Edit Online Forms With Emacs

If you'd rather use your own text editor to enter content into a web form, you could use and configure a browser extension to establish a link between the form field and the editor. One such extension that Google search suggests is Browser's External Editor.¹

But if you use Emacs, you're probably better off with Chrome Emacs.²

Chrome Emacs is added to a Chromium browser, but you still need to add something to Emacs. That something is the mode called atomic-chrome.

atomic-chrome can be found on Melpa; you can use the Emacs package manager to add it. My personal experience is that it's necessary to start its server manually with atomic-chrome-start-server, or add (atomic-chrome-start-server) to your init file.

I find it invaluable when commenting on a LinkedIn post, which can disappear whenever your feed is updated.

I also like it as a replacement for the Blogspot post entry field, which is easily cleared with an accidental press of Ctrl-a followed by any key press. Blogspot performs an automatic backup whenever you pause typing during new post mode. But that's a worthless feature because it will backup every mistake, including one in which you replaced all content with a key press. And it offers no way to access previous backups. I'm less likely to select all text in Emacs³, but it's not impossible. As well, I could still somehow still manage to do the Ctrl-a thing in Blogspot. Nevertheless this is a nice workaround.

But in fact I've been composing new posts outside of Blogspot for years; usually I use LibreOffice Writer because... Well, come to think of it, I don't know why I use Writer when I can use Emacs. Maybe it's because with Writer, I can insert pictures and such. (And I haven't figured out how to do that in Emacs.

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¹ https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/Browser's%20External%20Editor
² https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chrome-emacs
³ Pressing C-x h will select all characters in an Emacs buffer.

Define Emacs as Editor in Altap Salamander

I’ve been a devotee of the Servant Salamander / Altap Salamander file manager¹ for decades. I migrated from Norton Commander (NC)² soon after I started to work on a multi-tasking OS, Windows NT.

Likewise, I’ve been a fan of the (extensible) text editor Emacs³ for decades, having given up on Brief⁴, eventually. While on WinNT, I stayed with Brief a long time. But I seem to recall that Brief didn’t respond well to having one of its open files changed by another application. (This rarely happened in environments that it was designed for.)

Norton’s F4 key invoked a built-in text editor to open the selected file. The Salamander F4 key is configured to use Notepad.exe to open the selected file. But it can be configured to use other editors based on the selected file’s extension. I configure F4 to use Emacs for all text-like files.

Once I open Emacs, I like to keep that instance open for as long as possible. That’s because I build up a history usage, including:

• Regular expression searches
• Kill ring contents
• On-the-fly macros

Switching to a new Emacs instance is a major interruption to my workflow.

Enter Emacs server. Emacs includes a server that can open a file in a running instance when invoked from an external application, such as Norton, ...er, Salamander. This allows a user to edit new files while maintaining the previous Emacs instance.

To use this active server process feature, you’d invoke Emacs with this command⁵ (all entered on a single line): C:\Path_to_Emacs_bin\emacsclientw.exe -a C:\Path_to_Emacs_bin\bin\runemacs.exe

But I find that configuring Salamander’s F4 to call the Emacs server to be difficult sometimes. In fact I spent an embarrassingly long time yesterday trying to figure it out. But it’s not at all difficult if you really understand two things:

1. Only the Emacs executable should appear in the Custom Editor Target box; any switches go into the Arguments box before the $(Name) parameter.
2. Emacs doesn’t like file names that contain quote marks. So if there’s a space in the path to the executable, you should specify the 8.3 name and not the path seen in Explorer.⁶ Please see the figure below.

I’ve heard Emacs gurus advise against installing Emacs in a location other than the default. The default on Windows currently is C:\Program Files\Emacs\emacs-30.1\. And I followed that advice unfortunately. But it caused me a great deal of grief, because it forced me to surround the paths in quotes and was incompatible with the server process. On my previous computers I had been installing Emacs in C:\Users\Public\Programs, which all users have access to and conforms to the DOS 8.3 file name format. That’s why this error is new to me.

So here’s advice from a wannabe guru:

• Follow the instructions above to configure Salamander’s F4 to invoke Emacs if you already have Emacs and Altap Salamander installed.
• When you install Emacs, change the installation location to ensure that the path is made up of only alpha-numeric characters and that all users will have Read and Execute permisions.

