August 2025: Preserving and transferring information

August 2025: Preserving and transferring information

The August 19 meeting was supposed to include a discussion of virtual machines, but that was put off; covering other topics proved to occupy the time fully. Next year will be Apple’s 50th anniversary, which should also serve as a reminder that microcomputers are old, and much of the information we’ve produced with them is also old. Hence, there is a need to have a plan for preserving old information and transferring or converting it to new formats, storage media, and uses.

Nerd warning: you can skip these three paragraphs if you wish

I used as an example a catalogue of books I read in college. While writing papers on the history of science fiction, I read 2,262 volumes of science fiction over seven years. I kept track of these books on Hollerith cards, which is the formal name for the classic 80-column “computer card” or “punch card” used to program early computers. After graduate school, I lost access to the university mainframe, which made it impossible to read my catalogue, so I took the 54-page printed listing, in all upper-case letters (because the mainframe line printer only did upper case), scanned them, and used OCR (optical character recognition) to turn the paper record into a computer file. I then wrote a program to turn the ALL UPPER CASE text into “Sentence Text,” with the first letter of every word capitalized, then wrote another program to make articles and conjunctions (and other less significant words) lower case, then another program to break the various parts (author, title, publisher, date of publication, etc.) into separate fields, then sucked the entire result into a database where it could be searched, sorted, and otherwise manipulated.

Around the same time, I found a microcomputer with a card reader running Xenix, a Microsoft version of UNIX, and used it to read in all the cards, useed the UNIX iconv onversion utility to turn the IBM-coded EBCDIC text into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) text, and several years later used a Mac to turn the ASCII text into the more refined UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit) character set used by modern computers. I then wrote a program to compare the OCR-based text to the text produced from the card reader to detect any transformation errors.

Why did I convert the listing two different ways? Because I could, and I did find errors, which were corrected.

Preserving information

In essence, this was an exercise in information preservation, a task faced by countless people throughout human history. Before the invention of the printing press, highly educated scribes spent much of their lives transcribing old records written on vellum (calf or sheep skin) onto new sheets of vellum, or rewriting sheets of papyrus (pressed plants) onto new sheets of papyrus, or recreating written records on rice paper onto new sheets of rice paper as the old sheets faded into illegibility. Printing presses vastly sped up the process of duplicating records, and the telegraph allowed records to be sent electrically over long distances. Microcomputers gave anyone with a computer and a printer their own printing press, and the advent of the World Wide Web allowed anyone to create their own “press” electronically and broadcast it to the world, with no paper involved.

Yet computers also posed new preservation problems. While Hollerith cards, created on acid-free cardstock, have a projected life of over a hundred years (if kept away from fire, water, and bugs), computers stopped using card readers decades ago. The original Macintosh had a 400K diskette drive, capable of holding 400,000 bytes (equivalent to the text on 222 sheets of typed paper), but it has been decades since a Macintosh had a floppy disk drive. The Macintosh SE could hold the equivalent of 11,000 paper sheets of text on its 20 megabyte hard drive, but those 20 megabyte drives aren’t even readable by modern Macs.

In fact, no Macintosh currently made has a floppy disk drive, a hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, or a DVD. If you have data still stored on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs, or older hard drives, your window for recovering information from these storage media is rapidly closing.

Recovery is only half the battle, as many of these old records are stored in formats no longer supported. The Macintosh II was the first Mac to support color images, and these images were stored in PICT (Macintosh Picture) format or in GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). While GIF is still used, it supports only a limited range of colors, and the PICT format cannot be viewed on non-Macintosh computers, and is no longer supported on the Macintosh, either. Written words in ASCII text, and the more modern UTF-8 text, are still universally supported, but old word processing files written with Apple Writer, MacWrite, WordPerfect, WordStar, FullWrite, and even old versions of Microsoft Word are either unreadable or require significant editing.

Some random facts about storage

Hollerith card, also known as a computer card or a punch card
Hollerith card, also known as a computer card or a punched card

A typed sheet of paper contains, on average, 1,800 characters, counting spaces.

A 400K Macintosh floppy disk could hold the equivalent of 222 sheets of paper.

A 20 megabyte hard drive can hold the equivalent of 11,000 typed pages of information, or 50 floppy disks.

A terabyte flash drive can hold the equivalent of 50,000 20-megabyte hard drives, or 2.5 million floppy disks, or 555.5 million typed pages of information.

A Hollerith card had 80 columns, each representing 1 byte, for 80 bytes per card.

CD-ROM containing the first public version of MacOS X, March 24, 2001. A CD-ROM holds roughly 640K of data, or 74 minutes of audio. The 72 minutes are significant: the chairman of Sony wanted to listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without a break, and the symphony is 74 minutes long.
CD-ROM containing the first public version of MacOS X, March 24, 2001. A CD-ROM holds roughly 640K of data, or 74 minutes of audio. The 72 minutes are significant: the chairman of Sony wanted to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony without a break, and the symphony is 74 minutes long.

Hollerith cards came in boxes, each of which held 2,000 cards, and the box weighed 14.5 pounds.

The song “Zombie,” by The Cranberries, is 5 minutes, 5 seconds long, and stored digitally on a Mac takes up 7,358,063 bytes. Converted to punch cards, it would take 46 boxes of cards (91,960 cards, 667 pounds of paper) to store this one song.

“Les Misérables,” the movie version starring Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, and Russell Crowe, takes up 6,817,819,698 bytes of disk storage. Converted to punch cards, it would require 43,000 boxes of cards (86 million cards, 312 tons of cards) to store this one movie.

Summary: punched cards might last for a century, but it would take a large forest to hold the contents of your iPhone.

Some random things mentioned in the video require a note

Export: At one point, I was trying to export an .mp3 file from GarageBand, but could not find the required command. It is under the Share menu, which allows music and sounds to be exported in AAC (Apple high quality), MP3 (can be imported by non-Mac computers), AIFF (older audio format), and WAVE (old Windows format).

News sources: There was a question about recommended Mac news sources.

Geeky

Daring Fireball, https://daringfireball.net, by John Gruber. Gruber talks about technology in general, but he has an emphasis on Apple technology. He also developed the Markdown language for writing easy to read, easy to write plain text that can be converted to XML or HTML.

The Eclectic Light Company, https://eclecticlight.co, by Howard Oakley. A very geekly look at Mac technologies, complete with free utilities to do things you probably should not do. Eclectic Light Company also offers deep dives into art, chiefly European painting.

SecureMac, https://www.securemac.com/news. Information aimed at security and privacy on Apple devices.

Non-Geeky

Macworld, https://www.macworld.com. A long-running website devoted to all things Apple. Most of it is written for the everyday user, but there is a fair share of clickbait, imaginary controversy, and rumormongering.

TidBits, https://tidbits.com. TidBits started off as an email newsletter decades ago, and has morphed into a reputable general technology site with a definite Apple emphasis.

MacTech, https://www.mactech.com. Apple-centric news. Years ago, MacTech was aimed at technically trained individuals who managed large networks of Apple products, but it now has a more general focus.

Cult of Mac, https://www.cultofmac.com. Apple news site with a dose of rumor.

9 to 5 Mac, https://9to5mac.com. Apple news site with a dose of rumor.

Take Control Books, https://9to5mac.com. Take Control Books publishes mostly Apple-centric books, in ebook format, allowing you to buy and download them immediately and display them on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. While not a “news site,” it does offer a staggering breadth of Apple-centric information on everything from how to use Terminal and interact with Unix on your Mac to how to take a decent picture with an iPad.

MacMost, https://macmost.com/video-list. MacMost is a video blog, with each episode focusing on a single Apple-specific task or technology.

xkcd, https://xkcd.com. xkcd has nothing to do with Apple products. Instead, it is “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” It is geeky, but very funny.

Utilities mentioned in the video

Audacity, a sound player and conversion utility, https://www.audacityteam.org/

BBEdit text editor and conversion utility, https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

GarageBand, MIDI sequencer, composer, and sound conversion utility, https://www.apple.com/mac/garageband/

Preview, Apple image utility and converter, https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/welcome/mac

TextEdit, Apple text editor and text converter, https://support.apple.com/guide/textedit/welcome/mac

Video recording of the August 2025 SMUIG meeting

Click on the YouTube logo to go to YouTube and a larger version

Transcript of the meeting

This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom is sometimes creative. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.

