Did you ever want to see everything you ever posted on Facebook? You can download all that stuff and it comes in as folders. Double-click and they open up. The photos you posted and have long forgotten are all still there.
Go to Facebook.com/Settings. There you'll see a message which reads: "To download your information, go to 'Your Facebook Information.'" Click on those words, then click "view" and from there you can either download everything or uncheck the boxes next to stuff you don't care about.
We chose "download all," and were pleasantly surprised at how organized it was. We first clicked the "Comment" folder and saw all the comments we'd ever made. Then we clicked the "Messages" folder. There we saw a list of everyone we'd ever texted in Facebook, though clicking on some names produced an error message, saying the content was gone or had been moved. The "videos" folder had a few we didn't remember posting. We also looked at the "Posts" folder, which included our own posts and "Other People's Posts to Your Timeline," which in our case were mostly birthday messages. The "likes" folder had all our likes.
This should be a powerful tool for TV detective shows: "Look, Sam. He said he couldn't swim, but there he is crossing the English Channel."
NEW PORTRAIT
We have a friend who paid a thousand bucks for professional photos. But the kind of touching up professionals do can be done at your desk with the right software program. We're impressed with Portrait Pro, now out in Version 18.
Joy liked the previous version so much, she was tempted to carry her new portrait around with her and somehow work it into the conversation -- as in: "Funny you happen to mention pictures, because I have a great one right here." It comes up all the time.
But the new version of Portrait Pro, $45, is even better. Previously, if one eye was obscured by a flower, the program couldn't touch up the other eye without making a false eye shine through the flower. Also, the old program wasn't as good at touching up hair. It could easily miss some if you have the free-flowing kind. The new version has a "hair volumizer" for making your hair look thicker.
Most of the enhancements are automatic; the program greatly improved photos without our having to do anything but applaud. Other features include the ability to add a logo or watermark to a photo, which inhibits, but cannot stop, all those art thieves who want to copy your picture. There's a free trial of the program at portraitprofessional.com.
APP HAPPY
Moovit is a free app for users of public transit. The app tells you when to get off, solving the problem like Joy had as a 15-year-old on a train for the first time when she went right past her station. If you fall asleep, it will wake you up. If your stop is a big one, it also tells you which exit to use.
If you lose your connection to the Internet, you can still rely on Moovit's directions.
AOL OUTAGES
A reader wrote to say that her computer often freezes up; the cursor becomes unresponsive, and she gets a message from AOL saying "Oops." It took her a while to figure out it was caused by an AOL outage. "Oops" isn't that informative.
Downdetector.com tells you which Internet services are down. It lists dozens, including Instagram, Facebook, Gmail and many others. We clicked "AOL" and checked the outage map. Our reader always lists her location when she posts a complaint, but most people just express their displeasure that AOL is once again leaving them high and dry.
"Now, every time we freeze up," she says, "I go immediately to that site and bingo/bango, the live map shows that I'm on the outer reaches of yet another outage."
Her brother also experiences freeze-up. He called an online tech support service that wanted to charge him $700 a year. Since he's a heavy Photoshop user, we suggested he check his computer's system resources. Photoshop uses 5 gigabytes of random-access memory just to open and close the program, which is more memory than many computers have. We might as well say here, as we have many times before, that if you do photo or video editing, you need all the RAM you can afford.
YOUTUBE TV
We stumbled upon the movie section of YouTube and found lots of free movies for "Premium" users. This led us to wonder what's the difference between YouTube Premium, YouTube TV and plain old YouTube. It should be no surprise that the difference is money.
YouTube Premium costs $12 a month. You get quite a lot of free movies and you also get music without ads from Google Play Music, which we like better than Spotify because it usually plays the whole piece, no matter how long.
YouTube TV is $40 a month, and gives you broadcast channels, cable TV channels and live news. You can see their channel list at tv.youtube.com/directory. This is good for cable cutting, as they call it these days. We saw it had hundreds of channels, such as ABC and Turner Classic Movies, but it didn't bring in Wheel of Fortune, the Military History channel or horse racing, all of which we like.
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
Business on 12/08/2018