On the road again

 

I travel for work and pleasure. One thing I need no matter where I go is internet access. It has to be adequate speed and be reliable.

I have only found two reliable services for internet access with no problems. These are: Starlink and Nomad Internet. But first some background.

Currently the biggest problem besides reliability is throttling. What's that you ask? Cell phone carriers have a problem in that they don't have unlimited resources. So if you use too many of their resources according to them they slow down your internet access making your use of the internet almost unbearable.

Starlink has their own satellites swirling around the globe. So no speed issues from throttling. I have used it from coast-to-coast with no issues but one. My first dish (you can see it in the picture of the van) was out during a hailstorm and rudely failed to work after that. I've also had to replace my cable twice but that was clearly my fault.

Nomad Internet does use cell service but there is no throttling. I use their Nomad Air device and so far I'm extremely happy with it.

Both of these companies offer a service where you can start and stop their service if you won't be using it for awhile. Do check them out. You'll find links to the right under Our Favorites. And check us out if you need computer help. We do a lot of our work remotely. So no matter where you are we're there.

The pain of Passwords... eased

Be calm!

Passwords are infuriating!You just setup an account at your bank and you need to create a password for online access and since your name is Sally you try to choose "Sallyspw". But the bank's system says you need to use a password that conains no names, has at leaast one number and one special character. Plus it has to be between 12 and 18 characters and so you end up with a password like  BigLittle001!.Two days later you've forgotten the password. That's where tool like Roboform and Lastpass come in. These days a good password manager is esstential. Get yourself one and save yourself a lot of grief. 

 

 

 

Websites are funny

 What is a website other than a bunch of code. text, images, and possibly videos. It may even contain links to other websites or documents. But here's the thing. Each website has to be created and this takes time, energy, talent, and oh yes, money.

I have a wwebsite which you can find here. Its a very simple one page website. Other websites are quite complex. For example, the google.com website which looks so simple until you think of all that it does and all that must be behind it.

Why do I mention this? Because you may have decided you want to have a website for your business , organization, or club. You really need to consider what that might cost. For example, I was trying to do something that I had never done before. I spent several days beating my head against a wall and suddenly I hade an inspiration and was able to create that bit of code in minutes. So here's the question. If this was for a client (it wasn't) what would I charge? Could I charge for all the time it took to figure out how to do it? That seems wrong as I think it cheats the client. On the other hand, do I just charge for the final moments when I figured out how to do it? That also seems wrong. It cheats me.

There are other considerations. Perhaps the website needs lots of specialized or technical text. Perhaps pages of it. Who creates that? How much time is alloted for editing?

This is just to give you something to think about if you want a website.

Backing up

When we speak of backing up we mean making a copy from one device to another. It's no use making a folderol your C drive and copying there because if your hard drive fails you will likely lose the original and the backup. Is ckearkt you want to backup to a different device.

That device might be local. For example backing up to a plugged-in external drive. Or it might br remote (in the cloud). The cloud simply means a device  somewhere other than your location. And by device with probably mean a bank of hard drives or many banks of hard drives.

LOCAL:

A bit of history. The Norton company once had a product called Ghost. It would make a clone of your hard drive for the purposes of backup. Currently there is a friendly product called Casper which does the same thing. Do you see the connection?

Here is a list of some of the many backup products:

• Casper

• Acronis True Image

• Easus (several products)

• Backup Pro

There are many others.

CLOUD-BASED:

• Backblaze

• Carbonite

• iDrive

There are others.

The point of all of this is you should be backing up.

Don't Backup

•  You don't care if you're hacked.
• You don't care if your personal information is stolen
• You just love getting viruses
• You just don't care