Very busy October for Apple

Apple updates as of October 30, 2024

So far this week, Apple has released:

New Macs

  • A new, much more powerful set of 24″ iMacs with a new M4 chip, coming with a standard 16 GB of memory (up from the past 8 GB). I recommend that if you get one, you opt for the model with four Thunderbolt 4 ports (instead of the baseline two) and get a minimum of 1 terabyte of storage.
  • a new Mac mini with an M4 or an M4 Pro processor and a standard 16 GB of memory (up from the past 8 GB). I would recommend at least one terabyte of storage. The upgraded M4 Pro model also offers Thunderbolt 5 ports (up to 120 GBb/sec) instead of Thunderbolt 4 (40 Gb/sec) ports. The mini comes without a display, keyboard or mouse, but is otherwise currently Apple’s fastest desktop machine.
  • a new set of MacBook Pro with an M4, M4 Pro, or M4 Max processor and a standard 16 GB of memory (up from the past 8 GB). I would recommend at least one terabyte of storage. The higher-end models have Thunderbolt 5 ports, and you can add up to 128 GB of memory.

Apple Intelligence

  • a software update that allows the AirPods Pro 2 to offer a hearing test, and hearing protection, and function as a clinical-grade hearing aid.
  • software updates that bring the first elements of Apple Intelligence to certain models of iPhone, iPad, and Macintosh laptop and desktop machines.
  • a new iPad mini (technically introduced last week)

Software updates

  • iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1: brings Apple Intelligence to higher-end iPads and iPhones, plus has function bug fixes and security fixes to phones dating back to the iPhone XS.
  • iOS 17.7.1 and iPadOS 17.7.1: function bug fixes and security fixes to iPhones dating back to the iPhone XS.
  • macOS Sequoia 15.1: brings Apple Intelligence to Apple Silicon-based computers and function bug fixes and security fixes to machines running macOS Sequoia.
  • macOS Sonoma 14.7.1: brings function bug fixes and security fixes to machines running macOS Sonoma.
  • macOS Ventura 13.7.1: brings function bug fixes and security fixes to machines running macOS Ventura.
  • watchOS 11.1: brings function bug fixes and security fixes to Apple Watches running watchOS 11.
  • tvOS 18.1: brings function bug fixes and security fixes to Apple TVs running tvOS 18.
  • visionOS 2.1: brings Apple Intelligence and function bug fixes and security fixes to Apple Vision Pro.
  • HomePod 18.1: brings function bug fixes and security fixes to HomePod. HomePod software is not something you can check in an obvious way; see Apple’s directions on updating.

It is only Wednesday, and there is a possibility Halloween could bring something new, too.

Artificial Intelligence – A.I. – April 2024

Artificial Intelligence – A.I. – April 2024

By request, we talked about Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the April 2024 meeting. Rather than talk about all the different AI wannabees, we limited the scope of discussion to some general areas, such as: what is the difference between artificial intelligence and clever programming; are there dangers to AI and what are they; why should I, a run-of-the-mill home user, care about AI? While artificial intelligence research encompasses computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, mathematics, neuroscience, ethics, engineering, robotics, physics, and writing scary headlines as clickbait, we didn’t cover any of that.

This image was created, for example, with Adobe’s Firefly AI for illustrations. Using it requires little more than an Adobe paid account and some idea of what you want as a result:

Mona Lisa painting a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, created with the help of Adobe’s Firefly AI.
Mona Lisa painting a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, created with the help of Adobe’s Firefly AI.

Two pieces of homework were assigned as a pre-briefing for the April meeting.

First, is this video created with Artificial Intelligence?

The Japanese Zodiac done in Apple Memoji

Second, a brief overview of Artificial Intelligence:

Some basics on AI — Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is allegedly coming to the Mac, iPhone, and iPad this fall, and possibly to Apple TV and the Apple Watch.

Slides presented at meeting

The meeting video shows a few live demonstrations of AI, plus much discussion on possible uses and problems.

