Posts Tagged

software

Is It Uncool to Be Verified?

Elizabeth Technology June 15, 2023

Twitter’s handling of blue verification checkmarks is turning into a total mess amongst the people Musk intended as a target audience. When did it become uncool to be verified?

Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Support Twitter?

Firstly, even people who have no clue who Elon Musk is, or his dozens of scandals, don’t like him on Twitter because his policy decisions have actively made the platform more difficult to use. He’s a political figure, yes, and that alone makes him easy to dislike, but he’s also handling Twitter’s transition very poorly. Two-Factor authentication is now hidden behind a paywall, and the coding choices Musk has demanded in the past several months means that authenticator apps can’t fill the gap he left in security. His layoffs mean service is delayed, too: customers report that Twitter support only responds in a timely manner if they spam them with tickets and messages. Nobody likes slow service! Especially if their account has been hacked!

Even when his decisions don’t break critical functions of the site, they harm its culture. Several beloved joke/meme accounts that used the API to function have shut down because Musk started charging for access to the API, an attempt to curb bots that also doubled as fundraising. Companies that have historically used Twitter as an alert system can either cough up a couple hundred dollars on a monthly basis to keep going or quit while they have a good reason. Many just quit even if they theoretically could afford it. For example, the New York City transit committee won’t be using Twitter to update riders about route changes or delays anymore because Twitter is now too inconsistent.

He’s Not Cool

It’s not only the tech, though. His political leanings are putting him in with a crowd that thinks wearing a suit to school every day is cool. That is to say, when he tweets about his political beliefs or makes jokes, the people who retweet him sincerely are behind on pop culture at best or actively telling everyone how much they hate it and wish it would change at worst. That’s an opinion he welcomes on the platform as part of his push for free speech. That’s one thing, but the kids who like wearing the suit and the kids who don’t are two totally different crowds. Trying desperately to win the favor of the non-suit kids looks desperate. Especially when he doesn’t seem to know how. His memes are outdated. He posted a meme about Harambe, the gorilla that was shot at a zoo when a child fell into the enclosure, months, perhaps years after those memes wore out their welcome. He also famously tweeted ‘let that sink in’ alongside a picture of him carrying a sink into the Twitter offices, and then proceeded to fire huge swathes of the staff.

This is what made Musk uncool after years of being seen as the IRL Tony Stark. This is what made Twitter Blue uncool – it’s supporting an out-of-touch billionaire who’s trying so desperately to be cool but fundamentally doesn’t understand how. He’s basically trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen. The kids in suits wanted to buy it, but how much of Twitter’s population do they really make up? Clearly not enough for Musk’s taste.

Cool Kids Don’t Want to Sit At His Table

As such, the checkmark became a punishment. Generally speaking, your target audience should be excited to get your product for free! And yet nobody getting the check ‘as a gift’ seems to be super happy about it. The gift ones are indistinguishable from the ones that were paid for, so it looks like a handful of people have purchased the check when they haven’t.

Lil Nas X publicly complains about the blue check. Dril, most famous for his funny absurdist tweets, spent at least a day changing his name to break the blue check connection, only for it to reappear next to his name a few minutes later. Stephen King, the man who tweeted the check cost too much and he’d leave if he was forced to pay for it, is being assigned a check for free against his will. Dead folks are getting checks. A parody account of Nintendo’s UK division got assigned a check, signalling another Eli Lilly style fakeout scandal is still totally possible.

These people are getting the checks for free, and nobody can really say why – Musk publicly said he was paying for some of them, but others are seemingly being assigned to users with over one million followers. His actual fans, and the people who would actually be happy to get the check, don’t seem to be getting it at the same rate (although it’s totally possible they are getting the checks and not complaining because they wanted the check in the first place).

This is a sign that even Musk knows that this is not the buyable badge of honor it was meant to be. Gray checks remain a stopgap solution. Power to the people? Free speech? Fraud is harder, but not impossible, under this system. Verification has gone back to meaning next to nothing.

