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 podcast of today’s show is here:

The intro music was by Pentatonix:

Paul was in the studio today with his guest John Paul of Spiral Internet. We didn’t hear from Glenn.

They talked mostly about a project that Spiral Internet is about to start that would bring 1gigaBit/sec fiber optical cable service to the area. No calls from listeners where answered.

Paul has lived in Nevada City for 20 years. When he first moved there, there was no internet. Dialup became available around 1994 or 1995.

Now there’s an initiative to provide funding to bring 1gigaBit/sec fiber optical cable thru the Nevada City area. That’s orders of magnitude faster than the 36kbits/sec, or so, of dialup speed when it was first available. With speeds of 1gigaBit/sec, a file coming from across the country would open instantly in your application as if the file was sitting on your local hard drive.

John said this all started when Google announced it would deploy 1gigaBit/sec service to one community in the USA back in 2010. <Talked about on the 12-26-12 show> Kansas City was the first place picked for the Google project, in part, because Google was given access to the [telephone] poles. Though Nevada City submitted a request, the local [telephone] poles were in poor shape and maintaining the cables would have been daunting. The current project will put the cables underground.

Additional info about the fiber cable…
– An individual optical fiber is thinner than a human hair.
– There is a protective covering over the bundle of fibers.
– The conduit (1 inch to 3/4 inch dia.) is laid first and the fiber is blown thru it with air pressure
– Paul heard that orange conduit is sometimes mistaken for tree roots and that people attempt to pull out.
– Comcast & AT&T already have optical fiber cable in the Nevada City area, which they don’t share with any other company.

In 2010 a project called something like Central Valley Independent Network was funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to lay fiber cable from Bakersfield to Colusa, passing thru Nevada County. It’s an open project that independent service providers can hook into. <John implied the current funding initiative, mentioned above, is part of this ARRA project.>

2 high schools, a middle school and a library are being connected as a result of the ARRA project. Local service providers, like Spiral Internet, are expected to hook into that cable and bring the service to individual houses. This is a dedicated cable connection and is not shared with other subscribers like, for instance, Comcast cable. John also said Spiral’s fiber cable will come directly into the house. It won’t terminate outside with Ethernet providing the final link.

Fiber cable is used for more than just carrying internet traffic. Chattanooga Tenn. is using it for their smart grid electricity service.

Cloud storage services like Dropbox will be easier to use with fiber because when you collaborate on editing a document, the response times will be so short.

Current internet speeds, including [wire] cable, are not symmetrical. Download speeds are much faster than upload speeds. A Comcast cable with 100megaBits/sec download speed will have about 5 or 10megaBits/sec upload speed. With 1gigaBit/sec fiber cable is that same speed for both uploads & downloads.

John said the latency would go down to zero. Unlike raw speed, latency is the time it takes for the network to respond to your request for a page. This is important for game players who want the game to respond quickly to joystick movement. It’s also important for stock traders who want their orders to transact before other traders have a chance.

Paul again mentioned speedof.me. This site tests your internet connection speed. It uses HTML5 instead of Flash. For more info see the notes for the 9-9-15 show.

Paul asked if the internet is a utility but is not officially recognized as such. John said that though the service providers have opposed it, earlier this year the FCC declared that the internet is a utility, like water or electricity.

Paul wondered what companies benefit from fiber cable. John said that everyone benefits but especially those who use cloud services. Increasingly, software, as well as storage, is provided on the internet. Rather than use software running on their local computers, businesses are turning to the internet where software is provided as a service. Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office 365 are examples. Companies started to provide software as a service, in part, because people became reluctant to buy new version of software that offered only a few improvements.

Paul speculated that the light used in fiber optic cable is infrared. John said different laser light frequencies can be used in a fiber, each at 1gigaBit/sec.

Paul told of a guy he had spoken to who repaired fiber cables. He would use a microscope and a microscopic furnace to butt-join the ends of the fiber. The fibers are actually a bit dangerous, they can get under the skin like thorns.

Paul mentioned the Global Village software. Written to run on Berkeley System Distribution Unix for Berkeley students to use in the late 70’s and early 80’s. It was a discrete system, not on the internet. It was like a blend of Facebook & Wikipedia. Arguably, this began the transition from face to face interaction to virtual interaction.

