Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Tina: I’m a single mom and I’ve started dating again after being divorced for two years.
I have some dating-related documents on my MacBook that I would prefer my 12 year old son not see while he’s using the computer.
There’s nothing of an “adult” nature on there but I would still prefer to keep those dating-related documents private for now.
I noticed that some of those documents are showing up on the ‘Recent Items” list. How do I clear the items from that list? [Read more…]
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Question from Shruti: Hi, Rick. I hope you’re doing well.
I have a Dell XPS 13 9370 Ultrabook. Everything was fine until this morning when my screen just turned grey-ish black.
I had dropped my laptop and slightly cracked the top right edge of the screen along with one of the hinges a few months back but everything seemed to still be working fine.
I don’t know why this suddenly happened.
I have important data on this machine so I’d like to know if there is any way to retrieve the data without fixing the screen? [Read more…]
Question from Mallorie: I need some advice Rick, and it’s sort of a touchy situation.
We live in a duplex and our neighbor has a 14 year old son who bought a Straight Talk phone from my daughter.
The thing is she didn’t reset the phone before she sold it to him because he said he’d like to just take over her phone number, and she said that would be fine.
This phone still automatically connects to our WiFi network, and I know for a fact that he uses our WiFi a lot because he told my daughter that he does.
My question is do you think he could cause us any problems by piggybacking off of our wireless network? [Read more…]
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Question from Adam: I hope you can answer a question about solar power for me.
I have a small outbuilding that’s located about 120 yards from my house. This outbuilding has a dark green roof and it gets extremely hot inside on hot summer days.
What I’d like to do is install a fan in the eve of the building to pull fresh air into the building while expelling the hot air, but there’s no electric service there to power the fan. Can you help me with this? [Read more…]
Question from Rhonda: I have a question for you. How can I keep a YouTube video playing in the corner of my computer screen even when I’m working with other programs?
I subscribe to a channel that features inspirational videos and I’d love to be able to watch them while I’m working.
I know this can be done because I’ve seen it, but the person who did it is no longer with the company so I can’t ask them how to do it. [Read more…]