18:31:38 Good evening, can I ask a question?
18:31:40 Absolutely, that's what this time is for.
18:31:44 Haven't, uh… it seems to me that as long as I can remember Apple Mail on the Mac.
18:31:48 Has had, uh, a select all. Feature, so that if you wanted to delete.
18:31:56 Everything in your inbox, or one of those mailboxes, you could select all and then delete it.
18:32:01 Yes.
18:32:01 What… I ran into a lady who's got a… MacBook Air from 2017.
18:32:08 Let's select all isn't there.
18:32:11 Uh, it's… you have to click on at least one message.
18:32:15 So that it knows that you're in that pain, and then hold down the command key, press A, and it should select everything.
18:32:22 Oh, okay. I didn't try, you know, starting up in safe mode or any of that to see if.
18:32:28 I don't think that's necessary, but if you don't have. A message selected.
18:32:33 It doesn't know what you're doing, because that window isn't selected.
18:32:36 Yeah. I also noticed that she didn't have a junk mailbox or a trash mailbox, and I…
18:32:44 I thought that was odd.
18:32:45 Um, I've noticed that with some people who have corrupted mailboxes.
18:32:50 And if it's encrypted, then the, uh… the best thing to do is to rebuild a mailbox. There's a command to…
18:32:58 It's one of the menu choices to rebuild a mailbox. Depending upon how much.
18:33:00 Yeah.
18:33:03 Trash and junk and other mail that they have, and also on their internet connection, it can take quite a while.
18:33:12 And some people might need to try it 2 or 3 times, because.
18:33:10 Yeah. Okay.
18:33:17 The task might time out. Uh, before we get too carried away, I want to point out I am recording this.
18:33:18 Yeah.
18:33:23 And I did turn on closed captioning. Because unlike last month, I actually…
18:33:29 Have a note to remind myself to do that. So… Anyway, um, any other questions?
18:33:39 Well, first, I wanted to say hello back. I just couldn't find my unmute button.
18:33:45 Okay.
18:33:43 But… I do have… a question. I'm trying to get… I'm going to be getting rid of a 21-year-old PC.
18:33:53 There's some pictures I want off it, so I got a… I got the little thumb drives.
18:34:00 Is… is it difficult to… pull stuff off a PC and then put it on a Mac, it'll just…
18:34:09 Pictures.
18:34:10 The, uh… the only thing that is… I will… show you what I have. The only thing that's different is that Macs today all have.
18:34:21 A USB-C connectors. If you buy a new Mac, it has USB-C connectors.
18:34:27 And PCs, uh, generally have USB-A connectors, and. What that means, this is a USB-A connector, if I can show it, it's a…
18:34:37 It's a rectangular thing, and… This is a USB-C connector.
18:34:43 It's a much smaller, and it's oval-shaped. And the reason Macs have this is that the European Union.
18:34:52 Demanded that all, uh, electronics sold in the EU. If they have a USB-E connector at all, it has to be USB-C.
18:35:02 And this came about because. There are something like 80 different variations of USB-A.
18:35:10 Uh, there's micros, and there's mini micros, and there's about 80 different variations.
18:35:16 And, uh, when the USB-C came out, the USB-C. Electronics is much faster.
18:35:24 Now, just because changing the shape doesn't make it faster, but the electronics inside is much… are much faster.
18:35:29 And at that point, there's no particular reason. To make people go through all these hoops, so… new iPhones, new iPads, new Macs all have USB-C connectors. And I bought these clever little things at Costco.
18:35:44 It's got a USB-A at one end, so I can plug it into a PC, and it's got a USB-C at the other.
18:35:50 Um, so this is… this is my way around it. But if you have a bunch of USB-A.
18:35:57 Thumb drives. You can also get. Adapters. It's this little adapter that you stick on the end of it.
18:36:03 That gives it… it turns the USBA into a USB-C. The good news, bad news, just putting the USB-C connector on it won't make it any faster.
18:36:13 It will probably… It'll probably be painfully slow to take the images off of your PC, given the age of it.
18:36:22 Um, but it's well worth doing. It just started up, tell it to copy a bunch of photographs, and then go off and.
18:36:32 Okay, I think I got the right kind of. Um, it's got one end.
18:36:30 Do something else. Go shopping.
18:36:38 A C in one end is a A, so I think…
18:36:41 Absolutely, that's… that's what you want. But the next part is just finding everything, and uh…
18:36:47 And copying it over. And there are things other than pictures that you might want. Income tax things, and all kinds of stuff.
18:36:54 But just copy them off. And if you fill one up and you still have more, then the USB.
18:37:00 Drives are fairly inexpensive. Um, bike, just as kind of a FYI.
18:37:07 The first USB… flash drive that I ever got, uh, was…
18:37:16 100 megabytes, and I think it was 40 bucks. And now, for 40 bucks, you can go out and get a…
18:37:24 Um… I don't know. 128 gigabyte, I mean, it's just…
18:37:29 Orders of magnitude larger, so… That shouldn't really be a… a problem, but if you just… if you fill up one flash drive, just go out and get another.
18:37:38 All right, thank you. Um… So the old PC.
18:37:43 I know it has a motherboard still, because I used to know how to get in there and mess around. Is that what I should take out and smash up and…
18:37:49 No, the motherboard is… when you turn the power off, everything on the motherboard disappears.
18:37:55 The thing that you want to take out is the hard drive.
18:37:58 Because the hard drive, even if you think you erase it on a PC.
18:38:02 It doesn't really erase the drive. What it does is it deletes the directory.
18:38:07 But if you're some evil genius, like, I don't know if I'm a genius, but if you're somebody like me, I can get things off of a race drives.
18:38:15 And so the best way to deal with it is to just take the drive out.
18:38:21 And take a hammer and just beat on it. Or if you have… nephews or grandchildren or something.
18:38:30 Um, just tell them to destroy it, and they'll cheerfully do so.
18:38:34 Um, but, uh, the only safe way to, uh. To take care of the drivers, to destroy it.
18:38:40 There are, on the Mac, there are safe ways to. Erase a disk, but on PCs, it's… it's not at all.
18:38:51 Okay, thank you.
18:38:50 Easy. Just kind of as a background for that.
18:38:58 Um, I… I want… I needed some replacement drives, because I have a lot… I have a lot of photographs and such.
18:39:07 And I needed a replacement drive, uh. Last year, and I was procrastinating, and my spouse.
18:39:13 Goaded me into buying them. I bought these drives that I thought were at a really good price.
18:39:18 And when I looked at them, I thought, there's something strange about it.
18:39:21 And they were not new drives, which is what I was sold, they were used drives. In fact, one of them had.
18:39:28 54,000 hours of use. There's a way to find out. And I thought, oh, it's a U, so who had it?
18:39:35 And I used my. My, um, knowledge of this sort of things.
18:39:43 To find out it had belonged to a tax firm. And they apparently had just disposed of it.
18:39:50 And didn't realize people recovered, but… There were tax statements from people with social security numbers and bank account names and addresses, and…
18:40:01 For literally thousands of accounts. And, um, I reported this to the FBI, I reported this to.
18:40:11 Amazon, which, uh… It was not sold by Amazon, but Amazon was a delivery service.
18:40:18 Report it to the FBI, to Amazon, to a number of people, and things got really exciting.
18:40:25 But, um… I ended up buying more expensive drives from another.
18:40:30 More reputable firm. Um, but the first, if they had been new dries, it would have been a good bargain, but they were not.
18:40:40 Um, other questions?
18:40:42 Um, I had something, uh. Are you going to either today or next meeting, go over Mac OS26 and IOS 26?
18:40:54 Um, I talked about it a little bit last month, um… I'm going to put that off again until…
18:41:02 September, October, it depends upon when Apple. Releases the operating system. If you have a general question that I can answer in a couple minutes, I have been… I haven't played with iOS, because.
18:41:17 Um, it's out in beta, but beta is just the Greek word for not working.
18:41:22 And I'm not willing to experiment, especially given where we live.
18:41:27 I'm not willing to experiment with having a phone that's not working.
18:41:30 So, uh, I have put it on an iPad, iPadOS 26 on an iPad.
18:41:38 And I've put macOS Beta, uh, in fact, there's a new developer beta that just came out today.
18:41:45 I put that on, um… a laptop, so I have experience with them.
18:41:50 But I'm not going to demonstrate them until… Probably until they're released.
18:41:55 Simply because right now, some things are not working. And while they annoyed me greatly that some of the things are not working.
18:42:04 It's… that's where the state of the art is at this particular point.
18:42:08 One of the things that I always check. Is the help. There's a… there's a help, um…
18:42:16 Application on the Mac. So on the Mac, it's on the iPad, it's on the iOS. People… don't pay any attention to it, but it's still there. It's called TIPS.
18:42:24 And so I always launch tips to see if it says anything. And when tips comes up empty that I know they haven't got around to.
18:42:33 Writing the documentation. So it's kind of pointless to… to demonstrate it and tell…
18:42:40 Until it's actually working. But if you have questions, I'm more than willing to entertain questions.
18:42:48 Lawrence, I've got one. My wife has a whole lot of movies on her computer, and I says, you know, I think we ought to put this into the cloud.
18:42:57 Do you have any suggestions how you take a bunch of.
18:43:00 Movies, uh, they're… they're local movies, she's a dance instructor, these are all dances and things.
18:43:05 How to put them into the iCloud, and should you categorize them first, or.
18:43:11 What's the best way to do that so you don't have just a long list of alphabetical.
18:43:18 Files.
18:43:16 Um, I did this recently for my church. My church… I'm in… Don't ask why. I'm in charge of the audiovisual computer setup for the church.
18:43:26 And we started, um… videotaping… well, we didn't use videotape. We started redoing video recordings.
18:43:34 Of our services during the pandemic. Uh, because that was the only way we could have services. We'd videotape it, then I'd put it up on the web, and people could see it.
18:43:44 What we use is we use, uh, YouTube. Youtube, you can set up to… to either publish your movies so that everybody can see them, you can upload them in such a way that only people who have a link, like your relatives or whatever, can see them.
18:44:01 Or you can make it completely private. Um, and YouTube will do this, and it doesn't cost you a thing.
18:44:07 If you stick it on iCloud, which is much more secure, iCloud… Movies take up, uh, space, and so you'll have to buy more space in iCloud.
18:44:19 Um, I have 2 terabytes worth of space in iCloud. That's essentially.
18:44:25 Two fairly large, uh. Hard drives in iCloud.
18:44:29 Um, so that's… that's this, that's the space thing, the… Other limitation is your internet speed.
18:44:36 Depending upon the size of the video, it can take a while. Sometimes it takes me… Um, an hour and a half to upload a church service.
18:44:46 Because the longer the video, the longer it's going to take to upload, because we don't have the fastest.
18:44:53 Internet connections on, uh. Peninsula. Um… So, there's the space that you're going to be using, and then there's the time.
18:45:05 To your question, though, what you were asking about, should you do any work on it beforehand.
18:45:12 In order to… keep track of the church's videos.
18:45:17 They're all, um… there's a prefix before the title. And the prefix is the date.
18:45:24 And the data's done in ISO fashion, International Standards Organization fashion.
18:45:29 In the United States, we go month, day, year. Nobody else on the planet does that. In Europe, they do day, month, year.
18:45:37 Which is also brain dead, but for completely different reasons. The ISO standard is year, month, day. So today would be.
18:45:46 2025-0819. Why this is important?
18:45:53 They alphabetize perfectly on a computer. It keeps them in nice numerical order, so if you put them up in date order… well, if you, first of all, name the files.
18:46:01 With that date, and you maintain that. You can put anything you want after that date.
18:46:06 You know, like, Nancy dances with Sugar Plum Fairies, or whatever it is you want to have.
18:46:13 Is the title. That's fine. But that date thing will actually.
18:46:18 It's more help to you than the title. Because YouTube doesn't really put up with anything in any particular order. It puts them up in the order in which they were uploaded.
18:46:28 Which may have nothing to do with when they were taken, or edited, or whatever.
18:46:33 So, uh, I would urge you, the first thing you do is to.
18:46:37 Rename them with the very first part of the name being the date and year, month, day.
18:46:44 Format.
18:46:45 Yeah, so they would go with, like, numerical order. It'd be… Yeah, so I was thinking, you know, if she wants to select something, you know, how does she find it?
18:46:49 It'll be in numerical order at that point, so it'll be… It'll be…
18:46:56 She'd have to do it by year, and then identify the name of what she's looking for, like the name of a dance, and… But can you search… can you search in there for…
18:47:05 You can easily search for dates, and you can also just search for movies. Like, for example, if they're QuickTime movies, it'll have the extension MOV.
18:47:13 And so you can say, find, and then say, if you're looking for something that has Susan in the name and it's a movie.
18:47:21 Find, space, Susan Space. Dot Mov, and it'll look for things.
18:47:26 That have Susan in the name and have MOV. So you get all the movies that have MOV.
18:47:05 So if she names the names the movie. And then she could search on that name and find it.
18:47:40 Yes, uh, yes.
18:47:41 Okay, okay, that's… I think so. She's got a ton of movies, and I'm just thinking, I put it all in there, and it's gonna disappear in a list of, you know, chronological.
18:47:52 Would see the… Chronological is good.
18:47:52 Files, that'd be terrible.
18:47:55 Because chronological is less arbitrary than what you type in. What you type in, did you call it…
18:48:04 Thanksgiving, or did you call it dinner for Thanksgiving? Or, you know, there's no… There's no rhyme or reason for that, but the date, you have no control over.
18:48:17 Okay.
18:48:14 That's… that's by divine, you know, they… the divine calendar covers that. You have no control over that. So that's the point that you should focus on.
18:48:23 So when…
18:48:23 And if you don't sure… if you're not sure what the date of that is, look at the date that the file was created in the finder.
18:48:30 And use that as the date.
18:48:31 Info. And then, how do you do this on YouTube? Where do you go on YouTube to make that happen?
18:48:37 On YouTube, you create an account, you create an account. If you have a Google account, then you also have a YouTube account, you just don't know that.
18:48:44 You go into YouTube with your Google account name. And you create a channel.
18:48:50 And then you just start uploading videos. And at the time that you upload the video.
18:48:56 It'll ask you to fill in a bunch of metadata and so on and so forth.
18:49:00 And then it'll say, you know, next screen, and when you get to the last screen, it asks you.
18:49:05 Is this public? Is this private that people can see with the link, or is it just private?
18:49:10 And that's where you can decide whether or not you want to show the world about it.
18:49:15 Just as an FYI. More video.
18:49:14 Okay.
18:49:20 Is uploaded to YouTube. Every day, every day.
18:49:25 Then was taken. In all of human history up until the year 2000.
18:49:31 Every day.
18:49:32 Oh my god. Okay, thank you. Well…
18:49:38 I've got a project in front of me, then it sounds like.
18:49:42 Okay, may I ask a question? Um, so many, many years ago, I used to be subscribed.
18:49:51 To all of the Mac magazines, like Mac Addict, Mac World, etc. I enjoyed reading them like celebrity gossip magazines, only it was about Apple products.
18:50:01 Um, so, you know, I assume that paper media is totally ancient history now.
18:50:06 What are people reading these days to get informed on. Product reviews, new Mac products, you know, editorials about Apple policies, whatever.
18:50:20 Well, I'll give you my answer, and then we can ask other people.
18:50:18 What websites can I go to?
18:50:25 Um, there are two different types of, um… electronic media for this. One is the, uh, the… what you call the popular press.
18:50:33 And there are things like, um… I can't remember the name of it, but there's a… There's, um, a MAC Daily News and an iPhone Daily News, which are mailing lists that have stuff.
18:50:45 With an associated website. And then there are some things that are much more for the nerdy types for… for Mac photographers, for iPhone photographers.
18:50:56 For people who are doing movies, and then there are the really, really geeky ones. There's one called, um… Oh, I actually need to bring up my email.
18:51:09 Because that's the easiest way to tell. Uh…
18:51:17 And…
18:51:33 There's one called the Electric Light Company, which is a mailing list.
18:51:37 It's a guy who's absolutely a genius at art, and he has.
18:51:43 Art histories, about, you know, Picasso and whatnot, depending upon whatever he's doing.
18:51:48 But he also writes programs that do strange things, like look at your log files.
18:51:56 Set up firewall rules and all kinds of stuff. His is at the high end of the geekiness. Um, there is, uh…
18:52:05 There are other mailing lists that, um… that are, uh, talking more about the.
18:52:11 Nuts and bolts of what the day-to-day user might do. But more at the geek end, and… I can't remember the name of it. It's, uh…
18:52:24 I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. The, uh… The author's been… he used to work for Apple, and uh…
18:52:32 That's the sort of thing that, why don't you… send me a message, and I'll post a…
18:52:39 Okay.
18:52:40 Because, uh… Just off the top of my head, I might read these, but I'm one of these people who can go to a movie, I like the movie, and I tell you what the plot was.
18:52:50 And people say, who are the actors? Have no idea who was the director, have no idea. Who wrote it?
18:52:56 Beats me. That's not the part I pay attention to. Um, so I'm… I would need to, uh, actually go and look and see what it is that I…
18:53:07 Read. But, uh, um… There are quite a few things out there.
18:53:12 The difference between the really geeky ones, the really geeky ones, you have to have a fairly.
18:53:17 High level of technical understanding to understand what it is they're.
18:53:21 Talking about. The popular ones, the difficulty there is that. A lot of the popular ones I wouldn't trust.
18:53:28 With anything at all. Um, they tend to re… they tend to review things that people gave them, or they… solicited, and they often review things that they just want.
18:53:40 To have, so they took the right positive reviews of things that I wouldn't give the time of day to.
18:53:41 Hmm.
18:53:46 Um, so I don't trust a lot of the popular. Review sites, and then there are some that delay… that deliberately.
18:53:57 Work in controversy. So, uh, uh, Apple's going down the tubes because they don't have a good, uh.
18:54:05 Artificial intelligence, uh, plan. Apple doesn't know what they're going to do after the iMac.
18:54:12 They said this in 2001. Um, some… a guy I know.
18:54:17 He found over 8,000 articles in doing just an internet search, unique articles that said that Apple was going to go bankrupt.
18:54:27 And some of the earliest ones date back to, uh. Um, 1978.
18:54:34 Uh, when they first went public, that they were going to go bankrupt, IBM was… that IBM hadn't even… wasn't even in the PC market, but.
18:54:42 Ibm is going to introduce the IBM PC, and it was going to kill.
18:54:46 Apple. Well, IBM's no longer in the PC business. Commodore is no longer in the PC business. All of their…
18:54:54 Competitors basically aren't around anymore, so it's… that's… but that… that kind of controversy… Apple's gonna go bankrupt.
18:55:02 That gets them, uh, subscribers, that gets them people linking to their website. So there's just an awful lot of the, um.
18:55:10 Clickbait stuff out there. But the nerdy stuff doesn't tend to be that way.
18:55:17 Uh, but the difficulty is that you have to really know what you're… Um, talking about in order to understand what they're talking about.
18:55:24 What I'm going to talk about today is actually fairly nerdy, so…
18:55:28 All right. Well, thank you.
18:55:31 Yes.
18:55:30 I had a question, uh, Lawrence, and this might be what you're talking about today. And if it's nerdy, I'm probably not going to understand a lot of it, but someone gave me.
18:55:41 A scanner, because it was so old that she said, um, you know, she wasn't using it, and it only works on old computers, and so I… I came home, and I thought, wait a second, I have one old computer, the, um, highest operating system that it will be… use is Snow Leopard, and my computer has Snow Leopard, and I hooked it up, and it works beautifully.
18:56:05 What I'm afraid of is that this computer is already. Being funky, and I'm like, well, how do I get…
18:56:15 And then I have a new computer that's the, um, you know, the new chip.
18:56:21 Well, that won't work with this, so I really love this high-end Cano scan, um, but it needs Snow Leopard, so… I was looking online going, okay, I'll buy an old computer with Snow Leopard. Well, no, I can't find any.
18:56:37 I mean, I don't know where to look, so I need your advice. Is this what you're… something… yeah.
18:56:45 Um… just as a… just as an FYI, Canon makes fantastic flatbed scanners. I mean, the… and the Cano scan is a flatbed scanner.
18:56:49 Okay.
18:56:54 Yeah.
18:56:55 The, um, um… You can go out and buy a machine old enough to use Snow Leopard.
18:57:01 It's going to come with several downsides. One is. The hard drive in it's going to be 15 years old.
18:57:09 The average life expectancy of a hard drive is about 4.
18:57:15 Oh, okay. Okay.
18:57:14 So, that's not great. So that… that's an issue. The second thing is that I was really irritated. My printer has a scanner.
18:57:27 But the printer, and actually, any printer scanner, the resolution tends to be very, uh.
18:57:35 If you take a scan of a human face, you can see where it actually.
18:57:40 It has little, uh, terraces as it's going through the very gradiations of skin.
18:57:46 Because it's not very good at the subtle variations that you have in photographs.
18:57:52 Yes. Okay.
18:57:52 And this irritated me greatly, so I went out and spent $89, and I got a brand new Canon.
18:57:59 A Kano scan. That runs off… the power in everything comes from the USB, so.
18:58:06 You just plug it in, and you've got a flatbed scanner.
18:58:09 And I don't… I didn't even use the software that came with it, uh, until I found out that the software that came with it does one thing that I really like.
18:58:18 At that point, I installed it. But your Mac has the ability to just.
18:58:23 Hop2 scanners. You go in there, say, there's a new device out here, go out and grab the driver for it, and it'll install it.
18:58:30 The Canon scanner that I bought for $89. The reason why I installed the software, I can put 4 snapshots down on the bed.
18:58:40 And when it scans it, it gives me 4 separate files, rather than just.
18:58:44 Yes.
18:58:45 One giant one, which is really cool. So my… my thought is, yes, you probably can get a machine that runs Snow Leopard.
18:58:52 There are some companies that sell those. Um, um, that's not what you should search for. Search for a particular model, like, say you want a, uh.
18:59:04 A PowerMac G3 or something. That will get you in the right ballpark.
18:59:10 But I wouldn't do that, because. The new Canon scan… Cano scan that I bought.
18:59:11 Okay.
18:59:16 Much higher resolution than one that works with Snow Leopard. The software is up to date, it runs on your current computer.
18:59:24 I just wouldn't do that.
18:59:23 Okay. Oh, I didn't know they were so cheap. I didn't even… I was afraid to look. I mean, I haven't really looked at scanners, but you mean…
18:59:31 You can… you can get some that are, like, $300, $400, or $500. The $500 ones have one neat trick.
18:59:37 When you put down the lid, the lid also has a light in it, so you can put in slides, 35mm slides.
18:59:43 It'll shine. Light through the sky, the, um, slide.
18:59:50 So it'll scan the slides.
18:59:52 Well, that's what I need. I have transparencies, and they're… I need high resolution, but they're two and a quarter, so they're big transparencies that I need very high resolution.
19:00:01 Then you… you probably need… you probably need to have… the $89 one I have doesn't shine the light down.
19:00:02 Yeah. Okay. All right.
19:00:12 All right, all right. Um, I'll have to go that route.
19:00:08 Uh, for that, it's like the $300, $400 ones. And if you're looking…
19:00:16 If you're, uh, looking for that, you should also look really quick.
19:00:20 Because those are going to be subject to tariff. Because none of them are made in the U.S.
19:00:23 Oh. Okay, do you… even the… so, would you… is it the Kano scan? Is that a good brand for the higher… for the transparency?
19:00:33 Um, I… I like the Cano scan that I have, it's not the fancier one that does transparencies, but.
19:00:40 Okay.
19:00:41 I like the one I do, the, uh… the image quality is just exceptionally good.
19:00:47 Especially compared to one that works with something that's like Snow Leopard.
19:00:53 Um, the first scanner I ever worked with. Only did black and white, didn't even do gray.
19:00:59 And it costs the U.S. Government $1,000. So, things have changed a bit.
19:01:08 We're spoiled, aren't we? Well, thank you.
19:01:09 Yes, we are spoiled.
19:01:11 This scan you're talking about, is it color and black and white, the one you're talking about for $89?
19:01:17 Yeah, for $89, it'll lose color and black and white. And if, uh, 8.5x11, yes, it does paper and…
19:01:22 Prince. But it's print.
19:01:26 And photographs, and so on and so forth, but it doesn't do transparencies. Transparencies… it needs a light shining through it onto the… receiving surface. And, uh, Canon does make one that's got a light in the lid.
19:01:40 So that if you tell it you're a shining slight transparencies, it shines light downward.
19:01:46 Um, but that's a… that's fancier than what I needed.
19:01:52 Okay, well, thank you. That's good advice.
19:01:56 Any other questions? Uh, it's about time to start program.
19:02:01 I have a real quick one. Um, will we be able to go to the new library at the end of the year that's opening up?
19:02:08 The public library?
19:02:10 The, um, library has… they said they were going to try and open it by July, obviously that did not happen.
19:02:17 Um, apparently they were having parts shortage, not the library, but the.
19:02:23 Contractor was having parts shortage. And the last I heard, they have not given a definite date.
19:02:30 Um, I'm hoping that they have it. Um, I really… the temporary library location that they have is by far the.
19:02:39 Nicest temporary library I've ever seen, but it's still a temporary place, and the new place is.
19:02:45 Has a computer lab, and, you know, it's got… It's got stuck.
19:02:48 We'll have a conference room large enough to hold our meeting, or…?
19:02:51 I do not know that. The other thing is that, uh.
19:02:53 Oh, okay.
19:02:56 When it comes to fall and winter. Uh, given the, um… our makeup in terms of our demographic. A lot of people don't like to go out at night, so unless we wanted to do it on weekends, which tend to be a.
19:03:11 Difficult time to get space. Um, I… we might have trouble convincing people to go out at night.
19:03:21 I shall turn it over to the… president who hasn't turned on her microphone.
19:03:29 Good evening, everybody. Nice to see you.
19:03:29 Now…
19:03:34 Charles, are you by chance new? I haven't seen you before. Welcome to our meeting.
19:03:38 I am.
19:03:43 Thank you very much. Sorry?
19:03:42 How did you guys? How did you hear about us?
19:03:49 Internet search, um… I used to belong to a Macintosh club in my homeland of Austin, Texas, called Capital Macintosh.
19:03:58 Really, really enjoyed it, and I've not been active in a group for many years, so… Um, this is actually the only group I found in the entirety of western Washington, but…
19:04:10 Oh, great. Um, well, that's wonderful. We're happy to have you.
19:04:09 I'm not dissatisfied.
19:04:15 And, uh, welcome everybody else, and I'll just turn it back over to Lawrence.
19:04:20 Uh, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to paste into the chat window.
19:04:25 The URL for the, uh… sign-in sheet.
19:04:30 I actually made one this time, and I found out why the one last.
19:04:35 Month wouldn't allow anyone in. Google has improved their security.
19:04:42 Which is not a bad thing, but it's just that. I didn't realize that. I have to explicitly tell people.
19:04:50 That they can go into the… Uh, form. In the past.
19:04:54 Can I please stop some breaks?
19:04:54 They didn't care. Uh…
19:05:02 Wake up? Okay.
19:05:07 I'm going to talk about, um, two things to tonight. Um, they… have a lot to do with what I was doing recently. I was trying to recover.
19:05:18 Old data from, uh… CDs and DVDs. I got rid of…
