Covid Vaccine

Tech News and Views

If you are 65 or older you can now register with Marion County to receive the Covid 19 vaccine by going to this address: https://tinyurl.com/y98cxp6s

'Plug & Charge' Brings Charging Simplicity To Other EV Networks

The same ease of charging Tesla has had for nearly a decade is coming to other EV charging networks.

Suppose every time you went to buy gas, you needed a phone app or an RFID fob, and you had to be pre-enrolled with the brand. Drive in, validate the pump, and then learn how much you'd pay for your gasoline. No fob or app? Then you’d have to call a toll-free number to provide credit card info over the phone.

That's pretty much how electric car charging works today, for everyone but Tesla drivers. Some EV drivers carry up to six swipe cards, fobs, or phone apps for different networks along their travel routes.

There's a better way, and as early as 2012, Tesla showed the U.S. how to do it. You just drive in, plug in to charge, and any billing happens on the back end. That's how it should be, and the company's high-speed Supercharger network now lets you drive a Tesla almost anywhere in the lower 48 states.

Like Apple, though, Tesla has the advantage of a closed ecosystem. Only Teslas can charge at Tesla Supercharger sites. The company controls both sides of the transaction. Eight years later, the rest of the EV world, dozens of separate EVs, all of which may charge on dozens of different networks, has started to catch up.

All other charging networks will soon operate like the Tesla chargers. The machine will tell you to plug in first. Then it will quickly identify the car, validate the charge, and start the current flowing. No fob, no app, no toll-free number to call.

The magic behind this mundane transaction is the Plug & Charge protocol, which identifies an EV to a charging station. The charging network then validates the car with its maker, which provides billing information that starts the charging.

The U.S. system is similar (but not identical) to the European Plug & Charge protocol already in use by drivers of several EVs on the pan-European Ionity network and others. Half a dozen car brands funded Ionity to make long-distance EV travel practical and seamless through more than a dozen European countries.

Plugging in a car and having it charge automatically doesn't sound like much, but the software integration and validation to make it happen are surprisingly complex. Electrify America, for instance, tests dozens of charging stations for compatibility with dozens of the latest electric cars.

Plug & Charge is rolling out in the newest generations of EVs sold in the U.S. The Mustang Mach-E and the 2021 Porsche Taycan both started shipping to dealers during December with the software installed.

Credit: caranddriver.com

E.A.S.Y Pay

Tech News and Views

Most Oak Run residents have received their invitation to participate in Oak Run Associates’ E.A.S.Y Pay system. Unfortunately many residents will encounter a problem in trying the link. When you click on the sentence that says “Click Here”, nothing may happen.

The instructions tell you that if you have a problem to copy the link shown below the Click Here paragraph and paste it in a browser. Many residents may not know how to do that, so here’s what you should do:

Highlight the text that begins with https (it's the URL). You can do that by clicking your left mouse button 3 times rapidly in front of the h in https. Or you can hold down the left button on the mouse and drag the mouse across all the text. If you have done either method correctly, the entire URL will turn blue.

Press CTRL and the letter C on the keyboard at the same time and then let up on the keys. That will copy the URL into the clipboard (you will not see anything happen).

Open your browser. (Such as Google Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Internet Explorer)

Click on the Plus Sign at the top of the page to open a new tab, and click the left mouse button in the address line. You should see a flashing vertical line. Then press CTRL and the letter V on the keyboard to paste the URL you copied into the browser’s address line. The copied URL should appear in the address line. Press the Enter key on the keyboard and the Oak Run portal page should appear.

You will be asked if you want to pay Oak Run via Credit or Debit Card. If you want to pay via ACH (auto pay) select that option. You will be asked to enter the bank account routing number and your membership number. Then information about your account will appear. You should be able to follow the directions that appear on the portal page to see more information about your account.

Toyota’s Chief Says Electric Vehicles Are Overhyped

Toyota Motor Corp.’s leader criticized what he described as excessive hype over electric vehicles, saying advocates failed to consider the carbon emitted by generating electricity and the costs of an EV transition.

