Please note that some of the links referenced in this work may no longer be active.
There’s an entire book full of basic tips and tricks for your electronics—220 of them, neatly organized into chapters like Phones, Tablets, Cameras, Computers, Email, Web Browsers, and so on.
But hey—this is no place to plug Pogue’s Basics: Tech.
This is, however, a perfect place to offer a bonus set of tech tips. These are general, broad-appeal tips that fit right in with this book’s larger topic: life itself.
Press #3 to rerecord your voicemail
You’re leaving a voicemail message for someone, and you mess up. Or maybe you’ve just said, “Dude—your behavior today was appalling,” and you realize that a more tactful wording might be appropriate.
Or you change your mind about leaving a message altogether.
All you have to do is press the # key on your phone.
At this point, a voice gives you three options:
• Press 1 to play your message back so you can hear it.
• Press 2 to continue recording. (In other words, the # is a great pause key; it holds the recording while you think.)
• Press 3 to erase your voicemail. You can start over again if you like, but you don’t have to.
Impressively enough, all four US cell phone carriers—Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile—treat the # keystroke exactly the same way, and offer exactly the same options when you press it.
Get all your texts when you land
Here’s a little-known fact about text messages.
Ordinarily, your cell carrier (Verizon, AT&T, or whatever) tries to deliver your incoming texts immediately after they’re sent. If your phone is unavailable—it’s off; it’s dead; it’s on a plane—the carrier will try again to send the text in five minutes.
But if your phone is still unreachable then, the carrier’s attempts to send that text slow down. It tries again after ten minutes, then after 30, then an hour. So if you fly across the country, you might have a bunch of backed-up text messages that haven’t reached your phone yet, and they may not start to pour in until an hour after you’ve landed.
If only there were some way to tell the carrier: “I’m on the ground, and my phone is online again! Please send my backed-up messages—and resume sending new ones immediately!”
There is: Just send yourself a text message.
That gesture forces your phone to connect to your carrier, thereby letting it know that you’re alive and online. Your pending messages come flooding in, and you’ll get any new messages instantly.
(This technique applies only to standard SMS text messages—not to messages that come from the Internet, such as iMessages on an iPhone or BBM on a BlackBerry.)
Tie a knot in the left earbud
Tie a little knot in your left earbud cord.
From now on, when you put them on, you don’t have to fire up the electron microscope to hunt for the tiny L and R designations on the buds. You know by looking, or even by touching. Short, sweet, and super useful.
Handy to know: You can dial 911 on any cell phone. Even one that’s password-protected. Even one that’s been deactivated and has no cellular plan. Even if you’re in an area that doesn’t seem to have cellular service!
On an iPhone, for example, there’s an Emergency button right on the screen where you’re supposed to enter your password. So even if it’s someone else’s locked phone, you can still make that call.
If you have some technophobic relatives who claim they don’t need a cell phone, you could equip them with an old, out-of-service one to keep in the glove compartment. Without paying a cent, they’ll always have a way of calling for help. (They’ll have to keep it charged, of course.)
Oh—and in Europe, they don’t have 911. They have 112.
Make your phone notice the LTE network
Over the years, the cell phone carriers have steadily upgraded their networks to give your phone faster Internet speed. There were the slow, stately 1xRTT and EDGE networks—remember those? Good times. Then came 3G. Then 4G. And then the best possible cellular speed (so far), called LTE. Seeing “LTE” at the top of your phone is pure happiness. It means decent Internet speed.
Sometimes, though, your phone says “3G” up there—or, worse, the ° symbol that denotes the old 1xRTT network. Or, worst of all, “No Service.”
Well, if you’re a farmer in Montana, that’s just life. But if you live in a more populated area, the appearance of those indicators is generally temporary. It shouldn’t take much additional driving or train-riding before the LTE reappears.
Except that sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes your phone gets stuck in the slower mode—it still says 3G (and gives you 3G speed) even when you know for sure you’re in an LTE area, for example. Or it says “No Service” and you know there is service.
The solution is to whack it in the head—metaphorically. Turning the phone off and then on again works, but it’s faster to turn Airplane Mode on and off again. When it comes to, the phone notices the correct network type and gives you your speed back.
The free cell phone service for your tween
These days, kids are asking to have cell phones at younger and younger ages. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to buy Pampers with Integrated Smartphone Holsters.
But a cell phone is expensive. Not just the phone but the service. It’s hundreds of dollars a year for the privilege of calling or texting your little one. Worse, here’s a news flash: Kids don’t call anymore at all.
What they want to do is send texts, watch videos, play music, take pictures, surf the Web, and run apps. And they can do all of that with an iPod Touch.
