Hi, this is Alice in Cheriton, and this is Silicast Podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, November 26, 2023, and this is show number 968. While we're down at Lindsay and Nolan's house, so we've got our special road setup with our road mics, and things might not sound exactly the same, but we're gonna get on with the show. This week I got to be a guest on the Checklist Podcast, hosted by Mac OS Ken. We talk about a survey that finds that young people are less likely to report that they've been victims of cybercrime, and more likely to actually be victims than older people. Then we talk about the open letter I wrote to help people explain to their friends and family that past keys are a good thing and not scary. Look for the Checklist, number 353 in your podcatcher of choice, or of course, there's a link in the show notes. After the last episode of Programming by Stealth, where Bart gave us the intro to JQ and the problems it can solve, this week we start to get our feet wet by learning how to extract data from JSON files. We learn how to descend into dictionaries and arrays, and how to slice arrays. We learn how JQ will output sarcasm about Bart Bouchotte's if you don't want to learn how to ask it for raw output. That's a little inside joke. Anyway, we even learn how to extract data from multiple files at once, and how to extract multiple values from our JSON files. Finally, we learn how to explode arrays and how to suppress errors. I gotta tell you, I think I really love data manipulation because I love this episode. I think that JQ and working with JSON is really fun. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes, of course, at PBS.Bartefisher.net. And this episode of Chitchat Across the Pond is number 779. I recently sang the virtues of EufyCams as an inexpensive replacement for WiseCams that work with HomeKit Secure Video. Right after I wrote the article, I received my eighth and ninth EufyCams. I installed the eighth one without any issues, just like the first seven, but when I went to install the ninth one, for the life of me, I could not get it into HomeKit Secure Video. I started a chat session with Eufy, and I got the expected bot, but it was actually not bad. It asked me to test out a few different things, like trying to set it up from inside the same room with the router. I ran through the tests and I still couldn't get online, and the bot escalated me to a human who asked for a few more things. After going through what they suggested, the human said, you know what? It looks like it's not working. How about we just send you another one and you don't have to send back the broken one? Why, yes, that would be lovely. In a few days, I had the replacement camera and it immediately connected into HomeKit, unlike the other one. I was delighted with the customer service, but I gotta tell you, I felt like a real heel because a couple of days later, Eufy wrote back to me saying, well, did it work? Are you okay? Everything all right? Man, I hadn't even said thank you, and here they are checking up on me. So I'm telling you this story because I think it's a signal of a good company. Of course, we'd rather things everything works the first time, but knowing the company will be responsive when something goes wrong is nearly as good and it gives me confidence in continuing to recommend Eufy. You all know that Steve and I are big fans of Bode Grimm, host of the Kilowatt podcast. We always tell you that he's informative about the world of electric vehicles, but he's also one of the silliest people we know. Turns out he's become friends with another friend of ours, Rob Dunwood of the SMR podcast and the Tech John. Bode invited Rob, Steve and me to join him in what he called the 39th annual Kilowatt trivia Thanksgiving extravaganza. There have, of course, not been 39, but anyway, he had a lot of fun with the title. So he asked us to come on and he asked us trivia questions across a broad set of topics from OG Star Trek to knitting and he used a video board he created reminiscent of the Jeopardy game in order to ask us these questions to say that this was an orderly game where we played by strict rules with defined scoring would do injustice to the anarchy of the event. Bode's released the video on YouTube, which is a lot of fun, but you can also find it in your podcatcher of choice if you subscribe to the Kilowatt podcast. So look for the 39th annual Kilowatt trivia Thanksgiving extravaganza. Well, we've got some listener contributions this week that allowed me to have fun with my family over Thanksgiving, followed by a security bet. So let's get started. George from Tulsa here responding to Allison's request for a show contribution to reduce her load this Thanksgiving week. Years ago, we paid a bank service company to microfilm file cabinets full of irreplaceable paper, some now 120 years old. The company then scanned the microfilm to image only PDFs it delivered to us on optical discs. The working set of PDFs currently resides on our Synology NAS where they're in a folder structure organized by an indexed table of contents. I'm now engaged in a project to run the gigabytes of image only PDFs through optical character recognition. This will enable searching for documents across the network by searching for text within documents, searching within open documents and copying and pasting text and data tables to new documents and spreadsheets. Since I'm mostly using Linux, specifically Linux meant sentiment, I'm going to briefly describe here how that works in mint and put the more difficult technical stuff and all my links at the bottom of today's show notes. I'll also talk about Mac options for the same process. To begin, it's necessary to download two applications from the Mint Software Center. Tesseract is an OCR engine originally developed by Hewlett Packard and maintained by Google since 2006. Tesseract is really fast, taking advantage of all eight cores of my Ryzen 7 processor. It's also surprisingly accurate, even on less than optimal scans of old paper. Many languages are available, but I've only installed English. Tesseract is not user facing. It must be invoked by another program. For us, that's OCR my PDF, which is started by commands in the Linux terminal. Running terminal commands can be scary. No worry here is all we're doing is duplicating the original PDF to a new file with OCR without making any changes to the original. The command is one brief line you'll be able to copy and paste from these show notes where you'll also find step-by-step instructions. Processing is so fast, I'm using the Linux application PDF Arranger to merge related PDFs. Think monthly financial statements consolidated into searchable annual documents, hundreds of pages long. That works great for what I'm doing. PDF Arranger will also split long documents into shorter chunks if that works better for you. What if you want to OCR a file with a lot of text that's saved as, for example, a JPG? Simply print the JPG to PDF and you're good to go. Ocular is a Linux file viewer that has some editing and annotation capabilities. What I find invaluable is its table tool, which extracts tabular data that can be pasted into spreadsheets for analysis. One other application to mention. G Image Reader, available on Windows and Linux, uses the Tesseract Engine for granular OCR and editing of blocks of text. It does not embed the text within a PDF, but saves it as a separate text file. Down in the show notes, there's a neat video link demonstrating it being used to simultaneously OCR text in Korean and English, while the user interactively corrects errors. It's of course possible to OCR digital documents on a Mac. For a small number of documents, if you have a scan snap, which comes with the limited version of the Abbey Fine Reader, the easiest solution is to print the PDF to paper, then rescan with OCR enabled. That won't work for me because of the gigabytes I need to process and the forest all that printing would kill. If you're geeky and love playing with computers, you might be able to get Tesseract and OCR My PDF to run on a Mac using Mac ports or Homebrew. The full Mac versions of Abbey Fine Reader, a 69 annual subscription, and Adobe Acrobat Pro, $30 a month or 240 annually, do retroactive OCR. I had the perpetual version of Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 and found its OCR results required significant manual correction. Perhaps Acrobat is better now. Both offer free trials. Amazon Software Downloads offers an apparently perpetual version of Abbey's 2015 version. But from reviews, I suspect it isn't compatible with current versions of Mac OS. UPDF Googled up as another Mac and iOS option. Brief research revealed it's a product of the Chinese company SuperAce, and its privacy statement makes clear that if you're using its hallmark AI features, your content will be uploaded to SuperAce's servers. Speaking of privacy policies, Abbey's, Adobe's and UPDF's are all opaque and confusing, and I'm a lawyer. I'm pretty sure all are at least monitoring when, where, how, on and what computer their software is used. Do read and understand their settings, privacy policies, and end user license agreements, especially if you're processing confidential documents. Privacy is a reason you might want to try a Linux system of your own that can run open source applications, which don't phone home. Cost is another reason. There's a new generation of nano-sized Linux systems with useful specs that begin as low as $130. Compare that cost to Acrobat or Abbey, or the $99 a year virtualization application, Parallels, that will run Windows and Linux on Macs, and boy, does Parallels phone home. I'm wrapping up my audio here, but if you're interested in instructions and links, check out this episode show notes at podfeet.com. Well, thanks so much for that, George. This was fantastic. When we first talked, George sort of thought, ah, this is kind of a Linux topic. It's not really appropriate for your show. But I was like, of course, Linux is appropriate for a show. Plus, it's super nerdy. It's got command line stuff, and I've actually figured out how to do what George did on the Mac, and I'll be talking about that probably in next week's show. And it's a lot of fun. I'm really like what he's come up with here, and it solved a real problem for me. So thanks again, George, for coming on the show and teaching us how to OCR PDFs with open source tools. Hello, everyone. This is Jill from the North Woods. I didn't have a Christmas tree for the last 16 years primarily because of the cats. But this year, someone gifted me a new Christmas tree because they replaced it