Survivor’s Guide

I was asked recently what technology skills and knowledge I felt were important for non-technical boomers to have in order to function in this increasingly complex and ever changing digital environment. Presuming that most of us will not be retreating to some desert island or isolated mountain top to live out our days, like it or not we will be faced with more and more technology incorporated into even the most mundane devices and activities. I am not sure that I can really give a list of skills that you may wish to develop but I can suggest some ways you can more safely navigates this new territory.



As much as we may fight it, our banks and merchants will continue to move almost exclusively toward an electronic payment system. For now it may continue to be based on plastic credit and debit cards but soon will include mobile phones and other digital wallets. It will be important to understand that these conveniences carry with them the need to be vigilant. While most of us would never leave a wallet or purse containing our money and credit cards on our desk or car seat, we may be much less concerned about our cell phone or lap top. Very often these devices contain our passwords and account numbers. Some miscreant can easily find them.



Speaking of passwords, a recent study found that more than 30% of mobile phone users never changed the default password for their mobile phone voice mail account if one was provided by the phone or service vender. These default passwords are well publicized and not changing yours is as bad as writing it on the back of the phone. While we are on the topic of passwords, using your kid’s name or your birth date for a password is also so prevalent that hackers try those first when trying to compromise your accounts.



Wifi hot spots are springing up all over. Gas stations, coffee shops, restaurants, libraries and the doctor’s office provide wireless Internet access. Using your smart phone or lap top to find directions, check the weather or the sports scores via public wifi hotspots is fine. Checking your bank balance or paying bills is not. These wifi networks can be hacked easily and everything you type can be intercepted by that sweet old lady sitting next to you.



Using these new digital tools will continue to get easier. Using them wisely and safely will continue to be more difficult.

They are Everywhere

QR Bar Codes Are Showing Up Everywhere

They are showing up all over town. You find them in newspapers and magazines, on bus cards and in museums. You will see them on real estate signs and fast food menus. At first they may look like one of those Maze Games that you played with as a kid. In reality they are an extension of the bar code you may find on the box of cereal or loaf of bread as you run through the check out at the store. Called “QR” or “two dimensional codes,” these black and white printed labels made up of lines and boxes can hold much more information that the old bar codes consisting of only vertical lines of different thickness and placement.

The reason that they are becoming so prevalent is that they can be read by most smart phones and the information can be instantly translated into an Internet address leading to additional information and detail.

For example, using a QR code on a real estate sign provides a way for the potential buyer to see much more detail about a property of interest even when the agent is not there. Scanning the code on the sign can bring the prospective buyer to a video tour of the home, information about the neighborhood and any other detail that might promote further interest. All of this played back on the mobile phone while standing in front of the house.

Your walk through a museum or gallery can be enhanced if the displays and
artwork have corresponding QR codes. Scanning the codes as you walk through can provide added information. Even an audio or video presentation about the display can be presented to you on the phone’s screen. The same technology could be employed in cities and towns providing a running narrative of your walk through historic neighborhoods or buildings.

The CR code above can be scanned by a smart phone with an appropriate scanning app will take you to a page on Wikipedia. You don’t need to enter an address or any special codes. All you need do is scan and let the phone make the connection.

Your Age and Your Technology Linked

A recent conversation with a young lady tending bar at a local eatery prompts this week’s missive. As I was waiting for a lunch companion, I was speaking with a friend about how Apple had just announced that more than 15 billion Apps had been downloaded from the iTunes Store since it began a few years ago. That is “Billion” with a “B” and works out to more than 2 Apps for every person now living on the earth. The conversation was overheard by the bar tender who chimed in that she used several apps to just watch TV.

As the conversation progressed she related that she does not own a radio or a TV set but is an avid watcher of TV and listens to radio stations a lot. She does it all on her computer or digital mobile device. The young lady looked to be in her late 20s and is representative of a sea change in how we will all someday consume media. More and more of us are forsaking the cable, satellite or broadcast platforms and relying on the Internet for not only YouTube short videos but full length TV shows and movies. Pandora.com allows us to have customized “radio stations” that fit our changing moods and tastes. Many Public and Commercial TV programs can be watched on line.

