Is it really December already? Wow that year really passed by quickly! Hopefully next year the world will settle down a bit and we can get back to what might be something like normal, fingers crossed.
One of the things that has changed this year is Microsoft’s flagship operating system has been upgraded and if you have a qualifying computer, you can download it for free. Read this entire article »
Last month we looked at how you could physically connect your mobile phone to your telescope so that you could take pictures of the moon (and other night sky objects). If you decided to have a play then you will have taken a number of videos of the things you saw and you should, quite rightly, be very pleased with them. Read this entire article »
With the nights drawing in and things getting darker earlier and lighter later, my thoughts turn to the skies. You may (or may not) be aware that we live in some of the best areas for stargazing in the world. Its not that difficult to find a “dark area” within easy walk/drive of most of our homes here on the Costa Blanca. There are plenty of nature reserves and areas without street lighting that enable us even with the naked eye to see some of the wonders of the Universe. Alternatively, if you want to see even more – further afield, down in Almeria, we have the Calar Alto Observatory – www.caha.es where you could visit and look through their state-of-the-art telescopes. Read this entire article »
It’s becoming more and more important to take care of your online activities, your passwords, the places you visit and what you do. With companies like Facebook having millions of their users accounts’ compromised recently it’s a real possibility that some of your personal information has fallen into the hands of hackers and therefore criminals.
On the 30th September 2018 Facebook lost 30 million of their users’ account details to hackers who had exploited a vulnerability caused by three bugs on the Facebook system. It’s likely that you will already have been contacted if you were one of the unfortunate 30 million people involved, however if you want to be sure then visit the page https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice whilst logged into Facebook and scroll to the bottom. You will see a blue highlighted section titled “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?” and below that will be a message detailing whether or not your account was affected.
This, and all of the other high profile hacks brings me onto another great website that can check to see if your email address has ever been associated with any hacked sites. It tells you which sites and which information has been compromised. Armed with this information you can at least decide whether you want to continue to use the services of the companies that breached your data and if you do, you can take steps to change your password and lock down your security on those affected sites.
If you go along to https://haveibeenpwned.com you’ll have the option to check your email address in the search bar at the top of the page. Click the “pwned” button to find out whether your email address has ever been compromised and on which sites – you’ll see this information if you scroll down a little.
If your account has been compromised, then you can assume that whatever password and email combination you used is now known by hackers, so the first thing to do would be to change your password on the site that was hacked. The next sensible thing to do, would be to change your password on any other un-compromised sites where you use the same combination of email address and password as this is now not safe.
You see, once a hacker has this information, they know that many people use the same email address and password for multiple different services, so better to be on the safe side and change any accounts where you use the same email address and password. Also a good idea moving forward would be to use a different password for each service that you use, yes I know this means more things to remember but it also decreases the chance of multiple accounts being compromised at the same time.
Ever since Windows 8, we have have been able to select the lanaguge that we would like our computers and laptops to display. Before that, in order to legally change the language of your Windows computer it was necessary to reinstall the operating system with a version of the language that you wanted. Read this entire article »
It’s a question that I’m asked regularly and it’s not an easy one to answer. In order to give an unbiased opinion as to which one I would recommend, we need to firstly determine what you mean by “best”. You see, for some people best means ‘cheapest’, for others best means ‘easiest to use’ but for most, I suspect, best means ‘the most efficient at protecting against viruses’. Read this entire article »
This month we finalise the series in which we have reviewed various ways that you can speed up your computer, we have already covered identifying and replacing the hardware in your computer and this month we will look at the software options you can use to get the most out of your computer. Read this entire article »
This month we continue with our audit of your computer, trying to help figure out how you can get the most out of it for the least cost. Last month we looked at the version of your operating system and the amount of RAM in your computer, this month we look at your CPU and storage. Read this entire article »
So, last month we installed Speccy, a small piece of software that will help you understand what hardware you have inside your computer with a view to reviewing this information to get the best speed out of your system.
This month we will review the information you found and see if there are any quick wins to speed up your computer. Read this entire article »
If you use Google Drive or Google Photos on the PC or Mac then this effects you, Google will start to remove these products in December 2017 with a view to closing them completley by March 2018.
Don’t stress if you do use one of these products, however as Google will be replacing them with “Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive”. The good thing about this new piece of software is that it will enable you to “backup and sync” photos not only from your PC or Mac but from USB devices and SD cards – all to the cloud. Read this entire article »