Tetris

Elizabeth Technology May 18, 2023

Tetris, released in the 1980’s (the first version was released in 1985, but other countries received it from 1986-1988) is one of the most viral games ever. It’s simple enough that children can play it, but complex enough to keep players of all ages entertained for hours. It doesn’t require that the player speak any one language – the mechanics are simple enough to not need instructions. And, most importantly, it’s fun. Winning is satisfying. It gets harder the longer you play, so you’re never bored with the difficulty.

Versions of Tetris exist everywhere now. The game itself is as endlessly versatile as eggs. Physics-based. Efficiency based. Tetris games that want you to fill the board completely, like a puzzle. Tetris games that allow you to squeeze pieces in between gaps that are too small, and Tetris games that don’t. Tetris games that troll you. Competitive Tetris, where discarded lines are given to your enemies. Tetris games where the Tetriminos have 5 blocks, instead of four. The game is endlessly updateable, and the original remains the most ported game in all of video game history. Difficult, but fair, the standard games have chased since day one.

Tetris Effect

Some players develop what’s known as the Tetris Effect – they’ve played the game so long that it begins to seep into their dreams, and they unconsciously wait for blocks to start descending from somewhere whenever they aren’t occupied with another task. The Tetris Effect technically refers to any time a person is devoting so much time to an activity it starts to bleed into places it wouldn’t normally be – Rubix Cube speed-solvers sometimes unwillingly run through their algorithms in their head, and chess players may find themselves trying to identify what piece a traffic bollard would be and how it could move on the board.

When you look at it that way, sea legs are part of the Tetris effect. The Periodic Table in it’s solved state is as well! Tetris first put a name to the phenomenon because it is so genuinely interesting that people who weren’t accustomed to having it were experiencing the effect for the first time.

Repetitive Games and PTSD

Simple puzzle games have benefit beyond just immediate entertainment. Studies seem to suggest that repetitive games like Tetris or word games, something easy enough to be attention-absorbant, can help curb the effects of PTSD after a traumatic event, like a car crash. Specifically, games like Tetris help combat involuntary flashbacks. Treating PTSD after it develops with CBT shows promise, but intervening before it has a chance to really take root would be better. The study size in the initial research was small, but it shows promise: https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/tetris-used-to-prevent-post-traumatic-stress-symptoms .

DOOM (The Game) And Porting

Elizabeth Technology May 16, 2023

DOOM is an incredible game that is famous for running on everything. The game’s code only takes up 2.39 MB (it takes a little bit more to run it), and it’s method of recording player inputs as demos instead of video (enabling anyone to play a demo of another player’s run in a time when recording games as videos and uploading them usually looked like pixelated garbage) made it extremely popular among people who love speedrunning games competitively.

All that said, the original version of the game, run on an emulator, functions really well. What about the ports to other platforms?

The Times

Firstly, to ‘port’ anything in software terms means getting it ready to operate on a different system than the one it was first designed for. It’s the process of making the software portable.

Getting DOOM to play on anything is a trivial matter now. But back when DOOM was new and super cool, it wasn’t so easy to move it to handheld game devices or consoles. Picture a game made for the computer – you play it with your keyboard and mouse. To get it ready for the XBox or the Playstation, the developers of the game have to change how it handles inputs. They may also have to change textures (XBox plays on a TV screen usually, which is larger than a computer screen) and how the game handles loading. That takes work. And games weren’t an object of respect at that point. They were time wasters, something to keep the kids indoors if it was too hot or too rainy outside for them to play. A significant number of people involved in the game making process felt that anything they helped produce just had to be playable, it didn’t have to be good. The gradual dropoff of Atari and the ocean of shovelware games lost to time gradually changed that attitude, but DOOM ports to other consoles were an unfortunate victim of it before that happened.

Rush Jobs

Porting to other consoles was like rebuilding the game, and if you don’t respect the game, you’re going to build a facsimile of it good enough that kids will buy it and stop there.

