Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2019 July 18

= July 18 =

Notepad problem.
I recently got my Mom's laptop Windows 7, and she is Chinese, and so this laptop can do Chinese characters.

Problem is, when I open up my own files via Notepad, some of the characters become Chinese. Like 's becomes a Chinese character and <i becomes a ?. How do I turn this off? I don't have the same problem with Wordpad or Word. 67.175.224.138 (talk) 04:27, 18 July 2019 (UTC).


 * Probably someone with Chinese/Japanese/Korean locale will be able to tell you exactly what's going on. This is a mojibake problem. My guess is it's caused by the fact that you saved your original file as ASCII (aka ANSI) and Notepad working in Chinese locale presumes it's in one of the Unicode encodings despite the lack (or maybe in spite of the presence) of a byte order mark. 93.136.58.135 (talk) 05:34, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Facebook notifications
Some time ago for some reason I stopped receiving Facebook notifications about friends' updates (displayed as blue dots in my list of friends), even though all such options are turned on in my settings. While I do receive updates from my FB groups, I can't see any notifications about friends' actions in my account. Did FB change something? (Running on laptop, Firefox, Windows 10). 212.180.235.46 (talk) 13:19, 18 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Could your email account be blocking them as SPAM ? SinisterLefty (talk) 14:55, 18 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Facebook doesn't show you "updates" (whatever that is) for all your friends and all their updates. In fact, I believe the more and more you view a friend's profile, the more and more Facebook will notify of you their updates. 1 such person reported that Facebook notified a man's ex on what college she was enrolled to (and if I recall, they weren't Facebook friends anymore) so Facebook was updating someone that wasn't on their friend list. 67.175.224.138 (talk) 17:03, 18 July 2019 (UTC).


 * You might be a victim of Facebook's A/B testing. I advise trying to get a hold of FB support and pestering them if you have some time to kill. They like to make settings hard to understand/change and different from user to user on purpose, it isn't too likely anyone else will be able to fix exactly your problem. 93.136.39.191 (talk) 22:53, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Mozilla Firefox recently visited pages
I have the latest version of Mozilla Firefox (Version 68.0.1) as my browser, and I use no other browsers. On my Mozilla "Home Page", it lists the "sites that I visit most". There are 4 rows * 8 columns = 32 total sites visited most. My question: On that page, there are some sites that I have maybe visited once or twice in the past month or two. Hardly ever. And then, there are sites that I visit many, many times per day that do not get placed on the list. Does anyone know why this happens? Or how this page works? I don't believe that this is an issue of "refreshing the page" or having to wait for some "lag time" ("catch-up time"), because this has been happening for many months now. I'd like my list to work properly, as I would make better use of it. Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:03, 18 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Some web sites might use a lot of redirects, all within the same site but to different pages, and that might be miscounted as multiple visits. They might even do that on purpose to "game the system". As far as missing web sites, I found out (in Chrome) after I accidentally removed one by hitting the X when trying to click on it, that it never came back. SinisterLefty (talk) 19:29, 18 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, I think if you click "X", the site gets removed ... and never comes back. Is there a way to fix that?    Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:22, 18 July 2019 (UTC)


 * I haven't found one. I guess we both need to just manually add Bookmarks/Favorites and stop relying on them to figure out which sites we want on the list. Although I do think they should add a "Confirm/Cancel" pop-up if they are going to remove something permanently like that when we hit the "X". SinisterLefty (talk) 20:55, 18 July 2019 (UTC)


 * I don't know about Chrome ... but I just discovered this on Mozilla. On the page of "sites most visited", there is a menu where you can "change settings" and such.  In that menu, you can manually add in any website to the list of most visited websites.  I tried it and it worked (in Mozilla).  Thanks.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 03:47, 19 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Nice. SinisterLefty (talk) 04:11, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:23, 19 July 2019 (UTC)