Autumn OS Updates
It is the time of year when the major Operating Systems (OS) used by our devices get a ‘feature update’. Not all devices will be eligible to receive these updates – search for your particular device to find out.
Android 13
Android 13 was released on 15th August. Google Pixel phones will get the update first with other manufacturers following later in the year. The average user will not notice much change. This site gives more detail:-
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-13-features-3089673/
iOS 16 and iPadOS 16
iOS 16 was released on 12th September for iPhones. iPhones back to the iPhone 8 will get this update. iPads will have to wait until October for the equivalent release of iPadOS 16. There are quite a few improvements to many areas including Messages, Family Sharing and Maps. See this article for more detail:-
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ios-16
They also announced the new iPhone 14 range at it’s 7th September event. They have added an emergency calling feature via satellite using the Globalstar satellite system (requires a subscription).
Windows 10/11 22H2
Both Windows 10 and 11 now get one feature update each year (like Android and iOS). It will be version 22H2 – even though there is no 22H1! The release date for the Windows 11 update is expected to be 20th September. This article lists some of the new features, although the average user will see little difference:-
https://www.techadvisor.com/article/745594/windows-11-22h2-update.html
I am not sure when the Windows 10 22H2 update will be released.
iPhone/iPad “Weak Security” Messages
Wi-Fi (i.e. wireless Internet connection) uses some form of encryption to prevent anyone ‘seeing’ your data as it flies through the air. The encryption used has improved over the years – these are the main protocols used over the years:-
WEP (Wired Equivalent Protocol) – Introduced around 1999 and proved to be very poor and was abandoned in 2004.
WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) – Introduced in 2003 and used something called TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol). It was better than WEP, but turned out to be fairly easy to crack.
WPA2 – Introduced in 2004 and uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and is much more secure than WPA. WPA2 is probably the most widely used protocol at the moment.
WPA3 – Introduced in 2018 and provides further improvement in security over WPA2.
Some routers offer WPA2-TKIP, rather than WPA2-AES to provide backward compatibility with old devices, but WPA2-AES is the secure choice. As WPA3 becomes more widespread, new routers will offer this option, with a WPA2/WPA3 mode in the interim.
Since iOS 14, iPhones display a warning that the Wi-Fi connection is weak if it uses anything less than WPA2-AES. If this happens on your network, change the router settings to use WPA2-AES. If this is not possible, you may need to get a newer router. The average 'normal' user does not, and probably should not, delve into their router settings. Modern routers may have an app on your mobile device to access the settings, which makes it easier. Otherwise, you need to use a browser to go to the IP address of the router and then sign in with the admin username and password which can usually be found on the label on the back/bottom of your router.
The router's IP will typically be either in the range 192.168.xxx.xxx or 10.xxx.xxx.xxx. You can find it on a PC by using the ipconfig command and looking for the "Default Gateway" - this article explains how:-
https://www.noip.com/support/knowledgebase/finding-your-default-gateway/
On an iPhone/iPad you can find the router's IP by going to Settings, Wi-Fi and looking for Router.
On an Android device, you can find the router's IP by going to Settings, Network and Internet, Internet and tap the current connection. Scroll down the list to find Gateway (this sequence may be slightly different, depending on the device's manufacturer).
To be clear, an attacker would need to be present within the range of the wi-fi signal for some time to be be able to crack, even the older WEP or WPA, technology. Any encryption, even the old WEP, is better than no encryption.
Save Electricity by Turning Off Your Router??
As electricity becomes more and more expensive, some users may be asking this question. To answer this precisely, you would need to know the power consumption of your router and the price you are paying for electricity.
To measure the power in watts, you can buy an energy monitor for less than £20 such as this one from Screwfix:-
https://www.screwfix.com/p/energenie-ener007-energy-saving-power-meter-socket/3477h
You just plug this into a mains socket and then plug in the device, in this case, your router. Select the function that displays watts. The power consumption will vary, depending what the router is doing, so monitor for a few minutes.
You can find the cost per kWh on your electricity bill.
I measured an old TP-Link router and found it used about 7.5 Watts (newer routers my be more energy-efficient than this one).
Under the proposed new price cap from October, electricity will cost about 34p per kWh (i.e. the cost of using 1000 Watts for 1 hour).
That’s 0.034p per Watt Hour.
So, my TP-Link router would cost 7.5 x 0.034 p per hour - that's 0.255p per hour, or roughly 6.12p per day.
So a whole year would be 365 x 6.12 pence = £22.34
If you switched it off for 12 hours each day, you would save just over £11/year.
Generally, routers are designed to be left on 24/7 and there are disadvantages of turning off your router regularly:-
- The monitoring system at your ISP my interpret the connection dropping regularly as an indicator that the line is unstable. They may automatically reduce your maximum speed to try to make it more reliable, so your speed could drop considerably.
