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Show of 11-13-2021

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Troy in Newark: Dear Doc and Andrew. I am confused by the various way to shut down my computer. When should I use sleep mode or hibernate mode, rather than just shutting it down. Love the podcast. Troy in Newark, NJ
  • Sleep mode is the most convenient, because it allows you to start working with your PC again from where you left off. However, it is the least power efficient mode because although it uses much less power than when your PC is awake, it still uses some power to run background processes. How much power it uses depends on which background processes run while it is asleep.
  • Hibernation mode is a ‘deeper’ sleep. It essentially saves the contents of RAM to disk and then shuts down, so it uses no power. However, it takes longer to wake up and get going again.
  • Shutting down your PC means that it uses no power. However, starting it up again can take several minutes, particularly if you have lots of auto run applications and there are updates waiting to be installed.
    • Sleep Mode — If you have finished working or using your PC for the moment but plan to come back later, say in an hour or so, putting your PC to sleep makes sense. The difference in power usage in the space of a couple of hours is minimal, but the convenience of being able to pick up where you left off is much greater. Do not carry a laptop to work in the sleep mode.
    • Hibernation Mode — The main benefit of Hibernate mode is that it allows you to resume working exactly where you left off. So all the apps you were using will be open, and all the documents and windows that were open will be ready for you to continue. However, because it has to save the contents of RAM to disk in order to ‘remember’ what you were doing, it takes longer to shut down than either sleep or a regular shutdown. It also takes longer to start up again because it has to read all the data from the file. This is an option for carrying a laptop safely.
    • Shutting Down — Shutting down your PC closes all the apps that were open, clears the contents of RAM, and gets rid of temporary files that were created during the sessions – provided you shut down properly. If your PC shuts down suddenly, it may not delete temporary files. The main advantage of shutting down your PC is that it saves power, but it also ‘refreshes’ Windows by getting rid of those temporary files and it allows downloaded updates to be installed. The disadvantage is that it takes more time to start up again than if you just put your PC to sleep. I use this mode when carrying my laptop.
  • Email from Leslie in Oakton: Dear Tech Talk. I have Two-Factor Authentication enabled on several of my accounts. I’m getting ready to buy a new phone in a few days and I’m afraid I’ll have problems when I try to log into those accounts after I switch phones. What I am asking is will having Two-Factor Authentication enabled on my accounts cause me to get locked out of them when I replace my phone? Leslie from Oakton, VA
  • Tech Talk Responds: You do not really need to worry about getting locked out of your online accounts when you switch to a new phone. If you receive your Two-Factor Authentication login codes via SMS text messages, the security of your accounts is tied to your phone number instead of to the phone itself. Therefore, simply switching to a new phone won’t affect your ability to log in to your account at all as long as you keep the same phone number on the new phone.
  • What’s more, even if you lose your phone or it stops working for some reason, you’ll still be able to log in to your accounts using your new phone as long as it uses the same phone number as the old phone.
  • If you’ll be getting a new phone number on the new phone, that doesn’t have to pose a problem either. If you know you’ll be getting a new phone number simply go into the settings for each of your accounts and remove Two-Factor Authentication on them right before you switch phones, then re-enable it using your new phone after you get it.
  • If you use an authentication app (Google Authenticator, for example) instead of SMS text messages to receive your phone’s login codes, simply remove Two-Factor Authentication from all of your accounts that it’s enabled on and then reactivate it after you have installed the authenticator app on your new phone.
  • Most accounts/services provide a set of “Recovery Codes” that you can use to log in to your account if you are unable to retrieve the login code from your phone for whatever reason. If you have not done so already, I strongly recommend that you take a few moments to retrieve those Recovery Codes from your accounts right now and store them in a safe place. You should be able to retrieve those codes by going into the Two-Factor Authentication section of each account’s Settings screens.
  • Email from Howard in Washington: Dear Tech Talk. I have an Acer laptop that came with Windows 10 and now I am having a problem with it. When I finish using the laptop, I can click the Shutdown icon and it shuts down just fine. The problem is if I close the lid it does not shut the laptop down like my last laptop. It goes into Sleep mode instead. Is there a way to force this my laptop to shut down automatically when I close the lid? Thanks. Howard in Washington, DC.
  • Tech Talk Responds: You can easily force your laptop to shut down every time you close the lid by making one simple tweak to the “Power Options” settings. Just follow the steps below:
    • Click the Start button and type the word Power.
    • Click Power & sleep settings.
    • Click Additional power settings.
    • Click Choose what closing the lid does over in the left-hand column.
    • Find the line that says “When I close the lid:” and change both options to Shut down.
    • Click Save changes.
  • You can still shut your laptop down by clicking one of the shutdown options with your mouse, but you should now be able to shut it down simply by closing the lid.
  • Email from June in Burke: Dear Doc and Andrew. I am worried about Google tracking my every move. How can I see what information Google has collected and then change my permissions? I want to take control of my data profile. Thanks June in Burke, VA
  • Tech Talk Responds: Good decision. Google collects much of your history and activity and shares it for profit. They claim it serves you, but don’t believe it.
  • If you have a Google account and are logged in, go to a web browser and type in the following: https://myactivity.google.com/
  • This defaults to your Web and App history. Just scroll down the page and it will show you a timeline of your activity. There will be things on there that even you will not remember. They are using it to tailor products and advertising toward you.
  • You can control your activity on this page.
    • Web & App Activity – On/Off
    • Location History – On/Off
    • YouTube History – On/Off
  • If you scroll down, you can see what information has actually be collected by Google. Well, there is a options button on the top right which allows you to enter your activity controls. I
  • You can click on the Main menu in the upper left (four parallel lines). This will bring up several options.
    • Delete activity by (delete selected data)
    • Other Google activity (control additional collection options)
    • Activity controls (search, tracking, and YouTube tracking)
  • I was surprised by how much Google has been tracking me. I thought that I had turned off all tracking, but all three tracking areas had been turned on. My advice is to check back occasionally to make certain that your selections have not been changed.
  • Email from Barbie in Reston: Dear Doc and Andrew. I just have been sending talking emoji’s (Animoji’s) to all on my iPhone friends via text message. But I also have Android friends. Can I send Animoji’s to them too? Barbie in Reston, VA.
  • Tech Talk Responds: You can use Animoji in iMessage, as stickers, and on FaceTime. You can actually send Animoji’s to Android users. They show up as videos send via text message. They are not as attractive as they are on the iPhone.

