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03 Mar 2019 - Podcast #632 - (20:34)
It's Like NPR on the Web
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Operating systems are installed with a bunch of default options. Hundreds of them. The settings selected by the hardware manufacturer might not be the best settings for the way you want to use the computer. Let's take a look at some of the settings that can be changed.
This will be just a tiny sampling of changes that can be made. There are literally thousands of changes that can be made. Some are highly specialized but at least dozens and maybe hundreds of options will be of interest to average users.
Computers with relatively small solid-state drives are fast, but sometimes the SSD starts filling up. If you have a second internal mechanical drive or an external USB drive, it's possible to install applications there. The trade-off will be slower operation. SSDs are used for the operating system and applications because it allows them to start faster. Still, if the SSD is running out of space, setting the default installation location to an alternate drive will keep the boot drive from filling up.
There are other ways to recover space on the boot drive, though, and I'll get into those later.
To change the default app location, open Settings and type "default save locations" into the search dialog. In the resulting dialog box, you can specify a default location for applications, documents, music, photos and videos, movies and TV shows, and off line maps.
To move an application that's already installed, open Apps & Features, find the app you want to move, and single click it. This works only with apps, not desktop applications, so you won't see a move option for standard desktop applications.
Windows 10 keeps a lot of files that can be used when a problem occurs. For example, when a major update is installed, a Windows.old directory is created. It's a good idea to keep this folder around for a few days, but once you're sure that the new version is operating as intended, it's safe to delete it. Also, if you haven't emptied the Recycle Bin it may contain a lot of large files and crash dump files aren't automatically deleted.
To delete Windows.old, use File Explorer to open the boot drive (usually drive C). If Windows.old is present, you can delete it manually, but a better option -- and one that gets rid of more junk -- is right-clicking the drive, selecting Properties from the context menu, and then clicking the Disk Cleanup button. Select the files you want to delete and also click "Clean up system files".
This will lead to a variety of other options, including the ability to empty the Recycle Bin, remove temporary files, and generally remove files that are doing nothing more than taking up space.
While you're in this vicinity, you might want to see what's taking up space on the computer's drives. Start on the Storage panel of Settings and click a drive. This will open a panel that shows the types of files found on the drive. To see more, click one of the file types to open another panel showing directories that contain files of that type. From there, you can drill down to specific directories and files.
A clever Windows 10 feature that's disabled by default is called background scrolling. Maybe something like this has happened to you: You're working on one document and using a second document for reference. The second document is open in a separate window or on a second monitor. When you need to see another part of the reference document, you have to click inside its window and then use the mouse's scroll wheel or the scroll bars to get to the new location. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just place the mouse over the second window and use the scroll wheel? You can if Background Scrolling is enabled.
Open the Mouse panel in Settings and turn on the option to "Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them."
Nearly everyone who uses Windows 10 has a Microsoft account. This makes logging in easier and helps to maintain settings across multiple computers. It also gives the user a OneDrive account. You may think that OneDrive is just for storing files. It's useful for that, of course, but it can do a lot more.
When you enable the Fetch option on multiple computers, you'll be able to open files from one computer when you're using another computer regardless of where the computers are located. Both have to be on-line, of course, and OneDrive must be running on both. When those conditions have been met, (1) open OneDrive from the Notification Area and click View Online. Then (2) select a computer and (3) navigate to the file you want.
The first time you try to connect, you'll need to be able to prove that you are who you say you are. The easiest option involves using 2-factor authentication with the mobile phone number linked to your Microsoft account.
To activate this feature, open OneDrive from the Notification Area, click More and then Settings from the pop-up menu. In settings, select "Let me use OneDrive to fetch any of my files on this PC." You then need to log out of OneDrive or restart the computer. Follow the same process on the other computer and you'll have remote access to all of the drives, even network drives that are mapped to a drive letter.
In last week's program, I described how Focus Assist can be used to limit the interruptions that Windows 10 displays with text boxes that pop in from the lower right corner. You have other options, so let's look at them.
If Focus Assist seems to be the equivalent of flipping between Mama Bear's porridge and Papa Bear's porridge, you can create the Baby Bear's equivalent by modifying Action Center' settings. You can specify which apps are able to display notifications. Start by going back to Notifications and Actions in Settings. Now, instead of the blunt object that offers little more than off or on, you can scroll down to see a list of applications that can send notices.
Each sender can be set to off or on and those senders that are enabled have other settings that control whether banners are shown, whether a sound plays, how many notifications from a single application can be present in the notification area, and what the notification's priority is.
These are just a few of the settings that can be changed. When you wonder if there might be a better way for Windows to respond to certain conditions, start by typing a word into the Settings search box. Maybe you don't like the standard sounds that ship with Windows. Typing "sounds" in Settings will offer several suggestions, one of which is "Change System Sounds" and selecting that opens a dialog box where you can choose System Sounds or No Sounds. That may not seem like much of a choice, but you can save System Sounds using a new name (maybe "My Sounds") and then browse for sound files that you'd like to use instead of the default sounds.
That's a trivial example, but performing a search like this will often lead you to settings that can be used to make exactly the changes you want. If you find nothing there, try Microsoft's support site and search for what you want to do ("change system sounds"). Recommendations here come from Microsoft support technicians and from users; the answers aren't always correct, so proceed with caution.