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¹ https://www.altap.cz/
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander
³ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)
⁵ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emacs-Server.html
⁶ Eli Zaretskii, https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-emacs-windows/2014-04/msg00013.html

Cold in Summer; Hot in Winter

Why do most folks set their thermostats lower in Summer than in Winter?

I’ve seen summer settings at 68°F (20°C), while winter settings are at 75°F (24°C).  What do they expect the HVAC system to do when it senses an indoor air temperature of 72°F (22°C)?  Should it heat the room?  Cool it?  It’s a paradox.

Engineers who design thermostats have a simple solution for this paradox – they let the user figure it out.  They provide a Cool/Warm setting, which tells the device which setpoint is active.

This doesn't make sense to me.  Not only is it a paradox, but it defies the way people perceive air temperature.

For example, if it’s 18°F (10°C) cooler inside than outside, you should feel much cooler when you step inside. So if the outside air is 91°F (35°C), you should feel much cooler with a summer setting of 77°F (25°C).  And if the humidity is even slightly elevated, it will feel even hotter outside and cooler inside.

Similarly, if it’s 36°F (20°C) warmer inside than outside, you should feel much warmer when you step inside. So if it’s freezing cold (32°F or 0°C) outside, you should feel much warmer with a winter setting of 68°F (20°C).

But it seems that people no longer trust themselves to acclimate.  Heat has been a standard offering in automobiles for over 50 years – it’s free, a by-product of the combustion engine.  The default setting in wintertime is maximum heating, even though the riders wear coats.  And nowadays, nearly every automobile has air conditioning, and the default summertime setting for it is maximum cooling.  Climate control in automobiles mostly is “open loop,” meaning that the system does not monitor the air to see whether the setpoint has been reached.  It just keeps heating or cooling.¹  This is in opposition to indoor heating systems, which are closed loop.

The other drawback to the “low setpoint in summer, high in winter” method is that it’s more wasteful.  It’s like biking uphill into a headwind.

Here’s where I brag about the setpoints I use – feel free to roll your eyes.

In summer, I’m fine with the window units set to 77°F (25°C).  However on cool humid days, I might switch the units to dry mode, even though it doesn’t work as well as a dehumidifier.  In Winter, I use a setpoint of about 64°F (18°C).  Plus it drops an additional 2°C (or 3.6°F) at night in “setback” mode.²  Usually I get up before the furnace turns itself back on, so I experience a warming as I prepare tea / coffee, feed the cat, etc.  That slight warming helps me acclimate to Winter.

Would you like to save money and reduce your ecological footprint?⁵  Then try this:

If you live alone, try a higher setpoint at home in summer.  Wear a light sweater at work or while shopping.  Limit the use of A/C in the car.  And in winter, do the opposite.  Try setting a lower setpoint at home, dress lightly in layers.  When in the car, remove outerwear and limit the use of heat.

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¹ Some luxury cars provide closed loop climate control.  Indeed, I drove an old Audi whose heat and air conditioning seemed to stop working after about twenty minutes.  I don’t really know whether they were closed loop or was just broken.  Either way, it was difficult to get used to the effect.

² It’s a German-made boiler, which means the fundamental temperature units are Celsius.  It provides a Fahrenheit display for most things, but not for the setpoint, which is “programmed” by setting DIP switches ³ on the thermostat’s circuit board.

³ A DIP switch ⁴ or Dual In-Line switch is really a set of switches packaged into the standard outline of an IC. And while ICs have gotten 60% smaller over the past three decades, DIP-switches have retained the same bulky outline of the chip packages they were modeled after.

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIP_switch

⁵ What is Ecological Footprint?  Click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

⁶ Try the footprint calculator at https://www.footprintcalculator.org/

Proofread With Read Text

One of the best pieces of letter-writing advice came from the CT DOL¹.  The suggestion?  Get your word processor to read your content out loud.

Spell checking can’t catch misspellings where the word spells a different word correctly, such as “no” used in place of “on,” for example.  But when read aloud, the mistake is obvious.  It’s also great for catching cut and paste errors in which a word or phrase may be repeated or missing.

LibreOffice doesn’t “ship” with this feature.  But the extension “Read Text”² can do the job.  After you install “Read Text” and restart LibreOffice, you can select the content you’d like to have read, and then select Tools | Add-Ons and then Read selection…  “Read Text” can also read from the clipboard, so you can use the feature with content from your email client or web browser.

