Every few weeks, gMail has stopped auto-completing addresses as I type them into the “To:” box. Rebooting Chrome does doesn’t help. Rebooting my MacBook Pro doesn’t help. Clearing my cache doesn’t help.

The obvious remedy of typing people’s addresses manually requires that I remember their addresses. That  has only gotten less plausible as I’ve aged. Just ask our cat Smokey. No, wait, it’s Pearl. Hold on, I think it has something to do with being an outlaw. Smokey? No. Capone? We wouldn’t have named a cat “Dahmer”, would we? Oh, wait, it begins with an S! Sam Bankman-Fried? Smokey?  Oh, I remember! We don’t have a cat.

I hope you enjoyed that dramatic pre-enactment of what’s in store for you.

In any case, the solution I have stumbled upon is to turn off Chrome extensions one by one, test gMail’s autocomplete, turn the extension back on, and then turn off the next one. In short, do the first thing any “how to” that actually knows anything would have suggested, to who which I reply: D’oh!

Oddly, a different extension has been the culprit each time. But, in truth, isn’t the real culprit all of us? Or possibly Google. Nah, it’s gotta be all of us.

BTW, has anyone seen Dahmer, that fluffy little furball!

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Verizon three days ago sold Yahoo and AOL for a measly $5B. 

The “measly” is not sarcastic. Twenty years ago, Yahoo was worth $125B. Verizon bought Yahoo in 2016 for $4.8B. AOL was once worth $200B, but Verizon bought it in 2015 for $4.4B. Which means Verizon lost $4.2B in total in the sale of both companies. 

The private equity firm they sold it to, Apollo, will do whatever it has to in order to make back their money:

Under Apollo, Verizon’s former media properties will be challenged to grow and become profitable in order to attract yet another sale or exit down the road.

If Yahoo and AOL failed under Verizon, there’s little reason to think they’ll succeed under new management that wants to resell them. As of 2017 there are  2.3 million people still using aol.com as their email address, and that number today includes celebrities such as Tina Fey, Steve Carell and Sarah Silverman. Still, an email user base of 2.3M is unlikely to result in the billions of dollars Apollo would have to make off of it. (I am not wise in the ways of billion dollar businesses, though. If only!)

In short, it’s time to think about moving away from AOL.com. You can, of course, have two email addresses at once, and many email providers will  automatically forward your AOL email to your new address. That means that email sent to your AOL.com address will automatically show up in your new email’s inbox. (Here’s how for Gmail.)

Good luck cutting the emotional cord to a pre-Web Internet provider who most of us thought went away twenty years ago.

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If your Android phone no longer generates tones that work when you’re asked to “Press 1 to … do something” Pixel support says go to Settings > Apps > Phone. Touch the three dots in the upper right, select “Uninstall updates” and restart your phone. Worked for me.

My list of recent calls was preserved. Yay. But presumably Google is working on a more elegant solution.

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Google Docs’ version history functionality is getting to be really powerful and useful. Named versions help tame that power.

Google Docs automatically saves versions as you type so you can roll back to a prior state of your document at any point. In fact, you can roll back, copy a piece of it, roll forward, and paste in text from your past.

But because Google Docs makes so many versions and does so without asking you, suppose you want to go back to a version from earlier in the day before you cut that paragraph about secretly enjoying Paw Patrol? Google labels each automatically-created version with a time stamp, but you happened not to have memorized the precise time you made the change.

Now you can give a friendly name to a version. So let’s say you’re about to cut the Paw Patrol paragraph, but you’re not sure that you should. Before you make the cut, go to File > Version history > Name current version and give it a name such as “With Paw Patrol”. (If you want to be perverse, use the current hour and minute as the time. That’ll get you nowhere fast.) That name will show up in the list of versions under File > Version history > See version history.

Now when you cut the paragraph or make other changes, you’ll always be able to go back.

Meanwhile, Google will continue to automatically create new versions, capturing quite small increments of change. If you want to step back through the changes you’ve made since you named a version, click on the triangle to the left of the current version at the top of the version history.

Also, note that when you click on a version in the version history, it highlights the difference between the prior version and this one.

Note that comments are not saved with versions. Let me put this differently: When you restore a prior version, it will not have any of its comments. This is unfortunate.

Nevertheless, there are some big things not to like about Google Docs, but versioning definitely is not one of them.

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