Old Timey Video Explains Net Neutrality in 60 Seconds

Show this video to your friends and family if they ask about net neutrality

Ron Burgundy likes to think of himself as "kind of a big deal," but so is the topic of net neutrality, which we'd like to see him report on once the Anchorman series reaches the Internet era. In the meantime, it's up to us to educate ourselves on the topic, as well as make sure that our less tech savvy friends and family know exactly what's at stake. If you're having trouble explaining net neutrality to one of them, here's a short video that will help.

The embedded video below (which was brought to our attention by Business Insider) takes the core concept of net neutrality and presents a simplified visual using the analogy of cars traveling on a freeway. It begins with various vehicles all traveling down the freeway without obstruction. Some say YouTube and Twitch on the side, while others are unidentified.

Out of nowhere, a guy with a Comcast hat strolls onto the scene and sets up a toll booth. Netflix pays up and is able to race along at full speed, while an unidentified vehicle that refused to pay the toll has an obstruction place on his tire that slows it down considerably.

The video plays into the fact that Netflix recently inked a multi-year agreement with Comcast to make sure its traffic would reach the homes of Comcast subscribers at full speed. Prior to the agreement, Comcast customers frequently complained about frequent buffering, degradation in video quality, and even dropped videos.

In any event, here's the video

Cloud Storage competition is heating up..

With no shortage of competition in the cloud storage market, Microsoft is making it more attractive to use its OneDrive service.

The company on Monday announced it has more than doubled the amount of cloud storage space it offers to users for free. Now, OneDrive comes with 15GB of storage for free, up from 7GB.

"Our data tells us that 3 out of 4 people have less than 15GB of files stored on their PC," OneDrive Group Program Manager Omar Shahine, wrote in a blog post. "Factoring in what they may also have stored on other devices, we believe providing 15GB for free right out of the gate — with no hoops to jump through — will make it much easier for people to have their documents, videos, and photos available in one place."

Meanwhile, Microsoft is also hoping to get users to sign up for Office 365 with the promise of more OneDrive storage. From now on, all versions of Office 365 will come with 1TB of OneDrive storage, up from 20GB, Microsoft said.

With Office 365 Home, priced at $9.99 a month, you'll get 1TB per person, for up to five people. With Office 365 Personal ($6.99 per month) and University ($79.99 for four years), you'll get 1TB per subscription. The move comes after Microsoft in April first started offering 1TB of free cloud storage to OneDrive for Business customers.

Microsoft has also dropped the prices for those who need extra storage but don't want an Office 365 subscription. You can now get 100GB for $1.99, down from $7.49, or 200GB for $3.99, previously $11.49.

"With OneDrive, we want to give you one place for all of your stuff: your photos, videos, documents and other files," Shahine wrote. "Of course, to do this, we need to make sure you actually have enough storage space for everything, particularly given that the amount of content everyone has is growing by leaps and bounds."

Google Drive also offers 15GB of free storage. In March, it slashed the prices of Drive monthly storage plans: the 100GB plan, previously priced at $4.99 a month, is now just $1.99; while the 1TB plan dropped from $49.99 to $9.99.

With a little work, you can organize your bookmarks like a pro!

Bookmarking a link is the easiest way to save anything since it’s quick and involves no tool other than your own browser. Unfortunately, bookmarks, because they are so easy to create often end up being misused until all you have left is a big clutter of links. My bookmarks library was no different; it was full of folders nested in folders. The folders were poorly named and usually named to suit the ‘occasion’ I needed a particular link for instead of by topic. I had duplicate bookmarks by the dozens and what was most disappointing is that it was hard to find the right bookmark because I’d organized them so poorly. Commence operation Clean Up.