An iPod Touch is an iPhone without the monthly bill. It does everything an iPhone does except connect to the cellular network. It gets online only when in a WiFi hotspot.
But on the flip side, owning an iPod Touch means no monthly fee, no selling your soul to Verizon or AT&T. The iPod Touch does 90 percent of what a modern smartphone does—without costing a penny for the service. Chances are very good that your kid will be perfectly happy with this pseudo-cell phone, at least until, say, ninth grade. Your savings: About $900 a year.
Label your power cords
You know that rat’s nest of cables and cords that snake down from your TV or computer into a power strip or multi-plug outlet?
And you know how frustrating it is to figure out which plug goes to which device? You have to slide your fingers from the plug, up the cord, and through the tangle until you trace the cord back to its origin.
That’s why, on the next free Saturday afternoon you get, you should label them. Those square plastic tabs that hold bread wrappers shut work well. So do clothespins, or even tape folded back on itself.
In each case, the main idea is to label those tabs, pins, or tapes, so that from now on, when you’re down on the floor among the dust bunnies, you’ll know what you’re unplugging.
Turn off the “soap opera effect”
There you are, beaming proudly at your beautiful new 95-inch HD television (or the even more modern Ultra HD television). You gather the family round, you hit the On button, call up a movie—and stare, horrified. Something’s weird and wrong with the picture. It looks like video, like it was shot with a camcorder. It looks like a soap opera.
Welcome to the “soap opera effect.” Almost all new TV sets exhibit it. It makes The Godfather look like it was shot on the set of General Hospital.
The TV companies think they’re doing you a favor. This electronic processing is supposed to eliminate the blurring of objects that move quickly across the screen. It does that by automatically generating new frames of video between the ones of the original film. That’s what makes the result look so bizarrely, unnaturally crispy.
If you burrow into your TV set’s menus, you won’t find anything to turn off called Soap Opera Effect—because that’s not what it’s called. Its name varies by manufacturer, but it usually includes the word Motion.
On Samsung TVs, it’s Auto Motion Plus. On LG sets, it’s called TruMotion. On Sony models, it’s MotionFlow.
In any case, that’s the setting to turn off to get your fluid cinematic look back again.
Bringing an inkjet cartridge back from the dead
You already know that inkjet ink is among the most expensive liquids you can buy—far more expensive per gallon than ink, champagne, or perfume. So it must make you crazy when your computer reports that your ink cartridge is empty when you’re right in the middle of printing something—especially when you can see that there’s still ink in there!
Often, you’re not really out of ink. Instead, dried ink has clogged the cartridge’s nozzle. The quick fix: Remove the ink cartridge and heat it up with a hair dryer for a couple of minutes.
As it warms, the thickened ink flows more easily through the tiny cartridge holes. If you now reinstall the reanimated cartridge, you can enjoy a few more pages’ worth of printing. Maybe celebrate by chugging a glass of Chanel No. 5.
How to tell if your USB connector is upside-down
USB, man. That Universal Serial Bus connector has become—universal. Every computer built in the past 15 years has USB jacks. Into them, you can plug printers, scanners, cameras, phones, tablets, speakers, and on and on.
USB can be frustrating, though, because you can plug the jack in only one way, and there’s no obvious, universal way to tell which side is up.
Many USB jacks display the forked USB logo on one side of the plastic—the top side. But not all of them.
Here, at last, is the universal solution to that problem: Only one side of the metal USB connector itself has a line going down the middle. That’s the bottom.
Every time.
In early 2015, the world began its long, slow introduction to one of the best cables ever designed: USB Type C.
It’s a brand-new kind of connector, years in the making, concocted by a consortium of Google, Apple, and others.
USB-C is full of advantages that leave older cable designs in the dust:
• It’s tiny, so it can be built into phones or tablets. It’s the same size as micro USB.
• It does everything. It’s a power-cord jack, and a video-output jack for projectors or second monitors, and a traditional data-transfer jack like regular USB. With the right adapter, it can even do all of that simultaneously.
• Both ways are right-side up. You never fuss with which way to plug it in.
• Both ends are the same. You don’t even have to figure out which end to use.
And here’s the biggest deal of all—are you sitting down?
• They’re all interchangeable. You can use a Samsung phone charger on an Apple laptop, or a Dell laptop charger on a Google Chromebook. We have entered the era of universal power chargers, thanks to their delightful ability to adjust the voltage intelligently when plugged in.
In the short term, of course, it’s going to be a mess. No existing USB devices will fit into USB-C jacks without adapters, and no USB-C cables will fit into old USB jacks without adapters. And the adapters aren’t cheap, at least at first.
