Several months ago I wrote about how frustrated I was in the computer age when the following can occur.

1. Items from unknown, online vendors can be ordered on a Monday from a foreign country and be received at my home in Harrisonburg, VA, USA by the following Thursday.  This is a non-emergency, unneeded item.
2. I can place a Netflix DVD in my mailbox on a Monday and by Thursday (and a couple of times by Wednesday) they will have received it and a new movie will be back in my mailbox. This is also a non-emergency, unneeded item.
3. I order prescriptions from “a company I choose not to name” online for life preserving drugs and receive them in, oh, one to three weeks and sometimes longer.  This could be an emergency, much needed item.

But that is enough of the inequities of life that we all deal with from time-to-time.  Now I just want to thank Netflix for being the apparently well run and oiled machine that it is!

There were reports all over the news (online and offline) about the problems that Netflix faced this week with their delivery system actually collapsing and not sending out any, to very few, shipments from Tuesday through Thursday.  I, along with the other members got a nice form email stating basically that Netflix had the most severe outage in its history which stopped distribution to a third of its 8.4 million customers.

They also went on to say (get ready for this one as I know my drug company wouldn’t do this), “If your DVD shipment is delayed, we will be issuing a credit to your account in the next few days.   You don’t need to do anything.  The credit will be automatically applied to your next billing statement.”

I got some of this information from CrunchGear; however, it was available in a multitude of locations and of course even in direct email from Netflix.

Here is the way it played out for me:

1. Put DVD in my mailbox Monday morning.
2. They received it Tuesday.
3. I got the email about delivery problems on Tuesday afternoon.
4. I receive the next DVD in my queue on Friday, not late by my standards.
5. I checked my Netflix account just now and have a 15% credit which will be added to my next billing statement.

Now I am still waiting for prescriptions that I ordered the week before I dropped my DVD in the mail!

Netflix appears to me to be a quality company with good, pro-active customer service.  Netflix rules and the drug company that my insurance company requires me to use-drools.

Hemigal sent me a good question this week dealing with usernames and passwords.  I was really surprised that this is the first time I have received a question regarding this since it is something that may affect all of us from time-to-time.

She said, “I accidentally entered the wrong password for a site and my browser asked if I wanted to save the username and password.”  She went on to ask, “After I saved them I realized that it was the wrong password but now when I return to the site and put in the username it automatically fills in the wrong password…what should I do now?”

This happens to me often.  If your usernames and passwords are not being saved in MSIE go to TOOLS / INTERNET OPTIONS / CONTENT then choose AutoComplete Settings and check the correct boxes to activate this feature.  For Firefox use TOOLS / OPTIONS / SECURITY and under Passwords check, “Remember passwords for sites”.  For other browsers just poke around under Tools and you will find it.  If not contact the browser’s manufacturer and ask them.

What happens at a site when you have a saved username and password, is that you can click in the empty textbox and your username will be prefilled along with your password.  This is a very convenient feature although not that secure when someone else uses your computer.  Note that most financial sites will not allow your username and password to be saved as a security precaution.  This is a very good thing.

If you save the wrong password how do you correct it?  There are several ways this may be solved.  Microsoft Internet Explorer’s (MSIE) and Firefox’s (FF) solutions are similar.

The first I suggest is to click in the textbox and the saved username will appear.  Now highlight the username with your mouse and then press the delete key on your keyboard.  That should take care of it and when you retype the username you will be asked to save it again.  In FF you don’t really have to do that, just retype a new password over the old one and it will ask you if you wish to save the new password.  It should work like that in MSIE too, but not often for me.

A more aggressive way to correct this is to delete all of your saved usernames and passwords.  For MSIE go to TOOLS / INTERNET OPTIONS / GENERAL under “Browser History”, click the Delete button and finally click on the Passwords button.  For FF use TOOLS / OPTIONS / PRIVACY then under “Private Data” click “Clear Now” and check “Saved Passwords” and “Clear private data now”.

There are, as always, other ways to perform this same task but these are two of the more common ways.

