Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
When most folks set up a wireless router they create a secure Wi-Fi network that’s protected by a wireless security key (commonly referred to as a “password”).
Most computers and mobile devices will “remember” the passwords for each of the wireless networks they connect to, allowing the device to automatically connect to a network whenever the device comes into range.
That’s a wonderful feature, but it can lead to a problem… [Read more…]
If you’re a Windows user you’re probably very familiar with the need to “Eject” your removable drives before disconnecting them from your PC.
In the past Microsoft has always cached the data written to removable media to make the system run a little faster.
That meant we had to “Eject” a removable drive before disconnecting it from the PC to prevent losing any cached, but unwritten data and possibly corrupting the drive’s file system.
If you use Twitter you’ve probably noticed that they’ve started displaying “Best Tweets” at the top of your Timeline when you log in.
These “Best Tweets” are selected by an algorithm similar to the one Facebook uses to select the “Top Stories” you see on there.
Personally, I don’t much care for “Best Tweets” or “Top Stories”.
I’d much rather have everything show up in my Timeline in reverse chronological order and decide for myself which tweets and posts are the best.
If you feel that way too, a simple settings change will prevent those so-called “Best Tweets” from taking over your Timeline. Just follow these steps: [Read more…]
Do you have a young child who uses a computer of his/her own?
If so, you probably know that the major search engines make it very easy for your child to stumble upon web pages, photos and other content that are more suitable for teenagers and adults while searching for “kid” topics.
There are a number of great child-safe search engines out there, and I’ve tried a bunch of them over the years. After all my testing, I must say the one I like best is KidzSearch.
KidSearch is powered by Google, regarded by many to be the best search engine on the planet.
That means your child will get the best search results possible for most any query without having to be subjected to all the nasties that lurk about on the Internet. [Read more…]
Regular readers of this blog know that I often recommend replacing your computer’s hard drive with a super-fast solid state drive (SSD).
As I explain in this post, SSDs have several advantages over spinning hard drives.
But unfortunately they’ve always had one major disadvantage as well: SSDs have always cost a lot more than hard drives with the same storage capacity.
Well, thankfully that’s rapidly changing.