Category Archives: Computers

Plenty of time on Saturday for promising that we’ll get to the gym (and this time we really, Really, REALLY mean it!), watch less television, lose weight, blah, blah, blah.

For now, ending this year, here’s something that’s not really a resolution, but an excellent way to spend a half-hour tonight or tomorrow. You’ll thank me all of next year.

Go through your email and spend the time to hit the “unsubscribe” button on all of the daily and weekly crap that builds up in there.

If you’re anything like me, you buy something, blindly accept terms of service, or maybe even have a newsletter or something that you once actually used or found useful. But after buying one or two things, you haven’t bought anything further in months or years. You aren’t going to any of the concerts or plays from that band or that theater, and you don’t really need to know what that ticket broker has coming up every week. That place you donated to once is now bugging you every week (or more). That newsletter that was really good three years ago is now nothing but clickbait.

So now your inbox is filled with this junk and you either ignore it (and let your inbox fill up) or you just delete it en masse every day. It can be a pain to find the unsubscribe button, to deal with the little hassles they put you through to get them to stop, and it’s only a couple minutes a day to just delete them all. Plus, what if you block them and then you need to get something from them later. Unsubscribing = blocking, right?

Nope. You don’t have to block those senders and sites. In fact, you really don’t want to in many cases. You don’t want to block the airline that’s sending you those travel deals every day, because you do travel with them and you’ll need to see your ticket confirmation and updates. You don’t want to block that ticket agency because you will use them in the future and you don’t want your tickets going into your spam bin or junk mail folder.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to put up with their advertising and repeated appeals for donations.

In every one of those unwanted emails there’s an “unsubscribe” link. The good companies let you just hit it and be done. The pain in the ass companies make you jump through some hoops after they take you to their website and try to convince you to stick with them. Either way, use the unsubscribe button, and be vicious when you cull.

A few minutes a day? Yeah, and at 365 days a year that’s thirty or forty hours. Make the time and effort now, finish 2015 strong, and take back those thirty or forty hours.

You’re welcome.

One of my all-time favorite books is Robert Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love,” and one of my favorite characters from that novel is Dora, the intelligent, sentient, personalized computer. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know why many of my computers around the house have some version of “Dora” in their name, as in “Desk Dora,” “Laptop Dora,” and so on. The other are named things like “Lapis Lazuli,” “Lorelei Lee,” or “Minerva.”

Heinlein wasn’t the first to think of such a thing, and the idea of a sentient computer to run a ship but also be a companion and friend as opposed to being a machine or a servant is hardly unique to Heinlein. But Dora’s always been my favorite.

We’re a long way from such a level of functionality, of course. On the other hand, we’re starting to see the first inklings of that sort of thing with programs like Siri and Cortana. Speech synthesis has been pretty good for a while. Voice recognition is getting better and is pretty functional in normal use. Image recognition is still waiting for the big breakthrough it needs, but there’s some progress. Search engines, led by Google, are excellent. But when all of these pieces are put together and the machine or program tries to function in the real world, they all (except IBM’s Watson, perhaps) get left in the dust by any bright five-year-old kid.

Thus we find that Siri (I’ll use her only as an example since I haven’t used Cortana yet) can talk to you very well and she can usually understand the words you say to her – but figuring out what you MEAN or want her to help you with is still hit and miss.

I love playing with Siri to see what she can do and what she can’t. I love finding the “easter eggs” that have been programmed in by the Apple software engineers. (Have you asked Siri, “What is zero divided by zero?”) I want it to have access to as much voice-activated, hands-free digital assistance as I can get and if that means that I have to learn how to phrase questions or give commands a certain way, so be it. I’m willing to meet the computer halfway – even while I understand the average person can’t or won’t learn a particular way to interface with the computer. (See “television remote control” for reference.)