with something else. But here it was. I had no Christmas lights, at least none of them that ever worked. So I knew I wanted to get some kind of a smart light, something controllable, something I could do interesting things with. There are a lot of companies now coming out with string lights that are LED controlled by apps. And the two that came to my mind most were Twinkly saw them on Amazon quite a bit and of course, Hugh. Twinkly has been in the business, I think four to five years. So they've had a lot of experience in making these string lights controllable. But Hugh just ran pilots last year and this year is the first year where they're selling them in mass. There's all the Hugh string lights called Festivia that came out this year. Boy, I remember when they announced this particular model of lights coming out. People signed up in waiting lists. I know I was one of them. Very excited to get into this kind of a light. But by some weird random chance, Woot one day, Woot is a discount company owned by Amazon. They were offering Festivia lights 500 for a price that is about half the price of what you would pay for a 250 string. Boy, I jumped all over that. But when I got them, it was only 250 lights. And it turned out it was a mistake in the advertising. They offered me a bigger discount, said unfortunately they couldn't give me the 500 lights all I could have was the 250 and the sale was sold out so they couldn't even offer me more lights. But still, I got a Festivia 250 light for a really huge bargain. I was excited about that. But still the problem existed. I need about five to 600 lights for my new Christmas tree. I was going to have to do something else. The one thing I was excited about Hugh is that I have a lot of other Hugh bulbs. I'm very invested in the system. I know how it works. I have all sorts of scenes set up and using automations to turn on and turn off my Hugh lights. I really enjoy it. I think the only time I actually have a real light bulb colored light going on in my house is when I'm reading. Other times it is a full light fest in here. I'm sure my neighbors wonder what the heck I'm doing. But I love the beautiful Hugh lights. So the Hugh Festivia was a no-brainer for me. It fit into the rest of the module. I saw now I was either going to have to buy more Hugh lights, which are kind of pricey when they're not on a Hugh sale or a woot sale for the lights. And the other problem was I noticed when I got the Hugh lights, they didn't have the ability to twinkle in standard Christmas colors. I want twinkly lights on my tree, not just any lights on my tree. The bulbs are beautiful. The colors are beautiful. I really enjoy them. It was really the final touch in my recording studio to make it just as cozy and comfy as I wanted it to be. But then what was I going to do for my tree? I still needed five to six hundred bulbs of LED lights for my tree. Since the Hugh didn't twinkle the way I wanted it to twinkle, I decided to try the twinkly lights and got the six hundred light bulb kit for my tree. So now I have both systems. So I thought I would tell you all about it so that you could make a decision about which sets you would want to have. So let's first start out by talking about Hugh. Hugh is a more known brand. A lot of people have Hugh bulbs. It also has a hub that is nice because all your light bulbs attach to the hub. And so then if you have to make changes in the network or you're worried about the load on your network, the Hugh hub is taking on all that extra work to make sure that the network stays proper, that when you have to change your network settings, it only changes in one location and it sends it out to all the bulbs and adding and subtracting bulbs is very easy in the system. I really enjoy having that Hugh hub. Where it gets a little bit different for Hugh is that they have scenes which are just combinations of lights. So when I set the Aurora Borealis scene in my room, it all turns blue and green and purple and sort of fluctuates. You can do all of those scenes with these bulbs too. You can either decide that you want the colors to stream through the various light settings or you can decide that you want it to have a scattered look which means every other bulb in five or three or whatever configurations you want will take on those Aurora colors. So you can set them up so they have all the colors, like I said, either as they go through them all or as they individually set as scattered lights. But then again, they can't twinkle. There is no twinkle setting in these string lights where I can make any color scheme I want. Twinkle, glow. Some of them have these kind of pulsing colors to it. Can't do it. But they do give you a couple of scenes that are specially made for the Festiva lights. One of the special scenes is called prism. And it is essentially the basic colors. It looks like what you would expect out of a standard Christmas light set. And again, you can make them scattered so it looks like a standard Christmas light set. And so that's fine. Then there's another special scene called candle.  There's something called sparkle, which is that same kind of golden color. It's a little bit more bright and it doesn't twinkle or glow in that same kind of pattern. There's something called fireplace, which turns a very orangey red and will flicker a little bit as if it was a fireplace.  There is something called glisten, which has a little bit of gold and white and the bulbs will sort of rotate in this twinkly, lighter fashion like it's glistening on a lake. And the last one then is called opal. Opal is more pastels and they glow and twinkle just like you would expect a light string to do. So it will twinkle, but only when you're using one of these special scenes. If you have the ability to do that effect, why can't you do it on any color string you want? Now you may laugh, but I even contacted Hugh support on Twitter and asked him about twinkly Christmas lights and they said it can't do it yet. Maybe in the future. I told him in no uncertain terms that if you're going to have a product that people are going to use for their Christmas trees or Christmas lights, it has to be twinkling. OK, maybe I'm taking this all too far. But still, the lights are bright, they're beautiful, the colors are amazing and the ability to customize the colors from anywhere from one to five different lights on the string really is nice. You have the Hugh app, which then will allow you to schedule it, be hooked into a motion sensor trigger. And you can always use, of course, the Apple automations to turn them on, turn them off and do different things with them. Simple to use. There are some third party apps that offer you some additional features. And one of the more popular ones is called I connect Hugh gives you some abilities to increase or change the saturation. You have a little bit more flexibility. I still saw no ability to get my lights to twinkle. That was the goal. The plug itself is nice. You plug the lights into a box and then the plug goes into a larger box. I know there's a technical term for it. And then there's a cable running out of the larger box, which plugs into the wall. I don't enjoy plugging big clunky boxes into my wall. I much prefer having a cable so that it's more flexible and I can bend it around things. So I like how it plugs into the wall. Of course, the strings themselves are not replaceable. If one of them were to get damaged, you couldn't do anything about it. You couldn't replace a light like you put on our old string. That's what you're kind of set up with. And Hugh has, again, all the colors you also can get pure white out of the bulbs themselves. So you can make any kind of arrangement you want. The Hugh lights are indoor outdoor. They have water protection. So you don't have to worry about that. And they come with a 65 foot string with 250 bulbs. That's the one I have. And that runs about $219. The 130 foot string, which is about 500 lights, runs at $359. So they are pricey. That's pretty much why I jumped on that sale price when I saw it. Such a good deal, especially for a new product that hasn't been out for very long. There haven't been many discounts in the Hugh string lights at all. Now let's talk about the twinkly lights. The twinkly lights are very similar in a way. You have your string of lights, it plugs into a box. But here's the thing that's a bit different. That box actually plugs directly in the wall without a cable. Again, don't like that very much. I find that a bit clunky. But the other part is you get multicolored lights. You can get them in various quantities just like you can the Hugh lights itself. They're also controlled with an app. And it's very simple to set up and get going. So the lights I got are multicolored 600 bulb lights. That runs at 168. But it says that I don't get white or warm white with my lights. In order to do that, I would have to pay 198, which would be the multicolored lights with warm white. But when I was testing the lights themselves using the apps, they had some sort of red and white or blue and white patterns. And it looks pretty white. Maybe it's not exactly white and maybe it's more like a very pale blue. But I couldn't even tell the difference. It looked white to me.  Since I was really interested in the colors, I didn't really care about the white. And so the 168 600 bulb feature works great for me. But you can see right there, the price is considerably less than the hue bulbs. The Twinkly app works with HomeKit, the A-Lady, Google works with other automations too. So you can set it up just like you can't with the hue bulbs and work with any system that you have. What makes the Twinkly lights a little bit different than the hue lights is that this is something that you can set up in a very customized way. When you load them up into your app, and maybe you're going to put them on your tree, or you're going to wrap them around your porch, whatever you're going to do with them, you then bring up the app, use the camera in the app and it maps how you have the lights configured, whether it's on a tree or on some other object. Now you can apply different effects like a fireworks effects where it goes up in the air and then in a big fireworks or it snakes around the tree and spins around or it has hearts that float around the outside of whatever object you're using. You can use these very interesting effects and all you have to do is draw it out and the app will figure out on the mapping how to make it work with your lights. That's pretty cool. When I watch people do some more interesting effects, the one thing they said that makes those effects work better is density of lights. So the general rule is 100 lights per foot of Christmas tree. That's what you're putting it on. You want to have enough density of those lights to make the patterns work. If you buy too few lights for your tree for whatever object you're putting them on, it won't be clear necessarily what that pattern is because it won't have enough lights to complete the pattern. You can even have them flashing chasing each other or again even more subtle things. And I even saw someone put a tree with this purple pulsing pattern that was going on. It's just beautiful and really neat. So what you can do with twinkly lights is almost never ending. You can draw out your own patterns. Some people lamented a bit that it only remembers 16 patterns.  