Rick's Daily Tips

How to assign custom ringtones for your important contacts

Posted on May 14, 2022

Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter

By default, when people call you on your smartphone the ringtone will sound the same regardless of who is calling you.

And that can be a problem if your phone starts ringing while it’s sitting on a table on the other side of the room.

The caller could well be someone you really want to talk to, but it could also be a call you’d rather skip for the time being.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to stop what you’re doing and go pick up the phone.

Well, there’s an easy fix or this problem… [Read more…]

Q&A: Why is everything on my computer screen maximized?

Posted on May 13, 2022

Question from Evelyn: I have an Acer desktop computer with Windows 10 Home edition on it.

Everything was working fine this morning but when I came back from lunch my web browser was in full screen mode (maximized).

I thought that was odd because everything was normal when I left for lunch.

I tried to click the little square icon in the top-right corner to take the browser out of full screen mode but I couldn’t click it. It’s like it ignored my clicks.

Anyway, I was able to minimize the browser but then I noticed something else really strange. None of my open apps were showing up on the taskbar.

I don’t know how things got so messed up, but I hate it. Do you have any idea what’s going on, and what I need to do to fix it? [Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware the dangerous NewProfilePic app that’s spreading on Facebook

Posted on May 11, 2022

If you’ve been on Facebook recently you’ve probably seen lots of cool-looking photos that have been altered to look like drawings and other such adaptations.

Unfortunately, this is one of those apps that puts your privacy at serious risk.

First, we’ll start with the bad news…

[Read more…]

How to open your web browser’s built-in Task Manager

Posted on May 10, 2022

Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter

A while back I wrote this blog post explaining how to use Chrome’s native Task Manager to find out which Chrome processes could be causing the browser to operate slower than it should.

That post received a lot of engagement, and several readers contacted me to ask if there is a native Task Manager built in to other browsers as well.

I answered those folks directly, but since I keep getting this same question I thought it might be a good idea to write a similar post to answer it on the blog. [Read more…]

Learn how to do almost anything with YouTube

Posted on May 9, 2022

Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter

Back in the “stone age” (i.e. before we humans had the Internet) learning a new skill was time-consuming and often simply not worth our while.

With time being our most valuable asset, we often found it faster (and therefore “cheaper”) to simply hire someone who already possessed a certain skill to do that essential, yet one-time job for us instead of taking the time to learn how to do it ourselves.

But then along came the Internet, and before we knew it we had countless volumes of information at our fingertips. [Read more…]