Tech Talk
February 13, 2016
Best of Tech Talk Edition
- Segments replayed from previous shows
Email and Forum Questions
- Email from Fan in Bethesda: Dear Dr. Shurtz, Ever since I installed Apple’s new OS on my iMac my computer has slowed down and become unresponsive. It is driving me nuts. Should I uninstall this? I don’t even know how to do it. Thanks! Bethesda Fan of show
- Tech Talk Responds: There are several reasons that cause your Mac is running slow.
- Your hard drive is getting full. Nothing slows down a Mac more than having too much on your hard drive. If you can lighten the load on your Mac, you’re sure to see an increase in speed. The best option is to use a Mac cleanup tool, like CleanMyMac3. It cleans up your entire Mac, the easy stuff and the hard stuff. It knows what to clean and where to clean, and is incredibly safe to use2. Outdated OS X.
- Broken Permissions. If for some reason your Mac is running slow after update, don’t panic. It could happen that disk permissions are broken. You can repair them with CleanMyMac3. Download the app and go to Maintenance tab, click “Repair Disk Permissions.”
- Startup is slowing you down. When you start your Mac, a lot of things load up in the background. Not only do they slow down your startup, but they continue to do so the whole time you’re on your Mac. Give your Mac a clean start. Get a fast Mac startup by removing unnecessary apps. Go to your System Preferences > Users & Groups, and then click on your username. Now, click on Login Items, click on the name of an application you don’t need to launch during startup. Remove the application from the list.
- Too much running in the background. Activity Monitor will help out. Quitting an app that’s taking up a lot of processing power could make a huge difference in speeding up your slow Mac. Open up your Applications folder and then your Utilities folder. Here you’ll find the Activity Monitor, open it. Check out the list of apps and processes that happening on your Mac in real-time. Click on the Memory tab at the top, then the Memory filter at the top of the list; this sorts the programs by the amount of space they’re taking up on your Mac RAM. The higher the number, the more power they need. Stop an app from operating by clicking on the app in the list. Don’t remove anything you don’t know!
- You’ve got old hardware. Your Mac may just be too old to fix. When your Mac hardware gets too old, your speed drops drastically and you can do little to fix it without taking some serious measures.
- Email from Alice: Dear Dr. Shurtz, I listened on Sat, Nov 14 to the review you gave on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for the education on this. There remains an issue I’m not clear about that I hope you can address. With all the various paid for subscriptions offered on LinkedIn now, my research on which one(s) include full access to any/all profiles, regardless of the default position of your 3rd degree of connectivity, has turned up one subscription: Recruiter Corporate which is the most expensive subscription offered. Is there another option? Best, Alice
- Tech Talk Responds: Full access is the most valuable thing that LinkedIn possesses and they must charge for it. You can get a free 30 day trial, but after that you’ll have to pay. You can also connect with individuals not in your network with InMail (a paid LinkedIn mail service). This may be cheaper depending on the number of InMails you send.
- Email for Phuong in Australia: Dear Doc and Jim. I listen to your show on the podcast. My hard drive is about to fail and needs replaced. When I replace my hard drive, will I need to install a new operating system? Is there a way to clone my current hard drive completely including my operating system? What is the best way to save my existing files if I can’t salvage my entire hard drive? Are there software programs that can help me do this? Thanks. Love the show. Phuong in Australia.
- Tech Talk Responds: Using backup software, create a full-image backup of your machine. Use an image backup tool like Macrium Reflect. After to have successfully imaged you hard drive, create the “rescue disk” or “emergency disk” for your backup software. Turn off your machine, unplug it, and follow the manufacturer’s instructions for replacing the failing hard drive. After you put your machine back together again, reboot, using the emergency/rescue disk you created with your backup software. Now, use that software to restore your backup image to the new hard drive. When that’s done, you can remove the emergency disk and reboot, and you should be up and running as if nothing had happened, except you’ll be running from your replacement hard drive.
- It is common for replacement drives to be larger than the original. Most backup programs will restore the layout of the hard disk exactly as it was on the original drive. What that means is that there’s a chance all the extra space on the new drive will go unused. You can use Windows Disk Manager to create a new partition out of the unused space, which will appear as a new drive letter or you can use Windows Disk Manager to extend an existing partition (ideally your C: partition), making that partition larger.