Take the port to the Super NES, made in 1996 – the game literally does not have the functionality of saving. You have to beat each episode (episodes consist of nine levels each) in it’s entirety in a single sitting. Bizarrely, some of those episodes won’t let the player alter the game’s difficulty, so playing through on Easy the whole way through is not going to happen. It might still have been better than the Sega adaptation two years later, which cut several textures as well as a full episode altogether to make room for the rest of the game! Yeah, you could save, but at what cost? Meanwhile, the Atari’s port to the Jaguar console managed to make a passable copy of the game at the expense of only five levels and a lot of texture. But it could run multiplayer if you had a second Jaguar, so that already made it leagues more attractive than other ports at the time. Not that it was good, it sounded bad and it looked sort of ugly, but it was better.

Better Versions

Of course, DOOM had good copies as well! DOOM is surprisingly functional as an app on the Apple store. You can’t jump in DOOM, so the controls remained simple enough that players could still see most of their screen back in 2009 when the app released. To go just a couple of years after most of these ports to 2001, Nintendo’s Gameboy Advance made a surprisingly playable copy of the original game. The Playstation version from 1995 did a fantastic job of catching the spirit of the game instead of cutting things for time, even adapting some of the music and lighting so the console could handle it better. Eventually, XBox released a version of the game where you could play multiplayer and everything was 1080p in 2006 as part of the XBox LIVE Arcade, and even the Nintendo Switch can play DOOM now.

This isn’t counting emulators that allow the player to play the game on their home computer as if it were the original – the hardware most computers have by default means the game runs as well as the emulator does.

You can see which companies understood the appeal of the game they were porting, in the sense that the companies who went out of their way to make a good version of a simple violent videogame are still mostly competitive today. With the exception of Nintendo and their first chopped up version of the game and Atari’s functional multiplayer version, gaming companies who pushed DOOM to the side ended up pushed aside themselves.

Pong

Elizabeth Technology May 11, 2023

Pong is one of the earliest video arcade-style games, originally released in 1972 by Atari – it was actually their first game. The game was based on another tennis game manufactured by a competitor for a household console, the Odyssey, which was manufactured by their competitor Magnavox. Atari’s version was much more successful, and laid the first bricks in the road for video games as we know them today.

Sue Over Anything

Atari’s new tennis game got into hot water with Magnavox because they were both tennis games. That sounds funny now, but in the era of the first video games, lawmakers weren’t sure how to handle it. Atari believes it could have won, but the expense of fighting Magnavox would have cost them more money than they had at the time. Instead, they settled, and Magnavox agreed to a sum of 1.5 million dollars split across eight payments as well as full information on everything Atari was doing for the next year, public or in development. Atari, as a result, delayed some of it’s products.

In terms of business dealings, the original creator figured Atari would be able to produce the game themselves (instead of licensing it out, as this was Atari’s first game they both made and kept for themselves) but couldn’t get any credit or loans to actually manufacture the things, because it looked like pinball at a glance, and banks associated pinball with the Mafia at the time. Eventually Wells Fargo gave Atari credit, and the arcade cabinets went into production at the rate of ten machines a day. Many of them failed quality testing. This was still their first game! Eventually Atari got it together, and even began shipping Pong multi-nationally thanks to their success in the States.

Home Pong, the edition of Pong that gamers could play at home, sold so many units that it became Sears’s most popular selling item for the holiday season in 1975, a coveted position that lead to dozens upon dozens of copycats entering the market. But it was too late – Atari won. Atari won decisively. Pong was popular and fun among all ages, installed in bars or arcades, or even played at home.

The Age of CRTs

Many early CRT monitors didn’t have great resolution, and it’s not like the computers inside of the consoles of the time were powerful enough to display much anyway. Still, in spite of this, the creator aspired to make the game more interesting than the simple version found in the Magnavox device.

