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If you’ve ever suffered a hard disk failure on your computer, you know how devastating it can be – especially if you haven’t been backing up your data regularly (or at all). Most of the time, there is no type of warning when your hard disk is about to go out on you; it just happens and you’re left totally frustrated and unprepared.

If you’re a Mac user, there’s a very useful application that can help to prepare you for an impending disk failure. This application is SMARTReporter, and it works by periodically polling the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) status of your hard disk drives; it’s basically like an “early warning system.” SMARTReporter uses this technology to keep you up-to-date on the status of your hard disk and lets you know right away if errors are found.

If you have a ATA, SATA, or eSATA hard disk, here’s how you can find out if your hard disk is about to fail.

Installation and Setup

First, you’ll need to download SMARTReporter to your Mac. You can download the free “TRYOUT Version” from their website, or download it from the Mac App Store for $4.99. All of the included disk checks and features make SMARTReporter well worth the $5 price tag.

Once installed, open the application and you’ll be greeted by the SMARTReporter Welcome Assistant.

Since SMARTReporter has to be running in order to predict hard disk failures, it’s recommended that you keep it running at all times. In the Welcome Assistant, you’ll have the option to launch the app at login, and you can also choose to display the app in the menu bar (as opposed to the Dock).

Usage

Now that you’re done with the Welcome Assistant, the application window will appear. Here you can see the status of your hard disk, perform disk checks, manage SMARTReporter’s settings, and view your data history.

If there are any issues with your hard disk, you will see them listed on the Status tab. You’ll can also check to see the last time a specific disk check was performed.

The most important section is the Disk Checks tab. You’ll need to go through each section and customize them to suit your own  needs and preferences. For instance, you can tell SMARTReporter how often to check your hard disk for errors. There are different options for each section, and you can also enable/disable notifications on an individual basis.

In the Settings tab, you can change the menu bar appearance or Dock appearance, depending on which one you’re using. You can also choose to receive a daily status email and useful notifications.

Finally, in the History tab you can view a graph and log regarding your data and the activities that SMARTReporter has performed on your computer.

Final Thoughts

Even though no hard disk will last forever, we often have the “it will never happen to me” attitude about them. It’s time to change that attitude because you never know when it will happen to you. SMARTReporter is the perfect tool to help you keep your hard disk in check. Not only will it help to alleviate most surprise disk failures, but it will also get you better prepared for when it does actually happen.

Charnita Fance

Charnita has been a Freelance Writer & Professional Blogger since 2008. As an early adopter she loves trying out new apps and services. As a Windows, Mac, Linux and iOS user, she has a great love for bleeding edge technology. You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.

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You're reading Find Out If Your Hard Disk Is About To Fail With Smartreporter

Is Your Child Depressed? Let Artificial Intelligence Find It Out

Around one in five children suffer from anxiety and depression, collectively known as internalising disorders. A crucial part of an internalising disorder treatment is early diagnosis because children respond very well at the development stage of their brains. Late treatment exposes the children to the risk of substance abuse and greater chances of committing suicide later in life. However, since children under the age of eight cannot reliably articulate their emotional suffering, adults need to be able to infer their mental state and recognise potential mental health problems. There is a long line for vital treatments, as the waiting list for appointments with psychologists, dubbed with a failure to recognise the symptoms by parents and guardians all add to the growing menace. Behavioural characteristics of patients with internalizing disorders include loneliness, anxiety, withdrawal, and depression. Any standard diagnosis continues for 90 minutes involving a semi-structured interview with the child’s primary guardian.  

