient because it means that for things like you want to send a emoji or you want to send lots of things to somebody's got a blue messages, they'll get it.
19:01:26 There's a good chance if you send it somebody's got the green messages they won't get it because the message.
19:01:30 Client on on Android is not that sophisticated.
19:01:34 One thing I do like about the iPhone and messages is that when you send it to another person with an IVR and it says delivered, you know it's gotten there.
19:01:44 Yes.
19:01:45 With the other kind of phone, you don't know.
19:01:47 No, no, and Google has actually tried suing Apple to make, to get Apple to help them make their client better.
19:01:57 And they went to a judge with that as the basis of a suit and the judge laugh literally laughed at them and threw it out.
19:02:06 Because no, Not a research and development agency for Google. So that didn't work. Good track.
19:02:15 My daughter, my daughter and son in law live in Australia and I can my daughter has a iPhone and my son-in-law.
19:02:24 It's apples, so he has an Android. So I can text back and forth with my daughter.
19:02:29 With no problem, it's, you know, it's free and all that stuff, but for my son a lot, I'd have to add on international to my Verizon plan and to be able to text back and forth.
19:02:41 So we use that. Messenger in in Facebook to communicate back and forth that's what we came up with.
19:02:50 Yeah, I I cannot begin to tell you how much contempt I have for Facebook. Messenger. I refuse.
19:02:59 I'm with you, I hate it.
19:03:01 Yeah. I refuse to answer Facebook messages except for one relative. But anybody else sends me a Facebook message I'm not ever gonna reply.
19:03:14 Yep, yep.
19:03:16 Any other questions?
19:03:18 I had one name, a quick question. I'm using Sonoma on my new MacBook Pro M 2 max.
19:03:27 And a strange quirk seems to crop up when I'm using either the track pad or my mouse.
19:03:38 On a, in Safari. I, when I'm just moving the mouse along the screen.
19:03:48 It just changes web pages on them for some instantaneous thing. And goes back to my homepage if I'm on some other website Yeah, all of a sudden it just blinks to the other to back to the homepage.
19:04:04 And luckily there's history so I can go back to where I was. But, so I checked on the internet and several other people said they had this problem and no one knew how to knows how to solve it.
19:04:16 The, some people said, okay, change your track pads speed and don't use tap to click.
19:04:26 I try that. It still doesn't. Yeah. And so I don't know what's going on there.
19:04:32 I don't know if you've ever heard of that.
19:04:33 If this is on your track pad or track ball or what?
19:04:41 Huh.
19:04:37 I haven't, no, the laptop MacBook Pro trackpad. And I have a wireless mouse as well.
19:04:47 And it doesn't matter which one I use if I just move the cursor. Trying to click on something on a webpage, all of a sudden it just jumps.
19:04:55 Now it doesn't jump back to my homepage and It doesn't happen all the time.
19:05:01 It's like intermittent. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. But it's really annoying and I so a lot of people had the same problem but no one knows why it happens or it's just on Sonoma and it's never happened in Monterey.
19:05:16 I don't have an explanation for that. I do know you can run into problems with the trackpad spontaneously doing strange things, but that's caused by the fact that If you get have any kind of static charge on your body.
19:05:32 When you come near the track pad it responds as if you're touching it and so you can have goose movements.
19:05:38 Oh, do you? That could be it. That could be it.
19:05:51 Yeah.
19:05:40 Well, if you normally see that in the wintertime when it starts getting cooler. It hasn't been that cold though, but if you turned on the heat in your house, it could be you could be just the static chart.
19:05:58 I will tell you something that I did and I did this long ago because I was I have 2 degrees in the history, but I was a computer professional.
19:06:05 I only wear cotton and before I sit down at a computer I always wash my hands. There are 2 reasons for watching.
19:06:13 Well, wearing the cotton, if you're wearing cotton, you can't build up a, you, it's harder to build up a static charge.
19:06:18 But the washing your hands does 2 things. It gets the oils off of your hand. But the other thing does, touching the faucet.
19:06:25 The faucet in your home is grounded. And touching the faucet ground you and washing your hands washes off the oils and static.
19:06:33 So it's a I've been religious about that and I cracked me up because the last 10 days my granddaughter was here from England.
19:06:44 She's 6. And she wanted to use her mother's iPad and before she did anything she went into bathroom washed her hands and I thought she is trained well.
19:06:56 Of course my daughter That was first thing I ever, she started using a computer when she was around 6 and I said, now wash your hands.
19:07:03 So apparently my daughter has passed that on to her. To her daughter.
19:07:06 Well, thank you. I think I'll give that a shot. It does sound like the symptom, though.
19:07:11 And the reason is that the way the track pad works is through induction and you can create that a similar, a similar type of.
19:07:20 Field just with your hands if there's a static charge on it.
19:07:22 Right. Okay, thank you.
19:07:25 Can you disable the trackpad or? Oh, you can, okay.
19:07:31 No, not really.
19:07:37 Right, right.
19:07:29 No. Now, when you're, when your, when your MacBook turns on, it knows there's an iPad and there's and you really don't want to be able.
19:07:41 To do that, yeah. Yeah.
19:07:42 The mess with that. Anyway, it's 7 o'clock and now I believe so we will start the program.
19:07:53 I don't have the president or vice president so we'll just skip reports from, president or treasurer, so we'll skip reports from them.
19:08:04 Apple in case you had notice the pattern. In the spring they have major announcements for hardware and the start of June they usually have their Apple developers conference which they talk about new operating systems that they're coming up with and then in the fall they released the operating systems and they in September.
19:08:29 They released a new version of operating systems for watches, iPads, iPhones, home pod.
19:08:39 Most people don't know that it gets updated because it happens kind of invisibly. All kinds of stuff, including the Mac.
19:08:44 And this year was no exception. The a lot of people if if you read some of the commentary sites they say well they didn't really do much of it all just cosmetic and that's not true at all.
19:08:58 The, the Apple made a whole bunch of security and privacy. Changes they made several changes in terms of the functioning of the operating system and then they made some cosmetic ones.
19:09:12 For obvious reasons because I'm gonna do a demo we're gonna focus mostly on the cosmetic ones because those are the ones that I can actually show you.
19:09:21 But as an example of the kind of things that they have behind the scenes. They greatly cracked down on privacy restrictions.
19:09:28 You will see this sometimes when you've launched Safari and you try to go to a site that you've never gone to before.
19:09:34 And it just takes your browser a little while. And that's because the safari is trying to create a secure tunnel between your machine.
19:09:43 And what you're talking to. And if the other, if the other site isn't set up properly, it'll take a while and try, it'll try A, it'll try B, it'll try to see and eventually it might just give up and say, I can't get there.
19:09:57 And yet if you launched some other browser, it might work. And the reason because it for that is that Apple is getting really really picky about security for websites.
19:10:08 It's when you when you launch when you launch the fire and try to go to the site it checks it against a black list that Apple automatically updates on your machine every time you turn on your machine.
19:10:20 Checks that against a black list of compromise sites and just really bad sites. It checks the security certificate on your site.
19:10:30 And, certificate on the site that you're going to, it checks to see that your machine is actually properly configured.
19:10:39 And if you ever have your machine stolen, one of the things that it does is that when, when the thief launches, assuming they can break into the machine and right now it's kind of hard to break into the machine if they don't have your a username and password, but assuming that the thief can break into the machine and you've reported it stolen when the thief goes to that
19:11:01 website, Apple looks up a list of stolen machines and tracks their location and then notifies people, hey, this dollar machine is at this address.
19:11:12 And it's using GPS location for with IP to tell people where the Shell machine is.
19:11:19 So it's doing a lot of It's a doing a lot of stuff to protect you that you don't actually see.
19:11:25 The other thing they're doing in terms of just, on the security front and privacy front.
19:11:31 Is they are greatly cracking down on how you can share things. You want to share photos, you want to say share video, you want to share a lot of things.
19:11:41 Apple's very picky about checking the security of the people you're sending it to. So if you are sending it to, you know, Mike Johnson and it thinks you picked the right, and wrong, might argue with you about that.
19:11:58 And where it does a lot of the processing now, particularly if you have an Apple silicon machine, I can ask Siri for the time and Siri will give me the time.
19:12:09 In the past it used to ask Cupertino, okay, this guy is located in Washington State, New West and my Syrian another room is giving me the time.
19:12:19 Okay.
19:12:23 I could ask, I could ask for the time and it would have to ask Cupertino, he's based here, what's the time there?
19:12:29 And they'll come back and give me the time. Now, if you have an Apple Silicon machine, all of that processing goes on on the machine.
19:12:36 It'll give you the time. It'll give you weather in which Siri asked for the weather instead of asking it for you.
19:12:43 And so it'll just give you back the weather. A lot of things that can process on the machine.
19:12:48 Now if you ask for, I can't remember what it was. Kathleen and I were wondering when a movie came out.
19:12:55 And so I asked theory. Last night when this movie came out and Siri came up with an answer It can't do that kind of processing on on your computer because it doesn't know that.
19:13:07 So it had to go out and ask but came back instantly with the with the answer. So it's doing a lot of that on on your machine in order to protect your privacy.
19:13:16 Google recently was sued by the, European Union for violations of Oh, stop it. My phone's trying to answer all these questions that I just asked.
19:13:32 Good was recently, suited by the European Union for, Google has this thing called the Ign, incognito mode.
19:13:41 Where if you fire up Google Chrome and you go to incognito, you have a private tunnel.
19:13:48 And it doesn't share your name or your gender or anything about that. However, it still collects that information, so it doesn't know your name doesn't know your gender, but it knows that this person on this machine at this IP address looked up dockers and it looked up support hose and it looked up.
19:14:11 Penny liners or what it doesn't make any difference what it is you're looking up.
19:14:15 It knows that that person was looking for those kind of things and it keeps track and it creates an electronic profile that they sell to advertisers.
19:14:22 So on one hand, they said they're protecting your privacy, but on the other hand, they were not protecting your privacy.
19:14:28 And, and the European Union is charged, I can't remember, it was 6 8 billion dollar.
19:14:32 Fine for this and they're they're protesting this. But Apple, when you, When you ask for things from Siri, even if it has to go to Cupertino.
19:14:42 Apple doesn't give that stuff away. Doesn't tell anybody about it. Doesn't keep it.
19:14:47 They get rid of it. So they're doing a lot to protect your privacy and it's in it's invisible.
19:14:55 So I can't really demonstrate that. I can just tell you that that happens. But there are some things that I can demonstrate.
19:15:01 So I'm going to start off with the iPhone because the iPhone is the hardest thing for me to demonstrate.
19:15:11 But it so happens that I have the means. So I'll do it anyway.
19:15:23 And I did it wrong.
19:15:47 I'm not going to do it that way because .
19:15:53 I screen shared earlier and then I killed it. And in a way that I can't share it again.
19:16:00 Drat.
19:16:02 There's a little tiny icon at the top of your screen in blue that just I think that's new maybe that has something to do with it.
19:16:09 Oh, here it is. I found it.
19:16:11 Okay.
19:16:13 Alright.
19:16:18 One of the things that you should note is that as somebody mentioned, there's this little tiny icon up here.
19:16:24 This icon means that I am sharing my screen with something. Unfortunately, I managed to kill it so Kathleen can't see it anymore, but that icon means that I am sharing my screen.
19:16:35 With something I can share it with my computer or in What I was trying to do is also share it with my TV, but I managed to kill that off.
19:16:44 So that's new. This part up here is called Do you remember what that's called, Kathleen?
19:16:53 Dynamic Island.
19:16:51 Since I can't see it's hard. Dining Eric Island. And I managed to.
19:17:01 Kill it off again.
19:17:07 Hold on a second, I need to. Turn on Meringue, so Kathleen can see what I'm doing.
19:17:18 Speaking, Rich, I'll show you how to turn on nearing. I killed the TV, so I have to turn the TV on.
19:17:34 And I turned the TV completely off. Oh well. Yes.
19:17:43 Oh yes, I can do it that way. Sarah, turn on TV.
19:17:49 Didn't want to. Well, so much for that part of the. 24 7 and we have a lot of support.
19:18:05 New video tonight. Okay.
19:18:11 Back to my not terribly well done. Yeah.
19:18:20 Well, Fooi. I can either mirror it to the TV or I can mirror it to you, but I can't do both.
19:18:28 So. I'm just going to tell you what it can do. The, they've added more control panels to the iPhone that allow you to do all kinds of things including screen marrying and adaptive listening if you have a hearing aid and a bunch of other stuff.
19:18:50 And I was gonna show you some of that, but I guess I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to talk about some other things that it did.
19:18:57 I took some photos. And I went to show you kind of some different things you can do with. The photos.
19:19:07 These photos were taken on a new iPhone 15. And if you look at the sizes of them.
19:19:15 There this one here is 2.3 MB. This one's 3.2 8 MB.
19:19:24 This one is 6 MB. This one's 3.3 4 5 MB.
19:19:27 So. This one that 6 seems a little bit different, but the other ones aren't that odd.
19:19:33 Then you look at the dimensions. The first one is 4,032 by 3,024 pixels.
19:19:41 The next one is 4,032 by 3,024. This one is 5,712 by 4,284 pixels.
19:19:50 This one's 4,000 324,032 by. 3,024.
19:19:57 If you are really good at math, you'll realize that Most of these are.
19:20:06 12 megapixel, but. One of them is 24 pit megapixels.
19:20:12 And, but they all seem, you know, not that big, but if you export them as JPEGs, you'll see that there's a dramatic difference in size.
19:20:21 The H. A HEIC and I don't remember what it stands for, it's high efficiency, something rather.
19:20:29 Is Apple's format for cramming an awful lot of information. Into very little space and when you export them as JPEGs you'll see that they're actually much larger.
19:20:39 So this one that's 4,032 by 3,024 is actually 5 MB this one is 3.9 8 5 MB this one's 4.6 9 MB but the one that was 5,712 pixels across is actually a 10 MB picture picture.
19:21:03 So the, the, if you have this new phone, it can take really, really, really. High resolution pictures but only with the standard camera.
19:21:15 And there's a reason for that. And if I look at these. Photos. Open them up.
19:21:27 This one is taken with the wide angle lens. And it's it uses the standard camera, but it's just a wide angle mode.
19:21:37 This is the standard camera in standard mode. And if I blow this up, you'll see that it's really, really, really.
19:21:45 Detailed even if I blow it up because it's a lot more pixels there so very, very, very detailed picture of this.
19:21:55 Maple. This one is at 2 X and this is at 5 X. And the way in which Apple did this is actually quite clever.
19:22:06 If you look at professional cameras. A lot of them have what's a Pentax lens.
19:22:15 Pentax is the name of company, but it's also the type of box that has where the light balances around off of mirrors on the inside of the camera to increase the focal length without having a huge camera.
19:22:26 And Apple did the same thing only in this very, very thin. Iphone it's the same basically same size as regular iPhones, but it does at either 6 or 7 times it bounces the light around using mirrors inside of the camera.
19:22:42 To get of it a longer focal length. Though the farther it is from the lens to where it's recorded.
19:22:48 The larger something can be at a distance. So. That's what they did is they stuck a bunch of mirrors in here to increase the focal length without increasing the size of the camera.
19:22:59 That was one trick. The other thing is that it's image stabilized. So it bounces around with the motion to stabilize the motion.
19:23:07 So you can take a You can take a telephoto picture with this new camera and it's still image stabilized or you can take a video and it's image stabilized because it's got a bunch of little sensors in there that move it around.
19:23:21 As your body moves around. You can't do a huge amount of moving, but you can. You can bounce around quite well and it's also very good in low light.
19:23:30 I took these photos. Today at, at 4 o'clock. And as you see, It was very, very dark and rainy.
19:23:39 It was pouring rain when I took this. And yet that photo looks. Really, really nice and rich.
19:23:45 The exposure on it's just fine very very wet but nice rich photo in dim light. And that's the the new photo that they, new camera that have and the new iPhone.
19:23:59 But I lot of the other things that are on iOS 17 will work on any. Camera produced since the iPhone XS.
19:24:10 Camera. It's backward compatible. But some of the features won't work unless you have the newer hardware.
19:24:18 But in terms of most of the things it'll do. As an example, on the front you can have.
19:24:26 An image and I'm going to hold this up. That is a custom, image on the front of the camera that I added.
19:24:33 And I can, I added the. The fonts at the top where it displays the time, that's all custom.
19:24:43 It has an interface that allows you to to change that sort of stuff and you also have custom cards for some of your contacts.
19:24:51 So Kathleen calls me. Let's see if I can show her card.
19:25:07 If Kathleen calls me, I get a full screen of that. Of that photo.
19:25:15 It fills the entire front of the camera. So there's I can just tell that a glance that Kathleen's calling me.
19:25:19 And you can set that up for any of your contacts that you feel like. So a lot of a lot of nice things that they did with it in addition to the privacy and security issues.
19:25:35 So I'm quite, quite impressed with the new operating system. And if you have an iPhone, They can run IS iOS 17.
19:25:46 I highly recommend that you install it without hesitation because among other things is much more secure than prior operating systems.
19:25:55 Oh, the other thing I wanted to show you. Is that Apple has these widgets up here in this corner you'll see a widget that has a world clock.
19:26:05 And the world clock. It shows time zones for here for, Tokyo, for,
19:26:16 Alexandria, Virginia and for London because I have various relatives in those places. But it used to be that you could only have an image on the front.
19:26:27 On the front page, but if you move internally, you can now have as many widgets on any page that you want.
19:26:33 So, and. As many widgets as you want. And what a widget is is just a larger.
19:26:40 You kind of preview of what that app would do if you were running that app as a whole.
19:26:47 So the world clock if you run the world pocket looks like this. But the widget. Doesn't take up nearly as much space and it's just in that upper corner.
19:26:57 So, lots of different things have done with, with widgets and customization. And on the iPad, the iPad.
19:27:08 Has added widgets. Again, you can have one widget before and now you can have a widget on every screen.
19:27:16 And the iPad also has one of the things that I really like is that has the health data. In the past, There's a health app on the iPhone.
19:27:26 But. It can have an awful lot of information. But it's on a fairly small screen.
19:27:34 And. On the iPad, you have a much larger presentation so they can have a lot more detailed data.
19:27:42 And the health app on the iPhone will allow you to hook into things like a Olympic medical systems health record.
19:27:53 So their patient portal, you can suck all that stuff into Apple health and have it all in one place.
19:27:58 You can get. How far you walk that day you can get how many breaths per minute were recorded by your watch as well as gift your lab results from.
