Category Archives: tech rants

Tech talk

Posted by terip on July 1, 2019 1 comments

To start out, here’s a few links with protecting your information online:

http://techland.time.com/2013/07/24/11-simple-ways-to-protect-your-privacy/

https://www.wikihow.com/Protect-Personal-Information

We live in an era, where words you posted on the Internet a decade ago can come back to haunt you. And there are people out there looking to rob you and dox you. (Doxxing is searching for personal information, like name, address and employer and using that information to hound and intimidate you.) I thought it might be time to go over the basics again.

The first rule is, be suspicious. I deal with customers that get phishing emails, popups asking for information and strange calls. I’m always happy that they called before clicking on those links or giving out personal information. If I get an email from Paypal, saying something about my account, I go to the actual Paypal site. If you move your mouse over the actual link, you should see something in the lower left corner of the browser (PC) that shows where that link goes. Most of the time, it doesn’t go to the site. Start by being suspicious.

Secondly, close out old accounts! I finally closed out my LinkedIn account the other day. I’m done with looking for work–I’ll retire from this job. There was just too much of my personal information available there. I also closed out a Twitter account. I used my name for the username. Again, that’s just too much info out there. I opened a new one, with a different name and email address. I still have several free email accounts out there, that I’ll never be able to log into.

Third, passwords. Everyone hates passwords. I see a lot more than you do, dealing with customers. It is typically a five character word with the number 1 at the end. Seriously. I have a lot of passwords, both work and home. I was setting up a new website for myself and had to set up passwords for all sorts of things. For you, I’d recommend a password manager (digital) or a notebook for passwords (analog). I’ve used Last Pass. It’s a great program, inexpensive, and doesn’t store your information on the cloud. You set a master password to log into your saved info and you can set a different password for each site. It will generate one for you which is the best route to take. You need more complex passwords for critical services, like logging into your bank. Passwords need to be at least eight characters long. Every site will have different requirements and no matter what you do, you will face the frustration of trying five or six different passwords with no luck. Happens to the best of us. The other advantage to password managers and notebooks is that you let someone you trust have access to the information, if anything happens to you. My husband was not able to get into his second wife’s email account, after she died. He had no idea what the password was, and there were people that he just couldn’t contact.  And one last thing, do not use your work passwords for personal sites and vice versa. We all want to have just a few passwords to remember. But the fewer passwords that you have, the easier it would be for someone to hack into all of your sites and services. Keep track of your wifi password and change that periodically too!

Personal information. Try and give these sites the bare minimum. We try to be helpful, but really, why do they need to know some of this stuff? I went through Facebook and deleted all my work history. Fortunately, I’d never linked it to the official sites. Go back, take a look at the sites you use and edit what is kept online. It can be fun to do a search for your own name, just to see what pops up.

Tech. If you use newer equipment, keep it up to date. Do the operating system updates. Anti-virus and anti-malware software is a must on PCs. Do a regular scan and scan anything you see something suspicious on the computer. Macs are not immune to viruses. So far, there haven’t been a lot of cell phone viruses, but you should be aware they exist. If you have a router (and you probably do), you should know about firmware updates. If you own the router, you should learn how to check for updates and how to apply them.  The reason I said newer equipment is that I find it useful to use obsolete tech. I have a Palm PDA that has Keyring installed. This is a free password manager. I can sync to my old G4 Power PC Mac for a backup. The program works just fine. I also use HandyShopper for my grocery lists and a couple of other programs. Cost for this tech is minimal. The old computers don’t work well on the internet because they don’t have modern browsers. They still work well for all sorts of graphics, documents, spreadsheets and other interesting programs. They aren’t a target any more, so typically don’t get hacked. I run Linux Mint on older ThinkPads for my work from home computers. And this technology is cheap these days.

Finally, you are never too old to learn! I’m saving something up for when I do retire. Fairly regularly, I get someone on the phone that tells me they can’t do something because they are in their 70s or 80s. I can understand physical limitations. When I am ready to retire, I will tell them my current age (68) and let them know how easy they have it. I have to keep up with new technologies, operating systems and applications like email. There’s no real excuse for not knowing the right terminology or how to check the settings on your email program. If you don’t know something, learn how to do a search online. You Tube is full of how to videos. Look up definitions, learn how to secure your computer or change those passwords. Lifelong learning is what keeps your mind young. Don’t decide that you can’t do something when you haven’t really tried.

Please take the time to change old passwords, update old accounts, and learn something new.

Back in the day…..

Posted by terip on June 12, 2018 None comments

This used to be my go-to toy. It’s my Palm Zire 71, purchased new. It has the neatest camera ever. You slide the front up and the camera lens is exposed. It took pictures just the right size for webpages and you could be pretty sneaky about taking a picture. I have a 2gb SD card that I backed up all my programs on, and saved some free books and an album of music. I had a prepaid phone at the time, one of the green screen kinds, so I didn’t have anything that was always connected to the internet.

My Palm was like a time capsule of 2008. I had it with me when Jeffrey went into the ICU. I did not have any way to charge it. My co-worker was supposed to bring the charging cradle and never did. It stayed dead until I was finally able to get back to work after Jeffrey died. It left me distrusting digital solutions and I made sure that I always had a paper backup of important phone numbers somewhere. I just put it away. And I moved on to smart phones. But I really don’t enjoy them very much. I do use them a lot for the internet. I picked up an iPhone SE as I don’t really care for the large screen phones. I’ve noticed that they’ve re-written iOS for the larger phones now and it’s getting harder to type accurately. I’d go with something else, but I’ve never cared for Android. I’ve got two Kindles and an Android tablet. I just am not impressed.

I have a couple of Tungstens I picked up second hand, an E and a C. They both work. They don’t have cameras. The C can connect to wifi but can only use WEP encryption. And it has a keyboard. I like Graffiti a lot and I’m fast. I have a program called Teal Script that will let you use old style Graffiti letters and you can train it to recognize exactly how you write. I haven’t really done anything with the Tungstens, but have charged up one of them sometimes. I didn’t have a good charger for the Zire or the E. I got the wild idea to get charging cables last week, just for fun. I got the Zire working, but needed to get the backup program off the card to reinstall everything.

And that lead to great fun. I have a Thinkpad that runs Linux. I’ve used Palms on Linux before, but couldn’t get the conduit to work. I have an HP running Windows 7. I installed the Palm Desktop, but the conduit was 32 bit. There is a 64 bit driver another company wrote, but I needed to track it down. So..I pulled out my iBook G4, with OS 10.4 installed. I installed Palm Desktop. And I was able to sync and get the backup program installed. It’s not pretty because the conduit crashes regularly. But it worked. And when it restored from backup, it was all there. My carefully worked out system of memos in Pedit and Memoleaf. My copy of Bejeweled still works (and I keep playing it just to be sure!) I have used a LOT of Palm software and I have registrations for the programs I used most. I reinstalled a couple of them. I especially wanted to use Teal Auto again. We want to track mileage on the truck. (I can do this in Quik Budget too, but Teal Auto has nicer reports.) I found a copy of Carla Emery’s Checklist for Homesteaders, which doesn’t seem to be online any more. (I haven’t checked archive.org for it.) It has been an interesting experience.

I’m in the process of archiving and purging a lot of the old stuff and adding new addresses and memos. I am carrying my iPhone and Palm. I’ve taken a few pictures with the Palm but they aren’t as high resolution as the iPhone. I transferred a few new pictures over to the Palm and they look great. I even picked up a second hand Zire as a backup. I think I’m going to keep using this. So here are a few thoughts: I like writing much better than using my fingers. I can be more precise and I think faster when I’m writing than when I am tapping things out on the iPhone. I’m a fast typist, but you don’t really type on a smart phone. Steve Jobs was wrong. Styluses work much better. The Palm software community was amazing and some of the programs still blow me away. I wish Pedit was on another platform. It is such a great text editor. One of the lessons I learned was to use text files. It’s a format that doesn’t change and can be read on any platform. Pedit even has a scripting language. I’ve forgotten most of what I learned, but still have a few scripts I can mess around with when I have more time.

