Secure your Wi-Fi
If you think someone is poaching on your Wi-Fi, there are some ways to get them off. The simplest is to change your Wi-Fi’s password, although that entails teaching all your devices the new password. Many routers have a way to show you what devices are connected, which may allow you to block those MAC addresses (all networked devices have a unique Media Access Control address.) A longer-term method might be to enable a guest network—most modern Wi-Fi routers offer this option—and only share the guest password with others outside your immediate circle.
Windows 10 will reach it’s end of life on October 14, 2025, at which point there will be no more security updates. But as Microsoft did with Windows 7, they have announced that they will be offering up to three years of extended security updates, probably at a big cost. Pricing will come out sometime next fall and you will have to buy it in one-year increments. Or “just” buy a new computer.
That “cloud” sure does sound wonderful. Keep all your data and documents
in the cloud so that you can access them anywhere you are and they are always backed up, right? But, sometimes even those big companies can lose things, as Google recently did for some Google Drive users. The lesson here is to have duplicates (as in, multiple) for documents, data, pictures and other things that you really must have. Use something like an external hard drive along with those internet-based cloud services. Their reliability is still going to be better than just one external hard drive, but no backup plan should have just one point of failure when files are costly or impossible to replace.
If you are annoyed by phone games that use annoying in-app purchasing, ads, or other upsells, you should take a look at (pardon their language) https://nobsgames.stavros.io/ There you can explore for games, iPhone or Android, that are just games, you pay for them and then you are done, no more ads, etc.
When you want to get a general idea of the range of prices a vintage item is currently being sold for online, Google Lens can help. When clearing out old items from your house, you may think something is valuable but you can check by using https://lens.google/ to get the Google Lens app on your iPhone or Android. Using the app, it is easy to take a picture and search for the price of matched items on the web. You will want to scroll through the results to make sure that you are matching your item, for quality and brand for example.
Hankering to try out ChatGPT but don’t really understand it or want to pay for it? You can now try ChatGPT’s ‘Chat With Voice’ for free, it means you don’t have to type your question and you may find it easier to follow up on the result with further clarifying prompts or asking ChatGPT to change its viewpoint. Chat With Voice feature is only available if you install the official ChatGPT app for iOS or Android from OpenAI.
You may have used those live plane location websites to find out where incoming flights are, and there is a similar site for trains in the US and Canada. https://trains.fyi/ is where you can explore the speed of our closest passenger train out of Charlotte, as I write, traveling at 26 mph. toward Raleigh.