Month: August 2020

I was asked the other day how to setup Windows 10 and avoid having to set it up with a password and how to avoid a bunch of the other “crap” Microsoft tries really hard to force you to setup.

I have found what I think is a simple, elegant solution: When you start that initial Windows setup, do not connect to the internet, not by cable and not by wifi (if your machine has wifi, Windows 10 will list available connections for you and in the lower left corner there should be a prompt “I don’t have internet” or similar, click this instead of selecting a wifi) then continue with Windows 10 initial setup refusing any attempts to provide enhanced services (from the internet) and give a user name that is meaningful for you. Under the username is space for a password, it is your choice and you can provide one here or simply press enter or click on next to not have a password required to start Windows on this machine. Eventually, you will get to the normal Windows 10 desktop and have a copy of Windows that starts without a password or a pin. There are also some hidden advantages to this method too; but, most users will never notice. Mostly, this method avoids setting up 5 or 6 services that eat some resources and make the boot-up take longer.

I have been traveling again and my phone reminded me of an important lesson. I carry a prepaid cell phone these days and rely on it (and a prepaid unlimited plan) to provide me with internet service while on the road. Motel wifi tends to be way too iffy at best and downright useless all too often, so my phone becomes a hotspot and usually provides good service.

Now, I am not going to say that 4G or LTE is fast enough to compete with the office internet and wired network connections tend to be much more trouble-free than wifi; but, when away from the office, my phone provides the next best thing. 5G service, when available, is darned close; but, I rarely find myself in 5G service areas. Just the same, I find I can stream movies, videos, tv shows and the like just fine with 4G or LTE (branding affects what it is called and I tend to get 4G LTE service in most areas while in some towns the carrier just has 4G or just has LTE, in all cases my phone works it out for me)

So, back to lessons learned or reminded of. In medium-sized metropolitan areas and larger towns, cities, any given location may be within range of towers owned by a variety of carriers; and not all carriers provide the same quality of service. My phone automatically selects which tower to use based on the phone carrier signal quality; generally, the one with the best signal quality is chosen to provide connectivity. The automatically chosen tower may not provide the best internet service for you. I was reminded this week (by my phone) that it helps to go in (into settings in your phone) and manually select your service provider when multiple providers are available.

In this lesson, the difference was remarkable with one carrier providing insufficient speed to get an address before it timed out and my “home” carrier providing 72m / 72m service that has been an absolute delight. My phone had auto chosen AT&T for service which for whatever reason (heavy loads by contracted users and I was a roaming user) provided almost no service; but, T-Mobile had a tower providing half the signal quality to my location but clearly had no load on it and provided a tested 72m up and down speed. A Verizon tower also provided decent service with 5m download speeds, but in this specific case T-Mobile was the best choice for me. Which carrier is best will be different in every location. The best choice for you may vary depending on your phone contract as well as location.

It can be helpful to talk with your cellular retailer or tech support to get their hints and recommendations for how to get the best service when you are away from home or the office. Oh, and don’t forget to set your phone back to automatic carrier detection once you are on the move again (assuming that is the default with your carrier and contract).

Hey, I decided to try one of those magnetic charger cables and the associated dongles that stay in your phone and other devices. First, my smart phone is developing an issue with its data + charging port so I wanted a nearly permanent connection device to stay in it once I insured it had a good connection (to lengthen the service life of my phone) and I often find that I am trying to plug in devices to a cable located in a dark room.

So, I shopped a bit and purchased a kit with 4 cables with lighted magnetic ends and many tiny tips (dongles) to permanently plug into my devices. I plugged one into my phone and plugged the cable into my standard phone charger and voila! the end lit up in a pleasant blue light making it easy to find in any light and bringing it close to my phone caused it to magnetically zip over to the connection on my phone and form a good connection (good meaning the phone started charging at full charge rate). I put one of these cables in my car and I have to admit that little bit of blue light really helps me find the desired end of the cable while not having to see the end to identify up or down on it to get a connection to my phone really helps too.

I think this is a type of product that is well worth the investment and will significantly lengthen the service life of my phone while also making it easier and much safer to connect up in the car.

Well, the delayed tax season is upon us and a few folks are scrambling to get “stuff” prepared at the last second. These modern days there are so many more ways of capturing information than were even dreamt of 20 years ago; but, this has led to some interesting confusion. One individual hit me with “I have photographed all my receipts this year; but, how do I get them out of my phone?”. Yet another mentioned having moved to Windows 10 and now their old scanner doesn’t work and so forth.

So, it seemed to me that the same solution applied to both of these situations. Images taken with a phone are no different than those scanned with a flatbed or any other type of scanner. Yes, a flatbed scanner is quite convenient for pressing curled receipts flat and scanning them into the computer; but, the real purpose is often just to “capture” a number and have proof of the associated expenditure, asset, or whatever so perhaps a quick photo of that document or item is all you really needed.

But, wait you say, how do I get those pictures out of my phone, and then how do I get them into some form that is useful? For me, the first step is to get them transferred to a computer (yes, I know how powerful modern phones are; but, I am experienced in solutions using Windows and associated utilities).

My second choice for getting photos off of a phone and into a computer is to sync the phone with a cloud service (iCloud, google-cloud, and so forth) then follow the instructions to log your computer into that same cloud account and you can sync again or copy and paste from the cloud to your pc. This has the advantage that the cloud services are really good at converting names and formatting issues automatically so what you get on your computer is readily useable when it arrives. At this point, you could print them out (ugh!) archive them onto a portable memory device, burn them onto a CD or DVD, or whatever seems most functional for you.

However, some folks like to have all this information in a more standard form like JPG’s or even PDFs (Adobe format). How do I get all of this stuff into the right format, you know, so I can use it? Well, when it comes from the cloud it is extremely likely to come as a JPG which is a nice compressed format suitable for viewing. If, instead, you want PDF, you might have to print all of those photos to a PDF printer (Windows 10 has one built-in, or you can download one of several from the internet at no charge – “cute pdf” has worked well for me in the past). Oh, and you can select multiple photos and have them all printed to pdf files in a single step if you have a lot of them to convert.

For those who still aren’t happy with all these photos of information or pdf’s of information, there is a technique called OCR (optical character recognition) which can convert all of this into numbers that can be used in a spreadsheet or in a myriad of other ways. For this, I usually suggest looking on the internet for a utility program to do this partially automatically and suggest spending a few dollars to get one that reviewers have had success with; or, you could simply type the numbers into whatever application you favor and be just as well off (most spreadsheets allow you to import jpg’s and pdfs so you have the source material and the numbers together).

Very soon school will recommence in the shadow of the COVID specter. Looking at current trends, I predict that much of the coming school year will be carried out remotely using a wide variety of distance learning techniques. For the parents of school-aged children, this will have several impacts.

This spring some learned about the need for more connectable devices as the demand for computers at home suddenly increased when sharing one computer between 3 children simply did not work (and other similar scenarios). Then, as more devices were connected, the need for more bandwidth (simply more speed either in your internet connection or in your home wifi, or both) became apparent (the internet connection that was adequate for shopping online, getting the news simply came to a halt when 2 people tried to operate simultaneous video chats). So how much bandwidth (still just speed) does your household need?

Let me start by describing one cause of confusion. For news, streaming movies, reading email (the stuff we used to do), download speed is all that matters; but for video chatting, video conferencing, video phone calls, most forms of classroom “sharing” you use as much upload speed (previously unimportant to most) as download speed and this is a gamechanger for you and for the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). So a 20mb down by 0.5mb up service used to be great and as soon as distance learning started in your home it was woefully inadequate to the point of being non-functional. Just as cloud-based services do much better on connections with much more upload speed, say 20 by 20 MB, so virtual classrooms of various forms also work much better with symmetrical connections (same up speed as down speed).

But, how much is enough? Voice phone calls need 256K x 256K per active phone call, video chats vary somewhat but generally 2MB x 2MB minimum and 5MB x 5MB for full screen and 10MB x 10MB for high resolution per active “chat”. If you have 3 students at home using standard resolution remotes into school, 15MB x 15MB will be consumed upfront with internet searches, videos (watching), cell phone connections all piling on even more demand. If you run a business from home and rely on the internet to interact with your clientele, add even more. So, in my example maybe 30MB up by 50MB down will keep everything flowing during peak demand.

Based on what you have been previously offered by your local internet service provider, these numbers may seem ridiculous; but, let me assure you this is a real part of what distance learning does to your internet usage. Until ISPs catch up with this sudden change in demand, some sacrifices will be made (doing low-res remotes when possible, waiting till later to stream videos or catch up on social networking, etc.). Start by checking with your ISP to see if they have upped their offerings to meet this demand or plan to in the future. If not, then looking to competing service providers may be necessary.

This time around, I want to talk about turning an extra or lightly utilized television into a computer intended for internet access, email, remote learning, and similar functions. Let me be clear, none of the devices I will describe is intended for gaming, CADD, CAM, photo editing, or video editing. These devices (computers) are designed to get you internet-based content, display videos (even movies), and provide a portal for video conferencing (the basis for much of current distance learning).How does this work? Miniaturization of computers has come a long way and you can cram everything you need to make a good computing device into a 4″ stick with an HDMI connector built into one end of it (see a picture of just one such device below). To run Windows 10, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage are sufficient, though I recommend 4GB of RAM and 32GB or even 64GB of storage, and devices configured this way are available and inexpensive.What is needed to complete the package? I recommend you start with the stick device which Amazon (among other sources) sells for under $150. (brands like Intel, Azulle, Terryza, AWOW). Add wireless keyboard and mouse combination (using a combination or set makes it easy to add wireless keyboard and mouse with one USB dongle) at $30 or less from a variety of manufacturers including Logitech. Finally, add a camera (conferencing implies that you can send video or photos) at $30-$50 along with a simple multi-outlet extension cord $10 ish and $220 or thereabouts gets you a complete kit to turn any HDMI TV into a computer.What can I expect such a computer to be able to do? Well, it will be plenty powerful enough to run Microsoft Office or Apache Office (free), store numerous documents, photos, even a few videos (setting up a cloud connection can greatly increase this ability). It will do quite nicely browsing the web, accessing your email, streaming videos (HD or UHD available in some devices and a few tv’s) and will come with Windows 10 pre-installed or ChromeOS if you so choose. And yes, it should be able to smoothly handle video conferencing and other remote school functions.

Hello out there, this week I want to discuss or even propose the purchase of tiny computers to fill out your computer needs as the need for remote computing causes the desire for another computer or two. Generally, I think of tiny computers as using a television for its monitor instead of a dedicated monitor, though either choice works equally well. One of the benefits of tiny computers is that they can hide behind the display unit and not clutter up a workspace or family space.

Various providers have a considerable backstock of tiny computers and you can find them “new”, “refurbished”, or “renewed” usually with Windows 10 installed and a variety of “ports” built-in so you can accessorize as necessary. The one drawback to any of these small devices is that they tend to be too small to include an optical drive (cd, DVD, blueray, etc.) which can be dealt with by transferring content onto USB drives or pushing it up to the cloud or by acquiring a USB-DVD device. This backstock can make the price quite attractive with renewed Intel i5 based units with 8gb of RAM and 240gb of SSD drive going for under $200.

It is this pricing for a so much more capable machine than a stick computer that makes these tiny computers so attractive. One additional cost involved with the tiny machines is the video cable to match /connect the computer to your choice of a monitor ($20 or less) and then it is all the same as setting up a stick computer (wireless keyboard + mouse, etc.).
If you don’t already have a spare TV hanging around, you will find that 27″ – 43″ televisions are quite affordable in HD and even UHD configurations. Some advantages of a TV over a monitor are the built-in speakers and the tuner which can allow it to take on multiple roles (supporting gaming consoles, over air broadcasts, etc.).

Another approach is to get a low-end Laptop or even consider a refurbished or renewed mid-range laptop (notebook or similar). This is where some guidance can be assistive; because laptops tend to use low-power components that negatively affect overall performance choosing a CPU like an Intel i5 or AMD A-series or even a Ryzen5 will go a long way towards a good overall experience with a laptop. In addition, choosing a model with an SSD for main storage will provide a better user experience and longer quality service. Intel and AMD both produce lower-end CPUs with other family names (N2000, E3500, etc.) and while these have applications where they are appropriate, they can be frustrating slow when asked to support distance learning and other interactive applications.