But be careful -- the technique won’t draw attention to homophones³, witch yule all so have two bee vigilant too avoid.

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¹Connecticut Department of Labor
²https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/read-text
³https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone

A Wordle in Honour of Towel Day

Here's a Wordle devoted to Towel Day.

You can find out more about Towel Day here:

https://www.towelday.org/

My Wordle Strategy With “M” Words

You might recall that my starting Wordle word is STEAM, that my strategy is to enter guesses that end in Y, and that I like to choose words that contain repeated letters.¹

If the letter M were flagged as correct but in the wrong position (STEAM), my next guess would be MOMMY.  After this, I'd know how many Ms were in the word and where they're located.

But what if M were in the correct position (STEAM)?; Then I'd probably choose OPIUM, which would determine what the vowel(s) would be.  I don't recall this ever happened to me; for this post I've relied on the Word Finder tool at Word Hippo.²

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¹ https://ludditegeek.blogspot.com/2023/11/introducing-my-wordle-strategy.html

² https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/word-finder-unscrambler.html

Cybersecurity for Teachers

A kind reader suggested I share this cybersecurity resource for teachers:
https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/teachers-guide-to-cybersecurity/

Here’s a brief overview of the topics it covers:

• How Students Put You in Danger
• The Internet in Your Classroom
• The Hazards of Cyberbullying
• An Educational Solution
• Tips and Lesson Plans for Teachers

Thank you, RM!

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LudditeGeek is not associated with vpnMentor, nor received any compensation for this post.

My Wordle Strategy With “A” Words

I wrote a few weeks ago about Wordle, and that my starting word is STEAM.¹

As well, I wrote that my strategy is to enter guesses that end in Y, and to choose words that contain repeated letters.

Suppose the letter A was flagged as correct but in the wrong position (STEAM). My next guess would be AGAIN.

But suppose the letter A was flagged as correct and in the correct position (STEAM). My next guess might be AURAL to check for the double A, or more likely FORAY to check for a trailing Y.  LUNAR also is tempting, since the letters L, N and R occur commonly.

I’ll follow up with more second guess words next week. Meanwhile, please let me know what your starting word is and why.

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¹ https://ludditegeek.blogspot.com/2023/11/introducing-my-wordle-strategy.html

Introducing My Wordle Strategy

I’ve been enjoying Wordle¹ daily since before the New York Times. I like the game because of how little time it takes to play, and how rewarding it is to get the answer.

Here’s how my Guess Distribution looks today:

1. 0
2. 20
3. 148
4. 208
5. 196
6. 50

I’ve missed only 8 games, mostly by not guessing correctly within six tries, but also due to not playing a couple of times.

What’s my starting word? It’s STEAM.

In general, my strategy is to enter guesses that end in Y, and to choose words that contain repeated letters.

For example, suppose the letter E was flagged as correct but in the wrong position (STEAM). My next guess is usually NEPER, which, like the decibel, is a unit of measure for logarithm-based quantities.

And suppose the letter E was flagged as correct and in the correct position (STEAM). My next guess might be NEEDY.

Another favorite second guess is when both the E and M are correct but in the wrong position (STEAM). My guess then is EMCEE, after which I know exactly where the E(s) belong(s).

I’ll follow up with more second guess words next week. Meanwhile, please let me know what your starting word is and why.

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¹https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

CLCL Customization for Emacs

Way back in 2017 I wrote an introduction to CLCL¹, the clipboard manager that I prefer.  That post described how to add the supplementary Edit tool.  Today I’ll describe how to make CLCL work with Emacs.

By default, CLCL is set up to “listen” to the keystrokes Ctrl-x and Ctrl-c for pushing a selection to its stack of clipboard items, and Ctrl-v for popping the latest item into the focused application.  But Emacs’ standard keystrokes are Ctrl-w for “cutting,” Alt-w for “copying,” and Ctrl-y for “pasting.”  The terms “cutting,” “copying,” and “pasting” are in quotations because Emacs uses “killing” for “cutting” and “yanking” for “pasting.”²   And the keystrokes are described in Emacs-speak as C-w and C-y respectively.  The Emacs function “kill-ring-save” is like copy; it’s bound to M-w on my system.³

Anyway, to get a CLCL item yanked into the Emacs buffer, I add the Ctrl-y keystroke to CLCL.  You can do this on the Key tab of the Options dialog while Emacs is open.  Here's how.

