Steve writes, “When I’m on the internet, I constantly see things pop up on the screen that say ‘Check for malware now’ or ‘You’re missing drivers, click to update.’ Should I click on it? The way things are nowadays, I’m afraid to try!” 

Don’t click on it, Steve! As our friend Admiral Ackbar would say:

What you’re seeing is a pop-up ad designed to trick you into visiting a spam website or downloading harmful malware.

Internet pop-ups will disguise themselves as all kinds of stuff to get you to click on them. Spammers have gotten pretty good at making pop-ups look like legitimate error messages, so sometimes it can be hard to tell it’s a pop-up until it?s too late. Our advice is to install a pop-up blocker extension for your browser.

Extensions (also known as add-ons) are little programs you can install on some web browsers which give them extra features. There are a lot of extensions for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers, including effective pop-up blockers.

Adblock Plus is one of the most popular pop-up blockers, and is available for both Firefox and Chrome. It not only kills 98 percent of pop-up ads, but also removes most of the in-page ads from many websites. Try it out, and hopefully you’ll never see another one of those pesky fake error messages again.

But we wouldn’t stop there with browser extensions. You can trick out your browser in a number of cool ways. Some of our favorites include:

• Lazarus: Form Recovery – Remembers what you were typing in an online form, in case something happens while you’re filling one out and you lose everything. (Lazarus for Chome) (Lazarus for Firefox)

• Panic Button – Immediately hides all of your open browser tabs with a single click. We’re not saying that it comes in really handy for when your boss walks by, but we’d have to imagine it would. (Panic Button for Chrome) (Panic Button for Firefox)

• LastPass – One of our favorite password managers. Stores all of your passwords, generates complex new ones, and automatically fills in login fields for you. (LastPass for Chrome) (LastPass for Firefox)

• Honey – Automatically finds coupon codes and sales for many popular online stores. (Honey for Chrome) (Honey for Firefox)

• Google Tone – Google’s experimental extension, only for Chrome, which lets you share links with your nearby friends through sound. (Google Tone for Chrome)

It’s important that you only download Firefox add-ons from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on site, and only download Chrome extensions from the Google Chrome web store. Downloading extensions from other locations could be dangerous.

You may have noticed that we haven?t mentioned extensions for Microsoft?s Internet Explorer browser. The reason is, well, IE doesn?t really support them. That?s just one of its many, many issues. In fact, with Windows 10, Microsoft is officially killing it and replacing it with the new Edge Browser, which will support extensions soon. Until then, we recommend giving Firefox or Chrome a shot.

Safe surfing!

This week, Ray, Tom and Sean look at some of the news coming out of Apple’s annual Wordwide Developers Conference (WWDC), including the unveiling of the latest version of the iOS mobile operating system and the new music streaming app Apple Music. That and much more on this week’s Deemable Tech!

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THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

Apple WWDC 2015

This week Apple held their annual conference to showcase its new software to developers. Since there was so much to talk about, we are just going to focus on the stuff we found really interesting. For full coverage of the announcements made at WWDC 2015, check out iMore’s article about everything you need to know about they keynote.

iOS 9 to offer ad blocking

Apple unveiled the latest version of its mobile operating system this week, and with it comes a host of new features. iOS 9 is going to have ad blocking for the first time ever. Specifically, Safari is going to allow extensions that include the ability to block ads. Publishers that depend on ad revenue to stay in business are super excited about this announcement.

Six-digit passcodes

In an effort to make their devices harder to break into, Apple revealed that newer iPhones and iPads that have TouchID and are running iOS 9 will be required to upgrade from a four-digit passcode to a six-digit one. Passcodes will remain optional, but if you choose to use one you will have to change it to at least six alphanumeric digits.

Another safeguard they introduced: after 10 failed attempts to enter your passcode, your device will erase itself.

iOS 9 brings multitasking to iPads

iOS 9 will also introduce a long-expected feature for iPads: multitasking. This comes in the form of three features, actually, called SlideOver, Splitview and picture-in-picture.

SlideOver will let you quickly slide in another app from a menu on the right side of the screen. For example, you could be using Safari to read restaurant reviews and then slide in Messages to message your friend. Other apps they showed taking advantage of this feature were the Calendar app and Notes.

There will also be a more traditional Split View mode where you can have your screen equally divided up between two apps running simultaneously and independent of each other.

There will also be a picture-in-picture mode that will let you have a small video player on top of other apps. Yes, Apple has finally added a feature all of our TVs had in 1993.

Not all of these features will be available on all devices. The Split View mode will only work on the iPad Air 2. SlideOver and picture-in-picture will be available on late 2013 or newer iPad Airs as well as all iPad Minis.

iOS 9 brings battery life, performance boost

Apple says that iOS 9 is all about making the existing hardware run better. They said that they have seen an extra hour of battery life on the iPhone 6, and iOS 9 has a new lower power mode that can save iPhones an additional 3 hours of battery life.

Apple News

Apple News is Apple’s latest attempt to disrupt a dying industry. This new app will be built into iOS 9, but fortunately it will replace the utterly useless hunk of trash app that was Newsstand. Instead of being what was essentially a folder for news and magazine apps, Apple News is going to be a a news curator app. You’ll be able to read Sport Illustrated, the New York Times, Wired and tons of other top tier media and some not so top tier media like local newspapers, TV and radio stations.

According to Apple, the new app learns what you like and suggests similar content. We’ll believe that when I see it. The promise of learning content has always been higher than the actual end product.

