2021 - Facebook Hides Newsfeed Controls....Again!

How to Reset Your Facebook Newsfeed to See All Your Friends Uncensored.

Facebook really doesn't want to let all that research they did with the US government back in the Obama administration go to waste. There was a study Zuckerberg et al were caught doing some years back in which they screened the posts that Facebook members were receiving. The idea was to find out whether screening out angry conservative posts from members, made the more passive and receptive to the calming and enlightened progressive messages they put in their place. 

First Facebook rigged their newsfeed setting so that every two days or so, everybody's newsfeed switched back to the "Top Stories" setting.  If you will notice, your more provocative (and entertaining) friends get censored in favor of more progressive content and screens out more stimulating conservative content. And very recently, they changed the procedure for switching your newsfeed back to "Most Recent" so that most people have a hard time figuring out how to get back to where they see their friends' posts again. Facebook is clearly using this quiet resetting of your newsfeed to calm you down and manipulate your emotions and make you more peaceful and receptive to the message Mr. Zuckerberg thinks you ought to be seeing.

The "Top Stories" setting on Facebook is simply private corporate censorship and since Facebook is clearly a left-leaning corporate entity, it's also, in essence, censorship if content not approved by the Democrat Party. Fortunately, you can still switch your newsfeed so that you can once again get those posts from your grandpa complaining about how Joe Biden and that Pelosi woman are ruining the country. To be fair, Facebook also does censor ax murderers, the more open sorts of terrorists and most pornography. They don't trust their members to unfriend such people and, of course, conservatives like me get lumped in with pedophiles, serial killers, mass murderers and Ted Cruz and screened out of my friends' newsfeeds.

I on the other hand, live on the hidden island of the "Most Recent" Facebook newsfeed where I see the whole glorious flood of posts by my thousand some-odd friends. And you can too!  There are two ways to fix it so you see everyone and at the same time confound Facebook's Department of Acceptable Content Moderation.

#1.  The Easy Way - To make sure Facebook doesn't switch you to their heavily censored "Top Stories" newsfeed setting, download an app that Facebook doesn't like called "Facebook Purity". Just click on the link I just gave you and download the app. Once installed you can just click on FBP icon the program places at the top of your Facebook pages and you have control over Facebook at your fingertips. You'll have to update it a few times a year as Facebook generally eliminates FBP's access every time they update. Fortunately, the developer is never far behind in updating the app so you get it back in short order. I toss the guy a few bucks once in a while to support his efforts.

#2  The Hard Way - The Newsfeed link in the left column on the Home newsfeed page is now disabled. The other links work, but you can't click on Newsfeed like you used to and change the setting. You have to follow a more convoluted and distinctly unintuitive process. And frankly, I can't find anyone on the Internet who has figured out the new system for changing your newsfeed back to Most Recent. Using Facebook these days is like revisiting the Soviet Union or George Orwell's fictional Oceania where control over the proletariat is maintained by eliminating or redefining words, rewriting history or making it impossible to do things that might stimulate actual thinking which might lead to discontent which might lead to a revolt against the oligarchy.

I found a December 2020 article in Distractify that  explained how to reset your newsfeed after the 2020 "update' of Facebook. After 'splaining how to reset the newsfeed, the author noted, "...If you're finding yourself unable to find the option on the next update, chances are, following the same above steps will bring you back to the function. The order may change, and the icon, but hopefully, it won't ever disappear for good." Well in Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a dystopian social media future, hopefully didn't happen. The December procedure doesn't work anymore. Apparently it was too intuitive and people could still figure out how to get uncensored content.

So for now, see #1, because since the last time I changed my newsfeed manually, they eliminated the button that does so and substituted a button that doesn't work. For now FBP is the only way to reset your newsfeed.

One thing nice about having to use Facebook Purity is that it gives you some other great controls for managing what Facebook tosses across your screen. You can block things, improve the looks of your page and other fun stuff. So for now, until someone finds the secret door to changing your newsfeed, downloading FBP seems to be our only solution.

You know, Orwell's 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual for America's would-be oligarchy.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

How to Find Your Missing Friends Again

Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate censorship. We already know that Google, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook shadow ban conservatives. One of the irritating consequences of Facebook's busybody policies is the disappearance of your friends from your Facebook Newsfeed. Here's how it works:

1. On the Home Facebook page, newsfeed, Facebook sets the default to Top Stories.
   
2. Even if you set the newsfeed to something else, every day or two, Facebook resets your newsfeed back to Top Stories.
3. "Top Stories" is Facebook's edited newsfeed. Their algorithm edits out things they don't think you ought to see. It tends, in my case to shift posts I see in a distinctly leftward direction.
4. If you want to continue to see your friends' posts, you have to keep changing the feed back to "Most Recent".  
5. Or you can do this:

Download a program called Facebook Purity or as it's now known "Fluff-Busting Purity".

This app loads on top of your browser to provide a dashboard for Facebook that allows you to adjust settings, block spam and ads and, my favorite bit - it can prevent Facebook from resetting your newsfeed to "Top Stories" and blocking your friends so that you can't see them on your feed. It puts the letters FBP at the top of the Facebook webpages. You just click on it and select the settings you want. It makes your Facebook time more like what you want instead of what they want.

