Getting into a regular exercise routine is a wonderful way to improve your health and make you feel good while doing it, but today's tip can take that great feeling to a whole new level. Why not raise money for your favorite charity while you're running or biking every day with the Charity Miles app: https://charitymiles.org There are a variety of activities that you can track via the app that can actually raise money for your charity. The amount of money you raise per mile depends on the activity that you are tracking.and#160; Lots of you have seen your friends and family making social media posts with a reference to Charity Miles and now you can join them. You probably already have charities that you prefer to support that the app also supports like Habitat for Humanity, Autism Speaks or the Special Olympics. Whether you're an iPhone runner or an Android biker, the app will allow you to step up the value of your daily activities with every mile you accrue.

Social networks aren't just for wasting time on a personal level as productive business social networks such as LinkedIn are an essential part of doing business these days. Unlike personal social networks, LinkedIn isn't as much about the people in your inner circle as it is about business contacts that you don't really know all that well. That's also why the process of approving a connection is quite different from accepting connections on other networks. It's really about connecting with potential business contacts that could be beneficial to what you do for a living. I'm not suggesting that you accept any and all requests to connect, but take a minute to visit the potential contact's profile to see if they already have lots of other connections and posts that show they've been on the network for a while. The profiles that I reject typically don't have a picture, have a really basic profile or just about anyone in a foreign country. If someone you accept as a connection immediately goes into a hard sell, it's just as easy to kick them from your network as it was to accept them. If you're new to LinkedIn, here are the steps for removing anyone from your network: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/49

Cyber Security companies are constantly scanning the dark web and hacker websites for compromised passwords so they can alert users. The bad guys are constantly adding to the list of known passwords as each new data breach occurs because they know that your password is the key to your kingdom. These known password databases make their way around the Internet and are bought and sold as a regular course of business for hackers. So how do you know if your passwords have been compromised because of a data breach? Fortunately, there are simple free services such as https://breachalarm.com that will check for you. When you type in any of the email addresses that you've used to set up accounts around the web, the site will scan the databases to see if your account has been compromised. Knowing a password has been acquired, especially one that you use on multiple sites is a critical step in protecting yourself. If you use the site and don't find any known breaches, don't get a false sense of security. I'd suggest that you assume that any password that is more than a couple of years old has probably been compromised, so you should take a preemptive step and change them out.

It's hard to remember a time when we didn't turn to the Internet to go shopping for just about anything. Today we're going down online shopping's memory lane to revisit one of the most popular early shopping tools called Woot. In its early days, it provided a simple offer: a single item with limited quantities that would be gone by the end of the day. While that approach was very popular for a long time, it just doesn't cut it today, so they've evolved to offer a lot more than they used to. It's still focused on offering deals in lots of popular categories including electronics, home goods and even wine, but everything is available all the time until it's gone. It's a lot more efficient than watching a cable shopping television show and can be a great way to get gift ideas during the holiday season: https://www.woot.com

Today's online and digital world makes it easy to interact with anyone at any time, but it gets a little more difficult when you are trying to connect a group of people. We've all either have been the one sending out an endless number of emails or been on the receiving end of the futile attempt to find a time that works for everyone in a group. Anyone that seeks a solution, especially if this is a recurring issue, should check out an online tool called Schedule Once. Instead of being the manual referee in a group scheduling situation, why not let technology and automation do the grunt work? An additional benefit of their system is that it can manage the time differences no matter where in the world someone is connecting from. This is a pay service for those that want to minimize the hassle of this challenge on a regular basis, but you can use it for 14 days to make sure it fits the bill before committing: https://www.oncehub.com/scheduleonce

Tech-related gifts are usually at the top of the list for most people, but just too expensive for those buying the gifts. One item that we've spotlighted before is one of the best values in all of the tech gifting world. Google Cardboard is a platform that allows anyone to experience virtual reality apps using their smartphone and a special viewer. Coupled with good headphones, this cardboard-based viewing device will transport anyone into another world via the specially developed apps. My first experience with Cardboard was through a special concert video with Paul McCartney that places you on stage with him during the show. It's also a great way to experience the 360 videos that are uploaded to YouTube that will completely change the experience. It's a truly inexpensive gift that's one of the best bangs for the buck or you can create one yourself with their DIY instructions at and#160;https://google.com/cardboard

The lighting options for decorating your home and tree during the holiday season continue to get more sophisticated and many of them have wireless remote controls. This has caused concerns by some about interference with Wi-Fi signals, which might technically be a possibility, but not very likely.and#8232;and#8232; There's a small chance of some interaction if they're being powered off of the same outlet as your router, so keep them separated to avoid it.and#8232;and#8232; You can also test your network speeds with and without the lights being plugged in to see if there is any impact. and#8232;It's more likely that your Wi-Fi signal will be impacted by other wireless devices like an infant monitor or a cordless landline phone than your holiday lights. and#8232;and#8232;If you're using an older wifi router, it won't have the sophistication of automatically avoiding congested channels, so in those cases, setting your router to use channel 1, 6 or 11 will have the least overlap.and#8232;and#8232; If you have an Android smartphone, there's a great free Wi-Fi tool called WiFi Analyzer https://bit.ly/2JWC812 for checking every detail of your wireless network.

It wasn't long ago that we were seeing stories from around the globe of fires that were caused by the hoverboard craze. Trying to make popular items as cheaply as possible leads to lower quality products that can go from faulty to downright dangerous. One of the prime suspects in these device fires has been tracked to mismatched chargers and lithium-ion batteries. This potential danger isn't exclusive to hoverboards as today's battery technology is being used in virtually everything we own. Another common issue we've seen on laptop computers is the damage done by a mismatched charger that's either too much or underpowered. Mismatching a charger with LiON batteries can shorten the life of the battery or cause excessive heat leading to a fire. All batteries will heat up while being charged, but when the temperature gets uncomfortable for you to use, it's a good idea to have the batteries examined or changed out for safety purposes.

We all love apps on our smartphones and often times photography-related apps can accumulate very quickly. Most of them offer similar features that focus on the usual suspects such as brightness, contrast and color balancing. But today's tip will introduce you to a photo app that you probably don't have because it focuses on correcting distortion. Distortion can result in your images based on the type of lens that you're using or if you're at a bad angle taking the shot. This singular focus is in an app called SKRWT which has been recognized at one of the best at what it does. Unlike other apps, it doesn't reduce the resolution of your image when you adjust either the distortion that can be side to side or up and down. Learn more and download it atand#160;http://skrwt.com

Without question, one of the more common complaints that I field on a regular basis concerns the limited storage space that fills up so easily on smartphones. More and more devices don't offer the memory expansion option, which makes it important to stay on top of the space you're using. If you have a lot of apps that you no longer use, uninstalling them is a good start, but won't generally free up as much space as content like long videos and high-resolution images. Dumping old video files will clear the most space the quickest, so take the time to weed through them all. Another less known place that you can free up a lot of space is by getting rid of old text messages that included photos or videos. I've had great success with my wife's iPhone storage issues by spending time deleting old text messages. Here's more of our advice on this problem and#160;http://bit.ly/2N8hwDt