Beware of Clicking Links in Facebook or Anywhere Else

Today I was browsing through Facebook and saw something that looked interesting with a ‘Learn More’ box and stupid me, I clicked it.

And this is what I got:



I couldn’t close this! I clicked OK, nothing. I clicked the x to exit, nothing happened. The tab would not close and I couldn’t go to another tab. The only way to get it to close was to go to Task Manager and close Firefox.

This is designed to panic users so they will call the number on this screen and then the scammers will attempt to sell their sleazy product and or steal credit card numbers.

Apparently this is not a new scam as it has been documented on a number of sites such as Hoax Slayer, one of my favorite sites.

Now I am trying to figure out how they get this file to block me from exiting my browser. The file is a picture file, jpeg, ping or other, but something is preventing it from being closed and I really would like to know what!

To avoid getting a malicious site by clicking a link, see where it’s going by hovering over the link and see what is showing before you click.

Web Site Stuff That Bugs Me

There are a lot of things about some web sites that make me cringe. The worst is when I go to a site and a video starts playing and blasts me with sound. Most website designers know this is not good idea, but there are some who don’t know or maybe they don’t care. Either way, the first thing I do when I go to one of those sites is leave. Then I figure out how to stop that annoyance. Auto playing videos are evil!

More and more web sites are using a tactic that I just despise, they entice me with a number of things that interest me. Then I must click ‘Next’ repeatedly to view each item. This is also known a clickbait.



I really hate that and will often decide I am not that interested and just go on to something else.

I also hate ‘teaser’ sites. I saw one on Facebook.  It posted a ‘tease’ to get folks to go to their site and I had to click click almost endlessly before it came to the answer. I certainly won’t go back to that site again!

The tease: Real Rarity: Mother Gave Birth to Quadruplets and Then the Doctor Looked at the Face of the Babies and Saw This!  The fact was the babies were identical.

Tiny fonts and light grey colored fonts are not kind to my aging eyes. This forces me to use control plus (ctrl +) to make the fonts bigger and use an extension to change the background to black. Perhaps I am getting blind, but web masters should realize not everyone has perfect vision.

Popups wanting me to ‘Subscribe’. Some of them are even insulting.

This is one of the worst!



That wasn't blocked by most ad blockers.

Some sites won’t let you see their content unless you turn off your ad blocker or pay to see content. I make it a practice never to buy anything from an online ad. In the past, some of the ads online were for malicious sites. Until I am give an ironclad guarantee online ads are safe, I will continue to use an ad blocker.



Social media icons that cover content, so many ads that it takes forever to load a page are all major irritants.

How do I get around those sites that won’t let me see their content unless I disable my ad blocker? I use an extension that disables JavaScript and and then I re-load the page.



But then I have to remember to enable JavaScript or the next page like Facebook may not work.

Setup a Gmail Account and Import Your Yahoo Mail

Since Yahoo accounts have been hacked, you may want to change from Yahoo to another email service like Gmail or outlook. com.

Try Gmail.

If you have a Gmail account, you can import your Yahoo mail into Gmail. If you don’t have a Gmail account, sign up for a new account.



Just follow the prompts.



Be sure to use a valid phone number.

Agree to the privacy and terms.



 







Once you have your account set up, you can import your Yahoo mail and contacts. Go to Settings:



Select Accounts and Import



Add your Yahoo email address here:



Add your Yahoo Account name again and click ‘Continue’.

 

Now click agree to the ShuttleCloud Migration.



Follow the verification process.



 

Now you can import all your Yahoo mail and contacts.



Once you click the ‘Start Import’ button the import will start. It can take a very long time if you have a lot of mail to import.



This is essentially the same process to import sbcglobal mail as Yahoo handles sbcglobal for most accounts

Note: Gmail uses Labels instead of folders.

When I imported my Yahoo mail into Gmail This is what I had. One of the labels on the side was the name of the Yahoo account I imported.

I am not a fan of Labels, but many users really like them. If you are familiar with folders in email you might try Outlook.com to use for your import instead of Gmail.

Set Up an Outlook.com Email Account

If you currently are using a Yahoo email account, you may want to change your email to another service like Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook.com (previously Hotmail) becsuse of the Yahoo hacks.

If you decide on outlook.com, here's how.

First go to outlook.com and click ‘Signup’. (To view the screenshots in a larger view, click on the images. To get back to the post, just click the back button on your browser.