Apple News can include a lot of interactive features like charts, graphs, videos, and photos. So, it’s basically just like Flipboard, except it’s built into your iPhone. So, it’s going to destroy Flipboard.

Apple Swift programming language will be open-sourced

Apple Swift programming language is going to be open-sourced. For the first time ever, developers will be able to create apps for iOS and OS X on a computer that isn’t a Mac OS X. Don’t get too excited Windows Developers, it only runs on Linux.

Apple Music

Apple’s “one more thing” this year was Apple Music. Apple basically took Beats Music, Ping (you guys remember Ping, right?) and the new MySpace (you guys remember MySpace, right?) and stuck them in a Blendtec blender and poured out what was left and called it Apple Music. With Apple Music, you can listen for free to a 24 hour online radio stream called Beats 1, or you can listen to streaming music on-demand for $9.99 for a single membership or $14.99 for a family of up to six. They’ll give you a free, three?month trial membership to get you hooked too.

So, yeah, Apple created a Spotify killer. Built into the iPhone and you’ll be able to get it on Android too. That’s fine, but apparently Apple thinks that you don’t have enough social media accounts in your life, and you need one dedicated to communicating with your favorite artists with. You know, just like they thought when they came out with Ping. And it flopped. And, just like Justin Timberlake and the gang thought when they bought MySpace from News Corp and relaunched it as a social media site for musicians, and it? well we don’t know what happened to it because we’ve never been back for more than enough time to download our pictures and videos. But we’ve heard it’s a barren wasteland.

On Apple Music, you’ll be able to get exclusive content like behind-the-scenes videos, intimate conversations with the artists and musicians can post blogs and updates on Apple Music. You know, just like they can do on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and their own website.

Oculus Rift reveals consumer version of virtual reality headset

Oculus Rift held a major live event this week, officially unveiling the consumer version of their long-awaited, greatly hyped VR headset. Purportedly light and comfortable, the headset slips on like a baseball cap, is easily adjustable, and allows users to substitute their own headphones for the pair that comes with it. The screen is actually a pair of small, high-res LED screens set right in front of the user?s eyes.

Two controllers were announced. The one that it will ship with? The Xbox One wireless controller. Yep. A slightly more revolutionary controller called the Oculus Touch was also announced: this is a pair of thumbsticks with motion tracking and haptic feedback which the user holds in each hand. The Touch will release in 2016 but is not expected to be available when the Oculus Rift first launches.

Speaking of launching, you are probably wondering when exactly the Rift will launch and how much it will cost. That was one thing the press conference did not shed any light on. The company still says that it is targeting 2016 and there are rumors of a price point around $400.

Comcast takes away woman’s email address, gives it to new customer with the same name

Cable internet provider Comcast is infamous for their poor customer service, and this next story is not going to help their reputation any. Ken Amaro of First Coast News reports that Comcast took thirteen year veteran customer Kathleen Cox?s email address away and gave it to another customer with the same name who had just signed up in Michigan. Kathleen had used her Comcast email address as her primary email account and when it was taken away lost access to all her emails. She said that it wasn?t until local news took up the story that Comcast finally returned the address to her. No word on whether she got her old emails back as well.

Google Chrome will start pausing auto-playing Flash videos

Google says that their next version of Chrome will roll out a feature that “intelligently pauses” Flash content that isn?t central to the web page. This is in the interest of memory and battery life for laptops. By some estimates, disabling Flash while using Chrome on your laptop could give you 10-20% more battery life.

PornHub crowdfunding sex tape shot in space

Major porn site PornHub has launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGogo to raise money to shoot a sex tape in space. The campaign is looking for $3.4 million in funding which takes into account chartering the flight, insurance, crew, equipment, as well as backer perks. PornHub has not specified who exactly they plan to fly with or the exact date they plan to film on. They do, however, have the actors picked out.

Facebook payments

And here’s a story we apparently overlooked back in March that recently came to our attention. You can send your friends on Facebook money through Facebook messenger. If you have a debit card on file with Facebook (perhaps you have bought an ad or a dumb game), when you message someone on the Facebook messenger either the app or on the desktop website, you’ll see a dollar sign with a circle around it. Click that button and you can send your friends money. Right now it doesn’t cost anything to send or receive money via Facebook Messenger. Fortunately, you can set a PIN code for payments so that when you accidently leave your Facebook profile logged in and your friend or girlfriend “hacks” you, he or she won’t be able to transfer all of your money to a new account.

Reddit bans FatPeople Hate subreddit, throws angry redditors into an uproar

Reddit, which bills itself as ?the front page of the internet?, and is of course where post the news stories we are working on for this podcast, saw some major drama this week. Reddit has long had a policy of allowing people to create subreddits around virtually any topic they want, even when those topics are awful. There are subreddits devoted to racism, bigotry, and all kinds of vile stuff. Reddit generally leaves them alone, unless they start crossing certain lines.

This week, apparently, lines were crossed. Reddit banned five subreddits, the largest of which was one called FatPeopleHate, which boasted over 150,000 subscribers. At the risk of editorializing, FatPeopleHate was actually even worse than it sounded, as redditors there had linked to the Twitter feeds, YouTube channels and personal information of real people, allowing other redditors to pour abuse, bile and mockery on them. FatPeopleHate had also become very popular and was regularly voting threads to the top of reddit?s /r/all, the ?front page? of the internet?s front page.

Reddit said that FatPeopleHate and the other four subreddits had crossed the line by getting involved in harassment instead of just being about ideas. This did not go down well with a very vocal part of reddit?s userbase, who begin creating a flood of alternate subreddits like FatPeopleHate2 and FatterPeopleHate and filling up unrelated subreddits with angry posts about reddit CEO Ellen Pao.

