Blog: Tech News & Tips - Page 26 of 27

My Favorite Websites to Plan a Trip

Posted on June 23, 2015December 2, 2019 by Chris Eddy in Tips

When I’m off on a road trip, there are a few websites that I have bookmarked for easy access. Many of you know how many road trips I take so these resources are invaluable for me! I hope you find them useful too.

Google Maps:
This is actually my favorite site. It helps me plan road trips that get to all the places I want to go. If I want a quick highway-only kind of trip, I can do that. If I want to stick to the local roads, I can do that too. Google Maps tells me where the construction will be and how long the trip will take.

National Park Service:
Our country has so many amazing sights to see and the NPS has preserved many of them. When I know I’m going to a particular Park, like Yellowstone, or the Sand Dunes, or Arches, I take a look at this website to see what I need to be aware of and how to best plan my trip.

KOA:
I’ll admit it. My backcountry camping days are over! If I am camping, I want a place with a shower and a real toilet! I’ve been camping at KOA’s for most of my life as my parents took us around the country in our VW Camper in the early ’70’s. This site helps me find a campground near where I’m heading.

AAA:
The American Automobile Association is invaluable. From providing road side assistance, to maps and guides, to guided tours and cruises, to helping you buy and insure a car, AAA is a one stop place for most of my travel needs. http://www.colorado.aaa.com/

Google:
Of course Google. It’s how I find out just about everything. (Plus I love the Google Doodles.)

Local Chamber of Commerce sites:
Once I’ve decided on a destination, I search for the local Chambers. What activities are going on? Which businesses cater to tourists? Are there any coupons? What funky tourist attraction is this town known for?

Yahoo!Travel:
This site is helpful when I’m planning to stay at a hotel on the way. I’ve even found that Yahoo!Travel has access to lower prices than some of the other “discount” sites.

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Chris Eddy of Geek For Hire, Inc. has been providing computer service to families and small businesses with Mac’s and PCs for the past eighteen years. Angie’s List and the BBB rate Geek For Hire very highly. You can find more on our website, or give us a call 303-618-0154. Geek For Hire, Inc. provides onsite service (Tier 3 support) to the Denver / Boulder / Front Range area as well as remote service throughout North America.

We’ve been using Amazon Prime for the past few years. We like the free and fast shipping. With Prime, we have access to online streaming too. Prime is usually $119/year, but you can get a free 30-day trial by clicking on this link: Try Amazon Prime 30-Day Free Trial. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Protecting Your Pictures, Music, and Other Important Data

Posted on June 16, 2015December 2, 2019 by Gail Eddy in backup, Cloud, Data Backup, Tips

It’s summer and time for the weather to act up! Before the next ___Insert Disaster Here (Flood/ Fire/ Tornado/ Hail Damage/ etc.)____ occurs at your house, there are a few things you should take care of right away.

FIRST:
Back up your data to the “cloud”. We use Dropbox which I find very easy to use. There’s also Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and others. (Here’s a link to a review of 13 different options for you.) Make sure you choose a solution that backs up continuously and is accessible from all the computers, SmartPhones, and Tablets that you commonly use.

SECOND:
Because Ransom-ware is a bigger problem I also recommend that you have a hard copy of your backup. Ransom-ware is a new type of malware. The hacker gets into your system and locks you out of it unless you pay a ransom. This also affects data you’ve backed up to the cloud.

At least once a month, back up your data to a physical source – an external hard drive, DVD’s, etc. Then store them in a location outside of your home.

WHY DO BOTH?
To protect your data, you really only need a hard copy back up. But you’d need to do it very frequently in order to capture any changes to any of your files. In my experience, people are just not that disciplined! Plus, you have to remember to take it with you if you have the luxury of packing for an evacuation. Better to upload file changes automatically to the cloud and take a physical backup once a month, or after you’ve finished a big project.

ALSO:
Put your important stuff in an area that’s easy to access in case your home is evacuated because of an emergency. Things to include are family photos, family heirlooms, tent, sleeping bags, extra clothing, water, food & other supplies for your pets, etc.

