FALSE! Well, you might be safer on a Mac or Linux machine than on an unpatched Windows machine. But just getting a Mac and never taking safety measures, and then clicking on every link that comes into your email and giving your install password to every process that requests it isn’t any safer than running any other Windows machine. Remember Willie […]
I’m Completely Safe On a Mac Or Linux
When Does One Use a Hashtag? Twitter for Beginners
If you are a Twitter user, you may not find as much value in this post as someone who is not a Twitter user. But if you’re just getting started with it, read on, you might see something useful. Twitter has been described as microblogging. I guess that’s accurate. What you’re reading here is a blog, so the 140 character […]
Securely Logging In
All logins are not created equal, and they don’t all need to be. There are some places I visit on the web that don’t need a secure login, because they aren’t storing anything significant about me. I have a login for my RSS reader (if you want to know what an RSS reader is, check out my post here), but […]
Spammers Know There’s One Born Every Minute
I remember the early days of spam emails, before there was a way to block them. There weren’t nearly as many as there are today, but we still spent a lot of time keeping our mailboxes clean. It was pretty easy to spot one, too. They were always selling something, and it was always obvious that they were selling something, […]
A Post about POST
A lot happens after you push a power button, even before you see the “splash screen.” Electronic devices—computers, tablets, phones, PDA’s (remember them?), even appliances, go through a Power On Self Test, or POST. In basic terms, it is exactly what it sounds like. As the current is applied to the system board, the most basic components on the board […]
How “Free Stuff” on the Web Really Works
Everything has a cost of some type. That’s basic economics. It’s not always a monetary cost; sometimes it’s a price paid in effort, and sometimes it’s an “opportunity cost,” which means that as a result of choosing one thing you can’t take full advantage of another opportunity. An example of that would be in how we choose to spend our […]
Bits and Bytes: the Open and Shut Case of Data Terminology
The term BYTE in some form is probably the tech term you will hear most often, and without even realizing it, because it won’t always be used in it’s solo form or in its full form. Let me tell you first why this can get confusing: Because the very same words that describe how BIG something is also describes how […]
Okay, so what IS the motherboard?
A motherboard is a printed circuit board that contains the stuff that makes up the computer, or it has slots to put some of that stuff in. Your computer is a box of electricity, and what makes it work and display stuff to you is the flow of that electricity. Each component in the computer has a printed circuit board […]
What you’ll find in Generalities
You’ll find definitions here, explanations, basic stuff. It’ll be computing terms in very broad descriptions.