Getting Started

Before you actually get to organizing your bookmarks, you need to know if you need additional tools (extensions or add-ons) and what the Bookmarks Manager can do. Chrome’s Bookmark Manager will sort bookmarks by title only whereas, Firefox offers many more options for sorting such as by name, date, tags, or location. Technically, if you’re bookmarks are a mess they are not likely to have any tags added to them but the default description of a web page will be helpful. You can cut, copy, and paste bookmarks just like you can files . Several bookmarks can be selected using the Shift or Ctrl keys and they can be dragged & dropped on to a different folder to move them.

Sorting

Start by brining some sort of order to your bookmarks. Don’t organize from folder to folder; instead start with a holistic view and select the Bookmarks bar folder. All sub folders will show up just as they are so you’ll see them anyway. Sort the bookmarks bar by title. For more sorting options that your browser doesn’t support, try Super Sorter for Chrome and Auto-Sort Bookmarks for Firefox.

Delete Duplicate Bookmarks

Remember to only delete duplicate bookmarks. Do not delete any folders that have the same name, not yet any way. Chrome users can use Super Sorter mentioned in the previous section to delete bookmarks and Firefox users can try Bookmark Duplicate Cleaner. Don’t give too much thought as to which folder a bookmark is saved to. Simply delete the bookmarks because you are essentially losing nothing and then move on.

Duplicate Folders

Assuming you sorted all the folders on the Bookmarks bar by title, you should easily be able to see which duplicate folders exist. Simply drag and drop bookmarks from one folder to the other of the same name. Dealing with duplicate folders is easier because they are, for better or worse, organized by topic. Go through all your duplicate folders and at the end, you will have empty folders that you moved bookmarks out of. Go ahead and delete them.

Merging Folders

There is no merge feature available in either Firefox or Chrome. This is something you’ll be doing manually. Start with folders; you will not have folders with the same name any more at this stage but you will have folders that are similar in nature. For example; You might have a folder dedicated to tutorials for creating vector images, a folder dedicating to tracing images in Illustrator, etc. Consider moving them all into one folder called Illustrator Tutorials, or create a parent folder for them and move them to it. This way, the folders are sorted by topic but remain true to your original sorting as well.

This is where you will deal with most of the clutter on your bookmarks bar. Poorly named folders often have bookmarks that are similar in nature and it makes little sense to save them to separate folders called, ‘Drawing Hands’, ‘Drawing a face, ‘Drawing eyes’ when you can move the bookmarks in them to a folder called ‘Drawing Guides’.

Unorganized Bookmarks

These are going to be the most time consuming of them all to organize. The title description should help you out as you go through them, one-by-one. You’ll move them to existing folders, or create new ones if needed. In the worst of cases, you might have bookmarks that saved with no title and you’ll have to open them. If they’re useful, you can move them to the appropriate folder and if they aren’t useful, you can remove them from the tab they are open in.

Use the search feature to find bookmarks on similar topics, for example, it is highly likely that any recipes you have saved all have the word Food or Recipe in the title. It’s a quick way to filter them out without going through different folders. You can select them en masse and move them to the right folder.

Prevent This From Happening Again

Going through your bookmarks, you’re going to realize just what happened for things to get this cluttered. If you often save links for reading later, create a folder that you can save such links to and review it often. Delete the bookmarks you don’t need and move the useful ones to the correct folder.

Conclusion

This will take time; it won’t take an entire day as I previously thought it would but it will take at least 30 minutes of your day. What you’ll find when you finally get down to it is that moving and organizing bookmarks is made exceptionally easy by the default bookmarks manager and any shortcomings they might have can easily be filed with the right extension or add-on.

What each tab in Windows Task Manager is telling you

As an end user, you never really know what your computer can do until you break something and it stops doing those things it’s done so well. You may not break it in the literal sense but it’s only when something goes wrong that most of us try to dig a little deeper, to see what the problem might be. One of the very basic tools at our disposal for diagnosing a Windows PC is the Task Manager. If you’ve used it even a few times, you’ll know what information you get from some of those tabs but you may be clueless regarding some of the other tabs so here’s a brief overview of each one.