Spiral Internet applied for a grant to begin phase one of the fiber optic project in Feb of 2013. 2 weeks ago John received notice from the California Public Utilities Commission that they will likely fund 60% of the project. He already had 40% in matching funds. The PUC will vote on it on Dec. 3.

John said the project areas have been delineated and you can see where they are if you go to spiral.com/fiber. You can enter your address and see if you are in one of areas of the initial phase. This will also tell them you’re interested so they’ll know where to expand to next.

If the PUC votes to fund the project, Spiral expects to start laying cable in the spring. Notices will go out to homes in the area and local meetings will be held to promote the coming service. Go to the spiral.com/fiber page to see area where the project will start.

John wasn’t prepared to say what the price of the service will be. Fixed wireless or DSL typically costs about $10 or $11 per megbit/sec <per month, I guess>. Spiral’s service will be about $.06 megbit/sec. Google fiber is $120/month and AT&T is closely matching that price. Spiral hasn’t decided what to charge.

As more TV content is being provided over the internet, John expects people to drop services like Direct TV and Dish. He also thinks that people will be able to fine-tune the content so they only pay for what they really want.

Telemedicine is another area poised to expand on the internet, facilitated by higher speeds. Various health monitors communicating over the internet will help in diagnosing physical conditions.

Cellular phone service can be improved because cell towers can be installed in more places when there’s high-speed fiber nearby to carry the signal.

Listeners can help in getting the PUC to vote for the funding by sending emails to the commissioners. Go to nevadacountyconnected.com and you’ll find an on-going blog about the project. There you’ll find instruction on how to send supporting emails. And you’ll be able to keep track of the construction as it progresses.

Paul said he’ll put up the podcast of today’s show. Go to kvmr.org and then click on the items that “indicate streaming and past shows”. <I couldn’t find what he was talking about. I did find where KVMR’s has podcasts of past shows stored for a limited time. Today’s Zen Tech show is already there. You can find podcasts of various KVMR shows by going to kvmr.org and following the link called ‘Archive‘ located toward the bottom of the page

Contact info for Spiral Internet:
support@spriralinternet.com
530-478-9822

Last Updated 12:54 AM 11-12-2015

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 intro music was by Pentatonix:

Glenn & Paul were both in the studio today.

A few weeks ago, Paul got an Apple TV 4. He’s amazed by the quality. Youtube is increasingly making available feature-length documentaries and other content for free, and Paul sees no reason to subscribe to any video provider. It takes as little as 1.5 megabits/sec to stream Youtube video, he said.
<A few more details about Apple TV are in the notes for the 9-23-15 show>

Glenn recently installed a router at home, but when he tried to access it with his iPad, he got the message the “router is not connected to the internet”.

Glenn has AT&T DSL upstairs but the wireless signal wasn’t making it downstairs. He ran an Ethernet cable from the upstairs router to the router downstairs that he installed. Paul helped configure the downstairs router by turning off DHCP and assigning an appropriate range of addresses, thus turning it into a switch. He’ll need to look at it again, apparently.

Many residents in Nevada County have DSL and a beige-colored modem made by 2Wire. Some parts of the county have switched to DSL 2 Plus — called Uverse by AT&T. It “hands out the same kind of address range as the original” DSL, Paul assumed, so it shouldn’t look that different.

When routers are configured, they sometimes have 2 buttons, “save” and “activate”, and you need to do both for your changes to be stored in the non-volatile memory. Paul typically reboots the router and then checks to be sure the changes took effect.

Not all routers are the same. They vary in the power of the radio transmitter, the sensitivity to low power and the rejection of stray signals.
– Some routers perform channel hopping over the 11 channels assigned to the 2.4 gigaHertz band. <To find unused channels, I guess>.
– Ideally, you want to set your router to use a channel not used by other nearby wi-fi networks. Diagnostic software can tell you which channels are in use.
– 5.4 gigaHertz routers have a stronger signal and a shorter range. <Higher frequencies have less penetration, as I recall>
– You can use the less common 5.4 gigaHertz band to avoid interference from nearby routers, but the router has to be installed and configured to do that.
– Newer tablets and phones can use the 5.4 gigaHertz band but some older equipment can’t.
– The order of preference in connecting to a router: use a wired connection (not possible with most mobile devices), use 5.4 gigaHertz wireless if your device can use it or use 2.4 gigaHertz (typically used by most mobile units).
– Paul likes the app called Wi-Fi Analyzer, which tells you the channels nearby networks are using so you can configure your router for an unused channel.
<I found 2 called Wi-Fi Analyzer. The more popular one is here.
the other one is here:>