I’m actually enjoying my time off the internet. If I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep, I can play a quick game of Bejeweled now. And, I set an alarm on my Palm for my doctor’s appointment. I’d forgotten that my alarm tone is the Canteena music from the original Star Wars. I’m still carrying some paper with me and I am still using my iPhone. It’s just nice to have obsolete technology to mess around with for a change. And I like using my old iBook. I should upgrade it to OS 10.5 one of these days. The problem is that old technology that uses the internet is the tech that is obsolete first. When you can’t find a browser to use, it’s dead.

Lon’s birthday today! I hope he has many more.

Technology

Posted by terip on March 11, 2015 None comments

Palms

Here we have a Palm III, Zire 71, Tungsten E2, and a Tungsten C. They all work, although the Palm III doesn’t stay on. I bought the Zire new. The others were thrift store finds. Each one cost several hundred dollars new. Each one is obsolete, even though it still functions. And the purpose of the post is to remind you of this, when you go out to get the latest and greatest computer, phone, tablet, etc.

Back in the day, when we were playing around with our PDAs, there were a couple of analog GTD systems. There were Hipster PDAs, made of index cards, and the PigPog method, which used a Moleskine. And of course, the DIY planner series was another analog system. Are the analog systems obsolete? Did people have to throw out their index cards, planners or Moleskines because they couldn’t sync with their computer or couldn’t upgrade their system? It’s a silly question, but no. Companies deliberately make our electronics obsolete.

I still enjoy these Palms. I liked the operating system the first time I saw it. The Zire has a slider to hide the camera and it was fun to take sneaky snapshots. And I like my iPhone 4S, even though Apple prevents me from syncing it with my old Power PC Mac. Gotta encourage those upgrades, you know. I stopped trusting electronic systems, when Jeffrey got sick and my charging stuff was back at work. An uncharged Palm is a brick. You can’t access it when it’s down and all that information was locked away in it. My iPhone is no different. Think about this, when you consider buying the latest gadget.

“Smart wizards”

Posted by terip on July 20, 2014 None comments

Both Linksys and Netgear routers now use “smart wizards”. I can’t tell you how much I despise these. They are guaranteed to add 20 minutes to a support call, looking for a way to bypass them. I had one yesterday with that equally damnable wifi password protected set up. It had the wireless locked down and did not give you the wifi password to use.

I really am to the point where I want to refer these people off to the manufacturer. It’s not really fair to expect the internet service provider to deal with this. If I can walk a customer through logging into the router, it just takes a few minutes to configure it. It’s the same thing that has happened with Windows. They bury the useful programs underneath layers of junk and it takes twice as long to do anything. I really hope that I don’t have to deal with yet another version of Windows. I’ve been doing support work since the Windows 3.1 days and it gets harder every upgrade.

cell phone rant

Posted by terip on March 5, 2011 None comments

I’ve been reading a lot of cell phone reviews lately. We replaced Lon’s old Razr in December, after a brief try to replace it with a Chinese Razr. The Chinese Razr did have a perky ringtone “Hello Moto!” which caused us to answer the phone with the same. It didn’t hold up the way his original one had. Bad hardware, you could say.

And so, I started reading reviews. I read the ones on AT&T. On those reviews, no matter what phone, someone will say “This is the worst phone I ever had. DON’T BUY IT!) I read the reviews on CNET and a lot of other sites devoted to cell phones. What I have discovered is that cell phone reviewers are the worst sort of techno-snobs, counseling people to buy only what they personally love and sneering at the bulk of the phones out there. This is not helpful, to say the least.

