Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 194
You're all set: you've updated your Wi-Fi router's firmware, changed your router's default password and added all your computers, printers, phones and tablets to your new, secure Wi-Fi. Here's how to make it easy for your friends and family to connect to and use your home Wi-Fi network: Wi-Fi If you haven't already, make your Wi-Fi network name easy to pick out from your neighbors' Wi-Fi networks and make the password long but easy to remember. Something 11-15 characters long using two random...
We all use devices (smartphones, tablets or computers) that contain information we don't want strangers or thieves to access. Therefore, we lock them with a username/password combination to protect our privacy. However, since we will unlock our device 5, 10, 15, 20 times a day, we use fingerprints, faces, passcodes, PINs or lock screen patterns to unlock our device instead of our username/password. But what if you've got bandages on your fingers, your face got stung by bees, or you can't...
Blocking and reporting spam calls Are you tired of getting spam and scam calls on your cell phone? You know, those calls about elections, solar panels, IRS problems, dubious charity donations, energy retrofits, health insurance and all the rest. Current cell phone technology offers ways to block these calls. But, of course, the spammers know this and have adapted. Almost all scammers and robocallers use "number spoofing" to make it hard to block them. Just because a number starts with 661...
Every time we hear about a data breach, we know that a new bunch of usernames and passwords were just stolen and are about to be used against us. Somehow, and by somebody. But how do you tell if they stole YOUR email address and or password? You can always check by going to www.haveibeenpwned.com and entering your info, but wouldn't it be handy to have something that could check for you, something you already have on your computer? Google has a tool for the Chrome browser that will alert you...
The first versions of Windows didn't support playing music or watching videos. Of course, we're talking Windows 1.0x and 2.0x here. Those early versions of Windows were Microsoft's early attempts at implementing a computer graphical interface, first shown off at a COMDEX show in 1982 and even earlier at Xerox PARC. The early versions of Windows were not commercial successes, and it wasn't until the 1990 release of Windows 3.0 that Microsoft started selling many copies of Windows. Windows 3.0...
We know that computers, phones, and tablets store files and folders on your device, but what are files and folders? Is it like in the movie Zoolander where Owen Wilson's character learns that the files he needs are IN the computer, so he drops it off a balcony and sorts through the debris, looking for the files he needs? Well, no. In an office, a paper file stores related documents together in a container or a drawer. For example, a file might have all the receipts from last year, the budget...
In most cases, when your password suddenly won't work with a website or e-mail address, there is a "Forgot Password" link, and this is where it can get scary. The site may want to send you a code to your phone or your recovery e-mail address, or you'll get asked for answers to your security questions. What if the site has an old phone number for you? Or is your recovery e-mail address is the same as the one you're trying to recover? Or what if you and the site disagree about the answers to your...
Okay, I get it. I had hoped the whole selfie thing would be over by now. But it's turned out to be an excellent way to get yourself into your pictures. Now that your smartphone has a zillion megapixels, night modes, light and depth sensors, and even solar panels, for all we know, you can take some excellent selfies. Here's how. Background Since you're taking a picture of yourself, or maybe you and some of your friends, you and your friends should be front and center in the shot. In photography...
Modern computers have built-in web browsers, Microsoft Edge for PCs and Safari for Macs. And it's just fine to use the Edge or Safari browser to spend time on the internet. But here are some reasons for you to have another browser on your computer, too. The people that develop websites have a pretty tough job these days. A website must work on any browser, computer, brand, or size phone or tablet. Sometimes they don't get it right, and you'll find yourself on a website that doesn't look right...
After the day you just had, once you finally get home, all you want to do is check your email, play some Wordle and maybe watch a movie on Netflix. Except, you've got no internet. Not on your phone, your tablet or your computer. Now what? Getting the internet to your house is a complex undertaking involving global telecommunications corporations, federal, state and local governments, fiber optic cables, satellites, communications towers, data centers, undersea cables and miles and miles and...
It's always been a best practice to keep your friends and family emails separate from the flood of emails from the places you've shopped online, the newsletters you've signed up for, your social media notifications, and all the political emails. For a long time, the best way to keep those essential emails separate from the rest was to use different e-mail addresses for each type of e-mail. It worked, but now you have multiple e-mail addresses and passwords to keep track of. If only there were an...
If you use Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, or Google Assistant, your phone usually keeps and shares your voice recordings. As a result, there can be some pretty personal stuff in your requests to your assistant. Unfortunately, big tech companies have a checkered past about protecting and using our data responsibly. Here's how to delete the recordings on your phone and turn off your assistant if you don't want to use it or her. Siri Apple claims it randomizes all data collected by Siri, doesn't con...