For certain, the older you are the more likely you may be wedded to the more traditional forms of Radio and TV but, as sure as the VHS Tape and Cassette Audio disappeared from our media landscape, more of us will be using on line platforms and less and less using the traditional modes of delivery. Just ask a thirty year old.

This change in consumer behaviour poses lots of questions and issues. How will we pay for the programming if commercials can be deleted and skipped? When will we fill up the available band width that wireless internet requires? Will these new platforms prove reliable in emergencies and bad weather?

Perhaps the same questions were asked about the telegraph when it replaced the pony express or the steam engine when it replaced the horse.

TV Commercials for Hearing Impaired Legit.

I wrote about this a few years ago but the commercials on local TV are back offering telephones that display in text form the other end of a phone conversation so that those with profound hearing loss can make and receive phone calls. The ads indicate that the phones can be free. This is only one of several similar offers aimed at older adults and just like the free cell phones and free scooters, the offer is true but the description may be a bit incomplete.

In this case, a company called CapTel (www.capTel.com) markets a hard wired telephone that has a small LCD display. The phone uses the same wires and systems as any wired telephone and requires no additional fees to the telephone company. The phone is purchased from CapTel for about $100. The phone is only half of the required system. In order to display the captions, the incoming caller’s voice needs to be digitized for display on the phone. The CapTel phone does not do this.

What the advertisements don’t tell you is that when someone wants to call you and have their voice displayed on your phone in text, they need to go though a third party. Many states, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky included, have “relay” systems that provide this service. A person calling you dials a 800 number first and then, when prompted, enters your telephone number. The systems connects with your phone and displays the callers voice as text.

In most states, the service is free. It is in the case of our three neighboring states. Some individuals, depending on their income may be eligible for assistance in purchasing the phones as well. Information can be obtained in Ohio at (800) 973-4560 and in Indiana at (317) 334-1413.

This system should not be confused with the TTY services that have been around for years where special equipment on BOTH sides of the line allow two hearing impaired people to “talk” using text only. With the proliferation of mobile phones and text messaging, TTY is quickly becoming obsolete.

The CapTel systems work well but they are not as hassle free as the smiling elderly man on the TV commercial might indicate. You do need to let your friends and relatives know that they need to go though the 800 number if their conversation is to be translated into text. For those with significant hearing loss it is worth looking into.

If It Is Not Broke....

Since the very first days of the World Wide Web, most of us have grown accustomed to the various web address conventions. The dot com, dot org and dot edu suffixes are as familiar to us using Internet as Area Codes are when making a phone call. Over and above the suffixes listed above there are some that are used to designate various countries of the world like dot us for the United States and dot uk for the United Kingdom. Other than the country suffixes there are currently only about twenty other suffixes used throughout the world. The three listed above are the most used but there are others other less known like dot mil for the military, dot gov for government and dot info for reference sites. That list may get much larger very soon.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted overwhelmingly in favor of the proposal that will change web address conventions forever. ICANN is the Internet’s international body that is responsible for maintaining structure and order to Internet domain names for the millions of Internet address holders and billions of Internet users.
According to some experts, this is the biggest change to domain names since the creation of dot com 26 years ago. If these changes get implemented businesses will no longer be restricted to the list of generic top level domains which now include dot com and dot org when they apply to register a website address.
So a large company like Macy’s or Procter & Gamble might be able to change their web address from the current www.macys.com or www.pg.com to www.shop.macys or www.washwith.tide.
Companies wanting to take advantage of this new domain structure will find that it does not come inexpensively. ICANN will charge $185,000 per name and levy an annual fee to maintain the names.
I think this change is really an example to fixing something that is not broken and in many cases will be introducing a system that will be harder to use. Some websites already have very long names, but they most often make sense. For example, if you want information on the CSO concert at Music Hall you can go to www.cincinnatisymphony.org. With this new method of naming web sites it is anyone’s guess how long and how complicated they might get. If I had the bucks perhaps I could get a new web site. I would call it www.jackdominic.besuretoreadmygreatcolumnsintheharrisonpress. That should be easy to remember.

