Short topics: March 2024

Short topics: March 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video recording of the March 19, 2024 meeting

Video recording of March 2024 SMUG meeting on Small Topics.

Transcript of the March 2024 meeting

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

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

Files, Clipboard, Reminders, AirDrop, and Other Mysteries

SMUG meeting, May 18, 2021

Notes by Kathleen Charters

Q&A

Timetable for more powerful 27 inch iMac – 24 inch reviews show it can win against the new 27 inch; options wait for new, get 24 inch and add up to 2 other monitors; World Wide Developers Conference in June may demo things they are working on and introduce new hardware; constrained by worldwide chip shortage, existing chip set easier than new production line; a resource issue; worldwide shortage of cars since cannot get computer chips needed for cars; will not hear before June and may not be announced during the World Wide Developers conference; Apple may put out a press release, next generation of silicon Macs should be a bigger event

Chip foundries cost $1-3B to build, staffing by a few hundred people, resources to assemble – wire individual connections by 10,000’s of people; resource blanks in short supply; miners quarantined so cannot get raw materials such as sand, chip may depend on rare materials that are hard to find, difficult to process and purify rare earths

Not a simple problem to solve

6-year-old MacBook Pro not working, if motherboard repair is required, this is not worth doing; could be 50-80% cost of a new machine, 6 years old is not under warranty, may be more expensive; battery will not cause mouse trackpad keyboard to fail; battery issue will start, then put itself to sleep

iPhone 6 upgrade? No room on iPhone because limited space to begin with. At the end of life, time for a new phone; as new and different things are developed hard to support old hardware. Can make use of the device for other things, or as long as not traveling; if it works as a phone in the home, can limit it to that location

5TB drive stopped working, if Costco drive; bare 5TB may cost more; 5 TB may be (2) 2.5 TB, not top quality, may take a lot of effort to get the device recognized, can be difficult

Difference between a dock and a hub – hub is expanding ports for machine; dock extends the main circuitry from computer so like plugging into back vs drive everything off the same amount of power, high speed device will run faster on a dock but hub all run at lowest common denominator; if too much demand nothing will run on a hub – it acts like it is dead

Intel iMacs old model is available from big box stores (Walmart, Costco, etc.) with a full warranty, not recommended, computer years 7 times as fast as people years, a 2-year-old Mac is the same as a 14-year-old car; business requirement for Intel-based software; get at least 16GB RAM, invest in growth room

TB drives by OWC will work off a range of Mac devices; the best source next to Apple for knowing hardware will work with a Mac; can see what Apple is selling and go buy that from another vendor, read fine print to see what is compatible

Can show how to reset a Mac to factory settings in person, but not over Zoom, because Zoom will go away when the machine reboots

Session on Raid – redundant array of inexpensive drives; example of 4 hard drives, 5TB each – video greater than 10TB can be stored on a RAID so if put (4) 5TB drive created 20 TB as if one storage device or split into (2) 10 TB mirrored so if 1 fails the data will still be available


Present Sabrina – welcome

Treasury Report – $1545.55 in checking, more dues paid

In-person meeting at the Library when possible, for things that cannot be done over Zoom; e.g., recovery operations

Need publicity in Port Angeles for Zoom meeting to increase attendance; try for announcement in PDN? Many people do not read newspapers; PA radio station announcements; local one-page sheet available in the community; recruit Jefferson County as well; online presence for Clallam and Jefferson; radio garden application to get radio stations around the world; PDN public notice section is free and available online and in print


Presentation – Files, Clipboard Reminders and Other Mysteries (AKA interprocess communication)

Share iPad using the record function

Notes

Reminders – share shopping list, both parties add items and are immediately available; reminders can be location dependent, e.g., item appears when at Costco, can set time and date

Note on iPad from SMUG Website, copied and pasted on Mac and shared with user Peter Lyon (demo account); if have a Mac and iPad system preferences iCloud account, check services to send to iCloud and anything created on one device appears in all other devices as long as the device has Internet access; can write not on iPad and it will appear on Mac

Settings: Apple ID, select what to share with iCloud; do this for each device

Reminders: Create a new list: add an item, set a date and time, add a location – type in the name of business and select off the list; to remove simply check it off; if want to re-use an item can search for the item and uncheck it and it will appear; can view and search completed items

Can send a note from one device to another device via messages or e-mail

Select Reminders item, right click, and see the options of how can send the information to another device

Mac Notes – title is the top line of the note, can email, paste into WordPress, etc.

iPad Notes – can draw in Notes and share drawing, e.g., by e-mail; send a copy icon, see possibilities, select one, provide destination account; example of sending by e-mail, can drag drawing out of e-mail to desktop and will see .png file

Can be on different networks if shared to iCloud

If using sidecar have to be on the same network; you can use an iPad as an extension of the Mac and draw on the iPad and have it on the Mac

