Have You Tried Restarting?

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy Mighell

Have You Tried Restarting

02/10/2017

[Music]

Intro: Web 2.0, Innovation, Trend, Collaboration, Software, Metadata… Got the world turning as fast as it can, hear how technology can help, legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to ‘The Kennedy-Mighell Report’ here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy: Welcome to episode 185 of ‘The Kennedy Mighell Report’, I am Dennis Kennedy in St. Louis.

Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode we had one of our longest episodes ever as we got enthused about the possibilities and potential of voice tech tools like Amazon’s Alexa. We like to follow our more theoretical episodes with very practical ones and a few recent computer problems, some might call them “crashes”, let us ride to today’s topic. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of ‘The Kennedy Mighell Report’ we will be talking about tips for troubleshooting technology both yours and others. In our second segment we are excited to answer a listener question about Artificial Intelligence applications, and as a reminder incidentally, we always welcome your questions, and as usual we will finish up with our parting shots, that one-tip website and observation that you can start to use the second this podcast is over.

But first up technology troubleshooting; the unfortunate thing I think about technology is that unlike Apple’s claim it doesn’t always just work from time to time, probably more often than we want our technology goes wrong, it fails, it has a glitch, it doesn’t work the way we expected to, whether it’s a smartphone that can’t hold a Bluetooth connection in the car, like I have been having lately, or a hard drive that seems to be failing, I think every now and then we have to troubleshoot a problem on our own.

Dennis, I know that you recently ran into a new problem and you were very excited that you successfully fixed it, I guess, the question is, how many hours did you put into fixing that?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I don’t like to think of it as hours, but I think in afternoon sort of, maybe a little bit into the evening. But yeah, Tom, I was really excited to actually fix a problem that looked like it was I had kind of a dead computer on hands. I went to use to my wife’s computer and got this message that said something like fatal error and needed to reboot and then I went to reboot and I got the same thing and got into this loop, and did a lot of diagnosis. I am not saying there was a point where I lost my optimism but I did price new desktop and computers on Dell and I got to say, $300 seems like really reasonable for a decent desktop.

Tom Mighell: It’s a good price.

Dennis Kennedy: But I did figure it out and that got me thinking about how we actually approach these things, and I think you are right, I think that trouble is inevitable really like complexity going on, and plus, people keep their PCs a lot longer so you do run into some issues just because computers are older.

My issue with doing a troubleshooting was that it was on Windows 10 and that’s something I don’t usually use, so that made things a little bit tougher and it took me a while before I learned that what I was seeing on the screen is actually the Windows 10 version, the blue screen of that.

Tom Mighell: It looks different, yeah.

Dennis Kennedy: Which now I understand, and then even if it’s not your own stuff, Tom, as you have told me many times you and many of the rest of us are family IT person and sometimes you just got to learn how to do this stuff.

Tom Mighell: That’s true and I will say that because you are the family IT person my first piece of advice will be, and we have talked about this on the podcast before, having a good screen-sharing program is key, especially if the person I think you are helping out their computer is still capable of connecting to the Internet and you can do that.

I use a program now called TeamViewer that most IT departments use or that some IT departments use to share screens with others, and I am able to hop on my parent’s computer quite easily and fix things up. So that is key to troubleshoot problems on other people’s computers.

But I am going to come back to say, it’s not just — you are right, people are keeping their computers much longer, but I would say that it’s not just older technology that has problems, plenty of new technology has problems too. I think on a previous podcast I mentioned wanting to try out a non-Apple alternative to the Apple AirPods my Bragi headphones and I got them and they are incredibly small and I love how they have no wires and I can just put them in my ears, connect them to my phone and go out and do stuff without having to worry about wires and I put them on and they were miserable, it was awful, I went down the street and they disconnected 20 times, I had to turn around before I got to the end of the corner and come back and put on some regular headphones.