19:28:08 Going to the clinic and having your blood drawn all in one place. So. Lots of Very good changes large and small.
19:28:19 On the iPad as well. On the Mac. This first slide doesn't really tell you much.
19:28:29 Just tells you the Apple says it runs on all these platforms, which big deal. Here they were really happy with the fact that the especially on the Apple silicon machines they can get really fast.
19:28:40 Games running which I'm not a big game player so didn't really care too much about that but this is, this particular one shows profiles where this individual has a profile for home and a profile for school in Safari and I'm going to demonstrate that in a second.
19:29:01 But it, I, they've had profiles in. And for safari before but they were kind of clutsy and I didn't use them.
19:29:10 I used profiles on and chrome all the time so that if I'm doing something for my church it's different than for the user group and it's different for me and so on and so forth.
19:29:21 And now they've got profiles in Safari that actually work quite well. The other thing that you have are widgets.
19:29:28 So. There's a time widget here and weather widget and this is a photo widget and reminders and all kinds of things with widgets.
19:29:38 And I can't show you this because this is trying to show you a new feature in Facetime.
19:29:44 In Facetime. If you are doing Facetime presentation with say 5 or 6 people, you can now insert yourself into the image and your screen will appear behind you.
19:29:56 So it looks like you're standing in front of a blackboard, but this gentleman's actually got a computer in front of him and Facetime is fake projecting the screen behind him and he's just kind of seenlessly in front of it.
19:30:10 So it looks like he's got a big whiteboard behind it. But that only works with Face Time.
19:30:16 So I can show you that. However, they have some things that you can do with Zoom and I'm going to stop screen sharing to show you that because this is all also part of their presentation.
19:30:31 And that is they've implemented something called gestures. Some of these gestures I find difficult, like for example they have gestures where I can have a heart.
19:30:40 And I can. Rarely get this to work. But if it works right, it you should see parts bubbling out of my hands and I don't happen to see anything.
19:30:50 The other one they have is that you can have a thumbs up and it'll create a thumbs up gesture.
19:30:55 Does everyone see that? Okay, and if you have you can have a thumbs down and it'll give you a big Thumbs down.
19:31:04 But if you have 2 thumbs up.
19:31:07 You get fireworks. And if you have 2 thumbs down, you can pretend that it's Washington.
19:31:13 Any time of the year, any time at all, just starts raining. And you can have, let's see.
19:31:20 Bubbles if you do this And if you like Star Wars, you can do.
19:31:28 Well, that's a wrong one. That's an interest. I can't remember. There's a way to do lasers, but I don't remember how to do it.
19:31:36 Yeah, I don't remember. Anyway, there's a way to do lasers as well.
19:31:42 These are called gestures. They work in Facetime and for they'll also work in Google Meet and in Zoom obviously and other things as well.
19:31:52 So the next time you're Facetime with someone, if you want to give them a thrill, you can use gestures.
19:31:58 And I'll post these speaking which I should post something else, but I'll do that when I go back to my showing my desktop.
19:32:07 Yeah.
19:32:06 To do those work on the iPhone and the iPad with iOS 17
19:32:16 Yeah.
19:32:12 I know they work in the iPhone. I don't know if they work in the iPad because I haven't tried it but and some of the things that I'm talking about may only work if you have an Apple silicon machine.
19:32:23 The iPad and iPhone have Apple Silicon, but some of these things may require newer machines, then I don't happen to know.
19:32:34 It may require an Apple silicon machine. For some things, but I want to get back to my desktop.
19:32:44 And what was I gonna show you on the desktop? Oh, widgets.
19:32:52 This is a widget. That I have and you don't see it on my screen because I have 2 screens and this is on my other screen showing the when I snapped this this was several days ago.
19:33:06 This is the weather in Squim and it's showing you the weather. Here's the various times zones.
19:33:11 These are one thing that a lot of people don't realize there's a little tip thing built into the Mac that'll tell you how to use new features and it also exists on the iPhone.
19:33:23 There's an application called tips. There's an application called tips on the iPad. Just launch it and go through it because you'll learn things that you probably didn't know.
19:33:31 Here we have some news headlines and here's the battery level of my keyboard in my wireless mouse.
19:33:38 I have widgets for these plus some other things but those are the widgets and they you can have them all clustered together or you can have different widgets on different screens.
19:33:50 So just go to town with widgets. Another thing that I've talked about, I told you this was true, but I never actually showed and I'm not sure that it will work, but I got to try it.
19:34:00 Is that you can Now if you have an Apple silicon machine, you can now get a lot of the apps for iPhones.
19:34:11 On your on your Mac and one of the things that I like to play is mahjong which is a ancient Chinese game and most of the Mahjong games on the Mac have commercials and I couldn't stand the commercials.
19:34:28 Well, this mahjong game is for the iPhone and it doesn't have commercials.
19:34:34 So I immediately glommed onto that so that I can play mahjong. When I'm on hold, I will quite often play mjong or solitaire or something just because I'm stuck on hold and I don't want to be on hold.
19:34:47 One thing you will notice with these games that were reported from the iPhone is they have very simple interfaces.
19:34:53 If you go up under the menu, there's really nothing there. But, this will take you home.
19:34:59 And you can play a new game and it's set up. Very very simply because It's basically from an iPhone.
19:35:09 App and there's Not that much you can do with it, so. Let's go here and exit to point out of it or I could have gone up to the quit menu.
19:35:22 But that was basically unchanged from an iPhone app to work on a Mac and on the Mac it's got a bigger screen so it takes up more space but it's a fairly limited set of interface because there's not much you can do with it but on the other hand from mahjong i don't really need a heck of a lot So that's kind of cool.
19:35:46 And I thought I'd just show you that. Something that a lot of people don't know why you would ever subscribe to Apple Arcade.
19:35:56 I will tell you one reason to subscribe to Apple arcade. The arcade games have no advertisements.
19:36:01 So if it's if you like playing games and you can't stand the advertisements, you can subscribe to Apple Arcade and they don't have advertisements.
19:36:10 And now I want to show you Safari. This is Safari and when it came up. You'll notice that there's something new up here.
19:36:20 It says Lawrence. This is my basically the my standard. How I want Safari to come up when I'm working for me.
19:36:29 This is showing my website. This website has lists of my publications and there are quite a few of them.
19:36:39 Publications. And that's this is where I put them and I've only got like a third of them up, but.
19:36:46 I put them up on this one site. So. When I launched the far, I'd like to make sure that the site is actually up.
19:36:53 So that's my startup screen. And then I have things that I use all the time. The news sites and personal things having to do with like going to Olympic medical and church and whatnot and tools that I use quite often.
19:37:09 That's for me. But say I'm doing something for straight Macintosh user group. I can change who I am by coming up here and saying I want a smug window.
19:37:20 And I close this. So the smug window comes up and it's got the. Smug.
19:37:26 Website, but then it has things today that I want to talk about. So I've already pre-populated this.
19:37:33 So one of the things I wanted to make was the gestures that you, oh, this, this overlay that you can use in, and Facebook.
19:37:41 That's one of the things I wanted to show people. And then the, they call it reactions.
19:37:45 Those gestures. So you can have hearts will come pouring out in a nice little. Thing thumbs up we'll give you a thumbs up icon thumbs down balloons rain confetti and oh that's how you do it.
19:38:01 Lasers. There we got the lasers going there. And, and fireworks.
19:38:10 So. You can do that with these gestures. And the other thing I wanted to talk about was the attendance form.
19:38:20 I'm going to talk about that in a second. And what does Sonoma work run on? If you go all the way back, this is the Apple Sonoma page.
19:38:29 You go to all the way down almost to the very bottom. It comes up and with this box here and it says.
19:38:35 IMAX from 2,019 and later. I, Mac Pro from 2,019 and later I'm at pro 2,017.
19:38:43 Max Studio, MacBooker, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro. It has these here.
19:38:51 So if you want. A machine that runs the new Sonoma, and needs to have one of these.
19:39:01 I will tell you, looking at this list, it kind of gave me a dead giveaway. All of these machines either have a T one or T 2 security chip.
19:39:07 Or they have a powerful graphics card. And so that's. But they need for a lot of the features that they're using.
19:39:18 The T one, T 2 security chip is what allows. So, to accept a serial request for the time and give it back to you without actually tailing.
19:39:27 Telling anybody else, asking Apple about it. That's done with the security chip. It sanitizes those things and send you back.
19:39:37 Information and it won't. It won't accept some. Types of requests because it knows those are bad things to do.
19:39:46 So iPad similarly down towards the bottom, it's got a list of the machines that it runs on.
19:39:55 Here basically iPad Pro, 12.9. Inch second generation later, iPad Pro, 10.5 inch, so on so forth, list of the machines it runs on.
19:40:07 And iOS 17 down at the bottom of the page. Yeah.
19:40:16 Has a list of machines that it runs on as well. I forgot to tell you about one thing. I don't know if I can actually display it.
19:40:24 If. If the iPhone is turned on its side. And it will give you.
19:40:32 In a night time mode where it gives you the time and shows anything that might have popped up. While you were sleeping so you can use it as a Don't go out there.
19:40:44 It'll, you can use it as kind of a night time. Clock. And I like this so much that I got a stand to sit beside the bed so I can.
19:40:55 Refer to it at night in case I wake up at 3 30 in the morning and want to know exactly what time it is.
19:41:00 Oh yes, if if the lights are off it turns red so it doesn't ruin your your night vision.
19:41:07 Laura.
19:41:06 I haven't any, work like that on the side. It just wants to be in portrait mode.
19:41:14 I mean, it's so when I turn it sideways, the text is, you know, still, it's not right.
19:41:21 But it shows it shows the clock and everything.
19:41:24 Yeah, it shows the clock and it stays on all night, whether it's plugged in or not.
19:41:30 But it doesn't. It doesn't turn sideways. And I know it's supposed to.
19:41:36 How, when it turns sideways, is it, is it? If it's if it's to if it's not it's got to be fairly vertical in order for that to work.
19:41:46 So if it's at too much of a slant, it won't. Huh. How old is your phone?
19:41:53 Yeah. It's brand new. It's a 15, pro.
19:41:59 Well, see, that's a problem.
19:42:01 Yeah, I went from an 8.
19:42:05 I know it works on an iPhone, 11, a 12, a 13, a 14 because when my daughter and son-in-law were here while we were playing around with these And I know it works with those, so I'm not sure.
19:42:21 Do you have the, Phone set up to auto rotate.
19:42:25 Well, now maybe, maybe not. It does so on music videos, but I don't know about, Not otherwise.
19:42:33 Yeah.
19:42:34 I'm like, I can look into and see.
19:42:37 Anyway, I'm going to put the links for these pages that I, was showing I'm gonna.
19:42:46 Put these in the chat window. So that. You can see what it is I'm talking about.
19:42:54 So, this presenter mode for. Hey, time.
19:43:03 It's going to be here. Oh, that's terrible. I will clean that up.
19:43:16 And. So, You notice that, on that, You are that I posted this one up here that I chopped off some stuff at the end of it.
19:43:34 I'm going to explain that in a second.
19:43:41 This is the requirements for Sonoma. Requirements for iPad OS.
19:43:51 And. The requirements for iOS. 17.
19:44:03 I am gonna go back to. What was it? This first one that had the Ridiculous.
19:44:10 You're When you get these really long, and you want to send them off to someone, what you want to do is Look for.
19:44:23 Well, let me see. First of all, let's see if this works. Yes, it does.
19:44:29 A lot of these things are tagging information and trying to find out. Wow. What kind of machine you're using because it'll give you different kinds of information.
19:44:40 Depending upon what machine you're using. But also sometimes it is like who you are and where you are.
19:44:46 And Apple doesn't do that with their URLs, but a lot of places do. So you'll go to someplace.
19:44:52 And generally speaking, what you want to do is get rid of anything past the question mark. And I will show you what I mean by that by going to the New York Times.
19:45:12 You go to the New York Times.
19:45:26 I. And I know I did that.
19:45:37 New York Times. Continue. And you want to get this. Article.
19:45:43 So I went to Share this article with somebody. I don't care. I'm gonna share this article with somebody and our this was actually fairly It doesn't have a bunch of stuff after it.
19:45:56 But, what happens is that, When I first went to the New York Times from Google.
19:46:15 And I clicked on the New York Times.
19:46:20 Well, now it's not going to do that because I, it's cash, but. If you end up with these really long URLs, look for a question mark.
19:46:30 A question mark is not a legal character in a URL. And so what people do is they use anything after the question mark to send tagging information about you to whoever it's going to so that they New York Times will know that I came to the New York Times from Google.
19:46:46 And it's a way of getting ad revenue. Well, I don't want. To tell people where people came from.
19:46:53 So I will go through and just chop off everything after the question mark in the URL. Anything after that question mark.
19:47:00 Is not necessary. So just Go through and just get rid of everything after the question mark and it'll still work.
19:47:09 And this first one here had a bunch of strangeness in it. And it was Apple trying to find out was I.
19:47:17 Talking to Apple. From a. From a Mac or from something else.
19:47:23 So it, it, added a bunch of stuff to the URL that it really didn't need.
19:47:30 But the other thing I wanted to show you since I mentioned this is this is for this. User group meeting is that I can also stick things in that I frequently forget such as the October sign-in sheet.
19:47:43 So I. Tap the sign in sheet and I'm going to grab the URL. And paste it in down here and ask you that you.
19:47:53 Please go and sign in. Cause it helps me keep track of what we're doing.
19:48:05 But you can have as many profiles as you want. And I want to show you how to set them up.
19:48:10 It's really just super difficult. You go to Safari, go to settings. Go to this thing called profiles.
19:48:20 Say plus and say. News and here you can Use it for doing news or something. And you can pick an icon to show what it is and.
19:48:33 I don't know what color we call news. Since the, New York Times is supposed to be the grey lady.
19:48:42 We'll call it gray. And create profiles. So now we have. Hey, I guess that's not great.
19:48:48 That's brown. Okay, I don't care. So my personal ones got an icon of a person, the smug because I teach things.
19:48:58 It's got a picture of a graduates hat and the news is a briefcase. But now that I have this I can add bookmarks to this.
19:49:07 So.
19:49:12 Washington Post, I say. Add bookmark. And it adds me where I want the bookmark and I say that I want it under news.
19:49:25 And, and now when I go back to that. News profile it'll say
19:49:37 When it's got one tab and the one tab is the Washington Post. And if I go to bookmarks.
19:49:42 News has the Washington Post. So that's part of that profile. The smug profile has other things.
19:49:49 The my favorites which is what I have at home has lots and lots and lots of bookmarks.
19:49:55 But I can separate them depending upon what it is that I'm doing. And it's some.
19:50:01 If you're working, which I'm not doing, it's a great way to separate your work from what you're doing.
19:50:09 But since I do work for my church and I work for various other things, it allows me to segregate that.
19:50:15 Stuff so that I went in doing looking at church stuff. I'm only looking at church stuff and nothing else So it's really quite convenient.
19:50:23 Way to do things and Apple finally did it right. The first Couple tries that they did at this one.
19:50:30 It was not pretty, but this is this is pretty well done.
19:50:34 And do I have any questions about anything that I've talked about?
19:50:42 Lawrence, could you say again how you? Get your iPhone to be like a night.
19:50:50 Clock. I didn't catch that.
19:50:50 Oh. You plug it in and you turn it. Sideways.
19:50:59 Okay.
19:51:00 You turn it sideways. And it will eventually. Change to night mode. I think is what they call it.
19:51:08 And it's not doing that because I keep on moving it. But you just hold it sideways.
19:51:18 Okay.
19:51:14 I leave it plugged in because I don't. I charge my iPhone at night. And so I leave it plugged in and it recharges and it acts as a as a nightstand clock.
19:51:25 Does it have to be clubbed in?
19:51:28 Okay.
19:51:25 But it does not have to be plugged in. I didn't know that, but Mr. Brown says it doesn't, so it doesn't.
19:51:33 I'll take that.
19:51:32 Hmm. I have I have a special little, charger for my. Apple Watch. And that sits there and if you touch it, it tells you what time it is.
19:51:44 The the reason why I like this and reason why I keep it plugged in is that that way I don't have to touch it.
19:51:53 Okay.
19:51:51 I can just look at it and it tells me what time it is. It's it's I'm a light sleeper.
19:52:00 So if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'd like to know. Am I rested now or am I not?
19:52:03 Yeah.
19:52:04 So it's a good way to do it. And in the morning, sometimes when I'm feeling lazy and a call comes up, when it's in this nightstand, but mode, it shows who's calling me.
19:52:17 Oh.
19:52:20 Great.
19:52:22 Yeah.
19:52:18 And I can decide whether or not I want to ignore them. Something that Something that you may not know, you can, when you're sending up your Apple Watch.
19:52:28 You went to pair it with your phone. It's almost impossible not to. It's part of the process.
19:52:34 If you get a phone call and you know you don't want to answer the phone, if you cover your watch, just put your hand over the watch.
19:52:42 It silences the call.
19:52:44 Huh. Great.
19:52:46 You don't have to answer the call and hang up on them or anything. Just put your hand over the watch and it silences the call.
19:52:53 I know. Just.
19:52:52 And if I'm lying down in bread and I don't want to answer the phone, just put my hand over my watch.
19:52:59 Shuts it down. I am very lazy.
19:53:03 Okay.
19:53:04 Just a little update on on the night time clock thing. I plugged it in and it works sideways like it's supposed to.
19:53:13 Oh, okay.
19:53:16 Okay.
19:53:15 So is that with just the new operating system?
19:53:19 Yes, it's part of iOS 17.
19:53:21 Okay. Thank you. And we need to sign in, but we don't know how.
19:53:28 Oh, I stuck the URL in the, chat on the side and if you look at the last one I posted which says docs google calm if you just click on it it brings up this form that's on front of me and you just fill in the, add your email.
19:53:45 Your first and last name. And the reason why I say first and last name is that I've had several people just say Mike or.
19:53:53 Or Susan and that doesn't tell me who you are. So put in your first and last name and then check the box.
19:54:01 Meeting this is.
19:54:03 Okay, so, but that's your. What's your computer we're looking at?
19:54:08 That's my computer, but if you click on this URL over here. It'll bring it up on your computer.
19:54:16 Where is that URL?
19:54:16 Okay. It's in the chat window.
19:54:20 In the chat window.
19:54:21 Yes, down at the bottom of the.
19:54:23 I see it. Okay, then it just says to everyone.
19:54:27 We say yes, but I posted it earlier and it might be that I need to post it again for you because they scroll off.