19:05:23 Floppy disks a long time ago, when we moved. I actually held on them to him until we moved out here in 2018.
19:05:32 Uh, and, um… The Navy was not going to pay for our move, so I threw away about 40,000, uh, discs.
19:05:42 Uh, which is a lot of discs, but, um… I was, among other things, the, um… Software librarian for the Washington Apple Pie user group.
19:05:51 Which at one point had 5,000 members. And I was the bulletin board operator for the San Diego user group, which one had.
19:05:59 5,000 members, and between the two of them, there were just a lot of things that I had on floppy disks.
19:06:04 So I threw those away, but I kept the… data DVDs and CDs. And the trouble with that.
19:06:10 Is that CDs have… At best, a projected life expectancy of 10 years.
19:06:16 And I have some CDs that I purchased, audio CDs that I purchased in Japan in the 1980s.
19:06:22 So I went into the process of recovering. Anything I could off of these, uh, CDs and DVDs, and that.
19:06:30 Uh, was interesting. And along the way, I found out that there were… I could read the files, but once I had the files onto a modern machine, I couldn't actually open them up.
19:06:41 And so, one thing I want to talk about today is, uh, file formats and how to recover.
19:06:49 Information when you actually have the file in hand. And there's a related topic, which is.
19:06:55 Transferring files. When you send a ma… when you send a… if you have an iPhone, a modern iPhone, you take a picture with it.
19:07:04 If you have set it up properly, it's going to save everything in a very high… resolution format.
19:07:11 And they're also going to use a high-efficiency format that Apple calls HEIC, and I don't remember what that stands for.
19:07:19 And I don't care. If you email one of those photographs to somebody who has an Android phone.
19:07:26 They can't see it. So… It's one thing to recover files, but then it's another to actually transfer them off to some people.
19:07:35 And then, after I'm done talking about that for a while, I want to show you some virtual machines, unless you want me to do the virtual.
19:07:43 Machines first. A virtual machine is… is running a…
19:07:48 A machine as if it's an IBM or a Unix machine.
19:07:51 Even though it's not. So…
19:07:57 Anybody have a preference? Okay, I've got to, first of all talk about.
19:08:05 File formats. And I'm gonna share my screen, so don't go away.
19:08:15 And I'm going to move this menu bar that you can't see out of the way, so it stops irritating me.
19:08:21 Um. What happened to my…
19:08:27 Oh, there you are. Um… As I was recovering things off of, uh…
19:08:35 Diskettes, I noticed that I had some things that… We're problem children.
19:08:40 And, uh… Let me see if I can change the resolution here without screwing up, uh…
19:08:51 Zoom. Okay, can you see it better? I hope.
19:08:58 This file here says that it is an AU file. And if you know anything about science, you'll know that an AU is basically a unit of astronomical.
19:09:09 Measurement which has nothing to do with what this is. This is a sound file, and it's done in… it's stored in a Unix format.
19:09:17 So, if it's a Unix sound file, how can you hear it?
19:09:22 And the answer is, if you have a Mac, you can open up.
19:09:25 Ah, that's not what I wanted to open up. Uh, you can open it up with QuickTime.
19:09:32 And you can play it. Now, whether or not you can actually hear it is another matter. Well, I don't think there is any question about it.
19:09:41 It can only be attributed for… Consume an error.
19:09:44 I don't know if you could hear that, but it was from 2001.
19:09:48 This was recorded at least. Sometime in the 20th century, so it's quite old.
19:09:56 Now that you have this file, if you want to share it with someone, especially a PC user.
19:10:02 It's completely useless, because they can't hear a Unix, uh. Sound file. So if you go up to cook time, you'll see that QuickTime has an export command, and you can say.
19:10:14 Export it as audio only. And that'll try to save it as an.
19:10:20 M4a. Which is a modern audio format.
19:10:24 But it's a modern audio format. For Macs. It's not… generally speaking, something that.
19:10:32 A, uh, Android or PC user can use. So what can you do with something like that?
19:10:38 And the answer is, there are other tools out there. And the tool that I prefer for this sort of thing is called, uh, Audacity.
19:10:46 Which is a pun, because it's, uh… It's an audio pun. Um, and Audacity, he can read these files, so if I…
19:10:55 Drag it over to Audacity. I can play it.
19:11:00 Well, I don't think that is… well, I don't think… Yes, yes, yes, stop that.
19:11:04 But I can also go say, up here and say File, Export Audio.
19:11:09 And I went to export it to a computer. I have a whole bunch of different kinds of formats. I can have an MP3 format, an AIF format… oh, but you're… you don't care.
19:11:20 If you're gonna send it to a PC. Or anybody else, if you don't know what's going on.
19:11:25 Use MP3, say, export. And… now that audio format…
19:11:34 Uh, go away. Is someplace on my desktop.
19:11:40 And… I have an MP3 file that I can send off to a Unix… to a… to a PC user or an Android user, and they'll be able to hear it.
19:11:50 So, I took a file that was. Produced in the last century.
19:11:55 On a Unix machine, and I've saved it in a format that modern computers can read.
19:12:01 And listen to on both PCs and Macs.
19:12:06 Do you lose quality when you do that?
19:12:08 Um, it depends upon the original quality of the audio file. I… this was such an old one that any format I save it in today.
19:12:16 Any modern format is going to be a better format than the original audio. So it's not going to improve it.
19:12:22 But it's not going to decrease the quality. If it was a high-resolution audio file.
19:12:29 Um, you can save it in an MP3 format, and it'll be pretty good, but it won't be as good.
19:12:36 As the max native audio file. If you go to any.
19:12:42 Almost any audio workshop, or… movie producer or something like that.
19:12:46 Um, they use Macs. For their video, and they use Macs for the audio.
19:12:51 Um, and Apple's aware of this, and they work really hard at doing this.
19:12:55 Uh, making sure that it sounds and looks as good as possible.
19:12:59 But, uh, for an audiophile this old. If you get an MP3, that's as good as it's going to get.
19:13:08 It was probably mono, among other things, so… Um, unless somebody made an effort.
19:13:15 Next file format that I'm going to look at is this one up here. It's another audio format.
19:13:20 It's a wave file. And I'm going to open that in QuickTime.
19:13:25 And this is a finale to Rachmaninoff Concerto.
19:13:34 And it runs through the same issue. If I save it.
19:13:38 I can export it as a M4AV file, or whatever it is.
19:13:43 Um, and that's not gonna do it. But I can use Audacity to save it into another format. Audacity, by the way, is free.
19:13:52 You just go onto the internet, look for Audacity. And it's… it's free. It does a really good job on audio files.
19:14:00 I'm going to show you something that's a little bit different now.
19:14:05 I'm going to open up… Well… I'm going to drag this file over onto something called BBEdit.
19:14:13 Bb Addit is a, um… is a text editor that's designed for programmers.
19:14:19 And, um, so this is what this file looks at like. It looks like garbage.
19:14:25 And there's a way to make it look… Um… slightly less like garbage, so I'm going to tell it to dump it as, um…
19:14:34 Hexadecimal file. So now you can see it's numbers, as far as… the computer is concerned. But, uh…
19:14:42 This is what is called a MIDI file, and a MIDI file.
19:14:46 Stands for musical… instrument digital interface.
19:14:52 Um, a lot of, um… keyboards and other instruments today output things in MIDI format.
19:15:00 And since it's basically just. Text, um, it can be opened up pretty much universally.
19:15:08 By, among other things, but except that QuickTime doesn't want to open it. Well, heck with QuickTime.
19:15:13 Normally works with QuickTime. We're gonna use GarageBand instead. If you don't have GarageBand, you should. It's a really good.
19:15:21 Free program for doing all kinds of weird stuff. And this, if you look at it, the mini file, which is just text.
19:15:29 Is broken down, it had inside of it. Commands to play these instruments. The instruments are actually inside of GarageBand. So these are just instructions.
19:15:40 To software instruments that are in GarageBand. And I come up here, and I find the play button wherever the play button is.
19:15:57 It's a rock song that I like to use to irritate people. I like the rock song, but uh… It's interesting. And that ticking sound, if you heard it at all, the ticking sound is the, um…
19:16:10 Metronome that's built into GarageBand, and I exited before I finished showing you what the trick was.
19:16:19 And… So now we have this song up here.
19:16:23 If you wanted somebody to hear this, they don't probably have GarageBand. If they have a Windows machine.
19:16:30 But if you go, say, save as, you can now. Um… that's not what I wanted… I wanted.
19:16:43 Save as… I don't want it to say that way.
19:16:56 Uh…
19:17:08 I'm looking for the export button. And it's hiding. But anyway, this thing will export it as a…
19:17:18 As an MP3. All they have to do is figure out where it's located.
19:17:23 And… I don't see it right now. But anyway, GarageBand can actually take that.
19:17:30 Midi file and turn it into an audio file. That you can then share with other people.
19:17:37 Um… And…
19:17:42 Uh… There was one more I was going to…
19:17:48 Show you which easiest way might be. To… ah, yes.
19:17:54 Um, this is a WAV file, which is a Windows, uh… a Windows format.
19:18:04 And if you're gonna… because this is a Windows format, I'm kind of irritated if you send people.
19:18:09 This is a… is a Windows file if they have a Mac, but this is where you can save it as just an audio file.
19:18:16 And it'll save it as an audio file that they can play with QuickTime, or they can… play with, uh.
19:18:23 Uh, the, uh, music. Application.
19:18:27 A new music player application. So they're… when it comes to…
19:18:32 Audiophiles. There are different ways in order to. Convert them into something that either you or somebody else.
19:18:39 Can make use of. Sometimes, though, it gets a little bit, uh, tricky.
19:18:46 Um, as an example. I will give you my science fiction library.
19:18:53 And… where is my science fiction library?
19:19:00 That's one… where's the other one? There it is.
19:19:06 This is my science fiction library, which I haven't actually updated this in… um, 20-some years.
19:19:14 When I was in college. I… kept track of the science fiction novels as I was reading.
19:19:22 Because, among other things, I was writing about the history of science fiction.
19:19:26 It's not what I was told my department I was doing, but that's what I did.
19:19:31 And this text listing. Has 2,262…
19:19:38 Science fiction novels that I read while I was in college.
19:19:43 Um, and I keep track of each one of them. And I did it on Hollerith cards.
19:19:49 A hollerith card, where is a Hollerith card? Let's go back, can we…
19:19:55 This is a Hollow Earth card. I would punch these out on a key punch machine.
19:20:01 One card per book. And then, after getting my bachelor's and master's.
19:20:09 Kathleen decided we were going to move to, uh, San Francisco, because she was joining the.
19:20:14 Public Health Service, and I was going to lose access to the IBM mainframe.
19:20:21 So, let us now consider something. This particular card. Has 80 columns on it.
19:20:26 And that limits the amount of information you can stick on the card.
19:20:31 And the cards themselves are a little on the hefty side.
19:20:35 Um, there are 2,000 cards in a box, and a box of these cards weighs.
19:20:41 14 and a half pounds. So, on one box, you can store 160,000 bytes of information.
19:20:51 At this rate, if you took the, uh… Cranberries, cranberries are Irish rock group, they have a very famous song called.
19:20:59 Zombie, which is about, uh. Um, how bad the IRA was.
19:21:04 And, uh, Zombie… is about, uh, 7.5 million bytes long.
19:21:11 It's 5 minutes and 5 seconds long for the song. It would take 46 boxes of cards.
19:21:20 Weighing 667 pounds. To record zombie.
19:21:27 On paper. So you punch stuff out on the cards, and.
19:21:32 If you've got a nice paper record. The good news is that.
19:21:36 These cards have a life expectancy of 80 to 100 years. They're acid-free.
19:21:41 Paper, it's not… it's not regular paper, it's actually cardstock. Really good stuff. But the problem is, they weigh a lot, they might last forever, but they weigh a lot.
19:21:52 Les Miserables, the movie, if you streamed it, that's about 6.8 billion bytes. It would take 43.
19:22:00 Thousand boxes of cards, 86 million cards to record it. And that's 312 tons of paper.
19:22:07 So, I now had… I wasn't trying to record music or video, I was just trying to get my library. My library was recorded on these cards, and by the way, they only recorded in uppercase.
19:22:19 No lowercase. And I wanted them someplace else. So what I did, I kept the printouts, and eventually I used a scanner.
19:22:28 To scan them into my computer, ran OCR recognition against them to turn that scanned image into text.
19:22:35 And then I wrote a program to change them from all uppercase to upper and lowercase. I had to write a custom program to do that.
19:22:44 And I then produce this, uh, and then I wrote a separate program to break them into fields, so that the author was separate from title, which was… Separate from publisher, and so on and so forth.
19:22:54 And this… Um…
19:23:01 2,500 cards, what was it, 2,300? I don't remember how many I said it was.
19:23:07 2,262 cards worth of information, which came out to 55 sheets of computer… paper are now one file.
19:23:16 That's searchable on my computer. Um, 50 years later.
19:23:22 So that's one way to convert things. But you might already have things on your computer that you can't.
19:23:30 Read. For example, if you have one of the old Macs before Mac OS X.
19:23:35 They didn't put file extensions on things, and in fact, you can go into the Finder.
19:23:40 You can go into Settings, into advanced, and you can say.
19:23:44 Don't show the file extensions. And, uh, the next time I would reboot, they would disappear, but I want those, so I'm gonna put that back.
19:23:53 These file extensions are very, very useful. Uh, your Mac can look inside of files and tell what they are.
19:24:02 Sometimes, but not always. So, this file here that's black. If I look at it, over here it says it's an executable Unix file, so I click on it.
19:24:12 And it says I couldn't do anything, so it stopped. So it's not a Unix file, so what is it?
19:24:19 I drag it over onto BBEdit. And BBEdit says, oh, it's actually a text file.
19:24:26 So how do I convert this text file into something that I can read today?
19:24:35 Any ideas? No ideas?
19:24:41 This one's easy. Watch this. It's magic. I come here at the end of the file, I type in text.
19:24:51 T, and it says you want to add that? I say, sure.
19:24:54 And I click on it now, and it opens it up.
19:24:59 That's all I did. So I changed it from having no extension to having an extension, and the Mac says, oh, that's a text file.
19:25:06 I can open it up with something that opens text files.
19:25:09 So that's… that's easy. Some of them are a little bit more difficult.
19:25:15 Like, for example, this one down here, it says PowerBook 540C.
19:25:20 What is that? If I click on it again, it thinks it's a… a, uh… Unix program, it's not really a Unix program, doesn't know what to do with that, so I drag it over here.
19:25:31 And it says, oh, it's actually an EPSF file. In EPSF file is a PostScript file.
19:25:38 Now, most of you don't have PostScript programs, but I do.
19:25:43 So I'm going to type in… EPS, and say, do you really want to change that? I do.
19:25:50 And when I click on it now, it's going to open up.
19:25:53 Adobe Acro… well, it's opening Photoshop. Should have opened up Acrobat, but what the heck?
19:25:59 And… And… you can't see it particularly well, because it's small.
19:26:07 But it's a picture… it's a drawing of a PowerBook. From, uh…
19:26:14 Don't say. God save. Go away.
19:26:20 And that file's from 1994. And in 1994, the Mac knew that that was an EPSF file.
19:26:29 Because Max didn't use extensions back then. But the Mac today is running on Unix, and Unix kind of likes those extensions.
19:26:38 So, I created this… I made this into a usable file by just finding out what it was.
19:26:44 Giving it the appropriate extension. And that's… that works sometimes.
19:26:51 This one that says, read me first, that looks important. We should click on that, and again, it says, oh, can't do that.
19:26:55 So I drag this over here. And it says, oh.
19:27:00 Well, what is this? This is a PDF, it says. Hmm. Let's see if it's really a PDF.
19:27:07 So I come here, click on it. Type in PDF… PDF.
19:27:15 And PDF is a shortcut for Acrobat. A lot of you don't have Acrobat, but if you click on it.
19:27:21 You can say open with, you'll see that preview can open Acrobat files. So let's see, yep!
19:27:26 It's an Acrobat file. So I took an unreadable.
19:27:31 Ancient file from 1997, and I turned it into a readable file.
19:27:37 By just changing the extension. A lot of people, though, they do this the wrong way. For example.
19:27:45 We had a member a couple months ago who said that they.
19:27:49 They, uh, were changing files for somebody else by just changing the extension.
19:27:54 And most of the times, that's not going to work. You have to make sure it's the right.
19:27:58 Kind of extension. I can take this file here that says it's an HEIC file.
19:28:04 If I change this to say that it's a JPEG file.
19:28:07 And send it to somebody on a PC, it won't open.
19:28:10 Now, what is it? It is… an image file, but it's a high-efficiency image file that's Mac only.
19:28:20 Pcs, Android can't see these. So what do you do in this case? In this case, I come up to the File menu, and I say.
19:28:27 Export this as… and I'm in preview. As I say, exponent is JPEG and says save.
19:28:35 And it'll save it now as a JPEG. Image that PCs can see.
19:28:40 By the way, this picture is of an old NOAA ship.
19:28:43 Um, it's actually at, uh, Pierside. In, uh, Port Angeles.
19:28:50 It's had all the logos taken off of it, and I… was driving by one day, and I said, that's a NOAA ship, and it is.
19:28:57 Uh, the, uh… Uh, it was slightly damaged, although it wasn't slightly damaged. It was damaged about…
19:29:04 Five, six years ago, and they were going to send it in for repairs, and they decided, given the age of the ship.
19:29:10 That it wasn't worth the repairs, and I have no idea why it's in Port Angeles.
19:29:15 But it's been sitting there for, um… several months. But anyway, this is a… this is an image file.
19:29:23 But if you send this to a PC user, they won't be able to use it.
19:29:28 They just can't read it. There are other things that…
19:29:33 Are kind of imagery and really aren't. That are worth looking at.
19:29:38 Uh… did I get rid of them? Oh, no, they… there they are.
19:29:49 Uh… That's a text document, don't want that one.
19:29:57 These are all pictures. These are the very first pictures that I ever.
19:30:03 Worked with on a computer. This is, uh, Venus de Milo.
19:30:09 This is the Starship Enterprise. It's printed out, uh… 90 degrees, this is the Mona Lisa.
19:30:17 And this is a dragon. In the very early days of computing, when I was running… when I was using an IBM mainframe, this is how you created pictures on a computer.
19:30:28 You couldn't get graphics, graphics… graphics hadn't been invented. I used… I used to tell my daughter, she was born in 198.
19:30:36 She wanted to know why old pictures were in black and white, and I just told her that color hadn't been embedded. Everybody just… saw things in black and white.
19:30:44 Um, she didn't believe me, but uh… To some extent, that's true. The early computer art was just…
19:30:52 A bunch of text that was typed on a page. I'm going to turn off file sharing so that I can.
19:31:02 Answered questions. Any questions about that? I went through that fairly quickly, I recognize that.
19:31:14 One thing that, um, that I want to… kind of emphasize is a lot of the tools you have.
19:31:21 For converting old things into new things you already have. Preview can read all kinds of image files and save them back as JPEGs. You're not saving them, you're exporting them.
19:31:34 And you can do the same thing with sound files, either with, uh.
19:31:38 Quicktime, or you can use, um… Audacity, which is free.
19:31:44 A lot of the tools either you have or you can get quite easily.
19:31:48 And if you've had a Mac for some time, especially if you're trying to.
19:31:53 Think things from an old Mac. Put them onto a new Mac, you might find that you have the files, but you.
19:31:59 Really aren't sure how to re… how to read them. And one of the ways to find out how to read them.
19:32:06 Is when you click on the file, instead of just double-clicking on it.
19:32:09 Click on the file, use the right mouse button. To pop the little thing that, um, this menu that pops up and say, open with.
19:32:18 And it'll list all the files that can open that file.
19:32:21 Which may not be the file that you used to create it.
19:32:25 Pages, for example, can open up Microsoft Word files. So can simple text.
19:32:31 Not SimpleTouch. Uh, so can… what's the name of that? Text editor. Uh, it's called TextEdit. Can open up, uh, Word files. So a lot of, a lot of.
19:32:43 Things that you already have on your computer. Can open up these old files.
19:32:48 But maybe not if you directly click on it. If they directly click on it.
19:32:53 It may say, I have no idea what this is. And, um, you have to give it a little bit of help.
19:33:00 Do you ever use an open office, Lawrence?
19:33:04 I stopped using OpenOffice, uh, oh, like, 10 years ago. My reason for use… stopping using OpenOffice is that, uh.
19:33:14 The, uh, pro… the… the project was being starved for money by the Mozilla Foundation.
19:33:23 The Mozilla Foundation. Heavily funded that at the start, because Mozilla.
19:33:29 Wanted to be a, uh… they wanted to be a rival to Microsoft.
19:33:32 And they thought that if they just stuck with browsers and things like that, that they wouldn't be.
19:33:37 And, uh, so they… we're helping with OpenOffice and a lot of other open software projects, but when they starve for funding.
19:33:45 A lot of the… a lot of these, um. Software projects are done by teams of people.
19:33:52 Who have jobs, but a lot of them don't, and they were getting stipends from the foundation, and when the.
19:33:58 Stipends, uh, dried up, uh, they… went and did something else.
19:34:02 Yeah, I can drop stuff in open off sometime that I can't open, whether an open office opens some of the stuff up for me that I can't normally open up.
19:34:11 We'll open our office, among other things, does… will open files and formats that are no longer supported, and they're not just.
19:34:18 Yeah.
19:34:18 Not just from Microsoft, but from other. Companies. Um, because I am a writer at one time or another, I probably used.
19:34:27 Close to 100 different word processors. And I'm not talking about different versions, I mean different word.
19:34:34 Processors. And, uh, one of the problems you run into. Is that I have some… I have some… files that I wrote was something called FullWrite.
19:34:44 Oh, 15 years ago. I can't read them anymore. Um, there's nothing out there that can convert them.
19:34:50 So, being cognizant of maintaining your archives. Is an important problem. The…
19:34:59 I want to have… access to the bibliography of things that I've written.
19:35:04 And when I first wrote that, I wrote it in something called, uh, Scriptsit, which was a word processor.
19:35:12 With a TRS-80. Trs-80 was made by Radio Shack. In the 1970s.
19:35:17 And when… And later on, went into CPM and…
19:35:24 And Apple IIs, and so on and so forth, I had to convert that into something else.
19:35:29 And the most common denominator for that was just save it as text.
19:35:33 Which gets rid of the formatting, which is inconvenient, because. You're writing especially a scholarly paper, and it's got… you italicize the titles and things like…
19:35:43 Italicized foreign phrases, all that goes away. So, uh…
19:35:47 Um, on files that are, like, black, and it says EXEC on it, which I think's a PC.
19:35:52 Kind of a format. Do you do anything?
19:35:54 No, EXEC is an executable. It'll… that's a program.
19:35:59 And it'll try and run it on a PC.
19:36:03 Okay, can you convert that on an iMac from that format?
19:36:07 No. And you also want to be a little bit careful, because a lot of things that say that they are text.
19:36:07 Okay.
19:36:13 But they end on EXE, or EXEC, are actually viruses that… They masquerade as text.
19:36:21 In order for you to click on them and try and open them.
19:36:24 And then the virus attacks you. Now, there are PC viruses, so it won't do anything, but it'll torque you off a bit.
19:36:31 Um, but it, it… It can infect your machine, but it doesn't mean it won't… raise your blood pressure a bit.
19:36:39 I don't need that.
19:36:41 Yeah, EXE and EXEC. It means it's an executable program, which means it's a…
19:36:49 Okay.
19:36:48 Windows program. The Windows world, by the way, is, um… I… I don't know if I'll get into it today, but the Windows world right now is in a…
19:36:58 Is in a state of flux. Um… Apple, over its livelihood, when they first started out with the Apple II with the 6502.
19:37:11 Processor. That was just kind of a lucky break that the 6502 was available and it was cheap.
19:37:17 Apple built the Apple II around that. Then when they went to the Mac, they went to the 68,000, which was a molar roller chip.
19:37:24 And they went from a 8-bit to a 16-bit chip, and then they went to.
19:37:30 Uh, 32-bit chips, and then they went to the PowerPC, which was made by.
19:37:35 Ibm, and they went even farther than they could go with the Motorola chips.
19:37:41 And then they went to Intel chips because. Uh, when they had the iMac, they wanted to have.
19:37:48 They wanted to lower their manufacturing costs and increase their software compatibility, so they went with.
19:37:54 Intel chips, which are also used by the. Windows world, so the processors were very cheap.
19:38:00 And then Intel processors kind of plateaued. So, the way to make the machines faster and more capable, they put.
19:38:09 More processors in the machine. My iMac Pro over here has 8.
19:38:16 Intel Xeon processors, which are their high-end processors. 8 of them. Um… my M1 Mac.
19:38:24 Can run races with it and beat it most of the time.
19:38:27 So, in order to get beyond that hump. Apple started making their own processors.
19:38:34 When Apple started doing that, and they were successful. Then you can now go into, uh… Costco, and you can buy.
19:38:43 Chips that don't have Intel processors in them. They're using what's called ARM processors, and don't… Don't worry about what it's called, but it's the same kind of…
19:38:53 Technology that Apple is using. They're not Apple processors, but they're built using the same kind of.
19:38:58 Manufacturing. And they're doing that because they can get faster processes than you can get from Intel.
19:39:06 Well, Intel… is now saying that they're going to start making ARM processors.
19:39:11 So the Windows world is going through these. Changes as well.
19:39:16 And part of it is that if you look at your Mac today.
19:39:20 I'll give you a different analogy. If you had an Apple II using whatever the Apple.
19:39:26 WordPress or what sort of was, which I don't remember, because I never actually owned an Apple II.
19:39:30 I just taught courses with it. You cannot out-type the Apple II processor. If you're sitting in fast space and you're typing away on your Apple II.
19:39:40 You can't out-type it. That was on a 1MHz. Processor.
19:39:47 Now, the processor I have on this machine, it's got, like.
19:39:52 16 cores, all of them a thousand times faster. Than that Apple II, so… it… does that mean I've got 16 million times more processing power?
19:40:04 Yes. Can I type any faster than I did before? No. That extra power and the extra memory.
19:40:14 Is being used to do things like video and audio. Like, this… there's no way an Apple II could have a Zoom session.
19:40:22 Takes a staggering amount of horsepower to do that. But the other thing, aside from the horsepower for the things we're doing, the other thing it uses.
19:40:30 Is it's using that for intelligence to make it easier to use.
19:40:35 If you had an Apple II and you wanted to print.
19:40:39 Apple IIs weren't designed with printers in mind, so on an Apple II.
19:40:42 You didn't print to a printer, you printed to a card in your machine.
19:40:46 And then the card would talk to the printer, and it was… it was weird.
19:40:52 It was very weird. You couldn't have two monitors. You couldn't… You couldn't change the resolution of the monitor. The monitor that, when you bought it, it was that resolution forever.
19:41:02 And about half of all apples actually had monochrome monitors. With dark green and light green dots on it.
19:41:11 So that power is being used to make things. Easier for us, and to make us… to give us the power to do things we never did before.
19:41:21 How many of you have ever edited a movie? Raise your hand if you've ever edited a movie.
19:41:27 How many of you would have edited a movie if you didn't have a Mac?
19:41:33 The Mac allows you to do things you haven't ever considered doing.
