Rick's Daily Tips

How to quickly find out if your Internet service is down (without calling your ISP)

Posted on October 30, 2025

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Unfortunately, Internet outages are to be expected from time to time.

Storms knock down transmission lines, backbone cables get cut via construction mishaps, routing and switching gear go belly up… the reasons for Internet outages are many.

The thing is, when your Internet stops working it can be hard to determine whether the problem is an actual Internet outage or an issue you’re having with your own modem, your router and/or your connected devices. [Read more…]

Q&A: How do you take just part of a house off-grid to go solar?

Posted on October 29, 2025

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Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Keith: I just finished reading your post about taking your home office off-grid and I found it very encouraging because I’d love to that for just a couple of rooms in my own house.

My question is how do you take just part of a house off-grid while leaving the rest of it connected to the power line? [Read more…]

The benefits of using an all-in-one trading app

Posted on October 29, 2025

Whether trading the financial markets to earn extra income or investing for the long haul, nothing offers more convenience than an all-in-one trading app. Nowadays, diversifying your investment or trading options requires exposure to the forex, stock, and crypto markets.

The best trading apps have adapted to scale their services, offering users a variety of tools and market access to reach their financial goals. Here are the top benefits of using an all-in-one trading app. [Read more…]

From robotic to human: making digital text feel natural

Posted on October 29, 2025

Why your content sounds like AI-written

You know that moment when you read something and instantly feel it wasn’t written by a real person? The sentences are fine, the spelling is flawless, but there’s no warmth. It sounds as if someone stitched together the right words — without ever meaning them.

That’s what happens when writing loses its human touch. Sometimes, this happens because we rely too much on structure, templates, or AI-generated drafts. The result is clean but empty. The rhythm is flat, and there’s no sense of a real voice behind the words. You can spot robotic writing by looking for clues: too many long sentences, repeated patterns, or phrases that feel copied and pasted. It reads like text that forgot emotion. [Read more…]

How (and why) to make the Print Screen key always open the Snipping Tool on Windows

Posted on October 28, 2025

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If you’re a Windows user you probably know you can press either the Print Screen key or the PrtScn key (whichever spelling your keyboard uses) to immediately capture the contents of the entire screen as a screenshot.

And you might also know that you can press Alt+Print Screen to take a screenshot of just the currently active window.

But what if you want to manually select a specific portion of the screen to capture for a screenshot? [Read more…]