There use to be a way to reset your newsfeed to "Most Recent", but in late 2020 they hid that button under several layers of menus. Then in late March 2021, they did away with the link to change back to "most recent."  Now, without the FBP app, you simply cannot find a consistent way to switch your newsfeed back from the FB "Top Stories" censored feed and you'll miss all your conservative friends' very entertaining memes. And you will be effectively shadow-banned if you post conservative things.

Click the link above, download FBP and install it. Once you set the newsfeed you'll see your friends again. Facebook's going to hate that!

© 2020 by Tom King

How I Saved My Dying Hard Drive

I've got this 13 year-old 320 GB Seagate hard drive that has been my D: drive in my 3rd computer now. It's venerable to say the least. The power out here in the Fifteen Acre Woods likes to cut out. It used to do that a lot back when we lived out at Lake Palestine in Texas, so I bought a battery backup to preserve the drives in my computer because they said you ought to do that. Well eventually the first one stopped charging so I bought a second and the first one became a glorified surge protector. A couple of years ago (here I hang my head in shame) the second backup battery stopped charging. We've been pretty close to the wire financially the past few years, so I haven't replaced it.

So this morning, after leaving the computer on all night running a virus check, I woke to find it shut off, likely do to one of those power glitches we have pretty often around here. AND my D: drive which has all my original data on it would not show up. The computer couldn't read it. I panicked.

Then I calmed down and went to Youtube. There I found a guy with a Youtube channel called DIY Perks and got some answers to what was happening. He suggested several things that data recovery professionals say you should never do like tapping the case and (horror of horrors) opening the case and unsticking the drive manually. Data recovery professionals were aghast and loud in their condemnation of this practice. Yeah, of course they were!

Now data recovery professionals charge something like $750 an hour for this sort of data recovery and since I cannot afford that, I decided to give the DIY guy a try. It can be hazardous but the only options the professionals offered was to toss the drive as a total loss or let them do it for a couple or three thousand bucks. I had pictures on there and legal documents, so I gave it a try.  Here's what seems to have happened to my drive:

When the power goes off, the heads of the hard drive are often positioned over the platter (the disk). If that happens and the heads aren't parked, they can get stuck that way. If the drive is inside your computer, there's not much you can do. If you can get the drive outside the case where you can get your hands on it, it turns out there is something you can do.  Since this drive was my secondary data drive, the computer could start without it, although it required I remove the old drive. The computer couldn't read the old drive so it would abort the boot process when it tried to get the Seagate drive going. Fortunately, I have another 320 GB hard drive I just bought a few weeks ago. So here's what I did.

1. I pulled the old drive from the computer and put the new one in its place.
2. I closed up the case, reconnected everything and booted it up. To my joy it booted up seamlessly.
3. Because the heads might be stuck, I held up the old drive so that it was on its side. I twisted it back and forth a few times along it's flat side in order to perhaps cause the platters to rotate slightly and perhaps free the stuck heads or loosen the platters so they can spin.
4. I tapped the drive gently a couple of times on my desk, tapping it on its back end. Same reason - to unstick the heads. Be gentle and don't tap or shake up and down. If the heads touch the platter they can damage your data. You want the heads to move back and forth to the platter, not up and down.
5. I then inserted the drive into my Wavlink docking station where the replacement hard drive (now inside the case) had been previously docked. I switched on the docking station and (joy of joys), the old drive spun right up.

My trusty docking station. You've just GOT
to have one of these wonderful devices!

While I do not recommend this procedure (so you are not allowed to sue me now because I said that), it seems to have worked and given the alternative of throwing my precious data away without trying to get it back, it was darn well worth it to me to give it a try.

A couple of caveats.  

• This only works if your drive is not entirely dead (unlike the wicked old witch).
• You can hit the drive case too hard and damage your data, so be careful.
• Always back up your important stuff (some of which I had already backed up but wasn't through yet).
• Transfer your data to a new drive as soon as you can. Once you've transferred all the data off your old drive, consider it untrustworthy and don't use it for anything important.

 My old drive is right now busily backing itself up onto the new drive and making itself obsolete. I'll probably format it and use it for my XP virtual machine. If it fails there won't be anything on it I can't afford to lose.

Back in the olden days (the early 90s) I had one old hard drive that I had to get really creative to start, so I know about cranky hard drives. It was a 30 mb drive so you can get an idea of how long ago that was. It was my computer at work and it would get stuck during bootup. I finally set the case to one side where it was easy to get to and took off the screws. When I went to start work every day, I would pull the case off, reach in and spin the little silver thing on top of the drive and manually start the disk to spinning. It would boot right up. Once it warmed up, it ran like a top the rest of the day. The computer went to someone else when I was transferred to public relations. I wonder if they ever got my replacement a new hard drive or not?  I had a car about that time that the starter had died on it and I couldn't afford a new one right then. So I always had to park on a hill where I could push it and start it rolling. Thank heavens I had a standard shift. I did wind up having to buy a new clutch for it though. It didn't like being popped every time you started it.

Good luck with getting your data off of your sticky hard drive. There are many ways to skin a computer cat.

Tom King © 2018