I hope everyone survived Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. This is a hectic time of year, what with gift buying and parties galore. It's also the time of year when you need to take extra care with your wallets, credit cards and gift cards. The con men out there are just waiting for us to be a little careless. Many people worry about online buying and having their credit card info stolen, but think nothing about handing that same credit card to waiter or waitress at a local eatery. The one time I had unauthorized charges on one of my credit cards, I was able to trace the problem back to a local electronics store. And yes, the credit card company reversed the disputed charges.
Today, I keep one card exclusively for internet shopping and a different one for local use. And yes, I review each and every charge on each and every statement. Do you? Some people prefer to use debit cards instead of credit cards. Bad idea, if you stop and think about it. If your debit card info falls into the wrong hands, your bank account can be cleaned out, down to the last penny. I have yet to hear of fraudulent debit card charges being reversed. A debit card is just like cash. Someone else used it? So sorry. No can fix. Credit card companies, on the other hand, generally will work with you and generally reverse the charges.
Gift cards from the iTunes Store seem to be subject to theft. Some iTunes accounts were hacked over the last week, and from what I've read, they all were sporting gift card balances. To Apple's credit, all gift card balances were restored, but like credit card statements, you should be reviewing those emails from Apple that list your purchases. Didn't buy it? Notify Apple immediately. Better yet, don't credit that iTunes gift card to your account until you are ready to spend all of it. Add things to your wish list until they add up to the amount of your gift card, then buy them all at one time. How do I know about this one? Yep, my daughter was hacked, and her $25 gift card went for a bunch of racing apps over the weekend.
As to local holiday shopping, I'd like to pass on a couple of things I learned as the wife of a law enforcement officer.
1. If you are shopping at the mall or local shopping center and you decide to take packages to your car before you finish your shopping, don't just put the items in the car and go back to your shopping. Put them in the trunk (or under a jacket or blanket or anything that will disguise them, then move the car to a different location. This time of year, thieves cruise parking lots looking for people carrying packages to their cars. As soon as you stow those packages and go back to shopping, they will break into your car. The minute you get into that car and pull out of that space, they're going to start looking for someone else. Oh, and have your keys in your hand, ready to open that door lock as soon as you reach your car. Fumbling around trying to find your keys will make you an easy target for a mugger.
2. This one is for the ladies and applies all year. Never, never put your purse or shoulder bag in that convenient little spot in your shopping cart that is designed for toddlers. It only takes a moment for someone to grab it and run as you look at merchandise. I see this almost every time I go shopping, and it absolutely drives me crazy.
I wish everyone a happy and safe holiday shopping season.
Admittedly I don't do much printing these days. Also I'd have to say that i can't think of too many times that I was looking at something on my iPhone and thought "I'd like to print this." However, with the iPad things are a little different. I'm not saying that I suddenly have the need to print, but I can certainly see someone making the case for needing to print from an iPad more so than from an iPhone or iPod touch. In many cases the iPad has become a laptop replacement for a lot of people and no one would think twice about being able to print something from their laptop. Apple also sells iPad Apps like Pages and Numbers and certainly you might want to print a word processing document or spreadsheet. Apparently Apple got lots of requests for printing too and they added printing support in iOS 4.2.
The iOS AirPrint built-in printing support is severely limited!
Although iOS 4.2 now includes printing support (AirPrint), the current implementation is VERY LIMITED. Out of the box you can only print to select HP printers. That's right! No Epson printers, no Canon printers, no other printers are currently supported. So unless you're willing to go out and buy a specific HP printer, you're out of luck. Rumor had it that Apple was going to support AirPrint "sharing" in Mac OS X 10.6.5 and the support for whatever reason got pulled out of the final release. That's not to say that we won't see it in 10.6.6 or 10.6.5.1 or whatever Apple decides to call it, but for right now it is what it is. Don't worry though, I found a way to do it now!
FingerPrint to the Rescue!