Video recording of the April 23, 2024 meeting

Transcript of the April 2024 meeting

18:32:21 Did you make those videos that are homework videos?
18:32:25 Yes.
18:32:26 So that was you behind the
18:32:29 Yes, that was me behind the emoji.
18:32:33 Pretty clever.
18:33:44 For those joining, I have turned on recording. And also close captioning. If anyone objects to that, please tell me.
18:33:56 And, we usually start the meeting with a question to answer. So does anyone have any questions?
18:34:06 Well, I'm looking at the settings on the iPad for Zoom and I don't see anything about it.
18:34:13 Anything other than a microphone, there's nothing to adjust for sound. On the, at least not on my iPad.
18:34:19 Okay. Okay.
18:34:26 Cool.
18:34:27 I, you're muted.
18:34:32 Yes.
18:34:29 Okay, I have a question. How do you, fuzz or I don't know the proper term the background.
18:34:40 Everyone seems to.
18:34:40 On Zoom.
18:34:45 I'll put volume.
18:34:49 Let me try that. What was the question again?
18:34:52 I don't know if it's if you say fuzz the background. Or make the background so it's not like you can see all your background.
18:35:05 Okay.
18:35:05 But somebody said that you can kind of make it so it isn't all all the background.
18:35:10 Yes. If you're on a desktop or laptop, go up to it says Zoom workplace or Zoom if you have an older version settings.
18:35:20 And then there's background and effects. And the second effect over is blur.
18:35:27 Okay, so where do I go? You'll see showers and can expect a high of 53°F and a lower 44 degrees.
18:35:30 Go to the zoom go down to settings in the zoom menu. Go to background and effects, which is about halfway down.
18:35:45 And the second setting over is blur. You click that and it blurs the background.
18:35:50 I, I just have smug on here. So I don't I'm probably not hitting the right thing
18:35:58 Are you in Zoom? Are you using just a browser?
18:36:02 No, I hit. I hit the top. And it says mute, you know, that with video blah blah.
18:36:12 And then there's a zoom and a check.
18:36:21 Nice.
18:36:16 And then when I do that, it says smug, 1,900. The number, the pass code.
18:36:24 The perip participants encrypted.
18:36:30 Okay.
18:36:30 Then I hit the people that are on there and then we get more people.
18:36:35 Yeah, well above that in in the main menu for the computer There should be something, there should be a zoom or a zoom workplace.
18:36:45 Menu way up at the top next to the Apple menu. And under that is settings. And settings has something there for backgrounds and you can pick various backgrounds.
18:36:57 I used to.
18:37:00 I used to use the blurred.
18:37:06 Okay.
18:36:57 Okay, I'll check it. Oh, I'll go on my computer and do it. I'm on my tablet.
18:37:08 Oh, on the tablet. I, I don't know how to do this on the tablet.
18:37:12 Okay.
18:37:12 It's on the bottom if it's a tablets on if it's an iPad it's along the bottom You have to tap up above the black area.
18:37:20 To get all of the icons to pop up. And then way over at the right before the leave red X.
18:37:27 There are 3 dots. It says more. That pops up something that says apps meeting settings.
18:37:34 Backgrounds and effects, which is what you want. Backgrounds in effect. So you Yeah, now you're blur.
18:37:36 Yes. And it says blur. Blush your heart.
18:37:45 Okay.
18:37:40 Yes. And you just. Yes, you just blurred your background. I will tell you a disadvantage of a blurred background.
18:37:50 Okay.
18:37:52 I'll show you right the second. I'm holding up this orange. Hard drive.
18:37:59 If I go and I blur my background and I go into settings. And pick, background.
18:38:05 Blur and I Hold my, I need to find my mouse again. My mouse disappeared and I hold this up.
18:38:14 It kind of fades in and out of reality because it's focused on my face and it doesn't really see this if it's someplace that if it's not my face.
18:38:30 Oh.
18:38:24 So these things tend to disappear. And so it makes me, it makes it difficult for me to demonstrate things because If I have the background, it blurs that stuff.
18:38:35 So. My background now is this canvas. Print of the Pocosi print, very famous Hokusai.
18:38:46 Print.
18:38:49 I'm very fond of Hokusai, but then again, I'm a Japanese historian, so that's.
18:38:54 You know, hard for the course.
18:38:59 Any other questions?
18:39:10 Well, I will tell you a couple things while we're waiting for other people to come on and possibly have a questions.
18:39:16 First, st Apple is having their worldwide developer conference. On June 10th through the 14.th you, you can participate virtually online.
18:39:29 It's aimed at hardware and software developers, but they always have interesting things that you don't have to be a specialist to understand.
18:39:36 And then, the most important thing is that on the very 1st day, at 10 am they have a keynote and the keynote talks about their plans their software plans for the most part for the rest of the year and Sometimes they cover hardware as well.
18:39:55 But it's well worth seeing and it's it's free. And they just announced today.
18:40:03 A special event that they're going to have. And a ridiculous time it's it's going to be at 7 a.
18:40:10 M. On the 7th of May. They're having a special event and the graphic for it suggests that it's going to be, have something to do with the iPad.
18:40:20 But, these things are free and you can just log in to the Apple site and watch them.
18:40:30 If you have an Apple TV, the, you can use your Apple TV to watch them, which is what we do.
18:40:36 At home.
18:40:40 And. There are also been some updates to various Apple. Operating systems for iPads, laptops.
18:40:51 Desktops iPhones, whatnot, since our last meeting. Mostly security. Updates, but one thing that everybody could use is they've added some more emoji.
18:41:07 Which I always find a fun thing to play with. I like to send my daughter.
18:41:14 Strictic messages written entirely in emoji. She lives in England, so sometimes it's a mixture of US and British humor and she sits and puzzles them out and then says, Oh, Dad.
18:41:27 Which is appropriate.
18:41:30 Any questions anyone has?
18:41:40 Do you have any experience with back blaze on line backup service?
18:41:45 I use it. I've used it since, before we moved out here. When we moved out here and.
18:41:54 2,018. I have a huge amount of data, photographs and whatnot and While I shipped my computer, I wasn't.
18:42:05 Confident that they would drive in one in a in in good shape. So before I shipped it, I, synced everything I had up to back place.
18:42:15 Backplays is an online cloud service. And I don't remember how much it costs.
18:42:21 The, advantage that it has is that when you're off late, if you upload things to back place, it's done automated.
18:42:29 There's just a process it runs a new machine and it constantly updates. As you create new things, and they get updated, to back place.
18:42:39 And happens in the background and The price covers whether you have a lot of data or a little data. In my case, I currently have a 24 TB.
18:42:53 Of information stored on back place. And if I only had, you know, like. 50 gb would have been the same price.
18:43:02 They don't charge you for that. The good news bad news is it happens in the background.
18:43:07 I never noticed that it's happening. It doesn't slow me down at all. But given the kind of internet, we have around here.
18:43:15 It would probably take a while if you had like a terabyte of data you wanted to. Upload, it would take a while for it to get uploaded simply because it can't go any faster than your internet.
18:43:27 Connection. But, it's It's invisible to me. And doesn't cost that much money.
18:43:37 And it's a it's a good backup service. It's not a replacement for.
18:43:44 Time machine, time machine backs up a local copy. And if you lose something, it's much easier to pull it off with time machine.
18:43:52 Than it is off and back base. It's not difficult off of back place, but, among other things that it requires that you have.
18:43:59 Your machine setup with backlays that you go and search for the stuff and it's it's just.
18:44:06 It's slower and less convenient than time machine. Back blaze is, My, I, thoroughly endorse the.
18:44:15 Service. I've used it now for what?
18:44:20 7, 8 years and, never had any trouble. If you have a lot of data, they even have a restore.
18:44:29 By disk service so that if someone comes and steals your your computer and you have to start from scratch.
18:44:37 You buy a new computer and they'll ship you a drive and then you can copy it off of that drive.
18:44:44 You have to ship the drive back, but, it's, it's, I've never had to do that.
18:44:48 I'm just saying that they think about things like this. Because you have terabytes of of data.
18:44:59 Thank you.
18:44:54 It, it does take a while to transfer it back and forth. backlays because of the service that they have also has, they have these drive, reliability reports that I use when I'm purchasing.
18:45:12 Storage. Because they buy tens of thousands of drives and they're in constant use. And so they can tell you whether or not.
18:45:21 Drives are prone to dine or if they're more robust. I've last several years, every, any time I bought them.
18:45:31 Hard drive. I've gone to their site and checked out their. Stats for it. They've got some, geeks who were quite passionate about doing very strange statistics on hard drive.
18:45:47 So. It's always entertaining to see what they have to say.
18:45:52 Any other questions?
18:46:01 Paul, you're muted. Oh, you're not muted anymore.
18:46:03 I just unmuted. Okay, I have a question. I got scam the other day. I was reading a, an article.
18:46:14 On the PDM, they have I have their app. So you can read the newspaper. Now is reading it.
18:46:20 They have an app. They have an app? I didn't know. Oh.
18:46:22 What? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, can you, if, if you subscribe to the PDN.
18:46:31 You get the app and you, you can get the You can get articles and then it actually just looks like newspaper.
18:46:38 You can do whatever either way. But anyway, I was I was in the. Newspaper mode the editions mode and I was reading the article and I finished the article and this this window came up with a sort of a flashing pulsing.
18:46:55 Thing it was it was pink or red or something and it said take our survey. Okay, this is the PD and I put this I clicked on that and it had a little simple survey and I Complete that.
18:47:10 That is said, for taking the survey, you have a chance to enterprise. So, and it was late at night, so I wasn't thinking real clearly.
18:47:17 And so I clicked on that and this little machine came out and drew something out of a box and there wasn't anything. And I said, try again.
18:47:27 You have 2 more chances. I did another one and I drew up. A prize. It was a
18:47:34 IA iPhone 15 I think. Anyway, it said you've won this prize And, you just have to.
18:47:43 Hey, $9 50 for shipping and handling. Of sounds reasonable. And again, I keep thinking, well, this is a This is a.
18:47:53 Most of the news things so it. Should be fairly safe. So anyway, I clicked on that and put in my credit card knowing that if it was a scan light.
18:48:01 Oh no.
18:48:02 I'd, Go ahead and check my credit card and cancel. A cancel the transaction, which is what happens.
18:48:13 I clicked on the thing and it put up an error message and said can't complete there's an error.
18:48:18 And so I thought, oh, oh, so I, I mean, and they call the credit card and sure enough.
18:48:24 Somebody had. But a thing, a, transaction for a hundred $30 worth of, cosmetics and somewhere in eastern Canada.
18:48:38 Okay.
18:48:37 So they cancel and I cancel my card and had to wait for a week to get a new card. Now my question is, Was that something that was on?
18:48:46 There website or is that something that's invaded my phone?
18:48:50 Or how would we tell?
18:48:50 The answer is The answer is it's probably from the. Peninsula Daily News site.
18:49:04 Yeah.
18:48:59 One of the problems that I'll tell you my own story. Kind of his background. I was, I was on.
18:49:10 A site. I remember I've been a member since I was 17 at the US Naval Institute, which is a scholarly organization that, talks about the Navy and maritime law and so on so forth.
18:49:23 And I was on their website and this. Company was selling a model. Of of aircraft and there's 1 particular aircraft that the Navy used to have called it and a 5 vigilante that I think is one of the most beautiful planes ever made Doesn't make anything any difference about any of that, but it's just they had this model of this airplane.
18:50:00 Yeah.
18:49:52 So I clicked on that and it went to the model makers. Site and I saw that it was a hundred $40 and I lost interest but it was, it was a beautiful model, but it was also 140 bucks.
18:50:06 The next day when I went on to the Washington Post site I was kept on getting ads from. Lockheed and Macdonald Douglas for fighter planes.
18:50:18 Ha ha!
18:50:27 Okay. Yeah.
18:50:18 No, I personally just I'm just not I was a civil servant in the United States and they don't pay us enough for us to buy our own private fighter plane, but That is how that is how the advertising industry works.
18:50:35 Google in particular will sell people search histories. Advertisers plus they use it for their own advertising.
18:50:41 And when you go on to the Washington Post, the Washington Post sells the advertising space to a vendor to put up ads, but the Washington Post has no idea what they're going to be advertising.
18:50:56 Yeah.
18:50:56 They do the in in the in the wild West days that they started off they would they had no constraints at all.
18:51:04 So for example, the Washington Post for a couple of weeks was putting up ads for call girls.
18:51:13 Yeah.
18:51:11 They didn't realize that they were doing that. But, but, they started putting limitations on what you could have on sites.
18:51:19 And so things like, Scholastic, which is a, publishing company that targets children.
18:51:27 They, ads have to be things that children can do and not require credit cards and so on and so forth.
18:51:36 Whereas for adults, if you go into the Washington Post, they'll still try and tell you, sell you a fighter plane, but, No, more call, girls.
18:51:42 Yep.
18:51:45 So they do put restrictions on it. But the fact is that when Washington Post sells that space or, Peninsula, Daily News sells that space.
18:51:56 The vendor selling the advertising can put up there whatever they want. There are constraints in terms of the size and how much text it is and so on and so forth, but if somebody wants to establish a shell company and put up fake advertising in order to collect people's credit cards.
18:52:14 There's not much that peninsula daily dues can do about it. But having said that, I would tell Peninsula Daily News.
18:52:23 Because they essentially are selling that service. And they should know that the service that whoever is running the service probably is doing a bad job.
18:52:41 Yeah.
18:52:36 I was surprised recently to find out the potential the daily news is actually owned by a Canadian company. I didn't realize that until recently, which
18:52:44 Well, I did. I, I let them know. I told him and, Person I talked to passed it on pass the message on to their tech person so I assume that the least they have the information that I was not right.
18:53:00 Yeah, but. The the the simple fact is that probably Peninsula Daily News had nothing to do with this other than they sold the space.
18:53:10 Yeah, yeah.
18:53:10 In terms of how you can protect yourself.
18:53:16 I will tell you, I will tell you things that I do to protect myself. I do not ever ever ever spend money based upon and I, text message.
18:53:29 So if I get a text message on my phone. You like, I recently bought some shoes and the company that I bought the shoes from, text messages me, Hey, we got sales on this, that and the other thing.
18:53:41 If I decide that I really want those shoes, I will go on to their website from my desktop.
18:53:46 Explicitly go to their website and do a transaction there. I don't do it via text message and the same is true for things like ads like the.
18:54:00 I wouldn't have bought it within that box. I would have, quit out of the Naval Institute.
18:54:07 It would have gone to their website and done it that way. In terms of those contests, the contests are actually fairly They're fairly common.
18:54:18 There are vendors that go out there and actually manage contests for publishers because the publishers of newspapers and so on so forth like to sell ads and the more they know about you the better for selling you ads.
18:54:33 And so the other companies have set up these setup operations where they have contests. As an example, I recently bought some hard drives and at the end of my transaction, they had a survey.
18:54:47 And if you fill out the survey, then you can get a prize. And the price from this company is always a free magazine subscription.
18:54:53 Okay.
18:54:53 And there were things like house and garden and, home beautiful and so on and so forth. There's not a chance that I would ever read any of those, so I ignore that.
18:55:04 But I'm aware that they do that and that is a legitimate thing for them to do. But what they really this company that's selling you that's giving away these free subscriptions.
18:55:15 What they want is your name, your address. Where you live, so on so forth, so they can sell.
18:55:21 Things to you, then make you a better customer. So it's not really free because you're actually giving up some of your privacy.
18:55:29 Yeah.
18:55:29 But again, if I wanted to magazine, I'd go to the magazine. And I subscribe to it.
18:55:34 I don't respond to text messages. I don't respond to sale boxes within an app unless it's for that same company like for example if it's Washington Post wanting to sell me a book okay I'll go with that.
18:55:48 If I'll use the Washington Post app for that. But, you do have to be.
18:55:55 You do have to be. Wary and to give you an example specifically for this year this is an election year.
18:56:04 Roughly 2 thirds of the Messages that are sent out saying, please support our our candidate. The candidate doesn't actually get the money.
18:56:17 As in they have an example of the, a guy who ran for, and one in in Florida, a guy ran for and he won and congressional seat.
18:56:30 100% of the money that was collected by this one group in his name went to the guy who was running the collect money collecting operation.
18:56:40 His claim was that the operation cost so much money there wasn't anything left over to give to the candidate.
18:56:47 Ha!
18:56:51 Yeah.
18:56:47 So you want to be really careful about. How you give money and who you get money to. Like, another thing that people commonly do, I recently had one saying that my, My, Netflix account had expired and I thought, oh really?
18:57:07 So I looked at the email that it came from and the visible part of the. Email said it was netflix.com.
18:57:17 Okay, that's fine. But then it was dot. Gmail. So in other words, they created the domain that went to Gmail saying that my next, account, had expired.
18:57:28 Google doesn't track Netflix accounts. They, and, Netflix would never use Google to to.
18:57:39 To get you to resubscribe. So no, it was just, it was a scam.
18:57:43 But they came up with a, with an email address that looked. If you didn't look too closely like it might have come from Netflix.
18:57:49 You have to be, you have to be paranoid.
18:57:55 Yeah, I've since received a couple of request to fill out surveys and they look legit but I don't know they can do without my information.
18:58:06 Well, because it is an election year that you're gonna see a lot of people went to survey you.
18:58:13 Yeah.
18:58:13 Do you believe that toddler should be allowed to arm themselves to protect themselves in preschool?
18:58:19 Yes or no? Okay, I'm not gonna answer that. Survey. Yeah.
18:58:26 No, there's a lot of good stuff, yeah.
18:58:27 Yeah. Any other question? Yes.
18:58:29 Hi, I got one of those Netflix membership is expired. And we pay ours automatically. Every month and it comes out of my bank account.
18:58:43 So then.
18:58:43 Well, I I pay mine with my credit card so what I do is if I get something like that and it is from Netflix I do pay attention because it might be a credit card that's going to be expiring before the renewal.
18:58:59 So I'll check that way. But that's something I can do in my own home. I don't need to.
18:59:05 I, I don't need to do anything else.
18:59:08 Yes.
18:59:05 Yeah, well this says has expired. And the one my bank hasn't expired.
18:59:12 And also if if that was in danger of happening, Netflix would tell you they wouldn't tell you.
18:59:17 Right.
18:59:19 So be paranoid.
18:59:23 It's kind of a shame because Computers when they were originally, when I started using computers, computers were designed for computing.
18:59:30 They They add, subtract, and multiply, divided, they can do complex equations, so on and so forth.
18:59:36 Now we used computers chiefly as a communications tool. And because we use them chiefly as a communications tool.
18:59:40 Yeah.
18:59:43 They can be abused because they're a lot more powerful than the old telephone. This my iPhone here is more powerful than all the computers in the world combined in 1,970.
18:59:59 Just by itself. So this is an incredibly powerful Unix based computer and it happens to be in my pocket and I use it to play games when I'm in a waiting room at the doctor's office.
19:00:11 But you know.
19:00:11 Yeah.
19:00:14 Yeah.
19:00:15 It's a pity we have to be paranoid, but we do. And it is 7 o'clock and I should think about talking to our president.
19:00:25 Hello, President.
19:00:26 Hello Lawrence, how are you?
19:00:28 I'm fine.
19:00:29 Speaking of doctors offices, how is Kathleen?
19:00:33 I mean, that's a complicated question. She one sequence of therapy and we didn't get the result we wanted or that they wanted either and we're waiting for a bunch of referrals to come up with plan B.
19:00:49 Yeah.
19:00:49 So. She spends a lot of time snoozing. Right now.
19:00:57 But she's still at home. Okay.
19:01:00 And
19:00:58 Yes. In fact, he's watching the. The, the, meeting on our TV.
19:01:09 Yeah.
19:01:07 I'm using the Apple TV team. Rebarcast, the Zoom session.
19:01:13 Okay. Hi Kathleen. We miss you.
19:01:17 Okay.
19:01:18 I don't know if you could hurt here, but she said hi.
19:01:20 Okay.
19:01:20 Okay, I really don't have anything besides well just welcome everybody and
19:01:30 One second.
19:01:30 You're, it's going to tell us that I haven't sent in the invoices.
19:01:36 I know. I'm a bad boy.
19:01:38 Yeah.
19:01:37 Okay. And can you put in the sign in sheet on the.
19:01:46 I did put it in there, but I can copy it and. Hey, paste it again.
19:01:52 Okay.
19:01:52 I don't think I know how to do that well.
19:01:57 In the, meeting chat window is the link to the sign in sheet. And I use that for among other things, telling people that we have meetings.
19:02:09 Meeting chat.
19:02:06 So please, fill it out. And it would be immensely useful.
19:02:15 Okay, and now we have the Treasury report. Sound a free to look forward. That's we have thank you to the one member will send in the Do so we got $24 more than last month so we are at $2,442 and 93 cents
19:02:39 Until I send in invoice and then we'll have somewhat less better.
19:02:44 Yeah, there's a little bit less. Yeah, send it in when you have a chance.
19:02:51 Anything else before I do the presentation?
19:02:54 Are we gonna have any in person meetings anytime soon?
19:02:59 The answer to that is, with spring and it being warmer and more light outside, the answer is yes.
19:03:08 I would like suggestions in terms of what the what the. Topic would be I like in person meetings because among other things I'm assured it reminds me that there are really people out there who aren't small little boxes on my screen.
19:03:25 So, I like those. Plus.
19:03:27 You already have some ideas that you wanted to do that had to be done in person because of bandwidth.
19:03:35 Yes, there's some things that I want to do a in person because If I'm, we might run into of an issue today when I'm talking about artificial intelligence.
19:03:46 When there are certain things that I would like to demonstrate that. There's a good chance it'll interrupt the Zoom stream.
19:03:56 So. There are some things that are just a little bit difficult to do unless we do them.
19:04:00 Live, but, yes, there are some things I would like to. Like to pursue, but in terms of an in person meeting, yes, it would be nice if we had something in the May, June, July type, timeframe.
19:04:16 We can't meet at the library. Kathleen and I are planning tomorrow. To go to a groundbreaking ceremony where they break ground for the new library.
19:04:28 Yeah.
19:04:25 The library invited us because we're special people. So, we're going to go to that and the after they get done with the expansion, they're going to have a lot more.
19:04:37 Computer resources. So it will be curious to see if it's of, If it's something we can, take advantage of.
19:04:45 I don't exactly know what they're doing because they talk about it in general terms. I might find out tomorrow.
19:04:56 Yeah.
19:04:56 Yeah.
19:04:52 Lawrence, when you do AI tonight, can you really dumb it down? I don't know how many needed dumbed down.
19:05:00 But I even know, I'll see something in my daughter's like, that's AI.
19:05:04 That's that that picture is totally AI and I'm like. Or what's the other one?
19:05:10 It's not just AI. It's
19:05:11 Chat, chat, GPT.
19:05:13 Chat G is a considered an AI, agent. I am going to, I'm not gonna dumb it down, but I am going to address.
19:05:22 My particular bias is when it comes to AI. I don't know how many of you.
19:05:27 How do you, how do you?
19:05:29 How many of you looked at the movies that I put up?
19:05:33 Yeah.
19:05:33 The homework movies. The, If you haven't, you should take a look at the movies.
19:05:41 They're not terribly long. The,
19:05:47 What I use to create those, some people would consider AI. But I don't and I'll explain why.
19:05:55 But, anyway, I'm going to share my screen now so I can. Show off some stuff.
19:06:07 And the 1st thing I want to do is I actually have a. Slide show, which I know is not particularly Exciting, but.
19:06:21 Such is lie. And I'm going to post these so you don't have to sit here and read it.
19:06:28 And we're not going to start with that slide. We're going to start with this one.
19:06:37 The 1st I want thing I went to mention is there are many things you can do with computer. There are many different kinds of computers.
19:06:43 Yeah.
19:06:45 There are many different kinds of programming language, different kinds of programming styles, different kinds of programs.
19:06:50 And I mentioned that because a lot of what we do with people are calling AI is just programming. So I want to talk about what is programming 1st and then explain the difference.
19:07:03 This is the extended ASCII character set ASCII, American standard code for information interchange.
19:07:10 Is the standardized way in which computers. Store things internally and talk to one another. And as you can tell from the name, it's very North American centric.
19:07:22 It was developed during the 19, it was the standard was created during the 1950 s and pretty much every computer on the planet even ones that have never had anything to do with English use ASCII.
19:07:34 So when you see things that are written in Chinese characters, The computer itself is still using ASCII internally and it's using a much more extended character set to show the kind Chinese characters.
19:07:48 I'm going to show you, these, that's the extended character stat. It starts off, at 32, whereas 32. 32 is a space.
19:08:02 So starting from 32 to 255. Those are the characters in the ASCII.
19:08:06 Extended ask a character set this is a Fortran program which will print to the screen those characters from 32 to 2 55.
19:08:16 You don't have to understand it at all. Just that's what a Fortran program would look like to do that.
19:08:20 This is a cobalt program. To do the same thing print out those characters. Here's a p 0 1 program to do that.
19:08:30 PL one is not used anymore, but at 1 point IBM said this was going to be the programming language that everybody used.
19:08:38 That's why it's called PL one, programming language one. Here is an 80 80 assembler language program to print out those same characters.
19:08:47 Assembler is kind of like If you wanted to knit and you started off with the sheep and you actually, shared the sheep and carted the wool and made the strands and so on and so forth.
19:08:58 That's essentially what 88 is assembler is. You have to talk. It directly into computer speech, you can't use some English like language.
19:09:08 Here is a program written in snowball. You'll notice that this is the all the ones I'm going to show it.
19:09:14 Okay.
19:09:13 This is the shortest one. Snowball is my favorite language. When I was in grad school because it was designed to work with strings to a computer, anything that's not a number is a string.
19:09:26 And because I was working in the humanities, the strings were great. I was looking at this huge trial transcript and I wrote programs in in Snowball to do a analysis of it back in the days before people had come up with.
19:09:40 Tools for doing this kind of stuff. Here's a program written in basic to print those characters. Here's a program written in Ada, as a language done by the department, created by for the Department of Defense to create very rigid rules for things like weapons systems.