This is not the first time reddit has had problems moderating its own users. There was similar outrage when it tried to crackdown on users posting images from the nude celebrity leaks last year and before that when it attempted to purge subreddits dedicated to ?creepshots?, where men shared sexualized pictures taken of women without their consent.

The problem for reddit is that it doesn?t even require an email address to sign up for the service, and creating a new subreddit is the work of a moment, thus creating a situation that is very difficult to moderate.

—

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

Anyone who’s ever owned an iPod knows that stainless steel scratches.

This week, Google launched a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO). The new phone service uses Sprint, T0Mobile and Wi-Fi, but it only has one phone, the Nexus 6. There’s a few Apple Watch ‘scandals’ ramping up: tattoo-gate, scratch-gate and tap-gate. Microsoft has a new “edge”ier web browser, a man shoots up his Dell and the robots are coming to steal your car.

If you haven?t subscribed to Deemable Tech yet, get on it! Subscribe to Deemable Tech in iTunes, on Stitcheror subscribe to the show in another podcast reader. Make sure to leave a review on iTunes and Stitcher. The more reviews posted, the higher Deemable Tech will be listed, and the more listeners will see the show.

And make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

You can now embed playable MS-DOS games inside tweets

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive added roughly 2,400 MS-DOS games to their digital archive that are playable through your web browser on their site, Archive.org. But if you?re too scared to leave Twitter to check this out, never fear. The folks at Wired discovered this week that you can embed the games inside of tweets and play them right from those tweets.

So, you can now get your Oregon Trail, Sim City or Wolfenstein 3D fix from Twitter. Or, you can try out other classic games like the adaptation of the 1991 Hulk Hogan cinematic masterpiece Suburban Commando (just kidding, you should never do that).

Google announces cellular data network, which is actually two networks.

Google has officially announced its long-rumored cellular data network: its name is ProjectFi. As anticipated it is an MVNO network, which means that Google is ?renting? time on someone else?s network like many other small cellular companies. The differences is that Google is renting not from one other network, but two: Sprint & T-mobile, as well as WiFi. When you are on a ProjectFi connection your phone will seamlessly switch to whichever one of those networks is strongest. ProjectFi?s offers a very straightforward billing structure which will be appealing to some. It also will let you ?bank? unused minutes each month. And it offers promises of more innovations to come. The catch? Right now it is only offered for a single phone: the Nexus 6, and there is no LTE high speed service.

Robot car movers

The robots are coming to steal your car, or just move it out of the way. Gizmodo shared a story that researchers in Europe have created AVERT, the Autonomous Vehicle Emergency Recovery Tool. It is a system of robots that look like something out of Battle Bots. They are flat pieces of steel with rotors on the ends of them. Eight of them work together to pick up your cars tires and wheel it away. They only lift the car about an inch off the ground, but that’s all they need to move it out of the way. The idea is that the robots can easily move a car parked in a tight spot if there is a bomb in a nearby car. They could also be used to move an illegally parked car or a car that is blocking emergency services. Or, when the robots become sentient, they will likely start a car robbing career.

Man puts 8 bullets in his Dell desktop, tells police it was worth the ticket.

Police say that at 7 PM on a Monday, Lucas Hinch, the owner of a homeopathic herb store in Colorado Springs, Colorado, took his Dell XPS 410 out into an alley behind the store and unloaded eight bullets into it with a 9mm pistol. Hinch was ticketed for discharging a gun within city limits.

Lynch told the Los Angeles Times, which interviewed him, that the machine kept giving him the blue screen of death and that he had ?had enough.? He said that the shooting was ?definitely premeditated? and that he had no regrets. He reportedly told officers he did not know he was breaking the law in discharging his weapon.

Microsoft unveils Edge browser

During the opening keynote of their Microsoft Build developers conference this week, Microsoft unveiled the successor to their Internet Explorer browser (which they recently announced was ending).

The new browser, now called Edge (formerly Project Spartan), is said to be faster and more modern and will be a universal app across all Windows devices. Features will include, among others, extensions like you find for Chrome and Firefox, integration of Microsoft?s Cortana virtual assistant to help you search for things, reading mode (which removes everything from a page except for the text), and an annotation tool (which lets you draw on a webpage, take a picture of it and share that picture).

The new browser will not be in the initial release of Windows 10 this year, but will be included in a later update. Windows 10 will be shipped with Internet Explorer 11 for legacy compatibility, so you will have one last chance to use everyone?s favorite browser before it goes softly into that good night.

Tired of remember your passwords? Try swallowing them instead?

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Paypal?s global head of developer advocacy, Jonathan Leblanc, said that passwords might soon be available as ?embeddable, injectable and ingestible devices.? Mr. Leblanc said that in the near future thin silicon chips might be embedded under our skin or capsules might detect glucose levels to verify that someone is who they say they are.

The Wall Street Journal notes, “Mr. Leblanc admits that there’s still a ways to go before cultural norms catch up with ingestible and injectable ID devices.”

Google files patent for laptop with no spacebar.

Google already kicked the CAPS-LOCK key to the curb with its Chromebooks and now it appears it may be preparing to do the same thing to the spacebar. In a patent filed this week the company outlines a design where the spacebar is replaced by an extended trackpad. Sensors would determine whether the user wants the top of the trackpad to be treated as a spacebar or a mouse. Google told Quartz, who broke the story, that some patents get turned into products and some don?t, so only time will tell whether we will see a spacebar-free Chromebook.

