THE PULP JUNE 2021 The P U L P Newsletter of the Hartford User Group Exchange http://www.huge.org Volume 40 Issue -- 06
JUNE 15th General Meeting:
(Belated) Gift Suggestions
Rev. Fleming Hall 2533 Main Street, Glastonbury, CT
Q&A Session: 7 PM–7:15PM Meeting starts at: 7:15PM
Contents Page
From the Editor 2
Stu’s Quiz Page 3
Standard Ebooks Makes 4 Classic Texts Beautiful
Solve Wi-Fi Coverage Prob- 6 lems
Calendar 10
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The PULP is published monthly by and for members of the Hartford User Group MEETING LOCATIONS Exchange, Inc. (HUGE). HUGE is a nonprofit organization whose aim is to pro- vide an exchange of information between users of personal computers. The PULP is Rev. Fleming Hall not in any way affiliated with any computer manufacturer or software company. Original, uncopyrighted articles appearing in the PULP may be reproduced without 2533 Main Street, prior permission by other nonprofit groups. Please give credit to the author and the Glastonbury, CT PULP, and send a copy to HUGE. The opinions and views herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of HUGE. Damages caused by use or abuse of information appearing in the PULP are the sole responsibility of the user of the in- formation. We reserve the right to edit or reject any articles submitted for publica- tion in the PULP. Trademarks used in this publication belong to the respective own- ers of those trademarks.
From The Editor by Stuart Rabinowitz This month is a set of gift suggestions. Hope to see Apple's Mac security warning shows that closed you there. BTW: if you have some wants for the beats open list — send me an email. ‘FragAttack’ flaws threaten wifi routers. It is time In the news: Verizon sold AOL, Yahoo for $5 billion to patch against FragAttacks but good luck with to a hedge fund as it offloads media assets. So be home routers and IoT devices.A set of vulnerabili- aware if you have an email account with the or ties in Wi-Fi’s basic design offers a long-standing ATT. and widespread threat vector, but the probability There is a phishing attack that uses a call center to of compromise remains low. trick people into installing malware on their Win- Aukey, Tomtop and Mpow have been kicked off dows PC. Amazon following fake reviews allegations. There is a global chip shortage, the logjam is hold- A fix is coming for iPhone battery and performance ing up more than laptops and cars and could spoil issues the holiday. Almost everything with a plug or a bat- There is a Dell security flaw from 2009 affects tery is affected. 'hundreds of millions' of PCs. Check their website Bluetooth bugs open the door for attackers to im- for possible fixes. personate devices. If you move around outside, you may want to turn it off unless you need it. Microsoft warns watch out for this new malware (dubbed RevengeRAT) that steals passwords, web- Send your comments to [email protected] cam and browser data. It looks like a PDF, but is Until next month…Happy computing!! really a VB (Visual Basic) script. Apple just fixed a security flaw that allowed mal- Here is the appropriate copyright citation for the “Tidbits” ware to take screenshots on Macs, Smile. articles. Each article has a link to the full text. Google is imposing a data cap on June 1, and auto- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ matically enrolling users in two-factor authentica- tion. An Apple exec testifies, as part of the ‘Fortnite’ suit, that the amount of malware on macOS is ‘un- acceptable’ as compared to the amount on iOS.
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A Little Computer Quiz May Quiz Answers
1 NASA has landed Perseverance on Mars, 1 What was the first non-Apple Desktop Bus the COMEX-IE38 module on the probe stores (ADB) mouse? & sends images. What is the CPU that runs A The ever popular hockey puck the module? 2 How many of you remember ‘eWorld’? 2 What else has that CPU been used for? When did it first appear? A 1994 3 What is the main CPU used by the rover? 3 What replaced it? 4 What else was it used in? A MobleMe
5 How much did NASA pay for those CPUs? 6 Before the HomePod, there was …? A iPod Hi-Fi bookshelf speakers
5 What were iPod Socks? A In December, 2004 iPod Socks were sold for $29 in a six pack in bold colors tp protect your device from dust & scratches.