OK, I didn’t want to come back from vacation; however, since I like to eat…we did.

Today we will continue on with my Orbitz.com train of thought.

One of the more interesting things for me (now keep in mind I am new to flying in this century) was that Orbitz sent a voice message to my phone about three hours before each flight.  Along with other things, the messages let me know the flight number, the departure gate and most importantly if my upcoming flight was still on time.  A drawback about our one late flight… even though they did message me that it was late I received the message about 10 minutes after the flight had left the airport.  Of course seeing how poorly the preflight was managed I imagine Orbitz let me know as soon as they found out.

All-in-all, we feel that Orbitz.com was a beneficial way to go and will use it the next time the president provides us with a tax rebate.

Now I have a general technological comment or two about airports.

I found it nice that each airport provided Wi-Fi (although, I didn’t check that in SHD) which allowed me to use my computer to check mail, find out information that I could use on the trip, etc.  The bother was that of the three airports, two of them provided it free of charge.  But not Dulles!  They required me to pay AT&T to use their Wi-Fi system.  Needless to say, I didn’t pay for something that I didn’t really “need”.

Next, I noticed that most everyone had a cell phone at the airports even down to one little kid who looked to be about six or seven.  That pleases me corporately since I work for NTELOS but personally I wonder a kid that young needs one.  Many travelers also had iPods or other MP3 players with them.

Additionally I noticed that a large majority of people had notebook computers.  That was neat since it meant that I wasn’t the only geek out there…I was surrounded by them.  I believe we may have been in the majority.

There was a table in an airport eatery where it appeared a mom, dad, daughter and son sat dining.  The mom was messaging on her notebook, the dad appeared to be doing the same on his and the daughter, with the standard teenage, “bored-with-the-world” look on her face was listening to her iPod.  And then get this, the son, maybe eight, was writing in a paper notebook. WOW!  That was refreshing.  They were eating as they visited, oh wait, that’s what bothered me, there was no visiting at all.  They were each so intent on their own little worlds they didn’t communicate with each other - not one word for over 30 minutes.  The parents couldn’t even take time to look up when the boy showed them what he had been drawing.

Maybe we need to learn to communicate less to communicate more.

I feel like it has been confession time for me over the past several weeks.  I previously wrote about how I went to the dark side by buying an Apple iPod (i.e., not a Microsoft product), then I switched to the Firefox browser (also not a Microsoft product) and now I have another confession.

I pointed out a web site last year once in a negative manner.  The reason I was negative is because it was a major popup advertisement at several other sites I was visiting.  For several weeks I got to see that ad over-and-over again.

If you are a regular reader you know that I am of two minds about popup ads.

I don’t like them because they get in my way, I never click on them and in my opinion they are simply obnoxious.  However, I like them because as people do click on them they help keep the majority of websites in the world free of charge to us.

I want to now mention that website that bugged me in the past…in a positive light, Orbitz.com.

Every year or so I mention a site that helps us with vacation planning; Orbitz is it this time.  This year, thanks to Mr. Bush’s tax rebate (please don’t email me about politics; I abhor it and won’t respond), my wife and I decided to fly to our vacation spot.  I used to fly quite often many years ago (before the internet and 9/11 but that is another story) but this was somewhat new to me.

I will add here that the stinking popups must have worked.  Guess which website popped into my mind first when I thought about flying?  You got it, Orbitz.

I am new at the buying plane tickets online so many of you may know a lot more about this and other similar sites than I; however, I just want to give you what I found out.

We found round-trip tickets much less expensively than we thought were possible.  We easily found the airport we wanted to leave from (SHD) and arrive at (JAX).  We were offered a good rate on a rental car at the site.  Me, being the trusting guy that I am, called other rental car companies including the one we were offered at the site to check prices.  I could not get a rate anywhere near as good as I did in the original offer so we also went with that.

I could have also gotten hotel rooms and tickets for different attractions at discounted prices through Orbitz.  I didn’t take advantage of those as we didn’t need them for our plans.