Apple Watch – Tattoo-gate

Reports are coming in on Twitter and Reddit that people with tattoos on their wrists may have difficulty using their new Apple watches. iMore.com looked into it and confirmed the reports. The heart sensor detects pulse by flashing an LED light on your skin and senses the reflection. The problem is when you have a tattoo the reflection is distorted by the ink. Your mileage may vary, but for some folks it is really annoying. The Apple Watch uses the heart sensor to detect if you are wearing the watch, so when it doesn’t sense your heart rate, it forces you to re-enter your pin number.

Apple Watch – Scratch-gate

If you don’t like scratches, you probably shouldn’t get the stainless steel Apple watch. A lot of folks are reporting on social media that their steel Apple watches are already scratched up. 9to5Mac.com has an easy fix. Just buff it, like every other stainless steel watch in existence. Or, get the aluminum model, which is actually harder than the steel version.

Apple Watch – Tap-gate

Now for the first, actual, real problem with the Apple watch. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has found a major defect in the taptic engine in the watches. The taptic engine is the feature that causes the watch to vibrate or tap the wearer. It was a pretty groundbreaking feature because it models sounds so a tweet “feels” like a tweet, and a tap feels like a tap. Two companies built the taptic engines, but one of the suppliers has produced faulty engines. The Verge says that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber received an Apple Watch that had a taptic engine that didn’t work.

OUTRO

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback@deemable.com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there

I’m Ray Hollister, I’m Tom Braun, I’m Sean Birch and this is Deemable Tech. Thanks for listening.

Q: Is there any way to completely block pop-up ads while running Chrome or Internet Explorer? I have turned on the built-in pop-up blocker on both, but that doesn’t stop them on many of the sites I visit. What is up with that? I have to wonder what the point of blocking pop-ups is when so many get through anyway, slowing down the page loading to the point that it reminds me of being on dial-up.

A: To be honest, Bill, it’s been so long since we have dealt with a pop-up that we had forgotten Chrome and Internet Explorer even had settings to block them. To turn on the pop-up blocker in Chrome, click the button at the top right of the screen that has three horizontal lines. Then click on “Settings,” and search for “pop-ups” in the search box. In Internet Explorer, click on “Tools” and then go to “Internet Options.” There you can find the setting under the “Privacy” tab. Recent versions of Firefox have this option too, and you can find it under the Firefox settings.

Ah, the good ole days! Fortunately pop-up ads are much fewer and farther between now, but how do you make them go away completely?
Image credit: Minesweeper / Wikipedia

But as you say, Bill, these settings don’t always work. Why is that? Well, you have to understand that pop-up blocking is like an arms race. Every time there’s some new advance in pop-up blocker technology, the people making the pop-up ads just get smarter.

To make things even more complicated, browser-makers can’t simply ban all pop-ups. There are lots of legitimate uses for pop-ups – in fact, half of the websites on the Internet would stop working without them.

Now, the other way to deal with pop-up ads is with what Firefox calls “extensions”. Extensions are small programs you can download which add features to your browser, including more effective pop-up blocking. Extensions also work for Chrome and Internet Explorer, where they’re known as “plug-ins” and “add-ons”, respectively.

One of the most popular ones is Ad Block Plus, which is available for both Firefox and Chrome. It’s an industrial strength pop-up killer, and we’ve found it effectively blocks most pop-ups. Another good plug-in we’ve found for Chrome is called Better Pop-Up Blocker. You can find either one of these by just searching for it in Google. Try keywords like “Chrome pop-up blocker”, and you should get some very helpful results.

Your options are more limited on Internet Explorer, but there is an add-on called Smart Pop-up Blocker that will block most pop-ups. It’s not 100%, but it’s the best that we could find.

Regardless of what your favorite browser is, if you’re getting fed-up with annoying ads on the websites you frequent, there are tools out there that can make your web-browsing experience a little smoother.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s time for a friendly little PSA about pop-up blocking. Many of your favorite free websites are ad-supported, so when you visit one of those sites and you’ve got a pop-up blocker running, you may avoid seeing that annoying pop-up ad but you’ve also cost that site some ad revenue. So be sure to deploy your pop-up blocker judiciously.

This is such a big issue that the ever-popular Ad Block Plus actually has a setting called “allow non-intrusive advertising” which is on by default. As the name suggest, this allows many of the less annoying ads through. But keep in mind that the ones that it does block – the really annoying ones – may be real money makers for small, independent websites. Ad Block Plus gives you the option to allow pop-ups for certain websites to remedy this. Other pop-up blockers should, at minimum, allow you to turn them on and off.

Please pop-up block responsibly! Ads may be annoying, but they help keep the web free.

Sean was out of the studio, so Ray tried to play sound engineer and host. He almost pulled it off, but mostly through the magic of post production editing. On today’s episode we talk about how to keep your phone data usage low, how to download a new browser, how to install Adobe Acrobat even if you can’t see the installation page, and whether you should buy an bigger iPhone 4S or 5.

Make sure to subscribe to the show in iTunes by clicking here, or subscribe to the show in another podcast reader by clicking here. Also, make sure to leave us a review in iTunes. The more reviews we have the higher we’ll be listed in iTunes and the more listeners will see our show!

Download Episode 35 – Ray Grows Extra Arms

TRANSCRIPT

RAY: From WJCT studios in Jacksonville, Florida, I’m Ray Hollister, I’m Tom Braun, and this is Deemable Tech, technology worth talking about, and tech help worth listening to.

