ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: Trying to download and install Win 10. When I start the upload, I get a message saying I must first manually delete a Roxio software. I’ve done a complete scan of my system and do not have anything Roxio. I’ve downloaded 3 uninstallers but all report no Roxio anything. Is there anything I can do? 

– John B.
Destin, Florida

A: I won’t bore you by rehashing the normal way to uninstall software, John, since it sounds like you know what you’re doing. The tool in my arsenal for dealing with stubborn software that won’t uninstall is Revo Uninstaller, which you can find online with a simple search. I recommend you try it first and if, after letting it do its thing you still can’t proceed, you may have to do some registry editing. Be mighty careful with what you’re doing, but if you are absolutely 100% certain that you don’t have any Roxio software installed, you should be able to safely delete any registry keys that refer to Roxio, and once they’re gone, you should find that your problem went with them.

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 Q: Often you mention tiny urls. I would like to know is there a list of tiny urls showing some details where can I locate them AND what they do before I open them. It really is gReek to me.

– Greg D.
Shalimar, Florida

A: I don’t merely “mention” TinyURLs, Greg. When you see them in the column, those are actual web addresses that you can either type into your browser or click on, if you’re reading the column on my website. I answered a question quite similar to yours in a previous column (I.G.T.M. #360, June 15, 2014), but it’s been awhile, so it bears repeating.

URL is an acronym that stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is the formal name of those addresses that you type into your browser to take you somewhere on the web. Some of those addresses can get pretty long, and they have to be exactly correct, or you’ll either wind up somewhere you didn’t intend to go, or you’ll simply get a “Page not found” error. Since my column publishes in print as well as online, it would be asking quite a lot for my readers to accurately read and type in several dozen characters, whenever I need to share a web address. Can you tell the difference between the number 1 and a lower-case l (L)? How about the number 0 and an upper-case O? Also, when newspapers format content in columns, a hyphen is often inserted into text when it breaks across lines. That’s okay for regular text, but adding a hyphen to the middle of a URL means the reader now has to guess whether to include the hyphen when entering the URL into his or her browser (this sometimes happens even with the TinyURLs that I use).

These problems are mostly solved by using a URL shortening service. There are several out there, and I have chosen to use TinyURL.com for URLs that appear in my column. Using this service, I can take a URL that is hundreds of characters long, and shorten it to around five characters, not counting the letters in “tinyurl.com” itself. In the past year or so, I’ve taken to replacing the random string of characters that TinyURL generates with the letters “IGTM” followed by the column’s issue number. If there is more than one URL in an issue, I add a letter A, B, etc. to the end, and I get customized It’s Geek To Me URLs to share with my readers.

In regard to your other questions, there is no such thing as a list of TinyURLs. They are simply short placeholders for longer URLs, so such a list would be meaningless. However, because TinyURLs mask the actual destination that your browser will be taken to, they can actually be used to take you to malicious websites. You can check out what any TinyURL does by adding the word “preview” to the front of the address. In other words, use “preview.tinyurl.com” as the base part of the address instead of just “tinyurl.com”. You can also visit the tinyurl website, where you will find a link that says “Preview Feature”. Enabling this feature will put a cookie on your computer that causes your browser to translate TinyURLs and display the hidden, long URL to you so you’ll see the destination before you actually go there.