Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Keenan D.: Hi Rick. I hope you can answer a question I have about using my computer.
I have a 15.6″ Acer Aspire laptop and I usually rest it on my lap when I’m using it because it’s more convenient that way.
My roommate is constantly harping on me to stop holding the laptop on my lap because (according to him) it can cause serious health problems. Is he right?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for a while you’re probably well familiar with the infamous “White Screen of Death”.
If you haven’t encountered it yet, that’s the stark, panic inducing white error screen that WordPress displays when it encounters a fatal error with some component of your blog.
There are several reasons why you might see a white screen of death on your blog, but they’re usually the result of a serious problem affecting your blog’s theme, one of the installed plugins or the database.
Whatever the reason, it’s the last thing you want to see when you try to access your blog!
Question from Patty J.: I recently found out about the free certificates from Let’s Encrypt. I asked my web host to install it for me so I can make my WordPress blog secure.
I installed the Really Simple SSL plugin and that took care of the redirects from http to https as well as most of the mixed content issues.
But Firefox is still blocking parts of my pages that it claims are still trying to load from insecure sources.
I’ve looked my pages over and I can’t find anything that appears to be loading from an insecure location. Everything on the page appears to be loading from URLs starting with https instead of http.
When I load the pages in Chrome it shows the green padlock with no warnings. It’s only Firefox that’s not cooperating.
I’m pulling my hair out here. How can I find out what Firefox is blocking for being insecure so I can fix it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
If you’re a blogger you’ve probably wondered how your blog looks on different mobile devices and at different screen resolutions.
If so, there’s an easy way to find out right now, in mere seconds. Simply type your blog’s URL into the search box at Sizzy!
Sizzy will automatically load your blog into ten different mobile templates so you can see exactly how your pages and posts will look on both iOS and Android devices and at various screen resolutions.
Every now and then I have a need to combine two or more photos into a single image by arranging them side by side and/or over top of one another.
To get an idea of what I’m talking about, take a look at the image on the right.
It’s actually pretty easy to create a mini-collage like this with most popular image editing programs, but I’ve found a much easier and faster way to do it.
Just fire up your web browser and click over to the wonderful online Combine Images tool from the folks over at QuickPictureTools.com. [Read more…]