High-Tech Parenting With Kevin & Mike On Geekiest Show Ever Episode 204

!! colorful language advisory !!
Talking tech with Kevin and Mike on
"Geekiest Show Ever 204 – High-Tech Parenting"

Check out original show notes here: https://geekiestshowever.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/geekiest-show-ever-204-high-tech-parenting/
explicit
Tap or click the play button in this player to listen to the show.

Girl Day

Please help spread the word about #GirlDay "More than 1.7 million new engineers and computer scientists will be needed over the next decade, but women and girls are three times less likely to pursue these degrees and careers than their male peers. Dr. Misha Malyshev, CEO of Teza Technologies, (http://mishamalyshev.com) partners with nonprofits to reduce this discrepancy and increase hands-on learning opportunities for young women in STEM. Girl Day takes place on February 25th and is an opportunity to encourage girls to explore engineering, and discover the difference they can make in the world through a career in STEM."

Guy Lets Me Vent On MyMac Podcast Episode 584-5

Getting it out of my system with Guy on
"MyMac Podcast 584-5: TheMacMommy is Angry"

Check out original show notes here: http://www.mymac.com/2015/12/mymac-podcast-584-5-themacmommy-is-angry/

Tap or click the play button in this player to listen to the show.

Reader View for Safari in iOS 9 Has New Tools

Whenever you visit a webpage on your iPhone or other iOS device using Safari, check the url or address bar for the "Reader View Available" message that will show briefly. You can then tap the icon in the upper left corner to enable Reader Mode. This will strip the site down to just text and images and remove most ads and other details of a website that distract from reading the text of the article. Once you're using Reader Mode, tap the "aA" icon in the upper right. New in iOS 9, you can now change the text size, typeface, and background. Pretty nifty!

Here's a GIF showing the steps.

Adorable Little App Review: Find Adventure, Alfie Atkins

My very artistic 5-year-old son loves, loves, loves this app! It kept him completely entertained during our summer cross-country road trip. There is something very, very soothing about this app. (Besides playing it myself, I've witnessed my husband play it and become completely enamored with it for a long time.) There is no language barrier so children from any background or most any age could play with it. There is something so gratifying about completing these little building projects, exploring the make-believe land, and feeding little fruits to friends along the way. The app promotes creativity, exploration, imagination, compassion, and calmness. The incentive for completing the imaginary project builds is a new color dab or pattern. These can be used to color and design future builds.

I was amazed to check the progress my son was making as he earned new color dabs and bonus patterns. It's just a cool, entertaining app that reduces stress and gets imaginations going!

My only concern is the large footprint it takes up on our iPad. It's always up there at the top of the usage list. It would be great if the app developers found a way to reduce the size the files take up. Other than that, we love it and my son wouldn't dare delete it to save room! If you have room on your iPhone or iPad, I recommend it. Play it with your child and they will love showing you how to color the creations you can make together. You may find yourself playing it by yourself sometime just to relax!

Here is a link to the App Store where you can download it or put it on your Wish List for later. It would be a cool gift for a friend.



Thanks to the App Developers over at GroPlay for giving me this promo to review for you. They have some other amazing apps you should definitely check out!

How To Update Adobe Flash Player: A Walk-Through

Hand-Made Mac Tip:

How To Update Adobe Flash Player On A Mac — A Walk-Through
with Step By Step Pictures

I get many requests for how to do this, so I thought I'd make a tutorial.
I hope this is helpful and helps keep you SAFE from hackers!

So, you're surfing along on the Internet in Safari or whichever browser you choose and all of the sudden, this window pops up out of nowhere! It seems to do this fairly frequently!

Why? Because Adobe is constantly patching its software to keep the bad guys out and they need to send you an update. While you don't want to ignore these updates, you don't want to get tricked into putting something harmful on your computer by the bad guys pretending to be Adobe either.

Follow these steps to do it the safe way:

Here is the window that pops up. Even though this one may be legit, lets pretend it's not and go get it from the source making sure we are the one making all the calls.

You may have to repeat these steps if BOTH of these plugins have updates. Most times it's just one or the other. You will see a message that says you're up to date if none is needed. If an update is available, it will say so like shown in the next image.

Wow. 14 steps! They sure don't make it simple, do they  Why do we even need Adobe Flash anyway? 

It's one of those necessary evils that's called a plugin. It's like a supplement for our computers. Without it, we wouldn't be able to process certain multimedia content like videos or interactive graphs. Lots of banking websites still require it to make their websites function the way they were designed to be viewed by the visitor. They want to display information in a chart and it may have some type of animation. To you it may be overkill, but to the web designers, this is the choice they made. 

What if I don't care about updating it? Can't I just skip it? 

Sure, but you do so at your own risk. You could be allowing the plugin you are currently using to operate with a "hole" in it — one the bad guys could get through to compromise your security. Better safe than sorry.