If you use Chrome as your browser....

You should have this add-on, which helps you avoid unsafe sites while browsing the wild,wild web. It's a jungle out there, so do yourself a favor.

And if Firefox is your favorite browser, this is the add-on for you...

The Avant Browser...

Here it is, displaying it's 'What's New' page. It was developed (and still is) by a Chinese programmer, who has incorporated a lot of user suggestions and requests into it, and it gets a lot of very favorable reviews.  It is probably more configurable than any browser you have ever seen. You should check it out...

Other browsers

This one is made in Tokyo, Japan, and its Help files might not be (they may be in Japanese), but this one and the next both have a unique feature in that they both use all of the three most popular search engines. 

This one I'm actually trying, but I'm not very familiar with it yet. It does have some nice features, though, and is definitely worth a look.

Let's talk Cookies....and other unwanted stuff.

Most of us are familiar with cookies to the extent that we know what they are,
and why. They're little text files that are implanted into your system by websites you visit, so that information can be stored which helps to find that site quickly the next time you want to go there. 

But there are different types. First-party cookies are those from the site that you are actually visiting. Third-party cookies are those from other sites that may be connected to it through advertising pop-ups or videos, or whatever, and may not necessarily be safe sites to visit, or may be tracking you for your personal information. And we aren't even going to talk here about LSOs, better known as 'Supercookies', because ordinary cookie-handling tools can't even see those, and aren't aware of their existence. Too bad. Those are worse than the others.

First of all, to make your browsing safer, go into your settings and change those to prevent the acceptance of third-party cookies. You probably won't notice any real difference in your browsing experiences, except that maybe you won't have quite as many annoyances from sites you hadn't wanted anyway. Here's some helpful information about it. 

And here's something else to look at and perhaps change.....

 When you look at this list (above) there will likely be a check-mark in the box in front of that lowest entry (Enable third party browser extensions*) and what those are mostly are things like extra toolbars that you might not want installed anyway, especially if they came as part of someone's 'bloatware' along with something you did want, and did download. So you can probably remove that check-mark, and be quite happy.

And if you'd like to know more about those 'Supercookies', you should Google for more information on them, or check out the Firefox Add-on 'Better Privacy' which finds, lists, and can remove any or all of them, as you wish. If you use Firefox, you should have 'Better Privacy' installed, along with your AdBlock Plus, and other little helpers.... Here's part of its story....

A little more Mannheim Steamroller Christmas

                                                                         

More Christmas music...

Another from Christmas Past.....

And a little song...

And now, a dance....

The Christmas Song...

She recorded this version on June 29, 1961 in New York City, and I discovered it on the Columbia LP 'Jingle Bell Jazz', and this is my favorite rendition of this song, even though Nat King Cole's version may be more popular. 

Meanwhile, on YouTube...

A word about tracking cookies and yadro.ru

This is some of the rather limited information available about a Russian website called yadro.ru. It evidently acts as a hosting site for many others, some reports say as many as up to 260 other sites, and some of those are described as being sites that collect your personal information, the places you visit on the web, and other data you likely don't want made freely available to just anybody. Other sites hosted on there are reportedly spreading malware to unsuspecting users, or using browser hijacking processes to redirect your activities through their own websites, so they can monitor what you're doing.
So if you search your system and find anything relating to this Russian website, get rid of it, and then add that URL to your blocked lists in any of the browsers you use. If you use Firefox, it has an add-on called BlockSite that can block access to sites and disable their links. 

I'm including this just to show that this is an old problem, but one you may not be aware of yet, unless you've had some problems caused by it. Some of the references to it go back years, as in several many.... And there's an easy way to find out if you're getting tracking cookies from this or other sites - just go here and download this.

This shows a typical results list, and you'll notice the bottom entry is the site I'm ranting about. I've now added it to my blocked lists. But I digress; this program from SuperAntiSpyware is very good at finding tracking cookies, and it can also find and remove other kinds of malware. There's a free version as well as a reasonably-priced Professional version. If you use the free version, you must get the updates manually. Only the Pro version has automatic updates and  Real-time Protection. But both versions work very well.

You might also consider Malwarebytes Antimalware, which has some useful and effective tools for finding and removing hidden malware that may be disabling your protection. You can find it here. Check under its 'Tools' tab for more tools that can get you going even if something has stopped its main program. And those work, by the way. It is also quite affordable.

Further Reading: More ways to protect yourself on the web...

Sunrise...

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

Larger view of the Neuschwanstein Castle in that video

In case you'd like it for a background...

And now for something a little different....

