Talk to Your Device In the original Star Trek TV series, the crew of the Star Ship Enterprise would simply say "Computer," and the ship's computer would respond in a computer voice with an answer to their questions. Fifty years later, voice response capability is nearly ubiquitous working with devices small enough to fit into our pockets. Today, you can talk with your phone, your TV remote, your computer, or though special devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Assistant. I

The Maryland Insurance Administration, a state regulatory agency, will offer a variety of consumer materials on all types of insurance products from annuities to title insurance and health, auto and homeowners insurance. Trained staff will be available in Prince George’s County in July to answer consumer questions at the following locations: July 8, 2017 12 p.m.- 5 p.m. at First Baptist Church of Suitland – “First Baptist Church of Suitland Annual Community Day”, 5400 Silver

Back Up Your Data As I am writing this month's article, the headlines are about the WannaCry "ransomware" attack that occurred over the past few days. Ransomware is an attack in which a computer is infected with a program that encrypts data files stored on the computer. A screen is displayed explaining that the files are encrypted and to recover them a ransom will have to be paid in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a nontraceable digital currency. If the ransom is paid and the perpetrator

Stay Private Earlier this month, the legislative branch of our government passed a law repealing FCC Internet privacy rules and allowing Internet service providers (ISPs) to collect and sell information about the Websites each of us visits. The President signed the bill immediately after it passed both houses. It seems that lawmakers figure there is no need to keep our browsing habits private even though we use the Internet to explore things like health issues, finances, and

Pi Day This month I am writing my column on "Pi Day." Pi Day is an annual event that celebrates the number Pi, an irrational number that is approximated to two decimal places as 3.14 and thus celebrated in the United States on March 14. Pi, of course, is an important number in geometry and trigonometry because the circumference of a circle is 2πr (2 times Pi times r) where r is the radius of the circle and Pi is represented by the Greek letter π. The area of a circle is also

Bad Cortana This month we continue our discussion of Windows 10 frustrations. Cortana the Spy Cortana is an intelligent digital assistant built into Windows 10. If your computer has a microphone as most laptops do, Cortana listens to you and allows you to speak questions and commands. Cortana will then pose the question to Bing and return an answer. This is very similar to Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's "Ok, Google." Even if you do not have a microphone

Another Safe New Year Another January, and it's time to change all of your passwords again. Remember to use a different password for each website and make sure your passwords are at least 12 characters long with a mix of numbers, upper- and lowercase letters, and symbols. The technique described in this column a couple of years ago is fine for generating secure passwords for most websites. This technique requires us to create rules for creating passwords. Your rules should be

Windows 10 Pain Microsoft made a giant push to get the entire world to update to Windows 10. Microsoft gave free upgrades to everyone that had Windows 7 and Windows 8, and it installed annoying software to remind everyone to update. To be fair, Windows 10 is a much better experience than Windows 8, but it is far from perfect. Starting in August, Microsoft has been updating Windows 10 computers with the anniversary update, and it is expected that in the spring of 2017 ano