The paddle is designed so that the ball will bounce back at different angles, depending on which pixel of the paddle the ball hits. The ball goes faster, the longer the players are trading it back and forth. The game has a surprising amount of complexity given the simplicity of the tech put into it. Pong doesn’t run on ‘code’ as we understand that word today. The home version ran on a chip, but the arcade-cabinet version that kickstarted Atari ran on a printed circuit board that used transistor-transistor logic to determine where the ball was going to go. Remember – this is just three or so years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and Atari is certainly not working with NASA’s budget or their technology department. Part of the game, the way that the paddles don’t reach the top of the screen, is due to those circuits. It’s a built-in bug, a flaw that the creator let slide because it made the game harder. Today, making a Pong game is a popular beginner’s exercise in coding languages like Python, done on machines dozens of times more powerful than the original.

Truly, Pong was a pioneer.

Why Not Make Elder Scrolls 6?

Elizabeth Technology May 9, 2023

The Wii U was a console that operated on the same mechanics as the Wii, but was much more powerful. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, is almost unrecognizable from the base game that launched over ten years ago, in 2011.

What was once considered peak design is outdated; what sold well in the past sells well now, but begrudgingly.

What happened to designing games and consoles?

It Has to Be Impressive

The worst recent trend when it comes to electronics is that no matter what company is making the product, the product has to be impressive. In fact, newer companies have to be more impressive than ever to get a fighting chance in the market, without costing so much that a potential buyer is turned off. Plenty of smaller companies would love to make games for gaming consoles they designed themselves! (And in fact, plenty of consumers would love to buy a simple device like an iPod shuffle with only 16 GB of memory – but Apple won’t make anything that costs less than 400$.) But they can’t keep up with the biggest companies on the market, and trends suggest indie games are where users look to change up their experience, not indie consoles. The Switch is technologically unique, the PS5 and the Xbox 1 are the most powerful consoles ever in their respective lines – nothing but desktop computers could even hope to keep up. Buying a console has become a market like buying a major appliance. If you could spend just 100$ more on a fridge for a fridge that also defrosts itself automatically, wouldn’t you? Sure, minifridges are cute, but unless you’re a college student, you probably have access to a better one. Indie developers over a certain size can design games for the big consoles as well, so the more expensive fridge still has space for artisanal cheeses, even if it wasn’t built just for Mimolette.

The second problem is that gamers sort of don’t want to invest in ‘new’ right now. Everything seems to be on fire outside. Games are a comfortable distraction. Gamers want ‘familiar’. They want the things that reviewers have looked at and invested time into, even if they’re realistically a B or a C grade game at best. Old, huge companies like Nintendo make custom-tailored consoles like The Switch, but if Soulja Boy’s console company had come up with it first, it might have bombed. Nintendo making a console that mainly serves Nintendo games is no accident, as well. If Sony were to release an updated PSP or a PS Vita in an attempt to compete, there’s no guarantee it would work out for them as well as it does consistently for Nintendo, partly because it would be freakishly expensive to match the performance that Playstation fans have come to expect, but also because the Playstation has an enormous gaming library that’s pretty intimidating to approach as a newcomer. The ratio of games they make to games they outsource is completely different. It couldn’t guarantee a market for either old fans or new ones.

Nintendo releases its own games – Nintendo makes Mario, not a gaming studio that Nintendo owns. Nintendo can pull from old catalogue favorites like Legend of Zelda and remake them for the Switch without starting a copyright spat. This is not only a built-in age gate (Nintendo Games made for kids will always look like they were made for kids, and Nintendo Games that aren’t, don’t) but an easy flag for quality the consumer can keep track of. Nintendo rarely has ‘bad’ games. You don’t have to really research that ahead of time to know the worst Nintendo game is miles ahead of the worst game available on Steam. When games are consistently reaching 60 and 70 dollars new, a dud is a serious disappointment. That’s four movie tickets out here in Vegas. Of course people are expecting to get at least four movies’ worth of entertainment from a game that costs that much.