19:54:33 So.
19:54:33 Okay.
19:54:39 Well, I can write you a message.
19:54:39 Okay. No, it should be there now.
19:54:49 Okay.
19:54:49 And you just click on it and it'll pop up the form.
19:54:54 Hmm.
19:54:54 Any other questions? I covered a lot of different things. So. I may not know the answer, but I'll make something up.
19:55:04 Okay. I have a question. I put something in the chat earlier, but it doesn't seem it didn't trigger a Red dot on my chat window and it didn't seem to go through to any of you.
19:55:18 So I'm not sure why.
19:55:19 No, I'm not seeing the form either.
19:55:23 Do you have this chat window open?
19:55:26 I have it open, yes.
19:55:25 I can see yours. Okay, you went to okay chat. And then I just see to everyone.
19:55:32 So if you scroll.
19:55:34 You click on document Google, you don't pull it up.
19:55:38 Okay.
19:55:38 There should be a message about the chat saying to everyone is at the bottom and above that should be the message that I just sent, which is.
19:55:47 A URL and it should open this window. In this form.
19:55:50 No. No.
19:55:57 Oh, well, okay.
19:55:55 I got it just fine.
19:56:01 Thank you.
19:56:05 Okay, I've totally lost the meeting.
19:56:09 You lost the meeting. I can hear you.
19:56:11 Yeah, I know, but I can't see.
19:56:15 Oh, look under chat.
19:56:18 It's gone. Alright, I'm the person, no, okay.
19:56:27 Click on your Zoom icon on your, that should bring it up, I would think.
19:56:30 I think, yeah, I think she might have lost the zoom window.
19:56:35 Yeah, she lost the zoom window.
19:56:25 Hmm. Okay. I'm launch meeting so I don't wanna do that.
19:56:39 Yeah.
19:56:40 Yeah, click on zoom on the zoom.
19:56:45 Yeah, down in your, your, Launch bar down at the bottom of the screen if you just click on zoom it should bring it up
19:56:52 Okay. Got it. But am I still looking at your window?
19:56:56 You should be.
19:56:58 Okay. So, okay, I see to everyone. I can still see the. The one that you posted.
19:57:11 It's and it just says to everyone.
19:57:15 Yeah, and it should say. It should say below it says HTTPS docs google.com blah blah blah and if you click on that that should bring up a browser.
19:57:26 Window and this page.
19:57:28 Facetime video effects. I don't think I want to do that.
19:57:31 Now those are earlier up.
19:57:33 Yeah.
19:57:37 Okay.
19:57:37 I posted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Links.
19:57:44 Okay. Docs Google. Okay.
19:57:55 No, went to Apple Sonoma. Okay. That's right.
19:58:03 It should appear at the bottom of the list.
19:58:06 Oh, new message, okay.
19:58:11 There we go. Got it. Thank you. Sorry, that took so long.
19:58:13 Okay. What do we want to do next time?
19:58:22 Something I would like to do at some point is browsers. Because there are lots of different browsers out there and they have their strengths and weaknesses.
19:58:31 One of the good news bad news about browsers in order to demonstrate browsers I have to use bandwidth.
19:58:37 And I'm using the bandwidth to actually send the Zoom video out to you. Which means that it may not work particularly well, but.
19:58:45 At some point I would like to talk about browsers and I would like someday to show people how I created the smug website.
19:58:56 It's a piece of software called WordPress which is available to anybody. It's web-based, so you go to a particular website and you can create a website.
19:59:08 Of your own. So yes.
19:59:11 Hey, Lawrence. You mentioned earlier that you might want to do, A, a little talk on pass keys.
19:59:21 Yes. Yes.
19:59:24 That might be a good top, but I don't know how you can demonstrate past keys.
19:59:29 Well, I can use my fake user to demonstrate the past keys. My problem is that I'm having difficulty coming up with.
19:59:37 A something that I can really demonstrate because a lot of this is invisible if you're using pass keys.
19:59:45 So it works and as far as you looking at it and a view session session, you just say, okay, so you want someplace.
19:59:53 And it wouldn't tell you. It wouldn't explain how the magic actually happens. So this is one of those cases where the musician wants to hide the magic.
20:00:04 I went to show how the magic happens and and trying to
19:59:59 Yeah. Well, with my new M 2 laptop. Macwood Pro. It has a thumb print button in the power button.
20:00:25 Yes.
20:00:18 And a lot of times it'll say, Just touch your thumb or put in your password and it's much easier to touch my thumb and type in a password.
20:00:31 Is that a pass key or?
20:00:29 That's, that's true. But again, No, no, that's an encrypted.
20:00:36 That's an encrypted credential. A pass key is a is a little bit, different.
20:00:43 Essentially it's a pass key to your computer, but it's not a pass key.
20:00:50 Hmm.
20:00:47 To something else that's actually something else. When you when you press your thumb. And the thumb sends a pass key to a website.
20:00:57 It's not sending your fingerprint. It's it's sending a piece of code that says yes you really are who you are.
20:01:10 Okay.
20:01:05 So trying to explain how something that people can't see works. there's, some cognitive issues I need to overcome here.
20:01:16 I haven't quite figured out how to do it.
20:01:18 Unless you took a movie of Cat Kathleen doing it.
20:01:25 No.
20:01:25 It's something I need to think through. Because I've tried I thought of several things and they say no that's not gonna work it's it has to be something that
20:01:39 Right.
20:01:36 That you can see a cause and effect. I used to teach, I used to teach computer, security to people in the government.
20:01:44 And that was one of the hardest things to do this. Even when I was talking to IT professionals.
20:01:50 To show them how something was working when there was no when there was nothing visible to them that it was a computer talking to another computer.
20:02:02 It was a, it was a challenge. And, and even when that the day before I retired.
20:02:10 This woman asked me to come over to her computer. And because you said something wasn't working in and they said, what do you want me to do?
20:02:22 Yeah.
20:02:18 And she says, just stand there, it'll work when you're beside me. So she worked for a science agency, but she believed in sympathetic magic that if I was there, just the magic alone would happen.
20:02:31 And she tried to do it. Had she failed that a dozen times and it and it worked. And was I responsible?
20:02:47 Right.
20:02:38 No, I wasn't. But. Trying to Trying to show what was really happening was it's it's it's a challenge which is one reason why people insist on having stupid, you know, 8 letter passwords that they reuse for everything.
20:02:54 They say, oh, this is just too hard. And that's why. The United States is responsible for 99% of the credit card fraud in the entire world.
20:03:08 Wow.
20:03:08 Because we are still the only country in the world where you hand somebody a credit card and they accept it.
20:03:16 Anywhere in Europe you hand him a credit card and you also have to provide a PIN. There has to be that secondary authentication.
20:03:25 In the United States, nope, steal somebody's credit card, go into go into Starbucks and you can buy yourself copy.
20:03:31 There's no verification that you're who you say you are. The only place in town that verifies who you are, aside from the banks, is Costco.
20:03:41 And that's because you're picture is on the back of the credit card. Not that they look at it, but if they wanted to, they could verify.
20:03:55 So.
20:03:49 So it's Trying to explain computer security is is a challenge. I'm not saying I'm opposed, I just haven't figured out out.
20:04:03 Yes.
20:03:59 The book about, the next operating system, Sonoma, is that a book and book form or is it a download?
20:04:08 It's a downloadable book, but you can print it, but, there's no printed books on it because, and there may not be.
20:04:20 I wanted to tell you the dirty secret about a lot of printed books. Well, let me, before I do that, since I happen to be showing my screen, I want to show you something.
20:04:28 I'm going to, if I can see the icon, here it is. This is my
20:04:39 Apple Books and I'm going to move this thing out of the way. And, search for.
20:04:48 So, There we go. This is the Apple ebook on Seduma through, from, take control press.
20:04:58 And it's got a nice table of contents and You've got an index in the back and it shows you.
20:05:07 After there's some plimity things telling you how it works tells you how to check what operating system you have and what it runs on and all that kind of stuff.
20:05:16 And then it takes you through step by step how to upgrade and a bunch of other stuff. And at the back of it, it's even got an index.
20:05:23 The nice thing about this about these electronic books is that by the way I have 7 or 8,000 electronic books.
20:05:34 . So It helps if I spell correctly.
20:05:42 Control books and we go here. And you. Find what you want to know.
20:05:52 You went this book on Sonoma.
20:05:55 And takes you here. Click on this, it tells you what the book is for. It comes in 2 different flavors.
20:06:04 You can, you can download a sample if you want, but comes in 2 different flavors. If you buy it, you have a choice of either a PDF.
20:06:11 Or, a, EPUB. EPUB is what Apple Books uses.
20:06:19 All the all Apple books are an EPUB format and the nice thing about Apple Books is that, well, never mind.
20:06:26 The Apple books are much better than PDFs. But if you decide that you want to book, you say you add it to the cart.
20:06:34 And then you go and pay for it. And go to your card. And pay for it and then it downloads immediately to you.
20:06:48 So you can go shopping for the book. You can read the table contents and all the stuff you would in a book to store and then download the book and start reading immediately.
20:06:57 You don't have to wait for Amazon to show it to you. Now, why don't they?
20:07:01 Print computer books. If you go to Amazon right now.
20:07:12 And you type in.
20:07:17 Mac OS Sonoma. And look at all the books that they have, you'll see that.
20:07:24 This one here is 30 bucks, which is a lot more. It's terrible book. Mac OS, Sonoma for seniors, terrible book.
20:07:33 This one here. Is, you notice when it was produced, it says it was produced on October 12.
20:07:41 This is something that. That Amazon has, we can make instant, books. Out but these people they're really not very good books at all.
20:07:51 And the ones that I really hate are these for Dummies books. You should never think that you can't do something on a computer because you're a dummy.
20:07:59 And so why Wiley ever came up with this for Demi series, I really cannot stand their books.
20:08:06 Because they start insulting the user right off the start. But you can you can find the book you want on take control notebooks, download it immediately.
20:08:15 Don't have to wait for Amazon to deliver it and you're up and running and it runs.
20:08:18 Right out of. Out of ibooks on your on your Mac so you can read the book while you're doing things at the same time.
20:08:27 Works and the and these books work on the iPhone and the iPad just as well as they do on the Mac.
20:08:35 So you can actually read it off your phone and play with it on your computer at the same time. Really, really prefer these 2.
20:08:45 There's usually the. Very good. Oh, I was just. You go ahead.
20:08:42 Physical books for computer books. When when Yeah, go ahead. When? When I left when, at when Mac when Apple went app when Microsoft came up with a new version of office about 10 years ago.
20:09:06 I distributed electronically to everybody and then people said, oh, you can come and take the documentation away.
20:09:12 We had 1,200 copies of Microsoft Office that we bought. When I went and collected the documentation, the documentation came in a box that was a foot and a half long.
20:09:24 And wait a time. Of the 1,200 sets that I collected, 1,150 were still in the shrink rat.
20:09:33 Oh.
20:09:34 No, nobody read them. The nice thing about an electronic book is you can use the search function to go to the part that you're interested in.
20:09:44 You don't have to flip through all these pages trying to find what you want. So For computer documentation, they're much, much better than paper.
20:09:52 If you want to read a novel, novels on paper are still good, but Computer documentation electron electronically is much, much better.
20:10:01 Okay.
20:10:02 And we still haven't decided what we're doing next month. And half the people have run away.
20:10:08 So ideas.
20:10:08 Well, I have a question. It's a kind of personal for you. Are you going to upgrade to the new phone?
20:10:13 I mean, we spent a lot of time happily about the new. System for the iPhone, the new.
20:10:21 Yes.
20:10:22 Yeah, and I'm wondering if you're going to get the 15.
20:10:31 Oh, okay.
20:10:28 This is an iPhone. 15 pro max. I'm not going to reveal any secrets, but Kathleen insisted I get it and it arrived just before my birthday earlier this week.
20:10:42 Okay. Alright.
20:10:46 I take a lot of pictures and I I can't begin to tell you that the the difference between the 2 X.
20:10:55 Magnification that I have a telephoto that I had with my old iPhone and this Fivex is startling.
20:11:02 It's not like the, you know, 200 that I have on my professional camera, but.
20:11:07 For just I was taking photographs of my granddaughter riding a horse. And I could take a picture of my granddaughter.
20:11:16 And the entire horse and I could take a picture of just her face and I didn't even have to move.
20:11:22 I could take it. With the same phone just by flipping through the the, telephoto settings.
20:11:28 And it was, it was glorious. Plus it was raining heavily. And the phone didn't care, whereas my professional phone I would I really don't wanna take it out in the ring.
20:11:41 And my daughter's from Britain. My granddaughter's from Britain, so the fact that it was raining didn't slow down at all.
20:11:48 And she decided she really likes horses. We started our out on a pony and then we moved her to this full size horse.
20:11:56 And later on they were saying, do you like the pony? No, the pony was trash.
20:12:01 That's not really what she said, but when she when she felt the full size horse she thought that was way better than the pony.
20:12:08 I don't know why because I'm not 6 but She had a blast. And this is the new phone and it's really quite cool.
20:12:18 One thing that's amazing is the size of the screen is the same as the as the size of the screen on the 13 in terms of physical size, but the phone itself is smaller.
20:12:31 Really quite because they eat the screen goes much closer to the edge. It's, it's really.
20:12:37 Bye, quite spiffy.
20:12:42 What are we doing next week? Next month.
20:12:46 I vote for browsers like you mentioned.
20:12:50 Second, the vote.
20:12:52 That sounds good.
20:12:54 Okay. Alright, we'll give that a shot.
20:12:54 All third fourth it. Okay.
20:12:59 Okay.
20:13:00 Maybe the difference between a browser and what a search engine is like duck. Go. I don't know if that's a browser or if it's just a search engine.
20:13:08 It's both.
20:13:09 Yeah, I heard it's a new browser. That's available in the Apple Store.
20:13:11 Yeah. Yeah, it's both. I will warn you that I know a great deal about browsers because I built.
20:13:21 Roughly 500 websites. So. I know a lot about browsers, but. If you're willing to put up with me, I'm willing to cover it.
20:13:30 Okay, alright, thank you.
20:13:34 And anything else before we go?
20:13:38 Thank you.
20:13:39 Yeah, have a good night Lawrence. Thank you again.
20:13:42 Yep, thank you.
20:13:41 Thank you. Alright, good night.
At Apple’s September 12, 2023, Apple Event, called “Wonderlust,” Apple announced, as expected, new iPhones and Apple Watches. There were no announcements of new HomePods, Apple TVs, or iPads, though there was a mention of the M2 Ultra-powered Mac Studio and the M2-powered 15″ MacBook Air and M2-Powered Mac Pro.
Not mentioned, but of note:
macOS 14, Sonoma, will be released on September 26. It will run on iMac 2019 and later, Mac Pro 2019 and later, iMac Pro 2017 and later, Mac Studio 2022 and later, MacBook Air 2018 and later, Mac mini 2018 and later, or MacBook Pro 2018 and later.
iOS 17 will be released on September 18. It will run on the iPhone SE (2nd gen.), iPhone Xr, iPhone Xs, and iPhone 11 and later.
iPadOS 17 will be released on September 18. It will run on iPad mini (5th generation and later), iPad (6th generation and later), iPad Air (3rd generation and later), iPad Pro 11-inch (all), iPad Pro 10.5 inch (all), and iPad Pro 12.9 inch (2nd generation and later)
Apple watchOS 10 will be released on September 18. It will run on the Apple Watch Series 4 and later, the Apple Watch SE, and the Apple Watch Ultra (all)
Apple notes that not all features of the various operating systems will work on all devices.
Also not mentioned: Apple released some additional security updates on September 11:
ioS 15.7.9 and iPad 15.7.9. This unusual update to an older operating system is aimed at plugging a security issue.
macOS Monterey 12.6.9. This unusual update to an older operating system is also aimed at plugging a security issue.
macOS Big Sur 11.7.10. This really unusual update to an older operating system is aimed, again, at plugging a security issue.
iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus
The new iPhone is newer, faster, more powerful, etc., with an imposing camera capable of taking 48-megapixel photos with the main camera. It also comes with a USB-C connector, in common with all currently offered Macs. This change was dictated by the European Union, which objected to Apple’s “proprietary” Lightning connector, saying it caused confusion. Of course, there are almost two billion devices in use that have a Lightning connector — but confusion about confusion aside, it is a nice improvement.
iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max
The new iPhone 15 Pro has everything the iPhone 15 has, but additionally is clad in a titanium case, making it lighter and thinner. But the real gem is the camera system, which includes a camera with a 5X optical zoom that, under the right conditions, can also function as a 10X optical zoom, allowing you to shoot subjects ranging from bugs (using macro mode) to elk grazing farther away than you might wish. The USB-C connector can also transfer information up to 20 times faster than the USB-C connector on the regular iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.
Apple Watch Series 9
The Apple Watch Series 9 is newer, more powerful, etc., but it does have some impressive new features, including a more powerful neural processing engine that allows you to use many Siri commands and have them execute directly on the watch, without access to a cell signal or Wi-Fi. You can set a timer, ask for the time, ask the watch to trigger the camera on your phone, and many other things without Siri needing access to iCloud. There are also some new health metrics, making it an even more important healthcare monitor.
But existing watch owners may be most impressed with the ability to respond to many watch prompts with a “double tap” that does not require touching the watch. A double pinch with your watch hand can start a timer, tell your camera to take a photo, answer or hang up a call, and many other things. It also has some greatly improved tricks for using the watch to find your iPhone. Not that anyone has ever had that problem.
Apple Watch Ultra 2
If you like to scale mountains, dive under the ocean, or hike out in the trackless wilderness, the new Apple Watch Ultra 2 has a number of improvements, plus the pinch “double tap” of the Apple Watch Series 9. Alas, it is still the same size, which may be its biggest drawback.
We will talk about these at the SMUG meeting on September 19.
Apple will host an “Apple Event” on Tuesday, September 12, at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. As usual, Apple has not said a thing about what will be discussed, aside from providing a cool graphic:
Apple Event, Tuesday, September 12, 2023, 10 a.m. PT.
If they follow past practice, they will announce one or more iPhones, possibly a new Apple Watch or two, announce the release of iOS 17, and possibly the release of macOS 14 Sonoma.
Traditionally, they have not announced new computers in the fall, and on occasion, they have announced an iPad. Whatever they do, we will talk about it at the September SMUG meeting on Tuesday, September 19, 2023..