Stuart Rabinowitz
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Standard Ebooks Makes Classic Texts Beautiful Standard Ebooks titles in Apple Books on JOSH CENTERS 10 May 2021 iPad The volunteers at Project Gutenberg are some of the great unsung heroes of the Inter- net Since 1971 (!), they have digitized over 60,000 out-of-copyright books for preserva- tion and convenience. While Project Guten- berg texts are better than they used to be, they are often plagued by typos and don’t al- ways have the nicest or most consistent ty- pography.
A new project has risen to build on Project Gutenberg’s great work: Standard Ebooks. Their mission is as follows:
Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg Add Standard Ebooks Titles to Apple’s transcribe ebooks and make them available Books for the widest number of reading devices. The Standard Ebooks library is large and Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources constantly expanding. You can browse by like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets subject or search for a title. As you can see them using a carefully designed and profes- from the screenshot below, there’s a great sional-grade style manual, fully proofreads deal of diversity in the offerings, and there’s and corrects them, and then builds them to something for everyone. create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technol- ogy.
In other words, the volunteers at Standard Ebooks take selected books from Project Gutenberg, carefully proofread them, and put them in a prettier package to read on your fa- vorite device. Standard Ebooks titles provide:
Modern and consistent typography follow- ing a rigorous modern style manual Careful proofreading Rich metadata Upgrades to The Standard Ebooks library make them play nicely with e-readers, includ- ing hyphenation, popup footnotes, high-reso- lution and scalable graphics, and working ta- bles of contents High-quality covers Clean code and semantic markup for easymainte- nance Needless to say, every title offered by Standard Ebooks is free and libre, with no DRM.
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Here’s how to download a title in Safari and load it into Apple’s Books app on an iPhone or iPad. Once you tap a title you’re interested in, scroll down to the “Download for ereaders” heading and tap “Compatible epub.” (It is a little troubling that the Standard Ebooks site lowercases EPUB, in flagrant contradiction to the style set by the stan- dard’s creators.) There is also an “Advanced epub” option, but I haven’t found any advan- tages to that file format, and it tends to strip away the nice cover art.
Tap Download when prompted. Once the download is complete, tap the download icon vides specially formatted .azw3 files for Kin- in the upper-right corner and then tap the dle devices and apps, and .kepub files for EPUB file in the downloads popover. The Kobo devices and apps. book should open in Books
Apple platform. Standard Ebooks also pro- vides specially formatted .azw3 files for Kin- dle devices and apps, and .kepub files for Kobo devices and apps.
How You Can Help
If you have some spare time and love books, Standard Ebooks is always looking for volunteers. You can join their mailing list to get involved, make suggestions, and submit typos. They’re also looking for proofreaders Downloading from Standard Ebooks on and those with the technical skills to compile iPhone ebooks. And, of course, they always need money to pay for their tools and keep the It’s even easier on the Mac. Click “Com- servers running. patible epub” just as above, and if Books is your default EPUB app, double-click the downloaded file to load it into your library and open the book. If you have your Books library set to sync via iCloud, it doesn’t matter which device you add the EPUB files to because they will sync between each other.
Paradise Lost in Apple Books on iPad Standard Ebooks titles look beautiful on any Apple platform. Standard Ebooks also pro-
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Solve Wi-Fi Coverage Problems with WiFi Explorer and
Page 6 THE PULP JUNE 2021 the air and the radio choices you and your neighbors individual base station name. Click any bar, whether have made. in the middle or right displays, and the base station is selected in the list at top. These collections of networks **Sniff the Air Around You** -- WiFi Explorer helps are shown under Service Set in the Results bar at left, tremendously with understanding interference from ad- too. jacent networks by providing both comprehensive details and graphical insight. It also lets you see at a glance pre-
In the Network Details view, selecting any base station However, I’ve been told by IT professionals that one of shows a rundown of technical details specific to that base the nastiest problems with Wi-Fi interference in 2.4 station, and at the left a continuously updated scan of GHz networking comes from devices that are preset to network quality, which can be viewed as signal, signal use other channels, which includes some portable and noise, or signal-to-noise ratio. At the right, WiFi Ex- hotspots. Two networks on overlapping channels can try plorer shows a color-coded bar based on signal strength to avoid each other without losing too much throughput. of all other base stations using the same Wi-Fi channel. But networks on adjacent channels (like channels 1 and 2) have to employ different, less-efficient mechanisms to If multiple base stations use the same network name (or overcome interference, which can dramatically reduce SSID, Service Set Identifier), selecting any one of them the amount of data that gets through or cause inconsis- adds a display between signal strength and channel occu- tent performance. pancy that shows each base station’s power on the same signal axis, split by frequency band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz). In the 5 GHz range, things are more civilized: base sta- You can hover over any bar and WiFi Explorer shows its tions can only occupy channels exactly 20 MHz apart.