If you need help setting up your cloud account or learning how to back up your data to a physical source, give us a call!

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Top Ten Ways to Use Siri

Posted on June 9, 2015December 2, 2019 by Chris Eddy in iPad, iPhone, Siri, Tips

I’ve had a number of friends tell me recently that Siri is worthless and never gets anything right. “And besides,” they say, “I can just do it faster myself than asking Siri!”

Granted, Siri had her challenges when she was first rolled out, and many of them remain. But if you just ask her to do simple tasks, she’ll generally get them right.

Here are ten things I frequently use Siri for:

Call people: For example, ask Siri to call your Mom. (If you haven’t’ set up relationships within your contact settings, here’s an article that teaches you how to do that.)
Email people
Text people: I especially like this feature. I will dictate the message to Siri and she’ll type and send it.
Set timers and alarms Just be aware that Siri sometimes hears “60” as “16”. I will instead ask for a timer for “61 minutes”.
Check on the weather
Show most recently received email
Search emails: You can find emails with specific text in them or emails from a specific person
Find out the time and weather in another city: Don’t forget, these are two separate questions!
1. Siri, what time is it in London?
2. Siri, show me the weather forecast in London.
Search for a local business When you ‘re looking for a specific business, ask Siri to look it up for you. She’ll generally respond with a map and all of their contact information.
Open an application on your phone: Simply ask Siri to open the map application or the FitBit application, etc.

Siri still has her flaws, but if you know what they are and can work around them, she’ll serve you well. (In a limited capacity!)

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Windows 10 Upgrade

Posted on June 2, 2015December 2, 2019 by Gail Eddy in Microsoft, Tips, Win10, Windows 10

If you’ve got any version of Windows, from XP to Windows 8, you’ve likely seen the new little icon on the bottom of your screen. It looks something like this:

The current information available is that this is a free upgrade offer from Microsoft It is available for a limited time. After the free offer expires, the upgrade will cost around $200. Microsoft is saying that the upgrade will be ready on July 29th.

I asked Chris why our customers should (or should not) upgrade to Windows 10. Here’s what he said.

Reasons to get the Windows 10 upgrade:

It’s a free way to get the next version of the Windows operating system. My computer has Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, and I was presented with the choice to receive the new operating system as a free upgrade.
This is the general direction of where Microsoft is going with the operating system, and you are probably better off with it than without it.
There has been discussion about the Windows 10 user interface being more like Windows 7 than Windows 8. Since Windows 10 has not yet been released to the public, what it is is still an unknown.

Reasons not to get it:

If you have applications that require Windows 7 or XP, or there is a concern because those applications have not yet been tested to work with Windows 10.
If you need to reinstall the operating system onto your hard drive or SSD in the future, you’ll have to install the previous version of the Operating System, but may not be able to receive the update to Windows 10 without paying for it.

The upgrade may not include an installation disk, which would allow a clean install of the Windows 10 operating system in the future.

More information about the upgrade can be found on Microsoft’s website. http://www.microsoft.com/EN-US/windows

Apple has been offering OS upgrades as digital downloads through their App Store for years, and no one is complaining. The no-media upgrade process tends to work, even though it takes several hours to download (1-4H depending on the speed of your line to the Internet) and install (1-2H depending on the speed of your computer and the speed of your hard drive).

However, I think this will be the first Operating System upgrade that Microsoft is doing that is a digital download. The Windows Operating System Upgrade is inherently more complex than the Apple Operating System Upgrade, because Windows runs on many more machines from different manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, HP, etc., etc.,) than the Apple software does (which is exactly one: Mac’s). The Apple environment is proprietary and “closed”, eg: you are licensed to only run the Apple Operating System on Apple hardware, where the Microsoft Operating System does not have this constraint. Apple doesn’t charge for new versions of its Operating System, but Microsoft traditionally has.

Let us know if you have any questions about Windows 10!