- If you have any other internet-connected devices such as alarm systems, video doorbells, smart-speakers, etc theses will all stop working when the router is off.
- Some backups, such a iPhones and iPads, tend to take place overnight, so these may get missed.
- Going forward, when we all have to switch to internet-connected phones to replace the current landline system, these need the router, so your home phone would stop working while the router is off.
There are a number of articles on the internet discussing this, such as this one:-
https://homenetworkgeek.com/should-you-leave-your-router-on-all-the-time/
Removing Duplicate Photos
It’s very easy to fill your PC up with duplicate photos. This article suggests using a program called AllDup to find and remove duplicate files:-
https://www.pcworld.com/article/613426/delete-duplicate-photos-with-this-free-pc-software.html
If anyone has any recommendation of de-duplicating programs, please let me know.
Google Photos has an automatic duplicate detector. It creates a hash (a numeric computation) for each photo as it uploads it. If the hash of a new upload matches an existing one, it will not re-upload the file - although it doesn't pop up any message, it just skips that upload.
Tony mentioned that he is using Google Photos on his iPhone. By default, an iPhone will upload photos that you take to iCloud. If you install the Google Photos app, this will upload photos to Google Photos, which is part of your Google Drive. This can be useful to automatically create two backups of your photos. However, as iCloud only offers 5GB of free storage, compared to 15GB on Google Drive, you might choose to turn off the automatic upload to iCloud (by going to Settings, Photos) and just use Google Drive. You can purchase more space on both iCloud and Google Drive if you wish.
Google Search Tools
I’m sure you often search for information with Google Search. Of course, you might use Microsoft’s alternative search engine, Bing (bing.com). Other smaller search providers are also available, such as DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com), but these mainly rely on either Bing or Google for a significant amount of their results. For the purposes of this discussion, I am only considering Google Search.
You can search by going to google.com in any browser on any device. This brings up a page with a Search Box where you enter the words you want to search for. However, it is probably easier to search from the Address Bar of your browser. Your browser settings will allow you to select which Search Engine is used when you search from the Address Bar. If you are using the Edge browser, it will initially be set to use Bing (as Edge and Bing are both Microsoft products), but you can change it by going to 3-dots, Settings, Privacy, search, and services, then scroll down to Address bar and search.
You can also start a search from the Google app on mobile devices.
Page Options
When the search results appear, you have some selections you can use at the top of the search page, as shown here:-
Initially, this shows All web sites, but you can refine the results to show pages relating to Shopping, Images, News, Videos, Maps, Books, Flights or Finance by selecting the relevant option. Note, you may have to click/tap the More button to see some of these options.
Search Tools
A second option in Tools lets you select either All Results or Verbatim. The defaults is All Results, where Google will correct your spelling, look for synonyms of your words, etc. By selecting Verbatim, you just see pages with exactly the words you entered.
Double Quotes
It can sometimes help to just search for a complete phrase, rather than the individual words. For example, if you search for Age UK Cheshire, you get 15.3 million results, because you are getting pages that contain these three words in any order and not necessarily together.
If you search for “Age UK Cheshire” (i.e. include the double quote marks) you only get 30,900 results, being pages that contain the exact phrase within the quotation marks.
Exclude Words
It can sometimes be useful to ask for pages that do NOT contain a particular word. For example, if you search for How fast is a jaguar you will get results relating to the animal and the car. If you search for How fast is a jaguar -car -cars, any sites with the words 'car' or 'cars' will be excluded, leaving mainly the pages relating to the animal.
Calculating
Google can calculate as well as search. You can use the basic mathematical symbols +, -, *, / to add, subtract, multiple or divide. For example, to calculate how many seconds in a day, enter the following into Google Search:-
60*60*24
At the top of the search results, as well as the answer, you will see a scientific calculator which you can use to do further calculations. You can just search for calculator to get straight to the calculator.
Image Search
A further feature, which Linda mentioned, allows searching for an image. To do this, go to:-
https://images.google.com/
Click on the camera icon at the right-hand end of the Search Box. You can then drag an image into the box that says Drag an image here and Google will search for that image. Alternatively, you can paste in a link to an online image and search for that.
Spiders
I briefly outlined how Google's spider software is continually crawling the internet and creating an index of words and the pages on which they can be found. When you do a search, Google searches it's index, rather than the actual web. Occasionally, this can result in a situation where you click on a search result and get a 'page not found' error. This happens when the page has been deleted since Google last indexed it, but it is still in their index.
Bonus - Fun Tricks
Here are a few fun secrets (aka Easter eggs) which are built into Goolge which I did not mention at the Club, but give them a try. Just try searching for each of the following:-
askew
do a barrel roll
anagram
roll a dice
flip a coin
metronome
spinner
Next Session
Wed 12th October 2022 at 2 pm by Zoom.
