New Book: Take Control of FaceTime and Messages

My latest Take Control book is out! This one’s a doozy: I cover FaceTime, Messages, and Phone across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in Take Control of FaceTime and Messages. I learned so many new tricks and hidden features in writing this book, I can’t even begin to describe them all. (That, I guess, is what a book is for). While the book covers all the major features and how to use them best, you’ll also learn a bunch of nuggets:

Both FaceTime and Messages support screen sharing, but in different ways with different sets of features. I explain both, and why to choose one over the other.
iPhones and iPads (on supported models) can simulate direct eye contact in FaceTime—even when you’re not looking at the camera.
Include friends and colleagues on Android and Windows in your FaceTime calls.
Point your iPhone at a

Technology

This Week in Google and Tech Appearances

Let me tell you a funny story. Recently, I was a panelist on a Game Show episode of The Incomparable. That’s the podcast network on which I appear regularly on the main (“mothership”) Incomparable show and across many others on the network, and host the program Pants in the Boot. (We’re in our membership-drive month right now, producing extra episodes and audio commentaries for movies for our members.) The Game Show podcast rotates through regular shows we’ve invented, one-off concepts, and board-game/card-game playing.

On Lex Friedman’s task-oriented Friendly Competition, one round was called #glenning, named after my namedropping habit. This round asked other contestants and myself on which podcasts Glenn had appeared—points for uniqueness. One of my fellows included This Week in Tech (TWiT), a venerable show on a venerable eponymously named tech network. When it came to score, I couldn’t recall if

Technology

Understand Cryptocurrency, but Don’t Invest in It

I have followed, studied, and written about cryptocurrency for quite a while before the value run-up of the last few years. With people clamoring for information and potentially putting their real money into nebulous online currencies, I wrote this lengthy article for TidBITS, “Understand Cryptocurrency, but Don’t Invest in It.”

My argument: the principles underlying cryptocurrency are absolutely worth understanding as they will affect the future of financial systems, online transactions, and the recording of transfers of property and value. In what way, we don’t know yet, but that part isn’t a flash in the pan.

As for the value, something worth nothing doesn’t become something because everyone pours their money into it. Without value represented within the system, it’s merely a means of exchange among other systems. Despite all the hype, most of the utility of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies has to do

Technology

10 Minutes on USB and Thunderbolt Cables

If you’re frustrated with finding the right cable to connect USB and Thunderbolt devices with your computers, SSDs, and other equipment, have I got the densely packed 10-minute video for you! This is a distillation of a ton of information I acquired while writing Take Control of Untangling Connections, a book that’s a combination of troubleshooting advice, basic information you can master, and a reference guide for when you need to just look up some detail.

I joke a little, but having written this book, I now consult it. I can’t remember all the cable types for USB, Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, and HDMI—I can just refer to my own book when I need to make sure I have the right adapter or right HDMI version cable for a 4K display.

Bookselling

50% Off Seven of My Take Control Books!

It’s time for a Black Friday sale at Take Control Books starting today…uh, Beige Wednesday?

Take 50% off 16 Take Control titles, including seven books by yours truly, five of which were just updated this week for the latest changes in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows 11, Wi-Fi, and related topics!

No coupon is needed—just click through! The sale ends on Monday, 29 November 2021 at 11:59 pm PST.

Technology

A School Scanning Workflow

My 14 y.o. would rather work by computer than hand, and that’s understandable. They have spent most of their life typing and little of it writing, and the year and a third of distance learning involved about zero handwriting. They are a sophisticated technology user, but were getting stymied by some of the limitations they find in moving from paper given to them by teachers into something they could respond to by typing. (The teachers will actually prefer this, because it’ll be more extensive and legible than if handwritten.)

They discovered Acrobat Scan, but wanted to take the OCR results and paste into Word, which produced formatting problems and imperfect results. Also, Adobe’s OCR capabilities are frankly quite terrible and out of date. Head to head against PDFPen, Evernote (OCR for search only, not export), and Apple’s Live Text in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and

Books

Major Update to My Zoom Book

Like many people, I’d barely touched Zoom before the pandemic started. Then many of us moved into Zoom World even as the service struggled, added features, got rid of bugs, and closed security holes.

