Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • Short descriptions matter

    To me, the most important part of an email is the subject line. What it tells me factors into whether I read it immediately or get back to it later. Later might take months as I don’t really have the time to read my email. Same thing with tickets. Additionally, several times a week, someone […]

  • Federated social media

    Back in April, I learned about Mastodon. I made an account, but never used it. I made another and started using it. People are leaving Twitter. Many of those to Mastodon, so I will find them. You can find me there as @ezrasf@mas.to , so connect with me. The concept is interesting. There are many […]

  • Hozered Start Me Up

    So, I dug out my old laptop and found that it was very low on space. The last time I used it was before Dropbox started using the Save hard drive space feature, so it had a ton of local files that ought to be online only. I did a stupid thing and tried to […]

  • The email hammer

    A retired coworker was fond of the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. A super cranky former coworker railed about the terribleness of email. Mainly that too much stuff tried to go into email when it should be better off in RSS feeds or other. My […]

  • Feature request: unwatch

    Streaming services track what I have watched so I can see the progress. But only your first time through a series. If I start over, then it can be confusing where I am. I might start over because I didn’t finish and want to give it another chance. Or I want to watch a series […]

  • WordPress security for beginners

    The Jetpack (a plug-in) blog has a pretty good WordPress Security for Beginners post which talks about what you need to do to keep your blog safe. The TL;DR: choose a good host keep software updated (WP, plug-ins, themes) use secure credentials off-site backups protect against brute force attacks scan for malware monitor for downtime remove […]

  • MFA on a smartphone

    Multi-factor authentication (MFA; aka Two-factor authentication aka 2FA) makes access to things more secure. However, how to do it from the same smartphone seems to be an afterthought. First, if someone has the smartphone which is used to generate the code, receive the text, answers the phone call, or confirms the access, then is MFA […]

  • Facebook discourages providing sources

    A friend posted an article about a political candidate. I wanted to find a related article and add it to that conversation. So, I opened the browser, got pulled into a couple offline things, found the article, got pulled in a couple other offline directions, and went back to the post. The app refreshed and […]

  • Just Google It

    Saw a friend ask a question about how to setup a store for WordPress on Facebook. This seemed trivial. Just look on Google for the answer. But, then I had a thought: What if my working with WordPress for years yields me better results? First, I certainly have terminology that would give me better results. […]

  • Windows md5 checksum

    I was sent a script to run by an analyst who advised to verify the MD5 hash. This is good advice to ensure that I receive the correct content. And happens to be the advise I gave the DBA manager before restoring backup files that was going to take hours to download. The idea is […]