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.

Both Paul and Glenn were in the studio today.

Glenn thanked the listeners and supporters of KVMR. If you’d like to become a supporting member, you can call the KVMR office at 530-265-9073. If you’d like to talk to the guys during a Zen Tech show, call 530-265-9555 or send email to zen at kvmr dot org.

Paul was impressed by a device being used at a hospital where he was with a friend who was getting some blood drawn from her hand. It’s a hand-held device 6″ to 9″ long weighing about 9 oz. It has an infrared camera that scans the hand looking for temperature differences. It then projects an image back onto the hand showing black tracks where the veins are.

The device was made with off-the-shelf components — the infrared camera, a digital signal processor and a red LED with a lens on it. A Google search revealed that the device costs $6000.

Paul said a little know fact is that at the US patent office you can download most patents. You can copy the patent without violating the law, as long as you don’t make money from it. He noted that some people will get a patent and release it to the public. Jonas Salk did that with his polio vaccine and Tim Berners Lee with HTML (the structure for webpages).

Glenn reminded us that he was in the hospital about a year ago and had a device similar to what Paul talked about. But this one had a screen and was able to show the depth of his veins. They were looking for a vein because he had to be rehydrated. He said he’s back to normal now.

Paul wanted to find the vein-scanning device on Ebay. He found something advertised for $27 that looked like the right thing but was completely different. He used search terms that included the actual name of the manufacturer but still got steered to something different. He said to beware of such tricks that sellers use.

Paul said he enjoyed watching a documentary from Netflix called ‘Minimalists’ about a couple of guys with well-paid jobs who wanted for nothing. Apparently documentary had something to do with wanting things just to have them.

Paul briefly talked about Microsoft’s Surface. 8 to 10 years ago Microsoft had a project called the Surface Operating System. It was to work with different surfaces — kitchen table, office desk — to make it a “conscious surface”. If you put something on the surface, the operating system would recognize it.

Quite often technology consists of great solution in search of problems we didn’t know we had, Paul said. An example is the laser. When it was invented back in the 60s it didn’t seem to have many uses. Now, they’re used in many things including surgery where it both cuts and cauterizes the flesh.

Paul said there was a remarkable advance in cancer surgery. Someone thought of combining a laser knife and a gas chromatograph. Smoke from the burning flesh is fed into the chromatograph, which then analyzes it and tells the surgeon how the job is progressing. The inventor indicated he will patent it but then release it to the public for the greater good.

Paul talked a bit about magical thinking, which, to paraphrase, is assuming causal relationships. People have tendency to make connections between events that have nothing to do with each other. If you get a phone call about your aunt dying as you’re about to change a tire, you’re slightly more circumspect about changing a tires.

He thought females are less prone to magical thinking than guys when it comes to trouble shooting. Guys tend to “pre-fix” the problem by unjustifiably speculating about its cause. Paul said he sometimes has to catch himself at magical thinking when he would “assume I know what’s wrong because of what it looks like, not because of what it is”.

An example is when people assume they have a computer virus when their mouse pointer seems to move by itself on the screen. Changing the pointer’s position puts a surprising load on the system when it’s doing something else — the pointer has to be redrawn thousands of times to show movement. When the system finally is free to attend to the pointer, it seems to move by itself. A similar situation can occur when you’re typing into a document. You hit a bunch of keys and nothing happens, and a bit later the letters suddenly appear.

Glenn said he helped a friend who had a Windows 10 laptop with a problem by installing Kubuntu. He said the Linux operating system is bulletproof from virus. Paul interjected saying the virus problems are vanishingly small.

Glenn warned listeners, as he’s done before, not to open email from an unknown source. And if you do, don’t click on any links in the email. The links can take you to malicious places. You can end up on a site that looks authentic but is totally bogus. Paul said it can be hard to tell from the URL in the address bar if you’re on a legitimate website. For instance, you may think you’re on the Paypal site but the link may be something like www.paypal.com.xy.me/securitycheck. If you need to go to Paypal, use a link that’s worked for you before <from your bookmarks or personal notes>, don’t use the link in the email.

Also, Glenn said bogus email tends to be addressed “dear customer” instead of your name. Paul added that Mac users tend to be more careless than PC users because they think their platform is secure. There is no security from clicking on a bad link.

