Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Juliana P.: I was talking to some friends the other day and someone asked why Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and jumped from Windows 8.1 straight to Windows 10.
None of us knew the answer to that question. Can you tell us why they did it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
As you surely know by now, scammers and hackers are always working overtime to take advantage of innocent Facebook users.
Unfortunately, scammers are quite active on other social media sites as well.
Right now there’s a very dangerous phishing scam being spread via instant messages on Instagram.
For years now study after study has shown that about 25% of all PCs worldwide operate without effective protection from viruses and hacking attacks.
Most of those vulnerable systems have antivirus software installed, but that software offers little protection because the owners fail to take steps to keep the malware definition files updated.
Many people think that just having an antivirus program installed on a PC is enough to keep malware and hackers at bay, but nothing could be further from the truth. [Read more…]
Question from Carolyn L: A convenience store not far from where we live recently closed and the owners sold all the equipment at auction.
My daughter and I bought their very old, but working security system to monitor certain areas of our little craft store.
It came with two security cameras, two monitors and the cables to connect them to two VCRs for recording the video from the cameras.
A friend of mine hooked everything up for us and it all seems to work ok except for one problem. Both monitors have a ghost image that appears to show the convenience store’s parking lot from two different angles.
The images from inside our store are displayed on the monitors but the ghost images are displayed on top of them, making it hard to follow what’s going on inside the store.
Why are those ghost images on there and how can we get rid of them?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
If you’re a blogger, you’re probably familiar with Chitika.
If you aren’t familiar with them, they’re very similar to Google’s popular Adsense contextual ad service.
In fact, Chitika is where many bloggers who were turned down for admission to the Adsense program (or got booted from it) ended up turning to earn revenue from their blogs.
Although Chitika never really gained a lot of traction against the ultra-popular Adsense, they did serve as a vital source of income for quite a few bloggers who were unable to take advantage of the Adsense program for whatever reason.
If you currently have Chitika ads running on your blog(s), I have some bad news for you: The service has been shut down, effective immediately.