Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: How can I manage all the cords that are plugged into my computer?

Posted on February 12, 2018

Question from Judy C.: Rick, how do you manage so many cords on these stupid contraptions? They are confusing and they are dust collectors.

I’m wanting to rearrange the locations of all the parts of my computer setup, but I don’t even know where to begin. Right now, as I try to sort this out, I am using my mouse with my left hand.

I fear that if I start disconnecting things, I will never be able to put them together again. (Phone, hard drive, screen, scanner, router, some other boxes of some dang stuff.)

What do you recommend? Also, is there a way to shorten the cables?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

How to forward your Yahoo mail to another email account

Posted on February 11, 2018

Yahoo Mail is the second most used email service on the web, and it’s also one of the oldest.

But if you use Yahoo Mail you’re probably painfully aware of all the troubles the service and its users have endured in recent times.

Those issues have prompted a lot of users to switch from Yahoo to a different email service.

I’ve received several emails of late asking me how to forward Yahoo Mail to another email account, so I thought it might be a good idea to just write a how-to post explaining the procedure. [Read more…]

Add 2 super-fast USB 3.0 ports to your PC for the cost of a pizza!

Posted on February 10, 2018

A while back I wrote a post explaining why it makes sense to upgrade your PC to USB 3.0 along with instructions for doing it. In a nutshell, you simply purchase and install an inexpensive USB 3.0 upgrade card.

Now’s a great time to do it because you can pick up an awesome Anker Uspeed USB 3.0 PCI-E Express Card (#ad) that will add 2 super fast USB 3.0 ports to your Desktop PC for about the cost of a pizza! [Read more…]

How to hide the title of a widget in WordPress

Posted on February 10, 2018

One of the things that makes WordPress such a powerful blogging platform and CMS is the ease with which we can use widgets to do wonderful things with our sites.

We can easily give our widgets a title in order to help the reader better understand what they’re seeing at any given moment, but what if we don’t want a particular widget to have a title?

By default, we can leave the title field of a widget blank, however there will still be a blank space where the title would normally be. But we can use a nifty WordPress plugin called Remove Widget Titles to completely hide the “Title” field. Here’s how: [Read more…]

Review: Apple MacBook Pro MJLQ2LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display

Posted on February 8, 2018

Apple products have long been considered by many to be the “cream of the crop” in the tech world. In fact, in their eyes the Apple brand is almost synonymous with perfection.

While that opinion is certainly debatable, I would say that it comes pretty close to the mark in the case of Apple’s latest MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Pro MJLQ2LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display is a perfect combination of style, power and reliability. [Read more…]