Lots of people wonder: how to delete Facebook messages? Or, even, can you delete Facebook messages? For some reason, deleting Facebook messages doesn’t seem straightforward to some. But deleting messages on Facebook is actually pretty easy. In fact, you can even delete all Facebook messages with just a few clicks. (And be clear, Facebook chat messages are the same thing as Facebook messages, as you will see, so yes, you can delete Facebook chat messages, too.) Here’s how.

It’s happened to the best of us: you’ve forgotten the PIN number for your credit card or debit card. Specifically, this time, you can’t remember the PIN for your Paypal debit card. Never fear, because changing the PIN for your Paypal debit card is as simple as just creating a new PIN number for your Paypal debit card, which you can do easily from within your Paypal account – and you don’t even need your old PIN number to do it! Here’s how.

We apologize for the crude wording here – ‘How to get rid of all the crap that Facebook puts in your timeline newsfeed’ – but really there is no other word for it. Have any of you requested that Facebook put “upcoming events” to which you have no connection in your newsfeed? (Many people refer to this as their timeline, but it’s actually your newsfeed.) How about all those ads disguised as “such-and-such a friend Likes this”? How can you get away from all the advertising and other spam in your Facebook news feed, short of avoiding Facebook altogether (not necessarily a bad idea)? Here’s how.

In the past we’ve shown you how to create a foreign language filter in Gmail, and we’ve shown you how to have Gmail automatically delete certain spam without your having to sift through it. But we have finally figured out the holy grail of beating the Gmail spam filter into submission: How to have Gmail automatically delete foreign language character spam – for example spam in Chinese, or spam in Japanese. It seems that there should be a way to tell Gmail “I will never receive legitimate email in Chinese or Japanese (or Korean or Russian, etc.), in Kanji or Hanzi or Hanja or other logograms, so always delete it” but there is no built-in way. But there is a way to have foreign character spam automatically deleted by Gmail, and we have discovered it, and here it is.

Some time ago Facebook and Spotify unleashed an app that spews Spotify spam all over your Facebook wall or Facebook timeline. Any time any of your Facebook friends listens to music on Spotify, if they are using the Spotify app, it posts to your wall telling you what they are listening to. “So-and-so listened to such-and-such on Spotify.” Who the flip cares? If we wanted to know what our friends on Facebook were listening to, we’d go to their house and listen with them! Here is how to remove the Spotify notifications from your Facebook page.

Many an iPhone owner has a love/hate relationship with their iPhone. In large part this is because generally the iPhone is a masterful device, which ‘just works’ in so many ways, and has so many cool features, that it’s searingly frustrating when something that should be simple – should be so obvious – isn’t. Take, for example, rejecting an incoming call from the iPhone’s lock screen. Just how do you decline a call from the iPhone lock screen? Here’s how.

Here’s the skinny: LinkedIn experienced a password breach today – 6.5 million passwords were leaked. Now, according to reports, LinkedIn has 160 million users, so that’s not even 5% of the total number of LinkedIn passwords that could have been compromised, but its certainly enough that you should go to LinkedIn right now and change your password. Here’s how.

If you have been searching for a way to add an attachment – such as to attach an image – to an email in an iPhone, and think that you must be crazy because you can’t figure it out, well, you’re not crazy. While there is a way to email an image from the iPhone by first selecting the image, then hitting “email it”, there is in fact no obvious way on an iPhone or iPad to attach an image or other file to an already-existing email. And that, we think, is the crazy thing. In any other email application, and on any other smartphone (particularly Android) there is usually an “attach” button right in the email window! But not on the iPhone. But, there is a way to attach an image or other attachment in an iPhone, it’s just not obvious. Here it is.

While it’s often fine to leave all of the apps running on your iPhone or iPad, sometimes, for various reasons, you want to completely shut down an app , i.e. kill it, stop it from running, or close it.  It’s actually really easy to completely close an iPhone app (or an iPad app), but this is another one of those things that, while easy, is not obvious.  So here is a step-by-step tutorial (only 3 steps!) to completely shut down and stop an app from running.

If you get frustrated when your iPhone screen switches from the upright position (known as “portrait” view) to the horizontal orientation (known as “landscape” view) at the slightest change swivel of your wrist, you may have gone searching for a way to lock the orientation so that doesn’t happen. On the iPad, there is an external button to lock the orientation of the screen, but on the iPhone that same button serves the mute function. Here’s how to lock your iPhone screen so that it is locked in the portrait orientation.

More and more, people are performing web searches on their smart phones. It’s great to be able to do that, but it also can be frustrating to try to find what you’re looking for on that tiny screen, or without the full tools available to you with a keyboard or mouse. For example, how can you easily search for and jump to a particular word or term that’s down towards the bottom of a web page, and not visible at the top of the page?

Many people don’t fully explore each and every option available on their mobile phone (and even fewer fully read the user’s manual). So unless you have made a point of looking at each and every feature listed in your “Keyboard” setting on your iPhone or iPad (and who among us has?), you may have missed this fantastic goodie: Keyboard macros! Meaning custom keyboard shortcuts that you can create, allowing you to type a short set of letters that will magically expand to full phrases! For example, you can set up a keyboard short so that when you type “ty” it types “thank you”! You can create any shortcut that you want to… create custom signatures, frequently typed phrases, you name it! Here’s how to do it!

As many of our readers know, the Internet Patrol is part of ISIPP Publishing, a division of ISIPP (the Institute for Social and Internet Public Policy). What some readers may not know is that ISIPP Publishing publishes many websites, on topics as diverse as worms, legal Q&A, gluten-free vegan recipes, cruises, flowers, and more. We even have a site with thousands of “how to” videos! Each of our sites was created to fill a void – to provide credible and useful information where an information vacuum had previously existed. If you know of anyone who may enjoy some of these sites, or find them useful, please let them know!

Have you ever been reading a PDF file, or a website, on your Mac, and been frustrated at the lack of a “Page down” or “Page up” key? In fact, it’s very easy to page up or page down on a Mac, but it’s not obvious how to do it. Here is how to page down on a Mac (or page up on a Mac).

With the rash of Facebook spam and viruses going around (such as the “Vote for Nicole Santos” spam, and the “Please do your part in PREVENTING SPAM by VERIFYING YOUR ACCOUNT. Click VERIFY MY ACCOUNT right next to comment below to begin the verification process…” spam), it’s important that you know how to remove something that has been posted to your wall (never click on the “Remove this app” or “==VERIFY MY ACCOUNT==” links, those are links intended to trick you into infecting your machine!) Removing a post or comment from your wall is actually very easy. Here’s how to do it: