iPhone Charging Best Practices

I was at a holiday party this past weekend and, for reasons I cannot explain, iPhone battery life became the discussion topic. A slightly overserved holiday reveler was demonstrating how you can extend the battery life of your iPhone by setting the maximum charge to 80% instead of choosing "Optimized Battery Charging" in the Battery Health & Charging section of your settings. I was asked to confirm the veracity of the claim. The answer: "Yes… but…" Continue Reading →

Four New AI Resource & Case Study Pages

When you're doing a text-to-image prompt for a generative AI model like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, I'm sure you can conjure a Matisse-like image in your mindseye to help you inspire the model to create avant-garde or fauvistic images for your project. Continue Reading →

World Backup Day & Techstream

Tomorrow is April Fools' Day, so today (for obvious reasons) is World Backup Day. If you get April Fooled into clicking something you shouldn't have (because it was funny or looked safe) and your computer is transformed into a paperweight, at least your data will be safe. As I always say, "Back up early and often." Continue Reading →

University Nukes Data, Gets Schooled

Want a real education? Back up your own data. That's the lesson students and faculty at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington learned last week when the IT staff did some routine maintenance. The result: a factory reset of every PC connected to its network and a university of PCs with empty desktop folders and C: drives. Oops! Continue Reading →

Robocalls are back to pre-pandemic levels

There's a reason you're getting more robocalls now: due to the pandemic, many international call centers were shut down. At the same time, the government did its best to reduce COVID-19-related phone scams. All that's over now. Robocall volume is back to pre-pandemic levels, and about 60 percent of these calls are scams or unsolicited telemarketing. Continue Reading →