Detecting Early Signs

The next question is how to detect the early signs of depression among small kids? The answer is technology. To know the early signs of depression among kids, scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) which is capable to detect early signs of anxiety and depression that arises from the speech patterns among small children. According to the research published in the Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, the tool potentially provides a fast and easy way of diagnosing conditions that are difficult to spot and often overlooked in young people. The Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics suggests a machine learning algorithm could help speed up the diagnosis and treatment for kids with signs of depression. Using a modified version of the Trier-Social Stress Task, an assessment tool that induces stress and anxiety in the test taker, the researchers recorded the audio of 71 children between the ages of three and eight who were tasked with creating a three-minute story that would be judged on interest. A buzzer would sound after 90 seconds and again when there were 30 seconds remaining. The children were also evaluated using standard methods—a clinical interview and parent questionnaire. The audio recordings were fed into an AI machine learning algorithm to analyse the statistical features. The team discovered that three audio features, in particular, were highly indicative of identifying internalization disorders low-pitched voices, higher-pitched buzzer responses, and repeatable speech inflexions and content. The algorithm, which identifies the speech pattern, was able to distinguish between eight audio features out of which three stood out identifying the internalising disorder. These early signs include a low pitch voice, high pitch response to a surprising buzzer and stammering in speech which indicates the prevalence of depression. The algorithm took just a few seconds to analyse in contrast to parent-questionnaires and structured clinical interviews which generally take hours. In the test, the brief form inquires patients about their level of interest in the daily activities, including appetite and eating, their ability to focus and concentrate, one of the parameters designed to detect depression. This algorithm identified children with a diagnosis of an internalising disorder with an accuracy of 80%. The accurate diagnosis is a boom to

Early Diagnosis and Results

In addition to deploying algorithms, the children were also diagnosed with a structured parent questionnaire and clinical interview. These are both well-established ways of identifying internalising disorders in children.  

Looking Forward

The findings of the research would be very helpful to the medic-care industry as the speech analysis algorithm can be deployed into a universal screening tool for clinical use, easily reachable to the users through a smartphone app to record and analyse results immediately.

Around one in five children suffer from anxiety and depression, collectively known as internalising disorders. A crucial part of an internalising disorder treatment is early diagnosis because children respond very well at the development stage of their brains. Late treatment exposes the children to the risk of substance abuse and greater chances of committing suicide later in life. However, since children under the age of eight cannot reliably articulate their emotional suffering, adults need to be able to infer their mental state and recognise potential mental health problems. There is a long line for vital treatments, as the waiting list for appointments with psychologists, dubbed with a failure to recognise the symptoms by parents and guardians all add to the growing menace. Behavioural characteristics of patients with internalizing disorders include loneliness, anxiety, withdrawal, and depression. Any standard diagnosis continues for 90 minutes involving a semi-structured interview with the child’s primary chúng tôi next question is how to detect the early signs of depression among small kids? The answer is technology. To know the early signs of depression among kids, scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) which is capable to detect early signs of anxiety and depression that arises from the speech patterns among small children. According to the research published in the Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, the tool potentially provides a fast and easy way of diagnosing conditions that are difficult to spot and often overlooked in young people. The Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics suggests a machine learning algorithm could help speed up the diagnosis and treatment for kids with signs of depression. Using a modified version of the Trier-Social Stress Task, an assessment tool that induces stress and anxiety in the test taker, the researchers recorded the audio of 71 children between the ages of three and eight who were tasked with creating a three-minute story that would be judged on interest. A buzzer would sound after 90 seconds and again when there were 30 seconds remaining. The children were also evaluated using standard methods—a clinical interview and parent questionnaire. The audio recordings were fed into an AI machine learning algorithm to analyse the statistical features. The team discovered that three audio features, in particular, were highly indicative of identifying internalization disorders low-pitched voices, higher-pitched buzzer responses, and repeatable speech inflexions and content. The algorithm, which identifies the speech pattern, was able to distinguish between eight audio features out of which three stood out identifying the internalising disorder. These early signs include a low pitch voice, high pitch response to a surprising buzzer and stammering in speech which indicates the prevalence of depression. The algorithm took just a few seconds to analyse in contrast to parent-questionnaires and structured clinical interviews which generally take hours. In the test, the brief form inquires patients about their level of interest in the daily activities, including appetite and eating, their ability to focus and concentrate, one of the parameters designed to detect depression. This algorithm identified children with a diagnosis of an internalising disorder with an accuracy of 80%. The accurate diagnosis is a boom to healthcare providers as it can give the results much more quickly in a few seconds of processing time once the task is chúng tôi addition to deploying algorithms, the children were also diagnosed with a structured parent questionnaire and clinical interview. These are both well-established ways of identifying internalising disorders in chúng tôi findings of the research would be very helpful to the medic-care industry as the speech analysis algorithm can be deployed into a universal screening tool for clinical use, easily reachable to the users through a smartphone app to record and analyse results immediately. In the future, the voice analysis could be combined with motion analysis to turn them to a battery of assisted tools. The findings could prove to be a boom for the well-being and early diagnosis of children who are at the risk of anxiety and depression before even their parents suspect that anything is wrong.