TOM: Got a question about your computer, smart phone, tablet or the Internet? Give us a call us at One Eight Eight Eight, Nine Seven Two, Nine Eight Six Eight, or send us an email at questions@deemable.com.

RAY: This week’s episode of the Deemable Tech podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at a small orange dot com.

And, by audible.com – get a FREE audiobook download at audibletrial.com/Deemable Over 100,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player.

TOM: Today on the show, we’re going to going to talk about to keep your phone’s data plan usage low, and

RAY: how to figure out what browser you’re using and what a browser even is, but first.

One Spark,  April 17 – 21, 2013 register to vote at beonespark.com

The reason we are doing OneSpark is because we want to launch a full fledged public radio show. But to do that, we need money. It takes a lot of money to run a public radio show, and even more to launch one. So, hopefully, if a lot of folks vote for us, we’ll get a bit of money from the One Spark crowd fund, but even if we don’t hopefully a lot of people will find out about us, and we’ll be able to help them out!

*WALK THROUGH THE PROCESS*

You can hear Deemable Tech on WJCT 89.9 FM in Jacksonville, FL, now you can also hear it on WCWP 88.1 FM in Brookville, NY! Welcome to any listeners from Brookville.

 Questions

TOM: Michelle asks, I was wondering about ways to lower my data usage on my iPhone. I always seem to go over my limit, and then I am slapped with another monthly charge. What things can I turn ?off? or put away unless I need them, and how do I do it?

RAY: Thanks for your question, Michelle. iPhones and Android phones can eat up a data plan like a 5 year old with an unattended candy bowl. Unless you’re on an unlimited data plan, you have to keep an eye on what your phone is downloading and sending, or it’ll end up taking a bite out of your wallet.

Periodically check your cellular data usage on your iPhone by opening your Settings app, and tapping General, Usage and then Cellular Usage at the bottom. On that screen you can see how much data your phone has sent and received. Each month, at the end of your billing cycle, tap the Reset Statistics button to clear out the counters and start over.

TOM: Well, Ray, that’s good information about how to keep track of how much data you’re using on an iPhone, but Michelle wanted to know how to reduce the amount of data she’s using on an iPhone. Come on man, stay focused!

RAY: Well, you’re right, but the first step to any diet is keeping track of how much you’re consuming, or so I’ve heard. Knowing how much data you’re using in the first place will help to stay you on track. Now, here’s a few tips to keep your cellular data usage low. First of all, don’t download or stream any video or audio unless you are connected to a Wi-Fi network. Those NPR, Netflix, Hulu and PBS Kids apps will devour your cellular data. I’m not saying don’t use them! They’re great apps. Just make sure to use them when you are connected to a Wi-Fi network if you’re trying to save your cellular data.

TOM: And, if you have streaming video or music that you just have to watch or listen to over 3G or 4G, go for the Non-HD version or the lower quality version. That will save you a bunch of data, too. If you use Spotify, make your playlists Available Offline so that the next time you’re away from home they’ll play from your phone instead of over the Internet.

RAY: The same thing is true for Amazon Cloud Player and the Podcast app; make sure to download your songs and new podcast episodes to your device before you leave the house. Also, and it’s probably obvious, but make sure to only download new apps and updates when you are on a Wi-Fi network too.

TOM: Also, try reducing the number of times that your phone downloads new email. On the iPhone, open your Settings app and tap ?Mail, Contacts, Calendars? and then, Fetch New Data. Turn off Push, and change Fetch to Manually or, at most, Hourly.

RAY: Finally, If you see that you’re getting close to your limit, or you just want to save your data plan for later in the month, turn your cellular data off. On the iPhone go to the General menu under Settings, tap Cellular and then tap the Cellular Data on/off switch. You’ll still get phone calls and text messages, but you won’t be able to browse the web and none of your apps will access the Internet either unless you are connected to a Wi-Fi network. You can also turn off Cellular data for specific built-in functions like iTunes, FaceTime, and Personal Hotspot in that same menu.

Now Tom, we’re talking about the iPhone here, but do you have any tips for Android users to save on their data plan?

TOM: Well, Android phones have a lot of the same features. You can, for instance disable mobile data and only use data when you’re on WiFi. But there’s something even cooler that Android phones with version 4.0 or better can do. Open up your settings and go to the Data Usage menu. There is a checkbox there that says ?limit mobile data usage’. Check that and it will put a default cap of 5 GB. You can change the cap by touching the data usage graph below that option.

Alternatively, there is an option to have it alert you when you reach a certain amount of data. So Android gives you a lot of great options for monitoring your data usage.

Individual Android apps also often have settings that will restrict them from using data unless you’re on wi-fi.

In fact, I’d almost say that Android has more options for data saving than the iPhone does. What a surprise huh?

RAY: Yeah, BIG surprise.

RAY: Drew asked If I use Lastpass on my PC for an email account that I also have on my mobile phone can I still use that email account on my phone without Lastpass …

In other words that long password that Lastpass generates on my PC for that email account is that the password that I would have to use on my phone even if I don’t have Lastpass on it? Also if I uninstall Lastpass what will happen to all my passwords that were generated with Lastpass? Do I have to go in and change all my passwords to something that I can remember before I uninstall? Thanks!

TOM: No Drew, thank you.

LastPass is a great tool, but it does generate passwords that are difficult for humans to remember. Really, that’s the point of LastPass, which is to generate passwords that are hard to crack. So unless you set it otherwise, LastPass generates passwords of long strings of random numbers and characters, which makes it difficult to remember them. But that’s okay, LastPass remembers them for you. Unless you get rid of LastPass or don’t have LastPass on your device.