But to be alive in an age where there’s only one, single, universal power cord across every gadget in the land … what could be sweeter than that?
The professional photographer’s light box behind your napkin
Nice restaurants ought to be great places for taking pictures. After all, you and your date have probably put some effort into sprucing up for the evening, and the setting is lovely.
In fact, though, it’s probably dark. So to take a picture with your phone, you have two choices: (a) Allow your phone’s flash to fire, which bleaches out (and blinds) your subject and turns the background into a black cave or (b) turn off the phone’s flash, so you get darkness, grain, and blur.
Fortunately, there’s a third option: Use a second smartphone for illumination. Turn on its flashlight mode, but cover it with a napkin (cloth or folded paper). The napkin softens and diffuses the harshness of the flash. You might be surprised at how even, soft, and flattering the resulting portrait turns out.
Works great for shooting video with your phone, too.
Instant email address-filling
In this life, you have to enter certain difficult-to-type blobs of text over and over and over—like your email address. Every form, every sign-up, every log-in—there you go, fumbling for symbols like the @ sign, typing that same doggone text over and over.
On a phone, typing your email address and phone number are especially frustrating, since you’re typing on glass, on keys the size of carbon atoms.
Here’s a better idea: Let your phone type them in for you.
Use its automatic typing-shortcut feature, which lets you set up trigger phrases (like “tyvm”) to type out longer ones (like “Thank you very much!”).
• Your personal email address. Use the @@ symbol as the trigger, or the first three letters of your address.
• Your work email. Use @@@ as the trigger, or the first three letters.
• Your cell phone number. Use two colons as the trigger (::).
• Your work number. Three colons (:::).
On an iPhone or iPad, here’s how you set this up. Open Settings. Tap General, then Keyboard, then Shortcuts. Tap the + button. On the next screen, type the expanded text into the Phrase box. In the Shortcut box, type the abbreviation you want to trigger the phrase.
On Android, open Settings. Tap Language & Input. Tap Google Keyboard, then “Text correction,” then “Personal dictionary,” then English. Finally, tap the + button at top right. Enter your expanded phrase (“Type a word”) and the abbreviation (“Optional shortcut”).
(Android phones and versions vary. On some Android editions, you find the + button by opening Settings, then Language & Input, then Personal Dictionary.)
From now on, whenever you type your abbreviation, the phone proposes replacing it with your substituted text—like your email address or phone number.
It’s about time the phone started jumping through hoops for you.
How to save an unbelievable amount on printouts
Most people who print documents at home have an inkjet printer. It can print text, graphics, and photos, quickly and easily.
Not, however, cheaply.
You know the old saying “Give away the razors, sell the blades”? Nobody’s taken that to heart more than the inkjet-printer industry. You can buy a new inkjet printer for $30—but oh, boy, the ink! You think $4 a gallon is a lot for gas? A 16-milliliter black inkjet cartridge costs $18 online—which comes to $4,300 a gallon! The ink cartridges can cost hundreds of dollars a year.
Two words: laser printer.
A black-and-white laser printer is cheap ($80) and compact. It prints fast, printouts are razor sharp, and the printer lasts for years. Best of all, the toner (the black “ink” powder) is cheap and lasts a long time. It doesn’t dry out, as inkjet cartridges do.
A cheap laser printer isn’t any good for printing photos, of course. But for anything that can be represented by black and shades of gray, a laser printer makes a fantastic primary printer.
YouTube’s universal Pause key
You probably know that you can tap the space bar to pause a YouTube video that’s playing. (Don’t you?)
Except that sometimes, the space bar scrolls the YouTube page instead!
It all has to do with what YouTube thinks is currently “selected”—the video, or the page. And there’s no immediate way to tell which is selected.
Fortunately, you can ignore all of that confusion. Just learn to press the letter K key on your keyboard to pause the video. It works all the time, even when the space bar does not, whether the video is selected or not.
The Internet’s best tip for laptop luggers
When you come home with your laptop, you may enjoy turning it into a more fully blown desktop workstation—by connecting a mouse, keyboard, external monitor, Ethernet cable, nice speakers, and so on.
But where are those cables lying when you’re out of the house? In a seething mass, that’s where.
Here’s a better idea: Thread each one through the loops of a binder clip, like this:
They snap onto the edge of your desk or table, and hold the ends of your cables where they’re easy to grab.
The proofreading miracle of a different font
As anyone who writes or publishes can tell you, attaining a perfect proofread—ferreting out every typo, missing word, and so on—is staggeringly difficult. You can read over something six times, swear it’s perfect—and then show it to someone else, who spots a typo instantly. Somehow, your brain gets lulled into blindness.
