On The Fly

In this episode, Hidden WiFi Hotspot . . . As many of you know, I'm a MAC user at home and a PC user at work. Recently I read an article from one of my favorite online newsletters, How-To Geek, that caught my eye,  How to turn your Windows PC into a WiFi hotspot.  You can click the link in the blog post to review the entire article if you like but here is a quick summary. Did you know, Windows 10 and Windows 11 both have built-in features that can turn your laptop (or desktop) into a wireless hotspot, allowing other devices to connect to it and share your internet connection. Here's how it works. Thanks to a hidden virtual WiFi adapter feature in Windows, you can create a WiFi hotspot. At the same time, you're connected to another WiFi network or wireless router, sharing one WiFi connection over another. Why Share Your PC's Internet Connection? Let's say your phone doesn't get good WiFi or cell reception when you're at your computer, but your PC is connected...

In this episode, Web Addresses . . . Have you ever wondered why internet web addresses are in English? While poking around on the web, we discovered a riveting segment (if you're a Geek) from  howstuffwork.com  to tickle your RAM (Random Access Memory). Ok - "Why are internet web addresses in English?" The short answer: Web addresses are in English because the people who developed the standards for web addresses were, for the most part, English-speaking Americans. Are you ready for a longer answer? In the early days of the internet, the only way to connect to a remote computer was to know its unique Internet Protocol or  IP address , a long string of unique digits such as 165.254.202.218. But in 1983, as the number of computers on the network continued to grow, the University of Wisconsin developed the  Domain Name System (DNS) , which maps numeric IP addresses to more easily remembered domain names like google.com . In 1990, according to the Computer History Museum,...