Saxon called from Fair Oaks. A while back he called about offline storage for his photographs. Paul suggested a solid state drive that plugs into his USB port. Using that along with Lightroom, his photos come off the camera and onto the drive. He said that’s been working great. He paid $65 for a 1 terabyte Segate SSD. The guys were incredulous about such a low price — one can expect to pay that for a spinning drive, not a SSD. They asked Saxon to send them a link to it.

He also has 4-year old 15″ Mac Book Pro and asked what he might do for routine maintenance. Paul said he can try the utility called Drivedx to check the integrity of the hard drive. He highly recommends it. It comes with a 15-day trial. It probably won’t work on drives connected to the USB, just SATA or M2 interface.

Another tip is to run “drive utils”. But, Paul recently worked with a Mac that had a problem when dragging a folder across the desktop, it would slow it to a crawl. He eventually found that the home directory folder had the wrong permissions. “Disk utilities” could not fix it.

Also, Saxon has a 4-year old iPhone full of data. He had trouble regaining some space so he did an erase and restore and it freed up some space. Additionally, Paul suggested emptying the cache of the Safari browser. Paul said he’s never been able to find an app that cleans out cached data. On Android there’s Clean Sweep. Paul asked listeners if they’ve found such an app for iPhone. Paul did a quick search and found an app called Phone Clean, but wasn’t sure what it’s all about.
<I couldn’t find Clean Sweep but I see some people refer to CleanMaster as Clean Sweep. I suspect that’s what he meant, since he’s mentioned it before>

Paul noted that one shouldn’t depend on iCloud to backup everything. It backs up a lot of the important stuff but not everything. Glenn said using iTunes to do the backup to your computer is the way to go.

Paul said the Mac OS and IOS are quite orderly and prevent people from getting at its guts, frustrating people who like to take control of things like the “library”, which stores the profiles.

The guys warned listeners who use H2O Wireless, which uses AT&T network but is cheaper. They perform monthly billing by sending out a text message. Glenn got a text message from them promoting a two-for-one bundle. It had the link h2owireles.com (missing an ‘s’). The email was indeed from H2O but someone there missed the ‘s’. Then, one of its subscribers noticed this and registered the domain h2owireles.com. So a mistake at H2O led to someone exploiting it by creating a bogus website.

John called. He has a Mac desktop computer on which he installed the Sierra operating system. It slowed down a lot and he can’t figure out why. He couldn’t get Apple tech support to resolve the problem.
– Turn off Siri. Go to Preferences and uncheck the box that says ‘use Siri’.

Paul related a quick anecdote. He was in a restaurant with a friend and they wanted to know the origin of the phrase “something’s rotten in the state of Denmark”. His friend used Siri and got the correct answer. When Paul used his iPhone and asked Siri the same question, Siri replied “Sorry?”.

Last Updated 12:13 AM 12-29-2016

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 < >

The archive at KVMR seems to be having a problem. I didn’t see today’s show there. If it shows up, it should also be here along with past shows. At that point I’m guessing the link for the audio will be here.

Glenn was in the studio and Paul called in while RVing at Morrow Bay.

Paul has been suffering from a flu-like virus but he’s recovering now.

Paul said Windows 10 is far worse than he imagined. The anniversary update is causing problems. One problem is with DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), which gives you a unique number on your local network (internet protocol address). If this happens to you, you’ll get a little icon or indication that the network is connected but “you’re not going anywhere”. The fix is to turn off your router, then turn off your computer <then turn them back on, I guess>. If it still says “no IP address” you can give it an address to use. He didn’t give any details.

Another problem with Win10 is when it “performs an upgrade, reboots itself and then sits there looking lame at you, going “windows has encountered a problem” and gives you a whole bunch of very misleading statements about what to do”. He didn’t give any more details about this either. But he indicated that he might put up a article that explains more.

If you’d like to talk to the guys during a Zen Tech show, call 530-265-9555. Or you can send an email to zen at kvmr dot org.

Paul noted that it’s possible to switch to cellular providers like Puretalk or H2O by putting in a SIM card into your phone. But if you use an iPhone you will not be allowed to tether the phone. “What that means is my iPhone right now that I’m talking on has 3 gigabytes of data which I can’t use on my computer because it’s constrained by the company to not allow it to be shared with anything else”, he said. <It’s designed that way by Apple, as I understand>.

<I think Paul used the word unlock when he meant jailbreak, when he talked about the iPhone>. To use a SIM card from a provider other than the one you bought the phone from, you have to unlock the phone. But unless you jailbreak <he said unlock> the phone, you can’t use apps that aren’t provided by the [Apple] app store.