If you don’t have the luxury of four beta readers—or even if you do—here’s a miraculous trick that will make “blind spot” typos pop out: Change the font.
That’s right. A different typeface in your word processor gives the text a different layout, with different line wraps, making it look fresh. The writing no longer looks like yours, making it easier to spot errors.
For the same reason, choosing an unfamiliar font is a great idea when you’re trying to edit or shorten your paper. You’re less attached to your writing, less used to its look, and more able to see something new as you read it.
Music to your pillow
If you have a recent iPhone, it came with Apple’s latest earbuds, called EarPods. They come in a little plastic case.
Don’t throw that case away, though—it makes a perfect pillow speaker!
When you lay the EarPods into place, that case holds their sound holes pointed upward, and keeps their cables straight and untangled. You can put the entire thing inside your pillow, connected to your phone on the bedside table, and fall asleep to music that won’t bother your sleeping partner. A delightful bonus: You don’t risk getting strangled by your earbud cords.
And how do you make the iPhone play you to sleep? Open the Clock app. Tap Timer. Tell the timer how long you want your sleepytime music to play. Tap “When Timer Ends,” scroll all the way to the bottom, and tap “Stop Playing.” Now start the music, turn the screen off, and put the phone on your bedside table. That’s it: After the allotted time, the iPhone stops playing—and both of you can sleep in peace.
Get your month’s news
Have you been out of the country, out of sorts, or out of your head for a few weeks? Need a quick refresher on all the major world news you’ve missed?
Here’s a surprising news-recap service you probably don’t know about: wikipedia.org, the Internet’s encyclopedia.
Do a search for January 2016 (or whatever the month and year were). Presto: a tidy, nonpartisan, Wikipedia-style summary of all the headlines you’ve missed.
That trick isn’t just for current events. You can type in old month/year combinations, too, just to get a flavor of what on earth was happening in, say, June 1973.
Tech specs that make absolutely no difference
Electronics companies love to bombard you with numbers. Megapixels, gigahertz, terabytes—the more the better, right?
Well, one thing’s for sure: The more, the pricier. A lot of these specs make absolutely no difference. You have enough to worry about when you buy gadgets—price, size, color, online reviews—without complicating your decision by measurements that won’t affect you. For example:
• Megapixels. When you’re buying a camera, you’ll be asked to consider how many megapixels a camera takes. It’s snake oil—ignore it.
That measurement indicates how many millions of pixels (colored dots) make up each photo. It doesn’t say anything about how good the photo is; if you want a gauge of that, comparison shop by the camera’s sensor size or lens quality.
Now, in 1997, when it was a big deal for a camera to take 2 megapixel photos, you had to worry that it wouldn’t be enough for a big printout. But today, even phones take photos with 5 megapixels or more. You don’t need to worry about resolution anymore.
• Phone-screen resolution. Apple, Samsung, and the other phonemakers battle one another over how many dots per inch are in their phone screens. Truth is, the screens on the world’s iPhones and Galaxy phones surpassed the human eye’s ability to discern individual pixels long ago. You couldn’t tell the difference if you tried.
• Processor speed. When you’re buying a laptop, it’s not worth paying hundreds of dollars extra if it makes the difference between a 1.7 gigahertz Intel i5 chip (for example) and the 1.5 gigahertz model of the same chip. You will not see or feel any difference.
• Cable plating. Few scams are as widespread or common as the expensive-cable scheme. The industry wants you to believe that you’ll get better sound from gold-plated audio cables, or better picture from $50 HDMI cables to your TV.
The plating of the audio cables makes no difference to the sound. (Why would it? The cable inside is still copper.) And cables such as HDMI and optical audio cables conduct their signals as streams of digital information. In other words, they either work 100 percent or not at all. The picture delivered by a $50 HDMI cable from the TV store is identical to the one from an $8 HDMI cable you found on Amazon.
The free music “speaker” in your cabinet right now
Your phone may play music. But it is not exactly a tower of power. The force of its thundering bass won’t quite knock your chair over.
That’s why people buy those little rechargeable Bluetooth speakers by the shipload—to make their phones’ music playback audible from farther away than arm’s length.
But in a pinch, there’s an emergency amplifier that gets you partway there: a cup. Or a mug.
Insert your phone into it, speaker first, and marvel at the sudden boost in volume, bass, and richness that your music gains from its new little echo chamber.
How to find the owner of a lost phone
So some poor soul left his iPhone behind. Or someone set her Samsung Galaxy down and forgot about it.
And here you come, the Good Samaritan. The phone is protected by a password. How can you figure out whose phone it is?