Raymond called about the offer Paul made to people with older computers running Windows XP who’d like to change to Lubuntu — a version of the Linux operating system. Paul was hoping to provide a way for people to bring their old computers and have Lubuntu installed. He said he’ll figure out something before the next show
– It takes about .5 hr to install.
– Make sure you’ve backed up what you want to keep as the hard drive will be wiped clean.
– Go to lubuntu.net to see an animation of what to expect from Lubuntu.
– There’s a version called Edubuntu for people who like science & math and leans toward educating your kids.
– <He talked about this in the 9-23-15 show. See those notes for more details>

You can order a CD with Lubuntu <or other flavors of Linux> for about $10. You can then boot from the CD each time you want to use it, or permanently install it from the CD.

Ubuntu <and Linux in general> allow you to create accounts that have lower privileges than the top level administrator. These accounts, which you can assign to your child, make it difficult for malware to get installed. Viruses generally need administrator access to install and your child won’t have the administrator’s password.

To run Lubuntu your machine has to be able to boot from a CD, some older machines can’t. On Ebay you can find people selling Ubuntu on a flash drive. But, again, not all older computers can boot from a flash drive. You can test if your computer can boot from flash. You have to first insert the flash drive and then boot. While booting, keep pressing the F2, F10 or F12 key (depending on your computer) to get to the menu where you select the device to boot from. <For some computers, you’ll have to go in to the BIOS settings to pick the boot device>. Just remember to have the flash drive plugged in before booting or you won’t be offered the option to boot from it.

For those without an CD drive, there are external units available in the $25 to $35 range. That should get you a CD reader/writer & DVD reader/writer.

Around the time that manufacturers stopped providing CDs, containing the operating system, with new computers, they started providing a recovery partition on the hard drive, From that partition you can create bootable CDs in case you need to restore your operating system.

This is true for the Mac operating system, too. There are command line tools that let you create a bootable flash drive.

Paul talked a bit about monitors.
– You can buy a 24″ LED screen for about $139.
– LED monitors give off very little EMF.
– Negative features of CRTs (tube type monitors): they produce alternating magnetic & electrical fields, soft x-rays, ozone, they warm the air and produce static electricity that makes dust stick.

Ralph called. He has an XP machine that’s been having problems with some websites. He wondered if running Lubuntu will let him access the internet. And he wanted to know if his only choice is to overwrite everything on his hard drive.
– Lunbuntu comes with Firefox. It’s the same version that comes with Windows so there’s nothing new to learn.
– When you boot Lubuntu from a CD or flash drive, you’ll be given a choice of installing it on your hard drive or just run it for a single session while preserving the hard drive content.
– If you choose to only run from the CD, it will be slow (because it’s accessing the CD). And you can’t save things like browser bookmarks because the CD is not writeable. But you’ll have a chance to try Ubuntu before committing to it.
– Ubuntu gives you a third option when you boot it called memtest. This will run a diagnostic program to check the memory chips in your machine.
– Try speedof.me to test the speed of your internet connection. It can test multiple connections at once. It uses HTML5 instead of Flash. <Mentioned in the 9-9-15 show notes>
– There are times a website is accessed by a lot of people at once and it becomes slow for everyone.
– <You might try restarting the browser. If it’s been running for a long time, it can bog down>

Last Updated 10:59 PM 10/14/2015

/p

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 intro music was by Pentatonix:

Both Paul & Glenn were in the studio today.

Paul kind of rambled a lot today. No callers got on the air.

When Paul switched the Zen Tech website from running on Joomla to WordPress, he wanted to preserve all of the content including hundreds of show notes. He found a plugin for WordPress that was made to import from an old version of Joomla that the site had been running on for some 10 years.

Plugins for WordPress, as with many programs, are generally written by third parties who may not update the plugins in a timely manner, thus leading to security problems.

Some time back, LinkedIn had a security breech due, in part, to the users’ passwords not being properly encrypted. If a person who logs into LinkedIn uses a password that they also use at other sites, that makes it easier for the password thief to impersonate the user on those other sites. <don’t reuse your passwords — especially on critical sites like banks & brokerage companies.>

Captchas (text made so only a human can read) are often used during a login to make it difficult for robotic software to continually entering user name & password combinations until they gain entry. People from third world countries, who are paid paltry wages, are sometimes used in place of robotic software to decipher captchas.

