If you’re still running Windows 7 on your PC, it’s time to bump up to Windows 10. As of January 14th, Windows 7 will no longer receive software updates. It has reached the end of extended support from Microsoft. That means that when the next Windows bugs are found, your PC will be forever vulnerable.

I self-published the first edition of my book in January 2015. The third edition was picked up by Apress and I just officially started work on the fourth edition! Should be out later this summer. (Suggestions welcome!) About three years ago, I started the newsletter, blog and podcast. This has been quite a journey so

[Note: See the latest list for 2021 here.] 2019 is almost gone and 2020 is upon us. You know what that means: New Year’s Resolutions! I’ll let you worry about signing up for a gym membership or quitting smoking or whatever… I’m here to give you concrete steps you can take next year that will

While online data theft has gotten the lion’s share of the attention lately, snail mail information theft has had a recent resurgence. Thieves can find all sorts of interesting information in your utility and medical bills, insurance and financial statements, and credit offers. All the bad guys need is enough information to convince someone else

[Updated: Nov 30, 2019.] The holiday shopping season is once again upon us! And that means it’s time to update my annual gift guide. Unlike other guides, I’m not here to tell you about the hottest Black Friday deals or how to get free overnight shipping on Dec 23rd. My naughty and nice list is

(This is a guest post by Chad Warner, Internet safety enthusiast at Defending Digital.) You shouldn't know any of your passwords! You should leave this to a password manager, like LastPass. Here's how to get that set up.

I’ve been a faithful Dropbox customer for many, many years. Their service solved a very real problem for me: sharing files between multiple computers. As a software engineer (and just a generally geeky person) I have several computers. I have three at home (not including my file server or several Raspberry Pi project boxes) and

October is National Cyber-Security Awareness Month. So now would be a great time to get off your butt and implement some of the security tips that I’ve recommended over the years! If you think you’re in pretty good shape, then maybe this would be a good time to help your loved ones get secure. Here

A recent study found that most people aren’t taking the time to properly wipe data off their hard drives before they resell them. The researchers bought 200 used hard drives and found that a whopping 59% of the drives still had data that was accessible, including “employment and payroll records, family and holiday photos (along

[UPDATE: This is currently free while in beta, but in the future may not be.] This will be a simple one: Mozilla (maker of Firefox) is trialing a new, free VPN for its browser and you should use it. It’s called Firefox Private Network. It’s a free plugin for Firefox (which is the browser you