Episodes

Summer is almost here, time to do some traveling! When you’re on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, and taking hundreds (or thousands) of pictures, one of the worst things that could happen is for you to lose those pictures. How could this happen, and how can this be prevented? Here are a few ways this could happen: You drop your digital camera in the water. Your camera gets stolen. Your camera gets left behind in the hotel room and the staff checks and can’t find it. Your camera’s memory card ...

In the past I’ve written about third-party services that will alert you to new Craigslist postings. One of the ones I have used over the years is Blogtrottr, and I have definitely gotten some good deals as a result. But now there’s an even better way – getting new ad alerts directly from Craigslist. What’s the value in this? Let’s talk about an example situation. In our example, I’m looking to buy a used car. I want to get a Honda Civic. My requirements are: model year must be 2009 or newer ...

There’s one thing that is widely hated by Windows 8 users everywhere – the Windows 8.1 Start Screen. I usually refer to it as the App Screen, since that’s what it’s filled with – each tile represents an app. Microsoft originally called it “Metro” but changed later to just “Start Screen”. And there are some people that refer to it out of frustration, using words that, in the interest of good taste, I won’t repeat here in my blog. I think most people dislike it for a couple of primary reasons: T...

I think right now is the best time ever to be alive, because we are seeing so many amazing innovations in lots of different areas. I’ve just recently learned of something that I believe will change the way we think about location and mapping around the world. It’s called What3Words. What3Words.com is where you can get the app, and you can play with the mapping concept it’s based on, right there on the website at what3words.com. This innovative idea solves a big problem. The problem is trying t...

What would you do if you had a large file on your computer, and you needed to send it to someone by email? For example, you used your phone to take a video of your dog doing some tricks, and you want to email it to your friend who lives 500 miles away? To send an email by regular attachment, most email services have a strict limit on file size – and most video files are fairly big. But thanks to Google, there’s an easy way to do that now. You can use Google Drive. For this example, I’m going to...

Many of the things I cover here on my blog and on my podcast are products or services that I discover just in my routine daily work. Recently I came across a couple of handy things – one is an online service, the other is a product that’s sold online – and I know that a lot of people will find one or both of these useful. I was recently involved in a transaction with a client out of state, and part of the process was that the client needed to send me some money via Paypal. I know there are a fe...

Today I’m going to show you a couple of things that you might find to be pretty handy. Nothing fancy really, but each of these could definitely be a solution for someone that’s in need of either one of them. Tool #1: Simple countdown timer It doesn’t get much easier than this. Just go to Google, and in the search box type: timer 1 minute and hit Enter on the keyboard. Right away you will see a countdown timer at the top of the Google search results. But you don’t have to click on it or do anyt...

If you buy a new computer, part of your purchase decision is what software you need to also purchase. If you have a lot of specialized needs, you could probably spend more on the additional programs than you did on the computer itself. But the fact is, you don’t necessarily NEED to do that – there are free alternatives to almost every program available today. First a big word of warning – don’t go on Google and start searching for “free software”. If you do that, just about every website you fi...

I recently got a phone call from a business client. I’ll call him Matt for this story. Several months ago, Matt had a hard drive crash on his business computer. For a lot of people, this would have been a disaster. But thankfully, Matt had allowed me to set up an automated online backup for him, so all of his important files were safely stored away from the computer. I replaced the hard drive and reinstalled Windows, and Matt said that he and his partner could download his backed-up files and ge...

I got this question from one of my clients, Jim, recently: “Scott, whenever I move the mouse to wake up my laptop from Sleep Mode, I can’t access any website. I open Internet Explorer and it just says “Page cannot be found”. If I close Internet Explorer and wait a minute or two, I’m always able to connect to a website on the second try. Why is it doing this?” This probably happens to a lot of people, but they don’t bother trying to figure it out because they know after a couple of minutes it wil...

I use Google Maps all the time. By far, the feature I use most is the GPS aspect. When I make an appointment on my Google Calendar, I put the address in the “Location” bar. Then, when it’s time to go to that address, I open up my Waze app on my phone, and the address is listed there so I just tap it and follow the verbal street-by-street directions. It’s really an amazing process that we just take for granted now. BUT – there are some other things that you can do with Google Maps that are reall...

Last week we talked about the fact that even though it might appear that your email got hacked, it probably didn’t. In most cases it’s just a spammer using your email as the “From” address. But what about when your email actually DOES get hacked into – meaning some malicious person has gotten into your account and has control of it? What should you do? The easiest solution to this problem is also probably the most obvious – take precautions so that it doesn’t happen in the first place. This mea...