I imagine there's a little bit of work involved in making new patterns. So why be limited when you're spending all that time doing that? There's also some other configurations that almost look like artwork. Like there's a starry night and a roar borealis, a pumpkin, a heart. You can even download some from what other people make from a library of patterns. Some of them had smiley faces that will run around on the object that you put these lights on. It's pretty cool. I noticed in general that these lights are a little bit brighter than the hue bulbs. The hue bulbs are bright enough. There's nothing wrong with them. But once I plugged in the twinkly lights, I could tell this was a whole other level of brightness. I just went when I turned them on. But the colors are vivid. You can do all the other things like putting them on a schedule like you can with every other smart light or motion detection or other things. Both light systems connected to my Eero network very easily, both by using the app, telling it what network to connect to, and then connecting right up. Again, hue has the hub, but the twinkly has the ability to also create some kind of a local network so it can talk to itself if you don't have Wi-Fi at your house. So it even has a little bit of a workaround if you don't want to connect it up to your Wi-Fi. So I'm excited to get my tree set up. I'm going to do that hopefully next week and be able to see what amazing patterns I can create with these lights. The interesting part about the 600 bulb kit is that you're actually getting two separate strings of 300 each. So I could put 300 on my tree and then put 300 over my tree or around the room. They all plug into the same box. So that makes it a little bit more flexible too. These are also indoor-outdoor, waterproof. I always worry about LED lights because critters like to chew on them more than they like to chew on the old-fashioned lights. I think they don't sense the electrical pulse inside and so they more freely chew on them. I wouldn't want something so expensive getting ruined like that. So really the difference between the Hue setup and the Twinkly setup is that Hue is simple, easy to set up, easy to create scenes. If you're invested in the Hue world, you can turn your entire room into the same scene and the string lights and the lights in your room will all work together to be on the same scale. Very easy and pleasant to use.   Your imagination and your ability to think about things is endless. I know for me, when my tree comes down, am I just going to box these lights up and use them a year later or hey, I'm going to try to think of something creative to do with these lights. Kind of had the thought that maybe I'd put them on my ceiling in a pattern so I could have the whole aurora borealis glowing on my ceiling. I don't know, we'll find out what I do later. But if you're looking for that kind of power to create whatever you're looking for, the Twinkly lights will give it to you. So I think in the end, this isn't a debate between two competitors. I think that these are a similar product with two different use cases and two different levels of investment. One is simple and easy and part of a big system and the other one is endlessly flexible so that you can do anything with it. So again, this is Jill from the North Woods. I hope you enjoyed this. Please remember that you can always find me at Alice in Slack Channel or you can email me at Jill at startwithsmallsteps.com. I would love to hear from you and hear what you think about the different digital string lights that you have out there and which one makes the most sense to you. I love this Jill. My earliest memory of Twinkly lights was when I was about 11 or 12 years old, the people across the street had Twinkly Christmas lights and I used to just sit there and watch them as I went to sleep. So you brought back some great memories.  But we also have the Twinkly lights and there's one more thing it can do that I think you haven't discovered yet is you can set up patterns that react to noises. And we love to do this with the grandchildren because we'll bring them in and tell them to yell at the wall. We do them up on Steve as I pretend that I have anything to do with putting up Christmas. Anyway, he puts up the Christmas lights on a wall in the house and makes a pattern and then the kids run up and yell at it and watch it move. And it's really fun to turn on music and it reacts to the music too. So we're big fans of Twinkly and I did that review of both of them. It sounds like they both have their own advantages. Hello Allison and fellow Nozila Castaways. This is Tom from Ontario. One issue which we all grapple with often only in the back of our minds is how to ensure our digital information is secure that can be accessed by those who need it when we are having a medical crisis and can't act for ourselves. This piece deals with that same theme but from a hardware angle. So what is the problem to be solved? In our case it started with a small problem. My wife showed me her phone which had the message that her sent mailbox was full so she couldn't send any more emails. In this case I needed to log on to our mail server and set the system to delete sent emails after a certain period. But this was really a hint to our larger problem. Our emails revolved around our domain and our hosting service which only I could or at least was interested in accessing. So the small problem could have been much bigger for her if I had been traveling and away from home that week. But this then highlighted the big problem. I was the only and therefore the weakest link in the entire tech set up in our home. So it was now time to confront the issue I had kept on the back burner for far too long. I really enjoy playing with tech and have been doing the Office IT and Home IT for 45 years. We had registered our own domains and used them for our websites and for mail addresses. We had a basic internet configuration which included a modem from the cable company and our own router. A large screen TV connected to a stereo system cable box and Apple TV. My wife really enjoys the benefits and entertainment. Our tech brings us but doesn't want to know how the sausage is made. In fact, she just wants it to work now. And while I may look forward to the odd glitch which indicates a problem I can dive into and hopefully solve there is no way my wife would be interested in learning how to connect to our domain registrar manage our mail hosting service configure the router or program the universal TV remote. She has access to my computer and all my passwords but not the knowledge of what would need to be done with them. Our kids live a long way away and wouldn't be able to help at least in the short term. It has always been a risk that something would happen to me or perhaps I would run off with Amy from the genius bar and leave my wife with no IT assistance. But as I have now been collecting my government old age pension for 10 years the odds of Amy wanting to run off with me are incredibly small and the odds of some medical issue at some point interrupting or ending my ability to keep the tech running are getting much larger. So the issue became how to continue to enjoy all of the tech we love but ensure that minimal effort and technical knowledge is required to keep the mail flowing, the TV is working and the internet available around the house. We split the project into several steps. First was email as this was the one which would take the longest to clear up. We already each had a dot me dot mac or dot iCloud account so it was a matter of contacting businesses and friends to change our email address from our personal domain email to our Apple mail account. We also set up a Gmail account which we jointly use and which into rich we receive household bills or stuff which applies to both of us. Previous articles on the no-silla cast have dealt with the hassles of doing this. We left the old email addresses online for about 18 months to be pretty sure we had everyone covered. Now if there is an email problem my wife can at least do a Google search and likely find an answer as both Google and iCloud mail are such mainstream products or a tech savvy neighbor could perhaps step in to help. As the email switch was going on we carried out with some of the other changes. The wiring behind our entertainment unit was a real mess with a myriad of expensive cables running between the inputs and outputs. Also at the time we used a Logitech Harmony remote to control our TV stereo cable setup which had to be programmed and occasionally reprogrammed and about 95% of the time it worked fine. But at times the on-off status of the devices would get out of sync easy to fix but annoying for a non-tech person. Also the replacement of any of the hardware pieces would require delving into the myriad of cables and often some reprogramming of the remote or the stereo receiver. The fix for this was a smart TV. We eliminated the sound system and the Apple TV. So now we have a single remote which controls our Sony Google TV but we don't lose any functionality. I can still screen mirror from my iPad or phone. We can use the Apple app on our TV and coincidentally our cable company required us at the same time to replace our cable box with an app for the TV. So now we just have the single TV and it's dedicated remote and it does it all. The only cables now are an ethernet cable and a power cable to the TV. It was also a chance to play with Android. We have a few Amazon Echoes into HomePod which are nice to have but aren't necessary. We have a couple of Hue light bulbs which we can trigger by voice but if they all stopped working there is still the light switch on the lamp or on the wall so they don't need any support plan. The last issue we dealt with was the router. We had had an Apple airport extreme which was set up with a guest network and some Mac