Tech News Archives - Page 56 of 135

Heads-up: Apple now blocking health information for ALL iPhone batteries that were installed by third-party techs.

Posted on August 12, 2019

If you’ve been using an iPhone for a while you probably know that you can check the health of your phone’s battery by selecting an option on the Settings screen.

This battery health information basically lets you know if your battery is wearing out and needs to be replaced.

For years Apple refused to allow iOS to reset the battery health info back to “Healthy” after a new third-party battery was installed, but according to our friends at iFixit they’re now even refusing to reset the health information for genuine Apple batteries unless they’re installed by Apple authorized techs.

[Read more…]

Teach your child to save for the future with a Digital Coin Bank

Posted on August 10, 2019

Nowdays it is more important than ever to teach your kids the importance of putting money aside for a rainy day.

Teaching them why they need to save is the most important part of this task, and I’m sure you’ve already developed a good plan for that.

The purpose of this post is to let you know about a really neat tool that you can use to facilitate the actual saving part of this endeavor.

It’s called a Digital Coin Bank, (#ad) and it works something like this:

First, your child inserts a coin through a slot in the lid. As the coin passes through the slot the digital counter determines the value of the coin based upon its size, then automatically adds that amount to the running total.

Any number of coins can be added (one at a time of course) and the counter will add the value of each coin to the total.

Here’s a short video that shows exactly what I’m talking about: [Read more…]

‘Find My Device’ lets you locate and control a lost or stolen phone or tablet from another Android device

Posted on August 4, 2019

Google has updated their awesome “Android Device Manager” app and given it a new name.

It’s now called the more intuitive Find My Device, and it works even better than ever.

In a nutshell, this fantastic app helps you locate and control a lost or stolen Android phone or tablet using another Android device.

With all the personal information that’s stored on smart phones these days, it makes sense to do whatever we can to keep that data out of the hands of would-be scammers and identity thieves.

This app is a great tool for accomplishing that if your Android device ever gets lost or stolen.

Find My Device lets you use another Android device to: [Read more…]

Apple users beware: Complete strangers could be listening to your ‘private’ conversations.

Posted on July 31, 2019

If you use an iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch you know how handy Siri can be at times.

But what you might not know is Siri is constantly snooping on your conversations, and that even includes face-to-face conversations that don’t involve a phone call!

What happens is Siri records your conversations for use in training Siri to better understand how you speak and how it should respond to the things you say.

But Siri doesn’t do this “learning” all on it’s own. It has help from human contractors that Apple pays to listen to their customers’ recorded conversations and then provide feedback to help Siri improve.

[Read more…]

Heads-Up, Bloggers: The next version of Firefox will drop the final hammer on your blog if it’s still unencrypted.

Posted on July 19, 2019

Do you write a blog that’s still serving its pages to your visitors’ web browsers in a non-secure (i.e. unencrypted) state?

If you’re not sure, it’s very easy to find out. Simply visit your blog with any web browser and look that the URL in the address bar.

If the URL starts with https:// instead of https:// that means your blog is not being served to your visitors’ browsers in encrypted format.

If that turns out to be the case, your blog’s traffic is likely to drop to pretty close to zero after Mozilla releases the Firefox 70 update in October.

[Read more…]