TechByter Worldwide 2024-02-09: Some Of My Favorite Things Are Free. Short Circuits.

Normally this would be an off week for TechByter Worldwide, two days after Christmas, and five days before the new year begins; so it’s mainly silence, but this is also the end.

Internet service providers promise specific upload and download speeds. In most cases, these promises are stated as speeds “up to” whatever the promise is, which would allow the ISP to say 15Mbps is in the “up to 500Mbps” speed range they promised. That doesn’t happen much these days, but it’s still worth checking occasionally. In Short Circuits: There’s no cost for Adobe’s PDF Reader, but Adobe’s solutions start around $150 per year if you need to edit PDFs, even occasionally. There’s a free online service that might be more than sufficient. • Data breaches happen too often to be concerned about individual incidents. Instead, consider all of your relevant information is out there somewhere and instead develop a defense plan.

Text messages on our phones are so easy to use and so common that it’s all too easy to forget how useful they are to scammers. Every text message should be treated with suspicion. In Short Circuits: Recently I needed to format a 64GB thumb drive using FAT32, one of the older formatting types. The Windows formatting tool won’t allow it, so maybe you think the FAT32 limit is 32GB. It’s not and formatting the large drive turned out to be refreshingly easy. • Sometimes I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee or Marc Andreessen had any idea, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that the browsers they were developing to view simple text files would expand and virtually take over the world.

Some of Adobe’s improvements in Photoshop and the other photographic applications are little short of magic. Boring and cumbersome tasks can be handled by AI, giving photographers more time for creativity. In Short Circuits: If you’ve ever had your Facebook account stolen by thieves, or know someone who has been a victim, you understand how difficult it is to recover the account, if recovery is even possible. That’s why you should act now to enable security measures for your account, particularly two-factor authentication.

Because there is no program during Thanksgiving week, here is a link to last week’s podcast.

Is there a key on the keyboard that you absolutely despise? Maybe the CapsLock key. Maybe some other key that causes trouble for you when you press it accidentally. There’s an easy and free way to banish keys like this. In Short Circuits: Maybe you wish you could convert a key you don’t use to perform a useful function, maybe even start an app you use all the time. There’s also an easy and free way to do that. • Many early users of computers mastered the skill of creating batch files to perform repetitive tasks. Forty years later, these skills can be useful even with Windows 10 and Windows 11, and the skills aren’t that hard to learn.

Windows seemingly has adjustments, settings, configurations, and modifications for just about everything. Despite a decade-long effort to finalize the Settings app, the Control Panel is still needed sometimes and finding the adjustment you’re seeking can be difficult. That’s one reason you might want to enable God Mode. In Short Circuits: One of the first things technicians want us to do when something goes wrong with a computer or other electronic device is turn it off and turn it back on again. This actually fixes a lot of problems, but why? • Do you use Wikipedia for research? Millions of people do every day and, despite the doubters, it’s usually quite accurate.

Two words make my teeth itch when I hear them, particularly when I hear them from photographers. Someone who claims to be artistic and creative probably should use “always” and “never” rarely, if at all. In Short Circuits: Facebook seems to be the most annoying application on Earth, yet people rarely abandon it. There are ways to make it better, at least on computers, and I recently switched from one of the primary players to the other. • We need to get to the BIOS settings screen rarely, and getting there can be difficult. What if you could put an icon on your desktop to get there with just a click?

No matter how much effort Microsoft expends on the Start Menu, it will never please everyone. The Start Menu does offer a lot of customizations, but if you really want to take control there’s Start 11 from Stardock. In Short Circuits: Updating to the latest version of Windows 24H2 created some significant problems on my primary computer, but the update worked flawlessly on the tablet computer. This is why every operating system update needs to be approached with caution. • Too many organizations still force users to change their passwords too frequently, mistakenly believing that doing so improves security. The opposite is true.

I talk about libraries frequently because they are probably the best value provided for our tax dollars. If you’re looking for access to news media that are often behind a paywall, your local library may be able to help. In Short Circuits: Continuing with the topic of locating reliable, honest, unbiased news sources in the days leading up to this year’s presidential election, we’ll take a look at 1440 News. • Podcasts for the past two weeks were cancelled because Phyllis and I were both dealing with covid when I should have been preparing the report. You may already have had covid, perhaps more than once. For us, it was our inaugural voyage.