Click the Add... button and scroll the Present Window List until you find a row whose title matches the text in the title bar of your Emacs application.  For me, that’s “GNU Emacs 25.2.1: *scratch*”, which is shown highlighted below.  Select that line and then click the down arrow button (or just double-click the line) to transfer the settings into the edit portion of the dialog box.

The Emacs title bar may include the name of the buffer.  In my example, that’s “*scratch*.”  But since the buffer name will vary, we need to replace it with the asterisk wildcard.

Click in the textbox below Copy and press Ctrl-w.⁴  Likewise, click in the textbox below Paste and click Ctrl-y.  The dialog should look similar to the one below.  Note that CLCL shows uppercase versions of W and Y in the Copy and Paste boxes; if you had pressed Ctrl-Shift-W it would display Ctrl + Shift + W instead.  OK your way out.

Now when you choose an item from CLCL while visiting a buffer in Emacs, it will be yanked into the buffer as expected.

Do you have a CLCL tip that you’d like to share?  Please let me know.  Add a comment below or email me.

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¹ https://ludditegeek.blogspot.com/2017/11/introduction-to-clcl-tools.html

² And to further confuse the issue, Emacs maintains it own “clipboard” which is called the “kill ring.”  Somehow, Emacs on Windows will yank from the Windows clipboard or yank from its kill ring depending on which was modified last.

³ Please see https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CopyAndPaste for more details.

⁴ Actually, configuring Copy not not be necessary.  Emacs on Windows seems to kill to the Windows clipboard, and CLCL adds each new clipboard item to its stack.

Measure Your Laundry Detergent

The cap on a bottle of liquid laundry detergent doubles as a measuring cup.

Most brands instruct the consumer to "fill to line 1 for medium loads." Line 1 on this cap is about 1cm from the bottom, as shown in the photo below.

As well, when you put the cap back on the bottle, the cap and bottle are designed so that any residual detergent that remains in the cup drains back into the bottle.

I thought everyone knew that until the day I saw my wife pouring the detergent directly into the washing machine. Not only do you waste money using more detergent than you need to, the excess detergent produces lots of suds that muck up your drain pipe.

If you want to reduce your ecological footprint, this is one way to do it.

Introduction to CLCL Tools

CLCL is the clipboard manager that I prefer.  But it’s lacking in extensive documentation, at least for those who don’t know Japanese.  I figured out how to configure the Tools that it comes with, so I thought I’d share that with you.

This procedure assumes that you already know how to download, install and run the main program.

Download the Tools from http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html .  There are two ZIP files (tltxt002_eng.zip and tlutl002_eng.zip, as of this writing) that provide DLLs with the functions that serve as tools.  Copy the DLLs from those ZIP files into the directory in which the CLCL executable resides.  While you’re at the Nakka website, you might as well download the other ZIP files that provide ability to manage as wider range of file formats.  Copy their DLLs, too.  As of this writing, there are two: fmtrtf002_eng.zip; fmtmeta002_eng.zip .

Invoke Tools from the Viewer menu, then choose Tool Setup…

Click the Add… button.

In the DLL textbox, enter the path and filename of one of the tool DLLs, for example, C:\Program Files (x86)\CLCL\tool_text.dll .  If you click the Browse button, you can use a File Dialog box to navigate to and select the DLL.

Now choose one of the Tools to add.  I find &Edit to be useful, so choose that.  OK your way back out.

Now when you press your hot key to call up the clipboard list, you can right-click on a text entry, then click on Edit to open a simple editor to modify the text.  When you’re done, you can click OK to put the edited content onto the clipboard, replacing the original entry.

Use the same procedure to try out the other tools.

The Dreaded Non-Disclosure / Non-Compete Agreement

If you work in the USA tech industry, you've probably been asked to sign a non-disclosure / non-compete agreement with a new employer.  It may be that even your current employer asked you to sign a new one.

If you're not familiar with it, let me describe it for you in a nutshell: Anything you witness or produce on company time becomes the property of your employer.  Even if you think of something, if you thought of it on company time, that idea is your employer's property.  This explains a lot of what I've observed during my career -- many coworkers are so poignantly aware of this that the second they clock in, they empty their minds completely of thoughts and go about their duties thoughtlessly.

