Daily Battles: How to disable news notification on your Mac

I don't remember that I ever enabled news notifications on my Mac. But time from time, something would pop up on my screen, notifying me of some piece of news I had no interest in reading.

Hi Apple, if I want to follow the latest news, I go to Twitter or go to YouTube and watch the Daily Show. Stop sending me useless stuff I never requested like how the many other companies do.

I tried searching for "news" in system preferences in my attempt to shut it off and found nothing!! Is this Apple's way of telling me, stupid Apple users, Apple knows what's good for you. So stop questioning and just OBEY!

Enough ranting. Here's how you can turn it off:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Select Notifications.
3. Find News in the left pane and select it.
4. Select None under news alert style.

You are welcome! Now on to my next tech battle!

Key to Happiness: Lower your expectations, especially when it comes to your kids.





BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: An error occurred when viewing YouTube videos

When you open a YouTube video on your computer, have you seen this error below?

If you have, chances are, you see this error a lot when you go to different youtube videos. Even though you could refresh, or click the play button a few times to get past this error message and get the video streaming started, it is SUPER ANNOYING!

People have posted this issue on Google Support web site, and hundreds of people echoed their frustration with the same issue. As usual, Google simple ignores the request for help as evidenced in this thread below:

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/10329866?hl=en

Anyway, I did my own research and investigation and finally found a solution to this problem. Here's what you have to do if you are in the same boat: You have to disable hardware acceleration from your Chrome browser.

1. Click the 3 dots icon on the top right corner of your Chrome browser.
2. Select Settings.
3. Click Advanced in the left pane.
4. Click on System.
5. Toggle off Use hardware acceleration when available.
6. You will be asked to Relaunch Chrome.

That's it. Happy Internet Surfing!

Picture of the Day:

Lower left news: Speed limit jump will 'eliminate the safety risk' on Legacy Highway, officials say

Headline news: 2 dead after head-on crash on Legacy Parkway.

Such irony!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Not getting Blogger new comment notifications in email

I have been encouraging my daughter to blog because I think it is a great habit to write every day. Writing can help you organize your thoughts in a logical way, so it not only improves your writing skills, but also improves your thinking skills. It allows you to offload stuff from your brain so it can work better with other matters. It gives you tangible records of your thoughts that you can go back to. It also facilitates with whatever kind of research you want to do. It is just such a great habit that I encourage you all to try.

Here's my daughter's blog if you want to check it out. Appreciate any kind of encouragement you can give to her!

As I was going through my daughter's posts and leaving comments on how she can improve, it came to my realization that she never gets notified for all the comments I leave on her blog. Strange! Cause I do get notified in email whenever someone leaves a comment for my blog post.

After some digging, I finally found the reason: You have to specifically enable comment notification to the email you specify. It is not on by default.

If you noticed the same problem with your blog comments, here's how you can enable it:

1. Go to your blog settings page and then select Email under Settings.
2. Under Comment Notification Email, add the email you want to use.
3. Make sure you click the Save button to save your changes.

If you use a different email address from the admin user of the blog, an email will be sent to that email address inviting the user to view new comments.

There you have it. Wish Google would have made comment notification enabled by default. But Google is never good at UX design (or really, they never cared is the more accurate description), and we have to live with that.

Video of the Day:

If you have never heard of Andrew Yang, Google him. He brings a fresh air and a lot of sense to US politics. Here's a video of people dancing to a rap song written by a fan of his that describes his policies. This is the first time I know of people writing songs about a presidential candidate's policies. So check it out!

It's not left, it's not right, it's forward! -- Andrew Yang 







BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Fighting Bad UX Designs

Today's blog post on daily battles is a bit special, because we, consumers, cannot win this kind of battle directly with technological solutions or hacks. All we can do is to complain or vote with our choice of products. And if we are loud enough, product makers will have to listen and then make improvements.

I am talking about Bad UX Designs, where UX stands for User Experience.

A good product lets users accomplish tasks. A great product also makes the process intuitive, efficient, and pleasant.

Let me give you two examples of bad UX design that bugs me almost every day.

The first example is a function in the Android mobile operating system running on my Samsung Galaxy S8. As illustrated below, a user can use a button (or swipe up) to show all apps currently running on the phone and then swipe up to force quit the app that is malfunctioning or one you no longer want.

Most likely, you are in the app you want to force quit before you perform the swipe up action to kill it. But as soon as you swipe up, the app you want to quit moves right and hides itself behind the edge of the screen, so when you swipe up the app to kill it, most likely you'll be killing another app that you had no intention of killing. This happens to me almost every time, and it is super frustrating. Why can't we just keep the current app right in the middle? Whoever came up with this design would be having a serious talk with me if he/she worked on my team!!

The second example is a web page used by the County Library. What's the first thing a user does when he/she visits the library web page? Most likely the user would try to log in, so he/she can get personalized information and paths to activities relating to his/her personal account. In the picture below, you can see that when a user tries to log in, a popup would jump out from a control right above the login link, obstructing the login link completely. The user has to then try to figure out how to get rid of the big popup and then get to the login link by carefully maneuver the cursor around all the controls in order to avoid triggering any popups.

Such bad UX designs add unnecessary stress and cognitive workload to users who already have to fight all kinds of battles with technology every day besides their non-technical daily challenges. Please! Please be a little bit more diligent with UX design work so we can make their lives slightly better! Use your own design daily so you identify the suffering, and run good user studies to iron out all these annoyances!!

Video of the Day:

Lesson learned: divorce the woman who thinks the car is more important than your life.

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: OpenDNS blocking a domain resulting in undefined error

OpenDNS is a useful tool for monitoring your kids' online activities and blocking websites you don't want them to visit. I blogged about this tool in my blog series named The Complete Guide on Monitoring and Parental Control on a Chromebook.

One useful feature of OpenDNS is the ability to block en entire category of websites with a few clicks. You can look at the list of domains your kids visited and select the domain you want to block. Then you have the option to block this domain or block similar domains as shown below.

For example, my daughter used to waste a bunch of time "window" shopping on online shopping sites. I simply clicked block similar domains from OpenDNS, and many web shopping sites that I have never even heard of all became blocked, to my great satisfaction.

However, sometimes a specific website slips through because it was not part of a category when it should have. One example is disneynow.com. It is clearly a video site. But when I blocked YouTube with the category of video sites, OpenDNS only considered video upload sites.

If you select block similar domains on disneynow.com, you will get a prompt saying it doesn't belong to any categories and you can suggest a category. However, it doesn't really let you create the new category and block it. If you select block similar domains, you actually get an error message says "Error blocking disneynow.com. Undefined." This is No Bueno!

A little bit of research revealed that people actually reported this problem as far back as 2016. But guess this bug never had high enough priority, so it never got fixed (see link below).

https://support.opendns.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/220050547-When-i-try-to-block-a-domain-i-get-an-error-

However, it is still possible to block the domain. You just have to go through a different route. Here are the steps:

1. Click the SETTINGS tab at the top.
2. Select your network from the dropdown box.
3. Scroll to the bottom to find a section named Manage individual domains.
4. Add the domain you want to block in the Always block field.
5. Click the ADD DOMAIN button.

Voila, mission accomplished! Lanny 1 and Lanny's daughter 0!!

Moving on to the next battle!!

Video of the Day:

You got to love this boy's attitude. He keeps battling and never gives up!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com