If you have any experiences, good or bad, with sites similar to this let me know.  And if we decide to come back I may let you know how it worked for us.

I received several emails over the past several weeks about cleaning your monitors.  I’m thinking they all referred to the “glass” part so let’s take a look.  You may have even heard that you have to use a special cleaner on your monitor or you could damage the glass.  More about that later.

Cleaning your monitor first requires you to turn off your computer and unplug the monitor from the wall.  Now get a lint-free cloth.  If it is not lint-free it will not hurt your monitor, but it will leave pieces of lint to float around on your monitor.  This means that you will then have to clean the lint off.  Cut out that extra step and go lint-free.

Now as I have said in the past, always check your instruction manual as the next step may not be “authorized”.  They usually recommend using a special cleaning fluid or cloth for cleaning the glass.  I ordered some one time and paid $35 for a special cleaner and cloth.  The cleaner was the regular blue window cleaner that you get at the store (it still had the brand name label on it).  The cloth was lint-free.  What a profit they made on me that time!

My suggestion is to get some regular, non-abrasive, non-ammonia, window cleaner and spray it lightly on your cloth.  Don’t make it dripping wet, and NEVER spray the cleaner directly on your monitor’s screen.  If sprayed directly or too much fluid is on the cloth the cleaner could run down the glass and possibly get into the electronics and you don’t want that to happen.

Next, wipe the cloth on the screen smoothly, gently, and evenly.  When the finger prints and dust on the glass are gone, move on to the next step.

Using the same damp cloth, wipe it over the case, including the little holes that allow heat to vent from your monitor.  Canned air can be used to “blow” out those vents which could aid your monitor in running cooler and longer.  You can put more pressure here as it is just plastic and you can’t hurt it, don’t use an abrasive cleaner anywhere.  After you are done, take a can of compressed air and use it to blow out any leftover dust and lint that you may find.

If you have a newer model flat screen monitor this may not be the way to clean it, so for now follow the manufacturer’s instructions for those.  These may not have a glass screen and it could take special attention and cleaners.

Never remove the monitor’s case!  The inside of a monitor (not flat screen) has a capacitor and has the capacity to shock you possibly to death.

Last week I said that I would give you the other Firefox add-ons that I like to use, if anyone asked.  You readers really surprised me!  You asked, so here goes the rest of my FF add-ons, in alpha order just to keep it simple.  At the end of each I put a one-word adjective describing it for you.

First up, “ColorfulTabs” which a couple of you said were your favorites.  This add-on doesn’t do very much for the geeks out there but it looks good.  “ColorfulTabs” changes the colors of each tab to a different color.  That doesn’t sound so great; however, it makes them easy to distinguish and makes the browser just look better.  There is a separate link for FF v. 3, so click carefully.  Attractive.

Next in my list is “Searchbar Autosizer“.  This one is a real space saver which I like.   I don’t like lots of buttons in my browser since you can see more web page without them.  This add-on allows you to choose between different sizes your searchbar will use in FF.  You can: 1) size incrementally by each letter you type, 2) keep the searchbar small until you start typing then it auto-enlarges or 3) set it to the width of your choice all the time. Useful.

Now a really slick one for the FF GUI (Graphical User Interface, or how it looks on the screen) called, “Tab Preview“.  For you Windows Vista users this add-on makes the tabs in FF perform very similarly to the way that the Tabs in your taskbar do.  When you hover over a tab in FF a small thumbnail (picture) of the page represented by that tab opens.  This allows you to not only know what page the tab represents, but to actually see a preview of its contents.  Favorite.

“TwitterFox” is one that is specifically for Twitter users (twitter.com).  By-the-way, you should check out Twitter. Find me at http://twitter.com/rondoyle. TwitterFox lets you know twitter statuses and allows updates to your tweets. Like I said specific to Twitterers, is that a word?  It will add a tiny “T” icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their statuses. Also it has a small text input field where you can tweet. Cute.

