Table of contents for 563 in Computeractive

I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to win a fortune on EuroMillions, but it may deprive me of one of life’s most rewarding pleasures: prolonging the life of my tech to make sure I squeeze out every penny’s worth. Would I be so motivated if I had enough cash to purchase a new diamond-encrusted printer every day? Actually, yes, perhaps I would. Like love and happiness, money can’t buy the glow of satisfaction that comes from adding new features to a device through a clever tweak, or a timely download. Nik Rawlinson hasn’t won EuroMillions (or if he has, he’s kept it quiet), so he’s as keen as me on adding features to existing kit. His excellent Cover Feature explains how to upgrade your PC, laptop, router, printer, camera and…

Sainsbury’s has said customers aren’t ready to pay for items on their phones, and has reinstalled checkouts into one of its stores after a three-month trial. In April, the supermarket removed tills from a store in Holborn, London, requiring customers to scan their groceries using its Pay & Go app as they walked around. Sainsbury’s claimed this “created excitement amongst customers”, and that many “loved how quick and simple” the app is to use. However, it added that some customers preferred to pay with cash or card, which led to queues at the helpdesk. It has now put one conventional till and two self-checkouts into the store, while keeping the option for shoppers to pay through the app. It added: “We’ll take the learnings from this experiment to develop our…

LENOVO FIXES ORANGE SCREENSHOTS Lenovo has released an update to fix a problem that was giving an orange tint to screenshots taken on its computers in Windows 10. Users had complained that since the May Update (version 1903), grabs taken with Snip & Sketch or the Snipping Tool were shaded orange. People with Lenovo computers should follow the instructions at www.snipca.com/32774. APPLE’S FIRST THREE-CAMERA IPHONE Apple has released its first iPhone with three rear cameras (pictured). Both the iPhone 11 Pro (from £1,049) and the iPhone Pro Max (from £1,149) have three lenses on the back, while the standard iPhone 11 (from £729) has two. Compare them at www.snipca.com/32772. Apple also launched a bigger version of its cheapest iPad, increasing the screen from 9.7in to 10.2in. Buy it at www.snipca.com/32773…

Manufacturers can now start making faster USB devices after the technical specifications for USB4 were agreed. It’s likely devices will start appearing in shops in the second half of 2020, providing data-transfer speeds of 40Gbps, double what the current fastest standard (USB 3.2) can achieve. USB4’s 40Gbps matches the speed provided by Intel’s Thunderbolt standard, which is not as widely used as USB 3.2. Most devices though use earlier and therefore slower speeds, typically between 5Gbps and 10Gbps. This speed boost will make it much faster to perform tasks that require a lot of computing power. Crucially, USB4 will be able to allocate bandwidth to different types of tasks. If you’re sending video and data at the same time, USB4 will be able to devote, say, 20 per cent of…

LEAD CASE Have I been scammed by a fake HP site? Q When I bought a new Wi-Fi printer from HP, I ran into several problems. When I sought help on what I believed was HP’s website, using the live chat, a ‘technician’ took remote control of my PC. He said it was riddled with viruses and I needed to pay £200 to fix this. I suspected I’d been scammed so contacted HP’s CEO, but have heard nothing. What’s going on? Clive Tear A We’ll try to get to the bottom of this worrying case because it sounds like a scam, which has nothing to do with HP. It told us that it would never ask a customer for money through live chat. It has no record of Clive’s chat…

Sync your tree to phone and tablet There are many good reasons for carrying your family research on your phone or tablet. You can share your latest discoveries when visiting family, look up details when scouring archives, and even update your tree with new information discovered when you’re out and about. There are three main ways to transfer your research from PC to phone or tablet. First, you could try a mobile app that links to your genealogy software, syncing your work between the two. Another option is to sync your research using an online service like Ancestry as an intermediary: so once it’s saved from your PC to the web, you can access it online on your mobile device. A third route, when all else fails, is to find…

I’m what marketing departments call an early adopter. The kind who can’t help but leap at software updates the moment they’re released, even though there’s a fair chance something may go wrong. Recently, however, I’ve started taking the peculiar step of downgrading some of my devices. My Samsung Galaxy phone, for example, now spends most of its time in Battery Saver mode, which disables distracting, time-sapping features and apps, and rewards me with twice the battery life. And on my PC, I’ve stumbled upon the ‘Colour filters’ section in Windows’ Ease of Access settings (go to Start, click the cog icon, then ‘Ease of Access’). It’s primarily designed to help counter the effects of colour blindness (you can set it to deuteranopia, protanopia or tritanopia mode), but it also includes…

