It’s a bit scary for us to advise our readers to use an ad blocking extension but we’re about to do it anyway. Computers Made Simple makes a bit of money from the ads on our pages but we find the ads that are on Facebook very annoying. Then again, maybe some of our readers find out ads annoying, too. Regardless, here’s how you can block most of the annoyances that Facebook throws at you. Here’s how:
1. Download and install Google Chrome – We’re always suggesting that you use Chrome anyway so this step should be easy. Chrome is fast, always up to date and warns you when you’re about to step off the path into a malware minefield. You can’t go wrong with it.
2. Once Chrome is installed, look for the three horizontal lines up on the very top right corner: Click on the lines, scroll down to Tools, click on Tools then click on Extensions when the side menu opens.
Extensions is what we want.
3. Once you’re on the extensions page, look down at the bottom for the words ‘Get more extensions’ and click the link – Chrome has hundreds of extensions, essentially ‘plugins’, that you can add. We’ve written about some of them before, things such as Facebook Album Mod, etc. When the extension page comes up, type ‘adblock plus’ in the search window on the top left:
Click on Facebook Customizer then click on Launch App in the next window.
4. There are a few screens that follow, click OK on them. It’s very intuitive from now on – What you’re doing here is installing the extension then downloading the part of it that blocks the Facebook ads. This app works within Facebook but doesn’t require your password to work. It’s all free, too. Did we mention that yet? Everything is free here on Computers Made Simple, right?
TIP: Close then reopen Chrome. The instructions for the extension don’t tell you to do this but it won’t block any ads until you do.
5. Before AdBlock Plus – Here is a snippet of what we get on our Facebook pages every day:
Lots of ads, soon to be zapped by AdBlock Plus.
6. After – Get ready for a neat and clean Facebook page:
All gone, for the most part anyway.
7. This extension offers three levels of ‘cleansing’:
We still get suggestions so something isn’t working right but, hey, the big ads are gone!
8. Turn it on or turn it off: Up on the top right, one or two icons left of the three bars we click on before, you’ll see what looks like a stop sign with the letters ABP in the middle of it. Click that to turn AdBlock Plus on or off.
ABP is off.
AdBlock Plus is on.
We just found this app this morning so it’s new to us, same as it is to you. If we notice things that aren’t going smoothly with it, we’ll update this but, for now anyway, it seems to be working fine. How long will it work? We have no way of knowing. We do know that AdBlock has tried to initiate discussions with Twitter and now may do the same with Facebook , trying to get them to join its ‘acceptable ad’ initiative. You can read about all of this here:
Let us know what you think of all this or, better yet, suggest some things that are troubling you about Facebook, technology or the Internet in general. We love comments and questions.
Facebook needs to change in order to remain popular…and current.
Facebook’s popularity is fading fast, at least that’s what the media would have us believe. We tend to agree, basically because we don’t see a whole lot of activity there these days. Except for fan pages, it seems that anyone who wanted to join up has already done so. Fan pages abound, and yes we have one, but we don’t see a huge increase in the numbers of personal profiles. What will Facebook look like in ten years? We don’t have any idea but if it’s going to even exist at that time, here’s some changes they could make.
1. Allow private messages on posts – Renren.com, the Chinese version of Facebook, lets users make private comments on anything that anyone else posts. When you say something on Facebook, the world sees it. You’d think that China, because of its supposed personal restrictions wouldn’t offer something like this but they do.
2. Get rid of some of the ads – Facebook has sold out, in our opinion, forcing ads on their users. Not only do we see them on the sidebar, which we’re used to, we now see them in the middle of our newsfeed. Hell, we even see suggested ads, as if we’d shout, “Yeah Facebook! That’s a cool Buick ad right in the middle of my Timeline!”
3. Stop asking for personal information – We know where we live, where we went to school, where we work or used to work…why is that important to Facebook? The tendency now is to simply lie about all of this. Why not? It’s not as if we’re going to get something out of revealing our private information, right? Facebook gets something out of it, not its users.
4. Let us like something but don’t tell the world about it – This one change would mean the world to almost every Facebook user. Liking a photo or a comment isn’t always something we want to share, is it? As long as the original poster knows we like something, why does every single person who can see that post have to know? Can you imagine how this affects teens? High school is tough enough without the added pressure of everyone knowing that someone liked someone’s photo.
