Tony's Stuff

  I Wish Justice Truly Were Blind That would be expensive, yes, but much more fair DALLE 2 image of blindfolded jurors by author Imagine if you could have a trial where neither the judge nor the jury only knew facts without knowing the specific people or companies involved, so the defendant is always a faceless John Doe or an unnamed company. We certainly don’t do that now. We say that everyone is equal under the law, but obviously that isn’t true. The rich and powerful often get different treatment than the poor and powerless. The “jury of peers” may not be peers at all. Donald Trump is a polarizing figure. Can he really ever get a fair trial when almost everyone has very strong opinions about him, positive or negative? So how could we fix that? Masks and voice garbling? A black man in a mask is still black, a white man in a $3,000 suit is obviously not poor. A man speaking broken English will be seen differently than a native speaker. Prejudice and racism can’t be hidden that eas...

  Apple Has Made a Right Proper Mess of Share Targets in IOS and MacOS But I don’t know how they’d fix it now Print dialog in macOS After writing my post yesterday on saving PDF’s and other things to Notes and Books, I realized that some folks may not have realized what I meant by a Share target. I also realized that others may not know how to get a PDF from whatever they have on their screen. Rather than edit the post, I decided all that needs its own explanation, so here we go. If you can print it, you can get a PDF That’s the first thing to remember. Mac, iPad, iPhone: if it can be printed, you can get a PDF. On Mac, the option to print to PDF is right there in the print dialog. There are more options that appear if you use the down arrow beside that button. Options for PDF creation on Mac On IOS and iPadOS, it’s different. There’s no PDF button, but there is a Share button to the left of “Print”. Share button in *OS print dialog If it has a Share button, you can probably get it...

Store User Manuals in the Books App? What a brilliant idea! My most favorite podcast is  Mac Geek Gab , a weekly potpourri of Apple tips, computer gear, and more. As they themselves say, you don’t need to be a geek to listen, but if you listen long enough, you might become one. This week I was especially interested because a listener called Tigg described using the Apple Books App to store PDF’s of user manuals and receipts. That’s something not many people would think of doing, but when you buy new gear of any kind, it either comes with a small paper manual or a link to something larger on a website. Unfortunately, you can’t assume that the paper won’t get lost or deteriorate over time, or that the website link will still work when you need that manual years later. I have been doing something similar for years, but I use Notes. In addition to receipts and manuals, I store health info, taxes, ID{s, copies of credit cards, where I put things and much more. So is Books better than No...

  Elephants Without Borders Hair Care Mint strikes again Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) TECHNOLOGY DALLE-2 image by author I love Mint. It helps me manage my finances and I definitely recommend it. However, it’s not without its faults and, because it would be so obviously easy for Mint to correct those problems, it is frustrating that they continue to ignore these year after year after year. One of the most frustrating problems is something that used to work much better than it does now. It’s not that Mint changed anything; it’s that they have not changed it. Let me explain. Every month I pay rent at our Over 55 community. In the distant past, I was able to tell Mint to categorize any charge from Oak Point (the name of our community) as Rent. It was so easy. Screenshot of Mint transaction showing a category rule Alas, a few years back everyone started adding dates to bank and credit card transactions. So what used to appear to Mint as “ELECTRONIC PAYMENT OAK POINT” now has a date append...

  Stop Squinting or Fumbling for Your Glasses: Zoom Magnification on Apple Devices Take control of Zoom Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) There is so much more than this! Screenshot by author When I worked at an Apple retail store for a few years after retiring, I’d often see customers adjust text size using settings for Display and Brightness as shown in the screenshot here. Almost everyone knew how to do that; very few knew that there are  more and often better built-in tools. This is true for Apple computers, iPhone and iPad, Apple Watch, and even Apple TV; I will cover all of those here. On macOS I’ll start here because that’s the easy one. Mac System Preferences has an Accessibility section that does offer Zoom. Mac Zoom — Screenshot by author I don’t use it. While it does offer good control and the ability to have full screen zoom, a floating window zoom, and split screen zoom, that’s overkill for most of us. Without changing a thing in System Preferences, you already have the a...