And now that I've got your attention.... I have, haven't I ? - Duke Ellington....

And now for one from Lena Horne.....

And here's an instrumental version of it - 

And let's wrap it up with a medley - watch for a nice picture of the famous old Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, near the beginning, and enjoy the music.

Sunrise on a cloudy day

Memory Leaks and RADAR in Windows....

If you're going through Windows or using the Registry Editor and come across a listing for RADAR, it isn't what you think.... here's the story:

RADAR is a memory leak detection technology built into Windows 7 and 8 and integrated with Watson (error reporting) and AutoBug (automatic bug filing). It allows Microsoft product teams and third parties to discover and fix memory leaks early in the product cycle and after release. Since RADAR runs on customer machines, leaks can be caught during public betas, after release, and by third parties, thus ridding the entire ecosystem of memory leaks. RADAR-shipped components are highly optimized to have no appreciable performance impact.

"And what are Memory Leaks?" you ask......

A memory leak occurs when a process allocates memory from the paged or nonpaged pools, but does not free the memory. As a result, these limited pools of memory are depleted over time, causing Windows to slow down. If memory is completely depleted, failures may result.

Normally, when a process or program uses memory (RAM) during its operations, it releases that block of memory as the program or process ends, but if it doesn't, then there's a problem, which ought to result in a bug report, and an eventual fix. With RADAR, that is mostly automated. And all of that helps to explain why the newer versions of Windows are better than old ones.

A new theme

Registry: Reset the Screenshots counter...

First, a standard word of caution: be careful, because mistakes in editing your Registry can have nasty results.... and now, into the Registry....beginning with how to get there....

Use your Windows Key plus 'R' to bring up this little 'Run' window, and then in its search box, type in Regedit.exe, and click/tap 'OK', and then the Registry editing window will open. In the left-hand column, navigate to the following key: 

Once again, you want to navigate to HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer.
click/tap the word 'Explorer' and it then shows you the list in the right-hand window, where you look for and right-click on 'ScreenshotIndex', and that will
display the little window where you can click on the word 'Modify', which then shows you a window where you can enter a new Value, and the new value that you want to enter is 01, or simply 1. You can then close the Registry window and your numbering of screenshots will begin again at one.

Here's what the editor looks like after you have right-clicked on the word
'ScreenshotIndex' in the left-hand window. It shows the little window where you enter the new Value key for it, and as shown, that should be 01.

While you're in the Registry editor, and into the Current User section, look under Current User\Software on the left-hand column for a listing called 'Conduit', and if you find that, then delete it - it's malware that messes with your network connections, and causes your Windows to start looking for your Proxy settings, even when you don't have any. So you need to get rid of that.
If you aren't comfy with deleting something in Registry, then go to the website for Bleeping Computer, and download the program AdwCleaner, and run it. It can find and remove this malware for you.

Speaking of browsers....

It's an add-on included with another for Firefox called Power Bookmarks, which adds a little icon to the upper left corner of the Firefox browser......

And when you click that little icon to the left of the Search URL space, it opens a toolbar along the lower edge of the window with other choices....

.... one of which is this browser overlay called Duck Duck Go for anonymous browsing of the web. You can also choose other sites by typing in the box.

Better yet, go to their website and watch the video....

It's that season....

"Yes, Virginia, there are other browsers..."

 

Would you like a browser that gives you multiple choices of search engines? And many other configurable features you may not find in the usual browsers that are the most popular? Then you really ought to give this one a look right here.

 

 

This has a lot going for it, and is worth checking out. I've just downloaded it myself, so I can't tell you a lot about it just yet, but it looks promising, and has features not found in the usual crop of browsers. It comes highly rated by many of the usual rating sources. I found it because I've been getting progressively disillusioned with Google's recent revisions which seem to require performing more steps than before to get to the desired result. That seems counterproductive and totally unnecessary to me, so I went hunting for another alternative, and this may very well be it.

Ever wanted your own shortcut on the Start screen?

For example, let's say a tile that works as a shortcut to my blog, appearing like the others on the Start screen display, like this....

All you have to do is add your shortcut, in this case an internet shortcut, to the following folder's list:- C:\Program Data\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs.... You can open that folder, and just drag and drop it in there.
Then don't forget that it won't appear on your personal Start screen right away.
You have to select that from the main tiles display by clicking on or tapping the little arrow in the lower left of your Start screen, to take you to the complete one....

And tapping or clicking that little arrow takes you to this one.....

And on here, you find your newly created tile, and then you right-click it and select 'Pin to Start'. Now, you can find it on the first Start screen that you will see when you go to it. You can drag it around until it's located conveniently, and if you right-click on it, you have the option to change its size if you wish.