Chromebooks Offer Alternative to Labtops

It is interesting to see how technology prognostications often take longer to come to reality than anyone ever thinks and sometimes they never do come to reality. Back in the dark ages of the personal computer, an executive with IBM was quoted as saying that the world would someday have very few real computers. His vision was that we would all have inexpensive devices that connected us to super computers. His ideas were dismissed by many pundits in the 1980s since the PC was putting awesome computer power on the desktop. When CD Rom discs came out offering inexpensive data storage, it was predicted that everyone would have vast libraries of information in there homes stored on these shinny plastic platters.

Skip ahead to the present. Last week the first of the Google Chromebooks hit the market. These machines that look like a regular lap top computer are the incarnation of the IBM executive’s vision. The have no hard drive, they don’t require Windows or Mac software and are not prone to viruses. They have very good battery life since they are essentially a keyboard, mouse and video screen connected via the Internet to large remote servers. They are the ultimate device for cloud computing.

Unlike a desktop or laptop computer, all of the programs and all of the data files are stored in the cloud. If you should loose your computer or it gets damaged, all of your documents, pictures, videos and music are still available since those files were never actually stored in your machine.

Tasks that once required Windows or Mac operating systems and various programs like Microsoft Office, now can be done using the software available free on the Google web site. Just like your data files, the programs are never really resident in your machine.

The major drawback of using a Chromebook comes if you should loose access to the Internet. Without that connection the Chromebook is nothing more than a three pound paper weight. It can do nothing. You can’t write a paper, look at pictures or play videos.

The folks at Google are betting that since most of us are already doing much of our computing on the Internet, these machines will prove to be more than adequate for the majority of regular users. They point out that most people use their computer to access email, search for information on Google or Wikipedia or watch videos on YouTube or Hulu. These and other similar tasks can be done very well on the Chromebook.

Chromebooks connect to the Internet using wifi or the various 3G or 4G networks. The first of the Chromebooks are being made by Acer and Samsung in partnership with Google. The price is about $500 but the prices should fall quickly as more manufacturers bring versions to market. At this writing they are only available at Best Buy or Amazon.com.

Party to Mostly Cloudy

The recent announcement by Apple confirms that our computing future will soon go from partly to mostly cloudy. For more than a year now I have been discussing in this column the “cloud” and how it is changing the way we keep and use our digital stuff. If you missed earlier columns, cloud computing refers to storing our data, i.e. documents, photos, videos, music, all our digital stuff, on large servers in some remote location and connecting our computer, phone, iPad or other device via the Internet. Before the cloud, all of this stuff was stored in our devices.

There are many benefits to using the cloud. Since the remote servers are operated by large tech-savvy companies, they provide a level of back up well beyond what most of us have. Even if we do have the capability to back up our files, many of us just forget or put it off to tomorrow often with dire consequences. The cloud servers handle all of that for us.

Another benefit is that all of our materials are always available. Before the cloud, if I had a song on my MP3 player and wanted to play it on my laptop, the song needed to be stored on both devices. With the cloud, the song is available to any of my devices.

There is one aspect of the cloud that needs to be emphasized. You must be connected. You must have an Internet connection, either hard wired or wireless, to access your information. That being the case, important information that you may need in an emergency should be stored locally on a regular storage device as well. That way, if you do not have an Internet connection, that information is still available.

Apple is taking the cloud to new heights (sorry, I couldn’t resist) by essentially making the cloud invisible. In previous iterations of cloud computing, you needed to actively decide where you wanted your files to be stored. Apple is simplifying this process by developing applications that automatically store all files on the cloud. When you turn on your iPad or iPod or iPhone, the device knows that your stuff is on the cloud. When you create a document or take a picture or record a video, that material is stored there automatically. You don’t have to remember where you put it and you don’t have to “synch” your devices. They do it automatically. So that picture you took on your iPhone can be viewed on your laptop or iPod.

Apple’s endorsement and, more important, their skill at making the user experience intuitive and easy will advance the cloud concept. It will soon go from a novelty to the standard for storing and accessing all our digital stuff.