I’ve learned to do simple, but useful things. “Siri, please set an alarm for seventeen minutes.” “Siri, please read my email to me.” “Siri, what is 45°C in Fahrenheit?” “Siri, what is the score of today’s Kings’ hockey game?” “Siri, when do the Chiefs play football again and who is their opponent?” These all generate useful answers.

But ask, “Siri, please read today’s baseball scores to me,” and you’ll get a screen full of data, which is correct, but useless if I’m driving.

I’ll often ask Siri a series of questions if I don’t get a useful answer for the first one. At first I’ll be trying to figure out how to ask it “correctly” so that Siri understands what I want and gives me a useful answer. But after a few tries, if we’re getting nowhere fast, I’ll start to let the snark out and ask stupid and occasionally insulting questions just to see how the programming handles it.

This was happening on Saturday, when I asked the following and got a hilarious (but perfectly accurate and logical) response from Siri:

The most hilarious part of all is that somewhere hidden deep inside my calendar lurks that reminder. I’m sure Siri will pick the most inopportune time (such as the middle of a job interview) to pipe up and either tell me it’s time to do that, or to inquire whether or not I have completed the task yet.

One taunts our digital “assistants” at one’s own risk.

Dropbox is a wonderful service that not only provides “cloud” based computer storage, but does so in a way that I like a lot. I’m a bit distrusting of letting other folks take 100% control of my data and its backup and storage and accessibility. There have already been a couple of cloud-based places that either went out of business for financial reasons, had legal issues which resulted in their servers being shut down, or had some massive technical screw up that lost data. Either way, everyone who had their data on those servers lost that data, and if that was the only place they had that data (i.e., no offsite backup, such as on a memory stick, external hard drive, or their home or office computer), they were simply screwed.

Dropbox works by keeping your data on its cloud-based servers, but also keeping a copy on every computer that you have linked to your account. So, in my case, when I have my Dropbox account linked to two desktop systems and four laptops, all six of those computers have identical copies of those files. Those files which in turn are identical to the online files that I can access anywhere, any time, from my iPhone, iPad, or any computer on the planet with a web browser and an internet connection using the Dropbox.com website.

If I change a file or add a new file or make any changes at all, within a minute or so (huge files can take a couple of minutes to sync across all devices) all of those computer have the updated version.

If Dropbox goes off line or out of business or has a flood and a hurricane and an earthquake and lightning and a comet strike that wipes out their servers, I don’t lose a thing because I’ve got copies of everything on every one of those linked computers. Plus, of course, copies in those backups I’m doing regularly at my home or office. Right?

Great idea, and it works well. Since I signed up a couple of years ago I’ve gotten to the point where about 90% of the files I use day in and day out are on my Dropbox account. About the only things that routinely aren’t on Dropbox are my music library and my photos library. Those libraries have a ton of files and take up terabytes of space. But if I’m working on some much smaller subset of those files, I’ll keep the working files on Dropbox.

Now, for free Dropbox will give you 2GB of storage. If you’re storing monstrously big files for video or something, that will get filled up pretty quickly. But if you’re like me and you’re just storing Word files, Excel files, PDFs, and so on, that’s a ton of space. It’s free, take it!

Then I bought a new HP laptop back in March. As part of that purchase, Dropbox upped my storage limit with an extra 25GB…for six months.

No big deal, I’ll never use it anyway, right? Duh! I barely use the 2GB of storage that I get for free, what would I possibly use 27GB for?

As a side note, do you remember when you could get a 10MB hard disk for your computer but you couldn’t imagine why you would need it? Hell, you already had two eight-inch, double-sided, double-density floppy disk drives, and those suckers held 1.2MB each!!

Then when you had the 10MB hard disk you couldn’t think of any possible way you might want a drive with 100MB? Then 250MB? Then 1GB? 10GB? 100GB? 1TB?

Do you see the pattern here?

So, of course, when the little warning popped up yesterday, six months after I bought the new laptop, I was more than a little shocked (for at least thirty seconds) to see how much of that 27GB of Dropbox storage space I was using, and using hundreds of time every day.

