Show of 09-26-2015

• Email from Feroze in Fredericksburg: Dear Doc and Jim. I recently traveled to California and some of the calendar entries on my iPhone were in the wrong time zone. The calendar on my desktop computer in Virginia was correct. What are my options to keep my iPhone calendar correct? Thanks. Feroze in Fredericksburg.
• Tech Talk Responds: To adjust the time zone settings in your iPhone calendar, go to Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Scroll down to the calendar section. Time Zone Override should be off. That ensures that you time zone will always be adjusted properly. That  means that when you travel your meetings at home will show up as being in your current time zone. That we adjust when you return. The one thing that could cause an error would be if you got an invitation before you left of the trip and did not open it until after you landed. That may cause an error. Most problems occur when you create an event for another time zone while travelling. You have to manually adjust the time. That is when you might choose to override the time zone temporarily to make setting the time easier.
• Email from Jim in Michigan: Dear Tech Talk. I recently installed Windows 10 and just used the express setup. I have been reading about privacy issues in Windows 10 and now would like to make certain that I am not sharing too much information. How can I make these adjustments now? Thanks, Jim in Michigan.
• Tech Talk Responds: The key is to avoid the default “Express settings” option. Instead, always use custom settings, so as to expose the choices the setup program might be making on your behalf. 
• To see you privacy settings, click on the Start menu, and then click on Settings. In the Settings application, click on the Privacy option. On the left, the “General” section of settings is selected by default, and several privacy options are displayed. Turn each on or off as you see fit. Click on Location, in the left-hand list, to bring up location-related settings. Once again, this displays a list of privacy settings you can elect to turn off or on as you see fit. Repeat this for each of the sections listed in the left-hand pane. 
• Settings related to Edge, Microsoft’s new web browser, are contained within the browser’s own Settings page. Open Edge, click on the ellipsis on the right end of the menu bar, and click on Settings. Scroll down and click on Advanced Settings. At the bottom on this screen you will see several privacy settings. Select block only third-party cookies. IE has its own privacy settings too. Each application you run will also have its own privacy settings.
• Email from Wendy in Fairfax: Dear Doc and Jim. I have a four-year-old Windows desktop that frequently runs really slowly with Task Manager showing that 80-90% of the physical memory is being used even when I’m not running any applications. Svchost.exe seems to be the culprit, and sometimes RapportService.exe *32. My PC is an HP CQ5307UK desktop, with a 2.90GHz AMD Athlon II X3 435 processor and 3GB of memory running Microsoft Windows 7 and Norton Internet Security. I use Microsoft Office Pro and Mailwasher. Thanks, Wendy in Fairfax
• Tech Talk Responds: Modern versions of are designed to use all your PC’s physical memory: that’s what it’s there for. Either way, 3GB of memory plus a 4GB swap file is more than enough for the software you’re running. 
• It’s always better to have more memory. Unfortunately, your HP/Compaq only allows 4GB, so expanding from 3GB is not an economical option. I would upgrade to 4GB at least. That is the maximum about that a 32-bit OS can directly address.
• Windows could be running slowly because a program or device driver is leaking memory, because you don’t have enough disk space, because a rogue process is running your processor at close to 100%, because your PC is overheating, or because of a virus or other malware. 
• First, make sure you have at least 5GB of free hard disk space, in case Windows needs to expand its swap file.
• Second, run a quick scan with the free Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) to make sure nothing has got past Norton. Clean any malicious software.
• Third use the Windows 7 Performance Monitor to check performance. You can find PerfMon by typing pe or perf into the run box at the bottom of the Start menu.
• Fourth, reboot your PC and see how much memory is available. Don’t run anything else for 15-30 minutes to see if that changes: you may have a memory leak. After that, load your programs one at a time to see how much memory each one takes, and whether your PC slows down. If a program creates the problem, uninstall it. If you can’t manage without it, re-install it and hope it behaves itself in future.
• Fifth, check for driver upgrades. Go to Control Panel/Device Manager. Click on each Device in the list. Choose the Driver Tab and Click Update by searching the web.

