the iMentor

Hints & rants

This weB-LOG contains helpful hints and rants about your Macintosh, Apple products and your electronic life.

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Category: Uncategorized

Gone in a Flash

October 27, 2020 Uncategorized No Comments
Episode #613 October 31, 2020 A venerable animation and video technology is nearing End Of Life (EOL). The Adobe Flash software will cease to exist as of December 31, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vpntZxIr0Y Adobe announced its intention to discontinue Flash July 2017. They collaborated with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others to end support for Flash. Flash is a technology originally developed by FutureWave as SmartSketch by Jonathan Gay to aid in building animation and video files on the Mac in 1993. The groundwork for SmartSketch was laid during Gay’s development of the popular 1986 Macintosh game, Dark Castle. This was a ground...
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On Bored

October 19, 2020 Uncategorized 3 Comments
Episode #612 October 24, 2020 There are nine trillion bits of information on my computer, yet i find myself in the same small loop every morning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2WcdaF8uL8 i wake up and walk downstairs, pour a cup of coffee and walk to my office. Check email and deal with new messages. Some email gets replies, some get filed, some have links that i pursue and others (most) are deleted. Open Safari and click to Google news. Scan the headlines. Read some of the articles. Repeat until bored. Play some dumb game until bored. Write the text for my next bLog. Repeat,...
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Simple

October 12, 2020 Uncategorized 3 Comments
Episode #611 October 17, 2020   K.I.S.S. your life. “Simplify” sometimes means less. Less is more (efficient). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63vZcA5yYx0 Referencing and collecting can be the key of simplifying your life. All my email addresses point to one email address. i simply pick up all my email in one inbox. i strive for a zero Inbox. If i deal with, move or delete everything that arrives in my Inbox, there is nothing more for me to do. It is simpler to riffle through 5 or 6 new mail messages than it is to contemplate 2000 emails waiting for attention. All my accounts...
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Lasso

October 4, 2020 Uncategorized 1 Comment
Episode #610 October 10, 2020 One of the highlights of my youth was meeting Jay Silverheels. Silverheels was the Canadian Iroquois Mohawk actor who played Tonto in the television series “The Lone Ranger.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EMMH0NBcLU When Silverheels was a Lacrosse star he made friends with Gordie Peer. Peer was a former rodeo clown and legendary trainer of Hollywood cowboy wannabes. Peer met Clayton Moore (The Lone Ranger) through Silverheels. Moore learned his pistol tricks and rope twirling from Peer. Peer also taught Harrison Ford to use a whip in the Indiana Jones movies. Jay Silverheels learned a thing or two from...
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Error

October 1, 2020 Uncategorized 3 Comments
Episode 609 October 3, 2020 Apple seldom makes mistakes, but they are not without their errors.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SNtIOfuszg Some of us old timers remember Mac OS 7 which erased my hard drive. The errors in OS 7 were mostly due to Apple’s transition from Motorola processors to PowerPC processors. The eminent transition from Intel processors to Apple's own arm A14 processors will have growing pains as Apple prepares its operating systems and applications to run natively. Last week Apple made another big error. This error only affected computers with macOS Mojave 10.14 installed. If you have macOS Catalina installed you...
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Basic conversation

September 21, 2020 Uncategorized 5 Comments
Episode #608 September 26, 2020 What is the language of a computer? Some would name a programming language like Basic, Objective-C, Swift or Java. These are languages used to create applications that run on the computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmWQmROAck The language of the computer is how applications converse with the user. Conversely, the user must know how to converse with the applications. It is up to the user to initiate conversation with the computer. Otherwise the computer does not know what to do. Everything that happens on a computer is an operation. Every operation includes selection, instruction and action. These are the...
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