Technology

I sometimes get e-mails from job recruiters. Since I am currently employed in a decent position I haven’t paid too much attention to them. Although I know that I should continue to be open to new opportunities, sometimes I can’t help but wonder when I receive some of them.

A while ago I took one of the old desktop computers in the house and turned it into a basic home server. Right now its main functions are printing and file storage, and most of the time it can be turned off. To make this easy, I’ve kept the default behavior for the power button to shut down the system. But just shutting down a server like this is risky. What if someone is still logged in and working on something?

I bought a new car in 2020, and while I was test-driving it, I noticed something missing: an auxiliary audio (“aux”) port.

I still use a portable music player (sometimes called an “MP3 player”) to listen to my music.

I wish I could get 8 TB of storage for $30! This is clearly fake.

Fake storage devices with high capacities at ridiculously low prices are a scourge and have probably lost countless people’s data. They’re usually a smaller-capacity device that’s been reprogrammed to trick the computer into thinking it’s bigger than it actually is. When you try to save data that’s too big for the real capacity, old data gets overwritten so your files get corrupted.

Security questions are questions about personal details (like, “What was your first car you drove?” and, “What was the first concert you attended?”) that are meant to help recover your account in case something happens like you forgot your password.

As Wired writes, security questions are insecure. Why? It boils down to two things:

I logged into my MySpace account yesterday and pretty much everything was gone. It’s surreal to think that a significant aspect of several years of my life that I entrusted to this site has just disappeared.

I’m still amazed at how Google Chrome’s rise seems to have just passed me by. I remember thinking when it first came out, “What’s the big deal? Firefox works just fine.” And now it seems I’m in a vanishingly small minority.

Open data is data (like statistical and scientific data) that is free to use by anyone. During the COVID-19 pandemic, new data is coming from all directions on a daily basis.

One important aspect of open data is making sure that it can be used by computers. Computers make it much easier to collect and analyze data in order to find trends and make predictions, which is crucial in responding to a crisis.

This bothers me on several levels.