I don’t typically buy books anymore. I borrow books, I read books in the house, and I download free books to my Kindle from Amazon. I love my Kindle. It’s so easy on the eyes, and the text size is adjustable. There are highlighting features, and you can press on a word and it will tell you the definition. The Kindle site does offer free books, though it was easier to find them several years ago when I got my first Kindle. Now, if you look, they still offer some freebies. Before the Kindle, there were websites available where I could also read free books.
 
The Gutenberg Project, at Gutenberg.org is just such a site. It allows you to read over 60,000 public domain titles for free, and also download them so you can put them in your Kindle library. Following is an article to that effect, with 9 free sites for downloading. Check it out HERE.  
 
IF, like me, you then had a download and no idea how to put it on your Kindle, then read THIS.  It’s an article from PCMag about how to get eBooks into your Kindle library. I chose the emailing method. It’s a bit weird, and it took a few tries but I finally got it to work. Basically, find your Kindle email address, it has a special one, trust me. You have to look it up on Amazon or in your Kindle. Then, email the downloaded eBook file to that address. Remember to use an approved address, also in Amazon. I had to add my regular email address to the list of approved emails, which is different from the Kindle emails. It sounds confusing but it is pretty easy. Read the article, it’ll help.

If you’ve noticed in the news, there have been some articles talking about Amazon Sidewalk, and that you should opt-out of it before it’s too late. Most of the articles seem to have inflammatory headlines. Sadly, that’s typical of the news these days. Maybe it’s always been that way? At any rate, I have 2 articles and a Snopes blurb about it. The articles do a good job of explaining what it is. One article is definitely against it, while the other one is a bit more, I’d say, level headed.

First, If you have an Amazon Ring or Echo, this applies to you, if not, then you don’t necessarily need to read this. We do have the Echo, and have a Ring but not yet installed. There are plenty of creepy things about having this type of device in our home. The fact is, they are accessible by Amazon, and who knows who else. I would say the same thing about smart phones. In fact, I have. Not too long ago I wrote about how these big corporations are ‘listening’.

If you leave your home, you can be watched. If you live in a neighborhood, those Ring cameras that people have are, in effect, watching you. Not to mention security cameras in commercial buildings, and traffic cameras everywhere. If you are neurotic and off your meds, this could be quite upsetting. If you’re paranoid, you may have good reason to be. This is reality.

The Sidewalk is described as a mesh WiFi system created from the internet of Amazon Ring and Echo devices. Amazon will be taking a wee bit of your internet and distributing it through their devices to the outside, and PUBLIC world, where these devices live. The logic is so that Amazon products that use the internet can have better range. It does make sense, for instance, if I put a Tile ‘homing device’ on my dog’s collar, and she gets lost, the Tile could stay connected to the internet in a much wider range, allowing me to find her. Imagine if that’s my kid’s backpack instead of a dog collar. There is definitely a good reason for this.

The problem many folks have is that Amazon is controlling it. Also, that the option is already turned on and in order to not participate, you have to turn it off.

An article that is very against it is HERE.   He does use some profanity. He does NOT trust Amazon.

The Snopes blurb is HERE.   It’s short and to the point. It basically says it’s not the end of the world.

The third article, I think, is a more level headed explanation. You can read that one HERE. 
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If this topic interests you, then please do read the articles. For those of us in Abiquiu, this isn’t of the most immediate importance, as most of us are still trying to get decent internet and don’t have these Amazon devices. But many of our readers live in cities and towns, and this may very well be something that applies.  

First, I want to thank the 3 people that bought my MacBooks. I don’t usually sell computers, however, I needed to recoup some money and add to my kitty so I can keep buying parts for computers that I give away, and that helped BIG TIME! So, thank you Alicia, Katy, and Gail.
This week, I will talk about the Mac OS, in honor of those three lovely people.
First off is a video on 8 useful tips, target disk mode was my favorite which I didn’t know about. The printer icon one was also pretty great.  Click Here

And if that wasn’t enough, here is a youtube video of 25 tips for the MacBook that were posted by users, like you.

I liked this third one because it starts with removing login items. Those are jobs that start with the Mac, which don’t need to be running and slow the Mac down. On Windows 10 this is the Startup tab in Settings.   Click  

​So that should keep you Mac people busy for a while. Good luck!

Ransomware has been in the news recently. While I have known people who have victimized by ransomware, they are quite rare. They paid the $300 and got the encryption key and were able to recover their PC. Recently, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack appears to have netted the attackers $4.4 million. The attackers apparently netted $90 million in total before shutting up and presumably retiring or reorganizing. That article is HERE. 

I think for me, I’d just reformat my drive and start over. Hopefully everyone out there reading this has a good backup of what they would NOT want to lose, and has that safely in a drawer somewhere. My brother in law, David, sent me an interesting link about ransomware. Two actually. One link was saying Windows 10 had anti-ransomware software that you could activate, however neither he nor I were able to do so. The other link was a sensible discussion about ransomware, what it is, how to avoid it, and what to do if you get it. That article is HERE.
 
I’ve spoken about backing up your critical data for years. Have you done that lately? Pictures and documents are typically the biggies. A good option is to back data up to a service that has anti-encryption built in, like Microsoft OneDrive. Whatever you choose, don’t keep putting it off. 

A while back I posted an article on the tiff between Facebook and Apple pertaining to some disclosure and privacy options Apple was adding to their iOS. Facebook figured that folks would not like being told which apps were going to collect data, and they might opt out of that. Turns out, Facebook was right. An article on that is HERE.

Basically, Apple was changing the way apps ran, letting the user know that an app wanted to collect data on you, and allow you to say NO! Apparently, a study has been done showing that worldwide, about 12% were willing. That will likely prove beneficial for Apple in that they appear to be more concerned with your privacy. Sounds great right? Well, yes and no. It's good PR anyway. The truth though, not so much.

​In 2015 Apple had a security breach for 128 million app downloads. They chose to not mention it. An article on that is HERE.

It's a safe bet that huge corporations don't have my best interests in mind. The question becomes how much do I care, and what can I do about it? Well, it is a good question. I don't have an answer.