Month: January 2021

Which Computer Is The Best?

Posted on by Dustin Fontaine

Which Computer Is The Best?

Being in the technology industry, I’ve often been asked for recommendations on various types of electronics – from PC’s to tablets to Blu Ray players. Sometimes I’m just asked what computer I buy because it must be the best. Before I give my own opinions, I’d like to take a step back and review a few certain facts.

Setting Standards

First, all electronics are made from the same components – more or less. You have to expect that it’s not going to last forever, and it will more than likely fail at a very inopportune time – see my post on data backup to make this less painful. Any computer component can fail at any time and you won’t magically find that one model that is guaranteed to never die.

Second, we have to consider the risk/revenue ratio for the vendor. If you purchase your PC new, every vendor has to comply with the legally required one year warranty. They CAN however, set the terms of that warranty and in some cases it just barely qualifies. Nobody likes sending their laptop out for three-week shipping, only to have some random part replaced that was just lying around as a “known-good” part, then sending back over another three-week shipping label. Unfortunately, this happens more often than not.

Also note, the “extended warranty” or “protection plan” that is usually offered with purchase from Best Buy, Wal Mart or others, is through the retailer – NOT the vendor. Since it’s all too common that the exact scenario above is how your warranty is handled, I typically recommend getting the retailer plan if feasible. The even better option though, would be the expedited support plans from purchasing directly from the vendor.

Business Computers

Now the contrast to the scenario above is to go for business computers. A lot of the big names like Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc. have nice profitable contracts with a lot of enterprise-level customers and those customers buy A LOT of computers from them. They also usually purchase some sort of support plan that includes next-day on-site repair for the machine – because you know, the CEO can’t be bothered to send off his laptop for a month.

Now let’s think about that for a second. Not only does the expedited shipping of the part cost some money but they also have to pay for the technician’s time to repair the machine. That is a significantly higher cost than the scenario that involves shipping to the depot and back. As you might imagine, there is typically a lot better quality control over the machines that tend to ship out with these support plans than not. This is by no means a solid algorithm for purchasing, but it is something I usually take into consideration.

Here are just a few for you to look at:

Gaming Computers

Support-wise, all of the above have gaming options. If you are a student that also likes to play games, it may be in your best interest to slap on that next-day support plan on whichever one you like. Other popular options include MSI and Razer, or you can check out a specialty vendor like Xotic or Origin.

Apple Computers

Okay I have to mention these because you know I’ll be approached by those people who are basically Apple evangelists. I have owned a Macbook Pro in the past and I can say they have very good quality, nice computers.

However, you really have to think about what you are doing with your machine before deciding to jump on the hype train. Apple computers are very good design machines, have fairly powerful hardware, and are essential if you are developing iPhone apps. They do not integrate well with primarily Microsoft environments, at least without some work.

Chromebooks and Linux Computers

Chromebooks and Linux computers are commonly found in schools in this day and age and there is a market for them with people who do not use their computer for much more than web browsing. They can be powerful development machines too though, again – know your use.

In addition to many of the same big names selling Chromebooks and having the ability to install Linux on just about any of them (yes, including the Macbook) I also want to plug two vendors that specifically sell Linux laptops, though if you want you can still install Windows on them:

Conclusion

So you see, I don’t really have a brand that I recommend, because there is no real difference as they all have budget and premium options. Some people have anecdotal experiences with certain brands, and they have the right to their opinion on the matter. What is more important to me is that I like the look and feel of the machine that I’m spending my money on. I have to have a keyboard that isn’t a chore to type on. For these reasons, I tend to gravitate toward the Lenovo Thinkpad T series or Dell Latitude 5000 or 7000 series (though I have certainly looked at the XPS), but I’m not married to either of them.

In the end though – my best advice is to shop around and if possible, take the machine for a test run. Most local retailers are going to have their inventory on display and you have to be happy with a device that you are going to be relying so much on. It has to be comfortable in relation to the amount of time you are going to spend using it. So I say go on in, browse Reddit or your favorite news site, Youtube or any website you don’t have to log into (remember, it’s a public machine). Open up a word processor and pretend to type out a very important email. Just be satisfied with it before you purchase. You might even get lucky and get a discount on the display model if inventory is out – just be sure to sanitize it properly. Many larger online retailers also have good return policies so that might be worth considering before your eventual purchase.

