Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you use Yahoo Mail or AOL Mail (or both) you should know that the latest changes they’ve made to their Terms of Service (TOS) completely trashes your privacy.
Both of those services are now owned by Oath, the media division of Verizon.
Oath has merged their two TOSs into one and made some pretty disturbing changes in the process. [Read more…]
Question from Paula: My computer is a Dell desktop running Windows 10 and I’m having an irritating problem with it.
I have a folder that I’ve been using for months and all of a sudden it gets stuck when I try to open it. It just freezes up for a while and displays the message “Working on it…“.
If I wait long enough the folder will eventually open and I can use it like I always have, but it seems to take longer and longer every day. It took well over a minute to open a little while ago.
How can I stop this folder from freezing up on me? All the other folders on my computer open just fine.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
If you’re a Mac user who tends to have several windows open on the desktop at any given time, you might find yourself getting distracted at times by all the other stuff that’s on the screen.
If so, there’s a fantastic app called HazeOver that can help minimize the distractions from background windows.
In a nutshell, Hazeover dims everything in the background while keeping the active window bright and clear. You can still see everything that’s dimmed in case something important changes, but your attention will remain focused on the active window.
Here’s a short video that shows HazeOver in action: [Read more…]
A few days ago a reader asked me if it’s possible to use a full-size PC keyboard with a Windows tablet. The answer is yes as long as the keyboard supports Bluetooth connectivity.
As I was answering that question it got me to thinking about all the Apple users out there who might have a Bluetooth-enabled Mac keyboard laying around.
As one would imagine, a Mac keyboard should be the perfect keyboard to use with an Apple device running iOS. [Read more…]
I often receive questions about updating the UEFI BIOS firmware on a computer’s motherboard.
Horror stories abound about firmware updates that went bad and bricked the devices so many folks are understandably nervous about attempting to update the BIOS on their own motherboards.
In a nutshell, the UEFI BIOS firmware is a basic set of instructions and settings that inform your CPU about the various hardware components that are inside your PC and how it should interact with them.
If this firmware get’s corrupted somehow one or more of your computer’s hardware devices could fail to operate correctly. [Read more…]