Category Archives: computers

Guilt tipping

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A fountain at Carefree Town Center where they hold a farmer’s market each Friday.

Have you noticed when businesses use touchscreens for payment, they now include a tip screen with 18%, 20% and 30%? I first noticed it at Starbuck’s. Most of the vendors at the farmer’s market in Carefree use touchscreens, but I don’t remember seeing a screen for tips. At least not yet.

My hair dresser uses a touchscreen for payment. The coffee shop and even more formal restaurants have waitpersons come to the table with a card reader and they wait while we tip.

I’ve read a number of articles where people are feeling guilt over tips. Instead of the old fashioned tip jars at coffee shops, butchers and bakeries with counter service, you stare at a screen that may have choices much higher than you wish to tip.

In an article called ‘Guilt Tipping’: Pressure to tip everywhere has gotten out of control by Alex Mitchell in the NY Post there was one quote that stood out to me:

“I was somewhere spending $23 on just coffee and pastries and the suggested tip was another $8 and I simply said no way. I’ll give a dollar or so as a custom tip amount, but let’s have a reality check here,” said Jared Goodman, a 26-year-old recruiter who lives in Brooklyn. “Recently I got a quick bite with my girlfriend and the suggested tip amounts were 25, 35 and even 40%. That’s just insane.”

https://nypost.com/2022/04/08/guilt-tipping-pressure-to-tip-has-gotten-out-of-control/

Another complaint I read in other articles was self-service kiosks in airports that include a tip screen. Not only for snacks and drinks but for self check-in and bag tags. Think about that for a minute. What is the tip for?

What are your thoughts about the touchpads that include tips? Where have you noticed tip screens? Do you feel pressure with a person hovering over you while you select a tip?

Will they take a six-month pause?

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Cactus blooms

A cactus beginning to bloom. This is either a fish hook or hedgehog cactus.

Did you hear that Elon Musk, Andrew Yang and Steve Wozniak signed a letter asking artificial intelligence labs to put a pause on their development? Around 1,000 tech gurus signed the letter asking for a pause on development until shared safety protocol could be developed, implemented, and reviewed by independent experts.

What do they know that we don’t?

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who released ChatGPT-4, admitted he was a little scared of what they’ve created. But he didn’t sign the letter.

A headline popped up on my phone stating what jobs would be lost first to AI. Accounting, mathematics and writing. It’s predicted 20% of jobs will be wiped away. That’s 20% of our workforce with no insurance or income.

I’m reminded of a freelance writing job that kept me busy during the early days of the pandemic. I featured small businesses for a trade magazine and another magazine highlighted parks and rec. I’d receive an email from the editor with a list of contacts and questions to ask. Each story had to include several things, like the square footage of the business and revenue. The assignments began to feel robotic because it was so formulaic. What kept it interesting were the people I interviewed. They had unique stories of how they created their businesses and what they were doing to make things work during the pandemic.

If you take people out of the equation, what do we have left? What are your thoughts?

About getting hacked

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Rainbow in the back yard
View of a rainbow from the backyard.

It was the day before I left for Seattle when I was folding laundry and making the bed. I was listening to podcasts on Spotify on my laptop. I set the laptop on the nightstand. Suddenly, the podcast stopped.

I didn’t think much about it. Huh, I thought. Did my screensaver stop it? I tried to start up the podcast again. No luck.

Later, I was looking at my email and I got one from Spotify telling me that a new email was associated with my account, or some such words. They asked me to click on a link if I didn’t change my email.

Well, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck and I wasn’t going to click on their link.

At that moment my son called to chat and I told him what happened.

“What’s the new email address?” he asked.

“Something @Yandex.com.”

“Mom! That’s Russian!”

Yikes! I spent the next hours changing passwords to everything. My son told me I needed a password manager like Last Pass and a VPN. He said in today’s world, those two things are a necessity.

I quickly installed the needed items and felt better.

I copied the body of the email from Spotify and found a link on their website to send in the info that “No. I didn’t change my email address and now I was blocked.” I still wasn’t going to click on their link. But Spotify got back to me quickly and told me they’d secure my account. I had trouble accessing it for several days. Again this week I was logged out.

I wonder why my Spotify account was hacked? What was the purpose? Was it to gain access to my laptop and passwords?

This was not how I had planned spending my last day at home before my trip to Seattle to spread Mom’s ashes and reminisce with family.

Have you been hacked? Was it email or an app?

Do you have VPN or a password manager?

On getting hacked

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Desert lavender
This has nothing to do with my post, but it’s such a beautiful desert lavender plant in our yard I had to share.

I had an issue with my emails and wrote about it HERE last week. I was afraid I was hacked. Or in the very least someone was playing fast and loose with my email address. I set up a new email account and so far everything is going peachy.

But then I heard from someone today that their bank account got hacked. Listen to this: someone got into their bank account online and changed the user name and password so they couldn’t access their account! Then the hacker transferred money out using Zelle. This friend didn’t even use Zelle. But. if a person can get your username and password by hacking into your computer, they can turn on Zelle.

