Archive for September 20, 2016

So…. I’ve Upgraded To macOS Sierra

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 20, 2016 by itnerd

The upgrade to macOS Sierra was really straightforward. However I did run into a minor glitch and a problem. First let me talk about the upgrade. Here’s what I did after following these steps to prepare for the upgrade:

  1. I downloaded the installer from the App Store.
  2. I then ran the installer and went away for 40 minutes while it did its thing.
  3. Done. Declare victory and have a beer.

The update as you can see, is pretty straightforward. There were no issue with the upgrade. I did some testing and found two issues, one of which was a real problem:

  • My system was a bit slower after the upgrade. Since I use iStat Menus, I was able to trace the issue to a system process called “photoanalysisd” which is there to go through your photos and recognize faces in those photos. As I type this, it is still doing its thing and I expect it to continue for some time and then stop.
  • I then noticed that the real time threat protection that is part of AVG Anti Virus for Mac stopped working. Doing a search on Google, I found two mentions of this problem on AVG’s forums with beta versions of macOS Sierra. The thing is, these problems have been around since August and you’d think that they would have fixed this by now. That’s a #fail on AVG’s part. I’ve uninstalled the app and I’ll take a long hard look at reinstalling it in the future given that they should really have done better for their users.

So what’s my early assessment of macOS Sierra? Here are my thoughts:

  • Siri on the Mac is interesting but limited to installed applications. So if you want Siri to read you e-mail from your copy of Microsoft Outlook that’s not going to happen. But it’s best used to do things like web searches and to and to get the weather. It is also good for doing adjustments of system preferences like screen brightness and the like.
  • If you have an iDevice and a Mac, you now get a feature called Universal Clipboard. Copy some text on your iDevice, paste it on your Mac. It’s a simple feature, and it’s a useful feature.
  • There’s a new feature called iCloud Documents and Desktop which backs up your files in those locations to iCloud which makes the need to backup to something like Dropbox irrelevant. The advantage of this is that this is transparent. Though you have to have the storage in your iCloud account to leverage this feature.
  • Messages in macOS Sierra now supports the rich media that iOS 1o supports.

There’s a lot more to macOS Sierra like Apple Pay, Optimized Storage, the ability to unlock your Mac with your Apple watch, and Safari 10 to name four new features. But so far, it is worth the upgrade.

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Tesla Model S Hack That Enables Remote Control Demoed… And Quickly Fixed

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 20, 2016 by itnerd

I’ve been saying for a very long time that car companies have to do a better job of securing their cars from hacks. The Jeep hack from last year proves that more needs to be done on that front. Now there’s a new hack that has come to light. Hackers at the Keen Security Lab of Tencent, a Chinese Technology conglomerate, discovered the vulnerability and published a video demonstrating the hack:

But before any Tesla owners panic, the company has already pushed out a fix for this as fixes can be delivered over the air to Tesla owners. If you’re running v7.1, 2.36.31 of the Tesla software, you’re covered. That’s because Keen reported the issue to Tesla and gave the company the chance to fix it before going public. Also, I am guessing that they got paid as well seeing as Tesla has a bug bounty program. That’s good and this sort of quick action is something that other car companies should emulate so that their customers are protected from those who would wish to do something malicious.

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Slovoed Dictionaries Now Available for Chromebook

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 20, 2016 by itnerd

Paragon Software Group, has announced the release of its first browser-based series of Slovoed dictionaries for Google Chrome. Chromebook users can use English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish dictionaries in online mode, and enjoy the many advanced features, learning tools, enthralling games, and self-quizzes. 

Slovoed dictionaries include the most comprehensive and up-to-date content from the world’s foremost lexicographers. The advanced features allow users to look up words and phrases in any grammatical or spelling form, listen to word pronunciations, memorize built-in tables of irregular verbs, conjugation tables, and much more.  

Slovoed for Google Chrome apps include:

  • Slovoed Deluxe English ↔ German Chrome Store
  • Slovoed Deluxe English ↔ Russian Chrome Store
  • Slovoed Deluxe English ↔ Spanish Chrome Store
  • Slovoed Deluxe French ↔ German Chrome Store
  • Slovoed Deluxe German ↔ Russian Chrome Store

Features:

  • Headword search
  • Full text search feature looks up words more efficiently throughout the whole dictionary content, including headwords and usage examples
  • Favorite articles to quickly access and revise frequently searched words
  • Flash Card Quiz adds new words to practice
  • Spelling Game – listen to words and try to write them correctly
  • Search History
  • Table of English irregular verbs

Free Slovoed Spelling Game

With Slovoed Spelling Game, the user listens to word pronunciations and has exactly three minutes to spell them correctly. The game includes multiple difficulty levels, and the highest levels challenge the player with the most difficult words carefully selected by leading linguists and experts. This powerful, exciting, and free learning tool allows users to have fun, while at the same time stimulate foreign language skills, pronunciation, and verbal comprehension without having to purchase additional software.  

Slovoed dictionaries can be downloaded and tested for free from the Google Chrome Store  Prices start at $20.99.

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68 Per Cent Of Entrepreneurs Use Apps To Run Their Businesses: Intuit

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 20, 2016 by itnerd

Canadian entrepreneurs are using cloud and mobile technology in record numbers, according to Intuit Canada’s newest survey, the “2016 Small Business App Study”.

64 per cent of small business owners (SBOs) in Canada now use a smartphone to manage their business, up nearly 10 per cent from this time last year (55 per cent) and 61 per cent have migrated to the cloud, which is a whopping 30 per cent increase year-over-year from 31 per cent in 2015.

Canadian SBOs are increasingly turning to apps to solve their business problems:  

  • 68 per cent of small businesses use mobile or web-based apps for business; of those businesses, 87 per cent use between 1-6 apps to run their business
  • 61 per cent utilize the cloud to operate their business
  • Almost three-quarters (71 per cent) of small business owners would like to spend more of their time growing and expanding their business (45 per cent) and interacting with customers (26 per cent)

But the fact is that it remains early days in the evolution of the small business ecosystem, and small businesses are running into persistent pain points with existing apps.

  • 41 per cent of Canadian business owners who use apps feel that there are too many apps to choose from and they are unsure on which apps are best suited for their business
  • Other top pain-points for small business who use apps include:
    • 37 per cent say cost to purchase and train on apps
    • 23 per cent say using apps is too complex and they are unsure how to use them

Intuit believes that the key to building a better small business apps ecosystem is for developers to focus on:

  • Deeper integrations with existing platforms –56 per cent of Canadian small business say seamless integration matters when selecting an app to integrate with their business
  • Showing small business how apps can impact the bottom line – More than half (52 per cent) of small businesses say increase of revenue is the most important characteristic to measure the success of a technology integration

Survey Methodology:

  • A representative sample of 500 small businesses in each region (U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K.) were surveyed by Ebiquity from July 13-20, 2016
  • The vast majority of small business owners and managers surveyed had 1-50 employees
  • The types of business surveyed were: service-based (50 per cent), product-based (23 per cent), and hybrid (27 per cent)

While you’re at it, please take a look at Quicken’s list of top apps to manage your business.

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