address routing. Again this would be something my wife would not want to learn so the solution was a router from our cable company. I now don't have any control over it but if the internet goes down my wife only needs to call the cable company who are very good in our area and they can diagnose the problem and send a tech if needed. It has all been worth it and it was basically a stress-free experience. I think primarily because we were acting proactively. We haven't lost any functionality and things just run. The sound on the new TV is good enough that I don't miss the expensive audio system. I was also finding that the front line of technology was getting further and further ahead of me so just enjoying the benefits of the tech working is more fun than I thought. I feel a little like the Maytag Repairman in those classic commercials. My feet up on the desk listening to podcasts all the hardware just keeps running. Our costs are down with no domain registrations and hosting service to pay and we have fewer hardware pieces which will need to be replaced at some point in the future. Thanks for listening to this. Hopefully something in this article will resonate with a listener or two. Have a good week. Well, thank you so much, Tom. This is fantastic. I don't think we've ever had a review from Tom before and I think this is fantastic. It gave me a lot of ideas to think about. I've done a little bit of making sure people know how to use what I do in my house but luckily I'm surrounded by a lot more nerdery than most people but I think you've made some real good points about simplifying life and I definitely like your analogy of the Maytag Repairman going forward. I like it. I like it. I think it's a completely opposite thing to everything that we talk about here. You know, we try to encourage you to get as much complexity in your life adding home automation you don't need.  Why do I need nine cameras? I don't know. It's just a thing that we do here. So it's neat to think about how would you dial it back to make it consumable by a normal person if something were to happen to you and it's definitely something we should all think about. Well, I took most of the week off thanks to George, Jill, Tom and Bart so I'm not going to ask for donations this week. Instead, I'll only ask that you go out and be kind to one another. Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Security Bits with Bart Buchatza. We just talked yesterday so I already know you're doing fine, right Bart? That's it indeed. That's it indeed. All right. We got a lot on our plate so we should probably just get stuck in. What do you think? Let's do that. So let us start with a little bit of follow-up on some stuff we've been tracking for a while. So this is now the third Security Bits in a Row where I have to warn you that there are attackers successfully sneaking malicious ads into Google. And I can only imagine the Google engineers are working very hard to stop this but it would appear that at the moment the baddies are winning the cat and mouse game. So the latest, what they're doing is they're sticking in ads for common software so that when people search for the software they get the malicious ad and that takes them to booby-trapped versions of the software and then you end up hacking yourself, right? The easiest way to hack someone is asking is to do it themselves. When you said they were hacking into Google I'm thinking which Google product but no, you mean Google. Yeah, the one you type yeah, the original, the OG Google. So this time it was when SCP was the software app being victimized which is a very common free security FTP client for Windows. Right, right. But again, the lesson is those Google ads be very wary of them at the moment. The baddies are successfully getting stuff into those ads and that just shouldn't be possible. Yeah, yeah. So by those ads you mean ads for software? Well, I mean at the moment they're doing software but if they have this ability why couldn't they do something else? So, you know the way Google marks the ads? Not those ads. All ads. On Google. In Google, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. But it's not good for their business model. It's kind of slightly what they make their money from. So yeah. Moving on to Action Alerts the November patch Tuesday has been undone. Quite busy in Microsoft land a total of 58 patches covering five zero days. So patchy patchy patch patch. And we get a timely reminder that if you're running a WordPress blog you should really have that feature turned on that automatically updates your plugins because one of a really popular plugin is called Fastest Cash and right now it's installed on millions of sites and right now there are 600,000 of them running an old version which has a nasty security bug in it. So. Bart would you believe before today I didn't know I could have automatic updates? Because when you installed WordPress 20 years ago you couldn't. All right so making well you keep going and I'm going to write a little reminder turn on auto updates because that's what I do I go in and I see a two or a four and I go and I go click click click click and I say update so it's not like I spend a bunch of time reviewing it and deciding whether to use it. Yeah you need to go to each plugin and turn on the auto button because it's per plugin so if you have a plugin that's very brittle that you don't trust you cannot turn on the auto there but you can turn on the auto against the ones that are you know well maintained. I do it on the mold because I figure I'd rather have a broken site than a hacked site but you know it's just you yeah just me you know and again it's context right it's my blog is just something for fun whereas if I was making my living selling stuff online I'd probably think differently about these things so yeah it's all about balancing risk everything's about balancing risk um moving us into worthy warnings I don't you may have noticed I'm doing fewer stories about data breaches because they just happen like always and forever but every now and then fixing it's raining in Ireland yeah pretty much yeah so every now and then I sort of one of them raises its head above the parapet and I go yeah that's actually worth mentioning so I am sorry to say it is United States listeners who need to perk their ears up on this one uh a very popular thing these days is software as a service where someone writes a piece of software and instead of selling it to you to run yourself they run it for you in their cloud and you just buy access to it it's like hosted WordPress or something so you know very good feature to say work for your IT department but it means that one company can end up doing work for a lot of an industry like healthcare so there is a company called WellTalk who suffered a data breach and they leaked the health social security numbers insurance details and other personal details of 8.5 million American sick people the bleeping computer story has more details it's particular hospital groups in particular states but if you're in the states you may want to have a read of that story oh what so security bits is supposed to include which can we do about it you can't do anything about this right you should know because the only way to be alert so this is the kind of information that makes you very vulnerable to a spearfishing attack so if you don't know that the baddies know your say insurance number then if someone aim as you encodes you your correct insurance number you are going to believe that but if you know that that's leaked then you're going to keep your spidey sense going when you get it you know and unexpected communication that happens to know information that they shouldn't so I think it's important to know what's leaked so that you know what to not you're actually at the exit in mutholism sorry how do you know that you're in the breach they don't have a list on that link to all eight and a half million people do they I would imagine you would need to talk to your healthcare provider or something but I mean to be honest I can't I can't look into it to that level I don't really understand your healthcare system yeah but I'm just saying when we give advice to say something people should do I don't know I mean if some we go read that we're going to go ha eight and a half million us patients and I still don't know whether I need to take any action like I don't know whether well talk is used by my insurance company I don't know how to tell so I don't I mean I guess it's good I don't either I mean it just seemed big enough that it was worth warning our listeners about sure you know yeah like I say the reason I don't do many of these is because you ask me these questions and I can't possibly know the answer to the next level yeah now this one falls into the category of this is an example as opposed to the actual thing so I don't want you to worry about the specific thing I want you to bear in mind that this is an example of something that happens every year it's now holiday season what do we all do in holiday season we buy things so the probability that you're expecting a package from UPS or that you're expecting a package from DHL is way higher now than it is in the middle of summer so there is lots and lots of spam and malware pretending to be an email from DHL and you were you know a lot of people are going to be desperately waiting for a package they're not going to be turned on because they're in a rush and you're going to fall for it so this is now what the baddies are doing they are sending out fake emails related to shipping because lots of people are waiting for those emails and they might be paying attention similarly you'll love this one I thought of you when I put this in the show notes so you have said many times that one of the dumbest things to do is to find a USB stick in the parking lot and then to do that good Samaritan thing of plugging it into your computer to figure out who it might belong to so you can give them back their precious data that we talked about this in the show like a decade ago and I don't even think I'm exaggerating I genuinely think it was a decade ago Oh it's more than a decade because I was still working and I've been retired for more than a decade yeah there we go we've been doing this for a while haven't we so if you think that that's somehow old news you know 2000s these news it's absolutely not today it is being used by Russian intelligence to try trick Ukrainians into infecting their core infrastructure with stuff there are dodgy USB sticks showing up in parking lots in Ukraine which are almost certainly coming from the Russian intelligence so it's