Computer Handyman

 The Visa card processing system handles about 1,700 transactions per second. The Bitcoin blockchain can handle about 4.6 transactions per second.  Other blockchains, such as the Ethereum, may be faster but they still cannot approach Visa’s speed.  Three components of blockchain play off against each other when you try to increase the speed of blockchains.   These elements are decentralization (how many computers maintain records), scalability (how fast each transaction can be processed), and security (how long it takes to verify a transaction).   Usually, to attempt to speed up a blockchain by changing how one of these elements works will adversely affect one or both of the others.   A block in a blockchain contains a number of transactions.   Each transaction records the buyer, the seller, the amount, etc.   The initial Bitcoin block size was 1 MB, which could hold about 2,759 transactions.   One way to increase the speed would be to ma...

I have had two brushes with Vietnam during my life: one was serving in the Army artillery in Vietnam during the war, the second was overseeing databases of Vietnamese who wanted to go to the United States after the war.  When I was in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, I had very little interaction with the Vietnamese. I was in a heavy artillery battery that supported American Army soldiers on the ground.   Most of the time we were stationed at firebases in the middle of nowhere, with no Vietnamese around.   A few times we had Vietnamese units on the same firebase, but we did not interact.   They supported Vietnamese units and we supported American units.   We were in northern South Vietnam, which the Army called I Corps.   Occasionally I would ride into town with supply trucks; so, I occasionally saw Hue and Quang Tri. At Firebase Barbara, on a lonely mountaintop not too far south of Khe Sanh on the Laotian border, all of our resupply was done by helicopter. ...

Cybercurrencies are here to stay.  Maybe Bitcoin is too, but not at the levels it currently holds.  Tulips are still here, but the tulip mania of the 1630s has passed.  Bitcoin was originally intended to be a medium of exchange that would be insulated from almost all external control.  This anonymity made it an excellent means of exchange for illegal activities, most recently illustrated by the fact that most of the ransomware attacks on private data have demanded payment in Bitcoin.  Bitcoin transactions are recorded by blockchain, which is like an old accounting ledger.   It contains every Bitcoin transaction, although looking at blockchain from the outside, you can tell that a transaction is verified, but you cannot tell who the parties were or how much Bitcoin was involved.   As one of the parties to the transaction, however, you can pull out the specific information.   So, if Elon Musk for example says you never paid him for your Tesla, y...

I am trying to install GoogleAdSense on my Computer Handyman website , but all I get is a blank, blue space where the ad should go. I guess the problem has something to do with the way my CSS is set up, but AdSense says it may take 48 hours to start working properly. So, I will give it some more time.

  GoDaddy’s ftp connection for their websites does not work like most ftp connections do.   For most ftp connections, the address starts with ftp, as in ftp.website.com , but GoDaddy wants you to leave off the ftp prefix.   I could not connect by ftp to my GoDaddy website , it-handy.com .   I tried for a long time to figure out what was wrong – my password, my user id, etc.   Nothing was wrong except the address of the ftp connection.  

The media is overly excited about the Russian hacking using the SolarWinds update process.  First, was it Russia?   It seems likely that it was Russia, but not certain.   Anyone who is good enough to develop the SolarWinds hack would be smart enough to cover his tracks.   He may not have covered them perfectly, and we may be able to track down the hacker, but he may also have successfully covered his tracks.   He could be a Chinese hacker who copied the trademark signatures of the Russian hackers and who routed his hacks through Russian servers or websites.   It could be a hacker anywhere who did the same thing.   It requires computer expertise, but there are a lot of computer geniuses out there, including in the Middle East and Latin America.   I am surprised that no one has mentioned Edward Snowden in connection with the hacking.   He is a computer genius living in Russia who knows American computer security extremely well.   Is it p...

