Online slang and acronyms

Tech Talk #119 – December 21, 2019 Online slang and acronyms Twitter, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and even plain old text messaging use slang and acronyms to reduce our character-count and save us from mistyping what we meant to say. Here’s your Rosetta Stone to online slang. DM: Direct Message. Initially used on Twitter to send private messages between users. When you want to share something privately, you send a DM. AMA: Ask Me Anything. Made

Put your iPhone on a diet, plus useful and interesting web sites

Tech Talk #118 – November 23, 2019 Put your iPhone on a diet Maybe it was after the turkey and the stuffing and cranberry sauce (homemade,) or maybe it was the pecan and mincemeat and Dutch apple pies with ice cream. Or any of the other pictures you took with your phone on Thanksgiving. Or maybe you downloaded Elf to keep your nephew/niece quiet during your traditional post-dinner food coma. Whatever triggered it, your iPhone

Spam from yourself, easy Windows 10 shortcuts

Tech Talk #117 – November 23, 2019 Spam from yourself Have you ever received an email that looked like it came from you, but you didn’t send it? Self-spam is happening a lot now, and it’s usually tied to a blackmail or shaming scheme. Forging, or faking, an email address is called spoofing. And it’s easy. Most email systems don’t have any security checks to make sure the person in the email’s “From” line is

Technical debt and infrastructure, staying online when the power goes out

Tech Talk #116 – November 9, 2019 Technical debt and infrastructure Technical debt is a term used in the software industry. All the trade-offs, shortcuts, and patched-up mistakes made by the folks working on software are called technical debt. It’s called a debt because the cost of getting that software done quicker or cheaper creates a need to fix it later and that fix-it-later part is the debt. The United States, and indeed the world,

Wi-Fi – What is it, where did it come from, and how to make yours better

Tech Talk #115 – October 26, 2019 Wi-Fi – What is it, where did it come from, and how to make yours better Wi-Fi is a technology that uses a high-frequency radio signal to connect devices without wires. Because WiFi uses public radio frequencies, there must be standards and specifications. In 1997, a committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) created the technical standards for a section of public radio bandwidth. The

Duck Go, iOS 13 settings

Tech Talk #114 – October 12, 2019 Duck Duck Go If you want to loosen the leash Google has around your neck during your online activities, consider using Duck Duck Go (DDG) as your search engine. It’s a silly name, but a serious company with a serious purpose. DDG doesn’t track you, collect or share any of your information, or store your search history. You can search for something like “Philco TV parts” on either

One port to rule them all

Tech Talk #113 – September 28, 2019 The Universal Serial Bus, or USB. You know, that plug that can only go in one of two ways, but still takes three tries to get it plugged in? Yeah, that one. Where did USB come from, where is it going? And why? If you don’t know anything about PS/2 connectors, or parallel ports, DIN connectors, SCSI, Firewire, or 9-pin or 25-pin serial ports, you can thank USB.

iPhones and Windows10 – getting them to work together, Run Windows in Windows

Tech Talk #112 – September 14, 2019 iPhones and Windows10 – getting them to work together iPhones, from both a hardware and an apps perspective, have gotten so good that many people don’t need to use a laptop or a desktop. Social media, email, and shopping can all be done right on your phone. But what if you want to see the pictures from your iPhone on a bigger screen? Or work on a document

Tamper protection, PowerPoint > PDF, Pirated software = bad, Death and passwords

Tech Talk #111 – August 31, 2019 Windows Tamper Protection One of the features in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update is Tamper Protection. Tamper Protection prevents malicious applications from changing your Windows Security settings. A good thing to have, right? So why is it turned off by default? Microsoft ships Tamper Protection turned off because it can break enterprise management tools that businesses use. No worries, though you can turn it on yourself. Here’s

Locked out?

Tech Talk #110 – August 17, 2019 We all use devices (smartphone, tablet, or computer) that contain information we don’t want strangers or thieves to access. To protect our privacy, we lock our devices with a username/password combination. Since we’re going to be unlocking our device 5, 10, 15, 20 times a day, we use our fingerprints, our faces, passcode or PIN, or a lock screen pattern to unlock our device instead of our username/password.