One such app is called Tether (a tether provides a mobile hot spot). You’re not allowed to tether the iPhone unless you unlock <jailbreak?> it and use the tether app, or unless you hack the phone “in ways that then allow you to provision H2O <or other provider> to give you tethering”. Alternately, you can buy a plan that allows you to do tethering, but expect to pay twice as much.

Paul said that no one has succeeded in unlocking <jailbreak?> an iPhone that has iOS newer than about 9.3. And even older phones can have problems if unlocked <jailbreak?> them. He said he wouldn’t downgrade to 9.3 to make the unlocking <jailbreaking?> possible because it’s not a reliable unlock <jailbreak?> and every time you start the phone, you have to do it again. If you have an old 3GS iPhone that has iOS 6.1.8, you can experiment with unlocking <jailbreaking?> it. An Android phone is a lot easier to deal with, Paul said. “It’s not tied down nearly as tightly as that”. <From what I can see, tethering is built into Android, but I haven’t tried it>.

The Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed on KVMR are those of the speaker only and not necessarily those of KVMR management, staff or underwriters.

The guys upgraded the ASUS EPC laptop belonging to Glenn’s friend. They replaced Windows XP & a power supply, which Glenn took from his own identical model. From his description, it was the AC transformer that had the problem because it was getting hot. They then installed the latest version of Lubuntu, a version of Linux.

Paul said people get confused about the various versions of Linux. Lubuntu is a flavor of the Ubuntu operating system, which is a flavor of Linux. The L in Lubuntu means it has a lightweight windows manager called LXDE, if Paul remembered correctly. The manager basically gives you the user interface.

Paul spoke of someone who did a speed test of Windows compared to Linux on the same machine. Windows was faster but it’s generally known that it slows down as time goes on, Linux doesn’t. Also, the test was without an anti-virus program. Windows should always be used with an anti-virus and that results in about 10% speed penalty. And there’s a penalty of about 3% per week of continual use <without rebooting, I assume>.

Paul said, Firefox is getting “top heavy” and “still requires the presence of the Adobe Flash player in order to look at a fair number of sites”. Chrome, on the other hand, has built-in video rendering, which while not a complete replacement for Flash, does play videos. A lot of websites don’t require you to use Flash, they use HTML5 instead. But some still require Flash, and Chrome can handle those. Also, Paul thinks Chrome is somewhat faster and definitely more secure.

Glenn noted that unlike other browsers, you can log in to Chrome and once you do it’s very difficult to log out. Someone using the computer at a later time may be able to see your personal info. Glenn referred to such an incident at the KVMR office <see the 4-27-16 show notes>. He said he hasn’t had the time to figure out what’s going on and asked if listeners have a solution.

Paul thought it has to do with the single sign in (SSI) where the name and password are stored in the “default profile” for the Chrome browser. To be sure you’re logged out he said you have to kill or uncache each session by clearing the history, he believes. And if you let someone use your computer, have them use the incognito mode, which you find by clicking the 3 horizontal bars. <I assume this is to prevent them from leaving their personal info on your machine>. Similarly, if you use Chrome on someone’s machine, use the incognito mode and close the browser when you’re finished.

Firefox has a similar incognito feature called “private window”. You can find it under the ‘File’ menu at the top, Glenn said. In Safari it’s called ‘privacy’ and you get to it by clicking on icon in the lower right the “shows multiple pages”, Paul said.

Paul once again explained that on the Apple mobile devices, the only browser available is Safari. Even though you may think you’re using Firefox or Chrome, it’s only the user interface that looks that way, underneath it’s Safari that’s running. Apple made it that way to have better control over security. For similar reasons Flash is not available on Apple’s mobiles.

Sheree called. She has a home accounting business for which she uses a web-based program. She has Hughes Net satellite for her internet provider. She wants to know how to keep track of how much data she uses so she doesn’t exceed her data allotment.
– Paul said that data usage should be minimal in her case. Essentially, don’t worry about it.
– Go to the Hughes Net website and you should be able to see your data usage. But be aware that it may take several hours for that info to be updated.
– Also be careful to observe the timestamp in the Hughes Net info, it may not be for your time zone.
– Watching video is the big data consumer, followed by audio.
– Hughes Net gives you free time after midnight. Schedule your heavy usage after that time. This is especially true when you’re doing big updates when you can leave the computer unattended.
– Hughes Net has the option to send you notification about your data usage.

