In this episode, Chris explorers Black Ink, a crossword puzzle app by Daniel Jolkett of Red Sweater Software. Marty gives us some storage management tips for iOS devices, and Michael shares his impressions of a Lenovo laptop with tactile lines on key buttons and a fingerprint reader.
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Hi, everyone. I really love doing crossword puzzles, so I thought I would give you a demo of an app by Redsweater Software. And Daniel Jolcott owns this company, and he’s been doing great work for many, many years, and he makes his apps accessible. I use the red sweater software called Marzedit to edit my website on my Mac, and he’s very communicative and just an awesome developer. So I just learned about this app that he has created called Black, Inc. And it has several free crosswords. And then there are other features that you can unlock by getting a very inexpensive subscription. That’s well worth it, in my opinion, for $20 a year, basically. And then if you have logins to, say, the New York Times or some other well known sources for crosswords, then you can log into those services and play crosswords. The app was originally made for Mac, I believe, and I have not tried its accessibility on the Mac, but I’m sure with Daniel’s commitment to making things doable with voiceover and such that it would be accessible. So I decided to check out this black ink app, and it came with several items that are free and some features that I can turn on because I just paid the 1999 for a year. So here’s what we have when we open the app settings button. So we have our settings, and here are some things that are involved with settings.
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Black ink. Wall Street Journal.
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Okay, so what happens? I need to go to the top of the screen. Puzzle library.
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No login required. Heading.
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So this heading says that there’s no login required for the puzzles or the services that are underneath this. So the first thing is blacking sampler. So we have the black ink sampler. And when I click on that, there’s one puzzle that comes up, and then I can hit the more button and I can keep adding free puzzles to that library collection, which I now have several that I’m going to work on.
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The next option, Wall Street Journal.
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So you can access the Wall street journals, apparently puzzles for free through this app, or at least some of them.
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Washington Post Sunday.
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There’s the Washington Post Sunday login with existing account heading. Okay, now here are services or puzzles that you can access if you have an existing account with the following puzzles.
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New York Times premium, American Values Club, the incubator, crossword Nation. Crossword nation.
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Okay, so crossword nation is the last item in that category. So what I did was I tried out the black ink sampler. So we’re going to black ink sampler. Go up here.
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Wall Street Journal. Okay, black ink sampler, black. Laundry day.
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Okay, so laundry day is the first one. And so when I open laundry day.
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Previous clue button, one across, parcel out, five squares, all blank, square, one selected.
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Okay, so it tells me how many squares that the first square is blank and that is selected. So if I did want to solve that clue, I would double tap it and then I would enter the letters. So let me go to a clue that I would like to solve. And it’s a few away.
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31 across.
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Whoops.
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Left helpless, all blank.
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So here’s a little glitch that I’m going to write him about garage bands, is that it immediately kind of swipes quite a ways away. So what I’m going to look for.
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Is 19 across, 20 across, 19 across, teen affliction, four squares, all blank square one.
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Okay, so I’m quite sure that that teen affliction with four squares is acne. So I’m going to double tap on that.
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19 across teen affliction, four squares, a blank square, one selected.
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Okay, so I don’t have a Bluetooth keyboard or anything connected here, so I’m just going to find my way around the actual on screen keyboard shift.
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A a d x c c n r b c. Okay. 20 across Saint Francis’s home. Six squares, all blank square one selected.
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Okay, so what it did was it immediately went to 20 across St. Francis’s home. And I’m going to guess that’s cc. And sometimes I ask my digital assistant, either the a lady or perhaps the s lady or the g person how to spell things if I haven’t spelled a Cc in a while. But you get the idea that we are just entering clues and we can find the clue we want to answer, double tap on that clue and enter the appropriate letters. And so then if I find that I am too far down into the puzzle, if you touch the top left.
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Corner, 14 across, dry italian wine, five squares, all blank square one selected.
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Okay, so since I don’t imbibe at all and don’t really have a whole lot of knowledge of wines, I am not sure what that dry italian wine is, but I would maybe ask my digital assistant and we would kind of play knowledge base with that. So laugh at me, if you will. I do find out information in different ways. So that is kind of a rundown on how this puzzle works. So I’m going to go back to the puzzle library.
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14 across, one puzzles, back button.
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There’s the back button.
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Puzzles, laundry day.
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And here’s laundry day. If we wanted to check out the settings in further detail if we want to go up to the top here.
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No login required. Puzzle like settings button there’s the settings button done button.
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And of course here’s our done button.
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Settings head about black ink button there’s.
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Information about the developer premium features unlocked.
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Face with heart shaped eyes button okay.
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It’S happy I unlocked the premium features.
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Acknowledgements button appearance heading so if you’d.
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Like to change the visual appearance of.
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The puzzle color scheme button, which I.
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Didn’T do because I don’t have any usable vision. So that’s okay.
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After entering an answer heading, check answer for correctness switch button soft I do.