I am a geek of sorts. I run Linux Mint exclusively on this old laptop. I use a command line program “Task” to keep track of events. I keep up with technology as part of my job, since people love to have us walk them through setting up mail on their iPad or Droid. I’ve had people bring in their iphones so I can configure them. I have a lifelong love of different interfaces and operating systems. Yet I am not a cell phone geek. For the longest time, I preferred to keep my PDA and phone separate. I carried a Palm and a basic prepaid Nokia phone. This is still the cheapest way to go, by the way. My Tungsten C cost me $75 at FreeGeek. It does wifi and still amazes me. But I moved to a Samsung Propel 2 years ago, when my boyfriend added me to his cell phone plan (that modern day equivalent of engagement.) I read reviews before I bought the Samsung, and I wasn’t looking for a smart phone at that time. I almost replaced it in the first 30 days, as there is a problem with the keyboard. I have to pop the battery to turn it off most of the time. Sometimes the keys on the keyboard will type just one letter and not the one it’s supposed to do. I kept the phone and soldiered on. I wasn’t ready to type much on a phone. It does webpages, but really, who wants to surf the web with such a tiny screen.

I narrowed things down, when looking for Lon’s phone. I made myself stop looking at phones I found interesting. I knew Lon liked Motorola and I wanted a phone with a large keyboard. He hadn’t been able to text with the Razr. I thought he might learn to do that with a keyboard. I looked at the Backflip, the Flipout, and Flipside. I had him buy the Flipside. Reviews of the phone were anemic. They called it second class, not worthy. Better to go buy that iphone! They judged the phone on things like web browsing, picture taking, or number of apps. Yet the phone consistently got high marks for call quality. The reviewers liked Motoblur to some extent. Lon has used that a bit during a stretch when we didn’t have internet and he likes it. But he doesn’t like reading email on the phone, and I turned off the email updates. He’s never looked for apps, as he hasn’t yet looked at the ones installed on the phone. The keyboard makes it worthwhile as he can now add people to his contact list and text message his son. He likes seeing pictures of the person calling, when it’s one of his friends. All in all, he’s happy with the phone. If I’d listened to the reviews, I would have wound up with an overly complicated phone that was frustrating to use.

The Flipside is not without problems, of course, It freezes occasionally. The touch screen is, well, touchy. I’d been considering a Backflip, thinking that it would be good to have interchangeable charging equipment. I read the reviews and considered ignoring them and forging ahead. I had time to think it over and started looking at other phones.

I started looking at Palms. I do like the Droid OS. I happen to stumble across a review of the Palm Pre and WebOS. I loved the idea of WebOS. It’s sort of like betting on one of those great applications they came out with in the early days of tech, the applications that failed because the company that created them had a lousy marketing department. WebOS may go the same way, although it looks like HP is committed to it. But again, the reviews said these were second class smartphones and you’d be better off to buy that iphone. One frustrated Pre owner said that the main complaint about the Palm Pixi was the 2 megapixel camera. Why should that be something you even consider when buying a phone?

Now I don’t have an answer to all of this. I’m going to be upgrading to the Pixi. I have no use for iphones. I don’t sync with iTunes. I can’t even run it on my computer. I’ve found Apple to be a restrictive company, hell-bent on making technologies obsolete, bound to determine what you can install on your equipment and quite capable of turning out poor hardware. (Anyone remember the antenna problems?) I’d urge you to take those reviews with a grain of salt. Buy the cell phone that fits your style. Don’t get something too complicated for your purposes. Above all, keep in mind that you are buying a phone, something you will use to talk on. Make sure that it gets decent call quality. Look at how easy it is to save phone numbers. If the reviews indicate that the phone hardware has quality issues, look elsewhere. Don’t let someone else tell you what you need, based on the latest fad. Above all, don’t be concerned with how many “apps” are available. That’s the last of your worries. Maybe someday, we’ll see cell phone reviews that are more balanced. Today, there’s a lot of nonsense out there.

appropriate technology

Posted by terip on July 21, 2009 1 comments

I guess I should admit that I now have a regular cell phone, on a regular cell plan. I have been using a very basic prepaid. It seemed to be time to move to something fancier, given that I seem to use my phone almost daily. So I wound up with a Samsung A767 Propel. I am still sorting out what I want to use on it.