She also asked about other internet providers in the area.
– Much depends on the line-of-sight. There are terrestrial wireless providers but she seems to be in a bad area to take advantage of providers like Smarter Broadband or Digital Path.
– Periodically check with AT&T for their plans to bring broadband to your area.
– Spiral is expanding with gigabit internet. Visit spiral.com to see their plans for your area.

The guys wished the listeners happy holidays

Last Updated 12:55 AM 12-15-2016

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.

Both Paul and Glenn were in the studio today.

If you’d like to talk to the guys during a Zen Tech show, call 530-265-9555. You can send an email to zen at kvmr dot org. And you’re invited to visit the website: zen.kvmr.org. You can listen to the live broadcast of this show by going to kvmr.org and clicking on ‘Listen Live‘ or use the KVMR app, which you can find on that page.

Paul said the app gives you a 64 Kbits/sec stream that’s “close to CD quality over the internet, which in many instances is better than the FM we broadcast from here”. That’s about 28meg of data per hour or 1/4 of gig per 10 hours of listening. If you’re listening over a cellular connection and you have a 1gig data plan, you can listen for 40 hours before you exhaust the 1 gig (assuming you do nothing else online). There’s also a 32kbps stream for those with low bandwidth (dialup).

 If you go to kvmr.org and click on ‘Listen Live‘, you’ll see different types of stream to choose from. The one with the best quality is the AAC stream.

Glenn did some Black Friday shopping from the ease of an armchair. He then went to Fry’s to pick up what he ordered. Paul noted that Fry’s has a sign saying they will beat internet prices. Glenn had the impression that “most retailers” are doing that now.

By the end of this year, Paul expects to see the beginning of the end of hard drives with spinning platters and the rise of solid state disks (SSD). He thinks the sale of SSD will exceed that of the mechanical drive in all but the largest capacities. Currently the SSDs are about 4X the price of regular hard drives for the same capacity, but he believes that will drop to 2X at the start of next year.

You can convert your current computer to use a SSD.
– Mac Book Air don’t use the SATA interface but a miniature PCI data bus.
– Performance of SSDs is typically between 5 and 10 times that of the spinning drives.
– You can directly replace the spinning drive with a SSD that’s in the same enclosure that has the SATA interface.
– On Ebay or Amazon you can get a SATA to M2 adapter. It’s a black rectangular box that physically matches the dimensions and electronic characteristics of the spinning hard drive. It has 4 or 6 screws that let you get inside where there is an M2 socket where you plug in the SSD.

The Mac Book Air has been sold with a 128gig SSD and people have been upgrading them to a bigger drive and then selling the 128gig drive on Ebay. So that’s a good place to look if you want to get started with an SSD.

Paul said the strategy is to use the rather small 128gig SSD for your boot drive: you boot, 5 to 10 times faster, and run the operating system from it. And use a separate spinning drive for your data. A two-drive setup has always been more efficient than using a single drive because the read/write heads don’t have to make big movements between reading data and reading operating system files. For Mac users he suggested putting the 78 gigs of OS 10 on the SSD along with your applications, and putting the home directory on the second drive.

For Windows you only need 50 to 60 gig on the SSD for the operating system. You’ll likely have to call Microsoft to tell them you moved your operating system. They will issue a new key. <Windows is aware of changes in hardware and when enough components have been changed it may refuse to run, to prevent piracy as I recall.>

On Ebay, Paul found a SATA to M2 adapter for $5 and a 16 gig M2 SSD drive, which is big enough to hold the Linux operating system. Linux takes about 8 gigs of drive space.

Paul had some DV tapes (digital videotapes) that he wanted to edit. He downloaded a program called Dvgrab from the Ubuntu distribution. The program was able to recognize his Firewire cable connected to his video camera. He got it to rewind the tape, start playing the tape, start capturing the tape <the data>, read the timestamps of the scenes on the tape that were then used to create file names for each scene. So if he had 10 different scenes on a tape (he pressed the record button 10 times), there would be 10 files created, one for each scene. The files created are uncompressed and require about 14 gigs per hour of tape. He then used a program called ffmpeg and a frontend <a graphical interface> called winff to compress the videos.
<Paul didn’t say it but ffmpeg & winff are available for Windows too (even on XP). Download here…
ffmpeg – 48.5meg
winff – 20meg>

Paul said he could have done the job on a Mac but the software that comes with it tries to do all of the steps at once. He wanted to keep the scenes separate as well as monitor the results at each stage.