RAY: Then Drew, you have to remember those passwords yourself.

TOM: Right, Ray. LastPass is strictly a password database. It remembers the passwords you set, and it can suggest new passwords when you need them, but it does not actually control the passwords for any site.

So if you used LastPass to generate a password, all it does is suggest its usual string of random characters and then remember that string. If you used LastPass to generate the password for your email account, that password is the password for your email account until YOU change it. Deleting LastPass will not affect that password.

RAY: So if you delete LastPass, that super-complicated password is STILL your email account password, AND you now have to remember it. And that seems like a bad idea.

TOM: Bingo. I use LastPass when I have to create new accounts on the web. It generates 14 characters of gobbledygook for each individual website. There’s no WAY I’m going to be able to remember those passwords on my own.

So if you plan to delete LastPass, I strongly advise that you go to your email account and change your password to something you can remember on your own. And you need to do that for every account or app you have a LastPass generated password for.

Depending on how long you’ve been using LastPass, that could be a lot of passwords. So Drew, I strongly recommend that you do not delete LastPass. What I mean by that is, don’t get rid of your LastPass account. Even if you stop using it, even if you uninstall the app on your phone or the plugin on your browser, keep the password to your account handy. Because one of these days you’re likely to need to get in there and look up a password to some obscure website which you have forgotten.

RAY: And just to be clear, opening up the LastPass password vault, finding your stored email account and changing the password there will NOT change the password on your email account! It just changes the password LastPass remembers for your email account. Which will now be wrong.

TOM: Right.

RAY: No, wrong.

TOM: No, I mean ?right’ as in, ?you are correct’.

RAY: Oh, right. I mean, correct.

TOM: Another thing you can do is that LastPass allows you to export your password database. Just open up the LastPass password vault, click the down arrow by your account name and click ?export’. It will then walk  you through the steps to save all your LastPass stored passwords somewhere else.

RAY: So, if Drew wants to change his email password to something he can remember so he can type it on his phone, what should he do?

TOM: Well, the easiest way would be to access your email through your browser with the LastPass plugin running. Go to your account on your email website and change the password there to something you can remember. LastPass should automatically detect that you have changed the password and remember the new password.

If it does not, then you need to manually go into the LastPass password vault and change your password so that it matches.

Right, Ray?

RAY: Correct.

TOM: Christine asks, I have been having trouble getting on the Internet lately because of pop-up error messages. My friend Jeff, who usually fixes my computer, says the problem is my ?browser’ and keeps trying to get me to use something called ?Firefox’. I’m used to the normal way I get online. Do I really need to change?

RAY: It would be nice if the Internet worked and looked the same for everybody, Christine!

TOM: But that would be too easy! It’s a little more complicated than that.

Any program you use to view web pages is called a ?browser’. The browser that comes pre-installed on Windows is Internet Explorer, or IE for short. It’s the most popular browser in the world. But, there’s a catch.

RAY: Yep. Different versions of Windows, like Windows XP, Vista or Windows 8, come with different versions of IE. For instance, if you still have Windows XP then you may be running the version of IE that came with it, version 6.

TOM: But Internet Explorer is now on version 10! So IE 6 is way out of date.

RAY: If you have an old version of IE, some web pages may look wrong or not load correctly. You may see bugs or weird pop-ups like you described, Christine. You are also in danger from all kinds of malware and online attacks through loopholes that were fixed in later versions.

TOM: To find out what version you have you need to bring up the ?About Internet Explorer’ screen. Depending on what version you are running, that will be under the Help menu, or under the menu that comes up when you click the little gear icon. They’re both at the top of the screen.

Then you should install the latest version available for your version of Windows. On Windows XP you can get up to Version 8, and for newer versions of Windows you can get version 10. Having the latest version of IE will likely fix many of the problems you are having. Plus, it’s just safer.

RAY: Okay Tom, but Christine said her her friend Jeff is trying to get her to switch to Firefox? Why should she change to Firefox?

TOM: Ray, do you know the classic nerd joke about Internet Explorer?

RAY: Refresh my memory.

TOM: Internet Explorer is the best browser… for downloading another browser.

RAY: *vamps*

TOM: The point Christine, is that there are lots of different web browsers besides Internet Explorer. There’s Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Those are just some of the bigger ones. There are literally dozens out there.

Other browsers offer a lot of different features and are often faster, so techies who want more control over their internet experience almost always use something else.

For instance, with Firefox you can download ?add-ons’ for the browser, that do cool things like block ads, let you download YouTube videos to your computer, display the weather at the top of the screen and more.

RAY: Google’s Chrome browser is quickly gaining popularity. Chrome is known for being really fast, which is nice. But its killer feature, is that you can synchronize all your copies of Chrome on any computer, tablet or phone. Any changes you make to one copy are automatically made to the other copies. You can also access web pages that you had open on other machines.

TOM: I love that feature. It’s so nice to be able to open a web page at work that I had opened earlier on my computer at home.

It’s also worth mentioning that most browsers other than IE conform more closely to the standards for displaying web pages, so web sites may display better on Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

RAY: Unless you’re visiting a lot of Microsoft sites: often those sites won’t work correctly on anything but Internet Explorer.

TOM: But the good news is that you can have two browsers at once, and switch back and forth between them anytime you like. So there’s no harm in downloading Firefox and giving it a try. It will get your friend Jeff off your back, and hey, you might even like it!