If you're still looking for help, try a more general search engine query (Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go) for the same term. Be even more careful here because not all websites that claim to provide answers are reliable and some may try to install applications that claim to find problems, run a purported scan, find a problem, and then fix the "problem" only when you pay.
On March 12, we'll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee at the physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, was trying to solve a problem. Scientists needed to be able to share information and Berners-Lee had an idea for a system of interlinked documents. He submitted a document called "Information Management: A Proposal" that described his vision. It was approved.
Berners-Lee released his code publicly on December 25, 1990, and in 1993 the first commercial browser (Mosaic) was developed at the University of Illinois by Marc Andreessen. It was the basis for Netscape, which was released in 1994. So this month we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the idea that led to the web.
In 1990, Steve Jobs had built his NeXT computer and that's what Berners-Lee used to show what his invention could do. CERN has now rebuilt the original browser so that it will work inside a contemporary browser. If you'd like to see what everybody was excited about in those days, launch CERN's "WorldWideWeb" application. Your first thought will probably be along the lines of "Wow! That's primitive!" And you would be correct.
To view a modern page as it would have appeared back then, (1) select "Document" from the menu and then click (2) "Open from full document reference", (3) fill in a URL, and click (4) Open. I used last week's program link.
Graphics were not supported back then. Images were supported in 1993 by NCSA Mosaic. (1) The page title appears at the top of the window and (2) the menu is represented as list items. The podcast link (3) appears, but it wouldn't have back then. This might be something that is being displayed by a modern browser after being passed through by the original CERN browser. Entities such as " " (a non-breaking space) weren't supported back then, so they're just shown in text.
Several browser wars have erupted. In the early days, Mosaic had the lead, but Netscape took over in the late 1990s. Internet Explorer took most of the market from 2001 to 2010, but Google's Chromium has largely taken over. Even Microsoft's Edge browser will be based on the Chromium engine soon. Next week's main topic will be another browser that's based on Chromium.
Among the scams I've identified in less than 10 seconds this week is a "Western Union" message that claims to be transferring nearly $2000 "for my uncle". Let's take a look at the signs that mark this message as a phony.
The message claims to be from Fenando Stalin. I don't know anyone named Fenando Stalin. Fernando (not Fenando) is a Spanish name and Stalin is a Russian name. Stalin isn't really a name in Russian. It means "man of steel" and it's the name adopted by Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the native of Georgia who became the USSR's premier following the suspicious death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who adopted the name Lenin. This is suspicious, but not definitive.Too many red flags exist to consider this anything other than a fraud.
Apparently scammers can buy message templates now and then just fill in the appropriate bits of information to support their particular scam. I received two messages within hours of each other this week that were nearly identical, except that one claimed to be from Google and the other from F-acebook. Yes, there was a hyphen between "F" and "acebook".
The attempts were so lame that I didn't need to do more than just glance at the messages. I didn't have to trace IP addresses or find out who has registered a domain name or look at the raw message stream. Everything needed was right there on screen in front of me.
Error after error after error. So the score for the scammers is 0 for 2. Or, if you want to count the additional copies of that message that I received the same day, 0 for 15.
While writing this section, I was listening (as I often do) to music. If you once owned some high-end audio equipment, it may have had VU meters. VU stands for "volume unit" and the typical meters represent sound levels from -20dB to +3dB. Today's volume indicators are digital, of course, and most have a much wider range, but there's something about those old-school VU meters that appeals to me.
When recording the podcast, I set Adobe Audition's VU meter function to a 60dB range, from -60dB to 0, but I could choose a 120dB range. Analog gear had a bit of headroom above 0dB before distortion occurred, so radio folks aimed to keep the levels as close to 0dB as possible and occasional +3dB peaks didn't hurt. Some just ran everything wide open, but that's not possible with digital sound. Instead many people who record sound digitally aim for the -12dB to -15dB range and then adjust the final output up so that the peaks will be around -3dB. Going past 0 in digital results in what's called clipping and the result is not pleasant.
That's a lot of extraneous information. If you remember VU meters and you'd like to add them to your computer sound system, download VUMeter.exe from the VU Player website. James Chapman wrote the application in 2006 and updated it in 2010 to work with Windows Vista and Windows 7. It works fine with Windows 10, too, and doesn't need to be installed. Just double-click the executable file to run it. The VU meters can be resized by dragging a corner. Right-clicking also allows for selection of a recording or playback device.
Chapman has other free applications on the site, including an audio player.
Have you already bought your last car? Some people think so. They say that the future will be about shared vehicles that are used only when we will need them. This is already being used in some cities. And self-driving cars are coming.
SEAT and IBM are working on another part of the future. SEAT revealed its concept car (Minimó) in Barcelona this week. The application announced the next day, Mobility Advisor, uses IBM Watson AI and could advise those who live in cities about their daily transportation options: From cars and scooters to bikes and public transport.
Currently under development and designed to run as a mobile app on 4G/5G networks, ‘Mobility Advisor’ uses IBM Watson Assistant to provide users with a conversational interface to plan and optimize routes and suggest the most suitable transportation options.
“Traffic congestion and environmental challenges are putting huge pressure on cities to transform,” said Jordi Caus, SEAT’s Head of New Urban Mobility Concepts. “At SEAT we are leading the way by working with innovative cities and technology companies to come up with solutions to make mobility easier and more efficient. With its advanced cloud and AI technologies, IBM is helping us to innovate new approaches to mobility that will transform our business strategy while improving the lives of people living in urban areas.”