Fill out the form:



Now you will see something like this:





Choose a theme, but you can just leave it without a theme.



Setup your signature:



Outlook.com is easily customized. Lots of options available by clicking the ‘gear’ by your name.





To Access Calendar, Contacts and other Microsoft products, click that little box of colored squares on the top left:



Set your calendar up by clicking the Calendar box as shown in the picture above.



Outlook.com can be customized so many ways. After you create your account, just play with all the settings until you have it setup the way you want it to be.

Edge needs a lot of tweaking

I like Windows 10. In fact, I like it a lot.

One of the things Microsoft did with Windows 10 was to include a new browser to take the place of the old outdated Internet Explorer. I haven’t used IE in years except when Webmasters made it the only way their sites would work. (Naughty, web masters!)

I have tried Edge, but it just won’t cut it for me, at least not yet.

True, Microsoft has added some extensions and that has helped. But it still hangs too much. When I must use the Task Manager to get Edge to close, that’s not good.

I like the fact that Edge is using less resources on my notebook.

However, the real deal breaker for me is no way to stop those awful videos to blare up when I go to some sites. The only way to avoid those are to close Edge and just not go to those sites. Unfortunately, I go to some of those sites a lot and I can go to them without auto playing videos by using tweaked Firefox or Chrome.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to tweak Edge yet. But I am still hoping!

Now I am searching for ways to make Firefox use less resources.

Take note, Microsoft!

Email Junkies (Hoarders)

I admit it, I am an email junkie or to put it bluntly, an email hoarder.

I don’t keep email on servers or in email clients. I keep them in an amazing free (for home users) program called MailStore Home.

So simple to use, backup and move to a new computer.



You just enter the information on the setup screen, click the profile and then click Run. MailStore Home will archive all your email, just Like that. You can search for emails very easily, using the really good search.

If you are an email junkie like me, the first time you run the program, it may take a long time to backup all those hoarded missives. But once they are all safely downloaded, subsequent backups won't take all that long.

Run on a daily, weekly or whenever basis and MailStore will search for new emails and add them to your archive.

With all of the uncertainty about what will happen to Yahoo mail with the sell to Verizon, you may want to use MailStore Home to backup your Yahoo mail now.  Since Yahoo has been servicing some sbcglobal accounts, you may want to back up that email as well.

This is a really good way to backup your email. You never know what might happen to stuff on the web, and emails have been known to go missing when providers just suddenly close for no warning.

I know you'd hate to lose all those emails with links to cat videos!

Be safe, backup!

Outlook Has Defeated Me, At Least For Now

Somewhere in the hidden depths of Outlook is a hidden file for a recipient. This file is not letting me send an HTML file to this recipient.

I thought I had fixed it, because the fix worked for a bit. Then it reverted back to refusing to let me send HTML to that one person.

Searches show that the auto-complete cache can cause an issue like this,  I have deleted the auto-complete cache (more than once). I have removed the recipient’s email and added it back numerous times, all to no avail.

I downloaded and installed a utility to clear the auto-complete cache .

Didn’t work.

I created a new Outlook profile, still didn’t work.

Every search told me to check the properties by right clicking recipient’s email address, but there are no options for properties in the email address. All that shows up are these options:

No Properties.

Someone said to right click on the email address in a message. I did get 'Properties' so clicked properties and got the original form with the recipient's name and email address and nothing else.

So somewhere lurking in my Outlook there is a ‘Property’ that tells Outlook to send emails to this recipient’s address as RTF instead of HTML.

I usually keep  trying to fix problems until I succeed, but so far after almost 10 days I am not having any success.

But, I keep trying!

Not so Funny Business with Outlook

When Microsoft converted my Outlook.com email to Outlook Mail, I had to reinstall my email Account. Not sure why, but I followed the instructions here and everything seemed to be working ok, except for my rules.

I had to delete them all and redo them. I had a lot of rules so that wasn’t fun.

Then a odd problem occurred.

I forward some emails on a daily basis to two people. Ever since my Outlook.com email was changed to Outlook Mail, one of my recipients did not get the message in graphics mode but in text with links.

Before the transition from Outlook.com to Outlook Mail, the emails were just fine.

If I forwarded the email from Outlook on the web, the mail went through as it should. But if I sent it through my Outlook client (Outlook 2016) it was received as text and links.