still a problem you still don't pick up random USB sticks and again it's not you know I'm not saying if you're in Ukraine I'm saying no one anywhere ever should be picking up random USB sticks because this is still a thing still also on the category of still a thing I like to say that if you are not proactively seeking out software and it comes seeking you you're randomly browsing the web and all of a sudden something says hey why don't I update it used to be flash why don't I update your flash for you the answer is always no if you didn't go looking for it and I kind of thought those days were over but no there is a new strain of ransomware attacking Mac users and it's offering you Safari updates as a pop-up while you're browsing on the web which is not how Safari works at all that would come through your software update mechanism so don't install updates to things that just randomly appear while you're browsing the web you know now in the past we've been lucky as a moderately sophisticated user you can tell that's not what macOS stuff looks like like it'll have an X in the corner instead of a the red-yellow-green dots that kind of thing but they keep getting better and better at this so I suspect they'll do one that'll catch even somebody as sophisticated as a no-cell castaway yeah which is why I you know I remind people of these things and I tell the story quite often of one of my most the difference between someone who's prepared and someone who's not is nothing you'll never fall for it is that usually you'll realise you've fallen for it in time to stop the damage so I'd like to tell the story of how a string of expletives came across the office as our most senior sysadmin got fished but he knew it within five seconds and the damage was contained and that's the difference and we can put Allison on the same list and I've done it for the same scam twice oops I haven't done that it was uh kind of what was it I don't think it was a plugin I forget it was something I paid for in the past was coming up saying oh you have to your credit cards messed up on this and I tried to log in and luckily my login didn't work because I'd cancelled that account but I fell for it two years in a row oh two again two renewals I did it I went wait a minute they probably had a data breach that so that they knew when your renewal was due yeah maybe that's the kind of thing that they do with these data breaches because you think you know what value is it to know when people's account expires well actually anyway yeah and we have finally two more timely reminders I was in a very reminder removed today wasn't I I keep on telling people that cryptocurrency and nfts and all that stuff is a complete scam at the very least it's a security hellscape just to remind everyone this week an Ethereum feature was abused to steal 60 million US dollars from 99,000 victims and a flaw has been discovered in yeah it's it basically if you accept a digital contract and that contract does something you didn't expect that is implemented cryptographically you have lost your money there is no undo and because of this feature they can use a randomly generated wallet ID so that you don't it can be the baddies but they won't show up on a list of previously known baddies even if it's the same previously known baddies because this new feature lets you have different wallet IDs for all of these different things and so basically all the old tricks of oh no this is a wallet with a poor reputation doesn't work if it's a brand new wallet so yeah it's basically yeah bad bad design and these things are final finally final and there was a flaw in bitcoin back many years ago between 2011 and 2015 which meant that the supposedly random cryptography at the heart of generating the key protecting your wallet that holds all of your bitcoin was not actually properly random and therefore can be hacked so you may have a bitcoin wallet that you made a decade and a half ago no nearly two decades ago no a decade ago and it is now vulnerable to attack because you didn't back then there was a bug so you need to re-key your wallet oh jeez yeah anyway it's a train wreck absolutely train wreck I wonder if that would help anybody who actually forgot their password to their bitcoin wallet help them to crack it famously missing a million dollars worth of bitcoin yeah yeah leo has the one that's locked as in worse yeah Steve lost his completely leo just lost the key that's an interesting thought actually yeah leo could be able to hack into his bitcoin right notable news I thought I was going to have to tell people to steer away from a product from a company called Nothing that was promising people to magically integrate iMessage into a multi-platform communication mechanism and nothing by the way is a hardware manufacturer of android phones oh I didn't notice that sort of thing thank you I had never heard of them if you bought a nothing phone you would get iMessage on it yeah thankfully what I'm telling you is they abandoned the service because it was a security train wreck so problem solved that's supposed to be having to tell you not to do it they well the thing that I looked at immediately on this is basically what they were doing this company that they were contracting with was having you log in to a mac mini in a server farm with your your apple id so we've talked about this before your apple id password is the single most important password you have because if you use it as your primary email address because that's where all the password resets go for your bank for your health insurance you know you're obviously your photos and everything that you care about is basically tied to that email address that's the last password you should ever give to anybody well maybe your last pass would be a little bit but anyway it's way up there yeah it's crown jewels yeah it was a terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible idea and I'm so happy it's just gone so problem solved if you heard something about a cool new way no it wasn't cool and no so problem solved you may also have heard about another bug in intel cpu's called rector reptar I keep on wanting to say raptor because I think they're cool but no it's reptar and for once it's not speculative execution believe it or not it was actually a bug in an intel cpu that was not about speculative execution thankfully though it does have the same pattern as those speculative execution ones if you are running a massive cloud infrastructure you need to patch your massive cloud infrastructure if you're a home user carry on so for us this is fine for us it's fine okay and an interesting story that depending on it's sort of a rorschach test of good news bad news so Microsoft paid for a security audit of the hardware that is most commonly used to power windows hello so windows hello is kind of face id like for windows and it relies obviously on hardware to do either fingerprint scanning or face id or whatever so in this case it was fingerprint scanners were being checked so I guess it's more like touch id than face id and so this is hardware implementation by people manufacturing laptops for example correct so in specific actually very cleverly they wanted the most used ones audited so Microsoft surfaces Dell laptops and thinkpads so you know very common very good products so the bad news is that the hardware the standard was secure the implementations were not so the hardware vendors managed to mess up and some of them messed up badly enough that there was actually plain text information going from the scanner to the pc which is completely insane so there's actually proper protocols for doing that security which is why it's possible to have the touch id scanner on my mac on my apple extended keyboard connect over bluetooth to my mac and still securely use my fingerprint right we have protocols for this stuff so there is a lot of very concrete advice been given by the researchers telling vendors what they did wrong and what not to do in future so on the whole this is going to make things better but right now today these things can't be patched because these are hardware problems so you need to know that windows hello is not as secure as you think now there's another sort of silver lining on this the attacks are really hard to pull off so for regular home users it is still better to have windows hello than to have your machine sitting there without any sort of password but if you're a ceo for a major tech company traveling to china do not rely on windows hello to keep you safe because there is someone there motivated enough to do the difficult attack so the irony here is that so this is hardware implementation by the companies that make the fingerprint sensors that are actually in Microsoft's devices Microsoft Surface devices along with Dell and Lenovo yeah because obviously they buy Microsoft was mad yeah right because they have bought a chip from someone who's made them a chip only they haven't done it right not calling this spec yeah so anyway it's kind of the good news is that we have a very sort of a recipe solutions we have like a specific to-do list for the hardware vendors from the auditors that's kind of good so but yeah like i say bad news good news take your pick it's kind of both just just choose the bits you want to focus on and in related news one of the scariest things that haunts my nightmares with my work hat on particularly but frankly with every hat on is what if there's a bug in antivirus software what if the software we install and give massive privileges like out of root access in our computers what if it's the thing with the vulnerability and what if it gets hacked that will be terrifying so i am happy to say that if you're a security researcher you can now earn yourself a $20,000 book bounty if you find a problem in Microsoft Defender so response to be disclosed and get paid yeah so good that is what book bounties are for so i like this now we don't talk a lot about ransomware in this show for exactly the reason you've mentioned where we'd like to tell people what they can do about it and unless we were a podcast specifically for CEOs CTOs and CISOs really ransomware is not the thing we should be talking about because the target these days isn't your average home user anymore that was the early days of ransomware that's where they cut their teeth was on us regular folk now they've moved on to bigger targets like the you know giant big pipelines the Irish healthcare system those kind of things but every now and then it's worth talking about when they do something novel and this is not good novel so they used to extort you once by asking you to pay