Paul recently updated the version of WordPress at the Zen Tech site. After doing so, he found that the theme (the part that controls the appearance — the lettering, background, etc.) also needed updating because, apparently, of a security issue.

WordPress has become pretty mainstream now. If you go to a hosting company like 1and1.com, they already have WordPress websites ready to go, all you need to do is pay them their fee. Paul said, the easy way to find out how WordPress works is to go to wordpress.com, where you can quickly set up a website. He said, just start creating the site and things will become self-evident as you go along. You don’t have to give an personal information, you can even use a fake name and a throw-away email address.

There’s a trick you can use with Gmail by putting a period in your name. You can use one or more periods in the name (yo.urnam@gmail.com your.na.me@gmail.com) and you’ll still get email at yourname@gmail.com. You can use a name with periods when you sign up for some service, and later set up a filter at gmail to trash any emails with periods, thus disposing any spam that service may send you. You can also use this to find out if a service violated its promise not to give out your email to advertisers.

It once was, and may still be, true that you could use the plus sign in your email name. This was deliberately designed into Sendmail so that if you use yourname+randomletters@mail.com the +randomletters would get truncated and the email would be delivered to yourname@mail.com.

The domain naming system is not case sensitive, Paul said. You can use Kvmr.Org and it will still work like kvmr.org. In most cases you can use mixed case in the user name, too — yOuRnAme@kvmr.org for example.

The CAN-SPAM Act required that when you sign up for a mailing list, your request had to be confirmed. An email is sent to confirm your intent to join. And every email from then on has to have a link to let you unsubscribe. Some services make the unsubscribe link hard to find. And some will claim that it will take time to process the unsubscribe request, giving them time to sell your address to some other service.

There was a brief mention of the “Do Not Call List“. After Glenn first put his name on the list, the number of calls went down, but they’ve increased lately. He said he’d have to check if his name is still on the list.

A company can claim they’re calling from outside of the US and therefore not breaking the law regarding the do not call list. “There’s no way of figuring out where the call came from”, Paul said. Caller ID can be faked easily and is not trustworthy. Email addresses can be faked too.

If you get a call from someone claiming to represent your bank, it can be a scam. Hang up and call your bank at the phone number you know is good, <like the one on your monthly statement.>

Domain names that look similar to that of your bank can be created — bofamerica.com or bankofa.com or welsfargo.com etc. An unsuspecting user can mistakenly type in the wrong name and end up at a bogus website where they end up revealing their username and password.

Glenn asked the listeners if anyone has gotten the new iPhone 6 or 6+ or the new iPad. He’d like to hear from you.

Apple has issued a new operating system, iOS9. Often they’ll have a new iOS to go along with the new hardware. Paul said there some wisdom in waiting to upgrade, there may be some bugs that will be corrected with revisions. Paul thought iOS9 can be installed on an iPad as old as version 2, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Apple has a tendency to abandon older hardware as it improves the software or firmware.

Glenn’s iPhone 4S still has version 7 of iOS and he’s found some of his software won’t update unless it has version 8, and version 8 on a 4S is sluggish (as mentioned on a previous show). Paul’s iPhone 3GS running the Facebook app is so slow it’s unusable.

Paul got a new 20′ RV with a solar panel. Its interior lighting comes from tungstun filiament light bulbs that have a color temperature of 4000 to 5000 Kelvin. You can get direct plugin replacement LED lights on Ebay. Daylight (or warm white) LEDs are 5000 to 6000 Kelvin. Paul found some daylight 12 volt LEDs for $1 each.

The battery used to crank the engine doesn’t like being discharged more than about 10% so a separate, deep cycle battery is used to run the lights. It’s made to discharge as much as 80% without being damage. He found one for $99

There are other gadgets RV campers can get on Ebay like a voltmeter that tells you the house battery voltage. The discharge of a battery vs. voltage is not linear. Most of the time the battery is about 12 volts, it can be as high as 13 volts. “Anything below about 11.5 volts means it’s on the way out”. There’s also the type of indicator with just color bar graphs to indicate the state of the battery.

