At Home with Tech

Do you sometimes get spooked by your tech’s unexpected glitches? Here are a few of the ways I chase away the unwanted ghosts in my gear.

A good day is when all of your tech behaves and operates properly. While it’s sometimes fun to get a little scared during the Halloween season, that feeling should never kick in, simply because your gear starts glitching out on you.

Here are my 9 tricks to help your tech treat you right.

#1
Remove the Pocket Lint from your Smartphone’s Port
Is your smartphone misbehaving and not charging when you plug it in? Or do you have to wiggle the connection until the juice starts flowing? The culprit is likely a fuzzy pocket-lint mass that’s collected inside the phone’s port. Here’s the fix.

#2
Adjust your Camera’s Internal Clock
If maintaining the chronological sequence of your vacation photos is important, and you’re using a second camera on top of your smartphone’s camera, both clocks had better be synced. Otherwise your vacation photos will end up being displayed out of order.

#3
Turn off Portrait Orientation Lock on your iPhone
If you’re trying to watch a video, and your iPhone won’t play it full screen when you rotate it horizontally, the problem is likely the Portrait Orientation Lock. Here’s how to turn it off.

#4
Delete Downloaded Podcasts You’ve Already Listened to
Is your smartphone almost out of storage? Of course it is. Here’s one big way I like to free up badly-needed memory on my iPhone.

#5
Back Up All of your iPad’s Data
Last year, I lost a lot of my son’s photos and videos on our family iPad when we took it to an Apple Store for maintenance. I was devastated by my rookie mistake of not setting up the iPad’s iCloud backup properly.

My son was annoyed, but he quickly moved on and simply took more photos. (And I’m still writing about it.)

#6
Stop your Email Program from Suggesting Old Addresses
Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody had one email address assigned at birth, and that was it for life? How simple would that be? Then, you could easily keep track of all your contacts. No more old email addresses that don’t work.

Until that happens, here’s an easy way to clear out old email addresses from ‘Auto-Complete.’

#7
Do your Software Updates
Keeping all of your digital gear current with software updates is an endless process that requires a fair amount of effort and organization. And following an auto-update strategy can sometimes lead to updates that aren’t ready for prime time. I think it’s best to have your tech remind you about the updates, and then you can manually install them.

#8
Reorganize the Apps on your Smartphone
If you’ve been having difficulty finding certain apps on your smartphone or they’re not where you thought you left them, it’s time to take a few minutes and do a little reorganizing. That can include placing some of your apps into topic folders and perhaps pruning others you haven’t used for a while. (You can always reload them!)

Losing a few long-forgotten apps will also free up memory on your device.

#9
Make Sure You have Enough Wi-Fi Bandwidth at Home
When you’re presenting during a Zoom meeting from your home office, the last thing you want is for someone to interrupt and report that you’ve frozen up. While there’s no bulletproof way to prevent that, you can certainly upgrade your internet plan to improve your odds.

Going old-school and hardwiring your computer to your router may also result in faster streaming speeds.

Boo!
Hopefully these tricks will help prevent your tech from acting naughty and spooking you out!