Find Out Your Actual Gmail Reputation

A new tool from Gmail lets you see what Gmail and its users think of your email based on a reputation score and spam reporting levels. Follow Tim Watson’s tutorial for how to use it.

It’s no secret to email marketers that the major ISPs create reputation scores for email senders and that a good reputation is fundamental to getting delivered to the inbox.

Until now you had no way of knowing your Gmail reputation score. Getting to the inbox has felt like ten pin bowling with a curtain in front of the pins.

But over the summer Gmail made available a free tool for senders to obtain data on their own reputation. Finally you can know what Gmail users think of your email.

I’ll cover in a minute how to sign up to see your own stats, but first a quick summary of why you’ll want to do this.

Access gives you reports for Spam Rate, IP Reputation, Domain Reputation, Feedback Loop, Authentication, Encryption and Delivery Errors.

So far I’ve found the first three of these reports to be the most useful. So let me go into those.

With Gmail you don’t have a single reputation score but in fact Gmail calculates reputation for both the sending domain and sending IP addresses. Domain reputation is becoming a big factor at many major ISPs.

IP Reputation report

This report shows the reputation for all the IP addresses Gmail has seen email being sent from for your domain.

There are four levels of reputation and of course you’ll want to be high, as in the example below. Within the user interface (but not shown below) you’ll see detailed information for each of the IP addresses Gmail detected and their reputation rating.

The bars only show for days that you actually sent email.

Domain Reputation report

This shows the reputation Gmail has calculated for your sending domain. As with IP reputation it’s graded in four levels.

Spam Rate Report

Shows a graph of spam complaints over time. This is the number of your recipients classifying your email as spam in the Gmail user interface.

What level of Spam complaint rates is acceptable in Gmail?

You should be aiming to keep spam complaint rate below 0.1%. Because the report only shows data to one decimal point that means aim for most days aim to have 0% with a few at 0.1%. From the reports I’ve looked at the occasional 0.2% is not overall too harmful to reputation.

There is one additional criterion to get this report; you must have DKIM authentication setup. If you are using a good ESP this should be the case.

Gmail spam feedback loop (FBL) report

The feedback loop report shows the Feedback Loop Spam rate and Feedback Loop identifier count.

Confused? Sounds like the same as the Spam Rate report?

Well it is a very similar but this report is specifically giving a summary of the stats from the Gmail feedback loop system. The feedback loop system provides user spam complaint data back to ESPs that have support for this Gmail system.

It’s based on the same user spam complaints as the Spam Rate report, but provides further granularity. As long as your ESP has extra Gmail specific headers in your emails and is signed up with the Gmail feedback loop then data for spam complaints by campaign is also available.

How to use the tool

The most important use is quite simply to know if you have strong Gmail inbox placement. There is no tool or metric available anywhere else that will give you a better sense of this.

Simply signup and check you’ve high IP reputation and high domain reputation.

If you’ve high reputation then you’ve nothing to do but monitor it stays high. Put it on the regular report list, weekly or monthly depending on your level of email activity.

If it’s not high then you’ve now hard facts that you’ve an issue to work on and solve.

Does this help me fix my deliverability issue?

Some of the reports I’ve not covered give your deliverability analysis some further clues and of course looking at the time line for complaints and your sending pattern can help further.

Questions to consider when complaints peak include; what segments were being sent to? Was different or new data introduced? Was the message and content different to your typical emails? Did you change display from name or use a very different subject line?

For a prioritised list of the main causes of poor deliverability see 7 email deliverability issues.

Getting access

The tool is free, you just need a Google account and to complete a short verification process to prove you own the domain for which you wish to view stats.

The verification process involves adding a DNS record to your sending domain. If your company manages your domain then it’s 15 minutes work for the IT person in charge of your domain DNS to do this.

I’ve been able to get same day access to the Gmail postmaster tool for some of the brands I work with.

Head over to the Gmail Postmaster tools page to sign-up for access.

Along with Microsoft SNDS the Gmail postmaster tool is looking like one of the two must have tools for monitoring of inbox placement. It’s already become a standard tool in my toolbox.

Why Is It So Hard For White People To Talk About Race?

