Normally this would be an off week for TechByter Worldwide, two days after Christmas, and five days before the new year begins; so it’s mainly silence, but this is also the end.

Internet service providers promise specific upload and download speeds. In most cases, these promises are stated as speeds “up to” whatever the promise is, which would allow the ISP to say 15Mbps is in the “up to 500Mbps” speed range they promised. That doesn’t happen much these days, but it’s still worth checking occasionally. In Short Circuits: There’s no cost for Adobe’s PDF Reader, but Adobe’s solutions start around $150 per year if you need to edit PDFs, even occasionally. There’s a free online service that might be more than sufficient. • Data breaches happen too often to be concerned about individual incidents. Instead, consider all of your relevant information is out there somewhere and instead develop a defense plan.

Text messages on our phones are so easy to use and so common that it’s all too easy to forget how useful they are to scammers. Every text message should be treated with suspicion. In Short Circuits: Recently I needed to format a 64GB thumb drive using FAT32, one of the older formatting types. The Windows formatting tool won’t allow it, so maybe you think the FAT32 limit is 32GB. It’s not and formatting the large drive turned out to be refreshingly easy. • Sometimes I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee or Marc Andreessen had any idea, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that the browsers they were developing to view simple text files would expand and virtually take over the world.

Some of Adobe’s improvements in Photoshop and the other photographic applications are little short of magic. Boring and cumbersome tasks can be handled by AI, giving photographers more time for creativity. In Short Circuits: If you’ve ever had your Facebook account stolen by thieves, or know someone who has been a victim, you understand how difficult it is to recover the account, if recovery is even possible. That’s why you should act now to enable security measures for your account, particularly two-factor authentication.

Because there is no program during Thanksgiving week, here is a link to last week’s podcast.

Is there a key on the keyboard that you absolutely despise? Maybe the CapsLock key. Maybe some other key that causes trouble for you when you press it accidentally. There’s an easy and free way to banish keys like this. In Short Circuits: Maybe you wish you could convert a key you don’t use to perform a useful function, maybe even start an app you use all the time. There’s also an easy and free way to do that. • Many early users of computers mastered the skill of creating batch files to perform repetitive tasks. Forty years later, these skills can be useful even with Windows 10 and Windows 11, and the skills aren’t that hard to learn.

Windows seemingly has adjustments, settings, configurations, and modifications for just about everything. Despite a decade-long effort to finalize the Settings app, the Control Panel is still needed sometimes and finding the adjustment you’re seeking can be difficult. That’s one reason you might want to enable God Mode. In Short Circuits: One of the first things technicians want us to do when something goes wrong with a computer or other electronic device is turn it off and turn it back on again. This actually fixes a lot of problems, but why? • Do you use Wikipedia for research? Millions of people do every day and, despite the doubters, it’s usually quite accurate.

Two words make my teeth itch when I hear them, particularly when I hear them from photographers. Someone who claims to be artistic and creative probably should use “always” and “never” rarely, if at all. In Short Circuits: Facebook seems to be the most annoying application on Earth, yet people rarely abandon it. There are ways to make it better, at least on computers, and I recently switched from one of the primary players to the other. • We need to get to the BIOS settings screen rarely, and getting there can be difficult. What if you could put an icon on your desktop to get there with just a click?

No matter how much effort Microsoft expends on the Start Menu, it will never please everyone. The Start Menu does offer a lot of customizations, but if you really want to take control there’s Start 11 from Stardock. In Short Circuits: Updating to the latest version of Windows 24H2 created some significant problems on my primary computer, but the update worked flawlessly on the tablet computer. This is why every operating system update needs to be approached with caution. • Too many organizations still force users to change their passwords too frequently, mistakenly believing that doing so improves security. The opposite is true.

I talk about libraries frequently because they are probably the best value provided for our tax dollars. If you’re looking for access to news media that are often behind a paywall, your local library may be able to help. In Short Circuits: Continuing with the topic of locating reliable, honest, unbiased news sources in the days leading up to this year’s presidential election, we’ll take a look at 1440 News. • Podcasts for the past two weeks were cancelled because Phyllis and I were both dealing with covid when I should have been preparing the report. You may already have had covid, perhaps more than once. For us, it was our inaugural voyage.

