5 Ways to Simplify Your Tech Life

Make your smartphone, tablet and desktop devices go the distance with these top tips.

- Brain X.Chen

If you are like most people, there are things you do with tech that could use some tweaking. Strengthening your password security, for one, would benefit you tremendously in an era when hacks are rife. For another, purging the e-junk you have accumulated over the years would help the environment and your sanity. While you’re at it, start doing maintenance on your electronics to make sure they work as smoothly as possible.

Clean up your password hygiene

What’s that smell? It’s your bad password hygiene! You are probably using the same password across multiple websites for banking, shopping, social media and email. That’s understandable – a person can only memorise so many passwords. But in 2016, Yahoo reminded everybody that reusing passwords is a very bad idea, after it revealed that 500 million Yahoo accounts were compromised in 2014, in addition to 1 billion accounts that were hacked in 2013. If your Yahoo account password was the same as ones you used elsewhere, those accounts were vulnerable, too. 

Don’t become another statistic this year. Spend time logging into each of your accounts and creating unique, strong passwords. To make this easier, use applications like LastPass or 1 Password, which are password-managing apps that let you use one master password to unlock a vault of passwords to log in to all of your online accounts. They also automatically generate strong passwords for you. Then add an extra layer of protection by enabling two factor verification on your accounts whenever the option is available. When you enter your password, you will receive a message (usually an SMS) with a one-time code that you must enter before logging in.