Tricks you could do on Facebook

NEW YORK, Aug 19, (AP): Did you know you can add a pronunciation guide to your name on Facebook? Overlay colorful text on the photos you post? How about mark the end of a relationship without your 500 closest friends getting notified?

Many of these tips and tricks aren’t well known, even to veterans of the 1.5 billion-strong people-connector and time-waster. Facebook is constantly updating its service, adding new features or tweaking old ones. A lot can slip through the cracks even if you are scrolling through your friends’ updates several times a day.

Here are a few ways to enhance your Facebook experience:

More than 83 percent of Facebook’s users are outside of the U.S. and Canada, and they use over 80 languages to communicate with friends and family. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of different ways to say your name. To add a pronunciation guide, go to the “about” section of your profile and click on “details about you,” (called “more about you” on mobile) then “name pronunciation.”

Here, Facebook will offer suggestions for your first and last name that you can listen to before selecting. If none work, you can also type in your own phonetic pronouncer.

Logging in from a public computer? If you don’t feel comfortable typing in your password on a shared machine that might have malicious software, Facebook lets you request a temporary one by texting “otp” to 32665. You’ll get an eight-character passcode that works for the next 20 minutes and cannot be reused.

Anyone who’s commented on a popular Facebook post, or belongs to a particularly chatty group, knows that those notifications telling you that “Jane Doe and 4 others also commented on a post” can get a bit annoying. You can turn off notifications for individual posts by clicking on the globe icon on the top right corner of your Web browser, then on the “X’’ next to the individual notification. You can also change your notification settings here to get fewer or more of them for each group that you belong to.

To do this on mobile, click to view the original post, then click the down arrow in the top right corner of the post. You’ll see an option to “turn off notifications.”

Announcing engagements and mar- SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 19, (Agencies): Google Inc launched a Wi-Fi router on Tuesday, the latest move in the company’s efforts to get ready for the connected home and draw more users to its services.

The cylinder-shaped router, named OnHub, can be pre-ordered for $199.99 at online retailers including the Google Store, Amazon.com Inc and Walmart.com. The router comes with inbuilt antennas that will scan the airwaves to spot the fastest connection, Google said in a blog post.

With the router, users will be able to prioritize a device so that they can get the fastest Internet speeds for dataheavy activities such as downloading content or streaming a movie.

The router can be hooked up with Google’s On app, available on Android and iOS, to run network checks and keep track of bandwidth use among other things.

Google said OnHub automatically updates with new features and the latest security upgrades, just like the company’s Android OS and Chrome browser.

The router is being manufactured by network company TP-LINK, Google said, hinting that ASUS could be the second manufacturing partner for the product.

The product launch comes days after Google restructured itself by creating Alphabet Inc, a holding company to pool its many subsidiaries and separate the core web advertising business from newer ventures like driverless cars.

Making products for the smart home is one such venture.

The global market for “Internet of Things”, the concept of connecting household devices to the Internet, will nearly triple to $1.7 trillion by 2020, research firm International Data Corp

riages on Facebook is fun. Post and watch the likes and congrats roll in. Bask in the love and glory. Fast-forward a few years for some couples, and the glory fades, not to mention the love and marriage. In this case, you might not want to announce the irreversible breakdown to 450 of your closest friends.

Thankfully, you can still mark the end of a relationship without notifying everyone. Go to your profile and click on the “about” section, then “family and relationships on the left.” Under relationship, you’ll see a gray icon that probably says “friends,” or maybe “public.” Change it to “only me.” Then said in June.

Technology firms including Intel Corp, Cisco Systems, Samsung Electronics and telecom giants Vodafone and Verizon are betting heavily on Internet device-connected homes for future revenue and profit.

Pre-orders for the $199 wireless router, called OnHub, can be made beginning Tuesday at Google’s online store, Amazon.com and Walmart.com. The device will go on sale in stores in the US and Canada in late August or early September.

Google is touting the cylinder-shaped OnHub as a leap ahead in a neglected part of technology.

The Mountain View, California, company is promising its wireless router will be sleeker, more reliable, more secure and easier to use than other long-established alternatives made by the Arris Group, Netgear, Apple and other hardware specialists. Google teamed up with networking device maker TP-Link to build OnHub.

OnHub also will adapt to the evolving needs of its owners because its software will be regularly updated to unlock new features, according to Trond Wuellner, a Google Inc. product manager. The concept is similar to the automatic software upgrades the company makes to its Chrome browser and personal computers running on its Chrome operating system.

Wuellner expects most people will be able to set up OnHub in three minutes or less. The router is designed to be managed with a mobile app called Google On that will work on Apple’s iPhone, as well as devices running on Google’s Android software.

Google’s expansion into wireless

change your relationship status. After a while, you can change it back if you wish. Your hundreds of acquaintances will be none the wiser, unless they are stalking your profile to see if you are single.

Thanks to a popular but little-known new feature, Facebook lets you spruce up the photos you post by adding text and quirky stickers, such as drawings of scuba gear, sunglasses or a corn dog. This tool is available on iPhones and is coming soon to Android devices. To use it, choose a photo to upload and click the magic wand icon. Here, you’ll find text overlay options as well as the same routers may conjure up memories of how the company trespassed on the Wi-Fi networks in homes and businesses around the world for more than two years beginning in 2008.

In 2010, Google acknowledged that company cars taking photos for its digital maps also had been intercepting emails, passwords and other sensitive information sent over unprotected Wi-Fi networks. The intrusion became derisively known as “Wi-Spy” among Google’s critics.

Although Google insisted it hadn’t broken any laws, it paid $7 million in 2013 to settle allegations of illegal eavesdropping in the US made by 38 states and the District of Columbia.

Google is pledging not to use OnHub to monitor a user’s Internet activity. The company will still store personal information sent through an Internet connection tied to OnHub when a user visits Google’s search engine or other services, such as YouTube or Gmail, with the privacy controls set to permit the data collection. This is the same data collection Google does when users of its services visit through any router.

The new router represents the latest phase in Google’s mission to make it easier for people to be online.

Besides dispatching Internet-beaming balloons and drones to parts of the world without much online access, Google also has been trying to lower the cost and accelerate the speeds of the connections in more advanced countries such as the US The goal has already hatched Google Fiber, an ultra-fast Internet service that is already available in a few US cities and is coming to more than 20 others. Google is also preparing to offer a wireless subscription plan for smartphones running on the company’s Android software.

stickers you can use in other parts of Facebook.

Another recent addition to Facebook’s trove of tools is a “security checkup” that guides users through a checklist aimed at making their account more secure. This includes logging out of Facebook on Web browsers and apps they are not using, and receiving alerts when someone tries to log in to their account from an unfamiliar device or browser. To use it, go to https://www.facebook.com/help/securitycheckup on your computer - this feature is not yet available on the mobile app.