Applications

This tab shows all current applications that are running. The applications are those that the current user is running so even if other users are logged into the system, any applications they might have running will not be listed here. Each application appears under its own name and you will easily recognize it. The running status of each application is given and it can be either Running or Not Responding.

If an application is Running then all is well. If it is Not Responding then you can select it and click End Process which will terminate the application.

Processes

All process that are currently running are listed here. This list is going to be long because a single application may be running several processes and the system itself runs them when needed. An example of an application running multiple processes is Chrome. If you have several tabs open in a Chrome window, you will see several Chrome processes in this tab.

For each process, you can see the CPU and memory consumption. The more CPU and memory a process consumes the ‘heavier’ it is. If your system has come to a near stop or is lagging a lot, you should look for which process is consuming too much memory or taxing the system’s processing power. You can quit a process but if you do, you should know exactly what the process does. If you end up quitting a vital Windows process, your system may crash.

Services

Services can be started by Windows or they can be started by other applications or even drivers. The Services tab lists which services are currently running and what their function and status is. The status of a service is either running or stopped. Services can be stopped manually by a user but they are critical to the operating system and unless you know what a service is doing, you shouldn’t stop it.

Performance

This tab is like a health report for your system. It shows how much of your computer’s processing power (CPU Usage) is being used and how much memory is being used. If either of these are too high, your system will slow down or begin to lag. The tab can be used to determine whether the memory or the processing power of the system is being over-taxed.

Networking

This tab shows which networks your computer is connected to and the traffic flowing through those networks. Networks may be LAN, WAN, WiFi, or even Bluetooth connections. You can view how much bandwidth is in use over a particular network and the information can help diagnose a slow connection.

Users Tab

All active users currently logged into the system are listed here. You can disconnect, log off, or send a message to one of the users, provided you have permission to do so.

How to remove Google + from your Google Account

Google+ is the second largest social network in the world in terms of active users yet many people don’t use it as much as they spend their time using Facebook or Twitter. Although. you can stop using the service any time you want, it seems rather taxing that your Google+ profile is automatically created upon signing up for a new account. We all know that the social network is merely the web giant’s attempt to capture another bit of information about you, and possibly help bolster its advertising business and make more money. So here’s the cure: you can always delete your Google+ profile while keeping your other Google services and apps intact. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to do that.

First off, sign in to your Google account by visiting the site, and click your profile icon at the top right. This will pop up a small window with a link to your profile and options to sign out,  manage privacy, as well as your account settings page. Simply click ‘Account’ on this pop up to proceed.

The next page carries many different options and settings related to your Google profile, all of which are split under different tabs. The one we’re hunting for in this tutorial resides under ‘Data tools’, so simply click this link as demonstrated in the screenshot below.

The ‘Data tools’ tab houses further options regarding managing your account, for instance, it lets you download data related to your account, or access other pertaining information. Locate ‘Account management’ section and click the ‘Delete Google+ profile and features’ link next to it.

This in turn will open up the delete confirmation page. You’ll be given the option to remove what’s known as your Google Profile.  But before you proceed with removing the account from Google’s servers for good, it’s worth reading the page for information regarding what type of data will be deleted and other details.  If you often comment on YouTube videos, for instance, then deleting your Google+ profile might affect your account since YouTube now uses your Google+ profile to let you interact and post comments. Likewise, it may affect other similar account information, but everything related to your Gmail account will remain unaffected.

After going through all the information, you can scroll down, put a checkmark on ‘Required’ (and optionally on ‘Also unfollow me from anyone I am following in other Google products’), and click ‘Remove selected services’ to remove your Google+ profile.

Some tips on making Windows 8.1 less of a pain in the a.... Tip 2:

2. Win + T

Interestingly, Windows 8.1 Update 1 also adds the taskbar to the Modern UI. Not permanently, but it’s there. This means that you can access Taskbar in Modern UI apps and Start Screen. The only caveat however is that the Taskbar automatically hides itself after a few seconds. But you can press the Win + T hotkey combination to bring it up.