Techbyter Worldwide (formerly Technology Corner) With Bill Blinn

When a charge for a service I didn’t recognize showed up in an alert from my bank, I found that I had been signed up for a video streaming service I’d never heard of. Eliminating the service was easy enough, but a lot of people have reported terminating it was difficult. In Short Circuits: Even those of us who are not typographers, graphic designers, or publishers sometimes need to deal with typefaces. What most people think of as “fonts” aren’t fonts, but this may be a surprise: It doesn’t really matter. • Anyone who relies on Amazon’s ratings to make buying decisions isn’t getting the full story. A service that rates that ratings helps, but it’s still wise to proceed with caution.

Exposure hasn’t had an upgrade from the X7 version, which was released in 2021, but it’s still a good choice both as a standalone application and as a plug-in for Lightroom Classic. In Short Circuits: Speaking of golden oldies, I encountered a little connector that could be used to join lots of devices two years ago. It saved the day a week ago when I had to deal with an IPhone that had a low battery. • There’s a lot of concern about the dangers of artificial intelligence, so I went straight to the source and asked two AI engines about the dangers of AI.

A hijacked Facebook account can be a lot of fun, but only if you have a most peculiar understanding of the term “fun”. It wasn’t my account, but I had to deal with the repercussions of a hack recently. In Short Circuits: The technology that powers GPS, Bluetooth devices, and other modern high technology was invented 83 years ago by someone considered to be “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Even now she doesn’t get the recognition she deserved in 1941. • Ever notice how technology someone doesn’t understand, doesn’t like, or fears is labeled as “bloatware”. That’s the term being used with AI today, along with a fair amount of faulty logic.

Which is better, cable or streaming? There are lots of variables and cable is perfect for some people while streaming is the winner for others. After switching to streaming three years ago, now seemed a good time to re-evaluate. In Short Circuits: You might have some old digital photos that would benefit greatly from today’s AI-powered applications. I have a couple of examples. • “Warning: Your privacy settings can’t guarantee your privacy on Facebook.” That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

The more digital photos you have, the harder it is to find the one you’re looking for. Excire Search, a plug-in for Lightroom Classic, makes the process much easier. In Short Circuits: Libre Office is the ideal office suite for those who are unable or unwilling to pay a monthly subscription fee. The latest version, though, has a surprising number. • Microsoft wants to be the king of artificial intelligence and may well succeed, but do we really need a special AI key on our keyboards?

Free, open-source software is often viewed as being second rate when compared to commercial software, but sometimes the best application actually does cost nothing. In Short Circuits: When something starts with Windows, but you don’t want it to, finding a way to make it stop can be a challenge. Autoruns fixes that. • Phones no longer have dials, but we still say we’re dialing a number. Hardware, software, and processes are changing so fast that some arrive, flourish, and disappear seemingly in days.

Windows 11 cannot be installed on certain computers, mainly older models that lack sufficient hardware, but it is possible to force-install Windows 11 on computers that would fail otherwise because they lack hardware security features. In Short Circuits: With so many free email clients, you might wonder why anyone would be willing to pay $60 per year for one. Anyone who uses multiple mobile devices and wishes the same application was available for all portable and desktop systems might consider it. • If, like me, you’re someone who customizes the look and feel of Windows beyond what Microsoft allows, Stardock’s Icon Packager is a quick and easy way to make big changes.

Anyone who has digital photos that are more than a decade old could improve their quality substantially with an application that uses artificial intelligence to fill in details that don’t exist in the originals. In Short Circuits: Speaking of AI, if you’re trying to keep up with what’s new, you may suspect that it’s difficult and maybe impossible. Anything written more than a day or two ago is probably already outdated. • Have you ever needed to use a second computer near your primary computer only to find that making space for a second mouse and keyboard cramps your style? Multiplicity may be just what you need.

The Sysinternals suite of utilities has been around since the 1990s and has been part of Microsoft since 2006. More than 70 utilities make Sysinternals essential for all Windows computer users and today we’ll take a look at just two of them. In Short Circuits: Believable sound effects are essential for motion pictures and podcasts, but it’s not an easy process. The first step involves identifying and obtaining the right sounds. • Some Windows users like to keep all of their commonly used applications on the Desktop. That has never been my preferred method, but one of the applications included in Stardock’s Object Desktop suite has convinced me to make better use of the Desktop.

We don’t run out of disk space as often now as we did in the early days, but you might wonder about discarding some old junk even if space isn’t a significant problem. Several utilities are available to help you identify the junk. In Short Circuits: Scammers work hard to earn your trust and then steal your money. A Washington Post article about a retired federal scientist who was bilked out of her life savings is a cautionary tale, and we all need to be on the lookout for thieves. • Microsoft’s built-in screen capture tool has improved, now including the ability to capture video sequences, but it still lags behind both commercial and open source applications.

Microsoft’s new PC Manager takes the place of some other utilities such as CCleaner and offers quick, easy access to built-in Windows functions that are often several layers deep in Settings or the Control Panel. In Short Circuits: If you’ve ever wished you could unsend an email because you forgot to add an attachment or make an important point, SendLater will save the day, but only if you use Thunderbird. • Stardock’s SoundPackager makes it easy to add, change, or delete sounds that Windows plays to notify users of specific events, and it cost just $5.