There's an App for that! If you're on a Mac with a shared printer you can download and test Collobos Software's FingerPrint App for Mac OS X 10.5/10.6. This App aims to bridge the gap between AirPrint and your existing printer. You can download the App and test it for a week at no charge. As a matter of fact they encourage you to test it first before paying for it to make sure that it works with YOUR printer. Yes that means that even with this software there's a chance that your printer won't work and that's exactly what happened to me. Although I don't have any real interest in Printing from my iOS devices, I still want the option if I can have it. So I downloaded FingerPrint and within a couple of minutes I had it up and running and ready to test. It saw my Xerox Phaser 8550DP printer and so did my iPad! Woohoo! However, when I brought up a page in Safari on the iPad and attempted to print it nothing happened. Nothing was ever sent to the printer. I figured, "oh well I guess I will continue to live without printing." Then Collobos updated FingerPrint with a new option. This new option allows you to not only print directly to a "compatible" printer, but also send the print job to the Mac that's running the App as an Adobe PDF. You can either "Send to Mac" or "Send to iPhoto". I tried the "Send to Mac" option and it worked! My PDF ended up in the ~/Documents/FingerPrint folder and immediately launched in Preview. So at a minimum I could at least hit print from there and get the printout that I wanted.
That's not good enough!
She really reminds me of my old bar DJ days when women would dress to "the nines" and come in and nurse a drink all night till a guy that they liked came in and started buying drinks for her. Of course she was there just for some fun and dancing.
Recovery
The other half.
After yesterday's food orgy. After dumping the culinary cornucopia on my plate and becoming a "Ravenous Feaster", it's time for recovery.
After eating all of those delights of yesterday, the last thing I wanted to do was to get up at 2:00 AM to go and shop with hundreds of crazed people at 3:00 AM.
WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THE WORLD?!
Sure I would love a 40 inch TV for $100.00 dollars
A Laptop for $65.00
A Digital picture frame for $2.50
But when there is only going to be 3 of each with 2,000,000,000,000,000,006 people in line to buy it, what are the other 2,000,000,000,000,000,003 people thinking?
Oh I know maybe the person in front of me has a "Discover" card and this store only takes "Visa or Master" …. yeah right!
Okay getting down from the soap box
Do what you like. It's your time, your money and more important…… your life.
So …. remember. BACKUP this Back Friday. Also make sure you can RECOVER or RESTORE.
Enjoy the beginning of the holiday season.
Musical Selection
I am sure there will be a lot of dealing in …….
Radio Days
Hey they will be coming back but in the meantime we have been doing a Podcast show. Check us out at WJR Internet Advisor web site.
I will let you know when the next LIVE show is going to be broadcasted.
C Ya!
:::
AppleInsider and other outlets are reporting that News Corp. is planning on launching an electronic tablet-only "newspaper" called The Daily. It said the "paper" will cost $.99 a week. That got me wondering – who will pay for it?
It's not like there aren't plenty of free alternatives. Both the major local papers around here, the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, maintain free web sites (as do many of the smaller papers around here). Many other newspapers do too. I know some have content that's only available to paid subscribers, but if you're interested in breaking news, there's also CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Fox News, etc., that are all online for free.
In addition, the News and Free Press have subscription offers that let you view the paper, laid out just like the printed version, and they do have some articles there that you can't get at the free sites. But the free sites are constantly updated with news, just like the other news sites, while the online "paper" version is a static representation of the morning's print run. Why would I want to pay for old news when the fresh stuff is free?
I don't know yet if The Daily will be updating its articles during the day – but if not, then it seems to me that they're no different from the static printed page represented by the News/Free Press. If they do update, great, but then why would I not just got to, say, CNN, where the news is free and updated (or the free newspaper sites for that matter)? Any tablet The Daily will be available on will certainly be able to surf the web.
Maybe they'll be ad-free. I know some people are certainly amenable to paying to avoid ads. Or perhaps they'll have some great in-depth reporting that seems to be lacking in most online (and even many printed) newspapers these days. They'll need to do something to differentiate themselves.
