the Internet

th 13 Jun 2024	In the early days we unwisely used the same easily remembered password for multiple accounts. Then Yahoo a sort of pre-Google search engine got hacked revealing users' passwords. Our Google account has started sending slow to load emails pointing out our vulnerability. If you have a Google account go Manage your Google Account/Review security tips/Your saved passwords to deal with it.
sa 30 Jul 2022	Sending large files by email can be a bit hit or miss. We've found WeTransfer.com very useful, you don't have to open an account, you don't have to pay and your recipient gets an email with a link to download your files zipped into one ... pretty much instantaneous and much less risky than a DVD in the post.
su 1 May 2022	After 25 years the other Alexa (an Amazon company) has retired, Semrush is probably the best substitute.
fr 29 Apr 2022	Facebook have been pratting about with the pix at the top of a page (the cover); it's too big, low res and by default the top half is missing when landing. We dislike it so much we deleted it and FB then replaced it with a grey wilderness. We gave up, laid back and thought of England ... and another thing the associated slideshow editor is buggy, clearly Wayne the work experience kid hasn't been properly supervised.
fr 18 Mar 2022	In January the other Alexa said they were retiring in May but they already seemed to have shuffled off for pub lunches and Croc wearing.
su 6 Mar 2022	The BBC's news mirror web site on the dark web has been running since October 2019. It is a way to access the news in countries where the Beeb is blocked. News is available in Ukrainian and Russian.
tu 1 Feb 2022	Without actually trying it we were pretty sniffy about Wordle ... it's very addictive.
mo 24 Jan 2022	That's very disappointing, the other Alexa (an Amazon company) is being retired in May. Semrush is probably the best substitute.
fr 26 Mar 2021	Today we got both a scam text and a scam email pretending to be Royal Mail about the same fictional delivery. DON'T click on the links but if you hover your mouse over the links in the email you'll see the web addresses are nothing to do with Royal Mail.
tu 8Sep 2020	If you receive an unexpected and perhaps unexplained parcel (it happens a lot at this end of Stately Terrace) it may be a brushing scam but it doesn't mean you've been hacked.
we 24 Jun 2020	If you go through the online process to return an eBay item, get to the end and then want to go back to the beginning to change the reason for return DON'T click Cancel. If you cancel a return you can't start another one for the same item.
tu 24 Mar 2020	Sunday we had our first virtual dinner London-Dorset-Framlingham-Zurich via application Zoom and an iPad. Quite touching to see and hear Lady KRJ's two little boys chattering and eating spaghetti. Helps if you can get your device a little away, it puts you in context:)
fr 1 Nov 2019	We have friends who were living down an unmade road between Dennington and Stradbroke. Their dish washer overheated and filled the house with thick smoke. They heard the fire engine siren approach the end of the road ... and then go away. The what3words app would have helped. It divides the world into a grid of three metre squares and assigns each a unique three word address. We hadn't worked out even a modest house will have more than one address.
tu 24 Sep 2019	Oh poo, flickr have started putting adverts in when flicking through a free account photostream and in the Martlesham Tesco a couple of weeks back there was a £20 personal cassette/radio with built in speaker and mike ... cassettes eh?
th 16 May 2019	Here in what was the industrial South of Framlingham the broadband has been down for some 20 hours. If you're getting Internet on your mobile phone you may be able to use the phone as a modem for your computer. It's might be called tethering or possibly hotspot. Use your mobile to Google using <mymobilephone> as a modem. If you succeed your computer will be using your mobile's data allowance.
fr 4 Jan 2019	A bit techie but if you have your own web site this might be interesting. We hadn't visited Google's PageSpeed Insights for quite a while. Today we discovered it's had a major makeover, doesn't optimise graphics anymore and it looks like Lighthouse buried in the Chrome browser is more useful. (Lighthouse didn't like our robots.txt file but 100 speed score.) Yes, we're confused too.
th 20 Dec 2018	This week we ordered an Amazon Basics USB lead, when it arrived we'd ordered the wrong thing. Shall we bother sending it back? Decided yes more out of principle than financial gain. Went through the return process and at the end Amazon said they'd refunded our credit card but we didn't need to send the lead back ... Merry Christmas eh?
tu 4 Dec 2018	Amazon have sent us a card inviting us to try a second 30 day free trial with a letter telling us we won't believe the changes they've made. Hopefully this time they wouldn't start charging our credit card without warning.
sa 16 Jun 2018	That Mr Google has been not very nice to us over the past couple of years so when we received a letter (a letter not an email) from him this morning we thought maybe he was worried he'd offended us ... no, he was suggesting that if we give him £120 he might be a bit nicer to us.
sa 2 Jun 2018	Our previous BT router had a useful pull out thingy on the top with the logon details. When we got our new and present router the useful thingy on the top had gone, What a pity we thought. We moved the new router last week and discovered there's still a useful thingy but it's on the side.
fr 23 Mar 2018	Five years ago we didn't bother backing up to BT's Cloud as it didn't retain the source file structure. Given time even mega organisations sort themselves out (Microscoft and the web for example) and the BT Cloud does now retain file structure plus we're getting 200Gig compared with the free 15Gig from Google ... but then we're giving BT money. It's worth looking at the settings to stop it doing annoying things at start up.