5. Stop with the repetition of posts – There is no reason to repeat the same post endlessly in the newsfeed, is there? We get a notice if there is activity on something that we’ve interacted with so why does Facebook persist in showing us the same post ten times or more as we scroll down the newsfeed? Sure, we can hide the story but why do we have to interact with something we don’t want to see anyway. (We actually know why this is. Facebook is logging our ‘hides’ in order to tune the different types of ads that they put on our main page.)
Last but not least, and it’s not one of the five main points that we’d like to see changed, but Facebook does need a thumbs down icon, don’t you think? Not ‘liking’ something is not the same as ‘not liking’ it. We’ve all seen comments and opinions that we really disagree with so let us, darn it!
OK, that’s our list, what’s yours? Maybe we missed some key things here. Let us know. Better yet, let us know on your very own Facebook page. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
If it seems that computer geeks speak a different language, well, they do. Computers and the Internet are no different from many other areas of our lives. From the cars we drive to the food we eat, everything has its own set of terms. Brakes pads and complex carbohydrates are just as confusing to some people as the various computers terms and acronyms that we run into on a daily or weekly basis. Let’s take a look at some of these terms. By the time we’re through, you’ll hopefully feel a bit more comfortable around the machines you use everyday. Let’s go!
1. LED – Light emitting diode, something that doesn’t take a lot of electricity to make light. Most new computer display screens and HD-TVs have LED screens. They are cool, literally, and use much less power. The benefit? An LED screen on a laptop translates to much better battery life.
LEDs make up most current computer and TV screens.
2. Codec – basically a translator. If you speak English normally but are learning Mandarin, your brain uses a codec to change the English words into Mandarin words. The VLC media player can play any video on your computer, provided that you have the correct codec installed. These days, you don’t hear that term too often since video and audio files are somewhat more organized than they were in the past but if you can’t play a video, you will know that you need the correct codec (translator) to play it.
3. File format – every file has its own three letter designation, remnants of the old DOS OS, that lets your computer identify it in order to know what what program to use on it. An ‘mp3’ is both a music file and a file format, just as an AVI is. Some formats have become nouns that we use every day, just as we say Kleenex when we mean tissue. These formats include: .exe, .dll, mp4, .aac, .jpg, .gif, .zip. .rar, and so on. We will do a separate post on the main formats that you need to know. We’ll also show you how to tell which format a file is. It’s easy, actually.
4. USB – Universal Serial Bus is a way to get things from one device to another, usually something external, such as a cell phone or a hard drive, to a computer (laptop or desktop). Yes, we know it’s not really universal, right? One end of a USB cable is almost always the kind that fits into your computer but the other end might have a completely different connector. Then again, the one that comes with your cellphone doesn’t fit your camera and it doesn’t fit your MP3 player. Here’s a tip for you: Use masking tape to identify each cable as soon as you get it. Mark what device it’s for and you’ll always be able to find it.
Micro, mini and standard USB connectors.
5. SCSI – this is a term you don’t hear very often at all these days. If you do, it means Small Computer Systems Interface. The only thing that you have to know about SCSI is how to say it (scuzzi) and that devices that use it are very fast. The fastest hard drives are SCSI drives, or at least they were until…
6. SSD – drives showed up. SSD means solid state drive, essentially a flash drive. There are no moving parts to a flash drive, that’s why you can knock them, drop them, drive over them with a Hummer and they will still work just fine. An SSD is a much larger capacity flash drive, one that fits into a laptop or desktop and replaces your old ‘spinning platter’ hard drive. SSDs are very fast, quiet and don’t use much electricity. They can also fail without notice so don’t depend on them as a backup device. You’ll regret it.
7. Boot – start. When you start your car, you are actually booting it, even though you don’t call it that. We boot computers and reboot them when we want to shut them down and start them up again. When something happens ‘on booting’, that means it happens as the computer is starting. Boot menu, boot screen, reboot (remember the TV show?), boot up; these are all variations of the same word.
8. OS – operating system. Windows is an OS. So are Android, iOS, and Linux. There are remnants of Unix in both iOS and Linux. Windows still has some remnants of DOS in it. The Internet, for the most part, runs on Unix. The operating system lets you interact with your computer, controlling the machine by harnessing your input and translating it into a form that the device can understand. Each OS has its good points and bad points. Unix, it seems, is the most problem free but it does not have a GUI, relying on a command-line interface (CLI) instead.
9. GUI – Graphical User Interface, pronounced gooey, is what you use to interact with your computer, your cellphone, your HD-TV, your MP3/video player and so on. It’s the screen in front of you. Cars now have GUIs. Some refrigerators have GUIs. Again, a GUI is a translator. It takes something and makes it into something else, something you can see and, hopefully, understand faster. It also takes what you do, typing for instance, and translates it back into a form that your computer will understand. The symbol on a public wash-room door that designates it as women’s or men’s is, essentially, a GUI.
10. Modem/Router – the word modem is almost an anachronism these days but we still use it. It means ‘modulate demodulate’, actually, and is based on the older devices that changed your computer’s signals into bits of information that could be sent over a telephone line, then reversed when they got there. Think of a modem as the transporter on the original Star Trek episodes. Modern modems are silent, much faster and can be used on DSL Internet connections or cable Internet connections, although each is separate technology. A router uses wireless (WiFi) or wired (Ethernet) connections to distribute access to a modem across a network. Some devices are both modems and routers in one. The modem provides that pipeline while the router routes that pipeline to several computers.
These days, the modem and the router are often one device, not two.
Well, that’s ten terms or acronyms to start with. We tried to keep this short and non-technical, hoping to educate not bore you. If you can’t understand some concept, let us know. We’ll try to demystify anything that confuses you, whether it’s hardware or software or some arcane Internet term you’ve read.
Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, you’ve encountered an e-book reader somewhere. Virtually every mobile device these days has e-book capability. Sure, there are some pure readers such as the Kindle or the Nook, but smart phones and the many types of tablets, pads and pods can also be used to read them. We started out using our iPod then a Playbook and how we use our Nexus 4 smart phone. You can, of course, use your laptop or desktop computer to read e-books as well.
Each device has its own e-book format. When you download a book from a major site, it is often sent directly to your licensed device. Because of this you may never know what format they’re in. A format is something akin to a language. Some people speak English, others speak French, right? A device that can read one type of e-book format usually cannot read any other type. As long as you know which format your device uses, you’re home free, at least as far as getting new books on it. Here’s a guide to the formats:
As each device uses a different e-book format, there are also many different ways to get a book onto these readers. Some use a simple and easy drag-and-drop process while others, the iPod for instance, can be fairly difficult to figure out. What to do? Well, you could read the manual that comes with your device or you could use a free bit of software to help you.
Calibre is an e-book manager. It handles all of your cataloguing and format switching needs, something similar to the way iTunes handles most people’s music libraries. As with all software that we mention here on Computers Made Simple, Calibre is free. Here’s the link:
Calibre E-book Manager It’s quite a large download, about 80 megs, so it might take a while, depending on your bandwidth.
While Calibre manages all of your e-books, it can also be used to read those books on whatever computer where it’s installed. The best part of it, though, is its ability to convert an e-book from one format to another. This allows you to download a book in any format then switch it to the format that matches your device. Alternatively, you can put the same e-book on several of your devices, even if each one uses a different format.
Click the Download button.
Once Calibre is installed, and it takes a bit longer than normal, it will offer to locate and catalogue every e-book on your computer. After that, everything is essentially in one place, even if the books are in different folders. We aren’t going to go into the actual workings of this powerful program but we will say that its help manual is one of the best we’ve ever seen. The manual itself is online but it’s a click away and is very comprehensive. Here’s a screenshot:
It’s all here. Tips and how-tos for everything Calibre does.
If you haven’t tried an e-book yet, we’d suggest that you give it a try. Gone are the days of squinting to read fine print (just increase the typeface size) and trying to decide which book to take on your vacation (take them all! Our iPod has 653 books on it now). We’re not going to tell you that reading an e-book is as satisfying as cuddling up with a real book on a rainy day. It isn’t, it’s just different. In the same way that watching a movie in a theatre is a different experience than watching it at home, e-books have their place, just as real books do. Give them a shot and we think you’ll agree that they have their place all of their own in our lives today.
Finally, not all e-books cost money. There are many free sources for them on the Internet. We’ll do a whole post on this at some point in the future. Many classic books, titles such as Tom Sawyer for instance, are completely free to add to your device and read in your spare time. There are enough classics out there to keep you entertained for years. By the way, none of them are as heavy to carry around as Middlemarch was back in university!
Thanks for reading. We love comments, questions and suggestions so get busy and ask us something, even if it doesn’t pertain to this post. Like us on Facebook and we’ll like you! Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
In actual fact, there are probably thousands of things you shouldn’t click on when you’re on the Internet but we’ll deal with some that might pop up when you’re simply surfing. Here’s what got us started on this path.
We love Formula 1 racing, actually all forms of car racing. Unfortunately, our local networks don’t carry every F1 race. Luckily we’ve found several sites that stream these events live using TV feeds from around the world. While the commentators might not be speaking English, we don’t really care since a car race is pretty self-explanatory. Now, we’ll be the first to admit that this kind of streaming isn’t exactly kosher. It’s on the edge of what some people would consider being legal. Regardless, we’re hooked on F1 so we do it.
The sites that we use, which will remain nameless, are full of pop-ups and adult ads. On top of that, every page has warnings that suggest your browser is out of date, you need a plug-in to watch the video (you don’t) or your computer has a virus and clicking on a link will fix it. In reality, all of these warnings are false. The links look very official, however, and we think that you may find this kind of malware in other places on the Internet. Here are some examples of what we are talking about:
1.
This looks official right? It’s not.
2.
Your browser will play any video on the Internet. You do not need any other media player.
3.
If you use Chrome, everything is up to date as soon as you open the browser. It’s done automatically.
4.
Wrong. No plugin needed.
5.
Chrome updates itself. Don’t click on anything like this.
6.
This looks official but it isn’t. Internet Explorer is upgraded with Windows Update, not in the middle of browsing the Internet.
OK, you get the point. If you only surf well known sites, you’ll be fine. The problem comes when you step off the main road a bit and click on a link in Google that just might lead you to a site that installs malicious software if you click on the wrong button. Chrome will try to protect you from all of this but it’s not perfect. New malware sites pop up every day. You have to learn to protect yourself.
When you come across things like this, simply close the browser completely. When you restart it, don’t restore the last session, otherwise the whole thing will start again. Now, the problem that might come up is that some of these malware popups won’t allow you to close your browser, even if you click the little X on the top right. In fact, if you do click on that X, a whole other window might pop up! What to do? Here’s where we need the old ‘three finger salute’, the magic buttons that bring up the Windows Task Manager. Look for these keys:
Control (CTRL) Alt and Delete (Del). Press all three at the same time.
By pressing these keys, you bring up this screen:
Click on Task Manager down at the bottom.
Once you click on Task Manager, this is what you see:
Look for Chrome or whatever browser you are using.
What you are looking at is essentially the On/Off switch for everything that is running on your computer at this point in time. Once you find the program that won’t shut off, highlight it by clicking on it, then click on End Task down at the bottom. This applies to any program, of course, not just browser windows that won’t close. Say you’re using VLC or Media Player and it won’t close. Use this technique to shut it down.
TIP: Why is all of this important? If you do happen to click on any of these things, malware (bad software, like a virus) will be installed on your computer. Once this stuff is installed, you probably won’t notice much difference but, and this is the bad part, a key logging program will be running in the background, sitting there waiting for you to log in to your bank account. Once you do that, your password and credentials are sent off to a third party who can now steal your identity and, of course, some or all of your money.
We’ve shown you how to spot bad links and how to resolve a window that won’t close. Your job is to make sure that you and everyone who uses a computer in your house is aware of this. Tell your friends, share this post, tweet about it! Be the town crier, if you want everyone to be safe. We’d advise you to use Google Chrome as well as good anti-virus, anti-malware software. We like Windows Defender (Windows 8) or Microsoft Security Essentials (older versions of Windows). Both are free, by the way. You don’t have to pay for protection.
Thanks for reading. If you have questions or comments, use the form below. Better yet, like us on Facebook and you’ll be able to keep up with everything we post there. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
