Canary Tokens

Miners used to bring canaries with them deep underground, to help detect dangerous gases. If the bird perished, the humans knew to retreat before they too suffered harm. Nowadays, the canary-in-a-coalmine concept extends to other type of alerts & security “tripwires”, such as Thinkst‘s Canary Tokens. Offered as a free service, this website allows anyone … Read more

What To Do About Phishing Websites

I am seeing a rise in phishing websites; here’s some info on what you watch out for! When you use a search engine, cybercriminals can game the results. They have ways to get their fraudulent websites to rise to the top of the page, and one method for this is simply to pay for ad … Read more

Steam Tweak to Reduce CPU Usage

Some clever people over on Reddit have figured out that the Steam Client sometimes gobbles up too much of your CPU. If you see Steam using too many resources in Task Manager, try these steps. This “Steam Tweak” may help to reduce your CPU usage

Dish Network’s 2023 Outage

If you’re having trouble with Dish Network lately, you’re not alone. On 2/23/23, Dish was hit with a ransomware attack, and they’ve been struggling to recover from it for over a week now. You may notice troubles or outages pertaining to: Ransomware attacks can take significant time and effort to bounce back from. Last year’s … Read more

Will I Have to Pay for Facebook?

I get this question occasionally: Will I Have to Pay for Facebook? No. Facebook is going to remain free for all to use. Facebook’s Help Center clearly states this. If you read somewhere that Facebook is going to begin charging everyone for access, that’s just an old hoax that gets passed around every few years. … Read more

How Long Should My Computer Last?

Many people ask me, “How long should my computer last?” And I could answer rhetorically with “How long is a piece of string?” but that won’t satisfy. I can do better. Let’s go over some concepts and ballpark ideas that will help you plan and manage your expectations for your computer’s lifespan. Things Fall Apart … Read more

Check Mail from Other Accounts with Gmail

Google has built in a very useful feature with their email service. In Gmail, you can configure something called “Check Mail from other Accounts”, and then Google will continually pull in the messages sent to another email address you control. You can do this with one or many other email addresses! The Steps Before you … Read more

Shentel/Mail2World’s 2023 Email Outage

Can you believe it’s been a whole year since the worldwide Mail2World 2022 email outage? Also: Can you believe it’s only been a year and Mail2World has brought us another email outage? OK, so far, it looks like it’s only affecting Shentel email. I am checking in with other Mail2World clients, and they report no … Read more

YouTube: Closed Captions & Transcripts

When using YouTube, please know that many videos allow for Closed Captions & Transcripts. Just click the CC button below the video to turn closed captions on or off. If a YouTube video offers Closed Captions, then it also has a transcript. To see that, look a little further down and to the right of … Read more