There’s something about trains

(I hope you’ll indulge me in this off topic post tonight)

I love riding on trains.  In my personal experience they are vastly superior to planes.  It’s not that I hate flying, rather it’s the lack of leg room, and because I live on the West coast, getting up at the crack of dawn to get to the airport early.  In this era of lack of travel and lack of flying to conferences, I don’t miss flying, but I do miss train travel.

I also love toy trains.

As we decorate for Christmas, we get out our family’s vintage 1950’s era Lionel toy train that my Grandmother bought for my Sister when she was a little girl.  Tonight I’m watching a video on Amazon about Lionel Christmas toy trains.  My sister hasn’t (yet) decorated with as many trains as shown in that video.  We only have the one – and yes – it still works!  I’ve traveled to toy train shows where they have computerized consoles that control their whole train displays.

Real Trains changed the world.  It was a game changing technology that totally changed the world.  It introduced the concept of time zones in England and in North America so everyone could agree on what time you’d need to meet the train and not have “local only” time.   It made transportation of goods and services possible.  It moved us all to more industrial production.  As much as the Internet has changed our lives, Trains changed our Grandparents (and even Great-Grandparents) lives even more.

Now if you think train technology is stagnate, guess again.  Even Elon Musk is getting in on inventing new technologies for trains including – believe it or not – wind energy.  What technology do you see changing in your lifetime?

CentOS dead

Right on the same day as Patch Tuesday CentOS and RedHat notified everyone that they are shutting down CentOS.

What is disturbing about this is how EARLY the end of life came.  I remember when CentOS was touted as being a potential replacement for Small Business Server.

Anyone using this in their businesses?  Were you surprised?

MS-Defcon 2 – Here comes December

Microsoft is out with their December releases.  The blog post today focuses on something that a LOT of us complained about last month:  The lack of information that was lost in the new format.  We’ll have to see if they provide ENOUGH info this month.

Remember the Server only fixes Kerberos that were in those out of band Catalog update only patches are included in the December releases.

My biggest surprise?

WHY are we still getting Office 2010 updates when it is officially out of support as of October 2020?

More in ComputerWorld.   Full patch lists coming this weekend in the newsletter.  In the meantime what are your experiences?  Stay tuned.

They know what you are running

Whenever you surf, there’s a “user agent string” that advertises to the web sites what operating system and browser you are running.  It also advertises to the attackers as well.  The other day my sister was surfing on her random sites on the Internet surf machine (better known as an ipad) and she had installed the Edge browser on the device.  She asked me… “what is this?”

She had been surfing for something… I don’t remember what… and a web site came up that pretended to be an apple update/malware notification.

It flagged that it was a notification from Apple security.  The bad guys want to target what you are using and Apple devices are not immune.  Be careful out there.

Is 32GB really too small for a Windows upgrade?

LANGALIST

By Fred Langa

Last year, Microsoft quietly upped Win10’s minimum disk-size requirement. Now, even a 32GB drive might be insufficient, as an AskWoody subscriber discovered.

Plus: Restarting a laptop that’s been off for a year.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.48.0 (2020-12-07).

Freeware Spotlight — Beeftext

BEST UTILITIES

By Deanna McElveen

If you’re like me, you find yourself typing the same bits of text over and over again.

Ideally, you’d have a handy tool to let you quickly paste frequently entered prose.

There are a number of utilities for entering strings of text via keyboard shortcuts (examples). But another spin on that trick really caught my attention. Xavier Michelon’s Beeftext uses text-based keywords rather than keyboard key combinations. Why is a text keyword better? You don’t have to worry about key-combo conflicts with applications.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.48.0 (2020-12-07).

A new way to manage Exchange’s auto-forwarding rules

SMALL-BUSINESS COMPUTING

By Amy Babinchak

Here’s one never-changing rule for IT pros: Microsoft will always change the way that things get done.

For example, in September, the company rolled out a new version of the Exchange admin center (EAC). This change and others mean that we’re forever working to keep our system/service settings and configurations up to date.

