Interesting, I was under the impression that the Uber app that drivers used has some sort of tracking feature, but I guess that’s for the company’s use, not for your friends or family. Hopefully it’ll never be an issue, but yes, there’s a pretty easy way to share your realtime location for as many hours as you’d like through Google Maps. Even better, it works on both Google Maps on Android and on the Apple iPhone too. You’re definitely good to go with that Samsung Galaxy S7, and it’ll be identical if you upgrade to the S9+ somewhere down the road too.

The wrinkle is that you are giving Google permission to track your location – even when you then don’t think it’s tracking you – and keep a history of everywhere you’ve been. Even when Google Maps doesn’t seem to be running. Look closely at one of the last few screen captures in this article and you’ll see Google’s tagged me at an address on Mapleton Street and even includes the date when I was there. I didn’t know it was doing that! So if you’re cool with this privacy issue, here’s how to proceed…

To start, just  launch Google Maps on your S7. I’m in downtown Boulder, Colorado, so here’s what  I see:

It’s quite accurate in noting my location. To share it, tap on the “hamburger menu” on the top left (the three horizontal lines within the search box). That brings up a menu:

It’s the fourth entry in the menu: “Location sharing“. Tap on it to get set up…

Ready to share that info? Of course you are – that’s why you’re reading this!

Tap on “Get Started” to, well, get started.

Now you can see the options: you can share for an hour by default, but tap on the little “+” and “-” buttons and you can change that from 15 min up to 8 hours or more. Or, “until you turn this off” if you really want to stay in touch.

Then choose with whom you want to share your location. I suggest that you tap on the “•••” “More” button, which shows a ton of options for sharing your location through various channels, some of which don’t even really make sense (like Dropbox):

For this example, I’ll share my location via Messaging, an easy text message that includes a special link specifying your current realtime location. The next step after tapping on that icon is…

That’s really all there is to it. Add a phone number or type in the name of the person or people you’d like to have keep a tab on your location through the evening and night, and they’ll all get something that looks like this:

All they have to do is tap on the image and they’ll see your location with constant updates as you move around. Done for the night? Just go back to Google maps and turn off tracking:

That’s all there is to it. If you don’t want Google to have this data, by the way, I’m also a big fan of Glympse, which offers a service that’s just location tracking, but doesn’t share data with the big Google data library…

Pro Tip: We have lots of Android help on the site if you want to explore while you’re here. There’s sure to be at least a few that’ll help you get more out of your smartphone!

The post Can I Share my Location from my Android Phone? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

Reproducing what you’ve found online without credit and proper citation is a problem. It is essential for every writer to realize that copying and pasting from the work of another person is unethical and often a crime. To ensure you’re completely safe, it’s smart after finishing up your work to use a plagiarism checker to verify it’s all good and that a teacher, professor or editor won’t have any issues verifying the authenticity of your work.

Writers, students, and professionals all must understand that while information is freely accessible on the web, its reuse without appropriate citation is not only unethical but also can be regarded as breaching the rights of academic entities and other professionals.

When using free material from the web, your best strategy is to follow a simple code of conduct because, to reiterate the point, it’s unethical to steal the work of other people. And in case there’s any confusion, we’re defining “plagiarism” as a rewording or rephrasing for reuse with the intention of stealing images, text and other digital intellectual property.

Technology Helps You Decrease the Chance of Plagiarism

It’s not just a bad idea, plagiarism can be a criminal act in both professional and academic communities and has resulted in people failing college courses, being fired from jobs, even going to jail for fraud. Unfortunately, people can get lazy and compose articles, academic papers and other literary works from online sources, but forget proper citation. Like any other writer, they are required to cite each source appropriately lest they be perceived as having plagiarized content.

Sometimes writers and academicians can duplicate content without realizing that the content they’re using, perhaps from someone else at work or a writing team partner in college, isn’t unique. Without a mean to check plagiarism and the uniqueness of their text, it’s an unexpected risk. Fortunately there are free cutting-edge tools like Small SEO Tools that let you easily check the authenticity of your work. The plagiarism checker can quickly and clearly highlight any textual similarity with the work of another writer. Then you can rephrase, rewrite or completely discard that portion as desired.