When computer user groups first started up in the 1970s, they operated something like grade school “show and tell.” Users – almost all male – would show up with their $5,000 computers sporting 8K of memory and a cassette tape storage device and show off a program they’d written that computed the value of pi to six places, or something equally clever and not all that useful. Within a few years, the “show and tell” had advanced to commercially purchased programs, with users saying how much they loved a new program that tracked the inventory in the kitchen pantry, or kept bowling league statistics, or allowed them to make and print custom birthday cards for their kids.
No one talked about an application that shipped on these things.
Times may have changed, but the July meeting had the same grass-roots excitement as the old days as members talked about their favorite iPhone, iPad, and Macintosh applications (apps). But first —
Q&A
Q: I have a new laptop. I set it up to use Time Machine with an external drive, but it will only do manual backups, not scheduled backups.
A: Did you reformat the external drive? Most drives you buy at Costco or Amazon come with a bunch of junk on them, including adware (software that constantly insists you pay to upgrade it to a “pro” version), and the drives are not formatted for Time Machine. Time Machine requires the drive to be formatted (using Disk Utility) with a macOS partition and must be case-sensitive. Normally, it is a bad idea to make a drive case-sensitive, but this is mandatory for Time Machine backups.
Also, keep in mind that Time Machine does backups, not archives. It is designed to help you quickly recover from a problem, not to store everything in an archive.
Q: Since last week my iPad disconnects from the Internet; sometimes once an evening. Is something wrong?
A: Possibly, but it could be your internet service provider (ISP). For the last 6-7 months, between 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., our Astound/Wave connection stalls. In our neighborhood, Wave is installing a second backbone. Lawrence predicts turmoil in the next few years for Internet providers. The state and federal governments are pushing broadband providers in rural areas to increase speed and stability. Investment by the government goes to companies that can show they are expanding and building out the infrastructure. People moved from cities to suburbs during the pandemic. The federal infrastructure bill requires evidence of building out broadband into areas not previously served. This will create churn in the industry.
Q: Are (local) internet lines underground?
A: On the Olympic Peninsula, fiber optic cables may be underground, depending on where you are located. Putting up poles is easier and cheaper, but in the long run, poles are more vulnerable; if cables are underground, they are better protected and easier to repair if there is a break.
Q: Apple Watch – why get this? [This question was asked during the program, as many of the apps mentioned could be viewed or triggered from an Apple Watch]
A: In addition to telling time, date, and other useful things, the Apple Watch has Fall Detection (can detect a fall and dial 911); Medical Alerts; track sleep; tract activity; heart rate; exposure to loud sounds; can use with iPhone to receive calls; can receive family alerts; tracks O2 levels in the blood; can do an EKG; linked to Apple Health App; can work with medication schedule on phone and Watch will prompt to take medications; voice memos, get weather, track tides – hundreds of things.
Emergency Updates
Apple recently released emergency security updates for all devices, dating back to Monterey and Big Sur. Check About This Mac (or the equivalent on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV).
Expect more updates before macOS Sonoma and iOS17 are released this fall.
Presentation: Bring your favorite app
Apple App Store note: if you already own an app, it is hard to see the cost, as the button that normally shows cost is replaced by an offer to open the app, or to download it. Some price and subscription information can be found if you scroll through the description. Some apps are “free” and limited, or just a free demo, with a working version costing money. Some apps have multiple versions, ranging from free to a Pro version.
Apple App Store downloads, including free purchases, require an Apple ID to verify who gets the app.
If you have an Apple Silicon-based Mac, quite a few iPhone and iPad apps will work on those Macs, though sometimes they aren’t very useful on a desktop
BBEdit, a text editor for programming (Perl, HTML, Swift, Unix command line, etc.); highlights syntax by color, and spell checks code: https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
Libby, can check out library electronic books or audiobooks, can listen to books; do not own the book but check it out; can get on a waitlist; two weeks to read the book; may renew; supported by Sequim Library and North Olympic Library System; https://apps.apple.com/sz/app/libby-by-overdrive/id1076402606
Reminders, available on Mac, iPhone, iPad, Watch; can set time reminders, calendar reminders, or can trigger a reminder when you are near a location; alerts can appear on the lock screen of your phone or iPad, or on Apple Watch; https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/reminders-apdf10efb1bf/watchos
Photo Pills, assists in combining stars and sky into elegant photos; suggest times and what can be seen, so can set up a location at the right moment; teaching videos; https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photopills/id596026805
A Better Finder Rename, can change dozens or hundreds of file names at once, e.g., 1080p, will find and replace; e.g., image followed by a number – replace with the location where the photo was taken; may take a while if doing 10K files https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/index.html
Note: some of astronomical applications can work with a computerized telescope to automatically point and focus the telescope at particular stars or nebula or planets.
Next month – August 2023: Apple Maps; custom maps? (Google Map will do this); maybe? Or we will do something else.
Video of July 2023 meeting
Meeting transcript
Transcripts are automatically generated from Zoom via Zoom’s automated closed captioning.
18:32:42 Suppose captioning. So that we have a transcript.
18:32:51 And one more thing I need to do that I forgot to do as I did not make. Hey.
18:33:01 Hey, sign in shape. So I need to do something about that. But in the meantime, I can talk about.
18:33:11 Questions and answers if somebody has questions. Thomas.
18:33:18 Anybody have questions?
18:33:21 No, I had a question. I, last week but The new, laptop, M 2 max.
18:33:33 Laptop and I got Ventura installed on it my old laptop was so 8 years old wouldn't run Ventura so I can only run Monterey on it.
18:33:45 And everything went well. I used migration assistant. I actually installed all the applications from scratch without migration assistance so that I got the versions that were compatible with.
18:33:59 With the new operating system. And, everything was working fine. Except for one thing.
18:34:07 And I noted and I bought a brand new. External drive, to do time machine with. And it just wouldn't do automatic backups to the my new drive.
18:34:24 I it would do manual backups. Yes, and and all the files were there. And so I was doing manual backups, yes, and all the files were there. And so I was doing manual backups.
18:34:32 But on my old laptop, I had this. App called Time Machine Editor.
18:34:38 And it let you schedule the backups at your leisure. So I looked on the internet to see if there was a version compatible with Ventura.
18:34:47 Sure enough, the newest version of Time Machine Editor. Is, is for Ventura.
18:34:54 And so I downloaded it. And now it works fine. I could do hourly backups every other.
18:35:03 You know, every other hour, every 4 h, every 10 h, every day. Once a day, twice a day, 3 times a day.
18:35:12 You know, it has all these features. And actually, I made a little PDF.
18:35:22 Okay.
18:35:16 2 page PDF. That shows how that works. I don't know if you, I don't know if you could put that on.
18:35:26 Send it to me. Usually if people can't make backups with, First of all, I would not I would never ever ever have time machine run using your custom schedule.
18:35:39 But it doesn't do it.
18:35:38 It's designed to work on its own schedule. And you can well yes but you see there's something that you probably didn't do time machine the drive needs to be formatted.
18:35:48 When you plugged it in, did you format it?
18:35:50 It was already 4 min 8 PFS.
18:35:53 Yes, but it needs to be APFS case sensitive.
18:35:58 Oh. Oh.
18:35:59 And if it's not formatted, APFS case sensitive. It won't work right.
18:36:06 Yeah, it won't actually do the buy backups properly. So when you plug it in for the very first time and you launched Time Machine and pointed at at time machine or even before then when it sees the external drive.
18:36:19 Your Mac should offer to format it as a time machine drive and whatever you do don't cancel that you should let it do that and if it wasn't form formatting this APFS case sensitive You might want to go back and, do that.
18:36:34 Because the reason why that's necessary is that when it's backing stuff up, it's backing up just staggering amounts of stuff, including things that you can't see.
18:36:44 And Unix itself is case sensitive. You don't notice it because Apple has for the Mac operating system, it they make it case insensitive so that if you have uppercase A's and lowercase a's and they sort they'll still sort in alphabetical order.
18:37:04 Okay.
18:36:59 But for the time machine and actually
18:37:08 I'm not even sure if that's actually I've got a time machine back put up drive right here.
18:37:13 I shall ask it what it says it is.
18:37:16 So you can't do that after the fact and put the case in. I have to reformat it.
18:37:22 Unless it says the easiest way to find out is to click on the drive once say command I to bring up get info.
18:37:30 And if it says APFS case sensitive, then you're in good shape. And if not, then yeah, you really do need to reformat it.
18:37:38 I'm gonna share my screen because that way I can. Show you.
18:37:48 This is my time machine drive. Which is, over here behind this thing that I can't see right now.
18:38:10 Oh, okay.
18:37:55 This is my, where is my time machine? This thing says time travel is my time machine drive. And yes, that's a that's a, Star Trek, our fleet and logo there but anyway you'll see up here it says APFS case sensitive And that is when people say I plugged
18:38:15 in the drive and it didn't work, the first thing they didn't do is when people say I plugged in the drive and it didn't work the drive and it didn't work, the first thing they didn't do was they didn't reformat the drive.
18:38:22 You should never ever ever take a drive. In fact, I don't even to the drive. You should never ever ever ever take a drive.
18:38:27 In fact, I don't even, ever, ever, ever take a drive. In fact, I don't even just take computers when I buy a new computer.
18:38:29 The very first thing because I don't know what's on the I don't know what's on the drive.
18:38:33 Now if you don't have a fast internet and you reformat your Mac, That could be a you could be in a world of hurt because you need to download the new operating system afterwards and that's kind of difficult if you just.
18:38:47 If you just.
18:38:47 Yeah, well I haven't had trouble other than not having the backups work.
18:38:52 No, if you have a brand new Mac, I wouldn't worry about it. Because I'm just saying that I used to do that because I used to do security for the government and that was part of our protocol.
18:39:04 I can't really tell you the details, but we had good reason to went to do it that way.
18:39:10 So we reformatted everything as soon as it came in no matter what it just blew away what was on top of it.
18:39:18 As soon as it came in, no matter what, and just blew away what was on top of it.
18:39:19 On PCs, for example, PCs, for example, PCs, for example, PCs just come out of it.
18:39:21 On PCs, for example, PCs just come loaded with a bunch of Adwords.
18:39:21 You go into Best Bine, you buy a Windows machine. It's just come loaded with a bunch of adware.
18:39:27 If you go into Best Buy, you buy a Windows machine. It comes with a demo, a Windows machine.
18:39:28 It comes with a demo version of a Windows machine. It comes with a demo version of Mccaffy, a Windows machine.
18:39:34 It comes with a demo version of McCaffy that that expires after 90 days. And in the meantime, is it yells at you to update the subscription and you get adds it yells at you to update.
18:39:46 And in the meantime, it yells at you to update the subscription and you get ads from whoever.
18:39:48 Like if you buy it from ACS, you'll get So you really want to be a part of our Xbox family, don't you?
18:39:50 No, I don't. Now I don't. So,
18:39:53 Okay, well I guess I've only got a week's worth of data. The backup so I could easily reformat it and not lose much.
18:40:02 You won't lose anything because remember it's not an archive. It's a backup.
18:40:07 It backs up what you have. It's not an archive. If you want an archive, You want to lose anything.
18:40:14 So.
18:40:10 That's right, I won't lose anything. Yeah, in fact. You know, I had made changes and updates and things like that.
18:40:26 Yeah.
18:40:21 So Everything's done now kind of except that so it'll be easy to reformat it case sensitive and then you saying it should work automatically at that point.
18:40:31 You still have to tell time machine you have to point it to it and say use that. But. But and
18:40:36 Yeah, oh yeah, I did that right. Yeah, and I didn't realize that you know it came out of the box It said oh Mac ready you know and
18:40:44 Well, keep in mind, keep in mind that time machine, you use this 8 year old utility with time machine.
18:40:52 Time machine has changed drastically. Since then, the operating system is different. The processor is different.
18:41:01 Everything's different.
18:40:59 The disk drive formatting is different and you don't it's not HFS plus anymore it's It's APFS.
18:41:04 Right, right.
18:41:07 So there's nothing at all that's in common with your old machine.
18:41:10 Oh no, no, I downloaded the new scheduler from the internet for and it said Ventura.
18:41:17 Yeah, but I still, I, my, once you do the initial update, the initial update, the initial backup tapes forever because it's backing up everything.
18:41:28 Right.
18:41:28 But after you do that, just ignore it. It backs up every hour. You'll never notice that it's backing it up.
18:41:32 Right. Oh yeah, I have a 4 TB external drive.
18:41:36 Yeah, so don't do that. But the my time machine backup drive is a 4 TB.
18:41:42 My time machine backup drive is a 4 TB. What is this? Toshiba that I got from Amazon.
18:41:46 So solid state drive, 108 bucks plus Tax license, dealer prep, so on and so forth.
18:41:51 And it just backs up and I ignore it.
18:41:53 Yeah. Okay, I'll try that. Thank you.
18:41:59 So I actually had an answer for that.
18:42:01 Yeah, that was great. Thanks again.
18:42:08 Any other questions?
18:42:10 I have a question that. Trouble shooting type question. In the last week, approximately last week,
18:42:21 Both of our iPads have started. Disconnecting from the internet. One more than the other, but it's.
18:42:28 It happens once or twice an evening. For no reason that we can determine. The yes
18:42:35 Are you on wave? Okay, that's your answer. See another answer.
18:42:42 Yeah, okay. Care to elaborate.
18:42:48 Kathleen and I have noticed we want the news every night and we stream it via, YouTube, TV, which is Google.
18:42:56 And we use YouTube just TV because that way we can get Seattle news, news stations. And for the last.
18:43:05 6 7 months sometime between 5 and 7 30 every day every single day including weekends. We lose the internet for a few minutes.
18:43:17 And usually right in the middle of the news. So and the latest news from South Florida is and then you wait 5 min 2 min whatever for you to find out what happened in South Florida because it's just it just stalls.
18:43:35 We do know that in our local area. We live in sun wave has been running fiber here so that instead of having one fiber bundle come into our neighbourhood. They have to.
18:43:49 The way wave and everybody else works it. They run a big pipe and it's not a party but it's a wire but they run a big pipe into your neighborhood and then they split it off so that If you get up at 4 30 in the morning, you usually have great internet speeds because nobody's on, but around dinner time you have a whole bunch
18:44:08 of people get on that stalls. Is not probably not that. Reason, but it could be. We just think that day that the day shift leaves that wave and the guys for the evening have it come on and check the boxes. That wave and the guys for the evening have it come on and check the boxes or who knows what they're doing.
18:44:29 Maybe they're plugging in the guys for the evening haven't come on and check the boxes or who knows what they're doing.
18:44:32 Maybe they're plugging in their X boxes. We don't know. But it seems to happen at a fairly standard time every night.
18:44:35 And we don't know what they're doing, but we do know that locally they are putting in.
18:44:40 Additional cables. I expect a fairly great turmoil in the internet provider. Ranks in the next few years.
18:44:50 Because. The infrastructure, I can't remember what the infrastructure act is. One of the things that has is that one spring broadband to everybody in the country.
18:45:01 And into into the inner cities and into rural areas and so on. And broadband in. Clown County is.
18:45:14 It's broadband because the industry says it's broadband. If you have 2 megabits per second or faster the industry considers it broadband.
18:45:26 Now in Korea broadband is considered gigabyte which is 500 times faster than what the industry in the United States says it is.
18:45:35 But they're trying to increase the speed. Well, if you think about the billions of dollars that they say they're going to invest in this.
18:45:42 Is that money coming into you? Is that coming coming to me? No, it's going to the.
18:45:48 Is going to the internet providers. It's going to Comcast and and wave and and those people.
18:45:58 But in order for them to qualify it, they have to show that they're actually building out. About 20 years ago, Verizon started advertising they had FIOS.
18:46:11 Now, FIOS is just a trade name for fiber optic. You could get fiber optic at home with files.
18:46:16 And, they started advertising this heavily on TV. Kathleen and I signed up for it when we were in Columbia, Maryland and when at the time that we left, we were getting.
18:46:28 Dig a bit down and dig a bit up. to our home and it didn't cost that much more than what some people were doing for DSL.
18:46:40 By about 10 years ago. The powers that be at, that at Verizon decided they they were going to melt their cow and they decided to stop expanding their network and they were just going to sell it to new people into areas that they'd already built out.
18:46:57 So they weren't going to expand anymore. They were just going to sell it to more customers and whatever customer area they happen to be.
18:47:03 And they were going to pocket the money that they would have. Done on investment. So. They kept on advertising files, but they didn't actually start building it out anymore.
18:47:17 They just. Throws it in place. And a lot of the companies have done that. So after they go to the high density parts of New York City and Washington DC and Philadelphia and Chicago, they just stopped.
18:47:29 Well, people in suburbs don't like that and as the wealth hollowed out the cities as people moved into the suburbs.
18:47:38 Then the people in the suburbs didn't have high speed but the people in this in the cities did.
18:47:43 And the infrastructure bill, among other things, is setting standards that you must be doing this sort of work in order to qualify for these funds.
18:47:53 And so you're gonna see a lot of effort on the parts of Verizon and Comcast and ATT and everybody else to show that they really deserve.
18:48:04 To get some of this infrastructure funds it's sort of like when the high bill white bill comes out Does the state of Washington get the highway money?
18:48:11 No, does who gets the highway money? The people who actually have the bulldozers and and cement trucks and so on.
18:48:21 Of course they get the money. And the people in order to qualify for this infrastructure money are gonna have to show that they're actually building out.
18:48:28 Broadband areas that were not previously served. So if they've been sitting on their butts for 10 years, they have to get up and actually do something.
18:48:40 I suspect there's gonna be quite a bit of churn over there. Next few years because, You know, they want profits, but they also want somebody else to pay as much of the cost as possible.
18:48:56 Sure.
18:48:54 Can I ask a related question is the The, is it?
18:49:01 Typical on the peninsula for wave for example to have their main fiber pipe or cable underground.
18:49:11 That's a good question. The Answer is it depends upon where you were located.
18:49:17 Well, the reason I ask is that this is a We live in a relatively new development. And the When wave came out.
18:49:27 They pulled wire out of the ground. I mean it was in a the wire. The but the pipe from the house was already underground to a junction box.
18:49:41 So they just they had to pull the wire from the junction but but that box itself. Is connected to something underground.
18:49:49 Yes. It depends upon where you're located. Where we're located, all the utilities are underground.
18:49:57 So there's no There are no telephone polls or utility polls in our development. But in other places where there is, it's on the poll.
18:50:07 The good news, bad news about the polls. The polls are easier to put up and you can do it faster because you don't have to, you don't have to cut streets and so on and so forth.