 

You Need A Password Manager

Posted on by Dustin Fontaine

You Need A Password Manager

You may have heard of these newfangled things called password managers. Yes the hype is real and you don’t have to put everything in a notebook, spreadsheet, or array of sticky notes – which may or may not be subject to a horrific death in the event of a natural catastrophe. There is also something to be said for using the same passwords over and over or using easy to break passwords with some variant. Is your password on this list?

But which one to choose? There are plenty out there but the two I’m going to discuss today are Bitwarden and 1Password – mostly due to the fact that they are built on open source and are zero-knowledge (the data is encrypted in transit so they can’t actually see your content). Bitwarden has a free tier versus 1Password which has a two-week trial. They are both going to have browser plugins, mobile apps and desktop applications to make filling in information super easy. If you use a spreadsheet currently, it will likely be super simple to re-format it a bit for import. Post-Its are going to take a bit more time.

You can use it on your own or upgrade to a family/team account. Bitwarden uses Collections, whereas 1Password uses Vaults. The two work pretty much the same way in that you create an object and grant certain members of the account permissions.

To break it down, here would be a good example of how a family account might be managed:

  • Personal Vault – This is independent to each user and only visible by them.
  • Shared Family Vault – This might have universally shared items such as wifi passwords, streaming accounts, etc.
  • Shared Parents Vault – This has items that should be shared with parents and not the kiddos, such as bank logins.
  • Work Vault – The various logins to your portals for work, nice and tidy and separated from your other content.

I personally like the way 1Password makes the vaults appear more independent from each other so that was the route I went and have been using it for several years at this point. Bitwarden’s collections fundamentally function the same way, they just appear as another root folder. You would delegate access using the same concepts as above.

Of course my goal here isn’t to sell you on a particular brand of password managers, what’s much more important is that you use one, period. The two I discuss are the ones that I have more experience with so I can elaborate on how they function more. Other popular password managers include: Dashlane, Lastpass, Roboform.

Words Of Wisdom

If your master password in the manager is easy to break into, you’ve not done really any good. Instead of using a password for your password manager’s master password, I recommend using a passphrase which, as you may have guessed, is a phrase rather than a word. This makes it exponentially harder to break into and will more likely be easier to remember. Hear me out – Instead of trying to remember 53!P@ssw0rd$@@ which is not very strong, try remembering Somebody once told me, the world is gonna roll me! I’m sure you heard that song in your head just now – and it’s WAY more secure and more fun to type! You can see how difficult your passwords are here, so go ahead test your current ultra-complex password against your favorite song verse or movie line.

Just remember it because zero-knowledge means they can’t get you back into your account! Be sure to write it or print it out and put it somewhere actually safe, like a safe. I know, writing passwords is a known bad idea but you should have this one accessible in case you do forget it, just be sure it is somewhere that is difficult or impossible to access by others. 1Password has a fancy Emergency Kit but simply writing it will do.

But regardless of which route you take, just take a route. In the words of Shia LaBeouf, DO IT!

Backing Up Your Mobile Data

Posted on by Dustin Fontaine

Backing Up Your Mobile Data

 

You may have noticed that I didn’t include Mobile devices in my previous post. That is because I feel it deserves a post of its own, partially because the data is managed in ways that make this, well, not an easy task. Especially considering the fact that “offline backup” is not a term synonymous with the modern mobile ecosystem.

Between photos, contacts, calendars, and random items you’ve downloaded in between you may have trouble finding a reliable way to get everything in one go. To be honest the easiest way is to rely on the services that provide the experience – so Apple/Google or some other major service you might prefer (like some of the ones in my previous post). Of course most major cloud providers will have their own apps and they should have some sort of auto-upload function. The only caveat to this is (depending on the service) it’s only files – not app data or contacts, so you’ll likely need to rely on more apps to provide that functionality for your preferred service.

There are a few ways to get around having to use a service you may not quite trust with some of your data. Perhaps one the easiest is Syncthing . It does require you to have another target device that you use as a “server” but this can honestly just be your laptop. This app is installed both on your computer/server and your phone. It will then generate a unique ID that is entered on the device to be paired and you start setting up your folders. If you pair this with any number of backup/restore apps on the store, it should back up to your other device. Of course you’ll want to save your ID’s in a password manager.

The good news is, it adds your Camera folder by default.

For messages, your best bet would be one of the many SMS backup apps like this one for Android. You can then set the backup folder to sync via Syncthing. For Apple, it’s likely that your messages are going to be synced via iMessage, but if not – iTunes is probably going to be your best bet for an offline backup.

