Earlier this week, I installed Vivaldi browser, and decided to make it my default after reading CEO Jon von Tetzchner’s blog post about the potentially corrupt practice of Google suspending his company’s Adwords campaign after he was critical of them. I have resisted browsers made from Chromium because I was never sure how much […]
Tag: software
The lies and myths of Facebook, and what the tech press is too scared to investigate
Lie no. 1: ‘We want to show you ads that you’ll find relevant. That’s why we have ad preferences, a tool that lets you view, add and remove preferences we created for you based on things like your profile information, actions you take on Facebook and websites and apps you use off Facebook.’ ‘Choose an […]
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Bye to the US news app that ranks the Steven Joyce dildo incident above Martin Crowe’s passing
I’ve just switched from Inside, the much vaunted news app from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, to Wildcard as my principal news app on my phone. I never got to use Circa (which I understand Jason was also behind), which sounded excellent: by the time I downloaded it, they had given up. But we all need […]
What Facebook’s anti-malware malware does to your Windows 10 computer
When I said in January that Facebook’s and Kaspersky’s anti-malware malware (there’s no better term for it, though of course they will deny that it was malware) had it in for McAfee, what did I mean? As some of you know, I fell for Facebook’s insistence that I download its malware if I wanted […]
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Meizu M2 Note: welcome to a Google-free mid-2010s
Other than for the landline, I’ve never bought a phone before. Each cellphone has come as a result of a company plan or a loyalty gift from the telco, but when my Huawei Ascend Y200 began needing resets several times a day—I’ve had computer experts tell me this is the phone, or the SD card […]
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Facebook forced me to download their anti-malware, and my own antivirus gets knocked out
When Facebook says it cares about security, I laugh. Every day I see bots, spammers and click-farm workers plague the site, and despite reporting them, Facebook lets them stay. It will make a statement saying it would no longer kick off drag queens and kings, then proceed to kick off drag queens and kings. So […]
Capricious Cortana
I have never seen a program as inconsistent as Microsoft’s Cortana. We were always taught that computers were very logical, that they all followed a certain set of code each time. Not so Cortana, which has had more different behaviours than anything I have ever seen. When I run into technical issues, […]
My first day with Windows 10
I never expected that the Windows 10 download would ever begin. I had registered for it, but the Windows 10 notification window kept coming up with various excuses, talking about my drivers being out of date, then claiming that because of the automatic log-in, the download would not start. Clicking ‘Tell me more’ never did […]
Bugs galore: frozen while using Firefox; keyboard and mouse unresponsive when using Windows 7
Last week was an interesting one for computer bugs. Apple took 42 attempts to install the latest Itunes update on one Mac (and that was the good one that normally presents no issues with updates), but, to its credit, once it was done there were no further problems. Windows, however, gave me a few headaches […]
Firefox, Waterfox, Cyberfox displaying no text? Do the opposite of what you are told
After months of avoiding the latest Mozilla Firefox because it would display no text, installing, removing, and reinstalling an older version of Waterfox just so I could do some work, and experimenting over the last day with Cyberfox, which included editing fonts, looking at GFX settings, editing the registry, and doing an awful lot of […]
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