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

The intro & outro music was by Pentatonix.

NOTE: another Zen Tech show is scheduled for 8-30-17, the 5th Wed.

 

Glenn and co-host Mikail Graham were in the studio. Paul was dodging wildfires in Oregon and was unable to call in today.

 

Mikail said that nowadays its easy to create music, even on your tablets. The Brass Rail, one of the last of the “old school” bars in the area, is featuring an evening of electronic music. He marveled at how much times have changed that even the Brass Rail is offering a newer genre of music. Glenn asked if such venues have audio equipment (speakers, mic, etc.) that can hook up with the music producing devices. Mikail said that most of them do, all you need is a headphone jack on the device to plug into the audio equipment.
<There are many apps for creating music on the Android. Google the words: site:play.google.com create music>

Glenn has been hearing lot of skips in the audio while listening to the radio (AM & FM), KFBK & KNCO in particular. Mikail said he’s noticed it to but wasn’t sure why. Maybe it has something to do with cosmic phenomena affecting local magnetism, he said.

When Glenn went camping recently, he wasn’t able use his phone to listen to his music collection because it was in the cloud. He asked Mikail for a solution.

First, Mikail explained that the cloud refers to data servers where your data is stored. Companies like Google or Apple have data servers in many different countries and locations in a country. Your data is backed up in many places, not just one location, he said.

If you have an iTunes account, then on an iPhone, iPad and even a Mac there is a cloud symbol next to the name of each audio track. If you click or touch the symbol, that tells the server you want bring the track into your device so you can play it when you no longer have an internet connection. If you delete the track from your device, a copy will still be retained in the cloud. Amazon Prime’s music server works similarly.

There’s an additional feature that comes with using the cloud. If you uploaded a bunch of music and some of it is at a lower quality like 64kbps or 128kbps, the server will replace those tracks with higher quality versions. <Whether you want that or not? He didn’t say if that is an optional choice>. He said this is what iTunes does but Amazon doesn’t and he wasn’t sure about Google.

Mikail mentioned that a few years ago, Apple forced a U2 song (or album) onto people’s iPhones without asking. Many people were angry. What else can Apple put on your iPhone that you don’t know about, he questioned. It started a big conversation that’s still going on today.

Mikail said IOS 11 is coming out next month, Sept 12th he thought. Rumor has it that Apple will unveil the iPhone 7S & 7S+ and an iPhone 8 anniversary model.

If you lock your iPhone with a fingerprint, a cop can force you to unlock it with your finger. The same is not true with a pass code because you can’t be compelled to verbalize the password to the cop. In IOS 11, if you hit the home button 5 times it will disable the fingerprint feature and you can later unlock the phone using a password only.

The disclaimer:
The views expressed on this program are mine, Glenn’s and any guests’ we might have or callers’ and do not reflect those of the board, management or KVMR in general.

Reading from a Jun 28th article at The Verge, Glenn said Google Drive will soon be offering a computer backup service that can backup your entire computer. It will monitor and backup files inside of any folder you point it to. The app will be called Backup and Sync.

The article didn’t mention cost but Glenn thought it will be similar to the way Google Drive is now — free for a limited amount of space and additional space for a fee. As mentioned many times before, backing up is very important, especially in light of all the ransomware going around.
<Apparently it’s not for mobiles, yet. Here are some articles.
Google releases Backup and Sync for Mac and Windows
Now available for download
An earlier article — Google Drive will soon back up your entire computer

>

Mikail said hard drives can be bought rather cheaply from Best Buy or Amazon. A Western Digital My Passport series 4-terabyte drive was selling at $10 more than the 3-terabyte drive, which can be bought in the $110 to $130 range. A 1terabyte drive can be had for about $70. He said if you get a 2-terabyte drive, you won’t have to think about running out of space for quite a while.

The Timemachine backup program on the Mac will warn you when you’re about to run out of space and will let you continue using it by deleting old backups or allow you to switch to another drive.

Mikail’s first drive was 10 megabytes and cost him in the $700 to $800 range. Later, he got a 650-megabyte drive for $2000. He currently has 23 terabytes of storage and he’s looking for more.