So it’s not just old technology it’s new stuff too that you find yourself having to fix and figure out what’s going on with it.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, it’s not just hardware, it’s software, it’s network, it’s Internet connections, it’s printing, all those sorts of things, and the combination of all of them can get really tricky, and I think most of us do have a bag of tricks that we use, but I think typically you don’t get all systematic on that unless you face issues a lot. So I think I have really learned troubleshooting because I have had a lot of trouble, and that’s what teaches you those things. So we thought on this podcast we could kind of go over or share some of the systematic tips and tricks that we typically use. And to me I just kind of go back – Tom, I’ve got to say it, in my first legal tech column for Lawyers Weekly USA 20 years ago was called the case of the malfunctioning modem which tells you where technology was, but I kind of went through some of the approaches and we kind of settled more or less on our four-step approach, so I don’t know if you want to launch into step one.

Tom Mighell: Well sure, I think step one is really about trying to get, I mean, as you might say getting a good diagnosis of the problem, but I am going to argue that sometimes you can’t actually get a good diagnosis, I mean not all of us know exactly what’s going on with our computer, and I think that’s where the Internet can help. I will like a miss to unfortunately the Internet has made it much too easy for us to try and get a diagnosis on our health issues online and unlike relying too much on online diagnosis of hell things, trying to get something on the Internet for your computer things I think is significantly more successful.

But, I think like I said a minute ago, I wouldn’t just you are looking for a diagnosis. I frankly think that if you can plug in a couple of your symptoms, one of the symptoms of the problems that you are having, describing the problem that you have and we are going to talk more about the best ways to do that, but just go to Google and plug those in and chances are you are going to find somebody else who has had those exact symptoms and unlike the medical problems that you find on the Internet, you can actually try to fix those symptoms and they give you tips on how to do it to see if they solve your tech issues.

So, I mean, I think that trying to figure out what your problem is, is clearly the first step but I would argue that even if you don’t know exactly what your problem is, the problem is likely exhibiting itself as a symptom of something and that could be in itself a clue to figure out how to fix it.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I would say like the best fix is the one that just works, so if you don’t have to figure out like what actually is wrong, but it just starts working and that’s awesome, but that doesn’t happen all the time obviously. And so I do go back to little bit of diagnostics and I think it can be a little bit harder than you expect, I mean, normally I am trying to rule things out, so when I wrote that first malfunctioning modem article, I went through like a whole — I just had a modem that wasn’t working and I was trying to figure out what to do with it because I didn’t want to buy a new one.

And I went through this whole thing and I tried like all these different things ruling things out, was it modem itself, was it disconnection, was it dead connection, was it software, I mean, to give away the article because you probably can’t find it anymore but it turned out that some squirrels had eaten through the phone line outside and degraded the line and also was causing problems with the modem connecting to the Internet. So I took a call to the phone company.

So I would like the step one is ruling things out and then go back to the – the great Sherlock Holmes quote, it says — where he said, “how often I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains; however, improbable must be the truth.” So sometimes that’s what I found like the only thing that could be wrong with that modem was in the phone line and it turned out to be a squirrel.

So there are clues out there and I think Tom is right that using Google to kind of type of things in and do some searches will help you, but I think kind of just tracking through things, there is a Windows problem, there is a hardware problem and that kind of helps you get the diagnosis done and to move on to trying to at least get started on fixing it.

(00:10:01)

Tom Mighell: I guess when we talk about that, if I’m looking at my modem and it’s not working, my first instinct is not to try and figure it out myself unless for some reason I happen to be a modem expert to do it, and so I guess, my first instinct is to go to the Internet because likely someone’s actually already come up with that list, you just described, I mean, there’s tons of those lists all over the Internet that say here’s a checklist of things to do to rule everything out. If it’s not this, then try this. Then if that didn’t work, then try this. And then at the very bottom it says, if you’re down here, if you’ve gotten to this point then call us because you haven’t figured out what you haven’t isolated the problem.

