Excuse the croaky voice…

By | October 24, 2016
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If you use the internet as much as I do (or even if you use it quite a bit less than I do), you probably end up with all sorts of accounts at various websites.

From accounts at Amazon and eBay for shopping to email accounts… and maybe accounts at websites that you have no intention of ever using again, but had to set up in order to access something you only needed once.

It’s not necessarily a problem to have them – but if you do want to cancel some that you won’t ever use again, it’s not always obvious how.

That’s why an organisation interesting in privacy on the web have put together a list of links to how to deactivate or close accounts. You can find the list here.

If you want to close an account for, say, Channel Four or PhotoBucket, go to that website, find the organisation in the list and click on it – it’ll take you to a page about how to deactivate your account.

I’m definitely not saying you must deactivate old accounts that you aren’t using at the moment if you don’t want to – but if you do want to, this makes it easier.

A neat trick if you use Chrome as a browser on most phones (and tablets)
There are lots of different web browsers and I try to use different ones to keep up with what they’re all like. I use Firefox, Chrome and Edge on the PC and I use Chrome, Safari and Samsung’s “Internet” on the phone.

But when I’m not making the effort to use different ones, I tend to use Chrome. Partly because I like the way it works and it’s probably partly through habit as well.

And I discovered something useful on it on my phone the other day, by accident. It should work on most tablets that use Chrome, too.

It’s a little tricky to explain in words, so I’ve recorded a short video to show you – you can watch it here.

(Excuse the shaky quality – I did it at home with my own digital camera, rather than in our special recording booth with a proper video camera, because I wanted to record it straight away. Oh, and excuse the croaky voice – the cold is on its way out but not quite gone yet!)

You can use it for looking up all sorts of things you come across while browsing the web – words you aren’t quite sure of the meaning of, places that you’re not sure where they are or anything else you want to quickly look up.

If you use Chrome on the PC it’s not quite the same as in the video, but you can double click on a word to highlight it, then right click on it and select “search Google for”.

It’ll open a new tab with the search results, including the definition at the top. Not quite as neat as the version on the phone but still handy.

That’s all for now.

3 thoughts on “Excuse the croaky voice…

  1. Brian Harrison

    Tried your tip on chrome. Highlighted a word scrolled down but no sign or with to click on. Above the highlited word I can click on Look up. I am using an I phone 5 is that the problem?

    Reply
    1. Tim Post author

      It could well be – Apple have a habit of stopping things from Google (who make Chrome) from working properly. I suspect they wouldn’t want to allow the way the bit of screen pops up with the definition on. So it sounds like they’ve replaced it with the “look up” option.
      Tim

      Reply

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