 

 

Profiles in IT: Theodor Holm Nelson

  • Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, who coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963and published them in 1965.
  • Ted Nelson was born June 17, 1937 in Los Angeles, CA, to Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson and Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm.
  • His parents’ marriage was brief and he was mostly raised by his grandparents, first in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village.
  • Nelson earned a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959. He wrote and produced the first Rock Concert, Anything and Everything, a tale about student life at Swarthmore. He then made an experimental student film, The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow, where the hero discovers the meaning of life. Filmmaking was his calling.
  • When he discovered computers at Harvard, he saw the screen as an interactive movie.
  • Following a year of graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago, Nelson earned a Masters in Sociology from Harvard University in 1962.
  • After Harvard, Nelson wrote to John Lilly, a dolphin researcher, with a few ideas he had come up with for studying dolphin language. Lilly was impressed and hired him. Nelson spent a year working with dolphins at Lilly’s Communication Research Lab in Miami, analyzing dolphin behavior and making movies about dolphin activity.
  • From 1964 to 1966, he was an instructor in sociology at Vassar College.
  • In 2002, he obtained his Ph.D. in media and governance from Keio University.
  • His dream was using computers as a repository for the world’s knowledge in a way that facilitated drawing connections between ideas and creating new ones
  • This led to founding Project Xanadu in 1960, with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface that could link the world’s knowledge.
  • Xanadu was named after the magic place of literary memory in Coleridge’s poem Kubla Kahn. It represented Nelson’s dream.
  • In 1965, he presented the paper “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate” at the ACM National Conference, in which he coined the term “hypertext”.
  • The effort is documented in the books Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974), The Home Computer Revolution (1977) and Literary Machines (1981).
  • In 1978, he had a significant impact upon IBM’s thinking when he outlined his vision of the potential of personal computing to the team that three years later launched the IBM PC.
  • Because he never successfully launch his company, Nelson supported his work on Project Xanadu a variety of positions and consultancies, including Harcourt Brace and Company (where he met Douglas Engelbart), Brown University (where he developed the Hypertext Editing System and File Retrieval and Editing System, Bell Labs (classified hypertext-related defense research, and lectureships.
  • Ted Nelson claims credit for inventing the back button with regards to hypertext, as the Hypertext Editing System was the first system that contained one. His work on hypertext preceded WWW by over 30 years.
  • Nelson conducted research and development under the auspices of the Nelson Organization, which he founded in 1968, and the Computopia Corporation, which he co-founded in 1977. Clients included IBM, Brown University, Western Electric, the University of California, among others.
  • At the behest of Xanadu developers Mark S. Miller and Stuart Greene, Nelson joined San Antonio, Texas-based Datapoint as chief software designer in 1981.
  • Following several San Antonio-based consultancies and the acquisition of Xanadu technology by Autodesk in 1988, he continued working on the project as a non-managerial Distinguished Fellow in the San Francisco Bay Area until 1993.
  • From 2004 to 2008, he was a Fellow and Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute.
  • While the Xanadu project itself failed to flourish, some aspects of his vision were fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web in 1994.
  • He feels the World Wide Web and XML, as a gross over-simplification of his vision.
  • A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network and what we have become familiar with online is that Nelson’s network links were two-way instead of one-way.
  • HTML is precisely what he was trying to prevent, quotes you cannot follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.
  • As of 2011, Nelson was working on a new information structure, ZigZag. He also developed XanaduSpace, a system for the exploration of connected parallel.
  • In January 1988 Byte magazine published an article about Nelson’s ideas, titled “Managing Immense Storage”. This stimulated discussions within the computer industry, and encouraged people to experiment with Hypertext features.
  • In 1998, at the Seventh WWW Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Nelson was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award.
  • In 2014, ACM SIGCHI honored him with a Special Recognition Award.
  • Ted Nelson net worth or net income is estimated to be between $1M and $5M.