But I think that’s right, I think trying to isolate it is right. But the one thing that I find out more often than not to me and when it turns out you spent all that time on the modem to find out that it was a problem on the outside, I think that we either ignore or don’t pay attention often enough to what I would consider to be the easy fix. The fact that some of these problems are not that complicated; sometimes they can be fixed very simply by just a couple of quick things to do and you’ve got it solved, is that right?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I mean, and so I would go that — I mean, we laugh about this all the time when IT people tell you this, but basically turning stuff off and on really works a lot of times.

Tom Mighell: Turning anything off, right, anything, no matter what it is.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, it means the refrigerator, reboot to refrigerator.

Tom Mighell: That’s right.

Dennis Kennedy: I think there are also other simple fixes so in the Windows world, going to the Task Manager, which is Ctrl+Alt+Del, I think still gets you there in almost all Windows versions, and saying, hey, look, my browser is hung up or Word is hung up and just shutting it down and reloading it, sometimes will do the trick. And then sometimes you do those simple fix because you have constraints.

Obviously, if the cursor won’t move, your mouse arrow won’t move and everything is frozen, then your choice really is to turn things off and on and that can take you to the next place, which is what I did with the issues that I had.

Then I think the Google thing is great but I also would like to go to the actual support size, especially for Microsoft and Apple, because I think they are pretty good and they do walk you through the checklist. So that’s what I did and I went and said, when you get this sort of new version of the Blue Screen of Death there’s like eight different things you can try, and by God, I tried them all, and it’s when I hit the bottom and didn’t fix it then I had to go deeper, and that’s when I went to the Google route and that’s where I discovered that YouTube is also a pretty amazing resource on fixing things.

Tom Mighell: Well, I’ll say the Task Manager is actually something that helps me out more times than not, and it’s not necessarily just of programs hanging up because sometimes you don’t know what’s hanging up. I will have time to both my laptop and my desktop, the fan seems to be running really, really, really high and things just all — the whole computer is sluggish.

So that means if something is hogging up your memory and just turning on the Task Manager, you can see from that Task Manager what app or service is hogging up the most resources and just turning that off, just disconnecting that can immediately solve your problem on the computer. So the Task Manager is really a great idea for a quick fix.

And I agree with you going to the Microsoft and Apple Support sites are also good, but one of the quick fixes that I like to try more because I’m a little bit lazy and I want the computer to fix itself is at least in terms of Windows, Microsoft has really got a great troubleshooting feature now, where you can just open up the Troubleshooting feature in the Control Panel and you can say, go to town, go scan my system and see if you can identify any problems that are going on.

And it will; it will look at them and it will fix the problem and I have had that happen a number of times where my wireless adapter has gotten disconnected and for some reason I can’t connect to Wi-Fi at all. So I just run the troubleshooter, I’ll see it say, yep, we’ve identified that your wireless adapter is not connected, we’re restarting the wireless adapter, your problem is solved.

And I will say that’s just about the fastest, quickest fix that I could find in terms of getting something done on a Windows computer, but I will say also that if I’m going to find something on a Microsoft Support site, nine times out of ten, Google is going to help me get to that page better than if I just go to the Microsoft Support site first and try to search for it.

Google is a better search engine of Microsoft and Apple sites than I think those sites happen to be. And frankly, what I like about the fact that Google is so good at it is that nowadays they have structured things so that the first search result is actually usually a series of steps, it’s right in line with the search results where you don’t really have to go to another webpage, you just got the steps to fix your problem right there in the screen, so can’t get much easier than that.

(00:15:10)

Dennis Kennedy: I think that’s really true, those are good points. I think that the YouTube has become really interesting because you might find a video where somebody shows you how to do things, and I think that can be really useful rather than kind of ticking through some steps that are written out where you go like, hey wait, wait a second, there’s something on it where it says, this tab says this but it’s not exactly what’s said in the article or you find out that they are talking about a different version of Windows or Mac OS or Word or whatever. So sometimes the YouTube thing I think could be really helpful.

