Google+ April 2019 ~ High Tech House Calls
Expert Computer Consulting for Homes and Small Businesses

Let there be hope...

Life has changed there is no doubt and we wanted to reach out to see how you are doing.

As we go through this interesting time, we are trying to look at this as an opportunity to focus on our family and on friends like you. Let us use this extra time to catch up and talk more. Let us cook food that is not fast, but interesting and satisfying. Let us learn to enjoy a time to try new things. Let us find ways to enjoy time at home!

Computer Security

If my client base is any experience, anyone can be a victim of a Ransomware, Malware or Virus attack.

What can you do about it?

I conduct audits of your entire computer infrastructure and apply best practice solutions to plug the security holes on your computers, Smartphones and networks.

Now offering consultations to give you the best protection possible:


404.229.0839
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Jack of All Trades, Master of Many

Jack of All Trades, and Master of Many

We provide technical support for:


Homes and small businesses

Windows and the Mac OS platform

iPhones and Android Smartphones

Wireless and wired networks

New device setup

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How To Stop Malware

Sunday, April 7, 2019

How to cope with a Photos library too big to fit on an internal Mac drive By Glenn Fleishman

photos icon
Apple
iCloud Photos lets you have your picture of a cake and shoot a video of eating it, too. You can create a library of images and movies that’s far larger than the storage space available on any linked iOS or macOS device without losing anything you’ve captured.
Apple accomplishes this by treating iCloud as the “truth.” It stores the original, high-resolution versions of your media in your iCloud storage, while providing the option to store only “optimized” or thumbnail versions that take up a fraction of the space on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.
You can choose to download the full-scale originals, but you obviously need to have enough storage to hold the library.
If you don’t have an iOS device with the capacity or a Mac with a big enough internal or always-connected external drive, you have to rely entirely on Apple retaining the high-resolution originals. About 18 months ago, I wrote a column aptly titled, “Why you should not rely on iCloud Photo Library as your only media backup.” I meant it then and now.
The gist is that it’s risky to trust someone else, anyone else—even Apple—with the only backup of your stuff. Apple tends to encourage that these days with iCloud. And the company has been trustworthy with your data. But I still think we should always want and expect to have at least one—but typically multiple—complete copies of our important data in our possession or fully under our control.
Is there a way to work around this? Not easily. Apple didn’t plan for this scenario. There’s no option at iCloud.com to “download all media from iCloud,” and iCloud as a service doesn’t offer an interface for third-party backup services, like Backblaze or Carbonite, to extract or regularly update such a backup, either.
While Photos for macOS lets you maintain multiple Photos libraries, only one library at a time can be designated the System Photo Library, and only the System Photo Library can sync with iCloud Photos.
The obvious solution would be to use an external drive to hold your Photos library. Apple makes it quite easy to move your library and point Photos to it, including syncing to iCloud Photos from that migrated library. (See “How to move an Apple Photos for OS X library to an external drive.” The column is from 2015, but the instructions remain accurate.)
However, that depends on that external volume being available whenever you want to access your Photos library. (And iCloud Photos sync requires the library be attached to a Mac to keep it up to date.)
The obvious idea would be to create a backup of the optimized library on an external drive that you connect from time to time to your Mac and set as the System Photo Library. Then you would seemingly just enable Download Originals to This Mac in Photos > Preferences > iCloud. When all the images and video have downloaded, you’d then swap back to your internal library, and make sure the iCloud setting was switched back to Optimize Mac Storage.
mac911 icloud photos mac preferencesIDG
iCloud Photos lets you store full-resolution media or thumbnail (“optimized”) versions on your Mac.
However, it’s inadvisable. While iCloud Photos should keep track of which media and metadata is the most recent—such as after you add titles and keywords to a bunch of photos or organize them into albums—because Photos and iCloud Photos isn’t designed to switch among libraries, it’s unclear what will happen. It’s a difficult thing to test, because you need to check over time, too, to see whether problems appear.
Whenever I’ve attempted to test this with a massive library I maintain, either by enabling and disabling iCloud Photos or switching between optimized and full-resolution settings, iCloud forces a full sync. Even with the high-speed connection I have, it can take from hours to days to complete, and I’m never quite sure whether the final state has changed from where it was before I swapped settings.
The answer ultimately lies with Apple, which could let iCloud Photos users designate multiple libraries (a la Time Machine), a backup library, or other strategies. For now, you either need to trust in Apple, switch to an external drive, or reduce the images you sync with iCloud Photos.

