TechByter Worldwide (formerly Technology Corner) with Bill Blinn

We don’t run out of disk space as often now as we did in the early days, but you might wonder about discarding some old junk even if space isn’t a significant problem. Several utilities are available to help you identify the junk. In Short Circuits: Scammers work hard to earn your trust and then steal your money. A Washington Post article about a retired federal scientist who was bilked out of her...

Microsoft’s new PC Manager takes the place of some other utilities such as CCleaner and offers quick, easy access to built-in Windows functions that are often several layers deep in Settings or the Control Panel. In Short Circuits: If you’ve ever wished you could unsend an email because you forgot to add an attachment or make an important point, SendLater will save the day, but only if you use Thu...

Because digital photographs are free, we take a lot of them and that can be a problem when we want to find one particular image among tens of thousands on the computer. A new version of Excire Foto adds artificial intelligence that helps a lot. In Short Circuits: Anyone who operates a web domain on one of the big hosting services may occasionally have trouble with email messages being rejected as...

Like the Windows 11 Start Menu or hate it, Start11 from Stardock can make it better. Maybe you’d like the start menu to work the way it did in Windows 7, 8, or 10. Maybe you like the Windows 11 approach, but would like to add some features. That’s the point of Start11. In Short Circuits: Python is a popular programming language. It’s powerful, but the basics are easy to learn. If you’ve looked at...

Playing DVDs and Blu-ray discs on a computer can sometimes be better than watching them on a television, but Microsoft doesn’t include a player with Windows, and the Media Player app is quite limited. Other options exist, but some are pricey. One is free. In Short Circuits: Even if you use just a single chat application, taking a look at Beeper is a good idea. And if you use multiple chat applicat...

Development cycles for large applications once were frequently 18 months. Now it’s a rare day that we don’t receive a bug fix, security update, or feature release for at least one application. Keeping up is a challenge. In Short Circuits: Heat is the enemy of electronic devices and notebook computers are highly vulnerable. I recently added a device that places cooling fans below my primary noteboo...

Artificial intelligence is something Adobe has been working on for several years and this year’s advances mark the beginning of what seems likely to be an explosion of advanced capabilities. In Short Circuits: Adobe pointed to some of its plans for future products at the annual Max conference in Los Angeles. The sneak peeks could easily be mistaken for pure magic. • If your Windows computer hasn’t...

AeroAdmin is an excellent choice if you need to help friends or family solve problems with their computers and when you want to log onto your computer when you’re not in front of it. In Short Circuits: Artificial intelligence can create text for you, and it can paraphrase your text. Is it worth trying an application such as QuillBot to see how good an editor it is? • We’ve been able to synchronize...

Copilot is the most significant new feature in the Windows 11 Fall update, version 23H2. If your computer hasn’t been updated to 23H2, you can force the update or obtain some of the new features even without updating. In Short Circuits: Opera is a good browser that I’ve recommended several times in the past 25 years, and I still do recommend it, but only if you perform a fully manual installation...

Adobe didn’t wait for the annual Max conference to roll out some of the new features for Photoshop and other apps. Generative Fill and Generative Expand are still resolution limited, but they are already surprisingly useful. In Short Circuits: Printers have long been the bane of IT support, and Microsoft has plans to make printers a bit less vexing. Manufacturers will need to work with a universal...

The main article is really three short pieces: One about PowerToys Run, a quick and easy way to start an application or launch a search; the next about the now limited “unlimited” hosting plan from Bluehost; and finally a fond farewell to WordPad. In Short Circuits: Living like it’s 1983. If you loved WordStar, you can now install WordTsar and try to remember some of the obscure key sequences that...

Even basic smart phones can create remarkably good videos and more people are editing videos at home. As a result, there are lots of applications, both free and paid, designed to take the place of editing suites that once cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. In Short Circuits: New features in Adobe’s audio editor, Audition, are rare, but three improvements in the 2023 version will wow a...

