Are you checking in on Foursquare?

And, are you checking in on Facebook? Or, even if you’re not checking in, are you telling the world where you’re located every time you post a status update?

There are security risks with being so public about your location so often. In this video, I talk about those risks. And I also show you how to stop Facebook from posting what city you’re in when you post a standard status update.

Click Here To Watch This Video on Youtube.com

Here’s the golden rule of social media…

If you’re not OK with the world knowing about it, don’t post it on social media. Period.

You do that, you’ve got nothing to worry about when it comes to your social media privacy.

Now, I preface everything here with this…

I am a long-time iPhone user. I took a temporary hiatus into the world of Android awhile back, and was quite disappointed.

So, what did I think about the Samsung Galaxy S4? Here’s a video…

Watch This Video on Youtube.com

So, if you’re an iPhone user, what would it take to get YOU to consider switching over to Android?

It used to be that going online was a bit of a novelty. We’d buy a computer just so we could go online, and internet connectivity was something that we looked at as special. Remember those AOL discs?

Today, many of us are SURROUNDED with stuff that goes online. Let me just count what I happen to have:

1. My main desktop computer.
2. My laptop.
3. My iPhone.
4. My iPad.
5. Roku
6. Apple TV. In fact, we have 3 of these in our home. Yeah, I’m crazy.
7. My cable box. It pulls digital content (like weather, news, etc.) off the Internet.

So, that’s nine devices. And those are the ones I use regularly.

If I were to expand this to just the ones I own (not necessarily use alot), I’d have to include several other devices, including an old Kindle, a couple of old cell phones, and more.

Some of us even carry speciality devices which connect to the Internet. For example, the FitBit has been pretty popular in fitness circles. It connects online and reports in your fitness information. Some people have appliances like refrigerators which connect to the Internet. If you’re a gamer, surely your game console connects to the Internet. There’s a good chance that your DVD player or Blu-Ray player connects to the Internet. Many TVs connect directly to the Internet.

So, what do you have? How many devices do you have which go online?

Post in the comments below what your number is, and what those devices are.

Problem is, mounting a smartphone onto a tripod requires some extra gear. Whereas almost all cameras have a tripod mount on them, phones do not.

There are a number of options out there for tripod mounting a smartphone, but many of them require using a special case. This can be pretty annoying because it forces you use a special case you may not otherwise like. Or you have to switch cases just to record a video.

There is another option, and here’s a video on it:

You can check out the iStabilizer on Amazon.

This is a great little, universal grip. It will work on any smartphone, not just the iPhone. Definitely check it out if you want to use your smartphone to make decent videos. And, let’s face  it… today’s smartphones have pretty killer cameras in them, so they are every bit as capable of making great video as any point-and-shoot camera.

Garbage, that’s what. The resulting audio is noisy, full of hiss in some cases, and it picks up every little background noise going on. The subject of the video sounds distant and echoey.

The solution is to use an external microphone. Many cameras have a plug on them for an external mic. However, many smartphones do not.

The iPhone, specifically, doesn’t have an external, dedicated microphone jack. It has a combined port which works both for microphone AND headphones. The little white Apple headphones that come with the iPhone are built to work with it, and there is a mic included. But, once you get away from Apple’s own gear, what do you do?

Well, there’s an adapter for everything. Here’s a video.

You can check out this adapter from KVConnection.

Your alternative is to use a separate audio recording system and then couple your video and audio together in post-production. It takes more time, but works just as well. Here’s a video I recorded some time ago which talks about how to do that: How To Record Awesome DSLR Videos Without An External Microphone Jack.

I’m somewhat familiar with this, because this is something we dealt with within my own family recently.

Well, technology is here to solve problems. And, we recently came across a story online which talked about Lively.

Lively is a high-tech service which allows you to keep tabs on the everyday activities of your loved ones at home. It is also marketed as a way to bring families together:

Lively offers activity-sharing products that tighten the connection between older adults living independently and their families. By giving generations new ways to share their life, we’re adding to everyone’s peace of mind.

Lively consists of a set of gear installed in the home. It consists of a central hub which resembles a kind of router, and six sensors which can be installed throughout the home. The sensors can be placed in various parts of the home which correspond to everyday activities. Say, the refrigerator door, a bathroom door, a pill box, you name it.

Each sensor has a small accelerometer in it, so whenever it is open or closed, it detects it and pings the hub. And the hub reports back to the main service so that things are logged. The communication doesn’t require any kind of cell phone plan or internet connection. It works similar to Amazon’s Whispernet. Everything is included and… it just works.

The software portion of it will learn the regular habits of your loved ones and detect any irregularities. There is no location tracking or anything like that.

Certainly, there is a bit of a “big brother” feel to this. However, the company claims that their testing shows that people don’t mind it being there. Plus, it enables the older generation to live in their homes independently – longer. And it provides peace of mind to the family.

Lively begins shilling in July, 2013. Right now, they are raising funds on Kickstarter. They have a $100K goal by May 16th. If this is something you might be interested in getting behind, perhaps consider backing them.

And you know what? They’re right.