Glenn looked up an ad from Best Buy for a 4 gig external USB connected drive on sale for $99.99, and a portable external for $10 more. The portable drive is powered thru the USB rather that an AC wall outlet. <I think he meant 4-terabyte drive>.

Glenn wondered if these drives would be ok as network drives. Mikail thought maybe not. He suggested a NAS drive, instead. He said he bought 2 10 terabyte drives for himself. They came with 3 years of data protection where the drive will be replaced and the data recovered. There are smaller NAS drives in the 4 terabyte range from Seagate.

Mikail reminded listeners that data can still be recovered from a drive after you delete files. <Deletion only tells the system that a previously used area of the drive can be used for new data. It doesn’t actually alter the bits in that area>. You need to use a file shredder to get rid of the data. It will do that by, typically, rewriting random bits over the file you’re deleting. <There is a shredder in Spybot Search and Destroy>.

The other way to destroy the data is to take the drive apart and take a hammer to the disk platters. Glenn likes doing just that because he gets to keep the magnets.

The Seagate drive Mikail mentioned above is the Ironwolf model. There’s the regular version and the Pro. Mikail has the Pro with the 3-year data recovery and a 5-year warranty on the drive itself.
<Seagate IronWolf HDD 10TB Review>

The Samsung SSD drive mentioned on the 8-9-17 show comes with a 10 year warranty for the Eagle Pro model. Amazon has 500 gig EVO drive for $150. Solid state drives (SSD) improve performance massively, as mentioned before. The other improvement you can make is to install the maximum amount of RAM your computer can take.

Using extra drives at home for backups is fine but doesn’t protect the data in case of a fire or burglary. That’s another advantage of using the cloud for backups — you move your data to a completely different location.

Mikail mentioned that the iPhone has a feature called Find My iPhone that lets you locate it in case it’s stolen. He’s actually had to use that function. It also has a option that will erase all of the data if it takes more that 5 or 10 tries to enter the password.

Glenn reminded listeners that they can become contributing members of KVMR by calling the office number 530-265-9073. Or call the studio when the DJ is not talking on the air at 530-265-9555.

Ann called. A friend of hers inherited a PC computer but can’t use it because it’s password protected. She wanted to know how to bypass the password. Both Glenn and Mikail said they weren’t familiar with the process and thought Paul would have an answer. She was asked to email her question to zen at kvmr dot org.

Ellen called. After upgrading her Mac she’s been getting all sorts of ads, mostly for cleaning the Mac. Mikail said it’s malware and a scam that gets on the Mac when you visit websites and click things that say you need to update a program (the Adobe Flash player is a common one). Mikail suggested she do a Google search first. And if she still can’t find a solution, to call him for professional help.

Glenn noted downloads.cnet.com used to be a pretty good site for getting software. But lately, it’s gotten bad because all the ads make it hard to find the right button to click to get the program you’re after.

Dave Barnett, the KVMR engineer, came into the studio with a suggestion for Ann (above) who wanted a way to get into a password protected PC. He said to google the words: password recovery windows xxx. Where you replace the xxx with the version of Windows you have. He said the best ones are based on Linux. You’ll create a Linux CD to boot from, at which point you’ll be running Linux. It will guide you to where the password is stored. You’ll then deleted, not change, the password. You’ll also have the option of copying the files from the Windows drive, to a flash drive for instance.

Another method is to take the hard drive out and put it into another computer as a secondary drive. At that point you can copy data from it.

Mikail remembered getting an email regarding a previous discussion about using solid state drives (SSD) on a Mac. He said he misplaced the email and asked the listener to resend the email.

Joshua called about an old Mac he got from his mother. It has a Hypercard file of family recipes that he and his brother would love to recover. He wanted to know how to read the file. Mikail suggested that he google the words; hypercard import mac xxx. Where the xxx is the version of the Mac OS that’s running on machine you want to import to. As a last resort, call Mikail for professional help

To sum up, Mikail said the Mac operating system called High Sierra is coming in Sept as well as IOS 11. He really likes his iPad Pro, which Apple won’t be updating until about mid 2018. The next iPhones will start with 64 gig of memory and there will be versions with 256 gig and 512 gig. The 128 gig version is no longer made. The new operating systems were tweaked to use smaller files. <There’s more info in the notes from the 8-9-17 show>.

Last Updated 11:34 PM 8-23-2017

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