19:09:58 Here's a program done in Swift. Swift is the language used to make the Mac operating system make the.
19:10:08 Apps that you see on the app store, almost all of those were written in Swift.
19:10:14 Differences between AI and a traditional programming. And again, I'm going to post these slides. You don't have to read them.
19:10:21 Human programming relies on explicit sets of instructions. You, the programmer, write a set of instructions.
19:10:29 You try to anticipate how people will respond to those. To respond to the program and. Come to a desired result and the programs have a specific purpose.
19:10:43 Okay.
19:10:43 So when you write a program. The program does X does Y does Z. Microsoft Word, for example, it's a word processor.
19:10:53 It's never going to paint the side of your house. It can't trim your lawn.
19:10:57 Can't vacuum the floor. All it's going to do is be a word processor.
19:11:00 And even for the word processor requires a human to actually type. It's not going to do that on this own.
19:11:05 And if you have a game of chess. All this gonna do is play chess.
19:11:11 In machine language or artificial intelligence when it's done with machine language, you create programs that Allow the, program to teach itself.
19:11:24 So an artificial intelligence program has routines in it that allow it to ingest information and use that to change its own logic.
19:11:35 So instead of a person writing a program that does something very specific, The program itself is taught has taught itself how to do things.
19:11:47 That it may not have been originally designed to do. So that's a big difference between traditional programs and AI.
19:11:55 And it's also one reason why I think that a lot of things we call AI aren't really AI, but I'll explain that in a second.
19:12:03 Differences between AI and traditional programming, human programming relies on defined rules, you have a, you have a specific purpose with machine learning, it's designed to be flexible and to evolve over time.
19:12:20 The human programs are designed so that somebody can actually read the program and figure out what it's doing.
19:12:27 Machine learning models on the other hand tend to be very, very opaque. It's very difficult to figure out exactly how it came up with that result.
19:12:38 Scalability with human programming somebody has to actually do it somebody has to be fluent in not only the programming language but also in in communications some of the best programmers are actually writers and musicians and not computer scientists.
19:12:57 And if you want to have a big project, you need a lot of human programmers with machine learning.
19:13:04 The theory is that just by throwing additional computational resources, you can create. You can do more complicated things.
19:13:13 And then there's domain knowledge, the. A classic example is that if you have a very good chess program, it took programming by humans who were very good at chess in order to create that.
19:13:26 It's very difficult to have a chess program that's better than the programmers who created it.
19:13:32 Whereas with machine learning, because it's sucking in huge amounts of information that technically could be from multiple people, it might be better than anything that a, human could do.
19:13:45 And where am I?
19:13:50 I am here. There's also definitions. Sentient versus sapient. A sentient thing is something that's able to perceive or feel things around it.
19:14:03 Your cat if you rub it between the eyes is going to like that. Cause it can feel that and it responds to that.
19:14:11 If you have a deer that gets lost in your neighborhood, it's going to be frightened and because it's not next to its mother.
19:14:20 These are sentient creatures. They can are able to perceive things, they are able to feel things.
19:14:28 Artificial intelligence isn't at that level yet. And that's the lowest rank where it comes to.
19:14:36 Intelligence they really cannot perceive themselves and feel things sapien is even harder. Sapient things are considered wise there.
19:14:50 They're capable of problem solving. They're even capable of inventing problems to solve.
19:14:58 If you think about it, one of the most popular games ever invented was Solitaire, which is a sorting exercise.
19:15:06 And why do people do that? People like to play solitaire simply because our minds like to solve problems.
19:15:14 So that's something that. That, again, Artificial intelligence isn't there yet.
19:15:22 Artificial intelligence research requires computer science requires mathematics, requires cognitive science, cognitive science has to do with the part about being self-aware and making decisions and and how to learn.
19:15:36 Requires neuroscience, which is the study of how our brains function and get, insights on to how to program things.
19:15:49 But it also requires linguistics, the ability to communicate how communications theory works, philosophy to address moral questions and what is the nature of intelligence and things like that?
19:16:00 It requires electrical engineering, depending upon what you're doing might require robotics, which is applying. Intelligence to things that move.
19:16:10 Requires an understanding of physics because we're actually bumping up against the limits of physics with a lot of the stuff that we're doing now and requires the social sciences in terms of to give us insight into how these things are going to affect us culturally.
19:16:27 Dangers of artificial intelligence the big one is job displacement in the little video I put up the most common thing that a lot of companies want to do with artificial intelligence. They want to get rid of call centers.
19:16:44 They want to get rid of customer service. They want to. They went basically to have some machine tell you why you can't get a refund.
19:16:51 They're trying to cut costs. And so that's 1 possible problem with artificial intelligence. IS in terms of what the machine thinks is right and wrong.
19:17:03 A common tool used by a lot of loan companies and insurance companies and so on and so forth. Does demographic studies of places around the country and they say that if you own property or you have property in a particular area, you are a high risk and have to pay higher.
19:17:21 Premiums. Well, these tend to have economic biases so that if you're in a poor neighborhood you're a higher risk even though you might be perfectly capable you're going to pay more simply because of the biases in terms of the socioeconomics around you.
19:17:40 And in computer intelligence. Artificial intelligence. There's no way to overcome that bias because it's strictly data driven.
19:17:50 And if you say that that's a bad area, it'll say, okay, that's a bad area.
19:17:55 Privacy concerns.
19:17:58 Most of the artificial intelligence platforms that are out there right now now including things like Chat GPT, we're built using the database of millions of books.
19:18:11 That they did not ask the authors for permission and the books are a mixture of science books and mathematics books and philosophy books but also novels and one of the problems they run into is that they also looked at public databases.
19:18:28 So this data, but the most commonly used database has a whole bunch of information on, individuals up till about 2,019.
19:18:35 And so real problems with privacy there that should they have been scarfing up this data and should that be used to create the artificial intelligence.
19:18:46 You also have problems with things like autonomous weapons systems. If you have an autonomous weapon means the weapon can go out on its own and fire at somebody on its own doesn't need a human to say, that's a target.
19:18:59 It goes out and picks its own targets and fires. Probably not a terribly good idea. And there's also the fear that a lot of people have that the artificial intelligence may surpass our intelligence and they might decide that maybe we're a threat.
19:19:16 That's a common theme and a lot of science fiction movies. And even though We're not near that that that point it's still.
19:19:24 It's still something we should pay attention to. There are also security vulnerabilities. We have trouble.
19:19:31 Right now, securing systems that are designed to be secure. How difficult is it going to be to make something secure that we did not design?
19:19:40 That it was designed that the thing that we made is designed to learn and it could learn bad stuff. There's also social manipulation.
19:19:51 There was a There was a senator from. Pennsylvania who did something that one group did not like so they created a definition of his last name that was a vulgar act.
19:20:04 And now if you go search on a lot of search engines, you're going to see that the definition of his name is a vulgar act.
19:20:12 How did that happen? Thousands of people started writing that such and such equals such and such and so Google and Bing and everything learned that the definition of this word was this vulgar act.
19:20:25 And that's that kind of that kind of. Bias is very difficult for a computer to understand because a computer among other things doesn't really understand what it is to be a human doesn't really understand what it is to be a US Senator.
19:20:40 There are ethical, considerations on if these things really are intelligent, are you allowed to turn them off?
19:20:50 Yeah.
19:20:47 Or would that be murder? There are economic problems. Right now, most of the economic most of the AI systems are owned by people who are have at least hundreds of billions of millions of dollars if not billions.
19:21:05 So they right now control this type of research. And there's also the question of human autonomy.
19:21:12 Many of you might remember that when they 1st came out with electronic calculators, they were afraid that everybody would.
19:21:20 Would, stop. Learning how to do basic math. And there is. Some reason to think that that's something that we might be something we should pay attention to.
19:21:38 I'm going to show you a whole bunch of pictures that I created using an AI program called Firefly.
19:21:47 Firefly is owned by Adobe and in order to use it you have to have own some Adobe software and set up an account so and so forth.
19:21:56 I was fascinated when I saw some of the pictures of the total equillips of people. Looking at their phones instead of at the eclipse.
19:22:05 And so I said, okay, draw a picture of people looking at their phones during this eclipse.
19:22:10 And this is the 1st one that it came up with. What I did is I typed in the text and said, Eclipse of the Sun with a crowd looking at at their iPhones and it came up with this.
19:22:21 Well, most of the crowds not looking at their iPhone, both of them looking at the eclipse.
19:22:25 So that wasn't a good one. So I tried it again and I actually like this one slightly better but It's still not quite what I had in mind.
19:22:33 And this is based just upon a text description. This 1st one is an actual drawing. I wanted it to be a kind of a Art and it did pretty good in terms of the style there.
19:22:46 It's kind of art novelle. The second one I wanted more for So it came up with this.
19:22:52 Second drawing. The next thing I want to do, I asked for I said I wanted a frantic woman IT manager.
19:23:04 Frantic woman IT manager surrounded by many laptops and many raccoons eating computer tables.
19:23:12 So here's this frantic woman she doesn't look very frantic to me surrounded by laptops it's got that surrounded by raccoons but the Arab raccoons are not eating the cables and I That wasn't what I wanted.
19:23:27 This by the way is my joke that I tell people who are on the East Coast where they have high speed internet.
19:23:32 I say around here the the computer signals are actually taken back and forth by raccoon. So it's part of my joke about the raccoons.
19:23:41 So while I tried again and I got this one, she looks kind of harried. And there are raccoons, but she's eating the cables and not the raccoon.
19:23:50 So. Still didn't quite get what I wanted. But this is just a text prompt. What I typed into Firefly was Frantic woman IT manager surrounded by many laptops and many raccoons eating computer cables.
19:24:04 That's what I typed in to Firefly in order to get this photograph. This one worked out a little bit better.
19:24:11 I typed in, giant blue dragon looking at tiny bug and that's a giant blue dragon looking at a tiny bug.
19:24:20 And there's another bug like creature over here trying to run away. And I asked for a kind of a second one that's basically the same thing, but.
19:24:30 This one's kind of a close up of the giant. Dragon and the bug. So that's pretty good.
19:24:39 I, for other reasons that I'm not going to explain. Scones are Scottish and the Scots like T.
19:24:49 And I decided to combine the 2 and I said I wanted to Japanese samurai princess and armor having a cup of tea and a scone.
19:24:59 So here's the scone, here's the T, and that's sort of a Japanese princess, and it's, and it's done in this, a Japanese wooden block print style.
19:25:08 So that's when that one's not too bad.
19:25:15 There was an issue with. A new painting that was thought to be by Leonardo da Vinci and there was big to do about it and somebody asked for my thoughts on the subject.
19:25:27 And I decided what I wanted to send them was a for it was a picture of the Mona Lisa painting Leonardo da Vinci instead of Leonardo da Vinci painting Mona Lisa.
19:25:41 So I told Firefly One, Lisa as a painter created a painting of Leonardo da Vinci.
19:25:47 And that's what it came up with. Not quite sure understanding the mountains because there aren't mountains around there.
19:25:53 And I tried it again. Mona Lisa as a painter creating a painting of Leonardo da Vinci.
19:25:59 This one I Kind of like because it's a. It's not a bad, painting.
19:26:05 You can't see what she's doing. This one it got a little bit too creative and made Mimona Lisa look sort of like a Madonna, which is not quite what Mona Lisa was supposed to be.
19:26:16 Looking like. And I tried once more and this one's not bad at all because at least there's a picture of a man here.
19:26:23 And in this one, it shows that Mona Lisa is not necessarily a great painter, but It's getting to what I want to which was Mona Lisa painting Leonardo da Vinci.
19:26:33 And another try gave me this one. Which is a lovely, lovely painting, but. It doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Leonardo da Vinci, but it is a It is a nice painting.
19:26:49 My granddaughter lives in England and she was drawing a map. She said it was a map. And so I thought, okay, I want a child drawing a map of London and it gave me this.
19:27:00 And here's a child and I guess that's sort of like London and there's a of coffee, which is kind of weird because really probably not this child.
19:27:09 Favorite drink, but that's not bad. And. Then we were talking. My my background is Japanese history which means that it's also Asian history and somebody was talking about, they won a good Chinese restaurant that had fortune cookies and I said, fortunate cookies are not Chinese.
19:27:33 And I, and he said, what are they? And my response was, well, they were actually invented in San Francisco by a Japanese man.
19:27:39 But he wanted to know where's what's my source so I said here the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius contemplating a fortune cookie.
19:27:50 Well, Fortune cookies were actually developed in the 20th century in San Francisco. Confucius knew nothing about it.
19:28:00 And this guy looks a little bit too contemporary to be Confucius and and I'm not quite sure.
19:28:03 Why a Chinese philosopher would be in front of, Mount Fuji.
19:28:09 Then I asked, I said, I had been reading the story in the, Japan Times, Japan has only one time zone.
19:28:20 The entire country is one time zone. So it's really Cool, cause you can be all over the country and listen to the same TV programs and the same radio programs and you never have to reset your clock.
19:28:31 It's it's it's great. But there was an argument about maybe they should have some a time zone for Hokkaido, which is the farthest to the east and the farthest north, it should be different from Okinawa, which is like, 1,800 miles away.
19:28:48 So I said I wanted 2 Japanese politicians arguing about daylight savings time outside of Japan's imperial palace.
19:28:56 And it gave me this. That doesn't look like Japan's imperial palace, but it's got a kind of a Japanese feel to it.
19:29:04 So that's not too bad. And then I just said that I wanted to have a photograph type and so it gives me a more photo realistic one.
19:29:10 These 2 guys are kind of weird. And there is a Japanese flag and there is a palace, but that particular palace is actually in Osaka, but you know.
19:29:22 Okay, that's it was trying And then I said I wanted a warrior princess and armor having a cup of tea and a stone.
19:29:32 So this is a. Different warrior currencies. She's not a Japanese princess, she's just a warrior princess having a cup of tea in Scone.
19:29:39 That's not bad. And this is another warrior princess having a cup of tea in the scone.
19:29:44 That's not bad.
19:29:46 We were talking about fairy, I was talking about furious with somebody on the East Coast and I said, well, we have ferries here in Washington State and they say, oh, but the fairies are kind of boring. Nothing ever happens.
19:29:57 Also, no, I said we also have water dragons and they said, what's a water dragon?
19:30:02 So I sent them this picture, which is a Why Washington State Ferry. Boat being chased by Water Dragon.
19:30:10 Okay.
19:30:13 Can't really argue with that. And here I said that a woman. Is fighting evil spirits, pouring out of a computer.
19:30:24 Looks to me more like electrical sparks than, an evil spirit, but, it's not bad.
19:30:29 I can tell by the keyboard, this is more like a Dell than a Mac, but you know, details.
19:30:34 And finally, I wanted a wood block print of London as painted by Hokusai. I'm kind of obsessed with Oak Hokusai.
19:30:43 This is kind of a good poker sized wood block print. It sort of looks like London except that there are no volcanoes in London.
19:30:53 Unless they've added one that I'm unaware of. But this is an example of what they call a what is being, promoted as AI.
19:31:03 And it's being promoted as AI because it uses machine learning to learn how art is created. And then it knows how to mimic various styles.
19:31:13 And I can't really show it to you because if I did it, would definitely kill the Zoom connection.
19:31:20 But I type in a text string and then I can specify, do I want it black and white to color?
19:31:24 Do I want it photorealistic? Do I want it to be? A particular style like this is a woodblock painting style, but it also has watercolor and oil, painting, different kinds of styles.
19:31:37 Is this really a I? I would say that this is machine learning because it's learned a lot about art, but it's not really artificial intelligence because it's designed to do a specific thing.
19:31:51 It's designed to take a string of descriptive string of text and create an image from that.
19:31:58 It's not really.
19:32:01 You might tell it in expert system. We created a system that's has a pretty good knowledge of art, except that sometimes it does really weird things like if you look at these 2 guys, they're They're physically distorted and if we come to One I had earlier of the Eclipse.
19:32:23 This woman's nose in particular. Is, it's got issues. So It's not it's not perfect, but as an expert system to.
19:32:37 Create artwork. For people who really aren't artists, it's not, it's not a bad setup.
19:32:44 Will it put graphic artists out of business? No. This is. It's not gonna put a graphic artist out of business.
19:32:54 It's not gonna put a photographer out of business, but it is a good demonstration of what they are calling AI, but I would call this an expert system rather than AI.
19:33:06 It's It's not, sentient and it's it's It's not there.
19:33:18 I went to show you another example.
19:33:34 And this shouldn't be too. Difficult for me to deal with. Somebody give me a subject.
19:33:44 Any else subject can be a person's name or color or autumn or something.
19:33:50 Milton's Paradise Lost.
19:33:52 I'm Milton's paradise. Okay.
19:33:53 Okay.
19:33:58 Right a news story. About the election in this. Dial. Of Milton's.
19:34:14 Paradise. That's the That was my prompt and what it's doing is writing this.
19:34:24 Oh my god.
19:34:24 Much longer poem than I was expecting. And let's see if I can blow it up.
19:35:01 No.
19:34:57 That's true. Yes, this is chat GPT. Is that artificial intelligence?
19:35:12 Well, if it isn't, what is it?
19:35:12 I will tell you something. It's it's better at writing blank verse than I am. I, I will give it credit for that, but this is really not artificial intelligence.
19:35:25 This is a tool. That's designed to parse language and feed it back to you. An example of the misuses of chat GBT.
19:35:35 Hey, certain. Famous lawyer until he got debarred. Submitted a brief and one of the lawsuits against him And he did it in chat GPT and chat, GPT made up.
19:35:52 Legal precedents and cited them and he turned it in. Not knowing that they were made up so they were completely imaginary.
19:36:00 The problem with the good news is that chat GPT can do this, which I think is impressive.
19:36:06 The bad thing is that chat D GPT does not know the difference between reality and fiction. And so among other things, they can read a whole bunch of Perry Mason novels and a whole bunch of other things.
19:36:20 Without the permission of the authors, ingested just millions of books. Including novels and in these novels they talk about cases.
19:36:28 So chat GPT when it's sitting there and things, okay, how does a legal brief work?
19:36:33 It knows the style of a legal brief and it has precedence, but it doesn't know that a precedent a case that Perry Mason is citing.
19:36:42 Is make believe. So this. Politician who is also a lawyer. One of his appeals was he submitted a brief that was done by Czech GPT.
19:36:54 A trademark case done in New Jersey. Oh, somebody use chat GPT to for his legal brief and it got thrown out because again, it was made up.
19:37:05 Chat GPT is an interesting toy. But it doesn't really know the difference between what's real and what's fake.
19:37:17 There is a, I mentioned it in a little clip that I had. There is a.
19:37:24 Novel out and I think the title is Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer. And it's a novel because Lincoln did not go out and slave vampires.
19:37:34 But it's the supposition of the, I haven't read the novel, but, the, the, the, the, the, the novel is that the Confederates were using vampires to try and, overtake the union during the Civil War.
19:37:49 And so, Abe Lincoln turned out to be a really good vampire. And that's the plot of the novel.
19:37:54 That is not real, but if you fed that to chat GPT, it would give it the same weight as a
19:38:04 As the Kerns biography of Abraham Lincoln because as far as chat GPD knows.
19:38:10 It's says this is about Lincoln and Lincoln did that's true. It doesn't have the ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction.
19:38:20 But in terms of just, you know, a short little thing done in the Style of Paradise Lost, fact and fiction.
19:38:30 But in terms of just, you know, a short little thing done in the style of Par
19:38:30 Well, it's not, it isn't. It's not blank bursts.
19:38:34 Well, I don't exactly know what to call it, but it's done in the style of Paradise Law.
19:38:40 So.
19:38:40 It's rhyming couplets as more like pope.
19:38:44 Okay, I'll go with that.
19:38:48 Anyway, anything, give me, give me another prompt that I can try out. One of the nice things about chat GPT is because it's all tech space doesn't use up that much.
19:38:58 Bandwidth so I can sit here and play with it.
19:39:09 Nothing? Okay, well I'm gonna ask it something.
19:39:10 Okay.
19:39:14 Make me a recipe. For very Chuck, Chuck, go that. Chip.
19:39:26 Okay, That's why prompt.
19:39:33 Oh my gosh.
19:39:39 Okay, now this actually looks like a fairly decent One cap. 2 sticks, unsalted butter, softened one cup, graduated sugar, one cup.
19:39:50 One packet brown sugar, 2 large eggs, 2 teaspoons, pure, vanilla extract, 2 cups all purpose flower, one cup, unsweetened cocoa powder, one teaspoon baking soda, one a half teaspoon salt, 2 cups, semi suite, chocolate chips, additional semi suite chocolate chips for topping optional.
19:40:08 Pre eat the oven to 350 degrees. Now this will cause this grief right here. I try making I'm not a cook.
19:40:16 I tried making something in our oven set at 350 and it didn't work at all.
19:40:21 And then Kathleen told me that our Stove is seriously out of calibration and it needs to be 75 degrees warmer in order to work so Oh well, this would not have worked for me, but it looks to my.
19:40:34 I is a pretty good. Chocolate chip cookie recipe.
19:40:41 And unlike Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer, this doesn't seem to have any fictional elements.
19:40:52 Anybody else have an idea for that I can try?
19:40:56 What is the best way to get rid of moles in my yard?
19:41:14 What is the best way to get rid of moles in my yard? It says starts off.
19:41:20 I have to show this to you.
19:41:23 Because the opening. Sentence cracks me up.
19:41:27 Yeah.
19:41:30 The Elussi Moles, those subterranean wanderers whose presence can wreak havoc upon the verdant tapestry of your yard.
19:41:38 Fear not, for there are strategies to bid farewell to these burrowing bandits. I think it's still stuck on.
19:41:44 Melton but
19:41:45 Yeah.
19:41:46 Yeah.
19:41:48 Physical barriers, repellents, traps, flooding, natural predators, grub control.
19:41:53 Maintain a tardy yard professional assistance. I will tell you something that I am fond of. Moles don't like vibrations.
19:42:03 And if you get these, you can go to almost any garden shop around here and get these metal.
19:42:09 Pinwheels that the wind blows. Stick those and moles don't like those at all.
19:42:16 You, I 1st noticed this when I was a child, we had, 1st several years of my life were on a farm that among other things did not have indoor plumbing.
19:42:29 And had dirt floors inside. We had a windmill and there were no more moles within 100 5,200 feet of the windmill because it was constantly creating vibrations.
19:42:41 Oh, this is a full size windmill that also pumped water, but it just these PIN whales, metal PIN whales that you can buy.
19:42:49 We have wind constantly around here and the vibrations, the moles don't like it.
19:42:52 So it may not help your entire yard, but it might at least. Discourage them and it doesn't put any poisons around or anything like that so I recommend.
19:43:06 Yes.
19:43:05 Lawrence, when you're typing this in, how is this different than just asking Google a question?
19:43:12 If you ask Google a question, it'll send you to a page that has things like that. But for example, I could ask for this, my chocolate chip cookie, or if I asked for it in Latin, let's see if it'll do that right a
19:43:42 Told it to write a chocolate chip cookie recipe in Latin. And. I have no idea what it says so I'm going to go with the fact that it must be in Latin.
19:44:00 Yeah.
19:43:56 I'll ask my resident Latin, expert, Kath. Kathleen is this Latin?
19:44:04 Looks like it.
19:44:10 Not really.
19:44:13 She's, somewhat skeptical. Although it did translate Fahrenheit into centigrade.
19:44:19 So, you know, that's a step in the right direction.
19:44:27 Okay.
19:44:31 It, it's different from Google in as much as it tries to solve problems and it will create things that did not exist.
19:44:37 For example, the political process. That didn't exist. I asked it to create something and it created that.
19:44:48 It's a different process than going and finding it. I actually posted on the, on the, the, straight max site.
19:44:59 A troubleshooting process that it came up with. That it it wrote as if it was I'm an evil scribe and told you.
19:45:13 How to troubleshoot your Windows machine. And chat that because I couldn't. I actually didn't I did not try to go look for one thing like that but what chat GPT does is it can create things but it's strictly a text-based is it can create things but it's strictly a text-based engine.
19:45:32 You give it, you give it a task and if it does it'll go out there and create it.
19:45:36 A couple things that it is limited by is the database that it uses for the language. There was 3 million books and such that it's based upon it kind of ends around 2,018 2,019.
19:45:50 So it's not aware of anything that happened since then. Originally it would do things like come up with slanders of current politicians and so on.
19:46:01 So, and it's they've stopped doing that. So if you try and And, same thing with, Adobe's Firefly.
19:46:08 If you ask it to have, a a photograph of Donald Trump writing a unicorn, it will say that that it'll say it can't do that.
19:46:19 If you say. I want a picture of a clown writing a Yukon. It would do that.
19:46:25 But if you Try and give up. A politicians name or some current person it say it can't do that.
19:46:33 Those rules didn't exist when they 1st came out. And you probably read in the paper about.
19:46:43 People using different search, different search and different AI projects to to put. Teenage girls faces on.
19:46:54 The, port actresses. Bodies and the controls aren't Not too many of the of these search engines have developed controls to prevent abuse yet.
19:47:13 That's 1 of the dangers of these tools. But none of these right now are really artificial intelligence.
19:47:19 They're machine assisted tools and they can create things that did not exist before. Such as those images that I, was showing you earlier.