Toyota President, Akio Toyoda, said Japan would run out of electricity in the summer if all cars were running on electric power. The infrastructure needed to support a fleet consisting entirely of EVs would cost Japan between ¥14 trillion and ¥37 trillion, the equivalent of $135 billion to $358 billion, he said

“When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?” Mr. Toyoda said Thursday at a year-end news conference in his capacity as chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association.

He said if Japan is too hasty in banning gasoline-powered cars, “the current business model of the car industry is going to collapse,” causing the loss of millions of jobs.

Advocates of EVs say they can be charged at night when electricity demand is low and, over time, can grow in tandem with other green technologies such as solar power.

Local news reports in early December said the Japanese government was about to announce a ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035, while it would still allow hybrid gas-electric cars. Such a ban would follow the state of California and countries such as the U.K.

But no announcement has come amid industry resistance. Officials at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said they haven’t made a decision on the future of gasoline cars.

In a country such as Japan that gets most of its electricity from burning coal and natural gas, EVs don’t help the environment, Mr. Toyoda said. “The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets,” he said.

He said he feared government regulations would make cars a “flower on a high summit” - out of reach for the average person.

With models like the Prius, Toyota is a leader in hybrid cars, which combine a gasoline engine with an electric motor and can be refueled at traditional gas stations. It doesn’t sell pure battery EVs for the mass market in the U.S. or Japan, although it does have a model that runs on a hydrogen-powered fuel cell.

Credit: newsyfi.com

How To Delete A Drive Partition On Windows 10

You can delete virtually any partition (except the ones that make up the installation of Windows 10), and below, you will learn to use Disk Management to complete the task.

On Windows 10, a partition (or volume) is a logical division of the space available on a physical storage drive with a specific file system and settings that the system presents to the user as a separate drive.

Since a drive can hold many partitions, and sometimes, you may need to organize them, Windows 10 includes multiple tools to ease the process to remove those you no longer need to make more space available to increase the size of another partition. Or you can also use the available tools to clean the storage to prepare it with a different partition scheme and file system.

Warning: Using these instructions will erase all the data stored inside the partition. If you have any important files you want to preserve, it's recommended to create a backup of that data before proceeding.

To delete a partition (or volume) with Disk Management, use these steps:

1. Open Start
  
2. Search for Disk Management
  
3. Select the drive with the partition you want to remove
  
4. Right-click (only) the partition you want to remove and select the Delete Volume option
  
5. Click the Yes button to confirm all the data will be erased

Once you complete the steps, the partition and its contents will no longer be available on the drive making space available to expand another partition or format the drive with a new scheme.

Credit: windowscentral.com

Field Test Trick For Cellphone Signal Strength

Apple Bytes: 

Your cellphone’s signal strength changes depending on several factors, from any interferences to how far you are located from a cell tower. Your cellphone signal strength is measured in decibels (dBm).

You can check your iPhone signal strength by using its secret Field Test mode. Open the Phone app and dial *3001#12345#* on the keypad. In a few seconds, you’ll see a mishmash of numbers.

On the top right side, there is a menu. Go through each list until you see an entry that contains rsrp. That is your phone’s signal strength.

If the dBm approaches -120, you are located in what we fondly refer to as a “dead zone.” Anything better than -100 is considered a usable signal. A strong signal is -40 or better. So, the closer that number is to zero, the better the phone’s signal.

Credit: Kim Komando via USA Today

Executive Board Minutes

Computer Technology Club, Inc. – Executive Board Minutes
December 11, 2020

The Board meeting was cancelled by COVID-19 venue closures.

Browser Attack

Tech News and Views

Adrozek: 4 major browsers are getting hit in widespread malware attacks

ongoing-malware-attacks-are-hitting-users-of-4-major-browsers

Robots Invade the Construction Site

Theresa Arevalo works at Canvas, a company that’s built a robot using artificial intelligence that's capable of drywalling with almost as much artistry as a skilled human worker.

