Tekee Tim's Tips

Taking a screenshot of your device

If you want to capture some information that’s displayed on your screen, such as a receipt, it can often be helpful to take a screenshot.

Luckily this is easy on all devices, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Using any file as a template on a Mac

One of the great features of macOS is the ability to use almost any file as a template for creating new files based on that file.

Annotating PDFs on your Mac

If you're sending photos or PDFs to people it can be very helpful to add your own annotations, whether it's to give someone directions or point something out in the photo. This is very easy to do using Preview on the Mac and below we'll show you how to do it.

Saving time with templates

If you're typing the same types of document over and over again in your word processor, you can save a lot of time by saving it as a template. Templates are easy to set up and use in all word processing packages, here we'll show you how to set up a simple template for a letter in Word and Pages.

How can I ensure that all my devices are up to date?

Keeping your devices up to date is always very important, software updates allow bugs to be fixed, security issues to be addressed and new features to be added to all your devices. You'll usually get notified if there are any updates for your devices, but here we'll run through the most common machines and how you can check to see if you have any updates waiting to install.

Changing your DNS servers

If you find yourself having intermittent problems with websites loading slowly, email not working and seeing out of date websites, you could be having problems with your DNS servers.

All Internet Providers provide DNS as part of the connection and these convert a website name such as bbc.co.uk into the actual address of the website which is something like 63.194.125.69. Unfortunately the DNS Servers that you get with your Internet connection are usually pretty bad. They can be slow and out of date and we always recommend using better ones.

In this tip, we'll show you have to switch over to using faster and safer DNS on your Mac, Windows PC and your home router.

How can I create my own playlists in iTunes

Playlists are a great way to keep track of your favourite music in iTunes, they let you have quick access to the tracks that you want to listen to and you can easily swap songs in and out as you need to.

iTunes can also make you playlists automatically based on a few criteria. In this tip, we'll show you how to create a Smart Playlist.

Spotting a fake email

One of the most common types of scams aimed at businesses at the moment is sending a spoof email asking for a payment to be made. These are usually worded to make it sound urgent so no time is taken to double check but there are usually a couple of tell tale signs which we'll run through here.

How can I edit text on my desktop?

Whether you're writing an email or a document on your Mac or Windows PC, you'll often need to correct typos or move words or whole sentences around or add an underline, bold or italic for emphasis.

We’ll show you how to do the essentials below, using Word for Mac and Windows.

Can it be useful to have two browsers on your computer?

It's often useful to have two different web browsers installed on your computer, this can help if one stops working, doesn't display a page correctly or you just need to browse privately and need to clear the cache and history at the end of your browsing.

In this tip, we'll give you some ideas of the way they can be useful and give you some options for the best browsers to use.

How can I safely recycle my computer?

If you've replaced your PC or Mac and would like to dispose of the old one or sell it, then you need to be careful that you've erased all the data on the disk so that no one else can access any of your files.

Most people store a lot of private and sometimes sensitive documents on their computers and if someone else gets the machine, it's possible that they could recover this information so you do need to take some steps to ensure this doesn't happen and we'll show you some of those steps here.

Protect yourself on public WiFi with a VPN

Did you know that when you connect your phone to a public WiFi network, whether it's in a coffee shop, a hotel or even in guest network in an office, you're potentially letting everyone else on the network see all the websites you're visiting and potentially even your login information for websites? Here, we'll show you how to avoid this problem.