Tech Talk
December 6, 2014
Best of Tech Talk Edition
- Segments replayed from previous shows
Email and Forum Questions
- Email from Mary: Dr. Shurtz, Here is the speed test for my FiOS Service w/ Verizon. My speed test showed 10 MB upload and 5 MB download speeds. I only have FiOS internet (no TV and no phone and don’t want TV or phone from them which are the only plans that give a better price plan or so Verizon has told me….) and pay 47.99/mo for this. I’ve called to try & get a better plan, but, in order to improve this he next step up is almost double my current price. Anyway, is this the reason why when I make phone calls via my OOMA service causing the receiver of my call to say that they can’t hear but ever other word? It happens intermittently; not all people say they can’t hear me….Thanks! Mary
- Tech Talk Response: Your upload and downloads speeds are adequate for VoIP. Is there something on your network that is using bandwidth? You should not have any problems. Check the latency. Use www.broadbandreports.com and go to tools to find the speed tests. There is a discussion thread about a problem with Ooma and Verizon for some customers. Ooma has worked with Verizon to reroute the traffic and this worked for some regions. Ooma support is reading the threaded discussions and responded to voice quality concerns. Just Google “voice quality Ooma Verizon” to get to these threads. Ooma also has live customer service on their website. Try that instead of the support number.
- Email from LedbyBrain: Dear Dr Shurtz, This is how my main, professional Gmail acct is set. I have enabled POP, IMAP, and archive deleted emails. I want to be sure a have a retained copy of all sent mail messages for at least 18 months. Will this ensure that? I am using Apple Mail client to view this account. I found an article on the internet that said that Gmail sent mail is not saved! Thank You!!
- Tech Talk Responds: You configuration looks good. Gmail never delete mail, except for the Trash and Spam folders after 30 days. A sent email is put into the inbox when some answers the email. It you delete that message stream, the sent email is also deleted. That is the most common error when losing sent emails. Good luck.
- Email from Duc: Dear Tech Talk. I coach a local sports team and all the communication with my team is in my Hotmail account. Unfortunately I can’t access my email. How do I get into my Hotmail/Outlook.com account if I no longer have access to the phone number I set up on the account when I created it years ago. Thanks, Duc, an Ohio coach
- Tech Talk Responds: It appears that when you’re traveling to different countries, Microsoft is now often requiring that even when you know your password you also must be able to provide a code that is sent to your phone or an alternate email address associated with the account. Two factor authentication is the best way to combat account theft.
- It is critical that you keep your recovery information up to date. Not doing so is the fastest way to lose access to your account forever should something go wrong. It’s also a way to end up unable to access your account until you return home after traveling.
- Microsoft does have an account recovery process. It will opt to send you a code to either an email address for a phone. If neither of those channels works, you must provide enough information to prove who you are. You will be asked for information like:
- Your name and birth date.
- Your location.
- The answer to your security question(s), if you had one or more set up.
- Other passwords that you may have used on this account in the past.
- The subject lines of any emails you may have sent recently.
- The names of any folders you’ve created in your account.
- The email addresses of any contacts to which you’ve recently sent email.
- Billing information, including a credit card, if you have any associated with the account.
- The goal here is simple: to be able to provide enough information to prove that you are who you say you are: the rightful account holder. Then that information is sent for an internal Microsoft review. No changes will be made to 30 days to prevent unauthorized attempts. They notify the owner via email of such attempted recoveries. If you are successful, you will be sent a reset link for your account. By the way, you can also set up a recovery code. You can save this code and provide this code to recovery your account, if your email or phones are not available. Good luck, Coach.
- Email from Alex: Dear Doc and Jim. I’d like to get in touch with my old college. Its been over fifteen years and I would like to reconnect. Where do I start? Thanks Alex in Reston
- Tech Talk Responds: It is difficult to locate an email address, but you can get lucky. Finding someone’s email address is typically very, very hard for several reasons:
- There’s no central database or “phone book” for the internet. If all you have is a name, that’s not enough. There could be perhaps thousands of people with the same name. Not everyone wants to be found. It’s easy to set up a free email account with information that has nothing to do with who you really are.
- I always try Google first. She may have a presence on the web. If you have a town where she might have resided, that could be useful. Check Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn. If you know their employer, check the directory. You might check the online version of the phone. Finally, there are pay services that claim to be able to find out all sorts of information about people. These are mostly culled from public records also accessible elsewhere. I once did a search for an old colleague using a paid search. I knew the middle initial and where they lived at one point. That was enough to locate them. The service was $29 and worked quite well. The paid service would not provide an email, but would forward an email to the recipient.
- Email from Tung in Ohio: Dear Tech Talk, I am trying to upgrade my iPhone to iOS8.1 can’t because I don’t have enough memory. I deleted all my pictures after copying them to the website and still don’t have enough memory. What are my options? Thanks Tung in Ohio
- Tech Talk Responds: You could connect your phone to your laptop and install the new iOS using iTunes. This would still require some memory in your iPhone. If you have to free up memory, not that Photostream is stored on your iPhone, as well as, Deleted pictures. The deleted pictures stay on your phone for 30 days. You could unsync to music temporarily to delete all the songs from your iPhone too. I have had the same problems. My next iPhone is going to have more memory, at least 64GB and maybe 128GB. 16 MB is just not enough.