Since the recipient uses Gmail, I sent the same email that was sent to the recipient to my Gmail account and it went just fine.

I checked the settings in the other g-mail account, they were just like in mine.

I sent the email from Outlook Mail on the web, it was received as intended.

It had to be Outlook on my computer, but what?

How I solved it just goes to show sometimes stuff can get corrupted, changed or altered during an update.

I deleted the misbehaving senders email and re-added it. Once I re-added it, I got a popup saying something about another connection. (I don't remember the exact wording). So I opened the contact and there was a very old email address listed in addition to the current address. So I removed that address and resent the email and now the email was received as intended to the recipient.

Since my contacts list have been imported to each new version of Outlook there is really no way to know exactly when this happened, but because of the old email address listed, it must have been there for years. Apparently Microsoft Exchange didn't like it

Of course it could have been caused by  Microsoft by a glitch that picked up the old email address, but who knows?

Now I just have to find out what is causing this error when I try to send to a group contact.



Lots of other folks are getting this error as well, but haven’t found where anyone has solved it!

I solved the email address problem myself, guess I will just have to see if I can fix this one myself. Doesn’t happen online!

Windows 7 Searches and Searches for Updates

Because my HP computer crashed and couldn't recover, I reinstalled Windows 7. (See my previous post). But I still had a big problem!

Windows update couldn't find new updates. It kept saying 'No updates available for this computer'.  Since it was restored to way back in 2015, I knew there had to be updates, a lot of them! But everything I tried just didn't seem to work.

I just couldn't seem to give up that I couldn't fix this problem.

I searched and searched and while I found a lot (and I do mean a lot!) of folks had this problem as well. There were a lot of fixes found in my searching, but none of them worked. I kept getting the same message 'no updates available'.

I tried KB971058, Windows update Troubleshooter for Windows 8.1 Windows 8 and Windows 7.

Fixed several things, but not the one I really needed.

Downloaded Windows update Standalone Installer, now it is 'Searching for updates on this computer'. Searching and searching. I ( think I did this before!) I changed the Internet time server to nist.gov.

I checked services, windows update services was running, windows modules was not, started it.

Finally I just got too frustrated and turned the computer off. Lo and behold, there was over 100 updates waiting to install!

I have no idea which of the many (fixes) made Windows 7 updates finally work, but it is all updated and now donated.

Before I donated this computer I wanted to make sure there were none of my files accessible.

First I uninstalled all the programs and deleted the folders and files.

I created a new profile, logged out of the old profile, logged into the new profile and deleted the old profile. I told Windows to delete all of the old files and folders just to be sure.

Then I ran the cipher command to overwrite all the free space.

Windows 7: Cipher Command - Overwrite Deleted Data in Windows

That took quite a while as the drive was nearly empty, but now I can be reasonable sure my deleted data is gone.

Hopefully someone else will get some good use from this restored (and updated!) computer.

HP with Windows 10 is now HP with Windows 7

After the Windows 10 Anniversary update, the HP always hung at Restart. I could not find any reason for the  HP to hang, but there was a message saying something about a memory exception when it shut down. It went by so fast I couldn't really read it.

Since I was planning to donate the computer I wanted it to be in good working order.

I decided to put it back to Windows 7. I used Macrium Reflect to restore it back to Windows 7. The restore worked just fine, but the reason I upgraded to Windows 10 was still there. It would not update! I tried all of the so-called fixes I could find on the Internet, but nothing worked, it would just search and search and search. I let it search all night, no go, still searching when I gave up.

After seeing so many other frustrated users trying to update Windows 7, I wonder if it was a ploy on Microsoft to get folks to update to Windows 10. I did update, but eventually the update broke the computer.

Sad!

Removing The Cobwebs in Firefox

For some time now Firefox had been ‘acting up’.  I had just figured it was the sites I was going to even though they worked OK in Chrome. It couldn’t be my all time favorite browser Firefox! Or could it?

I was trying to change a setting in LastPass, but it didn’t save in Firefox. It worked in Chrome and it Edge, but not Firefox. There was no ‘’Save’ in Firefox! So it was my Firefox!

Chrome:



Firefox:



I thought it must be a setting somewhere in Firefox to enable the option to seeing ‘Save’ but I couldn’t find it.