them or you're never getting your data back and then they realized that people would say yeah whatever we have backups so then they started extorting people twice it was called a double extortion attack where they would say not only will we not give you your data back but we will actually publish your data on the internet and expose your private email or whatever right so that was a double extortion well and one of the ransomwares has now done the cheekiest ever triple extortion if you're in an industry where you are legally required to report data breaches and you haven't they will threaten to expose you to the regulator in this case the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission if you don't pay them the ransom oh my gosh so we will tell on the feds if you don't pay us Jesus where are we going with this great level yeah so anyway I thought that was worth mentioning that's quite the change staying on your side of the pond we have a letter from Senator Wyden which Wired obtained I have a funny feeling Senator Wyden may have BCC'd this because it's about a program which is classified but not what was the term for it basically it was classified but not a security risk so they've classified it because it would be inconvenient if people knew about this not because it poses an actual security risk so he couldn't legally tell anyone about this but somehow Wired got their hands on his letter anyway a letter from Senator Wyden to the oh your your chief lawyer person ah why's my brain just gone blank Attorney General DOJ you mean yeah head of DOJ Attorney General basically there is a classified program that has been hoovering up all of the phone records of all American citizens and regular police departments can search you without really much in place to stuff them at all and that's not supposed to be legal in the United States so Senator Wyden would like that looked into please more details in Wired so I hope he succeeds what does that sound what does that sound so suspicious to me I've been wrong before but well details are in the Wired story it's certainly not here it's a Wired story so it's quality so I will let you read and digest and yeah because you're a better place than me to understand if I can self-pass the ads yeah almost all of the internet now we switch to the Good News column Wired is worse than all of them Wired Wired's just a a couple that are worse than Wired I can't stand reading Wired anyway switching to the Good News column now and staying on your side of the pond the U.S. Federal Communications Commission the FCC have adopted new rules which require carriers to do stricter verification before making changes to the allocation of SIM cards from one account to another etc in other words SIM swapping and SIM porting have just become more difficult so when you are forced to use SMS-based two-factor authentication you are less insecure and I have chosen my words carefully there I hesitate to use the word secure yeah but that's good so that's in the Good News column and also a little I sort of like to mention the fact that law enforcement are getting pretty darn good at tackling these major crimeware organizations and what's really interesting is very often it involves multinational cooperation and they really are getting good at working together so the first story took place in Malaysia but it was a collaboration between the Malaysians the Australians who have a very good cybersecurity team and the FBI from your part of the woods and they have arrested all of the people and dismantled all of the infrastructure for a major adversary in the middle as we're calling it these days malware as a service that was doing the latest cutting edge token stealing that would allow you to bypass multi-factor and two-factor authentication it's called bulletproof link so it's basically fishing as a service but not like any old fishing the really scary fishing that steals your authentication tokens and gets you past multi-factor authentication for a couple of hours until the token expires and these attacks are bad Malaysian police Australian American law enforcement work together and dismantle this that's fabulous took it all apart and these these feckers if you let's use my Irish localism have been doing cyber crime since 2015 and now nice also FBI have been busy again they have also dismantled IP storm which is a botnet that was collecting together hacked devices on random americans home network and why would random hacked routers be useful well one of the ways that a lot of basically when you're trying to block a denial of service attack or something else you can't block domestic IP addresses because they change all the time so if you block someone's Comcast address it will be someone else's Comcast address tomorrow so the baddies love being able to hijack domestic IP addresses because everyone's loathe to block them because that's where the customers live and so this botnet was hacking people's routers and then selling access to it as crimeware as a service so that you could buy access to people's domestic IP addresses poof dismantled well done FBI buy access to an IP address yeah what does it what does it mean to have access to an IP address so you know the concept of a proxy server you can configure you know you can prox you can use a proxy server to send web traffic through another computer so if you don't have direct access to something you can go through another computer there's protocols for it like socks five is a proxy protocol so what these baddies did is they hacked routers all over america installed malware that was a socks five proxy and then sold access to that proxy as malware as a service so if you were a baddie trying to do some sort of a denial of service attack as an extortion you would buy access to these IP addresses from these other cyber criminals this whole thing is like it's a giant big marketplace it's money all the way down software as a service malware as a service but what i'm trying to figure out is so i'm i'm gonna do i'm gonna push out malware i'm gonna go through allison's IP address because i i bought access to it and then it's gonna look like it's allison doing it so they can't catch me okay that's the piece i was trying to figure out what are you but what's the purpose of using somebody's IP address got it well so half the purpose is because it won't look like you but the other half is if you steal someone's IP address in a server farm those are static so if you if you're naughty as someone else they just block the someone else but you can't easily block domestic IP addresses because that's where the customers of most of these companies are coming from and they change all the time right every time you reboot your reader you get a new IP address so they're very valuable to baddies interesting so okay wrapped up i mean we know this is going to be whack-a-mole but you still like to see the mole get whacked right yeah if you don't whack-a-mole your lawn is ruined right you have to keep wagging those moles and i'm gonna say stick a pin in this google have announced and i will believe it as i see it but they have announced that 2024 will be the year that third party cookies die in chrome and they say yeah that's what they say they've reached a blog post and they say they're going to start the process on the first of january with a trial with one percent of chrome users and depending on how that goes they will roll this out throughout 2024 as they say put a pin in it every every norm will be unable to use facebook on chrome well no because you can use facebook without third party cookies it will because facebook is that different than third party trackers yes it is because a mechanism that trackers use is third party cookies but third party cookies are not required to use facebook facebook functions fine without them okay okay so we shall as i say we shall see how this goes and we shall see whether they follow through because google's business model rather depends on them succeeding in selling advertisements without third party cookies so i'm only very curious to watch this develop huh but anyway they have promised and they say they'll start on the first of january so put a pin in it and it'll be our story for 2024 is this the same as in safari settings privacy prevents cross-site tracking is that the same thing same concept yeah same same concept their implementation may differ yeah it'll just be built in turned on always in chrome okay so yeah to some extent allison chrome will become as secure as safari and facebook works in safari yeah yeah that's why i was trying to double check what i what i was thinking so i was confused got it yeah wow and firefox has been doing this for ages because firefox don't have a conflict of interest in the same way that some others do so that's there we're all yeah so that's our sticky pin in that story then an excellent explainer i thought i would link to this feature is a not yet available and b not really for us and c really really interesting and very important people can't see the video but i've just watched allison have a slight hardware failure with her microphone so i'm going to keep vamping here when allison puts her microphone back in her stand beautifully muted though because i didn't hear a darn thing it was nicely done oh they might have heard it as it started to fall but i caught it it was one of those moments like leo on his bow of vanishing out of shot anyway it's just sort of slid down slowly and fell out of the out of the mount here anyway so like lockdown mode is very important that we have it on ios you and i don't need to worry about it because we're not journalists or freedom fighters or lawyers protecting dissidents or whatever so we're not likely to need lockdown mode but it's great that it exists and there is a new feature coming to iMessage where you're going to be able to prove that there is no third party eavesdropping on your iMessage conversations because at the moment it's all end-to-end encrypted and but apple are managing the key so hypothetically an extra key could get snuck into the conversation and then you would have end-to-end encryption between you the person you think you're talking to and somebody else there will now be a cryptographic way of proving to yourself without the need of an intermediary that it is only that you are talking to who you think you are and that there is no one else in the chain and that won't be any kind of a default but that will be if somebody can enable it it will be enabled in the sense that you will be able to access the various codes and things but in order to actually do it would involve you you know