Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Gloria: Hi Rick. I hope you can help me find a solution to a problem we’re having with my husband’s iPad.
He recently started using Facebook to keep in touch with the grandkids and some of our other family members.
The problem is he’s completely deaf and he can’t hear the notification alerts when someone sends him a message on the iPad.
Is there any way to have it light up with every new notification?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
This is now a digital world, and chances are you use multiple devices to communicate with friends and family, watch videos, play games, share photos and any of 100 other digital activities.
Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if you lost all the precious photos and other files you’ve accumulated on your computer or mobile devices over the years?
Unfortunately, bad things happen, and it pays to be prepared when disaster strikes. After all, hard drives crash and files get accidentally deleted. And yes, it will happen to you if it hasn’t already.
That’s why I’m constantly stressing the need to back up your data on a regular basis.
But the thing is, backups alone aren’t enough. Why? Because backups themselves can get lost or corrupted! What would you do then? [Read more…]
Question from Carol: My computer (Dell desktop with Windows 10) installed an update a few days ago and after it rebooted the screen was all out of whack.
Everything looks so ugly now. The text is really big and the icons are scattered all over the place.
My monitor is a 23″ Dell S2316M. It’s always worked at its maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080 before but the update changed it to 1024 x 768.
The problem is there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it back.
How can I fix this? [Read more…]
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Apple has just released an emergency update to iOS 14.8 and iPadOS 14.8 to patch a very serious security flaw.
In a nutshell, this flaw allows NSO Group’s really nasty Pegasus spyware to infect Apple devices that are running one of the affected versions of iOS.
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Question from Tina: I’ve noticed that the lights on my modem are blinking more or less constantly.
In fact, they even blink when I’m not using a web browser, checking my email or doing anything else on the Internet.
Is it normal for all those lights to be constantly blinking or should I be worried?
Rick’s answer: Tina, there is always data being passed between your computer and the Internet any time you have a live connection established, so yes, it is normal to see the data lights on your modem flashing pretty much all the time.
Your ISP is responsible for much of the data being sent back and forth because they love to “check in” to see if your connection is healthy along with other mundane housekeeping tasks. [Read more…]