Thursday, April 4, 2019

How to Set Up Auto-Reply for Texts & Calls with Do Not Disturb by iPhone Life



Have you ever wished you could set up an auto-reply text message on your iPhone for times when you can't or don't want respond to text messages? Well, Do Not Disturb While Driving has an auto-reply feature that sends a message to people who text you letting them know you're driving and can't reply. If you want to send auto-replies even when you're not driving, all you have to do is customize the message and then use Do Not Disturb While Driving instead of the regular Do Not Disturb when you are in meetings or are otherwise unable to answer texts. Here's how to set this feature to be used with ease!
To set up Do Not Disturb While Driving's auto-reply:
  • Open Settings.


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  • Tap Do Not Disturb.

  • Under Phone, tap Allow Calls From and select No One (or Favorites if you still want people you've added to Favorites in the Contacts app to be able to reach you via phone when Do Not Disturb While Driving is enabled). Note that calls are always sent to your voicemail when Do Not Disturb is on, so callers will not receive an auto-reply text.


  • Under Do Not Disturb While Driving, tap Activate and select Manually.


  • Tap Auto-Reply To and select which group you want to auto-reply to: Recents, Favorites, or All Contacts.


  • Tap Auto-Reply to customize your automatic message.


You can add the Do Not Disturb While Driving button to Control Center to enable this feature whenever you want with just a swipe and a tap.
To do this:
  • Open Settings and tap Control Center.


  • Tap Customize Controls.

  • Tap the green plus next to Do Not Disturb While Driving to move it to the Include section. 

  • Now when you open Control Center, tap the Do Not Disturb While Driving button to enable the auto-reply texts. 

Now you can enjoy your time undisturbed, while anyone who tries to text you will receive your auto-reply until you disable the feature. 

Tech tricks to help you organize your digital photo library By David Nield



 
Photos
Don't let your photos languish in obscurity.
Smartphones' ever-improving cameras encourage us to snap an ever-increasing pile of digital photos. And as these images build up in your phone's storage, they become harder and harder to organize. That's where apps come in.
Both Google Photos (for Android and iOS) and Apple Photos (built into iOS) can sort pictures by date, album, and other attributes (in addition to editing and backing upyour precious snaps). On top of that, they also come with some lesser-known tools to organize your photo library—and thanks to the rapidly advancing AI underpinning both apps, they do most of the hard work for you. Here's how to take advantage of these features.

Create albums

If you're the type of person who loves bullet journaling and keeps her bookshelf in alphabetical order, you may want to sort your images into traditional folders. This makes them easier to access and allows you to browse through themed albums.
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To create albums on your phone, you start by selecting the photos you'd like to include. You can scroll through all your images, which the apps automatically organize by date, or search for specific results to include.
In Google Photos, tap and hold on one photo. Once you've selected that image, you'll be able to select any other pictures you want to include in your new album. Next, tap the plus icon on the top right and choose Album. The app will ask you to name the album, and then you're done! To access any album, go to the front screen of Google Photos and choose the Albums tab at the bottom.
Inside Apple Photos, you need to tap Select on the top right before picking your photos. Choose Add To then New Album... and give your album a name. To find the album again, go to the front screen of Apple Photos and tap the Albums button at the bottom.
In addition to the folders you curate yourself, both Google Photos and Apple Photos will create albums for you automatically. They organize these albums by people or places, so you can scroll through images of your daughter or photos from your voyage to Shenzhen. You can access these albums the same way you view the manually-created ones: from the Albums page of the app.

