Author: gec

Windows 10 has a convenient feature which allows you to specify your IP address depending on the wireless network you join – making it far easier to bounce around between multiple offices, work locations, coffee shops, and home. But rather than the standard “Subnet Mask” option we’re all used to seeing, it asks users to fill in their Subnet Prefix Length. What the heck should that number be!?

(more…)

Look at what appears when I visit Walmart.com:

It’s asking me if I want to re-order those items. Trouble is I have never “ordered” those items from Walmart.com. These are items I’ve purchased in the store.

• In December, I purchased that big holiday bag of red and green M&M’s so I could put a candy dish on my table for a party I was having.
• I did buy Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice and I bought the Great Value brand to compare the two.
• I bought Swanson canned chicken when I made buffalo chicken dip for the same gathering in December.
• The Campbell’s cream of chicken and cream of mushroom soups are what I use when I make Stroganoff.


These are all things I’ve purchased in the store at one time or another. But why are they showing up on my computer at home? I don’t log in to my Walmart.com account when I check out in the store, so how is this working?



Walmart records every transaction, top to bottom, and stores it under your credit or debit card information. If you keep your credit card on file with Walmart.com, it can easily connect the two pieces of information. It really is just that simple.



The Walmart app for your smartphone also now has a “Savings Catcher” feature, which can be used to net you some savings on a gift card. while you’re trying to save a few dollars here and there, Walmart is just verifying that the “dots” they have connected are, in fact, accurate. You just connected the two unrelated pieces of information FOR them (your “real world” shopping behaviors with your “online” Walmart.com account). But I had never used the “Savings Catcher” feature when I started seeing items specific to me showing up in my online recommendations, though, making it apparent that Walmart.com isn’t afraid to use payment information as a method of tracking you.


Why is this important?


Some people may not actually consider this a huge invasion of their privacy. Some people like the ability to save some money with savings catcher, and they like convenience of having advertisements online that are relevant to their interests (it beats the old “male enhancement pill” ads on every single website, doesn’t it?).



But what if Walmart decides they’re going to profit from that information, instead of exclusively using it internally? They could sell your entire life time shopping list to someone else, for instance your insurance company. Maybe they see that you bought a few frozen meals and TV-dinner type meals, rather than fresh fruits and vegetables. They look at your diet and consider you a risk, causing your premiums to go up, and you have an uphill battle. You never gave them that level of permission to know you so intimately, but perhaps Walmart will in the future – and they already have your whole past purchase history tied to your account, every time you’ve swiped that card or clicked an online order.



If you saw my previous article about Facebook eavesdropping on your conversations, you’ll notice that the ad on the Facebook page was an ad for Sam’s Club. I had just recently purchased those Goldfish Crackers from a Walmart store, and I have very likely used the same credit or debit card at Walmart, at Sam’s Club, and on Walmart.com – so was it really Facebook listening to me? Or was it Walmart targeting me? It’s practically impossible to be certain, since these large companies don’t reveal their practices when it comes to consumer privacy and advertising.



So what can you do? Not much, unfortunately. If you really wanted to you could try using a unique card that you don’t use anywhere else, but it would likely still have your name attached to it through the payment processing system. You could try using cash exclusively whenever possible, but it seems antiquated in this day and age, when so many people choose the convenience factor of paying with a card. Gone are the days where a payment processor knew nothing more than the total dollar amount and who to charge it to, now everyone from Walmart to Visa and MasterCard and everyone else out there knows much, much more about you. Unfortunately, there is no great solution, but the best thing you can do at this time is at least arm yourself with knowledge and understanding of how these processes are working and make the decisions that are best for you.

People commonly post stories about how they talked about some product or service, and then suddenly started seeing advertisements for it on Facebook. While there are lots of stories about this happening, they are always based on conjecture and are simply speculation.

In a conversation with some friends a few YEARS ago, I believe not only did I prove this was happening, but I figured out how to prevent it.

In 2016, I went on a camping trip. I bought some “Goldfish Crackers” to take with me. After returning from my camping trip, I stopped at my dad’s house, and talked about how I had bought some of these crackers I haven’t had in years. Less than 24 hours later, I began seeing ads for a product I’ve certainly never searched for or mentioned on Facebook.

So I did some digging into the settings in my phone. Android offers the ability to draw an overlay over the full screen. This is how the Facebook Messenger app uses “Chat Head” bubbles – which allow messenger to pop up over the top of other apps. When I dug in to permissions of the Facebook app, it asked for an overlay permission. I thought that was strange, since the messenger app with its “chat heads” is distinct from the Facebook app itself.

When I tried to disable this overlay, I was alerted that I had to disable permission to the Microphone before I could disable this overlay. Luckily, with Android 6.0 “Marshmallow” and above, users have more granular control over their individual permissions, rather than just granting an app whatever it wants. So I disabled the microphone permission, then disabled the overlay, and I’ve never again had an incident where I felt like Facebook is “listening” to me.

How Do I Stop This?