It’s a good idea to check out any file you receive as an attachment, even if the file seems to have come from someone you know. Jotti’s free malware scan will show the file to more than a dozen antivirus applications so you can make an informed decision. In Short Circuits: Sometimes modifying a computer setting fixes a problem even when you’re absolutely certain the setting cannot have any effect...

Being able to tell the difference between truth and lies is increasingly difficult, especially on the internet, but also with organizations that claim to be presenting facts. We can’t escape bias, but we can at least try to be aware of it. In Short Circuits: Mouse Without Borders, a relatively new feature in Microsoft’s PowerToys utilities, solves a problem you may never have encountered. For thos...

Whether you’re a graphic designer or not, Adobe Express has something for you. Professionals can use it to give themselves more time for custom creativity and non-designers can leverage Express to perform tasks they couldn’t do by themselves. In Short Circuits: Although Python has been available as a paid add-in for Excel, it will soon be included in the application. Currently it’s available only...

Buying a new computer includes some of the same processes and decisions needed when buying a new car, and it’s important to base the buying decision on facts instead of on emotions. In Short Circuits: Sometimes antique computer-users like me say old DOS computers seemed faster than today’s Windows machines. That’s not entirely inaccurate and the Windows Task Manager helps us understand why. • Safe...

Disk partition managers are essential tools for technicians, but they can also be useful for any computer user. Third-party partition managers include more features than the one that came with your computer and might be free. In Short Circuits: The Employee Retention Credit Act was established at the height of the covid pandemic to help businesses that paid their employees while the operation was...

Mozilla has been working on a new version of Thunderbird for a while and the combination of improvements, new features, and ongoing debugging make it well worth looking at regardless of which email application you’re using now. In Short Circuits: Sometimes Microsoft does something so astonishingly ignorant that it’s hard to believe management was aware of it. I’ll describe what seems to be the dum...

Internet access is slower and more expensive in the United States than in many other countries, so it’s important to figure out how much speed you need and then to confirm that you’re getting what you pay for. In Short Circuits: The Windows package manager, WinGet, provides access to more apps and utilities than the Microsoft Store does, but it’s a command line function that’s cumbersome to use. A...

Sometimes saving money is a really bad idea. For example, doing without a backup system for the files on your computer because you don’t want to spend $100 to $200 per year. How much are your files worth to you? In Short Circuits: The utility CURL has been around since 1996, but it was just added to the Windows operating system this year. It’s a command-line function and it’s old, but it still per...

Scammers are always trying to find new ways to extract money from people they can fool. New variants of old cons are common, and for the past several months phony feedback surveys have been big. Most scammers can be defeated by treating any offer with a bit of suspicion. In Short Circuits: Early personal computers had the command line and no graphical user interface until the mid 1980s. The comman...

When pointing your browser at a website, the browser needs to find the site’s IP address, so it calls on a domain name service server. Using a better DNS server can improve the browser’s response time, but only by a bit. There are other reasons to use DNS not from your internet service provider. In Short Circuits: Adobe’s Firefly (generative fill) function, even in beta, has shown itself to be sur...

Microsoft 365 might be the best office suite for you, or maybe Google’s offerings would be better. Or perhaps you don’t need a suite at all. Let’s ponder that. In Short Circuits: Correspondence today heavily favors email and text messages, but sometimes you might need to send a real paper letter in an envelope using the US Postal Service. You can, even if you don’t have a printer, an envelope, or...

When you set up an account on a Windows 10 or 11 computer, it can be a Microsoft account or a local account. Some pundits maintain that Microsoft accounts should never be used, but I don’t like the word “never”. There are good reasons to use a local account and good reasons to use a Microsoft account, so let’s look. In Short Circuits: Scammers are finding that artificial intelligence is a marvelou...

Whether you need to replace a notebook computer that has a built-in screen or find a new monitor for your desktop system, it’s important to think about screen size and resolution. In Short Circuits: Renaming one or two files is easy, but when you’re faced with hundreds of files that need to be renamed, it’s time to call for the Bulk File Renamer. • Generative Fill, which Adobe also refers to as “F...