The other thing I think at this point where you try the easy fixes is it’s going to remind you the importance of backup because if you got this frozen screen in the middle of something you’re working on, a good chance you’ve lost that if you have to turn it off and on. So I think it stresses the importance of saving and backing up and then if you’re in a situation where it feels like you’re hung and there are some issues going on and you have any ability to save things, you need to jump in and take advantage of that opportunity to try to save what you can.

I think it goes back to looking at your settings in Word and the Office products and other places to do the automatic saves a little bit more frequently. Once you start to have issues on a computer, you may find that they become more frequent and so going to the automatic saves sooner like every couple of minutes is going to be a lot better than losing 10 minutes or more of work.

Tom Mighell: I think that’s actually critical, and we’re going to talk about backup in a little bit more detail in a minute, but I think that in terms of really backing up, that’s been one of my biggest issues. I have a spreadsheet that got my business users, that is notorious for crashing, and I’ve had to set that auto-save at a very light touch so that it is auto-saving all the time because I crash that spreadsheet constantly and I lose 20 minutes worth of work. And so it’s not just so much that you want to back up a document so that you don’t lose the entire document, it’s losing all that work. I think that’s incredibly important.

And like Dennis says, if you have the ability, if something goes wrong with your computer but you still have the ability to save your documents, don’t just reboot it or turn it off without doing that, try your best to save everything because you will come back to a computer that’s likely working but you’ve lost the last 30 or 45 minutes or hour of work, and that’s really important.

So Dennis, what do you think we do when those fixes don’t fix? What’s the next step at that point?

Dennis Kennedy: That’s the point of despair often. I think that probably in the Windows world, what I like at that point is the System Restore points. So you can go back in and Windows is more or less taking a snapshot on either a scheduled basis like if there’s an upgrade installed because sometimes a problem happens after you install an update.

So you can go back to like the last good point and you can restore from that, so you’re basically resetting, you’re keeping all the data but you’re kind of rolling your computer back to a date when it probably was working. And so, you can do that and that a lot of times will solve the problem and then you can kind of — then you’re working, you can save things, you can do other things, and then you can say, maybe what I need to do is go check, go out to Google and check to see whether there are issues with that last update I installed or something else that I did.

So I think the System Restore point is really a great approach for doing that. So a lot of times for me that’s really helped on getting things back up and going.

Tom Mighell: Well, I think that one of the nice things about System Restore is, is that it’s a little bit like a time machine that only gets rid of the bad stuff. So you can go back to a certain point in time where you weren’t having problems with your computer but let’s say that in between those times you created ten documents on your computer. You’re not going to lose those; it’s not going to go back as if those things never had occurred.

So you’re not going to lose that information, it’s just that your computer settings are going to go back to a previous configuration and I think that that’s a really nice a nice way to do it. I mean, obviously being able to — there are some systems, Windows is one of them, but even some applications have a safe mode, where you can boot into that safe mode which means that it’s not loading a whole bunch of extraneous apps or add-ins or other types of software. So you’re kind of getting the cleanest version that you can to help you troubleshoot what the problem is.

(00:20:01)

So I know, I know there are a lot of — this probably happens less on an iPhone that it does on an android phone but there will be times where they say to start adding apps back one at a time until you see the problem that you have. And I think it’s the same with Windows, you can start adding things back in until you start to see the problems. But the nice part about using safe through or something like that is that it helps you really rule out whether it wasn’t add-in that was causing the problem or if you might have — if it doesn’t even boot into safe mode then that’s telling you something as well.