EBOOK READER | £90 from Kobo www.snipca.com/32586 Kobo makes a full range of ebook readers that compete with Amazon’s, including the Kobo Forma (£240 from www.snipca.com/30988, see Issue 550, page 29), which competes with the Kindle Oasis. The Clara HD is cheaper, comparable to the Kindle Paperwhite (£90 from Amazon www.snipca.com/29818, see Issue 543, page 23). However, it has Kobo’s ComfortLight system, which uses extra LEDs – 13 versus the Paperwhite’s five – to give lighting of variable colour. As with the pricier Kindle Oasis, but not the Paperwhite, this lets you automatically or manually make the screen look warmer (more orange) to avoid prolonged exposure to blue light. You could mistake the Clara HD for a Kindle Paperwhite from the front. Its 6in screen has the same 300dpi resolution.…

LAPTOP HP Envy 13 £849 from www.snipca.com/29555 Tested Issue 539 The combination of an eighth-generation quad-core i5 chip and MX 150 graphics makes this an excellent all-round laptop, let down only by the poor colour reproduction of its Full HD touchscreen. Seven-hour battery life is adequate, and it’s nicely made. ALTERNATIVE Dell XPS 13 This premium laptop starts at £1,200, but the best deal is with the brand new quad-core i7-8550 and QHD touchscreen. £1,280 from www.snipca.com/26796 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 9.7 £399 from www.snipca.com/30707 Tested Issue 501 Now discounted and with a stylus included, this full-size HDR tablet is a better deal than the new Tab S4 (see Issue 540). Apple’s faster £319 iPad with optional £89 Pencil is superior, but lacks microSD expansion. ALTERNATIVE Amazon Fire…

1 Sign in at www.dropbox.com (or create a new account at the same address). Click your avatar at the top-right corner of the Dropbox files list and click Settings 1 from the menu. 2 Click Security at the top of the page then click the slider to the right of ‘Twostep verification’. Dropbox will tell you to use your key or code to log in using unknown devices. Click ‘Get started’ 1. 3 Enter your password, leave ‘Use text messages’ 1 selected, then click Next. Enter your mobile number, wait for a code to arrive by text, then type it into the Dropbox box to authorise your phone. 4 Click Next twice, write down the emergency codes that Dropbox displays (you can use these to log in if you ever…

I never thought I’d find WhatsApp useful, but it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever used. My daughter persuaded me to install it on my Android phone when she was expecting her first child, and I’ve since had many chats on it that I’d like to preserve for posterity. I didn’t realise until recently that you can back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive. You can set this to happen at intervals. In WhatsApp tap Menu, Settings, Chats, then ‘Chat backup’. Next, tap ‘Back up to Google Drive’ and select how often you want a back up to occur. The options are daily, weekly or monthly (see screenshot). Alternatively, you can keep this setting at ‘Never’ and decide to back up manually whenever you want. Also, don’t forget…

ANDROID & iOS Search for text in your photos Scanners are space hogs and text-recognition software can be expensive. So, we have good news: you can now photograph pages from books and magazines and, using Google Photos (www.snipca.com/32724), extract any text they contain. The same trick works for screenshots. Open Google Photos, tap the picture you want to work with, then tap the Google Lens icon (an incomplete rounded square with a dot at its centre, which is third icon from the left along the toolbar at the foot of the screen). Tap on the text you want to extract and drag your finger across it until it’s all selected, and Google Photos will give you the option to copy, translate or share it (see screenshot below left), or use…

WINDOWS 7, 8.1 & 10 Access the system tray easily Most programs that run in the background display an icon in the system tray in the bottom-right corner of the Windows desktop. Clicking these icons launches the program or lets you access its settings, but they’re rather small, which can make them fiddly to use with your mouse. If you have trouble with this, try using your keyboard instead. To shift the focus to the system tray, press Windows key+B. A small white box will appear around the up arrow (see screenshot below). You can then use the left and right arrow keys to shift the focus to different icons. Highlight the one you want, then press Enter to see its options. To reveal hidden system tray icons, move the…

In Issue 554, we explained how to quickly strip out duplicates from a range of cells in Microsoft Excel. You can do the same in LibreOffice Calc, but the process is slightly different. In this example, we’re using a spreadsheet of a register of club meetings over a period of time (so some people will appear more than once). We want to eradicate these duplicate entries, so anyone who has attended a meeting appears once only. To start, highlight the cells you want to filter. In our example, we highlight the Member ID, Forename, and Surname cells. Next, click the Data menu, select More Filters, then choose Standard Filter. Make sure all the Field Name options are set to ‘-none-’, then click Options at the bottom to reveal more settings.…

It was back in 1955 that Life magazine coined the term ‘throw-away society’. It’s just as relevant now, more than half a century later. Manufacturers need to take most of the responsibility for the cost – both financial and environmental – of our continuous upgrade cycle. Who can blame consumers for wanting to splash out on the latest technology? Apple and Samsung release new tablets and phones every year, Asus and Dell make ever-thinner laptops, and Philips and LG tempt us with bigger and brighter screens. But bigger, thinner, brighter and faster isn’t always better. What your PC did yesterday, it will still do tomorrow. It might do it a little more slowly, but that has less to do with the hardware than its configuration. Cluttered hard drives, poorly managed…

Regular Computeractive readers will already be well aware that Windows 7’s days are numbered. Launched in October 2009, the hugely popular operating system (OS) has certainly had a good innings. But, as with XP and Vista before it, Windows 7 has come to the end of its official product lifecycle. On 14 January 2020, Microsoft will flip the ‘off’ switch on all W7 updates, effectively rendering any computers running the OS obsolete and unsafe to use. According to Statcounter (www.snipca.com/32686), W7 still has a market share of around 31 per cent, meaning that many millions of PC users around the world only have a matter of weeks to prepare for Microsoft’s deadline. If you’re one of them, you need to act now, or risk leaving it too late. That’s why…

Q I’ve been a reader of your magazine for many years but, while I’ve seen both spellings used, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full explanation of the difference between disc and disk. You seem to use disk more than disc, but I do still see disc used here and there. Is this just a matter of differing personal opinions between your various writers? Geoffrey Moore A Our writers have strong and differing opinions on all sorts of things but on this particular matter it’s actually a matter of tradition that has dictated differing styles. In simple terms we tend to use ‘disk’ when referring to hard disk drives and ‘disc’ when talking about optical media, like CDs and DVDs. Of course, that raises the question why we make…

40Gbps Speed of USB4, which should start appearing in devices next year- p9 £200 How much one reader was scammed by a fake HP site - p14 774 million How many words and phrases AI tool GPT-2 has been programmed with - p49 HOW TO USE SNIPCA URLs We use snipcas to turn long URLs that are hard to type into ones that are short and simple. They aren’t websites themselves, which means they won’t be recognised if you type them into Google. Instead, you need to type them into your browser address bar, then press Enter. Doing this will take you to the correct website.…

You’ll soon be able to make phone calls through Windows’ Your Phone app, which connects your computer with your mobile phone. Microsoft has started to add this function to the app, though it’ll probably take a few months for it to work on all phones while it’s being tested by Windows Insiders. As well as letting you make calls using your PC’s microphone, the update to Your Phone will give you the option to transfer calls to your mobile phone. This may prove useful when discussing personal matters that require the extra privacy provided by a mobile phone. The current version of Your Phone, a free download from the Microsoft Store (www.snipca.com/32709), lets you connect your computer to your Android smartphone in order to send text messages from your Windows…

Coded messages sent by the BBC to resistance groups in Europe are part of a new online archive documenting the corporation’s role in secret activities during World War II. Documents released by the BBC to mark 80 years since fighting began include plans to replace Big Ben’s chimes with a recorded version during air raids. This was intended to make it harder for German pilots to know whether they were flying over Westminster. The archive also contains music the BBC played to send messages from the exiled Polish government in London to its resistance movement fighting the Nazis. Messages to the French resistance comprised a few phrases dropped into news bulletins. On the eve of D-Day, for example, the phrase Berce mon coeur d’une langueur monotone (‘cradle my heart with…

BBC licence fee is ‘excellent value’… Your reader Hilda Williams (Issue 562) bemoans the fact that she has to pay for BBC Four as part of the licence fee, as she loves Strictly Come Dancing but finds BBC Four “tedious”. I love them both! Well, there are a lot of services included in the licence fee that I don’t watch or listen to. Just as there are services provided that are paid out of income tax and council tax that I don’t use. I don’t begrudge paying for them if the services I do use are good value, and the licence fee is excellent value! Meredith Lawrence …but that’s ‘completely irrelevant’ Whenever people defend the BBC, you often hear them say that the licence fee is great value for money.…

When you buy a computer with Windows 10 (W10) installed, bear in mind you’ll need to go online to register the product key and activate the operating system. This tripped up reader Linda Guinan, who isn’t connected to the internet (see Issue 560). She wanted to return a Dell PC to IJT Direct (www.ijtdirect.co.uk) because it would be useless without a working version of W10. After Linda said that IJT wouldn’t let her return the PC, we spoke to the Somerset-based company to explain her predicament. It told us there had been a misunderstanding because Linda thought she needed to install W10 from the web, and not merely register the product key. Either way though, she’d need an internet connection. IJT said it hadn’t let Linda return the PC because…

WINDOWS TOOL PowerToys 0.11 www.snipca.com/32727 What you need: Windows 10 First released way back in the days of Windows 95, PowerToys was a collection of free system tools for enhancing Windows features. Microsoft ceased PowerToys development in 2006, but it’s now making a comeback thanks to the company’s decision to make the code open source, letting other developers take up the mantle. This new version comprises two tools (FancyZones and Shortcut Guide), and you can expect more to be added in the coming months. To download PowerToys, go to the link above, select the latest version (0.11 at the time of writing), then download and run the ‘PowerToysSetup.msi’ file. The first new tool, FancyZones, lets you divide your Windows desktop into segments - or ‘zones’. Once you’ve done this, you…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: Auslogics Duplicate File Finder Duplicate files are a particularly annoying form of junk. My suspicion is that my computer’s hard drive is full of them: photos I’ve saved to different locations, backups I’ve accidentally restored alongside the original files, documents that exist in both their rightful folders and emails I’ve sent or received. I’m always on the lookout for the perfect tool that will obliterate these doppelgangers and safely free up gigabytes of space. Unfortunately, Auslogics Duplicate File Finder appears more concerned with loading yet more junk on to my PC, rather than relieving me of it. These days, I’m always deeply suspicious when a program’s installer offers a ‘Custom’ option. And, sure enough, clicking this during Duplicate File Finder’s setup reveals some default settings…

Computeractive is owned by Dennis Publishing, which employs a team of specialist technical reviewers. You’ll often read references to our benchmark testing, which is a method of assessing products using the same criteria. For example, we test the speed of every PC and the battery life of every phone and tablet in exactly the same way. This makes our reviews authoritative, rigorous and accurate. Dennis Publishing also owns the magazines PC Pro, Computer Shopper and Web User and the websites Expert Reviews (www.expertreviews.co.uk) and IT Pro (www.itpro.com). This means we can test thousands of products before choosing the most relevant for Computeractive. FAIR AND IMPARTIAL Our writers follow strict guidelines to ensure the reviews are fair and impartial. The manufacturer has no involvement in our tests. OUR AWARDS We award…

PC MONITOR | £215 from Amazon www.snipca.com/32680 Imagine our excitement at receiving a box marked ‘BL2780T’, surely indicating bacon, lettuce and 2,780 tomatoes. Inside, sadly, was just a monitor with yet another impenetrable tech product model number, but at least it turned out to be quite a good monitor. BenQ (‘ben-cue’), based in Taiwan and originally part of giant computer maker Acer, is best known for cheap and cheerful kit. It’s edged upmarket recently with monitors like the colour-accurate SW2700PT (£585 from Amazon www.snipca.com/28011, see our review, Issue 530). This one isn’t aimed at graphics professionals, but it’s still a few quid more than you might expect for a 27in screen with a basic 1080p resolution, although you might find it for under £200 if you shop around. “Adjustable, plenty…

Q I’m looking for a new printer, and I notice most are now wireless. My desktop PC doesn’t have Wi-Fi, so I use an Ethernet cable to connect it to my TalkTalk router. Could I get a Wi-Fi dongle for the PC and set it up just to access the printer, while keeping the Ethernet connection to the internet? George Rogers A Every printer we’ve seen that has Wi-Fi also has a USB port, so you can connect it to a PC with a cable. You might choose to use Wi-Fi so that you can print from a phone or tablet as well as your PC. The printer won’t normally make a wireless connection to an individual device: that’s called Wi-Fi Direct, and not all devices support it. Instead, you…

PHONE | £220 from Amazon www.snipca.com/32711 The One Action is differentiated from the One Vision (£270 from Amazon www.snipca.com/31809, see our review, Issue 556, page 28) by its second rear camera, which promises something like a GoPro action camera built into your phone. It has a very wide-angle lens, fitting more of what you’re pointing at into the frame, which adds to the excitement and helps to make sure you don’t miss anything. It also adds extra stabilisation to keep the footage reasonably steady even when you’re bouncing around on a mountain bike, a boat or anything else. “A clever camera, long-life battery and smooth performance on a budget phone” Uniquely, this camera is mounted sideways. Normally, to shoot video properly you hold your phone horizontally. If you keep it…

HP Sprocket 200 portable printers No bigger than a smartphone and weighing just 172 grams, HP’s improved Sprocket 200 lets you print your photos wherever you are. Simply connect through Bluetooth via your iPhone or Android phone, then print via HP’s app. Printing takes seconds, giving you instant memories on 5x 7.6cm sheets. The revamped app lets you add funny captions to your photos before printing them – other users can see these using augmented reality. You can print from your social-media accounts as well as photos saved on your camera. Up to three users can connect to the app and print at any one time, giving more than one perspective at an event. To enter this competition, email your home address to mailto:acomp@dennis.co.uk with ‘Sprocket’ in the subject line…

1 Log into your account at www.gmail.com, click your avatar at the top right of the screen, then the blue Google Account button. Click Security 1 on the left, followed by ‘2-Step Verification’ 2 in the ‘Signing in to Google’ box. 2 Click Get Started on the page that opens, enter your mobile number, then click Next. When your code is texted, type it into the on-screen box 1, then click ‘Turn on’ to activate 2-Step Verification. 3 You’ll be returned to the Security screen. Scroll down and click ‘Add security key’ in the Security Key section. Click ‘Next’ on the box that appears and, when prompted 1, insert the key. Tap the YubiKey logo on the key itself. 4 You’ll be prompted to allow Google to register the key…

Evernote and OneNote As a keen amateur genealogist I always used Evernote (www.evernote.com) to make research notes, then moved on to Microsoft’s OneNote. Both did a reasonably good job, but there’s a much better alternative that I bet many people haven’t heard of. And what I use instead… It’s probably unfair to call Notion (https://www.notion.so, pictured) a note-taking tool because it does so much more. It’s more like an advanced ‘things you must do’ service, letting you set tasks and then prioritise them. I find this useful when coordinating my research – you need to be organised with a hobby as demanding and unpredictable as genealogy. Notion is also good for collaboration. My brothers and sisters help me with research, so I use Notion to make sure we’re not repeating…

Mensa IQ Check £1.99 Android www.snipca.com/32715 iOS www.snipca.com/32716 To join Mensa you need an IQ of at least 131. Would you qualify? It turns out we probably wouldn’t, as our score in the Mensa IQ Check was a paltry 108. Still, it was fun. There are two types of test to choose from: quick, comprising 15 questions and a 15-minute limit; and full, which is 60 in 60 minutes. Stellarium Mobile Free Free* Android www.snipca.com/32717 Give it access to your location and Stellarium will map out and name all of the night sky visible in your locality. The level of detail is stunning, and it only gets better as you zoom in. Overlays show different constellations and you can switch to a red mode, which reduces screen glare so you…

If you install an app through the Microsoft Store, Windows automatically updates it whenever a new version is released. This is usually a good thing because it means you receive important updates, such as security patches, as soon as they’re available. However, if you’d rather choose when your apps update, you can switch this feature off. Launch the Microsoft Store (click Start, type microsoft store, then press Enter), then click the menu button (three horizontal dots, top-right) and select Settings. Click the slider under ‘Update apps automatically’ to turn the feature off. Once you’ve changed this setting, you’ll need to check manually for updates now and then by clicking the down arrow to the left of the menu button (top-right). The number next to the arrow indicates how many updates…

Create a YouTube channel for your club Sharing club videos not only keeps existing members engaged, but can also attract potential new recruits. As long as you have a Google account (set one up for free at www.google.com/account if not), you can create a free YouTube channel to host and share all your club’s videos. Create a Brand Account To get started, go to www.youtube.com. If you’re not already logged in, click the Sign In button (top right) and log in with your Google account details. Next, click your profile picture (also top right) and select Your Channel. The ‘Use YouTube as…’ window will open, but instead of entering your name, click the small ‘Use a business or other name’ link at the bottom (see screenshot below). This lets you…

1 Plug your USB stick into your PC, right-click its entry in the Windows Explorer sidebar, then click ‘Format…’ (if the stick doesn’t appear in the sidebar, make sure the ‘This PC’ section is expanded to show its contents by clicking the arrow to the left of its name). Select NTFS in the ‘File system’ dropdown menu 1 and change the device name to USB 2 so that it’s easy to recognise when it appears on the network. Leave Quick Format ticked then click Format. 2 Remove your USB stick and insert it in the USB port on the back of your router, then open the router configuration pages in a browser. Using a Plusnet or BT router, these are usually found at http://192.168.1.254/, but if this doesn’t work, open…

Tell people where to find you As we discussed in Issue 561 (see ‘Question of the Fortnight’, page 10), What3words (www.snipca.com/32766) uses a unique three-word phrase to establish your location to within three metres anywhere in the world, helping emergency services to find you. It’s an essential app to have on your phone, but there are other great apps that can help pinpoint your location and alert others if you’re in trouble. Google Maps (Android www.snipca.com/32731, iOS www.snipca.com/32732) lets you set up contacts that you can share your real-time location with - tap menu, ‘Location sharing’, then ‘Add people’ (or Get Started if you’ve not used it before, see screenshot below left) to add contacts. This works best with contacts who have a Google account, but you can also send…

Q Until recently, when watching 360-degree videos on YouTube on my iPad, I could physically rotate myself and the device to ‘look’ in different directions. I really liked this feature but for some reason it no longer works. Even videos that I know for certain used to rotate no longer do so. Do you have any idea what has caused this problem, and how to go about fixing it? Keith Frost A Earlier this year Apple tightened various privacy aspects of iOS, the operating system that runs your iPad, with the release of the iOS 12.2 update. The change that’s causing your problem relates to a feature called ‘Motion & Orientation Access’. The update was rolled out in March, but if you’ve only recently updated or haven’t tried to watch…

Did you make a USB-C mistake? Q Encouraged by the How To feature in Issue 561 (page 35) about adding USB-C support to a PC, I bought the StarTec expansion card you recommended. I hadn’t, as you advised, opened up my computer to check that it had the requisite slot, so it’s entirely my fault that there was no suitable slot on my old Dell XPS 800 motherboard to accommodate the card. That aside, I’m wondering if there was a misprint in your article? On page 37 you pictured five PCI Express slots, saying the StarTec card could be installed in the “first, second or fourth slots” followed by the sentence “Only the first and fifth would be incompatible”. I assume this should have “only the third and fifth would…

1080p Common type of highdefinition video: 1920x1080 pixels. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much data a PC can process at once. Most older computers are 32bit, more modern ones are 64bit. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 802.11ac A standard for wireless networks that allows for much higher transfer speeds than 802.11n. 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard with speeds up to 10 times faster than 802.11ac. Also called Wi-Fi 6. 8bit Monitors that can display 256 different colours at a time. Action camera A digital camera that records action while attached to a person’s body or equipment. aptX Codec that compresses audio so it can be transmitted over Bluetooth with minimal loss in quality. Augmented reality Lets you view the real…

Creating a default formatting style for emails The signature is dead. Penned its final flourish and joined the choir invisible. It’s all technology’s fault, of course. The only “sign here please” I ever get these days is from delivery drivers with iPads, upon whose screens I might as well draw a smiley face for all the resemblance it bears to my actual name. The signature’s demise has stripped our communications of identity. Even messages to friends and family often fall back on rushed cliches, rendered in identikit sans serif fonts. You can upload a scan of your scribbled name as an email signature in Gmail and Outlook, but I find that even less personal than typing ‘Jane’ at the end. It’s just a bit weird. What I’d really like is…

Facebook knows when some of its users have had sex, according to a report from privacy campaigners. It says that women using apps that track their periods unwittingly share intimate data with Facebook. Women use these apps to gauge when they are most fertile, or when to expect their next period. But Privacy International (PI) has warned that the apps share data with Facebook using the site’s Software Development Kit (SDK), which is a set of tools that lets apps build extra features and target users with personalised adverts. Having studied several period-tracking apps, PI found that the “intimate details of the private lives of millions of users across the world are shared with Facebook and other third parties without those users’ free, unambiguous and informed or explicit consent”. In…

