I get an enormous amount of spam emails everyday and spam phone calls.  Here's a great article from Rick Rouse of Rick's Daily Tips

Like most everyone else, you probably receive SPAM and phishing emails all the time.
And despite the existence of the Can Spam act, this scourge of the Internet seems to actually be getting worse instead of better.

If you ever happen to accidentally open one of these obnoxious messages you might be tempted to click the “Unsubscribe” link located near the bottom of the message to have your email address removed from their mailing list.

Whatever you do, don’t click that link! Read on to find out why…

Why you should avoid clicking “Unsubscribe” in SPAM messages 

Clicking “Unsubscribe” in a fraudulent email will not result in your email address being removed from the scammer’s email list. What it WILL do is one, or both of the following:

1 – Verify for the scammer that your email address is in fact a valid and active address (which will have the unwanted side effect of making your email address even more valuable to the scammer in the future).

2 – Take you to a malicious website that will download malware onto your computer and/or trick you into falling for a scam offer of some sort.

I know how irritating it is to check your email and find dozens of SPAM messages filling up your inbox, but clicking “Unsubscribe” won’t help you avoid it in the future. All it will do is end up attracting even more malicious junk in the future, and possibly worse.

How to properly handle your junk emails
The best way to handle SPAM and other forms of unwanted email is to simply mark them as “SPAM” or “Junk” (depending on which word your email provider uses) and then delete them without even opening them.

Of course there will be times when you open one of these emails by accident, regardless of how careful you are to avoid them. When that happens, simply mark the message as SPAM or Junk and then delete it.

Whatever you do, DO NOT click on the “Unsubscribe” link (or ANY link in the email for that matter).

What to do if you accidentally click a link in a SPAM message
If you accidentally click ANY link in a SPAM message you should first deal with the email as explained above, then thoroughly scan your computer for malware by following the steps listed in this post.

And finally, one HUGE, and very important caveat…Everything I said above only applies to SPAM emails, primarily emails you never signed up for or joined an email list to receive.

If you actually did sign up for a mailing list please don’t mark it as SPAM or Junk if you decide you don’t want to receive it any more. Use the Unsubscribe link in one of the emails instead. That’s what it’s there for.

We all sign up for things we believe we’ll like, only to find out that it really isn’t our cup of tea. It’s fine to Unsubscribe from those types of things, and that’s what the folks that send out legitimate emails want us to do.

The folks who run legitimate newsletters and other mailings that you legitimately signed up for are actually eager for you to unsubscribe if you ever change your mind about receiving their emails.

Why? Because unsubscribing does two very important things:

1 – It prevents them from continuing to send emails to people who aren’t interested in receiving them (and therefore never open them).

Unopened emails lower a newsletter’s “Open Rate”, which negatively affects the ISP’s quality scores for that newsletter’s email address.

2 – Marking an email that you signed up for as SPAM or Junk effectively does the same thing as number 1 – it negatively affects the newsletter’s ability to make it into the inboxes of the people who really want to receive it.

Here’s a general rule to follow:
If you receive a marketing email that you never signed up to receive you should mark it as SPAM or JUNK, because that’s truly what it is.

You shouldn’t click the Unsubscribe link if you never subscribed to that list in the first place.
However, if you receive emails that you actually signed up for (i.e. subscribed to) but later decide you want to have your email address removed from their list, use the Unsubscribe link instead of marking it as SPAM.

That will ensure that you never receive another email from that sender without negatively affecting the deliverability of their newsletter to the other people who signed up for their emails and want to continue receiving them.

Note:  Should you decide you want to unsubscribe from the Abiquiu News, let us know or click on unsubscribe on the email you were sent.

There are several sites offering free books that are out of copyright. Before Kindles were a thing, I used to read free books from a site on my computer. Kindles are a great way to read a book. I love them. I have a paperwhite. It’s lightweight, super easy on the eyes, and very transportable. During the pandemic I used it to download Moby Dick, and the entire Jane Austen Library, all free books. I also downloaded and read The Metamorphosis, but I still don’t understand that one.

Amazon makes it simple to buy books for your Kindle but there is a way to load free books outside their world. You can also download PDFs into a Kindle. The easiest way to do this is to email the book to your secret, magical Kindle email address. Didn’t know your Kindle had one? Well, it does. You likely need to look it up in your settings. I did.
A great instructional link to do all this is right HERE. How to Sideload Books to a Kindle – Review Geek

Windows 10 and Windows 11 both have system methods for recovering disk space. I use a program called CCleaner that does some of that cleaning, but Windows makes it pretty simple. You just need to know where to look. I have an article you can use as a guide for Windows 10 HERE. 

Windows 11 is fairly similar.
Basically, you go into System, Storage, and then choose what you want to do. Read the above article first if you aren’t sure or aren’t comfortable with this sort of thing. If you’ve had your computer several years, or you have never done a cleaning, you will likely have some serious space to recover. Even if you have plenty of free space on your drive, cleaning can help with performance.
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It’s worth doing.

For 15 years I worked from home. This began when we moved to Abiquiu. Carol kept her Chicago job also. It was great.

Nowadays, working from home is in the news like it never happened before. We started in 1999, and it was on dial-up. It was sometimes miserably slow, but I was a text based programmer, so it worked OK. When there was a change to a GUI, Graphical User Interface, then it became a problem. It flat out did not work. That was the middle of 2006 and I was worried. That project fell through though and I was spared, plus, in January 2007, Abiquiu got DSL.

I found this fun article on the DO’s and DON’Ts of working from home and I thought it was timely. I don’t agree with everything. I did get dressed to go to work. It was part of the discipline of taking the work seriously. On the other hand, my desk is a MESS, and we never did video calls. Not once.

If you are working from home or you have a kid schooling from home, then this may be a useful READ.

If you are thinking about buying a new MacBook, I say “Go for it!” There are some considerations though.

The newer MacBooks, say from 2015 on, are not necessarily upgradable. This is important because Apple sells MacBooks with pretty small hard drives and ram. If you are somebody that keeps a MacBook for more than a few years, say 3 years, then you might consider upgrading your choice on the HD and ram. Make sure whatever you get is at least as big as the computer you are replacing. Upgrading older MacBooks, when possible, is fairly straightforward. The bottom cover comes off with about 10 tiny screws and you generally have access to the battery, ram, and hard drive. The three things a user might want to replace.

iMacs are different. Older iMacs had a magnetic screen cover, then the display screen to unscrew, and then general access. It can be a bit of an ordeal to replace the HD. Newer iMac screens are glued in and I find that quite a bit more problematic.

I haven’t seen a Mac Mini in years, so I can’t speak for the newer ones, other than that I have read they are really good computers and priced nicely.

An article to reference on upgrading MacBooks is HERE. 

​Older MacBooks,  prior to 2015, can really benefit from an SSD drive, if it doesn’t have one already. MacBooks prior to 2009 though, those are tough. There are patched versions of Catalina that will run on some Macs where Apple only allows El Capitan, so that’s something to consider. If you have a path to Catalina on an older Mac, then upgrading to an SSD and adding memory would also make sense. Ultimately though, if you are using a 2009 MacBook still, then you got way more than your moneys worth. I say, “Great job and well done!”.