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When “Viva Cortana!” starts ordering things off the Internet by itself, it will be too late.

But with the M1 and future custom Apple silicon in Macs, we’re only a few years away from full Mac sentience anyway.  Maybe Apple just respects our privacy enough not to intrude?

 

I have a Canon color laserjet MF726cdw laser printer.  It is an all-in-one device.  It will print to and scan from both sides of the paper, although if what you are scanning is at all wonky (folds, creases, etc.) you are better off just scanning manually on the glass rather than using the feeder.  I guess that’s the one thing that annoys me about it; I wish the feeder were a bit more tolerant of originals.  It makes copies, too, should that be necessary; you can choose to produce copies in black-and-white or color.  I suppose I could run a phone line to it and fax something if I ever had cause to do that.

It’s big and it’s heavy.  It can be a little loud when you sit right next to it.  I don’t print a lot, but I do print from time to time.  My wife prints on it more than I do.  She mainly prints recipes from Safari on her iPad.  She also prints from her Windows 10 desktop machine.

I think it was being discontinued at the time I found it for $275 on Amazon.  When I do replace the toner, genuine Canon cartridges run about $450.  Yes, that’s expensive, but the print is absolutely clear and there are no issues as there were when I tried off-brand cartridges.  Toner cartridges have been lasting me about 18 months on average.

This printer is supported without any special setup on Windows.  For those of you who are Linux fans, Canon has a downloadable driver for this printer that works fine from Linux Mint/Ubuntu.  I can print dual-sided from LibreOffice, browsers, etc. over WiFi.  I had to install the driver myself on Linux Mint 19.  Linux Mint 20.2 automatically recognizes and installs this printer when it is detected on WiFi during setup.  In addition, the printer supports Apple AirPrint, so you can print from Apple devices with no special configuration.

This printer replaced a long line of HP inkjet devices that were, shall we say, less than optimal.  HP’s inkjet technology seems to be designed to consume ink even when no printing is going on.  For infrequent printers such as myself, that’s wasteful.

At first glance, it seems like way more printer than anyone needs in a home setting.  But as I continued to find useful things about it, I was no longer bothered by its size.

I read this morning that Apple has just released an emergency iOS patch, zero-day, exploit exists in the wild, sky is falling, must install, blah blah blah.

https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-releases-emergency-ios-and-macos-security-patch-so-update-now

Nobody knew about this before 9/20, when iOS 15 dropped?

This smells to me like someone wants to push people to install iOS 15 faster.

 

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Charlie

Another interesting and thought-provoking article.  Thanks again, sir!

I like the new format.

Now, now, put down your torches.  Even if I like the new format, experience shows that Firefox will likely “fix” it again into something I don’t like.  Whoever is running the user experience portion of Firefox seems to take their cues from whatever is the hot new trend in UI at the moment.  It sort of reminds me of teenage girls reading fashion magazines: “Oh, dark mode is SO last year.  Everyone’s doing everything flat and white now!  Let’s turn everything extra white, and lock all of Firefox into THAT!”  And after four hours, my eyes are standing out on stalks.  No thanks.

So this is still useful information, even if you like what is there now.

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agoldhammer, wdburt1, Charlie, Cybertooth, rontpxz81

So, they moved the Start menu and icons over to the middle of the taskbar.  To be different, I guess.  But I love the Baidu page linked to in the Gizmodo article.  I don’t speak or read Chinese.  However, I’ll take a shot at translating anyway.  I’ll probably get a lot of it wrong, but…

Post 1: “Here are some early screenshots of Windows 11.”  [includes screenshots]

Post 2: dd [Someone typed something in error]

Post 3 – 6: Something along the lines of, “What were they thinking?”, “They just moved stuff around – did they do anything we’ve been asking for?”, “What’s up with the loofah wallpaper?”, etc.

Post 7: “I want REAL Windows back!” [sad face with tear emoticon]

Post 8: “Me Too.”

Post 9: “Here’s the article where these originated.”  [Hyperlink to an article on The Verge with more screenshots.]

Post 10-13: [Additional complaints, one with a graphic character expressing displeasure.]

Post 14: “There is a way to move the taskbar icons back where they belong, if you think that having them in the middle is silly.”  [Includes a screenshot showing the icons on the left side of the taskbar.]