If asked to sign a non-disclosure / non-compete agreement, what should you do?  This ebook from IEEE should help:
https://www.ieeeusa.org/members/IPandtheengineer.pdf

Good luck!

Dummies Data Visualization Links

The following links are listed in Data Visualization for Dummies:

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
http://visual.ly/
http://chartporn.org/
https://excelcharts.com/posts/
http://flowingdata.com/

Seems to be more for artists than for engineers, though.

On the Benefits of Social Media

Today's Soup to Nutz comic strip by Rick Stromoski is definitely blog worthy...
http://www.gocomics.com/soup-to-nutz/2017/01/14

If you can't follow the link, it's simply that Babs remarks to her brother Roy-boy,

I'm so glad I live in a time when there's social media...  In the old days it took weeks, even months...  before finding out that someone was an idiot."

Naturally I posted it to Facebook.

Presidential Candidates' Answers to the 2016 Top 20 Science and Technology Questions

For this election cycle, ScienceDebate has included the Green and Libertarian party candidates in its list of 20 questions regarding the most pressing "... Science, Engineering, Tech, Health & Environmental Issues in 2016."

You can read it all here: www.sciencedebate.org

Must-Have Extensions For FireFox and Chrome

FireFox is my favorite browser.  It beats Chrome in terms of usability.  But I'm curious to see if I could live with Chrome for a while.  So I'm taking it for a test drive.

First for safe browsing, I like to have...
NoScript (FireFox) // ScriptNo/ScriptSafe (Chrome)
Blocks all scripts from running.  Allows the user to add exceptions for scripts on any given domain, either just for the current session (temporarily) or also for future sessions (permanently).  I think I like ScriptSafe on Chrome better than NoScript on FireFox.  Why?  Because NoScript will reload the page each time a single host is enabled, whereas ScriptSafe will let you enable multiple host before reloading the page.  And ScriptSafe features color-coded buttons while NoScript differentiates between temporary and permanent whitelist with italics.

WOT (FireFox) // WOT (Chrome)
WOT, or Web Of Trust, warns you in advance when a link leads to a dangerous website, before you even click on it.  The database of dangerous links is maintained by the community of WOT users.  But this sometimes can lead to sites getting blocked when a user disagrees with a site's ideology.  Still, you can get more detail on each website's rating and decide for yourself.


For usability, try these extensions...
FBPurity (FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
Facebook could be useful if only _______ (fill in the blank).  Well, FBPurity fills in the blanks by filtering out the elements that you don't want to see.  I use it to block "food pron" (plus other annoying and recurrent topics), to keep videos from auto-playing, to hide the reactions bar, to always sort posts in Most Recent order, to hide the newsfeed, etc.

LastTab (FireFox) // CLUT (Chrome)
N either FireFox nor Chrome cycle through tabs with Ctrl-Tab the way Windows cycles through active programs with Alt-Tab.  These extensions alter how these browsers behave when you press Ctrl-Tab.  So rather than cycling tabs from left to right, Ctrl-Tab cycles in Most Recently Used order.  There is one caveat, though.  Chrome extensions are not allowed to redefine default keystrokes (such as Ctrl-Tab), so none of the MRU-type tab managers on Chrome can fix Ctrl-Tab.  However, you can bind CLUT to Ctrl-q and Ctrl-Shift-Q, which is just to the right of Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab.

Password Management
Both Chrome and FireFox come out-of-the-box with the ability to remember the username and password needed to log in at each unique website.  However, FireFox can remember multiple usernames and passwords for any given site.  After looking for a Chrome extension to get Chrome to work this way (and failing), I thought I stumbled across an experimental option to enable the behavior.  But perhaps not, since the setting I thought I discovered doesn't affect this at all.  Rather, Chrome (at version 49) just started behaving the way I wanted it to!

View Selection Source
In FireFox, you can select content, right click on it and then choose a command to view the source code for that extension.  Chrome provides an "Inspect" command, but it reveals only the CSS details and not the complete HTML.  The View Selection Source extension for Chrome (or its equivalent) is necessary to see the snippet of HTML that's rendered by the browser for that selected content.  Yes, you can press Ctrl-U to view the source of the entire page in a new tab.  But then you have to search for the content you're interested in.  That's awkward, and it works only if the content can be pasted into the search bar.  The weird thing about the View Selection Source extension is that it doesn't come up if you search for it on Google Play.  I found the link in a post on the Help Center.