18:50:16 But the bad news is they wear out and they get damaged and cars run into them. So long term, it's fast.
18:50:22 It's, more, it's, faster and easier long term to have it underground, but you see the quarterly profits don't take into account the fact that 10 years later your company is going to be making money.
18:50:37 So if at all possible, utility companies will run it above ground. But if it's already installed because the development was set up that way, they put it underground.
18:50:46 And when they pull that stuff from underground, if you've already got a cable, what they do is they just tie their new cable onto the old cable and they pull it.
18:50:54 They're using the old cable as a stringer. So it's it should be fairly easy.
18:50:59 They might have ripped it out, but really they were just taking advantage of what was already there to restring their new cable.
18:51:05 I'm a bit nervous because there within a half a mile of us. There are a number of projects and this apparently is all over the city.
18:51:17 Where they're digging up the street. And I don't know what they're doing.
18:51:22 I don't know if they're replacing. Water lines or storm sewers or whatever but I I'm nervous that while they're doing that they may inadvertently cut through one of these pipes.
18:51:32 I don't think that's happened. I mean, it sounds to us like what you just described with wave and daily interruptions for whatever reason that's That seems to be what we're experiencing, but.
18:51:45 All this construction makes me a bit nervous that there might be something worse. Down the
18:51:51 Well, Kathleen and I have commented that it seems that if you're going north on Fifth Avenue.
18:51:59 They finally get it paved and then the next. Week you come down there and they're digging new trenches.
18:52:08 And I'm picking on Fifth Avenue because we take it fairly often. I don't know what they're doing.
18:52:15 If If I wanted to, I could probably. Call up the city engineer or go into the column county website, but I don't know what they're doing.
18:52:21 Yes. Somebody just asked me how do you.
18:52:27 Sign up and the answer is I'm still putting together the. The the sign in sheet so I haven't got there.
18:52:40 Haven't got that far yet. I notice a number of people don't actually have their cameras turned off.
18:52:48 So we being We're being. Quiet today.
18:53:06 What did I call today? What's the name of it?
18:53:14 Doing your favorite app, okay. I'm trying to make the sign in form and I'm trying to remember what.
18:53:19 I called it.
18:53:25 Okay. Any other questions? Yes. Yes.
18:53:30 I have a question. Call here. Okay, when I plug in my iPhone to the computer.
18:53:39 The computer doesn't seem to recognize it doesn't show up on the screen. What's the problem there?
18:53:46 When you plug your iPhone in.
18:53:48 Yes. Shouldn't it show up on the screen as as a, device?
18:53:56 It can, but you have to do something in exactly what you do with it.
18:54:03 I don't remember.
18:54:04 To be able to ask you if you wanted to use it as a storage device and you would answer yes, but I don't know anymore.
18:54:11 I think you. I think your turn on screen mirroring.
18:54:18 I might want to do that tonight and I should have. Checked on that beforehand but there's if you go to the control panel One of the, one of the icons if you've added it is screen marrying you turn on screen Mary and then it'll show up on your desktop.
18:54:35 Screen marine looks like 2 rectangles right next to each other. It's about the middle of the screen there.
18:54:44 Looks like.
18:54:47 Oh, that's
18:54:47 You get that. Yeah, you get that by pulling down from the top up here.
18:54:52 Okay, right.
18:54:53 But if you haven't added it, I may not be there by default. So you might have to add it.
18:54:58 Oh, okay. Thank you.
18:55:05 Okay.
18:55:07 Sure.
18:55:11 Let's see.
18:55:17 Responses.
18:55:23 Alright. And.
18:55:29 Sign in sheet.
18:55:35 And yes, I was making a shine in sheet. While talking to people. And I of course, screwed that up.
18:55:45 So I have to. Go back here and get my link again.
18:56:05 Why does it have to be? Difficult.
18:56:12 No, it's because Google's not. Sharing the clipboard with my machine. So I'm going to mail this to myself.
18:56:30 I don't know. I think it just hates me.
18:56:35 You totally mean that. Okay.
18:56:45 Send.
18:56:53 Anyway, while I'm waiting for this to show up. I shall.
18:57:06 Well, that was not useful.
18:57:14 It sent me a letter but it didn't send things. Form.
18:57:26 Why won't it?
18:57:26 Wow.
18:57:37 Zoom hates me.
18:58:02 Paste. There it is.
18:58:10 And it's still not pasting.
18:58:19 That was too difficult.
18:58:24 Okay. So now there's a sign in form.
18:58:29 There it is.
18:58:34 Okay.
18:58:29 And it helps if I do this in advance. Anyway, any questions other than my relative competency? I'm not sure I understand.
18:58:42 If you
18:58:50 Indirectly. Any other questions?
18:58:56 Well, I have a question for you. Apple issued an emergency update. And how many of you installed it on your on your watch on your iPhone, your iPad.
18:59:08 Your Mac.
18:59:14 I did.
18:59:12 I did the iPhones and iPads, but I didn't do my watch and I didn't.
18:59:21 Can't do my Mac because it can't really get any more updates anymore because it's too old.
18:59:26 This latest update for some things went back to Monterey and Big Sir. So. Well.
18:59:36 Well, I think.
18:59:32 Yeah, mine is before that. Catalina.
18:59:34 Yeah. Meet me too.
18:59:43 Yes.
18:59:40 Are you talking about the rapid response update? Yeah, I installed it on everything. When it was the A version and then they pulled that and Set out the C version a day or 2 later.
18:59:54 Yeah.
18:59:54 But that was really quick. If you, if you installed the A, the C on the iPhone anyway was really quick.
19:00:01 Hey, yeah, that's because they change basically a hundred characters of the update. So it was really quick.
19:00:09 And.
19:00:09 And in fact, I didn't even notice that my watch was updated until my watch told me, Hey, I've been updated.
19:00:20 Any questions?
19:00:22 Just gonna say I have it on automatic so I assume it did it and I remember seeing something about it.
19:00:29 I'm not sure whether it's on my phone or on my computer.
19:00:35 Even though it's you can tell on your computer if you just go up to the about this Mac and it comes up with the version.
19:00:44 If it's got a if you're running Ventura it'll have a C. After it.
19:00:47 That means that it's got the security update and on the iPhone and iPad is a little bit harder to figure out what it is and on the watch it's really difficult.
19:00:55 But, I mentioned this simply because I normally just let the Mac update itself and I don't care but for security updates I update immediately.
19:01:08 And, for major operating system updates. I have a cycle like where there's gonna be a new version of the Mac operating system.
19:01:24 Ventura? No.
19:01:21 What's the name of it? Sonoma Sonoma Sonoma Yeah, so known as the ones coming out.
19:01:26 So normal.
19:01:30 I keep on forgetting because everyone says, oh, don't you like Sonoma? Well, I don't drink wine, so.
19:01:36 Yeah.
19:01:36 Okay.
19:01:35 Not really. The, for operating system updates, I always update them almost immediately because I want to know how it works so that people when they start asking me questions, I'll have an answer.
19:01:54 And we appreciate that.
19:01:51 So I'm usually. Quite quick on updates. How you had a question?
19:02:03 Yeah.
19:01:58 Question, yes. I did the update. But on my on my phone and it it only shows iOS 16.5 point 1, it doesn't have the C.
19:02:13 And I looked as soon as I updated and that's what it showed. And I thought, oh, well, maybe it isn't, isn't actually registering the C on the iPhone.
19:02:22 Let me see what it says here online.
19:02:26 Yeah, mine doesn't show. To see on my, but does on the iPhone, but not watch.
19:02:33 Mine doesn't show up on my iPhone.
19:02:33 On the watch, I don't remember what it does, but. And My internet is slow because I'm running to boot Zoom session.
19:02:50 Understand this.
19:02:44 So I'll just let this. Catering cogitate but yeah, this, see was because they had an A update and it caused
19:02:55 Unable to check. Okay. Be that way. Yeah, it does show the same.
19:02:57 It does show it does show the see if you On the, on the iPhone, if you go to general settings general.
19:03:07 Software update. It will show you, it will show you a good version.
19:03:16 See.
19:03:09 I don't know if you could see it, but it says. IOS 16.5 point 1 and then inside of parentheses Okay.
19:03:27 Oh, okay.
19:03:26 I should ask our president if there's in treasure if there are any things they would like to save.
19:03:31 Right now.
19:03:33 So sorry, I'm just doing the. The form. Let me close it.
19:03:42 Oh good.
19:03:41 Okay. I just did the sign in form. Welcome everybody. No, I have nothing to, to add and there's no, nothing new from Treasury in regards to, any numbers changing.
19:03:58 So it's all yours, Lawrence.
19:04:00 Okay. For this Today we were going to talk about someone suggested and I don't remember who suggested it that we talk about our favorite apps.
19:04:11 And I thought that was a splendid idea because that way I didn't have to prepare anything, but.
19:04:17 Yeah.
19:04:18 It's also, it's also interesting just to find out what other people. Are doing with their machines.
19:04:25 I, was talking to this guy and Maryland, couple of days ago.
19:04:34 More than a couple of days ago was last week. In his favorite Mac application is a, is a tool for making maps.
19:04:45 Now he's a geographer, so that's not too surprising, but he Works at my former.
19:04:52 I, my former place of work. He works at Noah and National Ocean Service makes all the nautical charts for the United States.
19:04:58 And he's been working for several years to come up with a a workflow that can be certified as as a workflow for for Noah Maps.
19:05:09 It's really, really complicated process. And the, a standard nautical try it's got like, 30 to 40 layers of information that you can press down onto this map.
19:05:20 And, it's complicated and expensive. And so he's really proud of himself and he was telling me about this and about 5 min into his explanation my I started glazing over because while it was fascinating I am not a GIS expert and I had no idea what he was talking about half the time.
19:05:40 But, so it's, but it's just interesting to see what people do with their machines.
19:05:45 So. Does anyone have anything they'd like to talk about first?
19:05:50 Well, I'm the one that made the suggestion last week, so I made sure and did my homework.
19:05:55 I have a bunch so I wouldn't wanna hog the thing and do all of them but I'll do a couple to start with if, if that would be reasonable.
19:06:04 Do you want to show your screen? I can set it up so you can.
19:06:07 Well, probably. No, it's on my phone and I'm logged in on my computer.
19:06:18 Okay.
19:06:14 So, but I can talk about it and tell you what it does, give you the name and if I know if there's a a subscription like that kind of thing.
19:06:22 So. Okay, so the first ones I got are have to do with nature. So I have a man a folder on my phone called nature.
19:06:33 I've imagined that. Anyway, I have a Merlin bird ID. MERL IN and it identifies birds and it does that by sound so it'll use your speaker and it'll listen and hear the bird and it'll make a darn good guess about what it is.
19:06:52 It also, you know, you can put in the size that has several listed there like hummingbird size, pigeon size and, eagle size or something like that, you know, and you pick one which ones you want there and then it asks you what color or colors it is and you put that in and
19:07:10 then what action is it flying? Is it on a tree? Is it on the ground? What's it doing?
19:07:13 Tree.
19:07:24 Okay.
19:07:15 And you tell it that and it will, give you a good guess based on your location. And then the third way that it, decides, helps you determine what the bird is.
19:07:28 Is it, let you either take or choose a photo so you could take a photo and it'll try to analyze that or it'll, offer to show you a bunch and you can tell us if any of those match.
19:07:43 So, and it does a good job. Especially on the sounds and it has a bunch of there calls and things that you can.
19:07:54 That you can, play back and if it annoys them greatly you'll know that you got the right bird.
19:08:02 Yeah. Evening.
19:08:01 Yeah. So it can base the identification on a photo you take of it. Or on the sound. Huh.
19:08:10 Yes. I do the sound because usually I can't get a good photo of it before it's already gone or whatever.
19:08:20 But and I haven't tried the photo or and I just saw that you could do that and it'll either let you take one or choose one from it's from its database.
19:08:29 Again, it's based on your location. It'll use your GPS to see where you are.
19:08:40 On the east coast, yeah.
19:08:33 So that way it won't include. Like, Australian birds for instance. Yeah, well some of these have databases for you choose whether you want to include.
19:08:48 West Coast versus East Coast versus all of it and that sort of thing. So that's, you know, that's a choice that you make and I can't remember about Merlin.
19:08:58 Merlin has, no subscription. And I can't remember, you know, once you, once you get an app, you can no longer tell the price.
19:09:08 If it's free or whatever because that's hidden from you when you try to go back and look at it again.
19:09:14 So, so I don't remember if it cost anything but I don't think it did and if it was it was cheap.
19:09:22 Oh, was it? Okay, cool. Yeah.
19:09:19 No. Yeah, it was it was free. Yeah, and I use it too. II could comment on that on the on the the microphone It's really sensitive.
19:09:42 Yep.
19:09:33 I'll hear a bird. And I'll hold it up and it'll it'll give me it might give me 3 or 4 birds 2 or 3 that I don't even hear you know and So, but when the bird sings, it lights up the, the hitting.
19:09:52 So it's really a useful app. That'd be one of my favorite ones too. Yeah.
19:09:54 Yeah, I when I, tried to get one the other day, I got the bird that it was, I can't remember what it was now, but it also, I think it was.
19:10:03 Yeah.
19:10:05 Anyway, it also got a hummingbird that I didn't even know was there at the same time.
19:10:09 Yeah, yeah.
19:10:19 Yeah.
19:10:11 So that's, my first one and another one along the same vein is picture this but picture this as a as a $30 a year.
19:10:26 Subscription fee And I don't like that. So I stopped using picture this and now I have another one called Sikh instead.
19:10:35 It's just SEK. It identifies birds, plants, and animals and there's no subscription fee.
19:10:44 So I like that better than the $30 a year that for picture this. Picture this is good for plants and it's quite good at it.
19:10:56 And it also will diagnose problems with, for instance, your house plans. It also will help you identify insects.
19:11:05 Trees and of course birds. Seek, I think it will help you try to identify just about anything.
19:11:16 Verge plants, animals. Probably not buildings. I think it does like bugs and things as well.
19:11:23 So. Good. So that's my 3 to start with. They're all easy to use, especially Merlin.
19:11:33 Picture this it has a bunch of different screens that you have to go through to to, have it work well for you.
19:11:43 And I have more, but I will give somebody else an opportunity to enlighten us with their choices now.
19:11:49 I'm pretty sure Kathleen was going to download Merlin because we were We were stopped at, we stopped at downtown, there was a bird that we could hear was in a tree up.
19:12:06 Yeah.
19:12:02 On Washington. We had no idea what it was, but it sounded really pretty. And so we speculated and she started hitting me because I have strange speculations but.
19:12:13 Knowing what it was would be a nice thing.
19:12:15 Yeah.
19:12:20 Anyone else?
19:12:25 Okay.
19:12:26 Okay.
19:12:25 Hi, I would like to ask. Since we're doing this And, you know, we're, there are useful apps and so forth.
19:12:36 And you might, for example, Tell us more about the Maps app. I wondered if we would consider having special interest groups.
19:12:43 Gracious one.
19:12:44 That would focus, you know, we're. Those of us who are particularly interested in One app might get together outside of our.
19:12:52 Regularly scheduled meetings. I, for example, the app I like best is I movie. Which I, but it's not the one I use the most.
19:13:03 It's just the one that I find. And I get the most pleasure out of using, but I decidedly an amateur.
19:13:10 And in terms of knowing. What it can do. And what the best ways might be. To do the things that I sort of know how to do.
19:13:21 Like for example, use the green screen.
19:13:24 Anyway, everybody knows about I movie so I'll mention one app that I've used which is you can have a subscription to it but it's one of those deals where you have to either pay by the year by the month.
19:13:38 And I don't use it enough. To make that worth. Subscribing to that's called Footpath F.
19:13:49 And it's like Gaia, I think is the name of Another fancy competitor. You know, you can download maps.
19:13:59 Topographical maps and all that sort of thing. But mostly it will show. For example, like it shows all the Olympic discovery trail stuff.
19:14:08 It shows most of the most of the, hiking trails. Yeah, in the Olympic National Park.
19:14:15 So. And it will tell you the distance and the elevation and all that sort of thing. I walk around town, you know, just because my doctor says I have to exercise my back.
19:14:27 So I walk around town and I can you can save up to 5 in the free version. You can save up to 5.
19:14:33 Routes and then you know you can change that. Change the 5 but it's handy because it shows you the street layouts and you know it'll tell you what the distance is you just trace along it And it and includes almost all the streets.
19:14:49 I mean, I haven't found any street that it doesn't include yet. And it has most of the trails around here and, you know, you can trace along those and I'll tell you.
19:14:58 Altitude and distance and so forth and if you If you have location. Turned on then it'll show you you know the GPS thing will show you where you are on the trail.
19:15:12 Which can be handy. For example, we got we got lost one time. Before I understood how to use it.
19:15:21 And after we had. Clambered through the woods and Fortunately intersected the trail.
19:15:30 Yeah.
19:15:27 We ran into a fellow who had gone along the same route that we did. Where we got lost he didn't because he was using the GPS which showed where the trail should be.
19:15:39 It was in the middle of a bramble patch and it is all overgrown. We couldn't see it and he couldn't see it, but he could see where he was and where the trails, should go.
19:15:49 So he just followed that on his phone. And got through it without having to scramble through the woods.
19:15:54 So, you know, I felt kind of foolish. For not understanding how to do that. But at least now I do.
19:16:05 What was the name of that app again?
19:16:01 And anyway, it's a very nice app. That's in the app store. Footpath F 00 TPAT H.
19:16:09 Footpath.
19:16:12 That's in the App Store.
19:16:13 Thank you.
19:16:14 Yeah, my 2 cents.
19:16:18 Since we're on that topic, I'll get to you in a second, Paul. Since we're on that general topic, I use, Strava.
19:16:24 Strava has a paid version. As well as a free version. I just use the free version.
19:16:31 And when I ride my bike or I go for a walk. I just leave my phone in my pocket.
19:16:37 I don't bother to. Look at it because if I can see where I'm going, I don't care.
19:16:45 But among other things, it has a complication that I can put on my phone because if I can see where I'm going, I don't care.
19:16:55 Yeah.
19:16:55 But among other things, it has a complication that I can from my wristwatch and it maps out my path so that if I'm riding my bike it'll tell me how far I went and give me a map of where I went, tell me the relative elevation and the distance and the speed and while I'm using it I
19:17:11 don't pay any attention to it, but it gives me a record of my walk or my bike ride and Strava has 2 versions and they constantly ping you to upgrade it to the professional version, but.