Paul said that there’s a distribution of Linux devoted to multimedia called Ubuntu Studio. You can find it at ubuntustudio.org. There’s nothing special about the Linux, it’s the programs included with it that are specially chosen to do work on various media, not just video.

Paul again mentioned software for DJs called Mixxx found at mixxx.org. There are versions for the PC as well as Linux and Apple. It also comes with Unbuntu Studio. He noted that Linux is great replacement for old operating systems like Windows XP, ME or Vista running on old hardware.

The disclaimer:
The opinions and views expressed on KVMR are those of the speakers only and not necessarily those of KVMR management, staff or underwriters.

Bruce called. He has a need to install an unsigned driver on a Windows 7 or XP machine. He wants to do it without going thru the process of plugging in the device, having Windows go look for a driver and finally give up, and then go into the device manager to tell Windows I have the driver. Is there a place to put the driver & .inf file where Windows will find it immediately?
– What works sometimes is to put in the medium that has the .inf file, right click on it and click install. It doesn’t always work. Paul doesn’t know why.
– Before you do that you may have to undo your previous attempt to install the driver. It’s possible that not all files will uninstall. Look in the directory called System32 for the .inf file <to remove it, I suppose>.
– Glenn suggested using Revo Uninstall. It’s good at finding all of the files that need to be uninstalled. You would likely want to try to go thru the install process so all the files you want to get rid of are where they should be, before running Revo Uninstall.
– On Win7 you plug your device in, “it immediately pops up trying to be helpful and you immediately tell it to go away and quit bothering you”. At that point you launch your device manager by right-clicking My Computer and left-clicking on Manage.

Beginning with XP, Microsoft provided the method of signing drivers to ensure that the driver came from the manufacturer of the device being installed. In Win10, possibly in Win7 but not XP “there is a test signing mode which is used by developers which is used in such a way that they can try their drivers out, but you have to turn that on”. However, you may have to contend with your anti-virus software issuing warnings and you may have to temporarily turn off your anti-virus.

The guys talked about misinformation and disinformation and Paul mentioned the site fair.org. He didn’t go into details but made it seem like a fact-checking site.
<Research suggests that misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information>

Paul talked about good journalism principles that he found on journalists.com in 2009. <Doesn’t seem to be anything on that page now.>
– Name your sources
– Protect your source
– Be objective
– Offer balance
– Avoid conflict of interest
– Don’t censor. Don’t withhold information that’s important to the whole story.
– Get it right. Better to be accurate than first.

Getting back to SSDs, Paul said M2 memory is also known as M.2. Newegg has it in a 256 gig size for $99.

Glenn thanked the listeners who support KVMR. If you’d like to become a supporting member, you can call the KVMR office at 530-265-9073 or visit kvmr.org.

Glenn said he’s gotten comments suggesting Paul hogs the air waves on Zen Tech. Glenn appreciates the concern but that it’s unwarranted. He always feels free to talk on the air and defers to Paul for his great knowledge.

Changelog:
Added links to Windows versions of ffmpeg & winff here
Added link to article about misinformation here

Last Updated 1:34 PM 12-1-2016

fair.org

NOTE: There will be another Zen Tech show this month on 11-30-16

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.

Both Glenn and Paul were in the studio today.

Glenn noticed that when using iMessage over a period of time, sending and receiving messages, the timestamp of each message doesn’t show up until a couple of hours later. But swiping just a little to the left in the iMessage frame will immediately show the time each message was sent.

iPhone 4 is not able to use iOS 10, Paul noted. For a period of time hardware and software makers would leap frog one another, each building features to take advantage of the other’s improvements <implying performance can suffer if hardware doesn’t keep up>. But most iPhones now have a fast processor, an A4, A5 or A6, Paul said. And the newer operating sytems, Android 6 and iOS 10, have algorithms that “slim down the power” each app uses, they “throttle back on the power consumption” of the apps. Going to iOS 10, Paul noticed, actually improved the power consumption.

Glenn said he was never particularly concerned about the power consumption so much as the slowness after upgrading the iOS of his 4-year old iPad 4. He said it has slowed but it still works fine. The battery, he said, lasts quite a long time, 6 or 7 hours using wi-fi. By comparison, his iPhone 6s will go from 100% to 50% in just 1 or 1.5 hours.

