Rick's Daily Tips

Review: Mimoday Kids Volume-Limiting Headphones

Posted on December 11, 2017

It seems like every youngster I see these days is listening to educational recordings, cartoons and music through a pair of headphones, and the volume is often loud enough for me to listen right along with them.

Unfortunately, listening to audio that’s too loud will cause many children to end up with significant hearing loss by they time reach adulthood.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A pair of quality volume-limiting headphones can protect your children’s hearing while still allowing them to fully enjoy they’re listening activities.

I’ve tested several models of these special kids’ headphones in the past couple of years. Most of them worked pretty well, but I recently had the opportunity to check out a pair that stands out above the rest. [Read more…]

You can install Adobe Lightroom on your iOS and Android devices for free!

Posted on December 11, 2017

Adobe Lightroom has long been recognized as one of the world’s best photo editing programs.

In fact, I often recommend it over the full-blown Adobe Photoshop program for those who don’t really need Photoshop’s powerful graphic design capabilities.

In a nutshell, Lightroom is a lean, yet powerful program that includes all the best image editing capabilities of Photoshop without all the extras that many users will never need or use.

While Lightroom is a lot cheaper than Photoshop, if you want to install it on your computer it’ll still cost you a considerable amount in most cases. But now you can install it on your mobile device for free! [Read more…]

Heads up: Facebook could soon be asking you to upload a “Selfie” to prove your identity

Posted on December 6, 2017

As you probably know by now, Facebook is a virtual playground for scammers, hackers and thieves from every spot on the globe.

The miscreants seem to be everywhere these days, hacking and cloning accounts right and left.

And as we all found out during the last presidential election, they’re even using Facebook to spread fake news.

Truth be told, rarely a day goes by when I fail to receive at least a couple of desperate messages from folks asking for help in cleaning up a compromised or cloned account.

Well, Facebook has recently devised a plan that should (hopefully) stop scammers and hackers in their tracks and prevent them from generally using their platform for mischief. This is how it works: [Read more…]

Q&A: Why is my computer not working with the new RAM I bought?

Posted on December 5, 2017

Question from Eric H.: I have an older ASUS Essentio CM1630 desktop computer that came with 2GB of RAM.

I scanned the system with Speccy and found out it currently has a single 2GB/DDR3 RAM stick in it.

I want to upgrade the RAM so I bought an 8GB/DDR3 RAM stick and installed it so I can have 10GB total, but I ran into a problem.

The computer won’t boot with both RAM sticks installed. It also won’t boot with just the 8GB stick installed. However, it boots just fine with just the original 2GB stick installed.

What could be the problem? I know this computer is supposed to support up to 16GB of RAM total.

I’m thinking I might have bought a bad RAM stick but I wanted to check with you first in case there’s a BIOS setting or a jumper that needs to be changed.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

You’ll no longer be able to log in to Skype with your Facebook credentials come January

Posted on November 29, 2017

Many web services allow their users to log in to their accounts by using their Facebook credentials, making it easy to log in to multiple services with a single login.

I don’t really recommend taking advantage of that capability, for several reasons, but lots of folks do it nonetheless.

The popular Skype Internet communications service has allowed users to log in via Facebook for several years, but come January 2018 that’ll no longer be the case. [Read more…]