19:17:24 The free version is fine with me. And the nice thing about the mass is I can I can email them to Kathleen or she can email me.
19:17:32 Her map so that she can show that she went half a mile farther than I did her. Was 2 min faster or whatever she wants to, but, It's a different purpose than what then.
19:17:47 Footpath because it doesn't guide me. If I'm going down the street, I don't really I don't need the guide, but I would like to have a record of how far it was and the distance and elevation and the time.
19:18:02 So that's handy for me. Paul, you had something to say?
19:18:07 Yeah, well, I use Gaia and, That's a good one. It does show some of the.
19:18:15 Some of the trails and And things we use it when we're mountain biking.
19:18:22 I use it when I'm mountain biking and like you say it gives you where you you know, it gives you a track.
19:18:27 Now I had a question about footpaths. Does that track where you've been? The footpath.
19:18:34 Well, no, it's just not the free version just shows. Just shows the route you choose.
19:18:42 I mean, for example, it's got it shows all the trails in the area and then you'd Use your finger and, or I guess you could use a pencil on an iPad.
19:18:53 Oh, okay.
19:18:52 You drag along where you wanna go and it'll tell you, it'll tell you, you know, mile by mile.
19:18:58 It does it by miles. I don't know if you can you can do it in kilometers, but I don't think it'll do.
19:19:03 Finer gradations than a mile. So for example, if it's a 7 mile. Trail.
19:19:10 It'll tell you the entire. Link like 7.2 5. And it will put a mile marker at each mile from whichever end you start.
19:19:19 Right. I found it. My wife. Wristwatch or the the Apple watch.
19:19:27 Compared to her iPhone will give me almost all of the information that Lawrence was just saying he gets from.
19:19:37 He is a, yeah.
19:19:35 Gaia. I mean, there's a map. There it shows the elevation.
19:19:40 You know, it shows all that stuff.
19:19:45 Well, I would definitely check it out.
19:19:46 So. Gota is a subscription, isn't it?
19:19:53 It's both.
19:19:55 Okay, so you either pick the pro version or the Free version. Oh, okay.
19:20:05 How do you spell Gaia?
19:20:09 She
19:20:09 . That's Greek. It means earth. It's a god of earth.
19:20:21 If you're great.
19:20:22 I was wondering what that meant.
19:20:25 Okay.
19:20:31 Anyone else?
19:20:36 Well, I've got more if, if people are.
19:20:40 Well, I may have one kind of. More of a scientific, or programming tool.
19:20:53 Hmm.
19:20:50 But I like a BB edit for for program, I program in Pearl and Unix.
19:20:57 And, it really shows you the syntax by color. Of all the commands and if you spill it wrong, it you know it It catches it for you.
19:21:10 So, I like that and, One another one called Tech Shop. And so I tutor algebra and and have equation.
19:21:21 It's I like to write a equations in PowerPoint, but PowerPoint is Not good at typesetting, you know, the radical sign and the, integral sign and the differentials.
19:21:34 And things of that nature, but tech shop does it perfectly and then you can copy and paste the answer into PowerPoint.
19:21:44 So it's, a real handy tool.
19:21:46 There's a copied in. Does it copy and is edible or is it is it an image?
19:21:53 No, let's see, is it an image? It's PDF and then it makes a PDF out of the out of the clipboard.
19:22:04 And you paste the PDF. Image into your into, so it's not really text.
19:22:13 You can't really edit it except in tech shop.
19:22:17 Okay.
19:22:18 And but once you get the final looking equation, it looks gorgeous. Absolutely the fonts and size ratios are just perfect for like it was a professionally typeset page.
19:22:33 So it really is a handy tool. And it's free. It's in it's in the Apple store.
19:22:41 As well as BB edit, both of them are in the Apple store.
19:22:44 The guy who invented. Pdf i can't remember his name right now he's one of the founders of Adobe.
19:22:53 He founded Adobe in order to develop type setting languages for mathematics. So Adobe now is known for art but He was a mathematician and he wanted to typeset mathematics.
19:23:07 And Nicholas, who does all the programming books. He invented the, a language specifically.
19:23:18 For typesetting to type set his books.
19:23:19 Oh, yeah, another thing, I noticed about, tech shop allows you to type set a movie, an MP 4 file into the page.
19:23:32 But if it becomes so PDF Apple's preview will not. Not show the movie, it just shows a blank spot, but Adobe's reader will play the movie perfectly.
19:23:47 On a slide show. It's a really, has a bitter, more advanced feature than preview in that respect.
19:23:58 Is it available for, iPad as well as Mac or just Mac?
19:24:03 No, it's, both Mac and iPad.
19:24:09 But it's, but I, it would be better with a keyboard in the iPad rather than trying to do it on the keyboard in the iPad rather than trying to do it on the screen with your finger.
19:24:18 Yeah, yeah.
19:24:19 Yeah.
19:24:22 Yeah, I use it on my laptop. I don't use it on my iPad.
19:24:28 Anyway, that's my 2. Go ahead. If you've got a couple more run.
19:24:34 Huh. Cool.
19:24:32 Yeah. I have a couple or I have one anyway. A, from the library.
19:24:36 Oh, there you go. Yeah, go for it.
19:24:42 You can download books either, audio or, written. Just depends on what you want and they don't have everything, but they have a lot.
19:25:03 It's L.
19:24:56 And I listen to books all the time. So that is one of my favorite apps. And it's LIDB Y.
19:25:07 And just, you know, go to the, to the local library, North Olympic Library system and you can download it.
19:25:14 And then you're good to go.
19:25:17 Question, would the apples book app? Read it or no?
19:25:24 No, Libby is it's own self-contained thing. The reason why, libraries endorse it is that, it allows them to deal with copyright because you don't actually keep the book unlike Apple's books. You don't actually keep the book unlike Apple's books. You actually own the book with Libby.
19:25:43 You basically check it out.
19:25:44 Right, and you have a time limit to read it. And you could get on a list.
19:25:50 You can, you know, sign up for books and, it will tell you when they're available and then you can download it if you want or you can.
19:25:58 Tell them to hold it for another week or whatever. I'm on a long list of different books and they come and, you generally have 2 weeks to read them.
19:26:10 So, you know. There you go.
19:26:13 So, and if you don't get it read in that length of time, then do you have to wait your turn again?
19:26:21 I assume before you can get it again and read the rest.
19:26:21 You know, I, it depends on the book. I've had some that, came close to the due date and they were automatically renewed.
19:26:30 Oh.
19:26:30 And, and yeah, so I don't know. I just I have not run into that problem.
19:26:39 Yeah, Olympic is. It's a very kind and warm and fuzzy library system.
19:26:46 I had one. Book checked out that, My mother got ill and I was busy for a couple of weeks.
19:26:55 And I was gonna go to the library to renew it and I looked at my email and the library system renewed it automatically.
19:27:04 Wow.
19:27:04 So. It doesn't work. It doesn't work that way all the time, but, They're definitely a warm and fuzzy library system.
19:27:15 I probably so. Yeah, probably.
19:27:17 Sir, and you can return them early, if you finish it. I mean, there's a button for that and it will show you how many people are waiting for the book.
19:27:12 Maybe it depends on if there's somebody else waiting for it or something or pretty good.
19:27:33 Have you found that the selection is extensive?
19:27:39 Yeah, for the most part, and, you know popular books tend to get there and You can always also do kind of like a wish list.
19:27:55 So II mean, there are some books that I would, that, I would like to read that they don't have.
19:28:03 But, you know. So it goes.
19:28:09 Libby.
19:28:11 Yeah.
19:28:11 I'm putting, I'm putting the link. To the library system for this. Into the chat right now.
19:28:19 Okay.
19:28:22 Oh, somebody asked me for the sign in for the meeting. So let's see if I can put that.
19:28:28 Getting good.
19:28:28 It's up there.
19:28:30 It's up there. Yeah.
19:28:32 If they came in late, they might not see it.
19:28:39 So I shall. See if I can copy it. Put it back in again.
19:28:52 And I'm having trouble with copying.
19:29:04 It doesn't like me today. How are you?
19:29:09 Lauren, I just put it. I just put it in.
19:29:13 Oh, okay. Good. Thank you.
19:29:16 Right after Libby. The Forums. That's the
19:29:24 Yeah, my copy pay skills seem to be defective today. I was I was using my I have a wireless keyboard for my computer.
19:29:34 And it's charged via a lightning cable. And I forget that and yesterday I was typing away and in mid paragraph it stopped working and I couldn't figure out why and I thought there was something wrong with the computer.
19:29:50 And then I thought, you know, it's probably been a while since I charged it.
19:29:53 Sometimes those little advantages. Of electronics fail you because usually your fault, but Anyone else?
19:30:06 Kathleen wants to talk about timer.
19:30:10 Kathleen.
19:30:15 So, oh my. Watch. I have something called timer and I use that all the time.
19:30:24 It's useful for like if I'm doing laundry and I'll. Set it so it'll remind me when things are done or I'll use it to set a time to leave if I'm have to and I'm in the middle of doing something will do that.
19:30:39 But I, you can both put in a custom time or you can select from existing. Times
19:30:57 Okay.
19:30:52 They're pre-selected. Just like. I need to put it on the opposite side of my wrist.
19:31:01 There are. Pre-selected times that you can pick. Right.
19:31:06 And I realize they're probably upside down, but all you have to do is just tap it.
19:31:10 And then it'll set one of those times or if you. When it for 45 min and you can type in 45 min the other thing, a related thing is, the reminders.
19:31:26 Reminders, the reminders is to remind to go get gasoline to go do this, that the other thing, but you can set up a reminder to not only tell you what time to go do this, like do this on Tuesday.
19:31:41 You can also set it with GPS coordinates. So if you go into reminders, doesn't work so well on your Mac if you're if you have a desktop machine.
19:31:48 But if you have a I found you can go into reminders and you can tell it a place. So it'll remind you when you get to Costco to buy cat food.
19:31:56 In our case that wouldn't do us much good because we don't have a cat but but it'll when you get to that location it reminds you that you're supposed to do that so go to Walgreens and pick up your prescription go to QFC and remember to get milk.
19:32:11 And as you approach that and it'll it'll buzz your wrist on your on your.
19:32:17 Watch or your phone about I'd say half a block to a block away it'll buzz it to remind you to that there's something there that you want to do.
19:32:28 So between reminders and the timer. And then just alarms that, you know, have an alarm to do something.
19:32:37 Those are probably some of the most commonly used. Tools that we use on our iPhones and Apple watches
19:32:46 Dimers also has a favorites. You can set favorites and it'll have another little separate list for them too.
19:32:52 Yeah, and Kathleen just reminded me. When I said that the buzz is the phone, it'll rattle of phone back and forth.
19:33:00 But if you're watching your risk will vibrate. When you're when you're using apple maps to go someplace and you're supposed to turn left Do your watch can't tell you that it's going that you need to turn left, but it'll vibrate tell you that you're supposed to
19:33:16 turn. And I recently found out that it'll that it has a signal for left and right. So it's like if it's going one direction that's one vibrate if you're going the other directions too.
19:33:29 I don't happen to remember what those are because as Kathleen will tell you I never bother to follow directions anyway.
19:33:35 Oh.
19:33:35 Bye.
19:33:35 It.
19:33:38 I don't know how do you tell, when you're looking at an app. And the Apple app.
19:33:44 Store whether it costs money or not.
19:33:48 If it's in the app store, it should list the price next to it. If it cost money.
19:33:53 Well, if you already own it, but. Yeah, but it varies if you're trying to get something.
19:33:59 Yeah.
19:34:01 What?
19:33:59 Yeah, if you already own it, it just says it changes to open. But if you don't own it, then it'll show you either a get or it'll tell you the price.
19:34:11 Okay.
19:34:13 And also you can read down it if you're afraid that there might be a subscription involved, which I don't like subscriptions.
19:34:20 I have a bunch, but I don't like them. But if you read down through the description of the thing.
19:34:26 It'll have a section on if it's compatible with your device and all that sort of thing.
19:34:31 In there it says, price or cost or something like that and it'll say yes or no.
19:34:39 And then or maybe it says paid but anyway if you click on that it'll tell you you know like 4 99 a month or $60 a year or, you know, that sort of thing.
19:34:50 So.
19:34:48 Yeah, this is. This is an app on the app store for your phone called Chart Maker and right under the button that says get.
19:34:59 It says in tiny, tiny little print in app purchases, which means that you can you can download it for free.
19:35:07 And sometimes the only thing you can do free is to download it, but in others you can at least get to play with it and decide whether or not it's something you want to spend money on.
19:35:20 It's kind of the difference between acrobat reader and acrobat. You can download acrobat Reader from Adobe for free, but you can't use it to create new PDFs, acrobat at the full version of acrobat you can.
19:35:34 You can create PDFs, you can edit PDFs, you can do all kinds of things with PDFs with acrobat reader you can just read it and some of the free versions that's basically what you can do.
19:35:44 You can look at. Something else that was done with that application, but you can't create something new or they add extra feed it choose like with with Strava I was mentioning that it'll allow me to go out and bike around the neighborhood and draw me a map and tell me the change in elevation my speed and all kinds of
19:36:04 things. But if I sign up for the pro version, it does more. Now, I personally can't think of what else that I want to do.
19:36:16 Yeah.
19:36:14 So I don't know what I'm missing, but. You.
19:36:23 Yeah
19:36:18 Sometimes the pro version of those things How are you to compete against other people? You know, so you can see all their times and your times and in real time.
19:36:28 You might have noticed from the hair on my head what little I have. Competition biking is not really in my.
19:36:37 Yeah.
19:36:39 List of ambitions. So. The free version is fine for me.
19:36:45 Sure.
19:36:40 Okay. I have another set of them I can share. We have Tide Pro, which, if you're wondering, oh, the tides.
19:36:53 I wonder if it's coming in or going out and you can pull it up on your phone and it'll tell you.
19:36:58 What time the highs and lows are and how far it's gonna be and all that sort of thing.
19:37:05 What was his name?
19:37:08 Right, pro.
19:37:06 I'd pro. And I believe it was free, but I'm not certain it might have been 99 cents or something like that, but there's no subscription.
19:37:16 Okay, and then next one is, relative for us. It's watch duty.
19:37:24 And that one is a wildfire maps and alerts app.
19:37:29 Hmm. Yeah.
19:37:30 That might be a good one to have around. Since we live so close to the to the National Forest.
19:37:38 That was watch duty and it was free as well. Then there's another one called the ferry friend.
19:37:46 Probably a lot of this if you use it very, very much. Just goes the watchdog.
19:37:52 The site and get your information there, but fairy friend has a really easy interface to let you see the cameras and, over the lines, you know, in Georgia.
19:38:03 What's going on? Of course, what times they are, how far they're behind if there's any alerts that you need to be aware of.
19:38:10 And it's really nice user interface.
19:38:15 Speaking of things, for tides, I use something called, What does it call?
19:38:23 It's called. Ocean watch and ocean watch. Gives you tides and such And the reason why I use that is that, it allows me to put a complication.
19:38:39 A complication is an extra feature. On my Apple watch so that I can just glance on my watch and it tells me that the tide right now is 8.1 feet above.
19:38:48 Slack tied and it's going down. And why do I have this on my watch? Because I'm a photographer and the kinds of photographs that you can take at low tide are very different than the kinds that you can take at high tide.
19:39:02 So if I want to go take pictures of birds, low tides great. If I want to go take pictures of waves, high tides, is much more interesting to me.
19:39:10 It just it's on my watch so I can look at it and say, oh, I should head to the beach.
19:39:15 Let's go.
19:39:15 So do you use photo pills by any chance?
19:39:19 Pardon me?
19:39:23 No.
19:39:20 Photo pills PILL S. That has to do with Pardon me. Oh, sorry.
19:39:30 Well, the one I have is called, Ocean Watch.
19:39:25 What was in? What was the name of the tide? You motion watch okay thanks
19:39:36 Yeah, photo pills helps you set up all for it used to be just for, eclipses and times of the moon and where to be and what you could expect to see from that position and so on.
19:39:52 Exponentially is wonderful. It's I believe it's free but if it isn't there is no.
19:40:01 Okay.
19:40:00 No subscription but it just gives you all kinds of information about pre-setting up locations and you know if you wanted to get that mountain peak, so that the moon is coming up right behind it.
19:40:15 For instance, you know, it helps you plan all that stuff. And what time to be there and the exact coordinates and all that sort of stuff.
19:40:22 It's wonderful. It has a lot of. Teaching type stuff in it to a lot of extra videos they just really go the extra mile for everything it does and that wasn't even on my list to share.
19:40:33 Well, it's definitely on my list now.
19:40:36 Oh yeah, yeah, you'll like it.
19:40:36 What was the name of it? What's the name?
19:40:40 A photo pills. 2 separate words.
19:40:42 Hills.
19:40:51 Okay, so let's see. There's one called Altimeter. Yeah, works just like an altimeter on an airplane.
19:41:00 Are you on a small airplane? You know, looks like that has that dial and it shows you what your altitude is.
19:41:05 It's, It's a really handy one as well. Another one that I really, really like is called peak finder.
19:41:16 Okay.
19:41:15 PEAK is in mountains and finder. And it allows you to hold your phone or your iPad up against or towards in the direction of the hills and it will make an outline along those hills and show you the name each one of those hills no matter 3 layers if it's hidden from you it won't
19:41:33 Oh.
19:41:36 show you like for instance it just shows the mountains that are if you look out there and if you can see a mountain that will be listed, but if it's hidden by another something, then it won't show you.
19:41:49 It still hasn't in its database, but it won't show you. It'll tell you the names and I believe the altitudes and this works.
19:41:56 As far as I can tell, anywhere in the world because I was in Australia and it certainly worked there.
19:42:02 Austria doesn't have any mountains, so you know.
19:42:06 Yeah.
19:42:04 Yeah, they have hills. Oh, they have glass mountains. That's mountains they have there. They're not mountains like we're used to, but.
19:42:14 Yeah.
19:42:24 Yeah.
19:42:15 So, KAY, another one along with Peak Finder is. Ship Finder and that one allows you to look out in the bay and you see a ship out there that you're interested in or wondering about.
19:42:32 You can point your phone towards it and it will do a good job of identifying it where it's from, where it's going to, how much it weighs, what speed it's doing.
19:42:43 It's, all kinds of information and marine traffic is another similar one to that. And marine traffic is another similar one to that. Only it gives you even more information about them.
19:42:55 Only it gives you an head down or a airplane view of what you're seeing rather than looking straight out at at it.