Observations from the Faculty Lounge

  • Ted Nelson felt that computer software is packaging for the underlying technology. And that what is included in the packages and who controls it is very political.
    • Beginners have the notion that computers can help them stay organized all the time and make life easier. Then they have to face the incredible difficulty and disappointment of learning today’s systems, and either give up or settle for far less.—Ted Nelson
    • The purpose of computers is human freedom. –Ted Nelson
    • I believe that original dream is still possible for everyone. But not with today’s systems. – Ted Nelson
  • His friend and visionary, Doug Engelbart, performed the Mother of All Demos and demonstrated the technology. Dr. Engelbart and Ted Nelson became acquaintances at the dawn of the modern computing era. They envisioned and invented the computing that we have come to take for granted.
  • Ted Nelson felt that world knowledge could be graphically linked to fuel the most creative output humankind has ever seen. His vision was truncated by a simplified view created by Tim Berners-Lee with the browser and its one way links.
  • Their ideas remain profound and forward looking. Anyone who really cares about the future of media, intellect, and culture, and how information technology can augment that, should consider their work.
  • Just because the Web took a turn to expediency in the past does not mean it will not realize its richer potential in the future.
  • Those trying to invent this “deeply intertwingled” future might want to stand on Ted’s shoulders. Ted may not have had the entrepreneurial genius of Steve Jobs, but his inventive vision is second to none.
  • Ted Nelson has become a cynic of modern technology. His voice should not be lost.
  • For him, good enough was the enemy of perfect. He always strove for perfect, but could not get the world to follow.

Emoji: Where It All Began

  • The New York Times published the first emoji. In August 1862, they printed a copy of speech transcription by President Abraham Lincoln, and there was a 🙂 emoticon.
  • In 1881, an American satirical magazine Puck included real emoticons as a part of their Typographical Art issue, published on 30 March. Using typography, it portrayed several emotions: joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.
  • In 1986, kaomoji was considered a thing in Japan. Using the katakana character set, it’s a representation of human’s expressions that particularly focused on the eyes.
  • It was not until 1999 that Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese artist, created the first 176 modern emoji while he worked for i-mode, a mobile internet service company.
  • Kurita created a set of 12 x 12 pixel images that work like texts, appearing on the keyboards for i-mode users, including categories for: the weather, traffic, technology, and moon.
  • In 2007, Google became the first US Company to incorporate emoji into their e-mail service, Gmail. It was a part of their effort to expand their presence in Japan and Asia. The next year, Google released their own 79 animated emoji for Gmail.
  • At the same year, Apple also launched their own version of emojis in November 2008. It was made available on their iOS 2.2 update for users in Japan.
  • In 2010, emoji became part of the Unicode Standard with each emoji having its own dedicated block and accessible worldwide.
  • In 2011, emoji finally made it into Apple keyboard on its iOS 5 update. Two years later, Android made emoji accessible on their keyboard as well.
  • In 2017, Facebook revealed that five billion emoji were sent each day in Messenger..
  • In 2017, iOS 11 introduced face-tracking emoji called Animoji. It enables users to create custom animated emoji using their own face.
  • The next year Samsung created their own AR Emoji. And the rest his history.
  • Emojipedia link: https://emojipedia.org/