If it’s an iPhone, you can use Siri, the voice-activated assistant. While pressing the Home button, say, “Whose phone is this?” or “Who owns this phone?” Presto: The owner’s name, address, and phone number appears. (Usually. It’s conceivable that the person never put in his own information.)
This works on an iPad, too.
You might also try saying, “Email me” and then dictate a note; the phone’s owner will get the email on his computer. You can also try saying, “Call Mom” or “Text Mom.” If the iPhone knows who the owner’s mom is, you’re now well on your way to returning the phone.
If the phone you found is not an iPhone, look at the top of the screen, or the logo on the phone, to figure out which carrier issued it (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, or whatever). If you drop the phone off at one of that carrier’s phone stores, they’ll see to it that the phone and its owner are soon reunited.
Too much work? If you can make a call with the phone, press the TALK button to redial the last number called. You’ll wind up calling someone who knows the phone’s owner, and you can get the ball rolling.
The secret keyboard shortcuts of Netflix
Lots of people watch TV shows on Netflix. And lots of people treat Netflix as though it is a TV—it plays, you watch.
But Netflix is a Web site, not a TV. It’s interactive. And by tapping special keys on your computer keyboard, you can control the playback in some useful ways. For example:
• Tap the space bar to play or pause. You probably knew that one.
• Press the letter F to make the video fill your entire screen. (Press the Esc key to shrink the video down again, so you can see your menus.)
• Press the up or down arrow keys to make the sound louder or softer.
• Press the left or right arrow keys to skip back or forward 10 seconds.
Too bad we can’t do that with actual TV …
Learn something new 10 times a day
When you open your Web browser, what do you see?
Is it some home page chosen by the maker of your computer, like Apple.com or Yahoo.com? Is it the Google search page? Is it a blank page?
What you see when you first open up your browser is, of course, entirely up to you; you set this up in your browser’s settings (read on). But that’s not the tip.
The tip here is that instead of opening the same page every time, you can learn something. You can set your home page to display a random article from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia; or a word of the day; or a famous quotation. Why not treat yourself to a juicy brain stimulation every time you start Web surfing?
First, here’s how to change your start-up page:
• Safari. From the Safari menu, choose Preferences. Click General. Paste the Web page’s address into the Homepage box. Close the Preferences window.
• Chrome. Open Preferences. Where it says “On startup,” choose “Open a specific page or set of pages,” and click “Set pages.” Paste the page’s address, and then click OK.
• Firefox. Click the 
icon (top right); click Preferences, then click General. Paste the page’s address into the Home Page box. (Make sure the pop-up menu just above it says, “Show my home page.”) Close the Preferences window.
• Internet Explorer (in Windows 8). With your mouse, point to the lower-right corner of the screen, move the pointer upward, and click Settings. Click Options, then Customize, then paste your desired page’s address; hit Add.
• Microsoft Edge (Windows 10). Click the … symbol at top right; choose Settings. Where it says “Open with,” choose “A specific page or pages.” Choose Custom; paste the page’s address into the “Enter a web address” box.
So what would make a good start-up page? Here are some suggestions:
• A word of the day. For example, http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/
• A quotation of the day. Example: www.quotationspage.com/mqotd.xhtmll
• A random featured Wikipedia page. Here’s the link: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~dapete/random/enwiki-featured.php
When the first Macintosh computer appeared, in 1984, offering a choice of typefaces to the masses for the first time, people went nuts using fonts. Every document and flyer looked like a ransom note.
You can’t blame them, really. Graphic design isn’t a standard course in school. How is anyone supposed to learn the rules for using fonts so that they look good—both the fonts and the people?
By absorbing the following pointers:
• Know the two font types. There are two kinds of fonts: serif, whose letters have little “feet,” and sans serif, whose don’t. See here:
Serif fonts are generally considered more readable for big blocks of text, which is why most books and newspapers use them. Sans serif fonts are great for accompanying smaller bits of text, like headlines and captions.
• Limit yourself. Consider limiting yourself to two font families per document, maximum—maybe a serif font for the body, a sans serif font for headlines. Within each family, you’re allowed to use all the variations (bold, italic, regular, etc.). But if you mix more than two font families, your flyer or ad starts to look like a ransom note again.
• Beware Comic Sans. Comic Sans is a cute font that looks a little like handwriting. And it is cute.
It’s also insanely overused, to the point of being a ridiculed cliché. Consider using a different font, especially if the document is in any way meant to be taken seriously.