It seems that I lied last week when I said TechByter Worldwide would resume this week. Covid is in the rear-view mirror, but I still can’t talk for more than 30 seconds without a sneeze or a cough.

Here’s where I would mention the upcoming topics, but there aren’t any this week. That’s because Phyllis and I both contracted covid after avoiding it entirely for more than four years. I’m better now, but there’s not enough time to finish the program that would have been here. I’ll pick things up again next week.

Just as people have fingerprints, so do browsers. The fingerprint is what allows the browser to be tracked from site to site. If you find this disturbing, there are ways to fight back. In Short Circuits: If you’ve ever posted something to Facebook and immediately received a like or a friend request from someone you don’t know, it’s probably yet another scourge that Facebook can’t (or won’t) do anything about. • Chrono Quest is a game that requires placing six historical events in the correct chronological order. It’s amusing, but don’t expect to learn any useful history by playing.

The National Institutes of Health would like to know more about you. Share some information with the All of Us project and you’ll help researchers understand more about disease treatment, control, and prevention. In Short Circuits: With the internet drowning in the proliferation of scams and fraud, staying safe involves treating any message from any source with more than a bit of skepticism. • When the plastic battery cover on my Bose TV speaker remote control broke, I contacted Bose to see if they sold replacements. What should have been a 5-minute chat went on for 40 minutes, required a 20-minute follow-up chat, and the problem involving a 5¢ part still hasn’t been resolved.

Regardless of what software came with your scanner, VueScan will do a better job and you’ll never have to worry about the scanner being orphaned by outdated drivers. In Short Circuits: Library Genesis, a source for downloading millions of books, articles, and academic papers, is controversial to say the least. Let’s consider the pros and cons. • I had a can of Stone Brewing’s FML hazy double IPA recently. Then I looked at the back of the can and learned more about those letters, which (in this case) mean “Fear Movie Lions”.

Is there a “best” browser? Of course there is, but your “best” browser may not be my “best” browser, and my “best” today at noon may not be my “best” browser this afternoon at 3. What’s “best” depends on a lot of variables. In Short Circuits: If paper sticky notes are all over your desk and computer, maybe it’s time to switch to the electronic version. • There are benefits to having an email address that obscures your identity and can be abandoned as needed without affecting your primary address.

You’re going to die someday. As a eulogy I once heard put it, “The young may die and the old must.” Dying is as easy as it ever has been but the job for survivors can be difficult if the they have no access to user names and passwords for the services we’ve used to make our lives easier. In Short Circuits: Windows has lots of hidden little keystroke sequences that can improve your life as a computer user, but first you have to find them and remind yourself to use them. • Microsoft’s Power Toys has long been one of my favorite utilities and one of its components, Power Toys Run, recently received a major update.

If you think sorting out differences between cellular plans is a challenge, try wading through information for the low-cost plans, particularly if the person who will use the plan has some unusual requirements. In Short Circuits: Microsoft has been talking about eliminating the Control Panel for about two decades and yet it remains. It may eventually be forgotten, but not gone. • A pleasant Friday afternoon was interrupted by two emails from my health insurance provider. The first said I had used the “forgot password” function and the second said my password had been changed. Stopping the scammer took only an hour, but it was an hour of frustration.

Sometimes the fastest and most efficient way to diagnose a problem with a computer involves creating a new account. In Short Circuits: When I increased storage on a tablet computer with a 1.5TB MicroSDXC memory card, I was surprised by the 10-year warranty it came with. I shouldn’t have been. • When you’re looking for a new or replacement disk drive, a quarterly reliability summary from Backblaze can help with the decision.

Canva, especially with its acquisition of Affinity’s Photo, Design, and Publishing apps, is a powerful competitor for graphic design, but don’t expect it to unseat Adobe anytime soon, if ever. In Short Circuits: Artificial intelligence for visual tasks is advancing so fast that any examination of the current state of affairs is nearly pointless, but let’s take a look at what Adobe, Microsoft, and Canva are up to.