Why Is It So Hard for White People to Talk about Race? A conversation with White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, speaking at BU Monday

Robin DiAngelo, author of the New York Times best-seller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Race.

Photo by Gabriel Solis

“I’m white—check me out, everybody,” sociologist and author Robin DiAngelo said as she launched into a talk about race at a recent higher education diversity conference.

DiAngelo has led racial justice training for corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and educators for more than 20 years. That work inspired her to write the New York Times best seller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Race (Beacon Press, 2023), and it’s the subject of the keynote address she’ll give Monday at BU, sponsored by the Associate Provost for Diversity & Inclusion office.

DiAngelo wasn’t raised to think about herself in racial terms, but she has come to understand that she moves through the world with a “most particularly white experience in a society that is profoundly separate and unequal by race.”

“People of color from a very early age have to know my reality in a way that I’m very sorry to say, I don’t have to know theirs.”

A University of Washington affiliate associate professor of education, DiAngelo came up with the term “white fragility” in 2011 to describe the way many white people respond when their assumptions about race (especially their own) are challenged—and how that response continues racial inequality.

BU Today: You write in your book that “white fragility is the inability to tolerate racial stress.” Can you talk more about that?

DiAngelo: The fragility part is meant to capture how little it takes to completely unravel us. For many white people, the mere suggestion that being white has meaning will cause umbrage—in particular, generalizing about white people will trigger umbrage.

But the impact of our umbrage is not fragile at all. It’s a weaponized defensiveness. It marshals behind it centuries of institutional power, and so the impact is quite profound. We make it so hard for people of color to talk to us about their experiences that most of the time they don’t, because it tends to get worse for them when they talk to us, rather than better.

What do you mean when you talk about the difference between people who say they’re “color-blind” and those who “color celebrate”?

My area of research is discourse analysis. That’s the critical examination of everyday narratives and how they function. In talking to white people day in and day out for years, I see two general categories of everyday white narratives that white people use as evidence that we’re not racist—color-blind and color celebrate.

Color-blind is probably number one—that’s some version of: “I was taught to treat everybody the same.” When I hear that from a white person, there’s a bubble over my head saying, “This person doesn’t understand basic socialization…this person is not self-aware.”

No one was taught to treat everyone the same.

Color celebrate is more popular with white progressives, where our evidence is some version of proximity. We’ll say things like, “I have people of color in my family,” or “I used to live in New York City,” or “I’ve been to Costa Rica.” If this is the evidence that white progressives use to establish their lack of racism, then apparently a racist could not take a trip to Costa Rica or work three cubicles down from a person of color or live in a major city.

How did you get to the point of being able to talk about what it means for you to be white?

I grew up in poverty, under patriarchy… With the feminist movement, I began to have a critical consciousness fairly early about sexism. But I had absolutely no critical consciousness about where I experienced privilege, where I actually colluded with the oppression of someone else. It wasn’t until I started working side by side with people of color in racial justice trainings at the same time that I was trying to talk to majority white groups about racism that my eyes were opened.  It was a parallel process and it was was profound.

I got a job as a diversity trainer, as we called it in the ’90s, and I had no idea what I was in for. The state of Washington Department of Social and Health Services had been sued for racial discrimination, and as part of the settlement the federal government mandated that every employee receive 16 hours of diversity training.

I applied for the job and I thought I was qualified because I was a vegetarian. How could I be a racist? I had that classic white progressive mentality. Here I get this job and I’m working side by side with people of color. They’re challenging me to the core of how I saw myself in the world. Part of being white is that I could be that far in my life—I was in my 30s and college-educated—and never before had my racial worldview been challenged.

My whole world was blown open. I was working side by side with some very strong people of color, but also going into these white workplaces trying to teach white people about racism, and the hostility was just jaw-dropping. I was very intimidated and very inarticulate in the face of it, but I hung in there. I had some amazing mentors of color who hung in there with me, and after years and years of work, it became clearer and clearer how we white people manage to claim race has no meaning in a society wholly stratified by race. Over time, I got better at laying it all out.

Then I got my PhD.  So I could apply all I’d learned; I went from practice to theory. Now, because I’m older, I have a degree of credibility that allows me to push harder.

Has your racial justice work become any easier now, the post-Obama era, as a lot of people seem to have become more aware of structural and systemic racism and inequality?