• One space after a period. Yes, yes, we know—they taught you two spaces when you learned to type. But that’s because you (or your teacher) learned to type on a typewriter, and pressing the space bar didn’t leave enough of a gap. They’ve fixed that now; in any of today’s modern computer fonts, the extra space is built in when you press the space bar. One space, please.
Mistyped words: The Basics
Good news: Hurray! Nobody needs to know how to spell anymore! Your computer, phone, and tablet auto-correct your misspellings automatically.
Bad news: Your computer, phone, and tablet still don’t know which word you meant. So when you type the wrong word, auto-correct can’t do anything to help you.
Sometimes, correctness matters—when you’re applying for a job, a school, or a grant, for example. Or when you’re writing to somebody whose opinion counts, such as a prospective date or boss. Here, then, for your reference, are the most common switched-out words—and how to get them straight.
• it’s, its. Use it’s only when you mean it is or it has. “It’s simple!”
When something belongs to something else, use its. “Press its button!”
• you’re, your. Use you’re only when you mean you are. “You’re crazy!”
When something belongs to the other person, use your. “That’s your problem!”
• loose, lose. Use loose when something’s not tied securely. “Loose change.”
When you lose something, you can’t find it. How to remember: The word has lost one of its o’s.
• lay, lie. Use lay when you’re doing it to something else. “Lay your coat on the bed.” You know that a chicken lays an egg, right? Same idea.
Use lie when you’re doing it to yourself. “I gotta lie down.”
This one’s especially tricky because if it happened in the past, lie becomes lay: “Yesterday, I lay down.”
And lay becomes laid: “The chicken laid an egg.”
Confusing? You betcha. Fortunately, you don’t have to remember all that. When all else fails, just remember this: If in doubt, use lie. Why? Because nobody ever mistakenly says lie when they mean lay (“Lie your coat on the bed” or “Yesterday, I lie down”). The mistake always goes the other direction. So if in doubt, use lie.
• e.g., i.e. These are both abbreviations for Latin phrases, so it’s easy to get them mixed up.
Use e.g. when you mean “for example”: “I like junk food—e.g., Doritos and Pringles.” (How to remember: “For eg-zample.”)
Use i.e. when you mean “in other words”: “He ate Doritos and Pringles—i.e., junk food.” (How to remember: “in other words.”)
How word prediction can save you time and typing
On both Android phones and iPhones (iOS 8 and later), there’s a strip just above the keyboard. As you type a sentence, the phone predicts which word you might type next. Actually, it predicts which three words you’re most likely to type next, and presents them to you on buttons above the keyboard.
So suppose you begin the sentence by typing, “I really.” At this point, the three suggestion buttons might say want, don’t, and like. You can tap one of those buttons to insert the word—and save yourself five fussy keystrokes.
But what if those guesses are wrong? What if you actually want to type, “I really have no idea …”?
Then just start typing have. The instant you type the h, the three suggestions might change to h, have, and hope. (One of the three buttons always shows whatever nonword you’ve typed so far, just in case that’s what you really intend. To place it into your text, you can tap that button, the space bar, or some punctuation key.)
In other words, as you type along, those suggestions are always changing, always predicting, always using what you’ve typed so far to imagine what you’re going to type next. Sometimes, it correctly guesses four or five words in sequence, which can make you grin in triumph.
The iPhone sometimes even offers several words on a single button, such as up to or in the. And if someone texts you a question ending in a choice (“Do you want aisle, window, or middle?”), the buttons offer those choices. Before you’ve even typed a single letter, the choices say aisle, window, and middle.
Still, if this feature is getting on your nerves, you can hide it or turn it off.
• iPhone Swipe down on the button bar to hide it; you’ll see it collapse into a horizontal white line. Swipe up on the white line to bring it back. Or, to turn it off fully, open Settings. Tap General, then Keyboard; turn off Predictive.
• Android: Open Settings, then tap Language & Input. From here, tap the name of the on-screen keyboard you use—Google Keyboard or Samsung Keyboard, for example.
If it’s Google Keyboard, then tap Text Correction, and turn off “Show correction suggestions.” If it’s Samsung Keyboard, turn off “Predictive text.”
The one-character phone password nobody can guess
Yes, you should have a password on your smartphone. You never know when you’ll one day leave it somewhere; without a password, some ne’er-do-well can pick it up and have full access to your life.
But you probably wake up your phone 75 times a day. So having to type in a traditional hard-to-guess password every time gets really old. Exasperating, actually.
This is the reason some phones come with a fingerprint reader, so that you can use your finger to unlock the phone.
But if your phone doesn’t have one, or it doesn’t work well, here’s a humble suggestion: Make up a one-character password—specifically, an accent character or funny symbol, such as; or % or §.
