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Showing posts from March, 2020

How People in Tech Have the Same Failings as Their Companies

You will often find that the biggest tech companies, who brag about their diversity and inclusion initiatives, often leave out one thing. Pretend you haven't read the title of this post, and guess what it is. eBay (Yes, I consider eBay a tech company). Disney Most of the jobs are clustered around only a handful of areas. Especially in the United States. There are few - if any - remote options listed. With the event of COVID-19, there are plenty of businesses scrambling to enter the 21st century with remote work. Figuring out how to adjust Active Directory to let users access files from home.  Setting up Zoom (With all its questionability ) meetings.  Using spyware and demanding employees have their webcams on at all times because they don't trust their staff, and are stuck in 1943. But I'm not here today to talk about companies and their Illusions of Inclusion. I'm here to talk about how people who pooh-pooh these companies hardly do better in makin

The 5G Future (TechRepublic PDF)

  "Artificial intelligence is coming— home assistants, smart homes, smart cities, all of those things are becoming real. We used to be talking about it in the past and now you’re seeing it day to day."  - Ana Tavares Lattibeaudiere Addendum: 5G is not causing Coronavirus. Here. Yep, gotta make an account to download it. It is fairly old, as it was published in 2018. So, to them, we're already living in the future of 5G, and it's a bit underwhelming. Isn't all new tech at first? It's been quite a while since we've written about our old friend, 5G technology for phones and other mobile devices.

11. Introduction to Machine Learning

Podcast Appearance: Bridges in Tech by Joanna Udo

That's me!  I talk about writing, my trip to Grace Hopper Convention 2019, and this blog! Read more here , and listen to Bridges in Tech on your podcast platform of choice.

Microsoft Safety Scanner

It's an executable, not a full-fledged program intended to replace your Anti-virus software. It self-destructs* after 10 days unused from the download. *Maybe not self destruct, but it will render itself inoperable. Threats change all the time, even 10 days could make it outdated! It took quite a long time, and slowed my PC to a crawl. Best to use it overnight, if possible. It concluded, and listed the removed software. You can download the latest version here .

Ring The Alarm: How Reliability Monitor Put Me on The Path to Solving a Serious Sound Problem.

So, here's a tool I didn't know about until now ("now" being when I initially wrote this post in...October?). Windows Reliability Monitor; You can find it by searching (Click the Windows icon and just start typing!) There are no errors between May 2019 and September 1st 2019: I did not get this laptop until July 2019, and it was refurbished. So, either the monitor doesn't go back more than 5 months, or this machine was returned and wiped and sat in storage for months until I bought it. The numbers on the far left indicate a health score - 10 is best. The problems make the score start at 5.  An update between September 1st and 15th caused some things to not update, including an Intel driver, but we're all good now . You'll see IntelAudioService and "Stopped Working" under summary. That is probably the one issue I have truly had with this laptop - The audio will randomly stop. It's nothing a restart can't rectify, but n

Today's Problem (Updated: 5/1/2020): "My Netgear Extender Won't Work with My Xfinity Router Anymore!"

So I was tinkering in the Router settings of my Xfinity router, looking at the things that could be done. I do admit that I changed some settings (mainly the ones that release the DHCP every day instead of every week). All this tinkering has somehow bricked my Wi-Fi extender, Netgear WN3000RPv3 It can connect to my main router (Xfinity), but Xfinity is no longer passing the data to it. It can be pinged. When I connect to it, I can ping other sites. It loads my Bing splash page and the list of news articles, but not the actual articles when I click them. Maybe a cache issue there?  The issue is actually with my personal laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad. Other devices can use it as intended. Good to narrow it down that way.  The LED indicating connectivity to the device is amber. The LED indicating connectivity to the Router is green. What did I do before contacting Comcast? I reset the extender back to factory settings. I power cycled both devices. I did ipconfig /release