But, who cares when you’re making all the money?! At least that’s how the people inside Apple are looking at it, I’m sure.

Asymco recently published an economic look at the PC market. It correctly shows that the PC market is shrinking, most likely due to consumers buying tablets and being completely satisfied with them. But, what’s also interesting is that it shows Apple has a 45% market share, when looked at in terms of money being made.

45% market share

Yes, Apple just has larger profit margins on their machines. They also maintain a tight hold on the Mac and the OS X operating system, so if you want a Mac, you do business with Apple. On the contrary, the PC market is heavily fractured and always has been.

Profit margins for PC makers has always been pretty low. But, that fact was made up for in volume. Problem is, that’s changing. From the post:

The real problem for the PC vendors is not that they have such low margins–they’ve had low margins for decades. It’s that the volumes which “made up for” low margins are disappearing. Apple is not immune to a gradual erosion of Mac volumes, but they have positioned themselves for growth with devices and content commerce and services. They have essentially “escaped” PCs and indeed caused the need to escape in the first place.

While 45% of profits in the PC market is already impressive, it is nothing compared to the 72% of profit they have in the mobile market.

That, my friends, is one big company.

Apple gave the Macbook Pro a single DisplayPort. That allows you to power an external monitor – obviously.

And, if you want to power more than one monitor from it (which the laptop has the horsepower to do), you’ve got to pony up for two big Thunderbolt monitors from Apple. Why? Because, you connect the monitors in a daisy chain and you can power the whole thing from one port on the laptop.

But, what if you don’t feel like throwing down almost $2,000 on screens?

Your solution is one of two options:

1. Buy a USB-to-VGA adapter. Yes, you can power a monitor off a USB port. It will work, but it does sometimes get moody. Plus, there can be some video lag because… let’s face it, the USB port was never designed for powering a monitor.
2. Buy a Matrox Dualhead2Go Digital ME.

I chose route #2. And, here is a video I recorded for my other site where I show it in action:

This setup works quite nicely.

The ONLY thing that is a bit annoying is that the two monitors are seen by the Mac as one big super-wide monitor. So, if you try to maximize a window, it will try to span both screens. Also, because of the way it works, if the two monitors have different native resolutions, one of them is going to look a little weird. So, best bet us to use two identical monitors.

But, it works. It works nicely. And, I can now use my Macbook Pro as a work machine and not feel as if I’m sacrificing all the screen space that my desktop has.

This laptop originally came with 4 GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive. And it served me perfectly fine for awhile.

After awhile, however, I started to become more aware of the speed. My usual activity with the laptop was perfectly fine, however I could feel it choking a bit when I had a lot of simultaneous things happening at the same time. This got me thinking about doing a memory upgrade. Memory is insanely cheap these days anyway.

As I continued to look into it, however, I realized that I wasn’t going to see a major speed bump with this laptop unless I replaced the hard drive. In fact, that is the case with MOST computers these days. The bottleneck to performance is very often the hard drive itself. My desktop computer has an SSD drive in it and I know just how snappy the things are.

So, I headed on over to MacSales.com and bought 12 GB of memory and an OWC 240GB Mercury Electra 6G SSD drive.

And, like a good little nerd, I recorded the process and made a video. This video will show you how to perform this upgrade on a Macbook Pro.

Now, this video would have shown the hard drive preparation process as well, but I began having mic issues. However, here it is in short:

1. BEFORE I took the laptop apart, I did a full clone of the old hard drive onto an external Firewire drive. For this, I used Carbon Copy Cloner.
2. I then did the upgrade as shown above.
3. When complete, I booted the laptop using the cloned image from the external drive. To do this, I held down the OPTION key while I turned it on and I held the key down until the startup manager came up. I then selected my external drive and booted the machine.
4. From there, I opened up Disk Utility and I partitioned the new SSD drive. I simply set up a single partition. I then did a quick format on the drive, just for good measure.
5. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner again to re-clone the external drive to the SSD drive.
6. When it was done, I turned everything off, unplugged the external, then rebooted normally. Only this time, it booted from the SSD automatically.

Booyah. Major speed increase.

The ONLY negative I’ve seen so far, and I just haven’t yet looked into it, is that the computer does seem to draw the battery down quicker than it used to. Not a lot, but some. I don’t know if this is normal. A quick search around sees a lot of people speculating that it wouldn’t draw more power, but few actually reporting real-world results. Well, my own real-world result is that it DOES draw more power. Not enough to be a bother, but it is noticeable.

Overall, really happy with the upgrade.

Oh, and for you PC people, I bet you could do the very same upgrade and get the same results. Hardware is hardware, after all. It isn’t much different just because it has a picture of fruit on the lid.

I am looking to put some new life into the PCMech Youtube channel. Which means, more videos.

Which brings me to the question…

What kind of videos would you like?

Do you prefer full-on tutorial videos? Do you like opinion-based videos, where we editorialize on something doing on in the world of tech? Do you like news updates? A mix?

And, what topics are you most interested in?

If you would be so kind, chime in below using this quick survey: