TechByter Worldwide (formerly Technology Corner) with Bill Blinn

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.