19:43:02 Okay.
19:43:03 And, oh the Let's see. So there's another one like, finder that I like even better, but I don't trust there's 2 things about it.
19:43:16 It's called the 3D map and peak ID. He could buy a peak visor. Now this is 3 49 a month or $30 a year, but it's It's country of origin.
19:43:32 I believe it was China. I'm not sure now maybe. Maybe Korea or South Korea or something.
19:43:39 I can't remember now, but anyway, it gave me pause before I wanted to continue using it once I found that out because I don't trust you know, some of those companies that are associated with web type things.
19:43:54 Yeah.
19:43:55 Okay, so somebody else wanted to take a turn. I got more if you want.
19:44:02 Yes, Paul.
19:44:02 Hi, just along the lines of, reminders when you were talking about those. I find that one of the calendar is Apple's calendar app.
19:44:11 One of the best features of it. Is to set alerts which are reminders. Which you can have pop up.
19:44:20 It'll pop up on the lock screen. I tell you, you know, I usually set it for a day in advance and an hour in advance.
19:44:28 Default
19:44:28 They'll pop up on the lock screen and remind you, you know, tell you what the appointment is and where and whatever information you put in there about it.
19:44:36 I find that very helpful.
19:44:39 The same thing.
19:44:38 You can also set traffic up for it if you have a location, put in for your appointment is.
19:44:48 It'll tell you what time you have to leave based on what the traffic is. I find it helpful.
19:44:52 Okay.
19:44:53 It also lets you set up family accounts. So when I put something on the calendar, the default for me is for my family.
19:45:05 So therefore it automatically goes to my wife's inbox for her calendar and then it puts it on her calendar too but she can you know verify that she got it by checking it off and that sort of thing but But then we know when one of us already has something planned for the day or the week or the month or whatever.
19:45:20 Yeah.
19:45:21 That also works with carplay. Have I got an appointment with the address in the appointment on the calendar?
19:45:29 Get in your car. Whatever time it is be it tells you the travel time that it's gonna take to get there and if you get in your car within that travel time it'll actually automatically put up the directions and says you've got and you don't even have to type it into the into the carplay.
19:45:49 It just comes up and you just say go and it just starts the directions from the calendar on your iPhone.
19:45:57 So that is an amazing. Thing and it also, like you said, Everybody in your family uses the one calendar and so it goes on my wife's iPhone automatically and my laptop automatically and the iPad automatically.
19:46:13 That's great, great application.
19:46:13 Yep. Yeah, yeah, they did good.
19:46:18 Yeah.
19:46:24 No, go ahead.
19:46:25 No.
19:46:19 I have a question. It's actually, Am I interrupting somebody? I was curious from everybody who's here tonight and online.
19:46:31 A lot of people, well I know Lawrence is a big one that refers a lot to his Apple watch and all the things he uses.
19:46:41 I was just curious from everybody that's on here now. That has an Apple Watch, what was your biggest reason for getting it and was it worth it?
19:46:51 Do you feel like Was it fall detection? Was it that you can answer your phone from it? What made you like it or was it worth it to you?
19:47:03 I got it on the basis of what Kathleen had told us a couple of different times. And,
19:47:11 Like, is that a lot of it the medical alert kind of things? At the
19:47:15 Well, I've been I've been I've been considering. Getting an alert device in case I fell in the shower or between the kitchen and the living room.
19:47:31 And I could never make up my mind. So I thought if this does it. I'm in.
19:47:38 So. When I had to upgrade my phone before a Verizon turned my old flip phone into a brick.
19:47:45 I was already a deal on the SE second generation, which is what I got. So it the, second generation.
19:47:56 Does not do all the things that Kathleen had. Told us about. Because it's well, I get it's not an ultra.
19:48:07 I wasn't gonna spring for an old trip and I wanted to test the waters. But something I now do every day.
19:48:14 Is second or third thing in the morning. Certainly when I started my first cup of coffee. I check.
19:48:23 To see how I slipped. How many steps I took yesterday? If my heart rate went below a certain number of beats per minute, which I have preset.
19:48:40 And then there's something else that I always look at. But I can't remember.
19:48:47 It will tell me. If I've been exposed to sound levels over a hundred decibels.
19:48:54 So when the Noisy pickup at the end of the truck goes by and I happen to be sitting on the front porch.
19:49:01 It will record that I had a high high high rate of it high level of exposure. So, I, it's doing more things now.
19:49:13 The watches then. 2 months ago even. I think because of updates to the iPhone operating system.
19:49:24 I still haven't figured out when I'm paying Verizon for exactly. For the IWAT connection.
19:49:33 So It's half a mystery to me, but I do like the feedback. For the heartbeat rate.
19:49:42 Overnight. And number of steps. Records that but that's from the iPhone so if I get up in the middle of the night I have to be carrying the iPhone.
19:49:55 In order for it to record and transmit to the watch later. That's all.
19:50:01 And the part of what you're paying for it. Like on mine II don't have it so that I can use it as a phone.
19:50:10 I know.
19:50:10 It either has to be connected via Bluetooth or on my wife I hear at home because I didn't want another.
19:50:18 Yeah.
19:50:16 As Ron was talking about subscription. Something, I mean, between Netflix and the magazine subscriptions and apps.
19:50:25 I mean, it's just endless and you can end up with hundreds of dollars just on subscriptions and you don't end up using them all and I just find a pointless.
19:50:34 So
19:50:33 Yeah, I think I need to talk to Verizon about. Taking something off my charge because I'm not using the I haven't got it connected to function as a phone.
19:50:46 To watch.
19:50:46 Actually, you do and that's what you're paying for. You might not use it that way, but it's all set up to use.
19:50:55 Yeah, yeah. I don't either. Yeah.
19:50:53 If you're paying for it. I don't pay for mine. It's Yeah, I just have it so that if my phone is within proximity to my watch, which typically they are or if I'm at home and it's on Wi-Fi, well then it just picks it up throughout the
19:51:12 house.
19:51:14 So then.
19:51:12 Yeah, same with mine. No. And then sometimes I answer on it. It's not great, but it does okay, you know, as far as answering with it.
19:51:22 Right, and if it's somebody that you really need to talk to, it's enough for them to know that you'll call them right back or yeah.
19:51:29 Yeah.
19:51:30 Anybody else have one that can? Enlighten.
19:51:35 Kathleen got her watch first because when she saw the keynote on it. She had me order one immediately.
19:51:45 And, when my mother's my mother started living with us, we bought one for her because one reason why she was living with us is she had fallen at her apartment in Bremerton and broken her leg.
19:52:02 So we talked her into, yeah, to having the watches for fall detection, but she also on her own.
19:52:11 She figured out that she could check her blood oxygen level and she didn't have to stick the little thing on her fingers.
19:52:18 She could just do it from the watch. And she could check her heart rate and EKG and all the rest of this, from the phone and She found that fascinating.
19:52:28 And, recently they updated the, Apple health app. Which is on the phone. So that you can put your entire medication schedule into Apple health.
19:52:40 And if you do that, then the watch will prompt you when you need to take pills. And she thought that was kind of cute.
19:52:48 I didn't know to do that. My mother told me about that. So. The integration between the phone and the watch is really quite high when it comes to health apps And this fall.
19:53:00 The next version of the iPad, operating system will have the health app on it. Right now it's limited to just the phone and the watch, but this fall they're bringing it to the iPad as well which for me is useful because I have a keyboard for the iPad and I'd much
19:53:18 rather type a lot of that stuff into my iPad than sit there and poke at it one thing with my with my finger on this stupid little keyboard So, the integration is really quite high.
19:53:30 Having said that Kathleen. Told me to buy this phone for the health benefits. What I use it for mostly, I use it for voice memos.
19:53:40 I use it for weather. I use it for the tides. I use it for the activity. I use it for Strava for mapping things out.
19:53:50 Those are the thing I also use it. I have a complication here. Tell me the time in London.
19:53:57 My daughter lives in England and if I want to color up on Facetime. Right now it's.
19:54:02 3 34 in the morning. So probably not a good. 3 54 in the morning.
19:54:07 Not a good time to color. So the what I use the watch for is mostly everything except for the health stuff because the health stuff it just keeps track of that and then occasionally bugs me about it if I'm not doing something.
19:54:20 But like the, for example, the with the, noise level. It never really occurred to me to worry about noise because I'm not.
19:54:29 Wild about loud noises anyway. But, coming down Fifth Avenue, as I mentioned earlier, they're doing construction on Fifth Avenue and my watch buzz to tell me, hey, it's too loud.
19:54:41 Go someplace else.
19:54:43 Yeah.
19:54:47 Yeah.
19:54:48 Yeah.
19:54:52 Yes.
19:54:50 I have a question. When, as an example that, A peak finder, I went.
19:54:58 And took a look at that and it wants your Apple ID. 2. Download that.
19:55:07 Is that normal?
19:55:08 Yes, it is because what you're doing, think about it from a security standpoint. You are taking something from the Apple Store and you're putting it onto your device.
19:55:18 And so Apple wants to know, are you really the person that it should be sending it to? And you want to know that it's trusted.
19:55:29 So you were telling Apple to trust your device and you're telling your device to trust Apple to transfer it onto your phone.
19:55:34 That the onto your phone or onto your Mac or whatever. So it's always gonna ask you for your Apple ID.
19:55:40 And your Apple ID is something that. It's something that you should definitely note should know what that is.
19:55:47 But this, I thought for the password.
19:55:53 Yes.
19:55:51 Yeah, that's that too. Let me know. Ask you for your idea and your password.
19:55:58 But once you get that locked into your device, then you don't have to put it in every time.
19:56:01 I understand but is I guess I'm leery about putting out my Apple ID and password on to, you know, into an app that I know nothing about who created that or anything.
19:56:14 Right.
19:56:14 Well, yes, but you're not sending it. You're not sending it to Apple ID and password to the developer.
19:56:21 You're sending your Apple ID and password to Apple. And that's perfectly logical because they run the Apple ID service.
19:56:29 So. They should know what you who you are and you should know who they are.
19:56:32 Sure, as long as it's coming from Apple. Yeah.
19:56:37 And all of your apps that you get at least currently, all your apps that you get for your phone and your iPad and your and your watch will all be coming from Apple.
19:56:49 The Apple store. Sounds like in the future maybe federal laws or at least, European.
19:56:57 Maybe the campaigns.
19:56:58 Yeah, they're, changing there so that might make it happen here too. I hope not because that's one of the big things about Apple is their their security is so good because they control everything and they weed out the bad stuff.
19:57:14 Thanks.
19:57:28 Dictated it, man.
19:57:12 Yeah. This, fall for example. The new I'm guessing but I'm guessing that the new Apple phones when they come out this fall are gonna have a USBC connector because the European Union said that Yeah, they dictated it and since it's gonna be cheaper for Apple to make one version of the
19:57:36 phone. I'm guessing we're gonna get USBC connectors on. Iphones as well.
19:57:41 They should have done that with 14 already because when my I got my iPad. Pro, I don't know, a couple of years ago it already had the C.
19:57:52 So I was already I don't know. It's just stupid to have 2 cables like what I can't use the same cable for my iPad as I can from my phone.
19:58:00 I am aware of that problem because I experienced that as well.
19:58:05 Probably daily.
19:58:08 The other nice advantage, this is completely off the topic of apps, but the
19:58:13 The USB C connectors. Assuming that you have the right kind of charger will be able to charge your devices faster because it supports more current than the lightning cable.
19:58:26 The lightning cable, it looks like it's just a wire, but it's actually got electronics inside of it.
19:58:31 That among other things keep your device from getting over charged and USBC has that as well, but it's for a different.
19:58:39 Different standard and so you can It'll charge things faster. We found that out. When we have a Apple Watch charger.
19:58:48 For the original Apple Watch and I and I got a. Whatever my watch is. 8 or something. I don't remember what my watch was and it came with a USBC charger and it charges in about half the time is the old one.
19:59:03 The old ones based upon a different version of the USB standard and The new one, it just charges it faster, which is which is cool.
19:59:12 Anyone want to talk about apps?
19:59:15 I just wanted to ask Steve what he was. When you mentioned getting together outside of smug in regards to maybe specific apps or Could you elaborate more on what you meant?
19:59:29 Well, some users groups have. What they call special interest groups within the user group. Which are people who for example, might wanna learn more about the watch.
19:59:41 Or in my case more about I movie. And those groups could elect to meet. Outside of the regular meeting time.
19:59:53 And on different days or you know, different places, that sort of thing. But they'd be focused on.
19:59:59 Whatever that special interest is whether it's the watch or the calendar maps you know, photography. That's sort of thing.
20:00:07 Hmm.
20:00:08 I was just thinking that you know, we're about to the point where we could have in person meetings.
20:00:13 So. I mean, I'm fine doing the Zoom Meetings for our regular meetings. But if anybody was in for me interested in meeting outside of our regular meeting time to focus specifically on a movie, I'd be all for it.
20:00:31 Because I wanna learn more about it.
20:00:31 Yeah, one of the first, smug meetings that I came to. Whereas a gentleman, I don't remember his name.
20:00:39 Who came and talked about I movie. I was a little bit disappointed because he limited his talk to I movie on the iPad, which is
20:00:48 Kind of a subset of a subset and so it wasn't as useful as II would have thought if he demonstrated it on the on the Mac but I'm all for I'm all in favor of that sort of thing if we come up with some topics we can either just announce it to everyone and we on a different day
20:01:10 or we can make that the meeting topic. And I also like the idea of having more in-person ones.
20:01:16 The in person meeting we had at this started June, there weren't that many people there, but they weren't the same people who came to smug meeting.
20:01:28 So I got a different audience and that's that's useful. A lot of people are very uncomfortable.
20:01:35 With virtual meetings. A lot of people have been in government. Associate virtual meetings with committee meetings.
20:01:44 And those who weren't in government associate virtual meetings with being kind of a poor TV they they'd rather talk to people in person.
20:01:55 Also the kinds of questions that I get. Here in in a Zoom Meeting you ask a question everybody hears it But in in person meetings, people come up afterwards and they say, I did something stupid on my computer.
20:02:10 Can you help? And they'll say that to me privately, but they don't want to say that to everybody.
20:02:17 So it's a different type of. It's a different type of atmosphere for an in person meeting.
20:02:25 So I have a question for you, Lawrence. Since I'm gonna be the one that has this.
20:02:32 Stupid problem. Something happened. Make a long story short. I had an old Mac Mini.
20:02:40 We're going back. My daughter's 18, so maybe 15 years. 16 years and
20:02:49 The somebody. And will not mention names. Took the hard drive out and then put the newer a bigger hard drive in it.
20:02:59 And then that hard drive got taken out. And now It looks like World War III. So I have our I have hard internal hard drives.
20:03:10 That aren't in the Mac mini anymore. And I probably have. Not so I have external ones and ones that were actually in the Mac mini that Don't have a case so I can't just like plug them in with the USB into a computer to see what's on it.
20:03:30 Yes.
20:03:28 Does that make sense what I'm trying to say? Like II need it, a shell to put it in.
20:03:35 They're pretty common.
20:03:34 No. You need that.
20:03:36 I'm sorry? What was that, Ron?
20:03:38 They're very common. You can you can find them and they're easy to use. Depending on the interface that your hard drive has, it will have a.
20:03:48 25 pins back there or it will have some other interface on the on the back of the drive and it.
20:03:55 Plugs into that and then on the other side as a USB. So it's really easy to use.
20:04:00 Some of them either even have multiple. Different interfaces that you can plug it into either that 25 PIN or 12 PIN you know depending on what it is but they're made for plugging in a a loose hard drive so that you can get the data off.
20:04:17 Or you can use them that way if you want to.
20:04:17 Yeah, they. I have, I call it a, a disc toaster and I can't.
20:04:25 Oh.
20:04:24 Show it to you right now because it's plugged into a different computer, but it looks like a small toaster and you take a bare hard drive and you just plug it in.
20:04:32 And, it makes a connection. The, thing is a little on the expensive side like 60 70 bucks, but I use it all the time so I don't care.
20:04:44 You can also go out and get inexpensive cases that are like 50 bucks and you put it into the into the case.
20:04:50 And you're basically building your own external drive that way. A good place to look for things like this is other world computing.
20:05:02 Bye.
20:04:59 Type it in as 3 different words and look for drive cases and drive docs and it'll give you a variety of those to play with.
20:05:10 But.
20:05:10 So my question though is So I understand what you're telling me, but I am so novice to it because I am really not a desktop user at all.
20:05:23 I'm a mobile user and I don't even have. a desktop computer.
20:05:36 Thank you.
20:05:29 So what I was wondering, is there anybody, Lawrence that could help me or Ron? Or Steve, I don't know.
20:05:41 That would be willing to help me take all my external hard drives that some were in computers that some were in computers that do not have a case.
20:05:52 I don't know to help me take all my external hard drives that some were in computers that do not have a case.
20:05:55 I don't know how to order a case. I don't know what I'm looking for. You're talking pins.
20:05:56 I kind of know what pins mean So I have like a bag full of these external hard drives terabytes and terabytes and they've been copied and copied and put on here and somebody says, oh, all your pictures are all on here.
20:06:10 But then something happens and they're not all on there. I just literally want all these 10 items put on one.
20:06:18 Hard drive that I can say it's all here and I don't have to worry if I lose any of these externals that I have one.
20:06:31 Okay.
20:06:29 One external hard drive that I can plug into a computer and then I can try to figure out how I'm gonna sort my pictures.
20:06:38 But I'm totally lost.
20:06:38 Okay, nice and interesting. Is that if you were to pick one of the drives. So that I can, well, pick 2 if they're different sizes, but, physically size, like you might have, 5, 3 and a half and a, and a 2 and a half drive.
20:06:58 Pick up.
20:06:57 Wouldn't they have to be the same size if they were from the same Mac Mini? Internally.
20:07:04 Okay.
20:07:02 Yes. Well, yes, but you see the original Mac mini had a had a 3 and a half inch drive and then later on they had smaller ones because they were more.
20:07:11 Oh, it's a real old one. I mean, we're going back like when the Mac Mini first came out.
20:07:17 Okay, you need to you need 2 things one you need to provide the drive for me to play with and see if I could do it.
20:07:26 Ucsb, you need to get a USB flash drive stick and this is Where's my camera?
20:07:33 I see.
20:07:33 Yeah.
20:07:32 There's my camera. This one has a USB end on it and the reason why a USBC end on it you can go into Amazon and order them.
