Has Your Email Been Breached?

Were you a LinkedIn user in 2012 or earlier? Email addresses and passwords on more than 164 million users were stolen in that massive hack. Last week, 117 million credential were leaked. Has your account been breached?

Check it out here

I checked all my addresses and one had been breached by Adobe (2013), Boxee (2014) and now the current Linkedin “thanks” guys. Guess we know who really needs password protection!

What you should do if you're concerned is to log into your "pwned" account(s) and change your credentials.

iOS Tip 140 - Extend Your Battery

Extend your battery life and turn off unneeded services ...

This tip is in conjunction with Tips 50 and 126.

Spend a few minutes thinking about what you do and do not use frequently on your iPhone, and then turn those things off. Don't need Continuity and Handoff and don't use a Bluetooth headset? Turn off Bluetooth. Only very occasionally need to make your own Wi-Fi hotspot? Turn it on manually when you need it, leave it off the rest of the time (that one will save you remarkable amounts of battery life). Prefer to invoke Siri by double-clicking the home button? Turn off "Hey Siri" (if it is enabled).

Here's another couple of big ones that save a lot of power: turn off "Background App Refresh." Just turn it off. Everyone is different, so possibly you have an app (other than Maps, which will do so regardless) that absolutely has to refresh in the background, and in that case you can turn it on for that app, but turn it off for everything else. It's a little shocking how many apps "think" they need this. Does anyone really believe restaurant app Zomato will work better if it's allowed to continuously update its listings based on where you are at the moment, versus just opening the app, which causes a manual refresh? Apparently Zomato's developers do.

The second one is a bit more involved, because unlike background app refresh you can't really just turn it all off: Location Services. You’ll have to visit the Location Services pane (under "Privacy") in settings and manually adjust each app's settings. Most apps have three options: "Never," "Always," and "While Using the App." Some apps from good-guy developers have either "Never" or "While Using the App."

There are apps that need or at least have a good reason to make the case for "always" needing your location, like mapping and exercise apps that run in the background. That said, you’ll be dumbfounded at how many apps claim to "need" your location. Most apps that only offer "Always" or "Never" have been updated over time to use the vastly-smarter "While Using the App" option, but you'll find a few that want constant access. Broadly speaking, all apps that want your location to, for example, start your travel booking from the airport nearest you, should be set to "while using the app" if it makes sense to you that it would be useful. For all others, ask yourself if the app really needs to know where you are, chances are high the answer will be "never."

If you've done the above and you're still seeing more than normal drain, check the Battery portion of Settings. Here you’ll find a list of what's been draining your battery: just checking it now, I am not surprised to find that the big culprit in the last 24 hours for me was Camera. If I looked at that list and was surprised by the chief culprit(s), it might be time for a restart - a residual process or something might be going wrong. The Battery panel is also where you’ll find Low Power Mode.

There are loads of other, smaller things you can do to cut down battery use, but the whole pile of them won't add up to much unless you do every single one of them, and that's a lot more work. The suggestions above are largely "one time only" type things (with occasional revisits as you add more apps). One more that can also make a big difference: if you are out somewhere and you know there is no Wi-Fi around at all (like when camping), turn off Wi-Fi. Smartphones constantly look for Wi-Fi signal when it’s on.

iOS Tip 139 - Find Photos by Location

1 Summon Siri as usual by holding down the Home button or with Hey Siri
2 Say a phrase like “Show photos from (location)”
Siri will automatically launch the Photos app and sort pictures based on the location parameter you provided.
In the example shown in the screenshots, “Show me photos from East Lansing” displays a handful of images taken near that location.
In order to search your image collection with Siri like this, you’ll need iOS 9 or later on any device that supports the hardware, and you’ll need to have geolocation of your images enabled with a library of geotagged pictures. If you disabled GPS geotagging data within the iPhone Camera app then you won’t find this feature to be particularly useful unless you save other images to your device that are geotagged.

Siri isn’t the only way to search an image library by location on the iPhone and iPad however, and you can show pictures by location through the Photos app manually from the Albums view.

iOS Tip 138 - Use iCloud Tabs in Safari

Go from one device to the next and pick up browsing wherever you left off. You can use iCloud Tabs on devices that are using OS X Mountain Lion or later or iOS 6 or later.