Local councils have objected to government plans to override existing planning regulations in order to build taller phone masts in rural areas. Last month Digital Secretary Nicky Morgan announced proposals to bypass rules that prevent masts from being built taller than 25 metres. She said this measure was needed to improve signals in the countryside, and that permitting taller and wider masts would mean fewer masts throughout the country overall. But Cllr Sue Baxter, chair of the National Association of Local Councils (NALC), said that councils should still have the final decision on whether to approve masts in order to protect the “rural skyline”. She called for the Government to “ensure that all heights of masts are subject to a full planning application and proper consultation with local (parish and…

I totally agree that it’s “shocking” that one fifth of care homes in the UK lack Wi-Fi (News, Issue 561, page 7), and that more attention should be given to this problem. When elderly people enter homes their ability to participate with the outside world becomes severely limited. The web isn’t a complete solution, but it does help. We’ve just had to put my 87-year-old mother in a home. Finding the right home wasn’t easy, but one of the reasons behind our choice was the full-fibre broadband available to residents. Now obviously this isn’t more important than the essentials, like good food and humane care. But nor should broadband be seen as a luxury. It’s an everyday part of life outside care homes, so why shouldn’t it be expected inside…

I have been using spam-blocking programs Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net) and Mailwasher Pro (www.firetrust.com/products/mailwasher-pro) from New Zealand company Firetrust (www.firetrust.com) for many years and recently got a new laptop. My Mailwasher Pro lifetime licence is for three copies of the program, so I uninstalled from the old laptop and re-installed on the new machine. I found I could not register the new installation because the product key had been used too many times, so I emailed Firetrust support for help. It took less than two hours for Nick Bolton, Firetrust’s CEO, to confirm that he had reset my licence key and to try again. It worked. It was perfect service for a piece of software that I would not be without. Tim Freeman Has a company impressed you with its customer service?…

What can I use to identify birds? Q I wouldn’t class myself as a twitcher, but I do enjoy identifying birds while I’m out walking. I’ve tried the RSPB online identification tool, but I find it unreliable. Is there a better app? James Barnaby A You won’t find a better app than the excellent Merlin (iOS www.snipca.com/32777; Android www.snipca.com/32778). When you first run Merlin, it asks you to register for free by supplying an email address, although you can test the app for five days without registering. Then install a Bird Pack database (tap View Suggested Pack to get the best one for your region - probably the Western Palearctic database). Each Bird Pack is around 500MB, so it’s a good idea to download it over a Wi-Fi connection. To…

LAPTOP | £1,120 from Lenovo www.snipca.com/32675 Slimmer of the year It’s 14 years since innovative multinational Lenovo acquired IBM’s ThinkPad brand, and this model shows how slyly they’ve evolved the classic business computer. The ‘s’ stands for ‘slim’, and this 14in laptop is no thicker than two mobile phones. In other respects it’s not the most compact, with broad bezels around the screen and a deep border below, making plenty of room in turn for a full-size keyboard with a function-key row and a decent-sized touchpad. Yet it weighs just 1.35kg, unless you prefer a silver aluminium finish to the traditional matt-black business dress, which adds 140g more. “Lightweight laptop with great keyboard, touchpad, and options to upgrade specs” This isn’t a convertible machine, even with the optional touchscreen, but…

What is it? One of the unwritten rules of the tech industry is that imaging hardware always needs higher resolution. The cameras on the backs of smartphones are no exception, and while their average spec has risen steadily from a couple of megapixels to 12 or so, the top end has disappeared into the stratosphere. We’ve seen a few phones with 48 megapixels, including the OnePlus 7 Pro (see our review, Issue 558) and the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom (Issue 561, page 26). Now makers including Xiaomi have announced 64-megapixel sensors. What does it do? bviously, a 64-megapixel camera takes 64-megapixel photos. Wait… no, it doesn’t. Current 48-megapixel phones mostly take 12-megapixel stills. By the same maths, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro’s (pictured) 64 megapixels produce 16-megapixel images. The…

Intel Viiv What was it? Launched at the giant CES technology fair in 2006, Viiv wasn’t just one gadget but a whole set of technologies bundled into, er, well, it’s hard to explain. You see, Viiv wasn’t a thing. Hmm. Well, Intel makes chips. Was Viiv a chip? Not exactly. It was a range of specifications that applied to various parts in a PC, including processors – some of which might be made by Intel, but not necessarily – that meant it would be a good performer for media stuff. Media stuff? Yes. You know, home entertainment. If a system had the Viiv logo on it, you could be sure it would, well, entertain you in your home. Not that other ones couldn’t, of course. Of course. So why did…

