Category: Technology

Managing your privacy on Facebook

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Facebook’s privacy settings can be managed in a very detailed manner, but setting them up correctly can be confusing to new members. It is not at all obvious that you have any control over what people see of your personal information.

Put your friends into lists

To get started with taking back control over your personal life, take a moment to consider what privacy levels you might need. There may be items you may be comfortable with your family seeing but not friends, and vice-versa, such as photos of yourself uploaded by your friends. You’ll be grouping people into lists that will allow or prevent them to see specific items. Typical lists you might consider making would be “family”, “friends”, “acquaintances”, “coworkers”, “party animals”, etc.

Click “All Friends” under the Friends menu in the blue stripe up top.

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IE8: Navigation to the webpage was cancelled

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With the advent of IE 8, I started getting calls about a new error when accessing our learning management system.

“Navigation to the webpage was cancelled.”

This error can be caused by many things, but in this case, I believe it has to do with the fact that the LMS has both secure and insecure assets in the frameset. Unfortunately, many times messages will come up asking people whether they want to view both types, and they will click “no” without knowing that the page requires them to function.

Since I can’t ever really know what is going on with a user’s home computer’s security setup, I simply tell them to reset their Internet Explorer to its default settings.

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Music: why not a finger-sensing keyboard?

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Electronic keyboards like the Yamaha Motif or Korg M50 often have a “Split” feature, allowing different patches to be assigned to different sections. For example, the bottom 18 or 20 keys can be assigned to a bass patch, leaving the rest of the keys assigned to an electric piano sound. These splits allow not just the patch to change, but the pitches as well. For example the bottom keys can sound an octave lower than they ordinarily would.

Small keyboards often have buttons that shift the octave to the left or right on the fly, effectively increasing the number of keys without the weight.

There is another split type that is possible nowadays but apparently no manufacturer has done it yet. What if the patch or pitch range were assigned to each key in real time by which finger or which hand touched the key?

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Review of “Times” RSS reader application for Macs

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I took a chance a few weeks ago and purchased the “MacHeist” bundle, mainly because I wanted the PhoneView application that lets you get at your iPhone images and music directly, and the cost is very low for all those applications.

MacHeist III is a bundle of 15 little utilities and applications for the Mac, many of which are surprisingly useful and well-written. One of the nicest surprises was an app called “Times”. Times is just a lowly RSS reader, but it does RSS with more style and readability than anything else I’ve seen yet.

(Click images to see larger view)

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