PayPal and AliExpress slow? It might be CloudFlare’s DNS

In May 2018, I posted this article: Speed up your browsing with CloudFlare’s public DNS

In that post, I recommended CloudFlare’s DNS, 1.1.1.1. At the time, it was quite fast, and worked perfectly.

Fast forward to today, and I’m afraid that’s no longer the case.

If you switched to CloudFlare’s DNS and you’ve noticed that things like paying via PayPal have become almost useless, read on!

(more…)

Is Firefox Content Blocking screwed up?

Recently, Mozilla introduced a fabulous new feature to Firefox: Content Blocking!

The idea is that Firefox will automagically block the tracking processes of web sites to increase your privacy.

By default, this tracking should only be enabled in Private Browsing Mode, which makes sense. You don’t want everyone’s web site experiences to be suddenly broken.

One minor detail: It appears that for many people, “broken” is exactly what Content Blocking is…

(more…)

Big Data, spying, & 5G pushers: Who are THEY??

We hear a lot of about “THEY”. Big data violates our privacy, new potentially dangerous tech like 5G is pushed by “them”, and so on.

But just who is this “they“, anyway?

It turns out, the answer is: It’s complicated!

The best place to look is the big data/spying nonsense. The real history of the internet gives a pretty good idea of just how it all works.

When you lump greedy CEOs together with power-hungry (and often paranoid) politicians, and then toss in some Tech Evangelists for good measure, you get exactly what we have today…

(more…)

VICTORY! Reactivate Windows 10 after a hardware upgrade

Windows 10 Reactivation after hardware upgrade: CONQUERED!

Regular readers are aware that I have been doing battle with re-activating Windows 10 after performing numerous major upgrades on various puters.

I had another opportunity recently to upgrade yet another machine… This time, the entire computer was replaced – except the graphics card and power supply.

Once again, I was confronted with an activation error after the upgrade.

Out of desperation, I tried something crazy… and it WORKED!

(more…)

Windows 10 1809 Update: What you need to know

Windows 10 1809 Update - What you need to know

It’s that time again!

A new update to Windows 10 was re-released a few weeks back, and it appears that it’s FINALLY rolling out to end users.

You may have heard that this update was the October 2018 update. It was, but then there were “a few problems” like people’s files disappearing.

I finally got the update on my desktop and lappy, and I’m happy to report zero problems.

It seems this bad boy is finally ready for prime time. So, what’s new in the features and privacy departments??

(more…)

How to safely clean the dust inside your laptop

Clean your lappy!

Has your laptop ever started to sound like a vacuum cleaner?

Cooling fans start spinning like crazy. If things get bad enough, your CPU can even overheat, halting the laptop and giving you a scary-looking error message.

To avoid such mayhem, you should dust inside your laptop twice a year.

It’s pretty easy. Should your laptop be REALLY clogged up inside, you may need to get a little crazy and start opening things up.

But don’t panic! YouTube will save you…

(more…)

Wireless Trolls: How to win against electrosmog naysayers

You know the drill: you try to tell someone about some study showing the health effects of WiFi, 5G, or whatever, and then it hits…

Maybe they come back with one of several standard cop-outs, maybe you’re called crazy, maybe they ask what happened to your tinfoil hat, or maybe they even get angry and abusive!

So, what to do?

In this video, I give some tips and tricks and information that hopefully you will find useful in spreading the word.

(more…)