19:41:38 When I started using computers, when you typed it out, and you printed it, it came out in 10-point pica.
19:41:46 Monospaced. Every letter was the exact same width. You can do that now on a Mac, but you have to work at it, because it normally puts out things in…
19:41:55 In proportionally spaced letters, and if you want to have italics, you can do that. If you want to have colored letters, you can do that. If you want to insert a color picture in your text, you can do that.
19:42:05 All of that's new stuff that didn't exist back with the Apple II.
19:42:09 But that doesn't mean that the information that you. Created back then. Doesn't mean you don't want to have.
19:42:15 Access to it, and to… sometimes to get access to it, you actually have to convert it to a… more modern format.
19:42:22 And that's what I've been doing for the last several months.
19:42:27 I went through 500 and 600 and 600 deaths. Taking stuff off of them, and this…
19:42:36 Throw them away. You know how you recycle a CD-ROM or a DVD?
19:42:42 You throw it in the trash. The only useful thing that you can do, and I've done this before.
19:42:48 We used to have, when we had Christmas trees at work.
19:42:52 It's a federal building, so we didn't have Christmas trees, we had holiday trees.
19:42:56 And you want to democrate it, I take CD-ROMs that we weren't using anymore, and I turn them into.
19:43:01 Danglies on the… on the Christmas tree. We had one tree one year that had 600.
19:43:08 Cds on it, and while, uh, during the Christmas vacation, one of the, uh, janitors accidentally hit it.
19:43:16 And it crashed, and the security people had to come and rescue him because the weight of the CDs, he couldn't get out.
19:43:22 From under the tree, but uh… There's really nothing you can do with them other than, uh… If you take a CD.
19:43:29 And you put it on fishing line, and you dangle it off your roof.
19:43:33 Uh, the birds will love it, because they like the flashy.
19:43:37 Object, but can you turn it into anything useful? No, it's… It's, um… the… you can't reuse the.
19:43:45 It for anything at all. And they oxidize over time, which is why there's a… you have a…
19:43:52 There's a timeline button on CDs and DVDs, you have to… Uh, if you have something that you want off of it, you need to take it off.
19:44:00 Now, because among other things, they stopped making optical disk drives. You can still buy them on Amazon.
19:44:06 But they've stopped making it. Lg was the last manufacturer of optical disk drives.
19:44:11 And they stopped it last, uh, December.
19:44:18 Questions?
19:44:28 What's the topic of our next meeting?
19:44:26 No questions? Well, I did not talk about virtual machines, and I kind of went to do that because.
19:44:37 Um. I have a number of computers, but most people don't want to have a number of computers.
19:44:43 And with virtual machines, it allows you to have. On your Mac, you can also have a Windows machine.
19:44:51 You can have a Linux machine, you can have a Unix machine. Actually, Microsoft, uh, Microsoft.
19:44:56 The Mac operating system is Unix. Most of you don't ever need to know that, but a lot of the things that I do on my Mac, I'm actually doing in Unix.
19:45:07 Underlying the glossy. Front, uh, veneer, there's a full-blown, certified Unix operating system.
19:45:15 Unix was invented by Bell Labs as an experiment. And, uh, the Unix world.
19:45:21 Officially came into being in January 1st, 1970. The clock inside the Mac thinks that January 1st, 1970 is the beginning of the universe.
19:45:33 Um, and that's because that was when they licensed it to, uh.
19:45:37 University of California, Berkeley. And the University of California, Berkeley created the Berkeley Distribution.
19:45:44 Of Unix, and if you… There's a way to look inside of the Mac operating system, and it credits the university.
19:45:51 California Berkeley. Um, so that's… You can do Unix on your Mac right now.
19:45:57 But you can also do Linux, you can do Windows. You can do different types of windows.
19:46:03 Will you go over a terminal?
19:46:05 Um, I will… I will definitely talk about Terminal, but… Talking about terminal in detail.
19:46:13 I kind of find… I want to kind of poll people, because.
19:46:16 After about 30 seconds, most people's eyes are gonna glaze over, because they're never gonna want to look at Terminal.
19:46:23 But, uh, um… That's definitely on the geeky side.
19:46:29 Um, but, uh, you can run a Chrome operating system on the Mac in a virtual environment.
19:46:36 Um, I have multiple machines, including two Windows machines. The two Windows machines, the only thing I use them for.
19:46:43 Is teaching people how to use safely use Windows. I don't do any of my own work on Windows.
19:46:51 Um, but as an example. With a virtual Windows machine, if Windows comes up with an update, and they say, you know, this changes something, and I think.
19:47:00 Do I want to do that? I can make a copy of my virtual machine and save it.
19:47:06 I know that one works, and do the update on the original, and if it torches it, I don't care, I just throw it away.
19:47:14 It's really hard to do that. Well, you can do that with real machines, but it's expensive.
19:47:20 I had a Windows machine that died. Last December.
19:47:26 I was doing an update, and it died. And, uh, I'm… it was just… it wouldn't do anything, it wouldn't even turn on.
19:47:33 And… I don't want any of you to tell people about this, because if you do, then they're going to want me to help them, and I don't want to, but…
19:47:43 A couple weeks ago, I had a brilliant idea, and I got it working again.
19:47:46 And I told some friends on the East Coast. And they, uh… We're laughing at me that people would fly from the East Coast out to the West Coast to see if.
19:47:56 I could do the same thing with their machine. When Windows machines die, it's really hard to get them working again.
19:48:03 But I got this where I'm working again. That's why I like the idea of having a disposable Windows machine.
19:48:10 I get one working on my Mac. It's doing what I want it to do, I want to do something that might be dangerous, I make a copy.
19:48:17 So I can always go back to it, do my experiment. If it works, great, and if it doesn't.
19:48:23 Um, I can just throw it away. Because all it is is just space on the hard drive.
19:48:30 Anyway, I…
19:48:30 Lawrence, I asked you this some time ago. Did you ever install iCloud for Windows on one of those PCs?
19:48:37 No, because it was about that time that that Windows box died, and that torqued me off.
19:48:44 I don't want to do it on my virtual Windows machines, because I'm using those for a different purpose.
19:48:49 I want to do that on my real Windows machine, and I just… I just haven't got around to it. That was going to be on my list of things to do when it decided to kill itself.
19:48:58 Um, so… But it was… it was a… It was a temporary suicide. I managed to revive it.
19:49:06 Well, I would… I'd like to hear how that goes. If you ever do it.
19:49:10 Well, I'm curious about it because it gives me an excuse to try something I'd never done.
19:49:15 Which is to share… resources from a Windows machine.
19:49:21 On a Mac via the cloud. And I haven't ever tried that, so that'd be… a worthwhile experiment.
19:49:24 Yeah.
19:49:28 I just don't… I just don't know. I'll give it a shot.
19:49:34 Yes.
19:49:33 Lawrence? I have a question. Earlier this summer, you told us to clean up our phones and clean up our computers with.
19:49:42 Old messages, and get the photographs to the cloud. And have you updated the operating system?
19:49:50 Now, or are you waiting?
19:49:53 I've updated… I have my, uh… I would not recommend that you go out and use the betas of the new operating system. You can… there are public betas of the Mac operating system.
19:50:04 Of the, uh, uh, iPad operating system and of the, um.
19:50:08 Iphone operating system. You can download them for free and try them out.
19:50:13 I do not recommend that you do that with a phone at all.
19:50:16 Because we live in a… at the edge of the known universe, and if your phones stop working because of a bug.
19:50:21 That would be bad. Uh, if you have a second Mac, and you can afford to experiment.
19:50:28 With the betas, then go ahead and try the public betas.
19:50:32 I have the, uh… I have the beta on one of my iPads.
19:50:37 And I have… for the… I have the beta of the operating system for the iPad.
19:50:42 And I have the beta for the Mac operating system on one of my laptops.
19:50:47 But I have more than one Mac. And I have more than one iPad.
19:50:51 If I had only one, I'd be very reluctant to do that.
19:50:55 The iPad…
19:50:57 I was gonna say, would you say that the new… 26 operating system is overhyped.
19:51:04 Or is there really big advantages that we don't have now?
19:51:10 There are… there are advantages to what you have over… right, at the present, and one of the things that I'm most looking forward to.
19:51:17 I'll have to wait until it actually comes out in release, and I can put it on my phone.
19:51:22 And that is, it does… that you can set up the iPhone with the new operating system to do phone screening.
19:51:29 So that if it's… they're not in your contact list, they actually have to identify themselves.
19:51:35 And little robots can't do that, which should cut down on the spam calls.
19:51:39 I think that's definitely something I want to do. But it also allows you to do the phone screening from your Mac, so you don't even have to be near your phone.
19:51:48 Yet a phone call in, you can screen it from your Mac.
19:51:52 And… I think that's just fantastic, but I have to wait for them to actually come out.
19:51:58 Because, I'm not going to try that right now. There are other things about it. On the iPad, it's a huge step up on the iPad.
19:52:06 Because you can have… you can have overlapping windows, like you do on the Mac, and you can move… you can do multiple things at one time.
19:52:14 On the iPad, and that's… It's not… it's not the same as a full-blown Mac operating system.
19:52:21 But it's much less confined than. The one screen at a time that you have with a… with an iPad. And I've had great fun with that.
19:52:31 What… the one thing I don't like about the iPad operating system, and it has a security flaw.
19:52:36 It's not a big one, but it's… it irritates me, and I've sent in, like.
19:52:41 Two dozen bug reports about it. It's something I'm sure that they will fix, but it just…
19:52:48 It, uh, irritates me. And that's one of the points of having the betas out there, is that people find false flaws, and you…
19:52:57 Uh, there's a little feedback. Application, you click on that and send them nasty notes.
19:53:03 Um, so I've been doing that.
19:53:10 Any other questions? Um, I would like to show you virtual machines, uh, next month.
19:53:19 Um, and probably the new operating systems, whatever they've released. Uh, in October.
19:53:26 Uh, is there something else you'd like instead, or in addition, or…?
19:53:32 Lawrence, can I ask you a quick question? It has nothing to do with that, though.
19:53:30 Anything?
19:53:37 Did you by chance know how to… you know, on your keyboard.
19:53:42 You can choose different ones. Well, I have several for different languages, and then I have an emoji.
19:53:48 Keyboard selected as well. And in my emoji keyboard, there are some emojis in there that are so ridiculous, and I never use them.
19:53:57 But evidently, I've used them a couple of times, I think?
19:54:01 Somewhere way back, but I can't get them out of there. So I went and I reset my keyboard, I took all of my different keyboards away, except for English.
19:54:13 Then I even took English away and put a different language in, so that it wasn't hooked to that, and reset everything.
19:54:21 I cannot get those emojis to go away. You know how after a while, if you haven't used them, they fall off?
19:54:27 Are you talking… are you talking about emojis on. A Mac or an iPad.
19:54:28 I must…
19:54:34 Ipad. Oh, and of course, it's so smart. It takes these emojis and puts it on all three of my iPads, plus my phone.
19:54:42 Uh, that, yeah, they're syncing through iCloud. Um, on your…
19:54:49 This is… Pardon?
19:54:48 Oh, I also decided that iCloud. Trying to get rid of it. I signed out of iCloud trying to get rid of it.
19:54:57 As soon as you log in to get your mail, it's gonna be there. Um… the, uh… On the iPad in particular.
19:55:06 Some emojis are added by applications. So, for example. Um, I can't remember, but there's probably… there might be an emoji associated with Zoom or something like that. A lot of applications will add emojis.
19:55:20 And you didn't add them, they're added by just having that application on your iPad.
19:55:27 Gives you that emoji. And the only way to… get rid of it that I know of is to delete the application.
19:55:35 The problem is, I don't care that it's in the, you know, 100 and whatever.
19:55:39 Emojis. But under your 20 most used, where the little clock is.
19:55:44 It's those emojis that… it bothers me immensely.
19:55:50 I'm sorry. There are limits on what you can do with artificial intelligence, and a lot of it's.
19:55:55 Based just on math. If you've used it, and it's… it was the… you use those.
19:56:02 18, and you'll use that 19th one. Several months ago, but it was still the 19th one most used. It'll show up.
19:56:11 It bothers me so much, I think I'm going to call AppleCare. It drives me nuts!
19:56:10 Um, it's… it's…
19:56:17 The people at AppleCare would not appreciate your call.
19:56:23 Oh, just be that special person that day that just there to irritate somebody.
19:56:31 It's weird, the things that can aggravate me, and the emojis are one of them right now.
19:56:36 Well, the, um… someday I should probably talk about that, too.
19:56:44 I did a short little. Video presentation for somebody that was done entirely with memojis, not emojis, but…
19:56:53 Emojis. So there was a talking… Uh, all the animals in the, uh, oriental zodiac were talking, and.
19:57:02 Um, and then there's a memoji of me, so it's a cartoon version of me that was talking as well.
19:57:10 And, uh… the person I sent it to, they're a video editor for, um…
19:57:17 Lucasfilm. And he's been demanding that I tell him how it…
19:57:22 I did it. And he's gonna be really torqued off when he finally figures out that I just use my iPhone.
19:57:32 That's funny.
19:57:35 Such is life.
19:57:37 Well, yeah, I'm… I'm of no help for choosing topics.
19:57:42 Uh, any questions? No questions? If you have some… if you don't want me to talk about virtual machines, uh, next month.
19:57:51 I was prepared to do it today, but I think it's… I think it's going to be… It's gonna be as involved as talking about file formatting, so…
19:58:01 Put it off until next month. Um, if you don't want me to talk about that, you want to do something else, then, uh… send me a suggestion. But right now, it's looking like we'll talk about new operating systems in October.
19:58:14 Um… And, uh, just… I don't know, I… there's one other thing I wanted to mention.
19:58:21 Um, if you subscribe to the website. And you get the automatic.
19:58:26 Messaging when… post… things are posted. You'll see that I posted a whole bunch of meeting recordings.
19:58:34 And I also had, uh… a thing of things of interest for this month. One of the things that, uh.
19:58:41 I post to Wes, they're gonna be these new operating systems coming out this, uh, next, um.
19:58:47 Four to six weeks. And the other one was that so far.
19:58:52 Apple has given no indication that they're going to release any new machines.
19:58:57 As in computers. They may… release, uh, new iPhones.
19:59:03 But that's based upon nothing other than the rumor sites say so.
19:59:07 But at the Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple made no hardware announcements, and it's the first time.
19:59:14 I think they've never made any kind of hardware announcement. I think they were afraid to commit themselves.
19:59:21 To, uh, to commit their supply chain. To building stuff when they didn't know if they'd be able to sell them at a reasonable cost.
19:59:31 The, uh… threaten 100% tariff on China, for example.
19:59:37 Would double the cost of an iPhone, double the cost of a Mac.
19:59:40 And they didn't like that idea. And even Taiwan, where a lot of the chips and.
19:59:47 Displays, and so on and so forth are made. We've stuck tariffs on them as well.
19:59:53 And I think they were just… leery of making announcements that then they couldn't.
20:00:01 Give any indication of how much they were going to cost.
20:00:05 And, um, how quickly they could… bring him into the country.
20:00:09 So, I think they're… I think they're playing it cautious. And the other side to that is if you want a new computer, go out and get it now.
20:00:21 They'll probably go up in price. I had a friend.
20:00:28 In Vermont, who was torqued off. That the price of maple syrup has gone up.
20:00:33 In Vermont. Vermont… makes maple syrup, but most of the maple syrup that Americans, um.
20:00:40 Buy is coming from Canada. And now it costs more.
20:00:45 So… we had an interesting transcontinental discussion about this. And, um, they've never worked for the federal government, and I used to.
20:00:55 So, it was my fault. And they were trying to get me to… fix this. And I told them the government doesn't really work that way, but…
20:01:06 They were still upset.
20:01:08 So when they say Apple's been… they're going to invest $600 billion or whatever in.
20:01:14 Production here in the United States. From them saying that to the… point that they are, like.
20:01:20 It's working, and they have the plants, and they're actually manufacturing here. Do you have any idea roughly how long that takes?
20:01:26 Well, the announcement of those things, they were investing in Corning.
20:01:33 Corning makes the, uh. The Gorilla Glass, well, actually, for Apple, it's not Gorilla Glass, but it's a very strong.
20:01:41 Glass that's on the front of the iPad, and the iPhone.
20:01:45 They were investing in Corning. Corning was thinking about going bankrupt.
20:01:49 And that really upset Apple, because they want that Gorilla Glass for their… Or their phones and… and… everything, computers and everything else.
20:01:58 So, they made the investment in, um… Corning to keep Corning afloat.
20:02:04 But in terms of new plants, if you take things like the liquid crystal displays that.
20:02:10 Right now are made mostly in Korea and Taiwan. Building one of those plants takes 5 to 7 years.
20:02:18 One plant. There is a plant in, uh… Arizona, that Intel…
20:02:25 Started building, uh, to build, um. Cpu chips, and they started that in 2018, it's still not finished.
20:02:35 They're very expensive, because basically. Uh, for these chip plants.
20:02:40 And the, uh, that… the screen on your… on your iPad is essentially one.
20:02:46 Big, huge chip. The chip plants have to be about 100 times.
20:02:54 Cleaner inside. Than an operating room.
20:03:00 And that's expensive. And it takes a long time to do.
20:03:05 And that's just to keep them clean. That's not actually talking about.
20:03:09 Taking silicon and purifying it to turn it into… chips and adding just the right contaminants to make them conductive, and…
20:03:17 All that sort of stuff. Uh, it's just extremely expensive. And then, after they create the chips, one reason why they're done in.
20:03:25 In China, in Thailand, in India. Is that after you have the chips.
20:03:30 Somebody has to hand-wire. The connectors to the circuit boards. They have machines that can.
20:03:39 Can plug in components, and that's one reason why Apple now has their system on a chip. On the… on my Mac Mini.
20:03:46 The memory, the disk drive, the, uh… CPU, it's all one chip.
20:03:54 One chip. But then you have to connect that chip to the motherboard.
20:03:57 And that takes hand labor. And that's why they're done in Thailand.
20:04:03 They've tried to do that in the United States. Apple had a plant in Fremont, Arizona.
20:04:09 Uh, to build Macintoshes. And they stopped using that plant, I think, in 1998, 1999.
20:04:16 And because they could not get the workforce to, uh. To run it. And right now, that same building right now, I think, is used by Tesla to build.
20:04:26 Something. But, uh, it's just, uh, it's very labor-intensive.
20:04:33 It's very… it's very exacting to build the plants themselves. They had one example at the apple plant. A guy shut them down for 20-some days because he refused to put on his clean suit.
20:04:47 He was having problems with his girlfriend, came in on a temper tantrum, went into the clean room.
20:04:54 Without dressing properly, and it shut it down for 20 days to clean it.
20:05:01 So… It's not easy to do. It looks like magic when you have your phone in your hand, but…
20:05:08 There's a staggering amount of effort that goes into making that, Maggie.
20:05:16 Any other questions?
20:05:19 Um, I'm… so I'm assuming we should, uh, for everything now, we should be buying them now.
20:05:27 Like, for, um, external hard drives, um, the LG optical disk thing we were going to get.
20:05:34 They're all going to get really expensive.
20:05:37 Or, in the case of the optical disc, they're just going to… the market's going to dry up because they've stopped making them.
20:05:43 There aren't any computers anymore that come with a built-in optical disk, so if you want to.
20:05:48 If you want to access an optical disk, you better go get one now, because they just stopped making them.
20:05:47 Right.
20:05:53 Um, and when it comes to the computers, because of the tariffs.
20:05:57 The tariffs are not a tax paid by Taiwan or China.
20:06:03 A tariff, you pay it in the price when you buy it.
20:06:05 Yeah.
20:06:06 And, uh, if it's 20% more, it's 20% more. If it's 50% more, it's 50% more.
20:06:14 Uh, so, yeah, if you… And the other reason why I want to talk about Apple.
20:06:20 Not even hinting at new. Machines, if you're waiting to see if they're going to introduce a new machine.
20:06:27 I will be astonished if they introduce a new machine, because they've had no hints.
20:06:32 Whatsoever. From anyone.
20:06:36 And that goes as far as, um, iPads and phones as well?
20:06:39 Um, there are lots of rumors that they will have new phones.
20:06:43 However, these are just rumors. Um, and also, if you look at the, uh, at the app, at the iPhone operating system, the iPhone operating system has.
20:06:53 Placeholders for a new phone. It doesn't mean that they're going to bring it out in September, October, November, December, just means that there's a…
20:07:01 There's a placeholder, so when the new phone comes out, they can plug in some.
20:07:05 Stuff. But, um… Apple has not said anything, but a lot of the rumor sites say that there will be.
20:07:12 However, rumor sites get clicks by having rumors, and if they.
20:07:16 Don't even have any rumors, nobody goes there anymore, and they don't make any money, so… They have a vested interest in having rumors, even if there's nothing to substantiate them.
20:07:26 How's that for a disclaimer?
20:07:29 Um, uh, Lawrence said. Hank just asked you, by AppleCare, when you purchase a new Apple product, I understand that they'll answer any questions without it.
20:07:39 True? You see it there?
20:07:41 Um, the… okay, here's the, uh… I buy AppleCare for my devices.
20:07:49 Uh, particularly things like iPhones and iPads and, uh… laptops, because if you're buying a laptop and it never leaves your desk, you probably shouldn't have bought a laptop. Laptops are more expensive than.
20:08:04 Desktop machines. A Mac Mini with a big display and a nice keyboard.
20:08:11 Is going to cost less money than a laptop, so you might as well just buy the Mac Mini.
20:08:17 Uh, and if you buy a laptop, then you're going to move it, and if you move it, you're probably going to drop it.
20:08:22 And so that's why I buy AppleCare for my, um, for all of my machines.
20:08:28 Um, the question, I think what they're asking is. If you did not buy AppleCare, but you called up the helpline, will they help you?
20:08:36 If you are asking a question about an operating system. And a computer that's still being made, yes, they'll probably help you.
20:08:46 If you go up and you ask about your Performa 650.
20:08:50 The person that you're talking to probably wasn't born when they made a performance 650.
20:08:56 So you're not going to get an answer to that. But if it's something that's still being made, and uses.
20:09:02 Current software, and you ask, hey, I'm getting this strange noise when I do this.
20:09:08 The answer that you get might be, well, stop doing that, or they might give you a more useful answer.
20:09:14 Uh, you don't have to have AppleCare for that. They just answer questions like that.
20:09:20 They're…
20:09:20 The understanding was that software is… not necessarily that you need AppleCare for, but if it's for hardware, that's when you want AppleCare, correct?
20:09:29 Well, the question was, if you did not have… I think the way it's phrased, if you don't have Ansel Applicare, will they answer your questions that you have?
20:09:37 Yes, if it is about a currently made machine. And you're using current software.
20:09:44 If you have… If you're using current software, but you're using an older machine, the answer may be that they won't give you an answer.
20:09:56 Does that help, Peg? I see her, but I don't hear her.
20:10:03 Yes. Sorry. Yes, that does.
20:10:04 Yeah, okay. Okay, I… Okay.
20:10:08 Thank you so much.
20:10:09 You're welcome.
20:10:11 Uh, any other questions? Okay.
20:10:16 I do, I do. If, uh, say you're, uh, I want to buy a Mac Mini.
20:10:21 Any suggestions for… and I use it for photography exclusively, and some video.
20:10:28 What are we looking at? What should I look at for amount of memory and that type of thing for, I mean, for RAM?
20:10:35 All of the Macs currently sold by Apple. It's different if you go through somebody else who has an old stock, but all of the Macs currently sold by Apple.
20:10:46 Come with 16GB. That is the… that is enough. To do what you would want to do.
20:10:53 Well, I have 32 on my MacBook Pro, and sometimes it's struggling.
20:10:53 Uh, I… Well, in my particular case, I don't remember. I shouldn't go check. I have at least 32.
20:11:04 But I do weird things, like run virtual machines. I have 24 gigs, um, on my Mac Mini.
20:11:11 Mm-hmm.
20:11:11 And I'm very happy with it. I do video, I do… photographs, I do all kinds of stuff.
20:11:18 Uh, so the Mac Mini with 16 or 24 is probably going to be fine.
20:11:24 The internal drives, you can get as low as half a terabyte. I got two… terabytes, and the reason is that even though I have external drives that I store the video and…
20:11:31 Right, and I have that too.
20:11:38 Um, even though I have those external drives, the Mac, by default, uses the internal boot drive.
20:11:44 To do… if we're scrap… if we're, uh, um… scratch space. So as you're doing.
20:11:51 Photography, and you do undoes and re-dos and so on and so forth.
20:11:50 Mm-hmm. Right, right.
20:11:55 It's stored on the internal drive. And I was finding that with the one…
20:12:00 Terabyte internal drive that I had on my, uh… Mac Studio, that every once in a while, I'd just be short of space. I never really ran out, but I get.
20:12:11 Short, and things would take longer than I wanted to. So, I got, uh, 2TB, even though I store everything on external drives.
20:12:20 And the other consideration with the Mac Mini. Is a good screen. I happen to have an Apple Studio.
20:12:27 And yes, they are expensive. But, uh, color rendition and everything is, uh, great.
20:12:32 I have a second monitor, it's an Asus. Uh, and it's their art.
20:12:09 Right. Artisan or something, yeah.
20:12:39 Color art or something like that line. It's not… it's not as good as the Mac Studio, but I'm happy with it.
20:12:50 And I…
20:12:49 Okay. I have an HP that is his… Pretty good. A 32 inch, that's whatever, that's 4K, and yeah.
20:12:57 I also got my keyboard with an extended keyboard with a numeric neat keypad, and the reason why I did that.
20:13:03 Is that a numeric keypad has them arranged like they were on old telephones. I've memorized that as a child, I still memorize that.
20:13:13 If I'm doing a lot of stuff with numbers. That numeric keypad is much handier than taking my hands off the keyboard and go finding the numbers up at the top.
20:13:22 Uh, so that's just kind of a hint that… spend the extra 20, 30 bucks and get the extended keypad, if you, uh.
20:13:30 If you do numbers at all.
20:13:37 Any other questions? Oh, one more thing about the Mac Mini.
20:13:43 The Mac Mini does not have a camera. My Mac Studio has a camera. My Mac Studio Display has a camera.
20:13:50 And, uh, it also has a microphone. I have an external add-on microphone. I like this one.
20:13:57 Because if I tap it on the top, the light goes out, and I can tell the microphone's off.
20:14:01 But with the Mac Mini. If you want a camera and a microphone, you're going to have to either get a, uh.
20:14:09 A video screen that has those, or you're going to have to add them.
20:14:13 Microphones and… And, uh, video cameras are not that expensive.
20:14:13 Perfect.
20:14:19 Right. I'm very true, thank you.
20:14:19 But, uh, it's just something else to think about.
20:14:26 Any other questions? Okay. I shall see you next month, and if you have any suggestions on what you want to talk about.
20:14:35 Um, send them in. And plus, I stuck a lot of stuff up on the website that you've never seen before, so go take a look.
20:14:42 Thank you, Laura. Have a good night.
20:14:42 Thank you, Lawrence. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah.
20:14:46 Thank you. Okay. Alright, bye.