I deal with a lot more technology these days. I even use a microwave now and then, although I still don’t like the taste of food cooked in one. I use a dishwasher, although I still believe that they take longer to clean dishes than just washing them. I do as the natives do. There are times when I have regrets over all that time spent without ammenities. I still feel that I learned some useful lessons during that time. As I get older, I find I desire a little bit of comfort. And I am living in a comfortable house these days. You can’t understand how much of a time saver electricity is, unless you’ve lived without it. And so I have a bit different take on “green” technologies. I don’t mind them, but too much of what I see just seems to be a waste of money. We need alternatives, true, and I realize that they are not going to be developed unless there is a market for them. Now, it just seems to be a way to show your superiority to the “unenlightened” masses.

Cold pizza of doom

Posted by terip on August 18, 2008 None comments

This is one of those things that happen in small support centers. The larger places usually have enough staff to handle high call volume, or have an overflow to route calls. But, what happens is a huge jump in the call queue. We had over 20 calls in queue when ours started. We had some comprimised email accounts sending out spam. When we locked those down, all our customers started getting emails requesting that they send in their email address and password, or the account would be shut down. Nothing generates calls like email. Everyone had to call in and find out if it was a legitimate email or not.

So this is where the cold pizza of doom comes in. You get an email from your supervisor or manager telling you that you will now be working through your lunch and they will be providing pizza. Technically, this isn’t legal. You are required to have a certain amount of time off the clock each day. But they send out for your pizza and you get to sit glued to your chair. Usually, folks in the office who are not working support drift by and grab a slice or two. By the time there is enough break in the calls for you to go grab a piece, the pizza is cold. You eat it anyway, of course. And you go back for seconds during the day, when it is even colder.

I really do not find cold pizza good compensation for losing my lunchtime. And I don’t like phone systems where you can’t record a message that customers can hear, up front, to let them know that we don’t need to talk to them. We had a full week of serious issues getting lost while we answered calls about those emails. There has got to be a better way to handle support calls.

Appropriate Tchnology

Posted by terip on December 31, 2007 None comments

This is an interesting article on how much technology is enough. I think that I am going to be blogging more in the coming year on technology. Maybe we can talk about companies that make snow shovels with plastic handles that are held on with a single nail. Guess what? The handle splits and breaks. Hope they saved a lot of money using that cheap handle. But really, I suspect that the next year is going to be difficult financially for a lot of folks. It’s time to stop thinking in terms of gadgets and start learning how to analyze exactly how much technology you need to do something. And happy new year to you all!

New Tech Rant

Posted by site admin on February 21, 2007 None comments

One of these days, I’ll dig up that post about tech support. For now, here’s a new tech rant.

The other day, we started getting a number of calls from Stevenson. Users were online but couldn’t browse. Things had been working earlier in the day. Sometimes they could get email, but the web just wouldn’t work. About the third call, I walked around and asked if everyone was seeing the same thing. All three of us were. All our Tier 2 was out and the supervisor was at lunch. So I sent an email to netadmin, told him we were all seeing this issue and that I could send details if he’d like. Also told him we did not have any Tier 2 folks to look at this, since our supervisor told us we have to say this when we send emails directly to netadmin.

So what was the response? A request for more details? No, we got an email telling us how to troubleshoot dns issues by trying to ping the dns servers and basically telling me that this was a browser issue. Oh, and that he was sorry we didn’t have any Tier 2 folks around but things were tough for him because he was the only one in netadmin that day.

So we kept getting calls. I talked with the other tech and he had about three trouble tickets out on the same issue. Finally our supervisor was back and I told him that I didn’t care what they thought, we still had an issue in Stevenson. He must have had a few calls on it too, because about 20 minutes later we had another email from netadmin. This one said there was a problem in Stevenson, high packet loss on the T-1s and a tech was being dispatched. When we got word that the issue was resolved, I called back everyone with the problem. Miraculously, it had been fixed for all of them.

It took longer to type out that worthless email than it would have taken to check the stats on that part of the network. At the very least, he might have checked to see if we’d already done the things he wanted done. He might have read the email that said all THREE of us were seeing the same problem. Instead, we had to sit around and take more calls until someone finally convinced them to look into the issue. This is dumb netadmin behavior. If you ever get in a position to be a netadmin, work smarter than this. It will save you a lot of time.