Data Doctors Tech Tips

If you're in business, you should have a website and if you have a website, you should know about today's tech tip. Making sure that your website is available to your existing and potential customers is like making sure that a store is physically open. For those that haven't considered this essential task, there's actually a free option to make sure things are all as you wish them to be. It's a website called Up Time Robot (https://uptimerobot.com) and it will monitor your sites availability every five minutes at no charge. It's a simple process to get your free account and from then on, you can monitor up to fifty different web addresses. The standard process is to have alerts about uptime sent to the email address that you provide during the sign up. Rather than getting a message from someone that tried to get to your site and couldn't, wouldn't it be better to have a bot let you know? Websites can go down for a variety of reasons just about anytime, even if you are a multi-million dollar business, so making sure you know about it is critical. It's an easy tool to setup and use, so let everyone you know that has a website about this excellent and free resource!

Today's tip is for anyone looking to punch up their morning run. If you're a big zombie fan, checkout the Zombie, Run app for both Android and iPhone users. It's a virtual Walking Dead workout. Could the threat of being caught by a zombie motivate you to run a little harder at the end of your workout? This could be just the thing you're looking for to make those boring runs more exciting. Just pick one the more than 200 missions, slap in your earbuds and take off to get things started. It's an immersive running experience tailor made for the zombie fan in all of us. Not only can you get the motivation from the zombies, you can do it while listening to your favorite playlists as well. You can make your morning runs in the real world a lot more interesting and entertaining while becoming a hero in the virtual world at https://zombiesrungame.com

We're a lot more comfortable buying just about anything online these days, but finding something at an extraordinarily low price is still a big red flag. Knowing more about a website that is offering this really low price can help you potentially sniff out bad actors. Your fellow Internet shoppers are a good resource for checking out any online retailer, so make advantage of the wisdom of the crowds with a couple of excellent tools. https://ScamAdviser.com is an excellent and quick way to get the down low on any website just by typing it into their site. Another tool that can work in the background for you is from Web of Trust (https://mywot.com) It's a browser add on that will give you a visual signal for any website in search results, social media and email. It uses the three colors in a traffic light to indicate what the rest of the Internet has to say about the retailer. Don't forget that using a debit card to make online purchases exposes you in a way that a credit card doesn't should you be the victim of a fraudulent transaction. The difference is that your checking account won't be out of balance while you sort through the fraud if you always use a credit card.

Most kids struggle with a subject or two in school, but rather than trying to find a tutor for those difficult subjects, why not give the Internet a shot?and#160; There's an online learning resource that is extremely powerful but absolutely free and easy for your kids to use. https://khanacademy.org has grown to become one of the most valuable tools for parents, students and teachers. The list of subjects available is pretty comprehensive especially in math, science, engineering, computing, arts and humanities and even finance and economics. The site also provides test prep for SAT, LSAT, Praxis Core, MCST, GMAT, IIT JEE and NCLEX-RN. Their secret to teaching kids is by using thousands of videos that hold their attention. Anyone that want to learn just about anything should bookmark https://khanacademy.org

In today's digital world, it's not hard to get behind on all of the correspondence channels that we use every day. If you're at all active on email, it can be a chore to stay current with your daily messages, but it get's even more overwhelming if you have gaps where you don't or can't check the daily deluge. For those of you that are facing this overwhelming load of unread messages, instead of trying to figure out how to plow through them all, have you ever though of announcing to the world that you are in email bankruptcy? To do it, you simply delete everything in your Inbox and then send a message to those you do want to communicate with that they need to resend any message they've sent to you that they are waiting to hear back from you on. Just remember that sending a mass email with all the addresses in the To: section exposes everyone's addresses to everyone, so put all of them in the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) line to keep everything confidential.

If you're like most households, you've managed to accumulate a small mountain of paper that you intend to sort and file. Most people would love to go paperless, but with that intimidating mountain of paper, how does one get started? Well the first step is to figure out what part of that mountain is no longer necessary and throw it out. Next, figure out what you need to shred instead of throwing it out and set them in their own pile for shredding. Next, if you need specific documents, don't physically store them, get them digitized by scanning and saving them on your computer. Another obvious place to reduce future paperwork is to convert as many of your accounts as you can to the paperless option when available. For those with a lot of mail, especially businesses, consider converting your incoming mail with a service such as Earth Class Mail. They receive all you mail and scan it, so all you have to do is tell them what you want and don't want!

If you ever forget your Facebook password or worse yet, get locked out of your own account because of a hacker, today's tip is for you! Facebook created an option called "Trusted Contacts" and it could save you a ton of hassle if you are ever locked out of your own account.and#160; The feature allows you to select three to five of your trusted contacts to help you recover your account. The way it works is that when you notify Facebook that you've been locked out, they'll send special codes to your friends to help you recover the account. They designed it so that no single contact on your list can get in because you need three different codes to get back in, from three different contacts. Anyone that has ever gone through the process of trying to recover a Facebook account that they got locked out of will tell you how much of a hassle it is. The "Trusted Contacts" options is available through the Security and Login menu or follow the instructions posted here: http://bit.ly/2Y1HSvB

We've all been told to always hope for the best but certainly prepare for the worst. For anyone that owns or manages a business, this adage applies to their technology and should take form in a disaster recovery plan. The easiest way to start the process is to ask yourself what you would do if the business was impacted by a flood, fire, theft, ransomware, sabotage or massive mistakes made by their users. The steps to get your business back up and running may vary dramatically for each of the scenarios, or it may end up being fairly similar. We've seen this for years, where a business has a comprehensive backup procedure in place but has never designated what is to happen in the event of a crisis. Not training everyone what to do, if something happens means you're hoping for the best bet never planned for the worst. Don't wait to try and figure out how to recover from a crisis in the middle of a crisis; do your fire drills before the fire.

If you're computer seems to be a lot slower while surfing the Internet compared to when it was new, the problem could be you and not the computer! A game changer in browser technology that's taken for granted today is the ability to open multiple tabs instead of having to manually navigate back and forth within on window. The downside to this awesome feature is that most of us open tabs and leave them open, even though we don't need them anymore. Each open tab takes memory, which taken to the extreme can be a big burden on your computer. A simple way to help speed things up is to start closing the website tabs you no longer need... remember, you can always use your History to get back to them. Everything you use on your computer, not just the web is impacted by this unnecessary use of valuable memory. If having lots of tabs open is important, checkout an add-on called One Tab for the Chrome browser. Once installed, it converts all your open tabs to one single tab with a table of contents for what was open. It's a more efficient way of having quick access to your important websites without the memory burden. https://www.one-tab.com

A while back, we told you about Adobe's shift from traditional software to an online subscription model for their popular apps like Photoshop and Lightroom. For those that don't really need these powerful programs all that often, it's hard to think about having to pay over $50 a month to use them. The good news is that there's a free option for people in this situation from a company called Pixlr. Unlike Photoshop, there's nothing to buy, download, install or configure in order to start editing your images and graphics because it's all browser based. It's certainly not as powerful as Photoshop, but it's got all the important features like red-eye tools, healing, drawing, cloning, sharpening as well as lots of great HDR options. It's also able to open existing Photoshop files, which means you won't have to start from scratch if you use Pixlr. Give it a try for yourself at: https://pixlr.com