Paul said he has a free app called Coconut Battery running on his Mac.
It provides info about the battery and the charger. It tells you how much the battery is charged & its capacity (the total charge it can hold <which goes down over its lifetime>). He said Apple guarantees that for at least 1 year and for at least 1000 charging cycles the battery will maintain at least 80% of its capacity: it will run for 80% of the length of time of when it was new.
<Coconut Battery was talked about on the 9-28-16 show. Charging, and charge cycles were explained too,>

When it’s time to replace the battery in your Mac, you can go to Amazon, for instance, and search for the model of your Mac. Paul said he’s found decent batteries from China for $20. You’ll pay $129 if you buy from Apple. The Apple battery will last you about 4 years. The ones from China might last 2 or 3 years.

When you first install a new battery, the machine will be confused about its capacity. Paul said be patient about warnings of errors in the battery, it may take a couple of charge cycles. <I heard that if you completely discharge and then completely charge the battery, The computer will recalibrate correctly.>

When you shop for batteries, use a reputable site and look at the warranty. Amazon warranty covers the behavior of the vendors selling thru Amazon.

Paul said he hasn’t found an app for iOS that gives a reasonable idea of what’s going on with the battery. But you can use Coconut Battery on the Mac with your iPhone or iPad plugged into the Mac and get a report on the condition the battery in your mobile device.

Glenn said his iPhone 6 is less than a year old and it currently shows 85% capacity after less than 300 cycles. Paul said Apple did a recall of the iPhone 5 because of a battery problem. Search for the words: iphone 5 battery recall. But be careful of ads in the search results, use the links that take you to Apple.

Glenn read the disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed on KVMR are those of the speakers only and not necessarily those of KVMR management, staff or underwriters.

If you’d like to talk to the guys during a Zen Tech show, call 530-265-9555. You can send an email to zen at kvmr dot org. And you’re invited to visit the website: zen.kvmr.org.

You (or anyone) can use Youtube to stream a live event so that it can be seen by a large number of people. Paul said Youtube itself will stream the 90th Macy’s parade tomorrow. Go to youtube.com and search for the words; macy’s parade.

Glenn bought a laser light infrared thermometer for Paul. It measures the radiant temperature of the thing at which you’re pointing it. It only measures the surface temperature, so it’s not suitable for knowing when your turkey is done.

Steve called. He’s shopping for a cellular service that includes a phone. He wondered if the Samsung Galaxy S7 is the phone that had a major recall recently because of a battery problem.
– No, it was the Galaxy Note 7, not the S7.
– The ones with the problem aren’t being sold anymore.
– Those who choose never to buy a Samsung again because of the recall are being kind of foolish, Paul said.
– Google-search the words; samsung note 7. You’ll find the Samsung site where they have a safety recall and exchange program.
<Galaxy Note 7 battery problems were discussed on 9-14-16 show.
Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge review: The best smartphones, period
Samsung S7: Rumours & reality
Specs for the S7 – Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge: Everything you need to known about Samsung’s Galaxy Flagship>

Paul asked Glenn his shopping strategies for the upcoming Black Friday. Glenn said he hasn’t been interested in Black Friday the past couple of years but is paying some attention the past couple of weeks because so many deals are happening early this year. He said he’ll be checking tomorrow’s newspaper ads as well as online ads. He’ll be paying special attention to Fry’s, one of his favorite retailers. He said you can preorder on Thursday and avoid the long lines.
<Some good suggestions here: How Not to Overpay on Black Friday? Let the Web Be Your Guide
The ShopSavvy app mentioned in the article is here.>

Robert called. He wanted to know how to get rid of an old desktop computer from the turn of this century.
– Take the hard drive out and destroy it. You can get hex screwdrivers to take it apart or take a hammer to it.
– Look for various recycling events in the local area on the behalf of non-profits.
– Recycling in the local area has slowed because the money being paid has gone down, Paul said.
– McCourtney Road Transfer Station will take any electronics.
– Try Rod’s Computer Service in Grass Valley for recycling service.

The guys wished the listeners a happy Thanksgiving.

Glenn noted that the Flea Market will not be on tomorrow. There will be some special program in its place.

Paul had a 2007 Mac Book with a battery problem. The battery had swollen due to the gases produced inside and was interfering with the trackpad buttons directly above it. He took the battery out, but is it ok to run the computer from just the AC power (from the wall socket). In general is yes, Paul said, but there are a couple of considerations.