Search smarter

When you're trying to dig up a nearly-forgotten photo from your archives, searching by keyword is more effective than hunting through a system of albums. But very few of us have time to enable searches by tagging all our photos with descriptions. Luckily, Google and Apple Photos can automatically tag and categorize pictures for us.
For example, play around with searching by keyword. In whichever app you use, employ the search option at the top of the screen to look up "trees" or "sunsets," and you'll see a selection of pictures that match your query. Experiment with the feature by searching for different descriptors, and if you vaguely remember a photo from years ago, try digging it up with a search term—chances are these apps will be able to find it.
In addition to keywords, you can search by specific places. Most phones embed location data in photos' metadata. Simply type a place you've visited into the search box to turn up images you snapped while you were there.
Searching for people is another extremely useful feature, but it takes a little more work than keyword or location searches. Google and Apple deploy smart algorithms to pick out faces that appear in multiple photos, but they rely on you to tell them who's who. In Google Photos, tap the search box, and the app will show you a row of faces that show up in your photo library. Scroll through these until you find the person you want to identify. Next, tap the thumbnail, then Add a name to match the image with one of your contacts. Once you've done that, you can search for that person using the standard search tool. In Apple Photos, find a photo that includes a person you want to identify and swipe up. Tap the thumbnail of the person under People and choose Add Name. As you type, the app will match the name to a person in your contacts. To view all the photos of a certain friend, open the front screen of the app, tap Albums, then select People.
As for finding pictures by date, these apps arrange photos chronologically by default. As soon as you open your app, just flick up or down with your finger to go further into the past. You can also type something like "January 2017" or "2016" into the search bar to find pictures from those dates. In Google Photos (Apple Photos doesn't yet enable this), you can also search for a specific date using the YYYY-MM-DD format or look for context-sensitive queries such as "last week" or "last April" work in Google Photos too. Again, any of the photos you turn up in a date search can be transferred to a specific album if needed.
Both of these apps let you combine search terms as well. Want to look for sunsets in Barcelona or pictures of your brother on a beach? No problem. Plus, Google and Apple are constantly upgrading the apps' scanning capabilities, so expect them to get more intelligent over time.

Build highlights reels

If you like reviewing your very favorite photos over and over again, you're in luck. Both Google Photos and Apple Photos let you combine your best shots into highlights reels that you view as albums, short videos, or collages. They even put together some of these memory collections for you. This gives you a cool way of arranging precious photos into a format you can look back on.
On Google Photos, start by tapping Assistant on the bottom left. Here, you should see suggestions for collections you can make. For example, if you've been taking photos and videos at the beach all afternoon, the app might ask if you'd like to combine those images into one video.
To put something together manually, first choose the type of content you want to create: AlbumMovieAnimation, or Collage. Next, pick the images and video clips you want to use and click Create. If you decide to make a movie, you'll first see a preview, which you can jazz up with special effects, using the buttons that appear at the bottom of the preview. Google Photos will automatically save anything you make to your library.
Over on Apple Photos, you begin by selecting Memories. Like in Google Photos, you'll see that the app has put together some sample memories on your behalf, usually photos from specific places or dates. To accept a suggestion and create a movie of these shots, choose one of the suggested options and tap the play button. Once the clip finishes playing, you can change its style and speed by tapping the icons underneath it.
You can manually turn any album into your own Memories reel. Go to Albums, tap the one you're interested in, scroll down, and select Add to Memories. As it does with its automatic videos, the app will add some basic transitions and effects to your slideshow. Then you can edit it further by playing the clip and then experimenting with the effects buttons below it.

How to Customize Junk Email and Safe Senders in Outlook by ROB WOODGATE

Junk Email is the folder where Outlook sends mail it thinks is spam. You can customize Outlook’s spam filter to block or whitelist senders or domains, or crank up the automatic filtering and delete spam automatically. Let’s see how.

Accessing Junk Email Options

You can access the Junk Email options by clicking Home > Junk.
The top four options will only be available if you’ve got a message selected in a folder, or if you have a message open and you click Message > Junk.
All of these options are also available from the context menu when you right-click a message.
We’ll cover the top four options on this menu as we go through the article. For now, we’re interested in “Junk E-mail Options” at the bottom of the menu.
Click on this option to open the Junk Email Options panel.