Paul found a 100watt solar panel that delivers about 17volts to charge a 12volt battery. A charge regulator has to be used between the solar panel and the battery to charge the battery properly. Paul paid $16 for a 20amp charge regulator. If there’s more electricity coming from the panel than is needed to run the equipment in the RV, the excess is used to charge the battery.

Glenn invited people to write to zen@kvmr.org.

Paul again offered Windows XP users whose machines are working OK, a CD with Lubuntu (a version of Linux). He talked about this in the 9-23-15 show. See those notes for more details.

Paul told us that while NASA was looking for solution for ballpoint pens not working in space, because they rely on gravity, the Russian solution was to use pencils, or so the story goes

Today’s Zen Tech show was made possible in part by Vermicrop Organic.

Last Updated 10:06 PM 9/30/2015

TODAY is the first day of Fall!

Repairing things like an Apple TV 4 using IFIXIT.COM

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 < >

Note: There will be another Zen Tech show this month on 9-30-15

Glenn & Paul were both in the studio today.

Paul started by talking about the Fall Equinox, which occurred today. During an equinox the length of the day and night are expected to be exactly the same everywhere on earth. But things are not so simple. Discrepancies in the length of day and night occur due to how you measure sunrise and set. For instance, the day can start when either the first light from the Sun, the middle of the Sun or the trailing edge of the Sun is on the horizon. The above link explains further.

Paul has recently been working on a VHS tape deck. Earlier models had a lot of belts driving pulleys. The belts would stretch and cause problems. Later on, manufacturers began using gears to avoid that problem. It used to be easier to find a replacement belt that would work, but the specificity of the gears made it hard to find replacements.

Paul went on to talk about cars that had progressive or continuous transmissions — such as the variomatic. Such a transmission “has to slip between the ratios” and the slippage tends to generate heat. Cars with this type of transmission never got a significant market share.

Last week Paul helped Glenn transfer some data from a Fujitsu laptop with Windows 7 to a desktop with Windows 8. Paul said there is a facility built into Win7, Win8 and possibly Win10 called Windows Easy Transfer. It didn’t come with Windows XP but is available for it. Search for the words: windows easy transfer xp. Using it is fairly straightforward.
– Execute the Windows Easy Transfer and it will ask if this is the old machine or new machine. <Apparently, you use it to transfer out and then use it again to transfer in.>
– Then it asks you if the two machines are connected by cable, or if you want to use a hard drive or flash drive.
– It then copies an archive of the entire profile of the user. It doesn’t copy the operating system itself.
– You then run Windows Easy Transfer on the new machine and let it know you’re on the new machine when it asks
– It will again ask if you’re using a cable connection or a drive.
– Then it will ask if you want to merge the copy of the user profile with an existing profile on the new machine, or if you want to create a new profile. If you’re starting fresh on the new machine, Paul recommends creating a new profile.
– Additionally, he said you can Windows Easy Transfer as a way of creating a backup. But it backs up all of the user data at once and it’s not the same as a file backup where you can pick and choose individual files.

As mentioned during the last show, Apple has come out with a new iPad, the iPad Pro. Glenn said it’s only availble in the 12″ model.

A new version of the operating system iOS 9 was also released and Paul thought it’s a good idea to wait before upgrading — see what others think of it, first. It can be installed on an iPhone as old as a 4S. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should upgrade to older iPhones. As an example, iPhone 4 suffered badly when you went from iOS 7 to 8. There tends to be a greater burden on the older hardware when you install newer versions of iOS. This is unlike Windows where, Paul noted, that a PC running Windows 7 would generally be able to handle Win8 and Win10.

Paul said he liked using the Apple TV 4.
– It’s a box about 4″ square.
– It has it’s own 110v power cable.
– It has an HDMI output and series of apps on board so you can watch Netflix, Youtube and such.
– Version 5 of Apple TV will have the ability to subscribe to content, similar to how iTunes subscription works on the iPod.
– Paul heard that the CPU inside is an A4, which is equivalent to the CPU found in some of the iPads.

The Apple TV 4 he received had suffered lightning strike before he got it and it’s power supply was fried. When he tried to take it apart he found, as with many modern devices, it had plastic latches holding the enclosure together. The plastic latches can get broken when you take it apart if you haven’t done some research ahead of time. Paul said ifixit.com is good place to learn what you need before you proceed. With second hand parts from China, he was able to get it going.

