Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Austin B.: Hello Rick. Love your site! I’m hoping you can help me get rid of a major frustration.
Ever since I installed Windows 10 I’ve been getting an annoying “Get Office” message at the bottom of my screen at random times.
I use Libre Office and I don’t have any intention of buying Microsoft Office. Is there any way to tell Windows to stop asking me to buy it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
As I mentioned in this post, Samsung has stopped making their ill-fated Galaxy Note 7 smart phones and issued a recall for all of the units that have already been sold.
According to the company, about 93% of all the Galaxy Note 7 devices that were sold have already been returned under the recall, and now Samsung is planning to use a special form of “tough-love” to spur the return of the remaining phones.
To that end, Samsung will be releasing an update on December 19 that will prevent the Galaxy Note 7’s battery from being recharged and cut off all access to cellular and Internet connections. In short, the phones will be effectively “bricked” on that date. [Read more…]
As you probably know by now, ransomware is an insidious form of malware that will encrypt the contents of your hard drive and then demand that you pay a ransom to a scammer in exchange for the encryption key.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to fall victim to ransomware, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to recover your files even if you pay the ransom as instructed.
Now, the scammers are planning to take this insidious threat to an even more sinister level! [Read more…]
If you own a blog or other type of website, you probably know how important it is to rank well in the Google search results.
Like it or not, the majority of a typical site’s visitors usually come from Google. That means anything that causes your site’s pages to tank in the Google search results is a bad thing indeed!
Last month Google announced that they’ll soon start ranking web pages based upon the content found on the mobile versions of the websites “crawled” by their bots. Well, now they’re taking their emphasis on mobile friendliness to an entirely new level.
Here is a direct quote from a recent Google blog post: [Read more…]
Hello again. I hope you had a great week and that you’re enjoying the holiday season thus far!
Believe it or not, some folks have already wrapped up their Christmas shopping for the year. If you happen to be one of them, congrats on a job well done!
But if you’re like the rest of us, you’re probably still struggling to find that perfect gift for a special friend or loved one.
Today I’m going to tell you about five awesome tech gifts that are truly useful, yet they won’t cost you an arm and a leg. In fact, all of them cost less than $100, and most of them cost about half that amount!
With the wonderful Christmas spirit (and a touch of frugality) in mind, here they are: [Read more…]