Dennis Kennedy: So my issue was, okay, Windows wasn’t loading, and so I think that can really throw people, so you’ve turned it off, you turned on and it still gets stuck without Windows loading and gave me a notice of an error. So then you start to dig into his system. There are system utilities. There’s the safe boot. Again, I want to Google — you just don’t do it often enough, you are going to remember things. I think it’s a little bit different in different versions of Windows. Then also you can read some articles that will tell you, here’s how you safe boot and you go and you do like an F2 or something like that, and then it doesn’t do anything. So you kind of need to make sure you’re doing the right thing to get the safe boot to happen. Normally what will happen if you do is, if you’re successful in doing a safe boot and can get in and then basically shutdown in the normal way or reboot, then a lot of times that will take care of the problem, then you’ll get into Windows okay.

Unfortunately for me in my case that didn’t work and I get a lot deeper into the system utilities than I’ve probably ever been, especially in Windows 10. But there are a lot of things that you can do that will come up as options if you hit the right keys as you start to go into Windows, and then you don’t get the normal Windows, boot up and the fail, but that will give you some options, that can let you run some tests and do some other things. And so for me what that really helped with was I was able to figure out. It made myself really sure that it wasn’t a hard drive going bad; it was actually a Windows booting problem in the issue I had.

So, utilities are good. If you pop up some error codes that’s in other place, this is a good, greatest thing to me. As you find a error code, you put quotes around it and you put in Google and that’s going to lead you to a lot of great information.

Tom Mighell:  Yeah I know. I think that’s probably one of it, if you can get an error code for something, then again, somebody on the Internet is talking about it and I’ve solved problems or at least gotten advice on what to do at that point in time. So let’s cut to step 4 because we’re talking a long time about this. Did that help you, did finding an error code help you? Where did you, where did you get at this point?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, so then I was able to find the support thing, I went through the eight different approaches. Some of the approaches ask me to like go on the Internet and grab things, which, if are not able to load Windows, you’re not going to be on the Internet. So here’s a great tip. Smartphones are huge when you have problem that involves loss of the Internet because that gets you there. Then you start to go, what is it that’s really going to happen and then I think that involves revisiting your diagnosis.

Like I said, I originally thought I had a hard drive going bad. I was going to just buy a new computer and realized I didn’t have a bad hard drive and I got to the point where we got to step 4 where realistically the only thing I was going to do other than buying a new computer was going to the nuclear option, which was basically reinstalling Windows. And that’s a tough decision to make, and I did it, and I did it successfully and got things back up and going. But, that’s a tough one and I think that’s time where you start to think very hard of like calling a friend or bringing in an expert at that point because reinstalling Windows is a dramatic step.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, really, reinstalling and operating system on any device is a dramatic step and I’ve had to do it both for Windows devices but I’ve also had to do it for both iPhones and Android phones. And you know, it’s a long-term thing to do, you have to plan to spend, like you said, in afternoon and into the evening. It’s not something that you can just do and let it happen. You’ve got to really plan for it because I think you’ll say here that backup is important if you’re going to do that. Not only is back up important, you need to make sure that you know what you originally had on your device. So what are the apps and programs that you want to reinstall. Having a program I used to use a tool called Belarc. It’s still out there but I’m not sure that it’s all that well known or well used these days, but it would take an inventory of everything on your computer.

I printed that out before I would either get a new computer or reinstall Windows on a computer and it would help me understand what I wanted.

(00:25:05)

And I would argue that it’s not necessarily about having a good backup or about using a good backup service. It’s being able to restore things quickly and easily, which frankly is why for me, reinstalling Windows or something like that is not a huge pain because being connected to the cloud means that you can really get up and running a lot faster.

You know, restoring things for me is pretty straightforward. I just reconnect to Dropbox and my files are there. I re-download Microsoft Office 365 and I am good to go with my applications, my photos are all in Google photos. I do have a backup if I need to get to them. My music is on Spotify, my work files are in my file Transporter and so I’m not worried so much if I don’t — if I lose what’s on my computer, if I just wipe it clean and start fresh, because it’s — I’ve got another copy somewhere else. So having that peace of mind if you have to do the nuclear option is actually not a bad way to go.