A battery in a computer provides a uninterruptible power supply. So if something happens to the AC power you can just keep on working. You don’t lose your work and data being sent to the hard drive doesn’t get interrupted.

The other thing is that the battery keeps the clock running for the correct time of day. Apparently, the Mac doesn’t have a button battery to run the clock like many (but not all) PCs do.

Up to a few years ago it was common to have a user replaceable battery in laptops. But with more efficient LED screens, batteries last longer between charges and the need to pop in a fresh battery has diminished. Modern computers often have non-removable batteries. If you have to replace your battery go to ifixit.com and look up your particular laptop to see what it says about replacing the battery.

Glenn thanked the listeners who support KVMR. <If you’d like to become a supporting member, you can call the KVMR office at 530-265-9073 or visit kvmr.org.>

Pilar (more phonetically: Peelar) called. She has an iPhone 5S that’s a couple of years old. Since upgrading it to iOS 10, it’s been having trouble maintaining a wi-fi connection to her local network. There’s no trouble with her iPad or 2 laptops. She made it forget the network, reset the network preferences, restarted the iPhone and rebooted the [network] modem and even “restored it as new” <Factory reset the iPhone, I think she meant>.
– Make sure to get the latest iOS update. She said she has the latest: 10 1 1.
– Paul said make it forget ALL of the networks it knows. Go to “wi-fi” where you’ll see the list of networks — forget all of them.
– Take it to an Apple store.
– Paul got her to say that it seems to work with other routers, just not hers. He said there might be a compatibility issue and to try using a different router.

Changelog:
Added link to ShopSavvy app here.

Last Updated 1:37 PM 12-1-2016

During the show, Glenn announced a lost female brown and white pitbull who’s 4-years old and about 75lbs with a red collar. She’s missing in the Brownsville area. She has Addisons and needs medication, so may appear sick. She’s been missing for 2 weeks. Call 530-448 2526 and ask for Laura if you have any info.

There was no Zentech show on 10-26-16 due to membership drive

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.

Both Paul and Glenn were in the studio today.

Glenn thanked those people who continue to support KVMR thru their generous contributions and the new members who joined during the recent membership drive — the drive that preempted the Zen Tech show on 10-28-16.

If you’d like to call in during the show, the number is 530-265-9555.

Glenn said that he and Paul are both using a new cell phone service. Paul is using it to make free international calls to England. They were going to talk about it today but didn’t get around to it.

Paul talked about SMART utilities for hard drives. SATA (Serial ATA) drives going back 10 years have the ability to record the parameters of their activities in non-volatile memory — things like temperature excesses or slow startups or sector reallocations. On 5 recent occasions Paul was able to diagnose hard drive problems using SMART utilities. You won’t necessarily hear the classic clicking noises from a drive indicating a problem, he said.

Paul found 2 SMART utilities, one each for the PC and the Mac. For the PC there’s a free one from Japan that, he assumed, you don’t have to install — you just run it directly. It’s called CrystalDiskInfo. When you click the download link you’ll be offered different versions. The one Paul got was 239 megabytes in size. It should work with Windows XP “all the way up to Windows 10”.

The program uses colored indicators in red yellow and green to tell you the condition of your hard drive. An orange indicator means impending doom. Red means something is wrong and data is being lost.

Paul related his adventure with a hard drive. Most hard drives made by Hgst (Seagate Technology) have a 3-year warranty, some have a 1-year, he said. A SMART utility will give you a serial number. You can then google the words: hgst rma, which means Return Merchandise Authority, and follow the link. Using the serial number you’ll be told if it’s still under warranty <and be given the authorization to return the drive>. Paul was able to get a replacement drive.

The SMART utility can print out the info it generates so you have something to look at while talking to tech support. The SMART utility works with drives connected by Firewire, IDE cable or directly over Serial ATA. It tends not to work on drives connected via USB.

The Macs have, typically, the same hard drive technology. The utility he found is free for 10 days and is called Drivedx. You can find it at binaryfruit.com. Solid state drives (SSD) have their own issues and utilities. Samsung and Intel each have SSD utilities for their own drives.

SSD drives are being used increasingly in laptops but are typically smaller in size than what used to come with laptops because they are more expensive. However, they’re worth it because of the gain in speed, Paul said.