Glenn said he’d consider posting podcasts of the Zen Tech shows, like he did before. Podcasts of some KVMR show can be found on at kvmr.org. Follow the link called ‘Podcasts’.

Brian called. He has a fairly modern laptop with an I7 processor and 32gig of RAM. It had Windows 8 on it when he bought it new. He has Pro Tools 11, which isn’t compatible with anything but Win8. He kept being asked if he’d like to upgrade to Win8.1, which he declined. Eventually, it automatically upgraded to Win8.1 and started asking if he’d like to upgrade to Windows 10. He figured he might as well go ahead. Now he’s experiencing odd behaviors — the screen goes black when he unplugs the AC power and Chromecast will play the sound but not the picture.
– Unless it says specifically that it won’t work with Windows 8.1, check with the Pro Tools company to find out if it can.
– Brian said they don’t “support” it on Win8.1. Paul said that doesn’t mean it won’t work in 8.1. Win8 and Win8.1 are not that different and Pro Tools will likely work on both.
– When you bought the laptop, it normally would have had the facility to restore the operating system to how it came from the factory. It’s often not well documented. It usually requires holding down a specific key when booting. Sometimes you’re given a chance to confirm the procedure, sometimes not. BACKUP before proceeding.
– Brian hadn’t yet even tried using Pro Tools in Win10. Paul suggested the try it and also to see if there are any patches for Pro Tools to make it compatible with Win8.1 or Win10.

William called. He called during the 9-9-15 show asking about exporting the address book from Thunderbird in vcard format. He has since found out that if he exports the address book in .csv format, he should be able to use Gmail to convert it to vcard. When he tried that, he got the file into Gmail but now he can’t seem to open it there.
– If the .csv values were incorrect it may have imported nothing (into Gmail).
– After importing it should have said how many contact were actually imported. That should confirm that there’s data there.
– The 1st line in the .csv files should have the names of the fields – FirstName, LastName, PhoneNumber, Email, etc. You can use a simple text editor to make sure it has correct field names — it might say StreetAddress when it should say Address, for example. Somewhere in Gmail it should tell you what it expects those field names to be.
– William took a closer look at his .csv files and found it had no data in it — so that’s why Gmail didn’t import anything.

William did not have Thunderbird set up to use his Gmail account. Paul said Thunderbird can have multiple accounts and asked William to set up Gmail by going to Tools -> Add Account (or something like that) and fill in his Gmail account. And the next step is to add the addon called Gcontacts, then “it will use Gmail to “funnel the addresses back and forth”.

William also wanted to know why the empty folders on his Windows 7 desktop “show the ghosts of images”. He said even that if he transfers the images out, it would show that the images are still in there. Paul said that’s because the images really are still in there. Paul wasn’t sure he understood the problem as William explained it. He wanted to move on and suggested they use email to continue troubleshooting.

Paul said Google has increased their security considerably. Now, when you configure things to hook up to your contacts, like Thunderbird, “it sends you back to the webpage to log in to your Google account”. Google did this to foil robots that continually try login to Google in an effort to break into an account. It’s easy for a robot to login to an IMAP or POP mail account. You’ll now see a login procedure that requires human input.

Paul touted the value of noise canceling headsets. They’re normally expensive, but he’s found some for about $19. One place they’re used is on the tarmac of an airport. The ground crews need to talk to their superiors amid the noise of the airplanes. The headsets have a mic on the outside which takes the noise and causes it to be 180 degrees out of phase as it’s fed into the earcups. The waveforms then cancel each other out, deadening the noise.

They work so well that if you use the headsets without the sound you desire to hear, like music fed in from an mp3 player, it can be an odd experience — the brain starts generating sounds for you to hear.

A surprising number of people are still using XP even though it’s been some 18 monthssince support for it had stopped. Paul said if you put an anti-virus on it, like AVG or AVAST, and don’t use Internet explorer, “it won’t be too bad”. Over time, however, more and more problems will arise.

For listeners with an old computer running Windows XP that’s approaching the end of life, Paul offered a free CD with Lubuntu <a version of Linux> that you can install and prolong it’s usefulness.
– It will have Firefox, Thunderbird and a word processor <and other programs, I’m sure>
– Installing it will wipe all content from computer, so beware.
– The window manager is similar enough to XP that you’ll be comfortable with it.
– Send email request to zen@kvmr.org.

Last Updated 11:46 PM 9/23/2015

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