Tom Mighell: Yeah. So the cloud stuff is great. This thing I found a little tricky was serial numbers, things like that as you reinstall things. So, but you can sometimes just load the stuff and you have 30 days to come up with the serial number, but all of these things make you realize there’s some basic backup and disaster recovery planning that you need to do even for yourself that will come in handy at some point. But I think also when this type of thing happens, it makes you rethink of what do you really need and all the stuff you have on the computer, are you better off storing things in the cloud, and what do you really need, because at some point you’re going to say, if I’m restoring, things do I really need want to put all this stuff back on? 26:45 time, just wrap it up other than saying, it’s good to avoid problems and backup, backup, backup. Do we have any action steps for listeners?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, the action step is really to do the kinds of things we talked about now. That 4 step process I think is a good process to follow. I’m going to give a very simplistic thing of advice to say that when something like this happens that you need to troubleshoot, take a deep breath, because you in most cases aren’t as screwed as you think you might be, and I’ll give a quick example. My father called me panicked. He said I’ve lost this document, I’ve been keeping this document on my computer since 1997, which I doubt, but he’s been keeping it for a long time and now it’s completely gone.

The document itself is empty, there’s no data in it. Oh my Gosh, it’s the end of my world and I was able to go into his backup. He uses Carbonite as a backup and it kept the last 30 days of versions. I went to a version that he had just saved the day before and there it was, all in its complete glory. I restored it for him and not only does he think I’m a genius, which I’m really not, but it’s really — it’s really not a matter of panic. If something goes bad, take a deep breath, dig in, and hopefully it’s not a difficult solution.

Tom Mighell: Yeah, I would agree. I always have this one caveat of like if a printer is not working; it’s just a matter of luck, whether you are going to get it working. That’s one thing I’ve never been able to figure out, but I think the thing is just kind of stepping back and saying, okay, there are some ways to go through this, there’s some help out there. If I’m just sort of systematic and logical about what I’m doing, I got a decent chance of recovering and then you just vow to be better a backup.

Dennis Kennedy: And before we move on to our next segment let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.

[Music]

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[Music]

Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy and in our constant quest to try to get listener to submit questions for this segment of the show, so I don’t have to keep coming up with the topics, we have actually achieved some success. We have an audio question for this episode and that’s your invitation to submit your audio or written questions to us, so we can answer them in this very segment. My one rule as I mentioned earlier, no questions about how to make your computer work with your computer that’s just too hard. So let’s go to the audio right here.

Dan Lear: Hey this is Dan Lear. I am the Director of Industry Relations at Avvo that means I do outreach and technology evangelism for the legal marketplace and my question is, what’s your favorite or what do you think is the most interesting Artificial Intelligence technology for lawyers on the market today?

(00:30:03)

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, how would you answer that question?

Tom Mighell: So I am going to go fairly simple and basic, but for me the most interesting uses of Artificial Intelligence — I am going to use — I am going to bring up two examples. The first one is I am really intrigued by ROSS. ROSS is the sibling of Watson from IBM. ROSS is being rolled out to some of the larger firms to help with legal research and is being offered as an alternative research tool to Westlaw and Lexis, and being able to look through and identify patterns and identify precedence and identify what judges are saying, what and where, and I am really intrigued to see if that can improve the value of legal research, because that’s really a hard, intensive, really time-consuming part of a lawyer’s job. And having a tool that can help make that easier, and they claim that it takes very little to no training to learn how to use it which to me all the better.

So I’m intrigued by a tool like ROSS. I am coming from an e-discovery background, I am also a big fan of Artificial Intelligence tools for e-discovery, and I want to make sure that we differentiate, because there are a lot of tools out there that do predictive coding, that can do analytics and can find information like that. And that is a form of Artificial Intelligence, but I actually think that the tools that are more interesting to me are the ones that use machine learning to get better.

