Author: Emily Dolloff

  • Block Telemarketing Calls Automatically

    Junk calls are one of the great annoyances of the modern world. You’re minding your own business when your iPhone vibrates in your pocket. You pull it out, curious as to who’s calling, but don’t recognize the number. You may notice that it’s in the same exchange as your phone number, suggesting that it’s a neighbor. But no. When you answer, it’s “Emily,” a pre-recorded voice wanting to sign you up for a resort vacation, give your business a loan or help with your credit card debt. Angered by the intrusion, you tap the red hangup button, wishing you had an old-style telephone receiver to slam down.

    There’s no way to retaliate against these bottom feeders, and the best option is to hang up immediately. For quite a few versions of iOS, you’ve been able to block a caller manually—just tap the “i” button next to the call in the Recents screen in the Phone app, scroll to the bottom, and tap Block This Caller. But that’s seldom worth doing since telemarketers often spoof the numbers they call from, making it unlikely you’d get a second call from the same number.

    Instead, I recommend taking advantage of a feature Apple introduced in iOS 10 that enables apps to block calls for you. Quite a few of these apps have appeared, with some of the best reviewed being Hiya, Mr. Number, RoboKiller, and Truecaller. Hiya and Mr. Number are both free and from the same company—Mr. Number is a stripped-down version of Hiya—whereas RoboKiller and Truecaller require an in-app purchase for a monthly membership.

    In general, these apps work by receiving caller ID information from iOS and comparing it against both your local contacts (to identify good calls) and a constantly updated database of numbers used by telemarketers (bad calls). Calls from your contacts ring through normally, as do calls from phone numbers not in either of those sets. That’s key since your doctor might call back from a secondary number, or your kid’s new teacher might call to talk about an upcoming snack day. But if you receive a call from a number known to be used by a telemarketer, the app can either identify it on the incoming call screen or block it automatically, sending it to voicemail.

    To enable one of these apps, after you download it from the App Store, go to Settings > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification and enable its switch. You’ll probably also have to do some setup in the app itself, providing your phone number, perhaps creating an account, and determining what should happen with different calls (Mr. Number is shown below, right). With Hiya and Mr. Number, you can copy a number from the Phone app’s Recents screen (tap the i button for a call, and then press the number to access a Copy button) and then look it up to learn more and see comments other users have made. And if you get a telemarketing call from a number that the app doesn’t recognize, you can submit it to protect others.

    RoboKiller claims that it wastes the telemarketers’ time by playing pre-recorded “Answer Bots” conversations to keep them on the line, preventing them from calling more people.
    Details vary by app, but the only real downside to using one of these apps is that it may ask for information about you or your contacts to improve its services. If that feels intrusive, investigate one of the apps that requires a membership, like RoboKiller, to see if it better answers your concerns.
    In the end, it comes down to how many telemarketing calls you receive each day, week, or month. If you’re lucky and get only one or two per month, it’s probably not worth messing with a call blocking app—maybe just send unidentified (and unexpected) calls to voicemail. But if you’re interrupted by multiple junk calls per day or week, give one of these apps a try and let it reduce the onslaught.

  • Don't Skip Those Updates

    It seems like Apple releases updates to iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS nearly every week these days. It has been only a few months since iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra launched, and we’ve already seen ten updates to iOS and seven updates to macOS. Some of these have been to fix bugs, which is great, but quite a few have been prompted by the need for Apple to address security vulnerabilities.

    Have you installed all these updates, or have you been procrastinating, tapping that Later link on the iPhone and rejecting your Mac’s notifications? Often those prompts come at inconvenient times, although iOS has gotten better about installing during the night while you sleep, as long as you have your device plugged in.

    I know, security is dull. Or rather, security is dull as long as it’s present. Things get exciting—and not in a good way—when serious vulnerabilities come to light. That’s what happened in November 2017, when it was reported that anyone could gain admin access to any Mac running High Sierra by typing root for the username and leaving the password field blank. This news was quite serious, and Apple pushed Security Update 2017-001 to every affected Mac and rolled the fix into macOS 10.13.2.