—–

Lynn asked, I typed this once before but not sure if it went through. I have an Asus laptop and have check on explore 8 and chrome but do not find java or it’s owner under either. I have Kaspersky and it uses Javascript. Could it be it never got installed? The laptop is about 2 yrs old, but I don’t use it much.

—–

Thanks for all your questions, and keep them coming. Call us at our toll-free number, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email at questions@deemable.com. Also, subscribe to the show! Search for Deemable Tech on iTunes or point your favorite podcast app to dmbl.co/pod.

Also, make sure to come out to One Spark April 17-21, and make sure to come by and visit Deemable Tech’s booth at Ignite Adecco on Bay and Main Street, and make sure to vote for Deemable Tech we’re number 253. If you haven’t already registered to vote, go to beonespark.com and register now to vote.

Our producer is Sean Birch. I’m Ray Hollister, I’m Tom Braun, and this is Deemable Tech.

Thanks for listening. Have a great week.

What Internet browser do you use? There are dozens to choose from, and many offer unique features. So which one is best for you? Ray Hollister and Tom Braun, the hosts of Deemable Tech, have the answer on this week’s Ask Deemable Tech.

RAY: Hi, I’m Ray Hollister,

TOM: I’m Tom Braun,

RAY: and we’re the hosts of Deemable Tech. On the show, we answer your questions about computers, tablets, mobile phones and the Internet, like this question:

TOM: Christine asks, I have been having trouble getting on the Internet lately because of pop-up error messages. My friend Jeff, who usually fixes my computer, says the problem is my ‘browser’ and keeps trying to get me to use something called ‘Firefox’. I’m used to the normal way I get online. Do I really need to change?

RAY: It would be nice if the Internet worked and looked the same for everybody, Christine!

TOM: But that would be too easy! It’s a little more complicated than that.

Any program you use to view web pages is called a ‘browser’. The browser that comes pre-installed on Windows is Internet Explorer, or IE for short. It’s the most popular browser in the world. But, there’s a catch.

RAY: Yep. Different versions of Windows, like Windows XP, Vista or Windows 8, come with different versions of IE. For instance, if you still have Windows XP then you may be running the version of IE that came with it, version 6.

TOM: But Internet Explorer is now on version 10! So IE 6 is way out of date.

RAY: If you have an old version of IE, some web pages may look wrong or not load correctly. You may see bugs or weird pop-ups like you described, Christine. You are also in danger from all kinds of malware and online attacks through loopholes that were fixed in later versions.

TOM: To find out what version you have you need to bring up the ‘About Internet Explorer’ screen. Depending on what version you are running, that will be under the Help menu, or under the menu that comes up when you click the little gear icon. They’re both at the top of the screen.

Then you should install the latest version available for your version of Windows. On Windows XP you can get up to Version 8, and for newer versions of Windows you can get version 10. Having the latest version of IE will likely fix many of the problems you are having. Plus, it’s just safer.

RAY: Okay Tom, but Christine said her her friend Jeff is trying to get her to switch to Firefox? Why should she change to Firefox?

TOM: Well there are lots of different web browsers besides Internet Explorer. There’s Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Those are just some of the bigger ones. There are literally dozens out there.

Other browsers offer a lot of different features and are often faster, so techies who want more control over their internet experience almost always use something else.

For instance, with Firefox you can download ‘add-ons’ for the browser, that do cool things like block ads, let you download YouTube videos to your computer, display the weather at the top of the screen and more.

RAY: Google’s Chrome browser is quickly gaining popularity. Chrome is known for being really fast, which is nice. But its killer feature, is that you can synchronize all your copies of Chrome on any computer, tablet or phone. Any changes you make to one copy are automatically made to the other copies. You can also access web pages that you had open on other machines.

TOM: I love that feature. It’s so nice to be able to open a web page at work that I had opened earlier on my computer at home.

It’s also worth mentioning that most browsers other than IE conform more closely to the standards for displaying web pages, so web sites may display better on Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

RAY: Unless you’re visiting a lot of Microsoft sites: often those sites won’t work correctly on anything but Internet Explorer.

TOM: But the good news is that you can have two browsers at once, and switch back and forth between them anytime you like. So there’s no harm in downloading Firefox and giving it a try. It will get your friend Jeff off your back, and hey, you might even like it!

RAY: To hear more answers to questions like this one, listen to our show at Deemable dot com, that’s D-E E-M A-B-L-E dot com. There you can listen to all of our previous episodes and subscribe to our podcast.

TOM: If you have a question for Deemable Tech give us a call us at One Eight Eight Eight, Nine Seven Two, Nine Eight Six Eight, or you can send us an email at questions at deemable dot com.

RAY: For Deemable Tech, I’m Ray Hollister,

TOM: And I’m Tom Braun.

If you heard today’s Deemable Tech segment during Morning Edition, you know that you need to disable Java on your web browser, now! If you didn’t hear today’s Deemable Tech segment, you should listen to it, and well, you read the last sentence, so now you know too. It’s not just our opinion, either. The Department of Homeland Security put out an urgent advisory in January for everyone to disable Java now, unless it is absolutely necessary for you to use it. What you need to know now is how to disable Java, now.

Keep in mind, if you regularly visit a website that uses Java, that website will not work once you disable Java. To reenable Java, simply follow the directions again, and enable Java instead of disabling it. Also, you should probably call and complain to the company that owns the website, and ask them to stop using Java.

Sadly, most people are still using Internet Explorer, so we’ll start with that.

Internet Explorer 8 through 10

(If you are using anything older than Internet Explorer 8, you need to upgrade! Try one of the browsers listed below, except for Safari.)

Click on the Tools menu at the top, and choose Manage Add-ons. On the left of the window that pops up, select All Add-ons from the drop down under the heading Show. Then, scroll down and disable anything that says ?Oracle America, Inc.? next to it. Finally, restart your browser.

Chrome

Click the white address bar at the top of the screen. In that field, type “chrome://plugins” (do not type the quotation marks). Then, press Enter. In the new tab that opens, look for the the item(s) with Java in the name. Click the blue Disable link below it. Finally, restart your browser.

Firefox

If you don’t see the menu bar, (File, Edit, View, etc.) at the top of the page, first click the orange Firefox button at the top-left. Then go to Options and click Menu Bar.

Open the Tools menu, and click Add-ons.  On the tab that appears, click Plug-ins on the left. Scroll down the list on the right-hand side until you see something that begins Java (TM) Platform… Click the Disable button to the right of the listing. Finally, restart your browser.

Opera

Click the white address bar at the top of the screen. In that field, type “opera:plugins” (do not type the quotation marks). Then, press Enter. In the new tab that opens, look for the the item(s) with Java in the name. Click the blue Disable link to the right. Finally, restart your browser.

Safari

If you’re using Safari on Windows, you should get rid of it. Apple has stopped updating it. Follow this guide to migrate to a new browser.

If you decide not to heed our advice, and you want to keep Safari on Windows, click the Action menu in the top-right corner. It looks like a gear. Click Show Menu Bar. Now, click Edit, then Preferences. On the window that appears, click the Security tab. Uncheck the box next to Enable Java if it is checked. Finally, restart your browser.

In Safari on Mac, if the menu bar isn’t visible, press the Esc button on your keyboard to exit full-screen mode. Now, click Edit, then Preferences. On the window that appears, click the Security tab. Uncheck the box next to Enable Java if it is checked. Finally, restart your browser.

Follow these directions, and keep Java disabled until Oracle pulls their act together. Stay tuned to Deemable Tech, and we’ll let you know when and if that happens.

I love the smell of new app updates. Well, I wish they had a smell. If they did, Google’s latest updates would probably smell like a nice, new fabric upholstered car. Not luxurious leather, but nice fabric. The update to Google’s two major offerings in the iOS app catalog have been long awaited, and are quite nice; however, they’re not enough to get super excited about.

Google Chrome, the alternate web browser for the iPhone and iPad, brings the less exciting of the two app updates, so I’ll cover it first. According to the update description, version 23.0.1.271.91 (They are very exacting with their version numbers, aren’t they?) of Google Chrome allows you to open PDFs with other apps, save tickets and boarding passes in Passbook, and enable text encoding detection so that the app will automatically show non standard characters correctly. Other than that, and the usual stability, security and bug fixes, that’s all that Google Chrome’s update bring with it this go round. The ability to open PDFs in other apps is long overdue, and something that most other browsers, including the built-in Safari web browser, could already do. This is a nice feature though if you have a preferred PDF viewer, and you have been using Chrome.

The ability to save tickets and boarding passes in Passbook is surprisingly unique to Chrome since Safari does not currently have that feature. Passbook has not been as simple and easy as most Apple products are known for being and as it seemed it would be when it was announced at WWDC earlier this year. When iOS 6 debuted, there were very few apps that worked with Passbook, and currently, only iOS apps that are Passbook compatible can generate a Passbook card. It will be interesting to see how this is implemented. Once I find a website that I can use to save a Passbook card, I will leave a comment on this article.

The big update tonight came in the Google Drive app. When the Google Drive app was originally released it was depressingly limited in its capabilities. Other than renaming and deleting files it was basically useless. Recently the Google Drive app added document editing, and now, the Google Drive app finally adds spreadsheet editing and file uploading to its range of features. Now, Google Drive users can create, edit and collaborate on spreadsheets that they save to their Google Drive account. That, combined with Gmail’s update yesterday to allow users to attach files of up to 10 GB to their emails, makes Google Drive a powerful tool for business users.

Spreadsheets on Google Drive are much more limited than on other spreadsheet apps such as Apple’s Numbers. However, the Drive app loads spreadsheets significantly faster than Numbers. The Drive app leans towards the more practical and less pretty, but in a usable, well designed manner. Just like document editing in Drive, formatting options are in the graphic menu along the top of the screen. Notably missing is number formatting. Even though you can bold, underline, strike-through and left, right and center align your cells, you cannot choose whether they are formatted as numbers, dates, times, or currency. The formatting is assumed based on what you enter into the cell, and cannot be changed. So, if you enter “1/4” Google Drive assumes you are entering a date and changes it to 1/4/2012. That is problematic if you were intending it to read “one quarter” or “one divided by four”.  Formats can, of course, be changed on a desktop in the web in Google Chrome, but that is an annoying extra step. Hopefully, that will be changed in a future update.

As usual, Google has brought good updates to an app that is slowly growing in usefulness and power. When it was launched, Google Docs was clunky and terribly under-powered. With each new update, Google Drive becomes more and more of a powerhouse that makes Google serious competition for Microsoft’s legendary stronghold, the enterprise.

The Google Drive app is available in the Apple App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch for free.

This week Ray Hollister, Kevin Clark, and Aaron Edelson get giddy over Google’s gorgeous new gadgets, the Nexus 7 and Nexus Q, and they get a sugar rush from Google’s new sweet Android version 4.1, Jelly Bean. Then, they pondered all the possible ways to keep your passwords practically perfect.

All that and more on this episode of Deemable Tech.

Deemable Tech – Episode 4