19:47:31 But it's not really intelligence. Things to be aware of. A lot of companies are trying to work on putting, artificial intelligence into things like chatbots.
19:47:45 So you have a blender and the blender is not working and you you go to West Bend or whoever made it and you try and get them to, you know, fix your blender and you end up in this conversation with something you think you're talking with human being and exactly a chat bot.
19:48:01 And the chat bot is probably programmed in such a way that it's going to reject. Anything that you want that cost them company money.
19:48:10 You should be aware that things like this are actually happening. And. It's the uses that people put this technology to is not necessarily good.
19:48:22 But as a tool for writing chocolate chip cookie recipes in Latin It's great.
19:48:33 I don't know if it could do that in Greek.
19:48:49 Yes, it's writing something I assume is in Greek because I can't read any of it.
19:48:55 Yeah.
19:48:58 If you asked it to show you the Correct HTML and and cast digging style sheet language for to frame a put a picture or photograph.
19:49:11 With a drop shadow. And a border, would it do that?
19:49:17 Yeah, well. Let me finish. Okay, It's I think it's done with the great care.
19:49:24 I'll try something simpler.
19:49:45 Okay, I told it to write a basic language program to calculate the 1st 50 prime numbers. Why am I doing this?
19:49:53 It's because why not? It's gives it something specific to do.
19:50:01 And that actually would work. It just wrote a program to calculate the 1st 50. Prime numbers.
19:50:09 I'm familiar enough with basic that I know that that would work. So yes, it can do things like that.
19:50:15 This is one reason why people are afraid that people are going to use AI. To replace programmers.
19:50:22 One of the problems that you have is that people are really good at finding edge cases, which as an example is an edge case is people using.
19:50:30 AI to generate port. That's an edge case. The computers don't know that those are edge cases.
19:50:39 So if somebody comes up with a way to phrase that, the computer will probably do it. Whereas a human being could, they, it's called trapping, error trapping.
19:50:47 You put in conditions that it must meet in order before it does something. And when you're a programmer, you do that all the time.
19:50:54 I'll give you an example. When you type in a search query, and you press enter.
19:51:05 Google looks it up and if finds a page that matches that, Google sends your browser to that page, but on the receiving end the the server also gets to log what the search party was.
19:51:19 Well, when I was working for NOAA, a very common question we, I would get.
19:51:24 The website would get was I work for National Ocean Service. So it was questions about the ocean. How much sperm does a sperm whale hold?
19:51:35 If I looked at these queries, which we got a lot of, you could tell that they were coming from junior high and high school kids and and people probably drunk in bars and so on and so forth.
19:51:47 So I created a query string that looked for sperm whale and did not contain the word weight.
19:51:57 Because if somebody wanted to know how much a sperm whale weighed, I have an answer for that.
19:52:01 But if they ask how much sperm was in a sperm whale, I sent them to a page that said, and this is almost a direct quote.
19:52:09 As much as you will find in the average American high school.
19:52:14 Now that actually says nothing at all because most people don't know what an average American high school is.
19:52:22 They it's implied that maybe I'm talking about the the. Kids in high school, but it doesn't actually say anything.
19:52:29 And I did that to stop people from asking questions like this. We just give them that page all the time.
19:52:36 And that's a way in which I could error trap for people trying to do things that I really didn't want them to do.
19:52:44 AI program has no such constraints. You tell them to solve a problem. It will take what it knows and combine it to solve a problem.
19:52:53 Many of you have probably seen YouTube videos of cats writing around on a Roomba. And there are also you can get little robots now, a Roomba vacuums up your floor, but they're also robots that trim hedges.
19:53:21 Yeah.
19:53:06 Well, if you told an AI program Make the cat stop. The robot might think that the the program might think, okay, I'm going to get the cat on top of the Room but gonna go outside and then I'm gonna use the hedge tremor to silence the cat.
19:53:27 To the AI program. It has solved the problem. To you, that's pretty horrific, but it took 2 data sets on how to solve problems.
19:53:36 Mashed them together and came up with an unacceptable solution. Humans can guard against this in the way we program.
19:53:44 We don't know that AI has that ability.
19:53:49 I probably didn't answer your question, but. You can get it to to write programs.
19:54:17 I told it to write a CSS segment for displaying a picture with the drop shadow and it gave me a block of code.
19:54:29 Which looks like it would that actually work?
19:54:37 And it list down below it the explanation of how the. Code work. So yes, it will do it's pretty good at writing code.
19:54:46 Sometimes the code I've noticed is very generic. I and Hmm, it does make any miss.
19:54:56 I can criticize the code, but I'm in human. So that's my, prerogative.
19:55:03 Anything else you want to try and torment it with?
19:55:07 Yeah.
19:55:06 Yeah.
19:55:14 Yes.
19:55:12 Lawrence? I see. Carol. And Marsha each.
19:55:22 Oh.
19:55:20 Have their hands up. And I'm unable, I'm unable to find. Anything that will let me put my hand up today.
19:55:29 But it looks like they have questions. But they're both.
19:55:36 Yes. Marshall, you're on mute.
19:55:41 Do you have a question?
19:55:50 Marsha, do you have a question?
19:55:56 Hmm. Anybody else have a question?
19:55:59 No.
19:56:00 Yes, Chris, go ahead.
19:55:59 I have a story. I have a story. I'm, I'm very interested to hear the term job displacement.
19:56:09 And also expert systems. Because in 1985 I and for other librarians gathered to form.
19:56:21 The artificial intelligence slash expert systems interest group. Of what was then. The Information Technology Division.
19:56:34 The American Library Association. And artificial intelligence didn't really.
19:56:44 F too much it was the expert systems that had lots of librarians scared they were going to be put out of jobs.
19:56:51 So 3 years in a row. We filled a hotel ballroom, the 1st one in Chicago, I think it was in 1986.
19:57:03 At the annual convention. We had standing room only. They were well over 300 people. To hear a panel.
19:57:14 Yeah.
19:57:11 And we called it Deus X Makinov. And then being struck with. Total.
19:57:21 Imagination paralysis. The second year we called it Dais X Machina, Roman numeral 2.
19:57:30 And then the 3rd year, Roman numeral 3. And after that, we either ran out of people who were willing to be on a 5 person panel talking about expert systems and AI.
19:57:43 Or interest dropped off or the bureaucracy of the institution decided we'd had our run.
19:57:51 Or we ran out of. People to form the interest group. There. In any case, that was 1985 and that's almost 40 years ago.
19:58:03 Yes, the I happen to I happen to be interested in this because I put myself through grad school working for Washington State University Library and I was one of the programmers for the Washington State Library Network, which was the first.st
19:58:22 Yeah. Yeah.
19:58:19 Statewide library network. In the country. And what I did was the catalog, I worked on the cataloging part.
19:58:28 And one of the things that, that you have problems with with with expert systems or with artificial intelligence is humans and how we see things.
19:58:41 For example, There are rules for how you catalog things, the most, famous of which are the ones we developed in the United States called the Anglo-american cataloging rules.
19:58:53 Right.
19:58:53 And they still exist and they're still in use but pretty much everybody else copied them. It's, yeah, I thought it was really interesting.
19:59:01 I was in the National Library of Finland. Oh, 5 or 6 years ago. And they use the Library of Congress.
19:59:10 Classification system in their national library. But one of the things that you do is that in order to sort things properly in different languages, you have to have special rules.
19:59:24 For example, Under the Anglo-american cataloging rules, the any Scottish name that ends in MC or MAC is alphabetized as if it's spelled MAC in full.
19:59:37 So you'll have McDonald and Macaroon will be listed together, whether it's spelled with MC or MAC.
19:59:44 That's something that you have to teach the computer. That we do things this way because otherwise all the MCs are going to be, separated quite a ways from the ones that are MAC.
19:59:56 So that's 1.
19:59:56 Yeah, but that's a, but that's a sorting function.
19:59:59 That's a sorting function, but it's also something where a human has to intervene and tell the machine that just because the machine can do it one way that's not the way we want it.
20:00:10 I had a fellow Asian historian his last name was Tenbrook and I can't remember what the nationality is but 10 Brook is spelled T and BR or okay so brook seems fine but in the front there's 10 and 10 is in lower case so 10 brook That doesn't follow the way that computers do things when they have names they want to capitalize it and the computers would capitalize the T
20:00:37 in tenbra and it really irritated him so I had to create a special rule for whatever. I don't remember that what nationality uses that prefix.
20:00:47 And we did the same thing for Van and Von and so on and so forth. These are all things that require human intervention to do them correctly.
20:00:54 And AI systems have real trouble doing things like this because to the AI system, that American standard code for information exchange.
20:01:04 A lowercase a is sorted after an upper case A all the time. Doesn't make any exceptions.
20:01:11 So to teach it to sort of the way we want. Takes human intervention and if you tell it to just go and Sort books, you're going to not necessarily have what you want.
20:01:22 You can do that just with Apple, books. In Apple's books. It really irritates me that sometimes Isaac Asimov is under I instead of under A.
20:01:33 And I have no real control over it because. Whoever made the book that's the metadata they used and so that's why we're it sorts it there are some There are some real fears that there will be job displacement with artificial intelligence, but it's also going to create a whole new category of people who will set about fixing AI systems to do what we really want them to do rather than what
20:02:03 they want to do on their own.
20:02:10 Kathleen was talking about what the, what about the use of AI for slander.
20:02:15 This is something that we've actually seen some examples of this year where people are using, they want to say something nasty about somebody else and they can't think of anything on their own.
20:02:22 So they, they pose a hypothetical to one of these expert systems that comes back with suggestions on things that can be done.
20:02:31 And I don't really consider that. Problem in and of itself because it's it's it's still slander by a human being.
20:02:42 What I do worry about though is that you you end up doing things like that center from Pennsylvania where associating his name with a vulgarity.
20:02:52 Becomes the norms of when you search for his name, that's 1 of the things you'll find is the And that's.
20:02:59 That is definitely a problem. Any other questions?
20:03:05 What if you ask chat GP something like this? What did Jesus mean in the Bible when he said, I am the way, the truth of the life?
20:03:15 Yeah.
20:03:14 Okay. I'm not sure my pastor will go along with this.
20:03:21 Yeah.
20:03:36 It's light light not LIFE
20:03:42 I'm sorry?
20:03:44 And it should be LIFE, not white.
20:03:48 And that manner.
20:03:47 Oh, I'm sorry. Paul, you had a question?
20:03:56 Yes.
20:03:53 Oh yeah, you gave us some homework to do. And, I dutifully watched it and and I noticed in your the Japanese Soviet Well, you had 12 little printers.
20:04:11 Now did you create that from AI or one of your apps or? Cause and I was wondering what was the purpose of the of the exercise.
20:04:23 Okay.
20:04:22 Because I notice that Who are the creatures? Weren't quite what they said they were.
20:04:32 Pardon?
20:04:29 Yes, well actually 3 of them were. 3 of them weren't. The unicorn is not really a horse.
20:04:37 Right.
20:04:37 The is not really a snake and aquala bear is not really a sheath but
20:04:42 Right, I didn't I didn't catch the snake one. Yeah.
20:04:45 The, They originally started as the I was having a discussion with someone about he was born in the year the snake and he wanted a snake, oji so that when you talk to me I'd be talking to snake he's Japanese and he was born in the earth.
20:05:01 Kathleen? Are you? Yeah, Kathleen was born in the US Snake as well.
20:05:06 I was born in the year of the Dragon. And our daughter was born in the year of the Ox.
20:05:10 But anyway. Memoji, we're created, emoji, we're originally created by a Japanese artist.
20:05:17 And they started using them on telephones for instant messaging in Japan. And gradually they became this huge thing so that now I think the iPhone can create something like 300 different emojis.
20:05:29 With, skin, different skin tones and it's got, all the flags of all the countries in the world and all kinds of stuff.
20:05:39 But memoji, which are these animated ones I created on my phone And what I did is I went into my phone.
20:05:49 And I said to send myself a message. And then I selected the option for a emoji.
20:05:55 And I picked those various animals and then I spoke them. And I did this. I made that video originally for my friend who was complaining about the fact that there was no a snake.
20:06:08 But it was also an example that I wanted to show you because I wanted to ask you the question.
20:06:15 Did I do that with artificial intelligence?
20:06:21 How many of you actually looked at the video?
20:06:25 Did I do it with artificial intelligence is the question.
20:06:29 No.
20:06:29 No.
20:06:31 Why not?
20:06:35 It was probably canned. I mean.
20:06:39 Well, the,
20:06:44 Let's go here, Great to send myself something. I'm going to pick, emoji.
20:06:54 And I gotta pick this one. Okay. This is Lawrence talking as if he's a tiger.
20:07:04 This is Lawrence talking as if he's a tiger. Okay, now I'm going to hold this up to my
20:07:15 To the camera and there is me. And the tiger, Momoji. And if I click it.
20:07:21 Yeah.
20:07:23 If I, well. Trust my word if I click on it, it will. This is Lawrence talking as if he's a tiger.
20:07:31 I did that with my iPhone.
20:07:40 I did that just on my phone. I wrote out a script because I wanted to know what I was going to say because among other things I sometimes would get ahead of myself and say a word that I wasn't in tending to but wrote out a script.
20:07:52 Picked out the emojis that I wanted for the zodiac and then had them say their name, say what they were in Japanese.
20:08:03 Is that artificial intelligence? I'd say no because Apple designed it to do that. Maybe not exactly what I was doing, but the Apple designed the iPhone to do that.
20:08:13 However, it takes a huge amount of machine learning to do this. The iPhone has a whole bunch of neural, what's called neural processing units, which are specialized CPUs that that are used to, I gotta turn offs.
20:08:31 Sharing so I can actually see. It has a whole bunch of neural processors on the iPhone that are designed to deal with things that are not.
20:08:41 That you can't add, subtract, multiply, divide such as pictures. And when, when you log into your phone, if you have a phone that's got, facial recognition, there's this bar up at the top.
20:08:56 That you can't really see cause I got a dark background but There's a bar up at the top that's a black bar.
20:09:04 That has thousands of little infrared emitters in there that when you use facial recognition, it bounces infrared light off your face and it can tell, it can tell, for example, my nose as part is closer to the phone than my cheekbones are.
20:09:20 Because and it can make a 3D map of your face. And when you do facial recognition, you have to move the phone around and move your head around so that it can get a picture of your phone.
20:09:29 And it concentrates particularly on the eyes. That's why they came up with a special feature. If you have facial recognition, you can put a mask on it and the facial recognition still works because it concentrates particularly the area around the eyes.
20:09:42 Apple designed that for face ID. Some programmers at Apple were playing around with and they say, if we text your map, you know, a clown face on it, we can talk as if we're a clown.
20:09:57 And instead of having a clown, which has, it can scare people. They used animals and they use cute little cartoon animals.
20:10:05 They didn't use scary little animals and you can make, And so that's what I used for the 2 videos that I did.
20:10:12 Is it artificial intelligence? No, does it use machine learning? Absolutely. Lots and lots and lots of machine learning.
20:10:20 The neural processing units on this iPhone can process billions of things a second. Not millions or thousands, but billions of things a second.
20:10:32 And when it's dealing with something that You cannot add, subtract, multiply, divide, which is a picture.
20:10:38 Or song or things like that. It does pattern matching to match the shape of my face to put that tiger face over the top so it knows where my lips are and makes my lips move.
20:10:49 Okay.
20:10:52 And if I blink the eyes blink and depending upon what I do, sometimes you can even make the little ears slicker with some of the, All of that's done with a staggering amount of machine learning.
20:11:04 That people think is artificial intelligence, but it's not really. It's not It's not the machine picking out a problem and figuring a way to solve it.
20:11:14 It's the machine doing what it was designed to do, but in a general way. It went from the general thing was facial recognition.
20:11:22 The more specific thing that I was doing, I was using it to be basically a puppet. And I was using a A staggering amount of technology to do that.
20:11:33 Yes.
20:11:32 Lawrence. Someone said that if I, that it's possible to use AI in writing a resume.
20:11:41 Yes.
20:11:42 If I was to do that, how how do I go about doing it or what program or? Yeah, I'm lost.
20:11:52 The what do you, what you, the easy thing to do and you could just do this on Google, you could go into Google and say, give me a form for writing.
20:12:05 And it'll give you a form. But with chat GPT, you would say something like, I have, 6 years experience at underwater demolitions and I know how to cook pasta and I've climbed Mount Everest.
20:12:25 And I have a cat named Fred. Please write a resume to be a bellhop at this hotel using this is my experience.
20:12:34 It'll come up with a resume. Probably a pretty terrible resume, but at least you'll see the outline of what that kind of resume would be.
20:12:41 What order it puts things in, how it emphasizes things. That's, the true value of that chat GPT can have.
20:12:53 If you've never done a resume, it'll give you a nice form to follow and you've never done a resume, it'll give you a nice form to follow and you change the content too.
20:12:57 To fit you. And that's the people who've done useful things with chat GPT.
20:13:03 That's, the starting point where they are trying to do something different and they want to know what what the proper form for that is.
20:13:10 I know somebody who made a will that way. Give me the outline of a will that's valid in the state of Washington and they gave them, the outline of a will.
20:13:21 So you just go through the change the specifics.
20:13:21 So. In a resume the way I've seen it when. Years ago. So it's been over 20 years since I've ever written a resume.
20:13:33 Do, how do you add all that fluff? People make them so fluffy and they're so full.
20:13:39 I hate to say it, it's so full of words that doesn't necessarily Like just not the nitty gritty's.
20:13:47 The you will see that A lot of people right now, they use professional programs to sit and evaluate resumes.
20:13:56 And the professional programs are basically the expert systems that one that Chris was, saying that would replace librarians that there's no chance of that happening, but.
20:14:07 These things, these resumes look for things that can be classified as skills. So for example, if you know how to type, if you know how to speak Spanish, if you know how to do whatever.
20:14:21 You list those skills and these programs that they're looking for somebody who can speak Spanish knows how to use a telephone and can type 50 words a minute if that meets their criteria you'll pop out.
20:14:33 But they're looking for skills more than fluff. You say I'm really interested in making the world better and bringing peace to mankind.
20:14:42 That sentence does not mention any kind of skill, does not say anything about any qualifications. That's that's an aspiration, but it's not a qualification.
20:14:54 So you went to you want to emphasize skills. And. And chat GPT can't read resume for you, but it can show you the format for resume and the order in which you put things.
20:15:08 And that's actually fairly standardized.
20:15:12 I have.
20:15:12 Okay.
20:15:15 I've written a lot of curriculum vetas. I haven't really written that many. Resumes.
20:15:23 But again, the resumes were focused upon skills. And I knew I was going to get the job anyway, they just wanted to resume for their file.
20:15:29 So.
20:15:32 But focus on skills and abilities and not. Not aspirations and They really could care less about your pet frog and things like that.
20:15:43 They do kind of like, dehumanize things. If you like course back writing, That's where the engineering or you are an amateur astronomer.
20:15:54 That's the kind of thing that. That humanizes things and sometimes sets you apart from somebody else but they're really looking for skills and today larger companies about 80 to 90% of them use, resume programs they just feed the resumes in electronically and it spits out a list of things that, you know, well, take a look these and ignore the rest.
20:16:17 I hate to say it, but that's the way it is.
20:16:23 Thank you.
20:16:26 Other questions?
20:16:31 Did anywhere, everyone sign in?
20:16:33 Oh, no. How do I do that?
20:16:35 Yeah. Okay.
20:16:36 Okay. I shall paste the link into the chat again.
20:16:43 Hmm.
20:16:44 So if you could sign and that'd be nice. And. 2 things.
20:16:50 One is. I think about what you would like to have in an in person session. I have ideas on myself my own.
20:16:56 And the second thing is what do you want to do next month?
20:17:02 Okay, while everybody's thinking of those questions, I'm interested in the photography book that you talked about in your earlier email.
20:17:12 So how do I go about? Getting one.
20:17:19 Yeah.
20:17:16 The, take control photography book on with iPhone photography. If you just go to that link, you'll go to a website.
20:17:24 And you pay the money and it downloads it to your computer, you double click on it and then opens up in ibooks.
20:17:32 And once it's in your ibooks library, you can look at it on your phone as well as on your.
20:17:38 Desktop machine or tablet or however you went to look at it.
20:17:43 So, and payment is some sort of a credit card.
20:17:46 Credit card yes.
20:17:49 And I got an Apple credit card. Thank you very much. For suggesting that.
20:17:54 I'm very fond of my Apple credit card. If you give somebody an Apple credit card, it has your name on it.
20:18:00 There's no number. There's nothing else on the card. So there's nothing that anyone can steal.
20:18:07 It does them no good at all. But it's it's and also they made a titanium so you can use it as a very small bulletproof vest.
20:18:17 Oh
20:18:17 Yeah.
20:18:23 Suggestions for next month.
20:18:27 Are we meeting in person or zooming?
20:18:32 Kathleen and I have to do a few things that might interrupt our schedule. So I'm kind of.
20:18:39 Hesitant to do it in person when until we have a very specific plan. so that probably is not gonna be something we do in May, but might be something we do in June.
20:18:57 So next month was probably gonna be via zoom.
20:19:02 Okay.
20:19:04 You mentioned before showing us about how to create a web page. Hello. Maybe you could explain the advantages of doing it yourself from scratch versus
20:19:18 Contracting with software like WordPress.
20:19:22 Well, WordPress is how our site is set up. WordPress is the software that I use to do it.
20:19:29 If you wanted a WordPress site, you either make one yourself or you contract somebody to use WordPress to make it for you.
20:19:35 But, I've probably made. At this point, I probably made 7, 800 websites and over the past.
20:19:46 Oh, 6, 8 years. I probably made. 50 of those in WordPress. The ones I made before were done by hand, where I actually wrote the code.
20:19:57 And. I made lots and lots and lots of those because I was being paid to do that.
20:20:04 But now that I'm not being paid to do that, I tend to use WordPress.
20:20:08 So this word plus does it have like templates and you just You know, with Laura MIPS, some text that you replace and So on our
20:20:16 Yeah, well WordPress calls them themes, but yes, they have themes for bookshop themes for a photography studio themes for all kinds of things.
20:20:26 And there are free themes and they are paid themes. What I would do if I did a presentation nights I just start from scratch going to WordPress pick a theme and start showing you how you add stuff to it.
20:20:39 It's not really that difficult. Most people with a website, the problem that they, the average website in the world, the average website in the world has one page.
20:20:52 Just one page and that's because some restaurant says they want a website with their menu so they contract with somebody for a hundred 5,200 bucks and they create a 1 page site that's got their menu and that's it.
20:21:07 Or the same thing for barbershops and so on and so forth. So they can be very, very simple.
20:21:14 Or they can be, I have, I have websites in my own that have thousands of pages.
20:21:19 That are just mine. So, it depends upon whether or not you're willing to actually put the content up there.
20:21:26 So part of it is a writing process and part of it is a technical process. But with WordPress, it's the technical barriers are much less than with almost any other way to do it.
20:21:42 I think that would be interesting.
20:21:46 Just keep an eye.
20:21:45 Okay, well. That is something that I am more than willing to do because I have lots of experience at that.
20:21:59 Okay.
20:21:55 And probably along the way I could also tell you how not to build a website. I have seen some just horrific websites.
20:22:05 Kathleen, who's, has 5 degrees and is members of various professional organizations.
20:22:18 Okay.
20:22:13 She was asked to register for this one conference. Year last year, year before. Every time she would put her information in there when she could print submit, nothing would happen.
20:22:23 And that's because when they built the website, they had this submission process for submitting your curriculum, and all that sort of stuff.
20:22:31 But they didn't have a database behind it. So the button for submit didn't work. It couldn't do anything with that data.
20:22:37 Okay.
20:22:38 And she, she got very frustrated and had me come and play with it. We broke out our Windows machine to make sure that it wasn't just discriminating against Max and no they hadn't actually.
20:22:51 Oh
20:22:49 Tested it. It didn't work.
20:22:51 Yeah. Yeah.
20:22:55 So would this be for in person?
20:22:59 No, this is something we can do remotely.
20:23:02 But that right there is the kind of thing that. People can run into which it would be helpful for you to cover.
20:23:12 For example, I ordered some iris from up. Place called Schriner's Iris Garden and in Oregon one of the famous Iris growers in the United States.
20:23:24 Very good place to buy stuff. Anyway. I use, my iPad and. They wanted me to set up an account so I did that using the, hide my email business.
20:23:38 But then I, there was no. There was no log out, but he says, well, there is on my screen.
20:23:55 Yeah.
20:23:45 So. So I wound up going to my desktop computer, my Mac. And looking at sure enough there it showed me a log out button but on the iPad it didn't So this is they somebody hadn't tested something.
20:24:01 Well, I had a manager who wanted people to he thought the only people would use their website where people in his own organization and he wanted to be logged in all day so he didn't want them to be able to log out.
20:24:14 Yeah.
20:24:14 So I created a lot out button anyway and when you went to try and push it, it would move it.
20:24:24 Yes.
20:24:19 Oh, you stole that idea from early Macintosh. Remember the bomb? That's exactly what I would do.
20:24:29 I'd run away.
20:24:29 Yeah, so he couldn't log out because the button would run away. But, He didn't realize that you could just quit the browser and that would also log you up, but you know, details.
20:24:39 He wasn't. I asked that he be replaced as the head of this project because he was impossible to deal with, but Be that as it may.
20:24:51 I'll, show you how to build a website next month. How's that?
20:24:54 That's great.
20:24:55 Okay. Have fun. See you next month.
20:24:59 Thank you.