Last, but not least, “Windows Update” will allow you to update your version of windows without having to open MSIE.  Convenient.

Tags: add-on, addons, FF, Firefox, twit, twitter, Twitter.com

Last time I wrote about my trip to the dark side by starting to use (and really enjoying) Firefox. I mentioned how Firefox (FF) uses add-ons to make other features available to you in their browser. Today I will tell you about some of the ones that I like to use.

At this time I use nine add-ons so I am not too addicted to them but the ones that I have I enjoy using. They can get extra info, do certain things that FF can’t perform by itself, etc. Here are my top four – I would add more if I had the space.

Getting to Add-ons is simple. While in FF, click on Tools/Add-ons and a window will open revealing the ones that are currently installed on your computer. Now click the “Get Add-ons” tab and you will have a few suggestions or you may search for additional ones.

Go ahead and search for “Fast Dial” the first of my favorites. You may need to click “See All” after the search to get this one. “Fast Dial” permits you to save any website to the Fast Dial window and when you go back to it later you will have a thumbnail graphic of that site. You may then click the “picture” to arrive at that page. It is basically a graphical Favorites list for the browser.

Next, I would highly recommend “Forecastfox”. This one will add the local weather report to the status bar (or several other locations that you may choose from) which can include the current weather as well as several days in advance…without having to click anything or open another window in your browser.

“IE Tab” would be my next and possibly most important addition to the list. The importance is that many sites will not work properly unless they run from Internet Explorer. For instance if any of you use Outlook Web Access you must have this add-on for it to work suitably. If you run into a site that requires MSIE to be viewed correctly just right click on the site’s tab and choose, “Switch Rendering Engine”. You can even enter the site into “IE Tab” to always be opened according to MSIE.

The last add-on I will mention today is “MapThis”. If you see an address while browsing the web just select it, right click and choose either, “Map This” or “Map to This”. The first choice will immediately open Google Maps (or Yahoo Maps depending on your choice at set up of “MapThis”) with the address you selected mapped in the center of the window. The last choice will open a map from your home address to the address you selected. Your home address is set up when you start “MapThis” the first time.

Have fun adding on! If there is enough email interest in this column from you, next time I may finish my nine.

OK, I hate to admit it but if you have read this column for a while you already realize it…I am a Microsoft addict.  I like Microsoft products like Word, Excel, Media Player, etc.  I rarely go over to the dark side of other major providers of software.  I did go over to the dark side of Apple last Christmas when I opted for the iPod over the Zune but that’s another story.

Well, I have a confession and since I write about computers I guess I have to go public with it.  Are you ready?  I am now totally pro-Firefox for my browser.  Yes, I have gone over to the dark side once again.

Firefox (free at mozilla.com) was created by a company named, Mozilla. Mozilla came on the scene in 1998 and started promoting something that has been gaining support ever since and that is open source software.  Mozilla originally started as the Netscape Navigator.  The name is derived from “Mosaic” (the dominant browser at the time) combined with “Godzilla” the monster.

Open source is software whose code is open for alteration by the public for free.  If I were a programmer and thought of a new idea to incorporate into Firefox I could write the code and implement use it with Firefox.

June 17, 2008, Firefox 3 was released to the public and I have been pounding on it ever since.  I have to say that I went in with a lot of prejudice and I have never been too impressed with the previous versions.  However, this one has now replaced Maxthon (my favorite for the past 6-7 years, maxthon.com) and MSIE (microsoft.com/ie) as my browser on all of my computers.  In my opinion this version is really well done.

The basic internet browser looks clean and is fairly similar to all the others.  The real power comes from features called “add-ons“.  Add-ons allow you to add on (duh) other features designed by people from all over the world; remember open source?  There are many of them that perform useful and sometimes just silly functions.  We will look at a few of my favorites next time.

There is one comment in their advertising that makes me wonder how good Firefox really was in the past.  They state, “With more than 15,000 improvements, Firefox 3 is faster, safer and smarter than ever before.”  WOW, that is a lot of improvements - I didn’t realize they could even have that many things to work on.