Post 15: “That’s much better.”

The first post on page 2 begins with the English phrase “classic shell.”  I feel your pain.

I don’t speak Chinese, but I speak fluent Nerd.

I dumped Norton/Symantec when they insisted on taking over a significant portion of system resources for their activities.  Apparently they felt that they weren’t using enough CPU already.

At first, I read this story and parsed it as thinking they would be adding additional protection against cryptominers being installed on your machine.  Then I read the actual article and saw that no, they’re actually installing cryptomining as a feature.  This seems like a rather odd choice.  If I want to engage in this activity, I’d add separate software that just does this.

 

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firstmerk

I want to put in another vote for continued coverage of Apple developments.

I continue to support this site because it has good information and my wife’s computers run Win10.  I appreciate all the help available here for Windows.

I also appreciate coverage of other platforms.  Both my wife and I have Apple iPhones.  Life doesn’t happen on a single platform anymore, and I am glad that AskWoody recognizes that.

Thanks for your additional coverage of Apple, and support of Linux in the discussion groups.

 

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Will Fastie

Here’s what I finally did when I got tired of all the nonsense robocalls.  I have an Apple iPhone:

• Go somewhere very quiet, and use GarageBand to record about 30 seconds of silence.  Save this as a ringtone.
• Go through all of your contacts and assign an actual ringtone to each one.
• Set the silent ringtone as your default, and turn off any default vibration for voice calls.

When a call comes in, if it is not in your Contacts list, it doesn’t ring – it is just silent.  The caller has the option of leaving a voice message.  If they do leave a message, and it is someone with whom you want to regularly communicate, add them to your Contacts and assign a ringtone.  I find that most robocalls don’t bother with messages.  Some do, though.

Now, when my phone rings, it is actually someone I want to talk with.

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wdburt1

I went to Fry’s in Fountain Valley during a business trip to Costa Mesa, CA.  Prior to this, I had been getting by with a plastic RJ11 crimper tool when working on phone cables.  Fry’s had one made of actual steel.  They also had a quality RJ45 crimper.  I got both, and large bags (omg!  so many!) of RJ11 and RJ45 connectors.  I still have the two crimper tools, and maybe a few of the connectors left of both flavors.  I wish I had thought to look for a punch-down tool there.

Why did I get something like this?  Seriously, you’re asking?  Well, how about because they’re so geekily nerdsome, for starters.  Both tools make such a satisfying sound when they crimp the connector to the wire.  When I got home, I immediately threw the plastic RJ11 crimper in the trash.

What a store.  Sorry to hear that it is closing.

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Lifetime user, Travasaurus

This was a very interesting article.  I’m looking forward to more of them!

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rc primak

This just in…Aero is Back!

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JohnW

I once had someone call me saying that they were calling from “Visa.”  I asked them what bank they were affiliated with.  They repeated their first line that they were calling from “Visa.”  I told them that credit card accounts like Visa are established through banks and that Visa does not contact customers directly, then repeated my question about what bank they were affiliated with.

They hung up on me.  How rude!

Tried upgrading from Linux Mint 19.3 to 20 again today.  Worked without any issues, and I don’t have DNS issues after the upgrade.  Also, things just seem snappier.

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OscarCP

I’ve noticed an interesting tendency on my work laptop, which runs Win10 and Office 2016.

One day, Word was acting rather flaky.  It seemed that it was forgetting where I was in the document, hanging, etc.  Went into Process Explorer and there were three instances of WINWORD.EXE resident in memory.  Only one was open on the taskbar.  So I exited Word on the taskbar, and killed the remaining WINWORD processes.  When I go back into Word, the flaky behavior is gone.

Next day, I’ve been working in Word for several hours, and I think hmmmm… I close Word, go back into Process Explorer, and sure enough, there are two instances of WINWORD resident in memory.  Word is not even running on the taskbar.  Apparently WINWORD just hangs around in memory now for some reason.  I haven’t noticed whether it is starting up an extra instance when you double-click on a Word file vs. opening the file from inside Word, or what the issue is.  Since I don’t work for Microsoft…sorry, since I don’t get paid for working for Microsoft, I am in no rush to debug this issue for them.

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Noel Carboni