Paul said some Mac hard drives have a temperature sensor on the outside of the drive with wires from it going to the motherboard. But there were some Apple drives made with a built-in sensor and the temp data is sent thru the SATA cable itself — no external sensor or wires. If you have to replace such a drive and want to save money, you can get a generic drive and a sensor that attaches in series with the SATA cable. You can get more information at ifixit.com. Search for the words: 2011 23″ imac, at ifixit.com. You should be able to find pictures of people replacing the hard drive.

You can share your expertise at fixing something. At ifixit you can create your own guide that others can use to repair stuff. It works in a way similar to Wikipedia where others can contribute their knowledge to the guide you’re creating.

There’s a utility available from the terminal on PCs, Macs and Linux called ddrescue. Its a command line utility that you can use to pluck data off a hard drive sector by sector, track by track, cylinder by cylinder or platter by platter. If it has trouble in reading the data at some point, it creates a log file and continues on. You can then have it go back and revisit the bad area. Some drive cloning software will wear the drive out trying to read a bad area and make it unreadable. Ddrescue is smart enough not to do that.

Paul said that on a Mac he uses macports, which gives you access to Unix command line utilities beyond what’s normally available.

Many Unix developers use the terminal screen of a Mac because it’s a perfectly legit version of Unix. It’s pretty well standardized and it will run most of the familiar things from the Linux world including Midnight Commander (named after Norton Commander from the DOS world). More info at macports.org.

Glenn talked about his 2007 iMac that can’t run an OS newer than 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard). He was having trouble copying files an Paul suggested he use a program called Free File Synch, but it wouldn’t run on his machine. The alternate suggestion was Carbon Copy Cloner. Glenn found an older version (ver 3.5.7) that runs on Snow Leopard at bombich.com.

Glenn is going to rely on Pauls knowledge to replace the CPU in his iMac, taking it from an Intel Core Duo to an Intel Core 2 Duo, which Paul says use the same socket. The firmware has to be modified too so the Mac “doesn’t mind” a change of the CPU. That will allow Glenn to install the Lion OS (ver 10.7). This later OS version will allow the use of iCloud and Messenger. Paul said he’s found these CPUs from China for about $4.

Don called. He said that ddrescue can also be used to get data from DVDs that may have gotten scratched up. He said the data extracted is still an encrypted ISO image so you can’t create another playable DVD but you can play the ISO image directly using VLC if you have a particular DVD decoder <css or dss decoder, I could discern what Paul said>. And to avoid copyright problems, VLC can’t play encrypted files & DVDs unless you also get a ‘package’ called lib dvd css 2. Ddrescue can also make backups of flash drives, Don said.

When Paul is recovering data from an iffy hard drive, he’ll often clone the drive and then work with the cloned drive, In case something goes wrong, he’ll still have the original.

Paul said he had a problem with Timemachine because it wouldn’t back up his pictures folder. Timemachine thought there was no need to backup the folder because it was unreadable to Timemachine. He made a clone of it and repaired the clone with “hms repair tools” using Unix. He didn’t use the Mac operating system because its disk utilities are “not nearly comprehensive as you might like”.

Paul said that in Linux most of the useful things you do are with the command line where you end up typing in arcane commands to get things done. However, there are ‘front ends’ to some of the programs where you’re presented with a graphical interface and where you can select the options using check boxes and such. The interface then constructs the command and executes the program in the background without you having to type anything.

Paul mentioned a website that has old versions of software for Windows, Android, Linux and Mac called oldversion.com. For instance version 2.95 of the venerable Winamp is available there. Don’t use old software unless you have a compelling reason, Paul said.

Paul had to leave the show about 10min early for a dental appointment and Glenn handled the last caller.

You can contact the guys by email to zen at kvmr dot org. Or you can visit the Zen Tech website at zen.kvmr.org. And Glenn’s show The Flea Market has special content on the kvmr.org page. Go to the bottom right of the page and click on the ‘for sale’ sign.

Jack called. He started using a tablet to access Facebook and thru his interactions with people on the site he started getting porn involuntarily. He doesn’t know how to stop it. Glenn isn’t familiar with Android but wondered if there is a way to reset the tablet to factory conditions <there is. In Settings look for ‘backup’, as I recall>. He suggested backing up the apps and data to Google first and then restoring after the factory reset. Glenn also suggested he delete the Facebook account and create a new one while being more selective about making friends. Glenn he only seeks out whom to be friends with and not just accept any friending request.

Last Updated 11:43 PM 11-9-2016