On Computers

We learned some interesting things about websites. For example, the minimum length for a website ending, which refers to the site’s “domain,” is two letters. There are more than one billion web sites and every possible letter combination has been taken. We went to GoDaddy.com to verify this and searched on tv.tv. Sure enough, it’s taken, though apparently it isn’t being used. (If you go to tv.tv, it just hangs there. It’s sort of a no-show show.) The domain name “tv” is for the Pacific island country of Tuvalu. Domain name sales are big business. HomeAway.com bought VacationRentals.com for $35 million back in 2009.  You can buy the website name “TV.xyz” for $3,250. “TV.lgbt” is $4000. We know a few […]

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Filed under: books, education, electronics, how-to, Internet, Internuts, TV, web | Comments Off on FUN WITH WEBSITE NAMES

It’s summertime and art shows have sprung out all over. Every time we go to one we see paintings that might have been done with a computer program. Some of them they are, and they’re often the best in the show. One artist whose work we liked said she used Ulead PhotoImpact, an old program you can find for about $5 on the web. We like it too and have used it for many years. On the other end of the scale is the new Corel Painter, which sells for $429, for Windows 10 or Mac. This is the program to get if you want the kind of effects professionals get. You can recreate brush strokes, palette knife smears, colors […]

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Filed under: apps, art, Corel, gadgets, health | Comments Off on THE NEW PAINTER

We recently mentioned using “File History” in both Windows 10 and Windows 8 because it backs up changes you make to your files. You can find it by typing the name in the Windows search box. Another solution is “Google Backup and Sync.” It’s free and somewhat simpler and works for both Windows and Mac. It automatically backs up all your files, or just the ones you mark; it also keeps tracks of the files you delete. We were deleting some old stuff recently and Google Backup  popped up with a message to ask if we wanted to also delete them from our Google Drive account, which is online storage. This is also free and if you use Gmail for […]

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Filed under: backup, books, facebook, free stuff, Google, health, TV, video | Comments Off on BACKING UP AND BEEPING

Ever wonder if your email account has been broken into? We wondered about that too. A new app called “Edison Email,” checks these things. When we clicked on “security,” we were warned that our passwords had been leaked. The message read: “This email address and password match public database breach records.” They suggested a change of password.”Public breach records” means people’s accounts, mainly business records, have been broken into, collected, and lo and behold, your password was among the records stolen. This in itself is not a disaster, unless … you used that same business password for other accounts, which Joy did. One of those stolen passwords was the same as one for our credit card. Now, following the rule […]

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Filed under: anti-virus, business, email, Internuts, security, virus | Comments Off on WE’VE BEEN BREACHED

We have a reader named McCoy, and he maintains that he is “The Real McCoy” (accept no substitutes). Well, we believe him and he has some good tips, which we will pass along a little further down the way. This goes back to a topic we wrote about a couple weeks ago. But it’s an important topic, and becoming more immediate as the world goes increasingly gonzo about these new digital assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo. We are going gaga along with everybody else and of course — as usual — the situation will grow increasingly worse as other manufacturers join the fray. Our Internet signal is strong in our office but not so good just 40 feet […]

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Filed under: apps, Google, Internet, web, wireless | 1 Comment »