Recommendations

Recently, many of the laptops I get in for repairs have been difficult to upgrade and service. The reason for this, at least from the reports from manufacturers, is that to make technology smaller, sacrifices need to be made in the device’s repairability. From my technology research and recommendation experience, I have found that design decisions boil down to cost savings to increase profits. In some cases, it’s cheaper for the manufacturer to design hardware that integrates many of its components, I.E does not have external components that can be changed out. Additionally, from a support perspective, it’s more cost-effective to limit repair resources for the life of the product. The device also gains performance and reliability benefits (during the life of the product) if components are integrated. But if one component fails on an integrated platform, the whole device needs to be replaced. This puts a larger cost burden on the customer, having to replace their entire device, which manufacturers knowingly make a profit from and it has an impact on our planet with more waste. ...more

An Authenticator App is a app that you install on a smart device, in most cases a mobile smart phone, that turns your smart device into a electronic authorization device for your on-line accounts. It does not replace the password sign-in part of the authentication, rather, the Authenticator App acts as a secondary conformation that -you- are in-fact the person who is signing in with your associated password. Many sites are including this feature as part of their 2-factor authentication processes. When you enable this feature, after you sign-in with your user-name and password, you are then asked to enter an unique Security Key which is generated by the Authenticator App. The Security Key changes every 30 seconds to prevent hacking of the key itself. You can also check out my article “protecting your smart phone from be hacked” if you want to learn more about securing your Authenticator Device....more

Remote Utilities is remote desktop software. I have tried many products and many of them work great, are simple to use, but expensive, or cloud based. I use to use Team Viewer, its worked really good, but they charge $1200 a year for a license, and there terms of service transparency regarding their polices around subscription billing in my mind is unethical. If you do not cancel the subscription 30days before you want to cancel it, your locked into another subscription for the following year. I have tried gotomypc and that works good but its cloud based. I do not like supporting cloud based applications if can avoid it. Cloud remote support applications like GOTOMYPC are hosted directly from the cloud, and they pretty much control everything about the application due to the subscription based model many companies use.

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Here is my recommendations for Password Managers. I look for solutions that are cross-platform, reliable, and since many of them store your private information on a cloud service, the provider needs to have good security practices. Also, the password manager should not have too many features that complicate the use and performance of the solution. The solution should also have the ability to sync your passwords in an encrypted form to a 3rd party cloud service, instead of including its own cloud solution. This is so you can access and sync your passwords across multiple devices, and not have all of your eggs in one basket. Similar to investing, this practice spreads your risk across multiple solutions, minimizing the impact on your life if the provider ever happens to change their policies, or suffer outages. The draw back is that is a bit more complicated to setup since you have to link your password manager to your cloud service. I have also found that all-in-one products tend to be very loose when it comes to privacy. In my experience, combining the software into a service, sold by the same company is to prevent the user from controlling their own information. Many times, you will see indemnifying language in relationship to your data in their privacy statement....more