Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Have you ever wished you could remove one or more of the stock Apple apps that came pre-installed on your iPhone, iPad or other iOS device?
If so, I have great news for you: Once you update your device to iOS 10 you’ll be able to do just that!
Beginning with iOS 10, Apple will finally give you the ability to remove at least some of the pre-installed apps that you never use. [Read more…]
Portable USB hard drives make it easy to back up the hard drives in our computers and share large quantities of files among machines that aren’t on the same local network.
If you’re looking for the fastest high-capacity USB drive around, a portable Solid State Drive (SSD) would fit the bill quite nicely.
But if you’re just looking for something that’s faster than the typical USB hard drive yet doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, you can’t beat a 7200RPM USB hard drive.
There aren’t that many consumer-grade 7200RPM USB hard drives on the market right now, but I recently had the chance to check one out. [Read more…]
Microsoft’s Outlook.com web mail service is a sleek alternative to Gmail, and I really like it.
That being said, it does come with one major annoyance: It insists on waiting a while between checks for new messages on POP3 email accounts.
But what if you’re expecting an important email that really needs to hit your inbox as soon as possible?
Outlook.com doesn’t come with a Send/Receive button and you can’t alter its built-in schedule for checking POP3 email accounts, but if you really need to check for a new email RIGHT NOW you can force it to check a specific POP3 account any time you wish with this workaround: [Read more…]
If you’ve been looking for a faster server to host your blog or website but you can only afford a shared hosting plan, I have some news that just might interest you.
Dreamhost, one of the world’s most popular web hosting companies, now has super-fast SSDs on all of their shared servers!
Why is this a huge deal? Because the access speed of the server’s hard drive is a serious bottleneck that limits the speed at which web pages can load and database queries can be completed. In short, the fantastic speed of an SSD ensures that you’ll have a much faster and vastly more responsive website. [Read more…]
Most people assume that their Wi-Fi connection is safe from hackers if it is secured with encryption and a password, but the sad truth is even a “protected” Wi-Fi connection can be broken into by a determined hacker using the right software.
If you suspect that someone might be piggybacking on your wireless network (and even if you don’t), I suggest downloading and running a free tool called WiFi Guard.
WiFi Guard is a small and lightweight utility that will scan your entire network and list all the devices connected to it including computers, tablets, smart phones, wireless printers and more. If it’s logged into your network, it’ll show up!
Using WiFi Guard is easy. Here’s how: [Read more…]