Because digital photographs are free, we take a lot of them and that can be a problem when we want to find one particular image among tens of thousands on the computer. A new version of Excire Foto adds artificial intelligence that helps a lot. In Short Circuits: Anyone who operates a web domain on one of the big hosting services may occasionally have trouble with email messages being rejected as spam or just being quietly deleted. Using a separate, dedicated SMTP service can eliminate the problem, possibly without cost. • Stardock Software has applications that can make your Windows computer look better, some that can make the computer work better, and some that do both. We’ll take a look. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): Was the 2003 version of Microsoft’s office suite just another pretty face? Compared to what we have today, the office suite was small and plain, but the growth pattern was obvious.

Like the Windows 11 Start Menu or hate it, Start11 from Stardock can make it better. Maybe you’d like the start menu to work the way it did in Windows 7, 8, or 10. Maybe you like the Windows 11 approach, but would like to add some features. That’s the point of Start11. In Short Circuits: Python is a popular programming language. It’s powerful, but the basics are easy to learn. If you’ve looked at Python because it’s now supported by Excel, you’ve already started. Maybe this is a language most computer users should be familiar with. • The TechByter website was down for several hours on 8 November and getting a straight answer from the hosting service turned out to be much more difficult than it should have been. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): Numerous “If Microsoft Made Automobiles” and “If Apple Was An Airline” pieces have circulated on the internet. In late 2003, I received a copy of “If Microsoft|Apple Made Elevators” and I included it on Technology Corner. Enjoy!

Playing DVDs and Blu-ray discs on a computer can sometimes be better than watching them on a television, but Microsoft doesn’t include a player with Windows, and the Media Player app is quite limited. Other options exist, but some are pricey. One is free. In Short Circuits: Even if you use just a single chat application, taking a look at Beeper is a good idea. And if you use multiple chat applications, I consider it essential. • Has your Facebook account ever been cloned by a crook? There’s one simple change you can make to your Facebook account that strongly discourages data thieves. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): In 2003, Apple was beginning the long transition from 32-bit processors to 64-bit processors with its new G5 Dual CPUs.

Development cycles for large applications once were frequently 18 months. Now it’s a rare day that we don’t receive a bug fix, security update, or feature release for at least one application. Keeping up is a challenge. In Short Circuits: Heat is the enemy of electronic devices and notebook computers are highly vulnerable. I recently added a device that places cooling fans below my primary notebook computer and it helps even more than expected. • I’ve been seeing articles about how to get Microsoft 365 for free. Although some of the suggestions will be successful, most of them seem like just too much work. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): AOL, in my estimation, did something right in 2003. What I offered was kind of a back-handed compliment, though.

Artificial intelligence is something Adobe has been working on for several years and this year’s advances mark the beginning of what seems likely to be an explosion of advanced capabilities. In Short Circuits: Adobe pointed to some of its plans for future products at the annual Max conference in Los Angeles. The sneak peeks could easily be mistaken for pure magic. • If your Windows computer hasn’t yet updated to version 23H2 and you’d like it to, the process is both quick and easy. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): In 2003, Apple released another of its big cat operating systems, Panther, and I was quite impressed by what it could do.

AeroAdmin is an excellent choice if you need to help friends or family solve problems with their computers and when you want to log onto your computer when you’re not in front of it. In Short Circuits: Artificial intelligence can create text for you, and it can paraphrase your text. Is it worth trying an application such as QuillBot to see how good an editor it is? • We’ve been able to synchronize the Windows clipboard between computers for a while now, but you can also synchronize the clipboard with your Android phone. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): Most of us occasionally think about “The Good Old Days”, but if we really stop and think about it, it’s clear the the good old days really weren’t that good.

Copilot is the most significant new feature in the Windows 11 Fall update, version 23H2. If your computer hasn’t been updated to 23H2, you can force the update or obtain some of the new features even without updating. In Short Circuits: Opera is a good browser that I’ve recommended several times in the past 25 years, and I still do recommend it, but only if you perform a fully manual installation to avoid some nasty “features”. • It’s hard to keep up with improvements in artificial intelligence imagery. I took a look at images from Adobe Firefly, Canva, and Microsoft’s Copilot, which uses DALL-E3. There’s one standout winner. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): Some of the security fixes Microsoft patched in 2003 seem quite simple by today’s standards, but others are similar to issues that are fixed today, differing only in the affected components.

Adobe didn’t wait for the annual Max conference to roll out some of the new features for Photoshop and other apps. Generative Fill and Generative Expand are still resolution limited, but they are already surprisingly useful. In Short Circuits: Printers have long been the bane of IT support, and Microsoft has plans to make printers a bit less vexing. Manufacturers will need to work with a universal printer subsystem instead of writing drivers for their devices. • If your browser and any other applications that can display WebP graphics are up to date, you’re safe from a nasty flaw. If not, now would be a good time to update them. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): It’s not unheard of for Windows computers to run for months between restarts these days, but it wasn’t common in 2003 and I was somewhat jealous of a Linux system that had been up for more than seven months.

The main article is really three short pieces: One about PowerToys Run, a quick and easy way to start an application or launch a search; the next about the now limited “unlimited” hosting plan from Bluehost; and finally a fond farewell to WordPad. In Short Circuits: Living like it’s 1983. If you loved WordStar, you can now install WordTsar and try to remember some of the obscure key sequences that made things happen. • If you’ve ever read either a privacy policy or a website’s terms of service, you’re in the minority. A service is available to show the important points without requiring the consumption of many pages of legalese. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): Burning CDs and DVDs was a big thing in 2003, but few of today’s computers have optical disc readers, to say nothing of burners. It was a short era.