Keep your Apple software current

Apple has a page that lists all current Apple operating systems. At the moment, it shows:

  • iOS 17.3.1 for iPhone
  • iPadOS 17.3.1 for iPad
  • macOS 14.3.1 for Macintosh
  • tvOS 17.3 for Apple TV
  • watchOS 10.3.1 for Apple Watch
  • visionOS 1.0.2 for Apple Vision Pro

I strongly recommend that you bookmark this page:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

as Apple updates it when new versions are released.

You should also note that, further down the page, it documents when Apple security updates were released, and what machines they covered.

If you want to be informed, via email, of security updates, go to this page,

https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/security-announce

fill in the blanks, and Apple will send you an email every time a security update is released.

This page,

https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo

shows several other mailing lists, covering everything from accessibility features, how to write programs in AppleScript, how to configure Macs and Apple devices for use in the federal government, and other even more obscure topics.

But what if I want to know more?

If you want to get very geeky, you can apply for a free Developer account,

https://developer.apple.com

which gives you access to Apple programming tools, where you can build applications, write scripts, and do odd things, some even useful.

If you are curious about programming, but aren’t sure if it is for you, know that most Apple software is written in a programming language called Swift. It has nothing to do with a famous singer. You can play with Swift using Swift Playgrounds, available for iPad and for Mac. You can read about that here:

https://developer.apple.com/swift-playgrounds

Swift Playgrounds can be downloaded, for free, from the Mac app store and the iOS app store.

macOS Sonoma, iOS 17, iPadOS 17

For October 2023, we delved into topics we’ve hinted at over the past several months: macOS Sonoma (macOS 14), iOS 17, and iPadOS 17. These three new operating systems come with new privacy and security improvements, plus tools to help with greater integration between Apple devices.

Shown below, for example, is a series of widgets that you can add to your macOS desktop. They are literally on the desktop: applications run on top of them, so they don’t interfere with whatever you are doing. These particular widgets show, respectively, the weather at a specific location (clicking on the widget brings up a web page with more information), time zones in various places, a tip on how to do something in macOS, some current headlines, and finally a display of battery status for a mouse and keyboard in use on this Mac.

A selection of widgets added to the screen on macOS Sonoma. If you have multiple screens, each can have its own set of widgets.
A selection of widgets added to the screen on macOS Sonoma. If you have multiple screens, each can have its own set of widgets.

Widgets first appeared on the iPhone and iPad, and have been expanded on both: you can now add widgets to every desktop, not just the opening one.

Security improvements to the Mac, iPhone, and iPad have also been expanded. Most of these require a security chip, which limits these operating systems to more recent devices.