And Familiarity Wins The Crowd

With all that said, it’s no wonder Skyrim is eating up development time that could have been used on a new Elder Scrolls game. Everyone still likes Skyrim! It plays on every console, so it doesn’t matter which one you’ve already got. You can buy mods for it, download free mods, and the dungeons are neverending if that’s your jam. It’s easy to take a break from serious quests if you want, or to beat the game and spend time doing the multiple hours’ worth of side quests once the final boss is dealt with. Skyrim is a good game. You’re going to have a good time playing it unless you go out of your way not to. It’s comfortable and easy to access. At this point, Skyrim’s replayability may steal sales from the next game, if Bethesda ever gets around to making it. Bethesda has a golden goose, and it’s not going to get rid of it until the goose dies of old age.

Wii U

The Wii was much the same, except Nintendo wanted to make the goose a little better. The Wii U’s mistake wasn’t in making a console designed to appeal to the fans of the Wii – the Wii U’s mistake was not making it clear that the Wii U was a younger sibling to the Wii, not it’s twin. Not enough was done to ensure that fans of the console knew the difference, and if you believe it to be a slightly different Wii and not a complete overhaul of the console, then why would you ever spend the money on it? The Wii U is more powerful, but it didn’t secure enough games that were unique to the Wii U and the Wii U alone – why would game developers make games for a device that sold as poorly as the Wii U did when they could keep making games for the Wii and get better royalties in the process? The failure to market the console trickled into every facet of it’s existence to ensure it could never eclipse the Wii.

Skyrim has cursed Bethesda. If the next game is too similar to Skyrim, it’ll be a Wii U. If it’s too different, and the reviews are mixed, game reviewers might not take to it so easily after a solid ten years of good Skyrim content.

Assigning Macros

Elizabeth Technology April 25, 2023

If you’re getting sick of having to, say, embolden and italicize words in your program over and over, have no fear – you can reduce the number of steps you have to take to do that (and many other tasks) using macros!

How To Make a Macro

The process is simple! To add a macro to a button on your mouse for use across the computer, follow these steps as listed by Microsoft (this document has pictures): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-create-macros-bd0f29dc-5b89-3616-c3bf-ddeeb04da2fb

To do so in Word, here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-or-run-a-macro-c6b99036-905c-49a6-818a-dfb98b7c3c9c

And Excel, here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/quick-start-create-a-macro-741130ca-080d-49f5-9471-1e5fb3d581a8

As with anything you do that could change the functionality of a button or mouse click, be very careful when assigning buttons certain actions! You don’t want to remove your ability to do something important (like right-clicking) by adding a macro that closes Word every time you try to paste something without using the keyboard.

Macros as a Malicious Entity

Programs like Word and Excel can come with macros designed to run as soon as the program is opened, and not every macro is harmless. Some do things like making hundreds of new documents, some can corrupt your drive, and most of them try to take over the other documents on the computer when they’re opened. This is why recent editions of Microsoft Office products warn you that you shouldn’t open a document outside of Safe Mode unless you trust it’s source. An ordinary-looking .XLSM document can completely brick your hard drive if it comes with the macros to do it!

This is also why you should always verify the sender of an attachment before you open an attachment, even a .pdf. Malicious attachments using macros can be used to steal the contents of the target’s email address book and send those addresses malicious emails too, continuing the cycle and spreading the document until it gets somewhere with valuable information. An early version of this, a macro called “Melissa”, would bait users into opening the document in Word, and then hi-jack their Outlook to send it’s bait email to the first fifty contacts in the victim’s address book as the victim (read more here at the FBI site: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/melissa-virus-20th-anniversary-032519). Melissa itself may be obsolete, but the technique sure isn’t.

Worse, because the macro is coming from an application, it’s already compatible with anything that’s using that application. Mac is not spared this time. A malicious macro can open hundreds of garbage word docs on a Mac too!

Maximalist Mouse – What Else Can You Use It For?

Elizabeth Technology April 20, 2023

You can bind keys on your keyboard, but you can also bind those extra keys on a gaming mouse, if you dare.

