TechByter Worldwide (formerly Technology Corner) with Bill Blinn

Luminar is a new photo editing application. Although it may not yet be a serious competitor for Adobe's Lightroom Classic, it does offer some useful features and works with Lightroom. In Short Circuits: Fans of magazines will find two on-line options worth checking out: Apple News Plus (formerly Texture), which has a $10 monthly fee, and Flipster, which is available for free to patrons of many lib...

TechSmith has added two features to Camtasia that anyone who makes instructional or promotional videos will doubtless want. In Short Circuits: Increasing numbers of crooks want to install malware on your computer and they're getting better at doing it. Fake Facebook accounts seem to be on the rise. You may receive a friend request from someone who is already your friend. That's just one of several...

Email continues to be the most common vector for distributing malware and attached documents slip by defenses all too often. In Short Circuits: Have you received a message from someone who says that he's broken into your computer, has embarrassing pictures taken with the computer's camera, and will send them to each of your contacts unless you pay? Oh, and he has one of your passwords, too. It's a...

If you're planning to commit a crime, you might want to leave your phone at home because Google's Sensorvault knows where you are, where you were, and how long it took you to get from there to here. Sensorvault has data going back several years and, in some situations, police can access it. In Short Circuits: Internet crimes cost individuals and companies nearly $3 billion last year and that's jus...

Carrying important information around on an unencrypted phone, computer, or thumb drive is dangerous, but you might think that encrypting important files is difficult. It's not. In Short Circuits: The prices for solid state disk drives continue to drop and 2TB SSDs are now available for about $100. If you've ever had to deal with a stubborn Windows update that simply will not install, you might fi...

Look up tables, LUTs, are an important new feature for Alien Skin's Exposure X4.5. LUTs are used in the creation of motion pictures, but they can also be used to great advantage by still photographers. In Short Circuits: Now is the time to get rid of Internet Explorer. The first step involves installing a more modern browser and making it your default, then you can remove IE entirely. The latest v...

Windows 10 shares information about your computer with Microsoft. There are good reasons for Microsoft to want the data and good reasons for you to allow it, but maybe you don't want to share the information. It's possible to disable the sharing if you know where to look and a small utility provides an easy way to review and change the settings. In Short Circuits: Some tech writers advise against...

Which is better: Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop? The answer to that question is "it depends." Mainly it depends on what you need to do, but that's not all. We'll try to sort out which is the right option to use and when. In Short Circuits: The operators of the electric grid and other utilities are under nearly constant attack. So far, most of the attacks have been limited to the IT network, but crit...

Removing unwanted key functions from the keyboard can be accomplished with a Registry Edit, but there's a better option for those who fear touching the Registry. And for those who do edit the Registry, there's a non-Microsoft editor with some clever tricks. In Short Circuits: Asus has moved to correct a problem with their Live Update application that was used to push malware to hundreds of thousan...

You've doubtless heard of the dark web and may consider it to be a place to avoid because illegal activity takes place there, but there's good to be found, too. After all, The Onion Router was a project undertaken by the US Navy in the 1990s. In Short Circuits: Merchants of angst are predicting that GPS systems will fail on 6 April. They will do no such thing, but older GPS devices might be a bit...

If your computer is a few years old and you'd like it to be faster, the right change may no longer be to add RAM. Instead, maybe it's time to consider a solid-state disk drive. In Short Circuits: Now would be a really good time to confirm that your browser is fully up to date. That's true for any browser, but this week it's particularly true for Chrome. Microsoft is beginning to bad-mouth its own...

Brave is a browser that promises faster and more secure operation. It seems to follow through on both promises, but there are some features that infuriate newspaper and magazine publishers. In Short Circuits: Flat maps have been lying to us and technology can be used to eliminate the lies by more accurately representing the land masses of the globe on flat monitor surfaces. Microsoft wants to get...

In podcast 631, we took a look at some blunt changes to the "toast" notifications that Windows 10 serves. If you'd like finer-grained control, I'll explain how to get it this week, along with some other tips and tweaks that can change how Windows works. In Short Circuits: It's been 30 years since Tim Berners-Lee proposed what would become the WorldWide Web (now just "web") and the European Organiz...

French software publisher DxO has updated PhotoLab 2, which was released late last year. Although its photo organizing tools are relatively weak, some special capabilities make it well worth considering -- either as a Lightroom plug-in or as a standalone application. In Short Circuits: At least eight apps slipped through Microsoft's security procedures to be featured in the Microsoft Store and the...

If you're tired of using sticky notes, losing track of the notes, and the forgetting to do something important, an application called Remember the Milk will remind you on desktop, notebook, or tablet computers as well as on Apple and Android mobile devices. In Short Circuits: It's easy to become complacent about security for mobile devices and that increases the danger. TechRepublic has some guide...

Although photographs you take today are digital -- from a point-and-shoot camera, a digital SLR, or a smart phone -- you may still have boxes full of old negatives. There are ways to incorporate these old images into your stored digital images. In Short Circuits: Scammers are becoming smarter, but spotting phony messages is still easy most of the time. Let's consider one scam that looks legitimate...

Sometimes getting rid of an application you no longer want calls for more than just the Windows Add and Remove Programs function. Fortunately there are several good uninstallers to choose from. In Short Circuits: If you're looking for a program to help with a specific task, Capterra might be worth looking at. The service provides free software reviews. Apple will probably fix the problem soon, but...

Thinking about a new computer? Selecting Windows, MacOS, or Linux is the first decision, but there are lots of others: Desktop, notebook, tablet, or convertible? How much CPU power? How much memory? We'll step through some of the choices. In Short Circuits: Once you've purchased a new computer, what will you do with the old one? Adding it to a landfill is the worst possible choice, but there are s...

Getting more than you paid for is a welcome change from the usual and there are hundreds of free and low-cost applications that sometimes compete well with commercial programs. In Short Circuits: If you decide that you'd like to try some free applications, the next challenge is how to get theme. Two excellent resources exist. Every Windows computer has a Task Bar and there are ways to make it more...

A plain-text editor is an essential tool for programmers because it will have lots of built-in functions that make writing clean code easier, but even non-programmers can make good use of these programs when writing because they lack a word processor's capabilities. In Short Circuits: How do you find a misplaced smart phone? Most people just pick up another phone and call it, but what if you don't...

If you have tens of thousands of digital images on your computer, finding the one you want is probably a time-consuming procedure, but a plug-in for Adobe Lightroom uses artificial intelligence that lets users find images by describing them. And it works! In Short Circuits: Some users who installed the Windows 10 October release in October had problems so serious that Microsoft withdrew the update...

We'll be back next week and the TechByter website will have a new look. In the meantime, here's a link to last week's podcast.

Security threats continue to mature and become harder to spot. We'll listen as Cybereason's chief security officer, Sam Curry, suggests what we'll see on the security horizon in 2019. In Short Circuits: The Windows 10 October update has been released, again, this time without a propensity to occasionally delete files and folders. If you don't yet have version 1809, you can force the issue or just...

Adobe's InDesign 2019 adds several new features that are close enough to magic for designers to wonder where Merlin is hiding. The two most remarkable enhancements use artificial intelligence to size and position images and to modify page contents if the page size needs to be changed. In Short Circuits: Renaming your computer is as easy as renaming your cat and sometimes it's a good idea because t...

The latest version of Acronis TrueImage includes image backups, disk cloning, file and directory backup, and active defenses against ransomware. It's available as a subscription with or without on-line backup or as an application with a perpetual license. In Short Circuits: Microsoft may or may not rename its hapless Edge browser, but one big thing will change: Soon it will be based on Google's Ch...