Tech Tips, Tricks and Tutorials
Do you ever have guests over to your home who ask to access your secure Wi-Fi connection? Depending on the guests, it can be a little uncomfortable handing over the password to your Wi-Fi network. Well, now you don’t have to if both you and your guests use Android devices.
Instabridge is a free Android app that allows you to invite guests to use your secure Wi-Fi connection without having to give them your network password. Here’s how it works: [Read more…]
Every day thousands of laptops, tablets and smart phones are lost or stolen, and relatively few of them are ever recovered and returned to their rightful owners. But a free app called Prey can tilt the odds greatly in your favor.
Prey is a small, discrete app that “hides” on your laptop or mobile device and lies dormant until you need it. Then if the device is ever lost or stolen you can easily “wake it up” with a remote signal sent by you either through the Internet or via an SMS message. Once activated, Prey gets right down to business by performing the following actions: [Read more…]
Imagine that you’re walking through your favorite store and an item catches your eye. You pull out your smart phone and take a picture of it and a description pops up with details on the manufacturer, retail pricing and more.
Or perhaps you’re walking through Paris and you come upon an interesting looking building, statue or other landmark. You snap a picture of it with your phone and you’re immediately presented with the details of what you’re looking at.
A bit farther down the street you see a sign written in French (of course), so you photograph it and your phone provides you with the English translation.
Sound like something out of a science fiction movie? Well, it isn’t. This technology is available right now, and it’s absolutely free. Just download a free app called Google Goggles and you’ll be doing just this type of thing in minutes! You can download Google Goggles for free from the Google Play Store.
If you send thousands of text messages every month but rarely actually talk on the phone, you can use a free app called textPlus to send and receive all the text messages you want for free.
textPlus works great with Andoid phones, iPhones and even iPads and iPod touch devices. This is a great way to downgrade your cell phone plan in order to save money, yet still have the ability to send unlimited texts.
There is one caveat to consider though. Whenever you aren’t connected via Wi-Fi, your text messages will be sent and received via your phone’s data pipe so you’ll need to keep an eye on your data usage. This shouldn’t really be a problem though unless you already max out your data usage each month.
Depending on your phone type, you can download textPlus for free from iTunes or the Google Play Store.
If you have a dual-boot system which lets you boot your PC into either Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu Linux, odds are the default O.S. is Ubuntu.
If you boot the computer into Ubuntu most of the time, this works out great. You can just press the PC’s power button and go grab a snack or something, then return to an Ubuntu Desktop ready and waiting for you.
But if you boot into Windows more than Ubuntu, you have to sit at the computer and wait for the Boot Menu to appear so you can instruct the computer to boot into Windows instead of Ubuntu. If you find yourself having to do this on a regular basis you can easily change the boot order of the operating systems on your PC and make Windows the default. [Read more…]
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