David Murphy
Wall Street Journal
Silicon Valley, CA, United States
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Past articles by David:
The 3 Best Espresso Machines for Your Home
We asked coffee experts and barista trainers to tell us the secrets behind the perfect espresso shot, and then tested the machines you can use at home to make them. → Read More
Why Is My Windows PC Always Running Out of Memory?
There’s an obvious appeal to off-the-shelf, “install this to fix everything!” software suites. Or, they sound great on paper, anyway: Dump an app (or a few apps) on your PC, and they’ll continually scan your system to make sure it’s free of viruses or malware. And depending on the suite, they’ll even work all kinds of other magical tricks to make your computer as fast as possible. → Read More
How to Get iOS Notifications on Your Oculus Quest
Entering virtual reality is fun, but it can also be productive: Lately, I’ve found it a fairly decent way to get in a quick workout. However, strapping on a VR headset does require me to untether from my phone and miss out on all the scintillating messages my friends are sending my way—or at least, it did. If you’re an Oculus Quest owner, you can now get all of your iPhone’s notifications sent… → Read More
How MoCA Made My Home Network Faster Than Mesh Wifi
I love fussing with wifi, but when I’m building the backbone of my network in a new location—a house, apartment, or wherever—I tend to go wired as much as I can. Wireless bridges and tri-band mesh/extender setups are great and convenient, but I always appreciate the stability and speed of an Ethernet cable. → Read More
Why Apple Music's 'Lossless Audio' Isn't That Big of a Deal
I confess, even I got a little excited when I heard that Apple was upping the quality of many of its Apple Music tracks to lossless audio. While that’s not a you-can-listen-now change, as the 75+ million lossless tracks are debuting in June, it’s still something to get excited about. Right? Lossless audio means you “will be able to hear the exact same thing that the artists created in the… → Read More
All the New Privacy Settings Google Announced at I/O 2021
I tuned in to Google I/O this year with privacy on the brain. Chalk it up to the recent drama of Facebook-exec-turned-Apple-employee-turned-unemployed-employee Antonio Garcia Martinez, who famously said in 2018: → Read More
How to Set Up Home Monitoring on Your Echo Show
It’s not the best week for a new feature that lets you turn your smart assistant display into a security camera, but one company’s misfortune is another company’s gain, I suppose. Regardless, a brand-new “Home Monitoring” setting lets you do just that with your camera-equipped Amazon Echo Show, offering a handy way to see what your Show can see without anyone else in the room seeing you. → Read More
How to Reboot Your Eufy Cameras So Strangers Can't View Them
Eufy makes a ton of cameras for various household needs: doorbell cameras, cameras you can set on at table to chat with people while you work, security cameras you can stuff in the corner of a ceiling, and more. The one attribute they share in common is that some kind of bug, vulnerability, or unfortunate issue on Eufy’s end allowed random people to view each others’ camera feeds. → Read More
How Can I Access My External Drive If BitLocker Won't Let Me In?
Encryption is a wonderful thing. While I don’t run full-drive encryption on my Windows desktop at home—courtesy of BitLocker—that’s only because I’m the only one who ever uses my system and I don’t really keep anything of value on it. (All my personal documents and anything I would otherwise encrypt live on a NAS box that’s usually powered down.) → Read More
How to Turn Off Edge Chromium’s Shopping Notifications
You might not begrudge your Edge Chromium browser for trying to help you save money, but it can be annoying when prompt after prompt pops up about cash-back programs and coupon savings. Sometimes the deals are great; other times they’re more of an annoyance than useful. → Read More
How to Protect Your Home Network From 'FragAttacks'
Hearing your wireless devices are vulnerable to something called “FragAttacks” doesn’t exactly inspire joy. However, the word is scarier than the risk; there’s no evidence that anyone is actively exploiting wireless devices via these vulnerabilities, even given the millions that could be susceptible to FragAttacks—short for “fragmentation and aggregation attacks.” → Read More
How to Add Your Pronouns to Instagram, and Why Everyone Should
You can now add your preferred pronouns to Instagram, and I highly encourage you to do so even if you feel like you don’t really need. The more people that do, the more we can normalize this behavior and make the process of sharing and accepting pronouns better for all. → Read More
How to Set Up '2-Step Verification' for Your Google Account
Google is going to start enrolling all of its users in two-step verification, if they haven’t set it up already. Will it come as a shock to some? Sure. But that’s fine; the surprise will fade away, leaving accounts that are much more secure than they were previously, especially for those people who use easy-to-guess pa… → Read More
Use 'Admin Assist' to Automatically Mute Trolls in Your Facebook Groups
If you’ve ever run a large Facebook group, you know the toll that spam, trolls, off-topic posts, or other conversation-killing problems can take on maintaining a sense of community. Now, Facebook is attempting to make the monumental task of keeping the peace in these online spaces a little easier with the launch of new auto-moderation features that will help you automatically deal with… → Read More
Peloton's Data Breach Is a Reminder to Lie Whenever You Can
Peloton has suffered a data breach. The good news? The information about your exercise habits that subsequently became freely accessible by outsiders isn’t all that damning. Peloton’s delayed response, however, is far more concerning. → Read More
Why You Shouldn't Use PayPal to Send Twitter 'Tips'
What a mess. No sooner had Twitter unveiled its new Tip Jar feature—which allows anyone using the app in English (at least, during the rollout) to send cash to a small handful of Twitter users whose work they’d like to support—than major privacy flaws were found in what should otherwise be a innocent way to toss people a few bucks. → Read More
Why Did My Wifi Disappear After a Windows Update?
I can’t resist a good wireless mystery, and this week’s question-writer for Lifehacker’s Tech 911 has a good one—an issue that you don’t even think about until it happens, and then it consumes your mind as you try every trick in the book to get your wifi back. → Read More
How to Unlock That Hidden Debug Mode for AirTags in iOS 14.5
Apple’s AirTags have a hidden debug mode that you can access pretty easily on your connected device (ideally, an iPhone). And while the features found within aren’t going to give you magical tracking powers, you can at least enjoy some of the data related to AirTag tracking. That, and you can change some colors, too. → Read More
Try Using a Bluetooth Scanner App to Find Unwanted AirTags
There’s a chorus of voices that say Apple should do more to guard everyone—Android and iOS users alike—against unwanted tracking and stalking. I agree with them, and the entire concept of the AirTag made me curious. Can you track the trackers? → Read More
Dude, Get a Security Update for Your Dell PC
Do you still own tech from 2009 or thereabouts? Maybe an old CPU or motherboard that’s sitting in a box in your closet “just in case” you need a backup? What about a Dell? If you or someone you care about happens to still be using a Dell computer produced any time between when Barack Obama started his first term and now, you should check to make sure you don’t need an important security update… → Read More