Two other choices for Android Backup include Fonedog and Migrate. Fonedog will take backups of your devices on your computer, and if you do not select encrypted backups, it will copy your photos and videos as they are. Contacts, calendar, etc are backed up in .info files but can be exported from the app. It is paid, but it does do a lot, and is probably worth it. You can select different components though if you only need the backup/restore.

(Slideshow)

The other option is Migrate, this is ONLY for rooted devices using a custom recovery. It creates a zip file for you to flash in recovery to restore your data. I like this because it’s 100% offline. It has a helper app you have to grant permission for it to function and it does give a warning to test uninstalling and restoring apps before you try wiping your phone. I thought that was nice.

I’ve tested this one out briefly and it seems to work as intended. The apps are backed up and contacts are in a .vcf file, though the sms and call logs are in .db files which can be opened using a database viewer.

Backing Up Your Data

Posted on by Dustin Fontaine

Backing Up Your Data

Whether it’s family photos, professional work or sensitive legal documents, everyone in the modern age has some amount of data that is precious to them. Not everyone is entirely informed on the best ways to preserve that data though. In previous endeavors, I’ve seen people come to tears that their computers drive had failed after storing the last five years of their childrens’ lives on their computers. The fact of the matter is, the materials in these machines are finite and you have to expect them to fail. There isn’t a set time-frame so the sooner you take action, the better off you’ll be.

In this article I’m going to discuss a few different options, considering there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. The option (or options) you decide on will depend entirely on how precious the data is to you, and how much it will cost to maintain the integrity of the data. Also it should be noted that I’m targeting the consumer class here, larger organizations I expect to have much more complex backup solutions.

I’ll start off by mentioning the most common solution – external hard drives. There are a few things to be aware of when choosing to use external hard drives. First, they fail too. Just moving all your data to a drive will not keep it safe if that is the drive that fails. Second, natural disasters – they can be damaged or lost in a fire. A decent solution to this if you want to be completely offline is to purchase two drives, one that you use consistently, and one that you store in a safety deposit box and update maybe twice a month or whatever time-frame you deem reasonable. Obviously you would be subjected to rent on the box, see your local banks.

Another option would be your standard-issue cloud storage provider. I’m not going to go into this one too much because most users are aware of services like Dropbox. However, there are a few things to consider on this, first is your cost, you’ll be paying a subscription to get any reasonable amount of storage. Second is privacy. It’s one thing to nonchalantly recognize that everything you do is being tracked. It’s an entirely different thing to read a person’s first-hand testimonial to the practice. No matter your opinion on the subject – you need to be aware that anything you upload will be visible to someone.

There are a few services that boast privacy such as Tresorit and Sync . You can also opt for a backup software that you designate the file structure such as Spideroak or Sugarsync.

Luckily there is a happy median to these solutions. I personally use a software called Duplicati. This software has been around for quite a while and has a large community of contributors that help to improve it and fix bugs. One reason I recommend this software is it runs on all the major operating systems – it just runs in the background and you open up the interface in your favorite web browser. You can set it to run the backup job on a schedule, and best of all you can encrypt those backups in-transit to many types of cloud storage. And there you have it, cloud + privacy. Win/win. The most important thing here is to store your encryption passphrase in a password manager (you DO use one, don’t you) so that it’s safe because it’s a two-way street – without that passphrase you can’t access that data either.

If you have the technical know-how, you can build out a Nextcloud server (a cloud storage solution that YOU manage) in your own home for a reasonable price, I do this personally, and have Duplicati backing up to a cloud storage I use every six hours. This is more advanced and requires you to have your own hardware, but it’s also the best way to have your cloud be completely private.

Happy New Year!

Posted on by Dustin Fontaine

Happy New Year!

2020 has been a hard year for everyone. It seemed like every month has given us something new to combat in our quest to lead a fulfilling and productive life. Now we are here on the other side and I don’t want to portray any naivety. The world didn’t magically get better at midnight last night. But it is up to us to make this year better. Many people have taken steps in 2020 to make their lives better – learning a new skill, reconnecting with family or friends. I myself have taken steps in my own life to try and shift my future to a better one – both for myself and my family.

I started this blog, and while I know I have a lot to learn I hope that I can educate others as well. This is how we evolve. We are not designed to remain stagnant, and we have the capacity to do more than what we can right now. I hope to engage others as I might be taught and that I might teach. I intend to push ever forward, won’t you join me?