I was also having to use Chrome for Chat pages as the Chat windows in Firefox were so big that there was no way to submit a reply and no way to resize the window. Everything I found on Google searches or Bing searches to resize the window didn’t work. (So why wouldn't I admit it was Firefox?)

I tried removing all the extensions in Firefox, that didn’t help. Resetting Firefox didn’t help. Somewhere there was a bit of corruption in Firefox, but where?

I bit the bullet and opened Revo Uninstaller Pro and uninstalled Firefox.

After I downloaded and reinstalled Firefox, all is well.

The cobwebs have been removed!

How I upgraded My Windows 10 to Windows 10 Anniversary

I am a bit impatient when it comes to getting new stuff for my computer. So on August 2, I wanted the update NOW. Before I started looking for the update though, I did make a complete backup (image) of my computer.

Since caution finally over ruled my desire to ‘get updated’, I decided to try on an older computer first.

I went to Settings/ Windows Update and searched for updates. No updates were available. I was so disappointed!

Some website said to click 'Learn more' on the Widows Update page and  it would take me to a Microsoft site to download the update, so I clicked the Learn more link and went to the site. I clicked the Get the Anniversary Update now and it downloaded the Update Advisor. I installed it and after checking to make sure my computer could handle it the download started. Eventually it started the install and then..major disappointment!

The install failed with this message:


I tried on another computer with the same result.

Now I was pretty upset, but I didn’t give up. I did some searching and found the solution.

I downloaded the installation media from Microsoft and created the tool to install the update. I chose the USB option because my notebook does not have a CD drive.



I also needed both 64 bit and 32 bit.



Then it asked to select the drive.



I clicked next and the download started to my USB drive.

Once the download completed, I checked the contents of the drive.



To install the update I inserted the USB drive and used the correct media for each computer by selecting  either x64 or x85 (for 32 bit) then clicking ‘Setup.exe.’



I installed the Windows 10 Anniversary update on a Compaq with only 2 gig memory, a Dell with 4 gig memory, an HP with 6 gig memory and my Toshiba with 8 gig of memory.

The only problem I had was with the HP, it hung during the install. After a long time I determined it was not going to finish, so I turned the computer off, preparing to do a restore. But when I turned it back on the update completed with no more problems!

When I turned the computers off, there was a brief message about an exception in explorer.exe, but I haven’t seen that error again.

Each 64 bit computer had another update the next day, ‘Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1607 for x64-based Systems(KB3176929). I really don’t remember if the Compaq had an update, but I think it did.

One thing I didn’t like, it disabled Malwarebytes Pro. It even removed the download file. Fortunately I had the license backed up to another external drive.

So far everything seems to be OK.

RSS in Thunderbird

I like RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. I can review the titles and decide whether or not I want to read the articles and go back later to read them again.

I have been using Windows Live Mail for RSS and it works quite well.

But WLM is old tech and may no longer be supported in the future. So I decided to try Thunderbird.  I already use Thunderbird for a Yahoo group.

I read most of my mail in Microsoft Outlook and I prefer Outlook for email, but not RSS. Thunderbird’s RSS feed is quite a bit different and took me a bit to get used to. BUT.. one thing I would never get used to and just may a deal breaker.

On some of the feeds when I clicked the subject to read the post, my browser would open to a blank screen with a one pixel only.



When I looked at the page source, all that was there was this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<meta chartset="utf-8">
<title>Twitter Widget Log Helper</title>

I closed it and could read the body of the post, but this was really aggravating as it happened with every post!

I searched on Mozilla’s help site, but if there was an answer there I couldn’t find it. I searched with Google and with Bing. There were a lot of folks complaining about this,  but it was with browsers, not Thunderbird.

Several sites suggested adding Adblock Plus to Thunderbird, so I tried that, but I still got that blank page when I clicked a subject in a Thunderbird RSS feed.

Finally I found the answer on this site: MarkMail.

I went to Add-ons in Thunderbird, selection options in Adblock and created a filter that did the trick.







I added these two lines to the filter:

||twitter.com/i/jot
||platform.twitter.com/jot.html

Now the post opens without that aggravating blank screen opening in Firefox!

OneNote Annoyance (or Is It Windows?)

Sometimes a seemingly minor annoyance gets to be a major aggravation if a fix is not so easy for me to find.

Every time I opened OneNote, it only filled the screen halfway. I had to click the Maximize button to open it full screen.

