It’s true. I made my mom cry. But before you start thinking what a terrible son I must be, let me tell you what happened. My brother and his family live in South Carolina. This summer they came down to our area for a brief visit. When they went back home, they left [...] Read more »
Thanks to my friend Eileen this week for alerting me to a fantastic add-on for viewing content on the web: Readability. If you get your news from the internet, you know that it comes with a price. Not a monetary price necessarily, but an “annoyance” price. All you want to do is read [...] Read more »
This past week was interesting. Several hundred people got my new guide to computer security, and one of my friends emailed me asking about what appeared to be a scam email that he received. I confirmed to him that it was indeed a scam, and thought it would be good to mention it here. [...] Read more »
It’s a simple fact: some websites are secure, and some are not. There’s no problem with that in itself; some sites do not need to be secure. This blog post is not “secure”, but that’s fine because I am not asking you to enter any critical information. But what if a website is selling [...] Read more »
YouTube has a huge variety of videos. Some funny, some bizarre, and some are actually educational and entertaining. Sometimes you might even want to watch a particular video more than once. One option is to just save that video page as a Bookmark (in Firefox) or a Favorite (in Internet Explorer). However, this doesn’t [...] Read more »
Recently I have seen a warning being circulated, mostly on Facebook and through email. It reads like this: There’s a site called Spokeo.com that’s a new online USA phone book w/personal information: everything from pics you’ve posted on Facebook or web, your approx credit score, home value, income, age, even credit card #’s. Remove [...] Read more »
I’ve been using Paypal for years. It’s almost universally accepted as a way to pay for online purchases, and you can accept credit cards using your Paypal account, even if the payer doesn’t have an account. To pay for that convenience, Paypal’s fees are higher than a typical merchant account. Now Paypal may have [...] Read more »
Now that the internet has become a big part of our day to day lives, privacy is a concern that a lot of people have. This even comes down to doing a simple Google search. Did you know that when you submit a search term to Google, some of the information you send is [...] Read more »
One of the best ways to gain insight into your own life is to keep a journal (they used to be called diaries, but that sounds pretty old-fashioned now). It can be interesting – and even a bit amusing – to look back and see what you wrote about your day to day life [...] Read more »
I have always enjoyed listening to police and fire/rescue calls on a scanner. Having obtained my amateur radio license when I was 16, pulling signals out of the air has fascinated me for a long time. However, a lot of police departments are using new technology (including “trunking”) which makes it difficult. You have [...] Read more »
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