Basic Settings on the Options Tab

The Options tab on the Junk Email window is where you can set Outlook’s junk email options for any message that comes in. Email marked as junk is sent directly to the Junk Email folder, and you can choose how aggressively Outlook marks emails as junk. By default, the junk email filter is set to “No Automatic Filtering,” so only emails from senders you’ve deliberately added to your Blocked Senders list will end up in the Junk Email folder.
You can switch to “Low” to catch more obvious junk email, and this setting should be enough for most people. If you want Outlook to be more aggressive you can go for the “High” setting, but this is very likely to move some legitimate email to the Junk Email folder, so you’ll need to check it regularly. If a legitimate email does get sent to the Junk Email folder, you can train the filter not to view email from that sender as junk by selecting the message and clicking Home > Junk > Not Junk.
A confirmation box will open telling you the mail will be moved to the Inbox and giving you the option to add the sender to the Safe Sender lists.
Going back to your Junk Email Options, the last level you can choose is “Safe Lists Only.” This will mark as junk any message from a sender or domain that isn’t in your Safe Senders list. This is a very restrictive setting, and you’ll need to check your Junk Email folder very regularly. However, over a suitably long period of time, it’s possible to train the junk filter quite well, especially if you have a low amount of email from unknown senders.
Underneath the filter levels are two additional settings.
The first of these, “Permanently delete suspected junk email instead of moving to the Junk Email folder,” is a setting that is probably most useful if you’ve set your filtering to “No Automatic Filtering.” That filter will only move mail from senders on your Blocked Senders list to Junk, and as they’re blocked, it’s probably fine for those emails to be permanently deleted. But at any other level of filtering—especially “High” or “Safe Senders Only”—there’s a very good chance that Outlook will pick up a “false positive” and mark a legitimate email as junk. If your junk email is set to be permanently deleted instead of moved to the Junk Email folder, you’ll lose legitimate email and never know it was there. Therefore we don’t recommend turning this setting on unless you’re very sure of what you’re doing.
The second option, “Warn me about suspicious domain names in emails addresses (recommended),” is Outlook’s anti-phishing tool, and it’s only available (and will be turned on by default) if you switch the junk email filtering on. This means switching from “No Automatic Filtering” to “Low,” “High,” or “Safe Senders Only.” Once this option is switched on, Outlook will start filtering potential phishing emails. As this is quite an important tool, we’ll let Microsoft explain what it will do.
We’ve talked about phishing emails for years, shown you how to use software features to help stop phishing attempts, and reported on new initiatives to help separate the legitimate mail from the phishing mail. We’re unsure why such a useful tool isn’t a) turned on by default and b) more widely publicized by Microsoft, but it isn’t.
If you’re using Outlook in your office, your administrators may be using anti-phishing technology of which you’re not aware. But if you’re using Outlook for a personal account, we recommend you turn this on. Setting the junk filter level to “Low” and switching on “Warn me about suspicious domain names in emails addresses (recommended)” will make you safer.

Managing Safe Senders

The next tab, Safe Senders, contains the list of individuals and domains that Outlook will never treat as junk email.
If you clicked Home > Junk > Not Junk for a message that was in the Junk Email folder, and accepted the option to add the sender to the Safe Senders list, this is where their address will end up. You can also mark a sender as “safe” by clicking Home > Junk > Never Block Sender (or Never Block Sender’s Domain if you want all emails from that domain to bypass the junk filters).
If you want to make sure that a particular address or domain is added to the safe sender’s list, click the Add button.
This will open up a window where you can type the address or domain to be added.
This is fine for one or two addresses or domains, but quite time consuming if you’ve got a large number to add. To make things a bit quicker, you have the option to import a list of senders and domains, or to export a list of your existing safe senders and domains.
Importing a list is great, but if you don’t have a list in the right format, it’s not very helpful. Luckily, Outlook only expects a text file with a list of senders and domains separated by a return, and that’s easy to put together. You can either export this information from another mail program or write it yourself, which is a lot quicker than clicking “Add,” entering the details, clicking “OK,” and then repeating that process for every sender. As a safe senders list can take a long time to build up, you might want to consider exporting your list now and then in case you need to reinstall Outlook or install it on another machine. It’ll save you a lot of time and keep your junk mail filter the way you want it if you ever move to a new version of Outlook.
You can also use the import/export options to make bulk changes or removals. Export the list, make your changes (or remove entries) in your text editor of choice and import the new list. The Import process doesn’t wipe the the existing entries before importing the new ones, and it treats changes as new entries (for example, if you change an entry from ebay.co.uk to ebay.com, it will add ebay.com, rather than replacing ebay.co.uk) so you’ll need to empty the list before importing your amended list. To do this, select the top entry, hold down the SHIFT key, and select the last entry. This will select all of the entries in the list. Then click Remove to delete all of the safe senders ready for your import.
The last two options on the page help you add senders to the list automatically by making some sensible assumptions.
Switching on “Also trust email from my Contacts” means that mail from an address that is in your Outlook contacts will be let through without being filtered into the junk email. Effectively, this turns your contacts list into a second Safe Senders list without you having to manually add all the addresses to the Safe Senders list yourself.
Switching on “Automatically add people I mail to the Safe Senders list” means that anyone you mail will be considered a safe sender, on the basis that it’s normal to receive a reply to a mail you sent. However, this is not always the case, because you might be replying to someone to tell them to stop mailing you (like a unsubscribe mail) so this option should be used with caution.

