Ask DACS
August 2010

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef

AskDACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem.

Q – The newer versions of Firefox save bookmarks in a database of some sort rather than the old HTML file. I used to use an add-on to have Firefox maintain both the new bookmarks data file and the HTML file. I can no longer find that add-on, so does anyone know how to find it?

A – The first answer was that no add-on is needed as Firefox can export the bookmarks into an HTML file, which should solve the problem. I then plugged my favorite Firefox add-on, PlainOldFavorites. This allows Firefox to use Internet Explorer Favorites (internet shortcuts) instead of (or in addition to) bookmarks. Apparently this add-on is so popular that it will be built into the next major version of Firefox. We had a similar discussion a few months back and several members recommended Xmarks that can synchronize favorites or bookmarks between computers and browsers and even across platforms.

D – The discussion the digressed into privacy, tracking cookies and add-ons that can block advertising and related third-party cookies. Those who are interested in such things can search the Firefox add-ons on Mozilla.org to find add-ons that suit your needs. Some members suggested using the “InPrivate Browsing” mode of IE 8, which keeps all browser history for the current session in an isolated sandbox and deletes it all at the end of the session. This is found on the ‘Safety’ menu. Firefox has a similar feature on the Tools menu: ‘Start Private Browsing’.

Q – I have a 22-inch large screen monitor and I have trouble reading the type on the screen. Is there a way to make the type larger?

A – Vista and Windows 7 support font scaling. To change this setting on Vista, right-click on the desktop and select Personalize; then click “Adjust Font Size (DPI)” from the menu on the left. The dialog that opens offers ‘Normal’ or ‘Larger’ plus a button for ‘Custom DPI’ where you can scale fonts to whatever works for you. The procedure is similar on Win 7: right-click on the desktop and pick Screen Resolution; then click the link “Make text and other items larger or smaller”; the resulting dialog allows you to change the DPI (dots per inch) setting for your screen. Try a few different settings doing your regular tasks to see the effect.

D – Discussion turned to Adobe Acrobat and Flash players. Jay Ferron, the speaker at the August meeting, noted that a significant security hole in both Acrobat and Flash as been patched. The recommended procedure is to uninstall whatever versions you have now and then do fresh installs of the current versions (10.1 for Flash, 9.3.3 for Acrobat). This ensures that the problem DLLs are replaced.

Unfortunately this was the last question that I could hear on the recordings for this month.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!

 


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