We Had A Quiet Day,

so I played with the computer,

for some time I have kept reading about programs that track you when you are on the Internet, sending data back and forth which can sometimes slow your computer down, so I had a look at how to possibly speed up my computer (and heaven knows it needs speeding up) and hopefully stop odd advertisements appearing every now and then, so I installed a free program called Ghostery, now before you read any further if you decide to install this program and it messes up your computer do not blame me! install at your own risk, the installation was easy enough, even for me, when complete a little blue ghost appears at the top right of the page, beneath it a square box with a number in it, this is the number of programs tracking you and sending information back and forth to their masters,

I clicked on a random page that I visit, you could have knocked me over with a feather, there were 41 different programs tracking me on just this one page! they included the following categories, tracking, information gathering, IP trackers (beacons), analytical, advertising, widgets, segment data and social amongst others,

when I clicked on the box with 41 in it a list of them appeared in the bottom right of the screen,

clicking the box again a drop down menu appears where you can allow the program to run or block it, just by clicking the space next to the blue button and the blue turns to red,

so I went down the list clicking to block programs as I went,

the next time you are on a page a drop down on the right hand side shows what is tracking you and what you have left tracking you and what you have blocked, the drop down disappears after a few moments, some I have left as I did not want to interfere with say Diana's facebook, or on our blog page, we have kept the Cluster Maps application going, that is the small map at the bottom of the page on the left that shows how many visitors we have had, the good news is that anything you have blocked is easy to un-block, just click to the side of the red button on the drop down, it will turn to blue and you are back on the map, has it made our computer quicker? I do not really know, but with on just one page 41 programs if they are called that, sharing data about us has been reduced to just a couple it must cut down some of the data traffic, so I guess that should speed things up, but please remember do not try this program if you think it may upset your computer!

 later we watched Django, which we had watched before, a fairly violent Western,

after our evening meal, Witness for the Prosecution a 1957 film, so it was in black and white, but still very enjoyable with more twists than a twisty thing that did not stop up to the last minute,

we rounded off the evening with one form Foyle's War, for this evening the episode Fifty Ships, which was another enjoyable episode and with that we were off to bed.