There you can train the tools to go back into the information and find something that you actually wanted to find. And there are only a few companies that are doing something that has really active machine learning to get in and find documents, tools like Kroll and a couple others are some of the tools that I would recommend. But I think those are really intriguing, because again, as discovery in cases with multiple millions of documents gets harder and harder, having a tool that’s smart enough to learn how to go out and find the information I think is most interesting to me. Dennis, what about you?

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so Tom, I know you get tired of me recommending Kevin Kelly’s new book, ‘The Inevitable’, but I heard Kevin talking on a podcast where he talked about the — where he is talking about Artificial Intelligence and how it’s going to be built into everything as time goes forward. But he had the notion of saying that Artificial Intelligence is really kind of hard to pin down, and so he said maybe we need to think in terms of Artificial Intelligences, because there are different intelligences, and he also used the term artificial smartness, which I also like here. And so that got me thinking about what’s really interesting in that I see in the AI world.

And so, what fascinated me as I thought about this is actually the anti-lock braking system in my car and also traction control, because it’s something useful, and it sort of just happens without me.

I also like the application of AI in chess games, and I love AI where it’s pattern recognition, and so that’s a variation of the e-discovery. So I go back to Dolphin Search and tools like that where the tool start to recognize patterns that you as a human might not see. And then a couple of all those things, and now Echo you hear, again, I think any of the Watson-based apps that are coming to legal and elsewhere are also interesting and I see a lot of buzz around some of the things that a company called Neota Logic is doing. I haven’t used it myself but I just see a lot of conversation about it.

So that’s what I have on that topic Tom. And it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip, website or observation that you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: I have mentioned the Note to Self podcast several times on this podcast, it’s from WNYC in New York, and it is a podcast about kind of the human side of using technology. By the time you listen to this podcast they probably will have already completed this program, but they have a new — a new kind of initiative that they call The Privacy Paradox, and every day during the week that we’re recording this podcast, they have a different episode on a different way to protect your privacy online.

The first one that they have done had Bruce Schneier, the Security Expert talking about all of the different things that the apps in your smart phone gathers about you, and as an exercise they have you go into your phone and understand which apps want to use your microphone, which apps want to use your location, and try to encourage you to, if not turn all of it off, at least to be smart and to actively choose those things you want to allow your smartphone to do for you and to be a better informed consumer about your privacy.

So I am intrigued to listen to the rest of it by the time, just because you’re hearing this later doesn’t mean you can’t go back and both listen to it and take the quizzes and get your own privacy profile. Highly recommended so far, I hope that it lives up to the good expectations that I have had so far. Privacy Paradox from WNYC, Note to Self.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, I am going totally practical for this episode with something from lifehacker.com called, ‘Top 10 Ways to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life’. So I have a new Windows Surface Pro 4 at work, and so as I go in and customize or personalize the settings for myself, there are a few things I always do to help get better battery life.

And so there are settings in there, but this article is great, because it has 10 ways to help you extend your laptop’s battery life, and a lot of times we use our laptops plugged in, so battery life is not an issue. But there are some pretty simple setting changes that you can make so that if you’re in a situation where you need to use the laptop on batteries that you can get a lot more life out of it, so totally great collection of tips all in one place.

Tom Mighell: So that wraps it up for this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thank you for joining us on this podcast. You can find show notes for the episode at HYPERLINK “http://www.tkmreport.com/”tkmreport.com. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site, where you can find archives to all of our previous podcasts as well.

If you’d like to get in touch with us then send us an email at [email protected] or send us a tweet. I’m @TomMighell and Dennis is @denniskennedy. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy, and you’ve been listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an Internet focus. Help us out by telling a couple of your friends and colleagues about the podcast.

Outro: Thanks for listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies Smart Ways to Work Together’ from ABA books or Amazon, and join us every other week for another edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

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