One familiar refrain amongst all Canadian Internet users when talking about service levels is “There’s nothing we can do”. We’re resigned to bad connections, routing devices that appear untested, over-priced services, phone systems that are truly hellish, and big companies that operate as if they were monopolies. In fact, you don’t have to go far to find horror stories. If you even look at the history of my blog, you’ll see that I write much more about negative topics than positive. The challenge, I find, is surfacing the good stories, so they can also compete for attention just as much. This is a story about Teksavvy.
The pitch, as Karl Palachuk puts it, is that Windows users who are not locally administrative users cannot be infected with viruses. This is an absurd and wrong line of thinking from someone who professes to have been in the IT industry for more than 25 years. But, we can all be wrong, so I say own it Karl.
Blogs, sites, social networks, and news sites are all vying or your time. With all that noise, it can be difficult to ingest the most compelling and useful information out there. In the past, I’ve resisted the idea of being part of that noise because I didn’t want to contribute to it. Over time, I realized that a great portion of my time is spent weeding through the noise. I do it so you don’t have to.
Often I hear this: “How am I supposed to know when I see a fake? They’re all so perfect!”. This familiar refrain is often followed by the person explaining how “computer illiterate” they are or some other version of that idea. The truth is, if you know what to look for, you can often tell that you’ve landed on a fake page. It’s important to learn that you have to suspect everything you see in a browser.
The amazing web-based tool KeeWeb is perhaps one of the better ways to make Keepass databases work for you in a cross-platform environment. The challenge with using this tool, however, is that it’s not exactly the easiest to get running on your own hosting server. Yes, you can just go to app.keeweb.info, but if you want to try hosting it yourself somewhere, it may seem like a real challenge. For that reason, I wanted to offer some thoughts on how you get this thing up and running.
This morning has started randomly. While sitting down to drink a coffee and read the tech news, I ran into Oshawa’s Mayor John Henry. As a homeowner, small business owner, and an electric vehicle driver in his city, I had a few questions to ask. Naturally, he with with another person, so I tried to be cognizant of not being a dick by interrupting them.
The most amazing side effect of being in the technology business is working with all sorts of technical people. Most often, they work for manufacturers or vendors; but they sometimes branch out and start their own businesses. After more than 16 years as a consultant, I’ve learned a few things and sometimes get to pass on my “straight talk” to others who do what I’ve been doing so long. I want to do more of this when I can.
The one thing a product that stores data should never do is destroy it. Sure, there may be other smaller issues, but I was surprised to learn that a Leef iBridge 64GB device I tested actively destroyed data while in use. Here’s what it does and how to get around it.
This whole HTTPS and Google’s push to encrypt (or weaponize depending on your perspective) is back on people’s lips again. I’m a little late to the party of course, since I have been out of the country so many times in the last three months that blogging has been a distant thought. With all of this talk, I’m left to wonder if the uproar has any merit.
Automattic, the makers of popular blogging software WordPress (this site is based on the self-hosted version), have released a newly re-vamped set of tools and software around the blogging platform.