- Email from Tung in Ohio: Dear Doc and Jim. My son installed BitTorrent on the house computer. This program slowed my computer down so much that I could not get online. I found out that as it was downloading, it was also uploading with unlimited bandwidth. I could not find any information on what it was uploading. I dislike P2P because of past experience with them, virus, spyware and the feeling I am stealing from the programmer. This program was promptly uninstalled. Is there any legitimate use for P2P programs? Love the show. Tung in Ohio.
- Tech Talk Responds: I had the same problem with my son. Peer-to-peer is a fantastic technology that is getting smeared with a bad reputation because of how some people choose to use it. There are many legitimate uses for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) programs like BitTorrent. Peer-to-peer shares the load when downloading programs. Many open source projects are downloaded using peer-to-peer. The fundamental concept is that once a computer downloads a file, it begins to share it with others who need it. There is no “master” distinction; all the computers are equal “peers”, and any that have a copy of the file can offer that file to any other computer looking for it. A peer may open connections to several other peers, each downloading separate parts of the file all at once. This typically makes much better use of bandwidth than a single straight download. The moment any part of the file has been downloaded, that part can be immediately shared with other peers who don’t have it yet.
- The reason that peer-to-peer file sharing has a bad reputation is not because of the technology, but rather because of what is being shared: illegal copies of software, movies, music, and images. Many of the illegal file-sharing networks happen to use peer-to-peer technology.
- Email from Benoit in New Jersey: Dear Tech Talk. I am frustrated with a couple of features on Waze. First, when the audio plays through the Bluetooth connection, the first few words are cut off and second whenever I move my phone, it activates the voice feature which is very annoying. What are the options? Benoit in New Jersey.
- Tech Talk Responds: The Bluetooth connection is not kept open between uses and there is a delay when Waze sends a new message to your audio system. This may be fixed with the next Bluetooth update. In order to solve this problem, you have to keep the channel open. I do this my playing Pandora music with the iPhone. It is soothing and keeps the Bluetooth channel open for my Waze communication. As for the annoying voice feature. It is supposed to help provide feedback while driving (police locations, hazard locations. Etc.). You can turn it off by open Waze and going to settings (that is the Gear symbol in upper left). Scroll down to voice commands. Turn off the line that says Enable. You’re good to do.
- Email from Beth: Dear Doc and Jim. I travel quite a bit between Florida and Virginia. I have a SunPass for Florida. What are the options for using it here in Virginia. Thanks. Enjoy the show. Beth from Virginia.
- Tech Talk Responds: You are out of luck. Virginia is in the E-ZPass network, which includes fifteen states: Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and West Virginia. The other states have their own, a very inconvenient system for travelers. Most states have some type of license plate recognition and will bill you if you don’t have a pass. Some of them have severe penalties. In the case of Florida, it is just a simple toll charges with a small surcharge. You will have to get an E-ZPass or risk getting a stiff fine here in Virginia.
- Email from Feroze in Fredericksburg: Dear Tech Talk. I have Nikon with multiple lenses and love taking pictures while on travel. However, frequently and only have my iPhone with me. Are there lenses that I can use on my iPhone to capture better pictures? The resolution of the camera is great, but the field of view is designed more for portraits than for great photography. I am only interested in quality lenses. Love the show. Feroze in Fredericksburg.
- Tech Talk Responds: Some lenses attach directly to the iPhone; others work in conjunction with a custom case. iPro’s Lens System is an example of the latter—after you slide your iPhone into the two-piece sleeve-style case, you attach the lenses via a bayonet mount that is secured with an easy quarter-turn of the lens. iPro has a clever solution for carrying the lenses. Rather than storing them in some sort of case or bag, they screw together into a cylinder that you can hang around your neck. It also doubles as a handle that screw into the case, which you can use as a monopod to stabilize your photos. You can even mount the case on a real tripod.
