Facebook privacy again, Krita, different search, email closings and organizing

Facebook may be finally making it just a bit easier to see all of their settings that control privacy by putting together a Privacy Basics at https://www.facebook.com/about/basics that will lead you into stepping through their Privacy Checkup to see some of your basic settings.

Another alternative to Photoshop, that runs on Mac or PC and is free, is Krita <https://krita.org/>. Apart from letting you edit images, it has tools to more easily let you paint and create digital artwork. Have fun creating.

Even though google became a verb some years ago, there are other search engines to use with different advantages. DuckDuckGo.com is a favorite for not tracking any information about your searches. For video search alternatives to youtube, there is vimeo.com, and yahoo.com does rather well as an alternative for image searches at <https://images.search.yahoo.com>. And, you can even search for sound effects at < http://www.findsounds.com/>.

Public WiFi networks are pervasive and tempting to use, and there are some steps you should take to keep your device and internet traffic safe. When using any network other than one you trust, you should always turn off file and printer sharing. If you are joining a network in Windows, always set it to public. And, turn off WiFi as soon as you are done. Make sure that you are using SSL, that the web address starts with https, especially on any site you are logging into. Luckily, most common social media sites have moved to SSL-based logins. And, maybe you should find out how to use your own smartphone as a hotspot for safer browsing, just avoid streaming long movies <G>.

With email, don’t neglect the closing as it may have an equally important effect on getting a reply. Boomerang, a company that makes email productivity programs, has studied email closings to see what differences they would elicit. Business emails that ended with “thankful closings” like “thanks in advance” got the highest response rate. <http://blog.boomerangapp.com/2017/01/how-to-end-an-email-email-sign-offs/>

If you occasionally need to encrypt a file before you send it off to someone, you should try whisply <https://whisp.ly/>. It lets you encrypt a file and share it out through Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft’s OneDrive. And, you can even add a PIN or password to further protect that file.

There is another way to organize email, there always is just keep everything in the inbox and then search for what you need, or you could try using four priority folders in addition to the inbox. They would be, today, this week, this month, and informational. As new messages come in, you sort them by when they need to be handled, or pitch them in the trash.