…or, in this case, the Itty Bitty. I get my news and information from a wide variety of sources: websites, newsletters, YouTube channels, and podcasts, primarily. Today’s media content lends itself well to consumer contribution, and that increases the value of each medium as well as each producer. I currently follow 17 podcasts, and the only reason I can do […]
Sometimes It’s the Little Things
Is Your Heart Bleeding?
What have you heard about the vulnerability called Heartbleed? More than you wanted to? Less than you needed to? Let me unpack it for you, only the part that you need to know, and then I’ll get a little deeper for those who want to stick around for the full meal. Let’s do a Good News/Bad News thing. What […]
The End of Support for XP–All is Not Lost!
Microsoft ended support for Windows XP today. The camps are divided as to whether that was just another ploy to get you to spend more money on another operating system, or whether it was time for XP to go gently into that good night. Keep reading to the end for a bit of a surprise. Let’s face it, XP was […]
What is “The Cloud” and Should I Be Using It?
This is a very simplified network drawing done in Microsoft Visio, using commonly accepted symbols. Something like this, only much more complex, would be used for planning a new network or an upgrade or change, or to identify where the technology components of a network are. In the center of the diagram, you see a Cloud symbol. This symbol has […]
I’m Completely Safe On a Mac Or Linux
FALSE! Well, you might be safer on a Mac or Linux machine than on an unpatched Windows machine. But just getting a Mac and never taking safety measures, and then clicking on every link that comes into your email and giving your install password to every process that requests it isn’t any safer than running any other Windows machine. Remember Willie […]
When Does One Use a Hashtag? Twitter for Beginners
If you are a Twitter user, you may not find as much value in this post as someone who is not a Twitter user. But if you’re just getting started with it, read on, you might see something useful. Twitter has been described as microblogging. I guess that’s accurate. What you’re reading here is a blog, so the 140 character […]
Securely Logging In
All logins are not created equal, and they don’t all need to be. There are some places I visit on the web that don’t need a secure login, because they aren’t storing anything significant about me. I have a login for my RSS reader (if you want to know what an RSS reader is, check out my post here), but […]
Spammers Know There’s One Born Every Minute
I remember the early days of spam emails, before there was a way to block them. There weren’t nearly as many as there are today, but we still spent a lot of time keeping our mailboxes clean. It was pretty easy to spot one, too. They were always selling something, and it was always obvious that they were selling something, […]
A Post about POST
A lot happens after you push a power button, even before you see the “splash screen.” Electronic devices—computers, tablets, phones, PDA’s (remember them?), even appliances, go through a Power On Self Test, or POST. In basic terms, it is exactly what it sounds like. As the current is applied to the system board, the most basic components on the board […]
How “Free Stuff” on the Web Really Works
Everything has a cost of some type. That’s basic economics. It’s not always a monetary cost; sometimes it’s a price paid in effort, and sometimes it’s an “opportunity cost,” which means that as a result of choosing one thing you can’t take full advantage of another opportunity. An example of that would be in how we choose to spend our […]