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Throw Away Technology

Posted on May 26, 2015December 2, 2019 by Gail Eddy in Tips

I was brought up by parents who grew up during the Depression in New England, and the Puritan frugality was bred pretty deeply in me. The whole “Reduce / Reuse / Recycle” motto was just the way things were during my childhood – especially Reduce and Reuse. Nothing was ever thrown away that might have another use sometime in the future. Protecting the environment by keeping things out of landfills was just a fortunate by-product!

Which is why I sometimes think our business is the perfect business for me. We help people repair or enhance their current equipment rather than dumping it and getting something new. Sometimes, it’s just one component that needs to be replaced, and that’s something we can easily do.

An older computer can have a new hard drive added to provide more storage, rather than getting a whole new computer.
Or, it can have a RAM upgrade to help it perform faster.
Or, change out the keyboard or screen on a laptop when they break.

However, with some of the technology being sold today, they are just not being built to be repaired! Some companies are now using cheap plastic clips to hold things together rather than the teeny metal screws. Extra care must be taken to remove the clips so that they don’t break or snap, and putting them back together again can be a challenge. This adds extra time to the repair work and makes the repair bill more expensive. And to all of those folks out there who say “It’ll cost $200 to fix my keyboard? I can get a new machine for that!”, I remind you that you get what you pay for.

We’ll always tell you when it’s more cost-effective for you to replace rather than repair. For example, it’s almost always more cost-effective to replace a broken printer then to repair it. A broken keyboard can go either way. If you’re like me though, the cost to replace will always include the environmental impact of adding to the trash heap.

If you’re wondering what kinds of services we can provide, please check out our services page.

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Smokin’ Hot iPhone!

Posted on May 19, 2015December 2, 2019 by Gail Eddy in Apple, iPhone, Tips

Last week my nephew shared a story about an iPhone in his town of Philly that had burst into flames in a young girls pocket.

Twelve-year-old Alexis Rolon has had her iPhone 5C since November and was carrying it in her back pants pocket when it started burning, giving her second-degree burns.

Since I had an iPhone last year that would get very, very hot, I wondered what the frequency is of cellphone fires and did a little research.

My search turned up several stories.

Another middle-school student in Maine had the same experience as Alexis with her new iPhone 5C.

She sat down in class with her phone in her back pocket. She heard a “popping” sound, and then felt a burning sensation. She was trained well, and did the “drop and roll” thing, though I think taking the phone out of her pocket should have been her first priority!

Remember when the iPhone 6 first came out and it had a problem with bending? Here’s an extreme case of “bendgate”:

Last October, an iPhone 6 exploded, then started burning in a man’s front pants pocket. He was in a minor accident and landed against a metal bar which bent the phone. Right after than the phone exploded and left him with first and second-degree burns.

Another story, this time it wasn’t in a pants pocket:

Last August a young girl had stored her iPhone 5 in her purse prior to boarding a plane for a flight from Israel. When the cabin of the plane started filling up with smoke, the girl realized the smoke was coming from her purse. When she opened the purse, flames were clearly visible. The airline blamed it on the lithium battery, though other stories blame it on a faulty screen replacement.

All of these stories make me really glad the Chris made me take my iPhone 5 in to be

checked last fall. It had been getting increasingly hot, and I was noticing that the screen was lifting up off of the body of the phone. We brought it into the Apple store in Boulder and made an appointment to have it looked at by one of their techs at the Genius Bar. Sure enough, the battery had expanded and actually pushing the glass screen up and away from the body of the phone. Apple replaced the battery and the screen under warranty. My phone no longer over-heated and I had a new scratch-free screen!

The moral of the story: If your iPhone is feeling hot or you notice something off about it, bring it in to one of Apple’s retail stores and get it checked out. Prior to bringing it in, sync your iPhone in case they need to restore it to factory settings. Also, if you can, remember to go online and make an appointment ahead of time. That will save you the three hour wait I had for my appointment time. If they do determine that it needs to be repaired, you’ll need to leave it with them and pick it up when they’re done, usually an hour or two later.

Questions? Comments? Post them below.

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Beware of Click Bait!