It takes only two taps to enter it (one tap to open the symbol keyboard layout, one to choose the symbol you want), yet nobody would ever guess it. (Remember, the password box doesn’t give the criminal any indication of how long your password is.)
When to turn off WiFi
A smartphone can get onto the Internet in two ways: over the cellular network, or in a WiFi hotspot.
Usually, WiFi is the way to go. Internet over WiFi doesn’t use up any of your precious monthly data allowance (2 gigabytes or whatever), for which you’re paying your cell phone carrier handsomely. And even if you have an unlimited-data plan, you lucky duck, WiFi connections are also usually faster than cellular ones. Plus, if you have Verizon or Sprint, a WiFi connection means that you can use the Internet, or apps, while you’re on a phone call.
Sometimes, though, you’ll notice that despite having a good, strong WiFi signal, your phone is struggling to get online. Maybe it has taken 90 seconds to try to open a Web page or send an email or a message. In any case, you get frustrated.
In those situations, your phone may be having trouble getting onto the WiFi network. Yes, it may show a strong signal, but that WiFi hotspot may be overloaded, frozen, protected, or otherwise not working right.
Learn to recognize those situations before you’ve wasted a lot of time sitting there baffled. When this happens, turn off WiFi. Your phone will be forced to use its cellular connection, immediately, and you’ll discover that you can suddenly get online as usual.
Here’s how you turn off WiFi:
• iPhone. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to open the Control Center. Tap 
to turn it off.
• Android. Swipe down from the top of the screen to open the Quick Settings bar. Tap to turn it off. (On the latest version of Android, called Lollipop, swipe down from the top twice to see this bar.)
The “Do Not Call” list—and the “Do not send me credit applications” list
You may have heard of the National Do Not Call Registry, which “gives you a choice about whether to receive telemarketing calls at home.” Or on your cell phone, by the way.
To sign up for this free Federal Trade Commission service, go to www.donotcall.gov. Click “Register a Phone Number,” and enter your phone and cell phone numbers. (Or call 888-382-1222 from the phone you want to list.)
From now on, telemarketers are not allowed to call and bug you on those numbers. Great, right? Never say the government never did anything for you.
(And if some lowlife telemarketer ignores the rule and calls you anyway, the same site offers a button that lets you report him.)
But wait, there’s more. There’s also an FTC list that lets you opt out of the unsolicited “preapproved” credit-card and insurance applications that arrive weekly in your mailbox, as the Brazilian rain forest slowly shrinks away to nothing.
To get onto this list, visit www.optoutprescreen.com, a site run by the four big credit-reporting companies (Equifax, Experian, Innovis, TransUnion). You’ll be asked for some deeply personal information—name, birth date, Social Security number—to confirm that it’s really you. (This is safe to provide.)
If you click Confirm, your name will be removed from those mailing lists for five years. If you also print and mail the form in front of you, they’ll take you off those lists forever. (If you prefer to do all of this by phone, call 888-567-8688, which works out to 888-5OPTOUT.)
If you feel that you’re getting quite enough junk mail in your physical mailbox, there’s something you can do about that, too.
DMAChoice is the “stop sending me junk mail” service created by the Direct Marketing Association, the trade group of junk-mailers. They’ve created an opt-out service in sheer terror that somebody might pass a law requiring them to stop the junk mail.
To sign up, go to https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php. Fill out the form, and enjoy the small reduction in the amount of junk mail the post office brings you.
The “Do Not Email” list
That same outfit, the Direct Marketing Association, also maintains an Email opt-out service. It’s a set of email addresses that responsible spammers agree to remove from their lists. (“Responsible spammers.” Insert your own joke here.)
To add your email address to it, go to https://www.dmachoice.org/. Click “Email Opt Out Service.” Fill in up to three email addresses.
Now, a word of caution: All you’ve done is add your name to something called the Email Preference Service—and junk-mailers aren’t required to obey it. “You will continue to receive mail from companies with which you do business and from charitable or commercial organizations that do not choose to use eMPS,” the Web site says. “In addition, you may continue to receive email from many local merchants, professional and alumni associations and political candidates.”
Great.
(A much, much better approach to avoiding email spam is to avoid letting your email address fall into the wrong hands in the first place. Start fresh with a new email address that you use exclusively for email communication, and never type it into a Web site, ever. Not to confirm a subscription, not to receive special discounts, never. Use a different email address for Web sites. That inbox will fill up with junk, but you won’t care.)
What the Web-site suffixes mean
You may have noticed that most Web addresses seem to end with .com. There’s Google.com, Amazon.com, Apple.com, Microsoft.com, and on and on.
