DROPPING THE PASSWORD

One of the most annoying features of Windows is the sign-in. This is the so-called “default” setting, which is to protect you from someone else using your computer. Of course, you may know that you’re the only person using that computer. But what if someone sneaks into your home in the middle of the night, just so they can watch movie trailers from Netflix?  Ah ha! 

Fortunately, we can save you. To remove the sign-in, go to the search bar in the lower left of your Windows screen, and type the letters “netplwiz” without the quotes. We know that doesn’t make sense but just do it. When it comes up, uncheck the box next to “Users must enter a username and password”and click “apply.” They’ll ask you for the user name and password for your Microsoft account. Enter it, then click “OK.”  Now you won’t have to sign in when you reboot your computer.

To avoid having to sign in when you’ve just been away from your machine for a little while, click the start button, then “Settings,” “Accounts,” and “sign-in options.” Choose “Never,” under the heading “Require sign-in.”

Revisiting the Clipboard

A reader was bothered by the fact that all the items you save in your Windows clipboard disappear when you reboot. But this doesn’t have to happen. More on that in a minute.

The default setting in Windows 10 is not to give you a clipboard extender. After all, why would you ever want to copy more than one item? This reminds Bob of talking to a Microsoft programmer at a trade show years ago. The programmer pointed out that you could now right-click a word and a definition of that word would appear. And he smiled and threw back his shoulders. Bob said, “What if there’s a word in the definition you don’t know and you’d like to look that one up too?” The programmer looked at him in astonishment and said, “Why would anyone ever want to look up two words?” Why, indeed.

To set it up, type “clipboard” into the search bar at the lower left of your Windows 10 screen. When it pops up, click on “clipboard settings,” and click the button under “Clipboard History.” You only have to do this once. To retrieve a clip, hold down the Windows key (looks like a flag) and tap the “V” key on your keyboard. Click on the clip from a list of up to 24 of them. 

Getting back to the problem of items disappearing when you reboot, you can pin them to the clipboard wall, so to speak.  Click the three dots in the upper right corner of an item. Then choose “pin.”

Robot Ball

If we had one of the new robot balls, called a “Sphero Mini,” we’d be playing with it now.  But first, we’d have to borrow a kid.

The kit comes with tunnels, pins and cones you can set up as a maze, or you could just have the ball roll in and around your furniture. The ball is about the size of a golf ball, and has a gyroscope, motor encoders, and accelerometer sensors. 

The $80 “Sphero Activity Kit” also comes with templates in the form of 15  “Activity Cards.” So before branching out on your own, you can put together some tried-and-true mazes. When ready, push your finger on the app to launch the ball toward your target. To see a demo, look up “Sphero Activity Kit” on YouTube. 

A free app, called “Sphero Play,” encourages kids to use pre-set building blocks of code, eliminating the mistakes you get when typing an actual programming language. The other free app, “Sphero Edu” takes a kid all the way up to Javascript programming. This can get pretty advanced if you want to.

 Decal City

Joy is always misplacing her laptop, so Bob suggested a colorful decal. That way the black PC doesn’t blend in with our black couch, the black piano, the black chair and other stuff around the apartment.

The decal she chose from Decalrus is a close-up photo of a tiger’s face, so vivid, you’d think it stepped out of the pages of National Geographic. It’s all in black and white except for the tiger’s green eyes. It goes edge to edge on her laptop lid, and puts more tiger around the keyboard and trackpad area on the inside.

On Amazon, we saw decals for all kinds of laptops, such as Dell, Lenovo, Chromebook and HP. Other than the tiger, we could have chosen Van Gogh’s starry night, a galaxy, flowers and many other scenes, for $23 to $29. If you want, you can upload your own photo or design.

Internuts

  • Take10.tv has free videos.  When we tuned in, we saw a guy playing 100 really quick electric guitar riffs from Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and others. If it wasn’t on Take10.tv when you visited, search on “100 riffs” to find it on YouTube. Click the Take10.tv home icon on the right to see channels, such as Science, Drama, Extreme Sports, etc. 
  • Seventy Five Scientific Research Projects You Can Contribute to Online.” Search on that phrase to find all of them, such as helping Berkeley researchers identify butterflies.  Others have to do with conservation.
  • SkyscraperCenter.com. Ever wonder how tall a building is? Enter the name of it and its location and they’ll tell you. We put in our own apartment building and they had it.

 

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