Utilities Part 2: March 2025

Utilities Part 2: March 2025

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

Updates: yes, get them!

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

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

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

Find My

Find My in action. It shows distances in feet, too, not just metric.
Find My in action. It shows distances in feet, too, not just metric.

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

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

Emoji and Symbols

Emoji and Symbol finder in macOS
Emoji and Symbol finder in macOS

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

Keyboard viewer

Emoji and Symbol finder

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

Adding emoji and keyboard viewers to Finder main menu bar
Adding emoji and keyboard viewers to Finder main menu bar

Preview

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

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

Weather

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

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

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

Video recording of the March 2025 Meeting

Transcript of the March 2025 Meeting

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

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

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.

March 21, 2023: Photo editing on the cheap

March 21, 2023: Photo editing on the cheap

The Strait Macintosh User Group meeting for March 2023 focused on photo editing, and how you could crop, resize, compress, and add captions to your photos using just the software that ships with your Macintosh (and iPhone and iPad). The demonstration involved macOS Ventura, Apple Photos, and Apple Preview.

Questions and Answers

Question about passwords — passwords that worked before do not seem to be working now. Your Mac automatically keeps track of passwords (from Apple programs, so yes, Safari and Apple Mail, but no, not necessarily Chrome or Firefox or Thunderbird) in a suite of software programs called, collectively, Keychain. Apple provides a utility to look at stored passwords, called Keychain Access. However, Keychain Access is written by engineers, and is not particularly user-friendly. If your Mac really did “remember” your password, you should be able to find it by using Keychain Access. However, you should also consider using 1Password, which is a commercial program that requires a subscription, but it is much easier to understand and can store, securely, a bunch of things (credit card numbers, secret notes to spies, loyalty card numbers, etc.) beyond just passwords.

A new MacBook Pro is not compatible with an existing laser printer — this may or may not be true. macOS can download drivers for a staggering number of new and obsolete printers. In Ventura, open System Settings > Printers & Scanners, press the Add Printer button, and if your Mac can “see” the printer, wired or wirelessly, it can probably find an appropriate driver. Printer and scanner manufacturers are notoriously poor about providing drivers for hardware they aren’t currently selling, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it to work.

Planning to upgrade from a Mac Pro 2013 to Mac mini with M2 Pro processor — can I use the same external RAID? Most hard drives are warranted for 1 year, though a few may have warranties as long as 5 years. The RAID — with some adapters — should work with a new Apple Silicon-based Mac mini, but you might want to upgrade the RAID, too. You might consider upgrading the RAID, first, and copying everything from the old RAID to the new RAID, and then plugging in the Mac mini. The Mac mini (with appropriate adapters) should be able to handle the old RAID and the new RAID, allowing you to use the old RAID as a backup.

Later on, there was a brief discussion of ChatGPT, which has been in the news pretty much constantly recently. Vice President Lawrence Charters noted some of his interactions, and stated that ChatGPT isn’t really designed for heavy use, and is frequently unavailable, or slow, or unstable. This message was a frequent response to trivial questions:

Something went wrong. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

There was an error generating a response

Regenerate response
ChatGPT Mar 14 Version. Free Research Preview. Our goal is to make AI systems more natural and safe to interact with. Your feedback will help us improve.

Other responses were accurate, if deflective, and some were quite funny:

Who will win the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament?

As an AI language model, I am not capable of predicting the future or the outcome of sporting events. The NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament is a highly competitive event, and the outcome depends on a variety of factors, including the skill and performance of each team, their preparation leading up to the tournament, and luck. The best way to find out who will win the tournament is to follow the games and see how they unfold.

Write a limerick on computer programming and kangaroos.

There was a programmer from Perth
Whose coding skills were quite an exert
But one day he went astray
And wrote a program for a stray
Now his code was jumping like a kangaroo alert!

Write a limerick on Apple Watch meeting an Android phone.

An Apple Watch and Android phone,
Met each other when they were alone,
They tried to connect,
But it was a reject,
Now they communicate by tone.

Write a haiku in Japanese

Certainly, here's a haiku in Japanese:

古池や
蛙飛び込む
水の音

This is a famous haiku by Matsuo Basho, which is often translated as:

An old silent pond
A frog jumps into the pond—
Splash! Silence again.

One question involved passwords and Keychain, Apple’s technology for managing and storing passwords. Lawrence suggested as references Take Control Books, https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/ and several specific books:

Take Control of Your Passwords, https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/passwords/

Take Control of 1Password [one password is a commercial password management program] https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/1password/

Take Control of iCloud [Apple uses iCloud to synchronize passwords between Apple devices] https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/icloud/

Another question involved where to send membership checks or membership renewal checks to Strait Macintosh User Group. The address can be found in the Join link in the top menu of the website.

For other questions, and sometimes appropriate answers, please see the video or the transcript, below.

Photo Editing on the Cheap

The most common photo editing needs are:

  • Cropping: getting rid of unwanted sections of a photo, or changing the orientation from vertical to horizontal — Apple Preview or Apple Photos
  • Straightening: changing the “horizon” of the photo so that the world, or room, does not look crooked. — Apple Photos
  • Exposure: correcting for under or overexposure — Apple Photos and, to a lesser extent, Apple Preview
  • Color correction: Correct for poor color, such as the yellow cast that comes from incandescent lighting. — Apple Photos and, to a lesser extent, Apple Preview
  • Captioning: adding captions to photos. — Apple Photos and Apple Preview.
  • Masking — Apple Preview, or, on the iPhone or iPad, Apple Photos.

You can do all of these editing functions with Apple Photos and Preview. For example, you can turn a photo of someone walking on a curb, copy just the person, insert a caption or title over the photo, and paste just the person back over the photo, to make it look as if the title is embedded in the photo and the person is walking toward it, like this:

Using Apple Preview to create a mask of the subject, then using Preview's annotation function to add a title, and then pasting back the masked subject over the top, to create an embedded title.

Using Apple Preview to create a mask of the subject, then using Preview’s annotation function to add a title, and then pasting back the masked subject over the top, to create an embedded title.

Or use Apple Preview to modify a photo of a famous Chinese spy balloon and add a photo of a child jumping over the balloon:

Chinese spy balloon turned into child'd toy through Apple Preview masking magic.

Chinese spy balloon turned into child’s toy through Apple Preview masking magic.

There is one piece of software mentioned in the meeting that was not made by Apple: ImageOptim. ImageOptim is a free (free!) utility that compresses photos, so that they take less room when sent in an email or put on a website, or embedded in a document. It is free (free!) and easy to use: just drag one or more images on it, and ImageOptim will compress them. You can get it here:

https://imageoptim.com/mac

And, if you care, they also make a Windows version.