You don't have to upgrade to Windows 11 if your computer asks you if you want to. Microsoft has committed to supporting Windows 10 until 2025. Ten years of support is standard for Windows versions. I did the math for you, Windows 10 came out in 2015, so support ends in 2025. Somewhere in the box that pops up asking you if you want to upgrade to Windows 11, there's a link (in blue and underlined) to "Stay on Windows 10 for now." So if you've canceled the Windows 11 update window, here's how to...
Seven months too late, but better late than never, right? Fifty (plus!) years ago, IBM birthed the floppy disk, and, eventually, that's how publishers distributed new software and how we saved files on our computers. But why and how did the floppy disk come to be? Early mainframe computers used core memory that kept information even when the power was off. Next, the mainframe computer industry moved to solid-state transistor memory, which was great, except it couldn't keep things in memory...
Yay! You've got some vacation time, and you've found the perfect place for you and your family to stay. Whether it's for security reasons, industrial espionage, or just because people are weird, you can find another article about people finding hidden cameras in their accommodations every few months. People find surveillance cameras in fake smoke detectors, bedside alarm clocks, behind A/C vents, USB hubs, and even embedded walls. There are legitimate uses for surveillance cameras, of course. An...
Google Photos can automatically make "Memories" from the photos you store with them. But maybe the memories they make for you aren't necessarily good memories for you. What can you do? Thankfully, there's a straightforward way to make Google forget certain people and even animals. Open the Google Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet. (The Memories feature doesn't show up when you open photos.google.com.) Click your profile icon in the top-right corner and select Google...
Have you switched to DuckDuckGo to escape the relentless data gathering Google does? But do the search results from DuckDuckGo seem to not reach into the deepest darkest corners of the internet to find what you want? There's a solution, sort of. The website www.StartPage.com is a Dutch company with privacy policies like DuckDuckGo. That means StartPage doesn't store your IP address storage or your search data. But, in 2009, StartPage agreed with Google to use Google as their search engine....
If we're talking about Wi-Fi, then the G stands for gigahertz. Wi-Fi networks are like radio stations in that they broadcast signals to be picked up by other Wi-Fi devices. Like radio stations, Wi-Fi radios broadcast on radio frequencies, either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. That whole GHz thing stands for gigahertz, which is one billion hertz. A hertz is one cycle (of something) per second. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz proved the existence of electromagnetic waves in the late 1800s, so they named one cycle after...
Billions of people have email addresses ending in Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or one of the many others. These email addresses are easy to get and easy to remember. Moreover, those email providers do a reasonably respectable job securing your email, offering industry-standard security like two-factor authentication and encrypting the connection between your computer and their server. So, why would you want to switch to something else? Privacy. You know those big multinational...
Something old #1 – Fake tech support scams I know we've talked about this before, but the fake tech support scammers are still out there. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, the FBI, or anyone else will not call you about your computer. So you know that when, not if, someone calls you, it's a fake tech support scammer trying to take your money. You also know that while you're on the internet, any screen or web page that comes up telling you about terrible things going on in your computer and telling you t...
You may have heard of people and companies selling NFTs. For example, Marvel, William Shatner, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Grimes, and many more. But of what? Seemingly nonsensical things like clips from videos, JPG art, tweets, baseball cards, and even pet rocks. Seriously. You probably have some questions. Let's start with the NFT part. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Now you're probably wondering what the heck non-fungible means? If we start with fungible, it's an actual word; fungible mostly...
After years of security breaches at the companies we trust with our data and zero-day security exploits against the back-end systems those companies use, you might expect that we've gotten better at picking passwords for our financial, shopping, email, and gaming sites, right? Wrong. Researchers go through the stolen user databases and compile lists of the most common passwords every year. One of the best lists this year comes from the company behind NordPass, a company that makes, you guessed...
Don't give up if your home Wi-Fi signal doesn't reach the other side of the house, upstairs, or out to the garage. Wi-Fi extenders and mesh networks can improve the Wi-Fi signal coverage in your home. How did it get this way in the first place? The installer from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) probably installed their connection and your Wi-Fi router next to your computer. Unless your computer is in the middle of your house, the walls, and the pipes and wiring inside the walls knock down...
Data breaches are common. Security fails even on major sites like Yahoo, Goldman Sachs, Home Depot and more. But what about all the smaller sites like that Vauxhall restoration forum site you signed up for? Or that mailing list for left-handed fishing lures? If the big guys have trouble keeping the doors locked, you know the little guys have trouble, too. So it makes sense to delete accounts with as many of those old, unused services as you can. While many of these accounts may only have your...
Did you know Windows has a built-in video editor? While more like Apple iMovie or Windows Movie Maker than Adobe Premier, the Windows Photos app also edits video. Surprised? I was. But first, get the video file onto your computer. Either pull the SD card from your digital camera and put it in your computer, upload videos from your phone to your phone's cloud service, or download them to your computer, and then you can edit them. Now that the video is on your computer, right-click on it, click...
