Meeting Report

Q&A and An Unusual Twitter Follower

At our online meeting on Friday 29th May we talked about choosing between Reminders or Calendar for different tasks, resolving an issue with Voice Memos on Mac and Researching an unusual Twitter follower. Members also gave various suggestions and updates.

An Unusual Twitter Follower

DaveK talked about investigating an account that followed him on Twitter and immediately sent an unusual sounding direct message. He explained how he researched the details of the account profile and used reverse image search on the icon and banner pictures. Doing this, Dave was able to identify that the account was using someone else’s photos (an innocent third party). When he reported this to Twitter the account was suspended.

Reverse image search takes an image and tries to find similar images on websites. Dave recommended trying multiple reverse image search engines including:

Ben recommended also trying Bing visual search which allows you to select a particular part of an image to search for.

Reminders vs Calendar

Liz asked about the differences between Apple’s Reminders and Calendar apps and how they compliment one another.

Robert lead a discussion on the topic which concluded that, while there is some overlap, Calendar is best for planned events that take place over a certain period of time while Reminders is suited to tasks and items at are either not tied to a particular time or are flexible.

Macmost has a useful video (with transcript) summarising the different uses.

Several members mentioned that the checkbox feature in the Notes app can also be useful for shopping lists and the like.

Mac Voice Memos

DaveB described an issue he had where Voice Memos would not record, when he clicked Start New Recording the record head did not move. After much research he found the cause of the issue, if “Play user interface sound effects is not ticked” in “System Preferences/Sound/Sound Effects” Voice Memos will not record. This appears to be a bug introduced in macOS Catalina, here is an Apple Community thread about the problem.

NHS COVID-19 App

DaveK gave us an update on the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app that we discussed at the last meeting. He referenced the following articles:

Clean my Mac X

Denesh mentioned that CleanMyMac X is now available as a free download in the Mac App Store, with a yearly in-app subscription to unlock all the features. CleanMyMac X is also available from the developer’s website and the Setapp app subscription service. The Mac App Store version has some limitations which you should read about if you’re thinking of buying CleanMyMac.

Suggestion

DavidB recommended Mythic Quest on Apple TV+, noting that episode 10 was shot entirely on iPhones.