A video of the meeting, including the Question and Answer (Q&A) session, is shown below. Closed captioning is available, if you select it in YouTube, and a transcript is also provided below the video.

Photo editing on the cheap, plus questions and answers.

Transcript of the meeting. The numbers in the left-hand column is the time, using a 24-hour clock. 18:39:05 translates to five seconds after 6:39 p.m. Pacific Time.

18:39:05 Turn on close captioning. And the reason why is that closed captioning, in addition to giving you closed captioning also makes a trcript of what we're talking so that I can later on find what lies I told people.
18:39:25 There is a book called Take Control of Icloud and take control of Troubleshooting.
18:39:31 Your Mac. I'm gonna show you the one for Icloud, because I know it has a a chapter on on key chain, and if you have the chat window open I'm going to the URL into the chat window.
18:39:48 So that, you can see what the book is. It's an electronic book.
18:39:54 You can buy it online. And the E, and then download it immediately, so that you can start reading it.
18:40:03 But what teaching is? It's a database on your macintosh that keeps track of passwords, and a lot of passwords you use passwords all the time when you log into your computer after rebooting or trinity it on you're using after your username and
18:40:21 password, and it's being stored in Keychain.
18:40:22 The other nice thing about Keychain is that if you haven't, if you have an iphone or an imax any password that you use on your on your iphone or your ipad automatically get synced to icloud and get synced to your mac so if you log, into your
18:40:40 your bank, from from your computer, and then you're out at the grocery store and you wanna check on what your bank is doing.
18:40:49 You can do that from your iphone, even though you've never logged in from your iphone.
18:40:58 Okay.
18:40:54 The key chain will remember what your bank password is, so it's very handy because it syncs among all the apple devices.
18:41:12 Okay.
18:41:04 But the reason why I don't recommend that you try and edit it with a reference is that it's really easy to delete things that you say.
18:41:16 I've never I don't know what this is. I'll just delete it.
18:41:17 Okay.
18:41:17 And then, later on, that you really needed that.
18:41:21 Right. So you you did send something, and I could see that it would be a way to get you to get to the book that you recommend.
18:41:31 And then it disappeared was just a tiny little.
18:41:35 Well it should scroll. It should be in the chat window.
18:41:41 If you open up the chat window, it should appear there.
18:41:44 There it is. Okay. Thank you. And it'll just stay there.
18:41:49 Okay.
18:41:49 Yes, and at the end of the at the end of the session, where that there's 2, little, 3 little dots down at the bottom of the chat window, and if you click on it you'll see that you can save the chat so anytime anyone types anything in during the meeting into the
18:42:17 Okay.
18:42:06 Chat window. It'll it'll save all the chat messages to a text file so that you have a copy of what we talked about and things that we might have referenced I'm going to type something into it later on.
18:42:20 When I get to talking about tonight. So topic.
18:42:27 But the key chain is just a little on the confusing side.
18:42:34 It's extremely important. But it wasn't really designed to be user friendly.
18:42:41 There is a commercial program that that I you personally use instead of keychain.
18:42:48 Mike Mac still uses Keychain. I'm not saying I'm replacing it, but there's a commercial program called One Password.
18:42:55 That does a really nice job of saving your passwords, your credit card information member member cards like you.
18:43:07 There, you if you were a member of various rewards.
18:43:12 Things you can store rewards things in there, and all kinds of things.
18:43:16 You can store, or just notes like, for example, when I go to the to the doctor's office, and they want to know what drugs are you taking?
18:43:25 I don't remember what drugs I'm taking.
18:43:26 They've got these, you know, 47 character long names. I don't know what they're so I type those into one password and a note, and then I can bring that up at the doctor's office, and they say, are you taking section section.
18:43:40 I say yes, and they say how much? Oh, I'm taking 50 milligrams, and it's it's there on my phone.
18:43:47 So I don't have to when they give me that sheet to fill out.
18:43:54 Okay.
18:43:50 I just say, huh! I got this because I already know.
18:43:57 So I recommend, when password, what password costs money, key change built in your Mac, so you can use it for free.
18:44:03 But it's it's just one password is just much easier to understand and much easier to edit.
18:44:13 Okay.
18:44:12 Then thank I cannot tell you. The number of people that I've had to rescue after they edited Keychain and ended up destroying something that one person deleted the passwords that they were using for their other computer which was awkward but
18:44:37 Problematic yeah.
18:44:36 hmm, Uhhuh, yeah, there are times there are times when we try to make things simple, and it turns out less than simple.
18:44:50 Anyway? Any other questions. Yes.
18:44:52 I have a question. Hi, just recently purchased a used Hi, Mac, because my macbook pro I downloaded the latest and greatest operating system.
18:45:09 But I have a hey laser, printer, brother, printer, that's older, and they won't support that operating system.
18:45:19 So I'm not willing to give up that I didn't want to give up my my printer, laser printer, so I just got a a used imac.
18:45:31 Okay.
18:45:32 So. And I'm using that and it prints. You know, it works perfectly problem I'm having is to, you know normally you have an Imac, and then you might add a macbook pro.
18:45:45 And I'm sort of going the opposite direction. So like I can't get both of my email addresses to link on the Imac, and I don't know how I put in my when I first got it, I went through my.
18:46:07 Anyway, so is there some way that I can check to link it to the cloud?
18:46:13 To my cloud account.
18:46:16 What? What kind of who's your email account with?
18:46:20 It's with Gmail.
18:46:23 Gmail. It should just happen automatically.
18:46:32 Okay.
18:46:30 If if you go into, let me show you easiest way is to share that screen and that's kind of not what I was interested in.
18:46:41 Sharing. But go away. Go away. If you go into yeah system preferences is that? No, it's not.
18:47:00 I'm thinking over. Thank you. An old operating system.
18:47:08 I don't remember where you have accounts now. Internet accounts.
18:47:13 There it is, and unfortunately I can't move this screen because there's a bar at the top.
18:47:23 From zoom that makes it difficult. You go into Internet accounts and use.
18:47:28 I have Icloud and Google. But if I had say, I didn't have Google here, you just say add account, you pick what kind it is.
18:47:36 Google. And then it says to open a browser Google requires that you do this using a web browser, you open a browser.
18:47:46 It goes to gmail dot Ddd. And it doesn't like this, because I've I'm doing a zoom session same time.
18:47:55 So things are slow, but pretending I was in there.
18:47:58 It'll ask for my name and as a password, and assuming I do it correctly, it'll just add my Gmail account right there, and that will happen on your macbook, or it'll happen on your Imac.
18:48:13 Both of work the same way you do have to put in your your, the correct username and password.
18:48:20 But that's that's basically all you have to do.
18:48:24 And then it remembers that. And if you write a message on one machine it'll appear in the cent folder on your other machine, and if you write a new message on your other machine it'll appear on the scentma folder on the first machine.
18:48:40 It. It's basically just one account. It's 2 different views of the same account.
18:48:44 I. So I've gone through that, and I have added it.
18:48:47 And it says it already has it but a like on my ipad and my iphone.
18:48:54 It shows. You know, I can like you're saying in both accounts.
18:48:59 Show there, for some reason on me that my new Imac doesn't show the second email address.
18:49:08 And it's not that big a deal, but it would just I'm just curious why it didn't.
18:49:13 Sync, you know.
18:49:14 Well did you get? Did you get an error message or anything, or did it? Just not?
18:49:18 Oh, it's it's there, but it doesn't show.
18:49:21 I can put it under favorites, but none of it isn't bringing over any of the messages.
18:49:28 Okay, something to think about. If you have touched something typed in the search bar in in your email account, it will show no messages.
18:49:44 Okay.
18:49:40 If nothing matches that. So we have to clear your search bar and the other thing to note is that it is the firm.
18:49:47 I'll go back here again, for if you bring up mail email, mail is on the other screen, you may have it so that it's not showing, because it's so.
18:50:02 It's minimized. So, for example, I have all of these different accounts.
18:50:05 Actually, I only have 2, but the icloud here is minimize.
18:50:10 So if I bring it down now, it's showing Icloud.
18:50:11 Bring Google here. Now, it's showing Google. They're there.
18:50:15 And up here at the top, showing all the inboxes at once, so depending upon.
18:50:22 If you're using apple mail for your mail client or Google, it may be that you just have told it to minimize it, and it's there, and you just don't see it.
18:50:29 Okay. Okay.
18:50:30 Uhhuh, but it as an example. Let me come up here to my search bar.
18:50:36 Come on. Search bar. Huh!
18:50:39 Go! Be there!
18:50:43 Where is the search?
18:50:48 Oh, there it is, usually on my regular account.
18:50:52 I don't have it there. So that's why I'm confused.
18:50:56 But if you type in Jeff, and that's Zach.
18:51:03 Sorry, and that's apparently I'll type in something else if I have something here in the search bar.
18:51:11 You come over here and you don't realize that this is in the search bar.
18:51:14 All of your messages look like they're blank, and they're really not blank.
18:51:17 It's just you need to go over here and clear the search bar that the search bar filters everything.
18:51:26 And if you forgot that you're searching for something you think, why aren't there any messages here?
18:51:30 And it's just because you haven't cleared the search bar.
18:51:33 So that's another way that you can do it. But quite often it's because people have minimized this, or they've even for some reason, turned it off.
18:51:43 And if you do that, then it's it's not going to show up.
18:51:47 So for example, here, if I go into my male settings, I can go into my accounts.
18:51:53 I can come here, and I can make that inactive, and if I make it inactive, it's just doesn't show up, and you can do that.
18:52:00 Sometimes accidentally, cause I've done that accidentally. So.
18:52:06 So there several possibilities there. But if it's a Googler email account you typed in the name and address, and it says it's there and it act. Then I would look to make sure that you haven't hidden in some way.
18:52:22 Okay. Thank you.
18:52:23 I had, I think I told this story before I had one of my coworkers in National Ocean, and it can atmospheric administration who told me that his email box was empty, and I knew that he never threw away anything so I found the hard to believe and he went over there.
18:52:43 And there was nothing there, and I said, Send yourself a message.
18:52:47 And so he sent himself a message, which means that that it should discipline, and then it should reappear in the screen, and it disappeared, and then it reappeared just as a flicker, and disappeared, and I thought what the hell he had set a a script, that said put
18:53:06 all red messages into red mail. Well, since he was in the inbox as soon as it shows up, but we count as being read and put it in his read Mail.
18:53:18 So his inbox looked like it was empty. No, it wasn't empty.
18:53:22 It's just he had set this script, and I tried really, really, really hard.
18:53:27 Not to laugh, but I had. I had never seen anyone do that before, and it cracked me up.
18:53:33 But I'm not making fun of him, or you.
18:53:36 I'm just saying that with with email, you kind of have to think like a robot.
18:53:42 The computer's not particularly bright, and if you told it, for whatever reason, to nest your email messages or to filter them, or something like that, it'll do it.
18:53:53 It does. It doesn't really care. Why, it'll do.
18:53:56 And sometimes you have to. If it says it's there, then then believe it, and then see what it is that you might have done to make it be invisible.
18:54:07 I had. Yes!
18:54:10 Yes.
18:54:07 I'm sorry I have a question. So on my iphone for settings.
18:54:16 I have no clue. Anything about family sharing, because it's just me, and it says family.
18:54:25 It's got my little red dot that says it needs to be updated family purchase sharing up.
18:54:29 And then it says, You know, view details, and it says, then the my next thing says, Allow sharing but I don't want to allow sharing. If it's just me.
18:54:39 So what do I do?
18:54:43 At some point you might have turned on family sharing.
18:54:45 But if there's nobody to share it with, then, if family sharing can is usually for things like photos and a bunch of other things, and just go see if you've accidentally turned it on, we have a family plan for Kathleen and I have a family plan that also
18:55:05 includes our daughter in England, because it's the easiest, fastest way to get pictures of our granddaughter.
18:55:12 But if you if you're not intending that, then you've probably turned it on in either photos or documents.
18:55:20 Hi Ted it on in photos to share something on photos.
18:55:24 So that's what that is.
18:55:24 Oh, okay, if you turn it on in photos, you don't have to turn on family sharing.
18:55:29 Okay.
18:55:32 Okay.
18:55:29 You can share individual photos or do a lot of people do.
18:55:35 And just email it, that's one of the things going to be talking about tonight is how to shrink your photos.
18:55:40 So you don't blow up people's mailboxes.
18:55:41 So where do I find vine sharing? Is it in my settings?
18:55:46 Is it what I?
18:55:50 Okay.
18:55:46 It's in this. I think it's in the settings for photos, but I've had it turned on forever, and I'm not absolutely sure.
18:55:54 Yeah.
18:55:54 Hi! Thank you.
18:55:58 Hey? You got about 5 more minutes before we start. So.
18:56:01 Laurence, I have a question. I talked to you last time about the fact that I'm I have a Mac.
18:56:10 Yes.
18:56:09 Pro 2013. It's on his last legs, and I can't update it to the latest operating system.
18:56:16 Yes.
18:56:18 So I'm looking at a Mac mini pro to replace it.
18:56:22 Yes.
18:56:22 But I have a external Owc. For bay 4 TB each.
18:56:33 Drive that lot of my photos and things are on. Can I upgrade my Mac?
18:56:41 Minnie, and keep my bay for a while without upgrading the bay.
18:56:53 Yes, it is real.
18:56:46 Yes, yes, you can. But if the if your rate it cause it is a rate, if it's Scott, for if your raid if the drives in the raid are more than 5 years old, and the Mac pro came out in 2,013 the the longest warranty, you can get for
18:57:07 our hard drive is 5 years. So if you're approaching that 5 and some places only have them a year warranty.
18:57:15 But it depends upon the manufacturer. So the some have one somewhat tab, 2, some have 3, some have 5, but if you're drive has a one year warranty, and you're on, its fourth or fifth year, then you're probably already into replacement range, there, and if it's got a 5 year.
18:57:33 warranty, and you've had 8 years, and you're also well into the replacement range.
18:57:38 And I mentioned this because if you have a new machine and your new machine is doing things, and when you plug in your rate into your new machine, you'll need an adapter for that, by the way, but when you plug your raid into your new machine the first thing, your new machine is going to do is
18:57:53 re-index everything because it's a new operating system, and so on, so forth.
18:57:57 That's creates an awful lot of dis activity.
18:58:02 And I can tell you a number of people that the first thing they did with their new machine was, plug it into these old drives that re-indexed everything derived, overheated, and died.
18:58:10 Oh no!
18:58:09 And I'm not saying that's going to happen to you.
18:58:12 But I do want you to to give some serious thought to either buying replacement drives to replace the ones that you have, that you bought.
18:58:22 Whenever you bought them, or to get a new raid.
18:58:32 No!
18:58:27 The raid that you have right now, I know, does not have thunderbolt, for which is what is offered on the new Mac Macbook Pros.
18:58:37 So drive a rate that had Thunderbolt forward.
18:58:41 Be a good idea, and or thunderbolt 3, for that matter.
18:58:51 Hey? Are they doing? Between 3? The difference between 3 and 4?
18:58:57 Is not that dramatic? But yeah, they, if getting a new thunderbolt rate, is probably a good idea.
18:58:45 I was gonna say, the Owc's highest thunderbolt is a 3 right now.
18:59:06 You probably don't have to do it immediately. But you do want to think about the fact that if you're running old tires and on your new sports car, that's probably not good for either the sports car or the tires.
18:59:19 So I at first I was gonna replace both of them upfront, and then I thought, What if I do?
18:59:26 The Mac Mini first, and then, you know, after things settle down, then upgrade the Owc bank.
18:59:35 But you're saying it's gonna re-index, and it might be not worth it right.
18:59:42 I'm not gonna say that it's gonna re-index. It.
18:59:46 Then you're old. Rate is going to go.
18:59:47 Proof. I'm just saying that plugging a raid that's been formatted back in 2,013, plugging it into a Mac Mini and new Mac Mini is going to be running apple silicon the operating system because it's completely different the operating system
19:00:05 Bye!
19:00:07 is also so far more advanced than it was back then.
19:00:10 So it's going to spend a lot of time re-entering that raid.
19:00:15 It'll basically rewrite pretty much everything. And if there's something wrong, even a little thing wrong with the old raid, it could be it could be bad.
19:00:24 What I have done when I've had similar things. What I do is I buy a new raid, and then I use that new raid to suck the brains out of the old.
19:00:34 So could I do so. You're saying, maybe do the drive first even though I'm on a older operating system with my Mac pro.
19:00:45 Do the drive first, and then upgrade to the next.
19:00:53 Okay. Yes.
19:01:01 Really paranoid.
19:01:01 I mean I can do it all at once. But if I don't know how to do this, and am I?
19:01:23 A little question is, when you buy an Owc. Drive, it comes optionally with software software if you want it. But I don't have that right now.
19:01:25 Yeah, it's.
19:01:23 I think I'm just using Mac raid software. I well, initially, when I set it up, I was using the server software because it wasn't integrated in the Mac at the time.
19:01:33 So I actually had separate server Max Server software.
19:01:38 Now it's all integrated, and I'm not quite sure you know, so much has changed since then, so.
19:01:46 The service offer is actually fairly irrelevant.
19:01:48 You can actually turn it off on the on your old machine.
19:01:52 It's not necessary that it be turned on for anything and the way in which you get the stuff from your old rate to your new rage, you just plug them.
19:02:02 You plug them into each other, and you just grab folders and you just drag it to the new machine.
19:02:09 I usually do it in stages, and and I color code.
19:02:16 The the folders after I'd made them. I color code.
19:02:20 Them blue blue means they've been black backed up, but you can colorcod it any way you want, but just keep track of which ones you've dragged over.
19:02:28 So you make sure that you get everything but you know, take, like, you know, 50 GB 100 GB, 200 GB, whatever you want to at a time.
19:02:40 And drag that over until everything is done doing it in stages, does 2 things.
19:02:46 First, it confirms to you that you're doing it right, and second, it minimizes the amount of time that both drives are spinning and using electricity.
19:02:58 It gives them a chance to rest.
19:03:00 So are you doing this? Would you do this while with my Mac pro before upgrade?
19:03:06 The AIM when you plug, if if you, if you have, if you're not changing anything on your old raid, and you copy everything to the new rate, then you plug your your new Mac mini into the new rate, everything should work perfectly the new, rick the new Mac
19:03:23 Mini is still going to index everything but I shouldn't really cause any great strain, and if there is a problem, keep in mind, you still have your old raid.
19:03:34 That's true, right?
19:03:34 There. So it's basically your backup at that point.
19:03:40 Okay. I'm very nervous about all this.
19:03:44 I didn't set it up. In the first place, I had Mac. Traders actually did it for me, and so I'm trying to put the pieces together in the right order.
19:03:56 Yeah, well, I'm just very. I'm just very paranoid myself.
19:04:02 So I tend to do things in stages.
19:04:09 Somebody asked a question and asked if I have a sign in sheet.
19:04:14 No, I did not make a sign in sheet.
19:04:19 So sorry about that. I should have. But no, just do it, do it in stages, do one bit, then do another bit, and because, among other things that it reassures you that you're doing it right.
19:04:33 Thank.
19:04:32 Lawrence.
19:04:34 Yes.
19:04:37 While this conversation has been going on, I've been writing D, the screen names of everybody who's here.
19:04:45 That's useful.
19:04:46 I could, so I could, you know, backup.
19:04:50 Yes, thank you.
19:04:52 Okay.
19:04:54 Mine. It's a time to go onto a program and is is our president here?
19:05:05 I don't see her.
19:05:08 I'm here.
19:05:10 Huh! Well!
19:05:14 I'm here.
19:05:13 She's with. She's with that she's with an Alice.
19:05:17 Oh, okay. Sorry.
19:05:17 Yeah, she's here. Good evening, everybody, and welcome.
19:05:27 I just put in the on the side there where we have the chat window for the address, for to send your yearly dues.
19:05:40 They are $24 per year per household if you haven't done so, could you?
19:05:46 Please just do that. And for those that have a we really appreciate it.
19:05:51 I have a question. Does anybody here know a Jim Arnold and Elizabeth lead?
19:06:02 Hello, butchering the last minute. Does it sound familiar to anybody? Lauren?
19:06:10 Hey! Have you spoken with any of either of those 2 names?
19:06:14 I don't have.
19:06:14 They sent us dues. But we don't have an email address for them.
19:06:21 Well, unfortunately, I can't wait. Could could you send me an email message with that?
19:06:26 And I'll take a look I can't see the database with with.
19:06:32 I made my fake user account right now, so I can't see. Can't see the records.
19:06:33 That's fine. I can.
19:06:36 You. You want checks, right?
19:06:38 Yes, please. Yeah. And do you see the address there in the chat where you can send it to? And.
19:06:47 Would you make it out? Who do you make it out to?
19:06:51 Smart. Okay.
19:06:49 Smug. Yeah, it's yeah. And it's a secure mailbox.
19:06:57 If people are concerned, it's it's like a Po box, but it's a personal one here by the oases in that parking lot.
19:07:07 So it would be secure if we don't check it daily.
19:07:12 I think that's everything. Oh, and, Lauren, I just have to tell you we really appreciate you and thank you always for doing such awesome meetings and a big thanks to your lovely wife, Kathleen, for always doing dictating and posting and the notes that's fantastic you don't get
19:07:32 enough appreciation or I don't know if people think you in private or not.
19:07:37 But we definitely appreciate you.
19:07:38 Thank you.
19:07:40 And now I turn it over to analyze the register and show, update the the money that was taken in.
19:07:48 I think through the news. Yeah, we got 5 more membership payments this last month, and like Sabrina said, We really thank you for sending a meeting.
19:08:03 And now at this point the balance is a $2,099 and 90 cents, and no expenses.
19:08:13 This month, Lawrence, you said you're gonna have some coming up right.
19:08:19 Yes, I there's there's the renewal for the the Forum software on the site, and also some wordpress expense.
19:08:34 But I don't remember offhand what it was.
19:08:39 I. I'm not terribly diligent about keeping track of this stuff, but that's.
19:08:52 Yup!
19:08:47 I just know there was something that was coming up in the end couple of months or so, and the other question was, When did you want to do it?
19:08:57 The in person. Have we discussed that?
19:08:59 We did, but then I got my church is busy doing the run up to Easter, and so I got.
19:09:09 I've been kind of swan with that, but I wanted to do it on a Saturday, and the reason why is that if we do it on a Saturday afternoon, that it's light out and such, and so it's easier for people to do things, and Sundays it's
19:09:30 hard for it's hard at a church to do anything on a Sunday but a Saturday afternoon.
19:09:35 People are working short should be off, and people don't have to drive in the dark and so on.
19:09:40 So forth, so as I, as, and just. Sometime April, May, June, I'd like to do it before we get too much further into summer.
19:09:56 Simply because it's a. It's kind of a public service thing.
19:10:00 And B. It would. There's some things that I really can't over.
19:10:06 Zoom I kinda have to have. I have to do it in front of people, because if I reboot my machine during a zoom everything goes bye-bye.
19:10:15 So!
19:10:15 Okay, just that. We leave enough time and not try to do it.
19:10:21 At the end of the meeting, when you're creating, you know, finishing up.
19:10:25 Right.
19:10:26 And I thought maybe we betterd better to discuss it prior to, so that we give it enough time.
19:10:31 So this is something that smock will put on, but it is a community.
19:10:36 It's open to the community.
19:10:38 Right? Okay.
19:10:39 And it'd be it'd be something that among other things, we need enough time to actually kind of advertise it.
19:10:46 Then tell people that we're doing it. Hey, June!
19:10:50 Yeah, yeah, so, we're probably looking at May, June and order to have enough lead time to do this.
19:11:01 And we have to make sure that the churches, and doing something else that same Saturday like, for example, somebody asked me to do something next Monday, and I said, No, can't do that.
19:11:13 We're having a blood drive. And they're saying, you're having a blood drive a church and says, Yeah, we go through a lot of butt at our church and says, Yeah, we go through a lot of butt at our church.
19:11:23 Okay. Sounds good.
19:11:27 Any other questions?
19:11:31 Okay, I wanted to talk tonight about photo editing, using basically stuff that you already have do stuff for free.
19:11:44 And a lot of people don't know what their Mac and their iphone and their ipad can really do.
19:11:51 I would. There's one. There's one thing that I do all the time that you can't do for free.
19:11:56 It does cost something. But for most of the stuff that most photo editing that people need to do, they can do using tools that they already have. And I'm going to share my screen.
19:12:14 And turn off stuff that I don't need, and move this bar some place else, because it's in my way.
19:12:23 First thing I wanted to do is talk a bit about photos. Photos, has a whole bunch of editing tools built in.
19:12:36 And.
19:12:45 Has a bunch of editing tools built in, and a lot of people haven't really thought about it.
19:12:51 This is just a collection of random stuff that I threw into a library.
19:12:56 The library. Among other things, you can sit here and look at thumbnails of the various things that you have in your in your library.
19:13:05 You can also change the size of the thumbnails so you can have it like this, which I think looks really cool even though it's impossible.
19:13:13 Actually see anything, or you can zoom in so that it's so.
19:13:16 The individual photographs are quite large. Most people will want to have it, and something like that size, so they can scroll through things and actually have some idea you can sort things by years by months by days, or you can just go all photos which again, is something a lot, of people have had been had this for years never
19:13:38 paid attention to it. The Mac automatically iphone does this to automatically sorts things into what it calls memories.
19:13:49 And these are topics that the Mac picks out either because there are a bunch of photos introduced on that day, or you created as a series of events that it thinks are interesting, or you have a I created an album called airplane.
19:14:04 So it made a thing called airplanes, cause it things I like airplanes.
19:14:09 Memories are done by the computer with the, with a few exceptions, you can create new memories, but for the most part these are automatically generated.
19:14:17 If we had a bunch of people it would have people by photos that I have really don't have any people.
19:14:24 But normally a lot of us will have a whole bunch of pictures of people there.
19:14:28 Places are places that the Mac can figure out from the photographs where they were taken.
19:14:36 So, for example, this showing that there are 3 photos that were taken in Denver, and I happen to know what these are, and if I click on it eventually, it'll show me what the pictures are.
19:14:47 It's pictures taken at the Denver airport. So.
19:14:54 But this. These are places that it knows where the pictures were taken.
19:15:00 You'll see that I have some that were taken in England, and some that were taken in, and this is just things that it can tell from the from the photograph.
19:15:10 If you take a photo with any recent. I found when I say recent in this case, like I ate, or better, it actually embeds geographic information into almost every picture that you take.
19:15:24 So it knows where you took those pictures, but you can also add things so for things that it doesn't know where they were taken.
19:15:32 You can actually add that. And I'm gonna show you how to do that later on.
19:15:37 Favorites are things that you put a little heart by. Reasons are things that have recently been imported, imports of things that have been imported, and the newest version of photos also has a duplicates feature.
19:15:50 It goes through and flags all the duplicates that you have.
19:15:53 So if you have a bunch of duplicates, it'll go through and flag these, some of your some of your photos can get quite large.
19:16:01 So let's go back here. None of these are particularly large, but some of them give me quite large, and so if they're duplicates, it's a good idea to know that.
19:16:11 And you can just go through and kill off a bunch of duplicates and save a lot of space on your hard drive.
19:16:18 It also has media types. Now, there are different kinds of media types and I'm gonna talk about what it thinks as a media type, a videos, obviously a video.
19:16:27 And these are the videos that I have on there. You'll see that when it was finding duplicate photos it didn't find duplicate photos.
19:16:34 It doesn't include duplicate videos and there's a reason why it doesn't include video.
19:16:40 So if you have a video that takes a lot of space like this one, you have to mildly, manually say to delete it.
19:16:49 And this, by the way, is going to save several megabytes just by deleting that duplicate selfies.
19:16:56 You'll notice that none of these are traditional selfies.
19:17:00 Instead of being pictures of my face. These are pictures of other things, and what a selfie is!
19:17:10 It means that you took this picture, using the front facing camera on your iphone.
19:17:15 So this is actually the roof of a cathedral in Helsinki.
19:17:20 I believe, and I was interested in it, because these are electric lights.
19:17:25 But one upon a time. Those were candles, and I didn't fill like craning my neck, back, and trying to take a photograph.
19:17:33 So I helped my phone flat in front of me and just said, Take a photograph straight up, and I use that quite often.
19:17:43 This is the roof of the Chapter House and York Minster.
19:17:50 Actually, this is not Chapter House. This is in. This is at the University I'll sync up.
19:17:55 Tells me right a stop is university of sinking. This one is the chapter House in New York.
19:18:03 So just shooting straight up. It's a really fantastic ceiling.
19:18:08 So you might as well take a picture of it, and this is again in York. Minster.
19:18:14 It's a it's a it's a canopy over a tool in the main sanctuary, and I don't remember what that one is.
19:18:23 That's also at York Minster. This is kind of interesting.
19:18:29 This bottom part of the photo back back here. This square grid.
19:18:31 Those are oak beams, and those oak beams are over a 1,000 years old, so you can.
19:18:39 You can learn a lot by staring at ceilings.
19:18:42 This is the underside of our table. I wanted to know where the brace was for the table, and I didn't feel like crawling into the fold, floor, so I stuck my kicked by phone under there and took a photograph of it, but as far as the
19:18:57 Mac is concerned, anything taking with the front facing camera is a self.
19:19:03 This is the only thing that kind of looks like a selfie.
19:19:07 This is Kathleen, dressed up to go bike riding on a cold day.
19:19:12 Now this cold day was 55 degrees, but Kathleen doesn't like cold, so she's well bundled up.
19:19:21 But the anything taken with the front facing camera is a self, a portrait is not necessarily a portrait.
19:19:28 A portrait means that it uses the portrait settings that are built into the iphone.
19:19:36 So this is a picture of George and George Washington in the town of George Washington, and I use the portrait mode because I was having trouble with the light.
19:19:46 It was on overcast day, and I just didn't like the light and the portrait mode does.
19:19:51 It does different things with the light, and I wanted to see if it wasn't to take a better picture of the statute.
19:19:57 This is a survey marker. And again it was a day that I didn't like the lights.
19:20:02 So I use the portrait mode to get the kind of light I wanted.
19:20:07 This is the closest to what a portrait mode!
19:20:08 Normally this, these are the steps going up to the altar in our church, and it's only about 6 feet away.
19:20:16 But it's fuzzy, and that's what the portrait Numuno.
19:20:19 Normally does. If you take a picture of a person's face with portrait mode, it'll try and blur out the background behind it, because when you're taking a you don't really, you're not interested in what's behind the person you're interested in there in their face so this was done with portrait
19:20:37 mode, because I wanted to blur out the background. But a portrait mode, again, is using the portrait mode setting on the phone a panoram.
19:20:47 These are not true panoramas. These are clipart that just happens to have a horizontal aspect.
19:20:54 But the Mac looks at things with that homeizontal aspect, but the Mac looks at things with that horizontal aspect. It says, Oh, that's a panoramic, and no, these are just it's Clip art that happens to have a horizontal aspect.
19:21:05 This is a true panorama. These are power turbines just slightly west of vantage.
19:21:13 Washington, and I wanted to get a I wanted to get a panoramic views.
19:21:18 I took a panorama, and this is just some prairie. Ouch!
19:21:23 In Eastern Washington, Kathleen and I went to school at Washington State University.
19:21:28 So we had this thing for empty prairie type areas.
19:21:33 This is the inside of the a dungeoness hook.
19:21:43 It's the sea shore there on a cold winter day.
19:21:47 This is not really a panorama either. But again, it's a vertical.
19:21:51 It's a horizontal aspect to the photograph and it's a fake.
19:21:56 Harry Potter quote that cracked me up, but it's a sign that I saw.
19:22:02 So basically a panoram is something that's really it's got a horizontal aspect.
19:22:07 This really is a horizontal. This is really was done in panorama mode, but I wanted to take a picture of this.
19:22:15 Get old gas, station, pump, it's at a pub in near the Uw.
19:22:23 And it was tall and narrow. So I put my phone in panorama mode.
19:22:30 And then I just move the camera up and down to take a panorama.
19:22:34 Most people think of panorama's as horizontal, but this is a vertical panorama, and the Mac Mac Mac knows that it's a panorama, and so it threw it in.
19:22:44 There, but that's what a panorama is.
19:22:46 Time, lapse. It's just it. You set your phone in time.
19:22:51 Lapse mode, and then it goes, turns these gently moving power turbines into really really rapid fans, or this is a fountain and Bouchard gardens that looks like that had too many amphetamines.
19:23:16 And this is a ferry that you definitely do not want to take.
19:23:20 If you're going to Canada because it's really moving a rapid clip.
19:23:26 Slow-mo is just the opposite of that. Instead of something being very rapid, it's very slow, and this is an example of what it means.
19:23:36 This was a very windy day, and this is at regular speed.
19:23:41 And a couple of seconds. It's gonna this is now in slow MoD.
19:23:46 It's still moving very, very rapidly, but the camera switch to slow motion.
19:23:55 Can anyone tell me how slow motion works?
19:24:01 When you see something on the movies. That's a movie frame, a movie is normally at 20 fourfour frames a second when they do things at in slow motion.
19:24:12 And to make it look and slow motion. What they do is they double, triple, or quadruple the film rate and then they play it back at normal speed.
19:24:22 So if you play back something that was shot at high speed, and you play it back at normal speed.
19:24:28 It looks like it's in slow motion or in this case it was moving very rapidly, and it looks like it's moving very slowly.
19:24:35 And here's the Dungeness River normal speed.
19:24:42 And it's slow motion.
19:24:45 So it's just taking a lot of pictures very rapidly, and it's playing it back at normal speed.
19:24:53 And your Mac can detect. That's what it's doing.
19:24:54 So it automatically classifies video selfies portrait panorama by information in the photograph and cinematic is using a cinematic filter to take a a video, a burst mode means you're taking a whole bunch of pictures.
19:25:12 Very rapidly, and I do this for things sometimes. It's by accident.
19:25:18 I didn't mean to do that for this ceiling, but these fireworks!
19:25:21 It's very difficult to take fireworks, so in order to get a good picture, the fireworks and it's dark and a whole bunch of other things going up.
19:25:31 I hold it in burst mode on a on a iphone.
19:25:34 You just hold down the button, and it just takes a whole bunch of pictures rapidly and then up here at the top you'll see it says, make a selection, and it gives you this menu down at the bottom, and you can go through the individual frames of that burst and if you find when you really
19:25:53 like this like this one. You can say that's the one I want it's a way of cheating to get a good picture when when you're having difficulties taking a normal picture.
19:26:06 Burst mode for a fog is really useless.
19:26:09 That was definitely not one of my better ideas. Screenshot.
19:26:17 When you take a screenshot on your Mac, you take a screenshot on your ipad or on your iphone.
19:26:23 It knows. You took a screen shot. So anytime you take a screenshot.
19:26:28 It, puts them all together, and so I don't know why.
19:26:31 I took a screenshot of that, but this I took.
19:26:34 This is a watch face. I took this screenshot for my presentation on for our presentation on health that we did couple months ago, and so it just puts them all together.
19:26:44 If you if you use Google Photos, Google Photos will periodically nag you to get rid of your screenshots because it knows that as a mistake.
19:26:57 And you probably want to delete them. But in my case I actually deliberately take screenshots.
19:27:01 An animated one means that it's got several frames that have been compressed together it to create one image, and it happens to move.
19:27:10 So this is a it's a series of stills that are offset to make it look like it's old fashioned movie.
19:27:20 Or in this case, it's a series of stills that are put together to make animation, and this was done mine by daughter.
19:27:30 This is her daughter here, and these are her other grandparents, and they're feeding ducks in England.
19:27:39 And essentially, what an animated movie what animated gif is just several images that play one after the other, and they're sent as one phone.
19:27:47 So it knows what these things are, and I'll raw.
19:27:50 Is that on high Endend cameras you have the option of shooting something wrong with what a raw photo does is that it captures an unbelievable amount of information, so that the images tend to be much larger.
19:28:07 But you can do a lot more in terms of editing, and I gotta talk about those in a in a bit and in terms of what you do.
19:28:14 You can also create drawings. You can also create albums and an updum is just a collection of photos that you've put together for a particular reason, like there's one drawing that's a drawing black and white photos these are black and white photos airplanes these are
19:28:30 airplanes. And I created this thing of airplanes, and same thing with ships and actually, there's a lot of boats, too.
19:28:37 So these are all alums are something that you create.
19:28:43 But the media types. That's Mac does that automatically and memories. For the most part, the Mac does that automatically.
19:28:49 And if I had a bunch of people photos it would I put in people photos and ask me who they are?
19:28:57 So the Mac does that automatically, and you can do all that with photos.
19:29:00 But when it comes to editing you can do an awful lot of stuff with editing as well, and I'm going to go take hey?
19:29:13 If we get back to the black and white photos if I go to the black and white photos, you'll notice that there are couple that look kind of yellow.
19:29:23 These are actually scans out of a newspaper, and it was a the newspaper is 30 years old, so it's in sad shape.
19:29:33 So what can you do about that? If you open it up and you go to edit there's a edit button up here, among other things, you can have it do black and white, and there's an automatic button for an audit black and white, or you can do it.
19:29:44 Manually. Now look at the photograph as I move back and forth through these settings.
19:29:49 It's not going to do much, because black and white doesn't have that much to do.
19:29:53 But if I press auto it turns it into a black and white photo.
19:29:58 Does that automatically. It's no, it gets rid of all that yellows now, just black and white, and if I don't like that, I can say reset adjustments, and it goes back to looking yellow.
19:30:06 But you can also do all kinds of other strange things, so you can.
19:30:10 You can. It's probably not gonna do that, because this is.
19:30:19 I can change what the, what, the level of orange or white is, and that photo, by coming up to the light options I can change the color settings here as well to change it from different ways.
19:30:37 But I really did. Wanted a black and white. So we're just gonna press that button.
19:30:41 Come up here and say done, and now it looks like the other black and white photos so that's one of the many things that you can do.
19:30:50 But there are other things that you can do, and for that I'm going to take a hey?
19:30:59 A real photo.
19:31:04 This is a submarine and health syncing, and there's nothing particularly wrong with it.
19:31:11 But I'm going to play with it anyway, so you can show you what to do.
19:31:14 Notice the color of the sky and the color of the boat.
19:31:18 If I come up here and say Otto, it'll see if it can do anything to to enhance the lighting of that.
19:31:25 It's probably not gonna make much of a change. So it made a little bit of a change.
19:31:29 But it's just a little bit of a change.
19:31:32 There's a bar here in the center. If I drag it back and forth it can turn it from late knee afternoon to noon to.
19:31:40 So if I wanted to look fully exposed. That's a good way to do that.
19:31:45 I just came here and picked it out, but I can also go back here and do this manually.
19:31:50 You can adjust brilliance and exposure.
19:31:53 Exposure means just letting more light in, and you notice that if I let more light in, it washes out the sky, which is probably not something I wanna do.
19:32:01 I can also do things like these shadows down here at the bottom of the submarine.
19:32:06 I wanna bring out the shadows so I can see more of the hull, and if I do this it lightens up just the shadows.
19:32:15 So I can see more of the hull, and if I do this it lightens up just the shadows.
19:32:18 Now, how does it know what a shad here? And it's brighter here, and darkness here.
19:32:20 So it just tries to make the stuff down to the bottom look more of the stuff at the top, and it doesn't very gradually and that's just built into photos.
19:32:31 You don't have to do anything particularly clever about it.
19:32:33 One thing that sometimes you have trouble is, you can't really tell what colorors something is, and there is a way to take care of that.
19:32:43 Where is that? Right? This second, okay.
19:32:51 White balance. White balance works by telling the computer that something is either white or gray, because the computer knows what white or gray is.
19:33:03 So if your hair were inside and you had a trungsten light, everyone looks like they're jaundiced in yellow, and by pointing to something that's white, it'll change the color of everything else, because it says I know that that's white.
19:33:18 So that helps correct the color for everything else. In this particular photo.
19:33:21 Not too much really needed to be done, but wanted to show you how those controls work. And I'm going to import a a program that's in really sad shape.
19:33:44 Now some things to note. This is a 137.2 MB photographs and it says I already have it.
19:33:53 I don't care. Import it again.
19:33:57 This is a photograph of Trinity, United Methodist Church.
19:34:03 Here in swim. It was taken sometime before the year 2,000, and I know that because it's got this bell tower that doesn't exist anymore.