What would it take to get you to shell out $.99 a week for a tablet-only newspaper (besides a free tablet<g>)? Or is it too late to try and establish a paid online general news service?
I have a passion for reading that was instilled in me as a very young child. By the time I was 8 or 9, I had worked my way through the children's section of our local library and had written permission on file that gave me access to anything on the shelves. At that time, I was reading 2 or 3 books each week and was devouring science fiction like it was going out of style. I'm still an avid reader, but thanks to my iPad, Amazon's Kindle stores seems to be going steady with my credit card. This past week, I started checking out storybook apps (free, of course) for the younger set, and I've found some that I think will be enjoyable for adults and children alike.
Alice for the iPad Lite is a beautifully illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland, and has two versions, the abridged 52 page "Bedtime Edition" and the 249 page original. It's easy to page through, and has interactive pieces, like the Mad Hatter's swinging pocket watch. There is a full version for $8.99, but I'd stick with this one. It seems to have everything.
I had the pleasure of attending Macomb Center for the Performing Arts fall exhibit series featuring speaker Steve Wozinak a.k.a. Woz who shared his life experiences leading up to as co-founding Apple Computer. He also discussed the importance of creativity and innovation in education in nurturing entrepreneurship. The arena was sold out, full house, well over 800 people! John Peterson External Affairs for AT&T took the stage, AT&T was sponsoring this event. He said that ATT is averaging 2 new inventions a day. He introduced Mike Wendland and Woz.
Mike Wendland known as PC Mike (also a member of MacGroup Detroit) said that the Woz’s grandparents are from Michigan. Woz also has other Michigan connections he has an honorary degree from Kettering University Flint, MI, and he has spoken before our Mac user group. He also mentioned his God Puppy who I happen to know belongs to a long-time Woz friend/MacGroup-Detroit member Carol Goodell who initiated his very first honored guest/honored speaker appearance in 2000 for our group. Also unknown to me was that Woz like myself, is a licensed ham radio operator. Steve has loved to tinker since he was 10 years old. He attended science fairs, and in high school took an electronics class. His teacher was an ex military guy and he built test equipment, he arranged for Steve to go program computers one day a week. His first program he wrote was Knights Tour of Chest.
Steve admits to being a social outsider, shy, didn’t want to go to parties since all they did there was take drugs and he didn’t want to take drugs. He also didn’t want to be a follower, he was independent. His father was an Engineer and he attended a Catholic school. His dad’s brother was a priest. Steve’s dad taught him to see both sides of the issue and never told him what to do, it was all about choices. He had him test things and come to his own conclusions.
………. Doesn't mean you don't have to back it up.
Lately there has been an influx of digital devices coming on the fore front. In particular, a lot of no keyboard, no hard drive, touch screen devices. This kinda made me think about the old adage "out of sight, out of mind".
So you you say to yourself, "Calvin, what are you talking about" ) Go ahead say it to yourself, I'll wait. Said it? Good.
What I am saying is that in the past week I have had the opportunity to see and touch a few of the new devices that are coming out. A lot of people mistakenly call them "iPad" contenders but really they are not. Sure they are about the same size. Sure they have a touch screen interface. Sure they can connect wirelessly to the internet. Sure they can handle multimedia. After all of that, then the "but it can do this that the iPad can't do or it can do this that the iPad can't do. Guess what, the iPad wasn't designed to do those functions.
So many toys….. tools, So little money.
The other confusion I think happens that folks don't "position" the device in the proper realm. For example, the new HP "Slate" which I saw and touched is more directed towards the "Enterprise" as a tool. With the Windows 7 operating system, it would work best there. However, on the other hand, the "Galaxy" device from Samsung looks closer to a consumer based system with the Android OS driving it.
The big point that I am trying to make is that all of these devices hold the most important thing you want to keep, your data! So you want to make sure that you BACKUP these devices on a REGULAR basis. The iPad backs up to your Mac so it behooves you to back up the Mac itself after backing up the iPad. Why Calvin? You ask yourself. Go ahead. Ask yourself. I'll wait. You done? Good.