Can copy to the clipboard on one device and take it off the clipboard on another device if in the same account

Airdrop allows sharing with anyone

Share file

Application on iPad Files – new feature; has folder of large photos and want to move from iPad to Mac; select the desired photos, select share, and use airdrop to share; select device to drop files on; device must accept the files, accept and save to downloads, will transfer from iPad to Mac very quickly over internal network

Note: when share by using Airdrop – only works for what is available on the network; has to be things set up to accept from Airdrop on the same network and receiving device has to accept it; always save to downloads folder; special protections for documents and download folders – Apple scans them when saved to make sure the files are not hostile

Security Conference after Airdrop came out – example of offer to transfer slides and got a malicious file instead – be careful where you save things to; take proper precautions when opening device to unknown files; people who routinely get files from unknown sources need anti-virus software or may be compromised

Adjustments to set the parameters of who will accept files from

Network distance farther away is slower, 60 feet from the router is possible, but 15-20 feet is more realistic; in theory can be 500 feet part but hard to know who is on the other end at that distance

If a dangerous file is scanned 1-2 times a week, get files from Apple to blacklist dangerous sites and types of files. Apple checks downloads to the downloads folder and documents folder

Antivirus software makes the machine run more slowly

If an infected file is detected, Apple will not allow to launch or will block a website

Google puts up warnings about dangerous websites, but does not prevent users from going there

Safari will not let you go to a dangerous website

Apple’s new privacy setting rolled out 2-3 days ago; if it tries to launch something that does not meet the privacy policy, Apple will not launch the application

New privacy setting – if you use FaceBook received a notice from Facebook asking to allow tracking, FaceBook is lobbying users to allow this for customized ads; the new version of FaceBook has 8% allowing this. Apple did not back down and allows people to block tracking on FaceBook; if offered a choice to track, make an intelligent choice

Google navigation needs to track the location to provide directions

Q&A

Calendar – danger if accepting shared dates in e-mail due to risk of malicious software; not the calendar but the Webkit that allows applications to talk to the Internet; lots of apps use Webkit; Apple patched this immediately; it does not protect if using a calendar other than Apple’s calendar

Example of downloading a sports calendar, and bad actors exploited this to infect with malicious software

iPhone iMessage comes in 8 hours to 2 days later – live on the Olympic Peninsula, and the Internet is not always current

Solar Winds the boat the delivery the army to our shores; used to attack Microsoft infrastructure: computers, services; in combating this slows things to a crawl; IM cn be slower than e-mail; protocols for quality of service (QOS) to know how long item has been in transit and move up in queue; IM does not do this

When the Solar Winds hack is cleaned up, this may get better; also affects other communication, e.g., Google alarms, may be a day late

When sending an item, it makes a huge trip even though the receiving device is in the same room; if by way of geostationary satellites for communication may go 100,000 miles

Clipboard on Mac is invisible – use when copying/pasting; can copy on iPhone and paste it into Desktop; hand-off uses the Internet to transport temporary files, so can start a message on one device and complete it on a different device; look up “Handoff” to learn more

Zoom delay – may start and stop, Quality of Service makes software more tolerant, if have slow connection give preference to voice over visual when low bandwidth; minimize interruption of voice if possible; bias towards rapid transmission of voice and more tolerant of pause in video; people accept low quality as long as voice continuous, your brain fills in video gaps, not the same for sound; disorienting to have gaps in sound; sound is last sense to go when dying

Autistic – how process sound is key to communication

If audio stops, there is a bandwidth problem; for example of 18 video screens on Zoom see mostly still images rather than full motion; will try to recover the paused segments, but if the bandwidth is too low, will have gaps; a complex interaction

Photos – easy way to get rid of duplicates; use of Lightroom to sort by size and time (chronological order) so if different name can find by size; software to get rid of duplicates is not infallible; better to do this manually; confusing when have two streams from different sources at the same time; create groups of photos

Post photo to Facebook without location; Apple App Store utilities will strip location from posted photos; FaceBook settings can be turned off for location, but not infallible, best to prepare photo for posting

Capital riot: 450 persons arrested, almost all posted the photos used to arrest them, committed a felony, and published the evidence

Next month: Sign-in sheet

Google Suite: Google Docs, Google Sheets; Google Lens to analyze what the item in a photo is.

Example: Create restored copies of text from a photo

Google Hangouts in-person meeting or use it for the meeting instead of Zoom;

Accessibility features for in-person meetings

Use of listening for e-mail or enlarging to check on punctuation; shortcut on iPhone for list of accessibility – use of magnifying glass; use of iPhone flash light and magnifying glass to read the menu in a dimly lit restaurant

Settings, control center, items to add to shortcuts: Example of Lawrence’s list of shortcut items; can add to Apple Watch as well, e.g., voice memo, so can have an idea when in bed and capture the thought