Yes. That surprised me because I thought it would be more difficult. I think this thin veneer of post racial-ness in the Obama years was just ripped off. I think a lot of white progressives were in shock, and there is a kind of urgency that I didn’t see during the Obama years. That seems to make white people more receptive. At the same time, there is more permission for explicit racism than there was. I don’t think that anyone is in denial anymore that racism exists.

You’ve said that your intention is not to make white people feel guilty and this is not about being a good person or a bad person. Can you expand a bit on that?

As long as we understand racism as individual acts of intentional meanness, we will feel defensive about any suggestion of our complicity. When we understand the systemic nature of racism, however, we understand that our complicity is inevitable. It’s actually liberating to start from that premise, because then we can turn our attention to identifying what our complicity looks like and how we might change it.

I don’t feel guilt and I do not want other white people to feel guilt. It’s a useless emotion, and we are not effective when we feel that way. Quite contrary to guilt, I have found this to be the most intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically rewarding journey I have ever embarked on.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In her keynote address, Robin DiAngelo: What Does It Mean to Be White? on Monday, March 4, DiAngelo will explore such questions as What prevents us from moving toward greater racial equity? How does race shape the lives of white people? What makes racism so hard for white people to see? She will speak at the George Sherman Union Metcalf Hall, 775 Commonwealth Ave., from 11 am to 12:30 pm. This event is free and sponsored by the Associate Provost for Diversity & Inclusion office. Register here.

How To Boot Up Raspberry Pi 3 From External Hard Disk

Raspberry Pi is designed to run from the SD/MicroSD card. For operating systems like PIXEL, this means that your “root” and “Home” partitions all lie in the SD card, which can be a little limiting considering its minuscule storage size. If you are intending to run a home storage server on your Raspberry Pi, it is best to move the OS to the external hard drive so you have tons of storage space to use.

In this tutorial we will show you how to get Raspberry Pi 3 to boot up and run from the external hard disk.

Note: The reason Raspberry Pi 3 is used here is because it doesn’t need an additional power source to power up the external hard disk. The power supply of Raspberry Pi 3 is sufficient to power up the external hard disk via the USB port. Do make sure that you are using the official Pi power adapter or that your power plug is capable of outputting 2.5A (minimum) of current.

Before we start, here are the requirements for this tutorial:

A Raspberry Pi 3

A microSD card (minimum 4 GB) with PIXEL installed. (This tutorial assumes that you already have a working PIXEL installation on your microSD card. For more details, you can check out the tutorials here to set up images for Raspberry Pi.)

An external hard disk formatted to Ext4. (You can use GParted or the fdisk command to format your external hard drive to Ext 4.)

Setting Up External Hard Disk

1. Insert the microSD card into the Raspberry Pi 3. Plug in the external hard drive to the USB port of the Raspberry Pi 3. Power up the Pi.

2. Once you have reached the desktop, open a terminal. Log into the root account and mount the external hard drive.

sudo

su

mount

/

dev

/

sda

/

mnt

3. Next, we need to install Rsync (if it is not already installed):

apt-get install

rsync

4. Copy all the files from the microSD card to the external hard drive. We are using rsync, so all file permissions and ownership are intact.

5. With all the boot up files in the external hard drive, we need to modify the startup file so that it is pointing to the external hard disk for boot up instructions.

cp

/

boot

/

cmdline.txt

/

boot

/

cmdline.txt.bak

nano

/

boot

/

cmdline.txt

We need to edit two parts of this line. Change the root= to /dev/sda, and at the end, add rootdelay=5.

The result should look like this:

nano

/

mnt

/

etc

/

fstab

Add this line to the second line of the file:

/

dev

/

sda1

/

ext4 defaults,noatime

0

1

Add a “#” at the start of the last line to disable booting up from the microSD card:

#

/

dev

/

mmcblk0p7

/

ext4 defaults,noatime

0

1

Note: /devmncblk0p7 is referring to your microSD card slot and the value might differ in your case.

After the changes, it should look like this:

proc

/

proc proc defaults

0

0

/

dev

/

sda1

/

ext4 defaults,noatime

0

1

/

dev

/

mmcblk0p6

/

boot vfat defaults

0

2

That’s it. Reboot your Pi, and it should boot up and run from the external hard drive. One thing to note is that the microSD card needs to be in its slot, as the Pi needs to read the startup file from it before it boots up from the external hard drive.