- The basic Trio kit ($279) comes with three lenses: a 2X telephoto, a super-wide angle, and a macro lens. You can also purchase additional lenses, such as a powerful 4x tele and a 165-degree wide angle. The lenses are made with Schneider Century optics. Link to company: http://www.iprolens.com/index.php
- There are many cheaper options for removable iPhone lenses. I have just given you the professional version. For instance Photojojo gives you six lenses for $115, including Fisheye, Super Fisheye, Telephoto, Wide Angle, Macro and Polarizing lens. Each lens is crafted out of solid aluminum and outfitted with thick, high-clarity glass. Each set comes with an adhesive removable metal ring that fits any phone. Lenses clip on magnetically.
- Link to company: https://2.photojojo.com/awesomeness/cell-phone-lenses
- Another low cost option for the Aukey’s 3 in 1 Clip-on Cell Phone Camera Lens Kit. 180 Degree Fisheye Lens/ Wide Angle Lens/ 10 X Marco Lens for iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, Samsung Galaxy, Windows, and Android Smartphones. List price is $39. Street price is as low as $16.
- Link to Amazon sales page: http://www.amazon.com/Aukey-Fisheye-Samsung-Windows-Smartphones/dp/B014CXK9FQ
Profiles in IT
- Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace)
- Ada Byron was the daughter of a brief marriage between the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke
- Ada married William King. King inherited a noble title, they became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace.
- Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and she saw to it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies.
- Ada met Charles Babbage in 1933 when she was 17 and they began a voluminous correspondence on the topics of mathematics, logic, and ultimately all subjects.
- Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was known as the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine that operated by the method of finite differences.
- Babbage held the same post as Sir Isaac Newton (known for the equations of motion and calculus) and Steven Hawkings (Black holes and Hawkings radiation).
- Babbage had made plans in 1834 for a new kind of calculating machine (although the Difference Engine was not finished), an Analytical Engine.
- His Parliamentary sponsors refused to support a second machine with the first unfinished, but Babbage found sympathy for his new project abroad.
- In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine.
- Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it.
- She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer.
- She understood the importance of keeping the calculating machine and the program separated.
- Proposed a method to computer Bernoulli numbers using the analytical engine
- The methods she proposed included loops, branches, and conditional statements.
- She is thus credited with being the first programmer.
- Babbage’s analytical machine anticipated most of the features of computers that were invented over a hundred years later
- The programs for his machine developed by Babbage and Lovelace anticipated computer programming methods that were developed over a hundred years later.
- In May 1979, the new DOD-1 programming language was named Ada in her honor.
History Mechanical Computers
- The abacus, a simple counting aid, may have been invented in Babylonia (now Iraq) in the fourth century B.C.
- The Antikythera (an ti ki ‘theer uh) mechanism, used for registering and predicting the motion of the stars and planets, is dated to the first century B.C. It was discovered off the coast of Greece in 1901.Accounted for leap year, irregularity in the Moon’s orbit.
- Wilhelm Schickard builds the first mechanical calculator in 1623. It can work with six digits, and carries digits across columns. It works, but never makes it beyond the prototype stage. Schickard is a professor at the University of Tubingen, Germany.
- Blaise Pascal builds a mechanical calculator in 1642. It has the capacity for eight digits, but has trouble carrying and its gears tend to jam.
- Joseph-Marie Jacquard invents an automatic loom controlled by punch cards.
- Charles Babbage conceives of a “Difference Engine” in 1820 or 1821. It is a massive steam-powered mechanical calculator designed to print astronomical tables. He attempts to build it over the course of the next 20 years, only to have the project cancelled by the British government in 1842.
- Babbage’s next idea is the Analytical Engine – a mechanical computer that can solve any mathematical problem. It uses punch-cards similar to those used by the Jacquard loom and can perform simple conditional operations.
- Augusta Ada Byron, the countess of Lovelace, met Babbage in 1833. She describes the Analytical Engine as weaving “algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
- Her published analysis of the Analytical Engine is our best record of its programming potential. In it she outlines the fundamentals of computer programming, including data analysis, looping and memory addressing.
Big Data for Dating
- A generation ago, most young men would have considered happy hour at a bar to be a target-rich environment.
