Tech-Knowledgy: Your Questions Answered! 3-25-11

The estimated reading time for this post is 5 minutes

Welcome back to Tech-Knowledgy, where your tech question are answered. I continue to get many great questions from readers and am posting the questions and answers below so others can learn and/or respond. Post your tech questions in the Comments section or email me at [email protected].

Q. I love Facebook, I have had so much fun reconnecting with old friends but I’m not sure what to do if I get a friend request from someone I don’t remember or know. Also, I have some Facebook friends where I have accepted their requests, but they post about a lot things I just don’t care about. If I “unfriend” them, would they know? Is there any other way for me to avoid seeing their posts on my Facebook page? Can I just block some posts like from Facebook games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars?

A. If you get a friend request on Facebook and you don’t recognize the name, first look to see if the person making the friend request has mutual friends with you on Facebook. If you see that you have mutual friends with him, you might be able to tell where you know that person from (for example, if you have 20 mutual friends and they’re all from your high school class, chances are he’s a friend from high school). If you just have one mutual friend, you could send a message to that mutual friend telling her about the friend request and asking her to refresh your memory. On the other hand, if you don’t recognize the name and you have no mutual friends, you can just click “Ignore”.

If you “unfriend” someone on Facebook that person does not get a notice, but if she looks for you in her Friends list or tries to contact you, she will figure out pretty quickly what happened. To avoid hurt feelings, you can instead block her posts. The next time one of her posts appears on your Facebook page, hover your cursor over her post. An “X” will appear. Click on the X and you will have a choice to block just that one post, all of her posts or all of the posts from that application (if the post is from an application, such as Farmville or Mafia Wars). This is a way to make your Facebook homepage more fun and relevant for you without hurting anyone’s feelings.

Q. I like the new format of your blog with the previews of the blogs on the home page, but how do I find an old article if I can’t remember the title? Do I have to open all of them until I find the one I want? I’m trying to find the post you had about the AT&T free thousand minutes. Is that deal still good? Can you send me a link to that post?

A. I’m glad you like the new format of The Wonder of Tech with excerpts on the home page instead of full articles. Navigation around the site should be easier now.

Good news! The AT&T offer is good through March 31, 2011. Here is the link to the post 1000 Free AT&T Minutes!.

If you want to find an older post on The Wonder of Tech, there are several ways to do that. First, you can use the Search box on the side of each page. Second, you can click on a term in the Tag Cloud on the side and bottom of each page. Third, you can check the category list on the side of each page.

Q. I hate small print. I have 20/20 vision but sometimes when I click on a link it takes me to a website that has really small print I can barely read. Or sometimes I see charts on a website where the print is so small that I don’t read it because it’s too much work. I don’t want to miss out on important information. Can you recommend any magnifiers for my computer screen? Either a physical magnifier or an add on to a browser?

A. Good news for you too! Increasing the size of the font and images on your screen is very easy. Click Control and + to zoom in and increase the size of the font and images. To zoom out and decrease the size of the font and images, click Control and -. Not only are these commands handy, they’re easy to remember. Another handy command, though not as easy to remember, is Control + z, undo (see, Love Me Undo!).

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Sales!

Amazon is offering deals on the Nintendo 3DS device and 3DS games. If you pre-order a 3DS with Amazon, you can get $25 credit towards the purchase of a 3Ds game. If you purchase a 3DS game, you get a $10 credit towards the purchase of a second 3DS game. Check out these offers at Amazon.

Remember when The Wonder of Tech told you about Chargepods and Fuel Tanks in Ready, Set, Charge!? These nifty charging devices are on sale, 50% off at callpod.com. Use the coupon code CALL999 and stay charged for half the price! No word on when this coupon expires so grab your savings soon.

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Follow Up

The NCAA March Madness On Demand app has become very popular, with 26.7 million visits to the NCAA site through the app for the first five days of the tournament, March 15-20. Live feed viewed through the app totalled 10.3 million hours (I’m hoping Wonder of Tech readers are paying attention to their data limits and mostly using Wi-Fi when viewing video on this app). With the tremendous success of this app, maybe other live sports feeds will be free in upcoming apps. The Wonder of Tech will keep you posted!  Read more about the success of the NCAA On Demand app at App Advice.

In What’s All the Hype About Skype?, I included a YouTube video that showed a man sending a video from his iPhone to a Times Square billboard. Kudos to The Wonder of Tech reader Terry who left a comment on the blog post calling “fake” on the video. Sure enough, the video was actually part of a marketing campaign for a movie opening today, Limitless. In the YouTube video, after the hacker’s video disappears from the billboard, the trailer for Limitless appears on the screen. The campaign was very effective with almost three million views of the video. Perhaps Terry knew the video was fake because the transmitter was plugged into the iPhone’s headphone jack?

Have a tech-tastic weekend!

*Image by Joel Broughton