Search in Several Databases

Any good plagiarism checker will have access to multiple databases of original source, allowing users to easily cross-check documents across a vast array of possible duplicated content. For example, the Small SEO Tools plagiarism check tool is designed to compare your paper with a multitude of indexes and databases. It works exactly the same as the tools used by professors and others at a high school or college.

Benefits of a Good Plagiarism Checker

A plagiarism checker has a number of benefits to a writer, whether in academia or a professional setting:

• Plagiarism checkers can quickly search the entire web and generate results quickly. These tools are designed to match each word of the text from various online databases and highlight plagiarized lines within a few seconds.
• By highlighting problematic text, you are able to also identify the page where the highlighted content is already available. You can also check the originality of your blog posts and web articles with the help of a plagiarism checker too, particularly  when it’s guest content from another writer.
• Small SEO Tools offers this platform to aid academicians and writers to ensure that their work remains within appropriate ethical limits. Indirectly, it lets you excel in your field without ever risking the accusation of plagiarism.
• Good online tools allow you to inspect any paper for red flags that suggest there might be an issue with plagiarism. Some people prefer to use a search engine directly to check for non-unique content, but that’s slow and inefficient. A plagiarism checker can do this work within a few seconds with greater accuracy.
• Plagiarism tools also give you a percentage of similarity score. Many universities allow a small amount of potential plagiarism. With plagiarism checker, you can easily approach that level of similarity without risk of going too far.
• After checking with a plagiarism checker, you will also have a sense of satisfaction knowing that you have not plagiarized any portion of your article, paper or essay. You can even save the report as proof to show your instructor that your work is not plagiarized if it becomes an issue.

Remember that that plagiarism is a serious issue and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Time and again, students and faculty both have been found guilty of plagiarism and punished accordingly, even to losing their jobs and being publicly disgraced. With the help of a plagiarism checker, you can avoid these risks, penalties and punishment.

This is a guest article written by an anonymous writer with an interest in ensuring others don’t get caught plagiarizing.

The post Improve Your Writing with a Plagiarism Checker appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

While many smartphone users think of Dropbox as a photo backup solution, turns out it’s a bi-directional channel and is quite capable of copying photos from other devices onto your Android, iPhone or other smartphone. In fact, when you see those gorgeous Instagram photos that the big influencers post, it’s often because they’ve edited them on either their phone or on a big-screen computer and funneled them back onto the phone so they can be posted. Try it yourself; take a photo with a high quality DSLR then post it to Instagram and you’ll see, it’ll be visibly higher quality than the phone camera’s pictures.

Back to Dropbox, though. Dropbox backs up whatever folders you specify on each of your devices, so as long as you have a folder that contains the photo set to sync on both your computer and your mobile, it’s actually pretty easy. The trick is to realize that you don’t want to “make photo available offline” from within Dropbox but actually “export” the photo into your Photos “Camera Roll”. Let’s have a look at the process.

To start, here are the latest photos in my own Dropbox account, organized by date added, in Dropbox for Mobile:

There’s a photo of my daughter on her first day of school that I want to get into my iPhone camera roll, so that’s going to be our  demo here. It’s the third picture in the most recent set of photos.

A tap on the image and it shows up bigger and more easily viewed:

Remember, this isn’t really “on” the smartphone yet, it’s just showing what’s in Dropbox. To save it, don’t be distracted by the “Share” button, but tap on the “•••” link on the top right.

A menu of many options shows up:

There are lots of Dropbox specific options about access control, the ability to add to your Dropbox favorites (they call it ‘starred’), etc, but what you want to choose at this point is “Export“. Tap on that and yet another set of options shows up:

Quite a lot of options, actually, but this screen should be familiar to you as it’s common across most iPhone apps with similar functionality (like Photos). In this case, the choice you want to make is “Save Image“, the second option on the last row. Do quickly check out the other options while you’re here, though, just so you know all the possibilities!

A tap on “Save Image” and, in very quick progress, you’ll see:

and then:

(note: it wasn’t so easy even getting those screen captures, but that’s another story!)

