Ever since moving to a larger home two years ago, I’ve been dealing with WiFi dead zones. The home is 2800 sf and it is a two-story home. The footprint is not very large though. You would have thought that a centrally located router/access point (router) would do the job. Not so. From day one...
Category: Tips & Tricks
Combine Multiple PDF Files in Linux
I switched over to LinuxMint full-time this year. More about that later. But I’m learning the tools now available in Linux. So… I had an occasion of combine multiple PDF files. Not having Adobe Acrobat Pro or otherwise, I was unaware of how to do it with Linux. A quick Google search later and I...
Straight Talk Wireless APN Settings for MMS
Around September 2013 I decided to ditch AT&T for my mobile phone service and move to Straight Talk Wireless. I love the service, especially the price. The service is $45 for unlimited talk, texts and data. I have not tested the limits of “unlimited”, but it works well. One caveat is MMS. Straight Talk has...
Great Gifts for the Geek in Your Life
People are always asking me if this tech gift or that geek gift is right for their significant other. The one rule that I try to follow is this, “most electronics are crap”. This is particularly true for many of the gifts that are marketed for “the geek in your life” around the holiday season....
Become a GMail Ninja
As a GMail user I tend to search for emails a lot. Rather than organize by labels I just use the search function. Search for a keyword from the email and up it pops in the results. You want an email from john@smith.com, searching for the email address gives you all the interactions with that...
Amazon Prime Hobbled
While making a purchase on Amazon today I ran into a problem that I hadn’t had before. The thing that I wanted, the USB to Micro USB adapter pictured at the right was listed as an “Add-on Item”. I wasn’t adding it on to anything. I just wanted to purchase the cable and have it...
How to Block Cellphone Spam
I’ve been getting quite a bit of text message spam lately. Strange messages show up on my cell phone telling me how to get my horoscope or how to make $100/day by being an undercover shopper. How do you stop it? You could do what the messages say and reply “STOP” or “NO” to the...
Google Apps for Free
If you’re a small business and are using the email service that comes with your Internet connection, you’re doing it wrong. Heaven forbid you’re using AOL or Yahoo as your email provider. At a bare minimum you should have a personalized email address with your company’s domain name. For example, I have the domain name...
Why’s my browser so slow?
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, Why is my browser so slow?, then this post may shed some light on that. More often than not, when I come across a slow website, the problem ends up being Adobe Flash content. The site is either using Flash to deliver all or a portion of their content....
Dropbox Makes Sharing Files Easy
Transferring files from home to work and back can be a huge pain. In the past you may have used floppy disks for transferring files back and forth. Then there were ZIP disks. Most recently flash memory USB thumb drives are the thing to move your files from computer to computer. Now there’s something easier....