Posted on May 12, 2015December 2, 2019 by Gail Eddy in Click Bait, Hackers, Phishing, Social Media, Tips

This morning, I was doing one of my morning rituals which includes reading through the recent posts on Facebook, and found that a friend of mine who lives on the east coast, liked a story. I worked with him many years ago. He was the manager of a major project which I worked on for many years. This was the largest project in my career, and I know that this system is still “alive” today because I have served a local customer twice who is dispatched by this system. Since I respect my friend, and he doesn’t casually like everything, the things that he does like tends to get my attention. The first thing I did was to like the story too.

The story told of a mother beating her son on national television because he was participating in the recent riots in Baltimore. My friend liked it, so it must be legit. I clicked on the link to the story, which went to a blogsite which I had never seen or heard of before. The content of the page had only a brief retelling of the title of the story, plus several advertisements, but there was no link to the salacious original video that grabbed my attention. Since I didn’t see what I expected, I thought this was a problem with the tight security settings of my daily browser (Firefox, with several add-ons), so I copied the URL from my “high security” browser and pasted it into my “low security” browser which works with everything (Internet Explorer), and fetched the page. The same page was displayed, but this time with many popup advertisements (pop-over and pop-under) which were really concerning to me. There was no salacious video or a link to it. I shut this down fast.

Still being interested in the salacious story, I went to YouTube and searched for the general words of the title of the story, and found several direct links to the video – without additional advertisement or commentary.

In this case, I fell prey to “Click Bait”. I saw a story that interested me, thought it was legit, and clicked on it. It wasn’t legit. I will be doing a total system scan of my computer to check for any residual nastiness.

If you think you’ve fallen prey to “Click Bait”, the best thing to do is to scan your machine for anything malicious. If you need help, give us a call!

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Myth – Mac’s Don’t Get Viruses

Posted on May 5, 2015October 19, 2020 by Gail Eddy in anti-virus, Apple, Hackers, iPad, iPhone, Mac's, Virus

More than once I’ve heard the myth – Mac’s don’t get virues.

Unfortunately that’s just not true. Mac’s can get viruses just as easily as any other kind of machine. It used to be that malware was written specifically for PCs and the Microsoft Operating System, because there were just so darn many of them out there. But if our experience at Geek For Hire, Inc. is any guide, plenty of our customers with Apples are getting all kinds of malware. This post contains affiliate links which means if you click and buy, we may make a commission at no cost to you. See our full policy for more details.

(By the way, “malware” is the catch-all phrase for any software you haven’t deliberately chosen to load onto your computer. Remember from high school Latin that “mal” means “bad”. “Malware” includes viruses, spyware, rootkits, and more.)

We use ESET to protect our Mac’s and PCs.

In fact, way back in 2012, Apple itself recognized the flaw. In April, 2012, more than a half million Macs were infected by the Flashback Trojan bug. Shortly after that, PC Magazine reported that Apple “removed from its website the claim that its Mac operating system is not susceptible to PC viruses.”, and changed its tagline to “It’s built to be safe”.

Today, even more malware is being written specifically for the Mac OS. And Apple does not seem to be on top of getting fixes out to their users. In an article by Digital Trends, they stated:

“Apple has also been criticized for being slow to deal with threats and shut vulnerabilities down. Rootpipe was discovered in October 2014, but the fix only came out this month (April 2015), and it only patches Yosemite, not older editions of OS X. To make matters worse, the patch doesn’t actually fix the problem properly. Apple’s big rival may have a bad reputation, but it has taken decisive action to tackle that perception.”

Don’t believe the Myth – Mac’s DO get viruses!

It’s best to protect yourself with a good anti-virus program for Macs. We’ve been using and recommending ESET for many years. And we like that they offer a discount for multiple devices and multiple year subscriptions.

I’ve created a Free Report on what to look for to protect yourself from “phishing” scams. Click here to receive it!

INFORMATION ABOUT GEEK FOR HIRE, INC.

