If you’ve been enjoying watching Netflix on your iPad, and your Netflix app has suddently stopped working, read on. The excellent – and free – Netflix app for the iPad allows you to instantly stream and watch both movies and television shows to your iPad, for nothing more than the cost of an $8.99/month Netflix membership. But some users are finding that after enjoying the Netflix iPad ‘Watch Instantly’ experience for a while, suddenly the ‘watch instantly’ option stops working. After selecting a show to watch, the Netflix application just hangs and hangs. After a great deal of testing, we have determined that a problem with Netflix ‘watch instantly’ is almost always caused by the same thing. Here’s how to fix it. (Bonus: We also explain what the Netflix “six digit phone service code” is.)

You may have read our article about the Chumby, and about how much we like it. Well, now you don’t even need a Chumby to enjoy the Chumby experience! If you have an Android phone, you can get Andorid Chumby application on your phone! Some people are finding that the Chumby app for Android doesn’t work, but that’s because there is a trick to getting the Chumby. It is an easy trick to getting the Chumby android app to work, and here it is!

AT&T is offering live streaming television direct to your smartphone or tablet, and even your Android or Apple Watch, through its U-Verse apps and offerings. While you do have to have an AT&T U-verse television package that includes home television (and includes giving you a DVR), there is no reason you have to use it at home or use the DVR, you can choose to access only the online streaming service.

If you’ve set up Google two-factor authentication (also known as 2-step verification – the second step is an SMS text message) and can’t figure out how to get your email program, iPhone mail application (or any other iPhone or Android phone application) or your iPad or other tablet apps to work with Google services such as Gmail or Google Voice, here is a simple, step-by-step tutorial for how to set up an email client or any other app or application to work with your two-factor verification protected Google account.

It’s happened to most of us at one time or another. You leave your laptop open and a family member accidentally sees an email that you’d rather they didn’t (perhaps you are planning a surprise party for them), or a friend sees an embarrassing chat in your instant messenger program, or a colleague finds that website you were looking at during your lunch hour. If only there were a way to password protect individual software programs and applications (increasingly known as simply ‘apps’ ) on your Mac or Windows PC. Well, there is!

Bots generate at least 10% of all online traffic, according to data released today by Solve Media, a company that provides security authentication solutions through CAPTCHA-based advertising technology. Solve Media indicates that they have seen a 400% increase in what they term ‘aberrant’ traffic across web-based services such as commenting, voting, registration, contact and commenting.

A new iPhone and Android app, FlyRights (not FlyRight, which is confusingly another iPhone application which allows you to use social media to provide feedback to the airlines) allows users who feel that they have been the the victim of racial profiling by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to immediately – on the spot – file a complaint (via the FlyRights app – hence “Fly Rights”) with both the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

While it’s often fine to leave all of the apps running on your iPhone or iPad, sometimes, for various reasons, you want to completely shut down an app , i.e. kill it, stop it from running, or close it.  It’s actually really easy to completely close an iPhone app (or an iPad app), but this is another one of those things that, while easy, is not obvious.  So here is a step-by-step tutorial (only 3 steps!) to completely shut down and stop an app from running.

A new Facebook program, called “If I Die” (shouldn’t that be “When I Die” or “If I’m Dead”?) allows a last farewell message to be posted to the user’s wall after they pass away. No, they don’t actually post after they are dead from beyond the grave (that would be a Oujia Board app), but the “If I Die” app is said to be the next best thing.

“Take This Lollipop”, the creepy Facebook tour through your personal information, is an excellent example of something we have been trying to pound into your heads all along: putting personal information on the Internet (such as location based check ins) can be dangerous. More to the point: most people have no idea how much personal information they really have revealed online, and how easy it is to track them down, stalking them, and worse. “Take this Lollipop” is technically a Facebook app, which is how (and why) it asks for you to log in using Facebook Connect, something that we also advise against.

It’s so easy to end up with a big collection of apps, isn’t it? There are so many free applications, so many interesting looking apps, that you can eat ’em like candy. But eventually they start taking up too much space on your iPhone, iPod or iTouch, or on your hard drive in iTunes. Here is how to remove an app from your device, from iTunes, and from your hard drive.

State Farm, the insurance company, has just released an iPhone app that evaluates how you drive. Called the State Farm Driver Feedback app, the iPhone application uses your iPhone’s accelerometer and GPS to track your acceleration, cornering, and braking, and then gives you a grade. But is that all it gives you? What about increased insurance rates, or even being declined insurance, based on how you drive, as recorded by the State Farm Driver Feedback app?

Google has announced a controversial face recognition software to run on mobile phones. The Google face detection application will access your personal information – including your personal contact information – when someone takes your picture using the Google face recognition app.

Splick-It is a mobile phone application that lets you place an order with your favorite coffee shop or restaurant, and have your drinks or food ready and waiting for you to pick up, already paid for. In theory, it lets you pull up, walk in, and go right to the head of the line, picking up your triple creme mochaccino without having to even pull out your wallet.

If you think that you may have a sexually transmitted disease (“STD”, which used to be known as “VD”, or venereal disease or – as it’s known in the UK – sexually transmitted infection or “STI”), such as syphilis, herpes, chlamydia or gonorrhea, or even HIV, and want to get yourself tested without having to leave your house, well, now there’s an app for that. Or, there will be, once the eSTI project goes from prototype to drug store.