Technology Tidbits

[cahwyguy]

Here are some technology news chum items that have caught my eye of late:

• Acronis Backup / True Image. Finding a good backup program is hard. I know. I looked for a long time, finally setting on the Acronis product. So when I saw this article about the incorporation of blockchain verification and ransomware production in the latest version, I was intrigued. Then I received an email about a 50% off sale until July 20. But then I looked at the webpage. The 50% off sale applied only to the standalone product, which doesn’t backup to the cloud, nor incorporate the ransomware protection. For those features, I’d have to go to the yearly subscription based version. Given that Acronis 2015 is working, plus I already pay Acronis for cloud storage which the backup can save to, I’m not sure I’ll upgrade. Yet. Maybe when I go to Windows 10. Eventually. But YMMV.
• Authentication and Passwords. A number of items here. First, here’s a good reference on how to set up two-factor authentication on your accounts. It’s a good thing to do, whether that second factor is a text to your phone, Google Authenticator, LastPass Authentication, or something else you have. If you must use passwords, I always recommend a password manager, for it simplifies having complex, unique passwords for every account while you only have to remember one password. Tied to that (h/t to Andrew Ducker for this and the next link) is an interesting recommendation from the UK government to not require users to change passwords so often. Andrew also found an interesting discussion about what happens if you treat password recovery question answers like passwords (also known as: Why did you name your dog  aftoNfAyougHTEn?). Lastly, there’s an interesting blog post from LastPass on how they notify you if your email ever shows up in a password breech database.
• Firefox. It used to be that the battle was Netscape vs. IE. Nowadays, Google Chrome is the King, but it might be too power-hungry. Here are two articles on Firefox. The first explores how to enable multi-process on Firefox 54+ if it isn’t already enabled. The second gives a series of reasons why one should switch to Firefox.
• Navigation Wars. Here’s an interesting piece that compares and contrasts the main navigation apps: Google Maps, Waze, and Applie Maps. Of course, I just prefer to use real maps.
• Genealogy. For years, my genealogy program of choice has been Rootsmagic, the successor to Parson’s Family Tree Maker. They just added support for integration with Ancestry.Com.

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