19:34:11 The bell tower, the church open, and I think, 1989.
19:34:17 Something like that, and the bell tower was very poorly constructed, and it lasted about 10 years, and then it rotted out so it had to be dismantled.
19:34:27 So this is an older photograph, and this is a damaged photograph.
19:34:31 You'll see in a second what I mean about that, and it's under exposed.
19:34:37 And it's got all kinds of problems. So we're gonna say that we're gonna and the first thing we're gonna do is go up here to the top.
19:34:46 And one of the things it says under light. It says, auto, I press auto and look at the colors on the screen.
19:34:52 It made everything a bit brighter automatically. And if I say color it'll also adjust the color the same way.
19:35:00 But it didn't do as much as I want. It's still very dark.
19:35:04 I can change that by changing the exposure, and if I do the exposure, you can actually see that the grass is beginning to look a little on the green side.
19:35:15 But you'll also notice that the sky is washing now.
19:35:19 So instead of doing that, I gotta move that back. And I'm gonna do what I did before I'm going to move the shadows and going to raise the shadows.
19:35:27 And by raising the shadows, I'm actually see that the grass is green, so that's a step in the right direction.
19:35:37 This was scanning from a photograph from when I stand it you'll see that there's a whites right side, and that's because it picked up part of the scanner.
19:35:48 So I'm going to crop it. And there's a controller here at the top.
19:35:53 Say, crop, and I can just pull in on the side here and crop out the parts that I don't want there's a little bit over here, too, and then, when I'm done, I press the return key, and I got rid of that edge there and I didn't mean to go back I undid
19:36:11 it. So let's go back here. Crap that again!
19:36:19 And little bit over here.
19:36:30 You can also pull from the corners, but if you look at this, it also has something up here.
19:36:37 It says, straighten, what does that do? This is something that normally you'd have to do in Photoshop it creates a grid.
19:36:46 And then I slowly straighten it so that it looks more like it's supposed to do and say done.
19:36:56 And and it I was done a little bit too seriously.
19:37:00 This. This is the one that I was playing with earlier, and this is the one I was playing with.
19:37:06 No, that's the old one. You'll notice that.
19:37:10 It didn't straighten it because I pressed the wrong button. So let's go to crop and straighten.
19:37:23 Okay? And it went back. Why is it undoing?
19:37:34 Adjust.
19:37:38 Something to note when when you straighten photos, you're going to lose the edges.
19:37:52 And that's because photographs are always going to be rectangular or square, and if you tilt it it's going to have to shrink.
19:37:59 The photo to get rid of the corners that aren't in the picture anymore.
19:38:05 So, we've we've done quite a bit of work here to make that look better.
19:38:11 One of the things, though, that you can also do is you can go to.
19:38:17 No. Where is the retouch thing? Retouch I'm going to retouch.
19:38:23 If you look at the bottom of the screen I'm holding down the command key and the plus sign to zoom in, you'll notice all these little white spots, these white spots are essentially dust that is appearing and I'm not gonna get rid of them all because it would take too long.
19:38:39 So I'm just gonna kill off some of them.
19:38:42 If you had infinite amounts of patience, you could go and get rid of all of this.
19:38:47 But this allows you to to retouch the I also.
19:38:55 I can move the size up a bit.
19:39:00 When you do this, how is it? How is it fixing this?
19:39:05 You'll notice that if I pick something like this you don't see a spot there anymore.
19:39:11 How did it get rid of the spot?
19:39:17 This. The white spot in the center is the part that's being touched and that circle around it is the stuff around it.
19:39:25 And what it's doing is, it's evening out.
19:39:27 The photograph, using colors and patterns from around it.
19:39:32 So you're not. You're not really revealing the grass behind it.
19:39:35 You're pulling a magic trick, and I can do it.
19:39:39 It's a little prop might be easy to see here on the on the roof.
19:39:43 If I click this white spot, it's gone, and it just filled in from the from the rooftop around it.
19:39:50 Now, if I zoom out a bit, you probably won't notice that much difference, because I didn't get rid of that.
19:39:56 Many but it's a little bit cleaner down here.
19:40:00 These are all things that you can do with with the editing tools and and photos and if I look at this one compared to the original, you'll see it's straighter. It's brighter.
19:40:14 You can actually see that there's grass and that's a lot of things to do well, I'm now going to exort this and as I export it, this was originally a Tif image.
19:40:27 That's a test stands for tagged image file format.
19:40:31 And just. It's one of the original image formats, and they tend to be huge.
19:40:36 And this one was a 137 MB.
19:40:40 So I'm going to export it, and when I export it I can specify whether it's what I want it to be.
19:40:46 I can have it. Be a Tif a Jpeg.
19:40:48 Or a Png. I'm going to say it's a Jpeg.
19:40:50 And I say export, and it wants me to tell me where it's going to export and gotta export it to the desktop, and it exports it to the desktop, and then we're going to leave here.
19:41:10 That's not far as from this one.
19:41:22 I'm doing a get info coming up here to the apple menu, I'm saying, get info!
19:41:30 And the original file was a 137,218,014 Byte, and this one is 5,511,285 still pretty big.
19:41:45 But it's much, much smaller, and it looks better. And so now I'm going to double click on it, and it should open up preview.
19:41:55 Open Preview.
19:41:59 Okay. It's open and preview preview is you normally use it for all kinds of things.
19:42:05 But it also has a photo editing capabilities.
19:42:08 So I've got this file, and if I come up here under tools I can go to a just size.
19:42:14 Now this thing is done at 1,200 pixels per inch, which is really excessive.
19:42:23 Your screen, a normal screen resolution is 72 dots per inch.
19:42:30 That means there are 72 pixels per inch, going horizontally and vertically on your iphone.
19:42:36 It's something like 240, which is why your iphone looks pretty clear.
19:42:39 But when you're sending something as an email, 72 dots per inch is enough.
19:42:43 The other thing to think about. If I turn this pixels in from pixels to inches, you'll see that it says that this is 93 inches across in 61 inches high.
19:42:55 You probably don't want me to send you a photograph that's 93 inches across to look on your iphone photo screen.
19:43:04 Which is only a few inches across. So you can change that right here.
19:43:07 Just turn it back to pixels the maximum that you probably want to send something to somebody else through email is probably gonna be 1,500 pixels.
19:43:19 So I type in 1,500 pixels, 72 dots per inch.
19:43:22 I say, okay, and you see, it looks really small. But if you I'm still in preview, if you come up to view and you say actual size, and it's still larger than this frame will hold.
19:43:34 So we could even shrink it down a little bit more and say, Yeah, if you think about it, if it's 72 inches, if it's 72 pixels per inch if you're sending you something 8 and a half by 11 in sheet of
19:43:49 paper, and he made it 720. That's 10 inches across.
19:43:53 So, even if I made this 720 that still gonna be pretty good size and go back here, say, view size again.
19:44:03 Actual size, and that is the actual size. So it's that big.
19:44:06 And I can also undo it in case I decided that was too much.
19:44:09 So here's my. So here's my photograph.
19:44:12 Now, and I save it, and now, after making those changes, instead of being 5 and a half, megabytes, it's now 460,554 Byte.
19:44:25 So it's just it's it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the original size.
19:44:31 And yet, if you send it to someone, it's still a fairly good size.
19:44:36 Now I'm gonna show you something that does not come with your Mac, but it is free.
19:44:40 Okay. And this, a program called Image Optimum. I am A. G.
19:44:45 E optim, and I'm going to paste the address of the company in the chat window.
19:44:59 As soon as I find the chat window.
19:45:15 That's the web address. And this program image optimum is free and you can drag one or more pictures in a time.
19:45:24 You drag it in there, you let go, and it'll compress them.
19:45:28 So I tell it to compress this and this.
19:45:35 Photograph is now a 104,000 Byte, and it used to be over a 137 MB.
19:45:44 In other words, it's more than a 1,000 times smaller than it was before, and I highly recommend image optimum again.
19:45:53 It's free, but it allows you to take a bunch of photographs, shrink them down in preview to something that's usable by whoever you're sending it to, and then to make it even smaller, drag them onto image optimum dozens of photographs at once and it'll it'll Crunch
19:46:11 them down in size, and yet it doesn't really change the it doesn't change the way it looks.
19:46:18 It still looks the same as it did before it was it compressed it? And I'm not even going to bother to explain the mathematics. Just trust me that it works any questions about that. So far.
19:46:32 Cause. My next magic act is a little bit more complicated.
19:46:39 Oh, there's couple of things I was gonna mention in the question and answer session.
19:46:45 I forgot the end of this month is world backup Day, where you're supposed to backup your computer and a lot of things that people are should also backup at their passwords.
19:46:54 And I saw this cartoon, and it cracked.
19:46:57 Well, this meme, and it really cracked me up.
19:47:02 I just I can't tell you how how amused this made me.
19:47:15 The other thing I wanted to do was I wanted to show you a logo.
19:47:21 This logo. It's an apple's logo that they created as a screen saver screen for a new apple store that they opened up in Korea, but they published it on the apple Websites.
19:47:33 So I download it, and I just thought it was a really cool, graphic.
19:47:36 But they open up this new superstar in Korea, and the last thing I was gonna show you was something that I took.
19:47:44 This is a photograph I took of my television set. Kathleen and I were trying to watch the extraordinary attorney Wu, which is a Korean TV series on Netflix.
19:47:55 Only Netflix showed this image from a series called Punk on Earth, and it's a BBC fake documentary series where this woman is pretending to be.
19:48:08 This woman named Philip Philanomia Punk, and she goes to various places around the world to examine earth's history.
19:48:15 And she's an idiot and but it's she's an actor pretending to be an idiot, and it's really, really, really quite funky, although what it uses non. Pg.
19:48:26 Language and on occasion. But anyway, Netflix screwed up, and they're showing the summary of extraordinary Attorney Wu and showing a picture of a completely different show.
19:48:38 And I thought this was great. But one of the things you'll notice is that there's a picture of my wall.
19:48:43 You can't really tell us. My wall, but this black space above here is above the TV set.
19:48:47 So what can I do? With this space? Well, this is a good place to put a caption.
19:48:52 So let's go over here, and we say that's create a text.
19:48:59 I, found some web results. I can show them. If you ask.
19:49:03 Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, I don't want you to do that.
19:49:08 I went to add some text and it has a text box way down here and I don't want it down there.
19:49:13 I want it up there. So here's my text box.
19:49:17 And I type in net clicks, does it again. And it gave me this strange box because it's longer than it should've been.
19:49:32 So I'm gonna move it out this way and to select it and I'm going to change the right now. It's red. I don't want it to be red.
19:49:41 I want it to be.
19:49:53 And that's not it.
19:49:59 Anyway. You can. Oh, there it is! I want it to be what?
19:50:05 And I don't want it to be that I want it to be palatino, and I want it to be 60 points.
19:50:18 Okay. So here's my caption, and I've captioned that that photograph that I took of my TV set.
19:50:29 But it's also too large. So I want to also crap it.
19:50:32 So again using preview, I come along and I tell it that I want to crop something, and I do that just by dragging a box.
19:50:45 And then, after I drag my little box, I go up to to text edit, and I say and to preview and say, Crap!
19:50:55 And it crops it, and I did that in preview.
19:50:58 So I edited a photograph. I added text to it, and I didn't use anything other than preview didn't have to load it into photo or anything.
19:51:07 It's just it's just done with preview.
19:51:12 And now I'm going to show you one of the few photographs I have of my granddaughter.
19:51:20 This is my granddaughter going off to school in England, and there are very few photographs existing of her face, because she likes to run so almost anytime.
19:51:32 You see her? She's disappearing off in the distance, and you see the back of her head.
19:51:36 So I would recognize my granddaughter anywhere, just by the back of her head.
19:51:40 And this is, this is a nice photo, and I, first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag it to my desktop, make a copy of it, because the next thing I'm going to do is a little bit on the dangerous side this is my granddaughter and i'm
19:51:53 going to. I'm going to remove her from the photograph sort of I come up here and I go to Preview Window.
19:52:06 And I say, remove background, and it makes a little sparkly thing.
19:52:10 Around her, and she gets well at all. Yeah. I removed her from the Coder.
19:52:17 I'm not gonna save this. And I'm going to save.
19:52:24 And I now have this picture of my granddaughter, and I'm going to drag the original photograph back again.
19:52:37 And then go to type on it. So I come up here and I say that I want to annotate it with text.
19:52:44 I get a text box again. I say.
19:52:49 Education. I probably wanted to make it even larger. So where was that?
19:52:59 Hmm! There you are!
19:53:06 Yeah, that's not enough.
19:53:10 That's good.
19:53:15 I take education, I put it right over my granddaughter.
19:53:18 Well, that isn't seem terribly nice so I'm gonna come here and I'm gonna say, I'm going to export this as a Png file and I'm going to name it.
19:53:30 Curve, 2.
19:53:36 And I'm going to take this one and gonna say, copy.
19:53:45 Paste!
19:53:50 And what I've done is I pasted my granddaughter over my granddaughter and the text now appears as if it's in the background.
19:53:59 I created a three-level photograph. There's the original photograph.
19:54:03 There's the text on top of that, and then there's the image that I captured out of it beforehand, and in order to do that I have to use a Png file, and the reason why I have to use a Png file is that a Png file has something to it called
19:54:23 an Alpha channel, and you don't care what an alpha channel is.
19:54:27 But a Png file can have multiple layers. So I have the original photograph is layer one.
19:54:35 The text is actually another layer. When I type that text over the top of it, I was creating another layer.
19:54:41 And then this photograph of my granddaughter, removed from the background is yet another one.
19:54:48 So I pasted this. I pasted her on top of the education.
19:54:55 And now looks like she's walking in front. She's walking up to the word education, and it wasn't there to begin with.
19:55:04 So it's just a it's a way of captioning photos in such a way that people look at and say, How did you do that?
19:55:11 You'll notice they do this all the time on TV when the weather people are, are there, and they're pointing to the weather map.
19:55:17 That weather map is actually just a large wall that's painted either green or blue, depending upon what equipment that they have.
19:55:24 And they're moving their hands around, and the only trick is that the producer has to make sure that the weather person is not wearing the same color, because if they are, and this happened a couple weeks ago one of the weather people on Channel 5, I think had on a dress a green dress that had the same color.
19:55:46 Green. In spots it had various little panels, and when she was moving back and forth you could see Mount Rain here through parts of parts of her dress, and that's because it was keen on that color to show what was in the background, and since it thought her dress was the background, it was
19:56:07 putting mount Rainier over the top of it, and that's how this is done.
19:56:11 It's doing something it's called an Alpha channel. And it keys on a particular color.
19:56:15 But in this particular case it heat on my granddaughter, and just to show you another one.
19:56:27 This again is my granddaughter, hey? Am I going to drag her out here?
19:56:35 And we're going to drag this picture of a balloon out here.
19:56:43 This is the famous Spotoon, and this is my granddaughter.
19:56:51 She just walked up on this railing and now she's jumping off of it, and a beam, and she's and she's jumping off of it, and I couldn't have done that when I was 20, and I she's completely fearless.
19:57:07 But anyway, I say that I want to remove the background for that, and yes, it's going to convert it to Pmg.
19:57:15 And there it is, and I'm going to save this.
19:57:22 And I'm going to convert this balloon to Png.
19:57:28 Say, save!
19:57:35 And.
19:57:39 Go back to granddaughter again and select this.
19:57:47 And paste it. Now, my granddaughter is jumping over the Chinese spy alone, and I'm not using any special software other than preview which comes with your with your Mac.
19:58:07 Nothing else was required.
19:58:14 Questions.
19:58:21 Could you do that again?
19:58:23 Yes, I can.
19:58:25 That was so cool.
19:58:32 Yes.
19:58:31 So for me, so like you're in your pictures.
19:58:36 You're in your photo library and you pick a picture and you save it.
19:58:43 Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
19:58:46 I'll I'll take a different picture.
19:58:50 Okay.
19:58:56 This is a why isn't not opening up? This is a dragon at Bouchard Gardens, and.
19:59:15 This is a picture of an elk. This is out towards.
19:59:25 Over me!
19:59:28 It out towards the coast. Some place there is elk in someone's backyard, and I'm going to put this dragon into that picture, and so how do I do that?
19:59:39 Well, I have to save the Elk as a Png, because it only works with Pngs.
19:59:47 So I just say to say, the alk is a png, and.
19:59:54 Then I have to do something with my dragon, and again I click on it.
20:00:00 So it has some idea of what it is. That, I think is my target.
20:00:04 I say, remove background, and, as I say, remove background.
20:00:08 It has this little lightning that goes around. What is going to remove, so that you have some idea that you're getting the right thing.
20:00:15 Say convert, yep, there's my dragon now, there's a little bit of artifact, cause it's tongue is kind of oh, that's a water coming out of his tongue.
20:00:25 So that's kind of a strange idea. But otherwise that's that's the Dragon, and I'm going to take my dragon, and I'm going to select it all and copy it.
20:00:42 And here's my elk, now the dragon is actually way too big.
20:00:49 So if I paste it in here, it's dragging kind of takes over.
20:00:53 But that's perfectly okay, because you know, he's a dragon, and if I wanted to, I could shrink him down.
20:01:00 Because again, remember, this is a layer, so I can shrink him, and I can put him in the background of this.
20:01:10 Elk so, or I could have done the other thing, or I could have had him in the back of the dragon in the background and put the elk in the front, and I couldn't do that the same way.
20:01:21 I could do a multi-step where I take out the elk, put the dragon in the background, paste the elk back over on top of the elk, so the dragon looks like it's behind the elk, but that's basically just playing with layers.
20:01:36 And you can shrink them and expand them, and do all kinds of things with them.
20:01:44 We're gonna have this elk over here threatening this other elk off in the distance.
20:01:51 But it's yeah. You're combining several photographs.
20:01:56 It's getting so easy to do this that if you see a photograph of Yo, yeah, like, President Bob Biden, shaking hands with Hitler, that's really easy to do.
20:02:08 Now, which is why you is why, among other things, you see so much fake news now, because it's so easy to doctor things like that.
20:02:18 But that was done, using nothing more complicated than then. Preview.
20:02:26 And.
20:02:26 Oh, I'm sorry!
20:02:30 Yes.
20:02:38 This new camera, called Pixel, and 8, when you could remove.
20:02:43 A person from the picture, and somehow the back ground gets recovered so that it looks like the person was never there.
20:02:54 Yes.
20:02:55 Is that possible in preview?
20:02:58 It's not possible in preview. It might be possible, using.
20:03:05 Now there are a whole bunch of steps to this. If you have a Google one account and a Google one is a paid Google account.
20:03:14 If you have a Google one account, they've added some of those pixel tools to Google photos.
20:03:23 But it'll only show up if you a have Google one.
20:03:29 And you're using Google photo if you're photographs are in Google photos.
20:03:34 And when I say some of them I haven't really explored all of them.
20:03:36 But I do want to talk about it a bit about what the trade-offs are when I did this bit of manipulation here with my granddaughter, and so on, so forth.
20:03:45 None of this information got sent to Apple. It was all done on my computer.
20:03:51 If you have an older, Mac is, some of it has to be sent to apple, because unless you have an apple sellicon processor, it doesn't have some of the the apple silicon machines have something called a graphical processor in it and my particular machine's got like 24 of them.
20:04:10 So if you have an older machine that can run Ventura, you can still do this, but it's gonna have to send some information back to Apple.
20:04:20 Not much, but some with Google. It sends pretty much all that information back to Google.
20:04:25 So that's one disadvantage in terms of just privacy, like, for example, you notice, I didn't show you any photographs of my granddaughter's face.
20:04:34 Why? Because her mother, my daughter, insists that we don't not do that.
20:04:38 She says that by the time her daughter's reaches age of maturity, her daughter should be able to decide how she wants to be exposed to the world, and so she just doesn't take, she doesn't allow me to take photographs to publish photographs of her face and
20:04:58 that's a privacy. Insecurities concerned.
20:05:02 And Google doesn't do that when you play these tricks with Google photos or with the Pixel, it's sending that information back to Google.
20:05:21 Oh, okay.
20:05:12 It is suspected that Google is crowdsourcing information for the background from other photos that were taken in an area and adding it in and and recently an issue came up.
20:05:28 And it's gotten a whole bunch of play in the technical press, and I even saw one of the national news channels.
20:05:33 Had it talking about the some snap, something around there.
20:05:45 Their latest phone has a 100 times digital zoom.
20:05:48 Well, let me tell you something about a digital zoom.
20:05:51 If I zoom in on this picture, and I do it enough.
20:05:55 It's starts to look really fuzzy. It doesn't look much like an elk anymore.
20:06:01 And that's only about so 10 times zoom with a 100 digital zoom, you basically end up with something that looks very noisy.
20:06:12 So if you take a picture of a of an elk, that's 500 feet away.
20:06:17 With that, with that Samson phone, you end up with a fuzzy picture of an elk.
20:06:23 It'll just be larger on your screen, but it's still really fudge.
20:06:25 It's fuzzy. Well, Samsung was running ads, showing people taking pictures of the moon and looking really crisp.
20:06:32 So some people got together and thought, Huh! How did they do that?
20:06:36 Samsung created a database of moon photos.
20:06:40 So when you take this fuzzy picture of a two-thirds fold moon, Samsung sends a picture back to its computers, and they say, Oh, let's fill in the blanks from our database of 2 thirds.
20:06:52 Photo, of 2 thirds, photos of the moon. And you end up with this really nice Chris photo of the moon on your phone, except that it really wasn't what your what your phone took.
20:07:05 Alright!
20:07:05 It was, it was added, it was added artificially, and I was suspicious.
20:07:14 Other people were suspicious, and so they tested it by putting the phone into a an electronic kind of durable cage so they can measure the electronic signals going out.
20:07:27 And they saw that it was contacting Samsung, and it was downloading.
20:07:31 This information to create this photograph. So it's very clever.
20:07:35 But it's not really a photograph taken with your phone.
20:07:41 And yes.
20:07:46 Yes.
20:07:39 So, Lawrence, back to the Png files that you created.
20:07:50 How do you get rid of the layers? If if you wanted to say print it?
20:07:55 I think they, once you save it. It's embedded in there like I close this.
20:08:02 It's all just one layer. Now. There are.
20:08:03 Oh, but does it need to be called Png again? Still?
20:08:10 Or we, okay?
20:08:09 Oh, no, no! You can go back here. It's just the Png that there's a special thing about the format that I can export.
20:08:15 Right.
20:08:17 This is as a Jpeg. And save it as an hour.
20:08:22 I already have it as a Jpeg. Let's call it elk, or and now it's a Jpeg image again.
20:08:31 Just a jpeg of a elk with a dragon of, and a figure perfectly normal thing to have.
20:08:33 Okay. Alright. Yeah. Thank you.
20:08:37 Oh, but the pn. The Png is just part of of of the process that it has to be in that format, because Png allows layers.
20:08:50 Right.
20:08:46 If you were using something like adobe. Photoshop, you can retain layers in Photoshop, and you can rearrange them.
20:08:55 Right.
20:08:53 Preview is free. It doesn't have that ability. So it doesn't.
20:09:01 Right.
20:08:58 You can't do that, but in Photoshop you can actually retain the layers and save it as if so you could manipulate later on.
20:09:06 But Photoshop is like 500 bucks. So there's a difference between free and $500.
20:09:12 The most important thing that that of all the things that I showed you, to do, that the one thing that it was almost impossible to do until recently was straighten a photo.
20:09:22 You can straighten the photo and I'll show you this is a preview. And if you come up here and you want to rotate things.
20:09:29 Rotate them that way. Not terribly useful. You can also come up here, and you can say, flip horizontal and flip it backwards, and which, incidentally, this main.
20:09:45 This is not as silly a trick as you might think.
20:09:47 A lot of people they'll take photographs of themselves with their self, with their camera is Selfie.
20:09:53 And if they're wearing a logo or something, the logo is backwards, and now they have this picture with the logo permanently backwards.
20:09:59 The way to fix that is, just launch Preview and say, flip horizontal, and your logo that's backwards.
20:10:07 Will be slipped properly, but when it comes to rotation that's been really difficult.
20:09:24 Alright!
20:10:14 Because again, Photoshop is $500, and Photoshop lightroom, which is used by photographers, is 200 and with the new apple photos and the ability to to a straighten photographs to minutely straighten photographs, just think of that as a free 200 to 5
20:10:36 $100 extra that that you now have in photos, because one of the things as a photographer one of the things that really annoys me about photographs is people send me photographs all the time, and it looks like the land is sinking or there's an earthquake.
20:10:49 Or there's a tidal wave or something, and straightening photos has been really difficult until they incorporate and photo in photos.
20:10:58 And so you definitely want to. You definitely want to take advantage of that.
20:11:05 Any other questions?
20:11:08 I also want to show you something else that you might know the apple, several years ago came up with this atic technology.
20:11:19 And it's a much, much more advanced compression algorithm for photographs.
20:11:24 So here's a picture of of 3 deer, and I'm going to save it.
20:11:28 I'm gonna export it. And I'm gonna say, if it is a Jpeg, so I'm gonna save it as a Jpeg and I already have 3 derel, let's call it 3D 2 I don't know why I have probably cause I was going to do something with
20:11:47 it. Okay, here's the original photograph from Apple.
20:11:52 And this h h e, I see photograph. That's the extension.
20:11:58 Hgic is 1.4 MB.
20:12:02 Well, if I save it as a Jpeg, you'll see that it's twice that size.
20:12:10 And apple did this so they could cram. They were finding out that in a single day people were taking as much as a 1,000 photographs on their iphone, and they only had, like a 60 four- gigs of memory on their Iphone.
20:12:25 So they were filling up their iphone. They were complaining about it.
20:12:28 So Apple came up with this phone, this format, to compress the files, and it it compresses it losslessly, which is hard to explain.
20:12:40 But it means that they look really crisp, and that it means that they look really crisp, and that's the native format.
20:12:44 But then people started sending these photographs to their in-laws, and their in-laws said, I can't open the file. Why?
20:12:50 Because their phone, their their their their phone, or whatever couldn't read this new file format, that apple device.
20:13:00 So what do you do? You launch it in preview? You come up here to say export, and you pick the format you want, and anybody can see Jpeg, so pick that one.
20:13:13 What you should never pick is this one that, says Jpeg.
20:13:15 2,000. Don't ever pick that one Jpeg, 2,000 is for geographic information.
20:13:21 Hmm!
20:13:20 Systems. And if you know what a geographic information system is, then that's great.
20:13:25 But if you don't, you don't care but what always want to use Jpeg cause everybody can read Jpeg.
20:13:34 But that's precisely why I stuck that one in there.
20:13:38 I wanted to know that you can do that kind of transferation using just preview any other questions.
20:13:50 There's one other thing I want to show you. It's because I forgot about it, and it has nothing to do with the photography, and that is, I was playing with the Chat Gpts.
20:14:07 Some people asked me last time about chat Gpt, so I wanna show you a session that I had with Chat Gpt.
20:14:15 And I asked, Who is the writer named Lawrence? Eye Charters?
20:14:23 And that's me, Lawrence. I charters is an American writer, software developer who has authored several books in programming, including the Microsoft Visual Basic Net step by step and programming the Microsoft Windows driver model that entire paragraph is wrong I don't know who that lawrence
20:14:40 charges, but that's not me. However, the next one is mostly correct, and addition to his work as a writer charters has also been involved in the software industry for many years.
20:14:50 True, as worked as a software developer project manager and consultant.
20:14:54 He has expertise in various programming languages, including languages and technologies, including, and then half of this is wrong.
20:15:04 This third paragraph, though, is almost impossible. It's completely correct, charges also known for his involvement in the Science Fiction and Fantasy communities.
20:15:12 He has written several works of Science fiction. Actually, it's about Science Fiction and has served as an editor of various Science Fiction and fantasy publications.
20:15:20 That's true, did Lawrence, I try to ever work for the Seahawks newspaper.
20:15:26 It's a newspaper, not newsletter, and sketch chat. Gpt said something went wrong.
20:15:31 If this issue persists, blah blah, blah! And then it came.
20:15:35 It rebooted and came back, and it says, I'm not sure if Lawrence, Ichard has ever worked for the Cf.
20:15:40 Newspaper, and so then I said, Who is Kathleen Charter's?
20:15:45 Phd. And Kathleen Charters. Phd. Is an American author, educating research.
20:15:51 She has written several books and articles on various topics that related to education, technology, and literacy.
20:15:55 That's sort of right charges received her. Phd.
20:15:59 In language, literature, and technology from the University of California. Irvine, not true.
20:16:02 And as taught at several universities, true, including the in of Hawaii, Manoa, and California State University.
20:16:10 Fullerton, not true. Her research focuses on blah blah blah.
20:16:14 Then this third paragraph is mostly correct, it says she worked with educational software.
20:16:20 Digital media says, received grants to supporter research in that and so on. So forth.
20:16:27 So apparently with chat. Gpt, you have to at least go down 3 paragraphs before you get something that's mostly correct.
20:16:34 I asked, who's going to win the Ncaa.
20:16:35 Women's Basketball tournament and it says this, an AI model that's not allowed to do things like that.
20:16:42 Write a limerick on computer programming and Kenya, roose. Now remember, that's what I told it to.
20:16:47 There was a programmer from Perth, who's a coding skills, were quite an exert.
20:16:53 But one day he went astray and wrote a program for astray.
20:16:56 Now his coding was jumping like a kangaroo, alert.
20:17:03 It's pretty nice.
20:17:00 Not a great Limerick, but it is right a Limeric on apple watch meeting Android phone.
20:17:09 This one's really funny. And I'll watch. And Android phone met each other when they were alone, and they tried to connect.
20:17:16 But it was a reject. Now they communicate by tone.
20:17:19 It's not only true, but it's funny. Write a hikeu in Japanese.
20:17:25 So Rona Hiku in Japanese, and then it gave me a translation.
20:17:28 It's actually a famous haiku. So what Chat Gpt does is that it has a massive database of stuff that collected from the rep web, and you give it a prompt and it tries to come up with a response.
20:17:41 But, as you can see from my biography quite often, it's it's utter nonsense.
20:17:47 I was thinking that this might be how George Santos created his resume.
20:17:52 He just asked Chat Gpt to come up with random stuff, and it put it into a resume, and he went with it.
20:18:00 But if you want to know what Chat Gpt is right now, it's just an experiment, and it's difficult to get it to work correctly.
20:18:08 And it's really not useful, Google announced today that they're doing a beta test of their AI programs called Bart and I know this because they sent me an invitation.
20:18:22 But it doesn't. It's not available to the public yet, and I really can't tell you anything more about it.
20:18:28 But it's become an issue, not because anyone really needs an AI powered search engine.
20:18:35 It's become an issue. Because Microsoft was getting too much publicity.
20:18:40 So Google had to respond. Google's been working on their AI for about 5 years.
20:18:45 So it's nothing. Yes.
20:18:46 Loris, do you think, in your opinion, that Apple will use Chat?
20:18:53 Gpt. Is Siri.
20:18:55 No, I do. I'm positive they will not use Chat gpt, because they don't need to.
20:19:02 They have already got siri, and what they need to do is just add a little bit more artificial intelligence on the back end.
20:19:10 Apple's really really cautious about this, though they don't want to see a lot of the mistakes that Microsoft made.
20:19:17 People people were talking to. You have to remember that Chat Gpt learns from users as well as other things and some people got on there, and they started pretending that they were or maybe they weren't pretending they came up.
20:19:32 They started feeding extremist technology and such. And it turned chat.
20:19:38 Gpt parent, and it started saying, racist, sexist things, and said there was kind of fighting suicide, and so on. So forth.
20:19:46 And that's because it was learning that from the people who were, it was talking to Apple doesn't want to do that.
20:19:53 So Apple's going to be fairly cautious, but they've been working on AI.
20:19:58 Oh, for 10 years now! And consider, for example, that.
20:20:04 This is an iphone. If you could see it did not get blurred out.
20:20:08 This is an iphone and the iphone has as much power.
20:20:18 My, yeah, oh, Kathleen's not saying sorry about that.
20:20:28 Stop, share. The iphone has been the very first iphone had more power than a supercomputer, which is what they originally were doing.
20:20:40 The Artificial Intelligence programming on this iphone has about I'll equivalent of about 150 crate supercomputers inside of something that weighs 8 ounces.
20:20:53 I don't know how much it was, so that's a huge amount of power.
20:20:57 So the in terms of the computer power apple has the computer power.
20:21:02 The problem is the AI, that the learning algorithm coming up with a learning algorithm that is useful and doesn't make terrible mistakes.
20:21:14 They were asking chat, gpt health information, and it doesn't know your health insurance.
20:21:21 So it was either getting back very bland responses that made no sense to most people, or it was giving me overly a specific stuff that did not apply to the actual user who was asking the question.
20:21:36 And so Apple's very, very cautious, because it doesn't want to make these kind of mistakes, and on the good news bad news.
20:21:43 It's good that that Microsoft kind of stumbled because it taught Google and Apple to be much more cautious about that.
20:21:55 There's a huge amount of artificial intelligence in your phone already.
20:21:58 When I was doing that, pulling my daughter out of a granddaughter out of photograph and placing it into another, where we, drawing the the boundary that's called masking.
20:22:12 If I used Photoshop to perform that kind of masking, it would probably take me 10 h to do as good a job, and I didn't have to do this.
20:22:23 I just said, remove the background, and it did it so there's an awful lot of artificial intelligence, but that's for a very discrete task.
20:22:32 If you give it more general things like I can tell Siri to turn my TV on and off, because we have an apple TV, so I can tell it to do that.
20:22:42 I cannot get it to tell me to bring up Channel 5, which is kind of Cairo.
20:22:48 Whatever Channel 5 is among other things, it's not even called Channel 5 is, among other things, it's not even called Channel 5 anymore, because it's not broadcast TV.
20:22:54 I just think of it as Channel 5, because when I was a child it was Channel 5, and I still think of it that way.
20:23:00 So there's a there's a limit as to what what a generalized AI can do.
20:23:06 And so you it's Apple's been giving them very discreet tasks and say, Do this, my monitor, which is an apple monitor.
20:23:14 I told it to tune itself to the room, and it created a color palette that matches the lighting in my room.
20:23:21 Does that automatically. But that's something that engineers know how to do.
20:23:25 And all they had to do is just teach the intelligence in the machine to duplicate that when it comes to something that humans haven't done before it's gets it gets much trickier, or when it comes to giving advice like who to bet on and super bowl it should have enough sense to say i'm
20:23:42 not gonna give you that information apple doesn't want to get sued because it said, Go with the the jets.
20:23:51 I can guarantee the jets aren't gonna win.
20:23:53 So you know, yeah, they're gonna take this cautiously, and they're gonna be focused. It's amazing.
20:24:02 Sometimes what? I asked. I can't Kathleen and I were watching something we couldn't.
20:24:09 This actress seemed.
20:24:13 Really young, and yet it was, and we've seen her in movies forever, and she looked like she was 20 years old.
20:24:21 So I asked Sarah how old she was, and she just popped back up 43!
20:24:25 But if you think about it, that's a very discrete task.
20:24:29 That's it's easy for Siri. Somebody else is probably already asked that question, or it's something that it pops up as a first result in a search result. But if it's more, I'm ambiguous, Siri will tell you things like I've sent the results, to your apple.
20:24:44 Phone, okay, if I'm not looking at my apple phone, that's not terribly useful.
20:24:50 But it's a way of answering a question that it can't come up with a discussion that it can't come up with a discrete answer and that's the way Apple's been running their their artificial intelligence.
20:25:00 I realize that's a complicated answer to a question.
20:25:03 But sometimes that's the way it works. Any other questions.
20:25:11 Hi!
20:25:11 I have a duplicate photos.
20:25:22 Oh, I forgot to show you that the new photos gets ready to do well, it can get rid of.
20:25:28 Actually, I did show you. If you dump a bunch of photos into the new photos and you give it a day or 2 to digest.
20:25:36 What's happening is that you either have your phone and your computer both logged in, or something that you're getting feedback.
20:25:49 But anyway, the new, the new apple photos does fine duplicates, but you have to give it like if you import a bunch of photos, you have to give it overnight to digest on it, and it does a really good job.
20:26:05 Okay.
20:26:06 I cleaned up out of this one photo album, probably 200 GB worth of duplicates.
20:26:14 Can you explain that a little bit more thoroughly?
20:26:19 Yes, because at 1 point you said that there's really, truly no duplicate.
20:26:17 How it finds the duplicates or.
20:26:26 I said, there's really, truly no duplicate.
20:26:29 Right, you know, like, maybe something like I took a picture second one and then second, 2.
20:26:35 Oh!
20:26:35 I took another picture, and it's not necessarily truly a duplicate, but it's close enough.
20:26:39 Yes, yeah, those it will not call duplicates a duplicate really means it's the same file.
20:26:47 Okay.
20:26:46 And what it, what it checks for is, it checks the file name, it checks the date time stamp.
20:26:57 Okay.
20:26:53 When you look at a when you do a get info on a photograph, you'll see that it has a timestamp that goes down to the well.
20:27:03 Actually, it says it's it just shows it to the minute.
20:27:07 But when it stores that it actually stores it down to the second, so it can tell if you take 2 pictures in a row a second apart, not only is the file name going to be different, but the timestamp is going to be different, but the timestamp is going to be different.
20:27:20 Yeah.
20:27:20 And if the timestamp is different, apples of apple photos will not think it's a duplicate.
20:27:24 So, but it looks at the the file, name the timestamp, the file size, the dimensions of the file, and that and I'll give you an example of this.
20:27:36 Say you have a photograph, and you took that on yesterday, and then you made a copy of the of the photograph, and then you cropped it like we were talking about here and you made a copy of the of the photograph and then you cropped it, like we were talking about here and you shrink it
20:27:54 down. Well, the file name and the timestamp are going to be similar, if not identical.
20:27:59 But the size is gonna be different. And at that point Apple's not gonna say it's a duplicate.
20:28:04 It's really paranoid about what it calls a duplicate.
20:28:06 It really does have to be a duplicate. It's really paranoid about what it calls a duplicate.
20:28:09 It really does have to be essentially that same file. And if it's the same file it'll flag it as a duplicate.
20:28:13 And you can just say I want that one, and not that one, and it'll get rid of them.
20:28:18 And like I said, in one case I found 200 GB worth of duplicates have found thousands of duplicates, and that happened when I had.
20:28:29 You can have multiple photos libraries. And I had.
20:28:35 I I was. Never mind. I had 2 photos libraries, and I sucked one into the other, and there were duplicates and I didn't know about it, but it found all the duplicates, and I got rid of them.
20:28:46 So it does a really good job. But you have to let it think about it overnight.
20:28:51 It needs to index all the photos and their characteristics.
20:28:56 If you, if you suck in a bunch of photos and you think their duplicates and go check immediately, it's not gonna find them.
20:29:04 It needs it. Take a while for my demo today. I deliberately had some duplicates, but I had to leave photos running for like an hour before it told me that.
20:29:15 It depends on how many photos you have and how many duplicates.
20:29:18 But it does really good job.
20:29:23 Any other questions?
20:29:27 What are we gonna do next month?
20:29:41 Kathleen has a list of what was just in the background.
20:29:52 She's in the past. She's gonna look that up.
20:29:53 But.
20:29:54 What about the guy that was going to do? A password?
20:29:58 One presentation.
20:29:59 I should contact him. He was. He was one of the producers of the recent musical at Olympic Theater Arts, and he was sucked up in that.
20:30:11 But.
20:30:14 Oh! Next month we're not gonna have a meeting.
20:30:20 Kathleen has just told me that next month I'm incent St.
20:30:24 Louis.
20:30:28 So we probably won't have one next month unless this other gentleman wants to run.
20:30:33 Run. But I'm gonna be in St.
20:30:36 Louis. So think about what you wanna do, and may, and send me an email or something.
20:30:48 He suggests that we could do it the next wait.
20:30:54 Let me look at my calendar.
20:30:57 I can't see my calendar here, cause I'm in the wrong user.
20:31:02 But yeah, either we push it back a week next month, or we put it off until May.
20:31:12 What's your or get somebody else to do it?
20:31:17 Let's just put it off till May.
20:31:20 Okay, that works for me. I shall send out a notice to that effect.
20:31:28 Any last questions?
20:31:33 Thank you.
20:31:33 I want to see. I went to see all of you create interesting fake photos, using masking in preview.
20:31:42 And you can send them to me, and I'll put them on the website.
20:31:44 Hmm! Thank you. Laurence.
20:31:50 Good night.
20:31:47 Thank you. Thank you. Good night.