Video recording of the October 17, 2023 meeting

Transcript of the meeting

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

18:33:15 Change the language.
18:33:20 You're not fun.
18:33:24 Kathleen didn't want me to choose Chinese or Arabic or Hebrew.
18:33:28 Yeah.
18:33:32 She's such a spoils part.
18:33:35 Okay. Tonight we're going to talk about, Sonoma and iOS, 17 and so on and so forth.
18:33:46 But first we're gonna have questions and answers. And, and as always, they can be about anything as long as it's.
18:33:53 Related to Apple hardware software. So any questions?
18:33:58 Hmm.
18:34:02 Well.
18:34:01 Lawrence, I have a request.
18:34:04 Yes.
18:34:09 Yes.
18:34:05 A few weeks ago, we talked about our favorite apps. For the Macintosh. Well, I have a favorite app.
18:34:13 That you might want to mention to others. For the iPhone and iPad, it's called Photocard.
18:34:22 Yes.
18:34:20 Made by Bill Atkinson. In the app store since we're coming up on. Howoween Thanksgiving and Christmas.
18:34:29 It's a really nice app for sending. A card, I mean it looked like a postcard.
18:34:37 Via email to a group of people like groups and the context list so You might want to mention that.
18:34:45 Folks night in our regular meeting.
18:34:47 Hey, yeah.
18:34:48 Is that PH or an F?
18:34:51 PH, OTO, photo, card, 2 words.
18:34:57 Bill Atkinson is the Apple, inventor of Quick Draw. Which was the It's the, it's kind of hard to explain what is, but.
18:35:07 In the original Macintosh when it drew things on the screen, it was using Quick Draw, which was a mathematical language.
18:35:14 For rapidly putting up graphical information and it was revolutionary at the time and it allowed the Mac to have a a bit mapped.
18:35:25 Display at the time that everybody else was using basically at dot matrix characters on a TV tube. It was what set the Mac apart from everybody else and in fact it's what made me buy one of the first Macintoshes.
18:35:43 We were living in Japan. At the time and the chief meteorologist for the US Seventh Fleet.
18:35:50 Picked up one in Hong Kong the day they went on sale. In the United States. He picked up one in Hong Kong at a Hong Kong computer store.
18:35:58 I guess it was technically a day later because never mind. He picked up one, he brought it and his daughter Emily had been using it.
18:36:08 And during the demo, he wanted to do something and it spit out the disk that it had because it only had one floppy disk drive and it asked for to Emily's disc.
18:36:17 And Kathleen and I saw that and we were instantly sold on it because prior to that time if you had a computer that had only one floppy drive and it wanted another one you put it in there it just assumed it was the right disc and if you told it to write over the top of something it would.
18:36:34 But this one. Spit the disc out because it said it wasn't Emily's disc and it refused to do anything until it got Emily's desk and we just thought that was that alone was brilliant plus the bitmap graphics even though they were only black back and white.
18:36:48 So we were extremely impressed with it. And, we bought a, I bought a Macintosh downtown, Tokyo, Nakiabara.
18:37:01 They had one on display. You came into the top floor of this building down. Actually, it wasn't, it was on the gains that wasn't Top floor they had cut off all the lights and they had a pillar in the center with a light coming down on it and I said I want to buy that and they said well that's our display and I said I don't care and I want to buy
18:37:22 it so. I got the first one sold in Japan. But, Bill Atkinson was the one who develop this way of rapidly displaying things on screen.
18:37:38 With great great precision we do not really use it today on mac OS 10 because macro attends based on Unix and a bunch of other things.
18:37:50 And they used a new type of system called quartz. You might, if occasionally see in technical documentations references to courts, but courts uses a bunch of, of vectors to draw things on the screen very rapidly.
18:38:08 And it requires staggering amounts of computer horsepower that they didn't have back in the day.
18:38:12 The original Mac is I recare all had a 4 megahertz. 68,000 processor, which is we now have.
18:38:23 We now have processes that are literally millions of times faster. But, photo card was designed by Bill Atkinson.
18:38:34 Cause he, made a lot of money and he decided he didn't want to be a programmer his entire life so he went into photography he's got a big website talking about photography.
18:38:43 And this photo card is free. You just. You can download it and you take a picture with your, iPhone and you can format it as a postcard and send it off to somebody.
18:38:55 Without leaving your phone it's really quite cool. And you can't beat the price.
18:39:02 There are other ones that do this not as well that cost money. So if you want to do that, you can, but.
18:39:11 I'm quite. Impressed with, photo card.
18:39:16 Anything else? Yes.
18:39:18 I have a quick question. Lauren. And I'll say in about the last month or so.
18:39:24 I've been getting these strange junk mails to my icloud email account. And I generally don't use that account and I rarely get an email on it.
18:39:36 And I just wonder if anyone else has that happening. They have titles, but there's symbols mixed in with the title so it's a dead giveaway they look like really weird So I just right click and I send him to junk, but is there anything else I can do to stop that?
18:39:54 Okay.
18:39:54 I can give you some general things to do with what junk mail is, but let me back up to it for a second.
18:40:01 It's not that your icloud account is hacked. I use my icloud account as my principal account.
18:40:09 I have lots of other accounts. The one for straight Macintosh user group is separate from the rest of them the one for my church is separate and so on so forth but most of them the rest of my stuff goes through my.
18:40:25 Hmm.
18:40:21 Cloud account and the reason is the security is much better. And when I say much better on a factor of one to 10 is about 10 times better than anybody else out there.
18:40:31 Having said that, sometimes you can think that you're, your address was compromised when it really wasn't.
18:40:40 I, had a Yahoo account because once upon a time Yahoo had a a photo sharing site.
18:40:51 I can't remember the name of what it was off offhand, but it was owned by Yahoo.
18:40:54 And so I set up an account with Yahoo so I could post photos and it wanted a backup account and for a backup account, a backup account is if you lose your password, what's your backup account so you can log in?
18:41:07 And I thought, well, I don't want to lose track of my photos. I gave it a backup account, which was my dot Mac account.
18:41:11 Well, Yahoo has been hacked 3 times and the first time they got a billion addresses, email addresses, the second time they got a billion and a half, the last one they got like 2.4 billion.
18:41:24 Addresses. And originally it was thought that they only got the addresses themselves, not the passwords and so on and so forth.
18:41:31 It later turned out that they did get the passwords. But I didn't care because I changed the passwords as soon as I found out it was hacked.
18:41:37 So that they didn't get my password. However, they did get the backup email account.
18:41:44 So even though you wouldn't use your icloud account for anything. At some point you might have used it for a bank or for credit card or for grocery store or something else and if they got hacked then your account is available to hackers to spam you.
18:42:01 Not to break into your machine, but to spam you. Or to trick you into giving up some information about yourself.
18:42:09 The other way that people can get that account is that somebody you know could have a machine that got compromised.
18:42:18 99% of the compromise machines in the world are Windows machines. And most of your friends probably have Windows machines.
18:42:25 So if one of them gets hacked and they at some point exchanged email with you. Now the hackers have your email account.
18:42:33 So that's probably why you're, that's probably why it's getting those email messages.
18:42:38 In terms of dealing with. Spam a couple things that I do is that every now and then I will go through and sort my mail by who is sent from.
18:42:52 And if you sort it by who it sent from, quite often a lot of the hackers will use the same thing over and over and over again.
18:42:59 Right now I'm getting something from Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo in case you had noticed has also been hacked.
18:43:08 Okay.
18:43:06 So I might get like 60 A message is from Wells Fargo. I don't have an account at Wells Fargo.
18:43:13 I just delete them all and I can do it all at once because they're sorted by who sent it.
18:43:17 The other thing to note is as you noted, they have these strange symbols at the top. If you sort your, empty, if you're search your emails addresses alphabetically, at the very start you're going to have things like emoji.
18:43:30 Because of just how the Mac sorts things, how computers sort things. The very start you're going to have things that have emojis at the start of this of the subject line.
18:43:41 And so they'll all be there together and you just kill them off because Most human beings don't start an email with an emoji.
18:43:49 Great.
18:43:50 The reason why hackers started with an emoji is because if you sort things alphabetically, they'll be right at the top when you go to look at your email.
18:43:59 So take advantage of the fact that they think you're sorting your messages by alphabetically, sort them by subject, besotting by the subject line, when all of those appear at the top, just get rid of them.
18:44:09 The other thing that I do is that Most people only get email in English and if you get emails in Japanese or Farsi or something else, they'll most often be clustered either at the very start or at the very end.
18:44:27 So if you get a bunch, if you sort them again by by the subject. Then you'll have a whole bunch of foreign languages at the start and whole bunch of at the end and you can just kill off sometimes hundreds of messages.
18:44:39 At once just by sorting in that way. I also would urge you to All the time go into your your spam mail and your junk mail and just delete it.
18:44:51 A lot of people, they put it in junk mail, but they don't delete it or they don't empty the trash.
18:44:57 This one woman, she had a map, she had an iPhone that had the standard 5 GB I cloud account and she was running out of space and she said I don't have anything in my iPhone on my iPhone.
18:45:08 Yeah, but she never deleted any of her junk mail. She never deleted any of her trash.
18:45:13 I deleted both and she had, there was half, it was half the space on her iPhone was just Messages that she wasn't looking at anymore, but they're still there until you delete them.
18:45:22 Right. Hmm.
18:45:22 So Start your email to get rid of a lot of the spam and then delete your spam and your Trash to free up space.
18:45:34 I haven't.
18:45:33 Okay, I only get like one a day. But they all kind of have a similarity and somewhere in the address it says Pop.
18:45:43 Which seems odd and then it has like these asterisks or hyphens or things between the letters.
18:45:50 Quite often.
18:45:50 But I can get a lot of them. It just seemed strange. I've never gotten ones that look like that before.
18:45:56 Right often, spammers will try to get around things like, for example, right now.
18:46:01 Almost everybody on plan is getting a spam email about your McCaffy account has expired. McCaffy.
18:46:10 Is, antivirus software that most manufacturers, Windows manufacturers, include a ninety-day account when they sell you a new machine.
18:46:20 They say comes with the cafe. They don't tell you that it's only for 90 days and then you have to buy it.
18:46:24 So most PCs come with. McCaffy and they know that most people won't renew it but it'll still come up and flag them.
18:46:45 Okay.
18:46:37 So in order to make it look like it's from a cafe they will send out spam email that says it's from a cafe and we received your order for $468 to renew your Kit McCaffy account which is way more this than it costs.
18:46:49 Hoping that you'll panic and logging on there and tell them something that allows them to charge you real money.
18:46:55 In order to get around the fact that people are now very suspicious of McCaffy, people will go through their mail and they'll sort and they'll say search for everything that has McCaffy and clump them all together so I can get rid of them all at once.
18:47:12 Yeah.
18:47:07 One way around that is to put spaces in the word macaffe. So without MC space, AFF, A, FEE, so that it still says McCaffy, but.
18:47:18 But it'll it'll get rid of that. It'll bypass that screening process and they'll stick in.
18:47:24 Little apostrophes or hyphens or other things to space it out so that they're still sending you the same spam, but they're hoping that it gets past your anti-spam.
18:47:34 Controls. So that's why you see a lot of that. When you see something about pop quite often It could be referring to an older, protocol used in, for email called pop which stands for post office protocol most of the most people today they should be using something called IMAP.
18:47:55 Hmm.
18:47:53 Which is much faster and convenient and so on and so forth. I'm maps the modern way of doing it and pop is the older way of doing it.
18:48:01 Hmm.
18:48:01 And it's possible that. That at some point it was passing through a pop account. Oh, so that might have something to do, why pops there?
18:48:08 Huh. Yeah. Thank you.
18:48:13 I see.
18:48:15 Yeah, I don't know whether you're gonna be able to help me with this or not.
18:48:21 I get the New York Times. I have Safari and I have Gmail. And when I try to send an article from the New York Times to somebody else.
18:48:33 I used to Do it without any problem at all. Now I get this message that says I can't connect.
18:48:40 To the Gmail account and then it has my, and it asks for the password.
18:48:48 So I tried to put in the password that I had and it doesn't like that of course.
18:48:54 So I went into Gmail, changed my password. Still didn't like it. So I thought, well, maybe it's the New York Times problem.
18:49:04 So I went to the New York Times and changed my password there. Doesn't have any effect at all.
18:49:12 So do you have any idea what the problem is?
18:49:16 I've been having problems with, authentication with, Gmail myself and as much as I know my password is correct and so on and so forth but quite often I'll get an error if I try to send through things through.
18:49:30 Gmail. And part of that has to do with that Gmail is not really an email.
18:49:36 System. Gmail is really just a whole bunch of web pages when you when you get your email in in Gmail, it's accepting email, but it's being stored in Google as web pages because Google's all about web.
18:49:52 So all of your email, you can go out, you can go look at your Gmail with a web browser and it's actually more full-featured than if you try to use a web, try to use an email client for it because it's web pages and I think that Gmail recently has has some kind of issue with their authentication.
18:50:12 So your passwords probably just fine, but the handoff between the New York Times and Gmail isn't working right.
18:50:19 And I've had the same problem and. They're just sometimes I just don't do it that way and I do it some other way.
18:50:26 But it's not you. I've had the same problem with New York Times. My daughter has an icloud account and she has a Gmail account and I was sending it to her Gmail.
18:50:38 I was sending things that I wanted her to read to her Gmail account because she shares it with her husband.
18:50:43 It's both of their names at Gmail. But it was stopped working, so I'm just plaguing her with it.
18:50:50 But I don't have a solution. I just have seen the same thing. That's all I can tell you.
18:50:55 Okay, what I've been doing is copying the, routing thing and putting it in an email to send.
18:51:02 So that's how I'm working around it, but you think that eventually they'll solve the problem?
18:51:07 I don't know. I don't know. Gene, Google and Apple and Microsoft.
18:51:15 All working to try to ween us away from passwords entirely and used pass keys. We should probably at some point talk about pass keys because Apple's pushing them really hard.
18:51:30 Microsoft pushing them really hard and Google is pushing them really hard. And where the past key is is just basically a piece of code that you have on your computer.
18:51:41 That identifies that yes, you really are who you say you are. So you don't want to have to type in a password when you go to to type in a password when you go to to a website.
18:51:52 Quite often people steal websites by setting up fake websites that look like what you think is a real site and you type in your real password and at that point they have your real account name and real password to the real site and then they use that for bad nefarious things.
18:52:07 And so Apple and Microsoft and Google are trying to get us to use task keys. But the way in which Microsoft is doing it is different from the way Apple's doing it and it's different the way Gmail is doing it.
18:52:22 It's kind of interesting because Apple was the first one with the idea, but Microsoft and Google didn't want to do it the way that Apple did.
18:52:32 They wanted to do it a slightly different way. And they wanted to do it a slightly different way. And it could be just they're trying to work through the hoops to have a different way.
18:52:41 And it could be just they're trying to work through the hoops to have a unified way of doing this.
18:52:41 But once you once you have a pass key set up for an account, it should be transparent between the 3 of them.
18:52:47 But if you If you just step back a second, you'll realize that your pass key for the New York Times and your pass key for Google, Gmail, and your PASS key for your password and Chrome for the New York Times could be 3 different things.
18:53:07 Hmm.
18:53:08 So it's a little bit complicated.
18:53:12 Okay, thank you.
18:53:14 I have another question about. Email. And the 3 devices I have an iPad, an imac, and an iPhone.
18:53:24 And the mail comes in to all the accounts. But if I delete it, On my imac.
18:53:30 And then remember to do the trash, that's fine, but then those messages are still on the iPhone and still on the Mac.
18:53:39 And you know, that's very laborious on. Especially the iPad to just. You know, you have to move them and put them in.
18:53:51 Yes.
18:53:49 The trash and I don't know what setting I need to change in order to have it be when I delete it if I delete it from my phone it should be gone from the computer and from the iPad, but it's not.
18:54:02 Yeah. The.
18:54:12 The answer is that if you're talking about messages as in Apple messages. The one of the things that you should do is to make sure that you're messages are synced via icloud.
18:54:27 Icloud is where Apple stores, photos, I, where they stored documents where they store passwords, where they store messages, email, everything.
18:54:37 Go through icloud. If you sync your accounts through icloud, then your map knows that the message account that you're using If you delete it from your Mac, it should delete it from the other ones as well.
18:54:52 However, that
18:54:52 Okay, well. Well, yeah, I don't know how to do that, so I'll have to find.
18:54:58 Okay.
18:54:59 You, easiest ways to show you. Share screen.
18:55:09 If we come up here to.
18:55:17 Up at the top of your preferences, system settings. You can actually let me show you this on a I phone, cause I wanna make sure that I got this set up front properly anyway.
18:55:34 Good.
18:55:40 I saw this earlier. There you are.
18:55:45 Okay.
18:55:50 And. If I come up into settings. Up at the top and your iPhone and it also works a mac OS.
18:56:01 If you click up at the top where it's got your picture and your eye account, a cloud account and everything where it says icloud.
18:56:09 It says what do you want to go on there and if you turn on photos, icloud, icloud mail, passwords, all this sort of stuff.
18:56:17 You turn those on, it will sync them. So that what appears on your iPhone is the same as of what appears in your iPad is the same as what appears on your Mac.
18:56:27 And the the good news bad news is you got to be a little bit careful with photos because it can easily overwhelm your account.
18:56:34 Kathleen and I, we share a 200 GB account so we're not too worried about that but for a lot of other people could overwhelm your account.
18:56:42 And if you do this, then you have a better chance that. The, the,
18:56:52 The messages will get. Deleted. Having said that, there are some, there are some problems with this.
18:57:02 And the biggest one is that I ran into this all the time. You can have, you can have multiple messy strings talking to the same person.
18:57:12 My daughter, I have one message string that goes to her and Kathleen. My daughter's name is like Cara.
18:57:18 So if I send it to like her and Kathleen, that might be one message string in messages.
18:57:24 But if I send it to Kathleen and like her, even though they're the same 2 people, it'll create a separate string.
18:57:30 Yes.
18:57:30 And because it's a phone if I. Send it to my daughter's. Phone number.
18:57:37 It'll be a separate thread than if I send it to her email account. So if you just think about Kathleen's email account.
18:57:44 My daughter's email account. And then switching the names back and forth, you could come up with dozens of different combinations for the same 2 people.
18:57:55 And That gets a little bit complicated if you try to delete the message on your Mac because your Mac doesn't have a phone number.
18:58:03 Your Mac is only going to get those messages that they go to the email account. If they go to the phone number, your Mac's not going to see it.
18:58:09 Unless you set up your Mac to respond to the phone numbers, which you can do. You can say, it goes to this phone numbers, put it on the Mac anyway.
18:58:17 But Just for the sake of argument, they're just they're dozens of different combinations and Apple can't fix that problem.
18:58:27 Cool.
18:58:25 Because the protocol that Messages uses is something called SMS. And SMS was invented long before Apple came along.
18:58:35 SMS was, stands for simple mail system. It was invented by the phone company's when they had pagers, even though those old little pagers used to have 128 character messages.
18:58:47 That's where messages comes from. It was used by pagers. Nobody has a pager anymore.
18:58:51 Every single pager company in the United States has gone out of business, but that protocol is still used for messages.
18:58:57 So yes, you can delete it, but you're going to be frustrated as I am and there's really nothing Apple can do or you can do to fix that.
18:59:06 Okay, well.
18:59:06 Unless you're just really disciplined and how you send messages, which nobody is. You do it on the spur of the moment.
18:59:13 If something occurs to you, and if I send it to Kathleen and Lai Car and then I respond to like her and Kathleen I've now got 2 threads going and if I use their phone numbers I could have a dozen threads going.
18:59:26 For the same conversation.
18:59:29 So I.
18:59:29 Well, I generally use my iPhone for messages and I don't message from my computer, so.
18:59:35 Yeah, I'm just I'm just explaining why it's difficult to kill them off because each device interprets that slightly differently.
18:59:43 And if all you have to do is just change recipients, what use the phone number instead of the email or the email instead of the phone number, or if you're sending it to multiple people at once, just list them in different orders and you create new threads.
18:59:56 Yeah.
18:59:56 And because it's a really, really old protocol and it doesn't, it's, it's, it's really.
19:00:04 Stupid. The big advantage of using messages for for sending messages, Apple messages for sending messages. Is that it goes as data.
19:00:16 If you send it to the phone number, it always goes as a message and the phone companies count it.
19:00:23 So if you somebody has has a very limited account that only allows a hundred messages a day. They'll get charged for those like 10 cents, 15 cents a message.
19:00:32 But if you send it as data, it's invisible to the phone company, the phone company doesn't see it.
19:00:37 And yet the people on the other end still get it. So message is a really quite powerful and it really, really, really torqued off Verizon and AT and T and everybody went Apple came up with it.
19:00:49 It's still using that old protocol in order to make it compatible. And that makes it difficult.
19:01:02 Yeah.
19:00:56 If you notice that you get messages and some are in blue and some are in green. If you get a message from somebody and it's green, it means that they have an Android phone.
19:01:12 Yeah.
19:01:08 If it's in blue, it means I have an iPhone. And that's really convenient because it means that for things like you want to send a emoji or you want to send lots of things to somebody's got a blue messages, they'll get it.
19:01:26 There's a good chance if you send it somebody's got the green messages they won't get it because the message.
19:01:30 Client on on Android is not that sophisticated.
19:01:34 One thing I do like about the iPhone and messages is that when you send it to another person with an IVR and it says delivered, you know it's gotten there.
19:01:44 Yes.
19:01:45 With the other kind of phone, you don't know.
19:01:47 No, no, and Google has actually tried suing Apple to make, to get Apple to help them make their client better.
19:01:57 And they went to a judge with that as the basis of a suit and the judge laugh literally laughed at them and threw it out.
19:02:06 Because no, Not a research and development agency for Google. So that didn't work. Good track.
19:02:15 My daughter, my daughter and son in law live in Australia and I can my daughter has a iPhone and my son-in-law.
19:02:24 It's apples, so he has an Android. So I can text back and forth with my daughter.
19:02:29 With no problem, it's, you know, it's free and all that stuff, but for my son a lot, I'd have to add on international to my Verizon plan and to be able to text back and forth.
19:02:41 So we use that. Messenger in in Facebook to communicate back and forth that's what we came up with.
19:02:50 Yeah, I I cannot begin to tell you how much contempt I have for Facebook. Messenger. I refuse.
19:02:59 I'm with you, I hate it.
19:03:01 Yeah. I refuse to answer Facebook messages except for one relative. But anybody else sends me a Facebook message I'm not ever gonna reply.
19:03:14 Yep, yep.
19:03:16 Any other questions?
19:03:18 I had one name, a quick question. I'm using Sonoma on my new MacBook Pro M 2 max.
19:03:27 And a strange quirk seems to crop up when I'm using either the track pad or my mouse.
19:03:38 On a, in Safari. I, when I'm just moving the mouse along the screen.
19:03:48 It just changes web pages on them for some instantaneous thing. And goes back to my homepage if I'm on some other website Yeah, all of a sudden it just blinks to the other to back to the homepage.
19:04:04 And luckily there's history so I can go back to where I was. But, so I checked on the internet and several other people said they had this problem and no one knew how to knows how to solve it.
19:04:16 The, some people said, okay, change your track pads speed and don't use tap to click.
19:04:26 I try that. It still doesn't. Yeah. And so I don't know what's going on there.
19:04:32 I don't know if you've ever heard of that.
19:04:33 If this is on your track pad or track ball or what?
19:04:41 Huh.
19:04:37 I haven't, no, the laptop MacBook Pro trackpad. And I have a wireless mouse as well.
19:04:47 And it doesn't matter which one I use if I just move the cursor. Trying to click on something on a webpage, all of a sudden it just jumps.
19:04:55 Now it doesn't jump back to my homepage and It doesn't happen all the time.
19:05:01 It's like intermittent. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. But it's really annoying and I so a lot of people had the same problem but no one knows why it happens or it's just on Sonoma and it's never happened in Monterey.
19:05:16 I don't have an explanation for that. I do know you can run into problems with the trackpad spontaneously doing strange things, but that's caused by the fact that If you get have any kind of static charge on your body.
19:05:32 When you come near the track pad it responds as if you're touching it and so you can have goose movements.
19:05:38 Oh, do you? That could be it. That could be it.
19:05:51 Yeah.
19:05:40 Well, if you normally see that in the wintertime when it starts getting cooler. It hasn't been that cold though, but if you turned on the heat in your house, it could be you could be just the static chart.
19:05:58 I will tell you something that I did and I did this long ago because I was I have 2 degrees in the history, but I was a computer professional.
19:06:05 I only wear cotton and before I sit down at a computer I always wash my hands. There are 2 reasons for watching.
19:06:13 Well, wearing the cotton, if you're wearing cotton, you can't build up a, you, it's harder to build up a static charge.
19:06:18 But the washing your hands does 2 things. It gets the oils off of your hand. But the other thing does, touching the faucet.
19:06:25 The faucet in your home is grounded. And touching the faucet ground you and washing your hands washes off the oils and static.
19:06:33 So it's a I've been religious about that and I cracked me up because the last 10 days my granddaughter was here from England.
19:06:44 She's 6. And she wanted to use her mother's iPad and before she did anything she went into bathroom washed her hands and I thought she is trained well.
19:06:56 Of course my daughter That was first thing I ever, she started using a computer when she was around 6 and I said, now wash your hands.
19:07:03 So apparently my daughter has passed that on to her. To her daughter.
19:07:06 Well, thank you. I think I'll give that a shot. It does sound like the symptom, though.
19:07:11 And the reason is that the way the track pad works is through induction and you can create that a similar, a similar type of.
19:07:20 Field just with your hands if there's a static charge on it.
19:07:22 Right. Okay, thank you.
19:07:25 Can you disable the trackpad or? Oh, you can, okay.
19:07:31 No, not really.
19:07:37 Right, right.
19:07:29 No. Now, when you're, when your, when your MacBook turns on, it knows there's an iPad and there's and you really don't want to be able.
19:07:41 To do that, yeah. Yeah.
19:07:42 The mess with that. Anyway, it's 7 o'clock and now I believe so we will start the program.
19:07:53 I don't have the president or vice president so we'll just skip reports from, president or treasurer, so we'll skip reports from them.
19:08:04 Apple in case you had notice the pattern. In the spring they have major announcements for hardware and the start of June they usually have their Apple developers conference which they talk about new operating systems that they're coming up with and then in the fall they released the operating systems and they in September.
19:08:29 They released a new version of operating systems for watches, iPads, iPhones, home pod.
19:08:39 Most people don't know that it gets updated because it happens kind of invisibly. All kinds of stuff, including the Mac.
19:08:44 And this year was no exception. The a lot of people if if you read some of the commentary sites they say well they didn't really do much of it all just cosmetic and that's not true at all.
19:08:58 The, the Apple made a whole bunch of security and privacy. Changes they made several changes in terms of the functioning of the operating system and then they made some cosmetic ones.
19:09:12 For obvious reasons because I'm gonna do a demo we're gonna focus mostly on the cosmetic ones because those are the ones that I can actually show you.
19:09:21 But as an example of the kind of things that they have behind the scenes. They greatly cracked down on privacy restrictions.
19:09:28 You will see this sometimes when you've launched Safari and you try to go to a site that you've never gone to before.
19:09:34 And it just takes your browser a little while. And that's because the safari is trying to create a secure tunnel between your machine.
19:09:43 And what you're talking to. And if the other, if the other site isn't set up properly, it'll take a while and try, it'll try A, it'll try B, it'll try to see and eventually it might just give up and say, I can't get there.
19:09:57 And yet if you launched some other browser, it might work. And the reason because it for that is that Apple is getting really really picky about security for websites.
19:10:08 It's when you when you launch when you launch the fire and try to go to the site it checks it against a black list that Apple automatically updates on your machine every time you turn on your machine.
19:10:20 Checks that against a black list of compromise sites and just really bad sites. It checks the security certificate on your site.
19:10:30 And, certificate on the site that you're going to, it checks to see that your machine is actually properly configured.
19:10:39 And if you ever have your machine stolen, one of the things that it does is that when, when the thief launches, assuming they can break into the machine and right now it's kind of hard to break into the machine if they don't have your a username and password, but assuming that the thief can break into the machine and you've reported it stolen when the thief goes to that
19:11:01 website, Apple looks up a list of stolen machines and tracks their location and then notifies people, hey, this dollar machine is at this address.
19:11:12 And it's using GPS location for with IP to tell people where the Shell machine is.
19:11:19 So it's doing a lot of It's a doing a lot of stuff to protect you that you don't actually see.
19:11:25 The other thing they're doing in terms of just, on the security front and privacy front.
19:11:31 Is they are greatly cracking down on how you can share things. You want to share photos, you want to say share video, you want to share a lot of things.
19:11:41 Apple's very picky about checking the security of the people you're sending it to. So if you are sending it to, you know, Mike Johnson and it thinks you picked the right, and wrong, might argue with you about that.
19:11:58 And where it does a lot of the processing now, particularly if you have an Apple silicon machine, I can ask Siri for the time and Siri will give me the time.
19:12:09 In the past it used to ask Cupertino, okay, this guy is located in Washington State, New West and my Syrian another room is giving me the time.
19:12:19 Okay.
19:12:23 I could ask, I could ask for the time and it would have to ask Cupertino, he's based here, what's the time there?
19:12:29 And they'll come back and give me the time. Now, if you have an Apple Silicon machine, all of that processing goes on on the machine.
19:12:36 It'll give you the time. It'll give you weather in which Siri asked for the weather instead of asking it for you.
19:12:43 And so it'll just give you back the weather. A lot of things that can process on the machine.
19:12:48 Now if you ask for, I can't remember what it was. Kathleen and I were wondering when a movie came out.
19:12:55 And so I asked theory. Last night when this movie came out and Siri came up with an answer It can't do that kind of processing on on your computer because it doesn't know that.
19:13:07 So it had to go out and ask but came back instantly with the with the answer. So it's doing a lot of that on on your machine in order to protect your privacy.
19:13:16 Google recently was sued by the, European Union for violations of Oh, stop it. My phone's trying to answer all these questions that I just asked.
19:13:32 Good was recently, suited by the European Union for, Google has this thing called the Ign, incognito mode.
19:13:41 Where if you fire up Google Chrome and you go to incognito, you have a private tunnel.
19:13:48 And it doesn't share your name or your gender or anything about that. However, it still collects that information, so it doesn't know your name doesn't know your gender, but it knows that this person on this machine at this IP address looked up dockers and it looked up support hose and it looked up.
19:14:11 Penny liners or what it doesn't make any difference what it is you're looking up.
19:14:15 It knows that that person was looking for those kind of things and it keeps track and it creates an electronic profile that they sell to advertisers.
19:14:22 So on one hand, they said they're protecting your privacy, but on the other hand, they were not protecting your privacy.
19:14:28 And, and the European Union is charged, I can't remember, it was 6 8 billion dollar.
19:14:32 Fine for this and they're they're protesting this. But Apple, when you, When you ask for things from Siri, even if it has to go to Cupertino.
19:14:42 Apple doesn't give that stuff away. Doesn't tell anybody about it. Doesn't keep it.
19:14:47 They get rid of it. So they're doing a lot to protect your privacy and it's in it's invisible.
19:14:55 So I can't really demonstrate that. I can just tell you that that happens. But there are some things that I can demonstrate.
19:15:01 So I'm going to start off with the iPhone because the iPhone is the hardest thing for me to demonstrate.
19:15:11 But it so happens that I have the means. So I'll do it anyway.
19:15:23 And I did it wrong.
19:15:47 I'm not going to do it that way because .
19:15:53 I screen shared earlier and then I killed it. And in a way that I can't share it again.
19:16:00 Drat.
19:16:02 There's a little tiny icon at the top of your screen in blue that just I think that's new maybe that has something to do with it.
19:16:09 Oh, here it is. I found it.
19:16:11 Okay.
19:16:13 Alright.
19:16:18 One of the things that you should note is that as somebody mentioned, there's this little tiny icon up here.
19:16:24 This icon means that I am sharing my screen with something. Unfortunately, I managed to kill it so Kathleen can't see it anymore, but that icon means that I am sharing my screen.
19:16:35 With something I can share it with my computer or in What I was trying to do is also share it with my TV, but I managed to kill that off.
19:16:44 So that's new. This part up here is called Do you remember what that's called, Kathleen?
19:16:53 Dynamic Island.
19:16:51 Since I can't see it's hard. Dining Eric Island. And I managed to.
19:17:01 Kill it off again.
19:17:07 Hold on a second, I need to. Turn on Meringue, so Kathleen can see what I'm doing.
19:17:18 Speaking, Rich, I'll show you how to turn on nearing. I killed the TV, so I have to turn the TV on.
19:17:34 And I turned the TV completely off. Oh well. Yes.
19:17:43 Oh yes, I can do it that way. Sarah, turn on TV.
19:17:49 Didn't want to. Well, so much for that part of the. 24 7 and we have a lot of support.
19:18:05 New video tonight. Okay.
19:18:11 Back to my not terribly well done. Yeah.
19:18:20 Well, Fooi. I can either mirror it to the TV or I can mirror it to you, but I can't do both.
19:18:28 So. I'm just going to tell you what it can do. The, they've added more control panels to the iPhone that allow you to do all kinds of things including screen marrying and adaptive listening if you have a hearing aid and a bunch of other stuff.
19:18:50 And I was gonna show you some of that, but I guess I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to talk about some other things that it did.
19:18:57 I took some photos. And I went to show you kind of some different things you can do with. The photos.
19:19:07 These photos were taken on a new iPhone 15. And if you look at the sizes of them.
19:19:15 There this one here is 2.3 MB. This one's 3.2 8 MB.
19:19:24 This one is 6 MB. This one's 3.3 4 5 MB.
19:19:27 So. This one that 6 seems a little bit different, but the other ones aren't that odd.
19:19:33 Then you look at the dimensions. The first one is 4,032 by 3,024 pixels.
19:19:41 The next one is 4,032 by 3,024. This one is 5,712 by 4,284 pixels.
19:19:50 This one's 4,000 324,032 by. 3,024.
19:19:57 If you are really good at math, you'll realize that Most of these are.
19:20:06 12 megapixel, but. One of them is 24 pit megapixels.
19:20:12 And, but they all seem, you know, not that big, but if you export them as JPEGs, you'll see that there's a dramatic difference in size.
19:20:21 The H. A HEIC and I don't remember what it stands for, it's high efficiency, something rather.
19:20:29 Is Apple's format for cramming an awful lot of information. Into very little space and when you export them as JPEGs you'll see that they're actually much larger.
19:20:39 So this one that's 4,032 by 3,024 is actually 5 MB this one is 3.9 8 5 MB this one's 4.6 9 MB but the one that was 5,712 pixels across is actually a 10 MB picture picture.
19:21:03 So the, the, if you have this new phone, it can take really, really, really. High resolution pictures but only with the standard camera.
19:21:15 And there's a reason for that. And if I look at these. Photos. Open them up.
19:21:27 This one is taken with the wide angle lens. And it's it uses the standard camera, but it's just a wide angle mode.
19:21:37 This is the standard camera in standard mode. And if I blow this up, you'll see that it's really, really, really.
19:21:45 Detailed even if I blow it up because it's a lot more pixels there so very, very, very detailed picture of this.