Once both of those informational banners vanish from the screen, you’re done. Mission accomplished. Now go to the “Photos” app and check in “Camera Roll”!

There it is, the very last – and of course most recent – photo in the All Photos gallery. Mission accomplished, and any app or program that works with pictures you’ve taken on your phone will be unable to differentiate this photograph saved from Dropbox with the photos taken on the phone itself.

Pro Tip: While you’re here, please do check out our quite extensive iPhone Help Area. Hundreds of tutorials on everything you can imagine, from whimsical and fun to serious and important!

The post Can I Save a Dropbox Photo into my iPhone Camera Roll? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

You’re exactly correct that the way modern file systems – and therefore modern operating systems – work with deleted files is to mark the space used by the file as “unused”, but not actually do anything to destroy or overwrite the data. And that’s where the problem arises: If the actual contents of the file isn’t overwritten or otherwise reused by a new file, the data sits and can be easily recovered, hours or even days later.

It’s a bit hard to understand but it’s as if you’ve picked up a book and erased the table of contents. If someone picks it up and just looks at the ToC they’ll think it’s a blank book, ready for use. But the pages themselves retain the data until something happens to replace them. The more free space you have on your computer, the longer those deleted but un “shredded” files can stick around too.

Which leads to the question you asked: how do you really delete and destroy a file so that it cannot be recovered? The best answer is to use a secure file removal program. I’m going to demonstrate all this with two programs from the same company, iBeesoft. First off, I’ll delete a confidential file then use iBeesoft File Recovery to show how you can recover it, even hours later. Then we’ll delete the same confidential file with iBeesoft File Shredder and show how that prevents it being recovered, even immediately after the deletion.

First off, here’s our confidential file, called “confidentialBenefits.pdf”:

If I was at a different job and reading this, it might well be the kind of thing I don’t want my employer to know about, but regardless, this is the file we want to axe. Deleting a file in Windows 10 is of course super easy – just put it into the Recycle Bin then empty it. Done. Deleted. Right?

Not so much, actually.

Now let’s launch iBeesoft File Recovery for Windows…

A click on “Start” and it’s ready to proceed:

Generally you can just use C:NFTS (NTFS = Windows NT file system, if you’re curious, and that NT stands for “new technology” but is by now many, many years old) which is the default. To proceed further, all you need to do is let the program scan all the free space — or better, “free” space — on your disk.

Click “Scan” and have some patience…

Finally it shows the file system to indicate it’s finished scanning. Since the last known location of the file in question was the Recycle Bin, that’s where I’ll look first. And, well, check it out:

That’s how easy it is to recovered files you think have been deleted on your Windows system. No special police or forensic science training required, just the right program, like iBeesoft Data Recovery for Windows.

Now let’s use iBeesoft File Shredder instead of the usual Windows move-to-recycle-bin strategy. To do that, launch the File Shredder program and click the big “+”. It’s kinda hard to miss:

The trick to using this program is that you need to use it to delete the file, folder or photos, it’s not something you can use to empty the recycle bin or digitally shred already deleted files. With that in mind, here’s my Computer in File Shredder:

A click to open up the Desktop and the file shows up…

There it is, now called “Confidential Benefits.pdf”. To properly delete it so that it cannot be recovered, even by the iBeesoft Data Recovery program, simply select and click the green “Shred Now” button…

Done. Now it’s properly deleted. To double check, let’s just run iBeesoft Data Recovery again. This time, however, neither the Desktop nor the Recycle Bin have any recoverable files or documents:

Now you have an answer to your question of how to really delete files in Windows 10. I suggest you check out iBeesoft File Shredder and know that your files will be securely deleted.

iBeesoft File Shredder: free, $9.99 for pro features, at ibeesoft.com

iBeesoft Data Recovery for Windows: $49.99 at ibeesoft.com.

Pro Tip: While you’re here, check out our extensive Windows help library too. Tons and tons of useful tips!