th 28 Sep 2017	It's taken three attempts for BT to actually dispatch a router/hub, hopefully it will arrive today. Worth tracking online and complaining sooner rather than later, we complain via the online chat.
fr 25 Aug 2017	pc tips/the Internet has spawned a social media page.
we 24 Aug 2016 Alexa	Alexa.com (an Amazon company) is a web site that ranks other web sites opining how important they are in the cyber world, it's particularly useful getting an opinion where money is involved. To give you some markers today the BBC is ranked 98, East Anglian 155,183 and the East African Daily Times 10,108,649. There is a rewarding addon for your browser that indicates the Alexa ranking of every site visited though very occasionally we've found it slowing the browser down.
tu 12 Jul 2016	When you turn off auto-renew on a domain registration at 123 Reg (123 call it Domain Cancellation) you're told you won't be contacted again about the domain ... not quite true, ICANN require you are given three warnings that a domain is about to lapse.
fr 13 May 2016	A techy one this time, if you have a server side script running on a Linux server and it's reporting errors which include ^M then a carriage return has crept in from the Windows world. To fix it use the vi editor on the server to remove the ^M. The trick is start the editor with the argument -b, this puts vi into binary mode and you can see the carriage return ^M.
we 2 Dec 2015	Perhaps it's cynical and habitual journalistic hysteria interpreting Ofcom's warning as Christmas lights mess up your wifi but a surprisingly informed Guardian article.
th 9 Jul 2015	To help declag a pc on the south coast we tried remote assistance ... multiple times. So we then tried the free (for personal use) and doesn't need an install at the client end TeamViewer. It connected so quickly it does make you wonder how secure it is.
fr 16 Jan 2015	WARNING TeamViewer is a genuine (and free) remote access/control application software but we've encountered it being used in scams where a gentleman (usually with an Indian accent) phones, says he's from Microsoft and there's a problem with your pc ...
fr19 Dec 2014	Here's one we've only just discovered (no doubt you've known it since before computers used valves and helped win the war). When doing a Google image search if you click on the Search tools button to the right of the Web Maps etc toolbar a second toolbar appears. If you click the Type pull down there's a Face option.
th 30 Jan 2014	If like us you're a little bemused by the Google page graphic today it's Chinese new year (year of the horse) tomorrow.
su 12 Jan 2014	For years Grisoft's free AVG has been our default anti-virus/malware software but as is the way it's become bloated and greedy of resources. Surprisingly for Microsoft their Security Essentials is a tight little beastie that does the job and has become our default, we have it on a Win7 desktop and a laptop and netbook running XP, the only problem has been the netbook's Security Center(sic) initially didn't recognise it.
mo 2 Dec 2013	On the basis you can't be too rich, too thin or have too many backups and finding the free 5Gig of Google Cloud useful we tried out the 2Gig BT Cloud that comes with a BT broadband account. Unless we're missing something (and we very well could be) it doesn't retain the filing structure of the source, it just makes one big flat mess of files ... so a bit useless then.
th 14 Nov 2013	When looking on ebay try searching spelling mistakes, for example if looking for a necklace try necklis or neklace. The mistake may be ignorance or a typo but the expectation is a misspelled item will go for less as it shows in fewer searches.
fr 7 Jun 2013	A danger of digital is the data is so vulnerable, if you're not backed up and you have a hard disc crash then there goes the family photos. CDs are fiddly and not that reliable, memory sticks are slow and not really big enough yet and both need to be stored off site for real security. For all these reasons we've been meaning to try online backup because it must have got better since we last tasted. Google supply a FREE 5 Gigs online with app Google Drive to sync with your selections on the hard disc. As you might expect Google Drive downloads and installs very nippily and you put in the folder My Documents/Google Drive what you want backed up and that's it ... except in can take four hours to upload 500 Meg and when we added the live version of this web site to the Google Drive folder things could get very slow indeed. We took this web site out of Google Drive and though now sometimes things can get slow, particularly at start up, it's acceptable as long as the Google Drive contents are not constantly changing ... gonna try BT Cloud next.
fr 8 Feb 2013	If the power goes off during daylight (like it did the other weekend in Framlingham) looking out the window to see if other people's lights have gone off too won't work. Here's a cunning ruse if you have a wireless connected smart phone, do a wireless scan and if your neighbours' routers have gone off too then it's a power cut not just you.
su 18 Sep 2011	Google Earth has gained a timeline control so now like us you can see you old car in 2000 and that the park you played in as a child was still allotments in 1945.
su 13 Jun 2010	If you have a web site and you get one of these ignore it, essentially it's a fiddle. It will almost certainly be cheaper to renew the domain with your present registrar at typically half the price, and they will certainly be contacting you about renewal.
we 24 Feb 2010	Picked up a bit of nastiness twice this week that pretended it had found a virus on our main machine and wouldn't let us do anything except watch it ... so we restarted the pc whilst holding down user key f8, user key f8 opens a DOS type screen and we chose to start Windows in Safe Mode. Then we used System Restore to roll the system back to before the nastiness appeared; surprisingly straight forward.

broadband • email us • advertise