RLROUSE Infoblog

Articles and information to power your life!

How to protect yourself from skimmers at ATMs

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Skimmers are ingenious little devices that crooks place on ATM machines in order to steal your credit/debit card information. These devices can sometimes be hard to detect, but if you know what to look for you can protect yourself.

The first thing to do before inserting your card into the ATM card reader is closely inspect it for anything that appears to be out of the ordinary. For example, does the card reader look like it actually belongs there as a part of the ATM or does it protrude, dangle or wobble when you touch it? Are there spots or patches of dried glue on or near the card reader? If so, there is a good chance that the card reader is a fake.

If you look closely at the photo on the right you’ll notice that the card reader is clean and actually built in to the machine. In all likelihood, this would be a safe machine to use.

If the card reader looks OK, take a quick look around the immediate area of the ATM. Look for a small camera that may have been hidden in the ceiling, under a stack of brochures, or anywhere else that one could conceivably be hidden. Crooks use tiny cameras to record your finger presses as you enter your PIN, then use that data along with the info collected by the fake card reader to create duplicate cards – which are then used to empty your accounts.

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Tips for buying a backup power generator

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If you live in an area that is prone to frequent power outages you have probably given serious thought to buying a generator. I purchased and installed one at my home several years ago and I can tell you that it’s a real blessing having power when all of your neighbors are sitting in the dark and shivering in the cold.

Backup generators typically come in two varieties: portable and permanently installed. Portable models have the advantages of being less expensive and, well…portable. They also have their disadvantages as well. Most portable generators run on either gasoline or diesel, both of which are expensive and can be somewhat dangerous unless the unit is properly set up and used.

In contrast, permanently installed generators typically run on propane or natural gas which tend to be safer and cleaner burning than gasoline. Permanent models are also the best choice for powering an entire house because once they are connected to the home’s wiring there is really little else to do except for routine maintenance. The disadvantages of buying a permanently installed generator are the extra expense involved with purchasing the unit and paying an electrician to do a professional installation (which is strongly recommended).

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Add life to your lawn with a decorative windmill

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If your lawn looks boring and blah, there’s an easy way to give it a ton of character: Install a decorative windmill!

Windmills have been around for centuries grinding wheat into flour, pumping water out of low-lying areas, generating electricity and adding beauty and motion to landscapes. The decorative variety are typically quite inexpensive, and with occasional maintenance they tend to last for years.

My fondness for windmills blossomed way back when I was a little girl growing up on my parents’ rural Wisconsin dairy farm.We had three windmills pumping water from a nearby stream into a series of small ponds that the cows drank from. I would stand for minutes at a time watching those beautiful blades spin round and round, whirring and working their magic on both the ponds and my psyche.

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Why you should install Windows on an SSD

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Plain and simple, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the future of mass storage for computers. After all, the prices of SSDs are dropping like a rock while their capacities continue to increase, a happy combination of circumstances that will eventually send the hard drive the way of the floppy.

SSDs hold a number of distinct advantages over traditional hard drives, the most important being a massive increase in speed. While movable platters and read/write heads will always be encumbered with physical “speed limits”, SSDs operate at the speed of memory chips (because in reality that’s what they are).

Ask anyone who has ever used one and they’ll tell you that a solid state drive is a veritable speed demon compared to a traditional hard drive.

The Windows operating system is a bloated ball of computer code that by necessity takes forever (relatively speaking of course) to load into RAM and become stable enough for you to use your PC. Installing the operating system on an SSD can literally shave minutes off of that load time.

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How to tell if your child needs glasses

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When I was a youngster I began playing Little League baseball, and during my first year I became quite a good hitter compared to most of the other kids on my team. But when the next spring rolled around and we began practicing for the new season I had all kinds of trouble hitting the ball.

My coach realized that something was wrong while watching me take batting practice one day. He noticed that my swing and follow-through were as good as ever, but I was squinting terribly in an effort to see the ball. After practice he told my dad what he had witnessed, and after a trip to the optometrist and a new pair of glasses I began hitting like my old self again.

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