Managing Safe Recipients

The next tab, Safe Recipients, is somewhat confusing. You don’t have control of how a recipient will treat your mail, so it can’t be for that. It doesn’t block you from sending mail to any address on the list. So, what’s it for? Safe Recipients are actually mailing lists to which you belong. Normally the “To” address for a mailing list is the name of the list (e.g., mygroup@mailinglist.com) and adding this to the Safe Recipients list makes sure that these emails aren’t treated as junk.
Otherwise, the options are the same as they are for Safe Senders. You can mark a mailing list as “safe” by clicking Home > Junk > Never Block this Group or Mailing List if you want emails from that list or group to bypass the junk filters.

Blocking Senders

The Blocked Senders tab is where you add individual addresses or whole domains that you consider to be junk mail. Anything added in here will go straight to the Junk Email folder.
The options are the same as they are for Safe Senders, with the ability to add, edit and remove entries, as well as import and export lists of addresses and domains. You can also add a sender or their domain to the Blocked Senders list when you have a message selected by going to Home > Junk > Block Sender
Any emails that end up in the Junk Email folder, whether from blocked senders or because Outlook has determined that the mail is probably junk, will have any links disabled and the contents of the mail set to plain text. Outlook displays a message telling you this in any message you open from the Junk Email folder.
Note: If you add a sender to both the Safe Senders and Blocked Senders list, the Safe Senders list takes priority, and emails from the sender will arrive in your inbox.

Blocking Top Level Domains and Encodings

The final tab, International, lets you block country-level domains and emails in specific encodings.
Click “Blocked Top-Level Domain List” to open the panel of the same name. This lets you select country domains to block.
If you wanted to block emails from Andorra, for example, you’d tick the “AD (Andorra)” checkbox and then click “OK.” Outlook would then treat mail from a domain ending “.ad” as junk.
This is useful if you get a lot of junk mail from a particular country domain, such as .cc (Cocos Islands), which at the time of writing has the highest number of ISPs that enable spamming. Unless you’re expecting to get a legitimate email from that country domain, you can go ahead and add it to the junk domain list. Bear in mind that this won’t stop all email that originates in the Cocos Islands—just mails from a domain that ends with.cc. So if you’re sick of receiving spam from Russian spammers, blocking .ru will only block them if their domain ends with .ru. A Russian spammer operating from a .com domain wouldn’t be affected by blocking the .ru domain.
If you want to block a particular geographical area, you can block entire encodings by clicking “Blocked Encodings List.” This lets you select email encodings to block.
Encodings are a big topic on their own so we won’t cover them here (Wikipedia has a good article on them if you want to know more), except to say that broadly, encodings determine how a character is represented digitally. Different encodings represent characters differently, and your email client (and your browser) can translate between (some) of the character sets, a process known as transcoding. If you regularly receive junk mail in a particular encoding, you can block that encoding by selecting it in the Blocked Encodings List and clicking “OK.” If you’re not sure what encodings are or how to find out what encodings your received emails are in, you probably shouldn’t set anything in here, as you could stop yourself getting legitimate mails.
These junk mail settings are a useful way of keeping your inbox clean and under control. If you put the effort in to block senders as you get emails you consider junk, then over time you’ll have a lot less rubbish in your inbox and a little less stress in your life.