Optional: Increase the swapfile size

Assuming your external hard drive comes with tons of space, you might want to increase the swapfile size so your Pi can run slightly faster.

1. Open a terminal and log into the root account.

sudo

su

2. Edit the swapfile.

nano

/

etc

/

dphys-swapfile

Change the value of CONF_SWAPSIZE from 100 to 512. Save and exit the file.

3. Restart the service to update the changes.

sudo

dphys-swapfile setup

sudo

/

etc

/

init.d

/

dphys-swapfile stop

sudo

/

etc

/

init.d

/

dphys-swapfile start Conclusion

The Raspberry Pi 3 comes with several useful improvements such as higher RAM, a WiFi module and a power supply big enough to support an external hard drive. This makes it useful to run bigger and more intensive projects. As such, the microSD card with a small storage size can be a limiting factor, not to mention its slow read/write speed and it being susceptible to data corruption. With the instructions above, you can now power your Raspberry Pi from the external hard drive and improve its performance.

Damien

Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.

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How To Check If Your Computer Has Been Tampered With

Whether you’re in an open office where colleagues regularly wander past, or live somewhere—like a college dorm—where you feel comfortable leaving your laptop unattended in the presence of relative strangers, it can be all too easy for someone else to sneak a look at your computer.

If you want to keep your device secure in communal environments, your best bet is to stop unauthorized access in the first place. Still, there’s some detective work you can do if you suspect someone else has been using your device.

Always make sure you lock your computer

Since prevention is better than a cure, you ideally want to prevent others from accessing your laptop in the first place. A simple way to do that is to lock your laptop behind a password whenever you step away from it.

[Related: How to remove Bing results from your Window Start menu]

If you keep leaving your desk in a hurry or just always forget to lock your computer when you step away from it, set your laptop to lock itself after a certain amount of idle time. On macOS, open the Apple menu and pick System Settings, then scroll down to Lock Screen. Find the option to Require password after screen saver begins or display is turned off, and use the dropdown menu to choose exactly when your computer will lock itself after it’s been idle. You can use the options and dropdown menus right above this to change the time it takes for a screen saver to appear or the display to turn off.

The duration of your PC’s various sleep and idle options is up to you—a shorter time is better for security and battery life, but also means your computer might lock itself while you’re still in front of it if you haven’t touched the keyboard or mouse for a few minutes. Start with something around five minutes, and adjust it if you feel that time is too short.

Check for recent activity

Let’s say you suspect someone might have been able to access your laptop while it was unlocked, or maybe even knows your password. Your next step should be to check for telltale signs of unusual activity inside the most commonly used apps.

Start with your web browser and call up the browsing history to see if someone else has left a trace. From the Chrome menu (three vertical dots in the top right corner of your browser), go to History, then History again; from the Firefox menu (three lines), choose History, then Manage history; from the Microsoft Edge menu (three dots), choose History, then either All to view recent pages in a dropdown menu or the three dots in the top right of that menu followed by Open history page; and from the Safari toolbar on macOS, choose History, then Show All History.

Finder can show you all the files that have been worked on recently in macOS—a good way to check if your computer has been tampered with. David Nield

You can dig into absolutely everything that’s happened on your laptop or desktop recently, but the utilities involved are quite difficult to decipher. You might have to run a few web searches to make sense of the information they provide. The utilities will also log all system actions, including those taken by the computer itself. Just because you see activity at a time you weren’t around doesn’t mean someone tampered with your device—it could have run a task itself.

[Related: Set your computer to turn on and off on a schedule]

Get some extra help from apps

Spytech Realtime-Spy will keep an eye on your laptop in your absence. David Nield

If you’re serious about catching laptop snoopers in the act, some third-party software might be in order. One of the best we’ve come across is Spytech Realtime-Spy, which works for Windows or macOS through a simple web interface. You can test out a demo version online, too.

The program shows you the apps that have been used, the websites that have been visited, and the connections that have been made on your computer. It will even take screenshots and record individual key presses. It’s a comprehensive package but will set you back $80 per year.

Another option is Refog, which concentrates mainly on logging keystrokes on your laptop’s keyboard, but which also monitors web usage and takes screenshots. The software costs about $30 per month for Windows or macOS, but there’s a free trial if you want to test it first.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on July 20, 2023.

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