20:07:41 But get one big enough to hold what you think. That needs to be rescued out of the drive.
20:07:47 And if I can get the drive to boot and if it's that old, it's kind of F if I can get the drive.
20:07:53 To boot, I can copy the contents onto USB drive. I can then give you the USB drive and you can plug it into your iPad.
20:08:02 Yeah, I have a drive like that that's at least 2 TB if not 4.
20:08:07 Might be 4 and it's tiny little thing and it just plugged into USBC on one end and then the US.
20:08:18 USBA.
20:08:14 USB something else on the other end and I have to look into my yeah and I have that plugged into the back of my Mac.
20:08:24 But if you give me a, a flash drive, it's got a USbc and make a guess as to how big you need like if 256, gigs, 500 gigs, you can get them on Amazon.
20:08:37 And then give me the flash drive, give me the drive and I'll see if I can get stuff off of it.
20:08:42 But that way you don't have, I can give you back the drive, but I can also give you the flash drive, which you can plug into your mother's computer or into your iPad and do with it whatever you wish.
20:08:56 Okay.
20:08:56 And that way you don't have to worry about what's on the drive anymore. And by the way, if you ever take the drive out of an old machine, which I highly recommend that you do.
20:09:06 And if you're not gonna use it anymore. Go into your garage, take out a hammer and just beat it to death.
20:09:11 Okay, see it wasn't that it wasn't good anymore. It was that they were so tiny at the time.
20:09:18 That we bought or my it was actually my mom's old Mac mini that then it has
20:09:26 What did they have then maybe 60 GB was like in you were like wow that's a lot of memory.
20:09:32 Yeah.
20:09:32 I guess, 18 years ago or whenever that first Mac Mini came out and so there was never really anything wrong.
20:09:39 It's not that the computer didn't work anymore. You let, I mean as you can probably imagine, you let, I mean, as you can probably imagine, there's no more updating it.
20:09:47 I mean, as you can probably imagine, there's no more updating it. I mean, I don't know if snow leopard or something.
20:09:49 No, no.
20:09:50 No, I think Lion might have been the last thing that ran on it.
20:09:57 But we were still in the cats.
20:09:53 No, it, the, no, it probably not. Before we go. Before we go, 2 things I want you to think about what we do next month and I would like to show you a.
20:10:06 Some, strange apps. Because I am the strange type. So I'm going to share my screen while all of you think about what it is you'd like to do.
20:10:19 And. We're talking about BB edit. This is BB edit.
20:10:25 And I'm gonna drag something into BP edit and this is a bookmark let. And a bookmark that is just a text file that, you get.
20:10:37 When you you bring up a, you bring up a web browser. And the web browser goes someplace.
20:10:48 Such as this is.
20:10:53 And it doesn't like this because because I'm streaming at the same time. Anyway, this is this is website.
20:11:02 This is my website. I can come up here to the address bar and drag. The address of that website to your desktop.
20:11:11 Which you think, well, that's kind of silly. Why would you do that? Well, if I double click on it, I can launch that site again or if I drag it into BB edit.
20:11:19 It'll actually take the text. Out of that book market and show it on the screen in BB at it, but you can use it for programming a lot of other things. I use BB at it, but you can use it for programming a lot of other things.
20:11:32 I use BB at it often for stripping complicated formatting from word when I want to stick it up on a website because where it does weird things And so that's what BB at it looks like and it does a lot of useful things but I'm not going to show you that because it would be complicated.
20:11:48 I could spend a week talking about BB at it. Here, this is a finder window. And if you look at the dates, let's see if I can blow up the screen.
20:11:58 You look at the days, it says that these files are recorded December, 30 first, 2,047 at 108 in the morning.
20:12:08 Well, December, 30 first, 2,047 is a ways away. And I would like to get these to be a more current date.
20:12:16 Now these are from the. My, these are video for my church service on Sunday.
20:12:22 And I like to be able to find things by date and it's very difficult for me to know.
20:12:28 What date something is if the, if the USB drive says they all came from 2,047 however i can launch terminal which is a program that's running on your Mac all the time you don't know that it's there but just Just ask them and I'll show you the hard way.
20:12:47 If I come here and I say terminal and spotlight. At a launch terminal. And I can tell it to go to.
20:12:57 That folder And I'm gonna tell it to change directories to go to that folder by.
20:13:04 Cheating.
20:13:10 And now I'm in the folder. If I tell it to list the files and I'm doing this in Unix, so it looks strange, it says that this is December, the 30 first 2,047.
20:13:21 Not useful. I'm going to use a Unix command called Touch.
20:13:28 And I'm going to say touch and then an asterisk. And asterisk is a wild card, meaning.
20:13:34 No matter what you see, touch it. And what touch does is it changes the date. So instead of December 30 first 2,047 it says it's July eighteenth.
20:13:46 At 2011 8 11 And it did that because it knows what the time is when I said to touch it.
20:13:53 It just touches the files. So now when I come here it says that these were all created today, which is a lot.
20:14:02 Yeah.
20:13:59 It's decades closer than what it said before. Since I'm in terminal right now, I might as well.
20:14:07 Can I pull this up? Yes, I can. Term terminal is also useful for silly things such as I was born on Chinese Independence Day.
20:14:18 What day of the week was that? Well, there's a calendar built into the, computer.
20:14:24 So I just said, it gives me the current calendar July. If I say, Cal, 2023.
20:14:33 It'll give me the entire year at once 2023. Well. October tenth, 2,01911 was the Chinese Independence.
20:14:48 That's when China overthrew the Manchu dynasty and became a republic. So I can say.
20:14:54 1911. And it says that October tenth in 1911 was on a Tuesday. So if you want to know I was born on a Tuesday, assuming that I was born in 1911, I probably don't look quite that old, but You can also do it for strange things.
20:15:13 You can ask if you've never used calendar you can ask. Cal man and it gives you directions a man cow sorry and give you a manual for the calendar command And it's got things that you can do with the.
20:15:26 Calendar and there's a note here about September second, 1,752 and I'm not going to bother to.
20:15:33 Show you that I'm just going to Yeah. 1752. Because something interesting happens in 1752.
20:15:46 Look at September.
20:15:52 That is.
20:15:51 And then the week or something or. 2 weeks.
20:16:01 Yeah.
20:15:55 1, 2, 1415, 16. What happened in September of 1752.
20:16:07 Do they adopt the Gregorian calendar?
20:16:09 That's when they adopted the Gregorian calendar. And they did this because the, the Julian calendar was gaining increasingly out of date.
20:16:21 And, the, Pope Gregor adopted the Gregorian calendar for the Roman Catholic Church decades earlier, but because the Henry the eighth decided that the Church of England was going to be different.
20:16:37 The, UK was not. Actually the UK didn't exist at that time, but, England was not on the, Gregorian calendar was on the Julian calendar.
20:16:50 But in September of 1,752 they switched So you miss basically 2 weeks.
20:16:55 This caused huge amounts of problems because when did people die? But what happened to people who were born? Did people miss their birthdays?
20:17:06 If you were born on September third When was your birthday? People, this was cause all kinds of, of, hate and discontent and it took years for it to.
20:17:16 Change but it is an interesting you've got an infinite calendar you want to know what happens it said that that those files were from December, 2,047.
20:17:30 So let's type Cal. 2,047. And that's the calendar for the year 2,047.
20:17:38 You can even go get really fancy. 3,000 that's the calendar for the year 3,000 but that's built into your Mac.
20:17:49 All you have to do is learn how to use terminal. If you ever want to have a meeting where we talk about terminal.
20:17:55 I'm more than willing to. Get into that. But there are a couple other things that I thought.
20:18:02 Might be of interest. Let's go to. There is a.
20:18:09 A program that I use fairly often because I have a lot of files that I want to rename.
20:18:15 Like, this, this says record, 1080 p, 1 21 blah blah. That doesn't tell me what it is.
20:18:21 And I found a application called a Better Finder rename that allows me to rename all kinds of things, all kinds of files all at once.
20:18:32 So I come up here and I say, text and I tell it what to look for. And so I'm going to grab part of this.
20:18:40 File name.
20:18:45 Just part. Copy and I say action.
20:18:54 Replace text. I'm gonna tell it to look for. Record 1080 p. And say.
20:19:07 Trinity worship.
20:19:11 And I say. Apply that to all of these files and drag these files over here so it knows what I'm talking about.
20:19:22 And for whatever reason, it decides it's gonna take a while. And it gives me a preview.
20:19:28 It's going to used to say record 1080 p and now it's gonna say Trinity Worship, 12121, 22, not the best name in the world, but that's what I want to do.
20:19:38 I say perform rename. It says, do you really want me to do that rename all?
20:19:41 And it changes all 4. Now I don't do this when I'm only looking at 4 files.
20:19:47 But, when I go out. For example, I went out and took 253 photos of the port towns and arrow museum which is in Port Townsend.
20:20:02 I did that on Saturday. And so I have a whole bunch of images that just say it's image.
20:20:07 1,956, 1,957, 1958.
20:20:12 Doesn't tell me anything about it. With a better finder rename, I go through and I just batch load all of those and I say that's the, port towns and error museum.
20:20:22 1,953, 1,954 in 1,955.
20:20:25 So it tells me where I took the photographs. If you're a photographer it's much much much less trouble than trying to do all of that.
20:20:36 At once. At one at a time. So. Those are a couple of things that I use fairly often is the text of the terminal for doing strange things.
20:20:49 And better findery name for renaming huge numbers of things at once. The most that I ever did is I renamed 10,700 photos at once.
20:20:59 Even with this bash file or it took a while. But I didn't care because I was having lunch.
20:21:08 Okay, those are my contributions. Any questions?
20:21:15 Yes.
20:21:21 Yes!
20:21:16 I just had one more app that people might be interested in. It's called Sky View. And, Ron's probably heard of it.
20:21:26 Basically you're out there and you're looking at all these stars and you With the app on you point your Your phone at it and it will tell you the stars, the planets.
20:21:37 In the constellation so it's it's a it's a good fun one So in a street.
20:21:41 Yeah, a couple. A month ago, was you could see Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn at the same time.
20:21:53 But if you were wondering which of those 3 spots were which, you take Sky View and it say, this one down here is this, this one up there is that.
20:22:02 It's really useful. Application.
20:22:07 Yeah, Star Walk, 2 and solar. Walk to both. Do astronomy and astronomical things like that too where you hold up your screen and then It'll identify things for you.
20:22:23 There's also a satellite finder.
20:22:28 Yeah, I have almost 600. Have a on my phone. So that's why I had lots to share.
20:22:36 Oh, I wanted to mention one thing that's on your Mac that you probably don't even know that you have.
20:22:45 There used to be an app called Shazam. And it was useful when I was in the dentist office.
20:22:50 I was in the end of Dennis offices. In this really interesting song came up and I thought, what is that?
20:22:54 And I asked the people there and they said, I don't know. Well, which Shazam, you fire up Shazam and it listens for a few seconds and it'll tell you what the song is.
20:23:04 Oh.
20:23:05 Well, Shazam is now built into the iPhone. It's iPhone is.
20:23:09 Right down there, but you don't normally see it. You have to go into your iPhone and go to.
20:23:17 Control center and add it. And then you can add Shazam and it'll sit there and it'll just Listen to the music and tell you what it is that you're listening to.
20:23:38 No.
20:23:28 I use Shazam the app. Separately and it has a auto sham now. I don't know if that one you're talking about does but say for instance if you're gonna be I don't know, taking a shower and you might have time for 3 or 4 songs and, you wanna turn it on before
20:23:48 you get in there because you can't have it identified. You know, you can't hit the button to sham it.
20:23:52 Yeah.
20:23:52 If you hold down the button for an extra couple seconds, it'll turn on auto sham and then it will name all of the songs that it hears after that until you turn it off again.
20:24:04 Yeah.
20:24:07 So question, how did you how do you find that in?
20:24:16 Thatings, yeah.
20:24:12 You fire up, settings. And then you go to a control center and control center lists a whole bunch of things that you can do.
20:24:25 The, it's not called Shazam anymore. It's called sound recognition, but it, Yeah, we'll sit there and tell you what, song is it's playing.
20:24:39 Oh.
20:24:38 And the reason Apple did this is they But you can add things like, yeah, something to change text size, stop watches notes, low power home, catered access dark mode, announce notifications.
20:24:52 Don't ever do that. Alarms, accessibility shortcuts hearing, quick note, sound recognition, music recognition.
20:25:01 There we go.
20:24:59 Oh, it's music recognition. It's Shazan. And wallet voice memos all kinds of things you can add to your phone and you get to them just by pulling down from the top.
20:25:16 Yeah.
20:25:10 Right corner and they pop up and you pick what you want the one I probably use the most is the magnifying glass where somebody gives you a prescription and it's got all this fine print on it and you're trying to find out and then you and you read the fine print it says must not be used if you are suffering
20:25:30 rabies. Oh, okay. Nice to know. You know, if you like reading fine print.
20:25:36 Is that is Shazam, or sound recognition on the laptop as well?
20:25:41 I know it's on the phone. I don't think it's on the laptop.
20:25:45 No. No, I. They don't normally put things in Mac OS that requires that you move.
20:25:59 Right, right.
20:25:55 Because you know if you have a desktop machine it's kind of inconvenient. Oh, this one woman, she had a 27 inch imac and she had a problem at my user group.
20:26:06 In Washington state in Maryland. And I'm sitting in up on stage and there are 500 people there and this woman.
20:26:15 She was probably about the age that I am now. She came in struggling with this 27 inch imac and she did it because she wanted to show me what this 27 inch imac and she did it because she wanted to show me what happens when she started the machine.
20:26:27 So we should wait until after we did a presentation that went out and set it up in the lobby and all it was is that shoot you was getting this icon because the IMAX have a battery inside.
20:26:44 The battery was low. And so it thought that the time was sometime in 1993 or something and or I can't.
20:26:51 I don't remember what it was, but it was easy to diagnose it said, yeah, your battery is low and you did not need to.
20:26:57 The whole thing in here to show me that. So things that you things that are helpful when you move around are gonna be on the iPhone long before they're gonna be on the desktop.
20:27:11 Yes.
20:27:10 One, what was that? App called that you were talking about it's solar or something.
20:27:17 Solar Walk.
20:27:19 Walk. Okay. I have the sky view. But it'd be what like to try something new.
20:27:27 So solar walk. Okay.
20:27:28 Yeah, that's for things. And that one is more like your guy. You're sky one that you are.
20:27:40 And you. Yeah.
20:27:40 Nice. Yeah.
20:27:41 Sky view, yeah. A bunch of them and if you're really into astronomy there's called one called the red shift It's an awesome program, but it costs, it's probably 20 bucks or so.
20:27:57 I, if I remember, right? But, it's, it's really detailed.
20:28:01 Yeah, the rich.
20:28:02 Mine isn't so much that I want it detailed. My biggest problem is So I'm wherever I am pointing the camera at the sky.
20:28:10 Well, it sees all the constellations and it sees all the whatever. But I physically can't see it.
20:28:17 So I just wanna know if there's something that I can turn on or off. What my camera physically sees.
20:28:26 It actually will. Only show me that. Does that make sense?
20:28:29 Yeah. The speaking of which the skywalk and red shift you can also get it in a version that if you have a motorized telescope celestial telescope, you can hook the phone up to it, say, you know, show me.
20:28:49 Polaris or something and it'll It'll make the telescope. Whip the telescope around actually fairly slowly, but so it'll point at Polaris so that you don't have to.
20:29:04 I don't know if you've ever used a telescope where we have a there's a finder scope and you look in the finder scope forever and you think that's it and then you look at it with the big scope and nope that's not it and it drives you nuts.
20:29:13 With your phone using these programs. It'll actually control. The computers and motors on the telescope and point it in the right direction.
20:29:22 Hmm.
20:29:22 Really, cool stuff. I don't happen to have that kind of telescope, but
20:29:27 Yeah, I don't either, but I've always wanted one.
20:29:31 Yeah.
20:29:29 Yeah, but I'm in the same boat there. What are we doing next week? Next month.
20:29:36 Next week I have jury duty so I'm doing boring stuff.
20:29:45 You're gonna show us all the secrets about Apple's maps.
20:29:49 Yeah, you asked the question that I never really explored. He wanted to know if you can make custom maps in Apple Maps and.
20:29:57 I, it got me curious, cause you can do that in Google Maps, but I don't know.
20:30:01 I've been exploring that. I read some directions from people who said that they could do it, but then I actually went through the steps and what they were doing was.
20:30:11 Stupid and not terribly useful, but it's a worthwhile thing to have. When we were coming across country we made a custom Mac.
20:30:20 In Google Apps, I, Google Maps. So that. We want to stop in Vicksburg because I'm an historian and Vicksburg is where Grand essentially killed the Confederacy.
20:30:35 It even though it took the Confederacy a couple of years to realize that. And we stopped at Meteor Crater in, Arizona.
20:30:41 It's the largest intact meteor crater in on the planet and it smacked into Arizona and and left this really big golf divot.
20:30:52 So we just mapped out where we were going. And guessed on how long it was going to take and then we made reservations at motels.
20:31:01 Because it was the summer season. We didn't like being stranded. When we move to.
20:31:06 Maryland in, 1991. We did not make reservations and we spent one night in the parking lot of a Methodist church in Arizona.
20:31:32 Yeah.
20:31:20 Because all the hotels were full. And my daughter who was 5 at the time. Would bring that up for years afterwards about what a terrible experience that was and her parents really should have done a better job and you know so.
20:31:37 We had that same problem on the Oregon coast. We went down there and we, you know, just to spend the weekend spur of the moment type thing and we wound up having to drive all the way home.
20:31:51 We didn't live here. We lived over in. Okay.
20:31:54 Yep. Well, send me your ideas and what you'd like to do next month. And I'd like more than just the Apple Maps idea because I'm not sure I can.
20:32:07 Show you anything useful. But if I can, I will show you something with Apple Maps. Apple Maps is actually much much much better than it used to be but when it comes to making custom maps I don't know if it does that.
20:32:20 So. Send me your ideas on. What we can do in August. And if nobody has any ideas, we might just take August off and go chase.
20:32:35 Thank you. Good night.
20:32:40 Yes.
20:32:37 Hi.
20:32:40 Do they?
20:32:36 Good. Have a really long life.
20:32:48 Oh. Good night.
20:32:48 Okay. Okay. Yeah.
20:32:50 Thank you. Thank you, Lawrence.
20:32:53 Thank you, Lawrence.
20:32:52 Thank you.
20:32:54 Thank you