Lost your phone? We probably all have at one time or another and it borders between annoying and scary depending where you've been. If you didn't leave home then it's there somewhere. If you did then it can be a full panic. Now Amazon would like help via its Echo device. You're likely familiar with that by now, thanks to a TV ad campaign a while back, but it continues to do different things thanks to constant updates. The latest is the ability to locate your lost phone, providing it's within earshot of your location and that your ringer is turned… [Continue Reading]
If you're setting up a PC for others to use then you’ll often want to limit their actions, prevent them running other applications or tweaking system settings. Windows has many security and user settings that can help, but they're scattered across many applets and may be hard to find. FrontFace Lockdown Tool is a freeware application which gives convenient access to many of these settings, allowing you to heavily restrict your chosen account in just a few minutes. The program organizes its settings into three sections -- Startup and Shutdown, Continuous Operation, Protection and Security -- and each one has… [Continue Reading]
I wouldn’t normally be writing a column early on a Saturday but I just read that John Ellenby died and I think that’s really worth mentioning because Ellenby changed all our lives and especially mine. If you don’t recognize his name, John Ellenby was a British computer engineer who came to Xerox PARC in the 1970s to manufacture the Xerox Alto, the first graphical workstation. He left Xerox in the late 1980s to found Grid Systems, makers of the Compass -- the first full-service laptop computer. In the 1990s he founded Agilis, which made arguably the first handheld mobile phone… [Continue Reading]