Tony's Stuff

Tips the manual doesn’t mention APPLE An almost fully charged Apple Watch on its charger When you first unpack a new Apple Watch, you will be pairing it to your phone, assigning a passcode and doing some minimal setup. These are easy tasks, and the iPhone Watch app will lead you through it all. There are some things the app and Apple’s help pages do not mention; I will cover those here. If you have not yet purchased an Apple Watch, you may find my  Picking Out Your Apple Watch  article to be useful. What phone do you have? First, your phone model may matter. You need an iPhone 8 or newer as of the 2022 models. Older watches will work as long as they can run the current OS (watchOS 9 as I write this). For example, I i am using a cellular Series 5 watch with my iPhone 14 Pro. Turn the watch on by pressing and holding the long Side Button under the Digital Crown button. When you see the Apple logo appear, you can let go. The yellow arrow indicates the Side Button. ...

  Elon Musk has done some weird things, but this is the weirdest so far Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) SECURITY Screen shot by author of Twitter TFA settings I certainly wouldn’t presume to know what’s happening inside Elon Musk’s head, but from the outside looking in, it looks like he’s either trying to kill it or somehow turn it profitable. Or he’s just bonkers. Let’s go with the profit motive. What he first did there was to institute a charge for “Twitter Blue”. Currently ( late February 2023) the cost is $11 monthly or $114.99 yearly. There are advantages to Twitter Blue. As of this writing, those advantages include 4,000 character Tweets, a 30 minute editing window, NFT profile pictures, a ranking boost, 1080p video uploads, and more features promised In spite of all that swag, it appears that not a lot of people have bothered to take Twitter up on it and some number of those who did were up to no good. A fake Will Ferrell account fooled the BBC because of Twitter Blue verification...

  It’s come a long way since iOS 9 Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) APPLE Ever notice this? What Is the Files App? You might not have ever noticed this on your Apple iPhone or iPad even though it has been available since iOS 9, when it was called iCloud Drive and had far weaker abilities. Originally, the intent of this app was to give your iOS devices access to files stored on your MacOS computer. This was done by automatically putting the Desktop files from the computer(s) in iCloud, and then the iCloud Drive app could access them. Of course, you could also use it to transfer a file from your phone or iPad to your computer. When iOS 11 arrived, the Files app replaced iCloud Drive (except on the Mac; it retains the old name there) and added the ability to access other services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and many others. That opened up a whole other world of possibilities, including easy copying from one service to another. More recently, collaboration was added. You can now let...

Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) #AppleTVPlus Apple   #Technology DALL-E 2 image by author One of my sisters is celebrating her 80th birthday soon. She and I regularly swap recommendations for TV movies and series we’ve enjoyed, but she has not signed up for any of the Apple shows I enjoy. I thought I’d fix that for her birthday, so I sent her an emailed Apple gift certificate to cover a years worth of Apple TV+. Easy-peasy, right? Nope. My sister is a bit of a technophobe. She has an Apple phone, but can’t do much with it beyond calls and texts. You need at least email setup to redeem an Apple gift card into your account so that it can be used to subscribe to Apple TV+. Now setting up email is not hard. All you usually need to do is know your email address and your password; Apple takes care of the rest. Then you open the email, click on “Redeem”, and the gift card gets put in your account. You can then use that money to pay for almost anything Apple sells, including TV+. But, even with ...

#Humor #Technology #Apple Or so some seem to think Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) APPLE DALL-E 2 image by author Apparently it is acceptable to prod and poke the screens of tablets and phones, or anything running Microsoft Windows, but you must never, ever put your grimy fingers upon the pristine screen of a Mac. I couldn’t understand what the problem is. Do Macs bite or deploy electric shocks to defend their honor? Do they harbor viruses? Or perhaps they are simply too sensitive, too emotionally fragile, to bear the touch of human hands? Whatever the cause, there are large numbers of people ready to defend the touchless state of affairs that has seemed inviolable ever since Steve Jobs proclaimed “ We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.” Note: Steve had no comment when I and others bought Bluetooth keyboards for our OG iPads. Well, I guess if Steve didn’t like it, that’s how it must be. I promise not to mention th...

 A radio app for Apple Watch.  Easiest to install from App Store on the watch.   https://apps.apple.com/us/app/streamlets/id1507575984

Fearmongering or Reality? Are We Poisoning Ourselves? We have to eat and breathe, right? Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) POLLUTION DALL-E 2 image by author of witch offerig a poison apple A few weeks ago I posted this at another site: An apple a day keeps the doctor away, assuming that you can wash off all the pesticides, but that takes a twelve minute soak in vinegar or a baking soda solution and you won’t do that, so forget it. That made someone quite angry because they mistakenly assumed that I was promoting organic produce. They accused me of “fearmongering” and insisted that organic produce can be dangerous because of pathogenic contamination from inadequately composted manure. I wouldn’t be surprised at that. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some “organic” produce is thoroughly doused with pesticides by dishonest vendors. And even if none of that were true, I have often pointed out that organic is likely impossible today because our land, our air, and our water are already contaminated....