The robot has been deployed at several construction sites in recent months, including the new Harvey Milk Terminal at San Francisco International Airport and an office building connected to the Chase Center arena in San Francisco.

About the size of a kitchen stove, the four-wheeled robot navigates an unfinished building carrying laser scanners and a robotic arm fitted to a vertical platform. When placed in a room, the robot scans the unfinished walls using lidar, then gets to work smoothing the surface before applying a near perfect layer of drywall compound; sensors help it steer clear of human workers.

The Canvas robot can help companies do more drywalling in less time. It requires human oversight, but its operator does not need to be an expert drywaller or roboticist.

It has long been impractical to deploy robots at construction sites, because the environment is so varied, complex, and changing. In the past few years however, advances including low-cost laser sensors, cheaper robotic arms and grippers, and open source software for navigation and computer vision have made it possible to automate and analyze more construction.

The more advanced machines marching onto construction sites will help make construction less wasteful. According to McKinsey, productivity in construction has improved less than in any other industry over the past couple of decades. The arrival of more automation may also alter demand for labor in a number of building trades.

Kevin Albert, cofounder and CEO of Canvas, previously worked at Boston Dynamics, a company famous for its lifelike walking robots, and in the manufacturing industry. He says there’s great opportunity in construction, which generates about $1.4 trillion annually and accounts for around 7 percent of US GDP but has seen relatively little use of computerization and automation. “We really see construction as mobile manufacturing,” he says. “There's this natural extension of what machines are now capable of out in the real world.”

Canvas is part of a boom in construction technology, says Alex Schreyer, director of the Building and Construction Technology Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He says some of the biggest progress is being made in prefabrication of buildings, using robotic processes to construct large parts of buildings that are then assembled on-site. But increasingly, he says, robots and AI are also finding their way onto conventional work sites.

Autonomous vehicles made by Volvo ferry materials and tools around some large sites. Technology from San Francisco startup Built Robotics lets construction machinery such as diggers and dozers operate autonomously. A growing array of robotic equipment can take over specialized construction tasks including welding, drilling, and brick-laying. “There are some really interesting things happening,” Schreyer says.

An IDC report published in January 2020 forecasts that demand for construction robots will grow about 25 percent annually through 2023.

One big opportunity in construction, Schreyer says, is using computer vision and other sensing technologies to track the movement of materials and workers around a work site. Software can automatically flag if a job is falling behind, or if something has been installed in the wrong place. “There is so much potential to do something with that using AI,” Schreyer says. “More companies are going to move into that AI space.”

Doxel, based in Redwood City, California, makes a mobile robot that scans work sites in 3D so that software can calculate how the project is progressing. A four-legged Boston Dynamics robot called Spot is being tested for the same purpose at a number of sites. Several companies sell drones for automated construction site inspection, including Propeller, vHive, ABJ Drones, and DJI.

Buildots, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, sells software that uses cameras fitted to the helmets of site managers, which automatically capture a site and process the images to identify discrepancies between plans and ongoing work. The technology is being used on several large European construction projects.

Roy Danon, Buildots’ cofounder and CEO, says the goal is to use the data collected from work sites to help companies design buildings and plan construction schedules better. “We believe we can have a huge impact on planning,” he says, “if we have enough projects that show how you plan and how things actually turn out.”

“The adoption of technology in construction has lagged behind almost everything except hunting and fishing for the past decades,” says Josh Johnson, a consultant at McKinsey who follows the building industry.

A McKinsey report last month predicts a big shakeout across the construction industry over the next decade, with companies adopting technologies and methodologies from the manufacturing world. Things have already begun to change, thanks to technological progress and an increasingly tech-savvy workforce, Johnson says. The pandemic is accelerating the shift too, by making it more difficult to bring workers to a site and forcing companies to reevaluate supply lines and processes. “It’s forcing many of these legacy [construction contractors] and large companies to begin investing,” Johnson says.

