Tag Archive for: Review

99% Invisible

Split composition showing a manhole cover: left side shows pedestrians walking past on a city street; right side reveals close-up intricate decorative details including gears, laurel wreaths, and the date 1923

I have talked before about my love of podcasts and the app I use to listen to them. I highly suggest you listen to podcasts and use Overcast to listen to them.

One of the podcasts you should subscribe to is 99% Invisible. A new episode of 99PI is one of my favorite events of the week! The production quality sets the bar by which I judge all other podcasts (most are found wanting), and the stories they tell are compelling. Every episode is a no regret, automatic listen. You can listen to one of my favorite recent episodes below:

Read more

Backblaze

Laptop, external hard drive, and cloud storage icon connected by glowing data streams with file icons flowing between them, illustrating multi-location backup redundancy

If you have a computer, you have a ticking time bomb. Some computers last decades before they have a catastrophic failure, some barely make their way out of the box. Whichever is the case, your computer will eventually fail and you will lose all of the data on that device. This outcome is guaranteed no matter who makes the computer, only the timeline is unknown. This means that you must prepare. 

Read more

Dropbox

Three devices - laptop, tablet, and smartphone - connected by flowing glowing streams in a circular pattern, visualizing seamless cloud data synchronization

A long time ago I downloaded an app for my iPod touch (my phone was an LG Voyager at the time) to help me take attendance for the class I was long term subbing for. The app was cool at the time and is out of development now, but there was an option in the settings for that app to sync data via Dropbox. I had never heard of Dropbox before so I signed up for an account and that was that. Dropbox is now the very first app I install on a new device, I rely on Dropbox to save all of the photos and videos that my family creates, and most of the apps I rely on every day use Dropbox to function.   

Read more

Square Cash

Two people at a coffee shop table, both smiling and holding phones showing completed payment transaction checkmarks, with coffee and pastries between them

Ever since I was I kid, I have been a fan of heist movies. To this day, I will argue that The Usual Suspects has the best plot twist of any movie of all time. But there are only so many The Usual Suspect caliber movies out there, so to fill the void I had to slum it a bit with lower quality heist movies, enter Swordfish, The Italian Job, and the like.

Read more

1Password

The idea of passwords may be flawed as pointed out in this educational and scary piece by Matt Hohn. Kill the Password: A String of Characters Won’t Protect You

In this article, Matt talks about how his entire life was hijacked by malcontents. All of his devices were wiped, every account hacked, and he lost every single photo of his daughter. Reading this was scary enough for me to take my password game seriously for the first time.

The rest of this post is the result of my research.

Read more