While I use the new iPhone app that reads sensors I have implanted in my brain so I don’t have to physically touch my phone anymore, I realize some folks still rely on the iPhone and iPad touch screen interface to communicate with their devices. For those of you still in the dark ages, I have a great article on several handy apps HERE. 
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While I don’t know why anyone needs a URL shortener, the other apps are quite handy. The PiP, or picture in picture option is fantastic, I use it all the time, though it beams directly into my optic nerve and can be confusing sometimes. On an actual iPad screen I’m sure it would be very useful, however, on an iPhone screen, it seems like it might be a bit tiny.
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Dictate to Notes is great, though I only use Think to Notes now. When my mind wonders it gets very surreal. Apple Frames is neat, it puts a frame around your pictures, and Make PDF is something I use all the time, for obvious reasons. Music Finder, (and Shazam), are great for identifying a song nearby, that you can’t remember the name of. This happens all the time with me these days, so this has been quite useful, though I have the brain implant version which saves the song to a storage area in the back half of my cerebral cortex so I can retrieve and play it later. 

The link is real, check it out.

This week’s article isn’t going to be me nagging you to make a backup, keep your device up to date, or to not click on unsolicited links. I’ve done that enough.
This week I want to talk about some other kinds of technology, old and new.

First, the first computer. About 15 years or so ago I first read about a find in 1901, in a ship that sank off the coast of Greece. An item was found that looked like a rock, but was actually a mechanical device that was quite corroded. Amazingly, it had gears inside it. The Antikythera mechanism appears to be an astronomical calculator, as far as scientists can tell. It’s over 2000 years old. The article I just read is HERE. 

When I first read about it, it was suggested that Archimedes himself was the possible creator of this device. Apparently, the current thinking is that it was likely from the Archimedes school, or about 100 years after Archimedes, somewhere around 150 BC. Apparently, this kind of science was then lost for the next 1500 years. I wonder how that happens, yet, it’s a recurring theme in history. Read more detail HERE. 
 
Speaking of lost knowledge, I read a great article about the same sort of thing regarding muslin. Yes, the fabric.

Dhaka muslin was a fabric made in what is now Bangladesh, in a 16 part process using a now extinct type of cotton. The thread count in my sheets is maybe 300? This hand woven material had a thread count as high as 1200. This was the most expensive fabric of the time, sometimes called “woven air”. It was sold all over the world, as far back in time as the Antikythera mechanism, but all that ended in the beginning of the 20th century. In the 19th century, it was popular among those that could afford it, including Josephine Bonaparte, and Jane Austen. Read the article HERE. 

It’s a fascinating piece of history, and another lost knowledge.

The BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) is a real thing, it’s been around for a long time, and oddly, Microsoft’s information on the BSOD is as useless as ever.

Recently, you may have read about the March update giving some users the BSOD when they try to print. The requirements are pretty specific, so you probably won’t need to worry about that, however, just in case, an article about it is HERE. 

While reading about this, I read somewhere that reverting to an earlier restore point was a solution. This sounded fine, but some people don’t have restore points because their computers aren’t setup to run them. That’s a system option that needs to be turned on. It has saved computers I’ve worked on, where something catastrophic happens to them, and I revert to an earlier restore point, and the problem is gone. So, to turn on the restore point creation, or to manually create a restore point, read THIS. 

For what it’s worth, I have 4% of the drive devoted to my restore points, for me, that’s about 14gb. Probably 10gb would be fine.
 
The other thing that’s been in the news is the M1 Mac SSD drive. There were apparently some panicked users claiming the hard drive would only last about 6 months. Since it’s non replaceable, and Macs are spendy, that would indeed be pretty awful. The premise is that an SSD has a theoretically finite number of WRITES. The more you write to the drive, the quicker it will succumb. This is a somewhat accurate description, but of course, the reality is nothing like it. A great article on this can be found HERE. 

I get asked about antivirus software quite a bit. I don’t like any of them. I have recommended Malwarebytes in the past, and I still like it. However, times change, and in the world of computers, they change even faster. I have found some AV software can slow a computer to a crawl. That seems unacceptable to me. It doesn’t matter how good the software is, if it prevents you from using your computer. Typically, AV software can slow down a computer that is a lower end or older model without many resources. That’s just the way it is.

I was hesitant to recommend Kaspersky’s because of recent allegations of a tie with the Russian government. Apparently though, these allegations are not proven, so I will withhold judgement for now, as perPCMag.

I found a very decent article from PCMag rating some popular AV programs and found the reviews pretty thorough. The individual products are scored near the bottom of the article, with a further Editor’s Review to read, if you are interested. The main article is HERE. 
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I trust PCMag, so that’s why I appreciate their reviews. You can’t just Google reviews and believe what comes up, you really need to go to a trustworthy site with people paid to investigate and compare. PCMag is a great source for that sort of thing.