Category: Misc
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Facebook’s Digital Unclaimed Freight Train
What will happen, 30 years from now, to the 300 million photos we uploaded yesterday to Facebook? Image Source Here’s your answer: Facebook will have them. We (probably) won’t. Facebook will have them labeled, categorized, ranked, and documented as to where and when they were taken, what they’re of, and who’s in them. We (almost…
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Make Your Own Animated GIFs
Animated GIF files are the rage these days. You know, those digital photos that contain moving objects and people, not unlike the hung pictures at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. Here’s an example: My niece, Bella Tanguay, making her first-ever horizontal dive. She already was doing straight-down vertical dives, headfirst, but needed coaxing from…
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Insert Special Characters
Back in the typewriter age, we knew how to add “special characters” such as exotic punctuation marks: Press a key along the top row for “$” or “%” etc. More common ones, like periods and commas, were among the main keys. Now with computers, we have Unicode characters, HTML characters, extended ASCII characters — more…
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A Walk in the Park
Cheri and I live just a couple of blocks from Chilhowee Park, an important and historic part of Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s the site of the Tennessee Valley Fair, held every September, as well as many conventions and exhibitions. To us it’s a walk in the park: a site, that is, for exercise walking. There’s a…
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Boomer Proves You Need Your Own Website
Still not sure you need your own website, under your own name? Boomer the Dog proves you do! Before we get to Boomer, here’s a wrap-up of what I’ve been saying about owning your own name: Like it or not, you have a public image. It’s an image magnified many times over by the Internet.…
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Holding on to Autumn
This time of year, I cling to the beauty of autumn. Brightly colored leaves, I love. Falling leaves — not my favorite. Because once they fall, they’re gone. So I “hold on tight”, cherishing every scrap of beauty, even as it fades away like the smile of Alice’s Cheshire cat. More and more trees show…
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Stop CryptoLocker Virus by Showing Extensions
There’s a deadly new Windows virus going around: CryptoLocker. Take all the usual precautions. But if you haven’t already done so — change your Windows folder options to show file extensions. Then don’t click open anything that looks like a data file (PDF, JPG, DOC, etc.) but ends in .EXE. Because then it’s a wolf…
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Rubik’s Robots: Real Life Transformers
Real life is increasingly — incessantly — inexorably invading what was once the privileged domain of science fiction. “Rubik’s Robots” — real life transformer robots based on principles of the famous Rubik’s Cube — are in the works at MIT! Erno Rubik, inventor of the Rubik’s Cube, is one of the fascinating people I follow…
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Are All the Good Domain Names Already Taken?
Are all the good domain names already taken? No, they aren’t! Millions of the best, most valuable website domain names are lying around unclaimed. Ripe for the picking — waiting to be registered by someone just like you. You’ve heard the opposite. The world is full of pundits telling you that all the good website…