Mobile wifi – a cautionary tale

A mobile wifi device can be useful, but it can easily become expensive Being able to connect a computer to the internet via the “personal hotspot” feature of a mobile phone is very useful to me when helping my IT Support clients. Sometimes, though, and for reasons I can’t explain, it’s not possible to connect …
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Free Cloud Storage

We are being bombarded with offers of “free cloud storage” The phrase “in the cloud” just means that computers remote from our own local network are involved. I covered this in a blog three years ago called Cloud Computing, but then I was thinking more of the provision of software in the cloud rather than …
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The Paperless Office

Having a paperless office is now more a question of trusting the technology and changing one’s habits than a question of technical possibility Way back in the mists of time (aka the 1980s), the “Paperless Office” was some kind of technological Holy Grail. Ironic, methinks, that this was also the time when computer programs used …
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Privacy (again!)

Are our expectations regarding online privacy changing? I may be wrong about this, but in the last few weeks I seem to have noticed a weary acceptance from many of my clients that online privacy is now known to be a myth, so “why bother trying to keep private information private?” This often crops up …
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Plus ça Change….?

I recently blogged that the computer market appears to be maturing in that there are fewer innovations in the hardware from year to year. All the bells and whistles that nerdy people used to add to their computers are now all built in and taken for granted. The hardware is still getting faster, but there …
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Evernote – taking the plunge

I’ve done it – I’ve committed myself to Evernote for my digital administration Following on from last week’s blog, I have started using Evernote to improve my digital organisation. It may be a bit premature to start recommending it, but I think I’m ready to take the risk. It’s a very versatile program, but it’s …
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Two Years of Blog Posts

It’s a whole year since I was congratulating myself on a whole year’s worth of weekly blog posts So, what’s the same and what’s changed in the last year? To begin with, an update on the items I mentioned a year ago – Microsoft Security Essentials I had recently introduced MSE as the antivirus program …
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Password Problems Taken To the Next Level

The biggest single preventable IT problem that my clients seem to encounter is lost, forgotten, or mis-remembered passwords I know it wasn’t long ago – see this blog on passwords – that I recommended writing down all passwords – manually – in one place. OK, I can see the obvious flaw in this advice. However, …
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