That conversation with my friends took place in 2016. So what can you do to see if maybe this applies to you? Well, first of all, you must have an Android 6.0 or higher device. I do not believe this privacy function can be tweaked in iOS, but I no longer have an iPad or an iPhone, so I’m not certain if you can stop this from happening. Leave a comment below if you’re an iPhone user who can offer feedback. But Android users can try the following (I currently use Android 7.1.1, so your steps may be slightly different):

1. Go to your complete list of Apps, then open Settings.
2. Scroll to Apps.
3. Tap on Facebook in your list of apps.
4. Scroll down until you see “Draw over other apps” and tap that.
5. Disable option to “Draw over other Apps.”
6. If prompted, you may have to go back out and adjust permissions to disable certain functions in order to disable the overlay feature.

If you really want to you can also go in to the Permissions section and disable certain features such as the Microphone itself, but remember if you use the Facebook app to record videos, or send voice messages, you may not want to disable that feature.

Let me know if that helps, I hope it does! If not, check back next week. Notice how the Goldfish Crackers advertisement above that was a screenshot from Facebook was actually an ad from Sam’s Club? Sam’s Club and Walmart are connected companies, and NEXT week, I plan to have an article discussing how Walmart Tracks you as a customer. See you next week!

Do you have an output that looks like the one above? Congratulations! You’re mostly patched up. Here’s the simple break down. (more…)

Like many people this week, I was trying to run some official Microsoft PowerShell scripts related to “Meltdown” and “Spectre” bugs. But when I tried this, I encountered an error message from PowerShell, telling me that “SpeculationControl.psm1
cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system. For more information, see
about_Execution_Policies at https:/go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135170.”

This is perfectly normal, it is a security feature that is easy to adjust when needed, and will apply to many scripts beyond just this week’s “speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities” checkers. First things first, make sure you ran PowerShell as an Administrator – right click the icon in your Start Menu and click “Run as Administrator.” If it still doesn’t work, you need to change your Execution Policy. Follow these simple steps:

1. type get-executionpolicy and press enter. Jot down the output for later, so you can re-secure your system (mine was “Restricted”).
2. type set-executionpolicy remotesigned and press enter.
3. Press “Y” and hit Enter to tell it you’re sure you want to change this setting.
4. Now, run your desired script. It should output normally.
5. After the script runs, I suggest setting your policy back to what it was. Again, mine was “restricted” so I type: set-executionpolicy restricted.
6. Type “Y” and hit Enter to once again tell it that you want to change the policy.

And you’re done! I certainly hope that helped someone out there!

When it comes to trying to configure something that should be simple like “PORT FORWARDING” in a more complicated corporate firewall, like Dell’s SonicWall, it can sometimes be a bit difficult. There are many guides online that are needlessly complex, and some that are confusing and not helpful at all. I ended up combining a few until I was able to work out a process of my own that seems to work best.
(more…)

People often get scared by some bum information that spreads around social media. Last week I saw a post about using a search function to find people who were “following me.” Trouble was, it was actually just returning results of people with the words “following me” in their profile! So I did my friends a favor and whipped up a quick guide to see who is “following you” on Facebook.

First thing to note: following doesn’t really mean anything, especially if you two aren’t “friends.” (more…)

For many years, the FalconFly Central website has been a staple of the 3dfx community. It continued on for years after I was no longer active in the realm of “Voodoo cards” and driver tweaking. Falconfly has always been an important member of the 3dfx community, and when he announced that he would be shutting down his archive of 3dfx files and drivers on July 1st, 2017, many people were sad to hear of it. (more…)

People ask how to get started with Linux all the time. But they need to know what the best distribution is for learning? Or for beginner users? Or to install on a spare laptop as newbies trying something different out. So I made a video. The script I used while recording the narration is below.

(more…)

If you can’t open the services window, try to see if perhaps the “.msc” file extension has lost it’s association with the Microsoft Management Console. Instructions follow! (more…)

Some people absolutely love the Focused Inbox feature and how it simplifies their life. Other people can’t stand the thought of a computer even just possibly making me miss something important. If you’re like me and you have trust issues, you can disable the “Focused Inbox” feature of the Windows 10 Mail client app (more…)

If your Facebook feed looks anything like mine, you’re seeing more and more Facebook posts that include phrases like “copy and paste, don’t share!” Some of the posts even include instructions for people who don’t know how to copy and paste! But why is this becoming so common? Here are the 3 main reasons, for good or for bad, and a few honorable mentions of other risks of using Facebook in this way (more…)

In an era where international travelers are being asked for social media accounts at the border, or the fifth amendment is under attack by forcing you to potentially incriminate yourself by unlocking your phone using a fingerprint (recent good news on that front), there are new concerns when it comes to security and privacy when traveling (more…)

While we wait for Microsoft to finish the new version of Windows Movie Maker for Windows 10, some people are left in the cold looking for the old version. Search no more! We have the full installer below the picture!

(more…)

This is a simple fix I discovered while working on a larger, more complex problem, when my entire computer was stuck “checking for updates.” Below only applies to fixing the issue with stand alone installers. If you need to fix the entire Windows Update / Microsoft Update feature of your computer, see my other article here.