- Millennials empirically know that bar crawling is for recreation — not for dating.
- It’s inefficient and time consuming. If you want to meet someone, there are any number of big dating sites and apps available.
- The major big dating players include Match.com, Chemistry.com and eHarmony — all promise long-lasting relationships.
- According to the Berkeley School of Information, one in 10 Americans has used a dating site or mobile app, and 23 percent have met a spouse or long-term partner through these sites.
- In fact, 11% of couples who have been together for 10 years or less met online.
- In 2005, 47% of people agreed that online dating allows you to find a better match; in 2013, that number went up to 53%.
- However,, there is no evidence that dating sites do anything much more than increase the pool of potential partners.
- At eHarmony a compatibility matching system identifies potential matches based on a proprietary 29-dimensional array. This is based on a 150 questionnaire.
- There is, however, a problem: people lie.
- To present themselves in what they believe to be a better light, the information customers provide about themselves is not always completely accurate: men are most commonly economical with the truth about age, height and income, while with women it’s age, weight and build.
- Many users also supply other inaccurate information about themselves unintentionally. What they listen to. Are they passionate, considerate, etc.
- Hinge, a Washington DC-based dating company, gathering information about its customers from their Facebook pages.
- Hinge uses Facebook data to supplement members’ online dating profiles.
- It also infers information about people by looking at their friends.
- This data tends to be more accurate and curated.
- Hinge suggests matches with people known to their Facebook friends. But it turns out that algorithms can produce good matches without asking users for any data about themselves at all. Dr Zhao’s algorithm can then suggest potential partners in the same way websites like Amazon or Netflix recommend products or movies, based on the behavior of other customers (or in this case friends).
- This collective knowledge system seems to be the best. Perhaps, this is why arranged marriages seem to work in so many cases. In this case the arrangement is crowdsouced.
Tinderbot for high speed swipes
- Tinder also saves time. Dozens of Tinderbots to increase their efficacy. Some Tinderbots use game theory and others use brute force.
- On his blog, crockpotveggies.com, Justin Long provides the code for “Tinderbox,” a Tinderbot that taps into Tinder’s APIs and uses Eigenfaces to build an invariant model of the face you’re most likely to “swipe right.” You can think of it as your “perfect model.” A model with all of the characteristics you love most.
- He also uses Stanford NLP to help the bot analyze the sentiment of chat responses.
- After about 60 manual swipes, the program has learned enough to start making choices for you.
Food Science: Chocolate
- Cocoa have originated in the Amazon at least 4,000 years ago.
- It was used by the Maya Culture, as early as the Sixth Century AD.
- Maya called the cocoa tree cacahuaquchtl “tree,” and the word chocolate comes from the Maya word xocoatl which means bitter water.
- To the Mayas, cocoa pods symbolized life and fertility.
- Aztecs believed that wisdom and power came from eating the fruit of the cocoa tree.
- The use of chocolate worldwide begins with the discovery of America.
- The Court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella got its first look at the principal ingredient of chocolate when Columbus returned in triumph from America.
- During his conquest of Mexico, Cortez found the Aztec Indians using cocoa beans in the preparation of the royal drink of the realm, “chocolatl”, meaning warm liquid.
- In 1519, Emperor Montezuma, who reportedly drank 50 or more portions daily, served chocolatl to his Spanish guests in great golden goblets, treating it like a food for the gods. Montezuma’s chocolatl was very bitter.
- To make the concoction more agreeable to Europeans, Cortez and added sugar.
- It did not take long before chocolate was viewed in Europe as a healthy food.
- In 1657 the first of many famous English Chocolate Houses appeared.
- By 1730, chocolate had dropped in price to within the financial reach of all.
- The invention of the cocoa press in 1828 reduced the prices even further.
- In 1847, an English company introduced solid “eating chocolate” through the development of fondant chocolate, a smooth and velvety variety.
- The second development occurred in 1876 in Vevey, Switzerland, when Daniel Peter devised a way of adding milk to the chocolate, creating milk chocolate.
- It was in the pre-revolutionary New England — 1765, to be exact — that the first chocolate factory was established in the US.