The post Use iBeesoft File Shredder to Really Delete Files appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

Well, I’m hardly going to tell you the ins and outs of how to be a hacker (though I will say that in my world, “hacker” is benign and describes someone who is interested in exploring data, sites and the network, not someone who is malicious and disseminating viruses, ransomware or shutting down power grids). Nonetheless, it’s up to every single person who uses the Internet to learn how to manage their own data privacy and security, so there are some really rudimentary sorts of “hacker searches” that I will share, along with some commentary.

First thing to think about is what are the common words and phrases that people use to describe the kind of information you seek? What kinds of files are they likely to use? For example, “CDL” is commonly used as an acronym for “California Driver’s License” (or other states whose names begin with C, of course) and “SSN” is a likely column header for a spreadsheet or data table with social security numbers.

More fundamentally, though, you can just search for “secret” or “top secret” or “confidential” and see what comes up. That’s a big, wide, search, however, so this is an example of knowing how to do more sophisticated searches on Google is beneficial. Filetype lets you choose results that are just a specific type of file (for example “filetype:doc” or “filetype:docx” gives you just Microsoft Word documents). There are plenty of filetypes to try too, as detailed on this page: Google File Types.

The other addition I really like is site, which lets you specify a domain or even a TLD (top level domain) like “edu” or “mil” or “gov” for educational institutions, military Web sites or government Web sites, respectively.

Add them all together and here’s my Google search:

You can search for other words, if course, but this is a search for what are known as comma separated value (CSV) files, a common export filetype from Excel and other spreadsheet programs. It’s limited to only gov sites, any site thats domain ends with “.gov”.

You figure that there won’t be any results, right? Surprise. There are. Here are a couple:

That third one looks interesting, something about administration salaries for people who work for the State of New Jersey. A click and here’s what you can see:

It’s ugly but it’s also names, addresses, titles, and annual salaries of hundreds of New Jersey employees. Probably shouldn’t be out in the public eye like this but that’s another story…

Anyway, I won’t go any further, but you get the idea. If you want, just do some searches for the kind of information you think would be “confidential” or “secret” or similar. But be careful and remember that finding this info and sharing it with others are two different things. Don’t do something dumb just to impress your friends!

The post Can I find confidential information online? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

Another month, another change to the Facebook interface. No surprise there. What is surprising is how often the change affects business pages, which are an important revenue stream for the company. You’d think that they would make things easy and stable for companies that are using the Facebook platform for marketing, advertising and customer service. Ah well, so it goes in the modern online world.

What you’re seeing with the Facebook “Stories” is something related to how Facebook has been working to more tightly integrate the Facebook and Instagram experience; The company has already been doing very well promoting Instagram Stories, so why not do so within the Facebook world too? And so, Facebook Stories.

Let’s just jump in and look at what’s changed, shall we? If you’re poised to post on a business page, here’s what you’ll now see:

It’s really quite complicated, so I won’t be surprised if it’s redesigned yet again to be simpler. For now, however, that’s what you’ll be working with. The two main choices are News Feed and Your Page’s Story. The former is what you’re used to doing and the latter is akin to Instagram Stories and is worth trying out to see how it works.

I’ll proceed by typing in a status update with a URL and a few page links. At this interim point it will look like this:

Looks good. But click on the “•••” button (I’ve highlighted it above) so you can see the bewildering variety of options now available:

Got it all figured out?

To schedule your post you’ll want to click on the “Share Now” option just below “News Feed”. It’s a menu:

If you’re thinking “choose Schedule” you’re right! Choose “Schedule” and you can specify date and time for the news feed update to go live:

Choose your date and time, then click “Schedule” on the lower right to queue it up and… well… you’re not quite done. Here’s where you’ll end up:

Once more click. Click on “Schedule Post” and, finally, your update’s in the queue for future publication. You can see that because the feedback should be something like this:

I have two scheduled now, as you can see. A click on “See posts” and you can change or delete them pre-publication too. And that’s how it now works. For this week, at least.

Pro Tip: We have lots and lots of Facebook help here and a helpful Ask Dave Taylor Facebook Page I invite you to join too. Thanks.