- Email from Alice in Washington: Dear Doc and Jim, I use Gmail for all of my business activity and am worried that I have no backup. What is the best way to back up my Gmail account? Thanks, Alice in Washington DC
- Tech Talk Responds: The easiest way is to use a desktop email program that supports POP3. You could use programs Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Apple Mail or others and configure them to download your mail. POP3 is the way traditional email programs that run on your PC get your email from your ISP. It’s perhaps the oldest email protocol still used, and is one of the reasons that so many different email programs – even ones decades old – can often be used for our backup purposes. Once you have an email program, Gmail’s online help has instructions for configuring POP3 access in many popular email programs. The important points are:
- POP3 access must be enabled in your account – it’s a setting you’ll need to confirm in the web interface at gmail.com. Before you download your email, there is one setting that applies only to using your desktop email program to back up Gmail: “leave messages on server.” The reason that this is so important is that without it your email may be moved from Gmail’s server to your PC and disappear from the web interface. Once configured, when you go to download or “check for new mail” using your email program, you’ll back up Gmail by downloading all your email. The first time it could be a lot, depending on how long you’ve been using Gmail and how much email you have. Do that periodically, and the mail that’s stored on your machine is your backup should you ever lose anything from Gmail.
- One of the nice side-effects of using your PC to back up Gmail like this is that your backup will, itself, be backed up again when you back up your PC.
Profiles in IT: RalphH. Baer
- Ralph H. Baer is a video game pioneer, also known as “The Father of Video Games”
- Ralph H. Baer was born on March 8, 1922 to Jewish parents in Pirmasens, Germany
- When Baer was eleven, he was expelled from school in Germany because of his Jewish ancestry and had to go to an all-Jewish school.
- Two months before the Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish stores and homes, the Baer’s fled first to Holland and then to the US.
- In 1940, he completed the National Radio Institute correspondence course.
- For the next three years he ran a store in New York City servicing and repairing not just radios, but PA systems and early television sets as well. He earned $12/hour.
- In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II, assigned to Military intelligence.
- He was assigned to Eisenhower’s unit in London, writing training manuals and becoming an expert in German in weapons.
- After the war, Baer graduated with a BS degree in Television Engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949.
- In 1949, Baer went to work for Wappler, Inc. where he designed and built surgical cutting machines, epilators, and low frequency pulse muscle-toning equipment.
- In 1951, Baer went to work as a senior engineer for Loral Electronics in the Bronx, New York,where he designed power line carrier signaling equipment for IBM.
- From 1952 to 1956, he worked at Transitron, Inc., in New York City as a chief engineer and later as vice president.
- He joined Sanders Associates in 1956, where he stayed until retiring in 1987.
- He then worked on alpha-numeric projection displays for the better part of the 1960s,and in 1966 came up with the original concept for playing games using a home TV.
- Baer’s was the first patent application for video games in 1968, which led to the “Brown Box” console video game system licensed to Magnavox in 1972.
- The”Brown Box” was known as the Magnavox Odyssey. Pong was a popular game.
- Baer is also responsible for the first-person shooter video game to feature a light gun peripheral pointing device, used for the Odyssey’s Shooting Gallery series.
- In the mid-’70s he started R.H. Baer Consultants. He invented and developed single-chip, micro-processor-controlled handheld games for Marvin Glass &Associates.
- In 1978, he and partner Howard J. Morrison created Simon, an electronic game based on memory skill, named after Simon Says.
- Baer has 150 U.S. and foreign patents — a significant amount of them resulting in toys and games that eventually went into production.
- In 2006, Baer donated all his hardware prototypes and documents to the Smithsonian.
- Baer is a Life Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
- On February 13, 2006, Baer was given a National Medal of Technology.
- On April 1,2010, Baer was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Science of Snowflakes – Is Every Snowflake Unique?
- Can you ever be sure that no two are alike?
- The short answer to the question is yes, since it is indeed extremely unlikely that two complex snowflakes will look exactly alike. Notice I said complex snowflake.
- Variations caused by isotopes
- If we restrict ourselves to water molecules which contain two ordinary hydrogen atoms and one ordinary oxygen atom, then again physics tells us that all such water molecules are exactly alike
- However about one molecule out of every 5000 naturally occurring water molecules will contain an atom of deuterium in place of one of the hydrogens.
- One in 500 will contain an atom of O (with an atomic weight of 18) instead of the more common oxygen (with an atomic weight of 16).
- Since a typical small snow crystal might contain 1018 water molecules, we see that about 1015 of these molecules will be different from the rest.
- The probability that two snow crystals would have exactly the same layout of these molecules is very, very, very small.
- Even with 1024 crystals per year, the odds of it happening within the lifetime of the Universe is indistinguishable from zero.
- However, if we consider a crystals of only 10 molecules, here’s a reasonable probability that two would be exactly alike.
- Variations caused by stacking faults
- When a crystal grows, the molecules do not stack together with perfect regularity, so a typical snow crystal contains a huge number of crystal dislocations, which again are scattered throughout the crystal in a random fashion.
- One can then argue, like with the isotopes, that the probability of two crystals growing with exactly the same pattern of dislocations is vanishingly small.
- Again one has the exception of few-molecule crystals, which can easily be free of dislocations.
- Variations caused by variable growth dynamics
- The number of possible ways of making a complex snowflake is staggeringly large. Now when you look at a complex snow crystal, you can often pick out a hundred separate features if you look closely.
- Since all those features could have grown differently, or ended up in slightly different places, the math is similar to that with the books.
- Thus the number of ways to make a complex snow crystal is absolutely huge.