Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you use the popular Snapchat messaging app there’s a good chance that your username and phone number could be in the hands of criminals right now.
Snapchat has announced that a recent security breach has allowed the usernames and phone numbers of 4.6 million registered users to be stolen by hackers.
While this breach isn’t anywhere near as serious as most of the ones that have been in the news lately, it could still cause problems for the unlucky victims. [Read more…]
Important update: The NoBars app is no longer supported and it doesn’t work with the latest versions of Android.
Have you ever noticed how quickly your Android phone’s battery gets depleted when you’re in an area where there’s either a very weak cell signal or no signal at all? This happens because the phone’s radio will go into overdrive while trying to locate any trace of a usable signal.
An easy way to prevent this from happening is to simply place your phone into “Airplane Mode” whenever you enter an area where you know there won’t be a usable cell signal. But if you do that, you’ll have to remember to take the phone back out of Airplane Mode later or else you won’t be able to receive any calls or text messages. [Read more…]
Have you ever been playing a game or using an app in iOS 7 and had the Control Center pop up at a very inconvenient time? I’m guessing that you probably have.
Unfortunately, it’s very easy to cause the iOS 7 Control Center to pop up when you don’t mean for it to simply by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. And usually when it does happen, it interrupts the flow of your game and/or breaks your concentration.
If you find this behavior irritating, here’s how to prevent it from happening again: [Read more…]
If you have recently updated your Apple device(s) to iOS 7 you might be confused about the new procedure for closing a running app. It really isn’t that difficult a task, but it also isn’t one that can easily be “figured out” by trial and error.
Follow these steps to close an app in iOS 7:
1 – Double-tap the Home button to display a horizontal row of icons representing all of the currently running apps.
2 – Swipe to either the left or right until you find the app you wish to close.
3 – Tap and hold the icon of the app you wish to close, then swipe upward towards the top of the screen. You should see the icon “fly” off the screen to indicate that the app is now closed.
By now you probably know all too well that the GPS radio on your smart phone sucks battery juice almost as fast as ice melts in the middle of the Sahara. But if your phone is running Android 4.4 “Kitkat” there’s a simple way to keep using the GPS feature without draining your battery quite so fast.
Android 4.4 has a new “Battery Saving GPS” mode that can help extend your battery life considerably over what you’d get by enabling GPS in normal mode. In my opinion, this is one of the most useful enhancements to Android in some time.
Battery Saving GPS mode works by limiting the number of reference points the phone uses to pinpoint your location on the earth’s surface. Checking fewer reference points means the GPS radio works less, which in turn means less current is drawn from the battery. [Read more…]