The 5G upgrade still has a long way to go.  This Wired article explains that 5G operates in three different radio frequency ranges, basically low, medium, and high.  The real, revolutionary changes expected from 5G really come from use of the high frequency ranges, in the millimeter band.  The higher the frequency, the higher the rate of data transmission, and 5G is all about fast data.  The problem is that shorter wavelengths have shorter ranges and cannot penetrate much of anything, like walls.   To get the higher speeds, there would have to be cell towers very close together, many more than we have now, and very close to the people using their phones.   According to the Wall Street Journal , the new cell towers are already running into resistance as they are installed across the US.   The Journal also reports that in one of the countries most wired for 5G, South Korea, it doesn’t work that well.   One place 5G is supposed to be available is ...

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Facebook has announced that it will introduce the Libra cryptocurrency, which will be pegged to several international currencies and will be backed by several well known financial organizations, including Visa and Mastercard.   It appears to be something like a cryptocurrency dollar.   Bitcoin is more like cryptocurrency gold.   It has no set value, but it does a limit on how many Bitcoins can ever exist, making it more like gold, something whose supply is limited and that has a value depending mainly on how much people are willing to pay for it.   Thus, the value of the Libra should be fairly steady, while the value of Bitcoin may vary wildly.   A story in the Verge examines some of the downsides of Libra.   One of the first questions is whether the Libra will work at all.   It seems likely that it will, but its blockchain technology is different from Bitcoin’s.   Bitcoin’s chain is basically open to the world, allowing anyone to create a...

The excitement over bitcoin and blockchain is overblown.  Blockchain may be a relatively secure way of storing information about transactions, but it is not cost-free.  The electricity and computing power used to create blockchains is expensive.  If you are tracking something that is very valuable, it may be worthwhile. but otherwise, the expense of creating the blockchain may it unreasonable to use blockchain. Several sources ( Morgan Stanley ,  CNBC )   say the breakeven point for mining Bitcoin is about %8,000 to $8,600.  Currently, the price of Bitcoin would not cover the cost of mining it in most places in America.  It may still be profitable in some places where electric power is really cheap. Another  Bitcoin-friendly site  puts the cost at just under $5,000.  Where power is cheaper, the cost is much less; in Venezuela, it is only a little over $500. Blockchain works by creating codes that are hard to break.  The co...

t I am disappointed that Microsoft Windows has dropped gadgets.  For a while in some version of Windows Microsoft offered gadgets.  Then they dropped them when Windows 8 came out.  Then someone offered gadgets that would run on Windows 8.  The 8gadgetpack was very nice; it looked good, worked well, and had the functions I was interested in.  As new versions of Windows 10 came out, they often disabled the gadgets, saying they were a security threat.  More recently there were reports that Russian hackers were targeting Microsoft Windows.  So, I decided to remove the 8gadgetpack, but I looked for a replacement. The main replacement I have found is rainmeter .  There are many “skins” available for rainmeter that provide many of the same functions as the 8gadget pack.  My question is, however, whether rainmeter opens the same security holes for hackers that the 8gadgetpack does? From discussions on the Internet, it looks like some server farm...

I was going to update an iPhone, and I got a notice that iTunes needed to be updated.  iTunes displayed a connection to the iPhone.  After I downloaded and installed the new version of iTunes, it no longer recognized the iPhone.  It would only connect to the the Apple Store.  This is not an improvement.  Apple messed up my evening. This operation restored the driver, but then iTunes said it wanted to update again.  Crazy! Connect your idevice to computer the go to device manager, expand other devices, you device should be listed there, right-click it the select update driver, click on search my computer for drivers, then browse to C/Program files/Common files/Apple/Mobile Device support/drivers click on Ok..... From https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5803142?tstart=0 There is lots of bad advice on the web about how to fix this problem.  At least those fixes didn't work for my problem.

