Background Mode with John Martellaro

Posted on by Peter

I recently had the great pleasure to talk with John Martellaro of The Mac Observer for a new episode of the Background Mode podcast. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s how TMO describes the show: “Join John Martellaro every week for fascinating interviews with tech industry pros and luminaries. It’s more than a show about what they do; it’s about who they are.”

My own personal background is as a first-gen home computer geek, so that’s where we started. We talked about Apple’s current events, too. And we kept it to a very reasonable 33 minutes, so there’s a minimum of bloviation, I promise.

Pokémon GO afflicted with throw accuracy bug, developer promises fix

Posted on by Peter

I’ve been frustrated because I’ve been wasting so many Pokéballs on monsters I knew I should have caught on the first throw. You too? That’s because Niantic broke it. They confirmed it in a Tweet on Thursday, and promise a fix:

RIP Seymour Papert

Posted on by Peter

I’m in my mid-40s, so I’m lucky enough to be among the first generation of kids who grew up with computers in the home and at school. For many of us who came up during that time, Logo was an essential computing experience. I learned through friends on Twitter earlier today that one of Logo’s creators, Seymour Papert, passed away over the weekend at age 88.

Logo was a programming language developed for kids. It was radically different because it was visual: You issued positional commands to a “turtle” on the screen (a triangular cursor). Once you got down the basic mechanics of it, you learned the essence of programming loops and functions, creating dazzling geometric visual designs in the process. It was a marvelous and engaging way to learn programming at a time when computers were still very rudimentary.

Now kids who want to learn the basics of programming have some great alternatives like Scratch and Kojo, but Logo lives on in spirit and in essence, and Papert’s legacy lives on in generations of programmers and legions of computer users inspired by his work.

How to play Pokémon GO without annoying everyone: Shut off the camera

Posted on by Peter

I love Pokémon GO but the novelty of actually having to find my Pokémon by looking through my smartphone’s camera wears thin quickly. There are only so many times I stop, lift my smartphone and “look around” to find my Pokémon before it feels intrusive and, quite frankly, a bit rude to the people around me. Fortunately Pokémon GO has a setting that lets you turn this feature off, and still play the game.

 

The next time you’re trying to catch a wild Pokémon, take a look in the upper right corner of the screen. There’s a toggle switch labeled AR. That’s short for “Augmented Reality,” and that’s the camera feature. Slide that toggle off, and your Pokémon will be rendered in a 3D setting, but your camera will no longer be used.

Ar off

The game renders a 3D scene and drops the wild Pokémon right in the center of it. That makes it a bit easier to locate the Pokémon and throw a Pokéball to catch it. It also means less jerking the camera around as you’re walking around. 

All the other aspects to the game remain the same. This won’t affect your ability to visit Pokéstops or gyms, won’t change the frequency with which you encounter wild Pokémon, and doesn’t affect basic gameplay mechanics when it comes to tossing Pokéballs or walking to hatch lucky eggs and the like.

Worried about malware on the Mac? Try this

Posted on by Peter

It’s sadly easy to click on the wrong link on a web page or in an email and end up with a software package downloaded to your computer, rooted somewhere to make your experience surfing the web an endless misery of ads. Adware and malware abound, not just on PC but on Mac too.

Apple continues to refine OS X to make it as resistant to malware infection as possible, and third party software exists to help as well. Here’s a quick roundup of what you can do to close the wagons, as it were.

Let’s start with what’s built in to the operating system. The Mac has Security & Privacy settings you can adjust to make it more secure. Apple’s Gatekeeper software manages which apps can be installed on your Mac, and its settings are under the “General” tab.

“Allow apps downloaded from” is what I’m referring to. It has three settings: “Mac App Store,” “Mac App Store and identified developers,” and “Anywhere.”

The first two options check for the presence of digital certificates that Apple has verified, a good way to make sure the application you’re downloading is what it’s supposed to be. The Mac App Store option restricts that even further to only those applications you’ve purchased through Apple’s buiit-in Mac App Store.

Problems can happen when you set that option to “Anywhere.” Then the Mac doesn’t check to make sure the app is from a registered Apple developer, which means that it could come from anywhere. It’s an expert level setting that’s best not to use unless you feel comfortable with the potential risk involved. If your Mac is set to Anywhere, now would be a good time to change it.

How to change your Gatekeeper security settings

  1. Open System Preferences.
  2. Click on Security & Privacy.
  3. Check the setting for 
  4. Click the lock in the lower left to make changes. Enter your administrator password and click Unlock.
  5. Change the “Allow apps downloaded from” setting to one of the first two, depending on your need.
  6. Close the Security & Privacy window to save changes.
Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper is a good first line of defense. If you’d like to make sure your Mac is free of malware, I’d recommend using Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware for Mac. It’s free, and it’s well-maintained by a company that sells anti-malware software for PC and business.

Mbam

Macs running Snow Leopard can’t run this software. If you’re in that boat, you should seriously think about upgrading your operating system or your hardware, because it’s really old and it’s not going to be supported for much longer. Having said that, ClamXav still supports machines running 10.6 and later.