Arevalo, who oversees deployments of Canvas’ robot, says the drywalling robot cannot tackle corners or angles like a human; she says many apprentices see working with the robot as an opportunity to learn how to use more advanced robotic machinery.

The company also has the backing of the local union. “It’s critical for skilled workers to have great resources in their tool kit, and we are excited to be on the leading edge of technology in our industries by partnering with Canvas,” Robert Williams III, business manager at District Council 16, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, said in a statement.

But this apparently hasn’t quelled concerns among construction workers who’ve seen the robot in action. “They love the fact that it’s so consistent, that the wall is gorgeous,” Arevalo says. “But then the next question is, ‘When is it going to take my job?’”

Credit: wired.com

The Secret Button On Your iPhone

Apple Bytes: 

Your iPhone got a new button recently, and you may not have even noticed.

No, Apple didn’t sneak into your house and secretly superglue a button onto your smartphone. But it did release iOS 14, the latest version of its iPhone software, which includes a feature called Back Tap. Back Tap adds a fascinating new “button” to your phone that blurs the line between hardware and software.

Back Tap turns the entire back of your iPhone into a giant touch-sensitive button that you can double or triple tap to trigger specific functions on your phone. There’s a good chance that you haven’t noticed it yet. Apple slipped the settings for Back Tap into its Accessibility menu.

Its intended purpose is to give users more options for interacting with their devices. Most of Back Tap’s options reflect that, with settings to open the app switcher, notification menu, or control center; scroll through an app or webpage; trigger Siri; or take a screenshot.

But Back Tap also ties into Apple’s incredibly robust Shortcuts app, which means you can effectively make those new buttons do almost anything you can imagine. It’s a fascinating kind of button: entirely invisible to the naked eye, completely nonfunctional until it’s enabled through software, but can be tasked to open, interact with, or accomplish nearly any task on your smartphone with just a quick tap.

That software customization is key. It’s easy to imagine a world where Apple limited Back Tap to just a few preset options focused on making the iPhone UI more accessible. But by opening it up to Shortcuts, the company turned Back Tap into a tool of limitless creativity, letting users come up with their own ways to take advantage of the new button on the back of their devices.

It’s not just Apple. Google experimented with a similar, albeit more limited, feature for Android 11, although it didn’t end up making the final cut. Some enterprising developers have since replicated the feature for any Android device.

This is also a level of control that’s almost unheard of for iOS devices. Imagine if Apple let you remap the side button (for Siri and Apple Pay) on an iPhone 12 to, say, launch Google Assistant or send a preset text message to your partner. It’s practically unthinkable.

It works well, too. The software is responsive, and whatever Apple’s doing to differentiate between an intentional tap and just regularly holding your phone, it works well. It's particularly useful for triggering Control Center to quickly toggle system settings.

Back Tap repurposes the existing sensors and hardware on your iPhone with software to create a new hardware interaction that wasn’t available before. It’s a new physical button users can interact with, but one that’s almost completely free of Apple’s limitations.

Physical buttons, of course, are the most direct form of interaction. It’s why Samsung insists on a bespoke Bixby button and why Netflix pays for a spot on your Roku remote. And while Apple may not quite be willing to give up control of the physical buttons on your iPhone, Back Tap, with its almost button, is the next best thing.

Credit: theverge.com

This Free Service Is A Way To Foil Spam And Protect Your Privacy

Don’t give your information to marketers who might pelt you with spam or even expose you to a potential hack. Use Abine Blur instead, a service that generates a free “masked email” address, to use instead of your real one The service will forward messages to your actual Gmail (or other) inbox and you can cut off any future emails with one click.

