Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Apple has just announced a recall of certain MacBook Pro laptops due to faulty batteries that could overheat and start a fire.
Most (but not all) of the faulty batteries were installed in MacBook Pros that were sold between September 2015 and February 2017.
Luckily, only one specific model is affected by the recall.
Follow these steps to find out if your laptop is one of them: [Read more…]
Do you use Google Maps on your Android phone to help plan your trips and then navigate to those destinations?
If so, before long you might be able to use this extremely handy app to help prove your innocence if you have to go to court over a speeding ticket!
If you’re a blogger and your blog hasn’t yet been secured with SSL/TLS encryption you need to get that done ASAP!
Back in December 2017 I wrote this post warning bloggers about the need to get their blogs encrypted before Google started actively penalizing non-secured sites.
Well, that day has come…
Google recently rolled out an update to their Chrome browser that causes it to now flag unencrypted pages as “Not Secure” right in the address bar!
Up until recently it was widely understood that only sites that collected credit card data or other sensitive visitor information really needed to be encrypted, but Google has changed that by deciding to clearly mark non-encrypted pages as “Not Secure”.
To show you what I’m talking about, I took a partial screenshot of a web page that I knew to be unencrypted at the time I began writing this post (the site has since been encrypted): [Read more…]
Have you recently crossed the international border between the United States and Canada?
If so, there’s a chance that hackers could now be in possession of photos of your face and your car’s license plate.
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agency has just announced that one of the contractors that supplies facial recognition cameras for use at border crossings has been hacked, and the hack resulted in about 100,000 border-crossers having their photos and license plate numbers stolen.
In case you’re wondering what mischief the hackers can do with that very limited amount of information, the answer is a lot.
Question from Phillip H.: I really enjoy your site, Rick. I’ve learned a lot by reading your tips. I hope you can help me solve problem I’m having.
I just bought three new HP desktop computers for my office and they all have Windows 10 on them.
When I was setting them up I uninstalled several pre-installed apps that I know my employees won’t need. But there are a couple of apps that I can’t uninstall because I can’t find a way to do it.
My question is do you know of a way to remove an app besides right-clicking on it and clicking “Uninstall”? The one I’d really like to remove is the Xbox app because I don’t want it on my office computers.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]