Star City Blog

GEEK GUIDE: Lies a “Geek” Told You

By Beth Sachtjen

Computer maintenance isn't the most exciting concept, but perhaps you'd be more interested in the topic if you knew you've been scandalously misinformed with outdated information and mythology about its maintenance.

You are now entering the Geek Guide Twilight Zone: a dark, seedy underworld of technology treachery with the following popular computer lies:

“Defragment the heck out of your PC!”

If you've moved from Windows XP to Vista to Windows 7, the exciting arc your defragmentation tool has taken might surprise you. In Windows XP, you knew that defragmenting your computer simply made it work faster. This is because defragmentation does two things: groups related files and makes more efficient use of free space. However, Windows Vista was developed with a new algorithm that accounted for the fact that defragging pieces of a file larger than 64 MB requires more performance input/output than the benefit of defragging. Windows Vista made this a schedulable process, and Windows 7 made defragmentation of multiple drives automatically a default. Therefore, if you are a Windows 7 user that regularly defragments your computer manually, you are wasting valuable Facebook time.

GEEK GUIDE: How to "Green" Your Tech Usage

By Beth Sachtjen

Energy-efficient home electronics are important for the environment and your wallet, but there are quite a few things that one can do to even further cut back on energy use with these devices.

For most people, a few changes to computer settings can make a big diference in energy consumption. For example, screen savers actually consume more energy than simply allowing your computer to sit idly. Instead, use a “sleep” or “standby” mode to conserve energy. Although these settings vary by operating system, it's a good rule of thumb to set them to turn your monitor off if not in use for more than twenty minutes and to turn off your entire computer if not in use for two hours.

If you’d like to take an even further step, many devices still use energy if plugged in (even when powered off) through a process known as "vampire energy loss." The use of energy-saving power strips can automatically cut power to devices that are plugged in but not in use.

GEEK GUIDE: How to Use Gmail Tools to Combat Spam

By Beth Sachtjen

Spam email happens.

Using your email address almost anywhere can lead to spam later. Your email can be harvested or even sold outright by the company to whom you gave it.

Gmail, and some other email clients, offers a unique way to defend your inbox from spam while helping you define how your address was harvested in the first place. “Plus Addressing” is a method of appending your existing gmail address with a “+” along with any other extraneous text that you might wish to add. Google will actually ignore this plus sign and subsequent text, allowing it to be delivered while still remaining a unique address. Using this method, you can create several “throw-away” addresses.

When you use your email address on a site that you do not especially trust, try adding the plus to your email along with text to help you identify the site itself. For example, if your original email is myemail@gmail.com, add “+” and the name of the website you are giving your email address to. It should look like:  “Myemail+Website@gmail.com”.

GEEK GUIDE: How to Use Facebook Lists

By Beth Sachtjen

You don’t want to be Facebook friends with your mother.

You also can’t say no.

If you have a Facebook account, chances are you have more than a few obligatory "friends." However, Facebook has a little-known permissions system that can help you create privacy while following some of your more delicate social contracts. Facebook's Lists allow you to be friends with someone without allowing them access to all of the information you post. For instance, you can hide your status updates or the posts your friends make on your wall from select lists.

The key to using this feature is to first create the lists of friends and then toggle your privacy settings using these lists as filters. Depending on your overall privacy settings, lists can be used to create privacy either by additive access, where another tier of access is granted, or subtractive access, where information is blocked from a selected list.

GEEK GUIDE: How to Stop Your Smartphone from Tracking You

By Beth Sachtjen

It has been all over the news this past week: your smartphone is tracking your every move.

Class-action lawsuits have been filed against both Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android claiming that their operating systems' geolocation data storage is a violation of user privacy.

The outrage first started when a pair of researchers released an iPhone application that allowed users to create visual data using "consolidated.db," the file of location data causing the concern. A similar system of data collection was found on Android devices. The technology world subsequently erupted with the possibilities of what this data could be used for.

The concerns about the iPhone and Android information logs are unique to each device. The main concern with the iPhone's logs is that they never expire and continue to accumulate. When an iPhone is synched with a computer, this information is also transferred and stored there. Although the logs do expire on Android devices, the information is sent back to Google before being deleted. Both Google and Apple have countered that they don't actually collect this data, nor do they associate it with any identified user.

GEEK GUIDE: How to Understand the Browser War

By Beth Sachtjen

Deep in the trenches of the Internet, a battle rages. The browser war amongst new generation browsers has been booming. 

You might wonder why the browser war is worth involving yourself in, given that the purpose of any browser is simply to offer you reliable access to the Internet. However, if you've never ventured out of the realm of your comfort zone to the browser battlefield, you might not be aware of the features available in other browsers.

The main contenders in the browser war today are Firefox 3.1, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), Chrome and Safari. Deciding which is best for your use depends on many factors, including which operating system you use (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, etc). Utilization, security features and accessibility features also play key roles.

 As of January 2011, Internet Explorer had the highest usage share of any browser at 43.5 percent, but it's important to point out that Internet Explorer has been steadily decreasing since 2003, while the usage shares of Firefox, Chrome and Safari have all increased. The rise of next generation browsers has lead to a rich feature set and a more robust offering of browser supports across the board.

GEEK GUIDE: How to Get Good Tech Support

By Beth Sachtjen

 "Hello, this is IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

There's a lot of validity to this standard tech support joke, popularized by the British TV show "IT Crowd." Not only in the literal sense, where rebooting your computer can often solve many problems from the start, but also in that many tech support professionals deal with the same problems so frequently that they may as well be part of their help desk salutation.

As a user, getting good tech support can be a frustrating experience because these issues are not as familiar to us. The next time you need to make a call to or email a tech support representative, here are a few things to consider that will make the process a smoother one.

First of all, make sure you have a problem. If you have rebooted your computer and still encounter the issue, think through the steps that brought you to the issue. Record your error message, and make sure you know how to reproduce the error. While this information might not mean a lot to you, knowing exactly how the error occurs is helpful to the tech support person in diagnosing your computer’s issue.

Tech support professionals deal with all levels of computer experience, but it can help to speed up the process if you know some basic information beforehand.

Jeremy Cech, technologist at Dell Support Services in Lincoln, said, “Understand what you are using. You don't have to know everything there is to know about any given piece of technology, but whatever functionality you personally get from something in the IT world, know what that piece is.”

GEEK GUIDE: Social Media Privacy Is In Your Hands

By Beth Sachtjen

 Privacy is dead, according to some social media sites.

While it's true that people are opting for more transparent lives online, the desire for privacy is still alive and well.

Adjusting our behaviors for privacy has long been a social norm. We reveal different sets of information in public restaurants than at private parties, for example.

But online, we have less control over how we're being overheard. On social media sites, it's often impossible to know what information is being collected by whom and for what purposes. Our information there is public by default and only private through the actions we take to make it that way. Social media works this way because we are not consumers of the sites, but the products. Our information is how these companies monetize themselves. 

There are a few general rules to Internet safety that become especially true for social media sites.