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Have that turned off because I usually would like to be surprised and work for the answer rather than knowing every single time.
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If I’m correct, move to unsolved square switch button done.
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So move to unsolved square. So that’s when I was on 19 across and it immediately moved to the next across clue.
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When changing selected clue heading, move to unsolved square switch button on.
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And that is on.
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When changing direction with arrow key heading, stay on selected square switch button on.
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So I believe that’s if you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard and you use the up or down arrow key. Let’s say you would remain in the same square in the row, but you would just be moving up one column.
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Stay on selected square switch button done.
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Okay, so that’s the end of these settings. So we’re going to go to done.
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About black ink button settings. Done. Button black ink sampler.
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Okay. And one thing that I realized is there is a sort of tools option. When you’re on a puzzle, you can check a letter, a word or the whole puzzle and I accidentally had it check the whole puzzle and it filled the whole thing in which I was really bummed because I did want to solve it. But there’s no erase puzzle or no going back once you fill the whole thing in. It told me, congratulations, you have solved the whole puzzle. And I felt a little guilty because I really hadn’t. I just accidentally pressed the wrong button. So I am looking forward to exploring all of the black ink puzzles, as many as I can get, and I will just decide whether it’s worth it to log into some of the mainstream puzzles and get those. But this is really highly accessible. I’m very excited about it. And the only thing I’m going to just mention to the developer is sometimes it scrolls quite a ways down into the puzzle. But if you touch the top left corner, you’ll be in the first say dozen of the clues and it’s just entirely accessible with voiceover and just delightful.
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I’m going to talk to you about hard drive storage on your iOS device. This process will work on both your iPhone as well as your iPad. So in order to check what kind of storage you have in terms of the amount, what you would want to do is go to settings, go to general, and go to storage there. It’s going to tell you how large your hard drive is, how much space you’ve used, how much space you have left. Below that is going to be the list of all the apps that are on your device, and they’re going to tell you how much space each of those apps is taking up on your device. Some of those apps are really big and if you never use them, things like iMovie, GarageBand and a few others, you just want to get rid of those straight away because they’re huge and they just take up unnecessary space on your device. If you ever want to get them back, it’s really easy. All you would need to do is go to the App Store. You can find them in the App Store and re download them. It’ll also tell you there’s apps on your device that you never use. You probably could delete those apps to create more space on your device. A lot of times people say, why am I having so many issues with storage, even though it shows I have a lot of available storage on your device? Well, that problem comes with iCloud sync, so everyone gets 5GB of free space. And when you fill that up, then it has nowhere to continue to back up. So what you would have to do is pay to get more cloud storage or turn that off. And then when you turn that off, you’re going to use only the storage you have available to you on the device itself without actually having to back up to the cloud. The other thing you can do is pay to get more space so that five gigs for free could go up to a list of different file size types depending on how much you want to pay. And they have everything from $0.99 all the way up. So you just have to decide what you feel like is going to be the necessary cloud storage that’s going to suit your needs. You can also take a look in your photos. If you have a ton of photos, you could possibly have duplicates, you could have videos, you could have all kinds of stuff. So you can create space by deleting some of those items. Also, you can go back and check your messages. And if you’re using cloud storage to store messages that you’ve never gotten rid of. These days, people are sending photos, files, videos, all kinds of stuff in messages so you can go through and delete a lot of that stuff. And that will also create a lot of free space on your device once you get rid of a bunch of things there. And that’s how you deal with storage on your iOS device.
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Recently, Lenovo sent me a laptop with tactile lines on key buttons throughout the device. These lines feel like the lines that are on the letters f and j on a MacBook air, I presume the MacBook Pro as well. But it’s also the same dots or lines that are on the Logitech Mx keys as well. The lines are located on the f key. There’s a line on the insert key, there’s also a line on the arrow key and a line on the enter key. And what I really found to be valuable is the volume lines that are on the f two and f three keys. So the f two has a vertical line on the left edge of it representing volume down, and the f three has a vertical line on the right side of it representing volume up. When I first found these, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do or where the volume keys were or how these were going to be beneficial to me. Now that I’ve actually had a couple of days to play with it, I think it’s really valuable for me to be able to reach up and know, oh, that’s volume down, so I don’t need to worry about that being the mute possibly, or oh, let’s move my finger over to the right a little bit to access volume up. Speaking of fingers, this particular laptop also has a fingerprint reader for Windows. Hello. And I found that to be invaluable when it came to logging in and just reaching over with my index finger, signing into the computer or authenticating myself and then continuing on with my workflow. I have more on this particular laptop and my thoughts of it over the next couple of weeks or so, and I even give you a model number. When I am able to remember which model it is. My initial thoughts are, you know, this is a pretty handy laptop and if I had to pay for the Lenovo laptop that they sent me as a loaner unit, wouldn’t have been disappointed. Did I mention it’s got great speakers as well? The music used in this and other unmute presents productions is thanks to Andre Louie and his shorts collection.
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