Thank you for joining us at the White Bear Yacht Club for our Tech Talk!

The following information is full of slides, videos and tips to continue to help you learn about the world of technology. Enjoy!

Dark Sky is a great weather app that shows you beautiful maps along with down to the minute forecasts in regards to snow and rain. With this app, you hopefully will never get stuck in the rain again!

The Bose SoundLink Mini can be found at many locations including Best Buy and Amazon.com. With over 3,000 reviews on Amazon, this speaker has received a 5 star rating. We have never heard of any complaints from students or clients that own the Bose SoundLink Mini!

The password below, baseball68 is a common type of password we see. Unfortunately, this is a very weak password and can be easily found out by the bad guys that attack passwords. 

What should I do instead of using a password like the one just mentioned?

You can go to How Secure Is My Password's website to check the strength of your passwords. If I were to use baseball68 as a real password and it would take approximately 10 days for a computer to crack this password. 

Creating a true one sentence story is a great idea for a stronger password. Remember the first letter of the word, symbol or punctuation mark and you have now created a password that is good. Twelve characters or more is a great start to improving your passwords.

By using capital letters, punctuation and symbols we come up with the password MdFi5yo&Cimf! Looking at how secure this password really is, we come up with a computer would need 26 million years to crack our one sentence story password creation. Much more safe and secure!

This might be your password for one site but for security purposes, a different site should have another password. The following slide adds a capital letter and that would work well with a website starting with an a, such as Amazon.

Amazon Prime is a wonderful service that offers numerous benefits including:

  1. The ability to receive free 2-day shipping on a large selection of items.
  2. Access to hear over 1 million songs. 
  3. There are 500,000 ebooks that you can read.
  4. Over 40,000 TV shows and movies to watch.

Brushstroke allows you to turn your photos into paintings. With many different features you can create a masterpiece that may be shared via Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Want to print your creation? You're in luck, Brushstroke has teamed up with CanvasPop who will provide you with a photo printed on to a beautiful canvas!

DuckDuckGo is a great way to do searches on the Internet in a similar way to Google. A benefit of DuckDuckGo comes from them not tracking your searches along with not building a profile about you to sell to advertisers. We like this option for searching because we do not like our information being sold.

It's not a question of will you lose your data—it's when. Whether it's a catastrophic event, such as an earthquake, fire, flood, or a mad panda that destroys your computer, or the more common virus, hard-drive crash, laptop left in a taxi, or coffee spill, your PC will eventually lose your photos, music, and documents.

On a Mac, it's super easy to back up your data. You just purchase an external hard drive, plug it in and Time Machine will ask you if you want to use the hard drive to back up and it will then automatically do the work for you.

On a PC, it's a bit harder to do and we assume that is the reason that many people don't backup. Most external hard drives come with some sort of backup software that will allow you to backup on a schedule. I would recommend Genie Timeline Free 2014.

When purchasing an external hard drive, we would recommend that you stick with either Seagate or Western Digital.

Backblaze is an option for people who want an easy to use system to backup their computers online.

Fractureme is a fantastic way to display your photos. This company prints your photo directly on glass. These are high quality, have vivid colors and are one of a kind! Great gift idea for family and friends.

Have you ever misplaced your iPhone or iPad? I know I have done so a few times. If this has happened to you as well, Find My iPhone is a great feature for you! The following video addresses Find My iPhone for both the iPad and iPhone.