respublica

I'm low on storage

My iPad often brings up a message that I'm perilously close to using up all my alloted storage. I've had this iPad for some years and have no intention of spending anywhere from 400 to 800 dollars on a new one. What I've learned is that text messages take up an enormous amount of usable space on the iphone and ipad. By deleting them, a whole lot of space comes back. Also deleting all those emails and especially deleting for good the already deleted emails brings back even more space.

My concern with deleting texts is that many of them contain photos family members sent me and if I don't want to lose them for good, I have to take the time to get them off and onto a computer before deleting. This week I was so uninterested in going through all that that I just deleted. I figured if the family members sent them to me, they'd still have a copy.

Also, for some reason I've been paying 99 cents a month for extra icloud storage but I have never been able to figure out how to get anything into it. I have 44 Gigabytes available but no way to move anything into this.

But by deleting all kinds of texts and several years of emails I never knew were still on the ipad, I freed up over a gigabyte of extra space.

What to do when there is nothing to do

This was weekend we learned what it was like to not have television, computer and wireless anything. While planting some flowers early Saturday morning, Dale shoved his shovel into our buried cable line. Everything inside the house stopped.  Well, not everything, the washer was still going, but the things we count on went out.

I went around checking things and hoping this was going to be an outage area wide so that the cable people would send someone out. But finally after an hour I realized it was just us. I knew this by going out to the yard and saw where Dale had been digging. The ground was exactly above where the cable line was buried as it was laid from the back of the house to the pole at the edge of the property. I asked him if he'd noticed an orange cord and he said yes. It never occurred to him that this may have been our cable line. He did admit to moving it as his dug, but didn't think he'd actually cut into it.

But he did.  Calling Charter or probably any cable provider is a pain. You get the automated answer which will require pushing one number or other and answering "yes" or No" to a mechanical voice for any number of questions. I gave up the first time since none of the choices met out situation. I tried again later and again was frustrated. Finally I decided to just press 0 when the voice came on and sure enough I got a real person finally.

She set up a time for a service person to come out Sunday morning. So we had all of Saturday and Saturday night to pretty much sit around and try to find things to talk about in a very quiet house. We both found our cellular data almost used up by the time we headed for bed. We've never been in that position before and we both wondered what it would mean if out cellular allotment ran out before the cable guy got here. Would our phone just shut down and be useless?  We did not find out because we managed to squeak by.

I spent some time during the boring Saturday giving some thought to getting one of the Over the Air antennas. They are pretty inexpensive and at least we'd be able to watch local things that night. So I did it. I went out to Best Buy while Dale was out running other errands and bought an over the air antenna. It sounded so easy.

But like all tech things, easy is in the mind of the beholder and in the tv's they own. Turns out we have a TV without a built in tuner which you must have in order to make the over the air antenna work. Who knew? Lots of tv's are being made without them these days. If your TV has a coaxial cable slot, you're good. If not you have to buy some other part to make it work. I will not buy another part. I may just use this over the air antenna on a different tv one of these days.

Technology! Always wanting you to buy one more thing.

What is "about blank"?

Every computer or laptop we've ever owned in the modern windows era has had the words, "about blank" pop up in a browser window at some point. There was a time when this bothered me, most of the time I've just ignored it. But when I saw it again this morning on our new laptop, I decided to check into just what it was. I was always under the impression it was something virus-y or other not so good a thing. I learned I'm not the only one who wonders about this.

But it turns About:blank is a page web browsers display when they have nothing else to display. It isn't malware or a virus.  Most browsers have to display something in the browser window, and Internet Explorer is no different. If IE can’t figure out anything else to display, it displays about:blank.

 

There is something maniacal about printers

We've owned quite a few printers over the years and each new one we get is harder to set up and use than the one before. Early on they were fairly simple, attach the cord from the computer to the printer and plug it in, turn it on. Now the advance of technology gives us more compact and wireless printers which should be fantastic, but the set up is ridiculously hard.

We bought a new one on Sunday, a very small, simple printer to use for small jobs like printing off Dale's class notes. We didn't want all the bells and whistles like a fax (who faxes these days) or much in the way of a scanner. I studied the reviews on many printers that had what we wanted and went off to Best Buy and bought the HP 3755 wireless printer. It had good reviews and it was indeed small which is perfect.

I read the instructions and followed them to a T. But the darn thing would not communicate with the computer. I tried again, this time with the website set up as opposed to the cd. Nothing. It was great at printing out the set up information but would not communicate for printing what we needed. Frustrated I took it upstairs to my computer and tried again. Same thing. It would not communicate with the second computer.

What I find odd is that I was never asked for our wireless password. You'd think that would settle everything. How can the two things communicate if one does not know how to get online?

I googled this issue and found many people with the same problem and the answers were gibberish or no help at all. I just don't get why it should be so hard.

A much needed new laptop

I've been struggling with my computers for some time and happily got a new laptop for Christmas. I spent most of Christmas Eve day setting it up, it's not as simple and quick as you might think. For every program or file or app I had to download them and then find and re-enter all the user names and passwords. Not hard but time consuming. I'm just so happy to have one that works fast. Here is a pro tip: Put all your user names and passwords in one place.

My desktop computer no longer has an internet connection because it is fairly old and did not come with the capability to use wireless. It had been hooked up to the cable internet but when I went out and bought the Google wireless system the cable line went into the first of the three routers. It's a great wireless system, it comes with 3 modules, the other 2 can be set out in different spots in the house without plug ins. But that made my desktop useless. I used Dale's laptop for a while to get his Meyer Minute sent out, but it is so slow, slower than the old dial up.

