Tech Talk #125 – March 14, 2020 I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, letting web sites show notifications about new messages and emails, even when the browser is closed. But somehow, somewhere along the way, websites started abusing the notifications feature. If you visit a web page just once, to read an article or check on a sale, that site can pop up notification messages to you. Honestly, it can
Tech Talk #124 – February 29, 2020 Protect your social media photos Did you know that your Facebook photos can, and are, being used by facial recognition software from companies like Clearview AI? Clearview AI sells its facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies and a big selling point is the more than three billion images in their database. Many if not most of those three billion images come from social media posts. Clearview AI
Tech Talk #123 – February 15, 2020 The internet. Billions and billions of devices loosely connected by copper wires, fiber optic cables, satellites, microwaves, and radio frequency networks. All these devices, whether doorbells, smartphones, thermostats, desktop computers, security cameras, laptops, streaming devices, or tablets, send and receive digital information through these networks. We know about wires in our neighborhood, WiFi routers and modems where we live and work, and cell phone towers. We may even
Tech Talk #122 – February 1, 2020 Windows 7 has become the new Windows XP. Since Microsoft has retired support for Windows 7, it’s suddenly become the best operating system ever. As a technical person, I appreciated the better stability and hardware-integration-without-exploding that Win7 brought us. The menus were faster, and people seemed better able to navigate and get work done. Windows 8 (shudder!) brought even better stabilization and device integration but ruined the desktop
Tech Talk #121 – January 18, 2020 Before we get started with how much Random-Access Memory (RAM) you need, let’s talk about what it is. There are two types of storage in your computer, permanent and temporary. Your hard drive or solid-state drive is permanent storage, and RAM is your computer’s temporary storage. Your computer uses RAM for loading and running programs and temporarily storing and using data. The contents of your RAM are lost
Tech Talk #120 – January 4, 2020 How to delete your Google data Maybe you don’t want to watch any more of those “how to replace a toilet” videos you had to look up last summer, but YouTube is still recommending them. Or maybe you listened to Macarena by Los Del Rio on Google Play to prove a point, but now you’re over it. How do you make Google forget? We know Google collects lots