Set up iCloud Tabs on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:
1. Go to Settings > iCloud and make sure that Safari is on.
2. Make sure that you're signed in to the same account on all of your devices.
3. Complete these steps on all the iOS devices where you want to share tabs. If you're sharing tabs with your Mac, set it up using the steps below.

Set up iCloud Tabs on your Mac:
1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, then click iCloud.
2. Make sure that you're signed in to the same account on all the devices where you want to share tabs.
3. Enable the checkbox for Safari.
4. Complete these steps on all the Macs where you want to share tabs. If you're sharing tabs with your iOS devices, set them up using the steps above.

Use iCloud Tabs with iOS 8 on your iPad, or iOS7 or later on your iPhone and iPod touch, when you follow these steps:
1. Open Safari.
2. Tap the Tabs icon
3. Scroll to the bottom of the list, below the images of tabs open on your device. A list of open tabs on your other supported devices will appear.
4. Tap the one you want to open.

Say Goodbye to Malware!

Malware, malware, malware with every link you click the potential for trouble exists: Mackeeper, Shoopy, Advanced Mac cleaner, Megabackup, Zip Cloud …

None of these programs do you any good and in most cases get in the way of your Macs performance. How do they get on your computer? We don’t know the definitive answer - you may have asked to have Mackeeper installed under the impression that it does help. In most instances though they enter your world via some pop up from the Internet such as “Your Flash Player is out of date - click here to update now”. It looks real but you’ve no way to tell - so DON’T click on it.

Though these pests are good for our business they’re bad for you. To help combat this irritant we’ve rolled out CapMac Health Care. This is a piece of software we install on your computer that will alert us if you have Malware. At the same time we’ll install a program, Malwarebytes, that will clean up any nefarious programs that might have been installed. Cost to do this? The install is free, and only $5/month to have us alert you if there's an issue found. For business customers there’s a $20 monthly minimum for up to 4 computers and $5.00/month for each additional computer.

Our Health Care program also checks the following:

• Hard Drive Space
• Hard Drive Errors
• RAM issues
• Time Machine failures
• Missing Hardware
• Failing Batteries
• RAID issues
• and a whole lot more

To date, the software runs more than 75 checks on your Mac. Find out before it’s too late that your hard drive is failing, you need more RAM or you haven’t backed up to Time Machine in awhile.

I WANT IT! How do I get it? For individuals bring your computer in and we’ll install CapMac Health Care and Malwarebytes, it's a same day installation. For the business customer, give us a call or drop Dave an email, and we’ll schedule a time to install CapMac Health Care - your first 30 days are free, if you stay with the program we’ll bill you, at an annual rate after the free trial period.

Privacy & other fine print
• CapMac Health Care does NOT have access to personal information such as files stored on your computer’s hard drive(s).
• CapMac Health Careoperates 24/7/365 – alerts will be sent to Capitol Macintosh 24/7/365 but will only be acted upon during normal business hours.
• CapMac Health Careoffers no guarantees as to anticipation of or limiting liability of computer downtime. CapMac Health Care should be considered an extra tool in the IT toolbox to assist the client and Capitol Macintosh at providing improved, proactive service and response.

iOS Tip 137 - Rotate or Flip Video on iOS

You can rotate any movie on your iOS device 90 degrees, 180 degrees, 270 degrees, or if you feel like going back to the default view you can rotate the video 360 degrees as well. This isn’t particularly obvious, but it’s easy, so here’s how to do it:

1 Open iMovie on the iPhone or iPad
2 Choose the video you want to rotate from the video selection list, then tap on the ‘Share’ / action button, it looks like a box with an arrow flying out the top of it
3 Choose “Create Movie”
4 Place two fingers about an inch apart on the video in iMovie, and rotate them like you’re turning a dial to the direction you want to flip or rotate the video to, a little white rotate image will appear on the display
5 When the video has been rotated to the orientation you’d like to keep, tap on the “Done” button in the upper left corner
6 Now tap the Sharing button again
7 This time choose “Save Video” (optionally, you can share it on Facebook, YouTube, iCloud, etc, but we’re saving the rotated video here)
8 Select the video resolution you’d like to export the movie as: 360p, 540p, 720p, or 1080p
9 When finished, iMovie will alert you the video has been saved to your Photos (NOT Videos) Library, so you can open the Photo app to look at your rotated video

iOS Tip 136 - Turn Any Voice Into a Ringtone

Ever wished you could turn your kids voice into an adorable ringtone saying “Daddy answer your phone!”? Or maybe a message from your spouse saying “Hi honey” when you get a call from their cell phone? Or maybe the sound of your dog barking when you get a call from your dog what, whoa!

1: Record the Voice Message & Send it to Yourself
• Launch “Voice Memos” on the iPhone and tap the red button to record the desired voice message
• Next, tap on the recorded voice memo, then tap the blue “Share” button and select “Email” to send it to an email address you can check from your computer
• Now jump onto your computer, Mac or Windows, you’ll want file extensions visible so that you can change it at the next point.

2: Turn the Voice Memo into a Ringtone & Import to iTunes
• This is the easiest part. Because the Voice Memo recordings are captured and saved as “.m4a” file format, you only need to rename the file extension to a “m4r” to convert it into a ringtone:
• Change the file extension from .m4a to .m4r
• Double-click the newly renamed .m4r file to launch it into iTunes, it will be stored under “Tones”
• Connect the iPhone to the computer (or use wi-fi sync) drag & drop the ringtone from “Tones” to the iPhone”
• This is the only time you will need to use the computer, so now you can go back to the iPhone to assign the voice recording as the ringtone or text tone.

3: Assign the Voice Memo as the Ring Tone (or Text Tone)
• If you’ve assigned custom contact ringtones or individual text tones before this should be familiar to you, otherwise here’s all you need to do:
• Open Contacts, locate the contact name, tap “Edit”
• Select either “ringtone” or “text tone” to change it
• Look under “Ringtones” for the newly transferred ring tone name (default is “Memo” if you didn’t rename it), select that and tap “Save”

#iOS Tip 135 - Retrain Siri

How to Improve “Hey Siri” by Training to Recognize Your Voice
This works with any iPhone or iPad (not iWatch) that supports “Hey Siri” mode. For best results, be in a quiet location and speak in your natural voice.
1 Open the “Settings” app and go to “General”, then choose “Siri”
2 Flip the switch for “Allow ‘Hey Siri'” to the OFF position – leave it off for a few seconds
3 Now flip the switch for “Allow Hey Siri” back to the ON position – this will trigger the learning voice recognition procedure again
4 At the ‘Set Up Hey Siri’ screen, choose to “Set Up Now”
5 Go through the voice recognition tests, use the same voice you’d use to attempt to activate Siri in the future
6 When finished, Hey Siri will say it’s ready, so tap on “Done” to reactivate the feature
7 This immediately turns Hey Siri back on again, but now freshly trained to your voice.
8 Now Siri will recognize your voice specifically when “Hey Siri” is attempted to be activated. Go ahead and try it out as usual by summoning thy voice assistant with Hey Siri, followed by a regular Siri command. (click for the Siri command list)

Going through this setup process (or re-training it by running through it yet again) can make a huge difference in how well the feature works, and it should dramatically reduce the accidental incident of enabling Hey Siri

iOS Tip 134 - Schedule Night Shift

Night Shift scheduling requires version iOS (9.3 or later) to have the feature, otherwise it’s the same on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Here’s how it works:

1 Open the ‘Settings’ app in iOS and go to “Display & Brightness”
2 Tap on the “Night Shift” option underneath the Brightness section
3 Now in the ‘Night Shift’ settings, flip the switch for “Scheduled” to the ON position
4 In the “From / To” section, choose “Sunset to Sunrise” (or set a custom schedule as well if desired)
5 Return back to the Night Shift screen, and, optionally but highly recommended, set the “Color Temperature” to the “More Warm” setting furthest on the right

6 Exit Settings and enjoy your automatic Night Shifting display
Now when sunset or sunrise comes, the iPhone / iPad display will automatically shift to be warmer, or back to the regular blue-light heavy display.