But that was 2020! Zoom hasn’t taken a break in improving its software and back-end services since early 2020, and I documented many changes through the version 1.3 release of Take Control of Zoom in April 2021.

When I dug into thoroughly updating the book in July, I discovered that Zoom hadn’t just added a few new features, but it had revised the user interface, options, or fundamental operations for dozens and dozens of parts of the program and administrative management.

We decided to produce Take Control of Zoom, Second Edition, to put a new stick in the sand for this similar seeming but somewhat different

Journalism

A 2000 Column on LINK ROT the Link to Which ROTTED

In an accidentally ironic self-reference, the first column I wrote about link rot—links that disappear or sites that are rebuilt and don’t preserve existing links—rotted not long after it was published in 2000. Fortunately, I snagged a PDF from an archived site at some point.

Here’s the original article’s text:

Link Before You Leap

Web sites often go through redesigns when new technologies, new marketing needs, or just the desire for a change motivates an overhaul. The older the Web site, the more likely it is to have had three or even more makeovers.

However, just as important as a new design is a smooth migration from the old structure. Most Web sites have links to pages on the site (including the home page) from other sites on the 'Net. The better the information on a site, the better the chance that other sites create

Technology

How To Get a Podcast Guest To Record Their Zoom Audio Locally within Zoom

As the author of an exhaustive book about Zoom, Take Control of Zoom, I am constantly looking for good tips and missing pieces in people’s Zoom experience. I encountered one in a recent podcast recording with a guest who was unable to record via QuickTime on her Mac. Her employer-issued device locked out USB input selection for QuickTime, even though she could use a USB mic with Zoom!

She was able to record locally within Zoom once I found the setting for that, but the file produced was a composite of both her and I instead of separate files, which are generally useful for audio editing. (Distinct tracks allow an editor to remove coughs or noises from tracks other than the one on which someome is speaking, as well as reduce cross-talk, more easily edit out false starts or digressions, and remove other noise.)

It was only after the

Books

New Book on M-Series Macs

My latest book is out, Take Control of Your M-Series Mac. This is a title I conceived of after spending a couple months with a new Apple silicon M1 MacBook Air, which is a shockingly fast machine. In some ways, the M1 Macs feel like they fell out of the future, because they leapfrog performance and battery life, two intertwined concepts that are hard to push forward at once. It’s nearly my favorite Mac ever, and I am constantly astonished by how responsive and fast it is at every task.

However, Apple made a huge number of small and large changes in their switch from Intel-based processors to their own ARM-based silicon. This has a lot of advantages, including simplicity, because Apple controls the chip from stem to stern. For instance, there are about a dozen startup modes for Intel Macs, and about five on the M1. (Note I

Personal

Twenty Years of Glenn-Fi

In October 2000, Apple offered to loan me some of their still-new AirPort wireless networking gear that used a year-or-so old new technology called IEEE 80211.b, also known by its trade name, Wi-Fi (from the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance’s testing and trademark group). I almost passed them up.

I’d used so-called “wireless networking” before in the form of infrared, and I had read accounts of the fussiness and low data rates of early plain 802.11 (no b) equipment. Wired 10Base-T (phone jack style) and 10Base-2 (coax) offered an incredible 10 megabits per second (Mbps). A couple Mbps seemed paltry. I’d also played with Ricochet, a wide-area networking service that had been deployed around the Seattle area by Metricom. It seemed more likely. Apple was still on the brink of failure, too, after disastrous management decisions across the 1990s.

But I said yes, they sent me

Books

Three Major Ebook Updates

I’ve been a very busy bee, writing two new books and updating five more just since early August. The latest three are out today from Take Control Books, a trio that relate to the iOS 14/iPadOS 14 update several days ago and the upcoming macOS 11 Big Sur release that Apple hasn’t yet scheduled.

Upgrades are available to all buyers of any previous edition. If you’re a new purchaser, you can add all three to your shopping card and get 30% off—Take Control’s standard discount for 3 or more books!

Take Control of iOS & iPadOS Privacy and Security (254 pages, $14.99). I’ve been revising and expanding this book across a decade now (and across six names!). For the last five editions, I published it myself, and now it’s back at the Take Control mothership.

The book covers all the ins