Category: From the Help Desk

What is my current IP?

Posted on by admin

Your current public IP address is:

18.226.150.175

This page is quickly and easily accessible via http://ip.nuangel.net.

This page simply detects and shows your public facing IP address (the IP address of your internet connection). It does not show the local network IP address of your computer, for instance, if your computer is on a corporate network.

In most cases, the IP address you’re seeing above is actually the IP address of your Modem/Router provided by your ISP (Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, etc…).

How long has Chromium Based Edge been in Development?

Posted on by admin

How long has the Chromium Based “Edge” been in development? I think almost as long as Windows 10 itself. The trouble is, I don’t think the entire Edge browser development team was on the same page.

In an article I wrote over two years ago I mentioned exchanging a couple of Tweets with Kyle Pflug, Senior Project Manager Lead on Microsoft Edge. I mentioned how, in March of 2016, the internet was abuzz with rumors that Edge would be 100% compatible with Chrome extensions. In June of 2017 Pflug kindly disagreed that this was ever promised.

I believe he is correct, that this feature was never promised in any official capacity. It may have simply been developers implying that there were similarities between the two types of extensions. But if the rumors came to multiple news outlets in 2016, could it all be traced back to a single news source? It feels to me like there may have been more going on in 2016 than we knew about.

In December of 2018, it was confirmed that the entire Edge browser would be scrapped in its known form, and a Chromium-based browser, also named Edge, would be getting feature enhancements and finding its way to Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and even other platforms such as MacOS.

It must have been difficult for Microsoft to decide to scrap years worth of work on their Trident and EdgeHTML browser engine. But if you go back to 2016, when Edge itself wasn’t even a full year officially on the market (remember, Windows 10 officially launched with Edge on July 29th, 2015), there were already plans to make Edge “compatible” with Chrome. I believe that these were signs, early on, that some of the Edge development team were pushing to integrate far more Chromium code into Edge than was initially there.

Although it may be presumptuous of me, I think that it is entirely possible that even before Windows 10 launched, an official Microsoft fork of Chromium was in the works. It took less than a year for the telemetry to come in and to see poor adoption rates of Edge among Windows 10 users. That, in my opinion, was when the decision was made to deprecate the Trident / EdgeHTML team and let the Chromium team lead the way. Based on his responses on Twitter, I’m led to believe that Pflug was on team Trident until he had no other choice.

It’s completely possible I’m drawing conclusions that are not really there, and I’m not actually trying to draw battle lines within the Edge dev team. I’m sure that at the end of the way they all just want what’s best for their users. I just think this browser that I’m writing in right at this moment has been secretly worked on a lot longer than many people suspect.

How to backup your email to your computer

Posted on by admin

People are often looking for ways to feel better knowing their trove of emails is safe. I’ve found a simple method that works reliably for me, and anyone can do!

First, install the Thunderbird mail client. It’s a free email tool that has a lot of settings for mail providers entered in to it already. If it doesn’t have settings for your email, it’s very similar to setting up a phone. I recommend setting up your email account as IMAP, because POP can sometimes erase messages from the server, and you may not intend to do that.

Anyway, once Thunderbird is installed and set up, to sync folders other than your inbox, simply click on them on the left hand side and give it some time for the folder to synchronize. It’s impossible to know how long this will take, due to variables like your internet connection or the size of your folder. Just watch the status bar in the bottom right to know when the sync is finished.

Once completed, create a folder where you would like your messages in that folder to be backed up. If you want, you could for instance create a folder on your desktop, and then create subfolders to match each and every one of your folders in your email account, and back them up one at a time.

Once the folder is created locally, simply highlight and drag emails from the Thunderbird client window to your local folder. To bring everything in the folder over at once, you can use Control A to “Select All,” or hold Shift and click the top, then bottom email. Once you drag everything to the local folder, you will see it create “.eml” files of every individual piece of mail. These are standard email files and are compatible with other email clients, like Outlook and the native Windows 10 Mail client.

If you wanted to move those emails into a new account, you could simply set up that account in Thunderbird, and drag files back to the folder in the other direction!