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With 802.11n, a Wi-Fi access point can span two chan- disappear. And of course, you have no control over what nels (40 MHz), if there’s no detectable use on the ex- your neighbors may do with their base stations.) tended portion; 802.11ac can grab a whopping 80 MHz. Each doubling of channel width doubles the effective Once you have a longer analysis of each point, you can top throughput rate, too. (WiFi Explorer shows all 5 try one or more of the following and then re-test in Net- GHz bands, which includes the little-used UNII-2 and Spot and drill down in WiFi Explorer to see what hap- UNII-2 Extended bands. For obscure reasons, few con- pens: sumer base stations allow their selection; read “Improve Wi-Fi Performance in the 5 GHz Band,” 14 December * Make sure your 5 GHz network is using channel 149 or 2009, if you’re interested. WiFi Explorer lets you sup- higher (called UNII-3, to be technical); you can use WiFi press them in this view via Preferences > Hide DFS Explorer to determine that, as well as any overlaps. If it’s Channels If No Networks Are Using Them.) using a lower-band channel (UNII-1), the base station may be using as little as _five percent_ of the power al-
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* It might seem counterintuitive, but you might switch to a lower-band channel to reduce power usage if you have plenty of signal strength and don’t want your network to extend into adjacent homes, offices, or apartments. (You might talk to your neighbors about doing the same thing.)
* In the 2.4 GHz range, change channels to find an unoc- cupied swath. As noted, channels 1, 6, and 11 (in the United States) are considered the ideal spread, but you might have to chart out different territory if channel us- age is clumped around one part of the band.
* Does the entire frequency map fritz out from time to time for seconds or longer? Someone may be running competing 2.4 GHz devices — which can include ham radios, ham television (yes, it exists), microwave ovens, badly designed video baby monitors, and industrial sealers. In the 5 GHz band, the most likely culprit is an older cordless phone. All of these can drive you to dis- traction because they may make your Wi-Fi network function intermittently. In 5 GHz, you can pick other channels, subject to the power limits noted above; in 2.4 GHz, you may be out of luck if you’re seeing garbage across all channels.
**It’s a Wi-, Wi-, Wi-Fi World** -- Wireless networking isn’t rocket science. Well, it involves a lot of radio tech- nology and calculations — okay, maybe it’s not far off from rocket science. But if you have your feet on the ground, you’ll appreciate any set of tools that let you sur- vey the invisible world around you.
Pairing WiFi Explorer with NetSpot gives you effective insight into what’s happening with your Wi-Fi network and those legally making an incursion into the public airwaves through which you also broadcast. With their visualizations, you might be able to fix persistent prob- lems and reduce dropouts.
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Membership: Anyone may become a member. Dues are PULP Staff $12 per year and includes a one-year subscription to The Editor Stuart Rabinowitz Pulp. Meeting topics, times and places can be found on Distribution George Carbonell page 1 of this issue.
Officers & SIG Leaders Leader: ______George Carbonell 860 568–0492 [email protected] Secretary: ______Stuart Rabinowitz 860 633–9038 [email protected] Treasurer: ______Stuart Rabinowitz 860 633 9038 [email protected] Director at Large: __Phil Manaker 860 659-4584 [email protected] Director at Large: __Ted Bade 860 643-0430 [email protected] Director at Large: __Stuart Rabinowitz Web Manager: _____Bob Bonato [email protected] Membership: ______Martin Ritter [email protected]
SU M TU W TH F SA June 2021
1 2 3 4 5 1867 1st 1979 1st demo description of of VisiCalc typewriter
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1979 The 1967 1st issue Source goes Computerworld online
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 General Meeting 7PM
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 1948 1st stored Alan Turing 1974 TI patents program run B’day Datamath calculator
27 28 29 30 Tau Day 1955 Sperry- Rand founded
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