I found a few articles about the scam. Here’s a quote from one:

Stealing money using Zelle is apparently as easy as adding a phone number to a consumer’s checking account, and then telling the bank to “Zelle” money to a hacker-controlled account — at least in some cases.

When following up my story earlier this week about consumers who don’t even use Zelle get hit by Zelle fraud, a bank official told me that’s how it’s done. Criminals — potentially using stolen online banking credentials or credential stuffing attacks — add a cell phone they control to the user’s profile, then send money to the hacker’s account.

After the hacker’s mobile number is added to the bank account, the banks’ confirmation code to verify the transaction is misdirected to that fraudulent number, and the hacker confirms the transaction. So once the account is compromised, a fraudster is able to transfer money out of the account.

https://bobsullivan.net/cybercrime/heres-how-hackers-are-using-zelle-to-raid-bank-accounts-and-why-victim-was-out-1800-until-i-wrote-to-the-bank/

I decided that changing my password wasn’t enough. I turned on two-factor authentication.

Have you ever had a credit card, bank account or email account hacked? What did you do about it?

Bombarded with junk

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junk email
One of the many hundreds of junk emails I got today.

I hate email. Not all the time, but often enough.

Today my inbox is flooded with subscription confirmations like the one above.Which makes me wonder if my email has been hacked? I’m literally getting thousands of emails in all languages from random companies asking me to confirm my subscription request.

What is up with that?

Of course I can only read the ones in English. They are addressed to all sorts of different people, none of them me, but they state the subscription request came from my email address.

It makes me nervous that I have been hacked, have a virus or someone is out peddling my email address.

Here’s another one. I’m not Glen Veum.

Has anything like this happened to you? How did you stop it? Should I create a new email address?

Do you think I’ve been hacked?

I had to laugh…

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macbook air grey logo on laptop
Photo by Marc Mueller on Pexels.com

I did it. I ordered a new MacBook Air. After losing files due to some software glitch, I tried to update the operating system on my current machine. I was given a message that there wasn’t enough memory. So I’m stuck with the glitch.

I called my computer expert (my son) and he informed me the amount of storage on my MacBook Air was less than what he had on his phone. With more files disappearing including my manuscript from NaNoWriMo (I wrote about that HERE) I was feeling desperate.

I went back and forth on which laptop to buy — the MacBook Pro or Air. How much RAM and storage. I finally settled on the Air and maxed it out. I like the light weight of the Air compared to the heaviness of the Pro.

Anyway, the only thing that was available immediately was the standard MacBook Air, which I knew wouldn’t last long due to not enough memory. I’ve been waiting patiently for a couple weeks for my souped up laptop to arrive. I got an email that it will arrive today.

I had to laugh.

Did you see the announcement from Apple? They are introducing a BRAND SPANKING NEW MacBook Air that is lightyears and decades superior to the one I’m getting today. But of course.

It has a better chip, more RAM, a better screen — better everything.

Oh well. I don’t care. I just want my work to be backed up, And not to have my work disappear before my very eyes. I did get an email from Apple that they lowered the price on my new computer and will refund me the difference. So there’s that.

What are your thoughts about Apple and how they roll out new products?

Screenshot of the brand new MacBook Air introduced this week.

Not to dwell…

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The baby quail are delightful to watch. They get my mind off the unpleasant.

So. Apple contacted me at 7 a.m. yesterday. Just like they said they would. However the news was not good. At least the customer service was excellent with the tech keeping his word on when he’d call. He followed up with me several times throughout the process.

If you missed my post yesterday you can read it HERE to learn what happened.

“It looks like they have recovered all available files that could be recovered. They also stated that they will have no other ways to recover the data if it is still 
missing,” he said.

I looked through my computer to see what files they were able to recover. I noticed three and four copies of the files already there. So now I have a mess to clean up.

I felt a mourning loss for my work. I don’t look forward to my next newsletter that I have to start without the use of the two published newsletters to use as templates.

My son told me something I’ve never heard before. Ernest Hemingway lost 10 years of his work. It was all in one briefcase that he left on a train in France.

I’m not the only one to lose a manuscript. And it happened before computers and the cloud. Who knew?

“Did you know that D.H. Lawrence never edited his drafts?” My son told me. “He threw it out if he didn’t like it and started over.”

He told me to look at my NaNoWriMo missing manuscript as an opportunity, not a loss.

Thinking about that, he may be right. I get too married to my first rough draft. I make little edits here and there on later drafts, but I never get to the meat of throwing out scenes or restructuring my plot. I’ve submitted manuscripts to agents and publishers and have gotten interest. I’ve been given suggestions and have been asked for rewrites. But, after I resubmitted, I’d hear that I didn’t go far enough.

Do you find the silver lining in your mishaps? When life gives you lemons, do you make lemonade? Can you give an example?