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I'm working on an essay for a law course I'm taking on information privacy; attempting to trace the evolution of "privacy in public" theory in the context of photo consent, and contrast it to both Canadian legislation and the growth pressures people in higher ed marketing are facing. I'm looking for information on how much higher education presence online has grown in the last decade -- increasingly large websites, more social media presences, etc. -- and it's been surprisingly difficult to find anything definitive, but I figured maybe y'all would have some ideas? [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 5:24 AM - 1 answers

I have long covid. The neurological effects vary a bit but for the past few weeks I've been experiencing something like vertigo, which means my brain doesn't enjoy all the scrolling involved in internet time. I'm optimistically wondering if there is an app or extension that enables an alternative to this - something like page flipping in the Pocket app, but for the whole of the internet. I have a MacBook and an Android phone, and usually use Chrome on both, but definitely don't need to.
posted by FifteenShocks at 2:36 AM - 2 answers

I am having a debate with friends. None of us are computer experts. Is a paywall a type of firewall? [more inside]
posted by Waiting for Pierce Inverarity at 2:57 PM - 14 answers

I am looking for a cheap or free speech synthesis/text-to-speech tool that (a) can control the pitch and timing of syllables for a janky "singing" effect, (b) can be invoked straightforwardly from the command line, and (c) runs more or less out of the box on a modern Mac or Linux machine. I don't need any level of acoustic realism: it could sound like Jingle Cats with English syllables as far as I'm concerned. [more inside]
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:52 PM - 3 answers

I am close to buying a laptop I plan to use for video editing, game making, comics creation and other graphics-intensive tasks. I have some rather specific requirements and I'm bewildered by all the choices. I hope the tech-savvy among you can help me out! [more inside]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:01 PM - 6 answers

I have no idea what just happened, but almost all the files have vanished from the desktop on my Dell laptop, Windows 10. For some reason a few things are still there....Audacity, Open Office, a VPN, but everything else I had on my desktop is suddenly gone. I don't seem to have a restore point. Am I fucked? It's not the end of the world as I save most things on google drive, but I did have some files on MuseScore I hadn't backed up other than printouts, and I'm sure if I think about it longer there will be some other stuff. Is there anything I should try as a person who just uses his laptop mostly for internet crap and is not good at the innards? [more inside]
posted by less of course at 7:35 AM - 9 answers

I've got a lot of apple computers, and they are all on the same wifi. And I've got the thingy turned on where they announce the time. And they mostly don't do it at the same time. Why is that?
posted by valkane at 8:05 PM - 10 answers

Can you suggest some xbox one games for me, given some criteria below? [more inside]
posted by no regrets, coyote at 1:37 PM - 16 answers

My new laptop, purchased for photo processing, has an apparently uncorrectable brown/yellow cast to the screen (HP Envy x360 Ryzen 4700U Radeon Octa-core 32GB). This was intended for processing 8-bit photos to be displayed on a computer screen. HP recognizes this problem on their help pages. All of the recommended solutions listed by HP were tried to no effect. [more inside]
posted by Raybun at 10:18 AM - 5 answers

Hey guys, I am struggling with a laptop purchase. I tend to be a power user of machines by having lots of apps running and doing multiple things at a time. I have a MacBook Pro 2015 15" with 16gb of ram. However, running windows with 8gb and another 8gb on mac just doesn't cut it. Excel (on Windows) is slow to respond at times depending on usage of the system. [more inside]
posted by iNfo.Pump at 7:08 AM - 15 answers

I just added an sd card to my phone. (samsung galaxy a21) and want to use this storage for my audiobook app. However, the operating system seems to have added duplicates of my existing directories to the sd card. I wanted to create a new audiobooks directory and so I did (via usb to a pc.) but my audiobook app doesn't see it (smart audiobook player). Instead it sees storage/emulated/0. Whatever that is. I think I don't understand the android storage model correctly. Can someone explain this to me like I'm 4 going on 5? [more inside]
posted by Obscure Reference at 12:47 AM - 4 answers

I need a real-time collaborative handwritten notetaking app for the iPad. Is there any app you've used to take handwritten notes in real time with multiple people? [more inside]
posted by vogon_poet at 6:54 PM - 8 answers

I would like to receive a daily e-mail with a Question of the Day. The question would come from me and answer would be saved for me. Difficulty level: have website with all the bells and whistles that should make this easy. I just don't want to reinvent the wheel. [more inside]
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 7:04 AM - 3 answers

Techies: what are your favourite (fun/useful/beautiful) tech accessories? [more inside]
posted by orange and yellow at 8:08 PM - 15 answers

This is the most boring thing to ask, I'm so sorry. I scoured the old answers and good ole Google for help before bringing this here, but I'm about to throw this dang computer out the window. It's an HP Pavilion laptop, Zoom was working fine for a long time, and now the camera says "Failed to start the video camera. Please select another video camera in Settings." and before that it was saying "camera being used by another application" but it ISNT! I need zoom every day, and haven't been able to have a camera for two months now, and it's driving me up a wall. [more inside]
posted by emirenic at 4:19 PM - 9 answers

I have an indesign document where each page is 12x12 ish and the spreads are 12x24ish. I want to print all the spreads actual size, though I have only letter and legal paper. Just for proofing purposes. I would like it to just print the overlapping bit multiple times if there's room on the paper instead of just strictly slicing up the document. [more inside]
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:31 AM - 4 answers

A HD in my NAS developed some bad sectors and crashed. I have replaced it but am wondering what to do with the crashed drive. It's out of warranty so I can't RMA it as I have done in the past. Is it worthwhile putting it in an external case, reformatting it as spare storage, but not using it for anything critical? Or would I be throwing good money after bad?
posted by Grinder at 8:08 AM - 7 answers

It was already sold sometime during the summer and is an oval shaped decorative plate with two blue colored birds on it. [more inside]
posted by fantasticness at 7:06 AM - 5 answers

My daughter and I built a new PC for gaming. It now has Windows and Steam, and appears to be working, but I am not sure if all is well with the graphics card and liquid cooling system. OK, now it just did it again. Something is not right. Can you lend me the benefit of your lights? [more inside]
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 7:54 PM - 9 answers

I'm teaching an Intro to CS course in high school and want to use the short week before Thanksgiving to introduce them to a command-line OS — namely, Bash on some vanilla Linux (Debian, I assume). How do I induce them to conclude anything other than "wow, command-line is a pain in the ass?" [more inside]
posted by argybarg at 9:20 AM - 44 answers