Gaming mice are designed with games that use hotbars in mind. A hotbar usually refers to the number keys across the top of the keyboard, sometimes including the F# keys as well. Within the game, you can tie specific usable items to those number keys, and simply hit the right key in the heat of battle to use the item. However, keyboards meant for gaming usually have bigger keys than ones attached to laptops or designed for travel, and sometimes it’s difficult to use the hotbar while your character is still moving – if you need a health potion for your character, but you can’t contort your hands to hit the right hotbar key, a gaming mouse with those hotbar bindings instead can save the day!

How to Bind Keys Elsewhere

Gaming mice are designed for games. Many of the games expecting a mouse like a gaming mouse will let you go into the settings and manually change the keys you need to press for certain actions, whether that’s to other keys on the keyboard or to the buttons on your gaming mouse. While most mice have two or three buttons (mice designed for Windows at least) the sky is the limit!

Be careful doing this – you don’t want to override the primary function of the left or right click buttons, just the ones that shouldn’t already have another function attached.

1) Click Start, and then click Control Panel.

2) Double-click Mouse.

3) Click the Buttons tab.

4) Under Button Assignment, click the box for a button to which you want to assign a function, and then click the function that you want to assign to that button.

5) Repeat this step for each button to which you want to assign a function.

6) Click Apply, and then click OK.

7) Close Control Panel.

That’s it! Your buttons should be working.

How to Bind Keys For Everyday Use

Elizabeth Technology April 18, 2023

Firstly, check out what bindings your operating system of choice already has built in to the program!

Here’s Microsoft’s list of pre-existing keyboard shortcuts: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/dcc61a57-8ff0-cffe-9796-cb9706c75eec

And here’s Apple’s: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

Microsoft

To start, let’s look at Microsoft’s limitations. Every shortcut must start with the CTRL key. The second key must always be either ALT or SHIFT. The third key can be almost whatever you want on the keyboard (any letter, number, or punctuation mark, just not special characters) but there can only be three keys. Additionally, the shortcuts you make are going to override the originals, so it’s important to read the list above and consider which ones you’re okay with potentially overriding.

According to the Perkins School for the Blind, one of the easiest ways to set up custom bindings to open specific programs within windows is to:

1) pin the program to the task bar,

2) right click it,

3) right click it’s name in the menu that pops up in step two (may take a second)

4) left click “properties”

5) click the box that says “Shortcut Key”

6) type in the desired shortcut combination by pressing the keys

7) click ‘OK’.

After this, you can remove the program from your taskbar if you don’t want it there. The key combination should then open your desired file! Take note, though – if you used the same key binding as something already bound, it will overwrite whichever one came first.

You should also write down what you made so you don’t lose track.

Apple (Mac)

Apple’s weaknesses are different! When you create a shortcut using a binding that is already used elsewhere, the binding you make won’t work, and the system keeps it’s defaults. However, like Microsoft, you can only use a key once in a particular shortcut.

To make your shortcut on a Mac:

1) Open Settings, then tap Accessibility.

2) Tap Keyboards.

3) Tap Full Keyboard Access and turn it on.

4) Tap Commands.

5) Tap a command, then press a custom key combination to assign to it.

6) Tap Done.

You can also create keyboard shortcuts for many specific commands within apps!

1) Choose the Apple menu, go to “System Settings”, click “Keyboard” (you may have to scroll to see it), then click “Keyboard Shortcuts” on the right.

2) Pick “App Shortcuts” on the left, click the Add Button (may look like a plus sign),

3) Click the Application pop-up menu, then choose either a specific app or “All Applications”.

“All Applications” will let you set a shortcut for a menu command that appears in many apps, while picking the specific app will only set a shortcut for that app. If the app doesn’t appear in the list, hit “Other”, and find it in the box that opens there.

4) In the menu title field, type the menu command for which you want to set a shortcut, exactly as it appears in the app – including the “>” character (use ->), any ellipses, or punctuation.