basically you would need to have a phone conversation where you say the number I am seeing is 5321 what do you see and if they also see 5321 then you know it's all good and then you okay telegram has that feature that you and I played with once where they it actually gives you a bunch of little emoji and so you tell the other person okay this is what I'm seeing what do you see and yeah I'm seeing the same thing okay now we know that's end to end encrypted yeah exactly yes correct and that is the same concept the same cryptography is coming to our message so it's very important for the people who it matters to it really matters to yeah for us not so much it might be fun though I'm probably end up doing it with you just to try it out but it's it's it's not available yet it's in the beta at the moment so it will be in the next release of iOS and that brings us on to some pallet cleansing and I they're all mine this this week because someone's been busy having turkey and family and all these things apparently you do that once a year anyway have fun so I have two tips for you first off iOS 17 had a little sneaker new feature I didn't know about but the good people at Kultimak pointed to me it pointed me to it I verified it I put a video up on mastodon it genuinely works are you as perplexed by many of the symbols inside your laundry as I am the one that says 30 degrees I understand wash this at 30 degrees that I get all the other ones are mystery meat to me and I have eventually learned the one that says don't tumble dry because I've broken things by not knowing that but I have no idea what the other ones mean if you take a photograph of the label and you wait for a second that little magic eye will appear underneath the photograph in the photos app and when you click on it it will tell you what the symbols mean so I now know I believe this when this first came out that's really really cool it's spectacularly cool so I now know that my luminous orange rainproof jacket shouldn't be bleached not that I was tempted to take a luminous orange you know safety glow orange jacket and bleach but anyway I now know I can't it's just a really useful feature so that was cool and then I have yeah it's kind of interesting that those symbols have been around so long and none of us know what 80% of them mean yeah we know the one about the temperature because otherwise stuff shrinks yeah yeah I uh I saw a bar post about this on Mastodon and you should follow him on Mastodon he's got a link to his Mastodon account in the show notes I do yes and actually just a lot of really fun people follow me on Mastodon a lot of them are in Silicastaways it continues to be a non-toxic place despite the fact that we've been there for a year or two now and it's it continues to be the lovely place that it was so yay it's funny when nobody's pushing toxic at you that toxic doesn't happen yeah imagine if your business model doesn't depend on it it doesn't happen yeah look at that um and finally a lot of people have some time on their hands during the holiday season so if you're looking for say a podcast to listen to while you're driving you know long distance home from family or whatever I have a two-part episode of the wonderful malicious life podcast to recommend to you it is one of the best explainers I have heard telling the story of the NSO group whom we have obviously heard so much about because of their infamous Pegasus software but it's a lot weirder than I had realized a lot weirder it's kind of interesting that malicious life is done by an Israeli podcaster and the NSO group is in Israel so you get it in an Israeli accent which is very appropriate but he also has a lot of insight into the culture and everything that surrounds the NSO group because he's in the Opsak community in Israel oh wow that does sound interesting I do find it hilarious that you have something called malicious life under palate cleanser yeah what do you know we're a funny bunch of podcaster Ursula Castaway's aren't we there we go I like it well this is good I'm I kind of relieve there isn't a deep dive because sometimes those are really bad news they often are especially if they don't have a fire extinguisher logo but no we we had a few stories what a bit of mean on them but nothing was worth the deep dive as such so we just sort of went through them in order and an interesting two weeks worth of news but remember folks the advice is always the same stay patched so you stay secure well that's going to wind us up for this week did you know you can email me at allison at podfee.com anytime you like if you have a question or suggestion just send it on over heck you can send it a review like the reviews we got this week it was fantastic and I loved having that extra time with my family you can follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social remember everything good starts with podfeed.com if you want to join in the conversation you can join a slack community at podfeed.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely snow silly castaways and if you want to join in the fun of the live show after you go outside and be nice to each other you can join us by heading on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no silly castaways thanks for listening and stay subscribed


Hello there! It's Sandy Alnok, and I have a short video for you today, well short-ish, and I'll be stitching on cards. Ellen Hudson has a new release out, and I'll be using the A2 Piercing Plate, which is a cover plate, and All About You, which is a stamp and die set.  This is the pattern for the first one that I'm going to be doing. I'll post this on the blog, but basically it's three X's across twice, and then three X's down. The way I translated it onto the paper was to take a really light colored marker, helps if it's a color similar to maybe one of the colors you're going to be sewing with, and just make your marks on it. So I did three across, three across, then three down, three down, and then when I finished that I moved to the next row and did the opposite of each one across each row. And it worked out really perfectly to have a strip down the side of the card. I was thinking about doing this across the whole thing and got really bored with it, so I decided a strip was going to be just dandy, and I would make it a clean and simple card. The math to do this so that it ends in the right place, so you have an even border, is something that is helped by the fact that this is a larger than A2 sized die. So you can get a bigger piece of paper and start inward and work your way out, and when you hit the place where you think you're going to cut it off, then I just worried about like my two squares away from the edge of the first X on one side, then I just trimmed it so I was two squares away from the X on the other side, and that helped to even it all out when I put it on the final panel on the final card. And literally all it is is taking your embroidery thread and making X's. Just X's and X's and X's. It's super easy to do cross stitch. This reminded me of when I was a little girl and I used to do cross stitch, and it was a lot of fun at the time. I would make pictures and everything. This is not making a picture in this particular example. I'll show you another one in just a minute, but making a really simple cross stitch like this is probably more doable for more people on a card because it's just a strip of embroidery. That's all it is, a strip of cross stitching, and it doesn't take as much time. Now it did take me a while to get this much done, so you may decide to maybe make a block of these on your card instead of making a whole entire strip of it.  So I just did this one with two colors, and as I said the picture of the pattern will be on my blog, but it's really easy to figure this kind of thing out. I'm sure that you could Google for easy embroidery and cross stitch patterns, and print them out, and then die cut on top of those, and do just great. This one is just one that I made up myself, and then I use the It's All About You stamp set and die set for the sentiment. The second card has a little more of a story to go along with it, which is I had the idea of trying to stitch flowers. I thought that would be kind of cool and kind of fun. I haven't embroidered again since I was a little girl, so I had to do things like go to YouTube and Google how to do a stem stitch, and there was all these wonderful videos for beginners, which was fabulous. And then I just went for it on my own for things like the leaves, and literally I just went around the leaf. There are some places on it where I had to make up a new hole because there wasn't one in about the spot that I needed, but I was also giving myself lots of grace. I wasn't really worried about being exactly on the edge of whatever the shape was. You can see here, there's a little yellow sticking out here and there. I would, if doing this again, probably use an even lighter color than this, but I wanted to make sure you could see it on here as I was working on it. But I just did a radiating stitch from the center outward. I don't know if that's called anything in particular, but I just wanted to fill that area so I could then add some pom-pom type centers to them. And I just filled it all in. Now, there were a couple of places on here, like the place that's right under my thumb that I'm holding down. I had a big train wreck there because the first time I did that section, something happened and all the threads came undone and it started going sideways and stuff. So I took that section out. I put some tape on the back and I re-soaked it through the tape. So yeah, I'm not very good at this, but it was a heck of a lot of fun to try. If you know how to embroider, you're probably gonna have way more success than I did with this. But nonetheless, I hope this inspires you to even think about what you could do with a cover plate dye like this because I think it has a lot of possibilities. Now, over on the MFT channel, I also have a Copic video so you can go see that little girl being colored, her and her butterfly friends. And then on Facebook, on my Facebook page at 5 o'clock Pacific, 8 o'clock Eastern, you can color along with me with this image inspired by my new bathroom. I just redid my bathroom and that's kind of ish what it looks like. So you can grab the free image from MFT's blog, link will be in the doobly-doo, and that is about it for me. I will see you guys very soon. Be sure to stop by Instagram and go on the hop so you can see all of the wonderful creations using all of the new Ellen Hudson products. Alright, I will see you guys later. Take care. Bye.