The post How to Schedule Posts in Facebook (Updated)? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

You’re not the first person to ask about disabling conversation view in Gmail by any means. What’s confusing is that disabling it on one platform doesn’t automatically turn off conversation view (or, as I prefer to call it, “conversation threading”) on the other platforms you use. Case in point: disable it in your computer’s Web browser and you still are stuck with conversation view on your Gmail for Mobile app.

Where this really gets fun is that while you can disable conversation view in Gmail for Android, that setting isn’t yet available for the Apple iPhone / iOS version. So if you’re on an iPhone, well, ya better just get used to the threading view for now (though Google has said that this setting option is coming very soon).

Oh! Not sure what “conversational view” is? Here’s Google’s explanation: “You can choose whether replies to emails are grouped in conversations, or if each email shows up in your inbox separately.”

So, let’s get to Gmail on Android and see how to disable it, then you can run that way for a while and decide if it’s the best option for you on your smaller mobile screen. Here’s my incoming mail:

Where you can see that it’s in conversation view / threading is the second email entry from “me, Jennifer”. See that tiny “6”? That means there are six emails in that thread, all grouped together by subject. If a new message comes in, it then is part of that thread rather than just the most recent incoming message, which can be confusing.

Before we go further, however, let’s rotate the phone so that these screen captures aren’t so tall, okay?

Now to get to settings, tap on the so-called “hamburger menu” on the top left (the three tiny horizontal lines stacked atop each other). That brings up this:

Looks like a lot of folders (err, “labels” in Gmail parlance), but swipe up, up, up on the left side and eventually you’ll get to the bottom of the menu where you’ll find these options:

You want to choose “Settings” here, so tap on that.

Now you’ll see a list of accounts – if you have more than one associated with your Gmail account – or just a single email address, like this:

Almost there. Tap on “General settings” and the “Conversation View” option is front and center:

You can see that by default it’s checked, and enabled. To disable it, simply tap to uncheck the box. Done. That’s it.

Now here’s what’s a bit weird; you won’t actually notice anything change. It’s as new email comes into your inbox that it’s organized differently. After a while, I do get a new message:

Notice that the new email from grace hasn’t been threaded or paired to the original conversation, it’s just a new message.

And that’s it. Now you know how to enable or disable conversation view in Gmail for Mobile. Coming to an iPhone near you soon too!

Pro Tip: We have lots of Gmail and Android help here on the site. Please check it out while you’re here!

The post Gmail for Mobile: Disable Conversation View? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

While I appreciate that battery life is a constant hassle for us smartphone owners, it is rather inexplicable that Apple still hasn’t offered some sort of always-on display feature similar to almost all Android phones. It’s a feature you can enable or disable entirely, of course, but if you do appreciate being able to have your phone double as a handy clock it’s nice to have the option.

In terms of how much battery power it really uses, that’s an interesting question. On Android Central, users say “I get virtually the same battery life with it on or off. Of course it lasts a little bit longer with it off, but it’s not substantial enough for me to keep it off…” and point out that for most Android phones if you put if screen-down on the table, the always on display (or AOD in Android parlance) is automatically disabled anyway. Which means that’s an easy way to have it off at night; just make sure you put your phone screen-down by your bedside.

But there’s a feature in the always-on display that can help you out anyway. Let’s have a look.

As always, start by going into Settings and tap on the magnifying glass icon, then type in a word or two that describes the setting you seek. In this case, just use “always”:

You can see that the one choice that pops up is exactly the setting we seek; “Always-on display”. Tap on it…

You can see that all the features are in one convenient spot. Enable AOD by tapping on the switch on the very top, and change exactly what’s displayed by tapping on the gear icon adjacent to the “Content” area (or use the default as I do).

The Advanced section below that is what you want in this instance, however: Daily timeout is the name of the feature that turns off the always on display. Tap to the right to enable it, then tap on the “•••” to adjust the time settings to your preference:

Tap on “Save” and you’re good to go. Now your display will either be as shown, or off to save battery:

And remember, flip the phone screen down and it’ll disable AOD too.