What you need:YubiKey security key Time required: 30 minutes Passwords are fast becoming a liability. You could once ignore the advice to use unique passwords for every service without running too great a risk, but that’s no longer true. So many websites have been breached that any password you’ve used on more than one is almost certainly in the public domain, and therefore available to hackers. Thankfully, there’s a solution: multi-factor authentication, sometimes referred to as two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires the use of an external device to authorise your password. Texted codes from your bank that need to be typed into its website to authorise a payment are an example of 2FA. So is the code Google sends when you want to change your password, and the card your…

While we generally recommend using a password manager to create unique passwords for every site you visit, we recognise that if you use more than one computer, keeping the password list up to date on each of them could be impossible. You therefore need to develop a system that allows you to recycle a single complex password, while still making it unique for each domain. There are many ways to do this, but the method we use is based on the domain we’re visiting. If your base password is computer1active!magazinE, prefix it with the first two letters of the site you’re visiting, plus the number of characters in its domain. So, for Amazon, which begins with ‘am’ and has six characters, the password would become am6computer1active!magazinE, and for American Express…

ONENOTE Use passwords to lock your notes Further to Michael Cornell’s tip on OneNote in Issue 561, I’d like to share my own tip about using passwords to lock your notes. I do this because I’m a bit paranoid about burglars stealing my PC, or muggers grabbing my laptop. Open the relevant notebook, right-click a section tab, then select Password Protect This Section (see screenshot below). Next, in the box on the right, click Set Password. Type your password, confirm it, click OK, and you’re done. It works in my version of OneNote (2016), but I’m not sure whether the option exists in previous releases. Robert MacMillan SHORTENED URLS See where Snipca URLs will take you I wonder if any readers realise there’s a quick way to find out where…

Cherry MX Board 1.0 Backlight £74 from Scan www.snipca.com/31293 I spent years as a secretary bashing away at old-fashioned typewriters, before graduating to computers in my final few years before retirement. After so long tied to chunky typewriters, I always struggled typing on the flat keyboards of computers. I read your review of the Cherry MX Board 1.0 (Issue 552, page 28), and nodded in approval when you lamented how manufacturers make their keyboards so flat that they don’t seem to have any moving parts. As a “proper mechanical keyboard”, the Cherry keyboard seemed like a good alternative. I bought it, and liked it from the first clickety-clack. It’s noisy, but my husband is hard of hearing so it doesn’t bother him. I love the detachable wrist rest too. It’s…

Caffèe Nero Free iOS, Android www.snipca.com/32720 Forget Nero’s blue loyalty card with red stamps: this app collects points digitally, and you’ll earn five stamps just for signing up – half of what you need for your first free cup of coffee. You’ll also find special offers and bonus points only available with the app, and can link a payment card to it to make collecting and paying seamless. Tesco Clubcard Free iOS www.snipca.com/32721 Android www.snipca.com/32722 Collect points by scanning your phone at the till when paying and either spend them in store or convert them to digital vouchers, which you no longer need to wait for through the post. The app also contains offers from Tesco’s ‘Reward partners’, which can be worth more than the vouchers’ face value. Greggs Rewards…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER Create better posters LibreOffice 6.3 (released in August - see Issue 561, page 18) introduced a tool that lets you apply a full background to your documents. In previous versions, you could add backgrounds, but they wouldn’t fill the whole page, leaving thick white borders on all sides. To try the new background tool, open Writer, then select Tools, ‘Page…’. In the Page Style window that opens, select the Area tab. You can now choose from five background options. The Colour option lets you apply a solid background colour, but we’ve selected the Bitmap option and chosen the Crumpled Paper background for our dinner-party menu (see below). The Bitmap option also lets you use your own images as backgrounds, but you’ll first need to convert them to the…

Q I recently bought a new custom-built computer from a small local firm that has built several excellent machines for me in the past. When we discussed software, I was told that the built-in Windows Defender was all I needed to keep my computer safe. I have always used free programs such as Avast in the past, with little or no problems. What do you advise? John Powell A For the sake of accuracy, we should point out that Windows Defender technically no longer exists as a standalone tool. Windows 10’s security tools are now unified under the single banner of ‘Windows Security’, which you can find by clicking Start, followed by the Settings cog, then ‘Update & Security’ and finally Windows Security. Now click ‘Virus & threat protection’ to…