The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
Every webmail service out there, be it Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or other, encourages you to upload or merge your contacts with their system. And most Mac and PC email programs automatically cross-reference an incoming email sender with their entry in your contacts. The result is often that their contact profile picture, and ‘friendly’ name, is displayed as the sender of that email in your inbox.
Usually we are writing about how to add or enable new skills and party tricks for Alexa to show off with your Amazon Echo. However, it may be that you want to remove skills from your Alexa’s list of skills, and don’t want to have to go through the agonizing 4-step process required through the Alexa app in order to disable each and every skill.
Companies, and indeed people, remake themselves all the time. And it seems that it is no different for Spotify, who has just announced that they are acquiring podcast producing and hosting platforms Gimlet and Anchor. And that they plan to acquire a whole lot more in the podcasting space, to become a full-service audio provider.
If you run any sort of website at all, it’s likely that you have at least dabbled with Adsense. And if so, you may also have decided to give Adsense Auto Ads a try. And if you did try Adsense Auto Ads it may be that you regret it, and want to get rid of the damned things. Which turns out to be easier said than done. Here’s how to stop Adsense Auto Ads and get rid of them for good.
Are you trying to find where is the Mail activity monitor on your Mac? If you are something of a geek, you probably really appreciated that the Apple mail app on your Mac allowed you to monitor every time an activity fired up in mail via a little monitor at the lower left of your Mail.app window. Here’s how to get it back.
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) admitted this week that it had suffered a data breach last August through October (2018), about which it learned last October (2018), but which it only advised those affected this week (the last week of January, 2019). Consider these dates when also considering the fact that just last month (December 2018, two months after ANA knew about the data breach) ANA was pushing back, hard, against legislation regarding more stringent requirements for – wait for it – notification of data breaches.
If you are a woman you know how awkward having a bra fitting can be. Bra retailer Soma figured to do away with that by introducing the Soma Somainnofit smart bra fitter at CES this month. The Soma smart bra lets you do your own bra fitting in the privacy of your home with a device that looks like a sports bra, but is actually a bra fit calculator.
The largest data set of astronomical sky survey data in history has just been made available on the Internet, for free, and for anyone to access. The data, the second edition of data from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), comprises over 1.6 petabytes of data.
In the past 24 hours it was revealed, and then admitted by Apple, that a bug in the FaceTime app was allowing FaceTime callers to listen in on the audio of what was going on around the recipient’s device before the recipient picked up the call. And if the recipient pressed the button to reject the call, instead of ending the call it would start broadcasting video from the recipient’s device as well!
Today Facebook announced new policies regarding removal of content deemed to go against community standards from Facebook Pages and in Facebook Groups, as well as measures to crack down on preventing those who have had their content removed from simply reinventing themselves in a different page or group.
While ‘archive’ had always been an option previously, now the only options for dealing with a received message in the Facebook Messenger app are ‘Mark as Unread’, ‘Ignore Messages’, blocking the sender, or deleting the message. Ignoring the message is the closest message option to archiving it, however that moves the message to “Message Requests”, which is not at all what you want to do.
The ability to “hide” a comment, as compared to deleting a comment, on Facebook has been around for a while, however Facebook users are still unsure of what it does. Does it hide it just so that you can’t see it? Does it hide it from all users? We explain, as well as explaining the difference between hiding a comment and deleting it.
The nettersphere is a’twitter with chatter about Amazon’s new free sample program, and people are wondering both how to get free samples on Amazon, and also how to stop getting free samples if you don’t want them. Here’s everything that you need to know.