5) Click into the Keyboard Shortcut field, press the buttons you want to use for the shortcut, and then click ‘done’.

Consider a Password Manager

Elizabeth Technology April 13, 2023

Alongside 2FA, making a difficult-to-guess password can stop a staggering number of cyberattacks, both brute-force and engineered. But how exactly do you do that? The latest recommendation for a password has jumped from 8 characters to 10, 12 if you really want to play it safe, and a scrambled set of characters that meets all of a decent administrator’s password requirements is going to be difficult to remember almost no matter what! If you do make a good, memorable one, you shouldn’t be using it anywhere else. It’s also unfeasible to just reset your password every time you need access to a site. What can you do?

Get a Password Manager

Password managers bridge the gap between the passwords you want to make, the ones you can remember, and the password that meets all of the site’s requirements. This is such a common problem that it’s even built into some browsers! Firefox will save your passwords securely for you, although you can always download the third-party extensions of your choice in the Mozilla add-ons page (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/). While Chrome also has a built-in password manager, if your Google account gets hacked, all of your passwords just went with it, so in their case it’s better to go third-party.

You can download reputable password managers such as LastPass or 1Password just as easily and perhaps more securely – in all of LastPass’s existence, it’s never had its password database breached (although their dev environment had a security incident a little while ago).

DO NOT “Just Write It Down”

If you think just writing the password down on a Post-It is good enough, don’t be so sure! Social engineering is probably the easiest way to get into someone’s computer. If someone wanders into your office when you’re not there, and they spy your password written on a Post-It stuck to your desk, then boom – they’re in.

Similarly, this actually isn’t a great way to keep track of your passwords even if nobody else has access to it. For example – if you keep a Word Doc with a bunch of passwords in it, assuming nobody is going to be able to

A) find it or

B) identify which passwords you used where (assuming you didn’t write down your username with them) you can also assume you’re not going to remember them either!

If you don’t use them frequently, you’re far more likely to forget what goes where. Oh, good, a random bunch of numbers and letters just titled ‘game account’ on the front of a post-it that’s lost all it’s sticky powers. Where does it go? What is the username? Does it need a username, or just your email? Good luck figuring that out!

But the Manager is Always On!

Yes, these password managers are always prepared to fill in a blank on a webform. If you leave your office without putting your computer to sleep, then hypothetically someone could access an account of yours using one. However, this is easy to fix. If you’re not putting your computer to sleep or locking the screen when you leave for extended periods of time, you should! If you’re not doing that because your password is too long to type in every time you get up, consider setting up a login PIN instead to remove that barrier – a regular person isn’t going to be able to guess every permutation of four-to-six numbers (and sometimes letters depending on your admin’s settings!) in a reasonable amount of time. By locking the desktop, the manager’s convenience can’t be used against you. It’s more secure, anyhow. It’s actually a requirement for companies that follow HIPAA standards!

Basic Adobe Acrobat Reader Instructions

Elizabeth Technology April 4, 2023

Adobe Reader is a free program offered by Adobe, that allows users to read PDFs. However, it cannot edit them, at least not for free!

Adobe Acrobat DC

Adobe Acrobat is a paid-subscription product that allows users to read and edit PDFs.

How Do You Set One As Your Default Program?

For Windows Users (10 and 11):

Right-click the PDF, choose ‘Open With’, click ‘Choose Default Program’, and then select your preferred PDF program from the list it provides. (If you have both Adobe Acrobat Reader DC and Adobe Acrobat DC, you should generally select Adobe Acrobat DC – it has more features!) If you want it to always use the program you’ve picked, select the checkbox at the bottom that says “Always use this app to open .pdf files” at the bottom, and hit ‘Okay’.

For Apple Users:

Click the PDF file’s icon in the finder to select it. Go to ‘File’ in the top left, and select ‘Get Info’. Click the triangle next to ‘Open With’ to open the dropdown menu of programs, and select your desired program from the list (if it’s not there, it may be available under the option for ‘Other’). Click ‘Change All’.