News and Views

“Internet Explorer users can be as much as 21 times more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than people who go online with Mozilla’s Firefox browser, academic researchers from Microsoft’s backyard said in a recently published paper.” Read more here. I know that I never get spyware anymore, just a few innocuous tracking […]

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Last week Mom sent me an email. She has started doing the daily “Sudoku” puzzles in the local Tribune newspaper , but she asked me if I could create a computer program to make it easier for her to play them. She complained that she was erasing holes in the paper! So I threw something […]

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If you installed the new 1.5 version of Firefox, you may have noticed a bug. If you print a selection, or a selected set of pages, images don’t print correctly. They come out all black, or black and grey stripes. The developers are aware of the problem and there’s a Release Candidate version available that […]

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The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of their Thunderbird Email client, Version 1.5. The release notes are sparse and vague. Looks like mostly security and stability improvements, with a few new features. One improvement is that it will recognize headers set by Spam Assassin on your mail server, and automatically classify the message […]

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I have a nice insulated coffee cup that has a screw-on cap with a rubber O-ring seal. Putting the cap on has been very frustrating for me over the two years I have owned it. Sometimes I gently screw the cap on, and the seal is good, no coffee leaks. Other times no matter how […]

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Gisele got a new computer for Christmas, with a “Dual Processor” CPU. The technical details: It’s an Intel 820, which runs at 2.8 GHz. She has 1Gig of Dual DDR2 RAM, and a fast SATA hard drive. I did some playing around with it to see if I could tell any difference between her computer […]

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I’m pretty happy with my old Toshiba 50″ rear projection (CRT) TV, and have been for several years (is it 5? 7? More? Not sure.) I’ve continually said that the new DLP, Plasma and LCD HDTVs are nicer, but until I can get a larger display that is “significantly” better than what I have, I […]

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Between helping people repair their computers and spending time every day browsing and searching, I’ve come up with some good programs that people might be interested in. Most of these are open source; all of them are free. 1) Firefox Web Browser Much better for web browsing than Internet Explorer, and much less likely to […]

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