So I'm happy with the new one, it just takes time to adjust to the new features. I was surprised there is not a slot for an SD card which I use to download photos from my camera. It seems SD cards are not part of most new laptops. I did learn there is a flash drive/memory stick I can buy which has a USB end and slots to hold SD cards and other USB flash drives. They're not sold everywhere, but I hope to find one. I use a camera more often than I take pictures with my phone.

Cable substitute a big nothing

This product report came from KSDK's Matt Granite for a local news segment. He tested a HK1 box which purports to be the solution to those who want to get rid of cable and the large bills which come with it. Granite made it sound so marvelously perfect I wasted some time checking into it.

"Do you feel like you're overpaying your cable company for channels you never watch and sub-par customer service? Looking to cut the cord? You'll want to check the top-rated new streaming box from HK1."

"Simply plug the HK1 box into the back of any available HDMI port on your television and in seconds it unlocks hundreds of free movies, TV shows and Google Apps in beautiful HD quality. Equipped with a remarkably fast computer chip and processor, this TV box out-performed Apple TV at a fraction of the price. It also supports Airplay if you have an iPhone or iPad as well as instantaneous connectivity with Android devices to stream content you already watch.

HK1 streaming box apps aggregate movies, TV shows and ad-supported content including live feeds for this TV station. You can also use it to enjoy live sports."

Sounds good until you try to get a half way decent review from someone who has one, or even finding the HK1 online. I checked Amazon since Granite mentioned that company as selling them and couldn't find anything like he described. And, since it is dependent on internet speed there is often a lot of buffering. Comments on this story on Facebook were all negative.

What this looks like to me is an ad for Dealboss and Livebox, not news.

Bigger, pricier iPhone

Today the Apple people will be unveiling 3 new model iPhones and at least one is expected to be the biggest and most expensive yet.

I won't be overly interested in their news conference since I just recently got a new iPhone after my 6 fell into Ferdie's water bowl and died. I switched over to the iPhone 8 plus and am quite happy with it. It has a bigger screen than the 6 which, honestly I appreciate, and has a lot more memory. The 6 had 16 giga bytes of memory and the new one has 64! Plenty of room for the photos and apps with much to spare. But, any bigger and I doubt it would fit in a pocket and be awkward to handle.

For people who use their phones almost exclusively this may be fantastic.

We're too controlled

Honestly some days I could just tear my hair out waiting for our laptop to get going. Every program takes forever to load, tick tick tick. I sit and watch the screen waiting and waiting and waiting.

There are just too many programs with too many built in security things attached and all are either updating or scanning for whatever issues the mysterious whoever thinks may be in there.

How slow can the computer go? We're going to find out. I tend to use my iPad much more often since it moves right along. But there are times when I really need the computer for its ease of typing.

Just what we needed

after a really busy week with orientation and the dedication of the library and the grandsons' cross country meet and Katie arriving for meetings in St Louis, we thought maybe Sunday would ease things. But this morning after filling Ferdie's water bowl, I stood up awkwardly and my iPhone fell out of my pocket and into the water bowl.  

I did all the recommended things but it is completely dead. I debated how to broach this with Dale and in the end he said to go replace it. Katie and I went to the Verizon store on Brentwood where we set the new phone buy in action. Now this was about 2:00, ground zero for shopping in that area. But of all things we were in and out with a new phone in, seriously, 10 minutes. 

We were amazed at how quick it was all the way home. In past years it seemed to take forever. So a toast to our salesperson, Tiffany, for being so good. 

Hete are the first two pics I took. 

Bigger phone, wireless charger. I'm happier than I was this morning 

Re-boot your router and beware of other programs

All of a sudden we're getting a spate of warnings about privacy concerns and malware. The problem is the solutions to these issues on our computers and devices is often confusing and sometimes even a false flag. A personal tech column in last week's New York Times gave a warning about not ignoring emails regarding privacy concerns. These emails are coming from companies which explain their new privacy rules, written after Europe passed the new General Data Protection Regulation law which went into effect last Friday. Since many companies are international, they must send out warnings about what to do to protect yourself to us in this country too.

You may have received an email from, say, Google or Apple or any other site which explains how to go about protecting yourself and most often the emails are asking your permission or consent for something. For example you may be asked to ok Pop-up ads. Or something else. The problem I have with these emails is it is hard to tell if it's the actual company or a hacker who seems to look like the real thing. I got one supposedly from Apple today and I'm pretty sure it isn't really Apple. By consenting to something from a possible hacker could be bad news. In any event, going through all the social media platforms and finding where their privacy policies are and how to handle them is exhausting.

All of which brings me to another issue. Tech news stories yesterday related a message from the FBI which advised, Re-boot your router. It seems Russian hackers have been able to slip malware into our routers and re-booting (unplugging and then re-plugging) should stem the malware.

Should you? According to the tech site, CNET, it won't hurt and we've often had to do this when we've had an outage or connectivity issues. CNET does however say that only a small number of routers have been seen to be infected and mostly some models of older routers. The router companies that found malware are Linksys, Netgear, Mikrotik, QNAP, and Tp-link. But again only a dozen or so models from those companies have been known to be affected.

It's kind of a crap shoot these days. I have no problem re-booting my router although it's not on the list, its the new Google Wifi mesh which is fairly well received and respected. But it's all the other things coming from company emails that concern me as to whether they are real emails or hackers. And, do I want to sit around all day and plow through all the steps for privacy protections.