A few times each month, I’ll get a phone call or an email from someone who thinks their email account has gotten hacked into. And why do they think that? Because their inbox is filling up with emails that are bouncing back, that say “This email message could not be delivered”. They might get a few of these bounced emails, or a dozen, or even a hundred. At first glance, it looks like all of these emails were sent from this person’s email account. But in most cases, no one has hacked into their em...

Many millions of people have Google accounts. I have several myself. And whenever I want to look something up on the internet, I use Google because it seems to come up with the most accurate search results, which means I don’t have to waste a lot of time weeding out stuff that is not relevant to what I was looking for. But did you know that Google stores your history of searches – for quite some time? There are two points I want to make you aware of today: Google stores your search history for...

Wikipedia (Wikipedia.com) is one of the most often visited websites on the internet. Virtually any topic you want to research, any well-known person, almost any city – it’s hard to imagine anyone or anything of importance not having a Wikipedia page. However, Wikipedia was launched back in 2001 – and the layout and design of the website seems to have not changed since that date. It’s usually pretty easy to spot a website that has not been updated in a long time. In some cases, a business might ...

Most households and small businesses use a router to distribute the internet signal. You might have purchased the router, or your internet provider may place it with your for you to use, but they still own it. Also, your modem may also be a router (all in one box) or your router might be a separate unit. There’s really no “normal” configuration for all these factors. What happens when your internet service provider’s router becomes old, outdated, or just worn out? That’s when they’ll call you u...

Want to find out your roommate’s Facebook password? Need to have a few “below average” grades removed from your college transcript? Would you like to have some embarrassing pictures removed from Google search results? If you find yourself in need of these or similar services, what you really need is… a hacker! One thing you need to realize is that the term “hacker” has evolved over the years, and now it doesn’t necessarily mean a bad thing. In the past, if someone mentioned a hacker, it would c...

My wife Jeanne recently embarked on a new career – she is a nanny for a young couple with a newborn baby girl. She loves babies anyway, so spending her days taking care of one is pretty much her dream job. And of course the baby’s parents love Jeanne because she has tons of experience with kids (successfully raising our own two, plus she taught First Grade for 17 years). When my wife was searching for a family in need of a nanny, one of the services she used was Care.com. That’s an online servi...

This week, some fun stuff. It’s good to have computer tips and security alerts and warnings to back up your important data, but sometimes we need to take a break and check out some things that can amuse and entertain us. And really, some of these things can be considered computer-related or technical in some way. Inspector Gadget What we have here are some cool little items. All of them are: Cheap – around $20, some a lot less Amusing/entertaining – some may actually even be useful Availabl...

I recently got an email from my friend Preston, who had this question: “I’m wondering why, when you get a new hard drive, you don’t get the full amount of space that it says on the box? When I got my PC a few years ago, it said I had that 500 GB hard drive, but when I look at the drive, it only says I have 465 GB.” So what do you have to say, hard drive manufacturers? Is this some kind of scam on the computer users of the world? Not a scam. There’s a legitimate explanation for this. Actually t...

After last week’s post and podcast about the dangers of sharing your wifi signal with your neighbor, I had several people contact me about how to keep a computer safe “the other way around”. Meaning, if you are using your neighbor’s wifi signal (with permission of course), what type of precautions should you be taking in order to protect and secure your own computer? In general, the best plan is to use your computer the same way you would if you were on a public wifi connection and wanted to st...

Recently I got an email from Barbara in Maine, with an interesting question. She wrote: “I have a next door neighbor who wants to hook into my internet and share expenses. Is that not legal to do? What do I need to know about it?” Great question, Barbara! I’ll tell you right up front, if I were asked this by one of my neighbors, my answer would be no. For several reasons: 1. I don’t trust my neighbor enough to justify the risk this deal creates for me That’s not to say my neighbor (let’s call ...

There used to be a traditional set of guidelines that you could go by, and by doing so you could be reasonably sure that your computer was safe from being attacked or infected by a virus or malware. Use a good antivirus, don’t open email attachments, don’t click on a link unless you know for sure where it leads, and don’t visit sketchy websites. Those are all still good and important, and I highly recommend all of those guidelines. But hackers have another way into your computer – advertising on...

Years ago, hard drive space was an issue that I dealt with more often. Back in the days of 40 gb and 80 gb hard drives, it didn’t take a whole lot to fill one up. Then you started getting the warnings “Drive C is getting low on space”. These days, with hard drives more commonly in the 1 terabyte (1000 gb) range, it’s not as big of a problem (but that creates a different problem, which I’ll talk about in a minute). But even now I sometimes see a client’s computer that is getting pretty full. And ...