You're listening to the Internet Pathfinder. I'm your host, Steve Phillips. In this podcast, the goal is to inform, educate, and reminisce as we find a path through the world of technology, the Internet, and podcasting. Well, the 28 -day podcast movement challenge, the PodSquad, is officially over. I just want to say congratulations to everyone who participated in the PodSquad challenge. And I look forward to interacting
with everyone in the group. So out of all of them, there was about 24 that stood tall at the end. And thankfully, mine was one of them. Which, thank you very much to everyone who listened and everyone who gave criticism and thoughts
on the entire project. It was amazing to get a... lot of interaction in the form of critiques on artwork, critiques on different podcasting styles, whether it be segments or long form podcasts, interview podcasts, short podcasts, long podcasts, just all of the questions collectively were answered by majority of people just on basic tastes or just things that they've noticed in the industry. I would definitely say that it was a very helpful and informative group to be a part of. And I'm
thankful for everyone that was in it. And congratulations to the five winners who get tickets and whatnot to Podcast Movement this year. I unfortunately will not be going. More so out of cost purposes. The convention itself isn't the big cost for me. It's flying or getting transportation down there and then the hotel stay itself, which is a bit much for me. I hope that eventually these jump around the different states and maybe Michigan
could be next or down the pipe some way. I'm very, very excited to see what comes out of the podcast movement, even though I will not be able to make it this year. This episode, I had planned on doing more tech -based, particularly because last episode we covered an extensive amount in podcasting, so this week I thought it would be
interesting to cover things. pertaining to computers, Windows 10, and some variety of settings that may or may not make any difference to certain people or may be very helpful to certain people. But before I get into that, I'm going to cover the tech history lesson. And starting us off there, we have Yahoo, which officially launched March 5th, 1995. Which I thought was kind of an interesting bit of information there just for the fact that Yahoo's been around since pretty
much I started using the internet. And it was probably the first search engine I'd ever heard
of as well. So it's kind of interesting to see how long it's been around, but it's also lost its relevancy over the last 10, 15 years with the... invention of Google and the lack of reliance on internet search directories themselves especially when you had to manually submit your websites to those directories to get them included in the search engines whereas Google pulled from metadata to create all that March 1st 2008 America Online discontinues the Netscape web browser.
I remember slightly using that, but I was a heavy Internet Explorer guy at the time. That has since changed with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. But yeah, Netscape was the first commercial web browser largely responsible for helping popularize the Internet in the mid -90s. It originally was obviously destroyed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer as they kind of locked it out of Windows in the
90s with all the antitrust information. However, as Microsoft included it for free with every copy of Windows of Internet Explorer, the computer code for Netscape lives on in Mozilla Firefox browser, which continues to gain popularity. I'm still a user of Google Chrome and Firefox for other things, and I haven't touched Internet Explorer in probably three or four years, and I'm not a fan of Internet Explorer's successor, which is Microsoft Edge, which isn't as bad as
Internet Explorer, but I don't like it. It doesn't seem like it's as fast, and I don't like a lot of the features to it. It's definitely something that it's kind of fun to think about the browser war. I remember a lot of different browsers back in the day between Neoplanet and where you could skin the browser and make it look like a show or something else. It's just kind of interesting when you go back and look at it. The funny thing is, is in February 26, 1991, the first web browser
was introduced. The first web browser and WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, HTML editor. And Tim Berners -Lee was largely responsible for that at the time. And that concludes our history lesson. So moving into Windows 10 settings and troubleshooting. Let me preface this with saying I've had Windows 10 since it came out. I've had it since whatever year it was. I think it was 2016, maybe 2015. I'm not quite sure when it came out. Anyhow, when Windows 10 first was introduced,
it was a nightmare. It was a mess. It randomly changed all the settings. It introduces a new standard font of Segui UI, which is kind of a... mix between the Calibri that's standard on Windows as well. However, if you install Windows 10 on a computer that does not only have the standard fonts on a computer, the unfortunate part is Windows randomly selects one of those fonts to be your standard font when you're web browsing
or opening a PDF file. And unfortunately, there's no way around this unless you remove said font. And it doesn't exactly tell you where it's using this font from or what font it's pulling. So what has happened is I've had this problem on multiple machines. I recently upgraded my wife's computer because my Windows 10 machine is all the bugs have been worked out. But I had since forgotten what. it was like to have to do this.
And I upgraded my Windows 8 .1 machine that my wife uses on her laptop and brought it to Windows 10. And it randomly selected one of my graphic design fonts that I was using and decided that this had to be the standard font. So it made it extremely difficult to read websites or PDFs or really anything that was on the web. And I tried changing the default fonts in the browser.