Computers can be a pain....

Computers can be a real pain in the posterior when some turkey decides to send you an infection that isn't readily visible to most ordinary security programs. That's when you need to have a couple of tricks up your own sleeve. Fortunately, I found a couple of those tricks, but I'm a little reluctant to go into details about it, because I don't want to give those guys at yadro.ru or 156.rax.ru or whatever they're calling themselves today (it changes frequently) any help. These guys apparently are running a central site that operates for a group of others who specialize in keylogging and spyware, and information collection, and malware that makes life difficult for others. Their exact location is a secret, but it is somewhere in central Russia. 

More pictures with PhotoStudio

This is the older version of PhotoStudio, from 2003, (version 5.5) and it isn't supposed to work in Windows 8, but it doesn't know that....and I'm not going to tell it. The image shown in it is about to be cropped.....

And this is the cropped version of it. Below are a couple without the program around them.... These were taken with the Fujifilm Finepix SL1000 at 50X.

Yes, PhotoStudio 6 works....

Here's a head-and-shoulders of one of my favorite Russian models, extracted from a "Not Safe For Work" larger image, and tweaked with the "beautify face"
feature, and then enlarged enough for a backgrounder on the monitor. Just for the record, she's about thirty right now, and everything looks just right...and no, I can't show you the rest of her just now. The censors wouldn't approve.

Got it back today....

Back when we were testing Windows 7, in 2009, I had purchased the version 6 of this program, but soon afterward, I lost it and its activation codes in one of many operating system re-installs, and I couldn't find the purchase order details until just the other day. Meanwhile, I had a copy of its version 5.5 on disk, and have been using that. Windows keeps saying it has compatibility problems, but if you click on "Run it anyway" it works fine. (Mighty Microsoft please take note.) 

Anyway, a couple of days ago, in a pile of my little notes to myself, I found the details of the purchase of the most recent version, so I sent that in to Arcsoft Support, and they very graciously sent back my activation codes which
convert the trial version to a registered version, and now I can use it again.
There's only one problem: I've got its version 5.5 installed in Windows 8, and it works fine, and I'm a lot more familiar with it than with this newer version.
But it never hurts to have a spare, I guess... and the newer one does have a few improvements I really ought to try.....and Windows 8 isn't complaining about it, and that's a good thing.

More camera fun...

This morning's moon.

Tonight's sunset.

Something else for you...

This really works - get it.

And the answer is.....

Just so they don't meet in the middle, and she starts walking on her knuckles and grunting a lot...that and twerking near the gorillas' cage could be trouble.

Castro, JFK, and conspiracy theories...

Everybody's got a theory, and that includes me. I think JFK's unexpected demise had something to do with Marilyn Monroe's equally unexpected demise just one year, three months, and eighteen days previously.

Marilyn, as some may recall, made quite a spectacle of herself displaying her affection for JFK, and some of her friends had connections with the mob back in New York, because it had been mob money that first got them started on the way to fame and fortune. It's just barely possible that JFK got his because Marilyn got hers, some say, because of him and his powerful connections. Some of the Kennedy clan's insiders were among the last to see Marilyn alive, and one might call it poetic justice if that's what started JFK's sudden end.

The snow report

And it's chilly out there.

Something else you should have...

This runs unobtrusively in the background and provides zero-day protection as in 'right now' for your browser(s) and files and it doesn't need updating nor a lot of TLC, because it's built to grab all kinds of stuff by how it acts. And I know what you're thinking, but you can never be too safe. I learned that the hard way yesterday. It took hours to fix that mess. Very nervous ones. 

Another handy toolkit

This adds any of the listed tools to your right-click drop-down menu, so that they're handy if you need them. I particularly like that Shredder, because it has various strengths, such as the military grade, and when it shreds something, it stays shredded. You can find it here.

If you get hit with ransomware.... don't panic, and don't reply.

First, you should have at least two browsers installed, so that if one gets locked up by the bad guys, you can go into Control Panel > Programs and Features and click or tap on Uninstall. You will still have the other one to use.

And I'm showing you the above, because Malwarebytes and its Anti-Rootkit and Chameleon tools can literally save your cute little posterior when the mung hits the fan, and please don't ask me how I know for sure. There's a story there, but it's an embarrassing one for a guy my age. Under 'Tools' in Avast, there's also directions for creating a Rescue Disk or USB, if desired.
Above all, don't reply to any requests, and don't provide any information.

Those pictures as a Windows Theme...

Zooming in on the hills

This peak is about 4 miles away.