Edited from an article by Jared Newman at

I started using Abine Blur about five months ago, after hearing about it from one of my newsletter readers, and it’s since become one of my most cherished privacy services. With masked email addresses, I don’t have to worry about getting spammed just because I signed up for an app, made a donation, or subscribed to some retailer’s newsletter in exchange for a coupon. I just tell Abine Blur to stop forwarding their emails, and our link is severed.

While the idea of avoiding spam through masked or secondary email addresses has been around for a long time, Abine Blur stands out for being easy to use across multiple websites, each with their own separate addresses. It’s a simple way to protect an important part of your online privacy, yet it seems to fly under the radar compared to flashier tools like ad blockers or VPNs.

The main reason to use masked email is obvious: Given the chance, too many companies will abuse the privilege of having your email address, sending endless marketing messages without your explicit permission.

The United States doesn’t have a law like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which requires opt-in consent for companies to email you. In the U.S., when you turn over your email address while signing up for a service or buying something online, that address becomes fair game for marketing. Here, the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act does require marketers to include opt-out mechanisms in their emails, but those unsubscribe options can be hard to find. Besides, I’ve been on enough seemingly inescapable mailing lists to know that the law isn’t always followed to the letter, and unsubscribing from one list won’t help if a company has handed your email address to a third party.

Beyond just the immediate privacy violation of having your inbox invaded, handing out your email can also be a security risk. Just type your email address into the long-running security checkup site Have I Been Pwned, and you’ll likely see that it’s been involved in all kinds of security breaches. Scammers can then use your email and any corresponding personal information from the breach in phishing attempts, which try to trick you into turning over even more sensitive information such as passwords or bank account details.

In the same way that you’d change your password after a security breach, a masked email would let you change your email address as well. If an app or website that you use gets hacked, you can just switch to a different masked email and dispose of the old one, and scammers would have no way of contacting you.

Creating email addresses in Abine Blur is pretty easy. After setting up an account, just head to the masked email menu and select “New Masked Email.” You can then specify what you’re using the address for, which will help you easily disable emails from that site or service later.

For each masked email, Abine Blur uses a jumble of 12 random letters and numbers, along with one of several possible domain names, so you’ll get an address like: 

9860nu90ed5n@opayq.com   or   i5qpqjmc7c22@blurme.net

You can then copy the email address and paste it into any sign-up form.

If that seems like too much trouble, Abine Blur also has browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. (The former is also compatible with other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge or Brave.) Once installed, the extension will automatically detect sign-up forms and offer to generate masked email addresses automatically. You can also generate and copy email addresses through Blur’s iOS and Android apps.

After setting up a masked email, any messages to that address will arrive in your inbox with a message from Abine Blur at the top, with a “Block” button you can click to stop any future emails from arriving. Abine Blur’s website and apps also have a section for blocking and unblocking addresses or deleting your masked email addresses outright.

It’s worth noting that Abine Blur offers other privacy tools, such as masked credit cards, masked phone numbers, and a password manager, but some of those features require a paid subscription starting at $39 per year. Personally, I just use the masked email feature, which is free and has no limits on the number of addresses you can create. (On that note, if you’re using the browser extension, I suggest clicking on the extension button, heading to Settings > Settings for All Sites, and disabling any Abine Blur features you don’t use.)

Abine Blur isn’t the only service that can mask your email address. You can also generate temporary email addresses with services such as  Maildrop or 10 Minute Mail, or rely on the time-worn practice of keeping a second email address for junk. In Gmail, you can also add dots or plus symbols to your username in email forms, then set up filtering rules so that emails to those modified addresses don’t land in your inbox. Even Apple now offers masked email addresses with its Sign in With Apple feature, which you can use to create an account in some apps and services.

But compared to those methods, Abine Blur is simpler to use. I don’t have to worry about checking a second inbox or wasting time with Gmail filters, and unlike Sign in With Apple, it works with virtually any app or website. (Some sites do block Abine Blur’s email domains, but I’ve yet to be thwarted by this myself.)

That ease of use makes me more likely to use the service in the first place. After months of doing so, I’m wondering how I went so long without it.