With the trial period expiring I was being knocked back down to my normal, free, 2GB storage allocation – unless I wanted to upgrade to a paid Dropbox account? Say, one terabyte? It’s only about $10 a month, but we’ll give you a discount if you pay for a full year in advance, then give you another 20% off if you get it now as an extension of the 25GB of storage from the laptop purchase…

This is why heroin dealers give out free samples, isn’t it?

So, for the price of one burger and fries or Starbucks coffee per month, not only do I get to keep my 25GB of storage that I’ve gotten so, so used to, I actually get forty times that!

I can’t imagine how I will ever use that much online storage…

Wait…

Well played, Dropbox marketing team. Well played.

The iPhone, iPad, and Windows 10 OS upgrades are proceeding apace (“iPhone, iPad, and Windows 10” might be the worst law firm name in history) with just a couple of minor, only slightly panic inducing moments in the iPhone upgrade last night. This is why you do backups first (and often)!

iOS 9.0.2 is actually quite nice on the iPhone 6+ so far. I like the new default font a lot, the keyboard improvements make a huge difference (at least to me), the new format for flipping through open apps and closing them is cool, as are a number of other new upgrades, such as iTunes. (Do not, repeat *NOT* join Apple Music! I’ll rant some other time, but trust me on this one.)

With that done, I’m spending tonight upgrading the iPad. It’s an iPad 2 with 64 GB of RAM, which was state of the art and the biggest and baddest available in its time. Unfortunately, that time was about five years ago, which is several generations in the computer world. It’s now sluggish and almost painfully slow at times, especially compared to the new iPhone.

But I still like it and use it a lot, so let’s hope the iOS upgrade goes well, even if I can’t count on it going particularly quickly.

Meanwhile, this just popped up on my FaceBook timeline, shared by one of my Pepperdine MBA classmates:

There have been a few of these over the last couple of years, usually with a found camera, phone, tablet, or some other electronic device. I have no doubt that a large percentage of electronic devices found by strangers, especially if they don’t require some sophisticated hacking to break into, are simply kept by the finder.

But increasingly we’re seeing people use the internet and social media to try to match the owners with their devices. This is no doubt because so many normal and decent people have figured out how much of their personal lives (data, pictures, video, and so on) are stored inside these magical devices. Folks are now thinking, “If I lost my [insert electronic device here], I would be totally screwed and pissed off!”

In the pre-internet age, the wallet or purse was the most likely receptacle of large amounts of personal information, but the amount of data held was minuscule compared to even the smallest and simplest of today’s “smart” devices. In addition, if one wanted to get the contents of the wallet or purse back to the owner, there wouldn’t be any huge problem in finding out who they belonged to. Real world river licenses and other forms of ID do not have passwords that include a capital letter, a lower-case letter, a symbol, a number, and the paw print of a rabid ferret.

So with so much more at stake in holding and guarding the details of our lives, of course we now have to be that much more careful about keeping those details private. In the event that one of our electronic devices are lost are stolen, we keep them protected, often with several layers of passwords, or even biometric verification schemes, such as the use of fingerprints. This is fantastic if your device is lost and you never see it again but someone, possibly someone without your welfare in mind, gets it and wants access to that data.

What is a good person to do in order to get this device back to those people when we have no clue about who those people are, where they live, or how to contact them. The police are too busy with crime and other problems, and to the average person this would seem to be a needle in a haystack task.

Until someone had the brilliant flash of insight to realize that if a funny cat video could get viewed by half of the people on the planet, so could a picture and the story of a lost camera or iPad.

None of this was why the internet was invented in developed. (Obviously it was built so that we could watch cat videos and get into horrific, stupid, abusive arguments about stupid crap that doesn’t mean squat!) But it’s a great unintended benefit, a way of letting each of us potentially contact millions of people if needed. Even if it’s just to get someone’s vacation pictures back to them.

Do you recognize these people?

And now the iPad upgrade has crashed and burned. What in hell is an “Error 4016”??