The reason why is simple. You keep you iPad and your Mac, most likely, in the same structure or home. If you back up the iPad to the Mac and don't back up the Mac and store the backup offsite at another location, when the house burns, or experiences a theft or natural disaster, all of your data is gone. Do your due diligence. ( I like that phase, got it from Steve Bernstein my lawyer).
Enough said for today.
Musical Selection for Rhythm Infection.
One day…. One Day …. I will be this cool. Yessssss! Jerome bring me my iPad.
Sunday 11-21-2010
Be there or be square. Big MacGroup swap meet and you don't want to miss it. You might be able to find that peripheral or Mac you been looking for , for a price you want to pay. r maybe you can sell something you no longer use that someone else can.
C ya there!
Whether it be the final frontier or not, space exploration has been a longtime favorite topic for me.
I love reading about it, learning about it, seeing the amazing images from the Hubble Telescope and probes sent out on fact finding missions.
So it was a given that I would download the NASA app created for the iPhone. Now NASA has done one better with a new NASA HD app for iPad. With all of the advantages that the iPad offers, screen size, clarity, interactivity, this app is truly an amazing wealth of information.
For people (like me) who came to the Mac from Windows, there's one big difference with many (but not all) programs when you close them. In Windows, closing the program's window usually (99.9% of the time) ends the program. It's removed from system memory (RAM), freeing up that space. On the Mac, however, that's not necessarily true. Sometimes you're just sending the window away, but the program is still running in the background. (Some programs do go away when you close the last window, but not the majority of them).
This can have a big effect on your available memory. For example, I just took a look at the memory on my system in the Activity Monitor (which you'll find in the Utilities folder if you're on 10.5 or 10.6 – I can't remember when they changed the name, but it was called something else before that). One program had been up for about a week – NetNewsWire, my RSS reader (and a pretty good one it is, too, if you are looking for an RSS reader). It was using up 500 MB of RAM – half a gig! I sent it away (with Command-Q, which does completely end a program, just like going to the program's menu and selecting Quit) and started it over – and it came up using 75 MB.
Why the huge difference? As an RSS reader, it goes out to a lot of web sites (I have 130 feeds that I follow) and as I go through the new listings, many have graphics in them. Also, there's quite a few of them that I load up in the internal browser each day. NetNewsWire is caching the graphics (and probably the texts, too) so that if I go back to them, they are instantly available. Safari does this too, caching graphics and web pages (which is why if a page changes you don't always see the change without forcing Safari to refresh the page).
All that caching has to go somewhere. Some caching is done to disk, and some to memory. This is the decision of the programmer, so unless there's something in the preferences that lets you fine-tune what's cached, there's not much you can do about it.
Now, you won't run out of memory (unless you leave a lot of stuff running) because OS X will use swap space, or disk, to move out chunks of memory you haven't used recently (like that photo you were editing but haven't touched in a few minutes) for another program if there's no free memory. Of course, you could run out of free disk, and then you will be out of memory. But unless your disk started out with little free space, that's usually not an issue.
But swapping is slow. You hard drive is many many many times slower than the RAM used by active programs. So it's a good idea to fully Quit a program every so often to free up the memory. I know at first for me this was an odd concept – I've closed all the windows, why is the program still showing in the Dock with the little "running" pip? Well, some programs (like NetNewsWire) can be doing a lot of work behind the scenes, even if there are no windows open.
Leaving something running in the background, like Pages, means if you go back to it a few minutes (or hours) later, it will spring to life immediately (since it is still running and doesn't have to go through all the startup work). If you've got a lot of memory, this can be a good way to easily speed up you machine (and one reason Terry White and I agree that getting as much RAM as you can will be the easiest and often cheapest way to speed up your computer).
But if you are RAM constrained – especially on an older system, where you might be limited to 1 or 2 GB of RAM total – you need to keep a close eye on the Dock, and send away programs you aren't using. Or if it's something like NetNewsWire, send it away every so often to free up memory.
Loading ...
