On Air Shortly– 1 pm Pacific Time
Battery University!

PDF: Process in WPS, OR, Save to Google Drive & Open with Word Processor

Download video straight from YouTube etc..
https://www.youtubnow.com/ and a little about webm

Zen Tech is not Zantac (Text Dictation!)
– although we hope you turn to us if you are sick of technology!

Refurbish Old PCs && MACs with Windows? Linux Mint is Ideal, But….!

DVDStyler DVD movie authoring software for PC & Linux..!
A good example of simplicity competing with comprehensiveness and usability..
“If computers are so smart how come they do not know what we want?”

 

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Additional notes

Notifications of new show notes and edits are tweeted at: twitter.com/ddhart.
– They’re tagged with #Zentech.
– When what’s said is unclear to me (or I’m unfamiliar with a topic) I tend to quote (” “) verbatim.
– Editor’s comments are delimited by < >

For a couple of months, the audio of today’s show is here. Recent shows are here.

The intro and outro music was by Pentatonix.

 

Paul was in the studio and Glenn called in.

 

Paul started off talking about how KVMR’s Community Calendar is displayed on his screen as he reads it. He said the way a screen appears is determined by markup not layout. Layout is more concrete and deals with things like how many inches and pixels and point size of text. Markup is a more general and determines how the elements of the page relate to each other — for example, H1 text is bigger than H2 text with out saying the exact size. He then introduced what’s called ‘responsive web design’, which makes a webpage readable on a small phone screen or a huge monitor.

Glenn saw the movie Aquaman the other night, He thought it was a pretty good movie and was impressed with some of the technology used in making it.

Paul found the Battery University website extremely interesting. <See the link above>. Going on he said that Lead-acid batteries (as in a car) leak current between the plates and will eventually become discharged, if they are left to stand unused. They also supply a tiny amount of current to the car’s radio so it can remember the preset stations. The car battery will not “do well” if the charge peak drops below 85% or 90%.

Paul bought a small solar panel of about 15 watts from Harbor Freight. He hooked it up to a battery to provide a trickle charge to make up any loss in charge from standing around for a long time. It’s perfect for his RV that doesn’t get much use. However, he cautioned listeners not to connect solar cells directly to a battery. It should first go thru a regulator.

He said “the peak natural voltage of a lead-acid battery that’s not being charged or discharged is somewhere around 12.7v”. So, from China you can get an LED display that will tell you if the battery needs charging, if it’s at peak charge or if it’s busy charging. He noted that if the alternator in the vehicle goes bad, it can pump too much current into the battery and damage it. <Presumably, the LED display will warn you about this.>

Recently Glenn had the battery in his iPhone replaced for $29.95, under a special program Apple created. The program covers the iPhone 6 and later. In later iPhones go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Battery’ to find out how much capacity is left. If it’s below about 80%, it’s time to think about replacing it, Paul said. If you replace the battery yourself or have it done by a third party, the battery won’t be as good as one furnished by Apple. The Apple battery will give you the best service lifetime — 80% capacity after about 3 years or 1000 charge cycles.
<The special Apple program was mentioned during the 1-10-18 and 10-24-18 shows>

Glenn has noticed that his refurbished iPhone 8 has been using up the battery at an unusual rate. Last Wednesday it went from 100% to about 16% in about 6 hours, without using it much. If it continues, he said he’ll have a chat with Apple. He thinks he may have turned on some feature that used a lot of current. Paul suggested he go to settings and find how much of the battery each app has used. In ‘Settings’ you can use the search box to find ‘battery’. He said IOS 12 and possibly IOS 11 has this search feature.

Glenn thought his mail service might been what was using up his battery. Paul suggested using ‘battery saver’ mode, which can be found the battery menu. This mode will suppress the push notifications from Skype, Facetime, email, etc.

When the guys went to the Apple Store at the Roseville Galleria to get the batteries replaced, they got the chance to examine a Tesla 3. It’s $47,000 out the door with up to $10,000 in rebates. But the federal rebate may be going away, Glenn said. The dashboard was very simple, just a 17″ touch screen display.

It has 7000 batteries similar to those in a laptop, probably NIMH Paul said. They are arranged in a big rectangle under the floorboard. And is has 4 electric motors, one in each wheel — the area under the hood and the trunk is available for storage. It comes with a charger and there are 10,000 charging stations in the US. The greatest distance between charging stations is 160 miles. The Tesla’s range is about 270 miles.

Paul chimed in to say that it takes 30 to 40 minutes to charge up at a charging station, which uses a high current that you won’t get at home. At home it will take about 10 hours using the standard 110v & 15 amps. 240v and 30 amps takes about 5 hours. Check with your utility as electricity rates can vary with the time of day.

In Asia and maybe Europe, Hyundai & Kai have a car similar to the Tesla in features with 310 mile range for $30,000. It will be available in the US some time this year, Glenn said.

The other question Paul asked the Tesla rep is what happens if you get stuck between the charging stations. He was told that Tesla has a charging truck that they will send out to juice up the battery. You should get plenty of warning before you run out and the navigation system will direct you to the closest station. Glenn vaguely remembered that Tesla offers free charging at their stations for the first 6 months.

Backtracking a bit, Glenn said having the battery replaced out of warranty is $49 for those with an iPhone 5se to the 8 Plus.

Talk turned to downloading videos from Youtube. There used to be plugins for Firefox and Chrome to download Youtube videos. But Youtube doesn’t want you to download so they tweak their service to discourage it and those plugins don’t work anymore. They’re not updated often enough to keep up with the changes at Youtube.

The site youtubnow.com lets you paste in the link to the Youtube page of the video you want to download and it gets the video for you to download.
<Though I haven’t used these for some time, keepvid.com is similar to the above. And the Dentex Youtube Downloader is an app for mobile (The apk is here)>

WebM is becoming a standard for streaming media. It comes from a consortium of companies like Youtube, Facebook, Microsoft, etc who wanted a royalty-free format that can play in HTML5. If you download a WebM video you’ll have a file that ends in .webm, which you can then play using VLC (Videolan). It’s a free program that will play many video and audio formats.
<More about Webm here>

Paul added that Youtubnow works with sites other that just Youtube. And it can extract and download just the audio.

If you have an older Mac to re-purpose with an Intel Core Duo, or Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, which are 32bit processors (later processors are 64bit), and as long as you have enough memory, you can boot and run Windows on it. You can buy a license key for Windows 7 from Microsoft. Or you can install it without a key, in which case it will nag you a lot. Or you can burn (on CD) a copy of Linux Mint, which is free.
<Linux Mint was mentioned in the 3-25-15 show>

Paul also mentioned DVD Styler for Linux and Windows (and possibly for Mac). It’s free and is used for burning DVD movies with many interesting options like making it start to play a some point other than the beginning.

Last Updated 12:55 AM 1-10-2019