Pro Tip: while you’re here, please do check out our extensive Android help area. It’ll definitely be worth your while

The post Save Android Battery by Snoozing your Always On Display? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

Turns out that all operating systems allow links, shortcuts or, in Linux parlance, “symbolic links” because it’s darn helpful to have a file or app icon that actually references something somewhere else in the file system. Useful, but inevitably as the file system changes, as apps are removed, as folders are renamed or reorganized, these links or shortcuts can end up being obsolete, pointing to something that just doesn’t exist any more.

Even without that, though, Windows programs in particular have a tendency to be installed in a variety of different spots rather than one standard location and it can be tricky to track them down and find their home directory. What most people don’t realize, however, is that these shortcuts actually include an explicit file and folder location reference that you can not only see, but follow to inspect.

Let’s have a look. First, here’s a typical Windows 10 shortcut, for Google Chrome on my own Win10 Desktop:

How do you know it’s a shortcut? The little arrow that’s superimposed on the icon itself. Right click on a shortcut and choose Properties:

You can see that option at the very bottom of the menu. Choose “Properties” and you’ll see general information about the shortcut:

You can see in the “Type of file” that it’s a shortcut (.lnk, if you’re curious about the filename suffix). You can rename the shortcut here too if you want; just type something new into the top box and click OK. But don’t do that! Instead, click or tap on the “Shortcut” tab along the top.

Now you’ll see what you want to know about, exactly where this link points:

The destination of the link is highlighted in blue. Unfortunately the box that shows the link is too small so you are seeing the latter portion, not the entire filename. You can, however, copy and paste into another app (like Notes) to see the info. Or, better, just click or tap on the “Open File Location” button along the bottom. That opens up the File Explorer in the target folder with the target program or file highlighted:

Here you can see that the folder in question is c:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application and that the highlighted program is “chrome.exe”.

That’s it. Now you know how to analyze your shortcuts and figure out where they’re pointing. Hope that helps you understand how they work and why they’re darn useful.

Pro Tip: We have a lot of Windows 10 help on the site. Please take a few minutes and explore!

The post Where do my Windows 10 shortcut links actually point? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.

The most basic answer to this question is “it depends”. More specifically, it depends on what you’re listening to and what program you’re using for the audio. I usually jump into the Music app if there are issues with output because I know exactly how that works. Generally, once you get one app working with you desired output device, you’ll find every other app and program conforms without any additional fuss or hassle.

The first step, however, is to ensure that your desired output device is powered up and connected to your iPhone. While most devices have auditory feedback or a status light or similar to show things are working well, there are some devices where it’s a bit of a mystery whether it actually is connected. Not great design, but that’s kinda beyond the scope of this Q&A, right?

Anyway, let’s start at the beginning. Go into your Bluetooth settings (Settings > Bluetooth) and ensure that your headphones are indeed connected if they’re not automatically selected and working. You should see something like this:

You probably have less devices than I do, but notice that the single most important one is “MOMENTUM M2 AEBT” which is the only one that shows Connected. None of the other devices are currently paired to my iPhone X and therefore cannot be chosen as output devices. There is a second device also connected, my Apple AirPods, but we’ll get to that in a second…

Assuming that your headphones are connected (and if they’re not and are on, just tap “Not Connected” and they should pair right up and be ready to go) then follow my example and launch Music. You’ll see something like this:

The song queued up and ready to play is “Entering the Lifeboat” from the Captain Phillips movie soundtrack, as you can see along the bottom. But what output will it use? You can’t tell from here Tap on the current song, however, and the full screen view does show the selected output device:

You can see that in this instance it’s using MOMENTUM M2 AEBT as the output (the very bottom line). Tap on that and you’ll see a list of all possible output devices:

See that tiny checkmark? It means that I’ve switched to using the AirPods as my output device. Also note “iPhone” as a choice; that’s for if you want to have your phone as the audio output device. Simple, really.

That’s it. That’s how you choose your Bluetooth audio output device in Apple’s iOS 11 system through the Music app. Hope that helps you get lots of enjoyment out of your headphones!

Pro Tip: I have a ton of helpful tutorials and iPhone help here on the site. Please take a few minutes to look around!

The post How to Select Bluetooth Headphones on iPhone? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.