1. If the installer is currently stuck open on your screen, you can open task manager and kill it by ending the task WUSA.exe.
2. Hold down the Windows Key and Press “R” on your keyboard to open the “Run” dialogue box. Type in services.msc and press the enter key or click OK.
3. Scroll toward the bottom of the list and find the Windows Update service. Right click on it, and click Stop.
4. Go to the folder where you downloaded standalone installer and double click it to run it.
5. You may notice, at this point, that the Windows Update service starts back up. People may use Task Manager to note that SVCHost suddenly starts using over a gigabyte worth of memory, or other strange behaviors. However, in the few seconds before it starts to behave rampantly, your stand-alone installer should have taken off and started to install your update. The “checking this computer for updates” screen should disappear in under 10 seconds and the installation should begin.

I recently ran in to an issue I’ve seen at least a dozen times before. This time, however, absolutely nothing I have tried before would fix it.

I will save the exposition for the bottom of the post, the short version: Microsoft’s official fixes wouldn’t even work because the standalone installers had the same problem as Windows Update, and every other guide, manual fix, and 3rd party tool I attempted to use failed!

(more…)

If you didn’t build a recovery image before you had problems with your Microsoft Surface device, good news! Microsoft will allow you to enter your serial number and download a recovery image!

Instructions and downloads are available directly from Microsoft!

The background:
Our office recently picked up some new computers, both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Some of these computers, upon reboot, are unable to connect to the internet. The Wi-Fi icon in the system tray has an exclamation mark, when you hover over it, it says: “Unidentified network (no internet access) – when you click on it, it does say that it’s “connected” to the proper network, but that it is “Limited.”

The temporary work-around:
The quick work around I’ve found is to simply put the laptop in Airplane mode, and then immediately take it out of Airplane mode. This will allow the laptop to connect to your wireless network.

But you shouldn’t have to do that! (more…)

I can’t believe I never put this article on my site before, it’s an ancient tip, and still useful for the “average” home user. Do you have a home computer and you don’t want to be pestered for a password every time it starts up? The following steps should be all you need Enjoy!

1. Open the Run Menu (Either by clicking Start then Run – or – simply be holding Windows Logo Key and pressing R on your keyboard).
2. Type: control userpasswords2 (leave the 2 off for older versions of Windows like XP and 2000) and hit enter or click OK.
3. Click the user in the list you want to be automatically logged in so that they are highlighted:

4. Uncheck the box at the top of the window that says “Users must enter a username and password…”
5. Click OK then enter your password (twice, to confirm you typed it correctly) – if you do not normally enter a password, just click “OK” leaving the two password lines blank – then click OK.

I believe the prompt may disappear even if you typed the incorrect password, so the only way to be sure it worked is to restart your computer. If all went well, the next time you start up, you should not be prompted for a password and be logged directly in to your desktop! Try it out! If you see the user logon screen or are asked for a password, you probably just missed the password in step 5. Pay close attention to what you type (or don’t type) at the logon screen, then try it again.

In 2012 I did a fun 27 year retrospective of official Microsoft version history information. Changelogs were shorter, back then. I grew up using BASIC on a Commodore 64 and a 128. My first computer had Windows for Work groups 3.11, and DOS 5. I still remember preferring DOS to Windows through Windows 98. But Windows kept growing on me, and has left an impression ever since. I was one of the few who resisted Windows XP, sticking with Windows ME, even upgrading to the business platform of Windows 2000 before finally getting onboard with Windows XP. But since those days, I’ve always enjoyed tinkering and experimenting with whatever Microsoft has to offer. I toyed with several builds of Longhorn, ages before Windows Vista launched. I used Vista with few if any issues. I quickly upgraded to Windows 7, pre-ordered the original Surface RT hours after pre-orders opened, and was an early adopter of Windows 8 / 8.1. Now that Windows 10 Threshold 2 officially launched earlier this month, Windows 10 is pretty much ready for prime time. I’ve been using it since some of the earliest previews and am a huge proponent of Windows 10. I’m proud to say I’ve been onboard with Windows for a long, long time.

I’m the kind of oddball fan who had a Windows Mobile device. Windows Mobile 6 upgraded to 6.1, learned some tricks on XDA Developers and hacked my own builds of Windows Mobile 6.5 on to HTC “Vogue” phones. I went on to use Windows Phone 7, 7.5, and 7.8, then another couple of phones with Windows Phone 8 and 8.1. Windows 10 Mobile should be available for my Lumia 640 in the near future and here I go, yet again, sticking with Windows and my strong desire to toy with the latest and greatest.

It’s an operating system. With a 30 year history, I’m actually older than Windows, even though I wasn’t exposed to it until I was almost 10. It seems strange that I would care what’s on my computer so much. But as someone who has owned Android devices, and iOS devices, and who has had lots of exposure to OS X, and loves tinkering with various Linux builds (Ubuntu, CentOS, Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora are all builds I’ve had installed to at least a VM if not more in the last year or two)… I love tinkering. But I genuinely love sticking with Windows. I feel right at home, even when they change everything you think you know about it, like they did with Windows 8, I was happy to learn all about it.

Microsoft has been keeping up with updating the History of Windows page and does have some fun geek trivia, so give it a look!