Will your Mac support macOS 10.12 “Sierra?” Here’s how to find out

Posted on by Peter

The release notes for the rechristened “macOS” 10.12 “Sierra” indicate a change in minimum system requirements. Older Macs got a stay of execution last year; El Capitan’s minimum requirements didn’t change from Yosemite. This year, Sierra ups that to Macs built since late 2009. If you’re not sure about the age of your Mac, here’s how to tell.

If you were planning to install 10.12 on an older Mac, you should probably make sure it’s up to snuff before you try. (If you try to install the developer preview on a Mac too old to support it, the installer will tell you it’s too old and will quit, anyway.)

If you’re not sure how old your gear is, here’s how to figure it out.

How to know the age of your Mac

  1. Click on the menu
  2. Select About this Mac
  3. Under the Overview tab, look at your Mac’s description. Its model age will be displayed.How old

Even though minimum system requirements had been static on the Mac for a few years, the actual supported features of OS X have been a moving target. El Capitan can be installed on Macs back to 2008, but features like Metal graphics acceleration, AirDrop file sharing, Handoff and Instant Hotspot are specific to Macs buiilt since 2012. That’s because those newer Macs have better hardware inside that enables the feature support. And while El Cap technically supported Macs with 2 GB RAM, running them in that configuration was maddeningly frustrating, especially on Macs without SSDs.

macOS Sierra ups the minimum system requirement to MacBooks and iMacs made in late 2009. That maintains that seven-year spread we saw last year, but cuts off older Mac models built before late 2009. I don’t know what, technically, is motivating the system requirement change. But generally, my experience tells me that Apple’s decisions on system requirements are rarely arbitrary: Apple simply won’t support hardware that they can’t back with a great user experience.

It’s too soon to tell what Sierra’s final system requirements will be: Yesterday was the release of the first developer preview, and a public beta won’t be out until next month, with a general release in the fall. So don’t draw too much from the developer preview as it stands now. Still, forewarned is forearmed, so tuck this information away for the coming weeks and months.

How to post to Instagram right from Photos on the iPhone

Posted on by Peter

Up until this week, posting iPhone photos to Instagram required the Instagram app. Now you can post directly from Photos. Instagram 8.2 finally adds support for Share Sheets, which we’ve been waiting for since iOS 8 was released in 2014!

If you’re like me, this is a big deal. I use Photos to catalog, edit and tweak my photos. I don’t much care for the built-in editing or filter tools in the Instagram app. So being able to post from right within Photos saves me the step of having to open Instagram and post from there. Even if you’re not using Photos but you are dependent on another photo cataloging or editing tool, Instagram’s support for Share Sheets makes it that much easier to integrate Instagram sharing into your workflow.

Here’s how to activate the new Instagram feature.

To add Instagram to your iPhone Share menu

  1. Make sure to download and install the latest version of Instagram from the App Store.
  2. Tap Photos.
  3. Select the photo you wish to export to Instagram. Tap the Share menu icon in the lower left corner.Share sheet
  4. The share sheet shows you the list of available services and apps, including Mail, iCloud Photo Sharing, Facebook, Twitter and others. Tap and left-slide until you see More. Tap on More.More
  5. In the Activities window, scroll down the list until you see Instagram. Tap the toggle to turn Instagram on, then tap Done.Instagram share
  6. Instagram will now appear in the list of services you can export photos to. You can add a caption and hashtags and post when ready.Instagram button

The downside of posting to Instagram is that you’re just posting to Instagram. The Instagram app lets you cross post to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Flickr as well. But those services are also supported in Share Sheets – it’s just not a one-stop crossposting shop. If you want to cross-post to different services at once, you’ll still need to use the Instagram app.

How to quickly see the emoji keyboard on OS X

Posted on by Peter

Sometimes you’d just to prefer to text on your Mac, and who can blame you? It’s got a nice big screen and a nice keyboard to use. But these days lots of us punctuate our messages and our social media posts with emoji, which are a bit more difficult to use on the Mac. Here are a couple of ways to make it easier.

One thing you can do to make emoji more accessible on your Mac is to enable the emoji menu. Open the Keyboard system preference and look for a checkbox near the bottom that says Show Keyboard, Emoji & Symbol Viewers in menu bar. 

Show emoji

With that checked, you’ll see a new menu appear on your Mac; click on it and select Show Emoji & Symbols to display a menu of all available emoji.

Show emoji menu

That will pop up a window that shows you all the available emoji. Position your cursor on the line of text you’d like to add the emoji to, double-click on the emoji, and it will be added to the text. The emoji window will float over the other windows in open apps. Close the window by clicking on the red button in the upper left hand corner.

Emoji menu

There’s an easier way, especially if you don’t want to clutter up your menu bar with additional stuff. Just hold down the command and control keys on your Mac’s keyboard, then press the spacebar. That’ll make the emoji menu appear as well.

How Dropbox works with Backblaze cloud backup

Posted on by Peter

It’s important to understand the differences in cloud-based file sync and backup services, so you can make sure your data is as safe as possible. In my latest blog post on Backblaze, I take a look at one of the most popular sync services, Dropbox: How Dropbox works with Backblaze cloud backup. While you can back up files after a fashion with Dropbox, there are limitations you need to be aware of.

Blog dropbox love v1 1

After we posted this, Ben McCarthy responded with a pithy tweet that I thought really framed the issue well.