    Part of the problem with security vulnerabilities is that they can be astonishingly complex. You may have heard about the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities discovered in January 2018. They can affect nearly all modern computers, regardless of operating system, because they take advantage of a design flaw in the microprocessors. Unfortunately, the bad guys—organized crime, government intelligence agencies, and the like—have the resources to understand and exploit these flaws.

    But here’s the thing. Security is an arms race, with attackers trying to take advantage of vulnerabilities and the operating system companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google proactively working to block them with updates. If enough people install those updates quickly enough, the attackers will move on to the next vulnerability.

    The moral of the story? Always install those minor updates. It’s not so much because you will definitely be targeted if you fail to stay up to date, but because if the Apple community as a whole ceases to be vigilant about upgrading, the dark forces on the Internet will start to see macOS and iOS as low-hanging fruit. As long as most people update relatively quickly, it’s not worthwhile for attackers to put a lot of resources into messing with Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

    That said, before you install those updates, make sure to update your backups. It’s unusual for anything significant to go wrong during this sort of system upgrade, but having a fresh backup ensures that if anything does go amiss, you can easily get back to where you were before.

  • Reminders Tip

    I have mentioned before that I have rediscovered just how useful Reminders can be. I do find that this is one of those apps that you either use all the time or perhaps very little. But, when you do become a loyal user, you’ll wonder what you ever did without your reminders! Here is a quick tip, or perhaps, a nudge to get you to try to use Reminders. I am a big fan!

    Do you create reminders with Siri on the iPhone? Those reminders are automatically added to your default list, which you set in Settings > Reminders > Default List. That’s great generally—“Hey Siri, remind me to update watchOS tonight at 11 PM”—but less effective when, for example, you want to maintain different shopping lists. Just for instance, create a list called “Grocery,” and then you can tell Siri, “Put chocolate-covered bacon on my Grocery list.” Want to get fancy? Make a list called “Hardware,” and then tell Siri, “Add birdseed to my Hardware list, and remind me when I arrive at Home Depot.” You may have to pick the correct Home Depot location from a list, but then you’ll receive an alert reminding you to buy birdseed when you pull into the parking lot. To look at any list via Siri, just say something like “Show my Grocery list.”

  • HomePod

    Move over Echo and Google Home, HomePod is officially available today for pre-order from Apple, and, in the coming weeks, we hope to be able to offer it as well. In the meantime, let’s take a closer look at HomePod. HomePod is a music system, a note taker, a translator, a timer and the hub of your home with its HomeKit controls. Unlike some of the other smart speakers on the market, Apple is focusing on Music with this new product. The HomePod acts like just about every other smart speaker, but what makes it a step above the rest is in the sound quality.

    HomePod is just under 7 inches tall and features a seven-tweeter beamforming array which allows better control of the sound and produces a more room-filling sound. It also has a large woofer for deep, clean bass. HomePod can adjust the sound accordingly, be it sitting on a shelf or sitting on a table. It can also adapt to the acoustics of the room giving you the best sound quality possible based on the environment the HomePod is in. You will also be able to add multiple HomePods to a room for stereo effect.

    HomePod is smarter than regular speakers with its A8 chip, which provides it with processing power equivalent to an iPhone 6. Software running on the HomePod gives it spatial awareness, so it can sense it’s surroundings and adjust the audio quality automatically for the best listening experience. You can use Siri to easily set timers to remind you it’s time to flip your burgers, and its six microphones ensure it doesn’t miss a request. You can ask Siri to read you the news, let you know the weather forecast and even transfer a phone call to the HomePod. Not to worry, if you prefer the comfort of buttons, HomePod has basic buttons and you can either single, double or triple tap to get it to play/pause, skip tracks and more. In software updates scheduled for later this year, you’ll be able to control multiple HomePods in different rooms as well as the feature of stereo mode when you have more than one in a room.