But not all of them. You might also run across suffixes like .gov, .org, .edu, and so on. Knowing what they mean can be very useful, both in figuring out whose address it is and in guessing some organization’s address without having to look it up.
Here’s the rundown:
| Suffix | Stands for | Examples |
| .gov | U.S. government | whitehouse.gov |
| .org | nonprofit organization | pbs.org |
| .edu | schools (usually colleges) | yale.edu |
| .mil | U.S. military | army.mil |
You also might see .net, .biz, and .info a lot; those can be pretty much any kind of outfit. They’re often used by companies who really wanted .com, but that was taken. For example, if you start a lemonade stand in Iowa but IowaLemonadeStand.com is taken, you could make your Web site IowaLemonadeStand.net.
There are hundreds of country-code suffixes, too, like these:
| Suffix | Stands for | Examples |
| .ca | Canada | Amazon.ca |
| .jp | Japan | Google.jp |
| .de | Germany (Deutschland) | Apple.de |
| .eu | European Union | Microsoft.eu |
Truth is, almost anyone can use almost any suffix these days. You may run across .tv, .city, .eat, .global, and so on. That explosion of possibilities sometimes makes it harder to guess the address of some organization—but it will always be safe to guess that, for example, NASA’s site is nasa.gov and Harvard’s is harvard.edu.
Online scams: The Basics
The Internet is a glorious invention. It brings people together, saves us time and money, gives the downtrodden a voice.
It’s also a cesspool of haters, scammers, and lowlifes.
Sooner or later, you’ll receive one of these messages by email. They’re very common—because, unfortunately, incredibly, some people fall for them every time. Don’t be one of them.
• The phishing scam. You get an email from your bank (or Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, Apple) saying that there’s a problem with your account. You’re encouraged to click the link to fix the problem—“or else your account will be suspended!”
If you do click the link, you go to a fake version of the bank’s Web site. If you then “log in,” you’re inadvertently providing your name and password to the Eastern European teenagers who are fishing for your login information, so they can steal your identity and make your life miserable.
If you have any concern that the message could be true, do not click the link in the email. Instead, open your Web browser and type in the company’s address yourself (www.citibank.com or whatever). You’ll discover, of course, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your account.
• The mugged-neighbor scam. “Things got out of control on my trip to London,” says an email from one of your friends. “I was mugged, all my belongings including cell phone and credit card were all stolen at gunpoint. I need your help flying back home and paying my hotel bills!”
This one’s especially confusing because the message comes from someone you know.
Needless to say, your friend wasn’t actually in London and hasn’t been mugged. The bad guys have planted software on your friend’s computer that sent this same sob-story email to everyone in his address book.
• The Nigerian prince scam. “I am Mr. Paul Agabi,” goes this email. “I am the personal attorney to Mr. Charles Wilson, a national of your country, who used to work with Chevron Oil Company in Nigeria, herein after shall be referred to as my client. On the 21st of April, my client, his wife and their only child were involved in a car accident. All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost there lives.”
Turns out this rich dead guy left behind millions of dollars—and your correspondent wants you to have it!
If you wind up taking the bait and corresponding with this person, things will go well briefly, and you’ll get very excited. But then a funny thing happens: Before you get your millions from Nigeria, you’ll be asked to send some money to cover legal fees, bribes to officials, taxes, and other expenses. You will never get any money. You will be asked to send more, more, more money until you come to your senses and realize you’ve been bilked.
According to the FBI, this decades-old con still costs gullible Americans millions of dollars every year.
• The preapproved credit card or loan. Incredible! Here you are, being offered a pre-approved Visa card or loan with an impressively high credit limit. If your current financial situation isn’t great right now, such an offer must sound too good to be true.
It is. You’ll send in the up-front “annual fee”—and you’ll never hear from them again. There never was a credit card or loan.
(Similar cons: “You’ve won a lottery!” “You’ve landed a great job!” “You’re invited to a great investment!”)
• The Craigslist scam. You’re trying to sell something on Craigslist, the free classified-ads site—a bicycle for $300, let’s say. You get an immediate offer: “Send me your address, and I will mail you check right away for $1,500 to cover the bike and shipping to me in Germany. Deposit the check and then send $450 by Western Union to my shipping company.”
Ka-ching! And sure enough, you get a money order or certified check in the mail. Fantastic!
The only problem is, it’s a forgery. You’ll deposit it, send this guy $450 of your real money—and a couple of days later, your bank will let you know that the money order was a fake. Now you’ve lost your bike and $450.
The clues that you’re being targeted: (a) The offer is for more than you’re asking; (b) you’re supposed to send your item to another country; (c) you’re asked to use the other guy’s shipping company.