Getting Organized in the New Year

I know a lot of folks who have made resolutions to get organized this year and one of the things they're taking a good look at is the amount of email on their phones.  Some have hundreds or even thousands of messages sitting there eating up storage and making finding anything a real chore. So, if you're in the same boat, using an iPhone, and want to dump all those messages I'll show you how to delete them all in one process without having ...

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iOS 11's Annoying I Issue

Some folks are having a problem when they type an 'I' on their iPhone or iPad.  they,re getting an A with a question mark symbol [?] next to it.  This is a problem in iOS11 that oddly only affects some users. Apple has released update 11.1.1 that is supposed to fix the problem.  If you haven't updated yet or need to hold off updating, there is a work-around.  Go to: Settings      General       ...

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Is Alexa Spying on Me?

Well, here we are a good ways past Christmas.  Chances are most everyone you know found some kind of tech toy under their trees.  A lot of folks got one of Amazon's Echo, Tap, or Dot devices.  These all run on Amazon's Alexa app to do their stuff. I got a question the other day from a friend who got an Echo; Is Alexa spying on me? The question was spurred in part by a brief flurry of postings online after Arkansas police dropped ...

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Excel Files From Web Won't Open

I had an interesting issue creep up a bit ago with Excel files that were created by a web application not opening in Excel. I had a ColdFusion app that would generate reports on the fly for users.  We were using CFHEADER and CFCONTENT to deliver table formatted data as XLSX files.  It had been working fine right up until it didn't.  We hadn't made any changes to the code and checked and confirmed that there were no changes/patches ...

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Apple Mobile Devices - Patch 'em Up NOW

Apple has issued an "important security update", iOS 9.3.5, to neutralize a new piece of malware that can remotely jailbreak iPhones allowing an attacker full access to your device to read texts and email, record calls, track your location and activate your phone's camera and microphone. The update patches the three previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities that together are referred to as "Trident". To check if you're at risk look at Settings ...

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Windows God Mode

Just the other day I was helping a friend set up their computer after doing a full reinstall of the OS. Now configuring a system can get to be a bit tedious with all of the clicking necessary to get to all of the settings and tools.  So to make things a little easier, I clued him into Windows' God Mode. God mode puts all of the the things you can customize together in one place on your Windows machine, and it is available from Windows Vista ...

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GHOST Buffer Overflow Vulnerability

A critical vulnerability that impacts a majority of Linux servers has been identified.  This vulnerability, named "GHOST", affects the GNU C library (glibc) that is used by Linux applications to interface with the Linux operating system via a series of function calls. The “buffer overflow” vulnerability in a pair of glibc’s functions can allow a remote attacker to exploit this flaw to execute arbitrary code on the system.   Details ...

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