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 < >

 

There will not be a Flea Market show tomorrow (9-10-15) at 1pm. There will be a special broadcast on homelessness.

 

Both Paul & Glenn were in the studio today.
You’re welcome to send them email: zen@kvmr.org

 

Glenn started the show by telling us about new Apple product announcements. There’s the new iPad Pro. It’s about 12″ in length and uses a new processor. It starts at $799.

Paul noted that the iPad is still running iOS, not Mac OS — Apple has not yet merged the two operating systems. And, unlike Windows, there seem to be no plans to make the Mac OS touch oriented.

Paul never met anyone who thought the touch-oriented Windows 8 was a good idea. His review of Windows 10 can be summed up by “I don’t hate it”. Coming from him, he said, that’s “not bad”.

In Win10, Microsoft moved things around. He compared it to rotating your car’s tires and imagining having a new car. On that sidetrack, he noted that if do a polarity tire rotation, you’ll go from having white walls to not having them and the tires will spin in the other direction. <The side with white walls no longer faces outward>. Paul wondered if this type of tire rotation is advisable. With modern tires, you’re not supposed to do that, Glenn said. “How ever you install the tire, as I understood it, is how it should remain for it’s life”, Glenn added.

Glenn wondered if people eligible to get Win10 should download it now even if they plan to install it later. Paul said he clicked the Windows 10 upgrade icon on a client’s computer and, past a certain point, you can’t turn back. He noted that the ability to do the free upgrade will exist thru July of 2016 and there’s no reason to do it now.

If you have Windows 8 and like it, just keep it. If you want to upgrade, be sure you have you important files backed up first.
<There are several articles about the Win10 update in the show notes for the 7-29-15 show>

Glenn thanked the supporters of KVMR. <If you’d like to become a supporting member, visit kvmr.org.>

Glenn had more to say about the iPad Pro.
– It has a 12.9″ screen.
– You can edit 4K video.
– You can design presentations and run a business on it.
– The screen has what’s called 3-D touch, it responds differently according to how hard you press. Paul said that would make it more like the current Wacom tablet that graphic designers use.
– Besides the full-sized software (on-screen) keyboard, there is an external keyboard available. Glenn said he uses a PC with a regular keyboard, if he needs to do much typing.
– Models with cellular network capability <Verizon, AT&T, etc.> in a wide range of LTE bands, are also available.

Paul went to apple.com/ipad and found more info. He said the Apple Pencil is now available. It allows for more precise touch control and should be handy for those doing technical drawings.
<Here’s the breakdown of the new $800 iPad (picture) (picture)>

In about 2008 or 2009 Microsoft started using a standard called XML — Extended Markup Language. XML had been around for quite a while but didn’t get much traction. Now when you save a document in Office (Word, Excel etc.) you’ll see filenames ending in .docx, for example. The x means it’s using XML.

Paul had to do some trouble shooting for a volunteer at KVMR who couldn’t get an Office 2013 document to open. He looked at the .docx file closely and found that it’s actually a .zip file. He renamed the file from .docx to .zip and then opened the file to discover it was composed of .xml files and directories with images etc. that all go into making the complete document. The .xml files are readable with a simple text editor and look similar to HTML files. He never did figure out why the document couldn’t be opened.

In an Office program <like Word> you can go to the ‘About’ menu item <I think it’s usually under ‘Help’>. Then look for an item that says something like ‘check and repair this installation’. This will verify if all the components of this program <like Word> are working correctly without have to reinstall it. Paul tried this without success.

He then used Revo Uninstall to remove all trace of Word and then reinstalled it. But it still wouldn’t work. He finally was able to open the file using Wordpad on a machine running Windows 7. Wordpad is a simplified version of Word but is not able to render all of the components of a Word document. Paul asked the listeners for a solution.

Paul suggested OpenOffice or LibreOffice for those who don’t have or want to buy Microsoft Office. These are open source projects and are free to download. They create documents that have much compatibility with MS Office. In fact, Glenn creates spreadsheets in LibreOffice for this Flea Market show and they open just fine in MS Office.
<The last I heard, LibreOffice gets updated more often than Open Office. I suggest going with that first.>

William called. He uses Thunderbird (a free email program) on a PC and he wants to transfer its address book elsewhere. Thunderbird exports an .ldif (Lightweight Directory Interchange Format) file and he wants to convert it to a vcard file.
– Paul thought he found an addon (plugin) for Thunderbird that does the conversion. It’s called Thunder Synch. William had already tried it but it seems to only synchronize 2 computers running Thunderbird but doesn’t export in vcard format.
– Paul thought he needed to restart Thunderbird to get the addon to work. Then look for the export option under ‘Tools’ or ‘Export’. However, it looks like you can only import vcard files, not export.
– There are other addons that allows you to save your address book in an email message format. It’s a specially formatted message that then can be imported into Thunderbird on another machine. <But this doesn’t meet his need to have it in vcard format>.
– Keep experimenting with other addons. Hopefully you’ll find one that does vcard.

William’s other question is how to synch address books on 2 PCs that both run Thunderbird. He wants the one with the older address book to gain the addresses from the newer address book.
– Thunder Synch will merge the address books.
– Then you’ll need another addon that will remove duplicate addresses.

Paul talked about paid ads on various sites like Facebook. Some of them entice you to click on something that initially seems interesting. While you’re waiting for that to load, your browser is told to go to dozens of websites in succession (if you use Firefox, you can see their names in the flash by in the lower left of the screen). Each of these sites sends you a single pixel image and loads a cookie onto your machine. You can’t see the pixels go by so it seems like the original page is just taking a long time to load.

So, now you have all of these cookies on your machine and a third party site that keeps track of them. When you go to one site, you may be sent an ad from another. They don’t know who you are unless you’ve filled out a form using your name on one of the websites. If you do, you might then be greeted by name on another site. For amusement, Paul will sometimes give an funny name to see how it propagates among the affiliate sites.

To avoid being tracked you can use the incognito mode of your browser. In Firefox go to the ‘File’ menu -> ‘New Private Window’. Other browsers have a similar function. Using this mode won’t save any cookies, sessions or history — they’re cleared when you close the window <or tab>. Incognito doesn’t mean you’re anonymous. Any bookmarks you made or links you dragged onto a toolbar are saved,

The ‘Do Not Track’ function in browsers is just a request — the websites you visit are not required to comply.

Speedtest.net has been recommended to test your internet connection speed but it requires Flash. Paul has found the new site speedof.me that doesn’t need Flash. It uses HTML5 instead.
– It forms 4 or 5 different connections to different locations to give a more ‘real world’ test.
– It keeps running to produce a continuous graph.
– Don’t forget to turn it off because it eats up the bandwidth

Last Updated 11:04 PM 9/9/2015