Leo's Answers #43 – September 15, 2006

Leo's Answers
A Weekly Newsletter From
Ask Leo!
Leo Notenboom


*** Contents

*** New Articles of Note on Ask Leo!

Can my boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse tell that I've hacked into their account?

A friend told me that my boyfriend was on Match.com. After discovering that he was, it was quite easy for me to guess his password and check the emails he sent/received. I didn't send or receive anything in his account or change any of his settings. I simply read them, copied and forwarded them to myself. After asking him about it and his denying it, I then confronted him with the emails (though I said someone else accessed them and sent them to me). So here's the question....Part 1: How much trouble can you get in for figuring out someone's password and accessing their email on say Match.com? Part 2: Is it possible to tell who accessed the account? If he reports the "break-in" to Match, will they be able to discover that it was me who accessed his account?

I normally avoid these types of questions, because in all honestly they're not about technology or computers - they're about relationships and ethics. And I'm no Dear Abby or Dr. Phil.

The problem is that I get several of these types of requests every day. Seriously.

And it's just wrong on so many levels.

Continue reading: "Can my boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse tell that I've hacked into their account?"

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Why does my video flicker?

Some (not all) of the time, when I attempt to watch a news clip or movie trailer online, the picture continually flickers. Why, and how do I fix it?

It depends on what you mean by flicker.

Various things can disrupt viewing video on-line. But the increase in popularity of sites like YouTube and Google Video, in addition to the news and movie sites you mention, has a lot of people giving it a try.

Let's look at some of the issues.

Continue reading: "Why does my video flicker?"

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PPS files still don't work even after I created an association - what do I do?

I followed your instructions to create a file association for PPS files, but I still get an error when I try to open PPS files attached to email. What am I doing wrong?

It's hard to say, but I will say that for some reason, PPS files cause a lot of people consternation.

Let's review what you should do, and what to do if that doesn't work.

Continue reading: "PPS files still don't work even after I created an association - what do I do?"

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This file does not have a program associated with it - what does this mean and what do I do?

How can I create an association in Folder Options? I get this error message when attempting to open picture attachments on Outlook Express: "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Folder Options control panel."

A file can contain anything. Under Windows (and under MS-DOS before it), the convention was established that the characters following the last period in a file name, called the file "extension", tells you what kind of data that file contains. ".EXE", for example, is an EXEcutable program. ".JPG" is a jpeg compressed image file, ".TXT" is a plain text file, and so on.

In addition to knowing what type of data a file contains, Windows also needs to know what program should be used to access that file.

If that information is missing, then "This file does not have a program associated with it..." is one of the possible error messages.

Continue reading: "This file does not have a program associated with it - what does this mean and what do I do?"

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Safely Remove Hardware: where did the icon go? How do I safely remove hardware without it?

I have several USB devices, and I'm used to using the "safely remove hardware" icon in the taskbar before I unplug any of them. All of a sudden that icon has disappeared, and I see no way to "safely remove hardware". What do I do? Can I just unplug the device I want to remove anyway? Or do I need to reboot every time this happens?

This happens to me all the time. The remove hardware icon in the taskbar's notification area disappears occasionally for reasons unknown. I've never actually had a problem just unplugging the device anyway, but it still makes me feel uncomfortable to do so.

So, I stumbled onto a fairly reasonable workaround.

Continue reading: "Safely Remove Hardware: where did the icon go? How do I safely remove hardware without it?"

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*** Popular Articles from the Archives

The spam thread continues this week with a personal annoyance. Each week I get several reports of people clicking on "This Is Spam" buttons when they get my newsletter. The newsletter that they asked for, and had to separately confirm that they wanted. Calling it spam when you asked for it hurts everyone:




Their legitimate, non-spam, email.

Read more... Why shouldn't I use the "Report Spam" or "Junk" button?

*** Thoughts and Comments

Today's notes are coming to you from my hotel room in lovely Round Rock, Texas - just north of Austin. My wife and I are attending a convention for her business - a convention for collectors of ball jointed dolls.

The hotel double-booked our room, so they're having to shuffle us around a little after the first night, but as part of the "oops, we're sorry" deal they're giving me free WiFi access for the duration of our stay. It's nice, and becoming more and more common as you travel that WiFi of some sort if available in hotels; the going rate seems to be around $10 per day.

It'll also be an important part of our business during the convention on the sales floor. Of course I have my cell phone as backup connectivity, but the hotel WiFi is much faster.

In fact, the sad part is that it's much faster than what I have at home. I'm limited there by my telephone company's old technology. Maybe someday.


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