Save As... / Print To... PDF
Chrome has a built-in PDF printer that it calls "Save to PDF."  It works great, and there's no need to install a separate printer driver.  But you'll have to choose at least one of these three options to get FireFox to save a page as PDF, too.

1. Install on your computer a PDF Printer Drive, such as PDFCreator or CutePDF.  (Both are free to download and use.)
2. Install in FireFox a PDF printer extension.
3. Use an online Web page to PDF service.

I like the first option, since the extensions I've come across either save the web page as a image or send the HTML over the internet to a server to perform the conversion.  I like the ability to select and copy text from the PDF, which is not possible with an image.  And when I generate PDF, it's usually to record a financial transaction, the details of which I'd rather keep on my local hard drive.

At one point I couldn't get the PDF printer drivers to work with FireFox.  Before giving up and switching to Chrome, I came across this Mozilla support page.  It turned out that resetting the print_printer setting fixed it.  As well, I've had to delete the prefs.js in order to solve a problem with the PDF coming out with all blank pages.

What are your favorite Extensions / Add-ons?

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2016-07-09 LG Added the section "Save As... / Print To... PDF"
2016-06-13 LG Added "View Selection Source" paragraph.

Notes on Setting Up Windows 7

Recently I had to set up fresh installations of Windows 7 on two computers.  Here are some tips to make that process go a bit smoother...

1. Windows Update #1 -- Microsoft has released hundreds of recommended and important updates for Windows 7 since it was introduced.  All that data is a burden for Windows Update, and the update process can bog down on slower computers.  To remedy this, you'll want to download the update associated with KB3102810 first before you even check for updates.  Adjusting your computer's Power Options so it stays awake during the long update process may also help.

2. Windows Update #2 -- I wrote about this before.  Unless you want to upgrade to Windows 10, you'll want to hide the update KB3035583, or uninstall it if it already got onto your system.

3.  Gadgets -- Third party gadgets are no longer supported due to "serious vulnerabilities" in the Windows Sidebar.  You'll still be able to add the default Microsoft ones, such as "Clock," "Calendar," "Slide Show" and "CPU Usage" (my favorites).  But I also liked the third party "Network Meter," which I'd use often to verify download rates.  Since Network Meter is no longer available, I figured out that I can use ResMon to do something similar.  To have ResMon (almost) mimic Network Meter I minimize the various components in the left pane of ResMon and resize the window so that only the network graphs show up.  And I add a shortcut to ResMon.exe in my StartUp folder.

Do you have any tips for setting up Windows 7?  Please share them!

The Windows 10 Giveaway

As of Wednesday Microsoft started giving away Windows 10.  What would you be giving away if you upgrade?  Privacy?  Security?  Performance? #UpgradeYourWorld

According to the Free Software Foundation¹:

• Windows' 10's privacy policy asserts the privilege to sell almost any information it wants about users, even creating a unique advertising ID for each user to sweeten the deal.
• Microsoft announced that, starting with Windows 10, it will begin forcing lower-paying users to test less-secure new updates before giving higher-paying users the option of whether or not to adopt them.
• Microsoft is reported to give the NSA special security tip-offs that it could use to crack into Windows computers.

"What am I supposed to do about it?" I hear you ask.

• Don't upgrade to Windows 10.
• Begin to use Free Software that runs under Windows.  Here's a small excerpt of all that's available.
• Download and try a free Linux Live CD.
• Install one of the many free Linux Distros on a spare computer.
• Spread the word about Free Software using responsible social media.
• Buy a computer that has a free Linux Distro pre-installed on it.

Close Windows, Open Doors

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¹ https://www.fsf.org/windows

Free Excel Tutorial

I'm still using Excel 2003 at work.  It does all we need it to do.

And at home, Open Office's Calc is so compatible that I can forgo Excel completely, although I still use the Excel Viewer.

But there are some really neat features of the latest Excel.  I especially like Data Bars and Color Scales.

To learn more about them, I studied this Excel Tutorial from Udemy.

Some of the other tutorial sections were helpful, too.  For example, Pivot Tables have been updated.  What used to be Page Fields is now Filter.  And unlike Page, Filter allows you to choose more than one value.