I figured there must be a way to get it to open full screen but I couldn't find any setting any where to make it open full screen.

Nothing in File/Options. I searched online, nothing very helpful, only folks wanting programs to not open full screen.

Since I have a subscription for Microsoft Office I decided to contact support for help and selected Chat. The agent first wanted my product ID, which I don't have for subscription, so he asked for  my name, email, etc. and then when he decided he could help me, we went on to the problem. Of course he didn't know I know how to minimize or maximize a program so we had to get through that.

Then he want me to let him access my computer to fix the problem. 'No way, no one is in my computer but me'.

So he checked his 'Resources' and had me go to this link.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-desktop/how-to-make-programsfiles-etc-open-in-full-screen/5016808e-ec78-475b-b398-2a0a5c7590c4

That's all well and good, maybe for Windows 7, but it didn't help me one bit. OneNote still opened half screen.

I tried the method shown here in tenforums:
http://www.tenforums.com/general-support/34261-there-anyway-open-fullscreen-windows-default.html

It seemed to work at first, but still it didn't keep very long, it still opened half screen.

Then I searched the Help in OneNote.

In Keyboard shortcuts in OneNote 2016 for Windows, I Found 'Press F11 to enable disable full screen.

There is no F11 key on this Toshiba!

Need to press the Fn key while pressing the f key and 11 at the same time? Seems awkward, but will try it. http://forums.toshiba.com/t5/Keyboards-Touchpads/Function-Key-F9-F10-F11-etc/td-p/507305

After all this it finally seems to be fixed as OneNote is now opening full screen. I hope it continues to do so!

OneNote

I love Microsoft OneNote. I keep everything in OneNote from Windows 10 Tips and Tricks to Recipes to what I did and when I did it.

I want all my notebooks to be sorted alphabetically. But when I add a new notebook it gets added to the bottom of the list. I could right click on the notebook and select 'Move Up', but I have a LOT of notebooks and this gets to be tedious as you can only move up one at a time.

 

Macros from Onetastic to the rescue! So now I can sort notebooks by name, oh so easy and fast!

Some of my notebooks have a lot of sections. It's nice to have those sorted as well.
Sort OneNote 2010 Sections and Pages While it says it’s for OneNote 2010, it works great for OneNote 2016.

If you have Windows 10, OneNote is included. For earlier versions of Windows, go to Microsoft’s site for OneNote and download your free copy.

What's the difference between OneNote and OneNote 2016?  Not much!

Before I started using OneNote, I used another note taking program, Evernote. I still use Evernote some, but I had so many notes in Evernote I had to get the premium version. I found a supercool program that could transfer my notes from Evernote into OneNote, called Evernote2OneNote

Microsoft has a similar tool as well, haven’t tried it yet.

Windows Time

Today I wanted to check on my bill for Charter. So I went to Charter's site and logged in. As soon as I did, I got a pop-up saying my session had expired, log in again.

I tried Firefox, Chrome and Edge all with the same results.

I checked the time and date, it's ok. I logged into other sites, no problem.

I rebooted my computer, same thing.
I tried with another computer, got logged in with no problem.

So it's this computer.
I checked the firewall. Turned if off, same results. Not the Firewall.
Ran a scan with Windows Defender.
Ran a Scan with Malwarebytes Pro.
Ran CCleaner.

No joy.

What could cause a web session time out on my computer in less than 10 seconds?

Finally, I seemed to recall an issue with the time zone when I initially set up Windows 10. I manually set up everything and I 'thought' all was well. Apparently I was wrong.

So I started checking. First I went back to Settings in Windows 10. Looks OK.



Under Related Settings I clicked Additional Time and Regional Settings.

Then I saw this!

The time was wrong!

So I clicked the tab for Internet time:



There were two options:

It was defaulted to Time windows.com which gave an error when I clicked ‘Update now’.



So I changed it to the other option, nist.gov and it updated!



I went back to Charter’s website , logged in and voila! No more messages telling me my saying my session had expired.

The time and date on Windows 10 seemed to be correct, but it wasn’t until I connected it to the server for time and date.

I should have checked this first but the time and date showing in the lower right corner had the correct info and when I went into Settings that also showed the right time and date. The manual setup seemed to be right, but it really wasn’t. I now wonder why Windows didn’t connect to the Internet time and date server when I first setup Windows1