March 2021: TextEdit and Preview

Notes by Kathleen Charters

The March 2021 focused on two essential but overlooked utilities on the Mac, TextEdit and Preview. But before we got to that, we had —

Q&A

Q: Why do I get an error message that my drive is disconnected when it is still connected?

A: I’m guessing you have a USB drive that you bought from Costco or off Amazon or Best Buy or something. These drives are great as Time Machine backup drives, but they are not top-of-the-line drives; they usually have a one-year warranty rather than a multi-year warranty, and were not burned-in at the factory to make sure they work properly. Essentially, the consumer does the manufacturer’s quality control: if the drive works, great! If it doesn’t, they’ll replace it.

These drives are not designed to be left on all the time. If the computer goes to sleep, the drive goes to sleep, without any hardware or software support to wake it up again when the computer wakes up. From the computer’s point of view, the drive was disconnected, and your Mac puts up a scary message. This isn’t really a problem if the drive is used as a Time Machine backup drive.

In contrast, I have three RAIDS with a total of 12 drives in them. These are “enterprise” drives, designed to be left on all the time, and they come with five-year warranties. They are mounted in cases designed for the purpose, and the cases tell the drive when the computer goes to sleep, and when it wakes up.

Q: If Time Machine backs up everything, continuously, won’t the backup drive fill up quickly?

A: Time Machine backs up every hour, and while it does back up everything, it does a “differential” backup, backing up things that are changed or new. When you do the first Time Machine backup, it takes a long time, because everything is new, but after that, only new or changed files are added, and backups are quite quick.

Q: Should I have Time Machine backup to two different drives and alternate them?

A: That sounds like you are trying to do an archive rather than a backup. A backup is just that: a backup of everything, including things you forgot to backup. An archive is a snapshot of everything that is then removed from proximity to the computer and stored somewhere else. The whole point of an archive is to have something stored elsewhere — a relative’s house, a bank safe deposit box — so that if something happens, you will have a copy of whatever was stored on the archive.

A backup drive should be connected to your computer at all times. An archive should be disconnected and stored apart from your computer.

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of having backups or archives. A recent poll asked 18-to-30-year-olds which would be more traumatic: getting dumped by a significant other or losing their phone? Most people said: losing their phone. The phone has contacts for everyone they care about, it has photos of vacations and momentous events, it has apps for banking and dating and games to play in boring meetings. One of my relatives lost a phone, and with it, all their photos of their children. They’d never backed them up, and suddenly, they were gone.

A backup is to rescue you from an unanticipated event, such as a hard drive crash or, if you have a laptop, the theft or loss of your laptop. An archive is a place where you store 13 years of photos of your children.

Do not put your Time Machine backup and your archive on the same drive. Not only should these be on separate media, but ideally the media should be kept in different locations. I, for example, save my Time Machine backups to a drive on an Apple Time Capsule, but I save archives on bare hard drives I insert into a “drive toaster,” such as the NewerTech Voyager drive dock.

Q: Do you need to “refresh” your drives to prevent them from freezing up?

A: Older drives from a decade or more ago had “stiction” problems caused by the lubricant in the drives, but that really isn’t an issue today. What is a problem is changing formats. For example, the original Macintosh image format was PICT, which cannot be used by modern Macs. You need to find a utility (there are several) to convert older PICT images into modern JPEG images. Similarly, older drives were formatted using HFS; Apple’s current drive format is APFS. There will come a day when future Macs probably will not be able to read HFS-formatted drives.

An extreme example: the 1890 census of the United States was stored on Hollerith cards, the precursor to computer cards. Various codes were punched on the cards, which could then be tabulated on mechanical tabulators. In later years, when computers had been invented, there was a problem: how do you get this old, paper-card data into a modern computer? Special card readers were developed, and special programs developed, to read in and reformat the data on the cards so they could be stored in modern computer databases.

Q: Why would you convert PICT images to JPEG? Why not TIFF?

A: TIFF files are much larger. If your iPhone took photos and stored them in TIFF, you’d run out of storage much faster. JPEG was specifically developed specifically for photographs. TIFF was developed by Aldus Corporation (later purchased by Adobe) for storing images scanned by image scanners, for use in desktop publishing.

Q: What do you think of BackBlaze?

A: Backblaze is an excellent service. For a monthly subscription fee, Backblaze will continuously back up your computer to their cloud service. The backup process is encrypted, as is the backup itself. Since the cloud service is not in your home or office, it also is essentially an offsite archive, too. When we [Kathleen and Lawrence] moved cross-country, we first backed up our data to Backblaze, so that even if our computers didn’t survive the move, our data would still be available.

Club business

President Sabrina Davis asked if there were any new people; no one indicated they were new.

Sabrina asked members, who haven’t paid their annual membership dues, to please send in dues to Treasurer Annalis Schutzmann. The address is on the Contact page.

Vice President Lawrence Charters purged 185 inactive contacts from the club database (out of over 400 contacts). Most of those purged were “inherited” from older club records, and consisted of individuals who have not attended meetings since October 2018. Purging the list will help with notifications to the group, as Google tends to limit accounts to no more than 300 messages a day as an anti-spam measure.

Presentation: Preview

For the March meeting, Vice President Lawrence Charters demonstrated Preview and TextEdit on an Apple Silicon-based Mac mini. Preview and TextEdit have been on every Mac since Mac OS X was introduced, and date back to even before then, as they were developed for the NeXT computer. (NeXT was purchased by Apple and the NeXT operating system is the foundation of macOS). Since these are utilities that everyone already has, it is worth knowing what they can do.

To start, Lawrence used Preview to scan something on a printer. The printer – an inexpensive Hewlett-Packard all-in-one printer with scanner, fax, and printer – has a flatbed scanner built into the top of the printer. Lawrence made a point of never installing the software supplied by Hewlett-Packard. Instead, the printer was “installed” by using the macOS System Preferences “Printers&Scanners” pane to “see” the printer on the network, and configure drivers for the printer using settings already bundled with macOS Big Sur.

When Preview was launched, it requested a file to open. The request was canceled. Lawrence then went to Preview’s File menu, selected Import from Scanner, selected the printer (scanner), and scanned an old photograph, taken by his grandmother, of the original Tacoma Narrows bridge during construction.

An 82 year old small (2 inches across) snapshot of the original Tacoma Narrows bridge during its construction. Photo by Viola Lemley.
An 82 year old small (2 inches across) snapshot of the original Tacoma Narrows bridge during its construction. This was taken from Tacoma, looking across the Narrows to Kitsap. Photo by Viola Lemley. The photograph was scanned on an HP All-In-One printer/scanner/fax purchased at Office Depot. The only software used to scan it into macOS was Preview.

When used to scan things, Preview is quite flexible. It can scan in color or black and white, can save the scanned image as a TIFF, JPEG, JPEG 2000 [don’t use this], PNG, or PDF. If the scanner supports it, you can select the resolution of the scan, and the size of the scanned object. If the scanner has a document feeder, you can scan multiple items and combine them in a single document, or save them as separate files. You can draw a selection box around what you want scanned. A preview of the scan shows up in Preview, which is perfectly fine for a program called Preview.

Why not use the printing and scanning software that comes with the printer (or scanner)? With rare exceptions, whatever ships with the printer is immediately out of date, and the manufacturers are not inclined to update the software. Manufacturers make their money selling printers and scanners, not in updating the software for them. Some scanners, such as the Fujitsu document scanners, do have special features worth using, but for most users, Preview provides what users need, and Apple updates Preview (and the print drivers) on a regular basis.

Once scanned, Preview has a range of tools to edit and enhance the scanned image. Preview allows you to crop the image, rotate the image, add labels to the image, adjust color and contrast, add text, and a number of other functions. Is it equivalent to Adobe’s Photoshop? No. But it comes with your Mac, and Photoshop users rarely do things that can’t be done with Preview.

Preview is also handy for converting images between formats. Load an image, and you can export it as: TIFF, PNG, PDF, OpenEXR (used for high end motion picture purposes), JPEG-2000 (don’t use), JPEG, and HEIC. HEIC was developed by Apple, and is short for High Efficiency Image File Format. HEIC files take up only half as much room as JPEG images, with better image fidelity, but — and this is an important but — if you send an HEIC image to a Windows user or a user with an older Mac, they probably won’t be able to see it.

In addition to image conversion, another good use for Preview is cropping and shrinking images that you send via email. Most users don’t really want a 20 MB image file to show up unexpectedly in email. Using Preview, you can reduce it down to under a megabyte — or less. Just open the image, go to the Tools menu, select Adjust Size, reduce the height and width to less than a thousand pixels, and then email the image.

Another absolutely vital use for Preview: rotating images. It can rotate photographs, and also PDFs, which comes in handy far more often than you might imagine.

Q: Where do you find Preview?

A: Preview is in your Applications folder. Just list everything alphabetically, and it is easy to find. It is highly recommended that you put it in your Dock for easy access.

Q: Do you need to use Preview if you have Photos?

A: Photos has much more extensive image editing tools, but it is also more complicated. When you launch it, it also opens up a database of all your photos, which may be more distraction than help. For simple tasks, Preview is more than adequate, and fast.

Q: Isn’t Photos somewhat limited?

A: When Photos came out, I didn’t pay much attention to it; I was using Aperture, which was Apple’s high-end photo management and editing program. But Apple abandoned Aperture, and at the same time expanded what Photos can do. Photos has the ability, among other things, to convert Aperture databases to Photos databases. As a result, I no longer use Aperture. (Aperture is also 32-bit, and won’t work on any Mac operating system after Mojave, macOS 10.14.

Q: Do you use Photos?

A: Not much. I tend to use Adobe Lightroom, which costs money, mostly because I have well over 100,000 photos.

Q: What about Adobe Photoshop Elements?

A: Haven’t used Photoshop Elements in possibly 20 years. But it does support 85-90% of the functions that most people use in Photoshop. It lacks the sophisticated image management of Apple’s Photos.

Q: Do you use a photo editor on your iPhone?

A: Not really. If I do, it is to make small cartoons, and I use a program from an Australian company called Comic Life 3. Most of my “serious” editing I do on my Mac using Adobe Lightroom. Or photoshop.

For more information on management of images (which is beyond the scope of the meeting), check out these two books:

[Photos may be the subject of a future meeting, since it is on every Mac, iPhone and iPad.]

Presentation: TextEdit

For the next often-overlooked utility, we looked at TextEdit. Available on every Mac since macOS was introduced in 2001 (and earlier on NeXT), TextEdit is a surprisingly powerful and versatile text editor. A “text editor” differs from a “word processor” in that a word processor can do almost anything when it comes to writing: you can change margins, page sizes, fonts, writing in multiple languages, add images and photos, and — pretty much anything. But a text editor is good for: text.

Since programming code is text-based, TextEdit started out life as a code editor. But not that many people write programs. On the other hand, almost everyone needs to read text at some point, and if you click on a text document on your Mac, such as the “Read Me” files included with almost every program or system update, macOS will launch TextEdit. You’ve probably used TextEdit thousands of times, and not noticed.

TextEdit, like Preview, is located in your Applications folder. You can drag it down to your Dock for ease of access.

If you launch TextEdit, it will open up a prompt to open a file. Cancel that, and you can create a new, text document. Once upon a time, TextEdit documents had to be fairly simple, but today you can go to the Format menu and select Make Rich Text, and TextEdit will put up a menu bar that allows you to change fonts, margins, tabs, and a host of other things that look a lot like a word processor.

When you save a TextEdit file, you are given a choice of formats, and it is here that you begin to see TextEdit’s power as a text Swiss Army knife: it can open and save a wide variety of formats.

TextEdit can save in Rich Text Format (RTF), Rich Text Format with embedded images (attachments), in HTML (formatted web pages), Web Archive documents (essentially stand-alone web pages), OpenDocument Text (used by some open-source word processing programs), and three different versions of Microsoft Word files, dating back more than 20 years.

Because it is included in every copy of macOS, TextEdit is a powerful, worthwhile tool. You can use it to open up Word documents, even if you don’t own Microsoft Word. You can use it to write programming code, or create a web page.

A separate menu option also allows you to export a document as a PDF file. TextEdit doesn’t read PDFs, however; for that, use Preview, as mentioned above.

Because TextEdit is a text editor and not a word processor, don’t expect to be able to do fancy text formatting. When you open a Word document in TextEdit, the formatting may often look quite strange.

Like many other programs on the Mac, TextEdit allows your Mac to turn the text in your document into speech. Open a document, go to the Edit menu, scroll down to Speech, and select Start Speaking. You use the same menu item to stop speaking.

TextEdit (or Safari, or Apple Mail, or almost any other Apple program) can convert text to speech, and read your document, or email, or shopping list, aloud. This is an often overlooked capability.

A brief aside

While the presentation was on Preview and TextEdit, speech is an important capability on the Mac. The very first Mac, during its introduction in 1984, spoke to the assembled reporters. Speech synthesis has advanced tremendously since that time (think of what you can do with Siri, on your Mac or iPhone or iPad or HomePod), but it is still overlooked as a tool.

If you are busy and want to read something, but your hands are busy doing something else, having TextEdit (or Apple Mail, or Safari, or almost any Apple program) speak whatever is showing on the screen can come in handy. You can change the default voice by going to System Preferences > Accessibility > Spoken Content and select a different voice from the menu, or even download additional voices to meet your needs. You can also change the speaking rate, have your Mac speak announcements, or a number of other options.

This is a demo of the speech capabilities shown at the meeting. Because Lawrence couldn’t figure out how to send the synthesized voice over Zoom, meeting participants couldn’t hear it at the time:

This video not only has the Mac speak a short page of text in a Scottish accent, it also tells you how the video was created.

You can also use the Mac’s Accessibility settings for zooming windows (enlarging or shrinking what is on the screen), and for dictation. Almost every Apple program that accepts text will also take dictation.

Back to TextEdit

While not demonstrated at the meeting, TextEdit can also import things from your iPhone or iPad, including images and scanned text.

Q: What is the equivalent of TextEdit on an iPhone or iPad?

A: There is no direct equivalent, though I use Notes for writing text. Notes has the added capability of automatically syncing Notes to iCloud, making them easy to pull up on your Mac.

Q: Can’t you do many of these things with Pages?

A: Pages comes with your Mac, which is nice (it used to cost money). And it is certainly more feature-rich, since it is a full-blown word processor, and it also comes on versions for your iPhone or iPad. But Pages documents can’t be read by anything except Pages, and the very flexibility of Pages makes it more complex to learn and use, and it takes longer to launch. TextEdit documents can be read by almost anything.

Next Month

When asked what to do next month, there were a number of suggestions:

  • Ways to have more advanced security on your Mac, such as two-factor authentication, different passwords for every purpose, password managers, etc.
  • A tour of the various System Preferences and what you can and should do with them.
  • Setting up a home network and showing how to get different devices to work together.
  • Demonstrate screen sharing.
  • Demonstrate how to use a VPN. (Lawrence isn’t keen on that, as setting up a Virtual Private Network is the antithesis of broadcasting your computer screen over Zoom).

The consensus was we would talk about some more advanced security measures that you can take with your Mac, on April 20.