    But wait, what about controlling your lights? HomePod aims to put your Google Home and Echo into retirement, so, of course, it can do that! Hopefully, you made sure all your smart home devices were compatible with both HomeKit and your smart speaker. Your HomePod will control your devices the same way you’re controlling them through AppleTV and Siri with one exception. Now you can put down the remote, and just say “hey Siri” without worry of needing your phone nearby or what to do if your Apple Watch is still on its charger.

    I am eagerly awaiting the side by side comparison between my Echo and my new HomePod!

  • Photos Editing

    The latest generation of iPhones have incredible photo capabilities and the quality of the pictures is pretty amazing. Thanks to improvements with the…

  • The temperatures have been on the rise these last two days and we seem to be experiencing a classic January thaw in Vermont….

  • Safari Tips

    Most of us use the internet on daily basis. We might be browsing a favorite news source, googling the answer to a trivia question or perhaps reserving movie tickets to the latest blockbuster. We do all kinds of different things throughout the day, and in the course of this you might find some annoyances like pop up ads, videos suddenly playing or sudden notifications while using a site. Luckily, these annoyances can be reduced by using a handful of settings within Safari. You can customize much of your browsing experience and adjust many preferences to suit your individual needs.

    To make the most out of Safari’s site-specific settings you will want to customize your frequently visited sites. First, load a site whose settings you’d like to customize. Then, choose Safari > Preferences and click Websites in the toolbar. You will see a list of general settings in the sidebar at the left, followed by any plug-ins you’ve installed. For each setting or plug-in, you can set what happens when you visit the site you just loaded—or, if you have a bunch of sites open in different tabs, you can customize the behavior for any open site. Here are some of your options.

    Content Blockers

    One way of seeing fewer Web ads is to install a Safari content blocker. Choose Safari > Safari Extensions to open Safari’s Extension Gallery, and then scroll down slightly to find the page’s Search field, where you can search for a blocker. There are lots—look for one like Adguard AdBlocker that supports Safari’s content blocking API. Once you’ve installed one, select Content Blockers in the Websites preferences. By default, Safari blocks ads on all sites, so choose Off from the pop-up menus for sites whose ad content you want to see.

    Auto-Play

    Little is more annoying than sites that play a video when a page loads, distracting you from the text you want to read. Even worse are those sites—Macworld, we’re looking at you—that auto-play videos that aren’t even related to the page. Safari squelches auto-playing videos by default, but for sites like YouTube, you might want to allow videos to play. You can also choose to stop only videos that have sound.

    Camera & Microphone

    Apart from Web conferencing services, you’re unlikely to run across many sites that want to access your Mac’s camera and microphone. That’s why the Camera and Microphone settings default to asking you whenever a site wants permission to record you. If you find it irritating to be asked constantly by a site you use often, choose Allow from the pop-up menu for that site. If a site asks repeatedly but you never want to allow it, choose Deny to stop those prompts.

    Location

    Most Web sites that ask for your location want to determine how close you are to particular stores. If that’s information you’re interested in sharing, let them see where you are, by all means. And if you’re using a mapping service that wants your location, it’s entirely reasonable to set its pop-up menu to Allow. But if a site keeps asking and it feels creepy, set it to Deny.

    Notifications

    Are there sites whose new posts you’d like to know about right away? If they support Web notifications and you give them permission, they can post push notifications that appear on-screen and in Notification Center, just your other notifications.

    The Notifications preferences look different from the others because they show only sites that have asked for permission in the past. Safari remembers your choice, and if the site gets annoying later, you can always take back permission by changing the Allow pop-up menu to Deny. And if you never want to be prompted for push notifications—they can be distracting—uncheck the “Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications” checkbox at the bottom of the pane.

    So there you have it, a few Safari tips to hopefully make things a little less annoying and in some cases, creepy, while you are on the internet. There are more options to explore, I have only mentioned a few. Take a peak at some of the other options within your Safari preferences and customize things even more!