Hi guys, all right brain my laundry room Okay, so this week since we are trying to Use recyclable found Objects trash if you want in our journals figuring out how to reuse things and make them pretty I thought I would revive an old craft thing that I used to do way back when I was in an artist cooperative gift shop and that is turn packaging Into fabric. I know you're like what? So I used to take potato chip bags coffee bean bags Sugar bags all kinds of stuff turn them into a vinyl fabric if you will and then I would make pencil bags and tote bags And all kinds of stuff out of it handbags So this one I'm not sure if it's gonna work because it is very plastic But we're gonna try it. This is a Dried berry bag Stone Ridge orchard's all-natural berry mix was very good The first thing you want to do is you want to cut It into something that's flat So I'm gonna cut the sides off I'm depending on the oops That way depending on the bag that may mean different things you may be able to just split it or you may have to cut Something off. This was a Ziploc Top so I'm gonna cut the Ziploc off Okay, and it has heat laminated corners. It's like folded in at the corner. So I'm gonna cut the corners off so that I can actually open it and lay it flat So we have something that lays flat like that. Now this other piece that I have is Harvest snap pea crisps wasabi ranch flavor bag. I Are all family. We're addicted to these snap pea chips I like a lightly salted flavor. My husband likes this wasabi ranch flavor if you're gonna try this at home You of course want to make sure you you need some packaging You also want to make sure you wash it out. You want to get all the food residue off that you can Again on this one I'm gonna cut the top and bottom off now on this one. It's got the seam up the back So I'm going to do this and then we're gonna cut that seam off So that again, we can open it up And lay it flat and this one should work fine at these this kind of thing I've used before In the version of a potato chip bag it worked great. I am going to this is a little damp from when I washed it So I'm gonna go get a rag to dry that off and I'll be right back Okay, so you're gonna need your clean packaging a pair of scissors to cut it open it So you can lay it flat with this is a pressing board this is actually made for pressing and ironing and Doing like iron-on application stuff you can find these of course on line and you should be able to find them at your fabric store I will try to link it in the materials list The other thing you're gonna need the most important piece is iron-on vinyl So this is by thermo web It's called iron-on vinyl. It comes in a bolt like this it's heat and bond iron-on vinyl by thermo web and You can get it by the yard.  So make sure you have them give you you a copy of the instructions And it's been a while since I've done this so I cut off some instructions and have them stink to the side so that I can see what I'm doing All right, we're gonna cut off just enough at the thermo web to do hopefully our Two pieces it's a little crowded in my laundry room. It's not that big a room. Okay So I'm gonna put a little one aside right now We're gonna work with the bigger one first so the first thing what you want to do is you want to have your iron on a medium temperature no steam And you should test a piece. I'm not going to do that because I've done this before You want to peel the paper backing from the vinyl, but don't get rid of the paper Maybe we're doing all of them at once. So don't get rid of the paper. We're gonna put this face Pretty face down on the vinyl. I'm gonna move my board out of the way really quick and Then I'm gonna smooth the chip bag Into the vinyl which is a little bit sticky. I'm gonna do my best To get out any air bubbles. It doesn't always come out perfect, but I don't necessarily always care about that So it's usually good. We have this piece over here So let's put our other bag again pretty side down. I have to put this back on the vinyl There's a shiny side and a non shiny side So you want to put shiny side down against the vinyl and the packaging I'm gonna try to match this up as well as I can because I don't want to get Any of the vinyl melted onto my iron. That would be bad Be very bad So with a medium pressure you want to hold your iron onto each section of this for eight seconds Until you have the whole sheet done. So remember in school, right? one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand four one thousand five one thousand six one Thousand seven one thousand eight one thousand and then move the iron keep doing that until you have the whole piece done All right, I'm gonna do that and I'll be back Okay, now you're supposed to do the fabric side with the pressing that we just did without the paper And then you're supposed to turn it over with the vinyl side up and press it with the paper because I'm always using Crazy materials when I do this I use the paper on both sides So I have flipped it over And I am going to put the paper Back on the vinyl and We're gonna do we're gonna repeat what we just did and basically heat up that plastic and melt it into our Product packaging that we just stuck to it. All right, and this doing it both sides will help ensure that it sticks really well All right, so I'm gonna do that and I'll be back Okay, generally speaking when I used to do this I would cover the whole piece of plastic entirely with packaging this time I didn't because we're just doing this little video So what I'm gonna do because this is still sticky is I'm gonna cut out the fabric that we've made out of the packaging from the plastic so I can throw the unused part of the vinyl Away and at the sticky Remnant edges are not driving me crazy If you're worried about fumes or an odor first of all I have asthma And I can tell you there aren't any but if you're worried about it open a window turn on a fan and wear a mask What you're left with then is This piece of now Vinyl-y fabric that you've made out of this chip bag So I'm gonna cut out this other one and we're gonna go back into my art room And we're gonna make something out of it and we'll be right back


Hi, I am Dr. Vijay Rao. I am a consultant working in the rheumatology department in Manipal Hospital's Bangalore. The first and foremost treatment is immediately in the form of steroids which is given, the safest route is an injection which is given on the muscle. It works pretty much instantly and lasts in the body for 4 to 6 weeks. In some people this alone might not be enough then we will have to give steroids in the form of tablets for about 3 to 4 weeks. But the main treatment is in the form of tablets what we call as disease modifying drug therapy that has to be taken minimum for 2 years and these treatments start working only after 45 days to 60 days and they should not be stopped until the rheumatologist says. You will not see instant relief with that. It takes about 3 months for about 90% improvement but has to be gradually increased the dosages over 6 months and gradually tapered over the next 2 years and stopped. Sudden stoppage will definitely bring back symptoms within a week's time. We sometimes use advanced treatments called biological agents which work on particular chemicals in the body achieving a better cure, control and lesser side effects. But these are reserved for patients who have not responded to tablets and for more severe disease because it's expensive and we don't use it up front.


TRB proteins have been shown to recruit PRC2 for H3K27 Me3 deposition. This work shows that TRBs also recruit JMJ14 to remove H3K4 Me3, demonstrating that TRBs silenced the target genes via a combinatorial histone modification mechanism. This article was authored by Ming Wang, Jin Huizhong, Javier Gallego Batolome, and others.