I tried changing a variety of fonts. But unfortunately, what I had to do was go through my graphics editing software, and I typed in some of the text, and then I had to go through and kind of cycle through. Another easier way, though, is physically going to the control panel fonts folder and scrolling until you see the letters that look like something else, which I took a screenshot so I could do a side -by -side. And I figured out what the font was. And there's only, I've seen different
options. There's one where you can create a registry file, which will auto -change all of the fonts on the computer to said font. However, it works for everything on the system, still doesn't make an impact on the browser. So it was a massive waste of time for me to try this, to try and create this file. that would rewrite in the registry the font. Way too complicated, way too difficult
for the normal person. It's not even needed, especially when if you find the main font that's causing the problem, you remove it and then you reinstall it. It does not take over the system anymore. But in order to get it to turn off because it stays on when you're in the system, you have to close the browser. So anyways, I found this font. I removed it. I fixed it, the problem went away. I'm not quite sure what causes this in Windows 10 other than the fact that it's layering
over top of an already built system. But I find it extremely frustrating the amount of changes that Windows performs when they install the Windows 10 install. And that's just one of the changes. One of the other things I don't really care for as much is the... the modification to the start bar, the random apps, the Windows 10 system update, which I find extremely frustrating because if you have newer builds of Windows 10, for instance, they prevent you from turning off Windows 10,
Windows update. You cannot select when it installs. You can set a window of when it will not touch your system. However, it will still install whenever it feels like it. and it will reboot your machine, even if you're in the middle of something. I mean, it'll give you a little bit of a warning now, but it still counts down. So what I was doing, because my system, I've worked out the
kinks. There's no bugs. I actually completely disabled my Windows 10 system update because I got tired of it trying to Shanghai my system. And what I mean by that is it was randomly uninstalling software that was older that I had grown accustomed to and I was using. And it also decided what it didn't support and it removed that software as well. So I went through this whole basis of registry editing and software disabling and task
scheduler to shut off the Windows update. And I finally got my main desktop to the point where it doesn't do this. Well, when I installed Windows 10 on my wife's laptop, the 8 .1 Windows, It prevented me from disabling the update to begin with. I eventually figured it out. It's at the same status of my desktop now. But it was extremely frustrating to try and figure out. And the only reason I upgraded that laptop was because Windows 8 .1 was super buggy. It would crash on boot
up every time. And now I don't have that problem. The switching between user accounts, it would sometimes take as much as two to three minutes. And the boot up time would take about five. After installing Windows 10, all of those problems have ceased. So, I mean, it's kind of a mixed bag of give and take, of like and dislike. I overall enjoy Windows 10 as a whole. It's a great version of Windows compared to the previous ones. It only compares to Windows 7 at this point.
That being said, I would strongly advise backing up software that you use and other documents or using a cloud -based service such as Google Drive, which I use. I pay the $20 a year, get the 100 gigabytes of space, and I back up all of my podcasting stuff. all of my art, all of my featured banners for my WordPress site for said podcasts. And I use it just to back up all my documents. So it's in the cloud. I can access it from my phone. I can access it wherever I'm
at. And it's a very useful service. And I mostly did this because I've had flash drives and I've had Windows fail on me and I've lost things in
the past. not a great scenario to be in and and i think that having a cloud backup is is something that everyone should have it's not that expensive if you know where to go like i i didn't want dropbox i think it costs too much and honestly i trust google more and my phone is a google phone it's so it's all kind of intertwined it's it's much easier for me that way um but What I'm trying to say overall is Windows 10 is very
much an education system. I've had a friend where, with the latest updates, his graphics drivers reconfigured. Because it was an older system, they created a default Windows 10 graphics driver, which replaced the onboard video card. and prevented his resolution from being as large as it used to be. So it's another one of those you kind of have to know what you're getting into as a whole with any version of Windows. Now, I don't know what it's like to have a Mac. I've used
them through college. I know that they're very stable for the most part. There's not a lot of them messing with the system. It's pretty sound. But I also think Windows 10 is at that base as well. It's just I don't like when they install the updates and then half my stuff goes away. Or I use like the Sticky Notes app that was built into Windows 7. And you can use it through early versions of Windows 10 and then it's gone after
that. And I use it for, for instance, my work or for podcasting notes that I want up on the screen, but I don't want to have to have like 50 documents open. So it's... Again, there's give and take between the two systems and designs. Switching gears, we'll be going to the podcast highlight of the week, where every week I play an ad for someone else's show. If you'd like to have yours played on the show, you can email
me feedback at internetpathfinder .com. Pixels in the Animation is the Geekcast Radio Network's video game cartoon review show. We are covering every episode of nine different video game cartoons. Join TV's Mr. Neal and myself, TFG and Mike, as we trek through multiple Mario tunes, Zelda, Captain N, Mega Man, Sonic, And we are also driving
through Donkey Kong Country. Pixels in the Animation is 100 episodes of video game cartoon goodness, so tune in to help us find the Pixels in the Animation, which you can find every Wednesday on iTunes and www .geekcastradio .com. If you'd like to find more from the Internet Pathfinder, you can find the podcast on InternetPathfinder .com, which at the moment links to... The subcategory on AlteredGeek .com. I plan to add more as the
podcast grows. But you can also find this podcast, like I said, on Altered Geek or GeekCast Radio Network. And it will be featured on Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher, and more as the weeks go on. You can get a hold of me on Twitter at SCP21 or enter Pathfinder for Twitter for this show. The podcast will be out every Wednesday. That involves finding a path through the world of technology, the internet, and podcasting where I'll be your guide into the coolest news, tech,
nostalgia, and answering your questions. So as usual, thank you for joining me and we'll see you on the other side of the net.