19:21:55 Maple. This one is at 2 X and this is at 5 X. And the way in which Apple did this is actually quite clever.
19:22:06 If you look at professional cameras. A lot of them have what's a Pentax lens.
19:22:15 Pentax is the name of company, but it's also the type of box that has where the light balances around off of mirrors on the inside of the camera to increase the focal length without having a huge camera.
19:22:26 And Apple did the same thing only in this very, very thin. Iphone it's the same basically same size as regular iPhones, but it does at either 6 or 7 times it bounces the light around using mirrors inside of the camera.
19:22:42 To get of it a longer focal length. Though the farther it is from the lens to where it's recorded.
19:22:48 The larger something can be at a distance. So. That's what they did is they stuck a bunch of mirrors in here to increase the focal length without increasing the size of the camera.
19:22:59 That was one trick. The other thing is that it's image stabilized. So it bounces around with the motion to stabilize the motion.
19:23:07 So you can take a You can take a telephoto picture with this new camera and it's still image stabilized or you can take a video and it's image stabilized because it's got a bunch of little sensors in there that move it around.
19:23:21 As your body moves around. You can't do a huge amount of moving, but you can. You can bounce around quite well and it's also very good in low light.
19:23:30 I took these photos. Today at, at 4 o'clock. And as you see, It was very, very dark and rainy.
19:23:39 It was pouring rain when I took this. And yet that photo looks. Really, really nice and rich.
19:23:45 The exposure on it's just fine very very wet but nice rich photo in dim light. And that's the the new photo that they, new camera that have and the new iPhone.
19:23:59 But I lot of the other things that are on iOS 17 will work on any. Camera produced since the iPhone XS.
19:24:10 Camera. It's backward compatible. But some of the features won't work unless you have the newer hardware.
19:24:18 But in terms of most of the things it'll do. As an example, on the front you can have.
19:24:26 An image and I'm going to hold this up. That is a custom, image on the front of the camera that I added.
19:24:33 And I can, I added the. The fonts at the top where it displays the time, that's all custom.
19:24:43 It has an interface that allows you to to change that sort of stuff and you also have custom cards for some of your contacts.
19:24:51 So Kathleen calls me. Let's see if I can show her card.
19:25:07 If Kathleen calls me, I get a full screen of that. Of that photo.
19:25:15 It fills the entire front of the camera. So there's I can just tell that a glance that Kathleen's calling me.
19:25:19 And you can set that up for any of your contacts that you feel like. So a lot of a lot of nice things that they did with it in addition to the privacy and security issues.
19:25:35 So I'm quite, quite impressed with the new operating system. And if you have an iPhone, They can run IS iOS 17.
19:25:46 I highly recommend that you install it without hesitation because among other things is much more secure than prior operating systems.
19:25:55 Oh, the other thing I wanted to show you. Is that Apple has these widgets up here in this corner you'll see a widget that has a world clock.
19:26:05 And the world clock. It shows time zones for here for, Tokyo, for,
19:26:16 Alexandria, Virginia and for London because I have various relatives in those places. But it used to be that you could only have an image on the front.
19:26:27 On the front page, but if you move internally, you can now have as many widgets on any page that you want.
19:26:33 So, and. As many widgets as you want. And what a widget is is just a larger.
19:26:40 You kind of preview of what that app would do if you were running that app as a whole.
19:26:47 So the world clock if you run the world pocket looks like this. But the widget. Doesn't take up nearly as much space and it's just in that upper corner.
19:26:57 So, lots of different things have done with, with widgets and customization. And on the iPad, the iPad.
19:27:08 Has added widgets. Again, you can have one widget before and now you can have a widget on every screen.
19:27:16 And the iPad also has one of the things that I really like is that has the health data. In the past, There's a health app on the iPhone.
19:27:26 But. It can have an awful lot of information. But it's on a fairly small screen.
19:27:34 And. On the iPad, you have a much larger presentation so they can have a lot more detailed data.
19:27:42 And the health app on the iPhone will allow you to hook into things like a Olympic medical systems health record.
19:27:53 So their patient portal, you can suck all that stuff into Apple health and have it all in one place.
19:27:58 You can get. How far you walk that day you can get how many breaths per minute were recorded by your watch as well as gift your lab results from.
19:28:08 Going to the clinic and having your blood drawn all in one place. So. Lots of Very good changes large and small.
19:28:19 On the iPad as well. On the Mac. This first slide doesn't really tell you much.
19:28:29 Just tells you the Apple says it runs on all these platforms, which big deal. Here they were really happy with the fact that the especially on the Apple silicon machines they can get really fast.
19:28:40 Games running which I'm not a big game player so didn't really care too much about that but this is, this particular one shows profiles where this individual has a profile for home and a profile for school in Safari and I'm going to demonstrate that in a second.
19:29:01 But it, I, they've had profiles in. And for safari before but they were kind of clutsy and I didn't use them.
19:29:10 I used profiles on and chrome all the time so that if I'm doing something for my church it's different than for the user group and it's different for me and so on and so forth.
19:29:21 And now they've got profiles in Safari that actually work quite well. The other thing that you have are widgets.
19:29:28 So. There's a time widget here and weather widget and this is a photo widget and reminders and all kinds of things with widgets.
19:29:38 And I can't show you this because this is trying to show you a new feature in Facetime.
19:29:44 In Facetime. If you are doing Facetime presentation with say 5 or 6 people, you can now insert yourself into the image and your screen will appear behind you.
19:29:56 So it looks like you're standing in front of a blackboard, but this gentleman's actually got a computer in front of him and Facetime is fake projecting the screen behind him and he's just kind of seenlessly in front of it.
19:30:10 So it looks like he's got a big whiteboard behind it. But that only works with Face Time.
19:30:16 So I can show you that. However, they have some things that you can do with Zoom and I'm going to stop screen sharing to show you that because this is all also part of their presentation.
19:30:31 And that is they've implemented something called gestures. Some of these gestures I find difficult, like for example they have gestures where I can have a heart.
19:30:40 And I can. Rarely get this to work. But if it works right, it you should see parts bubbling out of my hands and I don't happen to see anything.
19:30:50 The other one they have is that you can have a thumbs up and it'll create a thumbs up gesture.
19:30:55 Does everyone see that? Okay, and if you have you can have a thumbs down and it'll give you a big Thumbs down.
19:31:04 But if you have 2 thumbs up.
19:31:07 You get fireworks. And if you have 2 thumbs down, you can pretend that it's Washington.
19:31:13 Any time of the year, any time at all, just starts raining. And you can have, let's see.
19:31:20 Bubbles if you do this And if you like Star Wars, you can do.
19:31:28 Well, that's a wrong one. That's an interest. I can't remember. There's a way to do lasers, but I don't remember how to do it.
19:31:36 Yeah, I don't remember. Anyway, there's a way to do lasers as well.
19:31:42 These are called gestures. They work in Facetime and for they'll also work in Google Meet and in Zoom obviously and other things as well.
19:31:52 So the next time you're Facetime with someone, if you want to give them a thrill, you can use gestures.
19:31:58 And I'll post these speaking which I should post something else, but I'll do that when I go back to my showing my desktop.
19:32:07 Yeah.
19:32:06 To do those work on the iPhone and the iPad with iOS 17
19:32:16 Yeah.
19:32:12 I know they work in the iPhone. I don't know if they work in the iPad because I haven't tried it but and some of the things that I'm talking about may only work if you have an Apple silicon machine.
19:32:23 The iPad and iPhone have Apple Silicon, but some of these things may require newer machines, then I don't happen to know.
19:32:34 It may require an Apple silicon machine. For some things, but I want to get back to my desktop.
19:32:44 And what was I gonna show you on the desktop? Oh, widgets.
19:32:52 This is a widget. That I have and you don't see it on my screen because I have 2 screens and this is on my other screen showing the when I snapped this this was several days ago.
19:33:06 This is the weather in Squim and it's showing you the weather. Here's the various times zones.
19:33:11 These are one thing that a lot of people don't realize there's a little tip thing built into the Mac that'll tell you how to use new features and it also exists on the iPhone.
19:33:23 There's an application called tips. There's an application called tips on the iPad. Just launch it and go through it because you'll learn things that you probably didn't know.
19:33:31 Here we have some news headlines and here's the battery level of my keyboard in my wireless mouse.
19:33:38 I have widgets for these plus some other things but those are the widgets and they you can have them all clustered together or you can have different widgets on different screens.
19:33:50 So just go to town with widgets. Another thing that I've talked about, I told you this was true, but I never actually showed and I'm not sure that it will work, but I got to try it.
19:34:00 Is that you can Now if you have an Apple silicon machine, you can now get a lot of the apps for iPhones.
19:34:11 On your on your Mac and one of the things that I like to play is mahjong which is a ancient Chinese game and most of the Mahjong games on the Mac have commercials and I couldn't stand the commercials.
19:34:28 Well, this mahjong game is for the iPhone and it doesn't have commercials.
19:34:34 So I immediately glommed onto that so that I can play mahjong. When I'm on hold, I will quite often play mjong or solitaire or something just because I'm stuck on hold and I don't want to be on hold.
19:34:47 One thing you will notice with these games that were reported from the iPhone is they have very simple interfaces.
19:34:53 If you go up under the menu, there's really nothing there. But, this will take you home.
19:34:59 And you can play a new game and it's set up. Very very simply because It's basically from an iPhone.
19:35:09 App and there's Not that much you can do with it, so. Let's go here and exit to point out of it or I could have gone up to the quit menu.
19:35:22 But that was basically unchanged from an iPhone app to work on a Mac and on the Mac it's got a bigger screen so it takes up more space but it's a fairly limited set of interface because there's not much you can do with it but on the other hand from mahjong i don't really need a heck of a lot So that's kind of cool.
19:35:46 And I thought I'd just show you that. Something that a lot of people don't know why you would ever subscribe to Apple Arcade.
19:35:56 I will tell you one reason to subscribe to Apple arcade. The arcade games have no advertisements.
19:36:01 So if it's if you like playing games and you can't stand the advertisements, you can subscribe to Apple Arcade and they don't have advertisements.
19:36:10 And now I want to show you Safari. This is Safari and when it came up. You'll notice that there's something new up here.
19:36:20 It says Lawrence. This is my basically the my standard. How I want Safari to come up when I'm working for me.
19:36:29 This is showing my website. This website has lists of my publications and there are quite a few of them.
19:36:39 Publications. And that's this is where I put them and I've only got like a third of them up, but.
19:36:46 I put them up on this one site. So. When I launched the far, I'd like to make sure that the site is actually up.
19:36:53 So that's my startup screen. And then I have things that I use all the time. The news sites and personal things having to do with like going to Olympic medical and church and whatnot and tools that I use quite often.
19:37:09 That's for me. But say I'm doing something for straight Macintosh user group. I can change who I am by coming up here and saying I want a smug window.
19:37:20 And I close this. So the smug window comes up and it's got the. Smug.
19:37:26 Website, but then it has things today that I want to talk about. So I've already pre-populated this.
19:37:33 So one of the things I wanted to make was the gestures that you, oh, this, this overlay that you can use in, and Facebook.
19:37:41 That's one of the things I wanted to show people. And then the, they call it reactions.
19:37:45 Those gestures. So you can have hearts will come pouring out in a nice little. Thing thumbs up we'll give you a thumbs up icon thumbs down balloons rain confetti and oh that's how you do it.
19:38:01 Lasers. There we got the lasers going there. And, and fireworks.
19:38:10 So. You can do that with these gestures. And the other thing I wanted to talk about was the attendance form.
19:38:20 I'm going to talk about that in a second. And what does Sonoma work run on? If you go all the way back, this is the Apple Sonoma page.
19:38:29 You go to all the way down almost to the very bottom. It comes up and with this box here and it says.
19:38:35 IMAX from 2,019 and later. I, Mac Pro from 2,019 and later I'm at pro 2,017.
19:38:43 Max Studio, MacBooker, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro. It has these here.
19:38:51 So if you want. A machine that runs the new Sonoma, and needs to have one of these.
19:39:01 I will tell you, looking at this list, it kind of gave me a dead giveaway. All of these machines either have a T one or T 2 security chip.
19:39:07 Or they have a powerful graphics card. And so that's. But they need for a lot of the features that they're using.
19:39:18 The T one, T 2 security chip is what allows. So, to accept a serial request for the time and give it back to you without actually tailing.
19:39:27 Telling anybody else, asking Apple about it. That's done with the security chip. It sanitizes those things and send you back.
19:39:37 Information and it won't. It won't accept some. Types of requests because it knows those are bad things to do.
19:39:46 So iPad similarly down towards the bottom, it's got a list of the machines that it runs on.
19:39:55 Here basically iPad Pro, 12.9. Inch second generation later, iPad Pro, 10.5 inch, so on so forth, list of the machines it runs on.
19:40:07 And iOS 17 down at the bottom of the page. Yeah.
19:40:16 Has a list of machines that it runs on as well. I forgot to tell you about one thing. I don't know if I can actually display it.
19:40:24 If. If the iPhone is turned on its side. And it will give you.
19:40:32 In a night time mode where it gives you the time and shows anything that might have popped up. While you were sleeping so you can use it as a Don't go out there.
19:40:44 It'll, you can use it as kind of a night time. Clock. And I like this so much that I got a stand to sit beside the bed so I can.
19:40:55 Refer to it at night in case I wake up at 3 30 in the morning and want to know exactly what time it is.
19:41:00 Oh yes, if if the lights are off it turns red so it doesn't ruin your your night vision.
19:41:07 Laura.
19:41:06 I haven't any, work like that on the side. It just wants to be in portrait mode.
19:41:14 I mean, it's so when I turn it sideways, the text is, you know, still, it's not right.
19:41:21 But it shows it shows the clock and everything.
19:41:24 Yeah, it shows the clock and it stays on all night, whether it's plugged in or not.
19:41:30 But it doesn't. It doesn't turn sideways. And I know it's supposed to.
19:41:36 How, when it turns sideways, is it, is it? If it's if it's to if it's not it's got to be fairly vertical in order for that to work.
19:41:46 So if it's at too much of a slant, it won't. Huh. How old is your phone?
19:41:53 Yeah. It's brand new. It's a 15, pro.
19:41:59 Well, see, that's a problem.
19:42:01 Yeah, I went from an 8.
19:42:05 I know it works on an iPhone, 11, a 12, a 13, a 14 because when my daughter and son-in-law were here while we were playing around with these And I know it works with those, so I'm not sure.
19:42:21 Do you have the, Phone set up to auto rotate.
19:42:25 Well, now maybe, maybe not. It does so on music videos, but I don't know about, Not otherwise.
19:42:33 Yeah.
19:42:34 I'm like, I can look into and see.
19:42:37 Anyway, I'm going to put the links for these pages that I, was showing I'm gonna.
19:42:46 Put these in the chat window. So that. You can see what it is I'm talking about.
19:42:54 So, this presenter mode for. Hey, time.
19:43:03 It's going to be here. Oh, that's terrible. I will clean that up.
19:43:16 And. So, You notice that, on that, You are that I posted this one up here that I chopped off some stuff at the end of it.
19:43:34 I'm going to explain that in a second.
19:43:41 This is the requirements for Sonoma. Requirements for iPad OS.
19:43:51 And. The requirements for iOS. 17.
19:44:03 I am gonna go back to. What was it? This first one that had the Ridiculous.
19:44:10 You're When you get these really long, and you want to send them off to someone, what you want to do is Look for.
19:44:23 Well, let me see. First of all, let's see if this works. Yes, it does.
19:44:29 A lot of these things are tagging information and trying to find out. Wow. What kind of machine you're using because it'll give you different kinds of information.
19:44:40 Depending upon what machine you're using. But also sometimes it is like who you are and where you are.
19:44:46 And Apple doesn't do that with their URLs, but a lot of places do. So you'll go to someplace.
19:44:52 And generally speaking, what you want to do is get rid of anything past the question mark. And I will show you what I mean by that by going to the New York Times.
19:45:12 You go to the New York Times.
19:45:26 I. And I know I did that.
19:45:37 New York Times. Continue. And you want to get this. Article.
19:45:43 So I went to Share this article with somebody. I don't care. I'm gonna share this article with somebody and our this was actually fairly It doesn't have a bunch of stuff after it.
19:45:56 But, what happens is that, When I first went to the New York Times from Google.
19:46:15 And I clicked on the New York Times.
19:46:20 Well, now it's not going to do that because I, it's cash, but. If you end up with these really long URLs, look for a question mark.
19:46:30 A question mark is not a legal character in a URL. And so what people do is they use anything after the question mark to send tagging information about you to whoever it's going to so that they New York Times will know that I came to the New York Times from Google.
19:46:46 And it's a way of getting ad revenue. Well, I don't want. To tell people where people came from.
19:46:53 So I will go through and just chop off everything after the question mark in the URL. Anything after that question mark.
19:47:00 Is not necessary. So just Go through and just get rid of everything after the question mark and it'll still work.
19:47:09 And this first one here had a bunch of strangeness in it. And it was Apple trying to find out was I.
19:47:17 Talking to Apple. From a. From a Mac or from something else.
19:47:23 So it, it, added a bunch of stuff to the URL that it really didn't need.
19:47:30 But the other thing I wanted to show you since I mentioned this is this is for this. User group meeting is that I can also stick things in that I frequently forget such as the October sign-in sheet.
19:47:43 So I. Tap the sign in sheet and I'm going to grab the URL. And paste it in down here and ask you that you.
19:47:53 Please go and sign in. Cause it helps me keep track of what we're doing.
19:48:05 But you can have as many profiles as you want. And I want to show you how to set them up.
19:48:10 It's really just super difficult. You go to Safari, go to settings. Go to this thing called profiles.
19:48:20 Say plus and say. News and here you can Use it for doing news or something. And you can pick an icon to show what it is and.
19:48:33 I don't know what color we call news. Since the, New York Times is supposed to be the grey lady.
19:48:42 We'll call it gray. And create profiles. So now we have. Hey, I guess that's not great.
19:48:48 That's brown. Okay, I don't care. So my personal ones got an icon of a person, the smug because I teach things.
19:48:58 It's got a picture of a graduates hat and the news is a briefcase. But now that I have this I can add bookmarks to this.
19:49:07 So.
19:49:12 Washington Post, I say. Add bookmark. And it adds me where I want the bookmark and I say that I want it under news.
19:49:25 And, and now when I go back to that. News profile it'll say
19:49:37 When it's got one tab and the one tab is the Washington Post. And if I go to bookmarks.
19:49:42 News has the Washington Post. So that's part of that profile. The smug profile has other things.
19:49:49 The my favorites which is what I have at home has lots and lots and lots of bookmarks.
19:49:55 But I can separate them depending upon what it is that I'm doing. And it's some.
19:50:01 If you're working, which I'm not doing, it's a great way to separate your work from what you're doing.
19:50:09 But since I do work for my church and I work for various other things, it allows me to segregate that.
19:50:15 Stuff so that I went in doing looking at church stuff. I'm only looking at church stuff and nothing else So it's really quite convenient.
19:50:23 Way to do things and Apple finally did it right. The first Couple tries that they did at this one.
19:50:30 It was not pretty, but this is this is pretty well done.
19:50:34 And do I have any questions about anything that I've talked about?
19:50:42 Lawrence, could you say again how you? Get your iPhone to be like a night.
19:50:50 Clock. I didn't catch that.
19:50:50 Oh. You plug it in and you turn it. Sideways.
19:50:59 Okay.
19:51:00 You turn it sideways. And it will eventually. Change to night mode. I think is what they call it.
19:51:08 And it's not doing that because I keep on moving it. But you just hold it sideways.
19:51:18 Okay.
19:51:14 I leave it plugged in because I don't. I charge my iPhone at night. And so I leave it plugged in and it recharges and it acts as a as a nightstand clock.
19:51:25 Does it have to be clubbed in?
19:51:28 Okay.
19:51:25 But it does not have to be plugged in. I didn't know that, but Mr. Brown says it doesn't, so it doesn't.
19:51:33 I'll take that.
19:51:32 Hmm. I have I have a special little, charger for my. Apple Watch. And that sits there and if you touch it, it tells you what time it is.
19:51:44 The the reason why I like this and reason why I keep it plugged in is that that way I don't have to touch it.
19:51:53 Okay.
19:51:51 I can just look at it and it tells me what time it is. It's it's I'm a light sleeper.
19:52:00 So if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'd like to know. Am I rested now or am I not?
19:52:03 Yeah.
19:52:04 So it's a good way to do it. And in the morning, sometimes when I'm feeling lazy and a call comes up, when it's in this nightstand, but mode, it shows who's calling me.
19:52:17 Oh.
19:52:20 Great.
19:52:22 Yeah.
19:52:18 And I can decide whether or not I want to ignore them. Something that Something that you may not know, you can, when you're sending up your Apple Watch.
19:52:28 You went to pair it with your phone. It's almost impossible not to. It's part of the process.
19:52:34 If you get a phone call and you know you don't want to answer the phone, if you cover your watch, just put your hand over the watch.
19:52:42 It silences the call.
19:52:44 Huh. Great.
19:52:46 You don't have to answer the call and hang up on them or anything. Just put your hand over the watch and it silences the call.
19:52:53 I know. Just.
19:52:52 And if I'm lying down in bread and I don't want to answer the phone, just put my hand over my watch.
19:52:59 Shuts it down. I am very lazy.
19:53:03 Okay.
19:53:04 Just a little update on on the night time clock thing. I plugged it in and it works sideways like it's supposed to.
19:53:13 Oh, okay.
19:53:16 Okay.
19:53:15 So is that with just the new operating system?
19:53:19 Yes, it's part of iOS 17.
19:53:21 Okay. Thank you. And we need to sign in, but we don't know how.
19:53:28 Oh, I stuck the URL in the, chat on the side and if you look at the last one I posted which says docs google calm if you just click on it it brings up this form that's on front of me and you just fill in the, add your email.
19:53:45 Your first and last name. And the reason why I say first and last name is that I've had several people just say Mike or.
19:53:53 Or Susan and that doesn't tell me who you are. So put in your first and last name and then check the box.
19:54:01 Meeting this is.
19:54:03 Okay, so, but that's your. What's your computer we're looking at?
19:54:08 That's my computer, but if you click on this URL over here. It'll bring it up on your computer.
19:54:16 Where is that URL?
19:54:16 Okay. It's in the chat window.
19:54:20 In the chat window.
19:54:21 Yes, down at the bottom of the.
19:54:23 I see it. Okay, then it just says to everyone.
19:54:27 We say yes, but I posted it earlier and it might be that I need to post it again for you because they scroll off.
19:54:33 So.
19:54:33 Okay.
19:54:39 Well, I can write you a message.
19:54:39 Okay. No, it should be there now.
19:54:49 Okay.
19:54:49 And you just click on it and it'll pop up the form.
19:54:54 Hmm.
19:54:54 Any other questions? I covered a lot of different things. So. I may not know the answer, but I'll make something up.
19:55:04 Okay. I have a question. I put something in the chat earlier, but it doesn't seem it didn't trigger a Red dot on my chat window and it didn't seem to go through to any of you.
19:55:18 So I'm not sure why.
19:55:19 No, I'm not seeing the form either.
19:55:23 Do you have this chat window open?
19:55:26 I have it open, yes.
19:55:25 I can see yours. Okay, you went to okay chat. And then I just see to everyone.
19:55:32 So if you scroll.
19:55:34 You click on document Google, you don't pull it up.
19:55:38 Okay.
19:55:38 There should be a message about the chat saying to everyone is at the bottom and above that should be the message that I just sent, which is.
19:55:47 A URL and it should open this window. In this form.
19:55:50 No. No.
19:55:57 Oh, well, okay.
19:55:55 I got it just fine.
19:56:01 Thank you.
19:56:05 Okay, I've totally lost the meeting.
19:56:09 You lost the meeting. I can hear you.
19:56:11 Yeah, I know, but I can't see.
19:56:15 Oh, look under chat.
19:56:18 It's gone. Alright, I'm the person, no, okay.
19:56:27 Click on your Zoom icon on your, that should bring it up, I would think.
19:56:30 I think, yeah, I think she might have lost the zoom window.
19:56:35 Yeah, she lost the zoom window.
19:56:25 Hmm. Okay. I'm launch meeting so I don't wanna do that.
19:56:39 Yeah.
19:56:40 Yeah, click on zoom on the zoom.
19:56:45 Yeah, down in your, your, Launch bar down at the bottom of the screen if you just click on zoom it should bring it up
19:56:52 Okay. Got it. But am I still looking at your window?
19:56:56 You should be.
19:56:58 Okay. So, okay, I see to everyone. I can still see the. The one that you posted.
19:57:11 It's and it just says to everyone.
19:57:15 Yeah, and it should say. It should say below it says HTTPS docs google.com blah blah blah and if you click on that that should bring up a browser.
19:57:26 Window and this page.
19:57:28 Facetime video effects. I don't think I want to do that.
19:57:31 Now those are earlier up.
19:57:33 Yeah.
19:57:37 Okay.
19:57:37 I posted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Links.
19:57:44 Okay. Docs Google. Okay.
19:57:55 No, went to Apple Sonoma. Okay. That's right.
19:58:03 It should appear at the bottom of the list.
19:58:06 Oh, new message, okay.
19:58:11 There we go. Got it. Thank you. Sorry, that took so long.
19:58:13 Okay. What do we want to do next time?
19:58:22 Something I would like to do at some point is browsers. Because there are lots of different browsers out there and they have their strengths and weaknesses.
19:58:31 One of the good news bad news about browsers in order to demonstrate browsers I have to use bandwidth.
19:58:37 And I'm using the bandwidth to actually send the Zoom video out to you. Which means that it may not work particularly well, but.
19:58:45 At some point I would like to talk about browsers and I would like someday to show people how I created the smug website.
19:58:56 It's a piece of software called WordPress which is available to anybody. It's web-based, so you go to a particular website and you can create a website.
19:59:08 Of your own. So yes.
19:59:11 Hey, Lawrence. You mentioned earlier that you might want to do, A, a little talk on pass keys.
19:59:21 Yes. Yes.
19:59:24 That might be a good top, but I don't know how you can demonstrate past keys.
19:59:29 Well, I can use my fake user to demonstrate the past keys. My problem is that I'm having difficulty coming up with.
19:59:37 A something that I can really demonstrate because a lot of this is invisible if you're using pass keys.
19:59:45 So it works and as far as you looking at it and a view session session, you just say, okay, so you want someplace.
19:59:53 And it wouldn't tell you. It wouldn't explain how the magic actually happens. So this is one of those cases where the musician wants to hide the magic.
20:00:04 I went to show how the magic happens and and trying to
19:59:59 Yeah. Well, with my new M 2 laptop. Macwood Pro. It has a thumb print button in the power button.
20:00:25 Yes.
20:00:18 And a lot of times it'll say, Just touch your thumb or put in your password and it's much easier to touch my thumb and type in a password.
20:00:31 Is that a pass key or?
20:00:29 That's, that's true. But again, No, no, that's an encrypted.
20:00:36 That's an encrypted credential. A pass key is a is a little bit, different.
20:00:43 Essentially it's a pass key to your computer, but it's not a pass key.
20:00:50 Hmm.
20:00:47 To something else that's actually something else. When you when you press your thumb. And the thumb sends a pass key to a website.
20:00:57 It's not sending your fingerprint. It's it's sending a piece of code that says yes you really are who you are.
20:01:10 Okay.
20:01:05 So trying to explain how something that people can't see works. there's, some cognitive issues I need to overcome here.
20:01:16 I haven't quite figured out how to do it.
20:01:18 Unless you took a movie of Cat Kathleen doing it.
20:01:25 No.
20:01:25 It's something I need to think through. Because I've tried I thought of several things and they say no that's not gonna work it's it has to be something that
20:01:39 Right.
20:01:36 That you can see a cause and effect. I used to teach, I used to teach computer, security to people in the government.
20:01:44 And that was one of the hardest things to do this. Even when I was talking to IT professionals.
20:01:50 To show them how something was working when there was no when there was nothing visible to them that it was a computer talking to another computer.
20:02:02 It was a, it was a challenge. And, and even when that the day before I retired.
20:02:10 This woman asked me to come over to her computer. And because you said something wasn't working in and they said, what do you want me to do?
20:02:22 Yeah.
20:02:18 And she says, just stand there, it'll work when you're beside me. So she worked for a science agency, but she believed in sympathetic magic that if I was there, just the magic alone would happen.
20:02:31 And she tried to do it. Had she failed that a dozen times and it and it worked. And was I responsible?
20:02:47 Right.
20:02:38 No, I wasn't. But. Trying to Trying to show what was really happening was it's it's it's a challenge which is one reason why people insist on having stupid, you know, 8 letter passwords that they reuse for everything.
20:02:54 They say, oh, this is just too hard. And that's why. The United States is responsible for 99% of the credit card fraud in the entire world.
20:03:08 Wow.
20:03:08 Because we are still the only country in the world where you hand somebody a credit card and they accept it.
20:03:16 Anywhere in Europe you hand him a credit card and you also have to provide a PIN. There has to be that secondary authentication.
20:03:25 In the United States, nope, steal somebody's credit card, go into go into Starbucks and you can buy yourself copy.
20:03:31 There's no verification that you're who you say you are. The only place in town that verifies who you are, aside from the banks, is Costco.
20:03:41 And that's because you're picture is on the back of the credit card. Not that they look at it, but if they wanted to, they could verify.
20:03:55 So.
20:03:49 So it's Trying to explain computer security is is a challenge. I'm not saying I'm opposed, I just haven't figured out out.
20:04:03 Yes.
20:03:59 The book about, the next operating system, Sonoma, is that a book and book form or is it a download?
20:04:08 It's a downloadable book, but you can print it, but, there's no printed books on it because, and there may not be.
20:04:20 I wanted to tell you the dirty secret about a lot of printed books. Well, let me, before I do that, since I happen to be showing my screen, I want to show you something.
20:04:28 I'm going to, if I can see the icon, here it is. This is my
20:04:39 Apple Books and I'm going to move this thing out of the way. And, search for.
20:04:48 So, There we go. This is the Apple ebook on Seduma through, from, take control press.
20:04:58 And it's got a nice table of contents and You've got an index in the back and it shows you.
20:05:07 After there's some plimity things telling you how it works tells you how to check what operating system you have and what it runs on and all that kind of stuff.
20:05:16 And then it takes you through step by step how to upgrade and a bunch of other stuff. And at the back of it, it's even got an index.
20:05:23 The nice thing about this about these electronic books is that by the way I have 7 or 8,000 electronic books.
20:05:34 . So It helps if I spell correctly.
20:05:42 Control books and we go here. And you. Find what you want to know.
20:05:52 You went this book on Sonoma.
20:05:55 And takes you here. Click on this, it tells you what the book is for. It comes in 2 different flavors.
20:06:04 You can, you can download a sample if you want, but comes in 2 different flavors. If you buy it, you have a choice of either a PDF.
20:06:11 Or, a, EPUB. EPUB is what Apple Books uses.
20:06:19 All the all Apple books are an EPUB format and the nice thing about Apple Books is that, well, never mind.
20:06:26 The Apple books are much better than PDFs. But if you decide that you want to book, you say you add it to the cart.
20:06:34 And then you go and pay for it. And go to your card. And pay for it and then it downloads immediately to you.
20:06:48 So you can go shopping for the book. You can read the table contents and all the stuff you would in a book to store and then download the book and start reading immediately.
20:06:57 You don't have to wait for Amazon to show it to you. Now, why don't they?
20:07:01 Print computer books. If you go to Amazon right now.
20:07:12 And you type in.
20:07:17 Mac OS Sonoma. And look at all the books that they have, you'll see that.
20:07:24 This one here is 30 bucks, which is a lot more. It's terrible book. Mac OS, Sonoma for seniors, terrible book.
20:07:33 This one here. Is, you notice when it was produced, it says it was produced on October 12.
20:07:41 This is something that. That Amazon has, we can make instant, books. Out but these people they're really not very good books at all.
20:07:51 And the ones that I really hate are these for Dummies books. You should never think that you can't do something on a computer because you're a dummy.
20:07:59 And so why Wiley ever came up with this for Demi series, I really cannot stand their books.
20:08:06 Because they start insulting the user right off the start. But you can you can find the book you want on take control notebooks, download it immediately.
20:08:15 Don't have to wait for Amazon to deliver it and you're up and running and it runs.
20:08:18 Right out of. Out of ibooks on your on your Mac so you can read the book while you're doing things at the same time.
20:08:27 Works and the and these books work on the iPhone and the iPad just as well as they do on the Mac.
20:08:35 So you can actually read it off your phone and play with it on your computer at the same time. Really, really prefer these 2.
20:08:45 There's usually the. Very good. Oh, I was just. You go ahead.
20:08:42 Physical books for computer books. When when Yeah, go ahead. When? When I left when, at when Mac when Apple went app when Microsoft came up with a new version of office about 10 years ago.
20:09:06 I distributed electronically to everybody and then people said, oh, you can come and take the documentation away.
20:09:12 We had 1,200 copies of Microsoft Office that we bought. When I went and collected the documentation, the documentation came in a box that was a foot and a half long.
20:09:24 And wait a time. Of the 1,200 sets that I collected, 1,150 were still in the shrink rat.
20:09:33 Oh.
20:09:34 No, nobody read them. The nice thing about an electronic book is you can use the search function to go to the part that you're interested in.
20:09:44 You don't have to flip through all these pages trying to find what you want. So For computer documentation, they're much, much better than paper.
20:09:52 If you want to read a novel, novels on paper are still good, but Computer documentation electron electronically is much, much better.
20:10:01 Okay.
20:10:02 And we still haven't decided what we're doing next month. And half the people have run away.
20:10:08 So ideas.
20:10:08 Well, I have a question. It's a kind of personal for you. Are you going to upgrade to the new phone?
20:10:13 I mean, we spent a lot of time happily about the new. System for the iPhone, the new.
20:10:21 Yes.
20:10:22 Yeah, and I'm wondering if you're going to get the 15.
20:10:31 Oh, okay.
20:10:28 This is an iPhone. 15 pro max. I'm not going to reveal any secrets, but Kathleen insisted I get it and it arrived just before my birthday earlier this week.
20:10:42 Okay. Alright.
20:10:46 I take a lot of pictures and I I can't begin to tell you that the the difference between the 2 X.
20:10:55 Magnification that I have a telephoto that I had with my old iPhone and this Fivex is startling.
20:11:02 It's not like the, you know, 200 that I have on my professional camera, but.
20:11:07 For just I was taking photographs of my granddaughter riding a horse. And I could take a picture of my granddaughter.
20:11:16 And the entire horse and I could take a picture of just her face and I didn't even have to move.
20:11:22 I could take it. With the same phone just by flipping through the the, telephoto settings.
20:11:28 And it was, it was glorious. Plus it was raining heavily. And the phone didn't care, whereas my professional phone I would I really don't wanna take it out in the ring.
20:11:41 And my daughter's from Britain. My granddaughter's from Britain, so the fact that it was raining didn't slow down at all.
20:11:48 And she decided she really likes horses. We started our out on a pony and then we moved her to this full size horse.
20:11:56 And later on they were saying, do you like the pony? No, the pony was trash.
20:12:01 That's not really what she said, but when she when she felt the full size horse she thought that was way better than the pony.
20:12:08 I don't know why because I'm not 6 but She had a blast. And this is the new phone and it's really quite cool.
20:12:18 One thing that's amazing is the size of the screen is the same as the as the size of the screen on the 13 in terms of physical size, but the phone itself is smaller.
20:12:31 Really quite because they eat the screen goes much closer to the edge. It's, it's really.
20:12:37 Bye, quite spiffy.
20:12:42 What are we doing next week? Next month.
20:12:46 I vote for browsers like you mentioned.
20:12:50 Second, the vote.
20:12:52 That sounds good.
20:12:54 Okay. Alright, we'll give that a shot.
20:12:54 All third fourth it. Okay.
20:12:59 Okay.
20:13:00 Maybe the difference between a browser and what a search engine is like duck. Go. I don't know if that's a browser or if it's just a search engine.
20:13:08 It's both.
20:13:09 Yeah, I heard it's a new browser. That's available in the Apple Store.
20:13:11 Yeah. Yeah, it's both. I will warn you that I know a great deal about browsers because I built.
20:13:21 Roughly 500 websites. So. I know a lot about browsers, but. If you're willing to put up with me, I'm willing to cover it.
20:13:30 Okay, alright, thank you.
20:13:34 And anything else before we go?
20:13:38 Thank you.
20:13:39 Yeah, have a good night Lawrence. Thank you again.
20:13:42 Yep, thank you.
20:13:41 Thank you. Alright, good night.

