THE GREAT PIXEL PURGE Practical Tips for Faster Devices
We’ve gathered a group of friends for an all-important selfie that turns into a series of five blurry photos followed by the perfect one. You’ve captured the moment beautifully, but what about all those bad takes? Well, if they’re still sitting in your phone six months (or two years) later, it’s time to do some long-overdue digital housekeeping. Whether your smartphone is in desperate need of space or your laptop is taking forever to load, here are some helpful tips for freeing your most-used devices of unnecessary clutter. Commit to cyber cleaning. Here’s the most significant reason why our digital devices fill up so quickly: For as much as we use them, they’re among the least critical things in our daily lives. Sure, we depend on them for virtually everything, but how often do we skip past the mounds of spam in our inbox to get to a new email that actually matters? But just like our cars, our computers and phones can break down if we don’t perform routine maintenance. Set a date each month to delete unneeded emails, photos, and apps that could be clogging your device’s functionality. Do you really need that massive entertainment app you haven’t touched in months? If you commit to reviewing the contents of your phone or computer on a set day and time (and stick to it), you may
be surprised to see how quickly junk accumulates … and how much of it you can remove without even noticing a difference. If
you’re worried about losing something valuable you may need later, consider investing in an external hard drive for secure storage and quick retrieval. Redecorate your desktop.
If your laptop screen resembles an icon explosion, take a moment to organize your necessary files into individual folders (“Photos,” “Tax Documents,” “Work Stuff,” etc.). Regularly going through this process will help you better identify duplicate files. Stick with it, and you’ll soon reach a point where your computer home screen is aesthetically pleasing and less like a room full of six months’ worth of unfolded laundry. With a few new habits and a little consistency, a tech reset can turn chaos into clarity.
Taming Those Late-Night Alarm Calls SMALL FIXES THAT SAVE BIG HEADACHES
If you manage a building long enough, you eventually get a 2 a.m. call. The phone rings, you wake up confused, and someone from the alarm monitoring center starts talking about a trouble signal or a low battery. By the time you sort out that there is no fire or water running through sprinkler pipes, you are wide awake and frustrated. If a call like this is rare, it’s usually just a nuisance. But when they begin happening more often, you are probably going to start ignoring those calls. That’s a problem because it puts your building and anyone inside at risk. On the fire alarm side, we see a few common causes for these alarms. Sometimes, it’s environmental. Condensation can collect in detectors, or small insects can get inside. Dust and fumes from certain manufacturing processes can also cause issues, especially in places that aren’t cleaned often enough.
Neglect makes all of that worse. Heat and smoke detectors that haven’t been tested or regularly checked usually accumulate dirt, bugs, and other debris that clog sensors.
sneak inside. Even a ceiling decoration can trigger an alarm if it starts to sway when the furnace kicks on. Systems that were never set up quite right or that no one has looked at in years tend to cause the most issues. If you are getting a lot of nuisance calls, you can do a couple of things. First, you can have the monitoring center hold calls until business hours for signals that are really just maintenance issues, like low batteries and certain trouble alerts. They will still treat an actual fire or burglar alarm as urgent and call right away. Second, make sure the system gets regular attention. Fire alarms are required by code to be tested at least once a year, and all systems benefit from a periodic checkup. By taking care of a few details during the day, you’ll have a working system that’s far less likely to wake you up for the wrong reasons at night.
On the security side, the usual suspects look a little different. A loose door or window with a sensor on it can move just enough in a storm to trip the alarm. Motion detectors can pick up pets and critters that
2 · American-Alarms.com
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