The Windows 10 anniversary update appeared to kill my wifi network.  I tried many suggestions which I found on the Internet, but none worked until I tried this one to reset the network adapter .   After you run it, you have to log into your wifi network again; so, you need your password for the wifi connection.   http://pureinfotech.com/network-reset-fix-wifi-windows-10/

None of my Apple devices would connect to iTunes on my Windows PC.  Apple help on the PC and the official Apple help sites on the web were also of no use.  This site, however, had the solution to my problem, which was to install the Apple USB driver. http://www.syncios.com/fix-itunes-not-recognize-iphone-ipad.html As it suggested, my Apple device was improperly located under Mobile Devices in the Windows Device Manager. It should be been under the USB list. I followed the instructions and it worked. Thank you. I did later find it in an Apple discussion here https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4066236  

Sometimes Chrome will interfere with administering a WordPress blog. As an extra level of protection, WordPress sometimes adds a login that prevents machines from logging in. Before it lets you enter your real user ID and password, it will present a login screen and text that tells you what to fill in. Usually the login is just random letters and numbers, and the password is often expressed as the total of a sum of two numbers, so that the actual password number does not appear in the text. Chrome does not display the page with the text and login screen. It simply displays a message saying that your login is not private. One solution to this is to login with another browser, like Firefox, with displays the page of additional security. Write down the ID and password, and you may be able to use it to log in via Chrome, although that pages does not appear. You enter the WordPress generated info on the first screen, and if you are lucky Chrome will then take you to real login screen.

The HomeGroup networking program in Windows 10 needs some work. It is a good idea which makes networking home computers much easier that networking them the old fashioned way. However, it looks like HomeGroup runs into trouble when the original PC on which it was set up leaves the network, and nobody knows the old password. When you try to start up a HomeGroup connection or add a new PC to the HomeGroup, the program says that there is a group that you can join, but then it says the link fails. If you try to leave the old network and create a new one, you can’t. There are a number of suggestions about how to resolve this problem in chatrooms and on websites offering advice on Windows. Usually you can get HomeGroup working again, but not easily. One approach that seems to work sometimes, but not always, is to turn off all the computers on the network except one. Tell it to leave the HomeGroup, and then try to create a new HomeGroup. The trouble that often occurs is that it won’t let you ...

My Dell 8300 i7 computer with Windows 10 Home began freezing up periodically. It began freezing up once every two or three days, but gradually it began freezing up more frequently, sometimes several times in one day. The only way to turn it off was to hold the power switch down until the power supply turned off. Then, when it rebooted, the various drives would need to be repaired by Windows. After the hard drives were repaired it would work fine until it froze up again. Sometimes as it would start to freeze up, I could close a few open windows, but I could seldom get it to shut down using the Windows software. I ran every hardware test I could find, and they all said the hardware, including the motherboard, the hard drives, the graphics card, and the memory were fine. I got no errors, but when it started to freeze up, I could not start up the hardware tests. Since the hardware seemed to be okay, I decided it must be the software, probably Windows. I thought maybe Windows had been damag...

Apple should be willing to help the US government access information on the iPhones of terrorists and other criminals. I do not think that anyone living under a democratic government has an absolute right to inviolable privacy. If someone’s home is subject to a search warrant issued by a proper judicial process, his other possessions should also be subject to search when properly approved. Apple refuses toallow any search and seizure, even when there is probable cause as determined by a court of law. While the Fourth Amendment is explicitly a protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the implication is that the government should be allowed to carry out searches and seizures when there is probable cause. I think that some of the technical objections to requiring breakable encryption on private phones could be overcome by requiring that decrypting the information could be done only by physically connecting to the phone. This could mean that some sophisticated decryption devi...

The Windows 10 calendar reminder window has become very annoying.  At some point it downloaded the birthdays of everybody I knew on Facebook.  Now Facebook has apparently disconnected Windows/Microsoft from Facebook, so that the birthdays are now stored in some mystery calendar file.  But Windows 10 desktop keeps reminding me of them, every five minutes, and telling the reminder to dismiss does not help.  It just comes back over and over and over again.  And you can't delete the calendar entry, because it's not in a normal calendar.  The engineers at Microsoft are surprisingly stupid, despite doing a much better job in general on Windows 10 than on any previous version.

Quicken 2016 running under Windows 10 does not reconcile accounts correctly.  When you try to check or uncheck a transaction in the list displayed by Quicken, the balance does not update.  Sometimes if you exit reconcile and enter again, it will update.  Sometimes clicking "Mark All" will help.  But it doesn't work correctly.  The Quicken community says this is a known issue, but has not been fixed, yet.