Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: How do I copy photos from my iPhone to a laptop?

Posted on March 3, 2022

Question from Donna: My iPhone’s storage is almost full because of all the pictures and videos that are on it.

I want to copy all the existing photos and videos from the phone to my HP Envy 13 (2019) Windows laptop and then delete them from the iPhone to make room for new ones.

I know I could upload them to iCloud and then download them onto my computer, but I don’t trust cloud storage and I never use it. I have iCloud syncing disabled and I’d really prefer to keep it that way.

Can you tell me how to transfer the photos and videos from the iPhone to my laptop without using iCloud? [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I stop my neighbor from stealing my electricity?

Posted on March 2, 2022

Question from William: I have a detached garage that has a 120 volt electrical outlet that’s accessible from the outside.

On cold nights (which we have lots of here in Wisconsin) my jerk of a neighbor likes to plug his diesel truck’s block heater into that outlet with a long extension cord.

I’ve told him to stop doing this on three different occasions because I don’t like him running up my electric bill.

He’ll stop, but then a few days later he goes right back to doing it.

I’m thinking about temporarily connecting 240 volts to that outlet (which would be very easy to do in the garage’s breaker panel) to destroy his truck’s block heater and teach him a lesson. Do you think that would work? [Read more…]

Q&A: What’s a good replacement for Windows’ Photos app?

Posted on March 1, 2022

Question from Barbara: I bought a new computer with Windows 11 on it and after using it for a while I’ve decided that I despise the Photos app.

Can you recommend a good replacement for it?

Free would be great but I don’t mind paying if I have to in order to get a good one. [Read more…]

Q&A: Is my computer’s RAM really running at half-speed?

Posted on February 28, 2022

Question from Jimmy: A few years ago I paid a computer tech to build a gaming PC for me.

This machine has a Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3-CF motherboard and 8GB of Patriot Viper DDR4-3000 RAM in it.

That means the RAM should be operating at 3000 MHz, right?

After reading your post about Speccy I decided to install it and run it just to see all the specs of my system at a glance.

Speccy is reporting the DRAM speed to be 1496 MHz instead of 3000.

Is my RAM actually operating at that speed or is Speccy just reporting it wrong? [Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware the many ‘Ellen DeGeneres’ scams on Facebook

Posted on February 27, 2022

As you probably know, lots of celebrities use Facebook to keep in touch with their fans and share news of upcoming events with them.

Unfortunately, lots of scammers are busy piggy-backing off the success of those celebrities by cloning their accounts and using those fake accounts to scam the celebrities’ fans.

One of the scammers’ favorite targets is Ellen DeGeneres because of her well-known penchant for giving things away, both on her show and via her social media accounts. [Read more…]