Posts

Securing the Tech: Identifying Phishing attempts

In modern computer systems the weakest point (from a security perspective) is often times the person sitting at the desk. Tricking the person into opening up their computer can yield the best outcomes for hackers. Remember it is best security practice not to accept something that is offered to you but instead to go through proper channels to get what you may need. Someone coming to you with an offer of help, especially one you may not have known you needed, is much more likely to have nefarious purposes than if you sought them out yourself. Think about in the real world. If someone is too eager to offer help you start to wonder what their angle is. Why are they so keen to offer help? Often it is best to ask for help from a stranger than to accept help from someone who is approaching you offering. The odds that you will meet a nefarious character go way up when they are the one choosing to have an interaction with you. The same concept can apply to computer security. When a window pops

Securing the Tech: Email Aliases

 This is the inaugural post for a new series I will be doing called Securing the Tech. I will be publishing information about computer security. Sometimes it will be high level concepts, other times we may dig deep into topics. Hopefully it will remain relevant to what people are needing to know to make their lives more secure. Today we will be touching on email security. All of us have had that moment when we didn't really want to give our email address, but what else could we do? We give our email address at the risk of increased spam or likelihood of identity theft. But what can you do? Two words: email aliases . Most email services will let you set up multiple email addresses tied to the main email address you use. These "alias" addresses will allow you to keep your email address more private, though to be honest an alias won't work in all situations.  Depending on your email provider aliases can work very differently. I am not referring to "plus addressing&q

Returning An Empty Value In LibreOffice Calc

 I learned a cool trick today. If you need a formula to return an empty cell, say in an IF formula, simply use {} as the parameter. For example: IF(A1=B1,"True",{}) This will return an empty cell when A1 and B1 are not equal. This does not remove the formula, it simply returns nothing, or NULL in computer parlance. What is really happening here is that the formula is returning an empty array, or an array with no objects. This then gets treated as an empty cell by Calc for other formulas. Empty cells are treated as empty strings OR 0 depending on the context. If I had returned an empty string ("") or a 0 in my formula it would not have worked the same. I have a few formulas in the sheet I am working on that treat empty cells as empty strings in some cases and zeroes in others. This was sloppy on my part and bad programmatic design, but the tech debt was already there.  For clarity, the formula  ISBLANK({})   will return  TRUE , while  ISBLANK(0) and  ISBLANK("&

Omega Seamaster 300M James Bond Edition with British Government Markings

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The next James Bond movie to come out, No Time To Die, of course has a new watch associated with it. Ever since Pierce Brosnan took over as MI6 agent 007 the famous super spy has worn a watch made by Omega. Issued by said spy agency to Bond, the watch, as is the rest of Bond's kit, is the property of the British Government.  I have been researching watches lately. The watches worn by James Bond are of course interesting for their association to Bond, but they are also some very good looking time pieces. Bond of course has good taste.  I am also interested in more historically significant pieces. The Omega Speedmaster series that was used by NASA is particularly interesting to me, though I think I prefer the Rolex Daytona line for looks and features.  All of that being said, I noticed a strange connection between the World War II era watches and the latest wrist fair of Mr. Bond. Below is an image of a Smith's branded watch issued to members of the Royal Air Force during the war

Google Photos Abandons "Free Forever" High Quality Backups

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Five years ago, when Google announced their Photos service, they announced two tiers of photo quality. Original Quality photos were just that, exactly as originally shot on the camera. These photos would count against a users Google Drive storage limit. The High Quality tier, however, would be stored for free "forever". This was the promise made in their initial announcement. I knew, as soon as they said it, that nothing could be stored for free forever. Maybe Google, the company that runs YouTube, could handle it. At least if anybody could it would be Google. However, I knew this would have to end sometime. And now we have a date, June 1, 2021.  I will not go so far as to call this a bait and switch. I believe that Google had every intention to make this service free for their users. When they announced this, I asked myself how long will this last. I hesitated to use the new service for a while since I didn't want to get the rug pulled out from underneath me. To their cr

Mary Poppins Watch

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This post will be a bit different for me. Instead of covering current technology I will be discussing antiques. I am student of history of various types. I study the history of war, politics, and computers mostly, but I like to study the history of any other topic I am learning about. Computer history goes back much further than most people would expect. The earliest computers were humans. As late as the 1960's humans were the fastest and most reliable way to get general computational work done. There were specialized mechanical devices that were used as well. The oldest known example would be the Antikythera mechanism dating back to the first or second century BC. During the Second World War and through the Cold War mechanical devices were regularly used to target naval guns and calculate position from an inertial guidance system. Modern electronic computers came into their own during the 1960's and 1970's, becoming more useful for specialists needing to perform calcul

Copying and Pasting Formatted Text From Modern Applications Into Adobe Indesign CS3

The fact that computers work at all amazes me sometimes. These machines process 1 and 0, on and off, yes and no, and yet our entire world is run by these simple signals. Sometimes older software doesn't work with newer stuff. My dad was a COBOL programmer most of my life, and his career was spent partly making older programs work with newer ones.  Microsoft and Intel have made backward compatibility a priority for their two companies since the beginning. For the most part, code designed to run on the first generation Intel x86 processors or on the oldest versions of Windows will run on the latest models or versions. One notable exception to this is anything written for 16-bit Windows or MS-DOS platforms, since the effort to keep them running was not compelling enough for Microsoft to keep it up. I have an old copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 for Windows. (Thankfully I got it for Windows since the Macintosh version would not run on the latest computers: Apple is not so focu