Last week I mentioned an additional menu item I find on my computers when I right click on my Recycle Bin in Windows.  The one I told you about last time was Icon Restore and this week the menu item is “Erase Recycle Bin”.  The program that provides this feature is called “Eraser” (http://bbs.heidi.ie/eraser/).  When you right click on your recycle bin or any folder or file you can choose to eraser them so that they can not be recovered later.

I have talked before about how your computer deletes a file by changing the file’s name, which in turn makes the file undetectable to you. It also tells the computer that the space the file occupies on the hard drive may be used to “write” other data on top of whenever the space is needed.

If a file is deleted and no other information has been written over the old file, it is still there and could be retrieved using one of the many file recovery programs out there.  If another file is stored on that “empty” space over and over again the file will most likely be unrecoverable sometime in the future.

To delete the file permanently you need a program like Eraser. What permanent deletion programs do is to write over the deleted file once too many times.  Again once, an overwritten file will be made unusable and more importantly for security purposes, unrecoverable. There are many of these types of programs on the market.  I have used “Eraser” for several years and it seems to work very well so I recommend it; however, as with all software downloads proceed at your own risk.

“Eraser” will allow you to choose how many times you want the files over-written, either 1, 3, 7 or 35 times. The U. S. Department of Defense suggests three to seven overwrites to render a file unusable. Peter Gutman, magnetic storage specialist at the University of Auckland reports that, “…it is effectively impossible to sanitize storage locations by simply overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written.”

Having read that you should know that the 35 times overwrite is called the Gutman recommendation for secure file deletion.

Also note that it can take quite a while to overwrite large files 35 times so plan ahead.  The many spy movies that you may have seen show computers’ hard drives being deleted in a few seconds are not true. So if you choose to delete your entire hard drive you may need to plan anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days to perform a total erasure.

Keep in mind that that is sometimes possible to recover a file by very high end programs no many how times it is overwritten.  So if you are a spy hiding things from an evil government watch out, they may still be able to retrieve your secret files.

When I receive emails from readers with some great column ideas I copy them to my desktop and save them on the right side of the screen.  Later when I restart my computer I know where they are and can get right to them.  However, I sometimes have an issue and that is they may be where I left them!

Once you expertly arrange icons on your desktop and the system is restarted you most likely find that they have all moved to line up in a neat orderly list.  The list is neat but not where you want them.  I want emails and all of my other icons to stay where I put them not where Bill Gates folks want them.

Enter, Icon Restore (http://users.rcn.com/taylotr/icon_restore.html)!  “Icon Restore” allows you to keep all of your desktop icons where YOU want them.  Warning, “Icon Restore” is recommended for Windows 95/98/ME/XP/2000/NT4.0.  Nevertheless, I have used it on my new Vista machine and have had no problems with functionality,but as with any program use it at your own risk.

Once this safe little program has been installed you are back in control of, at least, this one issue.  “Icon Restore” adds two options to the menu that appears when you right click a folder or the Recycle Bin.  They are “Save Desktop Icon Layout” and “Restore Desktop Icon Layout”.

You have probably already figured out how to use it but here it is - quick and easy.

First, right click on your desktop in an empty place, i.e., not on an icon.  Touch “Arrange Icons By” and make sure that “Auto Arrange” isn’t checked.  If it is checked, click on “Auto Arrange” to uncheck this feature.

Now arrange the desktop icons exactly where you want them.  Now right click the recycle bin icon or any other folder on the desktop and choose, “Save Desktop Icon Layout”.  You will hear a little “ding” sound and see a message indicating that the layout has been saved.  That’s all.

The next time your icons area is messed up, right click on the recycle bin or any folder and choose, “Restore Desktop Icon Layout” and they will magically return to where you want them…slick!

This reminds me (since I just saw it when I right clicked) of another application that I wrote about a couple of years ago named, “Eraser”.  From the emails that I have received from several of you recently I think that I will revisit that app next week.