Chris Eddy of Geek For Hire, Inc. has provided computer service to families and small businesses with Mac’s and PCs for the past eighteen years. Angie’s List and the BBB rate Geek For Hire very highly. You can find more on our website, or give us a call 303-618-0154. Geek For Hire, Inc. provides onsite service (Tier 3 support) to the Denver / Boulder / Front Range area and remote service throughout North America.

Here’s a link to our Covid19 Policy.

What Is a Solid State Drive and Why Do I Need One?

Posted on April 28, 2015December 2, 2019 by Gail Eddy in Data Storage, Hard Drive, HDD, Laptops, Mac's, PC's, Solid State Drive, SSD, Tips

Check out our update on SSD’s in our more recent article.

For the past five years or so, whenever Chris had to replace a hard drive in a Mac or PC, or is designing a new computer for a customer, he always recommends that they get a Solid State Drive (SSD), rather than the traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Why?

First of all, here’s a great explanation from PC Magazine of how a HDD saves your data:

“The traditional spinning hard drive (HDD) is the basic nonvolatile storage on a computer. That is, it doesn’t “go away” like the data on the system memory when you turn the system off. Hard drives are essentially metal platters with a magnetic coating. That coating stores your data, whether that data consists of weather reports from the last century, a high-definition copy of the Star Wars trilogy, or your digital music collection. A read/write head on an arm accesses the data while the platters are spinning in a hard drive enclosure.”

And here’s a description from TechTerms on how the Solid State Drive works:

“While SSDs serve the same function as hard drives, their internal components are much different. Unlike hard drives, SSDs do not have any moving parts (which is why they are called solid state drives). Instead of storing data on magnetic platters, SSDs store data using flash memory. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they don’t have to “spin up” while in a sleep state and they don’t need to move a drive head to different parts of the drive to access data. Therefore, SSDs can access data faster than HDDs.”

For a long time, I just didn’t get it. Why is “newer” always “better” for these geeks?! Chris patiently explained to me some of the benefits.

More Robust:
Because a Solid State Drive has no moving parts, there aren’t any parts to break. This makes the SSD perfect for those who don’t count “grace” as one of their better qualities. It’s also a better choice for frequent travelers

Speed:
SSD’s are faster. I’ve read that they are 100 times faster than HDD’s. Machines with an SSD will boot faster, open programs faster, transfer files faster. Games process more quickly too. When seconds count, choose an SSD.

Lighter:
When you’re lugging a laptop through an airport, you want to shed every excess ounce that you can. SSD’s weigh slightly less than the HDD’s.

Downside:
SSD’s are more expensive to purchase than HDD’s. But, considering that the SSD will last longer, that’s only a short term problem.

Here are some additional articles on why the SSD is a better choice:
PC Magazine / OCZ / ThinLabs

Purchasing Recommendations:
If you are looking into purchasing a new SSD, C|NET has some great recommendations here.

Once you get your new SSD, we can help you install it – just give us a call!

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iPad Games For Your Cat

Posted on April 21, 2015December 2, 2019 by Gail Eddy in Apple, Entertainment, Entertainment Apps, Games, iPad, Mac's

I’ve been hearing about games you can play with your cat on your iPad. I decided to try a few and see how Dot (our cat) liked them. I started with this article on MacLife.com.

I have a silly rule about applications for my phone and iPad. All apps (except for the ones required for business) must be free! Most of the free apps I found were published by Purina/Friskies.

If you don’t have a screen protector, I’d recommend getting one before letting your cat play with your iPad!

First we tried Cat Fishing 2. Dot seemed interested in the fish swimming around the screen and watched them intently. But she never tried to catch them or attack them in any way. The game makes two sounds. Dot didn’t seem to notice the fish bubbles, but when the iPad meowed at her, she jumped about a mile!

Next we tried Nifty Cat Games. It showed a fly buzzing across the screen. Before Dot could express an interest one way or another – a mere fifteen seconds later – this nifty screen popped up:

Next we tried Game for Cats. I’m starting to think my cat just is too cool for the iPad. Here’s a photo of her with the laser tag game:

I think we’ll just stick to the old fashioned cat toys!

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