• Susan Diane Wojcicki (vui-CHIT-skee) is an American technology executive and the current CEO of YouTube.
• Susan Diane Wojcicki was born July 5, 1968 in California. Her father was a Polish American physics professor at Stanford University. 
• She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto and wrote for the school newspaper.
• In 1990, Wojcicki graduated from Harvard, majoring in history and literature.
• In 1993,, she received an MS in economics from the UC, Santa Cruz
• In 1998, she received an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
• In 1998, Wojicicki worked in marketing at Intel in Santa Clara, CA and was a management consultant at Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company.
• She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and going into academics, but changed her plans when she discovered technology.
• In 1998, Wojcicki married Dennis Troper and bought her Menlo Park home for $600K. They rented their garage for $1,700 a month to help with the mortgage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google that same year.
• In 1999, she became Google’s first marketing manager. She is employee #16.
• She was the first Googler to get pregnant and now has five children. She was four months pregnant when she joined Google.
• Wojcicki also took part in the development of successful contributions to Google such as Google Images and Google Books.
• Wojcicki grew within Google to become senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce and lead the advertising and analytic products including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics.
• She developed AdSense, which became Google’s second largest source of revenue.
• She oversaw Google Video, and proposed to Google’s board that the company should purchase YouTube, then a small start-up that was competing with Google.
• In 2003, she came up with her multimillion-dollar brainstorm: AdSense. AdSense, an extension AdWords, places targeted ads on affiliate sites.
• She handled two of Google’s largest acquisitions: the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006 and the $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in 2007.
• She later became the Senior VP and then President of YouTube.
• Wojcicki was 16th on Forbes List of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women and on Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business list, both multiple times.
• She believes in the importance of life balance and is home for dinner every night. 
• She is part of the Google Dynasty. Her younger sister Anne married Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Her husband is an operations executive at Google. Her mom, a teacher, has consulted for Google on educational issues.
• Her house, where Google was incubated, was purchased by Google in 2007.
• Apple App Store Malware Update
• As many as 4,000 apps were infected by the XcodeGhost malware used in an attack on Apple’s App Store.
• The news came as Apple said it was going to make its Xcode program – the tool used to build apps for its operating system – easier to download in China, where the problem originated.
• Some Chinese firms said slow download speeds behind the Great Firewall led them to seek locally held, bootlegged versions of Xcode that they did not know were infected with malware.
• Apple’s marketing boss Phil Schiller said the firm would offer domestic downloads in China in a bid to speed up downloads and convince people to install only the official software.
• App developers are not blocked from downloading the official version of Xcode. But censorship controls, along with low investment in infrastructure for international connections, make using services based outside China a painful process for some.
• The counterfeit versions served malware that infected apps built on them, allowing the attackers to steal data about users and send it to servers they controlled.
• The US security firm Palo Alto Networks said it believed the number of infected apps was likely to be “far greater” than the few dozen initially thought. According to FireEye, another security company, the figure could be as high as 4,000.
• The App Store had previously been almost entirely free of malware, and it was unclear how the altered code withstood Apple’s app approval process, in which developers often wait a week for reviews of updates to their apps.
• XcodeGhost’s malicious code isn’t particularly harmful so this explains why it can pass the App Store screening process. Apps infected with XcodeGhost collect the following data from users’ devices:
• Current time
• Current infected apps name
• Apps bundle identifier
• Current device’s name and type
• Current system’s language and country
• Current devices’ UUID
• The malware is apparently fairly benign. It does not log user names and passwords to iCloud or other secure sites. Perhaps this was a test run to see how far they could go.