New iPhones and watches announced on September 12

At Apple’s September 12, 2023, Apple Event, called “Wonderlust,” Apple announced, as expected, new iPhones and Apple Watches. There were no announcements of new HomePods, Apple TVs, or iPads, though there was a mention of the M2 Ultra-powered Mac Studio and the M2-powered 15″ MacBook Air and M2-Powered Mac Pro.

Not mentioned, but of note:

  • macOS 14, Sonoma, will be released on September 26. It will run on iMac 2019 and later, Mac Pro 2019 and later, iMac Pro 2017 and later, Mac Studio 2022 and later, MacBook Air 2018 and later, Mac mini 2018 and later, or MacBook Pro 2018 and later.
  • iOS 17 will be released on September 18. It will run on the iPhone SE (2nd gen.), iPhone Xr, iPhone Xs, and iPhone 11 and later.
  • iPadOS 17 will be released on September 18. It will run on iPad mini (5th generation and later), iPad (6th generation and later), iPad Air (3rd generation and later), iPad Pro 11-inch (all), iPad Pro 10.5 inch (all), and iPad Pro 12.9 inch (2nd generation and later)
  • Apple watchOS 10 will be released on September 18. It will run on the Apple Watch Series 4 and later, the Apple Watch SE, and the Apple Watch Ultra (all)

Apple notes that not all features of the various operating systems will work on all devices.

Also not mentioned: Apple released some additional security updates on September 11:

  • ioS 15.7.9 and iPad 15.7.9. This unusual update to an older operating system is aimed at plugging a security issue.
  • macOS Monterey 12.6.9. This unusual update to an older operating system is also aimed at plugging a security issue.
  • macOS Big Sur 11.7.10. This really unusual update to an older operating system is aimed, again, at plugging a security issue.

iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus

The new iPhone is newer, faster, more powerful, etc., with an imposing camera capable of taking 48-megapixel photos with the main camera. It also comes with a USB-C connector, in common with all currently offered Macs. This change was dictated by the European Union, which objected to Apple’s “proprietary” Lightning connector, saying it caused confusion. Of course, there are almost two billion devices in use that have a Lightning connector — but confusion about confusion aside, it is a nice improvement.

iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max

The new iPhone 15 Pro has everything the iPhone 15 has, but additionally is clad in a titanium case, making it lighter and thinner. But the real gem is the camera system, which includes a camera with a 5X optical zoom that, under the right conditions, can also function as a 10X optical zoom, allowing you to shoot subjects ranging from bugs (using macro mode) to elk grazing farther away than you might wish. The USB-C connector can also transfer information up to 20 times faster than the USB-C connector on the regular iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.

Apple Watch Series 9

The Apple Watch Series 9 is newer, more powerful, etc., but it does have some impressive new features, including a more powerful neural processing engine that allows you to use many Siri commands and have them execute directly on the watch, without access to a cell signal or Wi-Fi. You can set a timer, ask for the time, ask the watch to trigger the camera on your phone, and many other things without Siri needing access to iCloud. There are also some new health metrics, making it an even more important healthcare monitor.

But existing watch owners may be most impressed with the ability to respond to many watch prompts with a “double tap” that does not require touching the watch. A double pinch with your watch hand can start a timer, tell your camera to take a photo, answer or hang up a call, and many other things. It also has some greatly improved tricks for using the watch to find your iPhone. Not that anyone has ever had that problem.

Apple Watch Ultra 2

If you like to scale mountains, dive under the ocean, or hike out in the trackless wilderness, the new Apple Watch Ultra 2 has a number of improvements, plus the pinch “double tap” of the Apple Watch Series 9. Alas, it is still the same size, which may be its biggest drawback.

We will talk about these at the SMUG meeting on September 19.