On Computers

Topics: The Amazon Echo Dot, Internuts (a crazily lazy brass band, a girl who speaks 20 languages, Roald Dahl quotes), and how to make your web searches private.

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Filed under: Amazon, Internuts, music, web | Comments Off on I DREAM OF GENIE IN A HOCKEY PUCK

Five topics: Getting Better Directions, Better Searching with Google Chrome, Fun Doggy website, Political website tells you which candidate you’re most like, What Cortana can do

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Filed under: browsers, Google, Internuts, maps, web, Windows | Comments Off on COUNTING THE WAZE

There were 900 unique websites in 1995, 20 million in 2000 and now there are more than 120 million. You may have noticed that they’re not all “dot com.” Common endings include “.org,” “.net,” and “.edu.”  One of the newest endings is “.family.” If your name is Joe Doe, you might like a website called Doe.Family. Your email address could be joe@doe.family. Your wife might be jane@doe.family. Other new extensions include dot LIVE, dot SOCIAL, and dot ROCKS. To get one of these new names, you have to pay for it and register it. GoDaddy.com has some of the cheapest prices. They run around $1 to $40.  

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Filed under: numbers, trends, web | Comments Off on MOVE OVER DOT COM, MAKE ROOM FOR DOT FAMILY

After we threw Windows out the window and began using a Mac, we felt nostalgic for our test computer, a Windows all-in-one machine with a large screen. It felt real slow now compared to the Mac. Okay, time to go to work. To get to the bottom of things, we brought up “Task Manager.” You can do it too. Right-click the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, or press the “Ctrl-alt-delete” keys all together and choose Task Manager. If, like our computer, your computer’s CPU (the brain chip) is running at 99 percent capacity, that’s a problem. At first, we thought the culprit was Google Chrome. When we switched to Microsoft Edge, the replacement browser for Internet Explorer, the […]

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Filed under: computers, web, Windows | Comments Off on SPEEDING UP A COMPUTER – TAKE 5

Your Web browser is not your operating system! Nor is it your search engine. There’s a surprising amount of confusion, and it leads to anxiety. In fact, there’s plenty of time to panic.

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Filed under: Google, Internet, search, web | Comments Off on TIME TO FIND ALTERNATIVES TO BALKY BROWSERS

Most of the web is invisible to Google, according to an article in Popular Science magazine. The so-called “Deep Web” is hidden behind password-protected sites, or sites you have to pay to enter, or sites that require special software to view. By some estimates, it’s 500 times larger than the Web we see.

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Filed under: web | Comments Off on THE DEEP WEB

We bookmark favorite web pages all the time, so our list can get cluttered. Here’s how Joy keeps her favorite sites front and center. It’s a free service called “Homepage Ninja.” Everything you bookmark goes on your own special website page.

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Filed under: free stuff, web | Comments Off on HOMEPAGE NINJA

We always assumed that when you use Firefox’s “Private Browsing” feature, no one could track you. Not so, until now.

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Filed under: Internet, security, web | Comments Off on PRIVATE BROWSING

Chrome users no longer have to worry about so-called “Flash ads” playing automatically, ever since Chrome killed Flash. But what about other videos that start up out of the blue?

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Filed under: browsers, Google, Internet, web | Comments Off on WAIT, I DIDN’T PRESS PLAY

“Chrome Kills Flash.” This reads like a headline from a new comic book, but it refers to ads and pictures that use Adobe Flash to make them pop up from the Internet. (The late Steve Jobs often said how much he hated Adobe Flash.)

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Filed under: browsers, Google, web | Comments Off on CHROME KILLS FLASH