• CodeAcademy. More than 24 million people have already learned how to code through this educational company’s engaging experience. At CodeAcademy, you can take courses that teach you everything from HTML & CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby.
• Coursera. Founded in 2012, Coursera offers more than 1,000 courses from 119 institutions. While you can pay for certain programs to receive a certificate, there are a number of free introductory programming courses.
• edX. EdX is another leading online-learning platform that is open source. It was founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012. edX includes 60 schools.
• Udemy. Founded in 2010, Udemy is an online learning platform that has both paid and free course, including Programming for Entrepreneurs – HTML & CSS or Introduction to Python Programming.
• aGupieWare. AGupieWare is an independent app developer that surveyed computer-science programs from some of the leading institutions in the U.S. It then created a similar curriculum based on the free courses offered by Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley and Columbia. The program was then broken into 15 courses: three introductory classes, seven core classes and five electives.
• GitHub. You can find more than 500 free programming books that cover more than 80 different programming languages on the popular web-based Git repository hosting service, which means that it’s frequently updated by collaborators.
• MIT Open Courseware. MIT’s free courseware site includes classes such as Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Introduction to Programming in Java and Practical Programming in C.
• Khan Academy, Created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, Khan Academy is one of the original free online-learning institutions. With step-by-step video tutorials, you can learn how to program drawings, animations and games using JavaScript and ProcessingJS, or learn how to create webpages with HTML and CSS.
• HTML5 Rocks This Google project launched in 2010. The site is full of tutorials, resources and the latest HTML5 updates. It’s open source, so developers can play around with HTML5 code

Website of the Week: WhatWasThere

• WhatWasThere is an excellent web tool and mobile app that uses Google Maps technologies to provide users with an interactive experience through which they get to learn how different places looked in the past.
• When you install WhatWasThere on your iPad or iPhone and once it is launched, the app will detect the geographical location where you are and will provide you with any historic photographs that were captured nearby plotted on a map!
• You can also switch into Camera view to get an augmented reality experience of the history that surrounds you.’
• Historic photographs found on WhatWasThere come in with source information and more details to help you Google Street view it. You can also use the ‘Explore Photos’ feature to search for historical photographs related to any place in the map. 
• You simply select the location you are interested in and you will be able to see the historic imagery available for that place.
• WhatWasThere is still a work in progress and much content is still lacking. But users can help by adding photographs to the map. The upload feature is available only for registered  users. Registration is totally free.
• Link: http://www.whatwasthere.com/default.aspx

• Link: http://www.refugeehero.com/
• Helping a world in crisis: Refugee Hero is ‘Airbnb’ for refugees
• European government institutions cannot handle any more refugees
• The international refugee crisis is reaching an all-time high mankind has not seen since the great migration of World War 2. 
• Shelters and government institutions all over Europe are operating at maximum capacity and cannot handle the increasing inflow of refugees. 
• Unorthodox solutions are needed to solve this humanitarian crisis. Refugee Hero connects heroes – ordinary people and their warm homes – with refugees and facilitates in temporary accommodation and overall facilities.
• Founders Germaine Statia (23), Jamal Oulel (25) and Ayoub Aouragh (24) saw an opportunity in the current crisis. 
• The non-profit social start-up does not have a revenue model but is in negotiations with municipalities.  It is listed on Kickstarter.
• Refugee Hero is a – mobile friendly – website with similar functionality to Airbnb. Heroes post a listing to accommodate a refugee. 
• Listings can come from private heroes or from organizations opening up their facilities; such as churches, mosques, schools and universities. 
• Refugees can directly access their data to make an appointment or the volunteers and government officials responsible can use Refugee Hero as an intermediary.
• RefugeeHero.com is available worldwide for all refugees. 

• Australia’s national curriculum is dropping history and geography as stand-alone subjects and replacing them with computer coding. 
• According to the Australian, a new digital technologies curriculum was endorsed by Australia’s education ministers yesterday which would see students as young as early as Year 5 picking up computer coding with students starting to program by Year 7. 
• The push for young kids and students to take up coding and programming in Australian schools has been gathering momentum especially among the country’s top tech execs.
• Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne pledged to strengthen Australia’s science, technology, engineering or maths (STEM) skills base as well to bolster the digital skills needed to succeed in the highly competitive tech environment of the 21st century. 
• The new curriculum echoes successful programs implemented in the United States such as Code.org and “Hour of Code”, with the support of Google and Microsoft, including the United Kingdom who introduced coding in primary schools last year. 
• It is estimated that 75% of fast-growing occupations will require STEM skills in science, technology, engineering or math.