A security staple for IT staff is preventing email from auto-forwarding off domains. Recently the transport rule that powered this function stopped working for two of my clients. It’s continued to work for others, but it’s probably just a matter of time before they run into this issue, too. So, my staff is off making changes — proactively.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.48.0 (2020-12-07).

Versatile gadget gifts for stuffing stockings large and small

BEST HARDWARE

By Michael Lasky

Christmas stocking stuffers are usually thought of as small, whimsical, and not necessarily practical.

But relatively inexpensive tech gadgets can be both useful and appealing to your favorite digital denizen. You might even secretly covet them for yourself.

If your holiday list is still missing something, and you’re down to last-minute shopping, consider picking up one or more of the following devices.

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.48.0 (2020-12-07).

Tasks for the Weekend – December 5, 2020

Youtube link – Tasks for the Weekend December 5, 2020

Extensions.  I am not convinced that browser extensions are a good thing.  You are dependent upon the security resources of the person or company who built those extensions.  Chrome has long removed extensions when they’ve proven to be malicious.  Just the other day Edge removed some extensions from their “store” which then removed them from your computer.

You should periodically review what extensions you have installed and if you still want them installed.  Remember to review any extension, click on the menu bar and go to extensions (Edge) or menu, settings, Extensions (Chrome) or Menu, Addons, Extensions (Firefox) .  Now remove any unusual extension you don’t recall installing.

Sometimes a reboot is good

So today as I’m taking a slight break from technology … well kinda (*)…. and baking Christmas spritz cookies I am reminded of a reboot I had to do yesterday.  A modem reboot.  I have a consumer Comcast modem at home that every now and then I have to reboot.  The comcast app lets you do it quite easily.  Mind you I have another router in FRONT of that Comcast because we all know how we love ISP provided things and prefer something between us and them.

At the office I have a similar set up with a Business level model that I honestly forget that every now and then it’s good for it to be rebooted as well.  It’s more rock solid.  But just yesterday I thought the www.askwoody.com site was down.  Wouldn’t come up for me.  I knew that my internet was still up because I could get to other sites.  So then I started the normal…. is it me?  Is it them?

I opened up a command line and typed in ping www.askwoody.com.  Everything came back with no packet loss.  Then I went to the is it down site.  Hmmm still not down.  I then took my iphone off of the firm wifi and tried on cellular.  Hmmm the site worked.  I had in the middle of that emailed PK and Kirsty and they said it was fine.  Must be me.  But my firewall me or my Comcast modem me?  So I have some guest wifi that goes through the Comcast but not through the firm firewall and I connected to that with my iphone.   I even remoted into my home system and realized for sure it was just the office.  (Home is also on Comcast)   So it must be the Comcast modem.  Had to wait until after 5 p.m. to reboot and sure enough, that was the issue.

So a kind reminder…  EVERYONE including things you consider “rock solid” need a reset or a reboot every now and then.  What are you doing to reset or reboot your technology and yourself these days?  Do you regularly reboot your modem/router and any other wifi devices?  What steps do you use to troubleshoot connectivity issues?  What do you do to narrow down that it’s you and not them?  As calling anyone these days for tech support is not the most relaxing or fulfilling task these days.

(*) Okay so not completely free of technology, I am using my phone to search for a Christmas spritz cookie recipe and listening to Christmas Jazz on my Sonos streaming system.

Arecibo Observatory Tower collapse

Off topic post for the day – wow what a view of when the radio observatory collapsed.

There was a drone inspecting the Tower 4 Cables when the collapse started so we get a close up on the cables breaking, check the second video segment. pic.twitter.com/Qw37Z5byWg

— Scott Manley (@DJSnM) December 3, 2020

Are we ready for 2004?

ehhh…  I’m still wishy washy and thinking January might be better for the thumbs up

What do you think?  I’m on 2004 myself personally, but still see too many lingering issues that I wish were fixed.

I think the feature release process needs a redo.  I think Microsoft thinks so too.  What do you think?

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3599460/on-the-future-of-windows-10-s-feature-releases.html