My problem here was that a client asked needed to extract data from a few disparate sources and build a clean, usable list of email addresses. Certainly, no small feat since some of this would have to come out of an email account itself. I wasn’t even going to benefit from working from contacts either – addresses had to come from the messages themselves. I’m going to describe what I did to get there.
While posting a product online, I came across a well-developed scam. When I saw it, I wanted to humour the bad guys and see what information I might glean from the process. This is not something you should do, but the details I’ve gathered can help you look at these scams with a more critical […]
Passwords aren’t going anywhere. Even though we’ve seen a rise in a new type of authentication including two-factor and even Yubico-style log-in options; passwords still seem to persist in our lives. If you’re online and use passwords (I know you do), you want to be as sure as possible when storing them. This means, no […]
Internet Protocol (IP) is the general basis for all communications on local and Internet networks. These communications rely on some basic numbers that identify you to other computers on the local network, and to the world. Those numbers put together are what’s commonly called an IP Address. On occasion, someone in you IT department or support might ask you to provide this number format, and I’ll show you how to find it.
Early June of this year, I ordered five more drives for a client’s Dell PowerEdge VRTX server enclosure, This in addition to the currently installed seven 2TB drives that were humming along just fine. My only request from Dell is that these drives be the biggest we can get, and that they be compatible with the VRTX enclosure. Simple, right? So we ordered the $8,000 in hard drives, and waited. The drives themselves would kick of a strange saga of failure and support that I can’t recall since working on another blade system, one made by IBM.
You might have wondered why licensing Retail versions of Microsoft Office 2016 on Windows has become so cumbersome and clunky and confusing? Why does Microsoft force a login to install and activate Office? Why is this service so bad at showing information and handling more than one installation? If fact, if you have more than one retail copy of Office to install and activate on the same account, you’re in for serious confusion. I can’t answer all these questions, but I’ll show you how to fix this mess so you can install Office and move on.
When I was asked to move a customer’s 2000-odd contacts and 13 gigabytes of mail to Google’s cloud services from his MacOS-based computer, I knew this was going to be more than a challenge. To complicate matters, he had been using Outlook as a POP3 client of Google Mail and kept all his folders locally in Outlook 2011. From the beginning, I knew this was going to be an undertaking but I have some tips to help you face these particular challenges.
Wordpress. Incredibly customizable, but often incredibly frustrating. One such specific case is where themes can feature posts in a widget, but don’t always offer a way to set each post to do so. In my current theme’s case, it’s based on Orca and the theme has a “Featured Posts” widget, but there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to set a post as featured. I’ll show you how to modify a publicly available plugin to make this possible in Wordpress’ admin interface.
While in the Dominican Republic I made it my personal mission to gain data access on my smartphone. Over the years, this process has become easier as the companies have accommodated smartphone users. With an unlocked smartphone, you can get reliable and useful pre-paid cell phone and data access in the Dominican. I’ve learned a few things along the way that you’ll want to know if you plan to do this.
It can be hard to admit that.We’re naming the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of an Active Directory domain either a valid name, or using .local TLD and these are both incorrect. Recently, when I was again tasked to build a small (200-ish user) Active Directory domain from scratch, I was again confronted about how wrong those of us in this industry have been. What’s even worse is that Microsoft has been recommending the “Right” way for 14 years!